Silence on the Shores. (Algeria).

Cordova, Sarah Davies

Leila Sebbar. Silence on the Shores Mildred Mortimer, tr. Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2000. xix + 79 pages. $40 ($15 pb). ISBN 0-8032-4285-9 (9276-7 pb)

MILDRED MORTIMER'S TRANSLATION of Le silence des rives (1993) captures well the ebb and flow of Leila Sebbar's minimalist yet dense French prose. Written in the third person, ostensibly about a first-generation Maghrebi male immigrant to the south of France, the novella follows the course ... of a river reaching its estuary, of a life on the point of disappearing after a fall, of writing disseminated into a sea which lies between the shores of France and Algeria. Yet, with its striking cultivation of anonymity, the work focuses on a panoply of women characters whom the male protagonist has encountered: family members; cliched figures like the mother who died in childbirth, the cabaret owner in France who takes care of the young girls who have come looking for their male counterparts, hammam women, or singers; as well as three old women, alternatively referred to as witches, old hags, sisters; and Soraya, the only named person in the novel, the fortune-teller who will warn him of his mother's impending death.

Ubiquitous in the majority of the novella's anecdotes, death tropes most of the protagonist's reminiscences which eddy alongside his recurring thought of a broken promise to his mother that he would not allow the three wandering sisters to prepare her body in death. As he lies dying in France, wondering in epigraphs, in the first person, at the beginning of each of the novella's three parts who will whisper in his ear the prayer for the dead, memories wander in and out like dreamlike sequences, and elide, in the textual imaginary of life at death's door, the liminalities of real and metaphorical shores. Permeable crossings foil antithetically the intransigent demarcations of race, economics, and gender which structure the daily political realities on both sides of the Mediterranean, as the novella gestures toward the problematics of re-cognitions of others and their customs, toward a breaking of the silences that perpetuate the divides between exiles and inhabitants.

In Sebbar's novella, writing itself figuresas unreadable or (self-)censored. Even the protagonist, himself a writer, composes and destroys his texts, implicitly wishing his mother and his wife could correspond to ideal readers. Often moving between spaces with an "if" clause, Sebbar's ecriture expunges the undercurrent of the silence on the shores with a conditional to address the existential possibilities of a croise(e) for whom neither Algeria nor France is synonymous with home. Unfortunately, in the translation the arrangement of the printed text has been modified. The repeated epigraphs -- with slight variations in wording and order -- no longer stand alone, erasing the page setting's own bends and thus losing the representational reflexivity of a novella which images text and handwriting within its narrative as metaphor for existence at the estuary.

Sarah Davies Cordova
Marquette University