Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

The town notables speak: “May the great Masinissa and the Life of the Living both be praised throughout future generations. Do we not owe to their fighting and their vigilance the fact that we were not dragged into the ruin of Carthage or under the Roman yoke that is going to grow stronger and more burdensome!” In Dougga, the peace-loving city, where we still live …

Micipsa goes up to the steles. He checks each inscription and thanks the carpenters, the stone-carvers as well as the decorator and the sculptor; the statues of the winged goddesses are magnificent.

“So,” he says without solemnity but as if talking to himself, “at the height of my powers I was granted the sight of the destruction of the greatest metropolis on earth!”

Two or three representatives of the municipality of Dougga begin to make speeches. The first one speaks in Carthaginian, showing off his fluency; obviously he has studied in Carthage and is still proud of it. The second, a stockier man, makes his speech in Berber, with something like the rediscovered comfort of relaxing in the warmth of being “among one’s own.” And the third man, the youngest but the most gaudily dressed, brings it all to a quick conclusion — in Latin, the language of the future , he must have thought.

Micipsa, who has been listening patiently, raises his arm; he begins by thanking the orators for the eulogies that, one after the other, they have made to his father, Masinissa. “I would like, before you all, to ask a favor of my young nephew! It was not ten years ago that he saw, as did we, our enemy vanish as if in a nightmare. Now he reminds me that he is one of the people who speaks yesterday’s language best! May he then read for us all, and in both scripts, the stele dedicated to my father and the one bearing the names of the skilled artisans! My dear nephew!” he insists before everyone.

And Jugurtha steps forward.

In a very clear voice resounding through the respectful silence, he begins with “the Others’ language,” as he calls it, and his Carthaginian rises in praise of the great Masinissa, his ancestors, and his three sons. Then he calls out the names of the team from Atban in the same manner.

He takes a breath for a moment, a brief moment, and in the intensifying heat the chatter of a cicada is heard; he begins to read again, this time in, he says emphatically, “the language of our ancestors.”

All present reply with rounds of applause. The young Berber prince stands erect and unsmiling there for a moment before the elegant monument. Soon he moves away under the olive trees.

To leave! envisions Jugurtha who is not yet eighteen.

He uses up his days hunting and in battle practice with his fellow students. He studies, at least when he is living in Cirta, law texts and historical chronicles in Carthaginian — the family library enriched, so much enriched, by so many new books, the booty of Carthage …

Jugurtha has read the account of earlier wars between Rome and Carthage, but it is neither the ghost of Hasdrubal the Great nor even the ghost of glorious Hannibal, triumphant in Rome and many other Italian cities, that haunts him. No. He dreams more about the indomitable enemy of these two heroes: great Scipio.

Because the young man remembers: He was barely seven years old, he was standing there, frozen, at the gates of the palace of Cirta, above the cliffs, when a Roman named Scipio, a leader who was scarcely thirty, said to have been the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus in Rome, dismounted first, at the head of his troops.

The child Jugurtha stared at him with fiery eyes. Listened to what they were saying in Latin. Micipsa introduced himself and greeted the Roman guest in the proper manner: “My father,” he said, “died scarcely two hours ago! Certainly we have awaited your arrival for the burial. The women who come to weep, and his wives as well, are now at the place where he lies!”

Then, as was customary, he wrapped the general in a spotless woolen toga so that he could cross the first threshold.

At the entrance to the vestibule the child appeared, standing bare-chested and holding himself proudly, his hands together and ready to make the offering. He offered the general the cup of goat’s milk and three dates soaked in acacia honey.

Jugurtha raised his hands high. The general lowered his weatherbeaten face, weighed down by his helmet. He smiled with his eyes and his mouth at the same time as the child-prince slowly spoke the words of hospitality in Libyan which his uncle, Micipsa, scrupulously translated. “He is welcoming you in our language: ‘May the mourning,’ he says, ‘be eased because of your arrival, O friend!’ ”

Before drinking, Scipio Emilien studied the child’s face for a long time. He asked his name.

“Yougourtha,” the child replied in his sharp voice.

WHAT JUGURTHA DID will not be recorded in Berber: the letters of this alphabet, scattered on the ground like the bas-relief Roman chariots, the quadrigas, and the winged goddesses from the dismantled monument of Dougga, seem to have fled by themselves, going all the way to the desert of the Garamantes to slip into the sands and settle onto the immemorial rocks.

Jugurtha and his passion for battle will not be inscribed in the Punic alphabet either. Carthage is no longer there, even if Caesar will attempt to make it rise again on the high plain that the Romans made sterile. Carthage is no longer there, but its language is still current on the lips of both the educated and the uneducated in the cities that fell but were not yet romanized. The language, in fact, like a current, runs freely on, never becoming fixed. The Carthaginian language dances and quivers for five or six centuries to come. Freed of the soldiers of Carthage, of the priests of Carthage, of the sacrifice of the children of Carthage, Carthaginian speech, free and unsettled, transmutes and transports with vivid poetry the spirits of the Numidians who yesterday made war on Carthage. Now they will understand that they were almost making violent, bitter love to it — wanting to desecrate it.

Later and elsewhere, in the first century B.C.E., the same sort of ferment and the same inability to record its outbreaks of resistance will be seen in Gaul as it fights for its independence. Here, too, the task of writing about the defeated Vercingetorix will fall to the conqueror, Caesar. Later.

When Jugurtha reads the double inscription at the request of Micipsa on this spring day at Dougga, however, Polybe, “the greatest mind of the time,” who will soon be seventy, writes.

He records the destruction of Carthage. Before him rise the heroes of the tragedy of the blaze that for six days and six nights and for weeks to come seems to burn and redden the four corners of the known Mediterranean. Houses endlessly collapse in the streets of Byrsa, bodies living and dead of women, children, and old people mingle, and the horses of Roman and Numidian soldiers trample them, splitting human brains into this mud mixed with cries. Nine hundred desperate people shut themselves up in the temple of Aesculapius. In their midst on the roof the wife of Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian leader who is now a suppliant kneeling at the feet of the Roman general, holds his children by the hand, improvises a lyric of scorn, and shouts it at him; she refuses to have her life or the lives of her little ones saved and then leaps with them into the crackling fire … Little by little, a line of slaves leaves the city and its ruins; in sudden magnanimity Scipio Emilien has spared these survivors. And this Scipio, deeply shaken by a metaphysical nostalgia, declaims the verses of the Iliad describing the fall of Troy and the end of empires.

Old Polybe was present for the literary musings of his disciple Scipio who, once it is all decided, at the height of his complete and deadly victory, becomes elegantly sorrowful.