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BASSATINE NEWS  the ONLY Jewish newsletter reporting directly from Egypt
A Community Chronicle put out by the Jewish Community Council (JCC) of Cairo since 1995

OUR EMAIL CHANGED IN SEPTEMBER 2014 AND IS NOW jcccairo@gmail.com

CHAAR HASHAMYIM (ADLY) SYNAGOGUE IS OPEN DURING ROSH HASHANAH, YOM KIPPUR AND SUKKOT

EDMOND JABES: A POET FROM EGYPT

EDMOND JABES L’EGYPTIEN par Daniel Lançon, docteur en lettres
A Paraitre en Mars 1997 (ISBN 2-85893-260-3) editions Jean Michel Place, 3 Rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, tel: 44-32-05-90

Edmond Jabes est bien connu depuis les années soixante-dix comme le poete dont l’exil à la judacité paradoxale fit écho à de nombreuses preoccupations en France ou ailleurs. II se retrouve parfois aux cotés d’auteurs égyptiens plus ou moins connus (en France) comme Andrée Chedid, Georges Henein ou André Cossery, mais un peu abstraitement. II apparait ici auprès de coreligionnaires écrivains comme Elian Finbert ou Georges Cattaui (cousin par alliance de l’auteur), Raoul Parme, Robert Blum, Gaston et Nelly Zananiri (de mère juive originaire de Hongrie) - Joyce Mansour (née Adès), Jacques Hassoun et Paula Jacques etant aussi de ce pays.

Grace à de nombreux documents d’ archives (familiales notamment) et à plusieurs textes inédits de l’auteur en Europe, nous proposons la (re)découverte d’un “oriental” formé aux valeurs universalistes d’avant guerre. Nous invitons le lecteur à la rencontre, dans le contexte du champ litteraire francophone égyptien, et en remontant autant que faire je peut l’histoire familiale, d’un jeune homme, italien de nationalité, francophone, égyptien de coeur et dont l’imaginaire est intimement lié à l’évolution de “sa” ville du Caire (1912-1957).

Edmond Jabes animateur d’une revue litteraire et nationaliste égyptienne modérée, auteur de sept recueils de 1930 a 1955 (dons un inachevé, ici révélé), neo-romantique comme tant de poetes arabes de sa generation, puis considéré comme poete surréaliste, quelque peu malgrée lui, corréspondant de poetes cairotes à Paris, comédien amateur, créateur et animateur d’un groupement intélléctuel et mondain (Les “Amitiés Françaises”, qui recut André Gide, Henri Michaux, Roger Caillois... au Caire); mais aussi marginal cherchant l’Orient dans une maison arabe médiévale, “israelite” protégé au Caire en 1941 par une législation égyptienne (!), donateur des Oeuvres du Soldat égyptien lors de la guerre de Palestine (1948), Italien Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (1952), vice-président de la Bourse du Caire (1955).

La révélation de cet étonnant parcours, aux cotés de Paul eluard (sur lequel il publie un petit livre en 1952), de Pierre Seghers (1946) ou des démocrates grecs et yougoslaves (1943), au moment ou, en Europe comme ailleurs, des particularismes forcenés font échec à un devenir espéré de l’homme, est peut-etre a l’ordre du jour. Dans “son” pays meme, qui a presque complètement censuré sa francophonie, les traductions en arabe commencent, les études aussi (1992-1995).


EDMOND JABES, Poet From Egypt by Steven Jaron while at Columbia University, Cairo, March 1995

One of three children of a French-speaking couple of Italian nationality, Edmond Jabes was born in 1912 in Cairo during the twilight of Ottoman Rule. He began to write poetry in his late teens and he published it, in Cairo and in Paris, shortly afterwards. While he was born and raised in Egypt, all of Jabès’s poetry, like that of many other Egyptian poets who wrote in French during the twenties through the fifties, was composed with a vision towards the universal social values embodied in French Enlightenment philosophy. Yet it was the political liberalism of the Egypt of the 1930s and the 1940s that enabled him to formulate his vision, which was represented, for instance, in a book of poems written during the war, Chansons pour le repas de l’ogre.

By 1948, however, the Egyptian political climate changed for the worse in reaction to the creation of the State of Israel. Jabes continued to write, always with an eye towards France, and was named Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in 1952 by then-Ambassador of France to Egypt, Maurice Couve de Murville. As a result of the Egyptianization of the economy in the late 1940s and 1950s, Jabes, his wife and two daughters were obliged to leave the country. By 1957 they settled in Paris and in 1967 Jabes obtained French citizenship. After his immigration to France he never returned to Egypt.

Arrival in France--that long-esteemed country of universalism--brought with it a terrible shock of recognition. The anti-Semitic graffiti Jabes saw one night illuminated by an automobile’s headlights compelled him to re-evaluate what it meant to be a Jew in an openly hostile environment. Though preoccupied with the idea of foreignness while he was living in Egypt, the question took on a new, troubling meaning for him in France, his newly-adopted home. Another chapter in Jabes’s literary career was born: The Book of Questions, first published in 1963, established his reputation in the eyes of the French-reading public as a Jewish poet, although he still retained his universalist vision.

In the following excerpt from one of the seven volumes comprising The Book of Questions, the narrator, Yukel, reflects upon the depatriation of his family and their eventual burial in cemeteries across Egypt and Europe. An imaginary rabbi, Reb Azel, comes to ask a disturbing question, to which Yukel responds.

“In the cemetery of Bagneux, in the Department of the Seine, rests my mother. In Old Cairo, in the cemetery of the sands, rests my lather. In Milan, in the dead city of marble, is shrouded my sister. In Rome, where, in order to welcome him, the shadow dug out the earth, is buried my brother. Four tombs. Three countries. Does death know any borders?

One family. Two continents. Four cities. Three flags. One language, that of nothingness. One grief. Four gazes in one. Four existences. One cry.

Four times, one hundred times, ten thousand times one cry.
--And those who don’t have a sepulcher? Ask Reb Azel.
-- All the shadows of the universe, answered Yukel, are cries.”
(From The Return to the Book, 1965)


CHECK OUT EARLIER ISSUES OF BASSATINE NEWS

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Issue 17  | Issue 18  | Issue 19  | Issue 20  | Issue 21  | Issue 22  | Issue 23  |
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Issue 32  | Issue 33  | Issue 34  | Issue 35  | Issue 36  | Issue 37  | Issue 38  |

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