Mahi Binebine - Horses of God

Yes, we’d succeeded beyond all expectations. Abu Zoubeir, Emir Zaid, and his companions must have been rubbing their hands in front of their television sets. Fuad must have been tearing through the Casablanca streets like a convict, with his bomb pressing on his heart, searching all over for the Oubaida brothers to disconnect it. As for us, we were dead, just dead.

And I’m still waiting for the angels.

FROM THE DEPTHS of my solitude, when memories of my ruin assail and torment me, when the weight of my faults becomes too heavy to bear and my mind, already old and tired, begins to spin like an infernal merry-go-round, when Yemma’s tears fall on me like a shower of fire and Ghizlane’s grief injects its deadly poison into my soul, I go off wandering in the sky of my childhood.

I often go there at night to watch the shifting shadows take possession of the place, as the last lights go out. Then I weep, in my own way, waiting for daybreak. The slum hasn’t changed. It’s grown even bigger, and the shacks that were once separate now form a city. A vast city of the living dead. I wait and I cry, watching the wheel that keeps on turning. The dump is there, eternal and infinite. In the writhing turmoil of the garbage trucks, the foragers and the seagulls, the herds of goats munching on plastic bags, the dogs and cats shrouded in gray smoke and dust clouds, I can see some scrawny kids running after a flat ball, without a care in the world: the new Stars of Sidi Moumen.

The translator wishes to thank Ros Schwartz, Rémi Labrusse, Babajide Oyenigba, and especially Amia and Mahi Binebine for all their help.

MAHI BINEBINE was born in Marrakesh in 1959. He studied in Paris and taught mathematics until he became recognized first as a painter, then as a novelist. Binebine lived in New York in the late 1990s, when his paintings began to be acquired by the Guggenheim Museum. His first novel, Welcome to Paradise , was published in France by Librairie Artheme Fayard in 1999, in Great Britain in 2003 by Granta Books, and in the Unites States in 2012 by Tin House Books. He lives in Marrakesh.

LULU NORMAN is a writer, translator, and editor who lives in London. She has translated Albert Cossery, Mahmoud Darwish, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and the songs of Serge Gainsbourg and written for national newspapers, the London Review of Books , and other literary journals. Her translation of Mahi Binebine’s Welcome to Paradise (Granta, 2003; Tin House Books, 2012) was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She also works as editorial assistant of Banipal , the magazine of modern Arab literature.