Andrée Chedid’s childhood days and her early memories, particularly those associated with Egypt, play an important role in her formation as a writer. Emotions and images, as stamped in her writings, bear the impress of a dry and parched land with its sun-drenched tonalities ranging from deep ochre to a sandy-brown glare, from seemingly endless skies, depicted in nuanced tones of incandescent blues, set against a blazing sun and the sleepy, sometimes turbid waters of the Nile. Her novels are bathed in endlessly shifting emotional climates, disclosing and secreting shapes and hues, energy patterns transmuted into human beings or into landscapes—impenetrable domains where purity cohabits with depravity. As Andrée Chedid wrote in an interview:
. . . as far as I am concerned, it is less a matter of nostalgic return to the past, of a concerted search for memories, than it is a need to experience the permanent presence of an inner sentiment—pulsations, movements, chants, misery and joy, sun and serenity, which are inherent to the Middle East. I seem to feel all these emotions pulsating within me. I believe I was very much marked by both the poverty and the benevolence of those around me. I felt compelled to speak of the simple people in my novels because they seem to be closer to the essentials in life, to the elementary aspects of nature. Of love, death, and of life.
Andrée Chedid’s writings are many and varied. They include such novels as From Sleep Unbound (Le Sommeil délivré, 1952), The Sixth Day (Le Sixiéme jour, 1960), The Other (L’Autre, 1969), The Fertile City (La Cité fertile, 1972), Nefertiti and Akhenaton’s Dream (Nefertiti et le réve d’Akhnaton, 1974), Les Marches de sable (Steps in the Sand, 1981), La Femme de Job (Job’s Wife, 1993); collections of poems entitled Primal Face (Visage premier, 1972), Texts. for a Countenance (Textes pour une figure, 1949), Caverns and Suns (Cavernes et soleils, 1979); successfully produced plays, Berenice of Egypt (Bérénice d’Egypte, 1968), Numbers (Les Nombres, 1968). The Showman (Le Montreur, 1969); essays on Lebanon, war, poetics, the art of writing. She is the recipient of many awards, among them, the Louise Labé prize for poetry (1976), and the Goncourt prize for short story (1979).
Both the Occident and the Middle East are always present in her novels. Universal needs and feelings are stamped with collective as well as individual yearnings—set apart or opposed to environment or family situations—or themselves. The tension provoked by the innervating sensations which flow forth are evoked in muffled and muted tones, feeding and dilating the images implicit in her works.
Peoples and civilizations fascinate Andrée Chedid. As such, past is ushered into existence, creatures are enticed to spin their webs, to evolve, to act, while revealing both blemished and unblemished inner worlds. Her novels may be looked upon as meeting places between author and the creatures of her fantasy—and the reader—enriching one another deeply and permanently. The dialogue fostered in this tripartite dynamic arouses suspense, but most of all, fleshes out feeling.
Andrée Chedid’s novels are based on myths, that is, impersonal experiences. Past, present, and future fuse into an eternal present, grow, paradoxically, into a single harmony and/or cacophony. A theme may stem from a kind of anecdote, as it does in The Other, then expand in dimension, revealing the inner workings of a death/rebirth ritual. An old man is determined—and this despite all odds—to save the life of a young man, a foreigner, who had, it was thought, been the victim of an earthquake. He is convinced that the young man is alive beneath the rubble. Obdurate, the peasant pursues his arduous search into the profound recesses of the earth. Mythically, we see a man’s progressive and willed emergence from obscurity, his terrible struggle against the forces of darkness—his faith in life, in the individual. The old man’s simple and earthy vocabulary, and the passion with which he imbues his task, allow him to pass from the shadow world of unknown subliminal forces beneath the earth, to the sunlit sphere of enlightenment. From One world to The Other—death to life, action born of desire!
Language for Andrée Chedid is an instrument which allows her to decant her feelings, concretize her thoughts, philosophical and aesthetic views. Set in single and multiple sequences of energetic patterns, rhythmic groupings, and lyrical sonorities, her novels resound with subtle blendings, capture and encapsulate the reader in their flow. A voice always presides in each of her works: disconcertingly at times, assuagingly at other moments, it expresses the pain, anguish, joy, and the sensuality which exist inchoate in the mysterious sub-climates of a soul. This voice, which emanates from the very depths of being, links past, present, and future in ductile essences and sensations. The voice is attached to the land; it speaks mightily of Egypt, Lebanon, and France—elements of each, undefined and undelimited in an endless potent vision. The voice inhabiting Andrée Chedid’s novels transcends geographical boundaries; it bears the stamp of universality.
The voice which emerges from her works is linked and nurtured by the spiritual, psychological, and visceral configurations of her characters. Solitary, they frequently walk their own dismal paths, a prey to fantasies, terrors not always of their own making, but due in part to social stigmas imposed upon them by centuries of social conventions. Such beings yearn to be understood, to communicate their longings, to breach distances, pierce through matter and bathe in a wall-less world, warmed by a feeling sun rather than by the icy climes of a world engulfed in blackness. Strong and virile women also figure in Chedid’s novels, positive mother principles who know how to handle their pained lives, to assuage torment, assume helpful stances during agonizing moments.
Unlike the characters or non-characters of Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Claude Simon, Chedid’s creatures are not literary equivalents of people she has known or not known. They do not fit into a system or classification; they cannot be forced bodily into an opus, squarely or mathematically placed here and there. Her beings are amalgams or blendings—alloys in the alchemical sense—of memories and phantasms. They are never limited by area or intellectual stratifications. They are fluid forms emerging from a subliminal world, alive, breathing, acting and reacting to forces outside of their control or those over which they may have some authority. Although Andrée Chedid maintains that the people inhabiting her novels do not resemble her in any way, her protagonists bear the stamp of her personality—wistful, poetic, sensitive, compassionate, understanding—yet, they are also merciless and cruel if too acutely pressed, if pain grows unbearable; fulguratingly explosive situations are of their making. It is this very livingness, this poetic quality of fusing emotion and feeling with the workaday world, revealed in muted, subdued, and controlled overtones, which makes her works unique.
Nature is also a living entity in Andrée Chedid’s novels—a heaving, pulsating body. In The Fertile City, for example, the various forms delineating this metropolis are expressed in terms of blocks of images, evanescent in texture. Primary colors emerge in a series of stark blendings; metals take on emotional tonalities, they burn with force as if exposed to intense heat and great passion, then flow through intricate verbal patterns; elements, such as earth, water, and air, are transformed by the wizardry of Chedid’s pen into rows of concrete houses, vast landscapes, clumps of bushy trees. The city is the backdrop for the situations enacted in The Fertile City. Alefa, the archetypal mother, could be a hundred or a thousand years old—she is ageless. A dancer, she practices one of the most ancient arts known, one of the most elemental forms of expression. Alefa, however, is no ordinary entertainer. Both human and non-human, when she walks she “oscillates,” and in so doing, manipulates her limbs, concretizes her throughts and emotions in sequences of hieratic gestures which seem to float through space. Natural forces such as the tree, the stone, a tear, even silence and air come to life under Chedid’s verbal baton. A positive mother figure, Alefa nourishes, encourages, yields her embrace and comfort to those in need of warmth and understanding. Against this extraordinary mythical personification, are enacted the petty worries, jealousies, rancors, and loves of the protagonists.
Andrée Chedid’s characters are ambivalent. Rooted and uprooted, their joys and pains are woven into living and palpable forces which capture, hold, then release their loves and hates in spiritual, subliminal and phenomenological spheres.
