So Vast the Prison

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FOR A LONG TIME I believed that writing meant dying, slowly dying, groping to unfold a shroud of sand or silk over things that one had felt trembling and pawing the ground. A burst of laughter — frozen. The beginnings of a sob — turned into stone.

Yes, for a long time I wanted to lean against the dike of memory, or against the shadowy light of its other side, to be gradually penetrated by its cold, because as I wrote I recalled myself.

And life dissipates; its living trace dissolves.

Writing about the past, my feet wrapped up in a prayer rug which was not even a jute or horsehair mat tossed down somewhere on the dust of a dawn road or at the foot of a crumbling dune under the immense sky at sunset.

The silence of writing, the desert wind turning its inexorable millstone, while my hand races and the father’s language (the language now, moreover, transformed into a father tongue) slowly but surely undoes the wrapping cloths from a dead love; and so many voices spatter into a lingering vertiginous mourning, way behind me the faint murmur of ancestors, the ululations of lament from veiled shadows floating along the horizon — while my hand races on …

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