Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

And I, petrified, defeated. What shame! How could I ever have been attracted that way to someone whose back I am seeing now? Because he is running away, is it possible? Because he is leaving, he is afraid, can this be true?

I looked at his back. Then I turned to look at the other. Only then, behind me, did the trumpeter suddenly stop his melody. He alone had accompanied me in this desert, he alone tacitly asked, “When, now, will you ever have the heart to dance?”

And so I continued to see this back after it had vanished. Inside me a colorless voice: I loved a child, an adolescent, a young brother, a cousin, not a man. I did not know it yet . The voice spun out clear and hard; it did not speak in French or Arabic or Berber but in some language from the hereafter spoken by women who had vanished before me and into me. The voice of my grandmother who died a week after independence and who vehemently addressed me from the depths of my raging, my astonishment:

He did not face up , the voice went on, not even for me! He could have turned toward me. Faced with my husband seeking out his ridiculous duel, I would have made a lightning decision: I would have gone to you, you, Beloved of my heart, I would have gone toward your hesitation and even your fear, in front of everyone I would have held out my hand to you. “Let’s go! Let’s leave!” I would have said without question .

And he, the young man who was not quite a man, would have found the courage. Past the shrieking and the insults and the silence of others, we would have left.

My husband, his face full of hatred, would have stepped forward of course. He would have wanted to strike. He would have struck: he, who was larger, more athletic, more threatening than you the fragile, high-strung, sharp one, you next to me, myself trembling but steady, my husband more threatening than both of us together — but us together! … He would have hit the young man; he would have spared me, tried to pull me by the hand to put me back in the cage.

Myself with the loser. Resolute. Myself going away with the man being beaten by my husband and the other men.

An hour later I collapsed in my daughter’s room. Onto the mattress on the floor. Alone. I was not leaving this place anymore. One day, maybe two, I lay there. I was staring at my Beloved’s back before me — and because I had seen his back, I said to myself he was “my formerly Beloved.”

At the time I was still my grandmother’s grandchild — though she had been dead for fifteen years.

“What is a man?” her harsh and, toward the end, somewhat sepulchral voice used to exclaim, her hoarseness caused by occasional fits of coughing. The women of the town, the young girls and the little ones, used to wait for her pulse and breath to become regular again. Lying there on her sick bed, later her deathbed, she breathed with a death rattle that would become freer toward the end. She would fix her gaze on us one after the other, and, with unspeakable bitterness but also undeniable pride — as if, throughout the eventful journey of her life, she and she alone in our ancient city had had the rare privilege of having married, after all, “only men”—she would say it again: “What is a man?” Then, a ragged breath would tear through her that was even worse than her spasmodic coughing and she would say, “A man is someone whose back one does not see!” Then she would repeat it, staring especially at the granddaughters whose wedding day she would never see—“Someone,” she went on more specifically, “whose back the enemy never sees!”

Thus, at the age of forty, lying there like a vulnerable and shamefully enamored adolescent, I could not stop hearing my grandmother gasping for breath before me, stubbornly harassing me, fifteen years later. Maybe it is fate, maybe on this earth we women who know “what a man should be” have to bear this as our curse: We are no longer able to find any men!

She spoke to me. She said “we” because she continued to carry on within me. Because she was living through my defeat. As for myself, I was trying to free myself from her. I was no longer seeking liberation from the husband with his melodramatic mask, but trying to get away from the virile grandmother, away, at least, from this bitter, virile woman, and I wanted to retort, You speak of “our present lot, no longer being able to find any men! No longer having anything to do with men!” … But as for me, that is not my problem: myself, I love. I love and I did not think that I was guilty; I thought I was sick. Not at all because there was the husband from whom I had to distance myself, from whom in fact I discovered that I had long been distant. No, I thought that I loved and that it was itself a strange illness! He was so young, at least he was younger than me, a sort of young brother or cousin from my maternal line whom I discovered too late … And yet he is the one, in an awful moment, my Beloved (silently: my Beloved) whose back I saw!

I am trying, because of you, thanks to you, to get out of this mess, and at the same time perhaps to free myself from the spell of my obsession. Help me, grandmother, but not with your bitterness or harshness. No! Speak to me, confess the passions you felt as a young girl, your emotions: Was it the second husband, or the third, my grandfather, whom you loved every night? … My grandfather, I have always known, never showed his back to anyone, either in battle or in any sort of confrontation — only the murderer saw his back when he shot him from behind the day the grandfather invited him into his orchard and served him with his own hands each dish, receiving him as a guest at his meal. My forty-year-old grandfather’s back, in the orchard: the murderer took dead aim, then disappeared forever .

Who is the murderer for me? Shooting my silent passion, my hope, in the back? Today is it my own eyes that cannot stop seeing the young man, not quite a man, run away?

If it is not from your bitterness, then, is it from this languishing after him, O grandmother, that I must recover, you whose face lies deep in the earth, there where someday I hope to meet you again? … (Even though, in fact, I am desperately seeking the lover, to make love night after night beside him, but above all, when all is said and done, seeking to die beside him, before or after him, to meet him again in the earth, to lie within him for eternity.) O grandmother, whose face is buried in the earth, most likely I shall meet you again for want of this final love, this passion to the point of death that I seek. Because there is no Isolde in Islam, because there is only sexual ecstasy in the instant, in the ephemeral present, because Muslim death, no matter what they say, is masculine. Because to die, like my grandmother and like so many other women who know instinctively, through their struggles and torments, what is a man, one “whose back one never sees,” is to die like a man. In Islam all these women, the only ones who are alive right up to the moment they die — in a monotonous transmutation that I am beginning to regret grievously — the dead women become men!

In this sense death, in Islam, is masculine. In this sense, love, because it is only celebrated in sensual delights, disappears as soon as the first steps of heralded death are danced. This first approach to the sakina , that is to full and pure serenity, is feminine moreover. But after this introduction, which is light as a woman’s breath, death seizes the living, living men and women, to plunge them as equals — and suddenly all of them masculine — into the abysses inhabited by souls “obedient to God.”

Yes, of course, O grandmother, Muslim death is masculine. But then, as for myself, I want still to be loving with my last sigh; yes, I want to feel, even when borne off on the shoulders of funerary bearers, on that plank, I want to feel myself going toward the other, I want still to love the other in my decay and my ashes. I want to sleep, I want to die in the arms of the other, the other corpse who will go before me or who will follow me, who will welcome me. I want .