the self bathes in absence

MOHAMED YOUNSI

I drink memories.

SYLVIA PLATH

Was this self of mine a foreigner, or was it them?

I cut out the question. On the beach, blurry:

spleen, intestine, pancreas lying among the

crayfish.

Over Souk Ahras and Montréal the same fossils

rained down.

I exhumed exiled bones.

My father’s tears.

When I was tiny, I became responsible for the

insulation and clotheslines. From Montréal to

Souk Ahras: stretch the pelts. Certain people

spoke sickness to me. Some were mercenary.

I said nothing back, munching cherries of

silence. I treasured pink hatchets and wooden

bumblebees, and I hated the rumours humming

across my skin.

The wind didn’t shake me. I shook the wind.

Every Friday another cyclone took off, hanging

the clothing of corpses over the ocean.

When I was microscopic, my mother’s name and

cord disappeared.

My brother and I were sailors, and our couches

were rafts. Smurfs, cupcake dolls, and trolls

sailed with us toward the mirage.

The tide swept the floor away. A giant piranha

watched us. We had to stop the armchair from

capsizing against a rocky atoll. We couldn’t risk

our ankles in the foamy sea.

Our parents meandered through the continent.

Where was Souk Ahras hiding?

I was five, and I didn’t know that girls of my age

littered the Mediterranean like chunks of plasma.

My brother and I were not sailors. The couches

were not rafts.

Childhood was true and truth was false.

The basement loomed, dark as in the beginning.

Suitcases, mops, teddy bears: objects spread

their jaws wide. Sometimes the river seeped in,

and pikefish caught hold of my gums.

In the centre of all this sat a statue of a fisherman

and his line. My uncle? From the walls, living

portraits of dead ancestors watched me.

In this room I tasted peppercorns of mercury,

I devoured words and lymph.

I met Ouanessa in this room.

In the cellar of solitude, I composed Souk Ahras

for sand and fog. Gazelles, camels, cheetahs . . .

I inherited a desert.

In this mysterious town all the men became my

father, all the women my mother, and I was the

mixed girl. I shed my skin in seismic tremors.

My grandmother Ouanessa watered victims and

grapevines. At the market they traded olives

and buttermilk. Then the night came, tattooing

Souk Ahras in henna.

And Ouanessa opened me, shattering herself like

stained glass.

I was a character in someone else’s dream.

To stay grounded in time, I sculpted birds and

climbed dunes of origami.

The other slept. I didn’t sleep anymore.

My body’s scaffolding escaped me: my biceps

came undone, my vulva crumbled, my windpipe

grew into a cedar. Only my underground skin

and my rainbow femurs lasted.

I was a character in a dead girl’s dream.

As soon as it snowed, I gathered only July.

I burned like harissa on the tongue. If I spoke up,

wild animals struck me down.

In every storm, Ouanessa came to see me.

She offered a sunbeam of quartz and spice;

she was my grandmother. And when I collapsed,

Ouanessa fixed me with prayers and pistachios.

For my grandmother had become the unnamed

meaning behind the name we shared.

Every month, Grandma Ouanessa’s skull grew in

my uterus, then trickled out in cranberry drops.

My faith didn’t look like a berry at all.

I cut off my breasts to starve the tumours.

I threw them in the river. A willow tree ate my

shoulder, and I lived on within the ancestors of

paper.

A century later, Ouanessa learned to sew with

her mouth.

The moon sketched a hot crescent from Souk

Ahras to Montréal. The sky didn’t close that

night’s-eye.

I looked for the grave of my grandmother, killed

by her heart at thirty-two, ripped apart by a son.

The muscle continues to beat in protest.

And Ouanessa patches me back together with

skins of rage and a thread of a poem.

Rosebushes grow over Ouanessa. There were

clubbed owls, construction zones of crossed-out

words. I grew older surrounded by appearances.

Ghosts hung from the stars. I cried, a little girl

wrapped in their wings.

I watched the abyss.

The abyss held my gaze.

Ouanessa slept in amniotic fluid. She had neither

past, nor future. I wanted to bring her back to life,

but I was in chains, mauled by jackals.

Help! Help me!

Beauty didn’t react. She just combed her reflection.

Today if Ouanessa sleeps, murdered, it’s because

of silence.

Pain disfigured my vagina. Purple milk, curdling,

overflowing like a volcano, scorched.

A monstrous dwarf clawed at my walls. Black

bass swam upstream in my stomach, undeterred

by doctors — pale beasts — who prescribed

medications as they grazed in their pastures.

Was this the dead woman trembling within my

name? Or was this the fetus lost in my uterus like

a whiplash lost in patience?

I didn’t know. The truth seeped through, and so

did I, as liquid as vanilla.

Armed with a mirror I explored raspberry cliffs

and crags

and watched myself drip, covered in primroses,

from the lips of an ovary.

On the brink of bleeding, I raved madly,

convinced of my own infertility. Souk Ahras

would end here.

I threw my brain against a window. It rolled,

rolled, collected filth, storks, bottles.

It came back to me full of the tales I’d drunk —

playing pirates, bogeyman, Bluebeard; chewing

arsenic marshmallows.

Giving birth to the childhood was my consolation.

Jellyfish dried up on my chest. Fear gave way to

a singular desire.

I floated between Souk Ahras and Montréal.

A ghost ship rotted in the depths of tragedy.

From a porthole, a saltwater grandma waved.

My fingers lashed like eels. I tried to capture

them, but I got tangled in seaweed.

Back at home, I washed palms full of sharks and

regrets, not my hands.

Crosses dotted the countryside. A new church

overlooked the ocean, summoning the faithful

and the faithless. Prayers popped like balloons.

In the crowd I picked out foggy ancestors.

What was that woman screaming, the one with

my name? What was that father murmuring,

haunted by tunnels?

A lion gutted my sight. Mystery left my tongue.

My teeth shattered.

There, the war went on. Here, peace endured.

Maybe a parent died under a bomb, maybe a

soldier smothered a child under a mauve pillow.

No one knew where my uncle lay.

There are ashes at the border. A corpse spills

verbs across the page.

At ten I learned that my grandfather had died.

I also learned his name: Mohammed. I was more

shaken by his name than his death. I didn’t know

him, either in Algeria or in myself. Every day,

I dreamed up a new grandpa.

Mohammed had one missing hand and one

normal hand. As he aged, the former grew back

and the latter wore away. No longer distinguishing

between the whole hand and the partial one, he

cut them both off with a sabre. His granddaughter,

who was passing by at the time, took the blood

for juice and drank it.

Since then, green slashes of loss

grow like cacti.

The rumour: my uncle Mourad was a colonel

during the massacre. The racism: he passed

down dangerous DNA. The reality: I swallowed

raw tarantulas of amnesia.

Mourad was a name without a face.

Love him like a loss.

Glimmers of light shone through the fires I’d lit

in my hair.

I clung to an illusion — was it my aunt Elseghira

or my mother’s bloody breast? — giving

electroshocks. Now memory snaps the neck of

the story.

Snowflakes fall in my memory, my body ripped

apart by Elseghira.

I roamed through a maze of names. Spirits

pierced my flesh, leaving legends and pebbles

for me.

I devoured their truth, the teeth of God, like dice.

Little girl, I drew their bones and gnawed them

down.

Ghosts snapped the house’s tibias. My father set

forgetfulness-traps. Spirits skirted around them

and took human forms.

My nerves crumbled like chalk.

I watched the lie go off like a firework.

The film of my birth.

Our genealogy unrolled from my father’s skull

like a garland. Baptisms and bodies littered

town squares, parks, hopscotch grids.

They were renounced, and it crushed them.

When my inattention pressed down on them too,

their shadows stained, stained, stained me.

As if I was dirty, as if I am dirty, as if nothing

washes me clean.

I’ve been afraid ever since then of destroying

ghosts. My own. Those of others.

The ones I create.

The dead lined up, plates at the ready. From their

cemeteries from Souk Ahras to Montréal, they

longed for cumin, they begged for wheaten doves.

The feast was at my house, the feast was me.

We cooked, cooked more, couscous and tagine

and merguez sausages of dust. At the centre of

the buffet were harissa and my father’s remains.

I hoped to see my grandmother, born in Sakiet

Sidi Youssef and deceased in Souk Ahras, but her

recipe no longer existed on this earth.

The dead lined up and I wandered among them,

a little cannibal with no grandma and no stomach.

The end of the world. I watched for the apocalypse,

my palms deboned like cutlets. Lightning bolts

poured into my glass and I drank them without

an esophagus.

Sometimes a hazy Algerian uncle called out to me.

I didn’t reply.

A camel made of ashes broke through my reality.

I fell silent, watched the inferno, watched meteors

and titans of hatred. I fell asleep, sure I was dead,

surprised by the breath that whistled through

my dreams like bullets.

The next day, the world still existed, but I didn’t.

I was putting out fires in the living room. I put

one out, but then another caught in a photo album.

I couldn’t find a fire extinguisher. I hid the cat in

the piano.

Maman had taken maman away. Papa had taken

papa away. And the basement held my brother

hostage.

I apologized to the past.

I fought fires in the living room.

I was exhausted but I kept growing, ripening

with my phantom limbs.

They shared bites of matlouh, savoured hazelnuts,

apricots, cactus pears. These fruits embodied my

father, and they ate them. He bled, holey as a lake.

I fought off sleep, afraid that the ghosts would

snag the knit of my dreams.

To save myself, I drowned myself in the pond

of an O.

The headlines crushed my phalanges. I poured

sugar into a cup full of teeth, Souk Ahras in

light coffee.

I stirred the city with a spoon. I sipped its

outskirts. My father poured me a fresh thought.

I didn’t confess to him what it was.

Swords appeared across my throat, though I was

not a forest.

I contemplated the corpses in an empty

room. The door wouldn’t close — aunts, uncles,

grandmothers, grandfathers, all lay in a heap.

An unknown family called to me thought the

flutes of our veins. Incomprehensible streams

ran through me.

The empty rooms emptied out again. My aunties?

Maybe dead, maybe alive, I had no idea, and I

didn’t recognize the colour of my skin, and that’s

why I tore it off

like I rip away the fiction of my memories.

Why dismember the carcass of absence?

I dug up imaginary roots. I examined the horizon

not to see it, but to feel my eyes.

Armed with autumn, I waited for cliff-eagles.

Absence taken form.

The muscles behind the motion, I scraped

away epitaphs until I drew blood. Under the

inscriptions syllables emerged — Elseghira,

Mourad, Mohammed whispered to me of loss.

Young ancestors encircled me. I was full of

centres. The light leaked sound, but I wasn’t

worried.

I was drawing closer to my roots, and my future.

How could I remember these women I’d never

met? I grew up in their shadows, brushing

against the translucence of their tunics.

Chili peppers tasted of famine and sand. Camels

refused to wear their blinders.

My father lost his mother tongue, and I lost my

father’s tongue.

Loss was a language.

The years held me by the scruff. Dawn’s face was

burning. Death’s face was frozen. Writing drove

me back and forth from one to the other.

Fickle animal, would I ever go to that city of

mint? Would I go, in my madness, with these

women who were unknown but adored?

The clamour of my life.

And so I spent my childhood opening coffins.

There were still intact incisors and eyelashes,

there were centipedes of mystery.

I dishonoured nothing. I didn’t eat the dead.

I only wanted to burn in the gravity of it all.

Maybe no poem could replace what was unseen.

Trapdoors formed from imprints in my memory.

No one saw its birth. The desert was real, pita on

the ground.

Nothing remained but the sharp-toothed saws

behind simple gestures, terror

and goodness.

Come on, Ouanessa.

Let’s save the living child.