Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

“But you, I was fascinated watching you from a distance: your little hands turning page after page, you stopped crying for a moment; then suddenly, after a second, your voice — or, it was almost like the voice of someone else — began to moan. Moan? No, sob, but softly, a sort of lament!” She turned once again toward the nurse, who was smiling doubtfully. “You understand, it wasn’t because she sang and cried at the same time, no, it was that she never stopped reading, and when she wept that way, she seemed to be enjoying it. Isn’t that strange?”

She admitted a little later, disturbed, “You made me regret I cannot read French! It is good that I’m learning to speak it now, but what I would like is to read it like that! One is never alone then, I think …”

The nurse listened, then, in her tranquil way, spoke, her eyes first on one (my mother), then on the other (her little girl): “Come now, what are you saying, Lla Bahia! Human beings are never alone. God is always looking down upon them, isn’t he!”

“Of course,” my mother murmured sadly, turning her attention toward me, apparently discouraged by the village woman’s remark. And also, perhaps, by her unshakable calm.

Scattered scenes from a childhood I left behind at the age of ten to become a boarder at a school in the nearby city.

The year I was thirteen, soon to turn fourteen, how distant the day seemed when I was seven and, softly sobbing, read my first novel, brought home from the library: Hector Malot’s Sans famille!

My early adolescence at boarding school was influenced by my strong friendship with a girl who was half Italian, a boarder like myself who went back to her coastal village every Saturday.

Together we discovered in the school library the correspondence of Alain-Fournier and Jacques Rivière, who were adolescents at a Parisian preparatory school before the First World War. This bookish and passionate friendship, dating from a half century earlier, became our entry (probably it was not just by chance that our tacit friendship was formed in the mirror of this dialogue between two young people from the past) to everything we later read. A wide-open realm, an expanded space …

We emulated them daily as the ten months of the school year unfolded and we read. During recess we had almost clandestine conversations about Gide’s novels and about the theater, play after play by Claudel. Next I plunged into Giraudoux’s short, clear, and cutting novels, especially because my French teacher had seen productions of his plays that year in Paris. Despite our intense nightly conversations, my friend and I had our differences: She made fun of my pleasure in finding Claudel’s uncompromising heroines to be a reflection of something familiar, but what? My maternal culture, my tendency at the time to be religious? Our friendship intensified later when, after Rimbaud and Apollinaire, we were dazzled to discover the poetry of Michaux. And I suddenly began to seek out translations of ancient Arab and Iranian poems for my pied-noir friend.

I mention quickly our sharing of this first literary repast because it is connected with another day I still remember, the day that I was fourteen.

I had come home from boarding school. No one had thought to turn this first day of summer vacation (we were probably waiting to go to Caesarea shortly, to the family home) into a birthday celebration for me. My young brother had said ironically one day (or was this later?), “Celebrate a birthday? Just because we are neighbors with the French, does that mean we are going to adopt their customs?”

Why, ultimately, does this unforgotten day I turned fourteen come up? Because I decided to celebrate it alone with a new undertaking beginning — my journal. Maybe I thought, Like Alain-Fournier, like Jacques Rivière!

This is my life’s project … at least until I am thirty .

I lifted my hand from the page. After that , I thought, I shall be old! I did not know how one was supposed to live after thirty, or if it was even possible to have projects …

But thirty years hence? I saw myself then as halfway through my life — or at least the life I believed worth living: in my reading adventure I completely disregarded the restricted space of the home in which I was growing up. And, in the same way, I had not yet been struck by the injustice of the confinement of the women in my family. I felt only their poetry, their warmth which was sometimes not without sadness; only the pride of my mother, an aristocrat in my eyes, in her stiff silk veil — like Zoraidé, of course, in Don Quixote , which I do not think I had read yet.

Consequently, though isolated between two extremes in this village established by colonizers, I did not think of myself as alone. What should my life project be? I asked myself grandly. I wrote, and even now I remember these words from a journal that was, moreover, very soon interrupted, and rediscovered by chance in an old pile of stuff. I read the lines again with amused indulgence, and the scene of what we might call “the first writing” rises up intact.

I want to obey , I wrote, my own rule of life, the one I choose for myself today, at the age of fourteen, and I promise to do so .

Behind me stood the poets who had become my friends over the last few months, backing me just as much probably as the acrid pride of Lla Fatima and that of her daughter Bahia, exiled for the time being in this village. Behind me, before I spoke these words of a juvenile vow, the familiar saints from past centuries made their presence known, the ones whose sanctuaries I had only rarely visited when I was very young: the Berkanis, father and son, buried side by side, and Ahmed or Abdallah, whom I had so long ignored … Behind me, but why did I stubbornly persist in looking “behind” my first commitment for ghosts who, the instant they were invoked, crumbled away into dust, or rotted there in neglected tombs. Why “behind,” why not look for what was ahead, toward death in the distance, toward the last time one takes flight, the final departure?

I write. Beside me in the small living room my father talks at length with a neighbor, an employee who is “native” like himself and who has recently come from our city, Caesarea. My father is talking to this young man about the need to send “our daughters to school, all our daughters, in these villages and in the old cities as well, where traditions benumb them.”

I wrote at the beginning of this journal (which had no sequel beyond the notes I took on my readings then) I make this commitment, and to this rule of life I will remain faithful because I think it is the purest:

“Never to wish for happiness, but for joy!

Never to seek salvation, but grace!”

The following year, this time alone, I plunged into mystical writings, Islamic ones as well as those I found in my reading at school: In the wake of Claudel’s heroes, I moved to Pascal, then Francis of Assisi … Finally, thanks to having mastered ancient Greek, I landed in Greece, as if home at last!

These emotions kept me occupied while I was in boarding school but also when I was in the family harems in Caesarea the next summer, then for another whole year … Eventually an intoxication with poetry, a secret exaltation of sentiment, was all I retained of this. As a result soon afterward, and too quickly, I fell into love for the first time, absolutely. That lasted seventeen years …

Not happiness, but joy , I wrote in my youthful wisdom — and presumption.

More than twenty years later, when, just before turning forty, I leave my first marriage, the only part of this precociously written law that I have left is simple joy, thick of course and slow, joy in space each time it opens up, unscathed joy.