by Kamel Daoud
27
The Hamza affair was a strange incident, like a fever. It caught me off guard. I was distracted by my fight against the mocking laughter of my father, the ridicule of my cousins who were my age, the start of the slander about my celibacy. My gift was ripe at that age, I defended it and imposed it on death. I was in that powerful period when I could write fabulous things about a vine, an intersection, a facial feature. The story had reached its plenitude and possessed me. A juncture formed in my mind, which seemed absolute and definitive, joining my compassion, my beliefs, the metaphysical, and the grammar of a language I now mastered like breathing. I was saving lives with ease and the ridicule of my body had been nearly eclipsed by a sort of aura enshrouding my goat voice with a sublime language. Oh yes! Everything was going well, heading for happiness. That’s when the devil (or the jealous angel) returned in the form of a young man with a bulky body, a bushy red beard, and a sharp eye. Hamza. I had known him as a child, he was a felon, a bird hunter, raised by his grandparents after the death of his diviner father. Unlike me, the liberty of being an orphan launched him into the streets, with no fear or hesitation. He was the boss, the ringleader, he imposed his rules and his way of dressing.
I had run into him all over, at school before he dropped out and near our douar, on the hill. Except back then he wasn’t called Hamza, he was still Aïssa. When he was eighteen he suddenly changed his name, refused to turn around when they called him by the old one, grew silent and started selling sardines to make a living. That contrasted sharply with his typical verve and joie de vivre. No one understood his renunciation: but Aïssa was the first name of the prophet Jesus, cited in the Koran, respected and venerated, but who died in a different manner according to the Holy Book, which explains that he was not crucified but hidden, kidnapped alive and taken to the sky, and a doppelgänger was killed in his place. He turned it into a crusade and waged war against the recollection of his old name in others’ memories, through weak explanations and dubious historical facts. It was his first war, and he won it. Which gave him the idea to conquer the world, which is to say our village, proceeding in the same way: by erasing all evidence. I knew about his life, of course, his secret bitterness, and also the details of his face, and I had saved his life, several times, by writing The Upward Roads, Light in August, Cities of Salt. Pensive books on the fate of summers.
That didn’t change when, more recently, he came back into my life with verses and Hadiths that he used to shout, threaten, and speak to God, as if He had sent him. It was a strange time and I felt it: the village smelled like must but also like exhaustion. On television, the songs and hymns rang slightly false and a new kind of preacher showed up to offer a new story that began with fire and blaze; or the sand of the desert that suddenly became an ally. Yes. Over the years, Hamza had gained disciples, cast judgment on everything, and one day mentioned me and my gift. Cunning as he was, he avoided evoking politics and the law of God in the village, for he knew the State was watching him, but he preached virulently and denounced me as the worst enemy of our religion: not the godless barbarian from an obscure land, but the traitor, the hypocrite, that age-old obsession of the religious, the ambiguous believer. I was the portrait of the man who wears both the mask of God and the body of the devil, walks in the sun with a slight limp reciting verses, proclaiming the sovereignty of God but perceptive to the whispers of Iblīs, the devil. Skillfully manipulating the Arabic language, he named me as the worst enemy of the religion of the Book and the Word. It was thus me, Zabor of the night, impostor Ishmael of our religion, born of infanticide. The clever man played on an ancient competition between the verse and the line, adversaries of an unsurpassable speech. In the Book, the poets are in fact mocked, suspected of rivalry and wandering.
As for the poets, they are followed by the lost.
Do you not see that they wander aimlessly through every valley…
And say what they themselves do not do?
A gloomy and withdrawn teenager, I used to recite those verses to try to find a reason for this accusation, other than jealousy. I found that divine hostility unjust when I had to memorize the Book and give it my voice, my body, my intimacy, my footsteps. That was when I intended to use it to make my bread and bolster my dignity. My rival with the henna-dyed beard and the magnificent voice knew how to utilize those verses and saw me as an enemy to denounce, but also as competition to the budding influence of his word. Hamza got to work, with a few fervent young devotees, distributing books of exegeses, collections of Hadiths, feverish quartos on the prayers and ablutions, and imposed them everywhere. He didn’t know how to read or write very well, but he knew how to speak about his unique book.
Hamza sought me out, wanted to provoke me into an absurd duel, but I always managed to avoid him. How did I vanquish him? To be honest, it was his excess that was his downfall, not my cleverness. The village inhabitants were fascinated by him for a time and listened to his version of the world, but he infuriated them the day he tried to set fire to the Sidi Bend’hiba mausoleum. That was his fatal error. They found him hidden in the meager forest at the entrance to Aboukir, surrounded by a few companions, hairy, dirty as during the early days of his beliefs. He was arrested and imprisoned for two years. I have to admit, I was obsessed by the idea of him for a while. Like a monstrous twin gone astray, an evil version of the gift.
28
In the morning, Hadjer would see my clothes sullied by my nightly wanderings (and burials) but rarely asked me any questions. She would simply check my face to ensure I hadn’t fallen into the hands of my thieving shepherd half brother in the surrounding fields. The rare times I came home hurt, it was from the stones thrown by the children lying in wait for me under the vines, who followed me and shouted. “Zabor eddah el babor!” they would yell before scattering like wasps. “Zabor was carried off by a boat!” I was angry, but often what went through me was a wave of pity and sincere compassion for the miniature sleeping universe of the village and its hamlets, unaware of its fate as a child that was mute and deaf to the world, with no books to save it from oblivion, with no language other than my own, constructing its illusions and its lives in a small crevasse between the distant sea and the hill that sealed off the horizon like a tombstone. Were those people aware that I was saving them not only from death but also from futility and oblivion? Could they understand that my notebooks were the only rampart shielding them from erasure and that if one day I might reach absolute description, I could render them eternal or save them from the end of the world? Two books competed for their salvation, the one that descends from the sky and the one I write endlessly. Except that mine didn’t impose a Last Judgment or death and preserved the earth and its pebbles and shadows.
PSALM
…The great stories imperceptibly govern the world like mountains. They divide up the earth as soon as they flush it out. Sometimes they wage war and it’s horrible and bloody, as the newspapers and historians testify. The reason is that no Story, no history of creation wants to accept another as a relative or kin or as being born of the same womb around the same ancient fire. Nothing, except a ferocious jealousy and an irrevocable desire to be the first to recount things, in a singular version, and without ever pausing to let others speak and let people enjoy the difference. Nothing. In my books, I respect them, these Stories, I was afraid of them and they could have devoured me like whales. At one point, I asked myself which one was the most sincere or correct about the origin and value of the sun, the steps of the sleeping man, the troubling reason for the animal skins and the feelings and especially death and its way of walking in a zigzag. Sprawled on the earth that they crush, these first Histories terrified me and seduced me with their power—like sullen or spoiled children who only want to hear their own name and possess every golden object in the house. Children of Gargantua as they were drawn in one of my books, with men hidden under giant lettuce leaves and ewes reduced to olives or grains of flou
r. I think it’s because of this childish side that the stories kill and shout their heads off at each other to fight over the prophets, the poets, and the tales of tribes. It’s an assembly of jealous divinities but with the mentality of children who don’t want to grow up and accept that the world can settle for silence and light.
From time to time, these stories come back in force and provoke wars, beginning with the readers, the copyists, then the interpreters and finally the preachers and the stories of the end of the world. Sometimes, tired and somnolent, these stories about the world calm down, and then they become books, novels, or amusing explanations about the night sky and the birth of constellations.
That’s how I explained to myself, gently, over time, the power of holy books and the reproaches from my family when I started to speak about the Greek gods or other divinities in our small unknown and tenacious village. The suspicious Story of our own earth slowly lifted its eyelid and began to search for who, in its stables, was starting to doubt its version, its sovereignty, or was surreptitiously sowing doubt into the tree trunk of great truths. The dissonant voice is always perceptible within ovations, I think. But who recounts these stories first and gives them life? The gods or the blind? No, I don’t think so, for the gods themselves are unstable characters, constantly dragged around. I think the Story is earlier, older, I came with age to understand that it’s our gift to ourselves. We can find the vague outline of a god in a stone and lichen and explain the world with a tree and an animal that tries to climb it and falls back down. It’s in us, and we are in the story. Plunged into ourselves every time we try to look outside of our universe, trapped in our sleep. I think that was, in those years, my most profound intuition, the most distant place I ventured thinking about the books I had read, countless in my imagination, and the books still to be written, which are constantly reborn and reproducing even once we’re dead. At night, I imagined giant faces, and I asked myself what was the greatest importance of things. I dreamed of my father, too.
That immense vision made me cry with compassion, because I realized I was truly the only one of my people at that altitude.
29
The sun rises. The light comes back as though to confirm the order of things, their number. At first soft and golden, it mixes with the paint on the walls, then turns harsh and reaches the corners, the books, the notebooks, my bed. I shiver. For me, the world is a sort of indirect incandescence, eclipsed by the horizon. A book we burn but that is never reduced to cinders, that lights up for a long time with an entire story inside and then slowly darkens when the sun, the eye of the universal reader, shuts. At nightfall, the novel is scattered into luminous points, into the Milky Way, and becomes infinity and chaos before coming back together the next morning. It goes from starry table of contents to solitary eye. I will sleep in this fire, curled up until Hadjer comes to shake me awake to eat sardines, which I love. Who would I be if I were to marry one day? I could be the other bank of the same river for the woman lying next to me. It intrigues me, this sudden need. How would I be able to write, stay up until dawn, recount the world to keep it from crumbling, to a woman who doesn’t know how to read or write? My gift’s ultimate challenge: to go further than language, make it collide with its impossibility. (“Opposite challenge,” says the dog in my head: “the man who recounts, night after night, a story to a dead woman and, little by little, she comes back to life, to her senses, the palace rises from its ruins like the donkey of the Prophet who asked God to prove resurrection.”) That’s what I keep thinking about: Brahim’s suffering also brings a strange celebration. I am ashamed.
30
My screaming came back with even greater intensity when I was about ten. Nothing worked: not the unctions, not the imam summoned by my father, not even the sheep slaughtered in the mausoleums. I was becoming fragile like a tibia and my father’s heart was crushed with shame whenever he passed me with his friends. Even hidden at my aunt Hadjer’s house, I was an abomination to him and his reputation.
My body, the resemblance to my mother, my dietary preference and my bleating voice, all represented the reversal of his fortune that swelled like a hill at the top of the village. Even only glimpsed on the floor, drunk off the ground after the slaughter, blood still evoked a warm and ferrous taste in my mouth, lowered a black veil under my eyelids. As for food, I couldn’t touch anything but vegetables or cold fish that no one had slaughtered. Anything else meant vomiting and wretchedness for my stomach. A limp finger flipped at Hadj Brahim and his role as sacrificer. He felt profoundly insulted: why was God, who had given him sons and sheep, mocking him like this? I imagine he rifled through his past for a long time trying to find an explanation for my abomination, but he never seemed to find a satisfying answer. He firmly believed in God, because of tradition, by default, but his faith permitted a sort of secret irritation in the face of divine desires. He was reminded that he was guilty of infanticide every time he passed me and knew I had a solid recollection of his first fatherly act: abandoning us in a land of sandstorms and ruins with a few sheep and some change. Everything was arranged in circles in his house to conceal this first murder and his cowardice faced with his wife: his burnoose, his fortune, his prayers, his lavish generosity with the poor, his lofty phrases and the stories of his destitute childhood. For lack of courage, he had opted for an imaginary saga.
He declared one day that perhaps God had chosen me to serve Him with my voice, because its quavering grief, its plaintive, irritating tone, and the guilt it provoked were perfectly suited to recite the Holy Book. And so at ten years old, on a Monday in June, around the time of the siesta that emptied the village of men and allowed women to venture a few steps outside, I was brought to the house of the reciters, behind the mosque in the center of town, and handed over to the master of the old Koranic school packed with noisy children. They had decided that the modern school was no longer enough to protect me from being possessed by the devil and that learning the Holy Book could only heal me in the long term. Absent from public school for months because of my panic attacks and migraines, I had been excluded gently, politely, for my own benefit even. Since I couldn’t hope for the prestige of medicine or teaching, it was conceivable that I might earn my living and respect by reciting the Holy Book over the tombs, during weddings or burials, to soften hearts and consecrate nuptials.
A sweet and docile child, I followed my aunt to the door of the madrassa before I realized they were throwing me into the mouth of a whale that shook the entire village with its discordant voices. The master caressed my hair in front of my aunt who had slid a bill into his hand, looked me in the eyes with the false tenderness his profession requires, then declared that I must have been sent by God to honor the Book, to be its guardian until the Last Judgment. “Those who uphold the Holy Book cannot be touched by the fire of hell, said the Prophet,” he concluded, solemn. Hadjer’s suspicious faith and anger at destiny always left her skeptical about those who spoke in the name of the heavens and its justice, but she pretended to accept the sermon. After some hesitation, she let go of my hand and I joined the curious children, sitting in a circle on a halfa rug on the ground. The room was big, cool, and somber, and had a strange, subtle odor. Fermented clay, I learned later. The master didn’t look at me even when my aunt left the room and reminded him that I was the son of Hadj Brahim. He told the eldest of the disciples to give me a tablet with the shortest surah clumsily scrawled on it. The object, heavy, smeared with brown, tenuous ink, was fascinating to me. Like a talking stone. I plunged into contemplation, while around me children’s voices recited the words of God to embed them in their memories. The master dozed off all the time, half asleep, only seeming to wake up when the cadence dropped slightly, indicating a lack of attention, an absence, or cheaters reciting poorly. He was vigilant, his ear susceptible to the tiniest slip in tone or syllable. The Book was so holy that it couldn’t suffer a single erasure or voice crack without jeopardizing the miracle. Did I hat
e those summers in the village, stuck in the backyard of the mosque? Sometimes, yes. Especially when I had to hold in my pee and flatulence so as not to pollute my ablutions, when I had to complete my prayers without bursting out laughing or scratching an itch. I hated the constraint imposed on the laws of the body, and the conviction of the imam and our master, who served as the caller to the five prayers, that the body was something filthy, an obstacle to meeting God, to understanding the Book and accessing its meaning. We couldn’t recite or touch the Book unless we had been purified with water and intense cleansing.
Even so, I had happy friendships. Like with Noureddine, who gave me my first cigarettes, and Hadji, a sneaky child who had already had his first sexual encounter, who showed us his penis and told us about sperm and the sorcery used by girls. But, beyond those insignificant memories, those times introduced me to the disappointing mysteries of the Book. A child unsettled by silence and by waking up in the morning, I plunged into my studies with a force sometimes inspired by fear. It astonished my master: I memorized the surahs with a worrying speed that delighted Hadjer and my father, surprised by my rapid recovery. I slept better, always glued to my aunt, but my panic attacks were rarer and rarer, objects had started to recede into the darkness, my attention now absorbed by my studies. The cycles of recitations synced with the rites: we had to erase our tablet at the end of each month, reciting the memorized surah in front of the master who either certified our proficiency, and thus our right to erase the tablet and copy a new surah, or condemned the apprentice to another month of recitation. The Book was never explained, discussed, or recounted, we simply had to be its guardians, uphold it until the next generation. The exam session ended either in baton strikes on the soles of our feet, our hands restrained by two zealous members of the group who laughed at the cries of the boy being tortured, or by the rare ceremonious rite of replacing the master during one of his absences. I did that quite often, prolonging the delight of seeing the words of a god recede under the sponge soaked in water, plunging back into the primal silence like fish.