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[MQB present here a translation of the opening pages of Abdellatif
Laâbi’s L’Oeil et La Nuit, first published in Morocco in 1969 and
then in France in 1977. Laâbi, better known for his subsequent
poetry, offers up here a work of poetic prose that emanates from his
deep involvement in the Souffles group and in the political
upheavals of the time. The Souffles group was perceived as dangerous
and subversive by the Moroccan authorities and Laâbi was arrested
for ‘crimes of opinion’ and imprisoned for eight years before having
to flee the country for France in 1985.
The selection that follows is taken from the first section of the
novel entitled ‘Body Memory’ [Memoire-Corps] and as this brief exert
shows, his writing is not of the narrative kind but is a dense
weaving of affects, impressions, satirical insubordinations and
steadfast stoicism. This weave receives further poetic impetus from
its pre-eminent montage effect in which the reader seems to be
brought into the action in a way that mirrors that of the bemused,
resigned and yet combative participants: What’s going on? Where are
we?]
I heard the click. Indistinct weapons. Galloping. Rutting violence.
When I was hit. Multiple projectiles. Bullets? Marbles? Blades?
Darts? In my body. My brain. And without the least numbness. As
expected. In broad daylight. Publicly. In cold blood. Point blank.
In dreams of occult memories. Beneath the eye of dead gods,
inculpated, at rest, dragged to the bonfire on the guerilla’s
plazas. Galloping everywhere. And without dizziness.
I turn round. A continent. I see it in its totality and beyond.
Ravaged, empty. Petrified birds. No trace, life. Like in the
beginning.
But it isn’t indistinct night. There’s already a light without there
being a star or artificial projectors. A flowing hertzian cascade
which waters the earth, without refraction, zones of shadow, which
penetrates, comes through the walls during the galloping.
And without flinching, staggering, I try to get up, to stand
upright. Without kicks, squirts of blood from the anonymous bodies.
Without a vice on the retina. Without saliva foam nets, without
sirens nor calls, without the sound of upside-down magnetic tape,
reports, sketches of the earth, sockets, extraction of bullets.
Upright. Riddled. With my projectiles. My cancerous islets. Facing
crime. Terror. I’M ALIVE
***
Hospital. But I’m not laid low by illness. New dials have replaced
temporal divisions. Light, fire, asphyxia of colours. Night:
hooting. Itching. Anonymity of shale.
A click to fix the winding of the camera-dolly.
Dizzy-ringing. Nothing more than the eye. An excrescence hanging on
the forehead.
It’s a seahorse. A rat. A man perhaps. His crawling like a fang in
the heart. He enables me. Pours his spit into my ear. I can no
longer hear his yawning. The stairs have retaken him. Other masses
slide towards me.
White’s tentacles make ugly the blistered fag-end of the rescuers.
From the other side, a glabrous light grinds my bones. Concrete
trapezoids. Cyclones of nausea.
They are there. Dressed for waiting. A spittoon sold at auction. To
the client’s head. But it doesn’t hurt me. A threshold spreads out
all its problems. A backwards question runs up against a hinge. I
have hands galore left.
Viscous this ear chewed by mice. Next, these eyes content to meet
my disarray gut me.
By chance I get back to the benches. They’ve followed me.
I too am thirsty. But I don’t like to ask. I swallow slowly clots of
saliva. I smoke and it doesn’t hurt. I would have liked the white to
disappear from the ceiling, disappear from these butchers’ aprons.
Why this mourning colour?
I suggest blue, green.
Once
over the threshold, a lack of air assaults my nostrils. The
chloroform and other exhalations freeze my eyelids. Me too, like
them, I’ve crossed the border. The body’s border in the disruption
brought about by pain.
To coexist would have needed a stronger jerk. No. It’s space which
atrophies and expels a brain.
Them, they speak. It’s their way of not waiting. Collective
bragging.
“Two months stuck in bed. Very serious, said the quack. I’m young,
says one. There is the future. Lessons I’m missing. The future for
me, it’s everything. There are too many unemployed in my family.
Zero passes now, jokes the other. I’ve got number 4, you number 6.
But the Nazarenes don’t make you wait for nothing.
Mental ages. A gallery. If at least they would make up their minds
to spit simultaneously. I could estimate their age, their ethnic
origin.
I can no longer smoke. The cigarette itself is impregnated with
their flesh, between life and death.
The organ which doesn’t suffer must be amputated. There is no other
function but that established by atavism.
This one, veiled like a city girl, but stinking of cloves. She sums
it all up. I don't like to say "drama" anymore. There's too much of
it. It sounds false. It sums up something that is beyond
comprehension. One of those human situations where there are no
commas, no exclamation marks. It's all there and it makes you want
to slap the nothingness, to piss on the books.
The bench no longer surprises me because the stretcher pushes it
back into the category of an instrument of comfort. Nothing alerts
me. There was, and I don't feel it anymore, this galloping in the
skull that has become strident, the counterpoint of a vertigo that
doesn't go beyond the convolutions.
The body is the strongest, above and below the guts.
Atrociously. The others. Hanging on the door latches, on the numbers
written on tiny pieces of paper that they knead in their palms.
Space tumbles, carried along by zones of terror and infernos
quickly mowed down by chloroform.
I do not situate myself. I do not analyse myself. Nor do I
observe those around me. Back-to-back, pressured by the same
expectation. We sometimes bump into each other without batting an
eyelid, without asking for forgiveness, without touching each other,
without any human word redoubling our strangeness.
Yet the eye has not become infected with darkness. It remains
like a shore suspended between our masses absorbed in waiting.
I would have died and not been surprised once I was in the pit. For
me, there has never been a segregation between two states so
brutally indistinguishable. Pulsation. Force of inertia. The
cemeteries were my playground, the safe places where the mating of
the beasts made me discover each time my organs and their
attributions.
So, there was sun, laughter, walking and crying-pain. And
sometimes weddings when the flute-drenched walls activated the cycle
of hatching. The dream excluded. The dung hardened like jujubes.
Hopscotch. Ramadan when all the deceptions blasted sleep. The vigils
where the marvellous pierced me.
He moves. The son, it must be his son, picks him up, sniffs him like
a dog, whispers something to him. He lifts him up. Folds down the
sides of his jellaba. Fixes his turban and his cap. He looks at him.
A tear on each eye. And everything falls apart. The concrete cracks
me up. Slates of wind prostrate themselves like weathervanes
flanking the arch of the apocalypse.
A ray slips away, a spider's web abruptly slashed by an
imaginary dagger.
Number one.
Someone yelled that twaddle. It sounds like a woman's voice
to me. I can just imagine her, that trollop. Rouged with freckles.
The eyes of a naja. High heels and sharp buttocks. She emerges
between two doors, two corridors. Passes through. Leaves a fart of
perfume in the lounge.
Number. You. Quickly. See you next time. Blood-flask. Radio.
A slip of paper [fiche]. Infallible diagnosis. A very curious case.
Very characteristic. For the first time... What do you think? It
merits a message to the...
Bastard. A charlatan's head. After all, I prefer those of
Jemaâ Lafna. They have the delicacy of the verb. Exorcism.
Here. Number. We'll classify these cattle for you. The whole
lot for who knows where. Admitted. The cell...
[Translated by Alan Dent and Howard Slater. Taken from L’Oeil et La
Nuit, Minos: la Difference, 2003, pp.9-16. A further translation
from this work appears in MQB No.19, 2023.]
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