Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

Everyone looked forward to hearing one star that summer — a poet-singer who later returned three seasons in a row. The posters for his show already covered several walls in the capital, and one morning he arrived.

At four that afternoon I took my seat, alone this time, to watch the rehearsal. I was perched way up high and, though it was unusual, I was the only one watching in this theater that held two thousand. So this is how I saw Leo for the first time, looking down upon him, a robust man in his sixties with a monkey’s wrinkled face lit by the sun. On the huge stage, Leo adjusted the mike, talking with the stagehands in a very low voice. Then he tested the acoustics pointblank by calling out to the empty tiers, to the whole village behind and, it suddenly seemed to me, to the whole country, young and clumsy with its thirteen years of independence …

“Those eyes that watch you through the night, through the day

Eyes they say fix on numbers and hatred

The forbidden things, the things you crawl toward

That will be yours

When you close

the eyes of oppression!”

His voice, accustomed to speaking, to lampooning, curled a cappella higher and higher, unfurling the text. Sitting there, I listened. I knew that this night was going to be the event of the summer.

My three “musketeers,” it turns out, were standing in the wings. I later learned that they had gone to the airport to meet the singer very early; that they had all had breakfast together. “So Leo was the fourth musketeer that I was waiting for,” I said, laughing, when I found them after the rehearsal.

The evening was strange, at least for me. On a sudden whim I had agreed to introduce “Leo who needs no introduction” to the two thousand spectators (there must have been three thousand that night) who had come from the capital … Then I twisted my ankle after having improvised one or two gay sentences of warm introduction. There in front of everyone Leo kissed me on the cheek and I twisted my ankle taking a half-step backward. I took off my shoes with a wave and left the much-too-big stage to rejoin my three friends in the wings. The eldest holding me up by the shoulders, the other two smiling affectionately at me, we stood there, spectators bound together in the darkness, for the whole first part of the concert.

I saw, for the first time, a French poet address three thousand of my compatriots, and for three hours. At intermission I went to perch at the top of the amphitheater to study the audience intently. They all looked alike tonight; everyone seemed to be thirty years old — all had been barely fifteen or twenty during the war, and therefore they had all hummed the same French songs (Brassens, Brel, and Mouloudji, and Montand, and so on.). They had hummed them at the same time as they scanned the newspaper to see how many members of the Resistance had been killed, at the same time as they worried about a cousin arrested and tortured, at the same time as they fell in love, with a “Frenchwoman, a leftist,” who believed, it is true, in the future of decolonized peoples, but also in the beauty of the black eyes of her Romeo and his fervent voice!

They had all come together tonight to sing the refrains with Leo, to prompt him with a line when he feigned hesitation, when he stamped impatiently, when he shouted, whenever … Back in the wings, “Is he a ham, or is he a poet of the people, or is he just a real performer?” I asked the young man, the one of all the three who suddenly did not leave me anymore.

He confided that he had known Leo for a year or two, that his work had taken him to Italy to Leo’s place “for a two-day marathon interview,” and that since then they had exchanged brief notes on a regular basis.

I nodded toward tonight’s audience. “All the intellectuals in the country, the old activists of sixty-eight are here! … From who’s here tonight we now know that there are three thousand people on our ‘left bank,’ a majority of them male, and often with a ‘girlfriend’ who is French. Of course, there are several apparent variations — light or dark skin, straight or curly hair — but all of them are Francophiles tonight.”

“Leophiles, rather,” my companion corrected, and I do not know if he said anything else or not.

The applause went on and on and the calls for encores became more insistent. The star wanted to appear generous, suddenly feeling younger because this youth of a nostalgic summer bore him along. (Though, perhaps, I was the only one sensitive to this nostalgia).

He was called back two, four, ten times. Leo was sitting on top of the world. He recited another piece; he sang a new song that he warned us would be “short.” They finally had to turn off half the spotlights before the amphitheater began slowly to empty out.

At one or two in the morning twenty of us go to dinner in a nearby hotel; Leo presides, drinks, listens … At three in the morning there are four of us who decide not to go home and sleep: my husband, Leo, me, and my Beloved. (At the time I am not yet calling him that, I am sure). An assistant, a secretary, and the driver as well stay with us.

Some of the discothèques stayed open until dawn, and there was one set up not far away under a huge Tuareg tent, with a band made up of four young amateurs who were overjoyed to have a prestigious guest like Leo … A few night owls remained for another hour. Three men (Leo, my husband, and the young man — like Leo’s little brother) were seated at a table in the corner; their conversation seemed professional, about the two other concerts they anticipated that weekend. I was with the secretary, a young woman of twenty-five who had already told me all about her marriage, her divorce, and how despite her heavy family responsibilities (a widowed mother, two or three younger sisters who hoped to go to the university), she lived one day at a time. We decided to go from one person to another asking, “Have you been to the concert?” “Will you go back tomorrow? …” People invited us to dance; I declined. I felt I was floating in astonishing exhilaration, in gleefulness free as air; soon the sun would rise, we were never going to sleep ever again. This evening at the theater took place for me outside of any territory; it was neither in France nor in my own country but in an in-between that I was suddenly discovering. Those three or maybe four thousand fans of Leo’s had been engrossed in a romanticism that was as much anarchy as French, despite seven years of bloody battles still fresh in our minds. I saw this as the strange end of an era.

I myself was neither here nor there, not seeking my own place, nor even worried about it, but still I could not help feeling there were clouds approaching, storms in the forecast. The country, it seemed to me, was becoming a freighter that had already begun to drift into unknown seas …

Leo’s wholehearted success seemed to me enough of a gift from the past, and yet those there were all young men, old young men who had gone somewhere together to reassure themselves. What more could one ask of a true bard, a troubadour, a troublemaker, than to feel for ten minutes, or for an hour, like a family with shared memories, with equal parts irony and nostalgia.

I would have liked to talk about these ideas further with the only one of the trio who was still there, the Beloved. He sat in silence opposite Leo and my husband, listening to them. The young secretary said she was going home and had the driver take her. A few revelers departed, but three or four stayed on along with some foreign tourists; they asked for slow music to dance to.

“No, not a tango,” I suddenly said to the nearby musicians. “A pavane, please!”

“A pavane? What’s that?” a small fat man exclaimed, not getting my joke. He began to look at me shiftily.