Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

I laughed for the first time, after having spent days waiting to recover, my body more or less intact, and my face where, thank God, my eyes could still see!

“I laughed,” I said again to my lawyer, who ventured a more specific question: “Your sister listened; do you know how she reacted afterward?”

“No,” I said, “There was a long silence on the other end … I hung up finally; I did not want to upset her too much!”

“I found out later, through Djamila, who saw her in Paris. Your sister began to cry. Silently crying. She didn’t have the strength to speak to you. She cried, she told Djamila, because of her earlier fear and also because she was relieved!”

I remained silent there with my lawyer: my new friend — she whose sister seemed so close to my young sister, who for the past two years had been happily married in Paris, now with a magnificent baby. It was then, I think, that I decided to go and spend a week with her. To reassure myself that she was happy.

Sisterhood: Would that be the hidden, but calm, and infinitely open, eye that waits beneath the silent tide of friendship?

Sisterhood does not mean being permeable to each other, and certainly not sharing each others gloom. No. It just initiates some friability of emotion, where emotion flickers in two places at once.

Hands, gestures, smiles are slow to speak. A resemblance that, despite kinship or a shared childhood, is gradually revealed, abruptly unveiled: a sun after rain.

The days in Paris were good for me, a brief spell in which I was always outside. Carefree and relieved to be free; above all happy to have kept my sight. Walking in the crowd and looking greedily, to the point where I forgot myself. The wonder and elation of knowing I, a woman, was an anonymous passerby, a foreign passerby! As a result of seeing new things, multitudinous things, the repetition of landscapes and faces, I become nothing but gaze!

I returned home. I decided to propose a “semi documentary” project finally, one that would feed on my investigations and my research with sound.

In the building where I had once worked for several months, I introduced myself and the twenty-page dossier I was championing to the man responsible for production.

“What title do you have for your outline?” the producer asked indifferently.

“Arable Woman ,” I replied.

THE WOMAN WHO GOES AWAY

Algiers once again, home base. Going somewhere else, and always coming back! On one of these later homecomings I recall the face of a neighbor, a young woman living like myself on the fringes of transience in this oblique city, this capital always on the brink of some fever.

Why would I suddenly linger over this neighbor, my only friend in the old days? The old days, in my other life, that is, before the breach introduced by this passion in the process of being obliterated (during which I was alone, but also so little receptive to others …). Swallowed up in my youth, that is, absent in some way, or distracted, or immobile: The only things I seemed to put myself into were the air, the clouds, the unknown faces floating before me! As if I had no roots, as if I never touched the ground, except at night, sometimes, and in the revived voluptuousness of love …

And yet this friend suddenly appeared. Hania, which means the peaceful or the pacified: anyhow she sought her peace however she could. Her round face with large, shining eyes, a thick short nose, high cheekbones, jet-black hair that hung to her waist or was arranged in two soft braids that her hands would play with; her always-questioning eyes … Hania could not forget her oasis near Biskra. Like André Gide, who was preyed on by temptations in an earlier time, she would return there regularly believing that only there was she really herself.

She lived in a crowded, low-rent building, where I would come for her regularly. She asked me about my life, and then about my work: photographing the peasant women from the mountains of my childhood, what was I going to do with that? she demanded to know. I tried to say how much I liked to look at the people, as if I were seeing them for the first time, when I came “home.” “The people?” she said, looking at me with her devouring gaze.

“The people out there!” I answered. “Old people, children, little girls, adolescent girls, people who are out there, and outside this city with its incessant noise!” She listened to me.

I had to explain that, apart from my students and a few technicians, while I did my research during the past few months, I had seen practically no one. My parents. The children. Five or six friends, men and women. That was all. I felt I was living a full life.

“And all the others?” She made a face and a mocking gesture, her arm in the air.

I did not understand. She made the gesture again, a bit like a clown, suddenly so expressive.

“The people ‘upstairs’?” I translated.

“The ones in charge,” she said. “The ones who have solta! ”

I smiled. I remembered the expression that was several centuries old. I said it in Arabic, its music resounding like steel. “ Dhiab fi thiab! As el Maghroui said!” To myself I repeated, bitterly, Wolves in men’s clothing!

She laughed for a long time. And with that she right away became my friend. And so she poured out her life story. All I can remember of it now is one detail that leaped in my face.

She gave birth regularly every two years, sometimes with even greater frequency than that. All her pregnancies wore her out; no, she would not have an IUD inserted, “a steel thread in my belly, oh no!” As for the Pill, she did not know how to count the days of her cycle. So, once again, she laughed, then suddenly stopped her shrill laughter, looked at me, finally unburdened herself:

“The nausea had just begun, I am in the second month, hardly farther along, I ask my husband”—(she said in fact, “I ask Him”!) — to go there, to the douar that is my home. He refuses: his mother also refuses, because with me gone she will have to take care of the children — four, soon five now! In the fourth month, or a bit later, without meaning to, I lose my voice! Oh, I am normal, I work, I face the work. It is only that, once my belly becomes heavy, my voice goes away … And I know what it is doing, it has left and gone to the oasis, ahead of me! The children cry because they can’t hear me anymore; sometimes one of them refuses to eat, another gets sick. My mother-in-law is the one, finally, who pleads for me: ‘Let her go back to the oasis long enough to give birth!’

“And every time it is the same thing: I leave this city, I go to my people; when I am there, I speak hardly at all, but my voice comes back like a trickle, a tiny, thin trickle. Above all, I give birth among my sisters, with my mother and my aunt at my bedside. On the seventh day, after having finally presented the baby to the day and naming him, we dance the whole night long beneath the palm trees near the oued! I revive! And the baby then is so beautiful, full of vigor. I come home full of confidence. Every morning I sing …” (She is silent.) “But hardly have I weaned my child — at six months or a little older — and feeling light hearted, when unfortunately, in no time at all, the nausea is back; I’m pregnant all over again!”

She was silent. She did not laugh anymore. She sighed.

“Next time,” she muttered, her voice hard, “I hope to have a good miscarriage, or else to stay there and never come back to Him!”

In fact she had a miscarriage the next year. Three days later they carried her off, dead. Thirty years old and with five children already, all of them still very young.

She was buried in her village near the oued . Her face is the one surfacing within me; I hear again her inexhaustible laughter in the low-rent building where I find the mother-in-law who tells me what happened. I was not there in the city when the pallbearers took her away under a shroud, her face toward the sky. Her voice went ahead of her to the oasis, I am sure.