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A review by nealadolph
The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories by Assia Djebar
4.0
Last night I couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing, on a high of two cups of coffee, and on a low of a deep shame for something that I had said to a friend earlier in the day. In both instances I should have known better. My body doesn’t rest well once it has had coffee of any amount. And then when the caffeine hits my blood it throws me out of wack. I get jittery. I acquire sweats. I lose an important filter, and I become more honest with whoever it that is around me. And then I don’t sleep. Last night I was laying in bed, trying to find something to burn off some energy without causing noise for my room-mates. I picked up this book. I put it down whenever I yawned. I picked up this book again. I put it back down when a drop of sleep fell from my eyes. I picked up this book. I put it back down when I finished it. I stayed awake for another three hours. Damned coffee.
I’ve been trying to broaden my reading palette for a few years now. One of the most rewarding results has been reading more women from more regions of the world, and, in the process, finding some truly lovely literary voices. I would count Assia Djebar’s voice in that group.
Here you hear the voices of deep mourning produced by war. They are soft voices. They are gentle voices, weathered but enduring, weak and strong in equal measure. They have a melancholy and sadness built into their sentence structures and their words. Every letter, one could say, is written in an ink that, as you turn the page, seems to induce the feeling one gets just beneath the surface in the moments before an emotion, any emotion, takes control. And, they are extraordinarily feminine voices, unashamedly maternal, loving and compassionate; these seven stories are mostly the stories of women, of their strength, in a society that has deep and powerful rifts and sudden, terrifying shifts in power. These are stories of life and death in that space in between and inside Algeria and France - that space reserved for refugees, for asylum seekers, for lovers, for their children and their families, the invisible and bountiful, confusing relationships that are obstructed from our eyesight.
I want to get back to the writing for a moment, because it is often exceptional, and particularly exceptional when she talks about the bond between wife and husband and the immediate but long-enduring decay that one feels when the other is lost. There is a great, powerful murmur here, like a low and silent prayer in the corner of a room then doesn’t end, that permeates the air and the walls with a reverence and a sadness. You hear the sound of a heart crackling and a mind bending as it responds to the loss of a family member, or of a family, and you feel the distance that separates people who have lived and loved in different continents but still remain connected and loved in the opposite one. The murmur converts itself into a hum over the pace of the book, but it never draws attention to itself. It source, whoever or whatever that might be, sits at a window, bathed in sunlight, but doesn’t speak.
This isn’t easy work on the part of the author. I often think that compassionate writing is the hardest form, especially in the short story form, because you have to make characters who are likable and who the reader can empathize with in a very short time, in a few sentences you have to build this person into something worthy of the reader’s love and admiration and heart. Assia Djebar manages just that. I think a lot of that has to do with her words and rhythm. She is gentle, her words are round, her sentences thick and lavish and covered in a new, pure, perfect black velvet. Everything rolls along a river of reality rather than bounces in bloodied streets.
Nearly every story contains something memorable in it, but they are not, as a whole, perfect or consistent stories. At times they carry the radiant, soul-lifting lilac in bloom, the smell of earth just turned over after a long winter, the decomposition of a whole season lifting into the air like a brand new form of respiration, and sometimes they smells a little rancid, milk left out in the sun, not quite right, and sometimes they carry the alarming odor of iron flaking off in dried, red, blood, danger. Much of this variation, I suspect, comes down to the writing (which, despite its strengths, is rarely impeccable), but the occasional character falls flat somehow. For example, the first two stories are nearly completely forgettable, and the final story, despite the moments of beauty and the gentle handling of its ideas and themes, doesn’t quite reach the heights that it could or should, largely because of the narrator. That said, there are a few that are really good, and at least one which is amazing. These are almost all in the first part of the book, and they are the tightest, most heart-rending of the stories to be found here. Images of women rediscovering long lost children, of them returning to a long-lost city to mourn a dead or dying aunt, of the discovery that they were a target in the same attack that killed their husband, that they were to become a broken body defecated by a history of oppression and war for which they bear no responsibility.
Of all the stories one is, to my mind, the work a great literary power at the height of her ability. If you can’t find this book but can find the story somewhere, read “Woman in Pieces”. It is marvelous, thick, beautiful, and sad. And it made me want to read 1000 Nights and 1 Night. That’s not a minor accomplishment. Another, “The Attack”, is very nearly in the same league, and a third, “Burning”, was the first story that made me fall in love with this book. These are some of the largest stories in the book, which makes me wonder about her novels, and about the occasional perils of the short story form when it is, indeed, short. About her novels, I look forward to turning to them in due time, once I have been to another bookstore in another city and, in perusing the shelves, I manage to come across her name calling to me from a spine. Assia Djebar.
I had a thought for a moment, a thought about three quarters of the way through this book, about how compassionate literature about people between countries, particularly two countries whose histories are so bloodily entwined and who presents are, in their portrayal, so bound up in suspicion and hatred, compassionate literature can help us empathize and understand that “other” that we have created and, in the process, break down the walls between us and admire our mutual humanity. Our hope for security. Our need for love. Our heartbreak when the man we have circled our life around is shot dead in a crowd. Literature like this is important.
I’ve been trying to broaden my reading palette for a few years now. One of the most rewarding results has been reading more women from more regions of the world, and, in the process, finding some truly lovely literary voices. I would count Assia Djebar’s voice in that group.
Here you hear the voices of deep mourning produced by war. They are soft voices. They are gentle voices, weathered but enduring, weak and strong in equal measure. They have a melancholy and sadness built into their sentence structures and their words. Every letter, one could say, is written in an ink that, as you turn the page, seems to induce the feeling one gets just beneath the surface in the moments before an emotion, any emotion, takes control. And, they are extraordinarily feminine voices, unashamedly maternal, loving and compassionate; these seven stories are mostly the stories of women, of their strength, in a society that has deep and powerful rifts and sudden, terrifying shifts in power. These are stories of life and death in that space in between and inside Algeria and France - that space reserved for refugees, for asylum seekers, for lovers, for their children and their families, the invisible and bountiful, confusing relationships that are obstructed from our eyesight.
I want to get back to the writing for a moment, because it is often exceptional, and particularly exceptional when she talks about the bond between wife and husband and the immediate but long-enduring decay that one feels when the other is lost. There is a great, powerful murmur here, like a low and silent prayer in the corner of a room then doesn’t end, that permeates the air and the walls with a reverence and a sadness. You hear the sound of a heart crackling and a mind bending as it responds to the loss of a family member, or of a family, and you feel the distance that separates people who have lived and loved in different continents but still remain connected and loved in the opposite one. The murmur converts itself into a hum over the pace of the book, but it never draws attention to itself. It source, whoever or whatever that might be, sits at a window, bathed in sunlight, but doesn’t speak.
This isn’t easy work on the part of the author. I often think that compassionate writing is the hardest form, especially in the short story form, because you have to make characters who are likable and who the reader can empathize with in a very short time, in a few sentences you have to build this person into something worthy of the reader’s love and admiration and heart. Assia Djebar manages just that. I think a lot of that has to do with her words and rhythm. She is gentle, her words are round, her sentences thick and lavish and covered in a new, pure, perfect black velvet. Everything rolls along a river of reality rather than bounces in bloodied streets.
Nearly every story contains something memorable in it, but they are not, as a whole, perfect or consistent stories. At times they carry the radiant, soul-lifting lilac in bloom, the smell of earth just turned over after a long winter, the decomposition of a whole season lifting into the air like a brand new form of respiration, and sometimes they smells a little rancid, milk left out in the sun, not quite right, and sometimes they carry the alarming odor of iron flaking off in dried, red, blood, danger. Much of this variation, I suspect, comes down to the writing (which, despite its strengths, is rarely impeccable), but the occasional character falls flat somehow. For example, the first two stories are nearly completely forgettable, and the final story, despite the moments of beauty and the gentle handling of its ideas and themes, doesn’t quite reach the heights that it could or should, largely because of the narrator. That said, there are a few that are really good, and at least one which is amazing. These are almost all in the first part of the book, and they are the tightest, most heart-rending of the stories to be found here. Images of women rediscovering long lost children, of them returning to a long-lost city to mourn a dead or dying aunt, of the discovery that they were a target in the same attack that killed their husband, that they were to become a broken body defecated by a history of oppression and war for which they bear no responsibility.
Of all the stories one is, to my mind, the work a great literary power at the height of her ability. If you can’t find this book but can find the story somewhere, read “Woman in Pieces”. It is marvelous, thick, beautiful, and sad. And it made me want to read 1000 Nights and 1 Night. That’s not a minor accomplishment. Another, “The Attack”, is very nearly in the same league, and a third, “Burning”, was the first story that made me fall in love with this book. These are some of the largest stories in the book, which makes me wonder about her novels, and about the occasional perils of the short story form when it is, indeed, short. About her novels, I look forward to turning to them in due time, once I have been to another bookstore in another city and, in perusing the shelves, I manage to come across her name calling to me from a spine. Assia Djebar.
I had a thought for a moment, a thought about three quarters of the way through this book, about how compassionate literature about people between countries, particularly two countries whose histories are so bloodily entwined and who presents are, in their portrayal, so bound up in suspicion and hatred, compassionate literature can help us empathize and understand that “other” that we have created and, in the process, break down the walls between us and admire our mutual humanity. Our hope for security. Our need for love. Our heartbreak when the man we have circled our life around is shot dead in a crowd. Literature like this is important.