by Jefferson Hansen
According to Pierre Joris’ introduction, the Algerian Habib
Tengour readily approved of the title of this first selection of his work
translated into English. Indeed, the word “exile” appears often in the poems,
fiction, and essays in this volume. In Tengour’s hands, the word seems to
become the very given of contemporary existence; it is as much with us as
gravity itself.
We are all already exiled—nomads, in-between, in motion, in
the making, unsettled and not settling.
The experience is, perhaps, that much more acute for a
Maghribian Algerian who started moving back and forth between his birth country
and France, which colonized Algeria, before adolescence.
The very language he writes in, French, is, on some level,
an exile—the colonizer’s tongue. Yet it is a home tongue, as much as is the one
of the Maghribian market storytellers he celebrates in the essay “The Master of
the Hour.” To complicate things futher, Tengour analyzes these Magrhibian
narratives as fragmentary and open to wild ornamentation and improvisation:
exile again, but a joyous, spell-bound one.
This brings us to the issue of boundaries and margins,
frames and contexts. Tengour’s famous fellow Algerian, Jacques Derrida, at
least in his early work such as Of
Grammatology, seems to always retain a distinction between text and margin,
between an at least rhetorical center and that which both supports and,
simultaneously, undercuts it. Such distinctions seem to me almost wholly absent
from Tengour. Here, all is margins, all boundaries, all fluidity and motion.
This does not entail that there is no meaning. Rather,
meaning pushes and pulls, becomes frayed, scatters and dissipates into other
frames and contexts. Exile as condition, as given, as the contemporary ether.
The book is divided into three sections—one devoted to
Tengour’s poetry, a second to his fiction, and a third to his essays. I will
spend some time an an exemplary moment in each of these genres in order to
illustrate some of what Tengour offers us.
The selections from The
Arc and the Scar re/present Tengour’s re/reading/writing of The Odyssey. Ulysses seems to be a
favorite character of Tengour’s, since he returns to him repeatedly in this
selected. Here, Tengour both asserts and de-asserts the epic dimensions of his
hero. He writes an epic anti-epic: in between, pushing, pulling, unsettling:
even Ulysses cannot use his bow to get his world back.
She was in
front of him the substitute as echo
He was
sailor in the curature of desire
(we met so
as to burn our gazes)
She took
his breath in a sleep drenched dawn
He
interrogated her body in the despair of ports of call
(we tore
ourselves to bits to meet our dreams)
The
companions grunted under the stick
They
groaned the nostalgia of dried mud houses
… don’t
leave yet
He found
timid shadows in the secret of the evocation
She said
stay in the beauty of my language
We woke up
On one level, this passage is merely a fragmentary retelling
of the end of The Odyssey, a kind of
hinting and flashing of its material. On another level, it refuses to allow
Ulysses to fully return—think exile.
“Tore ourselves to bits” recalls moments of the voyage; “timid shadows” lurk;
when she asks him to stay, “We woke up.”
Interestingly, the status of this “we” remains indeterminate
throughout this passage. It shows up in lowercase and in parentheses in the
first two ‘stanzas’, then seems to shift in the final line. How does it fit
with the “she” and “he”?
In the essay already referred to, “The Master of the Hour,”
Tengour explains how Magrhibian marketplace storytellers “knew how to take
advantage of the fragmentation of the story. They would insert whatever
digressions they felt would make the exchange more lively.”
Could Tengour’s poetics, on one level, use these digressions
as a high-level tactic to displace one of the founding narratives of Western
culture, the culture that exiled him, an Algerian, into one of its languages,
French, through playing with the very warp and woof of displacement in
language: pronouns that stand in for no clear noun? Tengour exiles the
playfulness of the Maghribian marketplace into the originary narrative of
Western culture.
Politics, anyone?
“The imaginary carries considerable weight in the
affirmation of identity,” he writes in another essay. Contextually, “imaginary”
in this essay refers to constructed notions of nationality and religiosity that
cause unnecessary violence. But I think it also offers a way into considering
how Tengour offers a poetics of subversive cosmopolitonism, one that shifts and
moves, affirms and chooses, because there is nothing to find, no end to the
voyage as Ulysses mistakenly believed, but permanent nomadism between cultures,
because even a culture is mutiple—including French.
Tengour’s poetry is sometimes prose, sometimes quite
minimalist, and sometimes full of long lines. Always, however, it is full of
allusions, culturally mutliple, layered, fluid, and multivalent. One could
spend years with this multiplicity.
Even the characters in his fiction are multiple. They cannot
be understood in any conventional sense as a collection of traits or deep,
hidden drives that slowly get exposed as the narrative unfolds.
They improvise. They are unpredictible. They move, and
shift, explode and go extremely tender, for a time. The expectable is the
unusual. The typical is the adrift. They live amid exile, as a simple given.
Moses’ Fish begins
in a military camp with, apparently, an exercise gone amuck when a bomb hits a
barracks and causes death and wounding. Or is it a real attack of some kind? or
a mutiny among the mujahideen, who consider themselves mavericks against
military discipline?
It’s not exactly clear, at least not to me. What’s more,
tense changes, from past to present, and point of view shifts from first to
third: solid ground is not elsewhere, it is nowhere. The next section moves
into an acrimonious relationship between the main character, Mourad, and Léa,
his girlfriend. The relationship juxtaposes against the deadly military
tactics: we learn, in the next section, that the irritated Léa ends up drinking
herself to death. This from an old friend of Mourad, who is trying to come to
terms with his choosing to fight for Islam.
The story does not so much develop Mourad’s character as
elongate it, shift it, throw it into various perspectives: angular, geometric,
cubist. Traditional Western character development is, on the other hand,
linear—more and more is revealed as time goes on. Here, perspectives keep
coming. There is an additive effect, but also a subtractive one. At the end, I
feel I have had gleenings of Mourad, but no sense of thoroughly knowing him as
I would a character like Huck Finn. Things are left open, for the improvised ornamentation
of the storytellers of the marketplace, spellbound in the winding narrativity.
One essay, “On Raï,” appeared in AlteredScale.com issue 1.
In it, Tengour discusses “Raï,” a wild, underground music. Apparently, “Raï”
was associated with brothels and danger and the weird side of town, “which
explains its repressions.” Raï “translates the cry of love and existential
revolt of an Algerian youth that is lost, idle and out of work in a quickly
disintegrating urban space.”
Traditional Bedouin culture had a double repertory: the
audible (didactic, religious, praise, values) and “the unsayable, the forbidden
, the repressed, what is unleashed when language burst forth raw, brutal…There
lies the roots of raï.”
“Raï is the desire-scream of that which can never be: the
searing intensity of the moment that leaves no trace one could contemplate…It
is an open wound that never scarifies.”
What characterizes this and many of the other essays is a
kind of poking around the subject rather than an exhausting of it, more a
trying and a testing than an attempt to define, be definitive. These essays
give and go, feint, dance ideas—no end, no definite. The urge to establish,
exhaust, and define flies foolishing in the face of the agility needed to
navigate shifting complexities.
Is Habib Tengour’s poetry and prose like raï? At times. But
he’s way too complex, subtle, nuanced for such a singular outburst. It is only
one of his many registers, and one of his many layers. He is clearly an
important writer, one offering snippets and representations and angles onto the
shifting constructs of contemporary cross-cultural existence: we can never be
one again—if we ever were.
(tell Homer...
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