Assia Djebar: So Vast the Prison

COMING OF AGE

Should one tell, O mother (why do I suddenly speak as if I were the one, the dead child, the child never mourned, the child buried without my knowing how to find any trace of it again?) yes, do you have to be reminded, O mother, that you were worried about me from the time I was twelve until I was fourteen, waiting for my blood, my menstrual blood?

In vain. I had a bloodless adolescence, a bloodless coming of age, the way one would describe a death as bloodless. Later, well after my marriage, the gynecologist explained that one legacy of this land was that very young girls contracted the tuberculosis bacillus without anyone knowing, and they would only find out later, sometimes too late, that genital tuberculosis made them sterile wives. I gladly accepted the verdict: I would therefore be miraculously sterile, available to be a bosom friend to children, all heart, and never any blood!

So my coming of age made my life easier, allowing me to think of myself as androgynous for a rather long time. A gift. One that I expressed in the ignorance and haziness of a mind steeped in mystical reading (a jumble of Claudel and Jalal-ud-din Rumi) that day I turned fourteen, when proudly, too proudly, I wrote out my life project in black and white, Until I am thirty!

So, intoxicated with space and motion, I dreamed my life; I danced my little life of an odalisque who has left the frame for good, at least until I turned fourteen … And ever since? Between shadow and sunlight, between my vulnerable freedom and the fetters imposed on the women of “my home,” I zigzag along the frontier of a bitter, voracious land. I try my hand at living, that is at looking, one eye turned wide open to the sky and sometimes toward others, the other eye turned inward where it rediscovers, farther and father back, the funeral processions of yesterday, and the day before yesterday …

MATERNITY

Any number of interviews, meetings back to back, dozens of forms to fill out, questionnaires explained by the social worker, read by the woman in charge of children’s services, put in order by the family counselor, all ladies with sweet expressions, but who move quickly, speak like inquisitors, are courteous and attentive, and are probably prolific mothers outside these offices. For the past three months Isma has been severely testing the high walls of her patience. After she and her husband had the same impulse at the same time and decided to adopt a child, they had found the bureaucracy trying. Now that is over with! This is the morning they will choose.

They are going together to the nursery where all the babies are, some, they have been told, only a few days old, and some already as old as six months.

Choosing a baby the way you choose a doll, a knickknack, a refrigerator, a dog in a kennel, a cat; no, not a cat, people give you cats — a ball of fur in the palm of your hand — or sometimes the cat comes in by itself through the garden gate, stops on the sill, rubs itself for a second against the doorframe, studies the half-light inside the home, and suddenly it lives there.

Perhaps the same is true for a toddler who gets lost in the street, who dawdles in a playing field, who seems distraught at the entrance to a market: The child lays its eyes upon you and will not withdraw them. The decision opens up inside you like a water flower on some inner lake: It is your turn to approach, look, keep the child … Ah, such a choice (who chose whom?) would be lived as some obscure abduction in full daylight.

Isma has dreams like this as she prepares for the encounter at the nursery. Adopting a child is moving toward a moment of slow seduction, or of falling in love. She moves into this imaginary space: prowling, visiting a friendly house, leaving it. Where would it be? In what place open to every wind would she find herself face-to-face with this child?

Three or four years after the end of this long war, in every city in the country, and sometimes in the towns on the plains, homes have been set up where dozens of orphans live; boys of ten, sometimes older. The summer before, Isma visited the children’s houses in her region, one after the other. Once she forgot herself for an entire afternoon, playing with twins who were six or seven. It hurt her to leave them, and she made herself not go back to see them again. They had a paternal uncle, a peasant from one of the frontier regions, who was going to take them … The husband then came to a second decision: they would take in a child who was less than a year old, one of “the ones truly abandoned,” he said. Isma did not object and no longer went into the villages. The autumn rains flooded the city; the wind and its icy squalls preceded the winter that would be sunny, but chilly, violet. Isma was silent for days at a time.

The government’s positive response arrives: They are going to have a child.

The time to visit approaches. Isma leaves the house. She has dressed herself as if for an ordinary day. An hour later she meets her husband in front of a nursery in a nice neighborhood. A bright two-story building between gardens. They smile at each other uncertainly.

She makes the decision: “Let’s go in!”

He takes her elbow, his fingers gripping the wool of the young woman’s jacket.

A hostess greets them. Courteous reception; a few gentle phrases of small talk, a soft breeze of words murmured to swathe the beginnings of anxiety. The woman in charge of the nursery is introduced: she explains to them how the formalities will unfold, that was her word, formalities .

They stop for a moment in an icy corridor with a view of flowering groves. Outside, the sweetness of spring suffuses the horizon striped with rose and mauve.

The woman in charge points to a closed door. Her sharp voice pierces the silence that seems to have slipped in from outside:

“This is the room where our children sleep! Walk between the rows and look at them. There is a number on every bed. If you see one baby in particular …” Her voice is left hanging.

Isma keeps her head turned toward the door. “So go on!” the first lady says. “It’s always up to the woman to get things going. Your husband will do what you do.”

The husband lets go of Isma’s elbow; he had still been holding it tightly.

“Here we go,” she whispers.

And what if it’s just a game? she thinks, beset by timidity as she pushes open the door.

A deep, bright room, where the first thing awaiting them is the hospital smell. An undefined smell, not medicine but rather the stench of enforced waiting. And the silence. A few pediatric nurses in white smocks, all of them astonishingly young. These women tread imperceptibly from one bed to the next; they hardly seem to be working. Even the rustling folds of their smocks, when occasionally they brush against each other, cannot be heard. There are also the little canvas beds; they are deep and hide their contents. Tightly clasped in these two rows lies something like an evanescent secret …

When Isma reaches the center line, however, she notices a murmur, then plaintive sounds, a bit farther a sort of gurgling, the beginnings of some monotonous chant, the consultations of the deaf or the blind in this vast place, haunted despite the brilliant daylight. The visitor, motionless, considers there before her the great distance to be crossed to the canvas beds that are occupied but closed in upon themselves.

To choose , she says to herself, you have first to look at them, you know! Them!

Thirty, forty children, from one week to a few months old, are in this room. Later she will be told that this is a common number of abandoned children to be gathered in one administrative district over a period of several weeks.