He lives in a country whose children are incapable of naming the old war; by not naming it, they declare a new war, so like prisoners they light their cigarettes on the still-burning butts.
*
Aldji’s old buildings
are like veterans who survived the war
only to live on with a bullet beside the heart
but they still look youthful
their roofs draped with colorful clothing
women climbing stairs at midday
with loose hair and short skirts
like the nameless actress taped up in a teenager’s room in the '80s,
and gazing out from their balconies in early afternoon, men
with graceless forms
and paunches, in Spanish
la curva de la felicidad,
smoke cigarettes or turn their backs to the sea
the sea that is, to their eyes, no longer blue
but a vast bruise left by the invaders
*
women go up to the roofs
with the spirit of sacrifice
with the jubilation of a mother whose son survived a thousand years ago
they wash the sheep’s intestines without complaint
wash the rooftop with soap and water
rinsing away blood and undigested grain
and when the odor of scorched meat rises in the sky like incense
they let the boys go play outside in new clothes
the girls spend hours carefully straightening their hair
the sharp taste of charred liver on their lips
like licking salt from your fingers
to make sure you survived the drowning
*
before satellite dishes, water tanks and antennas evicted it
before perpetually dirty bodies
soap had a home on the roofs of that city
it was called bayt assaboon
the women went up each morning
and climbing to the neighbor’s, breakfasted on tea and cakes
gleeful gossip hidden behind their sleeves
scrubbing white collars against washboards
deftly, they sliced the neighbor girl’s scalp with sharp tongues
then they’d hang out the washing
unburdened now by rank odors, memories, sorrows, grudges
and nights of aborted love
the soap leaving its perfume on them
like villagers honoring a special guest
the soap was white, thick, solid
like a peasant woman’s arms
*
he doesn’t know which language that city’s buildings speak
although he’s spent years talking to walls
they never answer him
until he beats his head against them
at the neighbors’ urging
(when he gets worked up)
like the joke goes: as long as they don’t answer you, your head’s fine
but he hears the whooshing of water and piss through pipes
and the sound of bare feet after making love
or when the adhan wakes an old lady
children running at seven in the morning
a lone man’s laughter after midnight
sometimes he thinks he hears the bourgeoisie speaking a foreign language
to their kids
just to remind the walls of their creator’s tongue
although the walls only know the language of their builders
men who quietly cursed the construction foreman
or whispered dirty jokes about his wife, who brought his lunch daily,
paying them no mind, not even for a drink of water
*
pigeons
and those birds whose names I don’t know
will inherit the building on Krim Belkacem and its sacred street number
but Krim Belkacem is no street
Krim Belkacem
is a boulevard
and around here, we translate it with the word nahj, way
way: a direct path, a straight shot
my mother came up with a wonderful alternative, she says between the palaces
since it runs from the people’s palace to the governmental palace
but if you want the whole truth, Krim Belkacem was a martyr, martyred after the war
(in a year that bore the same sacred number),
then his brother-in-arms (martyred, himself, twenty-two years later) named this way for him
but the people who’ve lived in this building nearly sixty years,
who sometimes reminisce about the days of the red carpet
and the ribbon-wrapped bouquets in the lobby, they call it an alley
these people who watched the neighbor lady kill herself
and avoid talking about it,
an old family secret,
these people who, during the years of terror, told my mother in strident voices:
they’ll have to walk over our dead bodies to get to your son
whenever my mother remembers that scene, she weeps, adding:
they are my family
but still, pigeons and birds whose names I don’t know will inherit it all
pigeons who, every morning, leave traces behind on the balconies
and those birds that are forever tapping at the windows
just like in Hitchcock’s The Birds
I like to imagine Hitchcock visited Aldji in the late ’50s,
spent a night in that building
and that’s how he got the idea for the movie,
and the bird I rescue every Friday night
with a broom and a flurry of foreign words
(I like to imagine I’m speaking its language)
after it gets trapped between the window panes and the shutters
a bird that, as local lore has it, hovers around
poets soon bound for paradise
from Like a Dwarf Inching Toward Legend
Lamis Saidi
translated from the Arabic by Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg and Koen De Cuyper
Like a Dwarf Inching Toward Legend is a cycle of thirty-five poems by Algerian writer Lamis Saidi. Taking Algiers as its protagonist, the collection explores the city’s topographies and forgotten places in an attempt to grapple with the exile and estrangement inherent in a postcolonial consciousness. As the poet sketches out the landscape of Algiers, we are confronted by its history and the lingering traces of the colonists’ presence that characterize the modern city.
Adopting a cinematographic approach, the poet surveys the physical, architectural legacy of the colonial encounter. Algiers, with its crumbling kasbah rising above wide colonial boulevards (now rebaptized after Algerian revolutionaries), is emblematic of the postcolonial city. Using vivid imagery and an Algerian-inflected Arabic, Like a Dwarf Inching Toward Legend offers the reader a series of evocative snapshots of everyday life that develop into a wider reflection on what it means to be Algerian today.
Also integral to Like a Dwarf Inching Toward Legend is a preoccupation with the process of naming and of the role language plays in creating (or re-creating) realities. Algiers’s many names—al-Jazaa’ir, Dzayir, Aldji—point to the conflicting understandings of collective memory that each designation seeks to stake out. Which register can speak for the city—Classical Arabic, Darija, or French? Sometimes the inability to name a thing, such as the civil war (which Algerians often refer to cryptically as “the Black Decade”) can even serve to deny reality, foreclosing any possibility of expressing the resulting traumas and distortions, as the poet underscores in the collection’s opening lines.
Although Algeria embarked upon a process of Arabization following its independence in 1962, the vast majority of literary work from the Maghreb available in English has been translated from the French; while many major literary figures of the early post-colonial era did write in French—Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, or Mohammed Dib, just to name a few—Arabic accounts for nearly eighty percent of the region’s contemporary literary production. As a result, Anglophone readers have tended to have a skewed perception of Maghrebi literature—and we see our translations of these poems as our modest contribution to rectifying this imbalance and providing a glimpse into the rich and varied work of contemporary writing from the Maghreb.
Adopting a cinematographic approach, the poet surveys the physical, architectural legacy of the colonial encounter. Algiers, with its crumbling kasbah rising above wide colonial boulevards (now rebaptized after Algerian revolutionaries), is emblematic of the postcolonial city. Using vivid imagery and an Algerian-inflected Arabic, Like a Dwarf Inching Toward Legend offers the reader a series of evocative snapshots of everyday life that develop into a wider reflection on what it means to be Algerian today.
Also integral to Like a Dwarf Inching Toward Legend is a preoccupation with the process of naming and of the role language plays in creating (or re-creating) realities. Algiers’s many names—al-Jazaa’ir, Dzayir, Aldji—point to the conflicting understandings of collective memory that each designation seeks to stake out. Which register can speak for the city—Classical Arabic, Darija, or French? Sometimes the inability to name a thing, such as the civil war (which Algerians often refer to cryptically as “the Black Decade”) can even serve to deny reality, foreclosing any possibility of expressing the resulting traumas and distortions, as the poet underscores in the collection’s opening lines.
Although Algeria embarked upon a process of Arabization following its independence in 1962, the vast majority of literary work from the Maghreb available in English has been translated from the French; while many major literary figures of the early post-colonial era did write in French—Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, or Mohammed Dib, just to name a few—Arabic accounts for nearly eighty percent of the region’s contemporary literary production. As a result, Anglophone readers have tended to have a skewed perception of Maghrebi literature—and we see our translations of these poems as our modest contribution to rectifying this imbalance and providing a glimpse into the rich and varied work of contemporary writing from the Maghreb.
Lamis Saidi is an Algerian poet and translator. She has published four poetry collections, including Nasaytu ḥaqībatī ka-kull marrah (As Usual, I Forgot My Suitcase, 2007), Ilá al-sīnimā (To the Movies, 2011), Ka-madīnah taghzūhā ḥarb ahlīyah (As a Ravaged City, 2017), and Like a Dwarf Inching Toward Legend (2019), as well as one biographical work al-Ghurfah 102 (Room 102, 2015). Her writing has been translated into Dutch, French, and Spanish. She has also translated many poets, including Rabah Belamri, Emily Dickinson, Anna Gréki, Yamina Méchakra, Henri Michaux, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Fluent in both Arabic and French, Saidi seeks to redefine Algeria’s literary canon through translation while bringing the country’s francophone and arabophone literary traditions into dialogue. Read more about her on her website.
Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg holds an M.A. in francophone world studies and an M.F.A. in literary translation, both from the University of Iowa. Her translations from French and Arabic have appeared in Anomaly, Asymptote, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Poet Lore, Two Lines, and elsewhere. Nuernberg lives in Morocco, where she serves as an editor-at-large for Asymptote and works as a translator for film and TV. Her co-translation of Raphaël Confiant’s Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem was published by Diálogos in January 2020.
Koen De Cuyper earned an M.A. in translation from the University of Leuven, during which time he spent a year in residence at the Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech. He currently lives and works in Rabat where he is the scientific information specialist at the Dutch Institute in Morocco (NIMAR).
