Sherazade
Page 1
Leïla Sebbar was born in Algeria to a French mother and an Algerian father, both teachers until Independence. She studied in Paris and has lived there for the last twenty years. She is a leading writer on Algerian feminist themes.
Dorothy S. Blair first became interested in literature in French from Africa in the 1950s. In addition to her own work of criticism, she has published translations of many books written in French by African writers, concentrating more recently on woman writers from the Mahgreb.
First American edition published in 2014 by
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Copyright © Leila Sebbar 1982, 2014
Introduction and English translation © Dorothy S. Blair 1991, 2014
Originally published in France as Shérazade, 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts (Editions Stock, 1982)
First published in English in the United Kingdom by Quartet Books Ltd.
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ISBN 978–1-56656–988-0
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Glossary
Babylon, derogatory term used for the decadent Western capitals by immigrants, usually those from the West Indies
Beur, person of North African origin (Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian), usually second-generation immigrant, bom or having grown up in France. This word is verlan (backslang) for Arabe, as pronounced with strongly rolled R and voiced B by North Africans.
burnous, long, loose woollen cloak with hood
CAP, Certificat d'Aptitude Professionnelle, a technical diploma
DASS, Département d'Action Sanitaire et Sociale, Social Welfare Department
Eid, feast day, Muslim religious holiday
fouta, length of striped material worn by rural women of Maghreb round their waist, over their dress
haïk, veil, square of woollen cloth in which women envelop themselves in North Africa when venturing out of doors
harissa, an extremely hot, spicy, red-pepper sauce
harki, Algerian who volunteered to fight in the French army against the forces of Resistance during the Algerian War; repatriated to France, they were called 'French Muslims'
IRCAM, Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique-Musique (Institute for Research and Coordination of Acoustic Music)
kanoun, a brazier
mechta, a hamlet
medresa, Qur'anic school
merguez, a hot, spicy sausage
moujahideen, partisans, fighting for Independence during the Algerian War
pied-noir, person of European origin who Was bom and lived in Algeria, but left during or after the Algerian War to settle in France
RER, Réseau express régional, suburban line linked to Paris Metro at Châtelet and Charles de Gaulle-Etoile
Roumiette, dim. fem. of Roumi, Roumia (f.), derogatory word applied by North Africans to French or other Europeans
Sonacotra, Société Nationale de Construction de Logements pour Travailleurs, by extention, the immigrant workers living in the blocks of sub-economic flats, built to house them
Sonatrac, Société Nationale de Transport et de Commericialisation des Hydrocarbures, National Society for Transport and Marketing of Hydrocarbons
willaya, a Department in Algeria
ZUP, Zone à urbaniser en priorité, priority urban development area
Introduction
Leïla Sebbar was bom in Algeria in 1941 in Aflou, a remote village on the High Plateaux, and grew up during the Algerian War of Independence in a rural area near Tlemcen where her parents – a French mother and Algerian father – were schoolteachers, like the parents of Julien Desrosiers in her novel, Sherazade. There are clearly autobiographical echoes of the author's family in the story told by one of the colleagues of Julien's father (cf. pp. 17–19).
Besides many novels and short stories, Sebbar also wrote for the newspaper Sans Frontière, which caters for the Third World immigrant population of France, and which also features in this work.
Sherazade is set in Paris, where the author has lived for the past twenty years, but it is not the conventional Paris known to tourists, and the English reader may have difficulty recognizing the topography where her protagonists act out their marginalized or clandestine existence: the squats and flea markets, the working-class districts of Barbès, Jaurès, Crimée, around the Metro stations and boulevards of those names, where many immigrant families have congregated; the outer suburbs of Vanves and Le Kremlin-Bicêtre to the south and Bobigny to the north-west – with their bleak high-rise housing estates – and the Fleury-Mérogis Prison to the south of the capital . . . However, if tourists are not familiar with the Horloge (Clocktower) area in the Halles – the site of the old food markets -where Julien lives, they will easily recognize the Pompidou Centre for Art and Culture (Beaubourg) and the Forum des Halles with its many fashion boutiques, the haunt of Sherazade, Zouzou and France.
Except for Julien Desrosiers, the cast consists of drop-outs, delinquents, drug-addicts, runaways, revolutionaries, and the porn-merchants and yuppies who attempt to exploit them and usually end by being ripped off in their turn. The former are all children of the immigrant proletariat: from Guadaloupe and Martinique, from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Poland – mechanics, car-assembly workers for Renault or Citroën, dustmen, mineworkers. These youngsters – their ages range from seventeen to twenty-seven – are part of the youthful sub-culture of Paris: independent, unassimilated, unscrupulous, often intelligent, sometimes violent, very much as Julien's film-director friend envisages the heroine of his projected film: '... a gang-leader, rebel, poet, unruly, adept with a knife, expert at karate, fearless, a fugitive from ZUPs, hanging around housing estates, basements, underground carparks, wandering the streets, as illusive and frightening as a war-leader . . .' It could be London, New York, any large city with an ethnic mix and rootless, alienated youth. But these are, for the most part, Beurs, the untranslatable name given to the second generàtion North Africans, bom or growing up in France, with their own independent radio station, Radio Beurs, and catered for by the newspaper Sans Frontière.
There are no gratuitous descriptions, but Leïla Sebbar catches their individual voices, especially in the long unpunctuated passages in Flaubertian style indirect libre, the spoken or unspoken 'stream of consciousness' which she transcribes with faultless accuracy and through which her characters reveal the essentials of their backgrounds and experiences.
The eponymous heroine shares many of the characteristics of her streetwise companions and squat-mates; she is wayward, insolent, impulsive, exploitative, fearless and totally amoral. She works peripatetically in fashion boutiques in the Halles district, but supplies her basic needs by shoplifting. She takes part in burglaries and armed hold-ups. Yet she seems to retain a certain intransigent innocence, purity even. She is never tempted by drugs nor the easy opportunities of casual prostitution, like her compatriot Djamila. But what distinguishes her above all is the poetry she writes in secret, showing to no one, and her passion for reading, especially about her native Algeria, which she left as a child and yearns to revisit. Before running away from home she spent all
her leisure in the local municipal library, where the friendly librarian ordered shelvesful of books by Algerian writers. It is in the library of the Pompidou Centre at Beaubourg, where she continues her reading, that she attracts the attention of Julien, himself a dedicated Arabist. He introduces Shérazade to more works about Algeria and also Orientalist paintings, of which he is a collector. In the final resort it is the strange attraction of Matisse's Odalisque in Red Trousers which decides her to leave Julien and her mates and set out for Algeria.
Many of the characters in this work are obsessive: Krim, with his passion for motorbikes (particularly the powerful Japanese models which his English counterparts affectionately call 'Yammies' and 'Kwakkers'); Pierrot, the hardline militant, with his revolutionary fervour; Sherazade, fascinated by everything Algerian; Julien, with his twin passions for Orientalist paintings and the cinema. It is no gratuitous detail that one of Julien's favourite films is Jean-Luc Godard's illusive, unclassifiable Pierrot le fou, made in 1965, from the novel Obsession by Lionel White, two years after Godard had actually appeared himself in Gaspard-Huit's film Shéhérazade! The fragmented narrative with its sense of immediacy, the early Parisian scenes, the cinéma vérité technique, some of the episodes and the frequent references to paintings in Godard's Pierrot le fou (Renoir, Velasquez) are mirrored in Sebbar's novel. In the film, a respectable young writer, living a sheltered uneventful life, is fascinated by an enigmatic girl and flees with her from Paris. Godard's Pierrot is paralleled by the two men in love with Shérazade: the writer and scholar Julien, and the revolutionary Pierrot. Godard's Pierrot amuses himself driving his car into the sea, and finally kills himself by tying dynamite round his head, lighting the fuse and blowing his head off; Sebbar's Pierrot takes up Shérazade's challenge to drive the car into the Loire. Unbeknown to her it is loaded with smuggled arms. He crashes it and dies in the explosion. Shérazade is unharmed and disappears before the police arrive on the scene. Sebbar takes up her story in Les Carnets de Shérazade (Shérazade's Notebooks, 1985) and La Fou de Shérazade, 1990. Neither is as yet translated into English.
Dorothy S. Blair
Sherazade
'Your name's really Sherazade?'
'Yes.'
'Really? It's . . . it's so . . . How can I put it? You know who Sheherazade was?'
'Yes.'
'And that doesn't mean anything to you?'
'No.'
'You think you can be called Sherazade, just like that? . . .'
'No idea.'
He looked at her, standing the other side of the high, round counter at the fast-food, unable to believe his eyes.
'And why not Aziyade?'
'Who's that?'
'A beautiful Turkish woman from Istanbul who Pierre Loti was in love with, a hundred years ago.'
'Pierre Loti I've heard of. Not Aziyade.'
'He dressed as a Turk and learned the Turkish language for her sake. He even went to live in the poor district of Istanbul to see her in secret. Aziyade belonged to the harem of an old Turk. She was a young Circassian slave, converted to Islam.'
'Why you telling me about this woman? She's got nothing to do with me.'
'She had green eyes, like you.'
'That's not a reason.'
Sherazade was drinking her Coke out of the can. She wasn't listening any more. Julien Desrosiers went back to reading the small ads in Libération.
When Sherazade cupped her hands over the headphones of the Walkman hanging round her neck and clamped them over her ears, she broke the red and yellow rayon thread of the scarf with shiny fringes, favoured by Arab women from the Barbès neighbourhood and those fresh from the backwoods who haven't yet been attracted to the scarves sold at Monoprix stores that imitate designer label ones with muted colours and abstract designs. Sherazade didn't much care for this scarf, whose poor-quality material was too soft and slippery so the lead of the walkman got tangled up in it every time the material slipped, as a single knot was never enough to hold it in place; but those mornings when she decided to wear it, the loud colours that betrayed its shoddy quality gave her a sort of perverse pleasure which she made no attempt to show, as if the faint sunlight on the orange formica of the fast-food could make you believe it was summer. Besides, she knew she had to be careful of these almost phosphorescent colours which made her conspicuous and which she couldn't always manage to hide under the collar of her blouson jacket. Anyway the keffiyeh, the Palestinian cotton scarf with black and white checks that she'd never been separated from for weeks, would also call police attention to her. She's noticed more than once that youngsters wearing a keffiyeh, whose white soon turns grey if it's not washed regularly, are stopped by one of the cops patrolling the Forum or the Metro. Some of them hadn't got identity papers and the cops threatened to turn them in for loitering with intent but didn't do anything. They had to keep on repeating the warning until one day a cop got the idea of unrolling the scarf tied round the youngster's neck and saw a square of white paper slip out that anyone could spot. The kid tried to get his foot on it but the cop was too quick for him and already had it under his heavy black uniform shoe that the kid stared at desperately without moving, as he was held in an iron grip by the two other policemen who were admiring their colleague's accurate flair. The cop had picked up the dose, shaken out the scarf, folded it up, tucked it under his navy-blue arm, to be produced in evidence, and marched the boy off. He was a minor. He was taken to the Quai de Gesvres.* Sherazade had had to replace her keffiyeh by the Barbes scarf.
*Quai de Gesvres,paris headquaters of the police section dealing with juveniles. (Trans.)
Julien Desrosiers
Between two columns of small ads, Julien Desrosiers watched this girl who said her name was Sherazade and who'd so abruptly broken off a conversation that had scarcely begun. He'd promised himself several times he'd speak to her. He often saw her at the library but he'd never managed to find out what she was reading or get a chance of saying anything to her. She always came alone. She'd sit down without a glance at anyone, read and go away again. Once he'd decided to follow her but when she caught sight of him she'd given him such an insolent look that he'd never done it again. That was when he'd seen her green eyes. Even when he managed to get a seat facing her, she always kept her eyes on the book she happened to be reading, and till then he'd never been able to catch her looking at him.
Finally he'd wondered if she knew he was sitting at the same table, in the same reading room, sometimes quite near her, so near that he could have touched her by stretching out his arm, or bumped her shoulder as he passed between the tables to get to the shelves.
He came nearly every day. He lived quite near; he'd got a newly built flat in the Horloge district, through the Paris Municipality, light and clean where he could work at his drawing-table, when he didn't have to give his computer lectures and didn't spend the morning or the afternoon at the Louvre, the Salle Drouot, the Bibliothèque Nationale or the School of Oriental Languages. On Sunday mornings he went very early to the flea markets in Montreuil, Vanves, Kremlin-Bicêtre. He worked late into the night. He liked that. Sometimes he went to parties at two or three in the morning, but recently he'd been bored with them. He'd go back there with Sherazade. That's what he told himself when he saw her standing in the fast-food. She'd watched him come in as if she'd always known him. Since she smiled at him, he made his way to her table. If she hadn't smiled he'd have gone to sit at a table in the corner where he could see the whole room and people coming and going. Did she know he was the man from the library, or had she smiled at random and he'd thought she was smiling at him? She'd watched him as he moved over towards her eyes. But here, without the violence of her anger, they seemed almost too gentle.
He said, 'My name's Julien.'
And she, 'Mine's Sherazade.'
Delacroix
She was about to leave.
The metal headband of the Walkman had flattened the tight curls on top of her head. She tied another knot in her scarf
and it was only then that Julien thought of the picture he liked to linger in front of, all by himself, as no one ever stopped to look at these women who couldn't have been mentioned in the foreign guides or guides for the use of foreigners, among the works of art that you had to have seen if you visited Paris or the Louvre. No one in front of the Reclining Odalisque either, or The Turkish Bath. But he preferred The Women of Algiers. That scarf with its debased Oriental appearance, too yellow and too red, and just to look at it you could sense the poor-quality synthetic fibre, because this girl tied it in front of him, like the Arab women in the little village of Oranie, in the courtyard and the school house where his father taught, in the mechtas where his mother took him when she went to nurse the women and children, Sherazade's hands, her fingers that pulled the ends of the scarf into a knot that would not come undone straight away and then as an afterthought making a double knot, these gestures moved Julien so much that he had to hold on to the edge of the table. Sherazade noticed nothing of all that. She only learned later who these Algerian women were that Julien had thought about because of the cheap scarf she'd put on that day. When she went to the Louvre with him to see The Women of Algiers, she noticed that the woman on the left leaning on one elbow, with her legs folded under her on a red and gold fouta, had green eyes.
'It's true. It's incredible! Yes, you're right. She's got green eyes.'
He'd stared at Sherazade, putting his hands on her shoulders.
'Just like you.'
Several times they'd both hurried in to see the Delacroix, then out again without seeing anything except these women because that was what they came for, just for them. When they walked along the embankments, Julien talked of the pink in the hair of the woman with the hookah, the kanoun on the floor between the three women, the gold bracelets on their naked ankles, the beautiful Negress's hand, the black and red fouta with the narrow stripes round her hips below a short midnight-blue bolero, the way the standing Negress looked at her indolent white mistresses. He told Sherazade about the women of the harems, Delacroix's and Fromentin's North Africa, the Arab farmworkers and the poor-white settlers he'd known in Algeria, the street children he'd always played with.