Discovery of the New World by Farès Nabile

Author:Farès, Nabile
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Diálogos
Published: 2021-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

IV

Mother said:

“Don’t shut yourself in with her, in that room,” the old woman, so inoffensive, and my mother jealous of her power

What did my mother mean?

Maybe this:

“you’ll be lost to this world, if you listen to Jidda.” Since clearly this is what she meant to say:

That there existed—there had to exist, for me—a radical loss in listening to Jidda. A loss of this world, the world of things and their proximity in language, a proximity that Jidda knew despite what people were wont to call: her feeble spiritual health. The loss of the meaning of things, of those multiple senses by which one could read or listen to the meanings of things. And, certainly, in the murders of the last three years, Jidda spoke little and her striped and multicolored silhouettes proliferated on the walls, the silhouettes of her world, her world of an ancient agility now lost in the bounding of this world, this one, that carried everything away with it, that had ravaged everything ever since its appearance in the interior of the country or the coasts or the towns, had opened the bellies of men and women, like goatskins.

Yes. Anyway that’s how you heard about this bounding that had opened various bellies throughout the country, bellies known as Wilayas or Insurgents, the leaping that had surprised most of us even though we might have known that, one day or another, the Goatskin would regain its speech, the very Goatskin that would bring into the world the sons of the dead land.

A waiting, as well, but death.

For there was a death all through the city, Algiers, Wretched-Ville of so many people, those I climbed with, in a hurry to infringe on the law of life’s stifling, and to find, glued to her childish attempts at drawing, Jidda, yes, she who restored my life with just a brush of her veil.

That’s how I would surprise her, or rather: how she used to sweep me away, how she hurled afar the impossible colonial existence, enfolded me in her beliefs and the world she dominated, talked to me, initiated me into that other language, the one destined to overflow the Goatskin.

What could I understand of it?

I watched Jidda’s pencil, and heard her voice and the hand that smoothed the design and the color.

The world would almost instantly spring open, really, and inside it the various seeds of life were germinating, the ones that cause the other seeds of life to grow.

She also initiated me into

The Cycle of The Gaze.

At least, what she called

The True Gaze. The one that, the opposite of ours or perhaps like ours, creates while it sees.

God? She thought not a whit of God, or a Cause. No.

It was much more simple than that, or more exact or profound than a simple or unique cause. For Jidda could not think in terms of a single or unique cause.

Because: one day: this.

“Every being is within,” then, in all the innocence of her truth or her voice: “The ‘whys’ seek

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