Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

I do not cry, I am the cry, stretched out into resonant blind flight; the white procession of ghost-grandmothers behind me becomes an army propelling me on; words of the quavering, lost language rise up while the males out in front gesticulate in the field of death or of its masks.

YASMINA IN THE DITCH … Precisely at the moment that I bring this journey to a close (mourning so often friends killed in the preceding days — sobbing every morning, but continuing to walk, dancing at night with a hardened heart — days of exile, mauve, streaked with blood …); a young girl, who went to school with my daughter not long ago, has been killed …

A week before she was with her family, there, behind the door her voice still resonates, determined: “I cannot live outside Algeria, no! I am definitely gong back!” She went home. In Paris she kissed her father and her French mother. At twenty-eight she refused exile.

Yasmina, a young teacher, but also a proofreader for an independent newspaper.

That day at the end of June 1994 she was with a foreign visitor — a Polish woman. This friend was resigned to cutting short her trip because they could not wander in the streets and roads together or swim peacefully on the nearby beach. “There is danger everywhere, invisible but everywhere!” a neighbor told them, alarmed at seeing them so young and full of life. He added, and probably regretted it later, “Danger has a smell now on this earth!”

Yasmina drives her friend to the airport. Halfway there she stops for gas and finds police searching people. They are in fact fake police; they take the young foreigner away to “the station.”

Yasmina does not let go so easily: She follows the so-called police and suddenly, in open country, they take a shortcut. Yasmina — who by then must have recognized the “smell of danger”—does not give up. She feels responsible for her friend. She does not hesitate, harrying the kidnappers, honking constantly, not losing the trail, in the name of the sacred duty of hospitality.

The armed men — there are four — stop. Yasmina confronts them. They encircle her. They search her; and seeing her press card, it occurs to them that a woman journalist is a much better catch than a mere foreigner!

They set the young Polish woman free, taking in exchange their new prey. In their ultimate performance that is all caricature, they condemn her to death behind a clump of trees. Then they go after the friend she rescued.

The young Polish woman — will I ever speak to her? — left Algeria the same day, freed and voiceless: she runs away, she will run, I feel it, to the four corners of the earth. But before vanishing she testifies — a few brief words; this woman for whom another woman spontaneously gave her life — testifies that Yasmina, to the end, thumbed her nose at her murderers, insulted and defied them with her last breath. The only thing that cut short her angry voice and impotent pride was the death rattle, beneath the knife! This voice, the voice of Yasmina — Jasmine Flower — I shall hear it in all four corners of the earth …

Yasmina, whose mutilated body was found the next day in a ditch. Yasmina, who every day of her last year carried the kalam in her hand.

“I cannot live outside of Algeria, no!” she had decided. Algeria — blood.

TODAY, AT THE END of a year of dark, incomprehensible deaths, defiled deaths, in the shadows of fratricidal conflict.

What can we call you now, Algeria!

Luckily I am not in the middle of it all, the scene in which, as Kateb Yacine saw forty years earlier,

Men shot down pull the earth to them like a blanket

And soon the living will have nowhere left to sleep!

In the middle of it what can one do other than be dragged down by the monster Algeria — and do not call it a woman anymore, unless it is a ghoul (which is feminine), or a voracious female centaur risen from some abyss, no, not even madwoman.

Sucked up by the monster, what was there to do except plunge my face into the blood, smear myself with it, scald myself with it, in trances, hallucinating — the performances of Sidi Mcid, described by the mother of the poet in those carefree days, before there had even been a May 1945 (and the blood of Guelma, Tébessa, Sétif) to drive her insane.

In the middle of this scene, above all not crying, nor improvising funeral poetry, nor contorting oneself in stridency — the dances at Nador ravine but also at the sanctuary of my childhood at Sidi-Brahim, facing the sea, with its pebbly beach reserved for the deeply religious, little girls, and beggars …

Because from now on the dead we think we bury today will fly off. They are the lighthearted ones now, relieved, lightened: Their dreams sparkle while the gravedigger’s mattock is at work, while the mourning is filmed, projecting their revived grief to the four corners to repeat this procession of shrouds!

We think the dead are absent but, transformed into witnesses, they want to write through us.

Write how?

Not in some language or some alphabet? Not in the double one from Dougga, or the one of the stones of Caesarea, the one of my childhood amulets, or the one of my familiar French and German poets?

Nor with pious litanies, nor with patriotic songs, nor even with the encircling vibratos of the tzarlrit!

Write, the dead of today want to write: now, how can one write with blood?

On what Koranic board, with what reed reluctantly awash in vermilion red?

The dead alone are the ones who want to write, and “with the utmost urgency,” as we like to say.

How can one inscribe with blood that flows or has just finished flowing?

With its smell, perhaps.

With its vomit or its phlegm, easily.

With the fear that is its halo.

Writing, of course, even a novel …

About flight.

About shame.

But with blood itself: with its flow, its paste, its spurt, its scab that is not yet dry?

Yes, how can one speak of you, Algeria?

And if I fall someday soon, backing up into the hole?

Leave me, knocked over backward, but open-eyed.

Do not lay me either in the earth or at the bottom of a dry well.

Rather, in water.

Or in the wind’s leaves.

That I may keep on contemplating the night sky.

Smelling the grass quiver.

Smiling in the streaks of every laugh.

Living, dancing feet first.

Rotting gently!

Blood for me remains ash white.

It is silence.

It is repentance. Blood does not dry, it simply evaporates.

I do not call you mother, bitter Algeria,

That I write,

That I cry, voice, hand, eye.

The eye that in the language of our women is a fountain.

Your eye within me, I flee from you, I forget you, O grandmother of bygone days!

And yet, in your wake,

“Fugitive and not knowing it,” I called myself,

Fugitive and knowing it, henceforth,

The trail all migration takes is flight,

Abduction with no abductor,

No end to the horizon line,

Erasing in me each point of departure,

Origin vanishes,

Even the new start.

Fugitive and knowing it midflight,