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Foreword

Poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist, wife, mother, grandmother—Andrée Chedid is one of France’s outstanding literary figures. Her way is profound and sensitive, her vision innovative in its archetypal delineations, her aesthetic is lyrical, dense, symbolistic—a blend of the real and the unreal, the Occident and the Middle East. The protagonists of her novels emerge from a universal mold; they are eternal in their philosophical and psychological configurations—they have stepped into life full-blown from the dream.

Andrée Chedid, who is of Egypto-Lebanese origin, was born in Cairo in 1920. She received her B.A. degree from the American University in her native city. Married at the age of 21 to Louis Chedid, a medical student, Andrée Chedid spent the next two years (1942–45) in Lebanon. The couple moved to Paris in 1946 where Louis Chedid earned his degree in medicine, then became associated with the Institut Pasteur. The Chedids have two children and six grandchildren.

Andrée Chedid has repeatedly said that she is the product of two civilizations, two ways of life, and two psyches. These dichotomies, however, are fused in the works of art which are her writings—stilled in giant frescoes, visualizations and dramatizations replete with mysterious and arcane forces, spheres bathed in subliminal darkness, insalubrious realms, as well as crisp, stark luminosities which crystallize sensations, revealing the most imperceptible of sublime feelings. Unlike the New Wave novelists, such as Michel Butor or Alain Robbe-Grillet, who consider the novel to be a type of puzzle, a mythology difficult to unravel, whose works are divested of plot and characters and whose beings are perpetually following repetitive patterns; or the writings of Nathalie Sarraute, whose dramas stem directly from the interplay of tropisms, which is what she calls those inner movements, those sensations and hidden forces within each individual that are at the root of gestures, words, and feelings; or of Francoise-Mallet Joris’ dynamic clusters whose raison d’ȇtre focuses on questions of appearance and reality set not in any philosophical or political terms, but as part of a theological climate based on hope. Chedid’s novels resemble to a certain degree, Marguerite Duras’ works such as The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein or The Vice-Consul, sequences of essences flowing onto the stage in evanescent forms and shapes, capturing the fleeting, enclosing ephemeral thoughts and feelings in dazzling poetic images.

Andrée Chedid’s childhood days and her early memories, particularly those associated with Egypt, play an important role in her formation as a writer. Emotions and images, as stamped in her writings, bear the impress of a dry and parched land with its sun-drenched tonalities ranging from deep ochre to a sandy-brown glare, from seemingly endless skies, depicted in nuanced tones of incandescent blues, set against a blazing sun and the sleepy, sometimes turbid waters of the Nile. Her novels are bathed in endlessly shifting emotional climates, disclosing and secreting shapes and hues, energy patterns transmuted into human beings or into landscapes—impenetrable domains where purity cohabits with depravity. As Andrée Chedid wrote in an interview:

. . . as far as I am concerned, it is less a matter of nostalgic return to the past, of a concerted search for memories, than it is a need to experience the permanent presence of an inner sentiment—pulsations, movements, chants, misery and joy, sun and serenity, which are inherent to the Middle East. I seem to feel all these emotions pulsating within me. I believe I was very much marked by both the poverty and the benevolence of those around me. I felt compelled to speak of the simple people in my novels because they seem to be closer to the essentials in life, to the elementary aspects of nature. Of love, death, and of life.

Andrée Chedid’s writings are many and varied. They include such novels as From Sleep Unbound (Le Sommeil délivré, 1952), The Sixth Day (Le Sixiéme jour, 1960), The Other (L’Autre, 1969), The Fertile City (La Cité fertile, 1972), Nefertiti and Akhenaton’s Dream (Nefertiti et le réve d’Akhnaton, 1974), Les Marches de sable (Steps in the Sand, 1981), La Femme de Job (Job’s Wife, 1993); collections of poems entitled Primal Face (Visage premier, 1972), Texts. for a Countenance (Textes pour une figure, 1949), Caverns and Suns (Cavernes et soleils, 1979); successfully produced plays, Berenice of Egypt (Bérénice d’Egypte, 1968), Numbers (Les Nombres, 1968). The Showman (Le Montreur, 1969); essays on Lebanon, war, poetics, the art of writing. She is the recipient of many awards, among them, the Louise Labé prize for poetry (1976), and the Goncourt prize for short story (1979).

Both the Occident and the Middle East are always present in her novels. Universal needs and feelings are stamped with collective as well as individual yearnings—set apart or opposed to environment or family situations—or themselves. The tension provoked by the innervating sensations which flow forth are evoked in muffled and muted tones, feeding and dilating the images implicit in her works.

Peoples and civilizations fascinate Andrée Chedid. As such, past is ushered into existence, creatures are enticed to spin their webs, to evolve, to act, while revealing both blemished and unblemished inner worlds. Her novels may be looked upon as meeting places between author and the creatures of her fantasy—and the reader—enriching one another deeply and permanently. The dialogue fostered in this tripartite dynamic arouses suspense, but most of all, fleshes out feeling.

Andrée Chedid’s novels are based on myths, that is, impersonal experiences. Past, present, and future fuse into an eternal present, grow, paradoxically, into a single harmony and/or cacophony. A theme may stem from a kind of anecdote, as it does in The Other, then expand in dimension, revealing the inner workings of a death/rebirth ritual. An old man is determined—and this despite all odds—to save the life of a young man, a foreigner, who had, it was thought, been the victim of an earthquake. He is convinced that the young man is alive beneath the rubble. Obdurate, the peasant pursues his arduous search into the profound recesses of the earth. Mythically, we see a man’s progressive and willed emergence from obscurity, his terrible struggle against the forces of darkness—his faith in life, in the individual. The old man’s simple and earthy vocabulary, and the passion with which he imbues his task, allow him to pass from the shadow world of unknown subliminal forces beneath the earth, to the sunlit sphere of enlightenment. From One world to The Other—death to life, action born of desire!

Language for Andrée Chedid is an instrument which allows her to decant her feelings, concretize her thoughts, philosophical and aesthetic views. Set in single and multiple sequences of energetic patterns, rhythmic groupings, and lyrical sonorities, her novels resound with subtle blendings, capture and encapsulate the reader in their flow. A voice always presides in each of her works: disconcertingly at times, assuagingly at other moments, it expresses the pain, anguish, joy, and the sensuality which exist inchoate in the mysterious sub-climates of a soul. This voice, which emanates from the very depths of being, links past, present, and future in ductile essences and sensations. The voice is attached to the land; it speaks mightily of Egypt, Lebanon, and France—elements of each, undefined and undelimited in an endless potent vision. The voice inhabiting Andrée Chedid’s novels transcends geographical boundaries; it bears the stamp of universality.

The voice which emerges from her works is linked and nurtured by the spiritual, psychological, and visceral configurations of her characters. Solitary, they frequently walk their own dismal paths, a prey to fantasies, terrors not always of their own making, but due in part to social stigmas imposed upon them by centuries of social conventions. Such beings yearn to be understood, to communicate their longings, to breach distances, pierce through matter and bathe in a wall-less world, warmed by a feeling sun rather than by the icy climes of a world engulfed in blackness. Strong and virile women also figure in Chedid’s novels, positive mother principles who know how to handle their pained lives, to assuage torment, assume helpful stances during agonizing moments.

Unlike the characters or non-characters of Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Claude Simon, Chedid’s creatures are not literary equivalents of people she has known or not known. They do not fit into a system or classification; they cannot be forced bodily into an opus, squarely or mathematically placed here and there. Her beings are amalgams or blendings—alloys in the alchemical sense—of memories and phantasms. They are never limited by area or intellectual stratifications. They are fluid forms emerging from a subliminal world, alive, breathing, acting and reacting to forces outside of their control or those over which they may have some authority. Although Andrée Chedid maintains that the people inhabiting her novels do not resemble her in any way, her protagonists bear the stamp of her personality—wistful, poetic, sensitive, compassionate, understanding—yet, they are also merciless and cruel if too acutely pressed, if pain grows unbearable; fulguratingly explosive situations are of their making. It is this very livingness, this poetic quality of fusing emotion and feeling with the workaday world, revealed in muted, subdued, and controlled overtones, which makes her works unique.

Nature is also a living entity in Andrée Chedid’s novels—a heaving, pulsating body. In The Fertile City, for example, the various forms delineating this metropolis are expressed in terms of blocks of images, evanescent in texture. Primary colors emerge in a series of stark blendings; metals take on emotional tonalities, they burn with force as if exposed to intense heat and great passion, then flow through intricate verbal patterns; elements, such as earth, water, and air, are transformed by the wizardry of Chedid’s pen into rows of concrete houses, vast landscapes, clumps of bushy trees. The city is the backdrop for the situations enacted in The Fertile City. Alefa, the archetypal mother, could be a hundred or a thousand years old—she is ageless. A dancer, she practices one of the most ancient arts known, one of the most elemental forms of expression. Alefa, however, is no ordinary entertainer. Both human and non-human, when she walks she “oscillates,” and in so doing, manipulates her limbs, concretizes her throughts and emotions in sequences of hieratic gestures which seem to float through space. Natural forces such as the tree, the stone, a tear, even silence and air come to life under Chedid’s verbal baton. A positive mother figure, Alefa nourishes, encourages, yields her embrace and comfort to those in need of warmth and understanding. Against this extraordinary mythical personification, are enacted the petty worries, jealousies, rancors, and loves of the protagonists.

Andrée Chedid’s characters are ambivalent. Rooted and uprooted, their joys and pains are woven into living and palpable forces which capture, hold, then release their loves and hates in spiritual, subliminal and phenomenological spheres. There they dwell, along with multiple fantasy figures, each attracting and repelling those within their reach. Living in an atemporal time scheme, having rejected overly limited or specific personality traits, Chedid’s beings are people “of all season.” Archetypal, they are molded from universal and eternal fabric.

In Nefertiti and Akhenaton’s Dream, the queen is mother, wife, woman of insight and strength; she is the filament that binds, links, and fosters events and feelings. Plunged into what seems to be a timeless era—1375–1358 B.C.—the reader experiences a cyclical rather than eschatological time scheme. He participates as a dynamic entity in a world offering multiple possibilities and opportunities. Many of Chedid’s novels center around women, and Nefertiti and Akhenaton’s Dream is no exception. She excels in depicting their needs, desires, longings, and sorrows. She understands their many faces, their layerings, their mysteries. As such, the feminine principle in Nefertiti and Akhenaton’s Dream is depicted in rhythmic patterns, harmonies, dissonances, prolonged silences which reverberate in cadencelike fashion throughout the novel, supporting its plot and characterizations, and underscoring its inner tensions. Colors are also fleshed out in haunting, provoking and traumatic hues from bronzed yellow to deep turquoise, thus setting affective relationships; moods based on palettes, color supplements. Chedid’s hand is sure and certain when it comes to architectural descriptions: Egyptian temples, palaces, inner chambers, pyramids, stand high and mighty in the distance, like stark but flamboyant mural paintings or sculptures, carvings set on ancient temples and sarcophagi. They capture in words the immobility, elegance, remoteness of those powerful monarchs of old.

In From Sleep Unbound, so exquisitely translated by Sharon Spencer, we are introduced to a family of characters who, like Giacometi statues, are stripped of unnecessary accessories, both visually and verbally. As they move about, weaving; intricate forms in space, they, too, bear the imprint of ancient frescoes dimmed with the patina of age. The statically-paced dialogue injects a sense of timelessness and atemporality into events and into personalities, capturing the stillness and terror of eternity. Yet an urgency, extreme and traumatic, also emerges powerfully in From Sleep Unbound. Indeed, the novel begins with a crisis, as do the Racinian tragedies, a crushing impact. Compressed feelings are unleashed at the very outset.

From Sleep Unbound generates excitement not by exaggerated rhythmic effects or plot lines, but rather by the juxtaposition of tempi, feelings, yearnings, and longings. Samya, the paralyzed wife of Boutros, is depicted as a deeply introverted being, her needs held at bay throughout the novel until the conflagration which tears down the world of solitude. Her paralysis, symbolically viewed, is a manifestation of her inability to cope with daily existence, the routine of life—her rejection of her pariah state, of her excruciating pain. She cannot walk; helpless, divested of a life attitude, she is Cut off from earth, from all human company. Only her inner world is subsumed: that subliminal region where moods and anguishes are viewed as fluid and opalescent entities, where terror heightens feelings of apprehension; foreboding is spun into the very fabric of the novel in premonitory images of apocalyptic power.

From Sleep Unbound takes its readers directly into the heart of the woman’s world. Samya is the product of a contemporary middle-Eastern upbringing with its harsh and brutal customs, particularly concerning women, whose earthly existences serve certain specific purposes: to serve man and to bear children. Her husband, unfeeling, detached, uninterested, does not even notice the beauty which radiates from her face: large brown eyes, smooth olive skin, jet black hair, slim features. Daily, Samya feels her life eroding, slowly crumbling, slipping, dematerializing into oblivion. Sensations of uselessness reduce her to a state of psychological penury, of fragmentation. Then, anger and resentment, even hatred intrude, resulting perhaps out of sheer dismay at her own passivity. Her sister-in-law, Rachida, whom her husband depends upon so implicitly and explicitly to run the cotton farm, arrives. Rancor swells. Jealousy. As Samya pursues her story, defoliating her feelings, exposing her fulgurating pain like a raw nerve, images are marked with burnt umber, gray, black, darkened configurations. The atmosphere is suffused with feelings swelling with rapture and sensuality, also with bouts of rage and outrage.

Samya’s psyche is the prototype of the Arab woman—enslaved by her husband and by society. Misunderstood, subservient to her husband’s needs, Samya lives in her own muted realm—a world of whispers, fleeting emotions, expressed in a closed walled-in world of murmurs and halftints—fear. To reveal the inner workings of From Sleep Unbound would be to divulge a secret domain, arcana as spun into the ritual of life by the cryptic hand of the writer-artist that Andrée Chedid is.

From Sleep Unbound captures not one woman’s world, but that of all women, whether they lived cloistered and closeted in a society bound by retrograde customs or in a modern metropolis, liberated for all intents and purposes, but imprisoned within their own psychological cells. From Sleep Unbound is a concerted probing, a poetic search for a “direct breath,” an eternal voice, a single dream, participating in the cosmic flow; catalyzed by an ever-searching soul.

BETTINA L. KNAPP

Hunter College

and the Graduate Center, CUNY