by Assia Djebar
I relived the grief of my mother, banished from her childhood, just as I myself am by this very grief, the same as is described in the oldest of writings.
As if I were simultaneously Chérifa, dead at eighteen; Chérifa, the happy, expectant fiancée; Chérifa, her beauty shattered by the typhus epidemic in Caesarea that struck her down. As if I were simultaneously the dead woman dead too long because never spoken or written about and, at the same time, become again my stunned mother, a distraught little girl, taking this stroke of fate like a powerless old woman or an adult seeking in vain some way to rebel. Yes, the little six-year-old girl who stayed there, her mouth open and eyes dry (they did not show her the young woman’s body, only the thin shape beneath the white sheet, onto which the shrouded girl’s mother threw herself full length), and the little girl does not weary of her mother’s trances, her mother’s frenzied dancing and tearing of her cheeks—I am this little girl, an extra, an onlooker who wanders, voiceless, how long did you say, for six months? No, more, almost an entire year, until September, when the principal tenant farmer brings blanched almonds and jars of olive oil, just before the second tenant arrives with the lentils and chick-peas that have been harvested.
Chérifa the dead woman has returned. Onto Algerian soil the dead (men) are returning after so long. The women, forgotten ones because they have no writing, make up the funeral procession, new Bacchantes.
The dead (men) are returning onto Algerian soil. Is that the deepest desire of the men? The women? And would death be only “masculine,” as I thought: old women and old men, mere slips of girls and male corpses, all of them forming only an asexual mass without tenderness, merged out of fear or resignation into something ghastly and impersonal?
I had thought this before already as I looked at my grandmother’s body beneath its shroud, a body still possessing such a tenacious resentment, despite the lamentations and the verses of funereal poetry … I really thought that every death in Islam is experienced as masculine; because our proudest women in the end die as men so that they only bow before the greatness and the magnanimity of Allah.
And this recurrent dream that haunts my nights! In the bottom of my open mouth a soft, viscous paste, phlegm, stagnates, then gradually flows and I sink irremediably into this feeling of sickness.
I have to get this paste off my palate; it is smothering me; I try to vomit. What do I vomit other than a whitish stench stuck deep down in my throat? These last few nights the blockage in my pharynx has been worse: I have had to take a knife and cut some kind of useless muscle that hurts me, spit covering my vocal cords.
My mouth still hangs open; my persistent fingers are busy among my teeth, a spasm wrenches my abdomen—rancor or irresistible nausea. I do not experience the horror of this state: I have picked up the blade, I try to cut all the way down, slowly, carefully, to the bottom of this gluey stuff hanging under my glottis. Blood is all over my fingers, this blood not filling my mouth suddenly seems light, neutral, a liquid prepared not to flow out but to evaporate inside my body instead.
I perform this attempted amputation very carefully: I do not ask myself if I am suffering, or if I am wounding myself, and especially not whether or not I will remain voiceless.
Every night I am tormented by the muscular effort of giving birth through the mouth this way, this silencing. I vomit something, what? Maybe a long ancestral cry. My open mouth expels, continuously, the suffering of others, the suffering of the shrouded women who came before me, I who believed I was only just appearing at the first ray of the first light.
I do not cry, I am the cry, stretched out into resonant blind flight; the white procession of ghost-grandmothers behind me becomes an army propelling me on; words of the quavering, lost language rise up while the males out in front gesticulate in the field of death or of its masks.
PART FOUR
THE BLOOD
OF WRITING
“You say that suffering serves no purpose.
But it does.
It serves to make one cry.
To warn against what is insane.
To warn of disorder.
To warn of the fracture of the world.”
—JEANNE HYVRARD
La Meurtritude
“They say that after a long wait,
the stone lying beneath the earth
turns into a ruby.
Yes, I believe it—but it does so
with the blood of its heart.”
—HAFIZ
YASMINA
YASMINA IN THE DITCH … Precisely at the moment that I bring this journey to a close (mourning so often friends killed in the preceding days—sobbing every morning, but continuing to walk, dancing at night with a hardened heart—days of exile, mauve, streaked with blood …); a young girl, who went to school with my daughter not long ago, has been killed …
A week before she was with her family, there, behind the door her voice still resonates, determined: “I cannot live outside Algeria, no! I am definitely gong back!” She went home. In Paris she kissed her father and her French mother. At twenty-eight she refused exile.
Yasmina, a young teacher, but also a proofreader for an independent newspaper.
That day at the end of June 1994 she was with a foreign visitor—a Polish woman. This friend was resigned to cutting short her trip because they could not wander in the streets and roads together or swim peacefully on the nearby beach. “There is danger everywhere, invisible but everywhere!” a neighbor told them, alarmed at seeing them so young and full of life. He added, and probably regretted it later, “Danger has a smell now on this earth!”
Yasmina drives her friend to the airport. Halfway there she stops for gas and finds police searching people. They are in fact fake police; they take the young foreigner away to “the station.”
Yasmina does not let go so easily: She follows the so-called police and suddenly, in open country, they take a shortcut. Yasmina—who by then must have recognized the “smell of danger”—does not give up. She feels responsible for her friend. She does not hesitate, harrying the kidnappers, honking constantly, not losing the trail, in the name of the sacred duty of hospitality.
The armed men—there are four—stop. Yasmina confronts them. They encircle her. They search her; and seeing her press card, it occurs to them that a woman journalist is a much better catch than a mere foreigner!
They set the young Polish woman free, taking in exchange their new prey. In their ultimate performance that is all caricature, they condemn her to death behind a clump of trees. Then they go after the friend she rescued.
The young Polish woman—will I ever speak to her?—left Algeria the same day, freed and voiceless: she runs away, she will run, I feel it, to the four corners of the earth. But before vanishing she testifies—a few brief words; this woman for whom another woman spontaneously gave her life—testifies that Yasmina, to the end, thumbed her nose at her murderers, insulted and defied them with her last breath. The only thing that cut short her angry voice and impotent pride was the death rattle, beneath the knife! This voice, the voice of Yasmina—Jasmine Flower—I shall hear it in all four corners of the earth …
Yasmina, whose mutilated body was found the next day in a ditch. Yasmina, who every day of her last year carried the kalam in her hand.
“I cannot live outside of Algeria, no!” she had decided. Algeria—blood.
THE BLOOD OF WRITING—FINAL
TODAY, AT THE END of a year of dark, incomprehensible deaths, defiled deaths, in the shadows of fratricidal conflict.
What can we call you now, Algeria!
Luckily I am not in the middle of it all, the scene in which, as Kateb Yacine saw forty years earlier,
Men shot down pull the earth to them like a blanket
And soon the living will have nowhere left to sleep!
In the middle of it what can one do other than be dragged down by the monster Algeria—and do not call it a woman anymore, unless it is a ghoul (which is feminine), or a vorac
ious female centaur risen from some abyss, no, not even madwoman.
Sucked up by the monster, what was there to do except plunge my face into the blood, smear myself with it, scald myself with it, in trances, hallucinating—the performances of Sidi Mcid, described by the mother of the poet in those carefree days, before there had even been a May 1945 (and the blood of Guelma, Tébessa, Sétif) to drive her insane.
In the middle of this scene, above all not crying, nor improvising funeral poetry, nor contorting oneself in stridency—the dances at Nador ravine but also at the sanctuary of my childhood at Sidi-Brahim, facing the sea, with its pebbly beach reserved for the deeply religious, little girls, and beggars …
Because from now on the dead we think we bury today will fly off. They are the lighthearted ones now, relieved, lightened: Their dreams sparkle while the gravedigger’s mattock is at work, while the mourning is filmed, projecting their revived grief to the four corners to repeat this procession of shrouds!
We think the dead are absent but, transformed into witnesses, they want to write through us.
Write how?
Not in some language or some alphabet? Not in the double one from Dougga, or the one of the stones of Caesarea, the one of my childhood amulets, or the one of my familiar French and German poets?
Nor with pious litanies, nor with patriotic songs, nor even with the encircling vibratos of the tzarlrit!
Write, the dead of today want to write: now, how can one write with blood?
On what Koranic board, with what reed reluctantly awash in vermilion red?
The dead alone are the ones who want to write, and “with the utmost urgency,” as we like to say.
How can one inscribe with blood that flows or has just finished flowing?
With its smell, perhaps.
With its vomit or its phlegm, easily.
With the fear that is its halo.
Writing, of course, even a novel …
About flight.
About shame.
But with blood itself: with its flow, its paste, its spurt, its scab that is not yet dry?
Yes, how can one speak of you, Algeria?
And if I fall someday soon, backing up into the hole?
Leave me, knocked over backward, but open-eyed.
Do not lay me either in the earth or at the bottom of a dry well.
Rather, in water.
Or in the wind’s leaves.
That I may keep on contemplating the night sky.
Smelling the grass quiver.
Smiling in the streaks of every laugh.
Living, dancing feet first.
Rotting gently!
Blood for me remains ash white.
It is silence.
It is repentance. Blood does not dry, it simply evaporates.
I do not call you mother, bitter Algeria,
That I write,
That I cry, voice, hand, eye.
The eye that in the language of our women is a fountain.
Your eye within me, I flee from you, I forget you, O grandmother of bygone days!
And yet, in your wake,
“Fugitive and not knowing it,” I called myself,
Fugitive and knowing it, henceforth,
The trail all migration takes is flight,
Abduction with no abductor,
No end to the horizon line,
Erasing in me each point of departure,
Origin vanishes,
Even the new start.
Fugitive and knowing it midflight,
Writing to encircle the relentless pursuit,
The circle that each step opens closes up again,
Death ahead, antelope encircled,
Algeria the huntress, is swallowed up in me.
Summer 1988—Algiers.
Summer 1991—Thonon-les-Bains.
March–July 1994—Paris.
GLOSSARY
aïd: a religious festival.
bachagha: in Algeria, a chief who is the caïd’s superior.
baraka: luck, a favorable destiny; also a benediction.
bey: the representative of the sultan of Constantinople in Tunis. Although the sultan grants him this office, the bey functions, in fact, rather independently. In Algiers the same officer is referred to as the dey, and his independence was so notorious that the French referred to him as the “king of Algiers.”
brasero: see kanoun.
cadi: a Muslim judge with both civil and religious jurisdiction.
caïd: a North African chief who served as a representative of the French government for purposes of taxation, policing, and other administrative duties.
chahadda: the first verse of the first chapter of the Koran. It begins with the profession of faith.
chatter: someone who is tireless.
the Dahra: the back regions of the mountains.
djellaba: a long, loose Moroccan robe.
douar: an Arab hamlet of tents or more permanent structures.
fatiha: the Koran verses containing the profession of faith.
fellagha: an armed partisan of independence.
hadja: a woman who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
hadj: a man who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
hammam: the ritual baths.
hand of Fatima: the image of a hand used to ward off the evil eye.
hanéfite rites: rites practiced by the Hanafiyah, one of the smaller Sunite sects of Islam.
imam: a Muslim priest.
Kabyle: the people inhabiting the mountainous regions of Algeria. They speak the Berber language and have maintained ancient Islamic customs.
kalam: a pointed reed used to write on the Koranic tablet.
kanoun: a small container for hot coals used to heat a space or for cooking.
kharidjines: young men who have come of age.
koubba: the tomb of a local saint and the sanctuary associated with it.
Lla, or Llalla: address of respect for a woman: “My Lady,” the equivalent of Sidi for a man.
mahakma: the judge’s chambers.
mamané: a term of affection. Its English equivalent might be “granny.”
marabout: a Muslim holy man who has devoted his life to ascetic contemplation.
la Mitidja: the fertile coastal plain southeast of Algiers, presently a hotbed of religious fundamentalism.
mokkadem: the current representative and direct descendant of whoever the saint in question may be—whether Saint Ahmed or Saint Abdullah (our equivalents might be Saint Peter or Saint Paul, Saint James or Saint John, and so on).
Moriscos: the Spanish Moors, descendants of the Muslims expelled from Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century. When they arrived in Algeria, they were given the name Andalusians because of their most recent provenance.
Mourashidien: the “well-guided imams” were the first four caliphs, abu-Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali (the Sid Ali referred to by the old aunt). The term is only used by Sunite (Orthodox) Muslims, who consider that, following the schism prompted by the death of Ali, they and not the Shiites represented the legitimate continuation of the line under the guidance of Muhammad himself and hence, Allah.
muezzin: the Muslim priest who sings out the prayers at fixed moments in the day when the devout stop whatever they are doing and face Mecca to kneel and pray.
noubas: Andalusian songs retained as part of the “classical” music of the Maghreb.
oued: a temporary water source at an oasis (wadi).
pieds-noirs: French colonists in Algeria.
raïs: a pirate. Ramadan: the ninth month of the Islamic lunar year, during which Muslims fast, practicing strict abstinence from sunup to sundown.
rebec: a bowed musical instrument derived from the rebab and having a pear-shaped body, a slender neck, and usually three strings.
roumi: Christian.
sakina: serenity, particularly the moment of illumination experienced at death.
sarouel: the loose pants worn by women.
&nb
sp; Sidi: a term of respect used before the given name of a man, because of either his age or his station. In North African cultures it is more or less equivalent to “my Lord.”
solta: unbridled power.
sura: a chapter of the Koran.
tchador: the face veil worn by Muslim women.
tzarlrit: a traditional musical form of Berbero-Spanish origin composed of five distinctly different movements.
yaouleds: the sons of workers: lower class.
zaouia: a community built around a sanctuary where noble families descended from the local saint live.
zen oak: a type of oak typical of the Mediterranean coast.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR
ASSIA DJEBAR won the prestigious Neustadt Prize for Contributions to World Literature in 1996 for perceptively crossing borders of culture, language, and history in her fiction and poetry (previous winners include Max Frisch, Francis Ponge, and Gabriel García Márquez) and the Yourcenar Prize in 1997. She is a novelist, scholar, poet, and filmmaker who won the Venice Biennale Critics Prize in 1979. She writes in French and her books have been translated into many languages; those currently available in English are A Sister to Scheherezade (1993), Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1993), and Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1992).
Algerian with Berber roots, Djebar was educated in France and in her homeland. She is currently Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Louisiana State University. She lives in Paris and in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
BETSY WING is the author of Look Out for Hydrophobia, short stories and a novella and has published in The Southern Review and other journals. Her translations include Helene Cixous’s The Book of Promethea, Didier Eribon’s Michel Foucault and more recently The Governor’s Daughter by Paule Constant as well as poetry and essays by Edouard Glissant (Black Salt and Poetics of Relation). She lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.