Gods and Soldiers

by Rob Spillman

  It is, of course, possible to organize these literatures along certain lines, whether genre, temporal, stylistic, or thematic. For instance, because nearly all of the continent was under colonial rule in the 19th and 20th centuries, many novels originating in Africa share certain themes: the struggle for freedom, the pain of exile, the plight of immigrants and asylum-seekers. I can see many similarities between the French-educated Driss Ferdi in Driss Chraïbi’s The Simple Past, and the British-educated Mustafa Sa’eed in Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. In Muslim African literature, whether from Morocco, Egypt or Senegal, the foibles of a religious society have provided inspiration to many writers. Leila Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant, Alifa Rifaat’s Distant View of a Minaret and Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter could easily be read together.

  “All novels belong to a family,” the late Edward Said once wrote, “and any reader of novels is a reader of this complex family to which they all belong.” Whereas I was initially exposed to only a few members of this family when I was a child, my hope is that today’s children will get to meet as many relatives as possible.

  NAWAL EL SAADAWI

  • Egypt •

  from WOMAN AT POINT ZERO

  “HOW CAN YOU be one of the masters? A woman on her own cannot be a master, let alone a woman who’s a prostitute. Can’t you see you’re asking for the impossible?”

  “The word impossible does not exist for me,” I said.

  I tried to slip through the door, but he pushed me back and shut it. I looked him in the eye and said, “I intend to leave.”

  He stared back at me. I heard him mutter, “You will never leave.”

  I continued to look straight at him without blinking. I knew I hated him as only a woman can hate a man, as only a slave can hate his master. I saw from the expression in his eyes that he feared me as only a master can fear his slave, as only a man can fear a woman. But it lasted for only a second. Then the arrogant expression of the master, the aggressive look of the male who fears nothing, returned. I caught hold of the latch of the door to open it, but he lifted his arm up in the air and slapped me. I raised my hand even higher than he had done, and brought it down violently on his face. The whites of his eyes went red. His hand started to reach for the knife he carried in his pocket, but my hand was quicker than his. I raised the knife and buried it deep in his neck, pulled it out of his neck and then thrust it deep into his chest, pulled it out of his chest and plunged it deep into his belly. I stuck the knife into almost every part of his body. I was astonished to find how easily my hand moved as I thrust the knife into his flesh, and pulled it out almost without effort. My surprise was all the greater since I had never done what I was doing before. A question flashed through my mind. Why was it that I had never stabbed a man before? I realized that I had been afraid, and that the fear had been within me all the time, until the fleeting moment when I read fear in his eyes.

  I opened the door and walked down the stairs into the street. My body was as light as a feather, as though its weight had been nothing more than the accumulation of fear over the years. The night was silent, the darkness filled me with wonder, as though light had only been one illusion after another dropping like veils over my eyes. The Nile had something almost magical about it. The air was fresh, invigorating. I walked down the street, my head held high to the heavens, with the pride of having destroyed all masks to reveal what is hidden behind. My footsteps broke the silence with their steady rhythmic beat on the pavement. They were neither fast as though I was hurrying away from something in fear, nor were they slow. They were the footsteps of a woman who believed in herself, knew where she was going, and could see her goal. They were the footsteps of a woman wearing expensive leather shoes, with strong high heels, her feet arched in a feminine curve, rising up to full rounded legs, with a smooth, taut skin and not a single hair.

  No one would have easily recognized me. I looked no different from respectable, upper-class women. My hair had been done by a stylist who catered only to the rich. My lips were painted in the natural tone preferred by respectable women because it neither completely hides nor completely exposes their lust. My eyes were penciled in perfect lines drawn to suggest a seductive appeal, or a provocative withdrawal. I looked no different from the wife of an upper-class government official occupying a high position of authority. But my firm, confident steps resounding on the pavement proved that I was nobody’s wife.

  I crossed by a number of men working in the police force, but none of them realized who I was. Perhaps they thought I was a princess, or a queen, or a goddess. For who else would hold her head so high as she walked? And who else’s footsteps could resound in this way as they struck the ground? They watched me as I passed by, and I kept my head high like a challenge to their lascivious eyes. I moved along as calm as ice, my steps beating down with a steady unfaltering sound. For I knew that they stood there waiting for a woman like me to stumble, so that they could throw themselves on her like birds of prey.

  At the corner of the street I spotted a luxurious car, with the head of a man protruding from the window, its tongue almost hanging out. He opened the door of the car and said,

  “Come with me.”

  I held back and said, “No.”

  “I will pay whatever you ask for.”

  “No,” I repeated.

  “Believe me, I will pay you anything you want.”

  “You cannot pay my price, it’s very high.”

  “I can pay any price. I’m an Arab prince.”

  “And I am a princess.”

  “I’ll pay a thousand.”

  “No.”

  “Two thousand, then.”

  I looked deep into his eyes. I could tell he was a prince or from the ruling family, for there was a lurking fear in their depths. “Three thousand,” I said. “I accept.”

  In the soft luxurious bed, I closed my eyes, and let my body slip away from me. It was still young and vigorous, strong enough to retreat, powerful enough to resist. I felt his body bearing down on my breast, heavy with long untold years of his life, swollen with stagnant sweat. A body full of flesh from years of eating beyond his needs, beyond his greed. With every movement he kept repeating the same stupid question:

  “Do you feel pleasure?”

  And I would close my eyes and say, “Yes.”

  Each time he rejoiced like a happy fool, and repeated his question with a gasping breath and each time I gave the same answer: “Yes.”

  With the passing moments his foolishness grew, and with it his assurance that my repeated affirmations of pleasure were true. Every time I said “yes” he beamed at me like an idiot, and an instant later I could feel the weight of his body bear down on me, more heavily than before. I could stand no more, and just when he was on the point of repeating the same stupid question again, I snapped out angrily,

  “No!”

  When he held out his hand with the money, I was still wildly angry with him. I snatched the notes from his hand and tore them up into little pieces with a pent-up fury.

  The feel of the notes under my fingers was the same as that of the first piastre ever held between them. The movement of my hands as I tore the money to pieces, tore off the veil, the last, remaining veil from before my eyes, to reveal the whole enigma which had puzzled me throughout, the true enigma of my life. I rediscovered the truth I had already discovered many years before when my father held out his hand to me with the first piastre he had ever given me. I returned to the money in my hand and with a redoubled fury tore the remaining bank notes into shreds. It was as though I was destroying all the money I had ever held, my father’s piastre, my uncle’s piastre, all the piastres I had ever known, and at the same time destroying all the men I had ever known, one after the other in a row: my uncle, my husband, my father, Marzouk and Bayoumi, Di’aa, Ibrahim, and tearing them all to pieces one after the other, ridding myself of them once and for all, removing every trace their piastres had left on my fingers, tearing
away the very flesh of my fingers to leave nothing but bone, ensuring that not a single vestige of these men would remain at all.

  His eyes opened wide in amazement as he watched me tear up the whole sheaf of bank notes. I heard him say:

  “You are verily a princess. How did I not believe you right from the start?”

  “I’m not a princess,” I said angrily.

  “At first I thought you were a prostitute.”

  “I am not a prostitute. But right from my early days my father, my uncle, my husband, all of them, taught me to grow up as a prostitute.”

  The prince laughed as he eyed me again and then said, “You are not telling the truth. From your face, I can see you are the daughter of a king.”

  “My father was no different from a king except for one thing.”

  “And what is that?”

  “He never taught me to kill. He left me to learn it alone as I went through life.”

  “Did life teach you to kill?”

  “Of course it did.”

  “And have you killed anybody yet?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  He stared at me for a brief moment, laughed, and then said, “I can’t believe that someone like you can kill.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you are too gentle.”

  “And who said that to kill does not require gentleness?”

  He looked into my eyes again, laughed, and said, “I cannot believe that you are capable of killing anything, even a mosquito.”

  “I might not kill a mosquito, but I can kill a man.”

  He stared at me once more, but this time only very quickly, then said, “I do not believe it.”

  “How can I convince you that what I say is true?”

  “I do not really know how you can do that.”

  So I lifted my hand high up above my head and landed it violently on his face.

  “Now you can believe that I have slapped you. Burying a knife in your neck is just as easy and requires exactly the same movement.”

  This time, when he looked at me, his eyes were full of fear.

  I said, “Perhaps now you will believe that I am perfectly capable of killing you, for you are no better than an insect, and all you do is to spend the thousands you take from your starving people on prostitutes.”

  Before I had time to raise my hand high up in the air once more, he screamed in panic like a woman in trouble. He did not stop screaming until the police arrived on the scene.

  He said to the police, “Don’t let her go. She’s a criminal, a killer.”

  And they asked me, “Is what he says true?”

  “I am a killer, but I’ve committed no crime. Like you, I kill only criminals.”

  “But he is a prince, and a hero. He’s not a criminal.”

  “For me the feats of kings and princes are no more than crimes, for I do not see things the way you do.”

  “You are a criminal,” they said, “and your mother is a criminal.”

  “My mother was not a criminal. No woman can be a criminal. To be a criminal one must be a man.”

  “Now look here, what is this that you are saying?”

  “I am saying that you are criminals, all of you: the fathers, the uncles, the husbands, the pimps, the lawyers, the doctors, the journalists, and all men of all professions.”

  They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”

  “I am speaking the truth. And truth is savage and dangerous.”

  MOHAMED MAGANI

  • Algiers •

  from THE BUTCHER’S AESTHETICS

  Translated from the French by Lulu Norman

  THE TWO FRIENDS’ meetings resembled a ritual that went back to the years of holy struggle when they would drink more cups of coffee than they could count to give them energy, a small vice Laid Touhami had picked up in the mountains and the mayor at a young age, since his father considered coffee an aphrodisiac and permanently wore a necklace of coffee beans round his neck.

  In fact, coffee had been behind Zineddine Ayachi’s flight into the Ouarsenis and his joining the ranks of the Front. One day an enemy unit invaded his house on the false tip-off that he’d been helping the rebels, supplied by a local collaborator who was operating on a large scale for lack of specific names. His information targeted blocks of houses demarcated by roads and alleyways and numbered in sections. The soldiers surrounded Zineddine Ayachi’s house; some of them climbed onto the roof while others kicked in the door with their boots. Four men suddenly landed in front of him as he sat in the yard. He stared in terror at the black jaws of the submachine guns. A finger pointed to the coffeepot beside him and a voice screamed: “Who’s been here? Where are the others?” The soldier seized the single cup and the coffeepot, which he overturned. The black sand of coffee grounds fell on Zineddine Ayachi’s foot, and drips of coffee stained his white shirt in damp zigzags.

  “It was me! It was me!” he said.

  “This coffeepot is empty,” said the soldier.

  “I drank it all, it was me,” said Zineddine Ayachi.

  “It must hold at least ten cups. You weren’t alone! Where are the others?”

  “There’s only my family. I drink a lot of coffee. I can’t help it.”

  “You Arab donkey! You’re going to show us what you can do.”

  Zineddine Ayachi’s wife put the coffeepot on the fire, half full of water. The soldier giving the orders filled it to the brim, then poured a packet of coffee into the boiling water. “A man that fond of coffee must like it strong,” he said to Zineddine Ayachi’s wife, who sensed her husband’s imminent ordeal. All the soldiers gathered in the yard. None of them wanted to miss the spectacle of the man undergoing the torture of the strong coffee dose. They cleared out all there was to eat in the tiny kitchen. Zineddine Ayachi started on the first cup and answered questions about his amazing capacity to absorb an entire coffeepot with no damage to his physical and mental health. He was supposed to sip the thick black liquid slowly; disobeying orders cost him a rifle butt across the shoulders. His wife and children were shut, sobbing, in a room. He tried downing the third cup in two gulps. The soldiers were in no hurry, they were just sorry they hadn’t found any wine in the house—one of them said he thought grape juice flowed from the taps in a hot country, this paradise where vines were the only crop. The gulps of coffee fell heavily on Zineddine Ayachi’s stomach, like tar soup. On the fifth cup a nauseating saliva filled his mouth, a gurgle rose from his guts, he tried to speed up the forced tasting, then a blow from the rifle butt across his back caused a retching that momentarily relieved his stomach.

  “Swallow it,” said one of the soldiers, “you can’t waste all that coffee.”

  Zineddine Ayachi seized the coffeepot, lifted it into the air like a goatskin and let the contents pour into his wide-open mouth. A coffee hemorrhage immediately spurted from his nose, prompted by the heavy punch of a gun right in the stomach. Then the soldiers took him to the Lattifia barracks, where the torture continued: they made him drink saucepan after saucepan of coffee prepared with soapy water, this time with the aid of a funnel. His denials did little to alter Zineddine Ayachi’s fate; the soldiers set about ridding him of his taste for coffee so long as he would not deliver the names of the men who had shared it with him in his home. A possible way out of his ordeal crept into his mind in the brief moments of prayer afforded him by his executioners, for he sensed the end was near. The faces of those he loved, his friends and family, passed before his eyes; invoked silently, he asked each of them for forgiveness, forgiveness for his mistakes and his faults, his aberrations on this earth. In the end, Zineddine Ayachi arrived at the last name, his dead father’s. Helped by the combination of circumstances or the irony of fate, his thoughts returned by a curious path to the cause of his misfortune, and he remembered the coffee bean necklace his father used to wear round his neck.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “My coffee isn’t really coffee at all. It’s a mixture of bur
nt chickpeas, black pepper, paprika and coffee. My father loved this drink, it was his secret recipe. It’s an excellent aphrodisiac. A man becomes a bull with that coffee! The more cups, the more thrusts.”

  Every time they met in the mountains, Laid Touhami would laugh at his friend’s story. Neither he nor the other resistance fighters had any need of the magic potion Zineddine Ayachi had invented in a torture chamber; without women it would be a disaster. The enemy soldiers sent Zineddine Ayachi back to his house. He was to prepare five liters of his special coffee, which would multiply their orgasms with the fatmas. The future mayor of Lattifia owed his salvation to a psychological trick: he instinctively knew that these foreigners, the masters of his country, would follow their orders but also their lust. A very short time sufficed to say good-bye to his family; the torturers’ credulity would not last long. Zineddine Ayachi had no illusions about the effect of his concoction, yet he was tempted to add a few fluid ounces of piss from his belly, swollen with the soapy coffee ingurgitated through the funnel. On the Ouarsenis paths, he urinated symbolically on the enemy he’d be fighting for years to come.

  AZIZ CHOUAKI

  • Algiers •

  from THE STAR OF ALGIERS

  Four

  A WEEK LATER, 12 June, the municipal elections. The first free elections since Independence. Dozens of parties are contending, the walls of Algiers are dripping with posters. It’s a bitter, anarchic struggle between all the parties except the FFS, which has called for a boycott.

  Moussa, of course, didn’t vote, convinced it would be rigged as always, 99.99 percent for the FLN, the famous “Continuity within Change.”