They all have only this word in their mouths: to understand. How can you explain what derives from mystery? Before Yacine, I looked without seeing. I had put my eyes, covered with a tenacious film of melancoly, onto the scrap heap, in the attic of my outcasts, for such a long time that my eyes were like two pieces of fruit rotted on their branch. I don't know by what chance I found them one day at the bottom of Yacine's eyes. Immersed in his, they rubbed themselves, clean themselves of abstinence, of blind absence, the absence of all that is for me like a hole in nothingness. My eyes returned to me with sparkles of joy on a shining surface of arrogence. With unknown shivers. Finally, with a possible hope, though still without a goal. Before Yacine I could only tolerate the night. Night that erased the day's disasters. The darkroom night where I tried to develope the flim of imprecise dreams so as to escape from the shame and the guilt of having stayed alive. From out of Yacines eyes came light, without my having looked at it. Then the sky rose up, unfurled like a symphony: the dawn trembled like a resolving chord in a nacreous instant. The zenith's diamonds exploded into fireworks. The sunset's violins stretched out their sighs until desire blazed. The moon's laughter blew away the stars. Touching Yacine's skin, I came to know my own, his vigor and his seed heretofore hidden pleasure's long discharges adn short-circuits. Maybe we'd relearned to see together or one through the other, like two very sick people who have slowly come back to life through the same vision. Now I believe this was so. Since then, it hasn't mattered if the other were far away: he was always there in that state of attention itself, only drawn toward living in the liberated moment. Since then, from teh depths of my fears, I have seen the world through the light of Yacine's eyes.
-L'interdite, Malika Mokkedem