I became a Muslim. I had to leave for the desert.
So I left. I walked there. Soldiers accosted me. “What are you doing here?” they asked. “Where’re you from?” “A country where I couldn’t remain.”
Since then I’ve been waiting in this camp.
I thank the pack for forcing me here. I’ve learned a lot from “Muslim,” from this Name, from what it stands for.
If I reply to their accusations by saying, “I am Muslim,” then I suffocate. They condemn me to silence.
Zahia Rahmani
“MUSLIM”
A NOVEL
Translated from the French by
Matt Reeck
DEEP VELLUM
DALLAS, TEXAS
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Deep Vellum is a 501c3
nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.
Originally published under the title “Musulman” Roman
Copyright © Sabine Wespieser, éditeur, 2005
English translation copyright © 2019 by Matthew Reeck
ISBN: 978-1-941920-75-6 (paperback) · 978-1-941920-76-3 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951694
This work is supported in part by an Arts Respond grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.
This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.
Cover design by Tanya Wardell
Interior by Kirby Gann
Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.
Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
CONTENTS
The Little Poucet and the Magic Nut
My Mother Tongue Refuses to Die
Dialogue with a Government Worker
Unless your tongue was not cut off but merely split, with a cut as neat as a surgeon’s, that drew little blood yet made speech ever afterward impossible. Or let us say the sinews that move the tongue were cut and not the tongue itself, the sinews at the base of the tongue.
John Maxwell Coetzee, Foe
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
PROLOGUE
I WOULD NEVER HAVE GUESSED that it might come to this. I was forced to lose myself in the century of errors that came before me.
I’ve become the site of a dispute among men. I became, I became again, a “Muslim.”
From this madness, this limit, I wasn’t able to escape.
This condition put an end to my fiction.
I HAD TO RETURN. To return to a place of origins. I wasn’t one to bark at the heels of people. It’s impossible to do anything against the pack. It condemns you without a defense. “You were Muslim, you’re Muslim,” it named me. I was allowed to answer only from this position, as a “Muslim.”
“You want me to be Muslim,” I said, “So Muslim I’ll be! But why have you played this trick on me? Why do you want me like this, humbled before a god?”
“So we don’t lose track of you,” barked the pack.
For me, I think of God as a protocol, an agreement among people. But the rowdy crowd barred the road in front of me. So “my” God? They simply brought him down from heaven for me. That’s all they needed for proof!
The pack strapped me to God. I would have to exist for him.
I became a Muslim. I had to leave for the desert.
So I left. I walked there. Soldiers accosted me. “What are you doing here?” they asked. “Where’re you from?” “A country where I couldn’t remain.”
Since then I’ve been waiting in this camp.
I thank the pack for forcing me here. I’ve learned a lot from “Muslim,” from this Name, from what it stands for.
If I reply to their accusations by saying, “I am Muslim,” then I suffocate. They condemn me to silence.
Those who run this camp pretend to ignore this fact. They don’t want anything to do with us, with the word “Muslim.” Nothing. It’s a facile fact on the ground that our dangerous nature justifies their measures. They say we’re evil. That’s how they’ve decided everything. But are they really convinced? I’ve waited for so long in his corrugated tin shack, my cell, that they’ve forgotten why I’m here. Few of the prisoners here will be repatriated, and the State that keeps us, innocents