Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

He died in a hole, in Rome. Narrow the prison, nowhere release! Thus his death by silence crumbled and spread across the land of sun from Dougga to Cirta, then on through Caesarea as far as Volubilis. In spite of that, or because of that, his shadow grows longer.

Oh, I see (or hear, I do not know which), I see those who have been longest dead — including my younger brother, though my only memory of him comes through the shaky voice of my father describing the sorrow of the orphan mother. I see these people who died long ago not because I claim any legacy from Lla Rkia, the sorceress (there is no brazier down around my skirts, nor will I ever go on a pilgrimage, no), but simply because in my country, these past two or three seasons, all the dead are returning indiscriminately.

We women are haunted by their desire. Each of us has been too long shackled within our bodies, or too often without our voice, as I have been. As my hand races across pads of paper, my voice is patiently wrested from me, or rather, and this is something I do not really understand, the sound of my heart is stripped from my body!

The dead return to us; what do they desire in this sudden desert?

THE WOMAN IN TEARS

A young woman of my country was taken regularly to Paris by her husband to be treated for advanced cancer. On their last trip, despite the husband’s affection and precautions, the sick woman understood that the doctors were giving up hope.

She did not weep. She went home to her city on the coast. She picked up the phone to call her sister, who lived in a city in the interior. She spoke to her in the language of their mother.

“Daughter of my mother, a curse on you if you do not agree to what I shall ask now!”

“What do you want?” asked the other, knowing the state her sister was in.

“Listen, it is all over; I am never going abroad again for these treatments! I am going to bed this very day and I shall not get up again!”

“Don’t say that. For the sake of your children at least! Don’t say that! You must trust in God’s mercy at least.”

“I make one request of you. Agree to do what I ask before I even tell you what it is.”

“Yes, dear sister!” (The woman wept as she later told me of their conversation.)

“Listen, I want … do you hear, I want you to weep for me, I want you to mourn my death now so that I can hear you!”

The sister did not know what to say. And the other one, the sister who was ill, insisted: “You say nothing, but you can sing! Listen, I know that I am going to die. Very soon I am going to lie down and never get up again. I beg of you, daughter of my mother, weep for me, mourn my death so I can hear you myself while I am living!”

The sister held on to the receiver, gripping it tightly, and for ten, maybe twenty choruses she went through the slow, heartrending threnody sung by mourning women in her village. She celebrated the young woman’s too brief life, her marriage — first daughter of the widower who scattered his daughters too soon because their mother had died. She recalled the misfortunes of the young bride and the children that now she, in her turn, would leave as minors. Finally she keened to end it all, ululating one long breath of lament into the phone, until the woman listening on the other end could conclude, “Blessings upon you, O daughter of my mother! Now, do not come to see me before the funeral!”

That very evening she lay down. At dawn a few days later she died, and the next day, from the distant town where she lived, her sister was then able to come to her doorstep.

LAMENT

I thought that, by dint of writing about those who died last century in my country in flames, the blood of men today (the blood of History and of the opression of women) was rising again to splatter my writing and condemn me to silence.

Blood in my writing? Not yet, but voice? Every night my voice leaves me as I awaken the sickly sweet suffocations of aunts and girl cousins that I, a little girl, glimpsed and did not understand. Wide-eyed, I contemplated them, and later was able to picture them again and finally understand.

At the age of six, my mother turned her back on her dead sister. Annihilated her. Did not write about her. How can one write about her?

I relived the grief of my mother, banished from her childhood, just as I myself am by this very grief, the same as is described in the oldest of writings.

As if I were simultaneously Chérifa, dead at eighteen; Chérifa, the happy, expectant fiancée; Chérifa, her beauty shattered by the typhus epidemic in Caesarea that struck her down. As if I were simultaneously the dead woman dead too long because never spoken or written about and, at the same time, become again my stunned mother, a distraught little girl, taking this stroke of fate like a powerless old woman or an adult seeking in vain some way to rebel. Yes, the little six-year-old girl who stayed there, her mouth open and eyes dry (they did not show her the young woman’s body, only the thin shape beneath the white sheet, onto which the shrouded girl’s mother threw herself full length), and the little girl does not weary of her mother’s trances, her mother’s frenzied dancing and tearing of her cheeks — I am this little girl, an extra, an onlooker who wanders, voiceless, how long did you say, for six months? No, more, almost an entire year, until September, when the principal tenant farmer brings blanched almonds and jars of olive oil, just before the second tenant arrives with the lentils and chick-peas that have been harvested.

Chérifa the dead woman has returned. Onto Algerian soil the dead (men) are returning after so long. The women, forgotten ones because they have no writing, make up the funeral procession, new Bacchantes.

The dead (men) are returning onto Algerian soil. Is that the deepest desire of the men? The women? And would death be only “masculine,” as I thought: old women and old men, mere slips of girls and male corpses, all of them forming only an asexual mass without tenderness, merged out of fear or resignation into something ghastly and impersonal?

I had thought this before already as I looked at my grandmother’s body beneath its shroud, a body still possessing such a tenacious resentment, despite the lamentations and the verses of funereal poetry … I really thought that every death in Islam is experienced as masculine; because our proudest women in the end die as men so that they only bow before the greatness and the magnanimity of Allah.

And this recurrent dream that haunts my nights! In the bottom of my open mouth a soft, viscous paste, phlegm, stagnates, then gradually flows and I sink irremediably into this feeling of sickness.

I have to get this paste off my palate; it is smothering me; I try to vomit. What do I vomit other than a whitish stench stuck deep down in my throat? These last few nights the blockage in my pharynx has been worse: I have had to take a knife and cut some kind of useless muscle that hurts me, spit covering my vocal cords.

My mouth still hangs open; my persistent fingers are busy among my teeth, a spasm wrenches my abdomen — rancor or irresistible nausea. I do not experience the horror of this state: I have picked up the blade, I try to cut all the way down, slowly, carefully, to the bottom of this gluey stuff hanging under my glottis. Blood is all over my fingers, this blood not filling my mouth suddenly seems light, neutral, a liquid prepared not to flow out but to evaporate inside my body instead.

I perform this attempted amputation very carefully: I do not ask myself if I am suffering, or if I am wounding myself, and especially not whether or not I will remain voiceless.

Every night I am tormented by the muscular effort of giving birth through the mouth this way, this silencing. I vomit something, what? Maybe a long ancestral cry. My open mouth expels, continuously, the suffering of others, the suffering of the shrouded women who came before me, I who believed I was only just appearing at the first ray of the first light.