So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  So I quickly knew that the Madonna would only exist for me, outside the “shot,” that her image could not be bought … It was as if, right from the start, she held on to her integrity for two reasons, as if her beauty concentrating the family secret had to remain inaccessible to us … There was no violent refusal when this happened, not even the Islamic prohibition that one might have expected would be aggressive. “No.” It was a calm no that the mother would put to me, and the only reason she gave seemed obvious: “No, because her husband, my son, works in the capital and is not here.”

  I did not insist. I knew instantly that no would be no. Even though, during this period of cold heat prior to shooting the film, I knew that I would get everything (“everything” in my hunt for images). I was persuaded that insistence, friendliness, and solidarity, an appeal to reasonable interest, would work, and “any method” seemed honorable to me. But the crux of my confidence lay finally in this drive to make the film concrete; all the thankless or exalting work consisted of putting the documentary materials into shape. More precisely, rediscovering its original form and thus redoing mine.

  I go back to the Madonna of the shadows, to her baby who nurses but is sick. She could have been the first to say, with that shy smile she gives me, “I represent all the women here that your machines will not define. I am the fringe of what is forbidden, and I like you.”

  She made coffee for me every time I would come in tense and wanting to feel I was somewhere else. She was the somewhere else—and by the same token all my feminine past. Now I understand: Starting from the moment when taking her picture was denied me, precisely because of the proximity both of her beauty and of the halflight in which she constantly lived, her presence was an extension, the background that made those in the film uncertain. She evoked the persistence of things enduring back in time forever …

  And I stitched it together with the women of my childhood. Drawing a parallel between the Madonna and the wife of my maternal uncle, this aunt who died at twenty in childbirth and whom I must have just barely known, and yet—because of a faded photograph (she was seated, her long face, her evanescent body, in the huge armchair of a Syrian salon whose pearly luxury intimidated me for years afterward), in my child dreams she took on a poetic, haunting presence. She was dead, they told me. I was expecting to find her again in the back of some scene; suddenly the reality would come unraveled into shadows.

  And so the Madonna, during the course of this project, represented for me the grace to secretly question it. I, elusive, invisible, if I decided suddenly to appear, your moving pictures would reveal their bloodless, embryonic nature.

  If I decided … I came and went from shadow to reality, from the stage to the wings, from the spotlights to the Madonna’s candle. The obvious fact that crystallized in spurts within me was that it was the others: brothers, husband, neighbors, and most of all the all-powerful mother, who maintained the barrier between the two spaces. If I decided …

  The Madonna could have put her sick baby down just like that on a sheepskin or at her feet and take one step, just one step. I would open the door for her, she would have nothing to do for the cameramen, maybe just a hint of movement, her fingers pulling the neck of her gown shut, just a few steps.

  Abruptly the need for this work of sounds and images would dissolve; there would be no point to the fiction because, wonder of wonders, suddenly every woman on this earth would be able to come and go.

  “Finally, there are no more spying looks,” my character, Lila, says. Lila, beneath the spotlights, would reach out toward the Madonna; Lila would gradually move backward to the rear of the scene, the spotlights would go out, eyes would open wider and wider and from them the real light would finally well up as the Madonna would slip out, smiling. If I decided …

  THIRD MOVEMENT:

  OF THE MOTHER AS LITTLE GIRL

  TWENTY YEARS LATER, Fatima, daughter of the mokkadem of Saint Ahmed or Abdallah, goes back down to the city, this time for good.

  During these two decades she has lived her fate as the wife of three successive husbands. (The third was my grandfather, from whom that year, 1920, she officially separated, asking the cadi for autonomy, according to Muslim law, to manage her own wealth alone.) It was also her fate to be a mother. She returns to Caesarea where her stepmother, Amna, a widow now for ten years and a devoted friend, had welcomed her in her home before.) She is accompanied by all her children, except Khadidja, her first, who at the age of sixteen was married in a nearby hamlet. Khadidja was expecting a child at the time—finally a son who will live, O merciful Allah, not like the first three, all boys as well, who each died after a few days!

  Fatima: from now on everyone will call her Lla Fatima, though I, like all my cousins, call her mamané, hinting with this word at the affection that her strict bearing kept us from showing her. Lla Fatima has with her for this first move her only son. He is just barely ten, it is true, but so extraordinarily beautiful; this son, from now on, according to her will be “her only future.” And she has her three daughters, two adolescents, and the youngest child, who is two years old, the only child of the husband she is leaving. This little girl turning her back on the mountain (and leaving the Berber language) is my mother.

  Of my mother as a little girl? She never spoke of this day from her early childhood when she entered the first house in Caesarea. Does she even remember it? She probably does not want to, why recall the sharpness of the separation? The country house they had left behind whose many low rooms were painted in purplish-blue whitewash every spring, that had two yards and a row of fig trees and, in the middle, two very majestic zen oaks. There were children scattered everywhere. A separation from laughter and the vast horizon … Without transition there they were living in town, in a high building with imposing walls; at the bottom one huge, bleak bedroom into which they all squeezed. The mother is endlesly conferring. To begin with, she is given some advice by an old cleric connected with the family. Soon afterward she sells all her jewels to buy an old house a little higher up and not far from the walls, still in the Arab quarter. Consequently Lla Fatima will be almost Amna’s neighbor, in the neighborhood of her former home where Soliman lived. His daughters, moreover, who are older now, some of them already grandmothers, come to visit her and congratulate her on her move: She is the model of feminine decisiveness and intelligence. They call her aunt or amti, that is, “paternal aunt.” Out of respect.

  Lla Fatima, finally in her own home, surrounded by her son—who attends the French school—and her three daughters, begins her new life. She is not yet forty.

  Little Bahia, a little more than two, almost three now, explores the new place: four deep rooms, the patio with just one tree, an orange tree (with the bitter oranges so much sought after for preserves) spreading its low, dense foliage. Way in the back is the edge of a well and right next to it a staircase leading to a broad, low terrace from which there is a view of the mountainous slopes of the southern part of the city.

  Bahia squats all alone in the back near the edge of the well. When they call her, she runs away; she climbs the staircase and makes a place for herself on the terrace with her cat, in a hidden corner where she has put down a mat. She stretches out, contemplates the mountain: she can hear noise from the nearby houses, smell the coffee roasting or the paprika cooking, hear the scattered voices of the gossips shouting, laughing. One voice of an unknown woman, in the evening, just before the prayer at sunset, sings, naked and alone, always singing the same lament …

  Lying there on her back, Bahia fills her eyes with the blue of the sky and dreams: She would like to be far from the city. (Below, in the reception hall, the endless stream of ladies still comes to congratulate Lla Fatima.) She imagines herself at her father’s house at the zaouia of the Beni Menacers.

  Bahia’s father is the man Lla Fatima has left. One afternoon a week he comes. One hour after the Friday public prayer he knocks at the front door. The meal awaits him; he comes in. Afterward he shuts
himself up with his wife in her room.

  When Hassan, Lla Fatima’s son, returns from school to discover that “the other man,” the one not his father, is trying to bring Lla Fatima back to her senses (or submission?), he climbs up to the terrace, where he finds little Bahia. To calm his displeasure, he says mockingly, “You, why don’t you go with your father? That’s your father, isn’t it?”

  “That’s my father!” answers the child.

  “Go do it! When he comes out, go and tell him to take you!”

  Bahia would like that. She would like to take her father’s hand when he crosses the patio, she would like him to call her joyfully in his clear, musical voice, she would like to stay with him … She bursts out crying; she weeps in silence, but how could she defy the big brother?

  A fifteen-year-old girl appears; her long hair is light brown and her somewhat wide-set eyes are the color of honey. Catching them in this childish conversation, she scolds Hassan roundly: “Why are you jealous of her? And what will she do without us?”

  Bahia takes refuge in the skirts of her favorite sister, Chérifa. She cries even harder, this time for the pleasure of being comforted, of wallowing in Chérifa’s sweetness, her warm voice, her almost motherly caresses.

  The brother shrugs his shoulders, implying that he knows what is going on.

  “You think I don’t know! Mma brought us all down here so she can hang on to her wealth. Her wealth comes from my father. And that man there,” he says, waving angrily toward the couple’s room, “was the one profiting from it up to now!”

  “You’re not even ten years old and you’re already looking after grown people’s business!” Chérifa says sarcastically, finished now with consoling the little girl.

  “What kind of authority will my brother have over me and my sisters and my mother when my Lord Brother”—she says it in Arabic, “Sidi Khouya”—“is a grown man!” Chérifa, jaunty and teasing, bursts into laughter.

  Even now, three-quarters of a century later, I, Isma, the narrator, the descendant through the youngest daughter, do not know if Lla Fatima (“mamané”) loved her two successive husbands afterward, or one rather than the other, or one more than the other … Surely I am the only one who wonders about dead people this way!

  “The two mountain husbands,” I call them for short. The mountain is the Dahra—etymologically the mountain of the “back” or “that turns its back” on the city of Caesar. Despite the way it looks, in these ravines at the beginning of this century called by some “the colonial night,” right in with these rocks and eroded slopes, at the bottom of half-dried-up wadis, some rebellious individuals hung on and kept alive and resisted. They felt they were still “aristocrats”; even though all that remained of their property was dust, still there was a dark deposit springing inside them, the memory of former battles (against the Turks in the old days, against the French yesterday).

  Was it for this oxygen that Fatima, widowed at seventeen, furrowed with pride and sensing the acrid taste of freedom, left the city and went back up into the mountains? She raised her little girl, Khadidja, alone for several years and only returned to Caesarea once a year for the great feast of Abraham, to show her first child to the crowd of half brothers and half sisters. Was it for this air?

  When Khadidja is six, Fatima, taking the advice of her father the mokkadem, agrees to marry an honorable suitor from the region: Si Larbi, one of the descendants of another saint, twenty or so miles from here, on the slope that faces Miliana. This saint’s religious reputation is greater than Saint Ahmed or Abdallah’s.

  Si Larbi is not young, but he is still not an old man. He is “in the prime of life,” or at least that is how Ferhani describes him to Fatima through his wife Amna, “the Golden Woman.” In the spring Amna goes up to the zaouia for a few days. She sees Fatima, at twenty-four, acting as mistress of the house for the entire little community: servants, dependent families, tenants … Fatima, first one up at four in the morning, taking care of the animals in the darkness first then awakening the little shepherds and farm girls. Not stopping there, smiling, sturdy and radiant, taking hardly any rest when it is time for the siesta and then receiving the usual women come to visit; they will bring her the detailed chronicle that makes its way through the valleys, from the hills and tiny hamlets. On the other hand, she will listen somewhat absentmindedly to the news Amna brings from the city: the scattering of Soliman’s family, the weddings, the funerals, the newly wealthy …

  Amna mentions the Berkanis, the prestigious family to which the suitor belongs. She does not say that she understands perfectly well what Ferhani is up to. Up to this point he has been setting in play a whole strategy against the heirs of the two Berkani saints (father and son, buried side by side in two mausoleums), men of exalted faith who had only arrived two centuries before. Some said, predictably, that they came from Seguiat el-Hamra, on the borders of Mauritania, the cradle of almost all the sacred genealogies. Others preferred to say they were Andalusian exiles come through the usual places: Tétouan, then Fez and Tlemcen, then the mountains neighboring Médéa, at the moment when Algiers was a modest village (a little hideout for pirates trapped by the Spanish fortifications on Peñón). Finally, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, they would have reached this zaouia of the Beni Menacers that the oh so “glorious” General de Saint-Arnaud would come to pillage from top to bottom, burning the olive trees and all the orchards …

  So, as the mokkadem Ferhani sees it in his schemes and ruminations, Algeria at the turn of the century apparently is still at war with itself. One dead saint vies with another dead saint, one koubba, that is, tomb and sanctuary, vies with another koubba, another sanctuary—just as elsewhere, in other places, one bell tower would be the rival of another. A phantom Algeria where the living, who think they are living for themselves, continue in spite of themselves to settle the accounts of dead men who are not quite dead and who keep right on devouring each other …

  Amna talks to the young Fatima and convinces her to marry Si Larbi, the descendant of Saint Berkani, this saint who is considered to be a “modernist” because one of his grandsons (in fact, a great-grandnephew) chose, right from the outset, to side with emir Abd el-Kader against the protégés of the French. Aïssa el-Berkani, one of the emir’s five caliphates, lost almost the entire Berkani patrimony as a result, but increased its prestige considerably. Si Larbi, who thus became Fatima’s second husband, after a stormy life, much of which was spent in exile in the west, seems to have been a beloved, perhaps loving, spouse—in any case one who was sensible and with a tranquil spirit. Long after his death, forgetting herself, Lla Fatima, throughout her austere old age would mention and even sometimes quote Si Larbi.

  Her first child by him was Chérifa, the great beauty, and next Malika, two years younger. (This is the aunt who now welcomes and cherishes me during these days I spend resting there, probably because she has always been sad that she had only boys and not even one girl of her own.) Then finally came the beloved son. Soon afterward, Si Larbi, always lovingly responsible for the eldest child, Khadidja, gave Fatima some advice concerning her marriage. Then he fell sick; for a whole year Fatima cared for him.

  Dealers in ancient medicine came from every hill, from even the most modest and humble sanctuary, from as far away as the Sahel around the capital, sellers of potions and rare herbs: but any roumi, even a learned doctor, the sick man would have refused. Fatima knew that no Christian would cross the threshold of the Beni Menacer family, and regretted it. A second time she found herself a widow. This time, I imagine, she wept.

  When, two years later, she married Malek el-Berkani’s cousin (she was thirty, or a little older; he was practically the same age, though some say he was probably two or three years younger), it came as a surprise to the people around her. They expected her to take solace in solitude and piety. No.

  Was it a marriage for love this time? No one will ever know … The bitter and cynical version of the “other man’s” son sometimes
seems to be right: Yes, Fatima’s wealth was primarily Si Larbi’s, hence it was also the property of her son and her two adolescent daughters … And now the cousin, having remarried into the same household, started any number of new projects: modernizing the arboriculture and buying agricultural equipment never seen before in the mountains … Up to this point no “native” farmer had dared to imitate the European colonists of the plains!

  In the off-season the young husband, who had been so busy and energetic, became unruly! He liked the itinerant bands of musicians and supported them. Sometimes he would not show up until dawn after evenings spent far away in the company, people said, of dancers … News of this was reported any number of times to Fatima, who, with her children, remained near the sanctuary. Did she regret the days when, she, all alone in her father’s zaouia, knew just as well as this man how to inject enthusiasm into everything, or did the shadow of the dancers inhabit the sleepless hours of her lonely evenings? She was of two minds.

  Then Malek would settle down and devote himself entirely to overseeing the crops. Everyone called him the chatter, the man who is energetic and unflagging, throughout the region.

  The little girl that Fatima had by him, Bahia, was two, the same age as her eldest daughter, when Fatima was widowed for the first time and decided to return to these “back” mountains—the Dahra. She muttered this word: dahra; ancient revolts had taken place on this site, and it was also, she thought: “the site of women’s bitterness” (as if, suddenly, the image of her mother who died so tragically, had the upper hand)! In the end she decided upon the separation of property that is provided for in Islamic law.