Discovery of the New World, page 1
Nabile Farès
Discovery of the New World
The Olive Grove
Memory and the Missing
Exile and Helplessness
Translated and Annotated by
Peter Thompson
Preface by
Pierre Joris
Diálogos
New Orleans
Discovery of the New World:
The Olive Grove
Memory of the Missing
Exile and Helplessness
Nabile Farès
Translated by Peter Thompson
Copyright © 2020 by Diálogos Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced
in any form without the express written permission of Diálogos Books.
Cover art: The calligramme on the cover is a facsmile of the
original typewriter art by the author. The image originally
appeared on the cover of L’Exil et le désarroi (François Maspero: Paris. 1976).
A translation of the calligramme appears on page iv.
Printed in the U.S.A.
First Printing
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 21 22 23 24 25
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950479
Farès, Nabile
Discovery of the New World / Nabile Farès;
with Peter Thompson (translator; introduction)
and Pierre Joris (preface)
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-944884-90-1
Diálogos
dialogosbooks.com
Acknowledgments
Discovery of the New World is a translation and collection of a trilogy of novels, originally published in France as follows:
La Découverte du nouveau monde:
Vol. I, Le Champ des oliviers, Editions du Seuil, 1972
Vol. II, Mémoire de l’Absent, Editions du Seuil, 1974
Vol. III, L’Exil et le désarroi, Librairie François Maspero, 1976
Peter Thompson’s translation of L’Exil et le désarroi was previously published by Diálogos as Exile and Helplessness in 2012. The other two volumes appear here for the first time in English. Diálogos is grateful to Editions du Seuil, Librairie François Maspero, and the heirs of Nabile Farès for permission to publish this collection.
Discovery of the New World
Translator’s Note ix
Peter Thompson
Preface xv
Pierre Joris
The Olive Grove
PART ONE 25
The Ogress Whose Name Is Obscure
I 28
Origins
II 36
Discovery
III 41
Elements
48
The Prisoner
IV 54
The Prisons
V 70
The Ogress
PART TWO 78
The thrushes we call diurnal
VI 79
The Thrushes
VII 87
The Olive Trees
VIII 96
Algiers
IX 111
Paris
X 116
Abdenouar
XI 129
The Old Teacher
XII 139
Barcelona
XIII 141
Barcelona
XIV 160
The Inscription
Memory and the Missing
PART ONE 168
Dahmane
I 169
II 185
III 200
IV 208
PART TWO 222
The Enigma
V 223
VI 231
VII 253
VIII 279
PART THREE 280
The Narrator
IX 281
X 295
XI 310
Exile and Helplessness
PART ONE 319
Mokrane
I 321
II 334
III 341
IV 347
PART TWO 355
The Village
V 358
VI 368
PART THREE 377
The Changes
VII 380
VIII 398
IX 401
X 407
XI 411
Translator’s Note
Peter Thompson
Nabile Farès was a Kabyle, a Berber, and one who spoke Berber before he spoke Arabic or French—one who wrote throughout his life about Kabylia and its Berber stronghold. In fact his doctoral thesis centered on the figure of the Ogress in Berber folklore. It is worth noting that Kabylia is one part of Algeria never fully subdued by Arab or French invaders.
This ethnologist, philosopher, dramaturge, poet, novelist and psychoanalyst was born in Collo (Kabylia peninsula) in 1940. Thus he was a teenager at the time of the student demonstrations and the reciprocal massacres (French forces and settlers versus the Algerians) which began the Algerian War (the war of independence, 1954-62).
Farès’s father, Abderrahmane Farès (an administrator who became head of the provisional government after independence), sent him to France to study—and to be safe. Towards the end of the war, Nabile was one of the few Algerian students in Paris to choose to return to the struggle. He was on the east side of the Tunisian border—where FLN (National Liberation Front and their army) camps operated—when the war ended. A rich footnote to this era is that Farès carried the manuscript of Yahia, Pas de chance, his first novel, through France and North Africa in his back pack. Yahia was published in 1970.
Many Algerian writers saw the next years—eventually spanning decades—as a disappointment, then a betrayal. The victorious FLN became a one-party government, and a repressive one at that. The silencing of voices, an “Arabization” policy (Berbers are not Arabs), the discouragement of the French language, corruption, cronyism, authoritative Islam, and the receding of traditional (Berber) feminine roles are among the exactions that drove Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, Rachid Boudjedra, Farès and Kateb Yacine—among others—into exile. Worst was a collusion with neocolonial business interests (sharply outlined in Farès’s Un Passager de L’Occident, translated as A Passenger From the West), and, as a dark corner within the arch of this French shadow, the adoption of French torture techniques against insurgents. All this kept most writers—some of whom, like Farès, could no longer publish in Algeria—in France. Most of this group died in the exile that became an indelible mark of their work (particularly Farès’s novels and poetry). Farès died in Paris in August, 2016—recently married, having taught in Grenoble, founded a theater in Aix, received the Kateb Yacine Prize for lifetime achievement (1994), and provided psychoanalysis for years—often helping immigrants with their trauma.
During his student years he switched his “second” language (a diploma requirement, and really the third, after Berber and French) from Arabic to English. This is significant in two ways. First, it perhaps asserted the resentment many Berbers feel about the Arab invasions and dominance in North Africa. Secondly, novels in English—specifically American ones—were an element in his artistic development. [We add, here, that Farès’s English ability made him a lively and involved partner in the translation of his work.] Erskine Caldwell and Faulkner were especially influential. This influence was also felt by Farès’s contemporaries, including the (somewhat earlier) foundational group of Djebar, Dib, Kateb, Mouloud Feraoun and Mouloud Mammeri. Emmanuel Levinas, whom Farès met in his student years, was important to him, as was the novelist Witold Gombrowicz.
Another influence was the Moroccan, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Farès’s contemporary and a friend. Khatibi’s experiment with his “bi-langue,” a permanent tension between languages (as a result of colonialism), was the model for a creative, non-dogmatic, ontological sense of possibilities for the writer in the postcolonial age. What Farès did with this shows less tension in every line (in the novels), but adopts a similar sense of fragmentation in both poetic image and plot: a personal identity in flux, a language and identity always self-defining in terms of an Other, yet not an identity in crisis or political revolt. The constant influence of the Other is the alterity (“altérité”) central to many studies of Farès, including Mohammed-Saâd Zemmouri’s extended work, La Dialectique de l’identité and his article “La Passsion de l’altérité chez l’écrivain Nabile Farès.” As a literary preoccupation it also derives from phenomenology, from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and from their influence on many writers of the 1950s and 1960s, including the French Nouveau Roman (New Novel) group. In the latter group Claude Ollier made a profound impression on Farès. His La Mise en scène is set in Morocco, and his Le Maintien de l’ordre has a nameless setting but is based on French repression in Algeria.
As with much of modern poetry—as with the Hegelian dialectic that the Surrealists invoked in their definition of poetic image—Farès developed (in his protagonists) a dialectical approach to identity. Beyond that, and before examining it further, we note that he “deterritorialized” his protagonists, in the Deleuzian sense (Yahia, A Passenger From the West, L’Exil et le désarroi—the latter translated as Exile and Helplessness, the present Volume III). Their complex identities evolve as a function (with positive and creative quantities in the mix) of separation from homeland and mother tongue. The “New World” in his trilogy La Découverte du nouveau monde, and James Baldwin’s coming to Paris “from the West” (Passenger), structurally serve this purpose in the novels. With the
The complex issues of identity in the modern world—but also in the exile of the postcolonial context—have been given special emphasis by Deleuze and Guattari (in Mille Plateaux, A Thousand Plateaus). Their sense of identity (an exiled Algerian would be an example) as a “minoritarian” identity, as a project of becoming, is a broad avenue for understanding Farès’s poetry (particularly Escuchando tu historia, translated as Hearing Your Story, and L’Exil au féminin, translated as Exile: Women’s Turn), along with the characters in the novels (the trilogy, Passenger, Yahia, Exile and Helplessness). Réda Bensmaïa’s chapter in Experimental Nations is particularly helpful on exile and “minoritarian” identity. Valérie Orlando’s chapter in The Algerian New Novel is the other extensive scholarly piece available in English. The prefaces to all the English translations are useful (the very recent work, published to acclaim in Algeria, is not translated)—especially Bensmaïa’s introduction in Hearing Your Story and Pierre Joris’s in A Passenger From the West.
Concerning the Translation
My original note for Volume III, published in 2012, was brief:
This is the third volume of Farès’s moving trilogy, La Découverte du nouveau monde. The road to its publication and translation was not without adventure. It has a different shape, in several ways, from that of Le Champ des oliviers and La Mémoire de l’absent. More singularly, it is one of the (few) great feminist texts to arise from the Arab world. Its feminism is on a level with the courage and respect developed in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s and Rita El Khayat’s letters, in their great epistolary work Open Correspondence.
One of the bridges this volume crossed was the question of the next book—after Hearing Your Story and A Passenger from The West—to bring into the English-speaking world. Farès and I discussed this over a period of three years. I am very grateful for these conversations, for Corsican wine, for his blessing, and for his patience in many, many things. Of course, I am most grateful for the anguish and poetry of this unusual text.
To this I should add that Farès and I struggled over the title for this volume. Nothing elegant arose in the English, until he drew on his psychoanalytic training and suggested the term “hilflosigkeit,”—helplessness. A profound element of his own exile and of his therapeutic work with immigrants.
The preface by my distinguished colleague is an essential insight into Farès and this great work. My thoughts about his writing have, in any case, appeared in the other translated volumes of his poetry and prose. For those interested in the translation itself, my ideas about that process appear in the issue of Expressions Maghrébines (“Translation and Alterity,” in volume 17, number 2) dedicated to Farès, and in the book of homage published in Algeria in 2019, Nabile Farès—Un Passager entre la lettre et la parole (article, “Une Traduction”). My interview with Farès (Crisolenguas, 2008) begins the acquaintance that became a friendship, and initiates our collaboration on translation.
The title of the second volume is adventurous but in keeping with the several types of absence and memory that are the subject matter and medium of the book. The neologisms, inconsistencies, indentations and spacing belong—as does the joyful generosity of translation itself—to the author.
It remains to thank Bensmaïa and Orlando for encouragement. Also instrumental were Roger Williams University, the epochal vision of William Lavender and Diálogos Books, the profound Pierre Joris, and the elegant editorial touch of Anna Bliss.
Kateb Yacine is the chronological and esthetic preface to most of North African writing in French. I think Farès, who won the Kateb Yacine Prize in 1994, would be glad of this further introduction (from Le Polygone étoilé) not only to the weave of his themes but to the modern Algeria of his exile years:
Toute guerre est un héritage
Et seuls nos pères décapités
Se disputent le ciel
Tandis que leurs lignées
Pour les voir se confondent
Jusqu’à ne plus connaître leur emblème
Every war is heritage
And only our decapitated forbears
Argue over heaven
While their descendants,
To make them out, mix
Till they know not their heraldry
—Peter Thompson
Preface
Pierre Joris
Being is not given in midstream. Man is a migration.
—Nabile Farès
The first thing that hits me every time I open or reopen one of Nabile Farès’ books is the immediacy of the intense struggle— simultaneously, the glorious success— of a text that stays at white heat by bending/bedding itself between what some would call the “genres” of poetry & prose. But that concept of “genre” can come only for such a text after the fact of the writing and is thus as an imposition (often by the publisher who thinks that a book categorized as “roman / novel” will automatically sell more than one called “poésie / poetry.”) In this case a more interesting distinction is the one Mohammed Dib, Nabile Farès’s elder by twenty years, once provided by dividing North African literature into two camps: the imperial-classical and the anarchic-romantic, the latter the product of what he called cryptostasis, or “history’s shadow.” The imperial-classical would be the one into which most authors fell who wrote in Arabic, the supposedly traditional language of North African islamo-arabic culture, which the victorious post-independence governments exerted much effort to impose on the newly liberated country. The literature thus produced is in the main stilted & not memorable. Those in Dib’s anarcho-romantic camp are those writers who decided to keep using the old colonial language, French, while bending it to their anarchic needs (language-wise, at least, even if the powers that be would often also designate them as such, politically speaking). Farès is clearly central to this tradition— a tradition that further often arises from or is at least culturally and politically conscious of the fact that Arabic, as Kateb Yacine pointed out, was just another colonial imposition that had been suppressing the autochthonous Amazigh cultures and languages for a millennium and more. And that as Kateb also pointed out, the Algerians had won their War of Independence against the France and thus French was rightfully theirs— as the spoils of war.
Nabile Farès’ trajectory shows how it could not be otherwise: born in 1940 in Collo, Little Kabylia, to a prominent family of Berber origins (grandfather was a notary, father an important political figure) he took part in high school strikes in 1956, then joined the FLN— the National Liberation Front— and the ALN— the National Liberation Army. In 1962, after Algeria had won its independence, he moved to France, the manuscript toward his first novel in his satchel, to do graduate work in philosophy, literature, & ethnology. He taught literature in Paris, Algiers & was Professor for Comparative Literature at the University of Grenoble before starting a career as a psychoanalyst in Paris where he died in 2016.
Still, writing had always been the center and what I keep hearing as I read his books is a fierce request to witness: to witness history in the making, specifically the history of Algeria as he lived it as both actor and witness from the colonial days of his childhood through the struggle for liberation and on to the tragic rigor mortis the once revolutionary political power group fell into over time. But the work can in no way be reduced to “historical” novels or fiction, in that the implication of the writer is total, as actor, human & historian. Farès, to me, represents the writer-as-historian much as the American poet Charles Olson had tried to define and emulate him: not as post-fact outside observer-scholar or fictioneer, often in the pay (actual or symbolic) of the victorious party, but as one who, following the Greek etymology of the term “istorin,” acts to find out for oneself. Quoting Bertolt Brecht in The Olive Orchard to the effect that “history is written after the catastrophes,” Farès is aware that he is and has to remain implicated at every level in the events— and that this also includes shouldering the responsibility (qua “ability to respond”) of being critical, of not allowing himself to act as a supposedly “objective post facto bystander.” The revolution does not end with the victory of independence, but has to continue in(to) the daily life of both society and self. (If he were still with us, Farès would love the current popular uprisings and demonstrations against the tottering regime of an alzheimerian FLN). This is evident from his earliest books on, with their core-themes of rebellion against the established or re-imposed religious traditions and the newly formed conventions of Algeria since independence. His first novel, Yahia, pas de chance (published in 1970; “Yahia, No Chance”) introduced a quest that was to haunt his later works, including La Découverte du nouveau monde (“The Discovery of the New World”), the trilogy underhand: the search for the self takes him back to his childhood, and further still, to the pre-Islamic voices of inspiration tied to the earth and the Amazigh cultures that arose from this earth.
