a world where words are trimmed with silence
– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks
*
Someone screams across the open ocean.
She says it’s in the splash of a dream. She says time has closed over the scream, and the scream persists, there, on the open ocean. She doesn’t say what the open ocean is made of. Nor where the scream descends. Over the ocean open, she says. Someone screams over the open ocean. It’s a parasitic scream, returning from a long time ago. A collapse reconstituted in a scream, she says. But the body is barely visible, it appears just so the scream can be uttered. Then it disappears. As though eternal. It floats, there, in the water of the voice. It’s the voice that trembles on the surface of the water. In the distant open of its scream. Everything is muddled now. The voice fritters away like sand in the wind. She’s not sure about the wide moon in the heavens. She says that the scream is a prison. That nothing has been broken. That the scream belongs to the atmosphere, like water to the sea. It folds and then flows outward. The scream is a crease. It appears then disappears. She says that all that matters is in the disappearance of the scream that rests suspended in her eyes. That even when she closes her eyes, she sees the scream, she hears the body, she extends her hands to touch the air that flows in and out. She doesn’t say that her vision is made of roots, or how many roots must be present in the waterfall tumbling down against the boulders among the vines.
When he asks her the question, she doesn’t hear it.
Someone is screaming across the open ocean, she says. Imponderable. She says it’s imponderable, this scream, melting into itself, which she alone can hear. She says that the open ocean itself is imponderable now, that the forest prevents us from thinking about it. That the error of time is continental, and we found out too late. She says “too late” as though ashamed of it.
He listens but doesn’t understand the shame inside the voice.
She gets suddenly annoyed when she says the word “continental.” She wants to know what it’s doing there, and for how long she had accepted its presence. A waterland having sprayed its watery memory into the steely eyes of its citizens. That’s all it meant. She regrets having said anything at all. It’s been so long already.
She says the ring that holds the worlds together has grown wider. It’s possible the body has wandered there. Again, does it have to be that the body has wandered away? She can’t say. She says that the open ocean is a place as well, far be it from her to pass judgment. Meanwhile, when she dreams, the scream lives on, with or without a body, the scream screamed over the open ocean. He wants to ask her to speak more about the ring, if there’s just one, for instance, but he doesn’t want to bother her. She’s already trembling. The water trembles, she says, didn’t you notice. He says yes, the water is trembling, but if he knows it, few others do. Why a ring. She can’t tell him why. The scream is encircled, she says, what does it matter. What did they say about the open ocean? Nothing. She says that nothing was ever said, because there’s nothing to say about it, that way it recedes from view doesn’t allow commentary. Its already having receded is the basis on which we call it the open ocean, and it exists insofar as it has receded. She says that very early in the morning the balaos ripple across the ocean, they are momentary smiles for the water, heavens, the roseate terns. She says she’s sure about it, but she can’t say the same about the open ocean. He says that people say the “open ocean” like people say the “lands.” Yes, she says, it’s likely the same fear that makes us talk like that. She hadn’t wanted to speak of fear but now that he had, she feels almost relieved.
Now time has stopped mattering, she says. She says the scream has hollowed out time. That it swallowed the sun in the waning light of day, the fire, and its trembling. She steps into the liquid of her own voice and almost drowns. He shows her the cliff. It’s here, he says, where the water comes. Are you above or below. She sets her hand on the bluff. She says that she no longer knows what to think, that her hand is a rippling made of leaf and bark and that that is how love enters into the body itself a scream. She also says, didn’t you see that the island is a wing in the immense sea. That the country the wing has inside itself is a serious and sad country carried along by joy. He doesn’t answer because scared of losing her to chaos, but she is as serious as the country that has lost its scream. Her vision has turned inside. She shows her hands as though guilty of a crime. She says the continent lost its wings. That men came in the night full of the blood of their idea to cut the wings folded in sleep, and that the idea and the wing are now gone, lost in the homeless wind, to drain the bloody, invisible night. So the wounded continent separated itself from its intimate thoughts, from its sublime pulsing life, its people raced to the seaside, it lay down in the once empty marine depths that were gathered again under the wing of the little waterland abandoned in the surging waves. She says that this is what memory is. Someone screams across the open ocean, she says that without giving it any thought, for the first time, she says it just like this each time. It’s a dejected scream, a deep scream, or a surfacing. It comes, it leaves again, into the brush of the country of the trembling island.
She says that the scream was emitted just once. That it lasts just a second, cannot be copied, and is quickly reabsorbed. Since it has never been heard in all its depth and expanse, she says it will never leave the body that it never had. Just once, a full solitude, a cloud made entirely of water that never rains, without ever coming or going. She says that the scream is screamed like never before. She repeats this to make sure the pain of this single scream pinned to its radiance is heard, and the open ocean that envelops and drowns it. Hollow, she says, the scream is hollow, like time. It’s blue like glass. It’s round like water is round. A star abandoned to the sea, a celestial body without contours, without arrival, a wringing of worlds. A flight, he says to her, hoping to touch the same ardor, the same desolation.
Nathanaël [photo credit: Karine Villeneuve] is the author of more than forty books written in French or in English. A poet, essayist and accidental photographer, she has been honoured by several distinctions, including the Prix Alain-Grandbois (Qc) for …s’arrête ? Je, a Publishing Triangle Award (USA) for The Middle Notebookes, the Prix International de Poésie de l’Académie Claudine de Tencin (Fr) for L’heure limicole and the Prix international de l’invention poétique (Mq) for Tempes. Her work has additionally been recognised by fellowships from the PEN American Center, the Centre National du Livre de France, the Conseil des Arts du Canada, Terre d’Arts / ETC Caraïbe.
Nathanaël is also a prolific translator, for
example of works by Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant, Monchoachi, Catherine
Mavrikakis, Frédérique Guétat-Liviani, Chantal Neveu, Hilda Hilst (the latter
in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo). She collaborated with the
filmmaker on the English subtitles of the Monchoachi La Parole Sovaj’ by
Arlette Pacquit, with whom she is preparing a book of interviews, Andidan
(CARA, 2026). Nathanaël’s translation of Alfred Alexandre’s elegy The Ballad
of Leïla Khane will be published in 2026 by Wendy’s Subway.
Matt Reeck translates from French, Hindi, Urdu, and Korean. Forthcoming publications include translations from the French of Édouard Glissant (U Nebraska Press) and Shumona Sinha (Liverpool UP), the Hindi of Leeladhar Jagoori (World Poetry) and Adnan Kafeel Darwesh (Ugly Duckling), and the Urdu of Qazi Abdul Ghaffar (Penguin-India). A previous translation from Nathanaël's Tempes appeared in the Montreal magazine Ellipse 95 (2025).
