Zayneb Laouedj
 

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Sorrows

I am here
The universe is fabulous
I don't know you
I am the daughter of fire
I love you
And offer you this blessing:

It was a beautiful day
I invited my solitude
My closed sun
My words
My rhymes
And the shadows inside me
Shall we drink
To the memory of those no longer?

It was in the month of April
A beautiful day
Exquisitely so
With joy I wove
The lie
I believed
It was only
A chimera
When...
I opened my heart
At the threshold of my words
The poem
Wailed
Already covered in blood.
 

*

My garden blossomed no more
Its jasmine no longer crowns me
The basil thirsts
Our eyes too
My garden blossomed no more
Shrunken hearts
The stars fell from the firmament
And then
The sun
In its rays
Shrouded
The heavens
The vast heavens
Are veiled
And the moon is blind
The earth is covered in the darkest shadows
Heartless conjurers
Me
I'm still thirsty
My heart, too
The rain tastes
Of blood and bitter salt.
 

*

Ever since wretched faces
Haunted our skies
Raven-like faces
Slashed our dreams to pieces
Our women
Have offered
Their wombs to the fires
Our foetuses
Are still hidden
In the arid light
What remains of the suns
Of our virgins.
 

*

Monsterous shadows
Heinous voices
Sinister faces
Hover over the colors of our dreams
An atmosphere of gloom
In death all of death has been killed
In life all of life has been
taken
Yet in our women
Fire is still light
Flames and yearnings.

Here in our world
The fanatic monster
To your eyes
FIGHTS FOR THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND DEMOCRACY
Thus is practiced but
THE ART OF POLITICS
With its share of poetic license
In our world
The fanatic monster
Gives birth to the caravans of death
Swords rusted and penile
And ever since
Even our forests are no longer virgin.
 

*

Cities of lead
Cities of copper
Open your doors
To the flames
Offer your shrouds
Shssssss...
It's already late
And the monsters
Hover over our hearts
The Gods are absent
There are only the pleas of
Women and children
Oh! cities of lead
Cities of copper
Deserted towns
Open your doors
Time slumbers
Ravens cry out
The caravans of death
Promised our dreams to blood.
 

*

Consumed candles
Shaken dreams
Lost poems
Wasted hearts
Arid light
Drop by drop...
Time flees
Aborted dreams.
 

*

Plenty of meat
Red white
Many fish
And above all many drinks
Your majestic trash heaps
Are yet bursting
Your cats
Larger than me
Give birth in the heat
Your World a future
Your Dogs bark luxuriously
No longer hungry
But I, I am always hungry
With the Odor and the Color
Of your majestic trash heaps
I knew this World
WasnÕt mine
But belongs
To those who eat well.
 

*

Our children
Knowing lights
Invent colors
Whole universes and skies
Invent even the Gods
Drape themselves with rainbows
Of music and songs
Poems of love
Signs of nomadic people
Troubadour ancestors
Our children
Love words in flames
Sublime words
Before the monsters arrive
Darkening the heavens
Raping the soothing words of the Gods....

Our daughters with fairy-like fingers
Caress heaven's bosom
Braid the sun's rays
Tell the stars of their sorrows
Paint their eyes with the glossy moon
Drying their drunken tears all along
Our daughters, their shadows the color
Of rainbows
Raped in all their sweetness
Appease their ardent sorrows
When at the threshold of their misfortunes
They saw the Gods
All the Gods
Melt in sobs.

Our sweetest of daughters
Of the winter's first rains
Our daughters in full bloom
Elixir of paradise
Our mothering daughters
pungent with life
Before the monster arrives
And drains all the milk
Before the monster arrives
And rips away the life
of our sublime life.
 

*

I am sad
No one weeps
I am pale
No one blushes
At the threshold of my sorrow
I'm famished
No one remembers
The color of bread
I am young
I'm even a woman
No one falls under my spell
I am even the tree of life
No infant has savored the sap
Of my gazelle breasts
I am Venus
Tree of life
Your eyes are of marble.

 
 

 
translated from the French by Jordan Elgrably
from the author's translations from the Arabic

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Zayneb Laouedj is the recipient of Villa Aurora's 1999/2000 "Feuchtwanger Fellowship" for a writer-in-exile, in cooperation with the Getty Research Institute and PEN Center USA West.  Zayneb and her husband Waciny Laouedj are a celebrated couple in the Algerian diaspora, and much of their efforts to promote the country's secular intellectual culture has brought censure and violence from the Algerian Islamic fundamentalists.  Together they direct an independent publishing forum, the Maison d'Edition Espaces-Libres, and have published an anthology of Arab-language short stories from the African continent.  Zayneb Laouedj is currently researching her next book on the legendary Algerian woman writer, Zoukha Saoudi, and is translating the autobiography of German Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France, into Arabic.