So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  The camera, ravenous, catches it.

  “Ferial, go closer to your mother!”

  I almost destroy the spell.

  “Not my mother,” shouts Ferial instantly in a temper, “my pretend mother. My mother is right there next to you!”

  And I, made patient by the little game, I say “Yes,” of course, “your pretend mother.” Why not play games when one is happy? Real life is also an illusion, the illusion of childhood given free rein …

  Ferial expends great energy, Ferial jumps, Ferial is always on the move. The camera, poor thing, dragging its crew behind it, has trouble keeping up with the expression of so much life.

  It resembles a dance. Lila, like a good partner, picks things up when they die down, keeps the bursts of rhythm contained. Flares of laughter spark and soar. Ferial is in charge, she knows she is in charge. Suddenly she does not care that the whole technical crew is there, congregated as if to watch the show. She knows she is the star, she can do whatever she wants, she does whatever she wants, and it is still grace and pure joy, and life, unrestricted, following its life line. But the camera is no longer following …

  “We’re filming! We’re still filming …”

  Now film Ferial’s fatigue, let her laze around on the big bed: she knows she is sleepy; she would rather have her real mother beside her. I beg her and try to trick her too. “They will forget about you …”

  “I’m sleepy,” she pouts.

  “What about this bed?”

  “No, I want my own bed.”

  I argue with her, discovering great stores of diplomacy within myself: “No, not your bed in Algiers; very soon you will be sleeping with me in my hotel room, we agreed on that, didn’t we?” She agrees. “Now rest a little, no one will pay any attention to you now.” Finally I get what I was vaguely after: her languid, indolent movements—the little girl lying on her back and the slender leg bending, raising. The camera takes the last pictures of the night: childish sensuality, within a hair’s breadth of entering the secret kingdom, that we will leave in shadow for the young mother of the story.

  FIFTH MOVEMENT:

  OF THE NARRATOR AS

  AN ADOLESCENT

  THE DANCE ON THE PATIO: I was slightly more than thirteen, not yet fourteen … Why does this wedding of my first cousin, the third of them, come back to me? Perhaps because of a summer dress: I remember perfectly the black fabric sprinkled with purple flowers. I had dared ask the seamstress to make it so that my back, as well as my arms and shoulders, were left completely bare.

  “In short, practically a beach dress,” the lady remarked as she smilingly listened to me insist on an extraordinarily full skirt.

  I was happily surprised to find that my mother agreed, on condition that the seamstress add a bolero with little sleeves that would cover me up when I went outside.

  “For a wedding, just among women,” she said, “why should she not have a low-cut dress?”

  Still it seemed to me that my mother was suddenly allowing an astonishing bit of daring—“because among women!”

  Was it because I wore this dress that I still remember with something of an adolescent’s strong sense of style my first real dress, that I had the courage to accept the invitation? At the height of the festivities, deep inside the house where Soliman’s daughters lived, a house full to bursting with a crowd of guests, in front of the band composed of the town’s women musicians, yes, I agreed to stand up. And then in a few minutes forgetting myself, right in front of everyone, my back and arms bare, I was riding astride the rhythm and discovering the new pleasure of my body, despite the spectators and their eyes, in this most ancient of homes where long ago the grandmother made her entrance as a young bride (while I accentuate the twists and turns of my hips, my shoulders, and the fluid freedom of my arms like vines), yes, disregarding the kinswomen, all those spectators turning into a single multiple being, voracious, buzzing …

  My mother smiled at the compliments elicited by the black dress baring the girl. Well, but there it is, the twirling, irrepressible body quivers all over before the women on the alert. Too bad if two or three boys with even perhaps, a young man among them, are hidden away in some closed room where they become voyeurs behind half-open shutters.

  I dance. A few others are dancing as well, mature women. Gradually, in spite of themselves, they are dancing their grief and their need to get out, to fling themselves into the distance, into the beating sun. And I, I wheel around with my eyes closed (beginning to feel dizzy), offering who knows what image to these sequestered women, the ones crouched there, already prepared to repudiate me.

  “She goes out, she reads, she goes to the cities like that, naked, her father, bizarre, lets her … She goes into the homes of those other people there and walks around like that in the enemies’ world, well, in fact, the free world, but far away, so far away! She makes her way around in it—her poor parents when they find out that she will never come back! What good is the caravel that sails far out to sea after whatever riches and brings none of them back? What good is the caravan out beyond the deserts that takes the wrong road home and becomes lost in the sands? Oh what reckless parents this girl has!

  “Look how her face is stiff because she is both timid and too ardent; she dances, but too vigorously, her manner is too lively. How should one put it? She dances blithely! She has not yet understood and never will understand because she will never be part of our houses, our prisons, she will be spared the confinement and as a result our warmth also and our company! She will never know that when the lute and high-pitched voice of the blind mourner make us get up and almost go into a trance, it is because our grief makes us mourn, our hidden grief.

  “She dances, and is dancing for us, that is true; before us, well but there it is, she is expressing her joy in life. How strange that is. Where does she come from, just where has she been? Really, she is not one of us!”

  “And yet,” said one of the matrons, the wealthiest, very high and mighty, “if her father put her back in her place … really, if he made her wear the veil, and sent her back into the darkness and protection of our homes, I would not hesitate to ask for her in marriage for my eldest son! I would describe her to my son just the way she is now, her waist, her bearing, and all the fire in her eyes! Definitely! I would ask for her and I know my son would be happy I did!”

  Someone reported what was said to the girl’s mother, and told her who said it. The mother made a little face. The woman, who would have liked to present herself as future mother-in-law (on the condition, it is true, that the father lead his daughter back to strict Muslim orthodoxy), well, the narrator’s mother did not consider her station to be high enough for them. “Them,” that is herself, her mother, her paternal lineage with the saint in the mountains, who was so much a presence for them all, men and women. How could she even think of making an alliance with this bourgeois woman who was so “high and mighty”? And out of her depth!

  “Besides,” one of the mother’s friends said ironically (evidence, it is true, of her cramped conformity), “a forty-year-old woman, looking at a thirteen-year-old girl and wanting to describe her to her son herself. Is that proper?”

  “She would do that herself?” the mother exclaimed in innocent amazement.

  As if everyone did not know that any mother, especially a young mother, would also be modest in the presence of her eldest son, or any of her sons as soon as they entered the world of their father!

  “That is not how we do things!” replied the other.

  The mother would have been inclined to think that the woman’s remark was rather pleasant because she had been thinking about the happiness of her son, and before he yet desired it, she wished him to have a beautiful girl “with fire in her eyes”!

  Suddenly she had doubts. She had to ask the neighbor who was friendly and knew more than she about how people said things, “My daughter, my eldest daughter, how would you describe her eyes?”

  The neighbor used the typic
al terms and metaphors to praise the adolescent girl’s features, her eyes, her hair.

  At which point the mother stopped the conversation: “In any case, the father will let his daughter complete her studies. Tell that lady to look somewhere else for a daughter-in-law!”

  Once back in the village the mother boasted about this possibility of arranging her first child’s marriage while she was still so young. She talked about it with the only family she received in her home or whom she herself would visit: the caïd’s.

  He was a widower; the eldest of his three daughters who was divorced did not want to remarry because she wanted to attend to her very young sisters and two brothers. The last of the orphan girls had just finished elementary school and, as was customary, was now cloistered at home awaiting some future suitor.

  The caïd’s eldest daughter was the mother’s only friend. Upon her return from the city, Bahia described her niece’s wedding to this somewhat rural audience with discreet satisfaction. These womanly conversations, especially when they took place in the caïd’s house, looking out upon a deep orchard on the outskirts of the village, would end with musical sessions. One of the women brought a derbouka, a little girl had a tambourine, and the rather unpolished, somewhat nasal repertory of la Mitidja, could be heard beneath the trees, close to a hedgerow of almond trees—hostesses and guests all sitting on carpets laid out on the grass, the children all around, in the background some animals: a rooster and a peacock, kids, some very skinny cats, and even a rather terrifying wolf-dog that frightened the mother, a city-woman …

  At nightfall my father came to get us in a Citroën that he and the Kabylian baker had bought together. The baker used it all week, but when he was not at work, he agreed to chauffeur my father, who was incapable of driving it.

  The baker had closed up shop. He arrived accompanied by my impassive father. The car was parked. One of the little boys came and told us they were here. We climbed in back: my mother engulfed beneath her veils; myself at thirteen, stiff because I was on display; and my very little sister.

  My father then signaled to his chauffeur partner (or perhaps they had decided between them to do this long before) that they had to go the long way around in the car. It was “apéritif time” (my father’s phrase seemed mysterious to me, I never asked what the words meant). The two large cafes in the center of the village would be filled with men who were pieds-noirs, while on benches just across the way the native men, Kabylians and Arabs, congregated in angry, silent confrontation.

  Consequently, even with two men in the front, we could not drive there. A wife would immediately be the focus of all eyes: As if my mother, a lady who was of course veiled in silk, with embroidered organza over her nose masking almost her entire face, must not, because of her very worthiness, be thus exposed to the gaze of such spectators.

  A double public gaze, exclusively masculine: Europeans gathered on the terraces for their apéritifs and seasonal workers, whom hostility bound together to contemplate the leisure time of others.

  It would have been unthinkable for my father to permit “a lady” from where we came from to parade past, even rapidly! These potential gawkers would be incapable of seeing the innate distinctions: This masked figure, made mysterious because of her very sophisticated veils, in the Caesarean style, had to be imagined as extremely beautiful in theory even though they could not see her! Why do them the honor, even for the five minutes it would take the Citroën to drive around the little square and arrive in front of our apartment building?

  After all, the wealthiest settler of the plains, an all-powerful colonial master—with his farms, his hundreds of acres of vineyards, his army of workers—the man who decided the mayor’s election, who chose local elected officials, to whom one bowed very low on those rare occasions that he deigned to show himself, this secret master kept his wife and daughters hidden. He spared them the need to go through the village, just as a jealous sultan would have done.

  Of course it was not a matter either of male jealousy or of prohibition, merely disdain. The lady of the manor—or “the queen,” as she was called by the Europeans playing bowls and the natives playing dominos—stayed invisible, except …

  “Except on August fifteenth,” the baker at the wheel reminded him in a low voice, as he took us on a big detour to the south, then along the far eastern side, to return by the alley that was almost empty at this time of day, passing one side of the church and ending up, finally, in front of where we lived.

  As we drove home, through all the detours, I heard my father muttering, as if in a duel with the all-powerful settler whom so many visitors from Belgium, from northern lands and even farther away, came to see. (They came to admire the highly technical nature of his farms, his sowing by helicopter, his mechanized vineyards. They never, however, ventured into the innermost recesses, into the hidden corners they were unaware of, where ramshackle huts were reserved for his serfs.) “Because he does treat them like serfs!” my father remarked, furiously, there next to the baker. I think now that it was for my benefit that he would let fly this way in his usual diatribe against the local despot …

  As if, right at the beginning of my adolescence, he called me as a witness: “Your mother, my wife, has a special status, at least equal to ‘their’ lady of the manor, and it is as it should be that all those men—the ‘others’ and ours—do not deserve to see her go by. And I”—(this is the father speaking as I imagine it later)—“following the example of ‘their’ master, will not expose my wife either—the very heart of myself. She is of course entirely wrapped in her stiff and immaculate veils, and following our customary ways, she remains silent outside, her eyes lowered beneath the face veil! And I am just a schoolmaster. The only native schoolmaster for native boys. Pretty stiff and inflexible I am, too, and tough-minded under my fez. When I was a young man, I admired Atatürk because with a leader like him we certainly would not have been colonized—in our own country without being in our own country. Then, your mother, like the Turkish ladies of the former aristocracy, could have taken off the Islamic veil and worn Paris skirts. She might even have been able to drive the Citroën herself, as breezily as any sportswoman—because it is clear I will never be able to drive a vehicle! In that case, well then, she would deserve to be photographed!

  “Here women would have emulated the ladies in Turkey, but also the ladies of Damascus or Egypt, Cairo and Alexandria, the first emancipated Muslim women.” (My father was thinking then of how many of his friends, doctors, teachers, lawyers, who, like him, had dreamed ten or fifteen years too soon of “unveiling” their wives, traveling with them!)

  But we were living in a colonized country. Sétif, Tébessa, Guelma, tumultuous cities—thousands of men dead, then thousands imprisoned on May 8, 1945—that was two or three years earlier … Algeria at war, thank God, had other matters of urgency. It was perhaps even a stroke of luck that in these little ancient cities the families were huddled together like this, and the women of the city were trembling but safe in the warmth of women’s apartments.

  We returned to our apartment.

  By this time my paternal grandmother, who had lived with us, was dead. Only her ghost remained of her, nostalgically floating through the rooms … It was the period in which my sister, the youngest, about six years old, was just beginning to feel unwell—a long illness that made her weak for over a year. I remember the next summer, spent in a verdant mountain city so that the fresh air would make her get well soon.

  How exactly did I pass from my childhood to my preadolescence? It was before I was thirteen, or rather before I was ten, when I left for boarding school in the nearby city. (“The city of roses,” André Gide called it fifty years before I arrived. But he was there fifty years after the painter Fromentin, the first one to write a French account of this Arab city.) I see myself still half submerged in the mists of innocent childhood while all that surrounds my coming of age—the unknown, the ambiguous—marked by an ardor with no words to express it in
an Islamic land, was making itself known to me.

  What were the early scenes, experienced with the passivity of blind innocence, during which I partly left the family cocoon, the warm protection assured me by the affection of a group of women (an affection not without its acrid moments)? “Coming of age”: this term applied to women, to girls who reached physical maturity, is in the maternal dialect laden with threats. In the masculine plural, however, the kharidjines, the men said to be “of age,” are dissidents, indeed bearers of a religious freedom that occasionally turns out to be a cause of war, but the beginning of a collective adventure that starts a new phase … In the feminine singular, the girl “coming of age” promises only pure danger, sometimes reduced to a gratuitous fuss and bother. When did I, then, come of age out of limbo?

  The caïd had three daughters: This triad is at the heart of my village memories.

  My usual playmate is the youngest of these sisters, a year or two older than me. Our confederacy is reinforced every Thursday or Sunday in the back of their rustling garden by frequent disputes with her brothers, one in particular who was about ten. He used to climb the trees and trap birds. With a cruel grin, he would bring us their trembling, wounded bodies. “I am going to slit their throats according to the ritual right now and fix them for you to eat. You’ll be licking your fingers when they’re plucked and grilled, you’ll see!” His teasing eyes stared right at me; his calm cruelty made me uncomfortable … I stood stock-still; his sister never let up berating him.

  Before all this teasing, before our screaming—little girls scandalized by this boy we used to call a hoodlum—there is a sense of disquiet that remains and comes back to me, indelible.

  Was I six then, or was I seven? I think I had left nursery school. The youngest of the caïd’s daughters, following my example, was also now being sent to the French school. Whenever I visited, her sisters, who were oddly inquisitive about me, would pounce and trap me in a corner. There they would lift up my skirt or my dress to examine—my slip! It was a piece of lingerie they had never seen before. My mother was so style conscious that she insisted on buying me European clothes for little girls from a young Spanish woman who used to travel the length and breadth of the plains in her small truck selling underwear and various fineries to the village women shut up in their homes or living in isolated places.