Languages

A famed diva walks into a Beirut shop and creates an indelible memory for a five-year-old.  Fairuz represented a new kind of Arab star. In making the Rahbani brothers a household name, she offset with their music the predominance of Egyptian song but conducted herself in a fashion far from common to starlets of her standing. Her songwriter, manager, and, later, husband Assi Rahbani had laid down new rules for the game, and these were at polar odds with longstanding custom....

In this excerpt from Le Nez Juif, Sabyl Ghoussoub's expat filmmaker gets an unexpected review.   Mossad: Thirty Self-Portraits Let's face it: I can’t stand Arabs anymore. That’s what I really wanted to get across. I was a professional photographer, but I didn’t want to photograph anything other than my registration with the Mossad. The idea had tickled me for some time; I’ve always been fascinated by spies. Name, surname, address, spoken...

In this short story by Emna Belhaj Yahia, women debate freedom of dress and choice in contemporary Tunisia.   So here we are, Chokrane and I, as she’s leaving school, as I’m leaving the office. Still crushed by the disorderly memories of a sleepless night, I suddenly notice as she walks toward me, something very simple about her clothing, something I hadn’t thought of before, something that requires no explanation, no commentary: the free affirmation of liberty. The...

In these three poems, poet Amina Saïd inquires into life, death, and the nature of memory.​   V I did not choose to be born but I must accept life accept death I didn’t choose the day the hour the place or the era of my arrival in the world nor the name I bear nor my sex nor the color of my eyes but to predict the future yes I wanted that I hope and despair at the same moment  I have strange dreams that drive sleep away I have moments of long silence ...

Set in post-revolution Tunisia, this excerpt from Azza Filali’s novel follows an anxious man to a dermatologist’s office.   It must have been 5 p.m. when Jaafar walked into the dermatologist’s office. “The doctor won’t be long. Have a seat.” A head shot up from behind the desk, a fair-haired young man with freckled cheeks. “I’m his secretary,” he added. Newspapers lay scattered on a table; Jaafar picked one up and settled...

A stranger follows an old woman through a city’s streets at night in this charged work by Tunisian master of the short story Noura Bensaad.   “What do you know?”  “Nothing.”  “What do you hear?” “Silence.” “What do you see?” “Transparency.” “Where are you going?” “Where my feet take me.” The stranger walks through the city. He comes across an old lady. In her...

A local madman in Bonanjo, Cameroon, regales a stranger with stories about his country’s history, and his own, in this short story by Congolese author and 2015 Man Booker International finalist Alain Mabanckou. “The untold want by life and land ne’er granted Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find”                             —Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”  ...

Providing a look back into colonial Vietnam, this excerpt from Kim Thuy's coming-of-age novel Vi tells of the moment when a young girl's slender fingers had the power to change the course of a family's history.    When I was eight years old the house was plunged into silence. Under the extra fan fixed to the ivory wall of the dining room, a large bright red sheet of rigid cardboard held a block of three hundred and sixty-five sheets of paper. On each was marked the...

Inspired by the life story of the Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune, Chinese-born writer Ying Chen reimagines an unnamed Western doctor's encounter with a local child soldier and with himself.   The boat heaved, swept up in the night wind. His bed was narrow and hard. He held himself at the edge of sleep, afraid of falling in the dark. Despite this, he dreamed. He saw his great-grandfather on a similar journey, navigating the ocean on a frozen black night like this one,...

In this story, Sergio Kokis' ancient mariner recounts a series of mysterious disappearances at an isolated lighthouse. Situations of extreme isolation may cause such anguish and fear in certain fragile people that their minds exhibit an intensity bordering on true madness. What’s strangest is that these sensitive individuals may never before have shown the slightest symptom of insanity. But the simple fact of finding themselves far from their usual surroundings or social...

In this excerpt from Pan Bouyoucas' novel Cock-a-doodle-do, the lead detective of a crime novel series airs his grievances against his creator.    The sun beat down on him as the wail of a thousand cicadas filled the air. In his haste, he had forgotten both his sunglasses and his hat. The sky's light and its bright reflection off the surface of the island hit him square in the eyes, causing sweat to stream down his forehead, temples, torso, and back, drenching his shirt....

Aziz Chouaki's Algerian immigrant arrives to the sensory assault of Paris in this excerpt from The Eagle. Marcadet-Poissonniers metro station, 7:30 p.m. An enormous bag on his back, Jeff’s looking for rue des Portes-Blanches. As if in a dream, he crosses rue Ordener, which is buzzing with life. He’s just off the plane, it’s eight years since Jeff’s set foot outside Algeria. First Orly, a slap in the face, the sheer luxury of it—ah, so that’s...

In this excerpt from Négar Djavadi's novel Désorientale, an Iranian teen finds sexual and cultural identity in the Parisian punk rock scene.  The revelation came to me a bit later, through the TV (an old, poorly-functioning set left by previous renters and installed in our room by my sister Leïli), which I watched until late at night. That evening, a concert in a small venue was being shown on Les Enfants du Rock. Because Leïli and Mina were...

In this short story by Rwandan author Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, a mother finds herself caught in the intersection of family battles and ethnic conflict. Amagara araseseka ntayorwa Guts spill on the ground but cannot be gathered back up I stayed kneeling longer than everyone else, pressing all my weight into the wooden slats. My head buried in my hands, I kept whispering, “Don’t betray his name, don’t betray his name, Lord!” When I got up, my eyes were...

Zahia Rahmani portrays the mental and physical manifestations of dual exile from both homeland and language.  Translator’s Note: Franco-Algerian author Zahia Rahmani is the daughter of an alleged Harki, one of the thousands of Algerians who fought alongside or otherwise supported the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). It was the fate of such men to be twice exiled, first in their homeland after the war, and later in France, where fleeing Harki...

A Moroccan adolescent becomes obsessed with his nanny's previous charge, a French boy, and imagines a life with him.  My Lalla continued telling me stories to keep me calmly at the house, which was how my father liked it. I liked to listen to her, but she simply liked to know that I was close to her. She would come take me away from my friends, and other times when I was with girls, under the pretext that a boy was not supposed to play with girls. What I liked about her stories...

Calcutta native Shumona Sinha describes a communication breakdown when a French immigration officer interviews an immigrant circus performer.​   He looked perpetually amazed and stupefied. I recall having to ask him at several moments if he understood what I was saying. At several moments I thought he was simple-minded. He always took a few seconds before opening his mouth, to swallow his saliva, like a fish gasping for air. Only then did he utter a few hesitant, inaudible,...

1 kilo goat kid’s blood, goat kid liver, lungs, and fat, goat kid ribs and bones a full glass of oil minced shallots 1 tablespoon ginger-garlic paste chopped mint leaves chopped cilantro leaves 1 tablespoon aniseed chopped green chili 3 tablespoons garam masala 1 tablespoon cumin 1 teaspoon turmeric powder salt, pepper In a large cast-iron pot, heat the oil. Brown shallots, ginger-garlic paste, mint, and cilantro, aniseed, cumin, and turmeric. Add bones and cubed lungs, fat, and...

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès exposes mismanagement At this point in the story, the voice stops, immediately replaced by the kind of background music that increases cows’ milk production. Monsieur Wang looks at his watch and shakes his head at the punctuality of the performance. Five o’clock on the dot, good work. Not a bad idea to bring this guy on, he reflects, adjusting his cufflinks. Once more, the proverbial wisdom has proven true: without going into the tiger’s den, how...

Malagasy writer Johary Ravaloson riffs on the urban legend of the vanishing hitchhiker.  1 It happened in November. A sticky night, relieved by crisp poststorm air. I was waiting for passengers under a streetlight in Ampasampito, near the cemetery, when I heard squelch-squelch on the pavement. I looked up from my notebook and saw a faltering shadow stumble into the circle of light. Slathered with mud, her feet and wedge heels forming thick, slimy boots, the woman lurched...

Translator’s Note: Tazmamart was a secret prison for political prisoners built in the wake of a second failed coup d’état against King Hassan II of Morocco in 1972. Aziz BineBine was one of the soldiers caught up in that day’s events who found themselves condemned to a 2 x 3 yard underground cube in notoriously inhumane conditions for eighteen years. Over half of Tazmamart’s prisoners died there. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light (which...

L’or de Quipapá is the debut novel from Hubert Tézenas, an author who has spent the first thirty years of his career translating American and Brazilian novels into his native French. The crime novel dives into Brazil of the late 80s, exploring all the crime, corruption, and seedy underbelly of a country in economic repression, having just recovered from a military dictatorship. Quipapá is home to a sugar cane magnate, whose workers are treated more like slaves....

Long ago, my father told me that there was a place in Paris, behind a bush, where you could glimpse paradise, which you only saw once because men went there to die. This place was located somewhere in Montsouris Park, he said, hidden between two paths where someone walking would be swept along by the wind, while the dying man entertained his last conversation with himself before ending it all.   On September 6, 2042, I found myself there. Stretched out on the damp grass with a...

Centuries ago, on the vast plains that extend between the coasts of the Black and Caspian seas, was a kingdom founded by General Poltrov. Poltrov was the product of a life of military discipline: tyrannical, cruel, and rational to the extreme. At the pinnacle of his glory, he enjoyed absolute power over his subjects, a few thousand farmers and artisans. There were only two cities on Poltrov’s territory: Lalandia in the east and Falstria in the west. But communications and...

In a story that spans more than two decades, scenes from armed conflicts in Beirut and Sarajevo are portrayed in a literary diptych as six diverse characters struggle for survival and self-definition from inside varying epicenters of chaos. Holiday Inn: Nights of Respite is the polyphonic account of these characters’ lives, which are extraordinarily intertwined. It is also a fearless inquiry into some of the darkest human impulses. In this excerpt from Sonia...

“Belgium really is the birthplace of Surrealism,” sighs Dassoukine, staring into the distance. I don’t respond because this phrase seems like a prologue—and in the face of a prologue, what can you do but await what follows, resigned. My commensal examines his mug of beer suspiciously, even though we are, after all, in the country that saw the birth of this pretty blonde, sometimes brunette, child—in an abbey, I’m told. The server eyes us. In this superb...

Our country has no more warriors only timeworn fig trees beaten thoroughly by the thousand winds of our plight. The barefooted angels with pathetic faces at the bottom of our ramparts die with each new light. The scent of childhood is now nowhere to be found no chance of nursery rhymes or sunshowers what happened to the hours of ancient romance our dreamy obsession with Al-Buraq’s powers? Oh that horse-woman with the mane flowing longer than the clouds over our houses crumbling...

The weight of the world is visible in your eyes, heavier and fuller than the generous breasts of the unfamiliar girl seated across from you. She tells you her name is Hiba and says she lives in the next neighborhood over. She looks at you, dumbfounded, while you continue to play with the lighter that someone forgot in your apartment. You light it and let it go out, and think of the swamp of despair swallowing your heart. Hiba stands up and walks toward the large mirror. She adjusts her...

The Arabophone poet Abdallah Zrika composed a volume of French prose poems, La Colombe du texte (The Dove-Text), during his three-month residency at the Centre International de la Poésie Marseille in 2002. The following is an extract. The highest degree of solitude is not reached when you cannot open the door for more than two days, but when no fly enters through the window. I do not know the degree of solitude of the trees around me, or if they haven’t known...

In Infinite Fall, his second book, Mohamed Leftah takes up one of the “small true facts of the past” (Stendahl’s term). In Leftah’s hometown, a high school boy leaps to his death in front of his classmates. Leftah, one of the boys who witnessed this act, replays the scene in slow motion, and from it opens a meditation on homosexual love, repression, and bigotry, as performed in a small town in Morocco in the 1960s. This “little chronicle” (a...

Your pain Scars my blood With a fire Always smoldering   Your smile Escapes Their chains To light up My body   I sink Into the darkness Of your night To drink it in   Heart in     embers I cross Your night   I would like to hide myself in you   chisel time to the rhythm of your heartbeat cover the rose in the sky with your sheet I would like to sleep in your kiss   not wake up only dream in your night I would like to be...

Stick a toothpick of silence in your mouth! That your word should never bear witness! That your song should never be the echo of fire While a fire is being prepared for you in the afterlife! They told you That your feet should be nailed to the household! That you should never reach a market or a beach! They told you That you are your father’s when you’re young!    That you are your spouse’s when you’re married! That you are your grave’s once...

Illustration accompanying call for boycott. © Julie Maroh. The furor over the list of nominees for the Grand Prix of the Angoulême International Comics Festival (FIBD) should be understood as a typical example of a number of societal phenomena. I mean by this that the comics world is no more or less sexist than other communities: it’s just the same. But I also mean that this controversy was a gift for the media and for those who love to dig into such a juicy morsel since...

Translator's note: Driss and Souad are in their late twenties and recently married. Driss is a nurse and Souad is a cook at one of Marrakech’s finest restaurants. Their lives mirror those of the average Moroccan working class: confined to badly paid jobs in a country ruled by a monarchic kleptocracy. Driss and Souad work hard and are hoping to save enough money to buy their own home. During one of her evening shifts, Souad is assaulted by a drunken government officer: Police...

Saad bursts into the bedroom, where David is resting after lunch, and declares: “They’re coming! Quick, Monsieur David, let’s go see them!” The whole town seems to race toward Ambado. A cloud of dust rises into view in the distant haze between Tadjoura and the palm grove. David and Saad, on their mules, are the first to reach them. Hemmed in by around twenty armed horsemen, they’ve been marching like this for months. A thousand people of all ages, from the...

Burning, the needle that gently scrapes my skin, that doesn’t press very deep, that moves along slowly, that skims my flesh beneath the surface, that injects black ink blood between the two layers. Gaël crouches over my thigh. His left hand stretches and holds the skin. The other draws with the strange machine. Piercing, its sound—it reminds me of the dentist’s drill. Its tiny needle makes me think about the one in the sewing machine where Neny Kely rips open her...

One day, an uncle of mine called Alphonse sent me to get advice from his childhood friend who’d become a policeman. The friend’s name was Anatole Rabe. He’d steadily climbed the steps of the National Police hierarchy, my uncle said, and now found himself near the top. Alphonse and Anatole had first met when they were still in short pants and both had enthusiastically donned the thankless uniform of civil servitude—but that was at a simpler time when the...

Charlotte-Arrisoa Rafenomanjato’s tragic story of a father’s love for his son lays bare the class politics of Madagascar’s school system.   He lives in the land of impunity. Although he didn’t choose to live here, he loves it and he would not live in another place. His land is beautiful: milk and honey flow there and everything is blessed. It’s a shame that men have made a dump of it—a dump for injustice. Lehilahy is a craftsman and proud of it....

Crayfish leap backward in huge bounds, which I loved. But later, I’d find their own excrement in their heads.   Lord Rat washes his face, he is bald. Lady Mouse trills, she is toothless.   Once upon a time, I was a little girl. I lived in the country. Then, Nenitou came. Nenitou is my mother-sister. She took me with her. She made me leave the country. I was going to go to school. I was going to have beautiful dresses. Clean ones. I was going to watch...

Before starting his nightly route, Lemizo patted himself down to make sure that he had all the tools of his trade. On his left shoulder: a scrap paper bag glued around a large, empty, white metal container without a lid. On his right: two large sacks dangling down, one for different kinds of glass bottles, the other for scrap plastic. Around his waist: a large belt made from a tightly rolled swath of fabric, to hold any handled objects that could be reused. He also had his pointed metal...

Tragedy has struck the Rambahy house: Ikalamainty, the black chicken, has just joined her ancestors on Mount Ambondrombe. Her demise brings great sorrow: a steady source of income for the household has disappeared. And worse, the poor thing was brooding at the moment of passing, so this morning, Rambahy’s wife is brooding over the orphan-eggs. Her husband looks on, powerless to console her. “What are we going to do with these eggs now?” she asks, worried and sad....

On this morning, the old musician stops playing the moment I bend my lanky bag of bones and squeeze through the tiny doorframe of his home. I’ve stopped greeting him, at least while he’s playing, so as not to frighten away, like birdsong, the music my ears drink in from the street. But today, he breaks off. A long silence settles in while Marvane—that’s what I call him—aligns and adjusts the chunks of calabash gourd under the strings of his instrument. His...

Hamban-Joky and Hamban-Jandry were twin brothers, unusually identical brothers. They looked the same and acted the same. Their mother, Velonaina, mixed them up. Their father, Tsiahoana, couldn’t tell them apart. No one in the village knew one from the other. Only they recognized one another, only they knew which one was which. For Hamban-Jandry had been the first to see the light of day. And thus he was Zandry, his parents’ youngest child.  Hamban-Joky was the one charged...

First published in 1980 and republished in 2011, l’Anarchiste has never earned Soth Polin the literary status in France merited by the quality of its prose, whose luminosity is reminiscent of the writings of Marguerite Duras and Albert Camus. The novel's failure to gain stronger traction with French literary circuits on its first publication might have resulted from its stark critique of French journalists who had taken a strong pro-Khmer Rouge position in...

Nkunda kurya yariye igifyera kimumena amatama The glutton ate the snail; it made his cheeks explode By the time the sun’s luminous fingers had come to rest on Hariho’s fields, his neck was already sore. Undeniably, nights are cold in these parts. This morning he had come down to this trickle of water to rest, like a mosquito sated after a night pumping blood from the depths of fatigued and world-weary veins. He was calm, brimming with images from last night and the mouthfuls he...

History will remember this man Our grandchildren will study him between school recesses Old women will speak of him as a strange enigma A myth, an eccentric aberration . . . The old men will brush off their shoulders Their lesson finished, the children will rush to the courtyard to play ubete, the wolf And mothers let out a weak sigh At hearing their children cry: Peter ninde? Ni wewe, ni wewe Who’s Pierre? It’s you, it’s you. There will be no more wolf on the vast...

The weather’s so hot at the moment that I can’t be assed to do anything. I spend all day vegging out in front of the TV, watching shows aimed at the unemployed, even though I have a real job. And when I’m not staring at the box and doing my eyes in . . . well, I sleep, I eat. I sleep some more and I eat some more. In other words, I do fuck all. When I opened the mailbox this morning, I realized that I was making a serious mistake. The bills for the things that rule our...

“My son can ensnare you, you know. It comes right out of his eye.” —Edith Arnold-Delon   1954 Service number T 1023 T53. You board in Toulon, headed for Indochina. Another move—just farther this time. You’ve been racking them up ever since Edith and Fabien divorced when you were four. A foster family in Fresnes, by the prison where Laval was waiting for the firing squad—you just can’t make this stuff up. They invite you to lunch. You pick a...

I was brought into the world on a day of black misery. My mother, desperate and drained of strength, was nothing but skin and bones. Her body had become a frozen desert. She died in her struggle to give me life. Hunger was my first companion, and it has never left me since. It is always there, in my belly, relentlessly plaguing and torturing me within. My grandmother, old Kokum, the village midwife, attended my mother during the birth. Apparently I was no bigger than a young hare....

He arrived on a golden-yellow tricycle and offered to tow me. Frail sexagenarian, sickly thin frame, angular face, his craggy skin suggesting an old case of the chickenpox. A lightly broken-in cowboy hat made him look like a worn-out pistolero straight out of a Sixties Western. “Hop on board my taxi!” he said. I declined the offer, suggesting I walk beside him while he rode the tricycle. The man invited me to dine. Difficult to refuse such a priceless invitation given the...

Rosa Maria stopped in front of C tower. Boys and girls from the neighborhood were turning up in clusters, they’d waited for this moment for a week now, good mood, party clothes, name brand clothes, tracksuits. Last week’s success was on everyone’s minds. Black Move had a reputation as a gathering place now, good music, no fighting, nice atmosphere; word had spread through the housing project. With some worry, Rosa Maria noted the new faces, especially girls who might make...

Thankfully, the advent of my friends’ sexuality took me out of the lonely guilt I felt after being molested. The first year of middle school is the occasion for young studs to swagger onto the scene. Once past primary school, they become frustrated little stallions, keen to know their first successes, eager to flaunt the power they feel swelling between their legs. As they develop miniature male physiques, they train their changing voices to take on a virile resonance, grow peach fuzz...

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Spring (Printemps), which was published by Grasset in April 2014, is set in Algiers between early 2011 and 2013. Teldj, a former 400m hurdles Olympic medalist, is gay, in her thirties, and teaches at the University of Algiers. As Teldj watches the events of the Arab Spring unfold, she exhumes memories from her personal past, as well as her country's recent history, most notably the Civil War, which claimed hundreds of thousands of victims during the 1990s. ...

The dead need no more space than a mouth from its lipstick. They skate on the shutters. This slit of daylight is their last look, which spies us exchanging a kiss in a lapse of their memory. They’ve planed the wall thin drilled their opening across from the door. Breath that stirs the curtains, steam on the mirror, their beyond-fate breath. Watchful now, we wait. We are on the brink of things.   "Au bord de la vie," © Marie-Claire Bancquart. Originally...

A jersey skirt between the belly and the gray day. The Eiffel Tower cries electricity. On Mirabeau Bridge, a woman strokes the fabric thinking of the passing minutes, the year’s deaths in her journal crossed out by ball-point pen beneath it, the belly feels her fragility curtains of birds come and go along the sky’s bias she would like to entrust her small sack of entrails to them to no longer be any more than a look, luminous and naked, like the Tower.  ...

My bones have beautiful remains already cut, it’s true already mended together as they bravely remain. They hold my flesh and skin on. I bring their troop along and bring myself along with it (old impression: being only partly part of it) to museums, before the glass of prehistoric displays where, among the supposedly sharpened stones, arrowheads, are femurs, visibly broken but pieced back together. Which just goes to show, in ten thousand and some-odd years, my dear...

Mankind, this late in coming, rewinds a thread of the world along the stalls of early produce crates, market palettes smell, wet, like their tree of origin. Nearing the very depths of us transfusion of the millennial mildew trunks, grasses beneath the rising of the waters. The silken flesh, the acrid peat merge on this urban curbside splattered by cars.   "Millénaires," © Marie-Claire Bancquart. Originally published in Avec la mort, quarter...

This is the tale of a lengthy journey. A step-by-step journey, one inspired by a misfortune that took place in the court of the Hungarian Prince Esterházy, in November 1772, in the city of Esterháza. A kind of voyage. An esoteric and maiden voyage whose steps I will attempt to recount for you. So what is it? An itinerary. An itinerary of the twenty-six stations. As we approach the starting line, all is possible, all is permitted: is this freedom or is it permissiveness? This...

Melancholy So I’ll once more find my old horizons, cherished scent of winds and habitations. Fear not if it seems I’m quitting the place. I leave Paris just to love it better. One tends to hurry a banal embrace. But what’s this pride worth that’s past all seasons?    Try to unite the heart with its reasons.  The city, while smiling, leaves a rough trace. I leave Paris just to love you better. To love you better, I couldn’t picture— Now...

in the basement the heroine of a Gainsbourg song on the eighth a top executive smug and cocky on the first a sexually repressed family of bourgeois on the seventh Mr. Fix-It getting itchy fingers on the second a man all alone watching TV on the sixth an old couple bored as hell on the third no one home except the dust on the fifth the gang gets the party started on the fourth mom tucks her three kids in on the fourth she sings a lullaby they bawl in the basement she sits down with her...

Censorship We know that the earliest readers of Remembrance of Things Past objected to the length of its incipit narration of its hero’s noddings-off and nocturnal (and diurnal) reveries. A gentleman who spends forty pages explaining how he tosses and turns in bed and rumples his sheets is surely enough likely to rumple the patience of his readers. If patience is a bedsheet, which virtue is a pillow? Let us leave this enigma aside and return to the Proustian text whose standing has...

At the end of the furrow, words staple the page, lashing agile lines. None are spared.  The choice is made: it imbricates, recaps white porcelain, tin, polishes carets, better yet, china clay. Rhyming words, ternes bearing sludge with vestiges of tinsel, grown gloomy, kiss-crazed by a queen’s intels caressing your collar like worn petals, your anagram arrives—this time it’s “treens”— in place, on the fingertips of padres. A doctored line, but baited...

1. In September 1972, funded by a scholarship, I took the Orient Express to Vienna. Sixteen-hour journey, upper bunk. Less than enthusiastic about sharing a room in the student hostel, I looked for a studio and moved into 48/18 Fleichgasse, Vienna 15. 2. Certificate in German obtained, composition of a master’s thesis on the relations of words and music in the opera Lulu by Alban Berg. Alongside that, a course in electroacoustics at the Hochshule für Musik. 3. Exploration of...

Canada Dry Spoonerisms 1. A Sicilian caterwauls, except in Apulia. 2. The archaeologist’s wife does love a serious excavation. 3. How adroit you are with your crocuses! 4. The seafarer takes a pruning knife to caulk his dinghy. 5. Can someone repair my till? fretted the Druze bag boy. 6. The faithful communicant’s hand lingered on Saint Crispin’s alms-box. 7. Smirking, the abbess palpates the prelate’s brow. 8. The baroness’s ape dips his biscuit in the...

Cyarwa is the birthplace of my mother. She left when she was two years old and came back when she was forty, accompanied by her older brother. This poem is the story of their return after years of shared exile, in Burundi, Belgium, Ivory Coast, and France. Your daughter returned this morning Your son embraced you once again Cyarwa cya nyarwaya Your stories flow in the blood of my dear ones Your roots are written in the lines of our hands Cyarwa cya nyarwaya You, the land of my grandfather...

Distance, miles,  Songs of a Land that is not mine  Pain of exile.  Let me tell you who I am,  I am a child of exile.  I am the child of an encounter  Ivory Coast held me in its bosom  Rwanda, today, lets me tread on its soil.  Melting pot, meeting of cultures, are mine, Me!  I am diaspora!  Difference and Tolerance weave my life and blend in harmony.  Daughter of contrasts and colors  Of sadness and sweetness  Of odors and...

Novelist and playwright Koulsy Lamko came to Rwanda in 1998 as part of a project entitled "Writing by Duty of Memory," which brought a dozen African writers to Rwanda and provided each with a commission to write a text. The authors interviewed survivors, met with perpetrators, and visited many memorial sites. Most of these sites were churches where Tutsi had fled, hoping to find protection and refuge. During the genocide in 1994, however, there were no sacred places. Four years after the...

He had been watching me for a while, but I hadn't noticed him.  I was busy chatting with my cousin Astrida on the doorstep of her store in the center of the capital.  In Kigali, to greet an acquaintance means to ask her what is happening in her life at the moment.  Has she had children since...  No one says the word "genocide" in this context; people tend to say "since then," and right away the other person understands the reference to that catastrophic spring. ...

"Trouillot’s most striking childhood memories of the Duvalier dictatorship remain the image of Duvalier’s militiamen searching her family’s and neighbor’s houses for publications and other works of art deemed subversive.”—Edwidge Danticat   To Nadève At first Eléonore had been amused.  Why had she taken this detour?  A whim, a random impulse, and seemingly not such a bad one. But she began shaking her head in...

A man selling sweet dumplings comes up wiz his basket full and asks ze internashonal lady if se would be so kind as to buy one. No? Half of one, zen? — Ma’am iss not espensive, have pity on a poor Madagashi wiz zree shillen. Zis a bleshing ma’am. Internashonal lady rolls out her anger: “Can’t you see I have a situation on my hands?” Rakoto says: “We must go, Mudum.” Se replies: “I cannot go with a sick man in my arms who is chained to...

There is an atmosphere of intense concentration around the solid wood table. General Makhloufi, Commander in Chief of the Royal Gendarmerie, Tangier Province, stands in front of a giant map of the region outlining the tireless battle that the police—under his leadership—are waging against the growing and trafficking of cannabis in the Rif. He pinpoints each operation on the map. Facing him, three senior officials from the US Drug Enforcement Agency in staid suits are propped up...

I am a translator. At first, it is a pleasure a bit like being an actor. You have to get used to someone else, listen to him, understand him, immerse yourself in him, except that a novel, rather than a character, must be interpreted. I always proceed in the same manner. Once the book is in hand, I shut myself away at home. I wait till dark to start reading. At night, the violence of the outside world subsides; you’re that much more available. Seated at my desk, I read by a lamp that...

None of the great Spanish authors produced their own works at breakneck speed. Sometimes I had to wait months for an interesting book to appear on which I could exercise my talents as a translator. Actually, the national sport of Spain, not counting soccer, is drinking cold beer and eating tapas, an activity that requires of the client a dedication that is often incompatible with producing a masterpiece of three, four, or five hundred pages. I should have been aware of this issue when I...

The room is covered in dead leaves. Two benches are placed just so, conjuring up a bucolic garden scene, in the first days of fall, in the countryside, waiting for the season to roll by and take our memories with it. And yet we’re a mere stone’s throw from the Place de Clichy in Paris, in the eighteenth arrondissement, and it’s spring. On a small stage, a young performer from Toulouse, the twenty-eight-year-old AJ Dirtystein, is naked and covered in white rice powder....

This morning, I decide on another escape route to dodge the police surveillance of the rigid Mukhabarat we can’t seem to shake off. I will jump in the first illegal taxi that comes near the hotel and make a grand tour of Baghdad. No sooner said than done. I happen on an old retired civil servant, who’s turned illegal cab driver to make up his pension. In his wreck of a Fiat, Abdelbaki and I take a very long ride into the city, far from the hassle of the security...

They arrived together, a pair of butterflies with green and yellow wings, dappled and tremulous. They landed here and there on the hibiscus blooms surrounding the pool, and the youth marveled at their casual grace. His palms itched with the urge to paint. He yearned to take up the brushes hidden in the back of his closet, away from the scornful, jeering faces of his friends and the scathing comments of his father, who would much rather have seen him wielding an architect’s...

Fito looked at his watch. Ten to seven, he’d be on time for his appointment. The jeep’s headlights shiftily lit up the tortured trunks of the neems bordering Route 1. Traffic was fluid and the car was going fast. A sudden, liberating transition from the traffic jams that had held him up for almost an hour, all the way to the Bon Repos exit. Fito was a bit cold but he didn’t turn down the A/C. He was letting his blood cool down. In a moment he would be sweating out every...

Mid-August. The beach, for the first time since the earthquake. The water is warm, just the way I like it. I keep saying that Haiti is neither a postcard nor a nightmare. This Sunday more than ever. I’m exactly in between the water, the sun, the sand, and the sky. Not in a postcard, not in a nightmare. In something that makes my blood sing gently. That’s all. On January 12, time froze; every second was loaded. We were without a past, without a future. In the unique,...

An interview scheduled with the French writer and literary festival director Michel Le Bris and Dany Laferrière, a Haitian and Canadian novelist and journalist. The noise, first of all. As if some unknown monster were crashing through everything beneath us to get to the surface. And then, the swaying, slight, barely noticeable. Two seconds of swaying, as gentle as a cradle rocking. Acceleration—and within a few more seconds the room can’t hold still, dashes to the...

I give thanks to the earth, not the same, not mine—my stormy, radiant illiterate—I give thanks to the earth, not my island, that terrible girl, who learned, with her silent “S,” to play Russian roulette morning and night. Thanks, I give thanks to the foreign woman, to the virgin, the all indigo one who fainted and risked losing her heart in a leak of water, a sudden tear of compassion. I give thanks to the earth of men and of humanities. But I abhor… I...

OK, obviously you don’t believe me. You can’t help laughing. You tell me I’m not serious, I’m taking you for an idiot, a nitwit, I’m trying to put one over on you. Hey, did I ask you your opinion? Did I ask any questions? Do I know what they say about me? Sure I do. I’m an old schmuck who never did a thing in his life and still doesn’t do anything. I’m a loser; at forty I’m rotting away in a two-room flat, I have a face that would...

In another garage, in another slum, there’s the photo of me that Abu Zoubeir pinned to the wall alongside photos of the other martyrs: Nabil smiling beatifically; Khalil with a fixed grin; Blackie, his dark complexion gone, staring with his wide protruding eyes and making a victory sign; and my brother Hamid, true to form, displaying all the swagger of a born leader. This way, Abu Zoubeir glorifies us forever in the fight against the infidels. Looking at our portraits, other boys...

Jean Sénac was an Algerian pied-noir poet, whose European heritage, open homosexuality, and advocacy of a native Algerian literature put him in conflict with the nascent Islamist government.  He hosted a popular radio broadcast and helped to see many new writers into print, himself publishing multiple volumes of poetry increasingly under the sway of Allen Ginsberg and other radical American writers.  “Edgard’s Lessons” predates those...

At the first rays of dawn, when the dogs abandon their posts and the vagrants their cardboard boxes, the most pointless of prayers ascends into the sky. A plea. God, grant us this day our daily bread . . . The wind from the east muffles the prayer, the voice weakens, but at that very instant you think it will vanish into thin air, it intensifies, proliferates, spreads out over the tarnished roofs of the municipal buildings, onto the sticky benches of a classroom. In plain sight the...

Strange phenomena can strike such dread into human hearts that I ask you to believe in the one that knotted the stomach of the young diver named Paolo, who noticed the haze of the tunnel when he was returning from a day of fishing . . . Shortly after stowing his fishing gear, mask, snorkel, and flippers in a big, army-green sports bag, and proudly hooking the day’s catch of black jacks and red snappers onto the steel tip of his harpoon—which he immediately placed on his...

Writer, journalist, and filmmaker Alain Gordon Gentil has recently finished shooting four documentaries that retrace the great Indian, African, French, and Chinese adventure of immigration to the Mauritian land.  The series is titled “Venus d’ailleurs” [“They Came from Elsewhere”].   Memories from the set. I have never celebrated the past, but my childhood has had a way of hanging on. And when it has you in its grip, it conjures images that...

I am a cliché. An exotic cliché, indeed, I’ve been living here close to thirty years and like clockwork, I am asked the same questions, the same commentaries. So you come from there, it must be so beautiful so wonderful; why do you live here when your island is so lovely. I just dream of going there, to relax under the beautiful tropical sun, allow me to tell you madam, that you have the charm and kindness of the people from over there. Yes, nice and charming,...

our fragmented history written with a large axe told by the bordertracers slaves of their prejudice   our marooned history chained by hatred whitewashed memory, creole coolie color anger pain dockers   our disinvented history open book on nothingness pages thrown into oblivion rewritten by the portolan of night   our dismembered history archipelago of sorrow Chagos of our lost islands   our incomplete history treated with...

And as he gazes at her, their soul-child is conceived (Henri Michaux, Life Within the Folds)   That day as she finished weaving the few meters that would wind seamlessly around her body, she tied off the threads and eased the fabric from the loom to hold it and marvel at its lightness. Her hands beneath its sheerness had turned blue. She placed it over her face and looked through it at the softened outlines of objects. At her slightest movement it whispered, speaking to her—of...

1997. Day breaks under a raging downpour. It’s raining buckets. Raining screams. Raining mothers’ screams that drown out the thunder of the bullets raining down on their sons. It’s raining bullets over Mutsamudu. The Kalashnikovs fire away and stop.  Soldiers on the other side fall, fire back, run away. A rebel screams and falls. A bullet has lodged in his right leg and the blood is spurting out. The blood of independence, say the local media. The blood of...

Below the Mipham plane the Himalayan sky. The wind florifies the snow. Fa-fa-mi . . . mi-fa-fa   . . . Shadows gain in luxuriance, tufts of omphalodes and orthosiphon. Don’t stay grounded. Don’t stay attached to anything. My word as a stewardess! In order to thank the Black Virgin and brush her by a breath in her orchard of light, the plane loses some altitude. And to allow the amphibians of outerlava to turn their faces toward the wheel of Virgil. Rain or shine,...

It was only during our first weekend together in the Vosges Mountains that I noticed how in tune we were. Before that, whenever we met I felt as if the city, the noise, and other people were preventing us from being completely ourselves. For our first evenings out we went to restaurants recommended by Sunday magazines, and these were often alike, with the stark lines of their décor, their brightly colored walls, geometric plates and expensive wines. There was nothing to tell us...

Moorings (amarres in French), in Reunion Island Creole a profoundly polysemous term, also means   link, ties, enchanted, bewitched, to be in love, to be enraptured, to be bonded, to care (amar lë ker) whatever excites the senses (i amar la boush) [. . .]   Natives of an island that is often forgotten on maps of the world, often confused with other French overseas territories, we seek to affirm a problematic based on this very forgetfulness, on this...

Frogs invariably proliferate in a flood. My countries, crass latitudes and borders of hell, often encounter these blessed times. Winds and rains. Frogs. Toads. Pelobates and other pelodytes. Inflated rice paddies and the unmistakable stench of excavated death. Excavated lifted battered returned. The plague prowls and help is standing by to fill a few wallets. The world’s tears make good neighbors. Definite solidarity, international s’il-vous-plaît, on the silt of...

From my face made puffy by the swelling of centuries my shithead laughter, I gaze at you from my manure where negro death unfolds in mass, crater bodies in rotten piles, pink abscess on vagina in bloom, smooth penis, stuck inert in the still pulsating throat of the latest cut-carved On my pile, Let there now be modernity, Let there now be prosperity, Let there now be liberty, I perish humus by my flesh You may now develop, emerge, grow, increase, consume, see, you are progressing,...

But your eyes heard The brilliance of the laughter Residing in the pale bone Of our faces Your pupils will read The thread woven by time’s Imprint Upon the brow of the present With the red note of the river For a manuscript  To adjust Our song still to come   The odor of travel lingers about you   Your only sin is in wanting To live life   Some day Your steps  Will lead you to The stopping place Of mornings....

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. —Ernest Hemingway   A friend recently lent us a book called The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant.1  Its author,  one Jean-Baptiste Botul, examines the philosopher’s lifestyle, which besides the usual mingling and chitchat boiled down to study, study, and more study. And thus Kant not only preserved himself from marriage but from ever making room in his life for a woman, not the smallest corner. For a man to be chaste his...

the mother looked like the linden tree in the square like the wood of the table on which she wrote our faces like the log that didn’t sweat or complain about the smoke dead she began to avoid us turned her back to the mirror to the moon to the skylight less dead she would say that the moon was a loaf of bread baked between two stones   A moon doesn’t fill a bread-box doesn’t plug up the cracks in the sink doesn’t sweep the crumbs of...

we were lent a window on a fragment of the world We we re the house and the road that led to the house The mother moved the door each time a train went by and at each procession toward     the cemetery The earth remained the same despite the dead buried in it They were wept for in unison but laughter was separate The mother sprinkled the doorstep with soot though she no longer had a cauldron  Her kitchen utensils fled after the last guest deserted her...

the mother sent us out in the street naked Walnut husks served us for ink Fences we’d jumped were the pages we leafed through Euphoria in the evening when she multiplied her arms two to embrace us two to push us away and make sure we had the same number of smiles and tears How to tell her with no punctuation about the transparent toes of the children whose     paths we crossed the women all red on the inside the dogs blue at the corners of their...