The Revolution Amid the Revolution

“Trusting in a well-travelled subjectivity, one well tempered, that has acquired a patina; trusting in the choice to move books to one’s desk or bedside table, to move them onto one pile or another, to upend the pile itself; trusting to luck in book shops or with dealers, to luck alone. I glimpse Cossery’s name in a window display and, gradually, it is Choukri’s sharp tone, Genet’s choppy whisper, the discordance of Guyotat’s voice that I hear. And over all of them is imposed that of Yacine.Getting home, I turn again to Le Poète comme un boxeur. His voice has the implacable calm of the justly proven, both contemporary and ancient. And is familiar too.

His contours are the double of an old Vietnamese poet I once knew. The two of them shared common ground: the fight against colonisers; the French language when it “doubled back against those who used it as a means of oppression,” as Yacine wrote; affection for the illiterate folk who recite poetry; opposition to governments that muzzled freedom. And subsequently re-education following wars of liberation: social death for one; multiple exiles “in the lion’s den” and vagrancy for the other…”