Pax Babeliana

Omar Berrada

no trace of a maker remains
these monuments we raise, books we write,
wind up in a lost tongue
                              bp Nichol


I’d speak if I wasn’t afraid (…)
                              Fanny Howe




A town full of holes
Munumental latencies
Ruins in reverse

La nuit après l'amour
La tradition se retire
Un désastre nous dévore


Time is officially ended
In the Odyssey there is a pig
that speaks fluent Greek


La ville fantôme est un champ de ruines mais la ville la nuit se lève et se relève, érige dans la nuit ses tours ses ponts ses murailles et son peuple.


In the confusion
        I seek
provisional light

In the confusion
            I speak

                              لخولة أطلال ببرقة ثهمد                                             

Ruins
           appear
   
  أطلال ... تلوح

and fade
                 تلوح

    Speaking in tongues
    of primitive simplicity

In Navajo there are three hundred fifty-six thousand and two hundred
distinct forms of a verb that translates as ‘to go,’ she says.


‘To be’ hardly even exists.

une folie sous surveillance
C'est le réel qui polyglotte

           The trace of a tattoo
on the back of a hand

                                               لخولة أطلال ببرقة ثهمد
                                تلوح كباقي الوشم في ظاهر اليد   

The trace of a tattoo
           appears and fades

On ne coupe jamais
la main des artistes


In the desert
lightning is elegiac

                        يا بارق يا حارج يا ثهمد

In the desert
art is civility

est une manière الأدب

I'd speak if I wasn't afraid
of inhaling

                        يقولون لا تهلك أسى

Don't lose yourself
in grief
         I follow
myself fleeing

                fuir, là-bas fuir
        a feeling


   le pays qui me ressemble

Your ignorance will be your foundation

in the Odyssey
there is a fawn
that speaks
fluent Greek


We embraced the world
before we knew it

                            يقولون لا تهلك أسى
                         وتجلد

True fiction
         false reality
Exit myth


Below the Hafa café
a highway was built
Tarmac ashes
Magic rubble

    Exit the sea
    Gone with the sun

             لكل علم وعمل بقايا وخفايا

Our fantasy found a form
in geology

              Sous les pavés
   l'asphalte

              عرب وعجم وكلام وخمر

An erotics of words and wine
in عراق or in يمن
A Babel of sighs and brine

    Il n'y a d'originel
    que le malentendu

En choeur on ventriloque

We are the earth

et la terre n'est pas si ronde

“Nadie le vio desembarcar en la unanime noche”


                              اعطني ديك الخريطة عافاك


Light
in itself
is silent

And this mirror is a masterpiece

               Du lumineux
               et de l'obscur
               le mélange
               seul signifie

‘Your ignorance will be your foundation’

Finally all reference vanishes
                    —a sacrifice of matter


                              لخولة أطلال ببرقة ثهمد

                                       تلوح

           كباقي الوشم في ظاهر اليد


I'd speak
if I wasn’t afraid
of inhaling
a memory


                    ذكريات  ...  تلوح

Recorded at Ugly Duckling Presse for the Translingual Poetics reading on December 5, 2015:

I grew up with Arabic but one day it suddenly slipped away, withdrawing to a remote region of memory. It made way for French—with which I also grew up—and now increasingly English, in the midst of which I am living. Perhaps the reasons are merely biographical: I left Morocco for university in France, I wanted to see the world, to shed layers, to escape the determinations of national and cultural origins. Or perhaps it is a larger lapse, in the wake of what Etel Adnan called “the Arab Apocalypse”: my Arabic, a language forsaken by the times, lies somewhere on the other side of a disaster, and my mission is to reclaim it. This poem is a first step. It is built around fragments from classical Arabic poetry heard or studied in childhood, including the opening of Tarafa ibn al-‘Abd’s sixth-century Mu’allaqa, one of the canonical pre-Islamic odes, which are the oldest extant texts in the language. They are made to resonate with fragments from other languages and traditions that have come to equally constitute my “identity.” The poem is a translingual collage meant to shore them up onto a visual space of inscription, an earscape of uncertain echoes, giving substance to memory shadows within a temporary, frictional peace between languages. Pax babeliana. Several writers unknowingly collaborated with me on this mission. They include Marie Borel, Michael Sells, Robert Smithson, Sun Ra, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jalal Toufic, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Omar Berrada is a writer, translator, and curator. He edited, with Erik Bullot, Expanded Translation—A Treason Treatise, a book of verbal and visual betrayals; and, with Yto Barrada, Album—Cinémathèque de Tanger, a multilingual volume about film in Tangier and Tangier on film. He recently co-curated the "Temporary Center for Translation" at The New Museum and lent his voice to Christian Dior’s ghost in Frédéric Tcheng’s Dior and I. In 2016 he edited The Africans, a book on racial politics in Morocco, and curated "Memory Games," a group show centering on the archive of Moroccan writer and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani in the context of the Marrakech Biennale. Omar is a core member of the bilingual poetry collective Double Change and the international arts organization Tamaas, and is currently a visiting scholar at New York University.