Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Women's Studies. Translated from the French by Peter Thompson. The death of Nabile Farès in August, 2016, was a great loss to Francophone North African letters. He worked closely with translator Peter Thompson over the years to see several of his works translated into English. They were working together on EXILE: WOMEN'S TURN at the time of his death, and we are proud to be able to release this work into English now.
The tri-consonantal Arabic root h.j.r. states the fact of exile in the nouns hejer/hejira, while simultaneously naming the woman Hagar, mother of Ishmael, she who personifies exile as the condition of woman in the Abrahamic cultures, where, as Nabile Farès says, she is 'an illegal in language.' And it is the great merit & beauty of these poems to speak to & of (without the male arrogance of claiming to speak for) the women (of his native Algeria, & of elsewhere & not only in the Arab world) in their double exile, 'these women [who] resembled / Clandestine vowels / Of the Unwanted Languages, ' humbly declaring his work to be 'your voyage // my translation.'--Pierre Joris
