The Olive Trees’ Jazz and Other Poems

The Olive Trees' Jazz and Other Poems, by Samira Negrouche. Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker. Warrensburg, Missouri: Pleiades Press, 2020. 135pp. $17.95 (paperback)

A francophone Algerian of Maghrebin descent, Samira Negrouche has been widely published in France and in her home country for twenty years, but this new book of translations by poet Marilyn Hacker is the first collection of her poems and prose poems to appear in English. A physician by training as well as an academic, dramatist, and visual artist, Negrouche experienced firsthand both the exhilaration of the Arab Spring and the disillusionment of its denouement, absorbing the spectrum of its emotional effects and aftereffects and transforming them into a haunting, interiorized poetry that questions, critiques, and attempts to define the nature of identity in a diasporic, postcolonial society.

The work in The Olive Trees' Jazz and Other Poems is drawn from three volumes published between 2003 and 2017 and includes the original French texts with parallel English translations. The book opens with "Qui Parle?" ("Who Is Speaking"), a prose poem manifesto on the difficulty of discovering one's true voice after learning and speaking a colonizing power's language, particularly when that language is superseded by another:

Who are you? When you speak in someone else's language? Who are you when you seem to be waiting endlessly for the other, another who resembles you, to authorize your existence? Only silence can answer.

If words alone cannot establish identity, then the stable ground one occupies within the ever shifting territory of language, politics, and economics may be literally the ground itself: place, the geographic landscape one recognizes as home, though even that "implies a magma of complexity that starts to free itself at the same instant its specificity is authorized." Negrouche challenges the notion of authority in any sense of the word, finds it undermined by the varied, merged voices of her own ancestries, her personal history, her literary influences — a chorus that requires polylingual modes of assimilation and expression in "the underground of languages" that include the poet's "three mother tongues" and "the constellation of poets" who influence her work. Yet the recurring imagery of olive trees, the sea, the desert, and the night sky testify to the importance of landscape in centering the self within, yet at the same time outside of, "the underground of shifting languages":

Root yourself in the wind, in the Atlantic, in the morning fog. Roots have an urgent need of different structures. The memory of your water is a root.

These natural elements are common to poetry in any language written in any part of the world at any point in human history, and yet Negrouche brings them into a different light (or life) through the alchemy of an individual consciousness formed through the many voices and silences that preceded its becoming.

One might reasonably assume that the "you" being addressed in "Que Parle?" is the poet herself (or her literary avatar), but many of the poems that follow it also speak in the second person, and many of those seem addressed to another, a beloved, female, equally complex and redolent of an idealized, almost mystical world where silence is something spoken:

The silence of you
like the bite
of the ocean
I fall through the vertigo
of your mute
symphony
The shadows laugh at me
and your inconstant
gaze, curve
of indifferent
eyelashes

                                                ("In the Shadow of Grenada")

But this is not the unrequited love typical of romantic poetry where the victimized lover accepts and suffers from the lack of reciprocity. Here the imbalance of emotional investment spurs an awakening, a defiant independence that renounces the often deceptive, delusional vocabulary of love:

In the shadow of Grenada
words explode
on an undefined
shore

The volcanic
organ
on the valley
of glistening
waves

In the shadow of Grenada
a star
signals me

I’ll burn my velvet words

In "Six Makeshift Trees Around My Bathtub," the wisdom that emerges from this reclamation of one's own agency makes it possible for the speaker to "give your doubt back its soul," with doubt being a critical factor in one's location of self within "the fog of the senses." As Negrouche writes in another poem, "there is no love but doubt that grows and rests in the certitudes of the past," a conclusion that in effect renounces the tunnel vision of romanticism in favor of an informed, existential skepticism.

For all their abstraction, the poems reveal occasional instances of acute sensory perception, moments of presence surfacing from the reverie that are all the more prominent for their sparse appearances. In the poem "Between Scrawls and Sketches," we watch as "men seek each other out on unaesthetic terraces that smell of sweat and fried potatoes."  Negrouche evokes "a parade of dervish waves," "coffee with a cloud of cream," a "desert of electric / poles / and traffic signals." For all her deep interior journeys, "the world that stains and howls" remains as inescapable as the psychic trauma of displacement emerging from the submission of one power structure's language to another. 

Negrouche's lyric poems, like those quoted above, float in thin, vaporous lines through generous blank spaces, imparting a sense of infinity within the finite page, and yet they never seem disembodied, separate from a human voice emanating from a human soul. Much credit goes to translator Marilyn Hacker, who manages to capture the intimacy, passion, and the underlying senses of mission and yearning experienced by a poet in the process of simultaneously learning and unlearning. The reader feels spoken to, not spoken at, by a poet who has nothing to prove, nothing to demonstrate out of literary vanity. To be sure, her work is often opaque, self-contradictory, surreal, and yet a minor chord of thematic consistency runs throughout, as though only poetry could articulate the elusive, multidimensional character of the poet's philosophical and political thought. Negrouche "speaks for the ancestors" as well as for herself, hearing their voices echo through her own. At the same time, this multiplicity gives rise to the need for silence and a kind of disembodied beatitude:

To slide between the dead leaves of a belated winter and let yourself roll
knees loosened and muscles rusty deaf to all movement the animal mineral
climbs and tumbles down with an odd sensation of existing to kiss the
horizon.

In its anxious pursuit of clarity and authenticity in a chaotic and chimeric world of shadow-truths and "alternative facts," Negrouche's poetry encompasses major aspects of the global 21st century zeitgeist while at the same time resonating with aspects of Négritude, Afrosurrealism, feminism, and other 20th century theoretical frameworks that continue to develop and draw youthful adherents. Whether Negrouche's poems appear to address the self, a lover, the nation of Algeria, or the postcolonial condition that frames her existence, their enigmatic character can support a spectrum of readings and generic contexts, from the lyric, to dramatic monologue, to dialogic performance. Within any interpretive frame, her voice will be a fresh one to English-speaking readers, offering a distinctive, expansive poetic vision and adding yet one more refractive facet to the multilingual prism in whose shifting light she explores the "complex structure of silences."

—Reviewer Fred Muratori's poems and short prose have appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Barrow Street, Poetry, Boston Review, Poetry Northwest, and others. His latest poetry collection is A Civilization, published by Dos Madres Press.