Two Upper Valley authors have new works that pull from their lived experiences, though they’re set in very different locations.
Ivy Schweitzer’s “Dividing Rivers: Poems” traces her life in Brooklyn and the decades she’s spent in the Upper Valley, while Ezzedine C. Fishere’s novel “Nightfall in Cairo” draws from his years in Egypt during the political upheaval of the early 2010s.
When Schweitzer, a retired English and creative writing professor at Dartmouth College, set out to explore the complex thicket of her identity as a white, Jewish woman, a friend suggested she write essays.
Though well within her wheelhouse, prose wasn’t the right vehicle for what Schweitzer, who lives in Norwich, was hoping to achieve with the project.
“I really wanted to affect people on that gut level,” she said in a recent interview.
She instead stuck with the form in which the work first appeared to her: poetry. “Dividing Rivers,” a memoir in verse that reckons with her internalized biases against people of color, came out last August.
Though he teaches Middle East politics at Dartmouth, Fishere, who worked for years as a diplomat, also holds that “literature is deeper and more lasting in the sense of its touch, the way it touches people.”
An English version of his 2017 novel “Nightfall in Cairo,” originally written in Arabic, comes out on March 1.
The poems in “Dividing Rivers” include reflections from Schweitzer’s childhood in the Jewish neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn through adulthood and her life in the Upper Valley.
On the cover of the book is an image of a woman whose head and torso are painted white with gold lines snaking across her face and neck. It’s a reference to “kintsugi,” the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer mixed with gold powder. The technique ensures that the breakage is a visible part of the pot’s history and new life as a changed object.
Schweitzer has a similar approach to the poems in “Dividing Rivers.” She uses them to leave traces of her reckoning with her internalized racism — some of which she inherited from her family — and her identity as someone who has both experienced discrimination and perpetuated it. Always, she’s striving to bring the unconscious to the fore.
The first poems in “Dividing Rivers” came to Schweitzer when she and her husband were staying on their sailboat in the Penobscot Bay in the summer of 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd.
“The muse kind of came and plunked herself down on the bed,” Schweitzer,74, said. This happened three or four times, and one of the poems that emerged from those nights was “Whiteness: A Checklist of Excuses.” There are lines like “Feared when I passed a dark man on a street,” and “Cried when friends pointed out my racist language.” They’re uncomfortable admissions of racism, which continue throughout “Dividing Rivers.”
In the book, “Checklist” appears as two poems: the original version, which Schweitzer has crossed out, and a new version that rewrites each line with new answers. “That I’m a good person,” became “That goodness is not even skin-deep,” and so on.
“I had to eventually rewrite that entire poem and rethink my entire relationship to whiteness, but I really didn’t want to throw the first poem away and whitewash it, whitewash myself,” she said.
Instead, she presents her understanding of her privilege and bias as an iterative process, one that leaves traces that are vital to acknowledge.
“I’m crossing it out because I really don’t want to embrace it anymore, but I’m going to let you see it so you can see where I came from, and what was so problematic,” she said.
Though a work of fiction, Fishere’s novel also comes from a personal place. Around 2014 he was working on another book, when he felt moved to write something that spoke to the ripple effect of Egypt’s political unrest, and his own experience participating in the uprising against the country’s authoritarian regime.
“Literally everybody, regardless of political affiliations, was changed by the uprising,” he said.
“Nightfall in Cairo” follows Amal, a lawyer released from prison after years of detention and ordered to leave Egypt. At a gathering to bid her farewell, she meets Omar, who she asks to recount to her all that has happened while she was in prison.
Fishere, for his part, left Egypt in search of a calmer, safer place than what he’d experienced in Cairo.
In 2016, he moved to the Upper Valley and took a job at Dartmouth. That first year, he didn’t have a car and spent a lot of time walking around in the quiet outdoors.
“That was probably one of the best years of my life,” he said.
The English edition of “Nightfall in Cairo” comes out under Commonsense House, a publishing imprint Fishere, who lives in Hanover, started a few months ago that focuses on translated works.
Often international books that are translated into English aren’t reflective of what’s most read in a given country, but rather the taste of the publisher or translator, Fishere said.
“We end up with a slice of Arabic literature. Something weird, the exotic or the marginal,” he said.
There’s also a lot that gets lost in translation. “When you translate, in a way you rewrite the novel. It’s not just a language issue, it’s a cultural issue,” he said.
Fishere hopes that including authors in the translation of their works will help mitigate some of that loss.
“If the author can accompany this movement, I think it’s a better guarantee of transferring whatever the writer had in mind,” he said.