Boualem Sansal: Harraga

Where can it be, the path

Which from the unknown

Will fashion my native soil

My love, my life

And my death?

I had been feeling somewhat melodramatic and a little foolish when, in the depths of despair, I wrote those lines; the reality had proved to be infinitely more heartbreaking. It brought a lump to my throat.

I fell to my knees, I threw my arms around the headstone and I prayed:

God who art in heaven, my daughter Chérifa is with you. She’s sixteen, she hasn’t got a lot of meat on her bones, and life had left her black and blue. I couldn’t protect her. I only had a few short months in which to find her in this misbegotten world and to realise she was my daughter. Please, take care of her, love her as I loved her, but keep a close eye on her, she’s quite capable of doing a bunk from heaven and leaving a dreadful mess behind her. I know it doesn’t look good, a Lolita among all the sinless souls dressed up in white silk, but give her time, she likes to be eccentric. Intercede on my behalf, tell her I never intended to hurt her when I called her a harraga. This country is governed by soulless men who have refashioned us in their image, petty, spiteful and greedy, or rebels who curl up in shame and insignificance. Our children are suffering, they dream of goodness, of love and of games and are lured into evil, hatred and despair. They have only one way to survive, become harragas, burn a path as once people burned their boats so they could never return. My idiot brother Sofiane is caught up in that chaos, help him find his path. Take care of my sweet, gentle Louiza, my beloved Carrot Cake, her life is a living hell. Thank you for giving me a daughter and a granddaughter when I had long since given up hoping for anything from life. Believe me, I will prove myself worthy. Give my love to my parents, to my brother Yacine and watch over us. Amen.

I took a deep breath, I could feel life coursing through me. I was like a ship run aground suddenly floating free and setting a new course. I am not the sort to let myself be beaten or to give up along the way, this was something else I could ask of God:

Please, God, recall to Yourself the ghosts that haunt my house, Mustafa and the others. They deserve some rest, life betrayed them and death has forgotten them, I think that they are tired having wandered the earth for so long. They are my friends, they supported me when I too was but a shadow on the walls, but now I have a baby to bring up, I need freshness and light.

I long wondered whether our lives truly belong to us, I despaired of ever finding meaning. All things come with time. Was it foolish of me to doubt it? At the time, I could not have known: I was dead then, my eyes had yet to be opened to life.

I kissed Sister Anne, I cradled little Louiza in my arms and I climbed back into the taxi. Before it disappeared around the first bend, I glanced back to that place, that convent, where I had just been born. The nuns waved us off cheerfully but I knew, I could sense, that in fact they were crying their hearts out.

To Bluebeard at his window, quivering with joy, like a hunchback dancing a jig, I sent the silent thought: Oh, Bluebeard, Sister Anne was right, Chérifa has come back to us! I felt inspired, Sister Anne really exists. I should bring Louiza over to visit the old hermit and tell him it’s Chérifa, wasted away from all her running around. At his age, he’s bound to be half-blind so he’d probably believe it. And when she smiled at him, he’d have a stroke.

On the way back, the gallant and dangerous cab driver didn’t say a word, or perhaps he muttered to himself but I heard nothing, not even the sound of his rattletrap leaking oil; I was beyond the reach of the diatribes that he and his kind liked to spout, I was already dreaming of a new world.

Louiza, my child

When a new sun rises

Upon your first smile

We will take to the road

We will become harragas.

Louiza, my love

We will leave our misfortunes

And wash away our memories

In the first river we find

As harragas do.

Louiza, my darling

We will travel roads unknown

And watch where flowers grow

Where birds go

As harragas do.

Louiza, my heart

We will find way enough and time

We will learn to live

We will learn to laugh

As harragas dream.

Louiza, my life

When the sun shall rise

On your first spring

We will be far away

As harragas go.

My child

My love

My heart, my life

Like your mother, my daughter

We two will be harragas.

Written in Rampe Valée, in 2002,

in the house of the Good Lord

(for that is now its name).

Boualem Sansal (b. 1949) is the author of six novels and various other books. His first novel Le Serment des barbares ( The Barbarians’ Oath ) won the 1999 Prix du Premier Roman. In 2003 he was dismissed from the civil service for criticising the Algerian government. Since the publication in 2006 of Poste restante: Alger. Lettre de colère et d’espoir à mes compatriotes ( Poste restante: Letter of anger and hope to my compatriots ) his books have been banned in his own country. Today he is considered not only one of Algeria’s most important writers, but also a literary figure of international stature. Le Village de l’allemand (translated into English as The German Mujahid ) won France’s Grand Prix RTL LIRE 2008 and Belgium’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie 2008. In 2011 he was awarded the German Booksellers’ Peace Prize and in 2012 the Prix du Roman Arabe, but this prize money was withdrawn, despite protests from the jury, following his visit to Israel to speak at the Jerusalem Writers Festival. He lives in Boumerdès, near Algiers, with his wife.

Frank Wynne has won three major prizes for his translations from the French, including the 2002 IMPAC for Atomised by Michel Houellebecq and the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Windows on the World by Frederic Beigbeder. He is also the translator from the Spanish of Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatory , Miguel Figueras’s Kamchatka and Carlos Acosta’s Pig’s Foot . In 2014 he was awarded the Valle Inclán Prize for his translation of Alonso Cueto’s The Blue Hour .