On the other side of the Atlantic, there is my
native town.
The one where I was born,
And everything,
With heaps of orange peel,
With deaf men and blind men, with sores
at the edge of the weeks,
And the cracked photograph,
Imbecile,
The orphan photograph that bears no date
on its back.
On the other side of the Atlantic,
There is my native town.
My town in the north of Africa,
With smells like crisscrossing noises,
And all the streets are dirty,
Clad in paltry games and scraps
of sunlit insults.
O
On the other side of the Atlantic,
The wind sets the walls shivering,
Someone, but who?
Violates little Samia in the night.
Samia? Come now, that’s impossible!
There is no Samia in America.
So we’ll call her Jennifer.
On the other side of the Atlantic,
Someone, but who?
Violates little Jennifer in the night.
No, no, that won’t do!
On the other side of the Atlantic,
There is a little black coffee, all alone.
It’s a kid left at the doors of the churches.
Poem of the one who set sail without a skiff,
on a sea without shores, without rhymes, without
rhythms and without reason, but who arrived
all the same, without for all that having left.
And my little black coffee has no chance of
getting out of it…
Ah! yes, this is America.
The little one will grow up and shatter like
glass,
all the more so as he is black and as the streets…
(Ah! the streets are full of deaf
questions, of cracks and of couches of psycho-
analysts gone to pieces.)
On the other side of the Atlantic,
There are my madnesses in their diplomaed
uniforms,
My little fears with jutting bones,
My little fears astride received
ideas,
John Wayne, for example,
Or Manhattan,
Harlem pretending to be a city,
Brooklyn, sidecurls and delicatessen,
And tell me, Sir, you wouldn’t happen to have seen
a foreskin
Running loose?
A foreskin abandoned to public
welfare because its father is dead or
else gone away?
And go figure who the mother is, with all these
mad scientists,
Nowadays.
This cinema child had a funny name,
He was called Citizen Kane, I think.
On the other side of the Atlantic,
The thighs of women keep all their
white mystery,
Thank God!
The posters have not undressed my dreams.
America, are you there?
America received, America invented
Streaked with furtive Indians, with dappled horses,
With their feathers and arrows made of animal,
And leather thongs instead of legs.
America, are you there, America invented?
America in broken glass I mean,
In mirror,
In roads that go fast with the parting down the middle,
In telephones that walk in the street, all
alone,
Cut off from the ground, mingled with the world,
America in black and unreasoning
meanness,
In danger at night on 42nd,
And the subway has already shut its gates,
The big drunk Negress dances on the side-
walk,
Her mouth full of crack,
And good God! I’m about to turn twelve, any
moment now, at dawn, at break of day, don’t you
understand?
I’m about to turn twelve at daybreak.
Twelve years, I’m small since it’s Thursday,
Time to go and buy, in my town in the north
of Africa,
“Raoul et Gaston”…
What, you don’t know what I’m talking about?
Why, it’s the comic strip that isn’t yet
called a comic strip.
There’s “Raoul et Gaston,” and “Luc Bradefer,”
and what else,
“Le fantôme du Bengale,” I think.
And the merchant, in the alley of my little
town in the north of Africa, the one that’s on
the other side of the Atlantic, there where there is
America, I’m killing myself telling you over and over,
The merchant has lost, mislaid I mean, the
Petit Chose, and the curé of Digne, and the silver
candle-
sticks,
And the barricade, over there, in Paris, rue
Quincampoix, it seems to me.
Noise, blur in the memories.
The photograph trembled,
Since the operator, way up there, moved.
In any case, it’s certain,
It’s on the other side of the Atlantic.
My mother dances herself breathless, and
besides, she has lost it.
My mother dances like all the dead women,
With mist for a dress,
And unbound hair too,
And the cinema has brought out its great white sheet,
And Zorro arrived.
But who knew, then, that Zorro meant
fox?
And the western, the western,
Had not yet invented John Wayne, and who
else,
But only the cowboys, and Tom Mix, and
I am four years old, and full of brothers bigger,
stronger, and who do not think.
They content themselves with protecting me with the bow and
the arrows,
Because I make them believe I am
Robin Hood,
The one my mother calls, of course, Ruben
of the Woods.
On the other side of the Atlantic, there are
sparks in the eyes of women.
But the fire, good God! who could have put out
the fire?
I ran in search of fountains, I
ran for thirst,
And I only knew how to drink the ash.
The house danced beneath the flames,
The music exploded in the anger of the
stones,
And I sought my own with sharp cries, with
burned hands,
And of course, they hid the spring from me, taking
me for a voyeur.
I drank the ash and I wrote on the wall with the
fingers of the prisoners,
The fingernails, that is.
And all this, as if I had time
before me, and not this damned ocean for compe-
tition that I understand nothing of.
On the other side of the Atlantic, there is Rimbaud
who takes himself for Rimbaud, with his hole
in his chest — but no, it’s only
his soldier sleeping in the blue watercress —
There is Rimbaud, and his leg devoured by death
has gone on ahead of him, in Marseille, just
below, on the map, on the schoolroom wall.
There is Rimbaud waiting.
Behind his closed eyes, perhaps, Egypt,
the paradise of Aden, and all those weapons and those
spices eaten by the worms of Poetry.
There is Rimbaud,
(And what can my sister be doing, all alone, in
Charleville, wonders Rimbaud, what
can she be doing, if not dying?)
Might she, by any chance, have a fellow?
as they say nowadays,
Those who want to row back down my impassive
rivers hauled by oarsmen.
Might she, by any chance, be “going out”?
As they also say nowadays
Those who… etc… etc,
To say that she makes love out of wedlock.
But rest assured,
On the other side of the Atlantic, there where there is
America,
I have carried all my little luggage,
My olives, my cholesterol, my father, his
kippa,
And two or three crumpled lottery tickets that
are going to win, for sure, in the year 2595.
All my little luggage,
My worn-out words, my jokes astonished
to become jokes over there on 56th Street,
And it’s me who laughs
To see my olives, nose in the air, searching
for the rooftops, searching for the sky and
for my mother,
My olives lost, without a passport, in
Manhattan…
O
Ah! the violent smell of the orange trees!
The water of the orange blossom,
That water we called Chance back home,
I mean in my language,
Chance like a woman’s first name, quite
simply.
Chance, I love you, will you marry me?
And leave me the hell alone with your tefillin!
Don’t you see that Chance is growing impatient?
Where do you want me to find the time to explain to her
the thousand entrechats of my dance?
The words that tell of my absent mother, my
present mother,
All those staggering crumbs of my town
In the north of Africa.
Wait, I’m coming, I’m coming!
Wait for me, Chance, it’s settled, I’ll marry
you without a word, I’ll marry you without memo-
ries.
I’m soon going to turn twenty, I act as if.
Memory in tatters,
I sold my 8th of Mays, I sold my 5th of Augusts,
At the rag-market,
Sold them to be able to grow old, and walk, and
die laughing.
On the other side of the Atlantic, I act
as if,
Since I am the one who walks in
Jerusalem, when it was the English who lolled
in the great armchairs of the King
David smoking tightly rolled blondes.
I act as if,
And I turned twenty again, and again, until
the extinction of all my fires,
Until the drowning of all my suns in the
sizzle of bare-headed women,
Until the absence of moaning in love,
Until the fatigue in the knees and the breath-
lessness on the stairs,
Twenty years, believe me, good God, since I’m
telling you so!
But,
On the other side of the Atlantic, there where there is
America,
I was always fifteen, stepping off the
Boeing,
Fifteen, Lord!
And masturbation transported me to the
sulphurous summits of Beverly Hills, there where Rita
Hayworth moves like paradise and hell
reunited,
And no matter how I stretched out my hand,
The screen stayed far off and drew away as
in dreams…
So, I might as well be four,
Might as well believe that women are my sister,
or my mother who no longer has her periods,
No longer a bosom,
And good God! Where have her buttocks gone?
Come now, I might as well be four like any-
one at the little school, like my son,
for example, when he was four.
I am here, in my bed, on the other side of
the Atlantic,
I am here waiting for someone to speak, or
move, or make a gesture that would put some wind
into things.
Anything, the sheet on my desk
that flies off, the telephone that changes
place, the lamp that lights up, and that’s the signal
for that distant ship I had been waiting for,
Me, the cut-rate wrecker,
Columbus who went by the name of Christopher, Columbus
who returns,
Columbus with eyes of stars, with arms of sails.
I tell myself that the dead…
But no, it isn’t true…
No matter how I summon my idols, how
do you expect them to come?
They are of marble, of stone, of paper, of
tiny souvenirs, of trinkets from
department stores,
They are of dead gods, of statues collap-
sed, toppled.
Have you noticed how motionless
a statue fallen to the ground is?
My idols no longer believe me when I write.
They carry words of smoke that
no one hears any more.
So…
So, I arrived in New York, there where
all the images sleep,
New York, on the other side of the Atlantic,
in this little scrap of the north of Africa,
In this little lost heart of Poland,
In this suit made in Little Italy,
In this Mexico of the poor and this Cuba of the
mad,
And who will tell me, in my language, the
road chosen by those whom I never
knew?
Those whom I love without knowing them,
Gone, breathless, life-less, with their
stuffed carp, and their jokes, and their shtetls,
Gone without even a word
For the astonished child who must not be frightened,
Gone as if in secret, on gentle wolf’s
tiptoe.
Those whom I love without knowing them,
For that language as foreign to my mother too,
And that way, it’s true, of scraping the
least little penny off the skin of the weeks,
to make of them jewels of gold, evenings of
joy.
Ah! all that is true,
It was
On the other side of the Atlantic,
I tell you;
There where there is my native town,
The one where I was born, and everything,
With heaps of orange peel,
With deaf men, with pustular blind men,
With incurable sores despite the tincture
of iodine,
And scraps of sunlit insults,
My town in the north of Africa,
On the banks of the East River,
When I was four,
When I was fifteen,
When I was twenty,
Eternally.
America, that’s what!
native town.
The one where I was born,
And everything,
With heaps of orange peel,
With deaf men and blind men, with sores
at the edge of the weeks,
And the cracked photograph,
Imbecile,
The orphan photograph that bears no date
on its back.
On the other side of the Atlantic,
There is my native town.
My town in the north of Africa,
With smells like crisscrossing noises,
And all the streets are dirty,
Clad in paltry games and scraps
of sunlit insults.
O
On the other side of the Atlantic,
The wind sets the walls shivering,
Someone, but who?
Violates little Samia in the night.
Samia? Come now, that’s impossible!
There is no Samia in America.
So we’ll call her Jennifer.
On the other side of the Atlantic,
Someone, but who?
Violates little Jennifer in the night.
No, no, that won’t do!
On the other side of the Atlantic,
There is a little black coffee, all alone.
It’s a kid left at the doors of the churches.
Poem of the one who set sail without a skiff,
on a sea without shores, without rhymes, without
rhythms and without reason, but who arrived
all the same, without for all that having left.
And my little black coffee has no chance of
getting out of it…
Ah! yes, this is America.
The little one will grow up and shatter like
glass,
all the more so as he is black and as the streets…
(Ah! the streets are full of deaf
questions, of cracks and of couches of psycho-
analysts gone to pieces.)
On the other side of the Atlantic,
There are my madnesses in their diplomaed
uniforms,
My little fears with jutting bones,
My little fears astride received
ideas,
John Wayne, for example,
Or Manhattan,
Harlem pretending to be a city,
Brooklyn, sidecurls and delicatessen,
And tell me, Sir, you wouldn’t happen to have seen
a foreskin
Running loose?
A foreskin abandoned to public
welfare because its father is dead or
else gone away?
And go figure who the mother is, with all these
mad scientists,
Nowadays.
This cinema child had a funny name,
He was called Citizen Kane, I think.
On the other side of the Atlantic,
The thighs of women keep all their
white mystery,
Thank God!
The posters have not undressed my dreams.
America, are you there?
America received, America invented
Streaked with furtive Indians, with dappled horses,
With their feathers and arrows made of animal,
And leather thongs instead of legs.
America, are you there, America invented?
America in broken glass I mean,
In mirror,
In roads that go fast with the parting down the middle,
In telephones that walk in the street, all
alone,
Cut off from the ground, mingled with the world,
America in black and unreasoning
meanness,
In danger at night on 42nd,
And the subway has already shut its gates,
The big drunk Negress dances on the side-
walk,
Her mouth full of crack,
And good God! I’m about to turn twelve, any
moment now, at dawn, at break of day, don’t you
understand?
I’m about to turn twelve at daybreak.
Twelve years, I’m small since it’s Thursday,
Time to go and buy, in my town in the north
of Africa,
“Raoul et Gaston”…
What, you don’t know what I’m talking about?
Why, it’s the comic strip that isn’t yet
called a comic strip.
There’s “Raoul et Gaston,” and “Luc Bradefer,”
and what else,
“Le fantôme du Bengale,” I think.
And the merchant, in the alley of my little
town in the north of Africa, the one that’s on
the other side of the Atlantic, there where there is
America, I’m killing myself telling you over and over,
The merchant has lost, mislaid I mean, the
Petit Chose, and the curé of Digne, and the silver
candle-
sticks,
And the barricade, over there, in Paris, rue
Quincampoix, it seems to me.
Noise, blur in the memories.
The photograph trembled,
Since the operator, way up there, moved.
In any case, it’s certain,
It’s on the other side of the Atlantic.
My mother dances herself breathless, and
besides, she has lost it.
My mother dances like all the dead women,
With mist for a dress,
And unbound hair too,
And the cinema has brought out its great white sheet,
And Zorro arrived.
But who knew, then, that Zorro meant
fox?
And the western, the western,
Had not yet invented John Wayne, and who
else,
But only the cowboys, and Tom Mix, and
I am four years old, and full of brothers bigger,
stronger, and who do not think.
They content themselves with protecting me with the bow and
the arrows,
Because I make them believe I am
Robin Hood,
The one my mother calls, of course, Ruben
of the Woods.
On the other side of the Atlantic, there are
sparks in the eyes of women.
But the fire, good God! who could have put out
the fire?
I ran in search of fountains, I
ran for thirst,
And I only knew how to drink the ash.
The house danced beneath the flames,
The music exploded in the anger of the
stones,
And I sought my own with sharp cries, with
burned hands,
And of course, they hid the spring from me, taking
me for a voyeur.
I drank the ash and I wrote on the wall with the
fingers of the prisoners,
The fingernails, that is.
And all this, as if I had time
before me, and not this damned ocean for compe-
tition that I understand nothing of.
On the other side of the Atlantic, there is Rimbaud
who takes himself for Rimbaud, with his hole
in his chest — but no, it’s only
his soldier sleeping in the blue watercress —
There is Rimbaud, and his leg devoured by death
has gone on ahead of him, in Marseille, just
below, on the map, on the schoolroom wall.
There is Rimbaud waiting.
Behind his closed eyes, perhaps, Egypt,
the paradise of Aden, and all those weapons and those
spices eaten by the worms of Poetry.
There is Rimbaud,
(And what can my sister be doing, all alone, in
Charleville, wonders Rimbaud, what
can she be doing, if not dying?)
Might she, by any chance, have a fellow?
as they say nowadays,
Those who want to row back down my impassive
rivers hauled by oarsmen.
Might she, by any chance, be “going out”?
As they also say nowadays
Those who… etc… etc,
To say that she makes love out of wedlock.
But rest assured,
On the other side of the Atlantic, there where there is
America,
I have carried all my little luggage,
My olives, my cholesterol, my father, his
kippa,
And two or three crumpled lottery tickets that
are going to win, for sure, in the year 2595.
All my little luggage,
My worn-out words, my jokes astonished
to become jokes over there on 56th Street,
And it’s me who laughs
To see my olives, nose in the air, searching
for the rooftops, searching for the sky and
for my mother,
My olives lost, without a passport, in
Manhattan…
O
Ah! the violent smell of the orange trees!
The water of the orange blossom,
That water we called Chance back home,
I mean in my language,
Chance like a woman’s first name, quite
simply.
Chance, I love you, will you marry me?
And leave me the hell alone with your tefillin!
Don’t you see that Chance is growing impatient?
Where do you want me to find the time to explain to her
the thousand entrechats of my dance?
The words that tell of my absent mother, my
present mother,
All those staggering crumbs of my town
In the north of Africa.
Wait, I’m coming, I’m coming!
Wait for me, Chance, it’s settled, I’ll marry
you without a word, I’ll marry you without memo-
ries.
I’m soon going to turn twenty, I act as if.
Memory in tatters,
I sold my 8th of Mays, I sold my 5th of Augusts,
At the rag-market,
Sold them to be able to grow old, and walk, and
die laughing.
On the other side of the Atlantic, I act
as if,
Since I am the one who walks in
Jerusalem, when it was the English who lolled
in the great armchairs of the King
David smoking tightly rolled blondes.
I act as if,
And I turned twenty again, and again, until
the extinction of all my fires,
Until the drowning of all my suns in the
sizzle of bare-headed women,
Until the absence of moaning in love,
Until the fatigue in the knees and the breath-
lessness on the stairs,
Twenty years, believe me, good God, since I’m
telling you so!
But,
On the other side of the Atlantic, there where there is
America,
I was always fifteen, stepping off the
Boeing,
Fifteen, Lord!
And masturbation transported me to the
sulphurous summits of Beverly Hills, there where Rita
Hayworth moves like paradise and hell
reunited,
And no matter how I stretched out my hand,
The screen stayed far off and drew away as
in dreams…
So, I might as well be four,
Might as well believe that women are my sister,
or my mother who no longer has her periods,
No longer a bosom,
And good God! Where have her buttocks gone?
Come now, I might as well be four like any-
one at the little school, like my son,
for example, when he was four.
I am here, in my bed, on the other side of
the Atlantic,
I am here waiting for someone to speak, or
move, or make a gesture that would put some wind
into things.
Anything, the sheet on my desk
that flies off, the telephone that changes
place, the lamp that lights up, and that’s the signal
for that distant ship I had been waiting for,
Me, the cut-rate wrecker,
Columbus who went by the name of Christopher, Columbus
who returns,
Columbus with eyes of stars, with arms of sails.
I tell myself that the dead…
But no, it isn’t true…
No matter how I summon my idols, how
do you expect them to come?
They are of marble, of stone, of paper, of
tiny souvenirs, of trinkets from
department stores,
They are of dead gods, of statues collap-
sed, toppled.
Have you noticed how motionless
a statue fallen to the ground is?
My idols no longer believe me when I write.
They carry words of smoke that
no one hears any more.
So…
So, I arrived in New York, there where
all the images sleep,
New York, on the other side of the Atlantic,
in this little scrap of the north of Africa,
In this little lost heart of Poland,
In this suit made in Little Italy,
In this Mexico of the poor and this Cuba of the
mad,
And who will tell me, in my language, the
road chosen by those whom I never
knew?
Those whom I love without knowing them,
Gone, breathless, life-less, with their
stuffed carp, and their jokes, and their shtetls,
Gone without even a word
For the astonished child who must not be frightened,
Gone as if in secret, on gentle wolf’s
tiptoe.
Those whom I love without knowing them,
For that language as foreign to my mother too,
And that way, it’s true, of scraping the
least little penny off the skin of the weeks,
to make of them jewels of gold, evenings of
joy.
Ah! all that is true,
It was
On the other side of the Atlantic,
I tell you;
There where there is my native town,
The one where I was born, and everything,
With heaps of orange peel,
With deaf men, with pustular blind men,
With incurable sores despite the tincture
of iodine,
And scraps of sunlit insults,
My town in the north of Africa,
On the banks of the East River,
When I was four,
When I was fifteen,
When I was twenty,
Eternally.
America, that’s what!
Rolland Doukhan Paris, 4 February 2004.