Love in Two Languages

123 Pages·1990·5.731 MB·

by  Abdelkebir Khatibi

Love in Two Languages
EMERGENT LITERATURES
An American Story
Jacques Godbout
In One Act
Adrienne Kennedy
Little Mountain
Elias Khoury
The Passion According to G. H.
Clarice Lispector
The Stream of Life
Clarice Lispector
Hutnan Mourning
José Revue/tas
The Trickster of Liberty
Gerald Vizenor
University ïnnesota Press ·
Love in Two Languages
Abdelkebir Khatibi
Translation by Richard Hozuard
146838
Copyright 1990 by the of the of Minnesota
Originally published as Amoztï bdinguc © l 983 by Editions Fata
Morgana
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduc:ed,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55414.
Printed in the United States of America.
Calligraphy by Abdeslam Guenouni.
Cover and book design by Patricia M. Boman.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 1938-
[Amour bilingue. English]
Love in two languages / Abdelkebir Khatibi ; translation by
Richard Howard.
p. cm. -(Emergent literatures)
Translation of: Amour bilingue.
ISBN 0-8166-1799-l. -ISBN 0-8166-1780-5 (pbk.)
I. Title. II. Series.
PQ3989.2.K4A8413 1989
843-dc20 89-20354
CIP
The University of Minnesota is an
equal-opportunity educator and employer.
Love in Two Languages

Epigraph
(He left, he carne back, he left again. He decided to leave for
good. The story should stop here, the book close upon itself.)
Sentence that composed itself unaided. He jotted it down
in his bedside notebook and reread it every night before going
to sleep. When he was up, he was afraid. When he was in bed,
he was distracted-more than ever-bewitched by this impla
cable sentence.
The sea had receded quietly, calmly. He was seated on
the bed. All of a sudden, he had the extraordinary feeling that
he was being written by the night. He shivered violently. Ah,
he said to himself, every text should be final: he himself is
final.
Was he sleeping at that very moment? The night watched
him dozing, feeling him, taking his breath. The fear of being
lost forever. Once again, he shivered. In waves, simultaneous
dreams flooded into his mind. He nearly sobbed. The night
came and went under the sound of the sea which, though far
away, had suddenly surged up. He plugged bis ears. It was
then that the words fluttered in a parade in front of him, then
they came crashing down on top of one another: language
was mad.
Ger up? He couldn't: instead of the fragments of a word,
there was room for nothîng visible: the sea itself had sunk in
the night. And in French-his foreign language the word for
"word," mot, is close to the one for "death," la mort; only
one letter is missing: the succinctness of the impression, a syl
lable, the ecstasy of a stifled sob. Why did he believe that lan
guage is more beautiful, more terrible, for a foreigner?
He calmed clown instantly when an Arabie word, kalma,
appeared, kalma and its scholarly equivalent, kalima, and the
whole string of its diminutives which had been the riddles of
his childhood: klima . ... The diglossal kal(i)ma appeared
again without mot's having faded away or disappeared.
Within hirn, both words were observing each other, preceding
what had now become the rapid emergence of memories,
fragments of words, onomatopoeias, garlands of phrases, in
tertwined to the death: undecipherable. The sc:ene is still si
lent. And when he speaks, he will wear himself out in amne
sia, dragged clown by a prodigious weakness, forgetting even
the words that are most often used in one or the other of his
languages.
He thought of the sun and even in doing so its name, that
of the moon, inverted itself-frorn feminine to masculine-in
his double language. Inversion which makes words wheel
with the constellations, making for a strange attraction of the
universe. So saying, he believed he was explaining to himself
his obsession with androgyny, attracted and repulsed by the
same set of charms.
Impregnable love. At every moment, the foreign lan
guage, whose power is limitless, can drawback into itself, be
yond any translation. He told himself, I am a rnidground be
tween two languages: the doser I get to the middle, the
further I am from it.
A foreigner, I must become attached to everything which
exists on and under the earth. Language belongs to no one, it
belongs to no one and I know nothing about anyone. In my
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tongue, grow up as an ? From
one adoption to another, I thought I was language's own
child.
Bi-langue? My luck, my own individual abyss and my
lovely amnesiac energy. An energy I don't experience as a de
ficiency, curiously enough. Rather, it's my third ear. Had I ex
perienced some kind of breakdown, I liked to think I would
have developed in the opposite direction, I would have grown
up in the dissociation peculiar to any unique language. That's
why I admire the gravity of the blind man's gestures and the
desperate impossible love the deaf man has for language.
Yes, I spoke, I grew up around the Only One and the
Name, and the Book of my invisible god should have ended
within me. Extravagant second thought which stays with me
always. This idea imposes itself as I write it: every language
should be bilingual! The asymmetry of body and language, of
speech and writing-at the threshold of the untranslatable.
From that moment, the scenario of the doubles was cre
ated. One word: now two: it's already a story. Speaking to
you in your own language, I am yourself without really being
you, fading away in the tracks you leave. Bilingual, I am
henceforth free to be entirely so and on my own behalf. Free
dom of a happiness which <livides me in two, but in order to
educate me in thoughts of nothingness. I know nothing and
this nothing is twofold. I forget and that is already amnesia.
When I lose my head, the madness collapses into its depths.
This madness which denies as it affirms itself in a double
foundation which is itself transitory keeps me in good health:
truth and madness, both infinite.
(This beginning of a text seemed to consume the storyteller,
who read it ceaselessly. Each time he approached this begin
ning which excluded him: a story with no protagonist: or if
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there was one, it was the story itself, vvhich heard itself utter
the lone command: Start over.)
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