106 article(s) translated from French
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…...
God, the mother claimed, is behind every tree in the forest
his right shoulder lower than his left heavy with rocky snowfalls from such endurance It’s his motionless breath that fissures our walls in the night when one winter hands power over…...
When did their language mingle with ours
so my brother spoke the words of the arbutus so the mother thickened her sauces with the ash tree’s black resin The female branches made off with the laundry on our lines the young shoots…...
Dead
the mother looked like the linden tree in the square like the wood of the table on which she wrote our faces like the log that didn’t sweat or complain about the smoke dead she began to avoid us…...
As night became talkative
we were lent a window on a fragment of the world We we re the house and the road that led to the house The mother moved the door each time a train went by and at each procession toward the…...
Her apron drawn on her skin
the mother sent us out in the street naked Walnut husks served us for ink Fences we’d jumped were the pages we leafed through Euphoria in the evening when she multiplied her arms two to embrace us…...
How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills
How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills leaving us a body without contours two packets of cold for the armpits white grass for the pubis Gone off with her friend the fire…...
The Ark
I shall destroy man whom I have created from off the face of Belgium: both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them. Make thee an ark…...
The Red Loaf
Pluto Jedediah, dandy of the Caledonian Market, tells this tale: May dogs grow horns, I thought, waking on a bed in a seedy hotel, if I recall the creature for the sake of whose foot I found myself once…...
The World is Moving Around Me
My Nephew I stepped out into the yard with my nephew. The little shacks on the other side of the ravine stood up to the earthquake. The old wall collapsed. We sit on the hood of the car. “I’m…...
from “La Belle Amour Humaine”
There are seven hours of road between the noise and the silence. Between here in the capital and Anse-à-Fôleur. I suppose it's the same where you come from, one town after another and…...
Brine, Blood, and Mother’s Milk
For the woman with bound hands, a vacant stare, and an impudent bottom, whom I glimpsed at Corail one morning during the season of storms I’ve turned my skin inside out, but I can still feel the…...
Women’s Fantasies
For Susanne Rinne It pleases me to straddle a horse and ride like women do in the frescoes of Pompeii…...
Double Fishing
Trout Fishing in America writes to Barbel Fishing in Algeria Arlington, Virginia November 14, 1989 [ . . . ] I could go on to tell you all about the trip that came next, dear BFA, and you wouldn’t…...
A Scream Has No Alphabet: An Interview with Aïcha Arnaout
Born in Damascus, the poet and novelist Aïcha Arnaout has lived in Paris since 1978. We have had quite a few conversations over the past few years, often at the Marché de la Poésie,…...
The Fountain
When the inscrutable embraces sluggish time spreading its invisible light between two suspended shores rags of screams, a flight of black cloth spread a hollow vertigo down the native alley Sanctuaries…...
An Open Letter to Mohamed Bouazizi
Dear Brother: I write these few lines to let you know we’re doing well, on the whole, though it varies from day to day: sometimes the wind changes, it rains lead, life bleeds from every pore. To…...
Is This How Women Grow Up?
It is all a matter of décor Change your bed change your body What’s the use since it is still Me betraying myself Indolent and scattered And my shadow undresses In the arms of girls, all alike,…...
Path of Light
Where have you come from? From the other world. And where are you going? Towards the other world. Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya “Song of the Hermit” I slept for three centuries on…...
The Mothers
From now on the mothers will sleep alone among the portraits of the dead only the mothers know where they’ve gone and how the long labour of dying had distanced them already from the living alone…...
Publishing in Tunisia: An Interview with Elisabeth Daldoul of Elyzad
Elisabeth Daldoul founded her publishing house, Elyzad, in Tunisia almost six years ago. My first experience with her was with A cinq mains, a book in which she published five short stories written by…...
I Call You Tunisia
I I heard your voice at daybreak Like a scarlet dawn Giving birth in darkness The years’ turning back On themselves Rocking the ebb and flow On the shore of a sea At once full and empty I caught…...
The Algerian and the Moroccan
This is my private diary from the year 2002. A large notebook of ninety-six pages with a deep-blue cover. I had lost it. I found it yesterday while cleaning, forgotten, abandoned for I don’t know…...
The Zacharias Ascaris Affair
It all began five years ago, going on six. Ballast Publishing, a fledgling British publishing house, had just launched the first (and last) novel of its catalog, The Zacharias Ascaris Affair. No one, absolutely…...
Welcome to the Club
It was a spring evening and Dylane had invited us to her apartment in Rosemont, which she’d bought a few months earlier. It was the first time we were going to see it, so Hélène suggested…...
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