So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  Then, as was customary, he wrapped the general in a spotless woolen toga so that he could cross the first threshold.

  At the entrance to the vestibule the child appeared, standing bare-chested and holding himself proudly, his hands together and ready to make the offering. He offered the general the cup of goat’s milk and three dates soaked in acacia honey.

  Jugurtha raised his hands high. The general lowered his weatherbeaten face, weighed down by his helmet. He smiled with his eyes and his mouth at the same time as the child-prince slowly spoke the words of hospitality in Libyan which his uncle, Micipsa, scrupulously translated. “He is welcoming you in our language: ‘May the mourning,’ he says, ‘be eased because of your arrival, O friend!’ ”

  Before drinking, Scipio Emilien studied the child’s face for a long time. He asked his name.

  “Yougourtha,” the child replied in his sharp voice.

  7

  THE DEPORTED WRITER

  WHAT JUGURTHA DID will not be recorded in Berber: the letters of this alphabet, scattered on the ground like the bas-relief Roman chariots, the quadrigas, and the winged goddesses from the dismantled monument of Dougga, seem to have fled by themselves, going all the way to the desert of the Garamantes to slip into the sands and settle onto the immemorial rocks.

  Jugurtha and his passion for battle will not be inscribed in the Punic alphabet either. Carthage is no longer there, even if Caesar will attempt to make it rise again on the high plain that the Romans made sterile. Carthage is no longer there, but its language is still current on the lips of both the educated and the uneducated in the cities that fell but were not yet romanized. The language, in fact, like a current, runs freely on, never becoming fixed. The Carthaginian language dances and quivers for five or six centuries to come. Freed of the soldiers of Carthage, of the priests of Carthage, of the sacrifice of the children of Carthage, Carthaginian speech, free and unsettled, transmutes and transports with vivid poetry the spirits of the Numidians who yesterday made war on Carthage. Now they will understand that they were almost making violent, bitter love to it—wanting to desecrate it.

  Later and elsewhere, in the first century B.C.E., the same sort of ferment and the same inability to record its outbreaks of resistance will be seen in Gaul as it fights for its independence. Here, too, the task of writing about the defeated Vercingetorix will fall to the conqueror, Caesar. Later.

  When Jugurtha reads the double inscription at the request of Micipsa on this spring day at Dougga, however, Polybe, “the greatest mind of the time,” who will soon be seventy, writes.

  He records the destruction of Carthage. Before him rise the heroes of the tragedy of the blaze that for six days and six nights and for weeks to come seems to burn and redden the four corners of the known Mediterranean. Houses endlessly collapse in the streets of Byrsa, bodies living and dead of women, children, and old people mingle, and the horses of Roman and Numidian soldiers trample them, splitting human brains into this mud mixed with cries. Nine hundred desperate people shut themselves up in the temple of Aesculapius. In their midst on the roof the wife of Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian leader who is now a suppliant kneeling at the feet of the Roman general, holds his children by the hand, improvises a lyric of scorn, and shouts it at him; she refuses to have her life or the lives of her little ones saved and then leaps with them into the crackling fire … Little by little, a line of slaves leaves the city and its ruins; in sudden magnanimity Scipio Emilien has spared these survivors. And this Scipio, deeply shaken by a metaphysical nostalgia, declaims the verses of the Iliad describing the fall of Troy and the end of empires.

  Old Polybe was present for the literary musings of his disciple Scipio who, once it is all decided, at the height of his complete and deadly victory, becomes elegantly sorrowful.

  Polybe of Megalopolis, the man deported from the Peloponnesus sixteen years ago, his spirit now full of the flames of Carthage, full of the delirium of proud souls struck down and the thousands of trampled bodies, as well as images of despair and flight, prepares to write about the destruction; destruction is his point of departure.

  Before he returns home to Greece, he makes a request to see the Atlantic Ocean, to look at the coast from the land of the Moors (present-day Morocco) to the Mauritanian shores: he is passionate about geography, as if now truly tired of history—too heavy, too somber. He wants instead to see the physical world, landscapes, animals (“as for the quantity and power of the elephants, the lions and panthers, the beauty of the ostriches,” he writes, “there is absolutely nothing of the sort in Europe, but Africa is filled with these species”).

  Once back in his own country, in the autumn of the same year, Polybe must then bear the sight of the sack of Corinth, “pearl of Attica.” He would try to act as a negotiator and arrange better terms for his people, but a second time he is present, helplessly, at an irreversible fall of Achaean autonomy beneath the boots and brutality of savage Roman soldiers. He watches the light of Greece suddenly flickering out; he accepts it and writes.

  But I, today’s humble narrator, a woman, say that whereas Jugurtha at Dougga reads in the ancestral language for the last time, the writing of Polybe is nourished by all this simultaneous destruction. (He witnesses first the razing of Carthage, then the statues of Corinth, knocked down or carried away in shards, and, to finish it all off, he soon will have to contemplate the burning of Numantia and the dead Spaniards convulsed in their grandiose heroism.) I say that his writing, composed in a language that was, of course, maternal, but espoused by the cultivated minds of the West at that time, runs freely over the tablets and is polygamous!

  As if, giving an account of death—the death of men, the death of ancient cities, and especially the death of the spirit of light that had shone through the darkness—Polybe, writing in this third alphabet the account of his life—his political deportation, his observation of the seat of power in Rome, his journeys, as well as the sight of these immense ruins at the very moment that they come crashing down—Polybe, almost in spite of himself, turned the coat of mail worn by all resistance inside out, the one implied by a language of poetry.

  In fact for him the writing of history is writing first of all. Into the deadly reality that he describes he instills some obscure germ of life. This man who should be faithful to his own people justifies, consoles, and tries to console, himself. We see him, especially, confusing points of view. In the destruction his writing sets itself at the very center of a strange triangle, in a neutral zone that he discovers, though he did not expect it or seek it out.

  We see him, far from Carthage, but also far from nearby Corinth, writing neither as a loyalist nor as a collaborator. The mere fact of his history somewhere else nourishes his astonishing “realism.”

  Polybe the historian—who did not merely set out to give an account of civil war’s fatal effects like his fiery predecessor, Thucydides—Polybe the deported writer, returning in the twilight of his life to his native land, sees that he no longer has a land or even a country (the latter enslaved and in chains). All that he has is a language whose beauty warms him and that he uses to enlighten the enemies of yesterday who are now his allies.

  He writes. And his language, his hand, his memory, and all his powers just before they fade, contribute to this untimely, yet necessary transmission. Is that why his work, like the stele of Dougga, after having fed the appetite for knowledge and the curiosity of his successors for several centuries, all at once, unexpectedly and in great slabs, is erased?

  Because Polybe’s accounts of Carthage, of Corinth, and of Numantia, exist henceforth only in scattered scraps, only in bits of relfections in the mirrors held up by imitators, those writers of lesser stature, Appien, Diodorus of Sicily, and a few others.

  As if this literary ascendance exuded some danger, some acceleration toward its own erasure that would prove inevitable!

  Abalessa

  “Departures departures departures

  In these anchorages

&
nbsp; A wind to loosen trees

  Spins around its chains”

  —MALEK ALLOULA

  “Rêveurs/Sépultures”

  (Dreamers/Burials)

  Let me finally turn my musings to the royal Tin Hinan, the ancestor of the noble Tuaregs of Hoggar. Her history had long been told like a dream wreathed in legends, a fleeting silhouette as evanescent as smoke, or a ghost, or a myth, an imaginary figure. She suddenly became solid thanks to archeological discoveries by a French-American team in 1925. Tin Hinan existed. Her so moving mortal remains (the skeleton of a woman closely related to the pharaonic type) were taken from the necropolis of Abalessa and carried away to the museum of Algiers.

  Yes, let me dream about Tin Hinan, the fugitive princess, who made her way into the very heart of the desert of deserts!

  She was born in the north: in the Tafilalt, in the fourth century C.E., just after the reign of Constantine. What young girl’s reason could have made her decide to flee this northern Berber land in the company of her attendant, Takamat, and a group of servants? What reason, private or political, made her decide to abandon everything—despite her youth and the fact that she was perhaps to be the ruler—and push on beyond the oases of the Sahara? Was it because freedom—her freedom or her family’s or her group’s—was threatened?

  The Tuaregs ever since that time like to tell of her expedition: Tin Hinan, riding a white female camel, is accompanied by faithful Takamat and a caravan composed mostly of women, young girls, white and black intermingled. From their country they carry with them dates and millet, rare and precious objects, the royal jewels of course, as well as the vases and urns required by the pagan religion they practice.

  The route to Hoggar was long. In the final stages food became scarce. The situation became critical: to die of hunger in the desert!

  Takamat on her dromedary or Tin Hinan mounted high on her mount—the story does not decide which of the two friends—sees the little mounds on the ground formed by anthills. Takamat, with the help of the servants, sets about gathering, grain by grain, the harvest of the hardworking ants! Thanks to her patience Tin Hinan and her cortège are able to continue their journey. Finally Hoggar is close, a green and fertile valley opens up before them. Saved!

  They settle there west of Tamanrasset: Abalessa was a site of pilgrimage even before the mausoleum of the princess was discovered there.

  One day in 1925 the Frenchman Reygasse and the American Prorok enter the chamber of the dead princess, seventeen centuries after she was placed there in the center of a vast necropolis containing eleven other burial places. Around it a road was laid out for the religious processions that fervently circled the dead women!

  This funerary grouping, for its dimensions, its complex organization, the thickness of its walls, and its basalt stones, is the most imposing pre-Islamic necropolis in the region.

  I find that I am always dreaming about the day that Tin Hinan was laid to rest at Abalessa. They stretched her out on a bed of sculptured wood. Her thin body, pointed east and covered with cloth and large leather ornaments, lay on its back with its arms and legs slightly bent under.

  Tin Hinan—as the two archeologists verify by studying her skeleton—wears seven silver and seven gold bracelets on her left wrist and a single silver bracelet on her right; a string of antimony beads circles her right ankle. Precious and exquisite pearls cover her breast.

  Near her, dates and fruits had been placed in baskets; nothing remains of them but pits and seeds. Facing the recumbent body there is a stylized statuette of a woman (her portrait?) that has not completely vanished, as well as some pottery, fragments of which remain.

  A gold coin stamped with the likeness of the Emperor Constantine is still there; in a nearby room a Roman lamp from the third century is preserved. So, despite the distance of centuries, the chronological date of the tomb can be fixed.

  But there is something especially troubling to my stubborn dream in its attempts to reassemble the ashes of time, to hold on to the traces around these miraculously preserved tombs. Especially troubling (even though I am just as disturbed by Tin Hinan’s removal to Algiers) are the tifinagh inscriptions found here. They are very ancient in origin and they can also be found on the walls of the neighboring chambers (the chouchatts), where each of the princess’s friends was buried in turn.

  Libyan writings. Earlier even than the writing at Dougga, they are in Libyan script, no longer understood by the Tuaregs, who respectfully followed the archeologists into the tomb, then averted their gaze when faced with the recumbent Tin Hinan.

  And so I imagine the princess of the Hoggar who, when she fled in the past, carried with her the archaic alphabet, then confided the characters to her friends just before she died.

  Thus, more than four centuries after the resistance and dramatic defeat of Yougourtha in the north, also four centuries before the grandiose defeat of la Kahina—the Berber queen who will resist the Arab conquest—Tin Hinan of the sands, almost obliterated, leaves us an inheritance—and does so despite her bones that, alas, have now been disturbed. Our most secret writing, as ancient as Etruscan or the writing of the runes, but unlike these a writing still noisy with the sounds and breath of today, is indeed the legacy of a woman in the deepest desert.

  Tin Hinan buried in the belly of Africa!

  PART THREE

  A SILENT DESIRE

  “Confession is nothing,

  knowledge is everything.”

  —HERMANN BROCH

  Hoffmansthäl et son temps

  “Fugitive Without Knowing It”

  There are four of them, and when the message hanging from the end of a reed comes out through the closed window, it is only intended for the fourth man …

  The four are captives and probably a sorry sight—all except this fourth man receiving the missive in Arabic (a language that is a mystery to him) that comes with a tidy sum of gold. This writing in the native language, translated for him by a renegade who is in on the secret, comes from a mysterious woman of noble birth, the beloved only daughter of her wealthy father.

  That is the story of the Captive and Zoraidé from Don Quixote. I imagine (and why not?) that this entrance of the Algerian woman into the first great novel of modern times actually took place in Algiers between 1575 and 1579. Somewhere beneath a blind window this note of alarm was sent by a woman who was perhaps not necessarily the most beautiful nor the wealthiest nor the sole heir of her father, no, but certainly she was a woman who was locked away.

  Because she has been secretly spying on the wretched world of the convicts doing their hard labor in prison but out of doors, the unknown woman boldly dares to initiate the dialogue from her enclosed and gilded prison.

  The dialogue with the other: not particularly because he is this other, not at all, but because she is able to discern the true nobility and worthiness (that of the hero of Lepanto) beneath the tatters indicating this man’s temporary loss of place in the world. A voyeur, with her lynx-like gaze, like a madwoman, relishing the danger, she offers herself as the liberator of the person who will venture with her to make the ultimate transgression. Even as she plots the course, does she have any premonition that, at the end of the journey, she will find herself the wife of this Christian or perhaps some other, but that above all she will find herself a foreigner, a stranger in the language of Cervantes?

  Of course, right from the start the fugitive woman will recognize the images of Marie-Mériem in the church. However, in return for making this eventful trip with a whole group of people among whom she shines like a jewel, in the end she will see herself reduced to the role of stunningly beautiful deaf-mute—but then she will write no more.

  Freeing the slave-hero from the dungeons of Algiers, she sets herself free from the father who has given her everything except freedom, leaving him behind on the shores of Africa, and he will curse her for her betrayal. She exchanges her gilded cage (the richest house in Algiers, where she was queen) for an elsewhere that is bound
less but uncertain.

  Her writing is erased. No one can read it, so now it is useless. She is indeed the first Algerian woman to write—Zoraidé who meets, if not with Don Miguel, then at least with Don Quixote’s captive. The writing of a fugitive: a writing whose very essence is ephemeral. And the Knight of the Sad Countenance will be her first witness in the Christian world, while the language buzzing or written all around her will, for the present, allow her only a silent gaze. Which is, consequently, the end of the initial dialogue, if not of the dazzled, then of the dazzling, presence of the traveler.

  All up and down the Mediterranean this is the way the first exchange takes place: a portentous intermingling of the sexes—first of languages, then gazes, before the bodies collapse into each other. An ambiguous transmutation of roles: the woman free and the man a slave, the first image of the couple in this shift in worlds, that will—after numerous fluctuations, including a twofold and simultaneous servitude—result in a different equilibrium. The couple will be composed of the strange, foreign, Moorish woman—a Christian wife who is neither free nor a slave—and the soldier freed from his chains, but not at all from wretchedness and uncertainty …

  From the start the dominant theme of this loosely connected tale concerns a woman writing in Arabic, writing that on several occasions takes on weight by the addition of a gift of gold. The woman who writes is the one who pays, but she is also the thief and traitor in the eyes of her father and her family. She is the woman who, in the country garden in the Sahel of Algiers, dreams up the plot and sets it in motion, then, in the middle of the night, collapses in the arms of the stranger, and yet persists in her wish to run away. The journey she began wearing a gown studded with diamonds will end with her in the clothes of a pauper; her face veiled as it had been at home, she will make her way riding on the back of a donkey: and so exoticism creates a backwash.