Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

As for me, I shrugged my shoulders, pretending indifference; then, without a veil, without a shawl, and sometimes even bare-armed, I went off to visit my paternal aunt. Ah! I only had to cross two tiny roads in the old city to find this green-eyed, sharp-faced aunt, tall and thin in a way that was both rustic and thoroughbred, and find all the love in the world! She embraced me, she welcomed me effusively, going on and on.

Above all, every other minute, she would start her sentences by calling me, “O daughter of my brother!” There was so much affection in the way she spoke that her voice still haunts me today, as if the secret vibration of the mother tongue, to reach me, had to pass through the love of a sister … “Mother tongue,” I call it, but it is the quaver of this sisterly echo that I should evoke!

THE WOMAN WHO GUIDES

I finally understand that the pure passion that I first revived through words aimed at oblivion was for me a second birth. This began, as is often the case, at least for women finally reaching maturity, when there is a strong sense of feminine solidarity, when my mother first came to talk to me: seeming, in a single scene, to bring closure to this move I was making in my life.

So I had taken refuge at my aunt’s house — this aunt was my mother’s half sister; hers was the jasmine on the balcony that accompanied my daydreams during these days of transition and torpor. I slept opposite the balcony and the sky, to the sounds of the working-class apartments across the street. My aunt served me in silence, spoke very little, prayed beside my bed. It was only as we sat together in the evening that she would talk: detailed anecdotes about the women who were her neighbors and whose nagging voices sometimes reached us. In the evening twilight, just on the verge of falling asleep, I would recall the past affection of my aunt in Caesarea. She had been so vociferous, but still the reserve of the aunt who was present made me think of her.

One morning my mother came to find me. She came alone by car to the place where I was staying; she had learned to drive in the early days of Algerian independence and liked to set herself up as my chauffeur. She thought I was having a breakdown; she ate with us. I watched how full of energy she was and understood that she was preparing for combat, but in what battle? I left the aunt to go with my driver. Once outside, after she had begun to drive, and as she was slowly returning to center city, she asked briskly, “What are you going to do now with your life, your children, or …”

I was silent for a moment, then I forced myself to say what I was feeling: that my divorce was a repudiation on my part. She was startled by the Arab word, repudiation , that I had used!

“Irrevocable,” I added, “because it was pronounced three times! I know. I am the one who made the vow!”

She went on driving. How, I thought to myself, could my decision, hard and straight as steel, be transformed into words for the others? We went along for a good while in silence.

“All I know,” I said with difficulty, “is that I will not go back. Not at any price! If I did he might try to take away the children whom I would not give up! The children are growing up.”

“What do you wish to do … to defend your rights?” She repeated these words your rights . Then she assumed the position of official adviser: She proposed to take me right away to a lawyer, either someone close to the family or someone else. I would talk to him privately. She would wait outside. She added, “There are laws in this country! Defend yourself!”

The whole time she was taking me to her friend, a woman lawyer who was the one we had to have, my mother was not looking at me. In fact she never got over her amazement: So here was her eldest daughter, whom she thought was thoroughly clad in armor, paralyzed and unable to speak. In a totally traditional modesty that feared the brilliant light of the sun on intimate things, this daughter wants to struggle and release herself but would rather do so in a half-light, consequently in confusion.

We arrived. She chose to wait for me nearby at the home of one of her cousins, a woman of almost forty who was pregnant again. “She is making babies at the same time as her daughter-in-law, and in the same apartment!” she commented disapprovingly.

My mother was my guide. She led me, outside, in the jungle of the city, in the minefield of new laws, without suspecting that this time it was the energy of her own mother, now departed, that had driven me forward, almost with my eyes blindfolded.

A few days later I appeared before the cadi for the scene known as “the attempt at reconciliation.” I see myself seated facing the magistrate’s desk; my husband, who came in shortly after me, is seated to the side. I feel him; I do not look at him.

The representative of the law spouted a long speech in a form of Arabic that is referred to as literary. All that I got of it was its stiffness and its hollow circumlocutions while the man’s eyes, prying and suspicious behind black-framed glasses, goaded me. I take myself somewhere else: It is such a beautiful day, outside the window!

Then the husband and the cadi speak together, man to man: I am vaguely aware that this humming sound is a spider’s web being put in place. The judge asks me one last question, which he repeats. I merely say “Lla!” (“No”!) because I have the ludicrous and in fact ill-timed notion that this is the beginning of the chahadda —according to them, the words of submission. So I will only say one word in their learned language: no, non, lla!

I also remember that my innocence as a woman finally dawned on me and seemed obvious: I shall add nothing , I decided. I erased this face of justice from my sight, and at once my heart flew far away, outside the window, like swallows in flight. I tried to contain the smile that was about to break out on my face. The cadi examined the beginnings of this glow relaxing my features, or he saw into it.

Then I told my lawyer, who had waited at the door, how I had maintained my silence and why. It was this shadow of a smile, she explained to me later, that justified for the magistrate a verdict of separation, ruling that the “fault was mine” as well. As for myself, when I left this mahakma at midday, all I saw outside was the sun. And a second later I felt its actual heat, its vibration almost exploding against me, right in the chest.

My mother went with me the next day to the airport: In Paris my young sister had just given birth.

When I entered the room in the Paris clinic, the first thing I saw was the baby: She was up and naked and her head was covered with curly hair. The nurse laughed heartily as she wrapped the blanket around her flushed skin. My niece was less than two days old. I did not dare touch her then or caress her … For the next week I slept listlessly at my sister’s. Forget everything. Especially do not discuss with her any of the upheaval in my life. My lawyer, whose sister, Djamila, is very close to my sister, had asked me, “Have you talked to your sister about … about the night of the crisis?”

“Yes,” I said. I had talked to her about it in an ironic manner. My face was not swollen anymore, my hands were out of their bandages, but how could one explain this on the telephone, from so far away? I felt only cold irony about my stupidity. Because we could not spend hours on the telephone, I had shortened the story. I tried to think of some novels we had read together, or one of us first, then the other, at home … I ended up explaining: “You know, without being aware of it, I started to act out the princess of Cleves with my husband! Well, everybody — and he first among them — believed that I had chosen to play the part of the domesticated shrew! A simple mistake of repertory!” Then I laughed.