In From Sleep Unbound, so exquisitely translated by Sharon Spencer, we are introduced to a family of characters who, like Giacometi statues, are stripped of unnecessary accessories, both visually and verbally. As they move about, weaving; intricate forms in space, they, too, bear the imprint of ancient frescoes dimmed with the patina of age. The statically-paced dialogue injects a sense of timelessness and atemporality into events and into personalities, capturing the stillness and terror of eternity. Yet an urgency, extreme and traumatic, also emerges powerfully in From Sleep Unbound. Indeed, the novel begins with a crisis, as do the Racinian tragedies, a crushing impact. Compressed feelings are unleashed at the very outset.
From Sleep Unbound generates excitement not by exaggerated rhythmic effects or plot lines, but rather by the juxtaposition of tempi, feelings, yearnings, and longings. Samya, the paralyzed wife of Boutros, is depicted as a deeply introverted being, her needs held at bay throughout the novel until the conflagration which tears down the world of solitude. Her paralysis, symbolically viewed, is a manifestation of her inability to cope with daily existence, the routine of life—her rejection of her pariah state, of her excruciating pain. She cannot walk; helpless, divested of a life attitude, she is Cut off from earth, from all human company. Only her inner world is subsumed: that subliminal region where moods and anguishes are viewed as fluid and opalescent entities, where terror heightens feelings of apprehension; foreboding is spun into the very fabric of the novel in premonitory images of apocalyptic power.
From Sleep Unbound takes its readers directly into the heart of the woman’s world. Samya is the product of a contemporary middle-Eastern upbringing with its harsh and brutal customs, particularly concerning women, whose earthly existences serve certain specific purposes: to serve man and to bear children. Her husband, unfeeling, detached, uninterested, does not even notice the beauty which radiates from her face: large brown eyes, smooth olive skin, jet black hair, slim features. Daily, Samya feels her life eroding, slowly crumbling, slipping, dematerializing into oblivion. Sensations of uselessness reduce her to a state of psychological penury, of fragmentation. Then, anger and resentment, even hatred intrude, resulting perhaps out of sheer dismay at her own passivity. Her sister-in-law, Rachida, whom her husband depends upon so implicitly and explicitly to run the cotton farm, arrives. Rancor swells. Jealousy. As Samya pursues her story, defoliating her feelings, exposing her fulgurating pain like a raw nerve, images are marked with burnt umber, gray, black, darkened configurations. The atmosphere is suffused with feelings swelling with rapture and sensuality, also with bouts of rage and outrage.
Samya’s psyche is the prototype of the Arab woman—enslaved by her husband and by society. Misunderstood, subservient to her husband’s needs, Samya lives in her own muted realm—a world of whispers, fleeting emotions, expressed in a closed walled-in world of murmurs and halftints—fear. To reveal the inner workings of From Sleep Unbound would be to divulge a secret domain, arcana as spun into the ritual of life by the cryptic hand of the writer-artist that Andrée Chedid is.
From Sleep Unbound captures not one woman’s world, but that of all women, whether they lived cloistered and closeted in a society bound by retrograde customs or in a modern metropolis, liberated for all intents and purposes, but imprisoned within their own psychological cells. From Sleep Unbound is a concerted probing, a poetic search for a “direct breath,” an eternal voice, a single dream, participating in the cosmic flow; catalyzed by an ever-searching soul.
BETTINA L. KNAPP
Hunter College
and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Translator’s Preface
This translation of Andrée Chedid’s novel Le Sommeil délivré is based partly upon a literal rendering of the work from French to English by Roselyne Eddé. I am very grateful for the existence of this earlier text, for it facilitated my own work by providing a very useful foundation on which I was able to build a more literary version of the novel.
Le Sommeil délivré depends for its poetic artistry upon certain rhythmical patterns which are composed into a music for the ear. The original French is incantatory and obsessive, as befits Chedid’s subject and her protagonist’s situation. Throughout, I have attempted either to preserve or to simulate the rhythms of the original creation as well as the equally important classical and timeless nature of the novel’s elegantly simple language and imagery. The most difficult problem was to select for the title a phrase which would suggest the complexity of Le Sommeil délivré, which alludes not only to awakening and to release, to the sudden liberation in action of accumulated rage and resentment, but also to the crucial “deliverance” of the birth process. “From sleep unbound” suggests the essence of Samya’s definitive action at the same time that it emphasizes the novel’s unifying metaphor, that of sleep.
I undertook the translation of Le Sommeil délivré in a spirit of admiration for this book which now offers English language readers an intimate view into the soul of a woman whose life is its own tragic comment and whose ultimate destiny is oddly satisfying when one considers the brutal conditions she was compelled to experience as her life.
If these words seem enigmatic, they are soon to find explanation in the pages that follow.
Part One
1
The rays of the sun were already less blinding as they fell on the walls of the white house. In the distance an arm of the Nile stretched toward the suppleness of a shadow. Rachida came outside to breathe the freshness and, just as she did every evening, she rested her body against the grayish white wall, waiting for her brother to return. Her bun of gray hair and her drab garments always bore flecks of plaster.
Her brother’s name was Boutros. He supervised the farming of the surrounding lands that belonged to a wealthy man who preferred to live in the city. Three times a year this man, the owner, came to collect the money due him from the rents paid by the fellahin. For these rare visits he had built a stone house for himself. It stood facing the smaller house; its shutters were always closed.
Boutros appeared at the end of the narrow road. Above his face, which seemed to be squeezed tightly between his shoulders, rose his cylinder-shaped fez.
The double wooden door stood open. The brother and sister exchanged greetings, he moving on into the house. Turning, Rachida followed his figure with her eyes as Boutros climbed the first; hollowed-out steps. There came a bend in the stairway and then she could no longer hear the sound of his steps. The storeroom in which the cotton was kept was on the floor above. Rachida listened to the squeaking of the doorknob as Boutros turned it, assuring himself, as he did every evening, that it was locked. The office was located on the same floor. Rachida listened to the sound of the key in the lock, of the door opening. In this way she accompanied her brother on his evening rounds; she knew his movements so well.
Now he was entering the office. The walls and ceilings were covered with flaking plaster that sometimes fell onto the shoulders of the accountant, crumbling down the front of his jacket. Frowning, Boutros would be opening the drawers, peeling off a sheet from the calendar, approaching the large black safe. Rachida could see it all as if she were there. She also saw the huge portrait of a man wearing a fez and a neatly trimmed moustache, a man seated in a dignified posture; he was the man who had created this great fortune in land. Between his legs there stood a cane with a gold handle on which he rested his hands. He resembled the present landowner, who was, in fact, his grandson. When Boutros passed this portrait he always bowed slightly.
The visit to the office was completed now and Boutros began to walk back toward the stairway. Rachida listened as his steps began to grow heavier, for he was moving toward the three rooms on the third floor. It was here that he lived with Rachida and Samya, his wife, the cripple. Helpless in spite of her youth!
What if Rachida should catch a disease like that! This Samya attracted disasters. Her two legs immobilized. For what sin was God punishing her?
Now Rachida couldn’t hear anything. Boutros had entered the large foyer and Rachida told herself that she had earned the right to go for her evening walk.
She