Dear Houria,
I am writing you from a café near my apartment in Amsterdam. The stifling air of early summer is stuck inside the house while outside the days have suddenly turned cloudy and windy. Gusts of wind have been stirring up my thoughts. Today I just wanted to stay home and wait for them to pass. I read some Polish folkloric stories about winds that bring insanity, and I can’t get that thought out of my head anymore. I left the house, anyway, went into a café. I find the presence of strangers comforting. I used to collect stories from encounters in buzzy, smoky cafes and homes in the places where I lived. Whichever city I would choose as my temporary home I’d meet some chatty, usually old, person (one of those walking archives of the neighbourhood) who would say: Ah, you don’t know about this or that event? Of course you don’t know, it was before your time! It’s a kind thing to say, but I don’t think not being around is always a good excuse not to know about the past.
When I first read your book Whites, Jews, and Us, I was working on the final part of my novel Oroppa. The coda of the novel consists of the diary entries of a fictional Moroccan-French poet and political dissident who lives in Paris. In The Notebooks of Fear, as she calls them, the poet tries to figure out where the source of her anxieties lies. Maybe in the popular quarters of her childhood. Or maybe in the clandestine prison cells of the Postcolony. Maybe it all started much later, when she first set foot on this continent in the 80s. Or maybe those fears stem from much earlier, before she was even born.
In an interview on Palestine and narration, Adania Shibli says that accessibility to a clear narration with a beginning, middle, and end is something strange to a Palestinian. When someone recounts an experience, she says, “there is always a moment of hesitation – one could call it a stutter, a stutter in narration, where to start?” Don’t you think that, as North African Europeans, this temporal confusion sounds at least vaguely familiar?
I am unable to write in linear narratives and finished characters. I think we humans should stick to the principle that we are always incomplete. Maybe this is why the novel form to me needs to move, to travel. First, because I think it’s a shame to write a novel in our time and submit to the tyranny of the Plot. Second, because the orchestrated chaos of storytelling developed very naturally out of the social conditions in which I, a child from the North African diasporic working class, think. I have this feeling that a mode of thought exists, and so a language too, that transcends (or at least, shrugs at) the confusions of the double-consciousness.
The opening lines of Memory of Fire – the trilogy by Galeano read: “I was very bad at history. History classes were like visits to the wax museum or to the realm of the dead. The past was silent, hollow, mute. The teachers taught us the past so that, with emptied consciousness, we would resign ourselves to the present: not to make history, it was already made, but to accept it.” History, this dead thing (this thing, like Foucault said, that fits through the eye of a needle), comes back to life in literature. Galeano invented a literary form he called magical-Marxism (which he defined as “one half reason, one half passion, and a third half mystery”) to remind us of the horrific birth of the New World and the Old one that was lost.
Forgetting to some is as important as remembering to the most of us. But how to remember, dear Houria? How to write against erasure without pleading your case (if you know what I mean)? What kind of narration is possible for us, without othering ourselves and our experiences?
This letter has become way too long, and I’ve spent too much time in here, so much that it’s getting dark outside. No more wind, thank God. I’ll have to leave out some parts for now. I’ll save them for next time.
Someone told me you were in Amsterdam a few days ago. I am very curious to hear what your thoughts are on the city I call home.
So many questions.
Sending my best,
Safae el Khannoussi