{"id":11911,"date":"2014-04-16T11:26:27","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T15:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11911"},"modified":"2014-04-16T11:26:27","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T15:26:27","slug":"rachida-madani-walk-through-the-ruins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/rachida-madani-walk-through-the-ruins\/","title":{"rendered":"Rachida Madani: “Walk through the Ruins”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rachida\"<\/a>In preview of Rachida Madani<\/strong>‘s reading tonight<\/a> at 6:30 at Silvana\u00a0300 W 116th street in New York, here is a poem I just translated for the event from her collection Femme je suis \/ Woman I am<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\n

Walk through the ruins
\n<\/em>that wreck us
\nand tell yourself that we\u2019re camping
\nin a crumbling of stones
\neven if no denunciation
\ntransfers from the sand
\nto accumulate dune upon dune
\n     storm upon storm
\nall the way to the fusion of sand with blood
\nwhere the desert ends,
\nwhere the dancing corpses of the desert
\nstop troubling our sleep
\nsucking our blood crazed with the damned
\nbetween two assassinations
\ntwo cells
\ntwo traps at the corner of a dark street
\nwhere we are tellers of legends
\n        to come
\nbraiding our discoveries in a network of
\n        obsessions
\ncommunicable via contagions of ruins.<\/p>\n

We have never come to terms with the desert
\nwe have let camels run loose in it hostile
\nto the rough sketch of fake towns
\nbuilt on mirages
\nwhere everyone is buried in their metallic
\n        resonance
\nserves them as compass
\nall seeing their city according to their mirages.<\/p>\n

Walk all the way to the sonorous extremity of the desert
\nthat serves as a link
\nbetween errancy and the right to be a human.
\nWe are nomads until worn down,
\nhave neither tent
\n     nor palm tree
\n     nor rest halt in the
\n     desert\u2019s monstrous night.
\nHave neither language nor hope
\nnor anyone
\nto listen to our bristling voices
\nglass shards
\non top of the walls
\n     no dream to lose
\n     no throne to gain
\nbarely a scarlet foam
\nthe result of a long march…<\/p>\n

I want you without hope
\nwhen you knock on my door
\nand my door\u2019s caught red-handed
\nin its absence,
\nwhen all I do is stroll
\nthrough my obsession
\nwhen time brings back to me
\n        only time
\nand sand only sand.
\nBut in what cut up fiber inside me
\n<\/span>in what abrasion to locate you
\nwhen I love you and walk
\napart from you
\nbecause of too many fractures
\nthrough a rugged landscape where you persist
\nin the erasures\u2019 meanders
\nalone
\nstanding
\nstruck by
\nlightning
\nfacing the ruins.
\nBurned up
\nuprooted
\na knife between the teeth
\nirrefutable beneath the lightning storm to witness
\nagainst what harrows us with a razor
\nand the crowd you love
\nbeyond the infinite disaster.<\/p>\n

The crowd for which you build trenches
\non your very flesh
\nfor which you hallucinate
\npupils of towns issues of your wounds
\nand the bloody poems
\nthat slash us
\nin the desert\u2019s immobility, the crowd.<\/p>\n

The crowd made drowsy by a tired
\nmuwashaha, dead deep inside a palace
\none booze-sodden night,
\nthat separates us the splinter-crowd,
\nthe crowd…
\nI sense the haggard beast
\nthat turns a beastly thought
\nmortally wounded
\nfor having one day by chance
\n      maybe
\n\u2014 certainly \u2014
\ncaught a raging toothache
\nand that started to chase its tail
\nall the way into schizophrenia the crowd…
\nI am double and unable
\nto understand why the crowd.<\/p>\n

Walk you know how mortal
\nlove is.
\nI carry us wounded,\u00a0 at death’s door
\nto the center of the nightmare
\nwhere I love you while selecting the crowd
\nwith my voice crossing out all the closed furrows
\nthat obstruct the walk.
\nI love you.
\nIt\u2019s a broken tendon
\nit\u2019s a blocked breath
\nit\u2019s a strange night
\nlike an exploding vein
\nI pick up in a sprain
\nfor which I\u2019ll blame
\nan imagination beyond the possible
\nif it weren\u2019t this blood itself
\nthis piece of evidence
\nthat acquits me of all imagination
\nof all sarcasm
\nand when I say blood
\nI think of nothing but this country
\nthat I place nowhere
\nexcept there where I am arterial blood pressure
\nharbinger
\nof certain death
\n      in rivulets
\nfrom my head down to the public squares.
\nAt any rate an intuition
\nthat turns into clandestinity
\nin my bone marrow
\n       and spreads the plague.<\/p>\n

I love you and am not in the process
\n        of singing love
\nI don\u2019t need to encumber myself with a chant.
\nI do not know how to sing when it\u2019s a matter of
\n<\/span>ruins that furrow me.
\nI howl a country that transpierces me my
\nbody from one end to the other
\nthat pulverizes me
\nthat hurls a desert in my face.<\/p>\n

A country
\na desert
\nI am encumbered by a distress
\nI dissect
\n     ring after ring
\nthat ends up chaining me
\nto the dialectic of ruins
\nonly then do I see
\nthis country
\ndo I understand how much my head
\nis bowl of blood,
\nhow much we need to walk, to march
\neven separated
\neven destroyed
\neven half crazed
\nhallucinating in the glass night
\nwith the crowd.
\nI tell you march and I march
\nneither you nor I
\n<\/span>have hated enough
\nhave sowed enough bacilli of the damned
\nacross these towns.<\/p>\n

March you have never left me
\nyou will never leave me
\nas long as there is this semblance of a country
\nthat we want at all costs to be ours
\neven at the risk of ending up unidentified in the desert\u2019s
\ninfernal infinity.
\nFor you
\nfor me
\nfor all of this earth\u2019s plague-stricken
\nlove is the desert\u2019s
\n      hallucinated
\n       excrescence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In preview of Rachida Madani‘s reading tonight at 6:30 at Silvana\u00a0300 W 116th street in New York, here is a poem I just translated for the event from her collection Femme je suis \/...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110,1117,103],"tags":[1310],"class_list":["post-11911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-reading","category-poem","category-translation","tag-rachida-madani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11911"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11915,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11911\/revisions\/11915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}