Alger, Le Cri

1 1 2 Y A L G E R , L E C R I S A M I R T O U M I Translated by Alice Kaplan I was born in silence at the Saint-Eugène clinic, at 8 p.m. on the day of Mouloud. I didn’t cry. The midwife shook my legs vigorously until the cry came. Fireworks in honor of the Prophet’s birthday crackled in the night. Ever since, I’ve searched for the cry. Terrace in April This city assaults me, it climbs up and back down. Its chaos exhausts me, its pulsating disorders are my own, mirror of my own instability, my own chaos. Algiers, exploding city, made from the hundreds of mortar shells in the mountains that gave birth to these metastasized buildings standing like the quills of a hedgehog , like a mass of sea urchins stuck to their rock. Algiers, city bursting in the sun, sticky in its shades of gray, living at the mercy of its moods – no, her moods, which echo mine. Violent, they say this city is violent. I think I’m violent, like my city. Can she be held responsible? Irresponsible, nothing is ever her fault, same with me. When 1 1 3 R she happens to be guilty, she smothers you in her bay, deprives you of oxygen. In the night the city comes for you, she spreads her lights nonchalantly; when the boats appear to float weightlessly, when the waxing moon outlines its rump, when the noises are subdued, like a groan, only then does the city exhale her sensuality . I am watching Algiers from my terrace, there she is, crouching at my feet, gathered up and ready to leap. I light a cigarette, the smoke pollutes my lungs, this city pollutes me; insidious, it makes me dependent. The lights from the Moutonnière freeway highlight the bay like an eyebrow. And this never-ending groan. Moutonnière, the sheep’s hold – where is the shepherd? Algiers is a city without a shepherd, who mistreats her flock of residents, starting with me. Algiers laughs. Like a play on words. Alger rit. Algiers chokes by day, breathes by night, a long breath that makes her lights flash a hypnotic message. I talk about my city so I don’t have to talk about myself – Algerian modesty, like lowering one’s gaze and walking silently in the city, closed o√ in the midst of noisy agitation , and joining the others, equally silent, who are slaloming between the crying children and the racket of horns. Algiers strings out her young people like prayer beads along the walls, alone or in groups. What are they talking about? Curses. Curses on the city so as not to think about where you come from, Algiers shares the modesty of her inhabitants. Di≈cult for me to breathe amid the disorderly heap of buildings tumbling toward the sea, the unfinished houses like so many blisters. Algiers is never done dying of an endless asphyxiation, of a living death, so alive. Is the Algérois cursed? Is he a ghost? I would like to talk about myself without talking about my city, really I would, but in my city no one talks, no one looks. In Algiers, you survive: How are you doing – Okay, sort of? That’s how the people of Algiers greet one another, content with not much, with chouiya – a chouiya of hope, a chouiya of love, a chouiya of pleasure , or, as the song goes – a hymn to the Algérois – chouiya bark, nothing is already a lot. I would really like to speak, to exhale just a little, chouiya, in unison with my city. Exhale to atone, by talking about myself, made by my city. In my city I am veiled like the bay in fog, and between the fog and 1 1 4 T O U M I Y my modesty I dream about uninhibited writing the way Algiers dreams about the Mediterranean, but Algiers is as frightened of the sea as I am of words. I must exhale with words, I must atone for Algiers, languid Algiers, lining up her lights on filaments...