Leveling In Reverse

In the early sixties, poet-filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani traveled around Morocco to document traditional popular culture in all its fast-receding forms. In the Atlas mountains he visited the Amazigh tribe of Aït Bouguemmaz. The men danced in circles. Upon being asked why, they explained that Mazel had told them to do so. Jean Mazel was a French anthropologist who liked to speculate about solar dances. The Aït Bouguemmaz obliged. We can’t dance. We can’t talk.

I wish I were able to write this in Arabic. In theory, I am. It was, technically, my first language. I spoke the Moroccan version of it growing up. I learned the standard version of it in school. I have a perverse ability to spot grammatical errors, however small, when I hear them. But when it comes to writing, my confidence slips away. My alleged mother tongue turns into a guilt-inducing machine. Its imposing literary tradition becomes an intimate stranger, a paralyzing superego. Words come out in French or, increasingly, in English.

Viewed from the so-called Global South, in the Capitalocene, globalization appears as a continuation of colonization by other means. Decades ago, Jacques Berque spoke of “the impetus that leads the colonizer to liquidate diversity in the world.” The last century staged a steady withdrawal of cultural memory, an impoverishment of experience—the leveling of differences into a falsely horizontal space of economic exchange.

You are a postcolonial subject. Your tradition has become unavailable to you. It has withdrawn. To use Jalal Toufic’s terms, it lies on the other side of the surpassing disaster. In order for you to access it, it must first be resurrected—unless you are not from the community of the disaster, in which case you have seen nothing in Hiroshima, please proceed.

Because of ongoing work on Ahmed Bouanani’s archive, I have been returning to “francophone” North African writing of the ’60s and ’70s. Cultural decolonization was the word on the street, and the International Monetary Fund was unleashing “structural adjustment” programs upon the world. I am struck by the poetic force of these writings, but also by their overwhelming sense of loss, and the frequent return of the word “resurrection.” It appears twelve times in the hundred pages of Bouanani’s novella L’hôpital. Résurrection des fleurs sauvages is the title of an important poetry collection by Mohamed Khaïr-Eddine. Kateb Yacine’s world is permeated by the desire to make ruins flower anew.

I have been experimenting with a translingual poetics of reparation relying on citation and montage, whereby memorized fragments of Arabic tradition are made to resonate against words and phrases in other languages. I enlist French and English in my personal resurrection of Arabic. Can the page act as a leveler in reverse, a horizontal plane of apparition where singularities manifest? A terrain for words to flower out of reticent memory? A space for thoughts to dance to the rhythms of a lost mother tongue?