SOUFFLES 1: FIRST TRIMESTER 1966

PROLOGUE

Abdellatif Laâbi

Translated from the French by Teresa Villa-Ignacio

The poets who have authored the texts of this, the manifesto issue of the journal Souffles, are unanimously aware that publishing in this venue means they are taking a stand at a moment when issues pertaining to our national culture have attained a degree of extreme tension.

The current state of literary affairs is not characterized, as some might believe, by a proliferation of creativity. The cultural disturbance that some individuals or groups are hoping will pass for a literary growth spurt is, in fact, only the expression of our ongoing stagnation or a certain number of misunderstandings about the deeper meaning of literary activity.

Petrified contemplation of the past, sclerosis of forms and themes, shameless imitation and forced borrowings, and the misplaced vanity of false talents constitute the adulterated daily bread with which the press, journals, and the greed of our rare publishing houses bludgeon us.

Even when we leave these multiple prostitutions out of the discussion, literature has become a form of aristocratism, a rosette on display, a force of intelligence and cunning.

This is not a quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. In fact, the literature ravaging the country today most often conceals a shocking eclecticism of heritages and borrowings from hearsay. It would even be possible for an objective critic to study outdated literary trends here where they are still in vogue. And since the tourist brochures speak of a "land of contrasts," one will find in this literature whatever is needed to satisfy all curiosities, all nostalgias: the residue of classical medieval poetry, Oriental poetry of exile, Western romanticism, symbolism from the turn of the century, social realism, not to mention the results of existentialist indigestion.

As a result, "representatives" of "Moroccan literature" occupy a special place at international gatherings, and congresses of writers are held in our country. The reader is at once disoriented and nauseous. His dissatisfaction is all the more justified in that he can find some of his problems echoed in foreign literatures, those that various "missions" have benevolently placed at his doorstep. We can explain the oft-commented complex of our national literature by its current incapacity to "touch" the reader, to gain his attachment, or to provoke in him some kind of reflection, a wrenching away of his social or political conditioning.

On an entirely different level, Maghrebi literature in French, which at one time gave birth to so much hope, is currently stalled and seems, according to some observers, to belong to the domain of history. This literature must, however, be called into question today.

Two of its most brilliant representatives prematurely celebrated its demise with touching funeral ceremonies. Analyzing the situation of the colonized writer, his linguistic dramas, his lack of true readers, they concluded that this literature was "condemned to die young."

Others have abstained from falling into this pathetic determinism. But they are all ready, despite their lucid self-critique, to entertain the paradox of a suicidal literature that keeps going, in spite of everything, albeit in slow motion, along its path.

A glance through the most recent publications in French reveals that that those who have pronounced the imminent death of this literature have come to this conclusion too quickly. Although we should in no way ignore the issue of the very status of Maghrebi literature in French. This is a delicate issue, and we must approach it prudently while excluding all tendencies toward generalization. In fact, the situation of writers of the previous generation (Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri, Albert Memmi or even Driss Chraïbi), reveals itself to be closely tied to the colonial experience in its linguistic, cultural, and sociological implications. From the pacifist autobiographies of the 1950s to the protestatory and militant works from the period of the Algerian War, we may remark that despite the diversity of talents and creative power, this production was entirely inscribed within the framework of acculturation. It perfectly illustrates the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer within the cultural sphere. Thus, even when a Maghrebi was represented in these works or when autochthonous writers spoke up to denounce abuses, this literature almost always remained a one-way street. It was conceived for the public of the "Métropole" and destined for foreign consumption. That was the public it aimed to move to pity, in which it sought to awaken solidarity; that was the public to whom it needed to demonstrate that the fellah in Kabylia or the factory worker in Oran were not so different from the farmer in Brittany or the dockworker in Marseille. Today one has the impression that this literature was a kind of immense open letter to the West, or something like a list of Maghrebi grievances. Of course this enormous deposition has proven its usefulness. These Maghrebi works caused a scandal and accelerated a coming-to-consciousness among progressive milieux in France and elsewhere. In this sense they were revolutionary.

In order to avoid making generalizations of our own, we should point to the exceptional work of two or three writers who surpassed all the limiting frameworks of their time, even if their work initially arose from these common preoccupations.

We must admit that this literature now only concerns us in part; in any case it is hardly able to satisfy our need for a literature that bears the burden of our current realities, of wholly new problematics in the face of which disarray and savage revolt are gripping us.

Writers have had to attain a certain level of putrefaction, or maturity, if you will, in order to be able to formulate what you will read in these texts.

The poets who clamor here have not been able to avoid their elders' agonies, but it has fallen to them to rigorously delineate the limits of the arduous task they have inherited. They intend to demonstrate that they are less continuers than they are initiators.

Amidst the chorus of insults about our underdevelopment and current humiliations, these poets have seen with the eyes of peace the mutations of a society that has too often been taken for a testing ground or a storehouse of legends. They are its witnesses and its leading actors. Despite the kaleidoscope of tones, their voices come together in fierce alarms.

Hypotheticals remain to be leveed, contradictions to be sealed up and surpassed, but complexes are being swept away, a new circulation is gaining momentum.

At this point we can already guess what charges will be made against us, notably our choice of language.

Without wading into the murky waters of false issues, let us respond for now that four of these poets discovered their literary vocation through the French language. There is no drama or paradox there. This situation has become too common in today's world. The priority is to arrive at a correspondence between written language [langue] and the poet's inner world, his intimate, emotive language [langage]. Some are not able to achieve this. Others, even those who write in the national written tongue remain at the surface of their selves and of the reality they wish to theorize and put into question.

Despite their linguistic disorientation, the poets in this collection succeed in communicating their most profound feelings through a language filtered through their history, their mythology, their anger — in short, through their very selves.

The issue of communicating this poetry remains. On the one hand, and this has already been said (but strangely never taken seriously), there is the possibility of translating these works if one even briefly considers that they have their place and their role to play in the context of our national literature. On the other hand, the particular issue of communicating our literature in its entirety is not as simple as one might think. Putting aside questions of appreciation, interpretation, or critique of literary works, the Moroccan public that is even capable of reading such works is exceedingly limited. Illiteracy on the one hand and a superficial culture on the other has limited this readership to a nearly derisory residue.

Another paradox, but one that derives from a global social situation that can't be overcome through reasoning or some kind of magic trick. Why then resign ourselves to an even more overwhelming, sterile silence? The poet's language is first of all "his own language": the one that he creates and elaborates in the heart of linguistic chaos, the manner also by which he re-imagines the veneer of his world and the dynamics that coexist in him.

Why should we be distressed about this situation, as if we suffered an infirmity, when we must by all means make up for the delay we have incurred and respond to the urgencies of the moment?

Perhaps the next generations will resolve this issue, though they will already bear witness to their own world, a world that will no longer be ours though we are self-consciously striving toward it.

What is most important is that the one-way communication of past works is abolished. The era of managers and masters of thought is finished. We can no longer tolerate limitations due to favoritism or territorial taboos.

Something is about to happen in Africa and in the rest of the Third World. Exoticism and folklore are being toppled. No one can foresee what this "ex-pre-logical" thought will be able to offer to us all. But the day when the true spokespersons of these collectivities really make their voices heard, it will be a dynamite explosion in the corrupt secret societies of the old humanism.

We have had to exercise strict patience and rigorous self-control in order to produce this journal, which above all views itself as the vehicle of a new poetic and literary generation.

Souffles is not here to swell the ranks of ephemeral journals. It responds to a need that we can no longer ignore. If the journal finds its public, as we are hoping it will, as long as resources are available, it will become a flashpoint for debates on issues in our culture. All the texts that come to us will be examined with objectivity and, if they are accepted by our editorial board, published.

Souffles is not sponsored by any niche nor any minaret and does not recognize any frontiers. Our Maghrebi, African, European, and other writer friends are fraternally invited to participate in our modest enterprise. Their texts will be welcome.

It is still necessary to juggle with words tarnished by dint of being dictated. The act of writing cannot depend on any tabulations of income, nor concede to fashion, nor to the tear-jerking needs of wealthy demagogues hungering for power.

Poetry is all that is left to man to reclaim his dignity, to avoid sinking into the multitude, so that his outcry forever carries the imprint and attestation of his inspiration [souffle].

DOLDRUMS

Abdellatif Laâbi

Translated from the French by Andrew Zawacki

    Surrender
    small pledge of allegiance
    and the earth goes pale

    safe but not sane

    the splinter plunders
    this tadpole accuses
    and for starters who will I stick up my toe or thumb to

    I accuse yet again
    this time surrender
    small pledge of allegiance
    it's too much
    vast vast the fire vast
    and the vast bombs
    and this cursed Archimedes at the window
    turns turns a vast seism
    blows up the baobab's greening
    turns turns the scorpion dance
    and the arachnid's suicide
    black like my face
    or this crow watching over me
    turns turns the axis turns
    double
    the crowd of sharded abysses
    double facet
    you die
    but your place is an electric chair
    there will be no letting up

    Into the garbage poem
    Into the garbage rhythm
    Into the garbage silence

    the word thunders
    its first victim is me
    nevertheless I extract it
    and chuck it
    at you

    I accuse yet again
    and myself to start with
    of being your social animal
    your strapped for cash cow
    this dry moolah
    amid the soil
    the tree
    where I lay myself down
    and the centuries' crank handle turns turns
    the weapons' brew turns
    MINED
    our globe is mined
    terrestrial life is mined
    our human voices are polluted
    when the equations turn turn
    the cube roots of missiles
    Stop you airlift of ruins
    bastard Shem
    blow your nose
    you also look pekid
    and my face is afire
    like dry cilantro
    my face that no longer resembles me
    my face
    falls
    cluster of ants and spit
    my face cries out


    * * *

    My body lifts up
    a poem wrings me
    I jack it off
    like a rancid fetus
    I detach it
    place it under your gills
    your haywire lenses
    it's no vaccine I serve you
    hocus pocus or lighthearted truths

    Lord give us our share of the daily absurd
    and shield us from our overwhelming freedom

    I emasculate you
    in your husbandly pride
    your strident culture
    your floor level babble
    you make my text ugly
    you snuff me out
    you soften me up
    you dissect me in mini ceremonies
    how-are-you-doing and health-is-what-matters
    you fling your blandness
    your single-storey manners at me
    your flatlined familiarity
    you dumb me down to a blueprint my brothers
    but barely sully my torso
    I've roots
    a route of subterranean signs
    a breath of unknown elemental stuff

    Get out my body
    scar furred hyenas
    empty my bilgewater blood from your biles
    begone
    for good saltpeter and trash
    I've slammed my life shut
    on alms
    to your oblivion
    I'm going
    I leave you my carapace
    my appetite and my everyday talk
    I exile myself among you
    I hold my tongue
    I pull my anger in
    my brotherhood that takes you aback
    my words worn down by othering you
    freeze beneath your gaze
    poems stalk me
    foment
      the charges
      my putting to death


    * * *

    It's freezing
    someplace inside my brain
    a glass wall shatters in my temples
    a people gnashes its teeth
    let's say children die
    a woman aborts
    a man sells his body
    a cry stops me cold
    blasphemy hurled
    at the entrails of heaven
    the cemetery repopulates
    with hands
    It snows on the graves
    somewhere there
    in my brain


    * * *

    strong wind
    people united
    you explore my history
    you exclude yourself from my rigid perception
    walks
    hanged or guillotined
    wanks
    squatting
      your stride
    but shuttle body
    sweats
      walks
        wears out
    walks
      hush the horizon
    the pillory
        undo the language
          form the word
    return to me
    sarcophagus down in the dungeon
    take my hand
    suck in your tummy
    heave your heresies
          drool
    I don't like your blue Tuareg moon
    stomp on the recipe
    wind body mellowed
    citadel's crenels
    horde of convicts
    hide your gripes
    disguise your hunger
    your fag ends of hope
    your round the bend headwind from hand to mouth
    coarse and mine own
          morsel
    mundane
    you come from out the stunted dawn
    from the clanking of centuries
    and give your name up
    Pubescent
    tallying of ages
    you affect nothing but my freedom
    you seize only my freedom
    you don't know me
    but stay
    don't pity me
    don't plead me not guilty
    don't lie to the crowd
    to clear me


    * * *

    You
    you've got but a day
    haze from the levees
    edges of towns
    you should speak
    ducking out after would be easy
    they'll stone you
    so say what a dagger can conjure
    between the eye and the wound
    speak of this blood
    boils off in your breath
    tell them
    if your reach exceeds your grasp
    or else what
    dream of paradise
    of butterfly houris
    or flitting angels all ambrosial
    you stand guard
    your torch is the word
    exploding in your arteries
    don't titter
    I'm serious
    a serious swollen with gas
    I bloat myself
    to erupt at the crossroads
          at the pits
          at water's source
    Once polluted
        my life sterilized of the world
    I accuse yet again
    surrender
    small pledge of allegiance
    but this humanity I couldn't care less
    its copulations
    its thin-skinned skin
    its coitus between two cuts of meat
    Peoples with no memory
        none
    peoples of slag and hail
    mine are muscular
    dark skinned
    with a callused hide
    and turns turns the noria
    to a null tempo
    turn the seasons at random turn
    the colossal gusts of locusts turn
    rags
    typhus
    trachoma
    the buildings hold back
    when death turns turns
    in the alleys
    mucky
    like my face
    dispossessed of this face
    a mole has muddied by night
    my face
    multiplied in all the faces
    that shout
    voice of the gut
    of sex
    and of a sickly dignity
    unwritten
    that pussyfoots
    through a bombing
    by catapults