Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

I did not move. Staring at the lady who was so dear to me, the brotherly, or rather the motherly shadow of my past. Was that when I decided not to go up to her and make known my presence? Instinctively, probably out of cowardice, I stepped back.

Of course I should have simply kissed the palm of her hand (as I used to do every morning in my childhood as a sign of respect to my grandmother) and murmured, “I wish you a good pilgrimage! And pray for me there!” I would have said my name if she did not recognize me even after hearing my voice.

No, that was not how I did things. Or I could have taken the time (and mustered the courage) to speak cautiously. She was blind and she was going off to pray for her salvation and the salvation of her family!

Abruptly the shadow of her son raised a barrier, I think.

Even today I do not understand why. I can only confirm that there is something strange that recurs: When I leave a man, I have a hard time getting over the absence of his mother, or sometimes his sisters.

SIDI

During this same stay in Algeria I returned for the last time to Caesarea to pay my respects to an uncle, an aunt, and some cousins. Leaving the old city with my father, I went to visit Sidi in a country village not far away.

Sidi, the husband of my oldest maternal aunt, the only man that I would have called “Sidi,” like this, “my Lord.” He was a farmer, and a true model of his kind. An extremely corpulent man, he spoke rarely and humbly. We all respected him; as children we had been afraid of him, but because of his reserve, his calm haughtiness, and the familiar way he treated his horses and dogs, we found some mystery about him that reassured us. Later I learned how, during his youth, one characterized both by obedience and by a rebelliousness that was hard to hold in check, he had had to endure a maternal uncle who was the only means of support for his mother when she was too soon repudiated. This man acted as his father and rapidly became his oppressor. Rich, polygamous, and sterile, the uncle seemed to have it in for his nephew because, though the old man was constantly getting married, the boy was still his only heir.

Sidi came into his inheritance but never changed the austere life he led in the little village near Caesarea where I used to spend part of summer vacation. His sons had been students, his daughters had married: he had raised his family by his own labor and without ever counting on the miserly uncle.

My earliest memory of the country, farthest back in early childhood, is connected to Sidi. There he sits in the barouche in which I was taken with my girl cousins very early in the chilly halfdawn to one of the farms that would be the private world of our games and escapades. I can still hear, close beside me, the rhythmic monosyllables of his voice guiding the mare and talking to her. I am grateful to him for this vivid, undying sense of simply moving along, as if sailing above the road, in the fog, the cold, and boundless nature: “my Lord”!

Thirty, forty years after this sharp memory (the mare and the road before us, the voice of the reassuring coachman close beside me), now he is about to die …

The last time I saw this uncle he had just had the entire house whitewashed again: the façade, the numerous rooms, the two vast courtyards and the dovecote, even if the latter was empty now. My father, who was with me, remarked, “Sid Ahmed, your house certainly is beautiful!”

“Just clean, O Tahar. Clean and neat! This way, when it is my time, everything will be ready when people come.”

We were silent. My father must have protested. And, filled with emotion, I stared at him. Since the death of his eldest son at fifty of cancer, Sidi, who was seventy-five, suddenly looked ten years older. He rose early. Took care of the animals. Made an appearance in the village. Returned home for his prayers. Came and went stoically.

“When it is my time,” he had said. I did not see him again. One month later the men of the village went into the house that was so clean. They came to wash him, read the litanies, carry him away.

I learned about his last moments from his wife, my aunt, who had been more like our grandmother for twenty years, for all the boys and all the girls.

“He woke up at five in the morning as he did every day. I heard him vaguely in my dawn slumber. I faintly heard his prayer, his faint voice.”

Suddenly she was silent for a moment, let a few tears fall from her nearly blind eyes, then with the same voice went on: “He stood near my head. ‘Get up,’ he told me, ‘O Khadidja!’ I sat halfway up, attentive. ‘The time is come,’ he told me. ‘I feel it!’

“And right there, almost next to my bed, he went back to his prayer mat. He kneeled down again. I heard the beginnings of a verse … then … nothing more! I got up; I groped around. I found him crouched down; I touched him; I called him. ‘God is great! God …’ I said. He was dead.”

Her voice shook, just one spasm.

“Your Sidi, your Lord is dead! In his dawn prayer!”

Why is it that I am determined to report Sidi’s final breath? Why recount this very simple death? To open these our present days to the others, to the “dead who pull the earth to them like a blanket.”

To recall that my uncle Sidi died like so many others, men and women of this period of silence, patience, and simply carrying on. They watched the first oppression, the one in the first half of the century; then they saw the coming of oppression by their own people, their “brothers.” They underwent the first with the distance guaranteed by their faith. They contemplated the second with disdain and deep withdrawal — harsh silence and poorly concealed surprise. The world of the roumis had not surprised them; it was too completely strange to them, in its iniquity as well as in its foreignness. Occasionally, almost as a miraculous exception, they would acknowledge some kinship, sometimes just one person, a man or a woman, whose value they tacitly appreciated, and they would then grumble among themselves: “This Christian, he’s essentially a Muslim and doesn’t know it!”

Now, with age coming on, in the midst of all these changes and the stridency of the public displays that followed independence, they were often isolated within their own family circles. Suddenly they witnessed different forms of dissension and new hatreds whose nature they did not understand … It was no longer the foreigners who had set themselves up there as masters, and now were gone, who proved to be foreign to them! The strangers were their own descendants, people they knew shared their blood and, they had thought, also their aspirations — these people were the foreigners, in huge numbers, a hybrid species; still, among them they could also find, though rarely, some innocent man, some innocent woman.

Copper is the style today instead of gold!

The rooster rules the skies in the kingdom of the hawk

While eagles are imprisoned in chicken coops amid dung

When the dog takes himself to be king of the forests!

Bards in the markets of the last century already disguised their despair and pronounced, “Everything is so upside down that scandal becomes normal!” They maintained therefore their reserve, their austere morality, and prickly distance. And like Sidi, who interrupted his prayers to announce that his time had come, they are dead. A purified, bloodless death. No blood, no murder. They left all that behind.

They are the men I want to write about — not the victims, not the murdered ones! Because behind each of the latter there are ten murderers, and I see, oh yes, I can make out the cascades of blood behind the one man, the one woman, assassinated today.