Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

I go up to him. He is father again. In the chalky dust, in front of the open windows — the cleaning women are already coming in to wash the floor and wipe off the tables — the father and the little girl return to sweet, friendly conversation.

Hand in hand with my father, I walk through the village. I am going home with the Arab teacher. A tall man, wearing a Turkish fez above his green eyes, his handsome face, he takes me home. A little girl who is four, then five.

I remember nothing about sitting for the school photograph; at least for that first photograph in which I appear, right there, in this class of boys.

Today, so long afterward, I look at it. My father is less than thirty and I see him there: he poses in a dignified manner in his role, or his mission, as the village’s native teacher, but despite his stiff appearance, he seems a handsome man to me. And only today do I look these boys in the face, one by one.

They put me in the middle, on the front row: little girl with a rounded forehead, her black hair cut short, her gaze perhaps resolute, although I cannot really characterize it. On the slate held by a boy sitting in my row, written in chalk, is the date of the school year: 1940.

Now I look questioningly at each of the boys, who are seven to ten years old … They are yaouleds , the sons of workers, people who have been dispossessed, in this village in the Sahel where the richest farms of colonial Algeria lie … A few of the pupils, however, seem less working-class: the son of the grocer (who will later attend secondary school, who will become a student), the son of the barber, and among the faces that look serious, almost worried, there are two boys who are the sons of the caïd . Sons of the most important personage of the village — this caïd who wore traditional robes (a silk coat and woolen cloak and an impressive Bedouin headdress), an old-fashioned Arab chief. Their father always seemed to me to be an old man because, when I would be in his home visiting his daughters and stood close to him, I was afraid of his hand, which trembled.

Yes, I am staring at the pupils in my father’s class. What have they become fifteen or twenty years later — that is, during the war for independence?

The majority must have gone back up into the mountains, which, at the time of this photo, watched them, seemed to expect them. More than half died there: in the ditches, under a hail of gunfire, or in hand-to-hand combat … a minority — probably three or four — returned as survivors, as triumphant victors perhaps. Later, one of them must have been elected mayor of the village, which would later become a big agricultural town. Another probably enjoyed some important local position, sent as representative or allied, through marriage or business, with important officials in the nearby city … Yet another must be a policeman.

The yellowed photo is in my fingers: how can I know who these anonymous boys are, have I dreamed of them before? What reality have I entered, here in this class of my father’s?

The strange thing is that I so completely forgot the photo session itself. The photographer? Every year, toward the end of the year, there was a photographer who made us pose in our respective classes. This was the very first time, and so I was in my father’s class.

Reconstructing the moment it was taken: My father made all his pupils sit down, outdoors, in front of the door, the little ones who were shorter or younger in front, seated in two rows, the tallest standing behind. He must have checked the state of their clothes so that they would not seem too seedy. Then he went and stood beside them: They are all ready for the shutter to click.

And I? I would have waited there, docile and silent, at a slight distance, off to the side. It was the first time: no one had explained to me the etiquette of class photos. Suddenly … Suddenly, how did my father get so carried away? He looked at me, he saw me alone, waiting, intimidated as usual. What came over him? Some sudden affection? Some vague sense of injustice at seeing me alone, isolated from these children, as if excluded? For a second he forgot that I was a girl and thus, for his boy pupils, someone separate from them … He came to get me, he took my hand; he made the boys in the front row back away and had me sit in the middle facing the photographer … Then he went back to the side in his position as vigilant master. So there I was as if enthroned, the unexpected queen in the midst of these future warriors! Enthroned and unaware.

For the master now everything is fine, just before the click: he holds himself straight and tall, he is waiting beside the boys he teaches. He is posing for the others — the whole village, including the little colonial society that he scoffs at in his pride and his egalitarian demands. He poses, proud of the forty boys he is educating not just in how to speak French, and he is proud at the same time of his oldest child — she is a girl and so he put her in the middle like this.

She stands there, the little girl, leaning forward slightly, her face tense. The look in her eyes is probably too serious for her age — four, but she might as well be almost forty. She can tell, but in such a vague way, that she is out of place: Anywhere else putting a little girl all alone in the midst of those forty boys — and furthermore, older boys — is something that should not be done. She does not know that they are intimidated by her; she feels them as a single presence, respectful but mistrustful if not hostile. The little girl looks at the photographer. On one side her father, like the others, is waiting for the click.

That was the first photograph taken of me. One school day at the beginning of the World War in a village in the Algerian Sahel.

AICHOUCHA, LITERALLY “little life,” thus entered the house where we film at night — into one of the two rooms packed with technicians, spotlights, and stage props. I turn the child over to someone at first; I forget her; I plunge into the world of the artificial.

An hour later, just as we zoom in for the final close-up that curves in to embrace Lila sleeping, I remember the child’s bed in the background. Aichoucha? She has hardly budged. There, in the bright lights, she stares into my eyes and I take in her face, with the fleeting charm of a doll’s, and at the same time her silence.

She has contemplated everything that has gone on over the past hour: our bustling around, the people all concerned about different things. She has probably listened to some of the trivial conversations about the mud outside, the price some drink costs at the village bar … She has watched me rehearsing with the actor who plays the husband immobilized in his wheelchair; she looked at me, not understanding what I, a woman, was doing there.

I took her by the hand again. I led her firmly away to rescue her from it all, from the others. Alone with her in a poorly lit room, I provided a brief rundown, whispering to explain things: “You are going to be photographed sleeping! All I need you to do is sleep … All they will see is your hair … okay? Tomorrow you will meet another little girl. We are waiting for her to come from Algiers … She is the one it will be hard for …”

She smiles at me confidently. I begin to undress her … I feel my hands move softly and caressingly the way they moved in the past with my own daughter, when I spent a year entirely alone with her … a year of joyful motherhood.

Going back in time like this, I undress Aichoucha. That is what this story in images and sound is, an attempt to navigate as smoothly as possible back through the stream of my memory and the memory of several other women.

The little girl is smiling when we return to the world of spotlights. She still holds my hand. The next few days we will save flashes of her working daily as a shepherdess in the background. But tonight this is the first time, and she takes off her shoes next to the child’s bed. I chide her very softly for having left all that mud on her feet when she put her shoes on. Nonetheless I refuse to have them washed; everything is ready …