Abdelfattah Kilito

A writer can’t anticipate how his texts will be received.

Life is a heap of impressions, sensations, dreams.

the writer’s tasks is to adopt a tone, to preserve it, and make it welcome with the reader.

She never went out and never received visitors. A woman of the threshold, she lived at the limit of the exterior world but harvested its every echo, by stealth. We knew nothing about her except that she was R.’s wife and that her curiosity knew no bounds.

retrospect one might imagine his wife was a victim of the social system, a system that forced her to lurk behind her own door, forced her into this wanton spying, this perversion of knowledge called curiosity. Or, in a more sophisticated fashion, one might evoke the march of History, whose sweep lies beyond the understanding of its actors: years later they discover they were the instruments of forces beyond their control, and recognize in the past clues to a logic of events they misinterpreted at the time. In this light, the wife of R. obviously prefigures the new woman, preparing to issue from her chrysalis and go boldly into the world. Her behavior is inspired by a spirit of rebellion against the bondage and ignorance that have been the lot of women.

And her curiosity is evidence of the wish to educate herself, to participate in public life. At the threshold of her home, she has to take just one more step to find herself on the other side, in the territory of men. But that moment hasn’t yet come.

Epic poetry would have been lost had the rhapsodists not recited it, circulating from town to town, and the great learning of Herodotus and al-Masudi would have vanished if they hadn’t passed it down to their readers.

There may even have been something contemptuous in her attitude toward others. She received all, but gave nothing. It was as if she didn’t believe in the virtues of dialogue, of exchange, of sharing.