Nostalgia and the desire to journey

If dwellings and gender are conflated in expected ways in poetry written by men, these affective associations are challenged and re-written by women writers. Nostalgia, while present in women’s writing, is more about a voyage to a place never known, but imagined. Poems by women poets have a certain urgency about them. These poets are “writing the feminine body into being,” as Helène Cixous exhorts women to do. The poems are self-conscious creations of the feminine subject. They sometimes read as if they were anthems to of? [“of” is fine]feminine desire, but also lamentations of the feminine soul, as in the poem My Name is Rain by Malika El Assimi. In this poem, the female protagonist changes her name, thereby transforming herself, and by extension her gender, into another entity. The author plays on the meaning of her own name – Malika – which means queen/angel, but also the “owner” or “possessor”:

 

My name is Rain

I changed my name a while ago

When the storms

Hurled branch to branch

When the winds

Drove masses of clouds from over the sea

So that sorrow would sail away from the flowers

I named myself the waters washing the branches and the trees

And sweeping away dirt from inside the hearts,

From cloth and stones…

I decided to be called…

“Rain”

* * *

I own nothing but my torment

I own nothing but estrangement from loved ones

And friends

I own nothing but the cries of my childhood

And my melancholy

I own nothing

I will never be the Owner

My name is Rain…

Pouring down to water the earth holding the lover

A body I see in my dear strange dream

And with spring I continue to plant

Bunches of flowers in its soil

From my fertile and happy name

My daughter who was to be born from my blood one day

I kept this name to call her: my daughter Rain

But I will die no matter how long I live like dogs…

And there will never be

A child of mine named: Rain

I love the breeze of freedom

Like a lonely wild cat

Running from forest to forest

Fleeing people and chains

And I am the rain…

Pouring my dewy drops on the earth

I will make blossoms grow, spreading them over the lover’s body

So that it remains with the flowers…

Clothing it in spring, in the fall, in the summer-time

The perfume of flowers singing for him so he wouldn’t be alone

I have decided I would be called…

“Rain”

* * *

Oh my friends!

Excuse me if I

Don’t respond to your call

I don’t remember my former name

With the trembling of branches,

With the embracing of grasses in the meadows,

With the white and fatuous spring

In the world of women,

Oh my friends!

Excuse me

If I don’t recall my former name

When spring came, I picked bunches of flowers

And scattered them in my room

Everyplace and everywhere

And I knew that my name was…. rain”. (7)

 

In this poem there is a nostalgia for the daughter that will never be. The protagonist chooses rather to be free, “fleeing people and chains,” the owner of nothing. There is a return, however; like rain that falls only to be taken up again into the atmosphere, the protagonist pours her “dewy drops on the earth…spreading them over the lover’s body/ So that it remains with the flowers…” She is “everyplace and everywhere” rain. If calligraphy acts as a signature for Moumni, the name — the very proper name that Derrida asserts cannot be translated (in this case “Malika”)– can nonetheless be changed. In Malika El Assimi’s poetry, the notion of the female subject is a malleable one as she writes the new female subject into being.

Not all women’s poetry is motivated by a desire to journey forward. In Rachida Madani’s oeuvre, for example, nostalgia takes the reader back to a past of political turbulence, and to a mourning for days lost to prison and despair:

 

I am there

in your cell

there sitting in the corner

for five years there, dear brother

pale and taciturn

I look at you

and in my eyes pass

the hearses you couldn’t follow.

We were thirty

in a class of history

we were poets, artists

we were already men

already women

and we had dreams

for the men

for the women

that’s why on the blackboard

we hung Mussolini

Hitler

Von Hindenburg

and the old history professor

And we sang

we sang

we sang

Victory.

In my eyes pass

the hearses you couldn’t follow.

Mimoun the comedian at the parties

became a cop

at the end of the year

saluting Mussolini

saluting Hitler

saluting Von Hindenburg

and the old history professor.

Don’t cry dear brother

for the hearses you couldn’t follow.

We are no longer thirty.

Hazlim our poet

threw his poor blind head in the fire

surrounding himself with little dogs and screaming to men

and the full moon

a big song of love and

bitterness.

Don’t cry dear brother

for the hearses you couldn’t follow.

We are no longer thirty.

Fatima the big bitter clown

wasn’t pretty, do you remember?

Her husband realized it

and at the feet of a judge

she killed herself

with big bursts of laughter.

Don’t cry dear brother

for the hearses you couldn’t follow.

We are no longer thirty,

the other one

our sister of the shantytowns

our living water

the fresh spring of our thirsts

closed her long black eyelashes

on the world

dead of hunger in her cell.

Hold back your tears dear brother

for the hearses you couldn’t follow.

But we are many more

than thirty

And I am there

in your cell

there sitting in the corner

for five years now,

dear brother

pale and taciturn

you look at me

and in your eyes pass

the burning men of the hearses

burning mussolini

hitler

von hindenburg

to remake

History. (8)

 

While Madani does not exhort the addressee in the poem to cry for the past, the poet’s voice clearly mourns the loss of things and people who are absent. The past that she evokes is a time commonly referred to as the “years of lead” in Morocco, when many young people were imprisoned and tortured for their political beliefs. The poem addresses not just national injustices, however, but makes common cause with international ones. Written in French, the poet de-capitalizes the proper names of the enemies at the end of the poem (mussolini, hitler, von hindenberg and the old history professor), making them lose their status and their power. She also addresses the even more common injustices of gender discrimination, as Fatima “the big bitter clown” kills herself at the feet of the law “with big bursts of laughter.” At the end of the poem, the prisoner and the poet are interchangeable, the vision in the poet’s eyes present in the prisoner’s eyes as well. Just as the dreams of the poet inhabit the prisoner, the bars of prison come to inhabit the poet, and if the poet mourns for the lives lost to violence, there is also the hope to “remake history.” This dialogue between loss and hope, found also in El Assimi’s poetry above, gives a new odor to nostalgia, one imbued with the past, but oriented to the future, as in this untitled poem (also by Rachida Madani):

 

I leave them the period

the comma

all the punctuation

and know-how

for a while now I’ve no longer surprised myself

no longer questioned myself

no longer stopped myself

I am no longer a poet

just the oasis and the doe

that you dream of

Pilgrim my old brother

My words have become livid

on the milky way of your fantasies

insomniac city

where I lose my name.

I hug your walls

my delirium conjugated with your fountains

my mouth on the mouths of your sewers

where I vomit the detritus

of an aborted poem

from where can I climb to the sky

a cry decomposing in my entrails

the one spontaneous cry

of a destroyed woman

emptied of herself

agonizing.

 

Woman

I haven’t finished dreaming of my childhood

haven’t finished lifting each star

on the path of expectation

sentinels watching over my cemeteries

where I sit without counting

the tombs

without saying anything

watching for your return

Pilgrim my old brother. (9)

 

Like Mohammed Serghini, Madani also talks about the “insomniac city”; like Malika El Assimi, she loses her name. Yet at the same time that the poet sits among the dead in the cemeteries, she also awaits the return of her old brother, the pilgrim. Those who journey—and perhaps especially those who undertake a sacred journey, a poetic pilgrimage—must return.

 

Conclusion

 

The postcolonial condition produces a kind of homesickness for a home no longer identifiable, and the postcolonial subject often feels like a ‘sailor with an earthen temperament.’ Analyzing modern Moroccan poetry reveals the predominance of a nostalgia that, while providing an emotional tenor of loss and mourning, is nonetheless performative—that is, it not only describes, but it enacts something.

What does nostalgia enact? In the examples cited here, as well as many others in the Moroccan poetic oeuvre, nostalgia re-creates a sense of belonging, a sense of home and history that was ruptured by the colonial encounter. Yet James Baldwin has noted, “perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” The search for home, and its re-imagination, is evident in modern Moroccan poetry, as contemporary poets create from this ‘condition’ a home in words. Whether the nostalgia be for the old medina, the countryside, or the lives of dissidents, mystics and dreamers lost to political or gender violence, nostalgia makes us remember the forgotten, and dream about what is to come.

This article is drawn from a larger work in progress, Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Modern Moroccan Poetry, edited by Deborah Kapchan.

 

Footnotes:

1. Translated from the Arabic by Deborah Kapchan and Driss Marjane.

2. Translated from the French by Deborah Kapchan.

3. Translated from the Arabic by Deborah Kapchan and Driss Marjane.

4. Translated from the Arabic by Deborah Kapchan and Driss Marjane.

5. “It’s impossible to write what you feel,” he told me. “There is a communication between the picture and the word. The image is just a part of it (juz’ min-u). The image is the feeling, the writing before you write. You close your eyes, you are in trance (hal). The poem is the painting after it is painted.” He uses the same ink in his calligraphy that he does in his paintings. “The ink wants you to get lost in it. I mix the ink with my soul,” he told me (Moumni, 2003, personal communication).

6. Translated from the Arabic by Deborah Kapchan.

7. Translated from the Arabic by Deborah Kapchan and Driss Marjane.

8. Translated from the French by Deborah Kapchan.

9. Translated from the French by Deborah Kapchan.

 

References:

Cixous, Helène. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Susan Rubin Suleiman, editor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Khatibi, Abdelkebir. 1983. Amour Bilingue. Paris: Fata Morgana.

Laabi, Abdellatif. 2005. La Poésie Marocaine de l’Indépendance à nos Jours. Paris: La Différence.

Madani, Rachida. 2006. Blessures au Vent. Paris: La Différence.

Messick, Brinkley. 1993. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: University of California.

Moumni, Rachid. 2003. Personal Communication, Fes, Morocco.

Moumni, Rachid. 200 . The Cradle of Descent. INFO TO COME

Serghini, Mohamed. 2003. Fès de la Plus Haute Cime des Ruses. Casablanca: Publiday-Multidia.

Serematakis, C. Nadia, ed. 1994 Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in. Modernity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press

 

 

 

Bio:

Deborah Kapchan is Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, New York University. She has taught also taught at University of Texas at Austin, where she directed the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology. She is the author or Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (University of Pennsylvania, 1996), Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace (Wesleyan University Press, 2007) and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Modern Moroccan Poetry (forthcoming).