Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

A fifteen-year-old girl appears; her long hair is light brown and her somewhat wide-set eyes are the color of honey. Catching them in this childish conversation, she scolds Hassan roundly: “Why are you jealous of her? And what will she do without us?”

Bahia takes refuge in the skirts of her favorite sister, Chérifa. She cries even harder, this time for the pleasure of being comforted, of wallowing in Chérifa’s sweetness, her warm voice, her almost motherly caresses.

The brother shrugs his shoulders, implying that he knows what is going on.

“You think I don’t know! Mma brought us all down here so she can hang on to her wealth. Her wealth comes from my father. And that man there,” he says, waving angrily toward the couple’s room, “was the one profiting from it up to now!”

“You’re not even ten years old and you’re already looking after grown people’s business!” Chérifa says sarcastically, finished now with consoling the little girl.

“What kind of authority will my brother have over me and my sisters and my mother when my Lord Brother”—she says it in Arabic, “Sidi Khouya” —“is a grown man!” Chérifa, jaunty and teasing, bursts into laughter.

Even now, three-quarters of a century later, I, Isma, the narrator, the descendant through the youngest daughter, do not know if Lla Fatima (“ mamané ”) loved her two successive husbands afterward, or one rather than the other, or one more than the other … Surely I am the only one who wonders about dead people this way!

“The two mountain husbands,” I call them for short. The mountain is the Dahra — etymologically the mountain of the “back” or “that turns its back” on the city of Caesar. Despite the way it looks, in these ravines at the beginning of this century called by some “the colonial night,” right in with these rocks and eroded slopes, at the bottom of half-dried-up wadis, some rebellious individuals hung on and kept alive and resisted. They felt they were still “aristocrats”; even though all that remained of their property was dust, still there was a dark deposit springing inside them, the memory of former battles (against the Turks in the old days, against the French yesterday).

Was it for this oxygen that Fatima, widowed at seventeen, furrowed with pride and sensing the acrid taste of freedom, left the city and went back up into the mountains? She raised her little girl, Khadidja, alone for several years and only returned to Caesarea once a year for the great feast of Abraham, to show her first child to the crowd of half brothers and half sisters. Was it for this air?

When Khadidja is six, Fatima, taking the advice of her father the mokkadem , agrees to marry an honorable suitor from the region: Si Larbi, one of the descendants of another saint, twenty or so miles from here, on the slope that faces Miliana. This saint’s religious reputation is greater than Saint Ahmed or Abdallah’s.

Si Larbi is not young, but he is still not an old man. He is “in the prime of life,” or at least that is how Ferhani describes him to Fatima through his wife Amna, “the Golden Woman.” In the spring Amna goes up to the zaouia for a few days. She sees Fatima, at twenty-four, acting as mistress of the house for the entire little community: servants, dependent families, tenants … Fatima, first one up at four in the morning, taking care of the animals in the darkness first then awakening the little shepherds and farm girls. Not stopping there, smiling, sturdy and radiant, taking hardly any rest when it is time for the siesta and then receiving the usual women come to visit; they will bring her the detailed chronicle that makes its way through the valleys, from the hills and tiny hamlets. On the other hand, she will listen somewhat absentmindedly to the news Amna brings from the city: the scattering of Soliman’s family, the weddings, the funerals, the newly wealthy …

Amna mentions the Berkanis, the prestigious family to which the suitor belongs. She does not say that she understands perfectly well what Ferhani is up to. Up to this point he has been setting in play a whole strategy against the heirs of the two Berkani saints (father and son, buried side by side in two mausoleums), men of exalted faith who had only arrived two centuries before. Some said, predictably, that they came from Seguiat el-Hamra, on the borders of Mauritania, the cradle of almost all the sacred genealogies. Others preferred to say they were Andalusian exiles come through the usual places: Tétouan, then Fez and Tlemcen, then the mountains neighboring Médéa, at the moment when Algiers was a modest village (a little hideout for pirates trapped by the Spanish fortifications on Peñón). Finally, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, they would have reached this zaouia of the Beni Menacers that the oh so “glorious” General de Saint-Arnaud would come to pillage from top to bottom, burning the olive trees and all the orchards …

So, as the mokkadem Ferhani sees it in his schemes and ruminations, Algeria at the turn of the century apparently is still at war with itself. One dead saint vies with another dead saint, one koubba , that is, tomb and sanctuary, vies with another koubba , another sanctuary — just as elsewhere, in other places, one bell tower would be the rival of another. A phantom Algeria where the living, who think they are living for themselves, continue in spite of themselves to settle the accounts of dead men who are not quite dead and who keep right on devouring each other …

Amna talks to the young Fatima and convinces her to marry Si Larbi, the descendant of Saint Berkani, this saint who is considered to be a “modernist” because one of his grandsons (in fact, a great-grandnephew) chose, right from the outset, to side with emir Abd el-Kader against the protégés of the French. Aïssa el-Berkani, one of the emir’s five caliphates, lost almost the entire Berkani patrimony as a result, but increased its prestige considerably. Si Larbi, who thus became Fatima’s second husband, after a stormy life, much of which was spent in exile in the west, seems to have been a beloved, perhaps loving, spouse — in any case one who was sensible and with a tranquil spirit. Long after his death, forgetting herself, Lla Fatima, throughout her austere old age would mention and even sometimes quote Si Larbi.

Her first child by him was Chérifa, the great beauty, and next Malika, two years younger. (This is the aunt who now welcomes and cherishes me during these days I spend resting there, probably because she has always been sad that she had only boys and not even one girl of her own.) Then finally came the beloved son. Soon afterward, Si Larbi, always lovingly responsible for the eldest child, Khadidja, gave Fatima some advice concerning her marriage. Then he fell sick; for a whole year Fatima cared for him.

Dealers in ancient medicine came from every hill, from even the most modest and humble sanctuary, from as far away as the Sahel around the capital, sellers of potions and rare herbs: but any roumi , even a learned doctor, the sick man would have refused. Fatima knew that no Christian would cross the threshold of the Beni Menacer family, and regretted it. A second time she found herself a widow. This time, I imagine, she wept.

When, two years later, she married Malek el-Berkani’s cousin (she was thirty, or a little older; he was practically the same age, though some say he was probably two or three years younger), it came as a surprise to the people around her. They expected her to take solace in solitude and piety. No.

Was it a marriage for love this time? No one will ever know … The bitter and cynical version of the “other man’s” son sometimes seems to be right: Yes, Fatima’s wealth was primarily Si Larbi’s, hence it was also the property of her son and her two adolescent daughters … And now the cousin, having remarried into the same household, started any number of new projects: modernizing the arboriculture and buying agricultural equipment never seen before in the mountains … Up to this point no “native” farmer had dared to imitate the European colonists of the plains!