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From Sleep Unbound
This series brings the best African writing to an international audience. These groundbreaking novels, memoirs, and other literary works showcase the most talented writers of the African continent. The series also features works of significant historical and literary value translated into English for the first time. Moderately priced, the books chosen for the series are well crafted, original, and ideally suited for African studies classes, world literature classes, or any reader looking for compelling voices of diverse African perspectives.
Books in this series are published with support from the Ohio University National Resource Center for African Studies.
Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa
Phaswane Mpe
ISBN: 978-0-8214-1962-5
Dog Eat Dog: A Novel
Niq Mhlongo
ISBN: 978-0-8214-1994-6
After Tears: A Novel
Niq Mhlongo
ISBN: 978-0-8214-1984-7
From Sleep Unbound
Andrée Chedid
ISBN: 978-0-8040-0837-2
On Black Sisters Street: A Novel
Chika Unigwe
ISBN: 978-0-8214-1992-2
Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing Up Chinese in South Africa
Ufrieda Ho
ISBN: 978-0-8214-2020-1
The Conscript: A Novel of Libya’s Anticolonial War
Gebreyesus Hailu, translator
ISBN: 978-0-8214-2023-2
Thirteen Cents: A Novel
K. Sello Duiker
ISBN: 978-0-8214-2036-2
ANDRÉE CHEDID
From Sleep Unbound
Translated from the French
Le Sommeil delivre
by Sharon Spencer
SWALLOW PRESS / OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
Athens, Ohio
© 1976 by Flammarion
English translation © 1983 by Sharon Spencer
Introduction @ 1983, 1995 by Bettina Knapp
First Swallow Press/Ohio University Press edition printed 1983
Swallow Press/Ohio University Press
Athens, OH 45701
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 (pbk.)
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Chedid, Andree.
From sleep unbound.
“Translated from the original French title Le Sommeil délivré.”
ISBN 0-8040-0837-X (pbk.)
I. Title.
PQ2605.H4245S613 1983 843'.914 82-22459
CIP
ISBN-13: 978-0-804-04060-0 (e-book)
to Louis,
this first novel
Woman may be compared to a very deep
body of water; one can never
predict the power of the undertow.
Vizir Ptahhotep,
“Instruction on the Subject of Women,”
Egypt, about 2600 B.C.
Foreword
Poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist, wife, mother, grandmother—Andrée Chedid is one of France’s outstanding literary figures. Her way is profound and sensitive, her vision innovative in its archetypal delineations, her aesthetic is lyrical, dense, symbolistic—a blend of the real and the unreal, the Occident and the Middle East. The protagonists of her novels emerge from a universal mold; they are eternal in their philosophical and psychological configurations—they have stepped into life full-blown from the dream.
Andrée Chedid, who is of Egypto-Lebanese origin, was born in Cairo in 1920. She received her B.A. degree from the American University in her native city. Married at the age of 21 to Louis Chedid, a medical student, Andrée Chedid spent the next two years (1942–45) in Lebanon. The couple moved to Paris in 1946 where Louis Chedid earned his degree in medicine, then became associated with the Institut Pasteur. The Chedids have two children and six grandchildren.
Andrée Chedid has repeatedly said that she is the product of two civilizations, two ways of life, and two psyches. These dichotomies, however, are fused in the works of art which are her writings—stilled in giant frescoes, visualizations and dramatizations replete with mysterious and arcane forces, spheres bathed in subliminal darkness, insalubrious realms, as well as crisp, stark luminosities which crystallize sensations, revealing the most imperceptible of sublime feelings. Unlike the New Wave novelists, such as Michel Butor or Alain Robbe-Grillet, who consider the novel to be a type of puzzle, a mythology difficult to unravel, whose works are divested of plot and characters and whose beings are perpetually following repetitive patterns; or the writings of Nathalie Sarraute, whose dramas stem directly from the interplay of tropisms, which is what she calls those inner movements, those sensations and hidden forces within each individual that are at the root of gestures, words, and feelings; or of Francoise-Mallet Joris’ dynamic clusters whose raison d’ȇtre focuses on questions of appearance and reality set not in any philosophical or political terms, but as part of a theological climate based on hope. Chedid’s novels resemble to a certain degree, Marguerite Duras’ works such as The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein or The Vice-Consul, sequences of essences flowing onto the stage in evanescent forms and shapes, capturing
