ALL EYES AND A WOUNDED HEART
I grew up in the Tropics
dreamt of Paris and the Riviera,
studied the great French classics,
had a passion for Ravel, Debussy, Bizet,
and les chansons françaises,
for the great men and women of France,
Napoléon, Montaigne and Victor Hugo.
I neglected the darker sides of History:
la Terreur after the 1792 bloody Revolution
and the nefarious Vichy regime during WWII.
When you love, can you ever be objective?
Yes, I dreamt of la France Immortelle.
When I was ten, my beautiful mother
offered me a week in Paris as a birthday present:
my eyes darted every which way,
my heart was brimming with ecstasy
before all the splendor and the magnificence.
Then I came to live in
the ‘greatest’ city on earth.
First, i worked night shifts in recording studios,
witnessing the rows between singers
and producers, hearing the foulest sounds
of the language of Molière, and how in
a couple of words one could debase a person
to the point of stripping him of all the qualities
that make a human being.
Eventually I began to see the difference
between infatuation and illusion,
for Paris is still an incomparably magic city,
reviving anew the demons of the past,
but now the revolution is that of civil turmoil,
of yellow vests and Islamic terrorism.
When I now look at the Opéra Garnier,
the perspective of the Champs Elysées
from Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries,
when I embrace Paris from Butte Montmartre
or sip a café glacé on a terrace of the Marais,
my heart is no longer elate, for I think of all
the dead and the wounded of Charlie Hebdo,
of the Bataclan and the Hyper Casher,
of the broken spire of Notre Dame, and also of
that terrible image of Hitler, observing
the French capital with the greedy eyes
of the conqueror, considering it his property.
JOTTINGS
Throw me your dreams,
for I want to set you free,
and untie my shackles.
Three steps askance,
then hopscotch to the last square,
see how your mood brightens.
Bless those feet of yours,
for they have made of you
a true explorer.
Have you asked yourself
how much you have walked during
this new century?
What do your shoes say,
how many pairs have you changed
in the last decade?
Have you ever thought
of giving your feet a massage?
Don’t be so selfish!
You have no idea
the places they have covered,
while you kept brooding.
Beware of that smile,
it can be deceitful,
and before you know …
Look at him straight
in the eyes, and if he winks,
you know you can’t trust him.
MATERIAL THINGS ARE ALIVE
Some say that things
are not important in life
they are superfluous
and yet, many things
that ornate my home have lives
I hear them breathe
they may be small
and have cost little money
yet they are dear to me
like the model of
a Sabena DC 3
Africa of my youth
in the rain forest
the elephant figurine
it almost killed us
my choo choo train
over the rail bridge I can hear
Victoria Falls roaring
the old wooden mask
hanging at the entrance
the Congo I love
our small juke box
it’s Elvis, Ella and the Duke
singing to me
the painting of
frangipani flowers
my mother’s fragrance
gathered on a stand
plush animals in my room
I grew up with them
that wedding ring
a marriage and a divorce
two beautiful children
Take them all away
and you cut out pieces
of my existence
A humanist with roots in Central, Southern Africa, and the Mediterranean, Albert Russo has been acclaimed by important authors, such as James Baldwin, Edmund White, Martin Tucker, Douglas Parmee of Oxford University, Adam Donaldson Powell, David Alexander, Richard Mathews, Joseph Kessel, Pierre Emmanuel, and Jean d’Ormesson, all three of the Académie Française, as well as by his African peers, Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) and Maurice AMURI (DR Congo).
His seminal work, the AFRICAN QUATUOR, set in DR Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, has appeared in his own English and French versions, as well as in translations (Italian and Dutch), in over 20 editions worldwide. All in all, his work has been translated into about 15 languages. SPEAK TO ME, MOTHER BELOVED (2019) is dedicated to his adored mother and to POETRY, with about 140 poems and as many photos in both black and white and in color, that he took during his years on the four continents in which he has resided, and during his travels around the world. His last novel co-written with Jeanette Skirvin, TEL AVIV’S ETHIOPIAN QUEEN, was published in 2021 by l’Aleph in Sweden. His most recent French novels are MÉMOIRES D’UN FILS DE NAZIS and LE CAP DES ILLUSIONS.
Albert Russo was also a member of the 1996 jury for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which often leads to the Nobel Prize of Literature. Some of the Prizes he has received are: Best 2013 Unicef Short Story award in defense of childhood worldwide, for Revenge by proxy / Vengeance par procuration; 2018 Book Excellence Award for his big book GOSH ZAPINETTE!; Unicef 2018 and 2021 awards for the body of his poems; Mémoires d’un fils de nazis, novel (2020); Prix Colette, Prix de la Liberté, and Prix Littérature Jeunesse. Here are some of his other fiction and poetry awards: The American Society of Writers Fiction Award, The British Diversity Short Story Award, several New York Poetry Forum Awards, Amelia Prose and Poetry awards. He has also been nominated for the W.B. Yeats and Robert Penn Warren poetry awards, Prix de l’Ile des poètes, Bronze medal (Monnaie de Paris) for his book Éclats de malachite. And last but not least, GAYTUDE, a book of poems in both English and French, co-written with Adam Donaldson Powell, the multi-talented poet, author, musician, painter and gay activist, was honored as Winner of the National Indie Excellence Award for the Category Gay/Lesbian Nonfiction in 2009.
Websites: www.albertrusso.com