Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

Polybe of Megalopolis, the man deported from the Peloponnesus sixteen years ago, his spirit now full of the flames of Carthage, full of the delirium of proud souls struck down and the thousands of trampled bodies, as well as images of despair and flight, prepares to write about the destruction; destruction is his point of departure.

Before he returns home to Greece, he makes a request to see the Atlantic Ocean, to look at the coast from the land of the Moors (present-day Morocco) to the Mauritanian shores: he is passionate about geography, as if now truly tired of history — too heavy, too somber. He wants instead to see the physical world, landscapes, animals (“as for the quantity and power of the elephants, the lions and panthers, the beauty of the ostriches,” he writes, “there is absolutely nothing of the sort in Europe, but Africa is filled with these species”).

Once back in his own country, in the autumn of the same year, Polybe must then bear the sight of the sack of Corinth, “pearl of Attica.” He would try to act as a negotiator and arrange better terms for his people, but a second time he is present, helplessly, at an irreversible fall of Achaean autonomy beneath the boots and brutality of savage Roman soldiers. He watches the light of Greece suddenly flickering out; he accepts it and writes.

But I, today’s humble narrator, a woman, say that whereas Jugurtha at Dougga reads in the ancestral language for the last time, the writing of Polybe is nourished by all this simultaneous destruction. (He witnesses first the razing of Carthage, then the statues of Corinth, knocked down or carried away in shards, and, to finish it all off, he soon will have to contemplate the burning of Numantia and the dead Spaniards convulsed in their grandiose heroism.) I say that his writing, composed in a language that was, of course, maternal, but espoused by the cultivated minds of the West at that time, runs freely over the tablets and is polygamous!

As if, giving an account of death — the death of men, the death of ancient cities, and especially the death of the spirit of light that had shone through the darkness — Polybe, writing in this third alphabet the account of his life — his political deportation, his observation of the seat of power in Rome, his journeys, as well as the sight of these immense ruins at the very moment that they come crashing down — Polybe, almost in spite of himself, turned the coat of mail worn by all resistance inside out, the one implied by a language of poetry.

In fact for him the writing of history is writing first of all. Into the deadly reality that he describes he instills some obscure germ of life. This man who should be faithful to his own people justifies, consoles, and tries to console, himself. We see him, especially, confusing points of view. In the destruction his writing sets itself at the very center of a strange triangle, in a neutral zone that he discovers, though he did not expect it or seek it out.

We see him, far from Carthage, but also far from nearby Corinth, writing neither as a loyalist nor as a collaborator. The mere fact of his history somewhere else nourishes his astonishing “realism.”

Polybe the historian — who did not merely set out to give an account of civil war’s fatal effects like his fiery predecessor, Thucydides — Polybe the deported writer, returning in the twilight of his life to his native land, sees that he no longer has a land or even a country (the latter enslaved and in chains). All that he has is a language whose beauty warms him and that he uses to enlighten the enemies of yesterday who are now his allies.

He writes. And his language, his hand, his memory, and all his powers just before they fade, contribute to this untimely, yet necessary transmission. Is that why his work, like the stele of Dougga, after having fed the appetite for knowledge and the curiosity of his successors for several centuries, all at once, unexpectedly and in great slabs, is erased?

Because Polybe’s accounts of Carthage, of Corinth, and of Numantia, exist henceforth only in scattered scraps, only in bits of relfections in the mirrors held up by imitators, those writers of lesser stature, Appien, Diodorus of Sicily, and a few others.

As if this literary ascendance exuded some danger, some acceleration toward its own erasure that would prove inevitable!

Let me finally turn my musings to the royal Tin Hinan, the ancestor of the noble Tuaregs of Hoggar. Her history had long been told like a dream wreathed in legends, a fleeting silhouette as evanescent as smoke, or a ghost, or a myth, an imaginary figure. She suddenly became solid thanks to archeological discoveries by a French-American team in 1925. Tin Hinan existed. Her so moving mortal remains (the skeleton of a woman closely related to the pharaonic type) were taken from the necropolis of Abalessa and carried away to the museum of Algiers .

Yes, let me dream about Tin Hinan, the fugitive princess, who made her way into the very heart of the desert of deserts!

She was born in the north: in the Tafilalt, in the fourth century C.E., just after the reign of Constantine. What young girl’s reason could have made her decide to flee this northern Berber land in the company of her attendant, Takamat, and a group of servants? What reason, private or political, made her decide to abandon everything — despite her youth and the fact that she was perhaps to be the ruler — and push on beyond the oases of the Sahara? Was it because freedom — her freedom or her family’s or her group’s — was threatened?

The Tuaregs ever since that time like to tell of her expedition: Tin Hinan, riding a white female camel, is accompanied by faithful Takamat and a caravan composed mostly of women, young girls, white and black intermingled. From their country they carry with them dates and millet, rare and precious objects, the royal jewels of course, as well as the vases and urns required by the pagan religion they practice .

The route to Hoggar was long. In the final stages food became scarce. The situation became critical: to die of hunger in the desert!

Takamat on her dromedary or Tin Hinan mounted high on her mount — the story does not decide which of the two friends — sees the little mounds on the ground formed by anthills. Takamat, with the help of the servants, sets about gathering, grain by grain, the harvest of the hardworking ants! Thanks to her patience Tin Hinan and her cortège are able to continue their journey. Finally Hoggar is close, a green and fertile valley opens up before them. Saved!

They settle there west of Tamanrasset: Abalessa was a site of pilgrimage even before the mausoleum of the princess was discovered there .

One day in 1925 the Frenchman Reygasse and the American Prorok enter the chamber of the dead princess, seventeen centuries after she was placed there in the center of a vast necropolis containing eleven other burial places. Around it a road was laid out for the religious processions that fervently circled the dead women!

This funerary grouping, for its dimensions, its complex organization, the thickness of its walls, and its basalt stones, is the most imposing pre-Islamic necropolis in the region .

I find that I am always dreaming about the day that Tin Hinan was laid to rest at Abalessa. They stretched her out on a bed of sculptured wood. Her thin body, pointed east and covered with cloth and large leather ornaments, lay on its back with its arms and legs slightly bent under .