Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

That is how it was. From that moment on I wanted one way or another to break the glass panes behind which I had too long been coiled.

Why Pasolini? That is how it was, there is no more to it than that … I, an Arab woman, writing classical Arabic poorly, loving and suffering in my mother’s dialect, knowing that I have to recapture the deep song strangled in the throat of my people, finding it again with images, with the murmur beneath images, I tell myself henceforth, I am beginning (or I am ending) because in a bed where I was preparing for love, I felt — twenty-four hours later and with the whole Mediterranean Sea between us — the death of Pasolini like a scream, an open-ended scream .

I also remember how, ten months later, my mother wept over the death of an Andalusian singer who was popular in Algiers: Dahmane Ben Achour. It was the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan. As the news was announced on the radio, a few minutes before the breaking of the fast, she simply wept, sitting up straight at the table, and we ate our dinner in the silence … I knew then, because of my mother’s long pedigree, that an artist does not die, not on the day of his death. Afterward, perhaps, after the mud and violence of others … My mother wept while the others broke the fast. And I wanted to hold on to the tears of my suddenly younger mother. I wanted to delve into the song … but how, with what unreal choreography: images of women’s bodies floating across patios, in the air trembling between marble statues, with the modulations of the baritone voice of the man who had just died!

I am really moving toward the work of image and sound. My eyes closed, I grope in the dark, seeking the lost echo of the lamentations that made tears of love flow, back at home. I seek this rhythm in my head … Only afterward will I try to take the gaze inward, see the essence, the structures, what takes flight beneath matter.

OF THE GRANDMOTHER as a young bride: At fourteen she is given in marriage by her father — who was scarcely more than forty — to an old man, the city’s wealthiest man, and she becomes his fourth wife … Was she a little girl? Not at all. For four years she has been nubile. She lived up in the mountain hamlet near the most ancient sanctuary in the region, the one honoring Saint Ahmed or Saint Abdallah, the most firmly entrenched saint in local history. Her father is his descendent and is therefore the mokkadem , the man whose religious baraka is respected and who administers it naturally, petty nobility of the region, proud, stubborn, and calculating. Coming down into the city from her hamlet, she is proud as can be to be wearing the veil worn by city-women of the day, the veil that swallows up shoulders, bust, hips, on a body already wearing wide, puffed — out pants, obliterating the outline of the legs, the ones they call the “going-out sarouel .“ Wool on wool, the wide pleats that slowly fall and that take so long to prepare just before one goes out across the thresholds: wool on wool, even in summer. Silk and moiré will only replace rough and opaque wool twenty or thirty years later, at the end of the First World War!

So the little girl Fatima is like a normal adolescent as she comes to the city. It is 1896 and barely fifty years since the little city (called Caesarea, because it was formerly “Caesar’s city,” destroyed and brought back to life several times) became French, with a community of colonists from Provence and a small population of fishermen from Malta who live separately and are just barely beginning to put down roots. Ferhani, her father, has property, sharecroppers on the nearby hills, but a rather ordinary house in the ancient heart of the Arab quarter, sheltered by the ancient wall around it. He does not live there, except when he comes down on market day and spends just one night in the city. It makes him unhappy not to have a home in the city that is worthy of his rank. The people there (so many of them upstarts in these oppressive times) have absolutely no idea that up in the hills — that is, throughout the Dahra all the way to Miliana in the south and Ténès in the west — anyone who knows anything (naturally not the vagabonds and starving people wandering more and more along the roads, alas) recognizes him as the son of his father and of his father’s father and so on all the way back to the thirteenth-century saint, Ahmed or Abdallah! Consequently they kiss his hand; consequently they pay him rent when they come to the cradle of the family at the zaouia . As for Fatima, even as a young girl she had inherited a bit of her father’s pride, a less ostentatious version: timidity mixed with aloofness.

So Ferhani gave his second daughter, who was just fourteen, to an old man who was …

“Sixty-two?” I asked.

“Oh no,” my aunt replied. “They said he was a hundred!”

“No,” I retort. “That’s not possible! And besides, would he have married again?”

The aunt insists.

“Soliman’s grandsons already had beards! They say he had just lost his third wife, whom he had married very young, a virgin from a modest family who was fifteen or sixteen while he was already more than sixty-five, I’m sure of it! At that third marriage his oldest sons had already sulked, especially the first one, who was a highly regarded man of law in another city, Koléa, I think. And Soliman had been prudent this time in not requesting the daughter of a family of notables, but one from modest people who must have felt themselves honored all the same! …

“Well, this wife had given him four or five more children, three of whom were living. She died suddenly, giving birth once again, this time to a premature child, who took his first breaths of air, that blessing from God, and moaned once, then a second time, and was silent forever. And the unfortunate woman suffered for a whole day, despite the expertise of the old midwife, losing almost all her blood.

“Scarcely was the burial over when apparently old Soliman went into his bedroom — the most beautiful one, on the main floor and open to the west, and he wept there — great, long sobs … His daughters-in-law, or at least the second one, the one who dared speak in his presence and sometimes stood up to him, and therefore was his favorite, came to him and chided him: ‘Lean on God’s mercy, rely on his patience! Don’t despair and don’t weep so for the poor orphans! They have brothers and sisters who are men and women! They can count on them. I myself promise that if you wish I will suckle the youngest. I will be a mother for him! …’

“She had a big heart, this Halima, and thought to console him this way. But Soliman had always spoken his mind, and now that he was older, this habit was even more pronounced, and do you know what his reply was?

‘It is not for the orphans that I am weeping. No! They are little and know nothing about life! But I, I, am I going to end my life all alone?’

“In short, you see, ten years after people thought he was too old to marry a virgin, he was complaining. He was afraid of how cold his bed would be! He wanted a woman …”

My aunt sighs, gets up to serve the tea, then, after a thoughtful silence she goes on, her head bent into the all-absorbing past: “Of course, one could imagine that being so old (eighty, or a hundred, tell me, what is the difference?), he would at least be looking for a widow, a lady unable to have children anymore, just because his bed is cold every night and also, as they say at home, “so she can carry him,” him and his old bones! That could have seemed normal. Aren’t men after all, and especially when they get older, big egotistical children!” Suddenly she briskly recovered: “Except, may Allah forgive me, our Prophet so sweet to our heart. He and the Mourashidien, the four well-guided imams , especially Sid Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, his cousin, and—” her pious murmur became lost in a long list that her tears made incomprehensible.