Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry

Love, death, and memory are perhaps the three central themes of Djebar's wrenching collection of stories The Blood’s Tongue Does Not Run Dry, which was recently translated into English by Tegan Raleigh. When death appears in the text, it always violent, relentlessly stalking the characters as they each try to impose some sense on their surroundings. The Algeria chronicled in this book (that is to say, a country at the height of a fratricidal civil war) seems to resemble Europe during the Black Death. Life appears to go on normally, but in the midst of it all people just suddenly die.

Ah, one might say, but the violence in Algeria was targeted at specific people, and did not affect people randomly, the way a disease might. I did not get this sense from Djebar's stories, however. The French murder the Algerians, the Algerians murder the French, the Algerians murder each other. Murder in these stories is not politicized, although there is a strong implication that, to speak out, for whatever reason, is to court summary execution—trade unionists, teachers, and journalists being among the most prominent victims.

The young teacher Atyka assigns her class a story from The Thousand and One Nights, in which Harun Al Rachid must assign responsibility for the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman found chopped into pieces in a chest. As the number of contributors to her death multiplies, it becomes ever harder to isolate a culprit. Likewise, Djebar's stories have very little to say about culprits, but a great deal to say about the victims of violence. 

Felicie Marie Germaine, French expatriate, is one the few people who dies of natural causes in this book. Comatose in her French hospital bed, she is the subject of her Algerian children's long reveries about life with their father, Mohammed "Moh" Miloudi, “a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French.” It turns out that, as a woman of French origins, her throat was nearly cut by an Islamist insurgent whose hand was arrested at the last minute by the tiny gold Koran on a chain that Moh had given her. After three days of detention, she was returned to her traumatized family. After Moh’s death, she departs for Paris with her family. The fact that she survives the war only to die in her Parisian hospital bed is as fortuitous as the abrupt and bloody deaths of other characters in the novel. She returns to Algeria one last time, in a coffin tagged with the name “Yasmina Miloudi,” in order to persuade the authorities to allow a French Catholic to lie by her Algerian husband in a local cemetery. In death, at last, the characters are united in all the ways that life did not allow.

(With thanks to LL).