129 article(s) translated from French
The Opposing Shore
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…...
The Last Six Days of Baghdad
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…...
Primal Needs
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…...
from “At the Borders of Thirst”
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…...
Time Stretches Out and My Words Do, Too
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…...
January 12, 2010
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…...
In All Magnitude
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,”…...
The Killer’s Monologue
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…...
from “Horses of God”
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,…...
from “Edgard’s Lessons”
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. …...
Center of Flacq
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 Iron Caterpillar
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…...
Traces of Our Fathers
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…...
Diary of an Old Mad Woman
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,…...
Isle Say Blood
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…...
Weaving Dreams
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…...
The Crossing toward Hope
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…...
The Sea Horses’ Ball
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.…...
Wild Daffodils
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…...
Moorings: Indo-oceanic Creolizations
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…...
Famine
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…...
Kratos
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,…...
But Your Eyes
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 Sex Life of the Writer
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…...
It was a November of bitter rain and snow blackened by use
we filed the dead leaves by size to ease the task of the forest that was absent for reasons known only to itself The parents had left with the door We mistook puddles for creeks pebbles…...
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