(Algerian playwright, novelist, poet and activist, 1929–1989)
A moment jumps the interval; the next
second, a sudden dissonance swells up,
a crack down the smooth surface of the cup,
a dialogue with mistranslated text,
a tense the narrative poises, perplexed,
upon. The dancers and the singer stop,
swirled, each, in shadow like a velvet cape,
potential, and ambiguously sexed.
A gender and a nationality
implicit in the ululation rise
from a long throat to claim or compromise
privilege; responsibility
in texture, in that wound of sound, that vexed
surface, which could detonate, could drop.
Could drop into the anonymity
of headlines: war and fear and fear of war
and war abetted by ambient fear
honed to a hunger by publicity.
But there is a room above the street, a three-
o’clock winter sun, the nuanced, near-
ly translucent voice of a counter-tenor
threading a cantata by Scarlatti.
There were the exile’s words in Arabic
anathematizing any deity
if slaughter is sanctified in its name;
the voice, the struggle from which words became
corporeally transformed to music.
There is the emblematic cup of tea.
There is the emblematic pot of tea
steaming on a wooden bench between
antagonists engaged in conversation
halfway to official enmity,
halfway to some compromise they can agree
upon, and not lose face. A city drones
and screeches in the crepuscule beyond
the room, in contrapuntal energy.
They keep sentences moving, savor the way
to pluck the pertinent or flabby phrase
and skin and gut it, twisting in the air:
a game they magisterially play
like diplomats, not gray-sweatered, gray-haired
exiles filling the breach of winter days.
Exiles filling the breach of winter days
with rhetoric have nothing, but have time
for rhetoric as logical as rhyme.
Meanwhile a speechwriter drafts the ukase
which, broadcast to a military base,
sends children and their city up in flames.
Meanwhile, an editor collects our names
and texts in protest: we can only guess
who else is keeping tabs, who else will be
pilloried in an op-ed in the Times,
distracted by brief notoriety
or told a passport will not be renewed.
Imagined exiles, with what gratitude
I’d follow your riposted paradigms.
To make of his riposte a paradigm,
he conjured Nedjma from the wilderness
behind his distance-mined electric face.
Kahina, Nedjma, Ummi, a woman’s name
ejaculated to a stadium:
a heroine, a first lover unseen
for decades, a mother who mimed, silence upon
women’s silence screamed past millennium.
Another silence, the interlocutor
who argued over wine with Paul Celan
until the words were not German or French
in the cold hypothesis of the Seine,
no longer comforter, companion, tutor
to the last Jew on the November bench.
If the last Jew on the November bench
shivered, rose, walked to the rue de Tournon
and ordered a Rémy and a ballon
de rouge with Roth, could it blot out the stench
of ash and lies for both? (Over the ranch
in Texas what smoke rises in premon-
itory pillar?) The gaunt Algerian
asynchronous, among them, needs to quench
an equal thirst. We all had pseudonyms,
code-names, pet-names, pen-names: noms de guerre,
simple transliterations, unfamiliar
diphthongs in rote order, palindromes
and puns patched on the untranslatable
(unuttered, anguished) root of a syllable.
Unuttered, anguished, roots of a syllable
in her first language threaded the page she’d sign
(written at night, in a strange town, hidden
among strangers, once betrayed) “Nicole
Sauvage.”
Sun gilds the roof of the town hall,
its bridal parties gone, too cold, too late.
The February sky is celibate,
precipitated towards a funeral.
Yes, war will come and we will demonstrate;
war will come and reams of contraband
reportage posted on the Internet
will flesh out censored stories, second-hand.
Tire-treads lumbering towards its already-fixed
moment jump the interval: this war, the next.
(“Nicole Sauvage” was the pseudonym used by the writer Nathalie Sarraute during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, in the village where she went into hiding with her daughters after being denounced as a Jew by neighbors in another village.)