Another Paris Morning

The seventh of January 1992. Another Paris morning: rain and leaden sky. It is 8:30 and darkness is still total. Only the windows light the jet-black morning in this working class suburb where I live. The roar of the cars and the buses penetrates the double glass. People are going to their factories and businesses while my papers, waiting, remain blank.

Why am I in Paris? Why am I here and there, there and here, in migrations that started thirty-five years ago? Moscow-Damascus-Kuwait, Beirut-Algiers-Damascus.

Beirut-Cyprus-Beirut-Damascus...Aden, Cyprus, Belgrade, Tunis, and at last: Paris.

What am I doing in Paris?

What am I doing in non-Arab land?

Exile includes the idea of abrogation—abrogating the relationship of the individual with heaven, earth and society. There is a vertical line connecting heaven—where the worshipped is—with earth—where the ancestors lie in the long repose of death. And then is a horizontal line ordering the village or the town where homes, memories and childhood playgrounds are. At the point of intersection between those two lines stands the individual.

The horror of exile is in the uprooting of the individual from this point of intersection and transplanting him in another spot, which is not a point of intersection, where neither heaven is the primordial one nor the ancestors are ancestors; where there are no homes, no memories and no childhood playgrounds.

What remains therefore?

Hardship only: toil and pain in order to preserve the primordial composition, the stock that is threatened by extinction, and the root that is drying up.

But the rules of the artistic process make such preservation an extremely laborious task. The more someone makes an advance in art’s way the more his need for deeper roots increases—deeper roots at the point of intersection, not in the soil of exile.

Copyright © 2007 Saadi Youssef. All rights reserved.

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