It then deploys the expression كُن فَيَكُون ( kun fa-yakūn) to engage the question of the immaculate conception. 5Īs with the first word of the world (“the Word was God”), whence all things “came into being,” the Qurʾān, in the following verses, attributes the genesis and origination of lingual movement to nothing more than god’s will and decree, tongue and constructed channel. Dès qu’un phénomène se manifeste, il quitte le bruit il traverse canaux construits ou langues it moves through constructed channels or languages]. Le bruit ne peut être un phénomène, tout phénomène se détache de lui, figure sur fond, comme un feu sur la brume, comme tout message, tout cri, tout appel, tout signal, doivent se détacher du vacarme occupant le silence, pour être, pour être perçus, pour être connus, pour être échangés. Like John’s beginning-“the Word,” unfurled by god (“the Word was with God”), or at least within reach of god’s hand, or on the tip of a godly tongue, “lips moistened as though about to part / Releasing speech”-“le langage,” writes Michel Foucault, “naissait lorsque le bruit de la bouche ou des lèvres était devenu lettre”. The expression recurs no less than eight times in the Qurʾān. My mother’s fiery riff on kun fa-yakūn is one of them. Arabic literature erupts with “Homeric suddenness,” certainly “in the sense that a point is reached when not all compositions are lost.” 2 Long before that point, “in the beginning,” goes John, “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God All things came into being through him.” 3 The Arabic literary tradition and the Qurʾān, too, offer no shortage of origin words. 1 Go as far back as we may, the trail always goes cold. Literature’s greatest mystery lies in its beginning, “repliée sur l’énigme de sa naissance”. She stretches the long wāw, ū in yakūn, for closure, melty string of marshmallow. I want to say she sharp-nods her head down for compensatory effect as she sounds the closing n. Wa-ʾin qāla li-shayʾan kun fa-yakūn! The noise. The simurgh convalesces to the question mark I curl at māmā about where we and god come from. Armed with bucket and broom my father captures the parrot with the russet beak and broken wing in salvation from bony strays. Over years, gardeners peddle the remedy, gallons of irreal water fresh from fossil fuel–powered desalination plants, hauled in by truck, dumped onto the caltrops of the turf, perennially off-limits. Flocked by fluorescent green parrots our small sand-hued house features an ailing lawn lined with date palm and holy basil, yellowed grass inexplicably overrun by goatheads. Annual family holidays synchronized to the Hijri calendar and desert crossings in Chrysler New Yorkers beelining to Mecca. Primary school curricula spent on Islamic studies and programming Sakhr computers. I wake up to the acute awareness of my family’s immovable techno-Muslim identity. My earliest memory, beneath Riyadh’s dusty suns. A postfrancophone poetics ciphers historicity, ever on display for the curious reader. Beneath the surface tension of francophone Maghrebi literature’s invariably french-language appearance, the modernism of french poetics and the deep historical intertext of Islamic scripture and classical Arabic lyric freely, incessantly weave in and out of one another. It gestures toward one way out of the postcolonial lingual deadlock by eschewing the historical event as structuring principle and offering literary rather than historical markers-a constellation of references that isolates the fundamental plasticity of the french language and mollifies it with translation and intertextuality. A common battleground of the region’s postcolonial aesthetic and sociological configurations revolves around the choice of language: Should the postcolonized continue to write in the colonizer’s language? A postfrancophone poetics disrupts much of this terrain. History has long offered the primary organizational rubric for many forays into the field, whose long and ongoing colonial struggles remain unresolved on either side of the Mediterranean littoral. In the Maghrebi context, one of them involves substituting historical events for literary ones. As a discipline, francophone postcolonial studies defaults to several familiar tropes.
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