The Illiterate Man

Abstract

32 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 photo : lionel viroulaud I f you want . . . I tell myself each day: if you want to see the black dogs of your childhood again, give yourself a reason. Throw your hair into the river of lies, plunge, plunge further still into the blood of insanity. The masks don’t matter to you, but give yourself a reason and die if necessary among the bald heads, the shanty-town kids who eat grasshoppers and hot moons, and the black dogs that play in the garbage dumps of the suburbs. In that time, the seasons rained colors, the moon rained legendary dragons. The beneficent sky opened onto white cavaliers . Just as the coquettish old women sang over the terraces of Casablanca. One night, a child lured the moon into a trap. Ten years later, he found it again old and all pale, even older than the old women without mirrors, the mustachioed grandmothers arguing endlessly like rank rain. So, he understood that the seasons of colors were an invention of the ancestors. This was the death of trees, the death of giants. Ghalia bent el Mansour didn’t live beyond the seven seas in an emerald castle on the backs of eagles. He met her in the neighborhood of Ben M’Sik if not at the Carrières Centrales, near the fairground kiosks. She wore plastic shoes and prostituted herself with the bicycle repairman . There was nothing left to do but slam the doors to the sky. So, hands ablaze, I restarted the suns. My illness is a barbaric world that claims to be without arithmetic or calculations. I cover the sewers and the garbage dumps, I call friend all the black dogs, all the cockroaches that crawl through my deranged dreams. Forgive me and to the devil with you! Love, admire, detest as you see fit. My factory has no robots, my machines are on strike, the waves of my ocean speak a language that is not yours. Forgive me and to the devil with you. I am dead and you accuse me of living, I smoke second-rate cigarettes and you accuse me of burning feudal farms. Listen, listen to me. Under what law is it permissible for the chicken to fly higher than the eagle? In its dreams the fish would like to jump to seventh heaven. I built terraces and entire cities. Casablanca lived under the American bomb. My aunt trembled on the stairs and thought she saw the sky’s stomach split open. My brother M’hammed made Charlot and Dick Tracy dance with the flame of a candle. My mother . . . special section political voices from the maghreb The Illiterate Man by Ahmed Bouanani Must I really go back to the house of the louvered shutters? The stairs infested with an army of rats, the nude woman with sorcery hands, Allal raping Milouda in a pool of blood, and the Senegalese cutting off his penis at a butcher’s on Derb Al Kabir . . . Must I really go back to the house of the louvered shutters? The sentinel washes his feet with your tears. Your most beloved dream topples over in the barbaric world of daylight and the moon. You do not stand up. Your equations in your pockets, the world on the horns of the ox, the fish in the cloud, the cloud in the drop of water, and the drop of water containing infinity. The walls of the sky bleed from every pore. The dogs burst into a barbaric song. A Kabylian song or a Targuie legend, perhaps it’s simply a tale, and this tale ends by falling into the stream. He puts on paper sandals, goes out into the street, looks at his feet and finds that he’s walking barefoot. The walls of the sky bleed from every pore. The wind, the clouds, the land and the forest, the men turned into traditional songs . . . Behind the sun, the officers dig the tombs. A man is dead, a 7.65mm bullet in the neck. And then, here is an old woman lamenting, here is another recounting stories of milk and honey about the son of a nasty lumberjack who...