Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

I let my imagination go; I smile. Must not tell the crew that I am, through my mother and my mother’s father (is that the most fruitful genealogy, one that intertwines the maternal network with that of one of the father’s?) the direct descendant of this combatant. Though it is true that he, at the head of his three hundred mounted troops, was only able to hold out for two or three weeks, scarcely more, while the mountains of Kabylia were ablaze for months!

So I was there that morning, high up in the air in the crane, directly above my ancestor’s body, and all I cared about was the horizon, the Roman aqueduct: focusing on this with a panoramic shot that would then open onto “the song of the city.”

At my feet, while I sought an image in the sky, my ancestor must have been disturbed by my incongruous presence, especially by my being oblivious to his resting-place, the place where he is buried. Was I being faithless? No, irreverent and thoughtless perhaps, but seeing here, on the contrary, a return to what is truest, while poised precisely between heaven and earth, practically in a state of levitation — after all. That had been my choice the summer before, to go in search of the oral memory of the mountain ladies (including one very pious one, my great-aunt who fasts all year long enveloped in her veils of mauve gauze). These women had taught me how, during the final days of the last insurrection, my ancestor had advised them to protect the Christian prisoner, treat him as a guest, and in the end set him free, while he, our chief, went off for the final cavalcade and died in the last battle …

Buried in these hills, this act had never earned any written account because the new “learned men” go to the archives and consequently to reports, inventories, maps and sketches from the final impoundment; in short, they follow the traces left by clerks and notaries. During all this time, in hushed tones, the daughters of the granddaughters of the grandmothers, in the hamlets where folk wisdom, sometimes haloed with legends, still exists (but also a tenacious and determined memory, concentrated like the green of the leaves of a fig tree, like its starry thorns), these talking women pass on the shreds of their unoffical history …

“Do we have to redo the shot and go back up?” the chief cameraman asks me. The light will allow us fifteen more minutes of work. “One final attempt,” he insists, without having noticed the stele on the edge of the highway.

He and I go back up on the crane. We are rising, my gaze and the camera’s once again turn toward the tawny, age-old rocks of the aqueduct in the distance.

This time I cannot forget the ancestor who sleeps at my feet near the tree. I am sure that he is watching me, ironically or affectionately — I wonder. I also think about the Christian prisoner in 1871, set free just before the end of the conflagration, before the triumphant return of the French soldiers of that period. He probably went away, far from Caesarea.

I would like to begin the planned six minutes of the film about my city (that will be accompanied by a flute composition by Edgar Varèse, Density 33 ), with these stones that are twenty centuries old. Will this shot turn out? I suddenly feel it is impossible, and a month later, on the editing table I find this confirmed.

“The viewfinder moved again!” exclaimed the cameraman, exasperated.

Then he and I redescended.

I did not make the retort that perhaps my dead ancestor also had moved — in his tomb where he has been for a hundred years. Would he not have been offended that I, his great-granddaughter, in jeans and wearing a cap on her head, my face sunburned by working outside these past days on location, did not first bow before him, a few words of prayer on my lips, that I preferred (inadvertently in fact) to fly away up there in search of an image of stones that were even more venerable than he was?

Was it the time that I was worried and went back to stay with my daughter in the midst of Algiers in revolt? No, I remember another homecoming, to a country still at peace, an opaque and illusory peace in fact: During that summer of 1988, just before the autumn when the tragedy came to life …

I see myself at the Algiers airport. A friend, a kinsman by marriage, had come to get me and take me to a distant beach to be with a family that was dear to me. The man greeting me laid out the whole plan they had made for one or two weeks of vacation. The summer promised to be scorching, and the village beside the sea, so far away, would have a deserted beach: a kingdom just for us!

“Come with me,” he proposed. “I would like to say hello to a cousin of mine, despite this crush of people!”

He took my hand so that we would not lose each other in the jostling crowd. It was, in fact, unusually crowded; I quickly understood that the people congregating here were pilgrims, of both sexes but especially older people.

“The next plane is for Jidda! Booked entirely for the ‘little pilgrimage’!”

I wanted to tell the friend, “I’m not following you! I’ll wait in the cafeteria.” But a loudspeaker began to shout, and an even denser crowd — many women in white tchadors , their faces flushed with quiet excitement or openly joyful, grouped together like convent-school girls on an excursion — swarmed over the spot where we were in just a few minutes.

I let go of my guide’s hand. He found himself propelled farther along, but I did not budge. It was then that, trapped in the middle of the group, helpless at first, then resigned, I saw her, “her.” About six feet away from me. Bizarrely, despite the earlier tumult, a strange empty space widened between us. Between the woman (“my mother,” I was going to say, whereas of course this was not my mother) and me. I stood frozen.

Her. Now a little over sixty, the same tall silhouette but heavier, more massive … It was my mother-in-law, or rather, because my divorce had taken place two or three years earlier, my ex-mother-in-law. (Recently remarried, I had a second mother-in-law, this time in the principal city of the west.) I was really going to say “my mother.” I had loved her so much and still loved her so much despite the estrangement. Here in this chaotic airport I discovered how much this one loss from the breakup of my marriage hurt me, the loss of this woman alone, her, the mother of my first husband.

It was her, and yet not quite. Her silhouette stopped in front of me, about six feet away. Dressed in a Moroccan djellaba of light beige; wearing a tchador in silky white muslin with folds framing her face. Her face had stayed the same, chubby and austere at the same time. (In the past I had confirmed very early, and thanks to this mother-in-law whose soul was so beautiful, that there was a law of sorts: True goodness is austere, almost invisible to the eye, sometimes even offputting, and rarely does it have the radiant appearance one might expect. Because what is most often radiant is the pleasure of giving rather than the thing that is rarest: the complete forgetting of oneself in the gift.)

That is how this woman seemed to me: on a first meeting not at all open-handed; above all, reserved, and with a rather severe face. A woman whose richness of heart and moral rigor combined with modesty, this I had experienced. The modesty of a humble believer. My mother-in-law, or the purity of Islam.

Now here I am facing her after four or five years of absence and silence. My heart pounds as if I were seeing a vanished lover reappear. Before thinking: What shall I do? Greet her or not?

At the same time I was paralyzed, there was something disquieting. Her, but not her! I thought to myself again, disturbed, ready to step forward. Because she was right in front of me. I could forget the proprieties, not take into account the burden of the recent past, forget her son; I could simply embrace her, her, speak to her, ask about her health (she was older), listen to her dear slow voice questioning me, then finally tell her that I missed her and the “old days” I used to spend with her (weekends, conversations on Friday evenings, the hours we spent at the baths). In short, I could throw my arms around her, at the risk of becoming emotional. But just as I was about to step forward, I was suddenly shocked to see that the sixty-year-old lady, whom I discovered I still loved like a mother, this lady in front of me did not see me: She was blind.