Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

After all, the wealthiest settler of the plains, an all-powerful colonial master — with his farms, his hundreds of acres of vineyards, his army of workers — the man who decided the mayor’s election, who chose local elected officials, to whom one bowed very low on those rare occasions that he deigned to show himself, this secret master kept his wife and daughters hidden. He spared them the need to go through the village, just as a jealous sultan would have done.

Of course it was not a matter either of male jealousy or of prohibition, merely disdain. The lady of the manor — or “the queen,” as she was called by the Europeans playing bowls and the natives playing dominos — stayed invisible, except …

“Except on August fifteenth,” the baker at the wheel reminded him in a low voice, as he took us on a big detour to the south, then along the far eastern side, to return by the alley that was almost empty at this time of day, passing one side of the church and ending up, finally, in front of where we lived.

As we drove home, through all the detours, I heard my father muttering, as if in a duel with the all-powerful settler whom so many visitors from Belgium, from northern lands and even farther away, came to see. (They came to admire the highly technical nature of his farms, his sowing by helicopter, his mechanized vineyards. They never, however, ventured into the innermost recesses, into the hidden corners they were unaware of, where ramshackle huts were reserved for his serfs.) “Because he does treat them like serfs!” my father remarked, furiously, there next to the baker. I think now that it was for my benefit that he would let fly this way in his usual diatribe against the local despot …

As if, right at the beginning of my adolescence, he called me as a witness: “Your mother, my wife, has a special status, at least equal to ‘their’ lady of the manor, and it is as it should be that all those men — the ‘others’ and ours — do not deserve to see her go by. And I”—(this is the father speaking as I imagine it later)—“following the example of ‘their’ master, will not expose my wife either — the very heart of myself. She is of course entirely wrapped in her stiff and immaculate veils, and following our customary ways, she remains silent outside, her eyes lowered beneath the face veil! And I am just a schoolmaster. The only native schoolmaster for native boys. Pretty stiff and inflexible I am, too, and tough-minded under my fez. When I was a young man, I admired Atatürk because with a leader like him we certainly would not have been colonized — in our own country without being in our own country. Then, your mother, like the Turkish ladies of the former aristocracy, could have taken off the Islamic veil and worn Paris skirts. She might even have been able to drive the Citroën herself, as breezily as any sportswoman — because it is clear I will never be able to drive a vehicle! In that case, well then, she would deserve to be photographed!

“Here women would have emulated the ladies in Turkey, but also the ladies of Damascus or Egypt, Cairo and Alexandria, the first emancipated Muslim women.” (My father was thinking then of how many of his friends, doctors, teachers, lawyers, who, like him, had dreamed ten or fifteen years too soon of “unveiling” their wives, traveling with them!)

But we were living in a colonized country. Sétif, Tébessa, Guelma, tumultuous cities — thousands of men dead, then thousands imprisoned on May 8, 1945—that was two or three years earlier … Algeria at war, thank God, had other matters of urgency. It was perhaps even a stroke of luck that in these little ancient cities the families were huddled together like this, and the women of the city were trembling but safe in the warmth of women’s apartments.

We returned to our apartment.

By this time my paternal grandmother, who had lived with us, was dead. Only her ghost remained of her, nostalgically floating through the rooms … It was the period in which my sister, the youngest, about six years old, was just beginning to feel unwell — a long illness that made her weak for over a year. I remember the next summer, spent in a verdant mountain city so that the fresh air would make her get well soon.

How exactly did I pass from my childhood to my preadolescence? It was before I was thirteen, or rather before I was ten, when I left for boarding school in the nearby city. (“The city of roses,” André Gide called it fifty years before I arrived. But he was there fifty years after the painter Fromentin, the first one to write a French account of this Arab city.) I see myself still half submerged in the mists of innocent childhood while all that surrounds my coming of age — the unknown, the ambiguous — marked by an ardor with no words to express it in an Islamic land, was making itself known to me.

What were the early scenes, experienced with the passivity of blind innocence, during which I partly left the family cocoon, the warm protection assured me by the affection of a group of women (an affection not without its acrid moments)? “Coming of age”: this term applied to women, to girls who reached physical maturity, is in the maternal dialect laden with threats. In the masculine plural, however, the kharidjines , the men said to be “of age,” are dissidents, indeed bearers of a religious freedom that occasionally turns out to be a cause of war, but the beginning of a collective adventure that starts a new phase … In the feminine singular, the girl “coming of age” promises only pure danger, sometimes reduced to a gratuitous fuss and bother. When did I, then, come of age out of limbo?

The caïd had three daughters: This triad is at the heart of my village memories.

My usual playmate is the youngest of these sisters, a year or two older than me. Our confederacy is reinforced every Thursday or Sunday in the back of their rustling garden by frequent disputes with her brothers, one in particular who was about ten. He used to climb the trees and trap birds. With a cruel grin, he would bring us their trembling, wounded bodies. “I am going to slit their throats according to the ritual right now and fix them for you to eat. You’ll be licking your fingers when they’re plucked and grilled, you’ll see!” His teasing eyes stared right at me; his calm cruelty made me uncomfortable … I stood stock-still; his sister never let up berating him.

Before all this teasing, before our screaming — little girls scandalized by this boy we used to call a hoodlum — there is a sense of disquiet that remains and comes back to me, indelible.

Was I six then, or was I seven? I think I had left nursery school. The youngest of the caïd ’s daughters, following my example, was also now being sent to the French school. Whenever I visited, her sisters, who were oddly inquisitive about me, would pounce and trap me in a corner. There they would lift up my skirt or my dress to examine — my slip! It was a piece of lingerie they had never seen before. My mother was so style conscious that she insisted on buying me European clothes for little girls from a young Spanish woman who used to travel the length and breadth of the plains in her small truck selling underwear and various fineries to the village women shut up in their homes or living in isolated places.

The caïd ’s daughters, who were dressed in traditional clothing, did not dare speak openly to my mother of their compulsive curiosity. But no sooner would I find myself delivered to them in their house than, in a great state of excitement, they were immediately compelled to feel the satin slip I was wearing, even its embroidery if possible. I struggled. I had the feeling that what they were so eager to know through this feminine underwear was French womanhood itself. Because I went to school and was therefore disguised as a little French girl, they would have liked to caress, and feel through me, the whole body belonging to these distant ladies who seemed to them arrogant but so precious. “To know,” they exclaimed as they encircled me without seeing me, “to know what they wear, how they doll themselves up, underneath!” The fervent sigh that went with underneath made me want to throw up.