Joyce Mansour: Torn Apart (Dchirures)

translated from the French by Serge Gavronsky

Joyce Mansour (1928 -1986) was born Joyce Patricia Ads, in Bowden,
England to Jewish-Egyptian parents. She lived in Cairo where she first came in
contact with Parisian surrealism and then moved to Paris in 1953 where she
became the best known Surrealist woman poet, author of 16 books of poetry,
as well as a number of important prose and theater pieces. Equally
impressive were the painters who illustrated her work ranging from
Alechinsky, Bellmer, Benoit to Max Walter Svanberg and Wilfredo Lam. Hubert
Nyssen, her friend, collected all of her disparate texts and published them in
his Joyce Mansour, Prose & Posie (Arles: Actes Sud, 1992).

I saw my belly's electric red hair

Rise toward my breasts, feathered bird,
And I laughed.
I saw humanity vomit in a shaky church basin
And I did not listen to my heart.
I saw a camel dressed and leaving for Mecca
Without the thousand and one sand vendors and the scaly
Of the black crowds.
But I could not go with them
Laziness had reduced the better part of my fervor
And routine had retrieved the dislocated
Dance of the big toe.