Anissa M. BouzianeDune Song

of the same substance that wears rocks to sand, are themselves an unending promise of resurrection. Each element—stone, glass, cloud—is part of a shared palette among the near-colorless poems. Together, they form a life cycle within the work that binds every living and nonliving thing; as if what Forché is always noticing are silent transmissions between human and stone, bird and cloud, each only brought forth through the poet’s use of language. “So that is how we ascend! / In the clawed feet of fallen angels / to be assembled again / in the workrooms of clouds.” Anyone familiar with Forché’s work knows that her poetry of witness moves well beyond stunning imagery, having broad implications for the lives it hopes to remember and the readers it hopes to implore. The fallen angels from above are in fact zopilotes (buzzards), come to scavenge the remains of those killed by death squads in late 1970s El Salvador, many of which Forché searched for herself. The poem won’t allow her to leave out the depth of the horrors we are capable of, nor does it allow the reader to walk away in complacency. “You will be asked who you are. / Eventually, we are all asked who we are. // All who come / All who come into the world / All who come into the world are sent. / Open your curtain of spirit.” Books in Review Anissa M. Bouziane Dune Song Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2019. 350 pages. WHAT CAN ONE LOOK for in the daunting vastness of the desert? What happens when the desert teems with the harrowing echoes of terror? Jeehan Nathaar, the protagonist of Dune Song, is, like Anissa M. Bouziane, a US-born Moroccan American scholar who returns to Morocco after having witnessed the collapse of the World Trade Center. This traumatic experience continues to haunt her throughout the narrative as “the echo of dying voices” rings in her head, forcing her to deal with the burden of an obsessive and often unexplainable fear. Jeehan’s initial plan, after leaving New York, is to join Ali, a journalist friend with whom she had a brief affair, and travel together to southern Morocco, where they plan to investigate the trafficking networks of migrants crossing the desert. But the reader soon understands that Jeehan’s departure is an attempt as much to flee fear and horror as to reinvent herself on the other side of the Atlantic. Having abandoned her dissertation, lost her funding, and left academia following the death of her mentor, Jeehan seeks a way out: “I was running away from my shattered dreams,” she writes. “I wanted to spin the Angel of History around and have it boldly face the future.” In Morocco, Ali’s unexpected absence leaves Jeehan lonelier than ever. Even her energetic sister, Rizzy, has left for Sierra Leone to document human rights violations. As a result, Jeehan’s taxi journey to southern Morocco becomes a confrontation with the all-encompassing darkness of landscapes, memories, and solitude . As she delves into the desert, scenes from the past are vividly retrieved and reenacted in the present. Surrounded by heat and dust, Jeehan falls sick and experiences a long descent into an abyss of ghostly images and shadows. She seeks healing not only through interaction with her hosts—Lahcen, the owner of La Rose des Sables, the hotel where she eventually stays, his wife, Fatima, and their teenage son, Fareed—but also by “listening to the desert breath,” by deciphering “the sound of human voices and camel cries riding on the wind.” The narrative depicts an arduous process of sensorial learning, an overlapping journey made of loss and recollection, selfabandonment , and physical control. Being buried in the highest dune, Lalla el ‘Aliah, is, for Jeehan, an act of physical and psychological renewal. The novel is organized in alternating chapters set, respectively , in New York and Morocco, which not only redefines reading as a transatlantic backand -forth but also creates a dynamic relation between past and present. As a result, the narrative reads like a long quest for an intermediary space of regeneration that can both heal the American trauma and reinvent the relationship with the Moroccan homeland

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