Vénus Khoury-Ghata Alphabets of Sand

Translated by Marilyn Hacker

Carcanet Press, Paperback, 88 pp, ISBN 978 1 85754 977 5.

Price:£12.95

Katherine Wootton

Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s collection, Alphabets of Sand, creates a folkloric world in which the dead speak, language is made of giddy and untamed sprite-like syllables, and the natural world’s personality is as lively as a child’s. A Lebanese writer living in France since 1973, Khoury-Ghata’s work reflects her bilingual and multi-national experience, with the traditions of Arabic storytelling and the effect of the Lebanese Civil War, which began shortly after she moved to France, clearly influencing her themes and tone. Although her writing is often wry and sometimes quite humorous, largely due to her amusing characterization of village life, she also spends a great deal of time examining loss, abandonment, and particularly death. The mythic tone she takes imagining the provenance and life of language and the activity and personality in nature allows a great deal of playfulness and flexibility, combining it with more straightforward depictions from memory and quotidian rural life.

The most obvious interest in this collection is her vision of the life of the dead, and the sorrow related to loss and abandonment. Some poems, like ‘Widow’ and ‘The Darkened Ones’ deal directly with the subject, where in others, such as ‘The Cherry Tree’ it appears more elliptically. The collection opens with ‘Widow’ (a poem left untitled in the original French), wherein a mythic She suffers, like a Penelope without hope or patience, while mourning in the days following “his death.” She cannot be still, pulling at the home around her and the outside environment. Khoury-Ghata gives both ‘she’ and the natural world a kind of elemental strangeness with touches of outright surrealism: “she painted her face with earth/ attacked the peaceful shadows of passers-by/ slit the throats of trees”. The Jungian surroundings seem a reflection of her own sorrow.

The following poem, ‘The Darkened Ones’, imagines the consciousness of the dead, slowly decomposing underground, trying to imitate the rhythms of life that they still vaguely remember: “we fit into each other/ imitating intercourse”. Khoury-Ghata here compares the state of death to a kind of restless sleep, repeating a chorus of “sheet or shroud, what’s the difference”, and giving the dead fading personalities as they try to resist the final elimination of consciousness. Death, for Khoury-Ghata, is not a silent nothing, but a faded, caged version of life.

In ‘The Cherry Tree’s Journey’, Khoury-Ghata continues to create characters from natural elements, looking at feelings of abandonment and strained familial relationships in a kind of grim nursery rhyme. The family cherry tree decides to travel to America, leaving the family, and its shadow, at home. Children talk to trees and father writes to the moon, but there is a morbid undercurrent, repeating the destructiveness of sorrow and loss. “The sun was thorny when the mother planted the child in the earth back at home/ she dismantled the house”; death appears briefly, unexpectedly, and continues to echo “The mother arranges the marbles by size and sadness/ the child will play with them when he’s less dead”. Loneliness becomes anger and insanity, and ultimately silence between the remaining family members.

Khoury-Ghata maintains her story-book tone in ‘The Seven Honeysuckle Sprigs of Wisdom’ and ‘Words’, both of which could easily begin with ‘once upon a time’. In the first, the most prosy of her poems, she allows her humour full expression. Told by a chorus of villagers, Khoury-Ghata has said the style is based on an Arabic tradition of storytelling where people in a village invent ever-more outlandish stories about their neighbors. Her characterizations here are wonderfully quirky, as is the playful way she continues to use language in a less surreal world. Mordecai the hairdresser “is neither believer nor heretic but balsamic like vinegar”, Maroun “claims to have downed a dozen quail with a stone/ and to have started a storm by pissing in the wind.”

In ‘Words’ Khoury-Ghata creates a founding myth for words, personifying to the point of deifying language. “Words/blind flight in the darkness/(…) they broke up into alphabets/ ate a different earth on each continent”. Letters then syllables spring up as races, interacting with the people on the land, growing and multiplying and generally being knocked around in the mess of civilization.

‘From Early Childhood’, while in keeping with the style of the other poems, feels more intimate and personal. An elegiac series of memories, often of a mother figure who seems at times like a hearth goddess, inspires awe with the simplest actions “My mother had her own way of undressing/ as one would strip the medals from a disgraced general”. Adventures with childhood friends also form part of the recollection, replete with the magical thinking of youth “We had brought back blue toucans in our hair/ breadfruit trees between our teeth”.

Marilyn Hacker is an experienced translator of Khoury-Ghata, and she seems to have taken the route of direct translation, rather than hunting for words that capture the sounds of the French. Given Khoury-Ghata’s mother tongue is Arabic and the French already feels something like translation, this is probably the best choice. However, there were a few times when Hacker seemed more visible. Literal translation can sometimes stretch the language in rather surprising ways, for instance, where ‘sharpnesses’ is used instead of ‘sharp edges’. Sometimes, however, I wondered whether a mistake hadn’t been made; ‘evaporate’ used where ‘vanish’ seemed more natural, the two are similar words in French, and using ‘star-debris’ where ‘star-dust’ should have been. Other times, I thought perhaps some poetic license would be acceptable; ‘armpit’ appears repeatedly, and ‘aiselle’(the French) is far more elegant a word. Despite these few instances, it is Khoury-Ghata’s words we read, and Hacker captures her unusual tone well.

The mythic tone Khoury-Ghata uses makes room for the surrealist language and description, creating a world where the people, ideas, and nature all have a consciousness and responsiveness to overwhelming feeling. Sometimes the depth of surreality seems deliberately abstruse rather than part of a supernatural world. However, the world she creates is tangible and language often brilliant in its originality. Alphabets of Sand is a surprising and ambitious collection, combining traditional storytelling style with mythic treatment of people and environment.