Exile: Women's Turn

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.