by Kamel Daoud
Then I decided to try something else to learn the woman’s story: I reread a chapter skipping over the words I didn’t know, only reading the ones I could decipher. The phases of my excitement became my conjugation. It was the beginning of a miracle: the paragraphs slowly became illuminated, populated with heavy shadows and whispers, revealing a breach, a possibility of nuance, of nudity. Then I searched for the phrases beginning with elle, the first name of a woman, roaming the pages to find her, like in a crowd or in a train station, running, stopping, then starting up again endlessly when I confused her with others. I turned my back on the village and on all my people in these moments. I wasn’t the abandoned Ishmael with the goat voice, afflicted with fainting spells at the sight of blood or when trying to leave the village, but an Englishman (what was the nationality that the seas often spoke of?), a hand touching hair to calm a heart.
Hadjer, at first intrigued, decided that this was my own way of completing my studies or occupying my infinite time at that age. I have to say that the book was still descending from the sky in our world, guarding the prestige of a voice of God or a commentary on his verses. Destiny was “written,” ink had the power to heal and must be drunk on an empty stomach (mixed with oil, honey, and thyme), facing east, and writing was still a sovereign order, a mandate. Seeing me read all the time, leaning as though over a well, calm and without yelling, she decided this was a better remedy than movies on TV, her caresses in my hair, or her fragile explanations about my mother’s death and my father’s abandonment. I stopped time, my games with the neighborhood children, and my idle wandering through the house down below. But my aunt wasn’t duped for very long, because, through a strange intuition, she surmised that it was as much a fascination for the language of the former colonizers as it was about the troubles linked to this body that she saw taking on new angles and bones, and she noticed my goat voice change into the voice of a lamb with lowered eyes. Her femininity, exacerbated by the wait, sensed my transformation but decided not to worry about it.
The wild orchid resisted me for a long time, then, gradually, worn down by my persistence, she yielded, opened her mouth, her lips onto her tongue. I will always remember that moment of unexpected melody when I realized that I had mastered the language, that it had turned to music after having been carved stone, noise in my head, silent palm trees and flavorless coconut trees. Suddenly the book took on a voice and told me its story like a confession after the crime. Of course, I didn’t understand all the words, but the language, which was flesh, became a knotted muscle and started to move with the conjugated tenses. All discovery is music, melody, vibration. Even today, when I write to keep the village out of the well, inspiration comes to me like the buzzing of a bee. And the music inhabited me for years, it heralded an erection but also voyages. I ate little, reading everywhere, rereading (for lack of books), by the light of the television, by the flame of the candle in the courtyard, seated near my grandfather who was still alive at the time like an ellipsis. My eyes gleamed with obsession but I was also tired as a traveler’s back. A marvelous initiation—my panic attacks stopped and this language appeared to me in all its splendor and freedom with my first dozen books. It was of course a revelation about sex, but also about unexplored territories that were foreign to me, or almost: the sea, the valley, the tropics, the deadly fever, the sand and the shrouds, the island most of all, were revealed to me from the inside, touching my senses other than sight, in the rampant intimacy the reader feels faced with a world. Reading a book was like moving through a giant tree, climbing under its bark up to its fruit, inside its branches.
Learning how to read introduced me to the wonderful coincidence of the interior with appearance, it gave sound to the silence and allowed me to measure the exact expanse of the world on the other side of my fainting spells. It started that day, at the beginning of October, and culminated in my strange scars of a man hunched over his notebooks to keep the village healthy and safe in the face of epidemics, ailments, and the grief of mourning. The books, without illustrations and without images, were as dense as the tropics, and at first I spent hours staring at the covers, imagining the meaning of the titles, their shadows, their contrast with my hands made of flesh, their ink I was reheating. Each title was a universe in itself, a world. Even now as an adult, every time I read I sink with pleasure into a title’s universe. For lack of books, I found a way to make my library infinite. The end of a novel (so dreaded in Aboukir, where Elsewhere was a bus that passed twice over the highway) was neutralized by a list of “forthcoming” books, with titles offered up to my reverie. I imagined their contents, their characters, their plots and roads, and I could spend hours reading in my head, gamboling through the outlines of beginnings. Perhaps my grandfather did the same thing within his silence? That’s how I wrote The Lord of the Rings, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Confessions of a Mask, 2010: Odyssey Two, The Plague, To a God Unknown, The Book of Sand, The Dreaming Jewels (O beauty), and dozens of others.
Even when I hadn’t yet completely mastered that language, I had written a dozen novels in my head before I was even fourteen years old. The early stages of my gift, the announcement of my responsibility and my mission.
38
(My aunt still has not come back. I am alone with this language, and my father might already be dead if I don’t write even faster. An owl hoots, a caricature of the imminent mourning. The wind has its own favorite animals: the owl, the wolf, which is its essence, the crickets, they say, the bloodless insects, the dry spiders…Scratches on the glass of the windows, in my bedroom, and always the creaking of every door in the village as the wind trawls house by house. Searching for me, surely. Djemila is like a loose sheet of paper searching for a book to embed itself in, to have a story and participate in it.) My method was simple and ingenious as seduction: I cross-checked. I remembered the alphabet and a few words, from when I was in school so long ago, and I used pieces of texts I already knew, evocative and waiting in my head. With these resources, I constructed that language, entirely, alone with my own savage dictionary. A glossary fabricated from the scraps of shipwrecked language, findings made on the island, words made of bark, pieces of patched fabric and texts eroded by salt and oblivion, the tools of the survivor who tries to reconstruct a civilization with a few scraps of wood and a Bible. Or the titanic work of his parrot, Poll, offering to repopulate the island with variations on its only acquired phrase: “Poor Robin, where are you?” The familiar words allowed me to guess the unfamiliar words, through cross-checking, neighboring lights, the contamination of meaning. Little by little, The Flesh of the Orchid became a story, and I clumsily grasped the logic of its rhythm, the pulmonary meaning of its paragraphs.
The words working together in this way told me a story, and the first phrase, which to me was epic, revealed the link between sense and the senses, multiplied ad infinitum, and led me to the universal orgasm years later. The woman advanced toward me, in a hazy nudity that gradually took shape, became movement, flow, her body taking on flesh and leaving me feverish. Frantically, I read the erotic passages, the descriptions of kisses, embraces, the proximity of genitals and their wetness, the passion galvanized me and mobilized every effort at initiation. Still today I masturbate to certain books because there’s an intense bodily intimacy in them, but I feel an emptiness that can only be filled by the supportive presence of another body from after the fall. Adam did not fall alone with a piece of fruit in his hand. Writing always has the texture of skin, and the somber word is a mane of hair, as in those years. I swear. That first phrase, deciphered laboriously from the first crime novel I read, was that era’s revelation, a ripped dress.
Sex was half mysterious during those teenage years because children are violent and cunning: the insults, the aggression, the hierarchy, like the mystery, are always sexual. Boredom soon inspires children to show their penises, to measure their virility by the length of their stream of urine in the sand, to evoke sodom
y or attack the weakest by miming it. There were no girls to strip naked, no bodies to glimpse on the TV or in magazines. Suddenly, because I had dared to go down a new path, I had discovered that books could lift the veil and show me nakedness without anyone suspecting a thing. I was stunned. That phrase, unique and overwhelming, set the stage for my future readings and haunted me in its precision: I still don’t know what a woman’s genitalia are like, but nudity was possible, palpable and evident. All I had to do was keep reading, delve deeper into my comprehension of the words to more intimately touch the body and feel not only its form, but also its emotion!
This new world was dangerous in its splendor because it translated into a universe with unprecedented geographical possibilities. I discovered new plot motivations, climates and habits, names and histories of other countries. But in a chaos that brought deformities to this language I had only just learned. How can I describe it? The nautical novels were the most difficult, with their descriptions of ships, rigging, knots, their words for storms. What to do with those words, how to translate them for my people, in a little close-minded neighborhood in the village of Aboukir? “Starboard” resisted for a long time. Other mysteries were circumvented through the compromise of images. For example, the term “the late André” to speak of a dead man. At the time, I didn’t know anything about the ongoing ancient ritual of the chapelle ardente. So I decided to attribute to the expression the metaphor of the blue crown of fire in our kitchen, surrounding the name like a ring, a sort of halo. The Zabor as a glossary became a game of wild and domesticated lands, harvests and crops, absurd or precise definitions.
That language had three effects on my life: it healed my panic attacks, introduced me to sex and femininity, and gave me the means to circumvent the village and its narrowness. Those effects were the origins of my gift, which was the consequence. That language was born from a personal deciphering, it acquired the strength of sovereignty, it was royal and needed a king. It was precise, with words that I was endlessly discovering, that soon overflowed my universe and promised thousands of books to solidify its order. Its final virtue was that it was mine, secret, intimate, concealed from the rules of my father, from school, from my aunt’s gaze, and from the idiotic and redundant universe of my fellow teenagers. That was the start of my digression, a shameful satisfaction of the senses and a desire to flee. There is, in the word “evasion,” the word “vase,” infinitely expanded. I didn’t think of the imaginary as nonexistent, unlike my people, because, in our language, the word “imagination” is the same as “shadow”—the distant legacy of caravans and deserts, perhaps, there where shadow is merely the conceited opposite of the very real sun. My panic attacks were nothing but a memory. Sometimes I spent hours, finger raised, naming objects, nuances, colors, finding the right words for them, and synonyms, too. I quickly consumed the dozen novels, sometimes half ripped (O the memory of In Dubious Battle, with no beginning or author, and Night Flight, which I imagined at first was the monologue of a traveler speaking to a star that had turned its back on him to swim into the distance), before rereading them in every direction, wringing as much from them as possible until there was nothing left. Every phrase was a world, deciphered but also appropriated. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was the most fabulous, with etchings, immobilizing dark whales and diving suits in the ink, like a metaphor for the reader or the prophet.
So then I searched for other books, any books to quench my thirst. That was another adventure and another frustration. Which led me to discover secret mechanisms, vital for my vocation and for the survival of the village itself. Poll was flying. And my goat voice, when I was silent, transformed into a great song of life. Yes. I read everything I could find on the gods, equipment manuals, prescriptions for medications for the benefit of my attentive, illiterate family, my aunts and other cousins, I read rare newspapers and decrypted the old French plaques dating from the colonial period. I mention this now because it’s essential: my study of the language was a battle won against the poverty of the world.
I settled into a margin that was both shameful and fantastic, because I started to travel all over, outside the village, I saw with a bird’s view from the sky, barely identifiable by the meager greenery of its small eucalyptus tree forests and its fields of vineyards. I was swept up in whirlwinds, I read through, discovering the words or filling the gaps with my own imagination. Words that had little sense took on meaning through my effort and, later, when a dictionary corrected the meaning, my prayer book resisted like an old tribe faced with the arrival of the colonizers, walls, and clocks. I collided with terrible difficulties that I resolved through arbitrariness: for example, I didn’t understand why parfum was a masculine word; when the capital letter was necessary, as if one had to stand up to speak; what the purpose of the cedilla was, etc. An insane language, rich, happy, a hodgepodge of wild roots, hybrid like a mythological beast. I had the gift of being able to soften the iron of a new barbaric language, oral and yet tightly bound to the written, muffled like death. All kissing happened in the silence of the language.
I lost weight, ate less and less and eventually became even sicker, a sort of transparency riddled my skin and lifted me off the ground. Things that formerly posed a threat because of the deficiency of my mother tongue became confused, afflicted with an alchemical duplicity, hollowed by an endless polysemy. I felt myself sliding infinitely, seized, as soon as I opened a book to begin another story. The words illuminated one another, but also the phrases, the titles, and I suddenly fell into the vast field of conversations between books that conversed in the imitation cemetery of their bindings, I got lost in them, as though I were hallucinating. But I believe that was what spurred the madness of sex, and then its convergence with the words on the page.
39
(Four in the morning? I’m reminded by the taste of dust left in my mouth by the squall, because the wind has turned ferocious on this late summer night. I hunch over even more. To make myself smaller. To be nothing but a word falling toward the blank page of my notebook. I curl up as small as possible to give less grip to the storm rumbling outside, sneering through its rotten teeth.)
My grandfather died without saying a single word during the last ten years of his life, or maybe more, I can’t remember. Friday, August 8, 1984, he coughed the entire morning, spit up blood. I held him in my arms, I was alone, my aunt had left to go look for my father and my uncles, when he started to moan like a child. It was a strange moment: I was holding a body, his head on my knees, but I didn’t know what to do for him or how to restrain him. I was captive, incapable of feelings. I said words to him, but I knew they were absurd. Should I recite one of the most powerful surahs of the Holy Book? I tried, but I stopped short, because it seemed ridiculous, in that moment, my nasally voice and that prelude to burial. So I waited for someone to come help me.
Hadj Hbib hadn’t always been mute. To the contrary, I knew from Hadjer that he had been a lively man, dignified and stubborn to preserve his freedom to the point that he hadn’t held any job under the colonizers for more than a week at a time. My memory is hazy, but I do remember him speaking quite a bit at a certain point. Hadjer explained to me, gradually, over the course of a story in a thousand and one pieces, that his state began to deteriorate the day he started to ask his sons, his wife, and his loved ones their names. His mind crumbled even more when, a few years later, he lost all memory of our universe on the hill, he became a stranger, an unknown visitor, then a passerby who sometimes interrupted a silence of several days to tell us he had just arrived from France and was disappointed not to have seen any of us at the door of the big city waiting for him to help carry his bags, heavy with a thousand presents. His way of inventing the infinite story of his return from a voyage was a wonderful moment for the children, who used it as an opportunity to mock him by asking what he’d brought back in his suitcases, where his car was, and what was the name of his French wife or the money over there. He listened t
o them patiently, then adopted a clever air and described France as you might describe a cloud, a swift and brilliant animal, a large garden you’re forbidden to enter, or a tree defended by strict countryside policemen. He also had a habit, when they took him on walks around Aboukir, of pointing at remote and bare lands, recalling almond trees, sweet chestnut trees twisting in their very slow universes, vineyards that no longer existed. He knew the names of grapes, of vine varietals and diseases. His conversation was unique, for it was coherent, simple, guided by sincere emotions. As a child, I enjoyed watching him conduct his world, furnish it despite the black hole of his memory. His eyes were green, unlike mine, he had a determined face, a hard chin, as if confronting the invisible bust of someone threatening and terrible, whom he’d been standing up to courageously since his youth. Like Hadj Brahim, Hadj Hbib liked knives, but he kept them on his belt. He had an old pencil in his wallet, but no notebook, and he’d preferred to sew his things himself since my grandmother died of typhus. He liked to sleep in the kitchen, drink goat’s milk, and eat nothing but homemade bread, not the bread from the bakery. I remember he was a snob about even the simplest of things, and that he long had a very haughty tone, powerful as a captivating river with eddies and silent swells when he couldn’t find the words. In his ultimate struggle, the last months he spent at the top of the hill before being exiled by my stepmother, my father’s father started to confuse names, he described dead people while looking at newborns and lost his temper with his wife, who couldn’t answer his screams, fiercely insulting her even though she’d died long before.