Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

These families, therefore, made Zoraidé’s journey, but in the opposite direction, bringing with them the Mohammedan faith that for three or four generations, since 1492, they had been practicing in secret. Amid the general pushing and shoving of the exoduses and sea adventures, they in turn will look like renegades …

The women of my city in those days, these refugee women, in the modest patios of impoverished houses, make jasmine and lemon trees bloom again, while their men, when they do not choose to cultivate trees on the surrounding mountainous slopes, return to the sea for expeditions of revenge and pillage, as new pirates …

Three centuries after these journeys from which they will never return, just before the 1920s, my mother was born there, in the midst of these families who, with a naïve pride, still displayed the keys to their lost houses in Córdoba and Grenada. What was this legacy that she inherited and what did she transmit to me of this memory already covered in sand? A few details about the embroidery of women’s costumes, some residual accent distorting the local dialect, Arabic-Andalusian speech kept as long as possible … Above all, the music known as andalouse that was called “classical,” the music that simple artisans — Muslim and Jewish cobblers, barbers or tailors — practiced conscientiously whenever they gathered in the evening. At the same time, among the groups of women, the cantilenas of women musicians with their graceful, languorous rhythms maintained rhetorical figures, an old-fashioned prettiness, and the sweetness that masked the pain of the glorious epoch created by the intermingling of races, languages, and knowledge back there .

Thus I spent the summers of my early childhood surrounded by women who sang or embroidered. These odalisques young or old of a city closed in upon itself, where only the lute could complain out loud, passed on to me this still flickering light from the women’s Andalusia that still provided us with a little nourishment across the centuries .

My mother, accompanying my father, who taught French in one of the new villages of colonization, found herself isolated as a citydweller. Among all the articles of her trousseau, the velvet caftans, the ancient jewels, the rare boxes, my mother set the greatest store by her books of music. Though she could not write French, only later learning to speak but not write it from the Frenchwomen who were her neighbors and later from her children, she would open these notebooks where, as an adolescent, she had written down the poetry of the noubas of Andalusia. She knew the couplets by heart, and could read and write them in Arabic, so she could not be classified as illiterate, though otherwise she might have been so in our circle .

During the years of the Algerian war this writing would prove to have a meaningful destiny! One summer, a summer of journeys for my mother, who had removed her traditional veil to visit her only son in France, where he was imprisoned in Lorraine, French soldiers broke into our apartment (shut down while she was gone), to search the place. At the height of the wanton destruction usual in such cases, they ripped up the books of Andalusian music, interpreting this writing that they found mysterious as the message of some nationalist complicity …

In the first days of independence my mother told me with tears in her eyes the grief she felt over the violent attack on this writing. Her sorrow might have seemed incongruous during those days when all around us so many women were weeping — some for a son, others for a brother. Nevertheless because this writing had come so far, navigating from beyond the centuries and shores, having been transmitted from woman to woman, some of whom were in flight, the others locked up, I in turn felt my heart in a stranglehold .

“You knew those texts by heart,” I said faintly .

“But I had written them.” She sighed. “I was fifteen at the time; I cared more about them than about my jewels!”

My mother, who wrote Arabic but had shifted to oral French, probably saw herself as no longer able to write the language of her learned culture with as sure a hand. Although she no longer wore the veil, either on her face or on her body, and although she had traveled from one end to the other of France to visit its prisons, my mother, the bearer of this ancestral legacy, suddenly saw the legacy erased and felt an ineffable sadness .

The end of a woman’s writing, as if, as her body begins to move, no longer wearing her grandparents’ veil, her writing hand then lost both its passion and its sense of its own destiny! Zoraidé has thus returned, but in the opposite direction; with a new tale of the Captive that could have been about the son freed from yesterday’s French prisons but which becomes the tale of the daughter taking on the mother’s status …

Fugitive without knowing it, or rather without knowing it yet. At least up to this precise instant in which I am relating these comings and goings of women in flight from the long — ago or recent past. Up to the moment in which I become conscious of my permanent condition as a fugitive — I would even say: as someone rooted in flight — just because I am writing and so that I write .

I do not record, alas, the words from noubas . The language is too scholarly for me to write, but I remember them. Wherever I go, a persistent voice, either a sweet baritone or a reckless soprano, sings them inside my head while I stroll through the streets of some city in Europe, or even in the first few steps into the first street of Algiers, where I am immediately aware of every prison, whether open to the sky or closed .

I write in the shadow of my mother, returned from her wartime travels, while I pursue my own travels in this obscure peace composed of silent internal warfare, divisions within, riots, and tumult in my native land .

I write to clear my secret path. I write in the language of the French pirates who, in the Captive’s tale, stripped Zoraidé of her diamond-studded gown, yes, I am becoming more and more a renegade in the so-called foreign language. Like Zoraidé, stripped. Like her I have lost the wealth I began with — in my case, my maternal heritage — and I have gained only the simple mobility of the bare body, only freedom .

A fugitive therefore, without knowing it. Because knowing this too well would make me silent, and the ink of my writing would dry too soon .

ON DECEMBER 18 of that year, I filmed the first shot of my life: A man sitting in a wheelchair has stopped at the entrance to a room; he is watching his wife sleep inside. He is unable to enter: The two steps up to the room are impassable for his wheelchair. Room like a cave, hot, so near and yet so far: the bed is big and low, surrounded by numerous white sheepskins that soften the harshness of the high walls of this peasant’s house. The sleeping woman has wrapped her hair the old way, tightly in a red scarf. The immobilized husband watches from a distance. His torso moves; his hand rests on the doorframe for a second, and that is the end of the first shot.

The next three are from the man’s point of view (he is an actor with sad blue eyes). The camera pans slowly, very slowly around the bed: in my mind, and later in the soundtrack, a low-pitched music curls and spirals. The gaze of the paralyzed man: This is the dance of impotent desire.

The Arab woman seems asleep, an almost traditional image of her wearing a red scarf, an elusive image. The first “shots” of my work show a clear defeat for the man. I said: “Action.” I was gripped by an emotion. As if all the women of all the harems had whispered “action” with me. Their complicity excites me. Only what their eyes see matters to me from now on. Resting on these images that I assemble with the help of their invisible presence over my shoulder.