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Five Poems from Ingrid Thobois' novel ‘Le roi d’Afghanistan ne nous a pas mariés’

These poems are the result of converging research interests in movement between French and English, in cultural identity and place, and in writing the experience of travel as poetry. My interest in writing travel has recently focussed on Afghanistan; this has included research into traditional Afghan forms such as the landay, as well as essays on contemporary travel writing in Afghanistan.. My research on Afghanistan provided understanding of cultural context, whilst my own practice as a poet informed the choice of texts and their development as poems.

There are several elements of my research interests involved in these texts. There is the representation of a specific cultural moment, which I read in the context of my own research on how Western writers have described the people, landscapes and day-to-day life in Afghanistan. In this instance the female voice is able to access and represent the female experience in contemporary Afghanistan in different ways from male travel writers, which makes Thobois’ work particularly worth close attention. Secondly, there is the re-working of prose into poetry, a process which necessitates reflection on the choice of language in terms of sound as well as meaning, and on the presentation on the page in terms of stanzas and breaks, rather than the paragraphs of the original fiction. These are the same research and creative processes which inform much of my work.

This combination of research, translation and creative writing has continued: my creative publications have included more language work and travel poetry, whilst Ingrid Thobois is involved in a plan for an international research network on literary representations of Afghanistan.