Jabès amongst Songhay Sorcerers

Every time I read Edmond Jabès’s evocative writing about the silence of the desert, I daydream and night dream about Niger. Jabès’s provocative and fragmented body of work, published in French and translated into English, defies classification. Is it poetry? Is it philosophy? Does its classification matter? For me, Jabès is a philosopher who uses the evocative power of poetry to probe the fullness and emptiness of experience, the pleasure and pain of human existence, and the sweetness and sorrow of life and inevitable death. Through his evocative poetry of empty spaces—lyrical poems about the desert and of the trials of living-in-the-world, Jabès’s work compels the reader to dream about what life is and what life might become. These are themes that cut to heart of existential philosophy and bring into sharp relief the obscure elements of the human condition.