{"product_id":"demoiselles-of-numidia-isbn-9781635420661","title":"Demoiselles of Numidia","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe acclaimed Moroccan author’s debut novel, this stunning portrait of the world of sex work describes its sordid reality with beautiful, poetic prose.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAvailable now for the first time in English, \u003ci\u003eDemoiselles of Numidia\u003c\/i\u003e offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of young women working in a Casablanca brothel—their relationships with each other and with their pimps, their dramas, and the rare moments of happiness that bloom in this violent underbelly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginally published in French in 1992, the novel\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003equickly\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eestablished Mohamed Leftah as one of Morocco’s great writers. It showcases the extraordinary combination of elegant language and graphic physicality, as well as the nuanced questioning of traditional gender roles, which would come to characterize his works.“[A] vibrant debut about sex workers in a Casablanca brothel.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Startling…impressive…this tragic work remains timely and relevant, encouraging the reader to reflect on universal themes of gender norms, the self-perpetuating cycle of violence, and the inextricable ties that forever bind victims and their victimizers.” —\u003ci\u003eWashington Independent Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Written in elegiac prose that tends toward the poetic register of the ghazal, Mohamed Leftah’s novel brings a specific place and time to an aching kind of life, even as it tells, with great empathy, the story of a people who are often relegated to the shadows. The relationship between Zapata and “the Dane,” Nadia and Sophia, and the stories of Rose and Nectarine will stay with readers a long time. Fans of Anosh Irani’s \u003ci\u003eThe Parcel\u003c\/i\u003e and Orhan Pamuk’s \u003ci\u003eMy Name Is Red\u003c\/i\u003e are especially in for a treat.” —Shastri Akella, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Sea Elephants\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eCaptain Ni'mat's Last Battle\u003c\/i\u003e:\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Alluring…graphic and sensuous without being prurient, and a piquant exploration of masculinity, gender, societal taboos, and the nature of love.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Thought provoking and engaging, with well-realized characters and a satisfying conclusion.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Leftah is highly regarded in the francophone literary world (‘An observer of the abyss. A champion of delight’)…[\u003ci\u003eCaptain Ni’mat’s Last Battle\u003c\/i\u003e is] a stylish and intelligent read…a landmark statement in Egypt’s exciting national conversation.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Spectator\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“I read this gorgeous book in one sitting. The writing is poetic and breathtaking, rich with history. A must-read…\u003ci\u003eCaptain Ni’mat’s Last Battle\u003c\/i\u003e is so riveting!” —Hasan Namir, Lambda Literary Award–winning author of \u003ci\u003eGod in Pink\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMohamed Leftah \u003c\/b\u003ewas a writer and journalist born in Settat, Morocco, in 1946. He attended engineering school in Paris and then returned in 1972 to Morocco, where he became a literary critic for \u003ci\u003eLe Matin du Sahara\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eLe Temps du Maroc\u003c\/i\u003e. His career as a novelist began with the publication of the critically acclaimed \u003ci\u003eDemoiselles de Numidie\u003c\/i\u003e in 1992, followed by ten more novels over the next nineteen years. \u003ci\u003eCaptain Ni’mat’s Last Battle\u003c\/i\u003e (Other Press, 2022) was his first novel to be published in English.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eHe died of cancer in 2008.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLara Vergnaud \u003c\/b\u003eis a translator of prose, creative nonfiction, and scholarly works from the French. She is the recipient of two PEN\/Heim Translation Fund Grants and a French Voices Grand Prize, and has been nominated for the National Translation Award. She lives in Washington, DC.In this ancient land of Numidia, \u003ci\u003eNouar\u003c\/i\u003e, the plural of “flower,” is how we refer to syphilis, a disease that has long inhabited men’s bodies and haunted their minds.\u003cbr\u003e Could this strange and poetic designation be explained by the fact that in the Numidian tongue, many female names are also the names of flowers? Femme-flowers who, after the fleeting bloom of love, leave their paramours with petals embedded in their flesh, both badge of honor and mark of shame: Nouar, flowers of syphilis?\u003cbr\u003e Note how that last word whistles from start to finish, like a rattlesnake darting out (to then abruptly coil up). Whereas the word \u003ci\u003eNouar \u003c\/i\u003eevokes a bed of flowers, an orchard whose most verdant tree, its sexual organ, is attacked by a canker, or rather chancre; the syphilitic chancre.\u003cbr\u003e Imagining that these femme-flowers are indeed to blame for these syphilitic flowers, some, seemingly in response, see blossom on their own bodies—the cheeks generally, sometimes the forehead, rarely the breasts or vagina, though those vital parts, when afflicted, only become even more splendid and tragic—another strange flower, no less simultaneously glorious and shameful: a cicatrice.\u003cbr\u003e (A kind of revenge, if you will; a twin to the masculine syphilis, when this elegantly named scar appears between a woman’s legs.)\u003cbr\u003e Given the options—wound, scar, cut, mark, cicatrice—I barely hesitated, and you’ll see why, before settling on the last one, though I should have considered the weighty word “stigmata” first, I think. The miraculous stigmata that appeared on the hands of saints, but also those branded in red iron on the bodies of galley slaves, the stigmas of hysteria, or those that designate the orifices of certain insects and of pistils.\u003cbr\u003e That resonant, polysemic word, transporting (in its veins) pus, pollen, sap and blood, decay and miracle, might have been the most appropriate way to designate the scars that emblazon the bodies of the yet to bloom girl-flowers who are the pretext for this narrative and its heroines.\u003cbr\u003e If I resigned myself to keeping the word “cicatrice,” it’s because this term, while retaining its meaning as a scar left in the flesh by a wound, has also come to qualify, in Numidia, a condition, a state, an order.\u003cbr\u003e And so, if you happen to hear someone say one of the girl-flower names—Massc Allil, Yasmine, Warda, Zahra—followed by the word “cicatrice,” like a suffix or appellative (Warda Cicatrice, for example), then you’ll know that Warda (Rose) is a fille de joie. A whore. A whore who works for a pimp.\u003cbr\u003e The cicatrice that ornaments Rose’s body, as well as her name, is the mark (because we also say that these girls are “marked”), both visible and audible, of her condition.\u003cbr\u003e Before continuing this semantic digression, having only just begun, I realize that some of these words, whether I chose them or they forced their way in, starting with the one that prompted this detour—\u003ci\u003eNouar \u003c\/i\u003e(flowers)—the manner in which they arranged themselves, summoning others like the first birds to perch call the rest of the migrating flight, the clandestine links they’ve already begun to establish between themselves, the troubling emotions that some create, or resuscitate, in my heart (and body), all that is giving me a vague but powerful and joyful premonition. That is to say the womb and the skeleton of the story I plan to tell are already formed, almost unbeknownst to me. All that’s required of me is to journey through a few words, all the way to the end, like reaching the end of a tunnel, or a night.\u003cbr\u003e For you must have guessed that it was their pimps, those magnificent, young brutes, who marked these girl-flowers, these cicatrixes, as I call them.\u003cbr\u003e But from this violence, from this night, from a few mysterious, elemental words—flowers, girls, chancre, pollen, stigma—and a few enchanted names, Yasmine, Zoumourrod, will I be able to pull forth a song? Create order? Poetry.\u003cbr\u003e The only acceptable order.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Warda. Do I need to clarify for the reader what this name spontaneously evokes—Rose—when referring to a woman?\u003cbr\u003e In this case (that of a young girl), a rose in all the splendor of its first bloom.\u003cbr\u003e The “rosy-fingered Dawn!,” as sang so many poets, starting with that sublime Greek \u003ci\u003eaoidos\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e So shall I simply say that Rose is of the dawn? A woman who sleeps all day and only begins her work, performs her rites—she’s a prostitute in a bar—at the fateful hour of midnight? It’s at this hour, which divides day from night, millennia, reality and dream, that Rose truly begins her reign. Like a midnight sun.\u003cbr\u003e If Rose is an auroral flower, then the rays emitted by the deep décolleté of her bodice, when she leans over a customer, are those of the aurora borealis.\u003cbr\u003e A white Finnish plain, a herd of invisible reindeer running for cover once she makes her entrance into the miserable, semi-clandestine troquet (rhymes with “cabaret”) where she is forced to work by her man. Her pimp.\u003cbr\u003e I use the word “troquet,” popular in France, instead of the more common “bar” or even “joint,” deliberately. For me, it’s a magical word because I encountered it at the same time as the true love of my life. Have I tossed it into these beautiful and cruel stories of the night out of masochism? Or rather to show my tenderness for these cicatrixes, who, though very real, still strike me as more my own invention, born of my indignation and my love?\u003cbr\u003e Rose’s friend Massc Allil (Night Jasmine) works in this same troquet. But though she is named for the fragrant, musky night, her rites are performed during the day. A diurnal predator and prey (predator-prey).\u003cbr\u003e A year younger than her friend Rose, she already has a child; she also works for a man. The previous one, to whom she had been married, is dead. When she happens to mention him, infrequently, she simply says \u003ci\u003eal marhum\u003c\/i\u003e, the deceased.\u003cbr\u003e Rose and Night Jasmine kiss each other on the cheek; their men exchange a silent, virile handshake.\u003cbr\u003e Night Jasmine’s man will drive her home, and on the way relieve her of most of her spoils—her spoils of war: nectar gathered by an increasingly drunk, increasingly frenzied bee in the course of a day.\u003cbr\u003e Rose’s man, her esteemed pimp, who has the night watch, settles into the red moleskin booth. He lights a cigar. His gold lighter and his gold ring, its signet engraved with a single initial (“S”), gleam at the same time. The cicatrixes, a cloud of panicked butterflies seemingly driven by a sudden, strange phototropism, swarm to the pimp (but will they burn?).\u003cbr\u003e This sequence of events—a chaste kiss between two friends, tender words of complicity whispered in each other’s ears; a virile handshake, without a word, between their men, the switching of roles concluded: sleep for Night Jasmine, and for Rose, the continuation of the rites her friend had been performing; as for the two pimps: one would return the first lamb to her pen, while the other kept watch over the second as she was released among the wild beasts—barely lasted the blink of an eye, as if taking place in some timeless, unreal dimension. It went unnoticed in the same way the earth revolving around the sun goes unnoticed.\u003cbr\u003e A rigorous, immutable order, of the kind that governs the movement of the planets, must continue to govern the functioning of the troquet, of this white city of Numidia, of this vast universe. If Night Jasmine were to cease her diurnal duties, or if Rose began to sleep at night—no longer an aurora borealis—it would be akin to tearing apart the boundaries that separate raptors from their prey, diurnal from nocturnal, an upending of the order of birds, flowers, and planets.\u003cbr\u003e Two school-aged prostitutes and their pimps, equally young, carry on their shoulders, in their genitals, in their bosoms, on their knives, in their bags—Night Jasmine’s is made of crocodile skin and when she mentions it, she of course proudly announces, “It’s croc!”—the very order of the world.","brand":"Other Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302435442917,"sku":"NP9781635420661","price":16.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781635420661.jpg?v=1767724985","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/demoiselles-of-numidia-isbn-9781635420661","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}