Zahia Rahmani has placed two inscriptions at the front of her book “Muslim”: a Novel, one from Foe, in which Susan Barton addresses Friday on the subject of his tongue having been cut so that he cannot speak, and the other from the opening lines of Moby-Dick. We have thus two very different views on the imperial mercantile project, Melville’s vagabond on the one hand and, on the other, Coetzee’s upstanding lady and would-be artist, who speaks of the suffering of the indigenous man through the skill of writer Defoe. We also have a post-Shakespearean national epic of High Romanticism, and a postmodernist novel with metatextual and deconstructive links to a prior work. These characteristics give one a sense not only of Rahmani’s position vis-à-vis anglophone literature but also of the qualities one might seek in “Muslim”: a Novel itself. This is an affinity, across languages, more than an influence, the kind of fellow-feeling that one supposes is the breath of life to a translator.
In what language did Rahmani first read Moby-Dick? Was it among the books she tucked away in her attic library as a girl? In my dream of those days, she is shut away from the world on a winter night in Picardy, rapt in the first French version, published in 1941 by Jean Giono, novelist from Provence. So taken with his author was Giono, that the version came out simultaneously with his own novelistic essay-portrait entitled Pour Saluer Melville, in which Giono depicts the writer on his arrival in London to oversee the publication of White Jacket, imagining “his long, relaxed stride—a bit of a swagger, which he can’t alter; the way he swings his arms and shifts his broad shoulders; the mocking way he holds his head; and the isolation and bitterness of his faraway eyes.” Giono’s fascination with a beloved writer comes through in the detailed attention he pays to what he could not hope to know.
The wind is fresh on deck and salt on the dunes. Sleet ticks at the window where the girl sits and braces herself in a dream of the woman. It is Kabylia, it is Picardy long ago and Paris now. The action through speech of her mother drifts into her head in a Berber word, along with the memory of a drag on a cigarette she took as a teen. She closes the book, picks up her pen.
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