Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

My mother smiled at the compliments elicited by the black dress baring the girl. Well, but there it is, the twirling, irrepressible body quivers all over before the women on the alert. Too bad if two or three boys with even perhaps, a young man among them, are hidden away in some closed room where they become voyeurs behind half-open shutters.

I dance. A few others are dancing as well, mature women. Gradually, in spite of themselves, they are dancing their grief and their need to get out, to fling themselves into the distance, into the beating sun. And I, I wheel around with my eyes closed (beginning to feel dizzy), offering who knows what image to these sequestered women, the ones crouched there, already prepared to repudiate me.

“She goes out, she reads, she goes to the cities like that, naked, her father, bizarre, lets her … She goes into the homes of those other people there and walks around like that in the enemies’ world, well, in fact, the free world, but far away, so far away! She makes her way around in it — her poor parents when they find out that she will never come back! What good is the caravel that sails far out to sea after whatever riches and brings none of them back? What good is the caravan out beyond the deserts that takes the wrong road home and becomes lost in the sands? Oh what reckless parents this girl has!

“Look how her face is stiff because she is both timid and too ardent; she dances, but too vigorously, her manner is too lively. How should one put it? She dances blithely! She has not yet understood and never will understand because she will never be part of our houses, our prisons, she will be spared the confinement and as a result our warmth also and our company! She will never know that when the lute and high-pitched voice of the blind mourner make us get up and almost go into a trance, it is because our grief makes us mourn, our hidden grief.

“She dances, and is dancing for us, that is true; before us, well but there it is, she is expressing her joy in life. How strange that is. Where does she come from, just where has she been? Really, she is not one of us!”

“And yet,” said one of the matrons, the wealthiest, very high and mighty, “if her father put her back in her place … really, if he made her wear the veil, and sent her back into the darkness and protection of our homes, I would not hesitate to ask for her in marriage for my eldest son! I would describe her to my son just the way she is now, her waist, her bearing, and all the fire in her eyes! Definitely! I would ask for her and I know my son would be happy I did!”

Someone reported what was said to the girl’s mother, and told her who said it. The mother made a little face. The woman, who would have liked to present herself as future mother-in-law (on the condition, it is true, that the father lead his daughter back to strict Muslim orthodoxy), well, the narrator’s mother did not consider her station to be high enough for them. “Them,” that is herself, her mother, her paternal lineage with the saint in the mountains, who was so much a presence for them all, men and women. How could she even think of making an alliance with this bourgeois woman who was so “high and mighty”? And out of her depth!

“Besides,” one of the mother’s friends said ironically (evidence, it is true, of her cramped conformity), “a forty-year-old woman, looking at a thirteen-year-old girl and wanting to describe her to her son herself. Is that proper?”

“She would do that herself?” the mother exclaimed in innocent amazement.

As if everyone did not know that any mother, especially a young mother, would also be modest in the presence of her eldest son, or any of her sons as soon as they entered the world of their father!

“That is not how we do things!” replied the other.

The mother would have been inclined to think that the woman’s remark was rather pleasant because she had been thinking about the happiness of her son, and before he yet desired it, she wished him to have a beautiful girl “with fire in her eyes”!

Suddenly she had doubts. She had to ask the neighbor who was friendly and knew more than she about how people said things, “My daughter, my eldest daughter, how would you describe her eyes?”

The neighbor used the typical terms and metaphors to praise the adolescent girl’s features, her eyes, her hair.

At which point the mother stopped the conversation: “In any case, the father will let his daughter complete her studies. Tell that lady to look somewhere else for a daughter-in-law!”

Once back in the village the mother boasted about this possibility of arranging her first child’s marriage while she was still so young. She talked about it with the only family she received in her home or whom she herself would visit: the caïd ’s.

He was a widower; the eldest of his three daughters who was divorced did not want to remarry because she wanted to attend to her very young sisters and two brothers. The last of the orphan girls had just finished elementary school and, as was customary, was now cloistered at home awaiting some future suitor.

The caïd ’s eldest daughter was the mother’s only friend. Upon her return from the city, Bahia described her niece’s wedding to this somewhat rural audience with discreet satisfaction. These womanly conversations, especially when they took place in the caïd ’s house, looking out upon a deep orchard on the outskirts of the village, would end with musical sessions. One of the women brought a derbouka, a little girl had a tambourine, and the rather unpolished, somewhat nasal repertory of la Mitidja, could be heard beneath the trees, close to a hedgerow of almond trees — hostesses and guests all sitting on carpets laid out on the grass, the children all around, in the background some animals: a rooster and a peacock, kids, some very skinny cats, and even a rather terrifying wolf-dog that frightened the mother, a city-woman …

At nightfall my father came to get us in a Citroën that he and the Kabylian baker had bought together. The baker used it all week, but when he was not at work, he agreed to chauffeur my father, who was incapable of driving it.

The baker had closed up shop. He arrived accompanied by my impassive father. The car was parked. One of the little boys came and told us they were here. We climbed in back: my mother engulfed beneath her veils; myself at thirteen, stiff because I was on display; and my very little sister.

My father then signaled to his chauffeur partner (or perhaps they had decided between them to do this long before) that they had to go the long way around in the car. It was “apéritif time” (my father’s phrase seemed mysterious to me, I never asked what the words meant). The two large cafes in the center of the village would be filled with men who were pieds-noirs , while on benches just across the way the native men, Kabylians and Arabs, congregated in angry, silent confrontation.

Consequently, even with two men in the front, we could not drive there. A wife would immediately be the focus of all eyes: As if my mother, a lady who was of course veiled in silk, with embroidered organza over her nose masking almost her entire face, must not, because of her very worthiness, be thus exposed to the gaze of such spectators.

A double public gaze, exclusively masculine: Europeans gathered on the terraces for their apéritifs and seasonal workers, whom hostility bound together to contemplate the leisure time of others.

It would have been unthinkable for my father to permit “a lady” from where we came from to parade past, even rapidly! These potential gawkers would be incapable of seeing the innate distinctions: This masked figure, made mysterious because of her very sophisticated veils, in the Caesarean style, had to be imagined as extremely beautiful in theory even though they could not see her! Why do them the honor, even for the five minutes it would take the Citroën to drive around the little square and arrive in front of our apartment building?