Tahar Djaout — 14 years already

Fourteen years ago already! It was on 26 May 1993 that the Algerian poet & novelist Tahar Djaout was gunned down as he left his house in the morning to go to his job at the University (he would remain in a coma until his death on 2 June). The Islamic fundamentalists had started the previous year on their all out crusade to gain power in Algeria, and core to their plan was the assassination of as many writers, intellectuals, teachers and media-savvy people as possible. Such killings achieved two aims with one stroke, or bullet: they silenced intelligent and outspoken opponents and simultaneously scared the public as those deatsh would be more heavily mediatized and more symbolically percussive than the slaying of a random anonymous citizen.

Back in 1993 I wrote a little piece for SULFUR magazine, followed by the translation of a poem by Tahar Djaout. I think it’s worthwhile to republish this here now:

Our eyes are fixed on the TV screen or the New York Times Op-Ed page, transfixed & horrified, emptied & blinded by what is happening in ex-Yugoslavia, in the ex-Soviet Union & its ex-satellites, that is, as usual, in ex-Europe & its ex-tensions. Blinded thus, we know little, if anything, about what is happening — the horror, the horror, to use a famous fictional European’s dying words — in other parts of the world, & the media is certainly not going to deal with it unless it has some kind of marketable Euro-American angle. The quasi-civil war in Algeria, for example, is going largely unreported, except when a few weeks ago the ex-FIS (the outlawed fundamentalist Islamic party which, having more or less won the democratic elections a year ago, was sidelined by the FLN, the corrupt ex-revolutionary party that has been in power since independence in 1962, on which it has declared war) stated that to hasten its purification of the country it would kill all foreigners in Algeria (Twenty four were killed by the end of December.) Dozens of Algerians are being killed daily on both sides. The FIS’s assassination strategy is simple: kill off the intelligentsia & anybody else able to voice any intelligent opposition — or at least enough of them as gorily as possible to make the rest shut up or leave the country for fear of dying. Among the many killed this past year were two poets: Tahar Djaout, who was shot May 26 and Youssef Sebti, who was knifed to death on December 28 as he was going to his job teaching sociology in a college of agronomy in the suburbs of Algiers. They were killed because they were, quietly and seriously, going about their business as writers & would not shut up, but kept writing & saying what needs to be said: that totalitarianism under any guise, religious or military, is the ultimate evil. In an eerie, prophetic mood, Tahar Djaout, more than twenty years ago, wrote a poem that celebrated the independence of his country, but that was simultaneously an elegy for the writer Mouloud Feraoun who had been assassinated towards the end of the war of independence in not dissimilar circumstances & for not dissimilar reasons:

March 15, 1962

how to curb their rage to dissolve the stars
and to birth eternal night
I challenge their iron
and the enraged ire with which they multiply the chains

in the blue smile
of the Admiralty open on the promises
today in long swallows I gulp
— sun thundering over Algiers —
the joys of a feasting
where resurrected dawns gambol
and yet I think on the holocausts
unleashed to make dawn break
I think of Feraoun
— smile frozen in the sun’s circumcision

they are afraid of the truth
they are afraid of the straight pen
they are afraid of truly human humans
and you, Mouloud, you insisted and spoke
about wheat fields for the sons of the poor
and spoke of pulverizing all the barbed wire
that lacerated our horizons

they speak of you and say that you were too good
that you felt revolted
hearing shells greet each dawn
that you believed human beings to be born so as to be brothers
and though challenging all the orgies of horror
you were incapable of hatred

one day, Mouloud, goodness finally triumphed
and we could wear the sun’s trident
and we could honor the memory of the dead
because
with
your hands, those gleaners of dawn’s mysteries,
and your dreamy inveterate poet’s face,
you have known how to fulfill our truths
written in sun scraps
on the breasts of all those who revolt