Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora
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Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora
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Overview
This book examines a group of multicultural Jewish poets to address the issue of multilingualism within a context of minor languages and literatures, nationalism, and diaspora. It introduces three writers working in minor or threatened languages who challenge the usual consensus of Jewish literature: Algerian Sadia Lévy, Israeli Margalit Matitiahu, and Argentine Juan Gelman. Each of them—Lévy in French and Hebrew, Matitiahu in Hebrew and Ladino, and Gelman in Spanish and Ladino—expresses a hybrid or composite Sephardic identity through a strategic choice of competing languages and intertexts. Monique R. Balbuena's close literary readings of their works, which are mostly unknown in the United States, are strongly grounded in their social and historical context. Her focus on contemporary rather than classic Ladino poetry and her argument for the inclusion of Sephardic production in the canon of Jewish literature make Homeless Tongues a timely and unusual intervention.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804797498 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/27/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Homeless Tongues
Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora
By Monique R. Balbuena
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9749-8
CHAPTER 1
MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS
Reading Sadia Lévy
Pour accorder l'instrument ...
À Gustave Kahn.
Octobre 1928.
In memoriam.
Amusons-nous, ce soir, Muse musicienne
D'assembler en sonnet quatorze vers légers
De ceux-là que flûtait la syrinx des bergers
Aux temps arcadiens de l'églogue ancienne ...
Je n'ai qu'un instrument d'âme phénicienne!
Cependant joie ou deuil, rire et pleurs mélangés,
Je ne sais point d'accents qui lui soient étrangers
Et par lui j'ai ma voix comme a chacun la sienne.
Mystère d'atavisme en l'immense Athanor!
Un psalmiste, un lévi m'a légué son Kinnor ...
Ce kinnor qui sonnait aux fêtes solennelles
Des Hébreux dans le Temple élevé par Hiram,
Je l'ai pris pour chanter mes tendres villanelles:
Formosam Kehatus Ardebat Séfiram.
To Tune the Instrument ...
To Gustave Kahn.
October 1928.
In memoriam.
Let's amuse ourselves tonight, musician Muse
Crafting into sonnet fourteen light verses
Of those the shepherds' flute played
In the Arcadian times of the ancient eclogue ...
I have but one instrument of Phoenician soul!
Yet joy or grief, laughter and cries mingled,
I know no accent stranger to it,
And through it I have my voice, as each has his own.
Mystery of atavism in the immense Athanor!
A psalmist, a Levite has handed me his Kinnor ...
This kinnor which sounded during the solemn festivals
Of the Hebrews at the Temple Hiram built,
I took to sing my sweet villanelles:
Formosam Kehatus Ardebat Séfiram.
(my translation)
"Pour accorder l'instrument ..." is a remarkable mixture of linguistic and literary references: it combines Latin poetry, marked by images from classical mythology, with Hebrew poetry, bearing its own linguistic and religious affiliations. All of this is done, not only in French, but in a sonnet written in alexandrines, a poetic genre and a verse meter most closely identified with French.
The poem's two primary references, Virgil's pastorals and the Psalmist's songs, merge in the "immense Athanor" — the alchemist's furnace, the crucible of transmutations. The term "athanor" itself comes from the Arabic al-tannúr, "oven" (Hebrew tanur), adding yet another defining cultural strain to this voice to which no accent is a stranger. This sonnet indeed thematizes the gestation of an individual poetic voice, combining seemingly disparate elements, which constitute the prime matter of a complex, composite identity, just as the raw material in the athanor is the basis of the philosopher's stone.
The sonnet reveals characteristics central to its author's work and to my study, since it calls attention to multilingualism and a strategic choice of genres and intertexts. Using other and minor languages in a body of work written mainly in a major language, the poet problematizes the relation of minor and major languages, showing that minor languages have the capacity to challenge and reinscribe dominant languages, and also emphasizes the multilingualism of minority cultures. The poet in question is Sadia Lévy (1875–1951), an Algerian Jew who wrote in Oran in the early twentieth century, the symbolist author of hebraized latinate verses in French.
Lévy's work mixes poetic devices and combines languages and cultural discourses. The result is a radical, boundary-bashing, category-crashing taste of what poetry is capable of — indeed of what poetry is allowed to do — and a fascinating glimpse of how poetry can represent or express identity. It both reflects and exemplifies the very intricate cultural negotiations that Jews, in their complicated position, engaged in in colonial Algeria.
In Lévy's case, the issue of language is complicated by the Algerian context. Living in an Arab country under French rule, he chooses to write in the language of the colonizer. Not only does he adopt French, but he revels in both its expressive possibilities and its poetic traditions — an embrace that helps to explain why he has been consistently overlooked. Simultaneously, he chooses not to write in Arabic, the dominant language of daily life in Algeria, even if it then carried no political power. His French, however, is far from a mimicking of Algeria's rulers. It is not only laden with the references of a classical French education — with sources from ancient Greece to the Latins and across the spectrum of European letters — but is also infused with Hebrew and some Ladino, languages that are most definitely minor whether in the Arabic or the French context. Because he is an Algerian Jewish poet writing in colonial Algeria, the discussion of Sadia Lévy's work forces me to enter another controversial domain, since Lévy calls into question the boundaries of francophone studies and our understanding of the country's relationship to "colonial" identity. The more we search, the more complex our assessment of this forgotten author becomes. His combination of Jewish and symbolist discourses, and the mixture of languages in his work, does far more than mine the colonial language; Sadia Lévy's unique mixture reveals the poet's simultaneous attraction to and ambivalence about France, and shows his efforts to establish poetically an original Jewish-Maghrebi identity.
* * *
Sadia Lévy was born in Oran, Algeria, into a bourgeois Jewish family that had arrived in Sidi Bel Abbés from Gibraltar and Tétouan. He lived there most of his life, excelling in the city's lycée, except for a number of years he spent in Paris, where he studied at the École des sciences politiques and frequented the symbolist milieu. Besides French, his language of choice, Lévy knew Spanish, Hebrew, and the Judeo-Maghrebi dialects of Spanish and Arabic.
He began writing poetry in 1894. In 1896, collaborating with the pied-noir (i.e., French Algerian) novelist Robert Randau, he published Rabbin, one of the first Algerian novels written in French (according to Guy Dugas, the first francophone work by an Arab Muslim author would appear only twenty-five years later). Described by Dugas as a "coarse depiction of the Moroccan Jewish community and its desires for emancipation," Rabbin is a novel that discusses and reveals North African Jewish customs and social practices. It tells the story of a Moroccan rabbi from Tétouan, fascinated with France, who increasingly frenchifies himself; he slowly abandons customs, language, and religion, eventually leaving the mellah (Jewish quarter), and moving to Sidi Bel Abbés in Algeria. There he proceeds to adopt secular cultural practices and becomes a successful businessman. Randau described Rabbin as a novel depicting "the anguish and the conflicts of conscience of a Moroccan Jew extracted from his ethnic milieu, still half-savage, and taken to civilized Algeria, where the vibrant activity surprised him." The novel's plot introduces issues of modernization and acculturation then central to the lives of North African Jews.
This novel presents a problem to the literary historiography of Maghrebi literature in French. Guy Dugas claims that, when published, it was not well received by the Jewish community in Oran, not only because of its negative portrayal of them, but also because it was written in French, a choice that appeared to be a deliberate attempt by the author to break away from his community. Linguistically, therefore, the novel appeared to emphasize its own controversial themes, reflecting the apparent tension between an old order, guided by religious principles and traditional communal life, and a new one, where the influence of French culture and ideals changed the manner in which Jews saw both the world and themselves. Commenting on the reception of Rabbin by the Jewish community in Algeria, Guy Dugas states:
Writing, especially about oneself, means, in effect, to search for exile within the group, to try to extract oneself from it, to exorcise one's link to his or her own, to the collective. Such a distancing is even more obvious when a writer decides to express him- or herself in another language, and to an audience who are strangers to the original group. It is precisely because writing in a foreign language — and often for foreign publishers — was regarded in the interwar years as a desire for a break, that the still powerful Algerian Jewry reacted so violently to the publishing of novels such as Rabbin or Le sein blanc [by Elissa Rhaïs].
But even though Rabbin came out in 1896, no account of "francophone literature," "littérature maghrébine d'expression française," "littérature indigène d'expression française," or any of the other terms used to refer to literature written in French by autochthonous North Africans, will include Sadia Lévy or his pioneer novel.
According to Dugas, "the first volumes [of Judeo-Maghrebi literature] are published in the beginning of the [twentieth] century, about thirty years earlier than those by Muslim Arab authors." Dugas adds that Rabbin was also the first Jewish-Maghrebi work in French ("if we exclude a vaudeville [comic work] mimeographed in Constantinople in 1880"); the first book in French by a Tunisian author appeared in 1919, and the first by a Moroccan author, in 1925. Mildred Mortimer does not acknowledge Lévy's novel and identifies Mohammed (Caïd) Ben Chérif as the author of the first novel written by an Algerian in French. His novel Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier [Arab soldier in the French army] (reprinted in Paris by Publisud in 1997) was published only in 1920. She mentions another early novel, the 1925 Zohra: La femme du mineur, by Abdelkader Hadj Hamou (Fikri), and the famous tales of Cagayous, written in 1894 by the European Auguste Robinet (Musette). Mortimer cites no Jewish Maghrebi work. In "Inscribing a Maghrebian Identity in French," Farida Abu-Haidar also comments on Ben Chérif's novel, erroneously considered "the first example of Francophone fiction by a Maghrebian" (18).
Also ignoring Lévy's Rabbin, Jean Déjeux agrees that Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier is "the first [novel] published by an Algerian" (19), and that Fikri's Zohra: La femme du mineur is the second. Only Abdelkader Djeghloul refers to the Kabyle writers Mouloud Feraoun and Taous Amrouche, identified with the movement for independence in the 1950s, but he argues that in fact Algerian literature in French does not begin with them. According to Djeghloul, the first nouvelle was La vengeance du Cheikh, written by Rahal in 1891, but the first novel (roman) was Bouri Ahmed's Musulmans et chrétiens, published in episodes (feuilletons) in the newspaper El Hackin 1912. Djeghloul rejects the characterization of this literature in French by indigenous Algerian writers as "assimilationist," calling that judgment "too quick and erroneous," although it seems well accepted among scholars of francophonie. "Most of the time the critics only talk about the authors who appeared during the 1950s, forgetting those who preceded them, either because their works are hard to find or, as it was written, because they had the 'assimilated gaze' [le regard assimilé]," Déjeux explains.
Déjeux acknowledges Jewish participation in Maghrebi literature, but only in Tunisia and Morocco: "We don't hold on to the authors of Jewish origin in Algeria: the 1870 Crémieux Decree turned the members of the Algerian Jewish community into Frenchmen." He adds that it was in Tunisia, in 1919, that Jews first wrote stories about the hara, the Jewish quarter, citing names such as J. Vehel, Vitalis Danon, Rivel, and Benatar.
This brief overview offers intriguing data. Since Algerian Jews were collectively made French citizens in 1870, scholars of francophone literature do not consider their literature "Algerian," and most often do not consider it at all. If not necessarily in limbo, these works tend to be erased from the record. Mortimer acknowledges Auguste Robinet, who was a pied-noir. Somehow his French family and citizenship do not trump his place of birth or preclude his inclusion among the "Algerians," a recognition not extended to the Jewish authors, even though the ancestors of most Algerian Jews had lived in the country for some two thousand years.
The fact that Algerian Jews were granted French citizenship is the repeated argument, in Jean Déjeux's words, for not "hold[ing] on to authors of Jewish origin in Algeria." But Déjeux does not seem to see citizenship as an issue in the case of the "indigenous French citizen" (indigène citoyen Français) Hadj Hamou (Fikri), a member of the frenchified indigenous elite, whose Zohra he regards as "the second novel written in French by an Algerian." Hadj Hamou was a Freemason, a professor of Arabic and vice president of the Association of Algerian Writers, founded by the "Algerianists." Like Sadia Lévy, he co-authored a book with Robert Randau, in his case Les compagnons du jardin (1933).
In a rare reference to Lévy as an indigène, Claude Lanziou employs the phrase "literary mixing" to explain the connection between Randau and Lévy and Randau and Fikri, saying: "This attention to the autochthonous population, this desire to depict its life and aspirations as truthfully as possible, explains why Robert Randau practiced literary mixing by writing some of his works with a Jew — Sadia Lévy — and a Muslim — Mohamed Fikri (Abd el-Kader Hadj Hamou).
Generally, though, Lévy remains absent from accounts of Maghrebi writing in French or francophone literature. The criteria used to exclude Rabbin and its author, Lévy, but to include Cagayous and Musette and Zohra and Fikri, do not seem very consistent. The three authors were Algerian, all of them were French citizens; one was Jewish, one was Christian, and one was Muslim. Claiming the privileges of French citizenship as the reason to strip Jewish authors from their part in the cultural and literary makeup of Algeria seems to be an ideological choice. France granted and denied such privileges at whim, showing the precariousness of a title to citizenship that can be arbitrarily revoked. If colonial France decreed the Jews to be French, France likewise stripped them of French citizenship under the Nazi-friendly Vichy government, leaving them with none. No other group was neither French nor Algerian nor anything else — that is, stateless, literally without documents — a situation that revealed the essential fragility of their position, as Jacques Derrida has so insistently asserted. However, in this case, as I said earlier, the double standard is clear: inasmuch as he was a Jewish French citizen, Lévy and his Rabbin do not count as Algerian; since he was a Muslim French citizen, Fikri and his Zohra do.
We shall return to this double standard later; for now, let's continue to explore Lévy and his other works. Besides Rabbin, Lévy collaborated with Robert Randau on XI journées en force (1902) and the unfinished, unpublished novel El. He also co-edited, with René Ghil and Jean Royère, the Parisian journal Écrits pour l'art, publishing, among others, F.-T. Marinetti and Louis de Gonzague-Frick. Lévy was one of the principal contributors to the journal La Phalange, edited by Jean Royère, who published Apollinaire and Valéry-Larbaud's first verses to appear in print. Through their role as editors, these "marginal symbolists" served as mediators for symbolists, futurists, and cubists; their role, though rarely acknowledged, demonstrates the openness of the margins of such a movement to multiple and partial affiliations, allowing innovation to penetrate the center.
Between March 1905 and February 1906, Lévy saw his new novel La geste éparse de Kehath ben Lévi: Faits et dits recueillis pour un essai sur le stylisme (Kehath ben Lévi's Scattered Action: Facts and Sayings Collected for an Essay on Stylistics) almost entirely published in installments in Écrits pour l'art. Its hero is an aesthete, living in isolation, surrounded by art and books and immersed in mystical thoughts. Quoting Edgar Allan Poe, Nietzsche and Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), among others, and using kabbalistic images and concepts, Kehath is a sort of Jewish version of Huysmans's famous protagonist Des Esseintes. "L'après-midi d'un styliste" (The Afternoon of a Stylist; echoing Stéphane Mallarmé's poem "L'après-midi d'un faune"), "La Bastille d'Ivoire" (The Ivory Bastille), and "Insomnie et la Vêprée" (Insomnia and Vespers) are the titles of some of the novel's "episodes." In La Phalange, Lévy also published "Quelques Psaumes," his own "rhythmic translations" from the biblical Book of Psalms, which Jean Royère says in his preface to Lévy's Abishag, "garnered the respect of Hebrew scholars and the admiration of a fervent admirer of the Bible such as the poet Francis Vielé-Griffin, among others. The critics were unanimous in lauding his new translation." Around 1933, following a tracheotomy, Lévy published his notes on his aphasia in a book titled Sensations d'un égorgé.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Homeless Tongues by Monique R. Balbuena. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis introduction first introduces poet Clarisse Nicoïdski as a Sephardic poet who shifts languages and genres when she moves from French to Ladino, and prose to poetry, when confronting the death of her mother, her people and her culture. Then the introduction briefly presents Deleuze and Guattari's formula for "minor literatures" and the counter-arguments this book presents to it. The text then proceeds discussing basic concepts that are central to the book and to the poets here discussed: genres of Sephardic poetry, the Judeo-Spanish language, its development and its many names, multilingualism and Jewish langauges, and Diaspora.
1Minor Literatures and Major Laments: Reading Sadia Lévy chapter abstractThis chapter presents Sadia Lévy, an Algerian poet who attempted to inscribe himself in the gallery of French Symbolists while writing in a French enriched by infusions of Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish, activating biblical and Kabbalistic genres in his poems. Lévy allows us to look at the development of modernism from a different angle, and serves as an example that will prompt changes in Jewish historical narrative, destabilizing certain views of Jewish culture, more specifically about Sephardi and North African Jews. Writing in French in colonial Algeria, Lévy makes us rethink the boundaries that define a French and a Francophone author. Having written one of the first Maghrebi novels in French, his precedence has gone unrecognized because as a Jew, he is considered French—an ideological exclusionary act that misses his ambivalent position and does not recognize that the privilege of his French citizenship is more artificial than ever.
2At the Crossroads: Greece, Israel and Spain in Margalit Matitiahu's Hebrew-Ladino Poetry chapter abstractChapter 2, on Israeli contemporary poet Margalit Matitiahu, focuses on her bilingual Hebrew-Ladino books—especially her first volumes, Kurtijio Kemado and Alegrika. It discusses the critical reception of her work within Hebrew and Ladino literatures and, observing that her readers and critics are for the most part still divided across linguistic borders, offers a reading of two poems in both their Hebrew and Ladino versions, with attention to the specificities of the languages and their respective audiences, and observing the poet's strategies of self-translation. This chapter also brings to the foreground the politics of Jewish languages and questions the concepts of diasporic and nationalist identities, pointing to a critique of the nation and the attempted creation of a homogenizing national subject. It also touches upon the place of the Shoah in Sephardic memory and identity.
3Archaeology of the Language/Archaeology of the Self: Juan Gelman's Journey to Ladino chapter abstractChapter 3, about Argentine Ashkenazi poet Juan Gelman, destabilizes notions of fixed identity and breaks down dichotomic divisions of ethnic origins as it traces Gelman's gradual rewriting of himself as a Sephardic Jew at the very moment when he most identifies as a Jew. It reads Gelman's bilingual Ladino-Spanish collection Dibaxu as the culmination of his rewritings of Spanish canonical authors. It focuses on the "process of self-Sephardization," initially triggered by Gelman's historical condition as a political exile, and then fed by his translation and rewriting of canonical medieval Spanish Hebrew poets. He proceeds in a linguistic "excavation" of the many layers in the Spanish language, and writes himself as a Sephardic Jew. In opposition to an oppressive regime with which his language is associated, Gelman makes a deterritorializing move and radically assumes a new language: the Jewish, exilic and minor Ladino.
Conclusion: Wither chapter abstractThe conclusion revisits the main arguments of the book and discusses new developments and possibilities for the creative production in Ladino. It seeks to turn the focus from the atmosphere of death that surrounds the language to an acknowledgement, or even celebration, of Sephardim as present-day, creative, living Jews.