This Translation Tuesday, Tunisian writer Ines Abassi pens a powerful story of a woman who escapes her violent husband in order to furnish her account of things. In a breathless first-person narration captured brilliantly by translators Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza—who also translated Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian, our October 2021 Book Club selection—the power of this piece comes from its agile movement between the mind’s self-doubt and the certainty of one’s bodily experience. This memorable story shows us how Ines Abassi is a compelling voice working in Arabic today.
“I have wanted to translate this short story from the moment I read it in the Egyptian cultural magazine Mirit in 2019 because of its powerful expression of resistance. Resistance here is manifested in the ability to say no, to challenge the toxic masculine mentality that sees women’s bodies as a commodity to be consumed on demand. Resistance is also manifested in the author’s alternation of description, contemplation, and the narrative, in which time overlaps in a way that expresses the complexity of life and relationships. Inas Al Abbasi, one of the most important writers of her generation, is able to express in this short story the inevitability of continuing to confront and challenge violence in closed rooms and in an open writing in which colors, music, and events overlap to create food for a broken soul.”
—Miled Faiza
The night is stained with light.
It might end, this night, with a translucent fog covering the tops of the cypresses, like last night. Or it might end with a pale morning, crowned with a laurel wreath of terror and with an urge to run away, like the morning of that one summer night. Where does the road home start from? From the last house that I escaped from? Or from the last hurriedly booked hotel room?
I remember clearly: his hand was around my neck. The cloudy look in his eyes. The moon was alone outside, with no poems to praise its illusory beauty. I remember, at the same time, the delicate light flowing into the room through the open windows. We were in our room. We were together and his hand was around my neck, on that night and the other nights like it throughout the years, his hand pressing on my soul.
The road winds through the trees. There are scattered farms on each side of the road, and I see ducks and other farm animals here and there. When my heart starts to pound at the heights, I close my eyes. I remember my eyes clouding over from the pain. The scene in front of me is extravagantly beautiful. My eyes drink in the greenery at every bend, until I forget the hands that choked me one summer night. I feel dizzy from the extravagant beauty of the road as it ascends toward Bouisse, and I forget.
They say that children with iron deficiency will peel the lead paint off the walls and eat it. What about souls with love deficiency? They feed on the bark of trees—every single one, the trees on the road as well as the forest trees. Souls that are hungry for love touch trees, get close to them and embrace them. I did this every time, in every trip I took after becoming free of him, and from his hand and the frying pan. Every time I stopped the rental car and get out to embrace the trees.
A life can completely change between one night and another.
Tonight, it is Christmas night and time is passing lightly, carrying the smell of warm mulled wine, fragrant with cinnamon and lemon slices. Lovers, regardless of their different colors and ages, are decorating the night. Lovers, children, old people, women with their short skirts and transparent black stockings. Santa Claus hanging on the walls, in a pose that gives the impression that he is about to ascend toward windows to sneak inside the houses to pass out his presents. Celebrations are everywhere and the night is dancing with its light, like a carol I can’t quite place. The night is heavy with Arabic words in the back streets of Toulouse and the big Algerian flag that is flapping high from the balcony of one of the apartments.
Things happen, in the night stained with light.
“It was my favorite frying pan.”
I repeated this sentence in front of the judge, in front of the people in the courthouse. And a few months earlier I had repeated to the policeman at the police station and a few hours before that, that night, I repeated it to my neighbor Lamia when I fled to her house.
“It was my favorite frying pan—it never sticks.”
I repeated the same sentence for days while looking through my tears to the dented frying pan. I held on to it, clung to it with a shaky hand, with a heavy head and a bruised and scratched up body. I carried it as a guilty verdict, I carried it as an accusation, as a life buoy.
The day I kissed him for the first time on the beach, secretly behind the rock of lovers, I didn’t know that I would choose him out of all men to be my husband. I also didn’t know that he would beat me whenever I said no to him. I didn’t know that the word “no” sends him into an insane rage. And I didn’t know that my favorite frying pan would become his weapon. That night when I shook the hungry bird of desire off of me and dared to tell him no, my life flipped upside down. In the beginning, he strangled me and tried to pin me on the bed under him. I don’t know how I kicked him and slipped away from him. I frantically gasped for air. I don’t know why I ran to the kitchen. We stood there almost naked. Looking at each other silently. I looked with my eyes for something, anything, and when I saw the bread knife he had already beaten me to the frying pan. The blows that hit my head reverberated like the blows of a sledge hammer. The darkness of the night covered me as I surrendered and let my body collapse on the kitchen floor. A thousand stars exploded in a supernova inside my head before I passed out.
When I chose him, like when I was choosing the frying pan, I didn’t know that I was kissing the beast that would break me like a wild horse. The frog didn’t become a prince but I became a porcupine shorn of its quills, unable to defend itself.
When I woke up later that night I couldn’t believe that I was still alive. I also couldn’t believe that he was able to just go to sleep after what happened. I rushed to my neighbor Lamia. I left my son with her. The blood running from my nose was hot and I could barely stand up from the headache. But still I left the house and went to the police station. I didn’t take anything with me but my body and the frying pan that he hit me with. The frying pan became an extension of my right hand. It was like a strange new organ that I added to my body, to help me balance as I dragged myself inside the police station vestibule.
The policeman groaned and asked me: Who’s the son of a bitch that did this to you?
My father arrived, his face the color of an unripe mango, neither green nor yellow. My brother joined us. In the police station, they all wanted to take the frying pan out of my hand. The policeman, my father, my brother. But I didn’t let them, I held onto it tight. I know I looked crazy, I saw how they all looked at me when I grabbed a glass of water with my left hand and drank it without letting go of the frying pan.
Things happen, in the night stained with light. I felt his hands around my neck, strangling me. It was a brief, strange moment, in the moonlight stealing in from the open window. The child had sneaked early in the night to sleep between us, that hot night in August. Desire was hovering above us like a hungry bird. Desire was like a necessity, like a need that we had to satisfy: like for food, water and sleep. In the beginning I used the presence of the child between us in the bed as an excuse. I wondered to myself whether I really wanted that. I tried to avoid the matter entirely by using the child as an excuse. But he carried him gently making sure not to wake him up and put him in his bed in the next room. The bed is ours, he whispered with a hoarse voice. “But I don’t feel right, he might wake up at any moment.” He didn’t answer me. He barely kissed me when he lifted my dress touching the dew of my sweaty legs. I didn’t close my eyes as I usually do, but I looked at him instead. I wasn’t able to see the expression on his face. I realized that I didn’t want to satisfy the desire of the blind bird. I didn’t want this anymore. In the beginning I hesitated but when he succeeded in unzipping my dress I pushed him and said “no.” He got close to me but I pushed him and stood; I backed up until I felt the cool of the wall against my back.
“No—no, I don’t want you,” I said. The “no” came out shakily so I said again in a confident voice, “I don’t want you.” I felt his hand pressing more around my neck and I could hardly breathe. It occurred to me to knee him between his legs.
Things happen, in the night stained with light. Today I am free. I left him the child and I left. I am free of the darkness of pain, of the hammer of pain, of the frying pan.
But still I remember my swollen head and the blue bruises on my body. I remember the dented frying pan.
Translated from the Arabic by Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza
Ines Abassi is a Tunisian poet, children’s writer, translator, and novelist. She has published three volumes of poetry, including Secrets of the Wind (2004), winner of the Tunisian Poetry Prize; Archive of the Blind (2007), winner of the CREDIF prize, Tunis; as well as al Menzel BOURGUIBA (2018), winner of COMAR Prize. She is also author of the short story collection Tales of the Korean Scheherazade (2010; 2013), which grew out of a six-month residency in Seoul, and Hashasha (2013). She is also the translator from French to Arabic of Kim Thuy’s Ru (2016) and Jose Mauro de Vasconcelos’s My Sweet Orange Tree (2017). Her work has been published in numerous periodicals, and has been translated into English, French, Korean, Danish, and Swedish.
Karen McNeil translated Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian (with Miled Faiza), as well as poems and short stories for Banipal and World Literature Today. She was a revising editor of the Oxford Arabic Dictionary (2014) and is currently completing a Ph.D. in Arabic linguistics at Georgetown University, with a focus on the sociolinguistics of Tunisia.
Miled Faiza is a Tunisian-American poet and translator. He is the author of Baqāya l-bayt allaḏī daḵalnāhu marratan wāḥida (2004) and Asabaʕ an-naḥḥāt (2019) and translator of the Booker Prize–shortlisted novel Autumn (al-Kharif, 2017), as well as Winter (al-Shitā’, 2019), both by Ali Smith. He also translated Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian (with Karen McNeil, 2021). He teaches Arabic at Brown University.
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