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The Tongue of Adam
Abdelfattah Kilito
Translated from the French by Robyn Creswell
Foreword by Marina Warner
A NEW DIRECTIONS PAPERBOOK ORIGINAL
Copyright© 2016 by Abdelfattah Kilito
Translation copyright© 2016 by Robyn Creswell
Foreword copyright© 2016 by Marina Warner
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted if! a newspaper, maga
zine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be re
produced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Published originally in French as La langue d'Adam by Editions Toubkal
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1361) in 2016
Manufactured in the United States of America
New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper
Design by Erik Riese!bach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kilito, Abdelfattah, 1945-author, I Creswell, Robyn, translator. I
Warner, Marina, 1946-writer ofintroduction.
Title: The tongue of Adam / by Abdelfattah Kilito ; translated by Robyn
Creswell ; introduction by Marina Warner.
Other titles: Langue d'.A.dam et autres essais. English
Description: First edition. I New York : New Directions Publishing Corpo
ration, 2016, I Originally published by Les Editions Toubkal (Casablanca,
1999) as La Langue D'Adam et autres essais, 2e ed. I Includes bibliographi
cal references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016021272 j ISBN 9780811224932 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages-Origin-History. I Historical
linguistics. I Adam (Biblical figure)-Language, I Adam (Biblical figure)
In the Qur'an-Language. j Arabic literature-History and criticism.
Classification: LCC Pn6 .K54413 2016 I DDC 417/.7-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021272
10987654321
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
So Eighth Avenue. New York 10011
Foreword
Q
ver a lifetime of reading almost everything,
from the most profound Arabic philosophical
thought to the adventures of Tintin, Abdelfattah
Kilito has written a luminous sequence of books
and essays; much as the Alhambra itself, his oeuvre
forms a harmonious assemblage of different spaces
made for reflection and delight, touching the sub
lime and playing with lightness and air. The Tongue
ofA dam, together with its afterword, offers a suc
cinct and satisfying map to dominant themes in
Kilito's work, about medieval Arabic poetry, nar
rative and learning, interactions with European lit
erature, the destiny of writers and the books they
write, their purposes and the pleasures they offer.
The title puns on langue meaning both language,
as in "mother tongue," and the physical organ of
V
taste and discernment. To know, savoir, Kilito
points out, shares the same root as saveur, savor.
Within this theme, Kilito explores another that
lies very close to his own experience: the forked
tongue becomes an image of the self divided
or doubled, depending on point of view-by the
speaking of two languages. Kilito himself is bilin
gual and writes in both French and Arabic, choos
ing according to his audience. He considers here
the situation in Eden: after the Fall, the serpent's
tongue becomes forked, but is this a punishment?
He rejects this view: since the separation of heaven
and earth was necessary at the start of creation,
human beings also needed to be "distinguished
from one another by their colors and tongues."
The monolingualism of Adam in the garden was
limiting; after Babel, the new explosion ofindivid
ual voices opened new horizons and constitutes a
divine boon.
Although in Thou Shalt Not Speak My Lan
guage, a witty, mordant study (published in Ara
bic in 2002, and translated into English in 2008),
Kilito considers the attractions of unintelligibility
and the protection and power that it can offer, in
this collection of essays, he affirms multilingual
ism, heterogeneity, and plurality; his own voice,
vi
moving between the language of the school he at
tended as a boy growing up in Rabat and the lan
guage of his parents and his country, carries with
it the historical complexity of these currents. Over
an arc of forty or more years, his writing has of
fered a most thoughtful, often provocative, and
ceaseless reckoning with this forked legacy.
The Tongue ofA dam was originally given as a se
ries oflectures at the College de France in 1990;
the great French orientalist Andre Miquel invited
him, and they indeed share elective affinities of the
deepest kind, since Miquel translated (withJamel
Eddine Bencheikh) the Mille et une nuits in the un
surpassed Pleiade edition of 2005, and Kilito has
long been one of the most inspired commenta
tors on the Arabic tradition of the wonder tale, in
such books as L'CEil et l'aiguille (1992) and Arabs
and the Art of Storytelling: A Strange Familiarity
(2009, trans. Mbarek Sryfi and Eric Sellin, 2014).
It was at a public conversation about the Arabian
Nights that I first met him, at the Centre Pompi
dou in Paris, where we'd been invited by Alberto
Manguel; we discovered that many of our favor
ite tales coincided: "The City of Brass," in which
all the inhabitants have been frozen at a moment
in time and sabre-wielding automata guard the
vii
Queen's effigy, the tale of the monkey scribe with
the marvelous calligraphy, and "The Queen of the
Serpents," in which the hero tries to steal Solo
mon's ring from his corpse, and the hero Buluqiy!:l
wanders over land and sea in search of the plant of
immortality ...
Kilito has compared the Nights to graphic novels
and he is generously ecumenical in his approach;
his strong love of the literature of astonishment
(aj'aib) and his own taste for what is calledgharaba,
strangeness, shows in his own critical method in es
says collected here, as he proceeds by posing ques
tions that in themselves combine positivist histori
cism with fanciful musing: What was the language
spoken in Eden? (He reveals that Arabic commen
tators decided that Arabic was the language of Par
adise and that after the Fall our first parents had
to learn Syriac.) What happened after Babel? Who
wrotethefirstpoeminArabic?WasitAdam-with
help from Eve (and a response by Satan)? Or does
Adam's canonical status as a prophet-the first
prophet as well as the first man-preclude him
from the suspect role ofp oet, for poetry is imagina
tive utterance closely associated with demons and
error? The tenth-century poet al-Ma'arri, a source
of endless curiosity and puzzlement for Kilito,
wrote that poetry is "the Quran of Satan."
viii
While Kilito ponders these issues, he alludes
to many fascinating elements in the narrative of
human origins, from the Quranic story of Eden and
the Fall to the commentary of Tha'labi in the elev
enth century. We learn that when Cain murdered
his brother Abel, Adam was away at Mecca and his
sons were in India, but Adam realized something
terrible had taken place because all around him the
earth withered-thorns sprouted from trees, fruit
soured. Likewise, we are tantalizingly informed
that Cain and Abel came to blows, not over a sac
rifice and its acceptance, but over their sisters
their sister-wives-and that afterward Cain did not
know what to do with his brother's body, and car
ried the corpse in a sack on his back for a year until
a crow showed him what do to by scratching the
ground to bury its dead mate.
Kilito has approvingly quoted Nietzsche's remark,
that in "everyone there is a child who wants to
play." He has adopted the short French form of
the recit and the nouvelle to write playful fictions:
The Clash of Images (also translated by Robyn
Creswell, 2010) is a tender, bittersweet collection
of his childhood in the Medina; and some of the
prickly fables in a booklet called Archeologie have
been published in English on the White Review
ix
website. But fantastic ways of telling have not al
ways won literature respect among Arab read
ers ( the Arabian Nights for example was long dis
missed in the Arabic scholarly world as vulgar
trash-pulp fiction indeed). In another short es
say, Kilito asks if the Arabs have a national/ cultural
classic, a monument in which they see themselves,
in the same way, Kilito suggests, that the Italians
have Dante, the English have Hamlet, the French
the Essais of Montaigne, and, it could be added,
the Americans have Moby-Dick? He says not, ever
since the Maqamat or Seances of al-Hariri fell from
favor, and now circulates only for its manuscript
illustrations. He ends that essay on a rueful note:
"For the Arabs of today, the book no longer ex
ists-and does not yet exist either."
Elsewhere, in Thou Shalt Not Speak My Lan
guage (trans. Wail S. Hassan, 2008) andJe par/e
toutes /es langues, mais en arabe (2013), Kilito has
discussed the lusterless history of reception for Ar
abic literature beyond its home territories.' Setting
aside the question of an Arabic national classic,
there is the sharp problem that whereas most of us
can name classics from Japan or Russia or Eastern
Europe, few of us in the west can come up with
* See Marina Warner's essay, "Story-Bearers," London
Review ofB ooks 36, no. 8 (17 April 2014): 19-20.
X
Arabic authors and titles. The reasons are mysteri
ous, consequences of a mesh of historic, political,
and cultural strands, as well as of differences in lit
erary modes. However, some of the characteristic
forms of Arabic writing-glazing and philosophiz
ing, digression, salmagundis, list-making, table
talk, traveler's tales, and fabulism-are all return
ing strongly in both essays and fiction today, as is
literature about literature, about what words do,
what books are, what words and books should be,
in books that are essentially about books. Several
ofKilito's essays involve questions about the book,
events in its history and its place in imagination:
stories about books touching on censorship, imi
tation vs. plagiarism, authorial self-obliteration,
books as murder weapons. The sources through
out continue to be exhilaratingly various: Plato,
Averroes, Ibn Battuta the traveler, Cervantes,
Tha'labi, and again al-Ma'arri, as well as the Nights.
Jorge Luis Borges, who himself wrote so passion
ately about the Nights, hovers in Kilito's pages as
his much loved miglior fabbro.
The state of widespread ignorance in the West
has certainly not helped in the current crisis of
conflicts and upheaval. With the accelerated pub
lication ofm ore translations, this situation is at last
changing, and some of the writers whom Kilito has
xi
