Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

I think of myself as being happy in the garden to this house, with a sort of inexpressible excitement in my heart … A few trees, lemon trees, and a medlar tree in the midst of weeds; a corner where someone must have grown salad greens … We reach it through a rickety gate whose squeaking made us laugh.

It is only in this garden that I see myself playing with Maurice, the twelve-year-old boy who woke up one morning in my bedroom, next to me.

“Playing” with this boy: the voices of our dialogue have vanished. Of the scenes that come back, there is only one of these two child’s bodies clinging to the tallest lemon tree — Maurice, full of energy, manages to perch on the highest branch. He waves to me to come. His wave suggests that I climb up to where he is.

I stay clinging to the bottom branch. Strangely I refuse; I stay where I am. I am afraid of the contact. As if reaching the same branch, squatting there beside him, seemed to me in some vague way utterly sinful. My heart pounds. I am full of guilt, prickles of anxiety: In just a second my father, I am sure, is going to appear, stand there before the garden gate whose squeak I can already hear. My mother, at the kitchen window, must have watched me from the heights of her lookout post: she would watch powerless the scene in which my father would catch us at something, needless to say, I was doing wrong. I stay on my branch, immobilized. Maurice invites me up again; I can still see his mocking face. Not suspecting anything, not imagining that my fierce refusal could be anything other than a mere lack of physical daring, he insists; then I see him jump all at once into the grass on the ground, sing to himself, climb back up to the highest branch … He was probably sorry that I was not joining in this athletic competition!

The strangest thing is not so much that I refused, that my reluctance was as burdensome as if I had already come of age. The most incomprehensible thing about my memory is that I remember this scene of the tree stripped of words, with nothing at all uttered by myself. It is accompanied by no sound: no laughter, no exclamation, not the slightest word exchanged … So I did not yet speak French; so this boy seemed handsome to me — his energy, his smiling face, his beautiful straight brown hair that fell across his forehead, his air of an only son whose every last personal detail is wrapped in maternal solicitude.

In this aura in which Maurice moved, he was very near me and yet almost unreal because he was behind a frontier. He belonged “to the world of the others,” and there is no doubt that this frozen state of voices is what gives the picture of the boy its clarity, its immutable presence.

So I did not yet speak French. And the look I sent up toward the top of the tree, at the face of the boy with brown hair and mocking smile, was the gaze of a silent, formless desire, utterly powerless because it had no language, not even the crudest, into which to flow.

Maurice was neither close to me nor a stranger: he was first of all the one my eyes, through the branches of the tree, were filled with while my voice drained away, its laughter, its shouts, its words suddenly gone dry.

In that silence of childhood, the image of childish temptation, the first garden, the first forbidden thing — takes shape. Intense but paralyzing dawns.

This scene comes, I think, almost immediately after I awoke that night in a room that had suddenly become “French.”

I was not yet attending school. All these memories are set earlier than my fourth year, before the autumn in which my father decides to take me to nursery school.

The girls’ school and the boys’ school were separated only by wire fencing down the middle of the large central courtyard. Just about 330 feet separated the apartment building in which we lived from the elementary school. I crossed them, at least for the first two years, hand in hand with my father, who was the only Arab teacher of French, and also the only one proudly wearing a dark red Turkish fez of felt perfectly straight above his sparkling eyes.

He had a “native” class: During this period, at least for boys, school segregation was justified in this colonial village by the fact that little Arab boys, because they did not speak French in the family, needed “remedial” teaching. And for native pupils — a native teacher. But also these children, who were for the most part the sons of farm workers, had to spend two years studying a curriculum the others did in one. My father fought against this discrimination. He would have several levels of teaching in the same class and, in an attempt to repair this vocationally unjust pattern, he became a hard teacher to the point of being uncompromising with his pupils.

My teacher-father’s reputation for extreme strictness comes back to me now that I have recently rediscovered the first group photograph in which I appeared. (The only little girl, there I was in my father’s class, caught sitting in the middle of forty or more boys of different ages but all of whom were native). Thanks to this picture, I remember now those first days at school: Seated in the back row, I used to wait in my father’s classroom while he finished teaching his class.

Silent observer in this class of boys, I remember the collective respect, maybe even fear, in the concentrated attention of these children listening to the lesson. The teacher standing there, stick in hand, leads them through it from his desk on the platform, making them repeat a sentence, a word, several times, speaking sharply to a recalcitrant boy, giving extra homework.

His authoritarian voice, intransigent but patient, is raised. It goes up; it goes down. He is tall. He wears a black coat that he will take off when school is over. He never abandons his role, not for a minute — but is it a role? He is filled with an impassioned wish to urge these children, these minds, forward … He seems inflexible. Forty pairs of eyes of little boys of various ages say so.

Even though I am sitting in the back, I, too, share this kind of terror of the schoolmaster; master who dominates in every sense. I, too, am afraid, even though I am the “master’s daughter.” I must not move. I must not disturb this function.

I only see the boys from the back. Sometimes one of them, called on by the master, stands up and mumbles what is written on the blackboard. The master repeats it, he is merciless especially regarding pronunciation, elocution: he imposes some punishment … I am in the grip of anxiety, as if I were the child up there whose diction is deficient, but I also think I am invisible.

From time to time the master walks around, goes up and down the rows. When he comes abreast of me, he does not speak to me; he does not even give me a knowing glance. I must have a book before me, or more likely a slate. But I am so fascinated by my father’s class that I turn myself into a sort of peering shadow, passionate but powerless.

I see them all from the back. I do not remember any one in particular. I never speak to them of course, neither before nor after. Not one word: they are boys. Despite being so very young I must sense what is forbidden.

When class is over, when the shrill sound of the siren marks the end of study hour (because we are now in study hall and the reason for my still being there is that I am too young to go home alone: I am waiting for my father to go back to our apartment), all the boys must stare at me.

For them I must signify some privileged image of “the teacher’s daughter.” Their sisters, obviously, do not go to the French school.

My father, at the podium, erases the blackboard, takes off his black coat that is full of chalk dust. He puts his things away meticulously; he places the pupils’ exercise books into his briefcase.