Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

This gaze, I claim it as mine. I see it as “ours.” A single gaze piercing the walls of past centuries, escaping beyond the tomb-houses of today, concentrated, seeking a place to alight. Giving pause to the rhythm of things, slowing its pace.

My elation persists. “Action!” My voice neutral. Around me is a crew of nineteen people, fourteen of them technicians. Two, besides me, are women: the one who does makeup and the script girl. Julien, the friend who is supposed to be my photographer, will shoot some pictures of the set during the next break. It is dark, it is cold amid all the commotion of getting started, and I could feel alone. But no. The man is looking at his wife, a distant image, as she sleeps, and I look at him look at her.

Community of women shut away yesterday and today, an image-symbol that is the true action, the drive behind this hunt for images that is beginning. A female body completely veiled in white cloth, her face completely concealed, only a hole left free for her eyes. Ghost who, reversing appearances, is rendered even more sexual by prohibition; shadowy shape that has strolled along for centuries, never screaming that we were enshrouded, never tearing off the veil and even our skin with it if required. This image is the reality of my childhood, and the childhood of my mother and my aunts, and my girl cousins who were sometimes the same age as me. Suddenly this scandal that I experienced as normal looms at the beginning of this quest: a single silhouette of a woman gathering in the folds of this shroud, her linen veil, the five hundred million or so segregated women in the Muslim world. Suddenly she is the one looking, but from behind the camera, she is the one devouring the world through a hole left in the concealment of a face.

This hole is the only lance she has to throw out toward space. For me the eye, questioning from behind and in spite of all the screens, was no longer there just so that the wretched woman could see her way: just a bit of light, a gleam to see where to go and how to escape, as she walked away from man’s gaze.

“Because they spy, they watch, they search, they snoop! Smothered this way you go to the market, the hospital, the office, the workplace. You hurry; you try to make yourself invisible. You know that they have learned to make out your hips or your shoulders through the cloth, that they are judging your ankles, that in case the wind lifts your veil, they hope to see your hair, your neck, your leg. You cannot exist outside: the street is theirs, the world is theirs. Theoretically you have the right to equality, but shut up ‘inside,’ confined. Incarcerated.”

This artificial gaze that they have left you, smaller, a hundred, a thousand times more restricted than the one given you by Allah at birth, this strange slit that the tourists photograph because they think it is picturesque to have a little black triangle where the eye should be, this miniature gaze will henceforth be my camera. All of us from the world of the shadow women, reversing the process: We are the ones finally who are looking, who are beginning.

FOR A LITTLE OVER three months they had not heard a thing from Salim: no postcard from some little town in France — with that same illegible writing describing the weather or what he seemed to be studying; nothing, not even a telephone call like ones they had had two or three times, late at night, when a stranger’s voice said, in Arabic: “He is all right, he wants you to be told not to worry.” Nothing: silence from the mails, silence from the phones.

Though our mother was thinking about it, she did not dare discuss it with her husband. Every morning she would watch him go out very early for a few minutes and return with the two local newspapers. Anxiously he would skim them and she would end up by calmly asking, while she served him, “Nothing new?” They were both at that moment thinking of their son. The father was silent and then calmly replied, “Nothing!” He would, of course, discuss yesterday’s attempted assassinations, the military operations, or how the press assessed what was going on with his colleagues. She, however, would soon leave for the market there in the basement, under the housing project where they lived. They and two other families were the only native-born teachers living there among the hundred Europeans. She would take the occasion to visit with her French friend, the woman who ran the pharmacy next to the market — just taking the time between two clients to smile and say hello to her. That would reassure the mother!

Three months and more had gone by with no sign at all from Salim, from France. Eastern France, the father assumed, the one time he opened up about it in front of his wife and his brother-in-law who was visiting: “Yes, we are telling the neighbors, or at least the Europeans, when they make polite inquiries, that, yes, he is at university in Paris. But we know perfectly well that he is not in Paris anymore, or going to classes, even though he needs his student-identification papers for military deferment and to move around! We know … well, really, what can we know these days about our sons, about ourselves!”

He stopped; he had never revealed his worries at such length, but his wife’s brother was also his best friend; with him he was moved to speak up and thus confess his fears, especially relating to his son, things he usually did not even reveal to himself, or to his wife …

The mother stood bolt upright and left the room, left the two men alone; she went into the little bathroom, washed her face with great splashes of cold water, looked at her features — those of a woman who had just turned forty. Her face in the mirror became stiff, with a sort of gasp her cheeks tightened: she would not cry, she had decided. Comfort her husband before herself! As for her unspeakable anguish, she usually chased it away by talking endlessly with a few old women. The cleaning woman would come every Monday to do the laundry, and there were one or two other women in the market who sold herbs or eggs — in short, she would talk about it with anybody who told her she was lucky that her son was far away (of course he was her only son, “the apple of her eye,” “the promise of her future,” and so on) in France or somewhere else, but not here, left to the risks of retaliation, searches, interrogation, or … After listening to the whispers of the vendors or the washerwoman’s murmurs every Monday, the mother would breathe deeply and feel almost lucky. She would think that someday, returning to the city of her childhood, she would do what her old mother had done before her. She would go to the sanctuary near the sea, take tallow and wax candles, hard-boiled eggs and brioches for the poor, and give thanks to the dead saint. She would beg for blessings — you had to pay for them of course — from the heirs of this saint, and she would do this without breathing a word of it to her husband, who would be annoyed at her rituals!

Leaving the bathroom, she calmed herself, momentarily persuading herself that she would have the luck in this endless war to remain a mother. After all she had only one son, which was rather rare here, God would be kind to her …

Over three months with no news, the banality of days, the banality of fate!

She took the occasion of the end of Ramadan — also the fact that their daughter, their youngest, who was thirteen, had a holiday from school — to ask if she could go and spend the whole day in their city, in Caesarea.

They had barely arrived, but after dinner she and her sister-in-law excused themselves to visit an aunt who was very ill. They did, in fact, pay her a quick visit, then on their return (as they had planned from the start) they trotted along in their silk veils, each wearing the little stiff veil of embroidered organza across the bridge of her nose, leaving only two large eyes visible. Half anonymously, they thus visited the woman who was a seer and who, ever since her recent pilgrimage to Mecca, no longer sold magic potions or read the cards but lived on alms and her savings, which became more and more depleted by her devotions: Lla Rkia. All the matrons of the city knew her name.