Traces of writing, trails of subject: Atiq Rahimi’s “Ballade du calame”

Abstract

In the brief poetic prose “Ballade du Calame” (2015), the French-Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi sketches his intimate portrait thanks to an interplay between the literary writing and the very gesture of the hand that uses a reed pen. This interplay helps portray a wandering subject in exile. Between traces of the writing and trails of the subject, “Ballade du Calame” is inscribed in a poetic exercise that is conceived in function of the very movement of the writing that sometimes is confused with visual images offered to make up for words and meanings. This paper seeks to accompany this ballade – in the first and the second sense of the term in French –, which (re)builds a certain lost subjectivity.