Kind friends
usually when I write
I barely have the time
to feel your warmth
and sit amongst you
(a cigarette in my lips, the same tune in my head)
and must leave you
before I’ve reached the end of the page
You see, here they ration out
even the stationery
The request form that I fill
only allows correspondence
between the prisoner
and his family
They’ll never understand
that family to me
doesn’t mean ancestry
or heredity
or villages or IDs
I’ve never been able to estimate
the size of my family
It stretches out
as far the sunrise in our eyes
as far as our newly born continent
Friends
I’ve got so much to tell you:
it’s just that usually
I keep my mouth shut not wanting to risk
the censors putting a stop
to these acts of presence
in fact I censor myself
fearing the briefness of my answers
might twist my thoughts
out of shape for you
or warp what this humble letter
this gradual rediscovery of ourselves
these simultaneously peaceful upsetting accounts
of the other through dialogue
have to say
Friends
I grow more convinced
that the poem
can only ever be
a dialogue
made of live flesh and sound
that stares you straight in the eyes
even if the poem has to cross
the cold wastes of distance
to finally reach you
in the creases created by absence
This is why
you no longer hear me speaking alone
in the trances of exorcism
as I extricate myself from this quagmire
and call out to the earthquake survivors
to heap my distress calls and curses on them
A long time ago
I wrote those poems
about the infernos of solitude
about my desperate climb back to my fellow human beings
and I’m not quite ready to disown them
those bitter fruits
of the murderous twilight
where I struggled
as I sought the roots
of a voice I knew was my own
of a human face that reflected
the exact image of my truth
Those violent poems were healthy
and without them
maybe my voice
would be empty today
devoid of what gave it
its vital intensity
But the problem
is that I can’t write like that any more
Nowadays
my life’s taken a different path
and so has my style
I’m not alone any more
My ordeal has placed me
on the road of encounters
My body has learned
to be pushed to the limits and curl up
like a scalding hot steel plate
to endure the lacerations
and to resist
to translate humiliation and pain
into their literal opposites
and inside this lead-sealed arena
where they condemned me to shuffle
for ten whole years
I have started to dig
entire tunnels
and underground passages
even into my veins
even into my mind’s vital parts
and I heard other people were digging
in all the directions towards which
I was piercing through my aphasia
until the day when the first hand broke through
and I felt the willowy vines of embraces
Translated from French by André Naffis-Sahely