The Expelled (6 page)

I think in 1984 I had translated about 70 pages of that same book and had sent a letter to Jabès, a letter I have kept so well that I can't find it anymore, I did it for my love of art and to deepen my reading of this writer who had become one of my mentors, but they chose another translator although my translation was not only better but also impossible to compare. I even gave a lecture at the University of Jerusalem on what I had translated and that had been published in magazines, as well as other chapters of his work that have never been published in book formats. But at that time, and even today, you couldn't conceive that a Moroccan could be a translator and it wasn't just that, the Moroccan doesn't know languages, he is uneducated and cannot translate, because in addition to not knowing French and even less Spanish, he doesn't really know Hebrew and doesn't know the correct Ashkenazi Hebrew syntax. Language is a weapon of domination and often today, yes, even today, you find an article ridiculing the language of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who has a fabulous and anti-Zionist Hebrew but does not exactly match with the Hebrew that is considered legal. So all the writers born in Iraq or Morocco are always attacked for their language and for their Hebrew.

I can already imagine that if I have success in Spain they'll say that I haven't triumphed here because I don't know Hebrew, but I do know Spanish. Of course that is kind of a contradiction because when I try to get a job as a translator what I find most difficult is to convince the publisher that not only do I know Spanish, but that it is my first language. The absence of my entire country, Morocco, of the Moroccan Jews, makes for some comic situations as long as you don't live them personally. When I suggested to one of my publishers, I think he had read my two novels that he had published, to translate a book by Camilo José Cela, he asked me from what language I was thinking of translating it. The best part is that the vast majority of Ashkenazi Spanish translators have learned it in class and rely on English or French translations.

We started getting there around five o'clock but D-S, who was B-S's close friend, was already there. Occasionally I arrived at noon on Saturday or Friday and the two would sit down to eat a hummus they had bought at a restaurant called Pinati, they dipped the pita in and said "Life is hard" with each bite they took. It was an almost religious ceremony. B-S lived in a room that was a former waiting room to an office and we were not allowed to enter, and in front of that room there was a kitchenette and a restroom. The room was at the entrance of the lobby that started all the way from the end of the stairs on the first floor. There were many other rooms beyond this one, where on weekdays the administration of the Israeli philharmonic orchestra worked.

Quite often it would just be the three of us. D-S was taking his first steps, huge steps, in Hebrew, and he continued writing in Hebrew and Spanish. B-S was a Sabra, born in Israel, and he had already written some short stories and many poems, especially poems about his family, his mother gone mad and hospitalized in a mental institution and about his dead and foolish father. He lived with his grandmother, an old woman who was really evil, that had come to Israel from Tbilisi at age six and who didn't stop yelling at him. A few times we had meetings regarding the magazine Marot at his house. Because he took care of his grandmother, his family paid the rent of the house and sometimes offered to pay a financial assistance for his literature studies that he never finished. All three of us went through the department of literature at the University of Jerusalem, but none of us graduated with honors. Creativity always put us on the opposite side of our professors who taught literature but could not write it, or how it was written and what hell you had to go through to get to a poem. At that time, literature was still a mad people's devotion and visionaries and just a lifestyle, not another economic project. Many publishers still believed in the written word. One of them was the late Yaron Golan, and the agency that bore his name, and I always said that he was crazier than the writers that he published. Which was not a simple thing to be.

Then the three of us would sit and discuss the future of Hebrew literature. They were both supporters of Pinhas Sadé and at that time I was in favor of David Avidan. I hated Erez Bitton, who later on became my favorite poet, because he was Moroccan like me and he spoke of Morocco and I didn't. To be Israeli it was important, it was instilled in me, to stop talking about Morocco.

“You are not like those Moroccans right?” My friends from college said to me, to help me.

“You don't like Brera Hativit, do you?” (A band that played music influenced by Andalusian music.)

And that idiot Erez Bitton, does he really think he's a poet and he writes poems about mint?

“No, of course not, I hate them, anyway I don't remember Morocco.”

As a good immigrant, I had even accepted to lose my memory and I didn't remember anything I had experienced in the first thirteen years of my life. I had really forgotten, it wasn't a lie. I do not understand the reason for this amnesia that lasted until I was thirty. I couldn't remember and that was a great cover in the new society. But I soon realized that it wasn't enough to forget, I had to ease down the growing fear of the other Israelis, fear of remembering or that I would suddenly start acting like other Moroccans and forget normal behavior. That meant that I would suddenly start screaming or hitting people or injecting myself with drugs or speaking Arabic.

Because, in their minds, the Moroccans were not different from the Arabs and they represented the enemy within.

D-S and B-S often went to see Pinhas Sadé, who at that time was a kind of guru, and authors went on pilgrimages to his modest home in the poor Hatikva neighborhood of Tel Aviv. And there Sadé praised himself and said he was the best writer and poet in the world, and he criticized the poems of the newcomers, saying that he had already done better and that's not how one should write. I never went to see him. Although years later I saw Sadé, a sort of Napoleon shorter than five foot three, when we crossed paths at the post office branch where we each had a PO box, close to where I worked for twelve years as an accountant. Sometimes in the same day in King George street, I crossed paths with Sadé and Amijai, who did not exceed five foot three either. They both seemed like human concentrated matter in such a small space, they always seemed to be out of the racket and within their flesh. But I didn't greet them, although Amijai was my neighbor for a while and I met him once or twice and we talked about poetry. He was a good neighbor.

I like the word asshole, it reminds me of my childhood friends, before I knew it was a word that wasn't supposed to be pronounced in public, I don't like the word desasosiego
^[1]
, probably because of ciego
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, I don't like the word alféizar
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, although it reminds me of, or because it reminds me of, the word albaisal
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, a soup that I've always liked a lot. In 1996, I traveled with my brother to Tétouan and we ate fish in a restaurant by the sea. The smell of bean soup came to us, the albaisal, that the waiters were eating two tables away from where we were sitting. We asked the waiter who served us what that smell was and he said "That no, that's food for pirsons" with that he meant it was not tourist food, but we asked if he could bring one for each and he came back with two bowls of soup. We ate it like starving children after having played soccer and we asked if they had more, but that was all they had left for the pirsons.

I reached the Israeli prose as a tourist and not as a pirson. I always viewed things from another perspective. First I started to write about the Moroccan bourgeoisie in the world. A Moroccan writer should always write about the Ashkenazi bourgeoisie, like A-B Yehoshua does, a Moroccan's sole purpose is to give snacks to the bourgeoisie, it's simply a kind of shadow that makes him perceive himself as the light, the Ashkenazi calls a person that comes from the Maghreb an Easterner in order to feel like a Westerner, and he will always inquire why his writings are a mere reaction to the Ashkenazi, especially if they are not. The Moroccan is different, he's an Arab when he criticizes, he's a Jew when he bows, but he's a Jew that bows. I came with another language, with a Hebrew that no one expected or knew, a Hebrew I had learned in Morocco, my Hebrew, a Hebrew that didn't need Zionist symbols. Moreover, my literature always includes Europe either France or Spain, and it's more European than any other Israeli literature. But it is not Eurocentric and it creates a geographical space that goes from Morocco and Africa through Spain to Tel Aviv in Asia. So they criticize me for being too European, or for writing solely about Morocco, when the Israeli is nothing more than a mentally colonized subject who thinks he's European and who believes that if he repeats it from morning till night like Amos Oz does, then Europe will cease to see him as an Easterner from the Middle East who could never be a true European. But I am and I don't want to be European, or at least I don't want to be only European, I also want to be Moroccan and African, I want to be Asian and Jewish, and I want to be Sephardic Jew and not Ashkenazi, and I am all those things, they are the opposite of what the Israeli society wants to be and it is not. For that reason, and I can tell you that right here, every Israeli, writer or cultural attaché in an embassy, will do everything in his power to discredit me, and that's what I get when I move in the world. There is a lot to say about this dichotomy, this paradox, I, who writes in a European language which has been my first language for a thousand years, who speaks three European languages, am considered an Easterner in Israel by those who only speak a Semitic language.

I like that, contradictions, paradoxes, a world in which logic doesn't explain anything, the moment when the one who believes he is logical loses track and is confronted with something that cannot be logical. That's why I have stopped writing prose in Hebrew for the time being, I still write poetry, an internal and external process that was complemented, on the one hand my Hebrew confined me and the audience didn't come to see my books, and, on the other hand, I felt that I had to go back to my mother tongue, without thereby losing other languages. I feel very innocent again to think that if I have success outside of Israel, publishers who have disappeared and stopped talking to me five years ago will come back. It's innocent because the publishers want to showcase other voices to turn mine off. And above all other Eastern Jewish voices to drown out Moroccans’ voices, because for an Ashkenazi Iraq is the same as Morocco, they are both as nonexistent as the other, and it is all lost in the same mass, what comes from Europe and what it is not Ashkenazi.

The Uruguayan redhead D-S approached me and made friends with me through the Spanish language, and because he was still unaware of the segregation of the Israeli society, like many immigrants arriving from South America. After five or six years, by intuition, they start realizing to where the wind blows and they begin to distance themselves from those who are not Ashkenazi, but that's normal and human. The immigrant tries to be like the others, such as the Arab in France, he shows his resemblance to the French by displaying his anti-Semitism, and so in a few years I lost many friends. That process was a bit baffling to me and even inconceivable. Of course, there were and there are always other reasons. Today they don't publish you because you don't sell, although you do sell, before it was because you weren't writing about socialism or the true Zionist values, values that mean that you can only write about the Ashkenazi society.

Nowadays Jerusalem is peaceful it's been months and years, and that is something that in this city you simply cannot say or even think, because it seems that the moment you begin to think that peace is normal an attack takes place, that's why we don't talk about it. In summer, streets are full of tourists and you can't find a place to sit in cafes and restaurants.

A-H came at 10 p.m., after having dinner with her family, she often called and asked if she could come or played hard to get, she was older than all of us, she was over forty. I had met her in a poetry workshop. When she arrived she would tell us she had a horrible week and that she had not written a thing, and she would make us beg again, “well almost nothing”, and then the bargaining began. She was good.

“Yes, I wrote a little something.”

“Come on,” the Uruguayan would say, “let's see what wonderful verses you bring to us.”

“I can't believe you haven't written anything,” B-S would say, “there is always something.”

I smiled.

“Alright, she said after about seven minutes and a half, “yes I wrote something.”

She wrote ultra-modern poetry with street language mixed with almost Biblical verses and that left us all stunned at that time. She would take out her notebook and read for half an hour or more, thousands of verses, which were always verses that she had not written during that week. D-S and I were prolific, but A-H was a machine gun of verses, she had no sense of criticism and her poems could be great or complete crap and that was of no importance. But I think that what always emanated from them was an unmet mature sensuality. I believe that those readings, hers and ours, were a sort of orgy and a frustrated sexual initiation of a mature woman towards students who were trying to find themselves.

The sessions ended around 2 a.m. and A-H drove me home in her car. On the way, we engaged in small talk but mostly I talked about my virginity. She often told me that she was sure that with her I would get an erection, which I couldn't achieve in two previous attempts. It was all very theoretical until one day, when she stopped next to my house, I threw myself at her and put my right hand on her tits, then he leaned back and said she couldn't, that she was a married woman and other stuff. I didn't try again since that time and we kept talking about poetry and literature.

I was part of that group, but I wasn't in it. I was the expelled one before I had even entered. Because what I wanted to write I did not write, or couldn't, or I didn't know what I wanted to write. What I tried to do was what every immigrant does, be part of the society in which he lives. But all that this society wanted was for me not to be part of it, or maybe I was, only in one way, by supporting what is not mine. The problems that interested them were not my problems, nor could they be.