Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

I got away. I pulled their youngest sister with me. The two of us ran off together to the far end of the orchard. Being touched in this way was an assault that brought tears to my eyes. My friend was surprised at how strongly I reacted and in the end I said I was not going to come back alone to see her.

I told my mother why, and must even have wept. I think this experience still makes me instinctively back away, restive and anxious, when faced with the slightest physical contact in the most ordinary social situations (except in love. No, on the contrary, in love, too, which requires such a long preamble before I reach it) … Later on, when I was about twenty or thirty in fact, I discovered Western customs: coeducation, where the sexes mixed in apparent neutrality; the exchange of kisses on the cheek that no longer meant anything more than an easy, often immediate familiarity. The same is true of unrestrained public shows of affection between a boy and his girlfriend that other people pretend not to watch. Later I will approach this language of bodies, their display, sometimes their flaunting, with the eyes of a primitive. So often, I will find myself forced to turn away, in a reaction that made it look like I was a prude when in fact I was just “oriental”; that is, my bared eyes were sensitive, desiring above all to drink in the world as it truly revealed itself: secret, lit by the beauty of beginnings.

I return to my conversation with my mother: “I won’t go to their house alone again! Even to play … I don’t want them to touch me!” I screamed. “I don’t want to be touched!”

My mother came to an unexpected conclusion. Still in charge of my getting dressed every morning, she decided to take off my amulets (two squares and one triangle of silk, a present from my paternal grandmother, now dead). I wore them underneath my dress or pullover; I remember the thread braided in the old-fashioned way, more precious to me than any simple hidden necklace. I recall some classes vividly precisely because, while my attention was turned to the blackboard or to the teacher sitting beside it, I was in the habit of touching these squares or triangles of magical writing I wore on my chest. (“These amulets will protect you from the envy of others!” my grandmother told me, imagining that the world of the French school was hostile.) At night I would proudly wear these ornaments, finally on display, on my nightgown.

Did these night jewels still connect me to my grandmother, who was so sweet, a second mother to me? Probably, as she had said many times, I was convinced that these silk adornments, with their dull colors, gray, dark blue and black, were “protecting” me … I would go to sleep feeling safe, as if the grandmother were still there beside me. And throughout the day, without any of my schoolmates knowing, and in spite of them, I was under a second protection: an invisible and ancient eye that looked lovingly down upon me from afar …

But now my mother decided — I do not remember if it was in the morning or in the evening, all I remember is the room where I stood, undressed, maybe in my nightgown or maybe in the process of preparing for school — yes, she decided to strip me of them: she must have argued and explained. She said it was because the doctor was going to visit the school sometime in the next few days. How would I look, what would I say, parading these magical squares and triangles in front of the other girls, foreigners?

“But still! It’s the writing of the Koran!” I must have protested.

But had I yet discovered the argument of legitimization? I do not know: I must have talked about the gold crosses that they wore, the other girls — not hidden like my amulets! It was clear to my mother that the ridicule I might experience would be far more serious than wearing these holy writings, which was, she said, not particularly orthodox. They would call me a pagan, me, the one who was native, there with all the French girls, me the Muslim!

I must have given in. I was stripped, I might as well have been naked. And it was my mother who, caught up in a fit of rationality, took this first writing away from me.

During this same period, however, when the elementary school let out, I attended Koranic school. My mother liked to have a party with the nurse and the caïd ’s family to mark each level I achieved in learning the Sacred Book — three suras , then ten others, then twenty more. My walnut tablet, decorated by the sheik with numerous examples of calligraphy, was conspicuously displayed to all the women. How beautiful, the guests would exclaim! They claimed that this tablet was so elegant that it was a foreshadowing of “my wedding dress” that would come later!

My mother enthusiastically brought us pastries and recited the verses with me. The celebration — with the caïd ’s daughters all there, in our house this time — ended with musical improvisations.

I have only lamented one death, that of my paternal grandmother, the silent one; I mourned her, screaming and shouting in the oldest street of Caesarea. I ran down this street, leading down from the humble house where my father was a child and where his married sister who was always sick lived, until, sobbing, I arrived at the maternal family’s wealthy and half-European dwelling (with its windows and balconies on the main floor). I arrived where “they” lived, thinking this somewhat spitefully, because at that moment I was only the daughter of the woman who had held me when it was cold and dark, who had embraced me silently, who had not dared speak in front of the Frenchwomen who were our neighbors in the village. I am, first of all, the daughter of this mute affection, she, the grandmother that I saw as humble (why did this grieve me?) — humble and modest …

I cry, I weep (willing these tears to fall endlessly in protest), and my mourning, galloping at the same time as I race through space, becomes exacerbated and then splits in shreds like the great tapestry of my rebellion itself. It ends up vanishing because the women, all wearing white headdresses and squatting on carpets — the neighbor women have come to pay their respects — finally take me onto their laps.

Two, three years later, during the same period that I lose my amulets, I see my mother, merry as a child, chatting conspiratorially with the woman we called “the nurse” who, ever since her second son was born, worked for us as housekeeper. In the village everyone, right down to those in the poorest hovels, referred to her by the imposing title “the general’s wife.” Her husband, who was very old and never left his bed anymore, must have been some sort of handyman, the caretaker of equipment in the army, or perhaps the navy … Someone must have called him the “general caretaker,” and the term, at first said jokingly, in fun, stuck to him. Decades later he bore this nickname with not a trace of self-consciousness; sometimes, seeing the nurse and hearing her nickname, someone would ask, “Was her husband a sergeant? Sergeant general?” Nobody knew anything more about it. The “general’s wife” was a dark-skinned villager in her fifties with a face that radiated jovial kindness (despite the huge, ugly wart on one cheekbone that, upon the insistence of my mother, she allowed our family doctor to remove using local anesthesia).

I see my mother, on a Thursday afternoon, sitting recovering from the fatigue resulting from her weekly session at the Turkish baths. The nurse, the general’s wife, has made fritters the way I like them. The warmth of the house after the cold of the cold room at the hammam , where we had been offered pomegranates, oranges, and clementines already peeled and sectioned. At home the nurse’s thoughtful welcome …

I remember that particular Thursday. And my mother, in league with the nurse, suddenly asking me, “Yesterday you were in our room, sitting on the floor at the foot of our bed: you were reading that library book you had just brought home. Then, from the kitchen, I heard you crying … You were sobbing, but softly, a bit as if you were singing! I sneaked in to see, to understand.” In fact she was talking for the benefit of the village woman. “Explain this to me, my daughter. I think there is something mysterious going on. I read the words to the old songs in Arab, I sing them and sometimes weep to them in my heart … But still I am singing!