Thus it ever was? This is how it should be

What is it to ‘go beyond’? Perhaps only to stay a short while, bobbing on a moment in the seas of time. That staying upright — is it remaining in place, on the spot? is it being carried away briefly and then coming back without obvious loss to where we were before? staying enclosed by the inverted commas? does it make any difference other than that of the difference between one moment and the next, indistinguishable and yet not the same? Twenty years ago, or thereabouts, the Paris-based Tunisian poet, Abdelwahab Meddeb together with other North African writers who use French, visited the French Department, Queen Mary University of London. A group of students had translated portions of their poems and prose into English; the poets read them in French and the students their translations. Many of these students were Muslim, born and bred in London for the most part. Meddeb (his given name means ‘servant of The Most Generous’), after the poems had been read in both languages, told stories. He took them back to a North Africa most of them hadn’t seen, still less lived in. One of these was unforgettable as he told it: a Muslim enters at night into a monastery, to come upon a scene of feasting, of merriment. He takes part in the wild celebrations, the drinking, the singing: abandonment, no enmity. Movement beyond the line, the morning brings quiet and tiredness — he retreats into the day breaking. Meddeb didn’t say whether the society closed up again to exclude him. Is it that only at a moment of abandon does one find unity? Two young Israeli soldiers last August heard music — Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ — coming from a club in Hebron. They entered to find the celebrations of a wedding among young Palestinian men

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