Mansour's Eyes by Ryad Girod
Author:Ryad Girod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transit Books
Published: 2020-08-05T16:00:00+00:00
My heart has become able to take on all forms
It is a pasture for gazelles and an abbey for monks
It is a temple for idols and the Kaaba for any to circle around it
It is the tables of the Torah and also the tomes of the Qur’an
The religion I practice is that of love
Wherever its mounts may turn, love is my religion and my faith!
and sensing, perhaps, for the duration of that flash during which his mount reared up and he brandished his saber just before bringing it down on the neck of one of the elegant soldiers of the King of France, sensing that the fleetingness of this scene would be fixed in bronze, here and there, in that new nation they would call Algeria, and sensing—or maybe more than sensing, maybe seeing … seeing beyond the decades and the centuries … seeing the bronze statues desecrated, here and there, in that old country that would continue to be called Algeria, covered in obscene writing, in insults, in spit and in piss—seeing perhaps, during the time his horse was reared up and kicking and bounding forth, that all peoples who lose a thought, a grandeur, are inevitably bounding forth into violence and self-destruction.
When the blade is brought down on your neck, an entire people, an entire nation, an entire community of believers, will return to a pre-Islamic period, dark, violent, apocalyptic.
I left the scorching terrace of Al Faisaliyah and the pessimism that it had inspired in me and I raced over to Stan and Nadine’s house to find Mansour and remind him about Abdelkader’s circles and Faisal’s tears in the hope that something would come of it or that something would cease happening in his donkey head and that everything would return to the place it was destined to be … our lives, their trajectories … and to make him catch at least a glimpse of the possibility of holding onto something from Abdelkader’s circles, from Faisal’s tears, of holding onto something of this world that was evolving so quickly or, if absolutely necessary, to just accept the monstrosity and to settle for understanding even a tiny little part of it, one that was a more appropriate size for us, and if absolutely necessary to give up on that which is too big for us and to at long last make a fresh start on a new existence devoid of pretention, without great aspirations, those the wide avenues of Riyadh bid us to pursue, from mall to mall, in luxury automobiles without worrying about the rest, about what isn’t working or what we don’t understand, and to hold on to the small pleasures stolen here and there, as we had so well begun to do, out among the cliffs of the Najd or in the bars of Dubai or the brothels of Manama, and then, even if the small pleasures turned out to be ephemeral, the tears would be just as brief. Full of hope in the luxurious Camaro
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