a quiet man in the vast and chattering desert
Mohammed Dib Omneros (containing Formulaires
and Omneros), translated from the
French
by Carol Lettieri and Paul
Vangelisti (Los Angeles: The Red Hill Press, 1978); Omneros (without the other text) reprinted (Los Angeles: Seeing Eye
Books, 1997)
Mohammed Dib Qui se souvient de la mèr,
translated from the French by Louis Tremaine as
Who
Remembers the Sea (Washington, D.C.: Three
Continents, 1985)
Mohammed Dib La Nuit sauvage, translated from
the French by C. Dickson as The
Savage Night (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001)
Mohammed Dib L. A. Trip: A Novel in Verse, in French and English, translated
from the French by Paul Vangelisti (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003)
Over the years he wrote to me, in both English and French, in a short note of January 1997, thanking me for the anthology and noting that he had met John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski. Another short note, this in French from November 1997, speaks of Guy Bennett’s upcoming re-publication of his collection of poems, Omneros (first published with Formulaires by Paul Vangelisti in a translation by Vangelisti and Carol Lettieri on Paul’s Red Hill Press in 1978). Dib also sent me books, including Le Talisman, Feu beau feu, and L’Enfant-Jazz. It was clear to Dib that I was interested in his work, and it was only a matter of finding a good translator and the right work for Sun & Moon or Green Integer to publish.
Unfortunately, the Poets’ Calender
was never published, but we did later print a short story he had sent us in 1001 Great Stories, Volume 2. And
throughout the early years of the millennium, we kept regularly in touch,
exchanging publications. At one point in 2000 Dib wrote me, asking if I might
send him a map of Los Angeles (I sent him the indispensable, voluminous Thomas Guide of the greater Los Angeles
area) and a book of photos of Los Angeles. I searched for an appropriate
collection of Los Angeles photos, but was unable to send it before he notified
me he’d discovered one himself.
By 2002, I had discovered that his desire for these publications had to
do with his writing L.A. Trip, a work about his Los Angeles
experiences from 1974, when he lived in the city as Regents Professor in the
French Department of the University of California—Los Angeles. He had also
asked Paul Vangelisti to translate this new work into English, and when Paul
suggested that Green Integer might publish it, I quickly agreed. We signed an
agreement with Dib, and attempted to collaborate on a joint bilingual
publication with his French publisher, Éditions le différence. For some reason
the French decided not to publish with the English text, despite Dib’s own
insistence upon a bilingual edition. Indeed, the work, in part, is about the
two versions sitting side by side. So we went ahead with our publication plans,
preparing to issue our dual-language version in 2003, the same year as the
French only edition appeared in Paris. Dib was preparing to travel to the
United States to celebrate the American publication, and Paul was excited to
get the chance to greet his old friend again, and I to meet the author in
person.
It came as a shock to us all, accordingly, to receive the news that on
May 2, Dib had suddenly died.
We knew he had long suffered from diabetes, but he had seemed a lively
octogenarian, and we knew he had long been looking forward to his American
voyage.
Born in Tlemcen, Algeria, Dib attended a school where he learned French
before he studied Arabic. Although raised as a Muslim Dib never attended the
traditional Koranic school. His father, a carpenter, died when Dib was young.
Already at the age of fifteen, Dib began to write poems, while working
from 1939 to 1959 at various odd jobs, including teacher, accountant, weaver,
interpreter, and journalist. During World War II he studied literature at the
University of Algeria, and from 1950-51 wrote for the newspaper Alger républicain and Liberté, the Algerian Communist Party
paper.
Dib’s first major work was the novel La
grande maison, the first book in a trilogy, published in 1952, two years
before the outbreak of the Algerian War for Independence, L’Incendie (1954) and Le
Métier à tisser (1957) representing the other two volumes. These years from
1954 to the war’s end had a profound impact on Dib, and several of his books
throughout the period reflect his wartime experiences, particularly his novel
of 1962, the year of Algerian independence, Qui
se souvient de la mèr (Who Remembers
the Sea), the only of his longer fictions to be published in English. The
difficulty in living in Algeria while writing in the oppressors’ language of
French eventually led him to leave his home, settling outside of Paris in 1959.
Many of Dib’s fictions use more traditional narrative techniques to
describe the socio-political issues of the day; but influenced as he was by
Cubism, science fiction, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Jung, Dib gradually
moved away from realism, writing from mythic or dystopian visions.
This is particularly true of his great war-time novel, Who Remembers the Sea. For those of
later generations, the Algerian War of Independence may not evoke many
memories. It is important to understand that it was one of the first and most
important of decolonization wars, a war which was fought through guerrilla
warfare, retaliation, and terrorism that would later define Arab terrorist
acts.
What began on November 1, 1954 as a
guerrilla battle of the National Liberation Front against military
installations, police posts, warehouses, and communications facilities—a
national struggle for the “restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic,
and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam”—would end with
over 300,000 (the Algerians place that figure at 1.5 million) people dead and
over 2 million Algerians uprooted, many later dying of starvation, disease and
exposure. Both sides extensively used torture, but the French were particularly
effective, arguing, like the American government today, that the prisoners of
this war lay outside the controls of the Geneva Convention. Mass rapes, the
submerging of prisoners in freezing water or excrement and the repeated use of
electric shocks were extensively used as tools of torture. After the war Paul
Aussaresses, then director of the French secret service in Algiers, admitted
that over 3,000 prisoners considered to have “disappeared” were, in fact,
tortured and executed. These facts and
It is notable, accordingly, that Dib’s novelistic presentation of these
events are not at all presented within a realist context. The narrator
describing the war-torn city spends many of his hours at a regular meeting
place, a café, where various friends and he discuss, often quite obliquely, the
daily horrors of the war. Much of his energy is used up in simply getting to
the café and returning home, during which he and others are attacked by strange
bird-like creatures called (in Dib’s own vocabulary) “spyrovirs” and “iriace,”
science-fiction like-beings which, like rockets and low-flying cruisers,
terrorize the citizens of the city, often cornering them in cul-de-sacs and squares.
At home the narrator is equally greeted with the moans, cries and gossip of the
women. The peaceful and placid roar of the sea seems to have abandoned them, as
they lie awake each night, counting the numerous explosions and blasts,
imagining the torture and murder of their own people.
Dib’s innocent narrator is clueless, unable to even recognize, at first,
that his wife is clearly involved in terrorist acts, as she disappears for long
periods of time, leaving their children with neighbors or her husband. Yet he
is comforted by her, upon her returns, and able to continue as much as possible
in his daily routines. It is only upon her apparent death, when she does not
return, that he must seek out the secret entrance to what he has begun to perceive
as an “underground city” as vast as the city above it, which represents,
perhaps, either escape or death. It is only as he seeks the entrance to that invisible city that he comes to perceive
the seemingly innocent café as the center of the world of terrorists and spies.
In a Postface to this novel, Dib attempts to answer why he has treated
the horror and misfortune of the Algerians in such an abstract matter, and
calls up Picasso’s great painting of the Spanish Civil War Guernica as an example of how art can perhaps be more moving and
representative of reality in its abstraction as opposed to a realist
presentation. Putting his own suffering and that of his country in context, Dib
poignantly asks a question all 20th and 21st century
writers must face: “How can one speak of Algeria [or any other suffering
culture] after Auschwitz, the Warsaw ghetto, and Hiroshima? What finally can
one do in order that what nevertheless there is to say can still be heard and
not be absorbed by what that great demonic cloud that has for so many years
been floating above the world, not surround us?”
In this sense, we perceive many of the voices of Dib’s fictions and
poems as being quiet declarations (Dib describes poetry itself as “silent
music”) against what he describes in his later book of stories The Savage Night, as “the vast and
chattering desert that has spread over a large part of the planet.” If art has
any nobility, he argues, it is that it helps us survive this painfully
revelatory clatter of the hate, horror, and meaninglessness that overcomes even
the gentle throb of the sea.
Accordingly, many if not most of Dib’s characters, no matter how glib
and experienced they see themselves to be, ultimately turn to quietude in order
just to survive. There is no more apparent example of this than the modern
Algiers couple of his story “The Detour,” a man and a woman, Ben and Soraya,
who artfully steer their expensive Mercedes from the Algerian town they have
been visiting back to their city home. A detour sign sends them inland, into
the desert, where suddenly the road comes to an end, and their magnificent
machine becomes stuck in the sand. Night is approaching, so the couple set out
toward a distant light, meeting up with a seemingly pleasant enough native who
takes them to his home and feeds them. The next morning, as they wait expectantly
for help in freeing the car, the couple is taken away to a pit, where an orator
declares them to have been brought to the small village by “the hand of god.”
The village—arid, barren, desolate—has suffered for years, and now the natives
hope to free themselves from what they perceive as an evil spell by sacrificing
the couple. The story’s final revelation is as shocking to this sophisticated
couple as it is the reader:
This time, Ben didn’t hold himself back—he allowed his great, bellowing
laughter to ring out. But before he could dry his eyes, another group of
ruffians threw Soraya into the bottom of the pit with him. She landed nearby
without uttering a sound, as if she were already dead. Immediately afterwards,
a lid made of wooden beams lashed hastily together was pulled over the
mouth of the hole. Ben listened as huge boulders were rolled into place
over their heads.
The title story of this collection, “The Savage Night,” relates the tale
of a wealthy brother and sister, Nédim and Beyhana, as they travel the streets
of their city via bus from their beautiful villa to a poorer section of town to
release bombs in a local restaurant in an act of terrorism. Behi escapes, but
Nédim is shot, and she is forced to carry him long distances through the
streets while the military seeks them out until she can find a conveniently
isolated spot. So intense is their love for one another and their complete
belief in their cause, that even today, when we recognize the total savagery of
such acts, we can only sympathize with the young couple as the brother
gradually slips into death and Beyhana—still living years later in the villa
she has attempted as a youth to escape—is doomed to a life of terrifying
memories.
In another of Dib’s ironic tales, “A Game of Dice,” two young radicals
break into the house of an older man with the intention of killing him as they
have been ordered by their superiors. But the old man, armed with a gun, shoots
and kills one of the boys, betting the other his life with the roll of the
dice. Despite his recognition that reason will have little effect on this young
automaton—a boy whose life has been so denigrated that he has no comprehension
of the value of living—the man attempts to inculcate in the youth some sense of
moral values. When the boy is finally let go, he enters the streets where life
is held so cheaply that he is shot at by his own cohorts.
Perhaps one of the most humorously dark stories of this book most
clearly demonstrates the silence inflicted upon anyone with something of
importance to say. Sitting in a suburban Paris café, the author/narrator
overhears a conversation between two men—who in the U.S. we might describe as
rednecks—Gilbert and Marcel. Marcel loudly discusses the news he has just
heard, that all “the dark skins,” “the wogs, the spades, those maguerrebin
hustlers” have suddenly left the city en masse. Where they have gone no one
knows, but it is clear to him that, while their exodus has long been sought,
they have no appreciation for the cultural advantages that France has afforded
them.
Bemused but also startled by this strange information, the narrator—who
like Dib does not look like the “maguerrebins”—has no choice but to remain
silent in response to this absurd discussion. Ultimately the two men, glad to
be rid of “those bastards,” seem to miss their former neighbors:
Shit! Why in the hell did
they up and leave? What’d they have
against us? I just don’t
get it. Our country wasn’t good enough
for them? They’ll have
nothing but dirt to eat back where they
come from, I can tell you
that much. The bastards! I had a few of
them right next door to
me. I got along just fine with them. Think
I should’ve told them to
stay?
“It’s gonna seem awful empty, that’s
for sure,” Gilbert replies. Dib’s narrative comically reveals the frustrations
of those French citizens living at the fringes of their own culture, of having
a voice without a voice.
In this respect Dib has represented one of the major writers speaking
for cultures dominated by or immersed within other cultures. Like the
underground city of Who Remembers the Sea,
these “conquered” cultures and their spokesmen do not completely disappear, but
change within their new worlds, transform themselves and the worlds around them
in quiet reinterpretations of history, retelling history within what Dib
describes as the “crypto-spaces,” creating a kind of shadow history (“If
Tolstoy is history,” notes Dib, “Dostoevsky is the shadow”). It is clear that
this kind of rereading of culture is precisely what Dib had in mind by writing
the bilingual “novel in verse” L. A. Trip.
Like the narrators of so many of his works, the author, in recalling his stay
in Los Angeles, speaks in fragments, witnesses rather than reveals. But bit by
bit we see a city, described—like Dib’s friend and translator Paul Vangelisti’s
magazine of the period—as “invisible,” transformed by the images of Dib’s
imagination; a small Black boy with his back turned to the author, a passing
dog, a ringing bell, a dove, a beautiful woman named Jessamyn with whom the
author obviously has fallen in love, the sounds and emptiness of his sleepless
nights gradually build up an American landscape—Dib’s American landscape. As he notes in the very first
poem/chapter, appropriately titled “Those American Things,”
Things will open
their eyes by themselves.
He is silently disturbed
by their silence. He,
dying of longing.
Those things at hand.
He who was for them no
stranger,
who prowled around the.
No.
Not distressed. Silent.
Then from being unknown
they draw closer
for his longing to live
here.
He is silently disturbed.
By the time he “moves off in
silence” at the end of the poem, he has become a kind of faux
American, a kind of Black-hipster
cowboy singing the Blues. The final “chapter” appears only
in English:
You know, the man can’t help it
but
feel bad, yes just feel bad.
So
long, ma’am Jessamyn, so long,
Lord, I just couldn’t help it.
There ain’t no use crying, yeh Sir,
that’s gospel true. Let’s us git.
So
long, ma’am Jessamyn, so long.
So long, Mohammed, we will miss you, miss the re-discovery
of who we are in
the crypto-space, in the eyes of such a sensitive and observant “stranger.”
Los Angeles, November 29, 2003
Reprinted from Or,
No. 2 (April 2009).
