My Mother’s Language
It’s been twenty years since I last saw my mother
She starved herself to death
They say that each morning
she would pull her headscarf off
and strike the floor seven times
cursing the heavens and the Tyrant
I was in the cave
where convicts read in the dark
and painted the bestiary of the future on the walls
It’s been twenty years since I last saw my mother
She left me a china coffee set
and though the cups have broken one by one
they were so ugly I didn’t regret their loss
even though coffee’s the only drink I like
These days, when I’m alone
I start to sound like my mother
or rather, it’s as if she were using my mouth
to voice her profanities, curses and gibberish
the unfindable rosary of her nicknames
all the endangered species of her sayings
It’s been twenty years since I last saw my mother
but I am the last man
who still speaks her language
Translated by André Naffis-Sahely
Carcanet’s recently published edition of Abdellatif Laâbi’s selected poems, Beyond the Barbed Wire, is an excellent introduction to the Moroccan poet’s work and background. Laâbi writes in French, and is translated into English by the collection’s editor, also a poet, André Naffis-Sahely, interviewed here by Guernica magazine. La langue de ma mère (My Mother’s Language) first appeared in Laâbi’s 1993 collection, L’Étreinte du Monde (The World’s Embrace).
Laâbi was born in Fez in 1942. In 1961, he founded the journal Souffles (Breaths), a nexus for radical poets and artists. The journal was eventually shut down by the authorities. Laâbi was arrested, tortured and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. He served eight-and-a-half years, from 1972 to 1980. He has lived in France since 1985.
Beyond the Barbed Wire begins with examples of the distinctly modernist early work from the mid-70s. A less florid, more direct and simple manner marks the poems written during his incarceration, the style in which he continues to write. My Mother’s Language is characteristic, an autobiographical post-prison poem in plain free verse that takes everyday language on trust, and rejects the use of a persona. A trace of the more experimental poet survives with respect to punctuation. No punctuation marks are used: the invisible presence of a full-stop seems to be indicated when the ensuing word is given an upper-case opening letter.
The poet’s mother, like her language, remains nameless, but we meet and hear her in the poem. In the book’s concluding interview, the poet tells Christopher Schaefer a little about both his parents. Illiterate like his craftsman father, his mother, who had 11 children, eight of whom survived, possessed “a rich language, full of images, and a great sense of humour. She was often angry at her condition, and it was by listening to her speak that perhaps – and I say perhaps – the desire to write was born in me.” According to legend, the family was exiled from Spain, and Laâbi describes his mother as white-skinned and blue-eyed. The reference to the rosary in the 19th line, “the unfindable rosary of her nicknames”, may just possibly allude to some distant, cultural intermingling with Catholicism.
The poem begins with the son’s loss: it moves swiftly, almost harshly, to the mother’s despair and apparent suicide, and then, in vivid detail, evokes her fury: “They say that each morning / she would pull her headscarf off / and strike the floor seven times / cursing the heavens and the Tyrant.” One imagines the headscarf itself being used as an angry whip – a powerful image. The “Tyrant” is presumably Hassan II, who ruled from 1961 to 1999, the period of “the lead(en) years”.
The image of the prison cell as a cave recalls Plato’s cave as well as those prehistoric caves whose wallpainting survives. It’s suggested that the darkness of tyranny and suffering might be instructive, a means of education. The “bestiary of the future” may not, initially, seem an optimistic image, but the cave paintings possibly depicted hunting scenes – representing, therefore, food and hope. The prisoners’ bestiary is not necessarily a perpetuation of brutality.
The reprise of the first line marks a shift of mood to the tender tragicomic memory of the (presumably once-treasured) china coffee cups. Sentimental attachment to inherited possessions is tactfully rejected: the ugly cups get broken without regret. The mother’s legacy to her son is something more radical. In a striking image she’s felt to be “using” the son’s mouth. She becomes rawly audible with “her profanities, curses and gibberish” – the idiomatic earth of poetry.
“Language” in this poem is surely used in the broadest sense. It’s not relevant, here, whether the mother speaks the Moroccan Arabic dialect, or French, or Amazigh, or any other tongue. It’s the “how” and not the “what”, the way she makes whichever language she uses her own and her children’s, the personal and family idiolect and all its homely, inimitable context and connotation. Those coffee cups begin to gain a relevant metaphorical dimension. The coffee-loving poet doesn’t regret the broken cups. Coffee matters more than the cups in which it’s served, as speech amounts to more than an exquisite shell of signifiers.
The third reprise of the first line is nicely harmonised by the translator with a final qualifying couplet: notice the carefully judged, differently grammatical, repetition of “last”. “It’s been twenty years since I last saw my mother / but I am the last man / who still speaks her language.” It’s as if we’re caught with the speaker in the middle of time and the onward sweep of annihilation.
My Mother’s Language, as always in Laâbi’s mature work, captures political resonance at the level of human intimacy. The particular intrusion of an authoritarian regime, which terminated prematurely the connection between the son and his mother, contains the inevitable separations and silencings of existence. The son remembering his mother, her unwitnessed death and “all the endangered species of her sayings” is to some extent a universal figure.
