Description
Poetry. Women's Studies. Translated from the French by Peter Thompson. The death of Nabile Farès in August, 2016, was a great loss to Francophone North African letters. He worked closely with translator Peter Thompson over the years to see several of his works translated into English. They were working together on EXILE: WOMEN'S TURN at the time of his death, and we are proud to be able to release this work into English now.
"The tri–consonantal Arabic root h.j.r. states the fact of exile in the nouns hejer/hejira, while simultaneously naming the woman Hagar, mother of Ishmael, she who personifies exile as the condition of woman in the Abrahamic cultures, where, as Nabile Farès says, she is 'an illegal in language.' And it is the great merit & beauty of these poems to speak to & of (without the male arrogance of claiming to speak for) the women (of his native Algeria, & of elsewhere & not only in the Arab world) in their double exile, 'these women [who] resembled / Clandestine vowels / Of the Unwanted Languages,' humbly declaring his work to be 'your voyage // my translation.'"—Pierre Joris
Author Bio
Born in Collo, Algeria, in 1940, Nabile Farès was an activist, ethnologist and psychoanalyst. He has been a voice against colonialism in poetic works such as Chant d'Akli and Escuchando tu historia (Hearing Your Story), as well as L'Exil au féminin (Exile: Women's Turn). His popular second novel, Un Passager de l'Occident (A Passenger From The West), concerning his meeting and friendship with James Baldwin, was the first to be translated into English. Farès' work stresses Berber identity and—beyond the period of French colonization—the transience of the Arab presence and of Islamization. After a long period of active suppression, his early works are now being published in Algeria for the first time, with his latest work, Il était une fois l'Algérie, appearing in both France and Algeria in 2010. Long a respected figure in French letters, in Algeria Farès was awarded the Kateb Yacine prize for lifetime achievement. After the Algerian war, he lived in Paris, where he was a psychoanalyst with a practice focusing on issues of immigration and trans-culturation, until his death in 2016.
Author City: PARIS FRA