The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories

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The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories

by Assia Djebar, Tegan Raleigh (Translation)

3.86 of 5 stars 3.86 · rating details · 29 ratings · 6 reviews

What happens when catastrophe becomes an everyday occurrence? Each of the seven stories in Assia Djebar’s The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry reaches into the void where normal and impossible realities coexist. All the stories were written in 1995 and 1996—a time when, by official accounts, some two hundred thousand Algerians were killed in Islamist assassinations and gove...more

Paperback, 224 pages

Published January 5th 2010 by Seven Stories Press (first published January 1st 1998)

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Mar 03, 2010 Elizabeth rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: in-of-africa, 2010, french-francophone, reviewed

Assia Djebar's stories are about women and women's language; what is said, what is not said, and why. They are about constraints on the language because of repression and tradition and circumstances and choices. They are about speaking up when others can't. And they are about speaking a mother tongue, and what that may mean. In one story, the mother learns her daughter's tongue since they have been separated so long, the mother doesn't believe her daughter will know her own.

So, in all of this th...more Assia Djebar's stories are about women and women's language; what is said, what is not said, and why. They are about constraints on the language because of repression and tradition and circumstances and choices. They are about speaking up when others can't. And they are about speaking a mother tongue, and what that may mean. In one story, the mother learns her daughter's tongue since they have been separated so long, the mother doesn't believe her daughter will know her own.

So, in all of this thought and reflection on language, and its importance, particularly to women and their stories, why would the English translation change the title of the collection? The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry has its own important meaning, as discussed in the afterward of the collection, but the title of the collection in its original French was Oran, langue morte. Djebar, who was living in the US for more than a decade by the time the English translation arrived, is sure to have given her blessing to the change. But there's no explanation of why it happened. Would the American audience simply not know where Oran was? Does the word "dead" scare us so impossibly that we will not touch a book with the word on the cover?

But that is what this collection is about. It's about death and loss. All of her books are in one way or another. This one, more than any of the others I've read, is about loss suffered by women in remembering Algeria. The stories are of women who lived through the violence of the sixties, or the nineties, surviving or dying in assassinations, bombing, accidents. Women who loved Algeria but left it for fear of their lives or because they needed to live in a freedom that was impossible there. The stories are all told by protagonists who see the loved one die or who escape or who come only after the event. The first one, heart-breakingly, is told in flashbacks of when a child's parents were killed and how she refused to go with her grandmother to pray for them.

Djebar has a wonderful way with language, even in translation it still comes through. And, according to my college French professor, she has been very lucky with her translators. Reading the stories, I knew she was telling them deliberately in the most personal tone she could create. I wondered throughout if I was reading her journal or stories that happened to friends or stories she simply created based on a newspaper clipping. (There is an answer to that in the afterward). She is so intensely personal that to read her writing about death, dying, loss, grief, that sometimes it becomes impossible to keep reading. The only other experience I've had with that was The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, which is a completely different book and different experience, but they are so close in this feeling that I can't help but bring them together.

Here is what she tells us of writing them, in this fashion, and judging herself for it, (and why the title does, of course, make sense, even changed):

Sometimes I tell myself, "You grasp them from afar, write them by placing yourself somewhere that is closest to their bodies--their hearts! . . ." What good is it to write them down--she who will die, she who will take refuge, she who will close in on herself, or she who will keep quiet, with downcast eyes, in order to survive?

After all, whatever approach is used to write their shuddering, the blood of the tongue--their own blood--does not run dry, no matter what tongue it is, nor what rhythm, nor what words are finally chosen.

This is an old theme for her. All of her books (but I've only read eight, I think) come back to this. The prologue of the first book that I read (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment) by her says this best. She doesn't want to speak for other women as that is inflating her own self at their expense. She is careful to speak very near to them; share the story as her own, and also make you feel their story as if you are a friend, a close relation, able to know these women, without violating their privacy in any way. It is an incredible accomplishment. I marvel each time she does it.(less)

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Sep 12, 2008 Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars

Love, death, and memory are perhaps the three central themes of Djebar's wrenching collection of stories The Blood’s Tongue Does Not Run Dry, which was recently translated into English by Tegan Raleigh. When death appears in the text, it always violent, relentlessly stalking the characters as they each try to impose some sense on their surroundings. The Algeria chronicled in this book (that is to say, a country at the height of a fratricidal civil war) seems to resemble Europe during the Black D...more Love, death, and memory are perhaps the three central themes of Djebar's wrenching collection of stories The Blood’s Tongue Does Not Run Dry, which was recently translated into English by Tegan Raleigh. When death appears in the text, it always violent, relentlessly stalking the characters as they each try to impose some sense on their surroundings. The Algeria chronicled in this book (that is to say, a country at the height of a fratricidal civil war) seems to resemble Europe during the Black Death. Life appears to go on normally, but in the midst of it all people just suddenly die.

Ah, one might say, but the violence in Algeria was targeted at specific people, and did not affect people randomly, the way a disease might. I did not get this sense from Djebar's stories, however. The French murder the Algerians, the Algerians murder the French, the Algerians murder each other. Murder in these stories is not politicized, although there is a strong implication that, to speak out, for whatever reason, is to court summary execution—trade unionists, teachers, and journalists being among the most prominent victims.

The young teacher Atyka assigns her class a story from The Thousand and One Nights, in which Harun Al Rachid must assign responsibility for the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman found chopped into pieces in a chest. As the number of contributors to her death multiplies, it becomes ever harder to isolate a culprit. Likewise, Djebar's stories have very little to say about culprits, but a great deal to say about the victims of violence.

Felicie Marie Germaine, French expatriate, is one the few people who dies of natural causes in this book. Comatose in her French hospital bed, she is the subject of her Algerian children's long reveries about life with their father, Mohammed "Moh" Miloudi, “a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French.” It turns out that, as a woman of French origins, her throat was nearly cut by an Islamist insurgent whose hand was arrested at the last minute by the tiny gold Koran on a chain that Moh had given her. After three days of detention, she was returned to her traumatized family. After Moh’s death, she departs for Paris with her family. The fact that she survives the war only to die in her Parisian hospital bed is as fortuitous as the abrupt and bloody deaths of other characters in the novel. She returns to Algeria one last time, in a coffin tagged with the name “Yasmina Miloudi,” in order to persuade the authorities to allow a French Catholic to lie by her Algerian husband in a local cemetery. In death, at last, the characters are united in all the ways that life did not allow.

(With thanks to LL).(less)

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Sep 11, 2012 Beluosus rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: français

Sa prose évoque les souvenirs, à la fois brumeux avec le temps et d'une clarté perçante. Je ne sais plus quoi dire, sinon que c'est une des plus beaux, des plus déchirants livres que j'ai lu cette année.

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Jan 03, 2008 Heather S. Jones rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Heather S. by: Susan Barniker

Shelves: non-fiction-gasp

wowowow -- i really make it a priority to read collections like this about women from more troubled parts of the world. this was gloriously lyical and tremendously sad!

i returned the book before i could record some of my favorite snippets. drat!

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May 19, 2013 Teresa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013

***1/2 "The stories linger on in your mind long after you've started a different narrative."
read more: http://likeiamfeasting.blogspot.co.uk...

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Jul 18, 2007 Michael Standaert marked it as to-read · review of another edition

A friend of mine, Tegan Raleigh, translated this collection of stories.

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May 24, 2013 Gaeta1 rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, around-the-world-2013, flashes-of-brilliances, just-pile-on-the-tragedy, read-2013, wanted-to-like-it-more, self-satisfied-author-alert

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About Assia Djebar

(the pen name of Fatma-Zohra Imalhayene)

Assia Djebar was born in Algeria to parents from the Berkani tribe of Dahra. She adopted the pen name Assia Djebar when her first novel, La Soif (Hunger) was published in 1957, in France where she was studying at the Sorbonne.

In 1958, she travelled to Tunis, where she worked as a reporter alongside Frantz Fanon, travelling to Algerian refugee camps on the...more

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