The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry Read online

  Ponge sends his soap text to Camus at Éditions Gallimard. Camus responds, “As for Soap, your intentions escape me slightly. . . . There may be an excessive ellipse.”2

  Later, Soap will become a radio play “for German ears” and won’t be published until 1967. But from 1942 onward, over the course of these leaden years one of the text’s characters will protest, “For the toilet of the mind, a little piece of soap. Well-handled is enough. Where torrents of simple water would clean nothing. Nor silence. Nor your suicide in the darkest source, O absolute reader.”3

  So Francis Ponge does not find that “the soap of the tongue runs dry” for the “intellectual toilet.” It turns out that the poet came to Algeria after 1945, before the “Algerian War.”

  One day, he contemplates the sunset over the Mitidja. He is near Blida, just next to the first of the Atlas Mountains. He is trying to define a pink—“a passionate pink, intense, a little purple . . .”—in the sky. He searches for adequate words: “I felt that it was a pink that was something like the pink of Algerian women’s heels. It’s the only thing that you see of their skin.”

  And so, of the swathed body of the Algerian woman who is out-of-doors (he notices that, as for the veil, which covers the entire body and almost all of the face, “only one eye is uncovered, but it’s behind the veil!”), Francis Ponge sets out—he, the first foreigner and undoubtedly the only one—to observe the phantom woman out-of-doors exactly as Algerian men do, beginning first at the heels, “one of the only things that you see of their skin.” Yes, it is thanks to this very pink, this lower-most spot, that every Arab male recognizes she who perhaps passes in her engulfed anonymity.

  And so in Algeria, the desire to try and precisely define the pink of the sky at sunset brought Ponge to the extraordinary expression “a vaurien pink,” referring to the heels of veiled Algerian women.

  Out of the sharpness of his vision and everywhere he goes, in the variety and obscurity of the actual, he digs, purifies, and sculpts his mother tongue. In the end he declares, “The mute world is the country of our fathers!”

  As for Algeria and what was left in its wake, “the mute world” would for me be one not only of things (of shrimp, oranges, figs . . .), but also a generations-old one of women who are masked, prevented from seeing and being seen, treated as “things.”

  But in today’s torrent and drift, women are looking for a language where they can place, hide, nestle their rebellious power, their life power, in these vacillating surroundings.

  It was said in Soap, “Where torrents of simple water would clean nothing.” And from this text written to assuage a lack, I extract the words that shamefully hide the French poet’s passionate bitterness: “Nor silence. Nor your suicide in the darkest source, O absolute reader.”

  In these nouvelles (including a story and a tale), what did I look for between two places, between Algeria and France, or in Algeria alone, which is ever more torqued between desire and death? What guided impelled me to continue, so gratuitously, so uselessly, the narration of fears, of fears seized on the lips of so many of my sisters who are alarmed, expatriated, or under constant threats? Nothing other than the desire to reach this “absolute reader.” That is to say, the reader who, reading silently and in solidarity, ensures that the writing of pursuit or of murder liberates, at the very least, the shadow it throws, trembling, to the horizon . . .

  But I ask myself: today, is there still pink in the setting sun, in the bleeding sun of Algeria’s sky?

  —Paris, August 1996

  Nota Bene

  1. In the tale “The Woman in Pieces” (based loosely on the tale by the same name in The Thousand and One Nights), the two poetic citations are:p. 103: From Ibn ‘Arabi, The Interpreter of Desire, trans. by Reynold A. Nicholson, (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911), 78.

  p. 120: Attributed to Ibrahim al-Mausili, who would have sung them for Haroun al Rachid (cf. Kitab el Aghani, t.V). Based on the French translation, “Musiques sur le fleuve,” by Jacques Berque, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995.

  2. In the short story Burning the poetic Berber texts sung by the women of the Mzab (pp. 55-56) are from Goichon a. M., La Vie feminine au Mzab, (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthnier, 1927).

  3. Finally, I would like to acknowledge friends of mine who shared their emotions and vivid memories with me: Yamina, Zohra, Anne-Marie and Jacques.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Assia Djebar is one of North Africa’s best-known and most widely acclaimed writers. Author of Algerian White and So Vast the Prison, Djebar’s books often explore the struggle for social emancipation and the Muslim woman’s world in its complexities. She was elected to the Académie Française in 2005, won Germany’s Prix de la Paix in 2000, and the Neustadt Prize for Contributions to World Literature in 1996. She is Silver Chair Professor of Francophone literature and civilization at NYU.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Tegan Raleigh has a degree in French literature from Reed College and holds an MFA in literary translation from The University of Iowa. She was awarded a fellowship from the American Literary Translators’ Association in 2005 for her translation of Jean Pélégri’s Les Étés Perdus (The Lost Summers) and a PEN grant in 2006 for her translation of Oran, langue morte (The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry).

  1 Translator’s note: In French, “grenade” means both “pomegranate” and “grenade.”

  2 Ponge, Frances, Soap, trans. by Lane Dunlop (London: Jonathan Cape Limited, 1969), 30.

  3 Ponge, Frances, Soap, trans. by Lane Dunlop (London: Jonathan Cape Limited, 1969), 28.

  Copyright © 1997 by Assia Djebar

  English translation © 2006 by Seven Stories Press

  Originally published in French by Actes Sud, 1997, as Oran, langue morte.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Djebar, Assia, 1936-

  [Short stories. English. Selections]

  The tongue’s blood does not run dry : algerian stories / Assia Djebar ; translated from the French by Tegan Raleigh.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-583-22969-9

  1. Women—Algeria—Fiction. I. Raleigh, Tegan. II. Title.

  PQ3989.2.D57A2 2006

  843’.914—dc22

  2006027402

  S.A.