ABSTRACT
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? How many works of prose-poetry evoke existentially contoured dreams that extend the imagination to the limits of comprehension? In this essay, I describe a recurrent dream in which Jabès and I wander across a Nigerien dreamscape to encounter Songhay sorcerers in Niger. Through our in-and-out of dream travels we experience joy, wonder, pain, and sorrow as we find existential revelation on the periphery of consciousness, In the end, it is a textual journey that underscores an appreciation of the whys and wherefores of the human condition.
