The Homeland

by Hamida Na'na

  Revolution is not restricted to one single land.

  Remember, this is what she told you as you were trying to convince her of your current point of view.

  “Every freedom fighter on this earth is responsible for the lives of his comrades, no matter where they are.”

  Frank got up and went to the bathroom, seeking refuge in the hot water. If only he could get himself out of this train of thought. If only he could distance himself from this mania which was pushing him to the land where the battle rages. If only he could erase from his eyes the image of Nadia, lying face down, the gun-shot wounds decorating her back like medals. But the hot water only increased the sounds and thoughts burning in his blood and his head. Things now looked even more complicated than they did before. He had to make a resolution to rid himself of the duplicities which governed his life.

  What about Laurice?

  His mind was occupied as he dried off the drops of water on his chest. Will she live like an orphan? Who said she will live like an orphan?

  He stared at the torn canvas of the mariner. He saw new sails coming over the horizons, sweeping angrily over the oceans before his eyes. He quickly dressed and went down the wooden steps to the town which he loved.

  He crossed the street in the direction of the Quai de la Seine. Paris seemed cold and miserable that morning, with the gusts of wind blowing his hair this way and that. He got in his car and drove to the headquarters of his party. What was he going to tell them this time.

  “It’s all over. I have decided to leave France again.”

  They will probably stare at him in surprise. There are the elections soon and it is possible that the socialists might win this time. What will they say? That he has run away from the reality of his own land and has fled to another country. That he is now used to not having a homeland of his own, or a name, or an identity.

  He had got used to being the consultant, the outsider. They will say… .

  Well, let them say what they want. France does not need people like him. France will realize its profits whoever is in charge, Left or Right. History has given her the opportunity and her revolution was realized long ago. Here she is now, living in expectation of the achievement of even greater affluence. Institutions in France will be more democratic and revolutionary change will come as a result of the long history of a country which had already brought about change through its bourgeois revolution … As for Nadia, she has gone to a place where death waits outside the doors of time. Every day it knocks somewhere with its bloodstained hand, ready to snatch away a human being.

  When he arrived at the Café Saint Clô, his hands slackened on the steering wheel. He could not carry on any longer. He parked the car on the Saint Germain side. He looked at Paris in the morning. It had not changed at all. It had not changed since the day he left it to go to that other country. The first hours of the morning. Like every morning the newspaper vendor was on the corner where Frank normally bought his newspaper. The church was still there. The picture seller …

  The essence of Paris. That is how I imagined you in exile. She used to speak to me all the time that I was afraid.

  He got out of the car and headed towards the Café Saint Clô. He crossed the threshold and was hit by the heat and the empty expressions. Boredom and turbulence. But the turbulence dies down. The eagle which spreads its wings to receive her was asleep on that Saturday morning in 1977. He knew the face of the waiter. He was there every morning. And the fat man sitting at the till. The old woman who had frequented this place for the last ten years.

  And you used to come here, alone, your eyes ablaze, not able to face the frost of the political parties. The whole world sleeps under your memory. You try to force death to tailor itself to your measurements. Your vitality, your wonderings inhabit you from one dawn to the next. Eight o’clock at the library on Rue d’Ulm, you took your breakfast in the café opposite before you were woken up again by your questions. Sections of hell before going. Sections of hell after leaving. Sections of hell at your return. Sections of hell in the body of Nadia, which was engraved by torture. Rape in prison vaults. And a single woman loved you. A single woman parted company with you. She is the revolution which you searched for in your country and did not find. Calm down, Madame, I will not abandon you. You used to be afraid sometimes. Your mother used to look in your eyes. But you were in need. You needed to translate your body and your questions into action and you were sure about that need. The ceiling is in front of your eyes and your back stretches on the wooden floor of your room in the big house. Your blue shirt sticks to your body as you suffer the torture of your intellectual solitude and your alienation. Your hand is always tugging at alock of your hair and the sounds of alienation issue from your throat. The game has ended – or has it just begun? You must go back again, whatever. Mr ‘So-and-So’ is against the revolution because the objective conditions are not yet secured. Stop. There is a change of routes, please. Much ease. My dear Western Marxist. In these sorts of cases, you have to make your decisions on your own. There is no-one to help you. You don’t mean your leaders, with their puffed up stomachs and their constant mistakes. You make mistakes too, you know. The file is closed. Stop. Full-stop. You believed that there would never be revolution in your country. You were convinced and it was still impossible. Stop. For and against. The awareness of a fair, frail-bodied child. 1968. You wait. ‘You naughty revolutionary’. Divorced from the revolution but in fact almost made for it. The high rooms and the bowed ceilings. René’s face, coloured by Africa as he explains to you the consequences of your continued presence. You go to your party. Back to your leaders. Nine flights of stairs to the newspaper offices. Under the nose of the manufacturer of spite and justice and history. The road seems to go on for ever. No objective reality. You had to break your wings to forge them anew. After that the jungles, the comrade stabbed in the hot night between his prayers and his gun. His eyes looked towards your prison, and you saw him in yourself. You give him a name. You search for his face in the darkness of your solitude. You ask about his life. The land of his cross. His friends. You follow the paths of his body, his head and his soul. The paths of the spirit.

  “Miraille. Was he really killed?”

  Miraille held back her tears as she came to you with the face of the past. It was her first visit after your sentence was announced.

  “He was crucified. A hundred spikes pierced his body.”

  You were embarrassed by the pain you felt, and you tried not to let your guards and executioners see it in those moments of loneliness. You became convinced of the impossibility of a revolutionary operating in a country other than his own, while part of your soul conspired to convince you of the impossibility of revolution itself. You pulled the white sheets from your bed and you tried to make a rope out of them. Questions. Question marks.

  You heard fragments of lost poems by Aragon, obscure fragments of unknown origins. They came to you with the sunset which crept in through the hole in the highest corner of the wall. You were torn between your yearning for life and your hankering for death, the desire for liberty for many different men of this world. That is how you became so easily lost in the forests of your past. You drew a few spots of sympathy on the papers as a fair youth who had come from a distant land. Lighted spots like candles in a temple. At night you would wake up and see your steps across your cell – three metres long and two metres wide. You tried to write early in the morning. You tried to define the moment of the last breath. You couldn’t, so you distributed it over the past and the present. You used to write, in an attempt to pierce the walls of your prison, in the belief that the dawn would come. That unknown day which drove you to wonder sometimes whether it really existed at all on the horizons of time.

  The hand of night reached everything. Your guards. Your executioners. The sad calaria roasa growing on the other side of the wall. You are a living corpse in your cell. Deep, dark, black. You think of Paris and become immersed in the light of the Place de Da
uphine. The bright mornings when you had to draw the curtains before you could dream. The eyes of a man of thirty were cold wrinkles concealing nothing and revealing all. You became weak and you wondered if you would really be able to face the world again. You go over events without recognizing your failures. You try to be self-aware and self-critical. Sometimes you forgive yourself for having talked. The body which knew the snows of Europe could not bear the heat of their torture. You told them everything you knew. Your comrade was killed in the jungle after your confession. From that moment you were incapable of self-love. You tried to run alone in your cell. You tried to run towards repentance and purification. When terror ceased you found yourself face to face with your dead friend. You fell to your knees and called out his name.

  “Oh, ever-loving Christ, I have finished bowing to you and I do not know what truth brought me here.”

  You were a child playing with the stars, who noticed that their remoteness was at one with the remoteness of death.

  “Tell us, comrade, about how they fired at your head?”

  It was hard for you to imagine that head, which brought you out from the sterile philosophy that you learnt in Rue d’Ulm, which tried to restore justice and to bring order to the jungle, could fall from a bullet.

  “What were you thinking about when the executioner took aim at your head? Who did you dream about? Were you thinking about a woman of this world? Tell us, you archetype of man, what did you say the moment that you hit the ground? You were smiling. That is what Miraille said. They lit olive branches all over the world for you then. But what was the use?”

  At night crows flew from a northern country to perch on the bars of the window. They caw in anticipation of your appointed hour. Once you cried out in complaint, and countless obstacles sprang up in your head. Let revolution be that spectre. You were longing for the elm and ash trees by the walls of deserted graveyards. Primeval. Red mixed with green. You produced many sentences for your notebooks. You tried to draw your future in them. But what future was there for you, prisoner? Oblivion and the daily routine of pain. Charming harmony of everlasting torture. Secret pain until the end. Everything around you was penitent. In exile, the ghosts came to you. Your masters: Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, the Republic of Shadows. That is how you spent subsequent years, planting words and harvesting the woman who came to you from afar seeking to wrench you out of that nothingness. The day you inspected your arms, your chest, your neck, and you found them all in their place, you were happy because you were still alive.

  You, who used to try to shed some light on his past wondering. What made you go on living was the desire to be a father. You said this to your comrades when you were out of prison, and they found nothing treasonable or surprising in that. It had all been said before by prisoners. Transparent, like the face of your friend when you were in the jungle. The habits which produced the love in every night of your lives. Every shot was a straight line towards the construction of revolution and social justice. But what you needed after that was selfprotection. Awake or unconscious, time had succeeded in scuppering desire. Neither today nor tomorrow was the moment for hunting hatred and injustice. A triumph over slavery? But you already knew that … Perhaps the irons were broken slowly. “The Revolution Within” and you claim to have created a new world. Hoping for a better world which never dies, where prisoners stand up to torture and do not divulge every secret they know or the names of their comrades outside the prison walls. Their bodies will remain tattooed with love for ever and their lives will turn into an endless celebration.

  He sighed deeply. He took out his diary. He thought about writing aSong of Songs, the greatest love poem to Nadia, and to the revolution which had abandoned him. He thought about trying to be with her now under the lights of Ayntab. Paris asking questions. Paris awaiting the election results. Michel attacking François. Then everyone goes off to spend the weekend at their homes in the country. Olivier will make another film about the blueness of the sea and the greenness of the trees. Miraille will talk to him at length about her psychiatrist with whom she is discussing the moment of consciousness and unconsciousness. Here, everything falls apart. Everything falls into triviality and cosiness, right down to the long, overheated underground tunnels which penetrate Paris. Light is exiled in the darkness of the bombs fired far from this land. Bullets are fired at hearts. Political prisoners have their nails pulled out and their eyes plucked from their heads. Why does the world not return to purity? Why doesn’t someone take history outside and screw it.

  He took a blank piece of paper and wrote:

  “I am unable to live amongst you. One day I hope to create light in the world. I leave you like the stones of argument and luxury in your beds. Win if you so desire.”

  He folded the paper calmly and walked to the door of the café. He threw one last glance at the faces of the regular customers. As he crossed the street, he thought about the time and the date: 10.00 am, September 1977.

  Silence hung over Paris. It afforded the city an instant of death. What was he doing in this city? Would he give it a new birth?

  Paris has become sterile after bringing so many children into the world. Now she is in her dotage. Is it really she who threw his personal happiness far away from her soil? He would return to her again, perhaps when age had turned her hair completely white.

  He got into his car and turned on the ignition. He waited a few minutes before deciding where to go. Instead of heading towards Rue Bourbon-le-Château, he decided, on the spur of the moment, to turn the car around and go back to Orly Airport.

  Paris and the cold morning ran away behind him. On the airport road, behind the houses of the little villages scattered along it, he could see another horizon. It was the colour of the sea. His eyes did not stray from his destination: the airport. From there he would pass over the conflagrations of the world.

  Everything around him seemed to contain peaceful, unseen tunes.

  When we sing of the time of cherries.

  Gaiety of birds and the mockery of the nightingale. They will all be here,

  Terror in their eyes and madness in their heads. Fighters. Lovers.

  The sun in their hearts.

  When we sing in the time of cherries,

  The birds will live in a better way.

  The plane was going to the East. His face was fixed on the clouds below him. How would he find her? Perhaps she had been consumed in the flames. He must be patient and carry with him a god-like desire, a desire to explain the nothingness of death. How helpless he was. How helpless he was without her. Without her he could not even live. He built up life, destroyed it, built it up again. The love of a woman fighter means complete supremacy over freedom. It is ultimate life in the blue depths.

  He is travelling to her, unrestrainedly desiring to escape to her. Union with a body which does not bear the mark of a bullet is but a mute expression, nothing more than thin air. The body and the revolution merge together, become the natural intermediary between father and son.

  Let him say goodbye to Europe, to the bosom of Europe, and her leaders. Let him leave it all behind, the metro stations, the adverts for Nestlé milk and Chantelle lingerie. He would fire new bullets at silence in the factory towns. His struggle will not come to an end this time. Nadia will be his absolute freedom and he will learn in her body the meaning of faithfulness towards death and life, before old age, before dotage. He will become the man of chivalry who neither deserts nor betrays.

  “What we knew was love. But I didn’t really know you nor you me, that’s why you didn’t yearn for me. Remember the first meeting. How can something so banal produce such an ending. Remember the burning desire to change into comets.”

  The aeroplane was getting closer to the East. The houses of Athens have small fires.

  “You told me in the rain, on the Pont Neuf, the story of your first encounter with love. You lowered your voice and blushed.”

  The aeroplane approaches the East. The silence of the passe
ngers whispers incomprehensibly. It turns to cacophony. In his eyes the Mediterranean below seems like a blue legend touching the sky.

  He lifted his hand to his forehead and spent a moment in prayer, before the onset of battle. He remembered the first words that he had learnt there in the hot country. A burning memory of slain comrades rose from his heart and tore the deep inner night of his loneliness. The homelands are far apart and scattered, and now he was approaching a new homeland. He hears his heart beating. It was a sound he had ignored for a long time while he was going backwards and forwards between the Place de Dauphine and his party headquarters.

  This time his wings were no longer just wings, they were the world.

  Hamida Na’na

  Hamida Na’na was born in Syria. She graduated from Damascus University in 1971 and worked as a journalist before travelling to France to continue her education in literature and Islamic studies. She then worked for UNESCO between 1974 and 1977. During her subsequent appointment as head of the Europe and North Africa bureau at Al-Safir newspaper she published Debates with Western Thinkers, a series of interviews conducted with prominent writers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir. Her other novel Man Yajrou ‘ala al-Shawq was published in 1989 and has recently been translated into German. Hamida Na’na currently lives in Paris and works for the monthly French magazine Le Nouvel Afrique-Asie.

  Fadia Faqir

  Fadia Faqir was born in Jordan in 1956. She gained her BA in English Literature, MA in creative writing, and doctorate in critical and creative writing at Jordan University, Lancaster University and East Anglia University respectively. Her first novel, Nisanit, was published by Penguin in 1988 and her second novel, Pillars of Salt, is forthcoming. Fadia Faqir is a lecturer in Arabic language and literature at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Durham University. She is at present working on her third novel, The Black Iris Crossing.