From Sleep Unbound. Andrée Chedid

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      From Sleep Unbound

      This series brings the best African writing to an international audience. These groundbreaking novels, memoirs, and other literary works showcase the most talented writers of the African continent. The series also features works of significant historical and literary value translated into English for the first time. Moderately priced, the books chosen for the series are well crafted, original, and ideally suited for African studies classes, world literature classes, or any reader looking for compelling voices of diverse African perspectives.

      Books in this series are published with support from the Ohio University National Resource Center for African Studies.

       Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa

      Phaswane Mpe

      ISBN: 978-0-8214-1962-5

       Dog Eat Dog: A Novel

      Niq Mhlongo

      ISBN: 978-0-8214-1994-6

       After Tears: A Novel

      Niq Mhlongo

      ISBN: 978-0-8214-1984-7

       From Sleep Unbound

      Andrée Chedid

      ISBN: 978-0-8040-0837-2

       On Black Sisters Street: A Novel

      Chika Unigwe

      ISBN: 978-0-8214-1992-2

       Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing Up Chinese in South Africa

      Ufrieda Ho

      ISBN: 978-0-8214-2020-1

       The Conscript: A Novel of Libya’s Anticolonial War

      Gebreyesus Hailu, translator

      ISBN: 978-0-8214-2023-2

       Thirteen Cents: A Novel

      K. Sello Duiker

      ISBN: 978-0-8214-2036-2

      ANDRÉE CHEDID

      From Sleep Unbound

      Translated from the French

       Le Sommeil delivre

      by Sharon Spencer

      SWALLOW PRESS / OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Athens, Ohio

      © 1976 by Flammarion

      English translation © 1983 by Sharon Spencer

      Introduction @ 1983, 1995 by Bettina Knapp

      First Swallow Press/Ohio University Press edition printed 1983

      Swallow Press/Ohio University Press

      Athens, OH 45701

      All rights reserved

      Printed in the United States of America

      20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 (pbk.)

      Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper.

       Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

      Chedid, Andree.

      From sleep unbound.

      “Translated from the original French title Le Sommeil délivré.”

      ISBN 0-8040-0837-X (pbk.)

      I. Title.

      PQ2605.H4245S613 1983 843'.914 82-22459

      CIP

      ISBN-13: 978-0-804-04060-0 (e-book)

      to Louis,

      this first novel

      Woman may be compared to a very deep

      body of water; one can never

      predict the power of the undertow.

      Vizir Ptahhotep,

      “Instruction on the Subject of Women,”

      Egypt, about 2600 B.C.

       Foreword

      Poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist, wife, mother, grandmother—Andrée Chedid is one of France’s outstanding literary figures. Her way is profound and sensitive, her vision innovative in its archetypal delineations, her aesthetic is lyrical, dense, symbolistic—a blend of the real and the unreal, the Occident and the Middle East. The protagonists of her novels emerge from a universal mold; they are eternal in their philosophical and psychological configurations—they have stepped into life full-blown from the dream.

      Andrée Chedid, who is of Egypto-Lebanese origin, was born in Cairo in 1920. She received her B.A. degree from the American University in her native city. Married at the age of 21 to Louis Chedid, a medical student, Andrée Chedid spent the next two years (1942–45) in Lebanon. The couple moved to Paris in 1946 where Louis Chedid earned his degree in medicine, then became associated with the Institut Pasteur. The Chedids have two children and six grandchildren.

      Andrée Chedid has repeatedly said that she is the product of two civilizations, two ways of life, and two psyches. These dichotomies, however, are fused in the works of art which are her writings—stilled in giant frescoes, visualizations and dramatizations replete with mysterious and arcane forces, spheres bathed in subliminal darkness, insalubrious realms, as well as crisp, stark luminosities which crystallize sensations, revealing the most imperceptible of sublime feelings. Unlike the New Wave novelists, such as Michel Butor or Alain Robbe-Grillet, who consider the novel to be a type of puzzle, a mythology difficult to unravel, whose works are divested of plot and characters and whose beings are perpetually following repetitive patterns; or the writings of Nathalie Sarraute, whose dramas stem directly from the interplay of tropisms, which is what she calls those inner movements, those sensations and hidden forces within each individual that are at the root of gestures, words, and feelings; or of Francoise-Mallet Joris’ dynamic clusters whose raison d’ȇtre focuses on questions of appearance and reality set not in any philosophical or political terms, but as part of a theological climate based on hope. Chedid’s novels resemble to a certain degree, Marguerite Duras’ works such as The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein or The Vice-Consul, sequences of essences flowing onto the stage in evanescent forms and shapes, capturing the fleeting, enclosing ephemeral thoughts and feelings in dazzling poetic images.

      Andrée Chedid’s childhood days and her early memories, particularly those associated with Egypt, play an important role in her formation as a writer. Emotions and images, as stamped in her writings, bear the impress of a dry and parched land with its sun-drenched tonalities ranging from deep ochre to a sandy-brown glare, from seemingly endless skies, depicted in nuanced tones of incandescent blues, set against a blazing sun and the sleepy, sometimes turbid waters of the Nile. Her novels are bathed in endlessly shifting emotional climates, disclosing and secreting shapes and hues, energy patterns transmuted into human beings or into landscapes—impenetrable domains where purity cohabits with depravity. As Andrée Chedid wrote in an interview:

      . . . as far as I am concerned, it is less a matter of nostalgic return to the past, of a concerted search for memories, than it is a need to experience the permanent presence of an inner sentiment—pulsations, movements, chants, misery and joy, sun and serenity, which are inherent to the Middle East. I seem to feel all these emotions pulsating within me. I believe I was very much marked by both the poverty and the benevolence of those around me. I felt compelled to speak of the simple people in my novels because they seem to be closer to the essentials in life, to the elementary aspects of nature. Of love, death, and of life.

      Andrée