Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

She made coffee for me every time I would come in tense and wanting to feel I was somewhere else. She was the somewhere else — and by the same token all my feminine past. Now I understand: Starting from the moment when taking her picture was denied me, precisely because of the proximity both of her beauty and of the halflight in which she constantly lived, her presence was an extension, the background that made those in the film uncertain. She evoked the persistence of things enduring back in time forever …

And I stitched it together with the women of my childhood. Drawing a parallel between the Madonna and the wife of my maternal uncle, this aunt who died at twenty in childbirth and whom I must have just barely known, and yet — because of a faded photograph (she was seated, her long face, her evanescent body, in the huge armchair of a Syrian salon whose pearly luxury intimidated me for years afterward), in my child dreams she took on a poetic, haunting presence. She was dead, they told me. I was expecting to find her again in the back of some scene; suddenly the reality would come unraveled into shadows.

And so the Madonna, during the course of this project, represented for me the grace to secretly question it. I, elusive, invisible, if I decided suddenly to appear, your moving pictures would reveal their bloodless, embryonic nature .

If I decided … I came and went from shadow to reality, from the stage to the wings, from the spotlights to the Madonna’s candle. The obvious fact that crystallized in spurts within me was that it was the others: brothers, husband, neighbors, and most of all the all-powerful mother, who maintained the barrier between the two spaces. If I decided …

The Madonna could have put her sick baby down just like that on a sheepskin or at her feet and take one step, just one step. I would open the door for her, she would have nothing to do for the cameramen, maybe just a hint of movement, her fingers pulling the neck of her gown shut, just a few steps.

Abruptly the need for this work of sounds and images would dissolve; there would be no point to the fiction because, wonder of wonders, suddenly every woman on this earth would be able to come and go.

“Finally, there are no more spying looks,” my character, Lila, says. Lila, beneath the spotlights, would reach out toward the Madonna; Lila would gradually move backward to the rear of the scene, the spotlights would go out, eyes would open wider and wider and from them the real light would finally well up as the Madonna would slip out, smiling. If I decided …

TWENTY YEARS LATER, Fatima, daughter of the mokkadem of Saint Ahmed or Abdallah, goes back down to the city, this time for good.

During these two decades she has lived her fate as the wife of three successive husbands. (The third was my grandfather, from whom that year, 1920, she officially separated, asking the cadi for autonomy, according to Muslim law, to manage her own wealth alone.) It was also her fate to be a mother. She returns to Caesarea where her stepmother, Amna, a widow now for ten years and a devoted friend, had welcomed her in her home before.) She is accompanied by all her children, except Khadidja, her first, who at the age of sixteen was married in a nearby hamlet. Khadidja was expecting a child at the time — finally a son who will live, O merciful Allah, not like the first three, all boys as well, who each died after a few days!

Fatima: from now on everyone will call her Lla Fatima, though I, like all my cousins, call her mamané , hinting with this word at the affection that her strict bearing kept us from showing her. Lla Fatima has with her for this first move her only son. He is just barely ten, it is true, but so extraordinarily beautiful; this son, from now on, according to her will be “her only future.” And she has her three daughters, two adolescents, and the youngest child, who is two years old, the only child of the husband she is leaving. This little girl turning her back on the mountain (and leaving the Berber language) is my mother.

Of my mother as a little girl? She never spoke of this day from her early childhood when she entered the first house in Caesarea. Does she even remember it? She probably does not want to, why recall the sharpness of the separation? The country house they had left behind whose many low rooms were painted in purplish-blue whitewash every spring, that had two yards and a row of fig trees and, in the middle, two very majestic zen oaks. There were children scattered everywhere. A separation from laughter and the vast horizon … Without transition there they were living in town, in a high building with imposing walls; at the bottom one huge, bleak bedroom into which they all squeezed. The mother is endlesly conferring. To begin with, she is given some advice by an old cleric connected with the family. Soon afterward she sells all her jewels to buy an old house a little higher up and not far from the walls, still in the Arab quarter. Consequently Lla Fatima will be almost Amna’s neighbor, in the neighborhood of her former home where Soliman lived. His daughters, moreover, who are older now, some of them already grandmothers, come to visit her and congratulate her on her move: She is the model of feminine decisiveness and intelligence. They call her aunt or amti , that is, “paternal aunt.” Out of respect.

Lla Fatima, finally in her own home, surrounded by her son — who attends the French school — and her three daughters, begins her new life. She is not yet forty.

Little Bahia, a little more than two, almost three now, explores the new place: four deep rooms, the patio with just one tree, an orange tree (with the bitter oranges so much sought after for preserves) spreading its low, dense foliage. Way in the back is the edge of a well and right next to it a staircase leading to a broad, low terrace from which there is a view of the mountainous slopes of the southern part of the city.

Bahia squats all alone in the back near the edge of the well. When they call her, she runs away; she climbs the staircase and makes a place for herself on the terrace with her cat, in a hidden corner where she has put down a mat. She stretches out, contemplates the mountain: she can hear noise from the nearby houses, smell the coffee roasting or the paprika cooking, hear the scattered voices of the gossips shouting, laughing. One voice of an unknown woman, in the evening, just before the prayer at sunset, sings, naked and alone, always singing the same lament …

Lying there on her back, Bahia fills her eyes with the blue of the sky and dreams: She would like to be far from the city. (Below, in the reception hall, the endless stream of ladies still comes to congratulate Lla Fatima.) She imagines herself at her father’s house at the zaouia of the Beni Menacers.

Bahia’s father is the man Lla Fatima has left. One afternoon a week he comes. One hour after the Friday public prayer he knocks at the front door. The meal awaits him; he comes in. Afterward he shuts himself up with his wife in her room.

When Hassan, Lla Fatima’s son, returns from school to discover that “the other man,” the one not his father, is trying to bring Lla Fatima back to her senses (or submission?), he climbs up to the terrace, where he finds little Bahia. To calm his displeasure, he says mockingly, “You, why don’t you go with your father? That’s your father, isn’t it?”

“That’s my father!” answers the child.

“Go do it! When he comes out, go and tell him to take you!”

Bahia would like that. She would like to take her father’s hand when he crosses the patio, she would like him to call her joyfully in his clear, musical voice, she would like to stay with him … She bursts out crying; she weeps in silence, but how could she defy the big brother?