Torn Apart (Déchirures), Joyce Mansour’s second volume of poetry, is a collection of 117 numbered poems that together appear to undertake an exploration of what the poet sees beyond the fabric of religious belief when that fabric is subjected to tears (slits, slashes, or rips) through which she can glimpse a truer worldly reality. (Déchirures means “tears” in that sense; Gavronsky’s title for his translation of the book into English is evidently an evasive tactic, to avert confusion with tears, the secretions from the eye.)
The images and experiences conveyed in Déchirures do not construct a counternarrative to any religion’s grand narrative, nor do they entail a coherent personal vision of religious experience; all the same, they undeniably refer to God (who is addressed repeatedly) and to the poet’s reflections on the relationship of her contemporaries to religious faith, or its annulment.
Early in the sequence (in Poem 2) the speaker affirms that “there’s a god inside the church / Singing out of boredom” (9). However we read the lines, it is a wry comment. The speaker is indicating here not the capitalized God invoked in other parts of the book, but an erotic object observed with clairvoyant insight, a divine being exposed as uninterested in the edifice of God. The word singing (chantant) could refer instead—or as well—to the congregation, equally bored and unaware of the divine creature in their midst.
In Poem 9 the speaker envisions a false messiah, a golden idol born as a living creature: “the Golden Calf shall emerge from thighs in labor / It shall come out spotless from those contracted innards / Ready to be God for us, people of little love. / Moses get ready” (15). Poem 11 centers on those “who worship” the eagle (a transcultural symbol of empire) instead of God.
In Poem 15 the speaker suggests that God, like scavenger birds, loves responsive female flesh: “My breasts smile when the sun shines / Despite my dress despite my husband / For vultures love me / And God does, too” (19).
After a string of angry poems that show the ugliness and bleakness of existence—e.g., violence in a graveyard (Poem 17), roomers “in a rat trap” feeding on “embryos in the shape of salamis” (Poem 22)—the poet evokes a number of the world’s religions by referencing the death of “a” deity: “Have pity on us, God of our fathers . . . / . . . A God who has nothing left to do / But die” (Poem 29).
Poem 58 announces: “I’ve had it with rats” and nasty fish bones, dirty beggars, sordid crimes, and visions of the tomb “waiting for me in tomorrow’s shadow”; “I’ve had it with everything / And my disgust is dying of boredom” (Poem 58).
In the next poem a telephone call from the speaker’s lover causes the speaker to quiver (frémir) and her hard-boiled heart to overheat (Poem 59). The erotic and other torments of existence cause human beings unbearable suffering—which Mansour evokes with a biblical image of masses of supplicants: “We beg, arms raised / We wait, arms raised / For your mercy” (Poem 69).
The religious iconography possesses archetypal traits, and the poems capture dreamlike or nightmarish scenes; for instance, “Goats galloped in salty meadows / Followed by the devil dressed in satin” (Poem 79), while bombs, hospitals, and destruction occupy Poem 84, and a “lynched Negro” appears in Poem 85.
More than midway through the book, the poet, referring to the strenuousness of her efforts (which she calls the “leaves of [her] delirium”), cries out, “Weep my soul for the earth is naked . . . / My sex is drying out / And the golden leaves of delirium / Fall down” (Poem 92).
In the final poem, Poem 117, the speaker addresses God (a god reduced to ineffectual gestures in her preceding discourse): “Listen to me / . . . / Don’t hunch your shoulders / . . . / I’ve paid my tithe / And my prayers are as good as my neighbor’s” (95).
What is striking about Déchirures is its sustained representation of sexuality and other physical desires breaking through from the margins of propriety to declare themselves to be deep-seated (if suppressed or despised) aspects of human life that new forms of spirituality must strive to embrace.
The volume is a sustained and exasperated effort to draw attention to an obverse side of religions developed by men—an effort perverse in the purest etymological sense of that word, an effort to overturn.
Bibliography
Mansour, Joyce. Torn Apart / Déchirures. Translated from French and introduced by Serge Gavronsky. Fayetteville, Ark., and New York: Bitter Oleander Press, 1999.
Categories: Arabic Literature, Literature, World Literature
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