Single Last Sale: A Parallel Poem

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2012 15 liberation. A defiant posture was considered the ultimate expression of patriotic fervor at a time when embattled resolve dominated the moral landscape. The novel makes two predictions: Algeria will regain its freedom, and combatants will be reborn as children of a new world. This revolutionary sentiment is reinforced near the end of the novel when Lila is arrested and mistakenly thinks that prison will teach her to meet a challenge, when, in reality, it promises her rebirth in a new world. The belief in new men and women being born from the liberating effects of insurrectional violence is straight out of Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (1961; Eng. The Wretched of the Earth, 1965). The human capacity to strengthen one’s commitment under duress was a powerful ideal that Mufdi Zakariah captured in a song titled Qassaman (We pledge), written in Barberousse in 1956, which became Algeria’s national anthem in 1962. So the prison (and Barberousse, in particular) became the most important symbol for Algeria’s struggle for liberation and a crucible for the emergence of a new national identity. The first signs of apprehension about Algeria ’s future in Djebar’s writing appear in a collection of poetry published after the war, Poèmes pour l’Algérie heureuse (1969; Poems for a happy Algeria). These poems, written between 1954 and 1963, take up the idea of freedom with images that echo the national anthem, as in “Alger” and “Algérie.” There are fragments of distilled emotion that depict a range of unsettling experiences , from surveying a battlefield littered with corpses to the private hell of a woman raped by a soldier. The young writer has seen loved ones sacrifice hopes for a happy future even as she contemplates the ravages of war. In one of the last poems, “Toutes les amarres sont coupées” (All the ties are cut), she hints at problems that lie ahead. The metaphor of cutting ties that bind evokes freeing a prisoner from handcuffs as well as disconnecting a vessel from its anchor, so liberation as freedom from constraint simultaneously signals the potential for things to completely unravel. The poem’s setting is, once again, that of a victim being tortured in prison. In a posture of defiance, the prisoner taunts his interrogator by yelling that his blows are a source of enlightenment. It is precisely this image of the prisoner’s body in pain that provides the unexpected pivot in Algeria’s narrative of triumphant Single Last Sale: A Parallel Poem Changming Yuan You’ve long since sold out Both your sweat and blood Now you try to sell your heart Though nobody wants it Some say the blood is not red enough Others find the chambers too narrow Still others think the coronary arteries Stained with too many feelings You peddle around, chanting aloud From street to street With your heart still fresh Beating like a frog in your hands You hope to sell it for a glass of water Just to cool down your burning voice So you do not have to sell your soul Like all other hawkers in the market Well satiated, but hardly heart-felt 最后一卖：平行诗一首 你早已卖光 所有的汗珠和血浆 现在，尽管无人问津 你也要卖掉自己的心脏 有的人嫌你的血不够红 有的不满意你偏窄的心房 还有的认为你的冠状脈 沾满过多的情伤 你沿街叫卖，四处流浪 一颗心还是那么鲜活 在手中不停跳动 就像青蛙一样 你渴望能换来一杯清水 润润你冒烟的嗓音 这样，你便不必出卖你的灵魂 就像市场上所有其他小贩那样 贪得无厌，又铁石心肠 Changming Yuan, a four-time Pushcart nominee and the author of Chansons of a Chinaman, grew up in rural China and published several monographs before moving to Canada. With a PhD in English, Yuan teaches in Vancouver, and his poems have appeared in several hundred literary publications, including Asia Literary Review, Barrow Street, Exquisite Corpse, London Magazine, and RHINO. ...

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