Zabor, or the Psalms

by Kamel Daoud

  Then, I reached ecstasy.

  45

  There was another important night, when I was about seventeen years old. I prayed every day, but I had transformed prayer into interrogation. That night during Ramadan, the sky was vast and I was lost in it. Like the prophet Yusuf sitting at the bottom of the well where his brothers had pushed him, awaiting his glory. But unlike him, I was reveling in my fate, my head turned toward the sky. Where the wolf was immobilized in the form of a constellation (“The night sky is a cave drawing,” explains the dog). The Arabs gave beautiful names to the stars. They were masters of populating the deserts in general. They laid their best roads there, I think.

  Outside, the village night was noisy, lively like every year during those weeks of fasting. The night prayers resounded with psalmodies that were almost beautiful. All the stars were close, like neighbors, and the night was populated with children, insomniac families. For some reason, I enjoyed that inversion of the typical order when people stayed up late in the village. I felt less alone, as though in the middle of an unspectacular, but pleasant, wedding. A calm day that would culminate in a sacred night, in a way. Rereading a novel, I stumbled on an ordinary, ancient metaphor, impossible in its essence but rendered banal through use: “The woolly forest extended to the top of the hill.” Suddenly, somehow, because I had slept well, because I was alert and vigilant and my language was ripe, I lunged at the absolute miracle of metaphor and its infinite declensions. The forest, queen of the root and the peak, borrowed the form of the sheep’s fleece, its meaning, amalgamating flock and conquest, ascension and scramble, density and deluge, to simultaneously evoke the ideas of the forest and the innumerable. That potential coursed through me like a strong wave, like electricity. I understood the combinatory potential of language, but this time under the possible authority of my writing. The violence of eruptions through language, the opportunity to take stock of everything, of each movement and condensation, of writing the definitive chronicle of every cycle. Since I had read all the books in our house, it was now imperative to write them, and the revelation of the mechanics of metaphor represented a path to liberation.

  The world was fragmentation but writing was its Mass. Suddenly I understood that I could not only describe, save, and recount everything, but also imagine without disappearing, reconquer the land of fear and silence, be a master of nakedness. (“Writing is the temperature, time is the fire,” concludes my inner animal.) I could straddle the village and the curse of my fainting spells, and not only through reading the books of others. I felt able to save my life and the lives of my people through the vibrant and unprecedented metaphor. The Flesh of the Orchid, first name of the first woman, was a triggering accident, and I could prolong the wedding by imagining my own stories.

  In the village, children were playing in the night, celebrating the upended hours. Meanwhile, sitting inside, between my coffee and the walls, I had just collided with the third and final revelation of my life. Through a logic that was simple, unexpected, and obvious: for lack of books, I would write them, and that language would be the instrument not only of my reverie but also of my purification, my redemption. If I had known how to write at the time, and if I had written without stopping, I would have saved my grandfather. I would have resumed my father’s story starting at the moment when it had skewed toward confabulation and cowardice. I would have bestowed greater meaning upon each cousin, each person I saw in our village during my walks. The dying people I had visited could have been saved by a story, I was now sure of it. Except that I was also discovering the double imperative of speed and density: I had to write without stopping, quickly, about absolutely everything, about every encounter, every face, every name. I was realizing my power and my responsibility. Language had now become my entire being, and it was exhilarating. I was free!

  At night, when the sky had descended over the earth, I felt ready to topple over the parapet and soar. Everything was suddenly connected: my years of anxiety faced with calligraphy, learning to write with the sansal and the tablet near the mosque, the blind recitations, and even the glimpsed nudity of the body and the traveler’s tale. I could advance toward “her” and her nudity and no longer just await her, immobile. I could speak, continue other books, exorcise anguish through the legendary ellipsis and resume an ancient story. (The three dots don’t represent silence but the racket of books, of gods, and things reduced to the ellipsis. That’s why I use it with caution and as a sort of illegible prologue in every notebook, at the start of every story. The ritual of writing in the notebooks is simple: the first phrase is half of another that will never be written. I have to unknot it, search for the end of the string and slowly unravel the ball of wool.) Zabor would contain infinite possibilities from now on, not just a savage dictionary. I was already embodying the psalms. The call to prayer rang out behind me but I was high in the sky. My father couldn’t slit my throat anymore because his knife was a minuscule pin, a splinter. The only person who might have understood me was Hadjer, but she was watching television while I was moving among the stars.

  46

  (The wind uses every trick, including my family’s voices. Hadjer begs and pleads. I hear: “Your father wants to speak to you for the last time!” Her intonation is a moan, protracted on the ground like an abandoned hand. I even hear Abdel’s voice. He yells, he yells. They try to force the door open and in the racket I can hear someone try a set of keys, then give up. We changed the locks a long time ago and reinforced our security, my aunt and I. They won’t be able to enter. There aren’t any keys or faces, it’s only the wind. The wolf on the hunt, canines bared, come to bite me, to devour our house with dust, to scatter my notebooks in the fields, to kill me and kill my gift. I stand my ground, head bent over the writing that clamps down on its subject, protected by the red balaclava my aunt knitted, modeled on the hat I wore as a child. I know what to do. Every time since the first time, I’ve succeeded in adding almost a thousand and one days to every life saved. I prolong. I just have to write, give a story back to those who’ve lost theirs, and then they return to finish their narrative, alone in their lives. So I write, I don’t pay attention to anything and I ignore the temptation to respond. The devil takes you by the heart, by emotion, by family, by blood, or by desire. It wants my body, the wolf wants to eat me, I laugh and I write and I know that I’m holding the thread that will save my father, I laugh at his surprise and continue our old duel between his blade and my language. Moving on. Yes, moving on. Because everything depends on me, from the plaque inscribed with the name of Aboukir in the north to the eucalyptus trees in the south. Everything is connected to my fist and I pull the cord toward the sky. I didn’t take a wife, I have no family, I have no son—a horrible reflection—so that I could keep my promise and fulfill my duty. I would have dreamed of an even more powerful story, a monstrous caesarian, that could have brought my mother back, but that idea was suffocating, impossible. I have no memory of my mother. The wind wiped out any trace of her and her face is like the surface of a choppy body of water. I remember sitting in the house as a child while all around me they lamented the dishonor of my recluse mother’s rejection and her face was removed and replaced by her two hands. I asked Hadjer about it but she answered me with cunning, concern, almost pettiness: I was her son and she didn’t want me to climb back any further than her own stomach. My mother is a hollow, a feather, a dead weight when I think of possible women, a silence. I’ve never missed her because she never existed. I tried one day to write her notebook, but it had no subject, just scribbles, the writing was tired, asleep. Let’s move on, and quickly.

  The essential is that right now I know I have to write the most powerful talisman, the Zabor, in several notebooks that I will place wherever necessary to save Aboukir, its hiding inhabitants, its beliefs, trees, storks, and cemeteries. I never thought everything would come at the same time: my father’s potential death, the fire of the senses, the wind turned mute, a jaw, the Dajj
al of the end of our world announced by the Holy Book, one-eyed and seductive, emperor of end times, the Christian Antichrist. In the burnt, gray sky, I predict the sun will come from the west this time, that there will be no cardinal points, no roads stuck to the lands, that everything will be caught in an immense whirlwind and I will be the essential crux of that confrontation. God is the wind, we mustn’t insult him. But I’m not insulting him, I’m standing up to him, hidden in my blood-colored balaclava, absorbed in my writing.) I had read absolutely everything in the village and I was waiting, a teenager, for that language to reappear in other books brought by the emigrants who returned for the summer, by teachers, buses, archives. The language came back to me sometimes loaded with novelty, sometimes it didn’t come back, like lost storks. Those were vapid, boring times. Whenever I came out of a book I would stumble on my own body and fall back into gravity and the limits of meaning. With no book open on my knees or held up over my head when I was lying down, no wife, shiny lips, tides to separate with a staff, no foremast, breasts, or sweltering heat that made the refugee of the body groan. The island was a rock and the only story available was that of my father, who belabored his largesse, his lambs, and his misery under the colonizers.

  Oh, how I hated his stories! The only one that escaped my grimace might have been the one about the bag of sand. According to legend, on a day of famine and typhus, during his early childhood under the colonizers, he didn’t want to return home without anything in his knapsack. So he filled it with sand, went back to the house up top and went to lie down to avoid confrontation with my grandmother. At dawn, he smelled warm bread, ate some, and asked where the flour had come from. “From the bag you brought,” answers the ancestor I never met, surprised. “Miracle of God!” he concluded each time, seeking pious approbation. A story that was surely stolen, I thought to myself, almost angry. But I, too, stole stories. Titles especially. Ah, how I loved those pearls with no strings attached! I had hundreds of them, then thousands. I could make a library from the back covers of books empty on the inside. Filled with sand. Like a Potemkin village for an indefatigable reader. The names of authors were details, guides, guardians at the gate. What they recounted wasn’t theirs, but passed through them. “Finding is not stealing,” says tradition. I had favorite stories, at the beginning. Which led to others, and so on. A thousand and one books. Wind, Sand and Stars, Tropic of Capricorn, which was an archipelago, The Grapes of Wrath, The Flower Quay No Longer Answers, The Vulture Is a Patient Bird, etc. I wandered.

  And I started to write by stealing titles.

  47

  The night of ecstasy is important to understand. That was when I wrote my first metaphor. I was reversing the order of anxiety and night. I was illuminating as I went. Hadjer passed me in the courtyard smiling, exalted, light, bearing the most important news in the genealogy of my tribe, no branch of which really knew how to read or write. I couldn’t sleep for days, I was so happy. I had just solved at once the problems of my lack of books, my bodily exhaustion from rereading the erotic passages of escapist stories, the weight of shame and guilt, and the feeling of indignity. I could bring order back to the world, write stories, escape my village and its pebble fate, encounter the invisible in its flesh, and reestablish the legend of my life from the beginning. The metaphor was like a verse that went from the body to the sky and not the other way around. It was a variation on incantation, a shortcut, a side road. I could gain time or add it to my stories.

  The second night, still staggering with insomnia, I came to my final revelation: I could, through the order imposed by writing, and because I was respectful of the secret of the sacrifice, prolong lives, postpone death by writing stories. I understood that everything was connected, from writing to breathing, and that I was responsible for an immense discovery, which wasn’t an accident but a revelation. My goat voice, my body, my uncircumcised penis, my orphaned status, my night terrors, everything was knotted and connected. The amulet of the storyteller who had tried to heal me, the horror of tattoos, all of it had been necessary to reach this mastery of language. I could not only prolong lives, but also give reprieve to my own, and that responsibility was universal, spread to everything I touched, everything I could see. Each detail of the village, the houses, the trees, and the names. All of it might disappear one day, slowly or abruptly, if someone didn’t start to write in my tribe, in this village, in our house. This unjust fate contorts my heart with pity for every being, their ignorance, their naïveté faced with the void, their innocence. I embraced Hadjer and she squeezed me in her arms, she didn’t understand but was happy like a mother, close and reliable.

  A book is only sacred if it’s the inventory of all things, the hand that holds and holds back, the necessary reminder before the oblivion of death. Books are pedestals, moorings. If a man stops speaking to himself in his own head, writing in his soul, he will stumble, fall ill, grow old quickly, and die. “We have told you the tales of the ancients,” the Holy Book says. Because they maintain cohesion, cover the abyss of the beginning and push back the abyss of the end. I cried. (And I’m crying now because if I stop writing my father will die, and he’s completely unaware of this sacrifice of my youth, my body, my time.)

  I need a language that’s even more precise, even stronger, but on the verge of ecstasy language is impossible and writing is nothing but a shiver. Have you seen how sufis describe ecstasy? With simple and almost old-fashioned words. As close as possible to the burning star, poetry is a croaking. I saw it on those three holy nights when I started to write the next day in my new notebooks bought that very morning. And since then I’ve filled an enormous number of notebooks that I’ve buried all over. I visited the sick, the dying, candidates for death, sweating children, and women ripped open by birth. My reputation grew and caught the attention of the devil and the wind. My father laughed mirthlessly, my aunt was proud, my half brothers were jealous of my kingdom, but the poor villagers continually turned to me as a last resort. I saved hundreds of them, adding a thousand and one days nearly every time, made the island habitable, and Poll was flamboyant in the night, phosphorescent when he read. My gift came with mockery but I didn’t care. Why do I write? Because I witness, I am the guardian, I chase death away from my people because they are important and worthy of eternity. God writes, I do too. (The wind is outraged and tries to make me shut my mouth. It attacked me with the knives of my father, my half brothers, Hamza and the odious story of his name, the gendarmes, and the slander. The same scattering wind. My father is dying but he’s the only one who senses, perhaps, that I’m holding his hand and that without my sacrifice as a perpetual writer, sitting for hours in the same place in this bedroom, he will die and become a blank space between two dates. In the agony that lays him bare, forces him out of his bones one by one, makes him hold his breath until the Last Judgment, I see him and forgive him. He had no other story to tell but his own.

  And the door smashes to pieces because the wind couldn’t let me win.)

  48

  (Writing is a tattoo and, behind the tattoo, there is a body waiting to be freed.)

  They stopped me on the seventh day. I was brought to the gendarmerie, where they treated me kindly but firmly. The truth is that they ignored me for almost half a day because they didn’t know what to do with me, then they put me in a cell and left me there for a night. From time to time, a gendarme would come to examine me, ask questions about my father, share his condolences or gravely shake his head. They asked imam Senoussi about me, who tried to calm their fervor and explained that sadness is a wind that can provoke insanity, but that there was nothing blasphemous in my scattered notebooks or the cramped handwriting I had scrawled on the walls, plaques, doorways, sidewalks, and every possible surface for days on end. Mysterious signs to a layperson, tall and radiant capital letters, incredible excerpts and fake novel titles, with dates, numbers, moons, and names. I had sprinkled them everywhere. In addition to this excess, I had left bags of
my notebooks at the entrance of the village, to the south, to the east, to the west. I had put some under the prayer rugs at the mosque, on nearly every tomb at the Bounouila cemetery and in the Christian cemetery where covert drinkers had watched me with curiosity. I had given some to children outside the school, I had placed some in hair salons and in the village’s administrative buildings. I had even managed to pile them up outside the hammams and in the mausoleum of Sidi Bend’hiba, the saint of Aboukir. They were absolutely everywhere, pages flapping in the early September breeze, used as wrappers by the peanut sellers, folded into planes by children, carried into the fields and stuck to tree trunks.

  “Damage to public property” was the charge that would have been brought against me had imam Senoussi not intervened. He ordered them to let me go. I was stunned, smiling indecently, as though victorious.

  It was a strange week for me, hallucinatory, free but joyous. Like the end of a season, an apotheosis for my writings as they commemorated the seventh day of Hadj Brahim’s death, accompanied into the afterlife by a thousand sheep. I had spread my pages nearly one by one so that everything was touched, reached, or amalgamated. A sort of leafy deluge, strewn in lines. People had seen me all over, rushing around with a gray bag to scatter my writings, in silence, serious and rushed, trying to unite the outside of everything and to spread the virtue of my law to all. “Zabor eddah el babor!” yelled the laughing children who harassed me. But I smiled at them, finally free and exposed, relieved.