Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

“Any dance,” I said, “just not a tango!”

The saxophonist launched into a South American tune and there I was out on the floor. Avoiding the little fat man who wanted to ask me to dance, I insisted, “I always dance alone!”

I must have danced more than an hour without stopping … The rest of the audience was enveloped in a half-light. There were one or two other dancers, and also a couple who joined me in monopolizing the dance floor lit by a dim red light. Then I do not know if they went to sit down or if they left. Whenever I stopped for a moment on the edge of the circle of light, one of the four musicians would make a conspiratorial sign to me and set off again with a new beat that he seemed able to guess in advance would be the rhythm of my body … I was off again, I twirled, time enough to smile at the musicians, my accompanying shadows, my night guides. At the same time, I felt I was alone, suddenly bursting out of a long night and, under these red spotlights, finally reaching shore. The saxophone player, the drummer, the flute player, and the guitarist stood there, lone interdependent ghosts facing me on these fringes — a night quartet.

I danced on. I danced. I feel I have been dancing ever since. Ten years later I am still dancing in my head, within myself, sleeping, working, and always when I am alone.

The dance inside me is interrupted when someone, man or woman, begins to speak, really to speak, relating some joy, some suffering, some glimpse of a hurt. Then the rhythm inside me stops: I listen, surprised or shaken, I listen to bring myself back, suddenly to feel this brush with reality. Sometimes I also listen to ways people have of staying silent … I listen and I try — but I don’t know, I never dare — to make the other person, the person who has forgotten himself or herself and spoken, or someone whose silence speaks for them, feel that this imperceptible shock has seeped into my eyes, my hands, my memory. The next instant the dance begins again: under my skin, in my legs, up and down my arms, all along the inertia of my face. Yes, it was that night under the tent that the dance began, in that instant: Leo and my husband chatting in a corner and suddenly the young man coming closer and closer, pulled in by the weak, still reddish lights, drawn perhaps by my dancing body. (I knew then, but only vaguely, of my power over this man, that it was beginning, that it would hover for a long time, that I would let it hover, then fray and dissipate.) So the young man came to the edge of the darkness; he sat down and looked in my direction without really staring at me; he didn’t move.

I danced on. I danced. I have been dancing ever since.

In the twenty years that went before, say from when I was sixteen to when I was thirty-six, I had of course played my role within circles of women, guests, neighbors, and cousins, young girls or mature women. There was a protocol to this: Each woman would slowly dance in the manner traditional to the town she came from. When the body was burdened with jewels, belts, tunics embroidered in gold, stiff and sparkling moiré, the dancing was ceremonious. It was frenzied, or I was going to say lustful, when, in special instances, in defiance or the pleasure of showing off, the rhythms were those of a village or from the high plateaus or deep Africa. This often took place when the orchestra was no longer one of established musicians but rather women who were amateurs; with two derboukas and a drum, with their rasping voices and brilliant eyes, they would launch into some ancestral refrain.

The urban ritual became more disorganized: Six to ten women would step forward together to see who best showed off her shape, her curvaceous hips, her abundant breasts, her voluminous hindquarters, shaking them frenetically until they hurt, until the ululating, bursting solo voice convulsed.

So I had participated in all those slow, formal ceremonies, even if, when my turn came, I could never keep myself from doing some nervous, hybrid dance, leaping or moving around with only my feet tracing a whimsical choreography, that shook my calves and intertwined my bare arms. Thus I would transform this constraint into a solitary dance, fleeting and “modern”—as the women called it, disappointed by my imagination, which seemed to them a betrayal … Betrayal of what? Without analyzing it, I think that the important thing was the challenge my engulfed body made by expecting to improvise the movements. The important thing was to distance myself as much as possible from the collective frenzy of those women, my relatives — I felt I could not accept for myself the almost funereal joy of their bodies, verging on a fettered despair.

As an adolescent and a young girl I had danced often and long, always in these groups of women and in crowded patios during the traditional festivals that we looked forward to.

Once, at a wedding, one of my female cousins went to get my husband so that he could hide in a window and watch what she called my “personal style of dancing.” My heart had pounded from shyness, or some unaccountable distress, as if this man with whom I had been sharing almost everything for ten years had willingly become a voyeur, just because he was a man and had caught me in my dance among women.

Strange theater, the binding of eyes and soul that resulted from the rituals of my childhood.

Of course, traditional though I was, I had ended up seemingly adopting Western dance steps before this summer in the seaside resort: Two or three times, in front of everybody, in the arms of my husband, a waltz or a slow fox trot perhaps had made us just one couple lost in the midst of others. I kept my eyes down, and kept him from holding me tight (“Others can see!”), agreed to none but the lightest touch, and finally, obeying the rhythm all alone, rejected my “escort,” in “their” words.

No, despite the fashions I had to escape that, I had to avoid being “touched” in such a manner by a man, no matter what man, in a crowd … The secret of the body and its autonomous rhythm, the velvety texture inside the body, and, in the dark, in the emptiness, the music goading me on.

This night, then, I could not stop. I would leap and then suddenly feel like moving more slowly: my feet marking the rhythm unchecked but almost dryly, my hips or my torso applied to stepping back from the excess of this rhythm, playing down the ways it interlaced, transforming its oriental character into figures that were sparing, faithful of course, but neither lyrical nor overabundant. Tonight my arms alone became lianas, drawing arabesques, in the half-light only my bare arms moving now like serpents and now like calligraphy …

I danced for a long time. The saxophone player, eagerly backing me up, sometimes moved one or two steps forward to follow me or bring me back toward him; for a long time I danced. I am still dancing.

I have forgotten if it was the musician who decided it was over or if, just like that, I left the dance floor first. I remember one person sitting there as witness, his eyes toward the light, his eyes turned toward the ephemeral, ever-changing nature of my figures, my Beloved. I remember that I went in the opposite direction, away from his silence.

The spotlights went off under the tent and we left. I was at Leo’s side. He took my arm in a friendly manner (Leo, the man I felt was so available this night; he had come such a distance not to give something but to receive … receive some secret — what was it? — from my opaque country that was starting its transformation). My husband came alongside me and it was then that my witness, my young man, left, speaking low to the three of us, “Goodbye. I live just two steps away.”

The first light was dawning.

As he went off (I could not help turning my head in his direction … he went along the beach to reach his house, which he had shown me one day was not far!), I finally felt the concentration of his presence vanish as the night drew to a close.