Listening in Khaled Mattawa’s “Zodiac of Echoes”

Abstract

This article analyzes the acoustic dimension in Khaled Mattawa’s Zodiac of Echoes, particularly its relation to diasporic subjectivity, faith and translation, starting from the premises of Jean-Luc Nancy in À L’Écoute (2002) / Listening (2007). Unsatisfied with the visual paradigm that dominates Western thought and the related anesthesia of the senses associated with ocularcentrism, the French philosopher evaluates the possibility of an ontology and epistemology based on listening as the sense that touches upon and stimulates all bodily senses and the mind. Like Nancy, Mattawa seems to propose resonance as a foundation, as the first or last profundity of sense itself. Zodiac of Echoes is the space/time of reverberations where the diasporic subjectivity of the poems lends an ear in the process of ongoing definition and redefinition of the self.