The Francophone writer Habib Tengour, born in Mostaganem, Algeria, in 1947, likes to say that he lives “between Constantine and Paris.” Indeed, although Tengour writes in French, his French gives expression to the liminal space that exists around and between the literary and cultural traditions of France and Algeria. His poetry is equally likely to invoke The Odyssey as it is the muʿallaqāt of pre-Islamic Arabia,1 and his writings brim not only with the voices of other Maghrebi writers, like the Algerians Kateb Yacine and Mohammed Dib, but with the giants of French letters, like André Breton, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire; German Romantics like Friedrich Hölderlin; medieval Sufi poets like Ibn ʿArabi; and on and on and on. Over almost fifty years, having published more than fifteen works of poetry, essays, and drama, Tengour has built a house of literature whose windows and doors are open wide to the world.
In this excerpt of his long poem, Ta voix vit/Nous vivons (Your Voice Saw/Your Voice Lives/We Go On, 2019), Tengour invites in another voice, that of the celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008). Known and loved throughout the Arab world, and often described as Palestine’s national poet, Darwish both embraced and, particularly in later years, chafed against the ties that bound the reception of his poetry to the political fate of his homeland.2 In this poem Tengour alludes to Darwish’s longing to be read in an aesthetic, rather than political, light: “His secret is a worry / The discontent of not finding the right words.”
Tengour, too, like so many others from the Arab world, loves Darwish’s poetry. In his introduction to Ta voix vit/Nous vivons, Tengour describes his first encounter with Darwish at a sumptuous Lebanese restaurant in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, arranged by their mutual friend, the Syrian poet Adonis. “What did we talk about? I have no idea. I was so intimidated,” Tengour writes. He had been reading Darwish since the 1960s, and had attended sold-out performances of the Lebanese musician Marcel Khalifa’s musical renditions of Darwish. “We were romantics,” Tengour writes.
After that first meeting, during the years when Darwish was living in Paris, the two poets sometimes crossed paths, but they weren’t particularly close. “Language probably had something to do with it,” Tengour writes. Arabic has multiple registers. Not only is there a difference between formal fuṣḥā, which is used in literature and the media, and colloquial ʿāmmiyya, but these dialects also vary between regions, even sometimes within the same country. Tengour’s Algerian Arabic is different from the Palestinian Arabic that Darwish spoke. Tengour writes that those from the Arab East—Syria, Lebanon, Palestine—“were always refusing to understand us. Why is it always we Maghrebis (especially we Algerians) who have to make the effort to understand them? Why is their Arabic more Arab than ours is?”3
As much as Tengour may take exception to the ingrained cultural hierarchy of various Arabic dialects (where dialects from the East, the region known as the Mashriq, are considered more correct than those from the Maghrebi West), Ta voix vit/Nous vivons becomes an occasion to reflect on—and to evade—the ties that bind language to identity. For just as Darwish came to resent the expectation that his Palestinian identity would define his poetry, Tengour resents the expectation that his choice to write in French constitutes a betrayal of his Algerian identity. Following Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, the young nation-state underwent an intensive “Arabization” process that prescribed the use of fuṣḥā as “the cornerstone of the construction of the nation-state,” even though much of the country was illiterate and Arabic, too, had first arrived in Algeria as the language of the conqueror.4 As a Francophone writer, Tengour uses the French language to challenge the quest for authentic origins that resides at the heart of so many postcolonial nationalist ideologies. Writing, Tengour suggests, “no matter the language used, is never the language ‘of the mother,’ but always that of the ‘teacher.’”5 This tension is only accentuated and complicated in a colonial and postcolonial environment. Thus, for Tengour, language is not a transparent window onto an authentic self, but rather a kind of translation: “What is said in writing goes beyond the concern for self-expression of the one who writes because, fundamentally, he does not have the say, but he has to serve a text that always escapes him. . . . The writer begins to know . . . how words mask, disfigure, distance, transport elsewhere or render mute.”6
In Ta voix vit/Nous vivons language becomes something else—not a window but a clouded mirror, a raw material, a game, and, in the final section, something like a talisman. We notice it when the font changes: “The children of Gaza hear it beneath Summer Rains.” Here, and in the lines that follow, Tengour calls our attention to the names of Israeli military operations conducted in the Gaza Strip, which range from the lyrical (“Cloud Column”) to the imperial (“Pillar of Defense”) to the banal (“Protective Edge”). The invocation of these military operations throws into relief the violence that is masked by their clichés. Tengour shows that language can hide as much as it can reveal. Later in the poem Tengour reveals his love for games and what the surrealists called “objective chance” when he describes placing letters in a bag and proceeding to “shake / then / choose / at random.”7 Here, language acquires something like occult powers.
In the final section of this excerpt, Tengour uses the letters that constitute Darwish’s name to create an acrostic. In fact, this choice echoes an acrostic that Darwish himself uses in Jidāriyya (Mural, 2000), a long poem composed after Darwish had twice survived cardiovascular death, in which he meditates on poetry, mortality, and the relation of the individual to the collective. At the poem’s climax, the Arabic letters of Darwish’s first name are spelled out vertically, each line unfurling in a wave of alliteration and enumerating the many nouns, adjectives, and verbs one might associate with Darwish’s life: “ميم/ المُغَامِرُ” (“Meem / I am lovesick”), “واو / الوداعُ” (“Waw / I wish you farewell”).8 The letters emanate a sacred, talismanic quality, a dynamic that Tengour re-creates in his acrostic ode to Darwish. For each poet, the letters that make up his name and the language in which he writes do not circumscribe or delimit. Rather, they “open wide an imaginary of homecomings, to insinuate themselves into all the hidden corners of a collective consciousness, to set themselves adrift on the dynamic nostalgia of myth.”9
In my translation I have tried to honor that sense of a collective that permeates this poem. If the poem feels polyphonic, intertextual, or occasionally even disjointed, this is intentional. I think of the poem as a conversation between two poets, Tengour and Darwish, that is nonetheless punctuated by interjections from the many other writers evoked by each poet in their respective oeuvres. There is Rimbaud, with the “cabbage green spine” of his Bible, and there are the surrealists with their games, and there, with “the trace fades,” are the muʾallaqat, whose first movement always begins with the poet contemplating the ʾaṭlāl, the traces of a campfire where his beloved has stopped. Robyn Creswell refers to Darwish’s late poetry as a “gathering of ghosts”—a phrase that could also describe Tengour’s recent work, now in his seventh decade.10 I am honored to join this gathering. I listen closely to their voices as they chat late into the night.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Julian Roland and Conor Bracken for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this translation.
Notes
The muʿallaqāt refer to a series of odes whose name comes from the Arabic verb علق, “to hang.” These poems were said to have hung in the Ka’aba before the birth of Islam, indicating their importance in community life. They are foundational to Arabic literature. Tengour evokes them most explicitly in his poem “La sandale d’Empédocle” (1993).
This echoes a moment from Tengour’s playful manifesto, “Le surréalisme maghrébin” (1981), in which he describes placing numbers in a red fez and shaking it to select the title of a poem. This itself recalls an early surrealist game in which words would be placed in a top hat and chosen at random to generate a story.
Darwish, Jidāriyya, 52. The alliteration is impossible to capture in translation, but I have attempted to do so by adding the verbs am and wish.