In 1970, Nabile Fares interviewed African-American author James Baldwin for Jeune Afrique magazine. What begins in this book as an interview with Baldwin confronting the history of Black America leads Fares into a journey through his own past. Vivid encounters in France and Spain connect with Fares' remembrances of his native Algeria, its war for independence, and the effect it had on his childhood. The original interview with Baldwin is included.

A Passenger from the West (Engaged Writers)

Biographies & Memoirs

Farès, Nabile

Community & Culture

UNO Press

This translation of Exile and Helplessness marks the introduction to the English-speaking world of Nabile Farès’ great trilogy, La Découverte du nouveau monde (The Discovery of the New World). An experimental work set in the time just after Algeria’s war with France, Exile and Helplessness probes issues of identity—race, gender, nationality—in the wake of European colonialism. The intensity and self-awareness of this work—in relation to both language and the existential urgency of its content—brings Nabile Farès’ writing closer to the white heat of poetry than to the narrative leisure of the novel. This is writing as enactment and not as mere representation. The immense pleasure in reading Farès’ work—a pleasure that shines through in Peter Thompson’s excellent translation—comes from the nomadicity of his language, the thinking and doing that happens at any given moment all over the place, if we let it. Let it happen to you; you’ll be the richer for it. —Pierre Joris, Editor of The University of California Book of North African Literature. “You have to learn to read between the lines of the sky, and of the tree, in the gaps that overflow with light and possibility.” Peter Thompson’s nimble and evocative translation brings to English readers the oracular intensity of Nabile Farès’ “multiple kind of speech.” Exile and Helplessness is a risky dialectic of prose and poetry, distance and rootedness, words and body, the politics of living and dying, of the female and the male, of liberation, anguish and ecstasy. —Adam J. Sorkin, translator of Ioan Flora’s Medea and Her War Machines

Exile and Helplessness: (L’Exil et le désarroi)

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Dialogos

From the Foreword by translator Peter Thompson: This most recent translation of Farès is the first one to follow his death (August, 2016). I had greatly looked forward to giving him the English version. He was a reader of English and an admirer of Bill Lavender's book designs. I had also anticipated more conversations about the theme of the book. We had finished work on the manuscript, but its central image--perilous crossings of the Mediterranean--had surged back into the news. Within these journeys beats the brave, feminist heart of this book. Farès had explained to me, about three years ago, that this poetry arose from a special moment in African migration and exile. Men, before the 1980s, had always been the ones to leave North Africa in search of work (mainly in France and Spain). They found dubious lodging--often in exploitive dormitories--and sent money home. That changed when women, in a considerable wave, undertook the sea crossing on their own. Exile: Women's Turn is that journey, and that sea change in women's destinies.  The tri-consonantal Arabic root h.j.r. states the fact of exile in the nouns hejer/hejira, while simultaneously naming the woman Hagar, mother of Ishmael, she who personifies exile as the condition of woman in the Abrahamic cultures, where, as Nabile Farès says, she is "an illegal in language." And it is the great merit & beauty of these poems to speak to & of (without the male arrogance of claiming to speak for) the women (of his native Algeria, & of elsewhere & not only in the Arab world) in their double exile, "these women [who] resembled / Clandestine vowels / Of the Unwanted Languages," humbly declaring his work to be "your voyage // my translation." —Pierre Joris, author of h.j.r., An American Suite, Barzakh (Poems 2000-2012), Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected later Poetry of Paul Celan (2013.) and The University of California Book of North African Literature.

Exile: Women's Turn

Poetry

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Translated by Peter Thompson. In 1970, Nabile Farès was asked to interview James Baldwin for Jeune Afrique magazine, an experience which set in motion A PASSENGER FROM THE WEST. What begins in this book as an interview with Baldwin confronting the history of Black America leads Farès into a journey through his own past. Vivid encounters in France and Spain connect with Farès's remembrances of his native Algeria, its war for independence, and the traumatizing effect it had on him as a child. The original Jeune Afrique interview with Baldwin is included as an appendix to the novel. "It is Farès's unique sensitivity to the power of allegory that gives his work its distinctive place in Maghrebi literature. His work marks a turning point and foreshadows the tragedy to come in Algeria."--Réda Bensmaïa, Brown University "Here, in this unique, multicultural space, Farès engages the diverse complexities of our globalized age before we even knew they existed."--Valérie K. Orlando, University of Maryland

A Passenger from the West

History & Criticism

Discovery of the New World

United States

Dialogos / Lavender Ink

Mémoire de l'absent, Découverte du monde

Genre Fiction

SEUIL

Une enfance algérienne

CIXOUS, Hélène

COLLECTIFS

DIB, MOHAMMED

Vircondelet, Alain

SEBBAR, Leïla

Tengour, Habib

ALLOULA, Malek

Daniel, Jean

Dadoun, Roger

Cohen, Annie

BENSOUSSAN, Albert

Kacimi, Mohamed

Millecam, Jean-Pierre

Pélégri, Jean

Gallaire, Fatima

Bencheikh, Jamel Eddine

Contemporary

Gallimard]

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