Demoiselles of Numidia - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Mohamed Leftah Klappentext Originally published in French as Demoiselles de Numidie in 1992 by âEditions de l'Aube, La Tour d'Aigues, and reprinted in 2006 by âEditions de la Diffâerence, Paris. Leseprobe In this ancient land of Numidia, Nouar , the plural of “flower,” is how we refer to syphilis, a disease that has long inhabited men’s bodies and haunted their minds. Could this strange and poetic designation be explained by the fact that in the Numidian tongue, many female names are also the names of flowers? Femme-flowers who, after the fleeting bloom of love, leave their paramours with petals embedded in their flesh, both badge of honor and mark of shame: Nouar, flowers of syphilis? Note how that last word whistles from start to finish, like a rattlesnake darting out (to then abruptly coil up). Whereas the word Nouar evokes a bed of flowers, an orchard whose most verdant tree, its sexual organ, is attacked by a canker, or rather chancre; the syphilitic chancre. Imagining that these femme-flowers are indeed to blame for these syphilitic flowers, some, seemingly in response, see blossom on their own bodies—the cheeks generally, sometimes the forehead, rarely the breasts or vagina, though those vital parts, when afflicted, only become even more splendid and tragic—another strange flower, no less simultaneously glorious and shameful: a cicatrice. (A kind of revenge, if you will; a twin to the masculine syphilis, when this elegantly named scar appears between a woman’s legs.) Given the options—wound, scar, cut, mark, cicatrice—I barely hesitated, and you’ll see why, before settling on the last one, though I should have considered the weighty word “stigmata” first, I think. The miraculous stigmata that appeared on the hands of saints, but also those branded in red iron on the bodies of galley slaves, the stigmas of hysteria, or those that designate the orifices of certain insects and of pistils. That resonant, polysemic word, transporting (in its veins) pus, pollen, sap and blood, decay and miracle, might have been the most appropriate way to designate the scars that emblazon the bodies of the yet to bloom girl-flowers who are the pretext for this narrative and its heroines. If I resigned myself to keeping the word “cicatrice,” it’s because this term, while retaining its meaning as a scar left in the flesh by a wound, has also come to qualify, in Numidia, a condition, a state, an order. And so, if you happen to hear someone say one of the girl-flower names—Massc Allil, Yasmine, Warda, Zahra—followed by the word “cicatrice,” like a suffix or appellative (Warda Cicatrice, for example), then you’ll know that Warda (Rose) is a fille de joie. A whore. A whore who works for a pimp. The cicatrice that ornaments Rose’s body, as well as her name, is the mark (because we also say that these girls are “marked”), both visible and audible, of her condition. Before continuing this semantic digression, having only just begun, I realize that some of these words, whether I chose them or they forced their way in, starting with the one that prompted this detour— Nouar (flowers)—the manner in which they arranged themselves, summoning others like the first birds to perch call the rest of the migrating flight, the clandestine links they’ve already begun to establish between themselves, the troubling emotions that some create, or resuscitate, in my heart (and body), all that is giving me a vague but powerful and joyful premonition. That is to say the womb and the skeleton of the story I plan to tell are already formed, almost unbeknownst to me. All that’s required of me is to journey through a few words, all the way to the end, like reaching the end of a tunnel, or a night. For you must have guessed that it was their pimps, those magnificent, young brutes, who marked these girl-flowers, these cicatrixes, as I call them. But from thi...

Product details

• Authors: Mohamed Leftah, Lara Vergnaud
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 06.06.2023
• EAN: 9781635420661
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-066-1
• No. of pages: 208
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 203 mm x 16 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature