Assia Djebar: So Vast the Prison

FOR A LONG TIME I believed that writing meant dying, slowly dying, groping to unfold a shroud of sand or silk over things that one had felt trembling and pawing the ground. A burst of laughter — frozen. The beginnings of a sob — turned into stone.

Yes, for a long time I wanted to lean against the dike of memory, or against the shadowy light of its other side, to be gradually penetrated by its cold, because as I wrote I recalled myself.

And life dissipates; its living trace dissolves.

Writing about the past, my feet wrapped up in a prayer rug which was not even a jute or horsehair mat tossed down somewhere on the dust of a dawn road or at the foot of a crumbling dune under the immense sky at sunset.

The silence of writing, the desert wind turning its inexorable millstone, while my hand races and the father’s language (the language now, moreover, transformed into a father tongue) slowly but surely undoes the wrapping cloths from a dead love; and so many voices spatter into a lingering vertiginous mourning, way behind me the faint murmur of ancestors, the ululations of lament from veiled shadows floating along the horizon — while my hand races on …

For a long time I believed that writing meant getting away, or at the very least, leaping out under this immense sky, into the dust of the road along the foot of the crumbling dunes … For a long time.

During that period, almost fifteen years ago, every Saturday afternoon, I used to go to the hammam at the ancient heart of a small Algerian city at the foot of the Atlas Mountains.

I went with my mother-in-law, who would meet her friends there in the mist and the cries of children in the hot steam room. Some of these older women, matrons parading around in their striped tunics, made the bathing ceremony an interminable ritual, with its solemn liturgy and melancholy languor.

There one encountered mothers also, humble, worn out, and surrounded by their brood, and there were sometimes also young, harshly beautiful women (whose behavior the distrustful bourgeois matrons viewed with suspicion). Ostentatiously immodest, they would remove every hair from their bodies but not the heavy gold jewelry that still sparkled around their necks and naked, wet arms … I would wind up being the only one to make polite conversation with them afterward in the large, cold room.

Like many of the women, I felt the pleasure of the baths upon leaving them. Carpeted with mats and mattresses, the antechamber became a haven of delights where you were served peeled oranges, open pomegranates, and barley water to your heart’s content. Perfumes mingled above the bodies of sleeping women and engulfed the shivering ones, who slowly dressed as they spun their colorful threads of gossip.

I stretched out, I dozed, I listened. My mother-in-law spread out her satin undergarments and taffeta robes. She kept a motherly watch over me as she greeted this or that neighbor or young beauty passing by. Then in a low voice she would recount for me the details of their ancestry. I surrendered to the hubbub and murmuring warmth. When finally my kinswoman began to unfold her creamy white wool veil and wrap it around herself, I in turn would get ready. The time to leave had come. Then I would play the role of silent companion. No veil, of course, but taciturn. Attentive, while the heavy door in the back opened slightly from time to time to exhale steam and distant sound like breath from a magic lair …

One day an amply endowed lady in the splendor of her fifties, cheeks pink with heat and her forehead crowned with a white taffeta headdress fringed in shades of purple, began the lengthy formulas of farewell.

My mother-in-law, who enjoyed her company, wanted her to stay longer.

“Another fifteen minutes, O light of my heart,” she insisted.

The other one, exasperated, made a face and excused herself in a scornful voice. This woman who seemed so expert in affectation ended her list of justifications by letting slip a stark expression.

“Alas, unfortunately”—she sighed dramatically—“I am fettered.”

“You, fettered?” her friend exclaimed, filled with admiration, as if she were in the presence of a queen.

“Yes, I am,” retorted the lady through her immaculate veil. She then closed the matter by concealing her face entirely with a haughty gesture. “I cannot possibly stay later today. The enemy is at home!”

She left.

“The enemy?” I asked, slowly turning toward my mother-in-law.

The word l’e’dou , resonant in Arabic, had sounded a dissonate note.

My companion helplessly contemplated the complete astonishment that filled my eyes. She forced a half smile; perhaps she felt also at that moment a sort of shame.

“Yes, ‘the enemy,’ ” she whispered. “Don’t you know how women in our town talk among themselves?” (My silence continued thick with questions.) “Don’t you understand? By enemy, she meant her husband.”

“Her husband, the enemy? She doesn’t seem so unhappy!”

My naïveté suddenly seemed to irritate my mother-in-law.

“Her husband is no different from any other husband! ‘Enemy’ is just a manner of speaking. Women, as I said before, have called them that for ages … without the men knowing it. I, of course—”

I interrupted her with a gesture as we stood up. My mother-in-law was a saint: Even had she had a real enemy, she would have called him “my lord.” As for her husband, a hard though fair man, she served him with unfailing dignity.

This word, l’e’dou , I first heard in this way, in the damp of the vestibule from which women arrived almost naked and left enveloped head to toe. The word enemy , uttered in that moist warmth, entered me, strange missile, like an arrow of silence piercing the depths of my then too tender heart. In truth the simple term, bitter in its Arab flesh, bored endlessly into the depths of my soul, and thus into the source of my writing …

Suddenly one language, one tongue, struck the other inside me. The voice of a woman who could have been my maternal aunt came to shake the tree of my hidden hope. My silent quest for light and shade was thrown off balance, as if I had been exiled from the nurturing shore, orphaned.

The word spoken by the older woman in her veil who had been smiling just minutes before, certainly no victim, but comfortable in her role as a city-dweller, peaceable and somewhat affected, this word — not one of hatred, no, rather one of despair long frozen in place between the sexes — this word left in its wake within me a dangerous urge to self-erasure …

This lady from the baths left in a dignified manner. Shortly afterward my mother-in-law and I followed. I, speechless and, as the next few years would show, stripped bare, drowned mourning for things unknown and for hope.

Was that why I began to mistrust writing? It had no shadow? It dried things up so fast? I discarded it.

Those years were not really years of silence or depression: Inside my ear and heart grated the gift of the unknown woman whose voice tormented me. Through her the mother tongue had shown me her teeth, inscribing within me a deadly bitterness … Where was I to find the thick undergrowth within from now on, how was I to open a narrow corridor into the warm, black tenderness, whose glowing secrets and gleaming words piled thick and deep?

Would I not have to beg, plunged into the darkness of the lost language and its hardened heart that I had found at the hammam that day?