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The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry
What happens when catastrophe becomes an everyday occurrence? Each of the seven stories in Assia Djebar’s The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry reaches into the void where normal and impossible realities coexist.
All the stories were written in 1995 and 1996—a time when, by official accounts, some two hundred thousand Algerians were killed in Islamist assassinations and government army reprisals. Each story grew from a real conversation on the streets of Paris between the author and fellow Algerians about what was happening in their native land.
Contemporary events are joined on the page by classical themes in Arab literature, whether in the form of Berber texts sung by the women of the Mzab or the tales from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry beautifully explores the conflicting realities of the role of women in the Arab world.
With renowned and unparalleled skill, Assia Djebar gives voice to her longing for a world she has put behind her.
All the stories were written in 1995 and 1996—a time when, by official accounts, some two hundred thousand Algerians were killed in Islamist assassinations and government army reprisals. Each story grew from a real conversation on the streets of Paris between the author and fellow Algerians about what was happening in their native land.
Contemporary events are joined on the page by classical themes in Arab literature, whether in the form of Berber texts sung by the women of the Mzab or the tales from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry beautifully explores the conflicting realities of the role of women in the Arab world.
With renowned and unparalleled skill, Assia Djebar gives voice to her longing for a world she has put behind her.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
11 people are currently reading
605 people want to read
About the author
Assia Djebar
38 books386 followersAssia Djebar was born in Algeria to parents from the Berkani tribe of Dahra. She adopted the pen name Assia Djebar when her first novel, La Soif (Hunger) was published in 1957, in France where she was studying at the Sorbonne.
In 1958, she travelled to Tunis, where she worked as a reporter alongside Frantz Fanon, travelling to Algerian refugee camps on the Tunisian border with the Red Cross and Crescent. In 1962, she returned to Algeria to report on the first days of the country's independence.
She settled in Algeria in 1974, and began teaching at the University of Algiers. In 1978, she made a feature film with an Algerian TV company, The Nouba of the Women on Mont Chenoua, which won the critics' prize at Venice. Her second feature, La Zerda, won a prize at Berlin in 1983. In 1995, she took up an academic post at the University of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and in 2002 was named a Silver Chair at New York University. She is a member of the Belgian Royal Academy and of the Academie Française.
She published her first four novels in France, between 1957 and 1967. These were followed by her Algerian quartet, of which three titles are complete to date, and by her three "novels of exile." Djebar has also published short stories, essay collections and two libretti. All of her writing is in French.
In 1958, she travelled to Tunis, where she worked as a reporter alongside Frantz Fanon, travelling to Algerian refugee camps on the Tunisian border with the Red Cross and Crescent. In 1962, she returned to Algeria to report on the first days of the country's independence.
She settled in Algeria in 1974, and began teaching at the University of Algiers. In 1978, she made a feature film with an Algerian TV company, The Nouba of the Women on Mont Chenoua, which won the critics' prize at Venice. Her second feature, La Zerda, won a prize at Berlin in 1983. In 1995, she took up an academic post at the University of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and in 2002 was named a Silver Chair at New York University. She is a member of the Belgian Royal Academy and of the Academie Française.
She published her first four novels in France, between 1957 and 1967. These were followed by her Algerian quartet, of which three titles are complete to date, and by her three "novels of exile." Djebar has also published short stories, essay collections and two libretti. All of her writing is in French.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
February 7, 2017
Last night I couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing, on a high of two cups of coffee, and on a low of a deep shame for something that I had said to a friend earlier in the day. In both instances I should have known better. My body doesn’t rest well once it has had coffee of any amount. And then when the caffeine hits my blood it throws me out of wack. I get jittery. I acquire sweats. I lose an important filter, and I become more honest with whoever it that is around me. And then I don’t sleep. Last night I was laying in bed, trying to find something to burn off some energy without causing noise for my room-mates. I picked up this book. I put it down whenever I yawned. I picked up this book again. I put it back down when a drop of sleep fell from my eyes. I picked up this book. I put it back down when I finished it. I stayed awake for another three hours. Damned coffee.
I’ve been trying to broaden my reading palette for a few years now. One of the most rewarding results has been reading more women from more regions of the world, and, in the process, finding some truly lovely literary voices. I would count Assia Djebar’s voice in that group.
Here you hear the voices of deep mourning produced by war. They are soft voices. They are gentle voices, weathered but enduring, weak and strong in equal measure. They have a melancholy and sadness built into their sentence structures and their words. Every letter, one could say, is written in an ink that, as you turn the page, seems to induce the feeling one gets just beneath the surface in the moments before an emotion, any emotion, takes control. And, they are extraordinarily feminine voices, unashamedly maternal, loving and compassionate; these seven stories are mostly the stories of women, of their strength, in a society that has deep and powerful rifts and sudden, terrifying shifts in power. These are stories of life and death in that space in between and inside Algeria and France - that space reserved for refugees, for asylum seekers, for lovers, for their children and their families, the invisible and bountiful, confusing relationships that are obstructed from our eyesight.
I want to get back to the writing for a moment, because it is often exceptional, and particularly exceptional when she talks about the bond between wife and husband and the immediate but long-enduring decay that one feels when the other is lost. There is a great, powerful murmur here, like a low and silent prayer in the corner of a room then doesn’t end, that permeates the air and the walls with a reverence and a sadness. You hear the sound of a heart crackling and a mind bending as it responds to the loss of a family member, or of a family, and you feel the distance that separates people who have lived and loved in different continents but still remain connected and loved in the opposite one. The murmur converts itself into a hum over the pace of the book, but it never draws attention to itself. It source, whoever or whatever that might be, sits at a window, bathed in sunlight, but doesn’t speak.
This isn’t easy work on the part of the author. I often think that compassionate writing is the hardest form, especially in the short story form, because you have to make characters who are likable and who the reader can empathize with in a very short time, in a few sentences you have to build this person into something worthy of the reader’s love and admiration and heart. Assia Djebar manages just that. I think a lot of that has to do with her words and rhythm. She is gentle, her words are round, her sentences thick and lavish and covered in a new, pure, perfect black velvet. Everything rolls along a river of reality rather than bounces in bloodied streets.
Nearly every story contains something memorable in it, but they are not, as a whole, perfect or consistent stories. At times they carry the radiant, soul-lifting lilac in bloom, the smell of earth just turned over after a long winter, the decomposition of a whole season lifting into the air like a brand new form of respiration, and sometimes they smells a little rancid, milk left out in the sun, not quite right, and sometimes they carry the alarming odor of iron flaking off in dried, red, blood, danger. Much of this variation, I suspect, comes down to the writing (which, despite its strengths, is rarely impeccable), but the occasional character falls flat somehow. For example, the first two stories are nearly completely forgettable, and the final story, despite the moments of beauty and the gentle handling of its ideas and themes, doesn’t quite reach the heights that it could or should, largely because of the narrator. That said, there are a few that are really good, and at least one which is amazing. These are almost all in the first part of the book, and they are the tightest, most heart-rending of the stories to be found here. Images of women rediscovering long lost children, of them returning to a long-lost city to mourn a dead or dying aunt, of the discovery that they were a target in the same attack that killed their husband, that they were to become a broken body defecated by a history of oppression and war for which they bear no responsibility.
Of all the stories one is, to my mind, the work a great literary power at the height of her ability. If you can’t find this book but can find the story somewhere, read “Woman in Pieces”. It is marvelous, thick, beautiful, and sad. And it made me want to read 1000 Nights and 1 Night. That’s not a minor accomplishment. Another, “The Attack”, is very nearly in the same league, and a third, “Burning”, was the first story that made me fall in love with this book. These are some of the largest stories in the book, which makes me wonder about her novels, and about the occasional perils of the short story form when it is, indeed, short. About her novels, I look forward to turning to them in due time, once I have been to another bookstore in another city and, in perusing the shelves, I manage to come across her name calling to me from a spine. Assia Djebar.
I had a thought for a moment, a thought about three quarters of the way through this book, about how compassionate literature about people between countries, particularly two countries whose histories are so bloodily entwined and who presents are, in their portrayal, so bound up in suspicion and hatred, compassionate literature can help us empathize and understand that “other” that we have created and, in the process, break down the walls between us and admire our mutual humanity. Our hope for security. Our need for love. Our heartbreak when the man we have circled our life around is shot dead in a crowd. Literature like this is important.
I’ve been trying to broaden my reading palette for a few years now. One of the most rewarding results has been reading more women from more regions of the world, and, in the process, finding some truly lovely literary voices. I would count Assia Djebar’s voice in that group.
Here you hear the voices of deep mourning produced by war. They are soft voices. They are gentle voices, weathered but enduring, weak and strong in equal measure. They have a melancholy and sadness built into their sentence structures and their words. Every letter, one could say, is written in an ink that, as you turn the page, seems to induce the feeling one gets just beneath the surface in the moments before an emotion, any emotion, takes control. And, they are extraordinarily feminine voices, unashamedly maternal, loving and compassionate; these seven stories are mostly the stories of women, of their strength, in a society that has deep and powerful rifts and sudden, terrifying shifts in power. These are stories of life and death in that space in between and inside Algeria and France - that space reserved for refugees, for asylum seekers, for lovers, for their children and their families, the invisible and bountiful, confusing relationships that are obstructed from our eyesight.
I want to get back to the writing for a moment, because it is often exceptional, and particularly exceptional when she talks about the bond between wife and husband and the immediate but long-enduring decay that one feels when the other is lost. There is a great, powerful murmur here, like a low and silent prayer in the corner of a room then doesn’t end, that permeates the air and the walls with a reverence and a sadness. You hear the sound of a heart crackling and a mind bending as it responds to the loss of a family member, or of a family, and you feel the distance that separates people who have lived and loved in different continents but still remain connected and loved in the opposite one. The murmur converts itself into a hum over the pace of the book, but it never draws attention to itself. It source, whoever or whatever that might be, sits at a window, bathed in sunlight, but doesn’t speak.
This isn’t easy work on the part of the author. I often think that compassionate writing is the hardest form, especially in the short story form, because you have to make characters who are likable and who the reader can empathize with in a very short time, in a few sentences you have to build this person into something worthy of the reader’s love and admiration and heart. Assia Djebar manages just that. I think a lot of that has to do with her words and rhythm. She is gentle, her words are round, her sentences thick and lavish and covered in a new, pure, perfect black velvet. Everything rolls along a river of reality rather than bounces in bloodied streets.
Nearly every story contains something memorable in it, but they are not, as a whole, perfect or consistent stories. At times they carry the radiant, soul-lifting lilac in bloom, the smell of earth just turned over after a long winter, the decomposition of a whole season lifting into the air like a brand new form of respiration, and sometimes they smells a little rancid, milk left out in the sun, not quite right, and sometimes they carry the alarming odor of iron flaking off in dried, red, blood, danger. Much of this variation, I suspect, comes down to the writing (which, despite its strengths, is rarely impeccable), but the occasional character falls flat somehow. For example, the first two stories are nearly completely forgettable, and the final story, despite the moments of beauty and the gentle handling of its ideas and themes, doesn’t quite reach the heights that it could or should, largely because of the narrator. That said, there are a few that are really good, and at least one which is amazing. These are almost all in the first part of the book, and they are the tightest, most heart-rending of the stories to be found here. Images of women rediscovering long lost children, of them returning to a long-lost city to mourn a dead or dying aunt, of the discovery that they were a target in the same attack that killed their husband, that they were to become a broken body defecated by a history of oppression and war for which they bear no responsibility.
Of all the stories one is, to my mind, the work a great literary power at the height of her ability. If you can’t find this book but can find the story somewhere, read “Woman in Pieces”. It is marvelous, thick, beautiful, and sad. And it made me want to read 1000 Nights and 1 Night. That’s not a minor accomplishment. Another, “The Attack”, is very nearly in the same league, and a third, “Burning”, was the first story that made me fall in love with this book. These are some of the largest stories in the book, which makes me wonder about her novels, and about the occasional perils of the short story form when it is, indeed, short. About her novels, I look forward to turning to them in due time, once I have been to another bookstore in another city and, in perusing the shelves, I manage to come across her name calling to me from a spine. Assia Djebar.
I had a thought for a moment, a thought about three quarters of the way through this book, about how compassionate literature about people between countries, particularly two countries whose histories are so bloodily entwined and who presents are, in their portrayal, so bound up in suspicion and hatred, compassionate literature can help us empathize and understand that “other” that we have created and, in the process, break down the walls between us and admire our mutual humanity. Our hope for security. Our need for love. Our heartbreak when the man we have circled our life around is shot dead in a crowd. Literature like this is important.
April 28, 2016
Sublime, wrenching and sometimes tragic stories of women navigating Algeria's changing cultural landscape in the mid-1990s written by a master. Excellent translation from the French.
I picked this up at the Strand during Book Riot Live last year, having previously enjoyed Children of the New World - to my surprise the copy is signed by Djebar (who unfortunately passed away a few years ago).
I picked this up at the Strand during Book Riot Live last year, having previously enjoyed Children of the New World - to my surprise the copy is signed by Djebar (who unfortunately passed away a few years ago).
March 9, 2019
In the 1990's Algeria suffered a bloody civil war between the government forces and Muslim fundamentalists. These stories were written in 1996 and 1997 by renowned Algerian author Assia Djebar, while she was living in Paris after fleeing her homeland. All these stories are based on conversations she had with women from Algeria who had lived through the events she relates.
There are grown daughters returning to Algeria with next-to-nothing to remember their murdered parents; an elderly lady whose children have to make the decision of where to bury her; a teacher whose husband has recently been assassinated who is terrified after inadvertently dropping a French word in a classroom.
My favorites in the collection incorporate classical themes and magical realism from Arab literature and the “One Thousand And One Nights”. One of these is “The Woman in Pieces” where the severed head continues to tell its truth. In another Berber texts are sun by Mzab women.
These stories, while reflecting the bloody struggle of the 90's, are also relevant to the Middle Eastern conflicts today. As the cover blurb says: Djebar ”explores the conflicting realities of the role of women in the Arab world … and the struggle for change...”
There are grown daughters returning to Algeria with next-to-nothing to remember their murdered parents; an elderly lady whose children have to make the decision of where to bury her; a teacher whose husband has recently been assassinated who is terrified after inadvertently dropping a French word in a classroom.
My favorites in the collection incorporate classical themes and magical realism from Arab literature and the “One Thousand And One Nights”. One of these is “The Woman in Pieces” where the severed head continues to tell its truth. In another Berber texts are sun by Mzab women.
These stories, while reflecting the bloody struggle of the 90's, are also relevant to the Middle Eastern conflicts today. As the cover blurb says: Djebar ”explores the conflicting realities of the role of women in the Arab world … and the struggle for change...”
December 23, 2021
Hard to connect with but passively interesting. However I read this as a complete outsider and so know that I am not the target audience and am hereby not critiqueing the quality.
April 28, 2021
World Book Tour #3: Algeria
Assia Djebar's The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry presents a collection of short stories set during the civil strife and spate of Islamist assassinations that gripped Algeria in the 1990s. It was a real privilege to read this book: Djebar's stories all center women (she drew her inspiration from real conversations with other Algerians in Paris) and the perspective of women in North Africa is certainly not one I've often encountered in literature. As with any book of short stories, I enjoyed some more than others, but overall I thought that this collection was a real masterwork. It's often a tough and very poignant read, dealing with grief and the human consequences of political violence. But it's certainly not all dour: there's also resilience, hope, love (familial and romantic), and lots of wonderful little insights into Algerian culture. Moreover, Djebar's prose (well translated by Tegan Raleigh) often attains a wonderful, poetic lyricism. On the whole, Tongue's Blood does a splendid job of revealing and celebrating the unspoken inner lives of Algerian women and I would heartily recommend Djebar's work to anyone looking to expand their literary horizon.
Assia Djebar's The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry presents a collection of short stories set during the civil strife and spate of Islamist assassinations that gripped Algeria in the 1990s. It was a real privilege to read this book: Djebar's stories all center women (she drew her inspiration from real conversations with other Algerians in Paris) and the perspective of women in North Africa is certainly not one I've often encountered in literature. As with any book of short stories, I enjoyed some more than others, but overall I thought that this collection was a real masterwork. It's often a tough and very poignant read, dealing with grief and the human consequences of political violence. But it's certainly not all dour: there's also resilience, hope, love (familial and romantic), and lots of wonderful little insights into Algerian culture. Moreover, Djebar's prose (well translated by Tegan Raleigh) often attains a wonderful, poetic lyricism. On the whole, Tongue's Blood does a splendid job of revealing and celebrating the unspoken inner lives of Algerian women and I would heartily recommend Djebar's work to anyone looking to expand their literary horizon.
August 28, 2020
Assia Djebar mourns the reality in Modern Algeria. She mostly stresses the double standards and hypocracy imprinted by colonialism on independent Algeria. Women are treated as object, controlled and restricted by virtue of patriarchal norms. Moreover, Djebar demonstrates the Algerian identity as fragmented and fragile. Not to spoil the book, I recommend this collection of short stories to anyone who's interested in problems of identity, colonialism and its effect on cultures, and patriarchy. Good luck everyone!
October 26, 2022
Las historias que Assia Djebar escribe en este libro exponen los problemas subyacentes a la guerra civil de Argelia en los 90's, sobre todos aquellos que recaen sobre las mujeres. Mis cuentos favoritos: "Oran, dead language" (sobre la lengua y la identidad), "Mother and daughter" (dos mujeres solas tras la muerte del padre a quien le negaron ayuda en el hospital), "The woman in pieces" (violencia contra una profesora que retoma un cuento de Sherezade) y "Annie and Fatima (migración); estos, en mi opinión, representan lo que es este libro.
December 9, 2020
Really, really, really depressing. I don't think there's a whole lot of hope in these stories, just pain. I finished this novel with a few reading hours left for the night, but then couldn't concentrate on anything else. I kind of felt depressed and wondered why I would read something that put me in such a bad mood.
May 29, 2022
This is a collection of stories focused on Algerian women and their experiences primarily centered in the 1990s, during the Algerian Civil War. Some worked better for me than others. These are often sad, sometimes brutal, but also filled with rich historical and cultural detail. While not a genre or style I really care for, it’s well done, and evokes a strong sense of time and place.
November 5, 2016
Yikes... beautiful, violent, heart-wrenching stories that highlight the gaps left when friends and family are suddenly missing from our world.
Not sure I'd recommend reading before a trip to Algeria though... Maybe for after a trip.
Not sure I'd recommend reading before a trip to Algeria though... Maybe for after a trip.
October 25, 2023
It’s a beautiful book but half the time I didn’t really understand what was going on..perhaps one can just blame it on my state of mind who knows. Definitely sometimes confusing though as you weren’t sure who the character is referring to
November 10, 2025
These stories are hard to read, for the awful reality in them. The author has a very poetic voice and wonderfully mixes the action, the surrounding, and the feeling of the women. Most stories work wonderfully, but the story of the One Hundred and One Nights does not really work for me.
November 16, 2016
Well, that was a disorientating experience. Beautiful, lyrical and calamitous writing. I liked it. Worth a shot.
January 22, 2022
3.5
Second book of 2022 for Invisible cities project
Country: Algeria
Second book of 2022 for Invisible cities project
Country: Algeria
September 13, 2008
Love, death, and memory are perhaps the three central themes of Djebar's wrenching collection of stories The Blood’s Tongue Does Not Run Dry, which was recently translated into English by Tegan Raleigh. When death appears in the text, it always violent, relentlessly stalking the characters as they each try to impose some sense on their surroundings. The Algeria chronicled in this book (that is to say, a country at the height of a fratricidal civil war) seems to resemble Europe during the Black Death. Life appears to go on normally, but in the midst of it all people just suddenly die.
Ah, one might say, but the violence in Algeria was targeted at specific people, and did not affect people randomly, the way a disease might. I did not get this sense from Djebar's stories, however. The French murder the Algerians, the Algerians murder the French, the Algerians murder each other. Murder in these stories is not politicized, although there is a strong implication that, to speak out, for whatever reason, is to court summary execution—trade unionists, teachers, and journalists being among the most prominent victims.
The young teacher Atyka assigns her class a story from The Thousand and One Nights, in which Harun Al Rachid must assign responsibility for the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman found chopped into pieces in a chest. As the number of contributors to her death multiplies, it becomes ever harder to isolate a culprit. Likewise, Djebar's stories have very little to say about culprits, but a great deal to say about the victims of violence.
Felicie Marie Germaine, French expatriate, is one the few people who dies of natural causes in this book. Comatose in her French hospital bed, she is the subject of her Algerian children's long reveries about life with their father, Mohammed "Moh" Miloudi, “a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French.” It turns out that, as a woman of French origins, her throat was nearly cut by an Islamist insurgent whose hand was arrested at the last minute by the tiny gold Koran on a chain that Moh had given her. After three days of detention, she was returned to her traumatized family. After Moh’s death, she departs for Paris with her family. The fact that she survives the war only to die in her Parisian hospital bed is as fortuitous as the abrupt and bloody deaths of other characters in the novel. She returns to Algeria one last time, in a coffin tagged with the name “Yasmina Miloudi,” in order to persuade the authorities to allow a French Catholic to lie by her Algerian husband in a local cemetery. In death, at last, the characters are united in all the ways that life did not allow.
(With thanks to LL).
Ah, one might say, but the violence in Algeria was targeted at specific people, and did not affect people randomly, the way a disease might. I did not get this sense from Djebar's stories, however. The French murder the Algerians, the Algerians murder the French, the Algerians murder each other. Murder in these stories is not politicized, although there is a strong implication that, to speak out, for whatever reason, is to court summary execution—trade unionists, teachers, and journalists being among the most prominent victims.
The young teacher Atyka assigns her class a story from The Thousand and One Nights, in which Harun Al Rachid must assign responsibility for the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman found chopped into pieces in a chest. As the number of contributors to her death multiplies, it becomes ever harder to isolate a culprit. Likewise, Djebar's stories have very little to say about culprits, but a great deal to say about the victims of violence.
Felicie Marie Germaine, French expatriate, is one the few people who dies of natural causes in this book. Comatose in her French hospital bed, she is the subject of her Algerian children's long reveries about life with their father, Mohammed "Moh" Miloudi, “a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French.” It turns out that, as a woman of French origins, her throat was nearly cut by an Islamist insurgent whose hand was arrested at the last minute by the tiny gold Koran on a chain that Moh had given her. After three days of detention, she was returned to her traumatized family. After Moh’s death, she departs for Paris with her family. The fact that she survives the war only to die in her Parisian hospital bed is as fortuitous as the abrupt and bloody deaths of other characters in the novel. She returns to Algeria one last time, in a coffin tagged with the name “Yasmina Miloudi,” in order to persuade the authorities to allow a French Catholic to lie by her Algerian husband in a local cemetery. In death, at last, the characters are united in all the ways that life did not allow.
(With thanks to LL).
Read
March 30, 2021A collection of short stories that were written in 1995 and 1996 – a time when, by official accounts, some two thousand Algerians were killed in Islamist assassinations and government army reprisals.
This collection of short stories is split into two parts. The first is titled “Between Desire and Death” and the stories are equal parts romance and the horror of death and violence. The second is titled “Between France and Algeria” and centre on characters who are pulled between the two countries and may not feel they fully belong in either of them.
Even though they were more shocking and tougher to read, I preferred the stories in the first part of The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry. They are little snapshots into a character’s life as they deal with the threat of violence and assassination for their beliefs or heritage, or its about what happens after a loved one is killed. The stories focus on women and how they struggle to deal with the changing cultural landscape in Algeria. There’s some liberation but then there’s those who fear liberation and want to kill those who they feel don’t have the correct values.
There’s an underlying feeling of grief through all of the stories in The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry. Grief for a loved one who is assassinated, grief for the loss of naivety, grief for the loss of a culture, a home, or a language. A lot of the stories feature characters who were born and raised in Algeria but then moved to France as they got older. With that move came the issue of identity, whether they saw themselves as Algerian or French or a mixture of both, and perhaps guilt or fear over what was happening in Algeria, especially if they were removed from it and seemingly safe.
Once again, reading a book for my Read the World Project has led me to do more research about a certain moment in a countries history that I knew nothing about. These short stories came about from conversations between the author and fellow Algerians who lived in Paris, so there’s truth behind the fiction which makes these stories even more wrenching. The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry is a collection of short stories where each one is impactful as the last.
This collection of short stories is split into two parts. The first is titled “Between Desire and Death” and the stories are equal parts romance and the horror of death and violence. The second is titled “Between France and Algeria” and centre on characters who are pulled between the two countries and may not feel they fully belong in either of them.
Even though they were more shocking and tougher to read, I preferred the stories in the first part of The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry. They are little snapshots into a character’s life as they deal with the threat of violence and assassination for their beliefs or heritage, or its about what happens after a loved one is killed. The stories focus on women and how they struggle to deal with the changing cultural landscape in Algeria. There’s some liberation but then there’s those who fear liberation and want to kill those who they feel don’t have the correct values.
There’s an underlying feeling of grief through all of the stories in The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry. Grief for a loved one who is assassinated, grief for the loss of naivety, grief for the loss of a culture, a home, or a language. A lot of the stories feature characters who were born and raised in Algeria but then moved to France as they got older. With that move came the issue of identity, whether they saw themselves as Algerian or French or a mixture of both, and perhaps guilt or fear over what was happening in Algeria, especially if they were removed from it and seemingly safe.
Once again, reading a book for my Read the World Project has led me to do more research about a certain moment in a countries history that I knew nothing about. These short stories came about from conversations between the author and fellow Algerians who lived in Paris, so there’s truth behind the fiction which makes these stories even more wrenching. The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry is a collection of short stories where each one is impactful as the last.
July 16, 2016
A set of Algerian stories, linked by the themes of identity and struggle. Mostly told from the point of view of women as national and international concerns affect personal lives in painful and fatal ways. The struggle for identity of the country during and after its messy divorce from France is played out in the characters own contradictory and confused identities. The title nicely picks up on the part of language in identity -- French, Arabic and Berber -- as well as the urgency and importance of these stories being told come what may.
Powerful and poetic writing, which comes over well in Tegan Raleigh's English translation. Not a cheering read, but an important one, whose themes are relevant to today's conflicts around the world.
Powerful and poetic writing, which comes over well in Tegan Raleigh's English translation. Not a cheering read, but an important one, whose themes are relevant to today's conflicts around the world.
January 3, 2008
wowowow -- i really make it a priority to read collections like this about women from more troubled parts of the world. this was gloriously lyical and tremendously sad!
i returned the book before i could record some of my favorite snippets. drat!
i returned the book before i could record some of my favorite snippets. drat!
Want to read
July 19, 2007A friend of mine, Tegan Raleigh, translated this collection of stories.
May 19, 2013
***1/2 "The stories linger on in your mind long after you've started a different narrative."
read more: http://likeiamfeasting.blogspot.co.uk...
read more: http://likeiamfeasting.blogspot.co.uk...
August 13, 2014
Not an easy book of short stories based in Algeria and France. Stories wound from fragments told to the author of love, fear, homesickness and religion. Very atmospheric.
November 29, 2014
Djebar's writing really impressed
October 27, 2018
Amazing!
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