by Ryad Girod
You are on your knees now and the crowd is fused together in silence … silence so as to hear the last prayer that Judge Abou Daoud has reserved for you and the sound of the blade that will cut through your neck and that, imperceptible, of the impact of your head as it falls on the much-trampled mat. This is where we are now, Mansour … You don’t see us anymore, Mansour, but know that we are all around you. Hallaj has returned from March 26, 922 and has made his way through this impure crowd to take my hand and finish bringing me to the first circle, among those close to you, among your friends, Mansour … There are some here whom I recognize and still others, all dressed in white, in a tight circle around you … I recognize Plato and Plotinus, Suhrawardi and Ibn Sina, Abdelkader and Ibn ʿArabi … as for the others, those I do not recognize, their faces smile at me in this tragic moment … And who knows, maybe Poincaré is among them, Bergson and maybe even Louis-Napoléon … and who knows, Jesus, Moses, Abraham … All here so that before our eyes the center and the circumference be reunited, the here and the elsewhere, the visible and the hidden reunited, the rational and the irrational reunited. The winds redouble in intensity. Everything is now so white, all that remains is light on light.
Abou Daoud joins his hands together over his head and opens his mouth to initiate his prayer of farewell but nothing comes out … Nothing but silence in the whirling winds. Lord, grant me access to one atom of your knowledge, that which reduced mountains to dust, so that I may understand the slightest little bit of anything about this entire story. Abou Daoud turns his eyes toward your executioner who brings his sword down into the whirling winds and the silence is split asunder by the sound of a sword cutting into sand … and the sound of a heap of sand falling onto the mat that has been rolled out at the center of Al Safat … By the light of lights, I swear that an atom of your truth would make me into The Truth before its power reduces all the cliffs of the Najd to dust. Your executioner turns to the crowd and lets loose a cry that remains voiceless before the eyes of the crowd as they attempt to see you through the billions upon billions of atoms of dust that veil your miracle. Give me the strength of an atom of your truth so that I may understand that you became sand the moment the blade grazed a single atom of your skin.
It is Abdelkader, before that still-ignorant crowd, who pronounces what is meant to explain your passion and your miracle. As if his presence wasn’t just as miraculous, he kneels down before the clothing that you left on that mat which should have collected your blood and your parts … but you are not made of parts.
I am God, I am the creature
I am the Lord, I am the servant
I am the Throne, I am the trampled mat
I am hell and I am blissful eternity
I am the water, I am the fire, I am the air and the earth
I am the number and the way
I am the presence and the absence
I am the essence and the trait
I am proximity and distance
All being is my being
I am the One
I am the Only
Abdelkader bin Muhyi al-Din
Damascus, May 26, 1883
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Renee Altergott, Santiago Artozqui, Heidi Denman, Mohamed Elkhadiri, Ryad Girod, Adam Levy, Lara Vergnaud, and Rawad Wehbe.
RYAD GIROD was born in 1970 in Algiers, where he teaches mathematics in the Lycée International d’Alger. Girod is a part of what the French press have labeled the October Generation, along with fellow writers such as Adlène Meddi, Samir Toumi, and others who came of age around the time of the October Riots in 1988. Winner of the Assia-Djebar Grand Prize, this is his first book to appear in English.
CHRIS CLARKE was born in Western Canada and currently lives in Philadelphia, PA. His previous translations include work by Raymond Queneau, Pierre Mac Orlan, and François Caradec. He was awarded the 2019 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for fiction in 2019 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives (Wakefield Press), a prize for which he was a finalist in 2017 for his translation of Nobel Prize-winner Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth (NYRB Classics). He is a PhD Candidate in French at The Graduate Center (CUNY), and his dissertation examines the role of translation in the career of French author Raymond Queneau.
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