2024 Online Translation Contest Winner: Mériéma

By Isabelle Eberhardt, translated by Donald Mason

A low sky, opaque, incandescent; a dull, rayless, burning sun. On the dust about, covering everything, and on the white and grey fronts of the houses, the blinding heat, unrelenting, reverberates, seeming to emanate from some interior hearth hidden within the earth. Along the angled crests of the hills, kindled with dryness, some low flames lie darkly brooding—the reddish-coloured smoke amassing behind the mountains about Figuig.

Nothing shimmers or glows here; nothing lives in all this heat. At times a dry gust of wind is felt, as from some distant furnace, scattering little whirlwinds of dust that rise and fly rapidly off towards the east, dispersing in the valley.

At the station, amongst the blackened cars and broken, gaping fences, some people are waiting—a few exhausted Europeans, some weary, gesturing Arabs. And the horses and mules, their necks hanging down in silent resignation, their heads drooping, their nostrils bleeding from the heat. An inexpressible, almost palpable, silence weighs over this place. It is neither the restful slumber of repose, however, this silence, nor the more blissful quiet of gentle languor; instead, it is of an enervating morbidity, a sort of deathly anguish. 

That, at any rate, was my first impression of Beni-Ounif.

There is no guide, no external body or perspective, to intervene between my senses and the surrounding terrain—no pointless explanations. I was wandering alone in this lost corner of the earth on the Algerian-Moroccan border between Aïn-Sefra and Béchar. At the edge of the village, beside the station, a raised bit of greyish wall glowing like some heated metal. Further off, beyond the blue rails—ending abruptly in their reddish trench—nothing . . . the endless plain sown with black stones, more dust, a scorched and naked landscape.

At the very foot of this wall, a narrow strip of sandy-coloured shadow, a poor bit of shade offering neither coolness nor shelter. And it was here that I first saw Mériéma squatting in front of a small pile of debris amidst some old poor scraps of metal. A naked broken body, two empty sagging breasts, her black flesh sunken and soiled by filth and dirt. Her frizzy head shaved like a boy's; a thin and wrinkled face; her large thick mouth showing strong yellow teeth; her huge staring eyes like the eyes of some poor sick beast, a sad mask of a face full of fear, suffering, madness.

She was nodding her head strangely, her long bony fingers scavenging through her pile of rags and sweepings; talking ceaselessly, as to no one in particular, in a harsh, incomprehensible tongue—a distant dialect from the Sahara or Sudan.

I spoke to her in Arabic. Her ramblings continued. I held out my hand. Without ceasing in her harangue, she took each of my fingers in turn, pulling them one by one—all the while nightmarish grimaces convulsing her face.

A man from Figuig came over and spoke to me. He told me the woman was not from here. He then continued—

"Her name is Mériéma. She was a slave to some Muslims at Merires. She was married and had a son named Mahmoud. You see what destiny is—this Mériéma was pious, quiet, sensible. Among the women she enjoyed a reputation for virtue. Then, one day, God took her son. She became demented and fled, scared and alone. She ceased speaking Arabic and returned to the language of her ancestors, who were from far away, beyond Touat. And she goes about like this, travelling about the roads and villages, living on the charity of the faithful. Several times she has been taken to the ksar at Figuig, where some pious Muslims took care of her. But she always returns to Ben-Ounif. She lives under a pile of boards. The children taunt her and make fun of her. On Sunday nights when the legionnaires get drunk, they forget that she is a poor innocent, and take their pleasure with her—assaulting her, paying no heed to her cries and pleadings . . . drunken men are like savage beasts. God preserve us from the sort of misery which has befallen this poor creature."

A bright morning. The sirocco has abated where, for some days past, the heavy winds have been strewing the plain with reddish cinders. At dawn, a light wind blowing from the north shook the dust from the date palms; and the valley, surrounding the ochre-coloured village, returned to its former greenness.

Day begins. The tirailleurs pass by, heading in the direction of the riverbed, where some scattered oleanders and palm trees grow in the blood-coloured clay. Dressed in whitened linen, the brass surface of their horns shooting golden sparks of sunlight, and accompanied by the less gaudy instruments common to the Arab, the nouba, r'aita and drums, the musicians are on their way to rehearse. Until nine o'clock that morning they will rouse the dead valley with the echoes of their trumpets, the plaintive nasal notes of the r'aita and the dull pounding of their drums.

As they cross the village, the early morning sunlight caresses their bare, muscular necks, bringing a bright smile to their bronzed faces. With a dry, mechanical motion, all arms lift their horns in unison, and a lively music, full of carefree joy, bursts forth . . .

All of a sudden, as from some shadowed hole, Mériéma appears, looking like some ancient puppet. Someone has dressed her up in a ragged gandoura and old straw hat, tied about her chin with pale blue ribbons. At the head of the little troupe of laughing tirailleurs, Mériéma leaps and jumps and dances, making little cries and screams like some demented monkey. Gradually quickening her movements, her hips swinging in a sort of frenzy, she tears away her gandoura and continues to dance, naked, her straw hat still tied tightly beneath her chin.

And all the way to the quarries, the little troupe continues, Mériéma accompanying the tirailleurs with her wild, frenzied dance . . .

A calm day in the silent desert, the village. A light mist colours the open sky, skirted by the rapid flight of migratory birds. In the dried bed of the oued, amongst the black slabs of rock, Mériéma sits beneath the angled fronds of the date palms. She has decorated the bushes about with coloured rags which she has gathered in the street, as if in preparation for some strange fetish or ritual. Her long thin gnarled arms raised, she is keeping time, beating upon an old tin can. Unintelligible and monotonous, her endless chant accompanies the beat, sung in a harsh, falsetto voice.

Behind the line of the trees, an acrid smoke rises in grey spirals from a small fire of camel dung. From the earth about rises the faint odour of the charnel house. Some bones lie about, and a large pool of iridescent blood, putrefying . . .

The dried bed of the oued serves as a sort of slaughterhouse, though Mériéma doesn't seem to notice the sorry carnage, or the foul pigs that come to dig through the bloody debris with their greedy snouts, licking the drying blood. Nor does she smell the horrible odour of death about. Instead, she prays, she chants, she weeps, forever estranged from her fellow beings, plunged in the piteous solitude of her confused and darkened soul . . .

I saw Mériéma one last time on the night of my departure. It was very late. The pale waning moon was rising, as if furtively, over the blue-coloured earth of the plain. And Mériéma was dancing—naked and alone—dancing on a low grey dune . . .

About the Authors:

Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), the daughter of a Russian anarchist, spent much of her brief life travelling and writing in North Africa. An arabized European dressing as an Arab boy, Eberhardt was killed in a flash flood at Aïn-Sefra, near the Algerian-Moroccan border, in 1904. She was twenty-seven years old. 

Donald Mason has published translations in Brick, Alchemy, and The Antigonish Review. He has also edited four popular anthologies for Penguin Canada. He is currently working on a proposed collection of translated stories by Isabelle Eberhardt, entitled Daughters of the Casbah.