by Assia Djebar
“What I’m left with is their dancing escape, for hours and hours . . . I remember our evenings, with the hunt finished and the animals cut up. Around the campfire, some Tuaregs who had ended up with us would declaim their strange poetry, accompanied by their twangy, husky flutes. And then I’d tell myself, ‘They must speak to the wounded ostriches or to the ones that have disappeared! They are the ones closest to them!’
“Then, as we headed back north—and while I was staying with the second group, the one with the servants—someone would say to me, ‘We left four or five ostriches unharmed! We let them, all females, get away, because we’ll return next year.’
“We came back in slow stages. The Tuaregs went their own way. The men from our tribes, in turn, recited their Bedouin chansons de geste.” This story, repeated by my father in this cemetery where preparations are currently being made so that your body may rest there, Félicie . . . how many times I longed to present it to you, to translate it for you!
But, as a matter of fact, this childhood memory of Father’s remained our only man-to-man secret. I couldn’t translate it into my bland French, just as words would escape you when I insisted that I wanted to gather, from your lips, the story of your brush with death, the blade of the knife that you saw in a flash . . . If you started, you’d stop shortly after.
Now that you’re sleeping over there, I wonder: did you want to be swallowed up into oblivion on that almost bloody day? That day when you were the threatened “French woman,” saved by the calligraphy of the Koran. Did you swallow this image? Did you disown it?
It wells back up inside of me today, Félicie. You, your throat back, the man with the knife pulling your hair, lifting his other hand. And the necklace slips, and the object that saved you makes the brute with the bulging eyes recoil. His knife falls. You hear the sound of the steel resonating against the ground. A little later, you calm down, and you confront them, you stamp your feet. “Kill me, if you want, but I’m not leaving! This is my country!”
Thirty-three years later, the image arises intact, grows larger. You, so beautiful. Your hair pulled back, your hands arranging your clothes. The necklace back in place. You, proud but calm, and the fearful group of others—the foreigners—staring at you. You saved them, too, first by your submission, then with your audacious words. The “little hoodlum,” as you said, was expelled from his bloody rapture because you had spoken or simply because the name of Allah had formed a protective wall for you.
You, your image on the verge of immolation, then all elegance and bravado!
No, Félicie. You’re not dead.
Today, this image of you comes back up and inhabits me, is larger and reilluminated. My eyes open, I talk to you in the night. I think about you, rooted over there, but soon to be the buried woman!
Strange, my sorrow will be even more wrenching tomorrow and the mornings that follow; I will wear it differently.
“Brother, do you have news about Algeria?” People visiting from Oran who happen upon my store ask me this every day.
Up until now, I would mumble the same brief response. “I live here in Paris, brother! Don’t talk to me about Algeria or about Oran!”
Before.
Now, in response to the same questioning, which will certainly be as frequent in the upcoming months, I’m sure I’ll hear, I’ll say to myself, “Félicie?”
I’m making a joke, or I’m suffering from hallucinations. “Algérie.” “Félicie.” What’s the connection?
Except that the other, the other woman, the one in transit, wandering, today the mother of so many innocents who are pursued, expelled, and so many others who remain to be stifled with fear over there, yes, the other, Algeria—she rises up before me in Félicie’s image. A murderer, a second, a third knocks into her, assaults her, pulls her by the hair. Her eyes bulging, she sees the blade approaching . . . Who will save her? What word, what object can make the lunatic attacking her recoil?
Félicie, you who were saved yesterday, who will be buried with the next dawn, tell me, Félicie, Algérie. I’m rambling, you can well see this, Mman, all tonight and the following nights, and so many others more!
V. THE LAUGH OF THE SHROUDED WOMAN
Bearing me to be borne off
I’ve turned in with the slanting sun
And resting, here I lie.
Their smiles fading, the others are so far from here
Môh’s arms are stretched out for me
Môh’s severed hands
The sun is slanting, and I’ve turned in.
I’m drowning, I’m overwhelmed with white
Bearing me to be borne off
And they’re far—so far from here
I feel the road rolling under my body
And Saint el Houari is so distant as we leave Oran
On the road for Mascara, my first nest
And my highs
My love forgiving me at last.
Bearing me, and Simone weeps on the distant shore,
for she did not see my face one last time
my closed eyes.
My sister, my mother. Does it matter?
I enter Mascara as Queen, and they lay me down.
Where to rest? We must go on
I feel the road rolling under my body.
Above the vanished vines, I float
And the others, my children, are so far from here
Drunken still, and the voyage continues
Beyond this city, my first haven
my happiness we were so smitten
Môh, my beloved
I gave birth to my first son there,
And you smiled
Bearing me to be borne off
You’re waiting for me beyond the vine
Where the ocean of Alfa grass begins,
Once the kingdom of ostriches,
And still for you of the wild boar
We approach Saida and I fall asleep
We are greeted with women ululating
And despite the shroud
I suddenly dance
And horizontal, I sway
Not yet interred
The procession leaves Saida
without a palanquin, but escorted by a strong camel
The sun has set, and I rest
Si Salem’s feast
Is nearing its end.
Impatient, the succession of riders
From the tribe of remembrance
Await the beautiful woman:
Me, the foreigner.
They expect trances
tomorrow
Bearing me to be borne off
In the village on the desert’s edge
Stays the other woman, radiant
The Cheikha, my sister, a holy terror
No longer Simone but the great Rimiti
tormenting
and nagging
She too is my sister
She who shatters the turning song of glass
“Leave me be, I’m not from here,”
Rimiti sings
“No, I’m not from here
Oh my Father, my little Father!”
My sister Rimiti has come
I am her glass that turns
For those from the round here and far
The road comes to a stop
I’m taken to sleep under the tent
On the ground
Amid incense musk prayers
The woman sings and that’s me
She who turns
Who tomorrow
Will plunge laughing into the pit
The roumia now buried
The believers the mendicants the orphans
come to sing
and hum sweetly
Two months later at the marble
above Yasmina
“for a girl born as the hope
to relieve a pain:
Félicie or Yasmina!”
The roumia at the edge of the village
Immaculate patch of bare earth
T
he women
The chanters
The beggars gather
They’ve come from far off
from all the corners hemmed
by the frontier
for Félicie for Yasmina
Her voice flowing or flying
“Bearing me to be borne off ”
Running through fields of Alfa
And vanished vines
From far away to visit the roumia!
And each woman
Takes her turn resting
In the red dust
or on the cold of the marble
Beneath the hot dizzying wind
that carves the dunes
Women converge from afar, each in her turn
to hope and to find each other
to sing and to chant
“Bearing me to be borne off
You or me with the body of Félicie!”
—Paris, September 1996
Afterword: The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry
Blood does not run dry, it simply dies out.
—Assia Djebar, So Vast the Prison
I
Story of the women of the Algerian night, today’s “new women of Algiers.”
As women leave and return, travel and migrate, snatches of life are transported at outposts harboring breath and memory. Stations not of escape, but of mobility, where dialogues are exchanged between Algerian women from there, from here. In a flash, sections of a life are illuminated, then collapse. Images of pursuit, of escape, of death. Of hope, sometimes, in this long night.
Anonymous among the migrants that have flocked to a North Mediterranean port, a retired teacher recounts the events of the life she led high up in Algiers, in a “mellow,” almost bourgeois neighborhood. Yes . . . in a placid tone, with no histrionics, she evokes the ordinariness of a life. The life of a woman from Algiers.
One of her colleagues, Mina—fifty years old, with four children—teaches in a nearby school. At the start of 1995, she receives a threatening phone call: a strange voice spouting curses, avowing her death. Mina, flustered, doesn’t get it. Maybe he’s crazy . . . is it really necessary to call this “a threat”? And why? What law has she unknowingly transgressed? She teaches a foreign language, and . . . what does religion have to do with it? (A hadith, one of the Prophet’s duly reported tenets, widely known, if not observed: Seek knowledge as far away as China! This of course concerns all believers, men and women.)
Mina decides that the caller is unstable. Delirious. As for herself, she is just an ordinary person, slightly more knowledgeable than other women in her neighborhood, and she shares what she knows. That’s all. And she forgets. She has too much to do, watching over the children’s studies, taking care of her lesson plans, running a household.
A few days pass. Everyone knows the route she walks to the lycée where she teaches. One sunny morning, worried that she is late, she hurries down a road lined with bougainvilleas. Two strange men accost her, block her on either side. Each one takes out a gun. Each one aims for her temple, from up close. Mina’s head shatters.
This teacher . . . murdered. A few hours later, so many weeping students, running, overwhelmed, a whole school of little girls, troubled. Then a petrified silence throws itself onto the days that follow.
The storyteller steps in again—a Scheherazade in the age of ink, in the age of misery with a monkey’s face. Dread that spools into little round, worn-out words that are intoned almost sweetly. The voice does not grow louder, no. She remembers:
“My mother died this past Ramadan. She was growing weaker, had just turned eighty. My little sister didn’t leave her side. As for me, I would walk down from my place to the housing project where the old, small house was—where I was born, where I spent a happy childhood, where I also prepared all my tests, first as a professor, then a school inspector.
“The situation was bad on that day in this modest neighborhood. The military had its hands full. Terrorists had indicated that they were hiding out in different houses, taking families hostage or getting help from sympathizers. My mother’s house was in the middle of it all!
“That March evening, my sister called. ‘Mother is dying!’ I left my five children behind. ‘Don’t come with me! I’m going to walk there by myself, before curfew! If mother has to die, I must be by her side! She’s comforted me all my life!’ My husband wanted to come. ‘No,’ I insisted. ‘I want you to stay with the children.’
“With the traffic of the military trucks on the road, I don’t know how I got there. I heard they called women and children out from the targeted houses, then blew up the houses. Sometimes women who were sympathetic to the terrorists’ cause refused to come out, preferring to die with them. Or maybe they were kept back by force. Impossible to tell. I kept walking all the way to my mother’s house. She died in the middle of the night, without suffering (may God rest her soul!), her two daughters at her bedside . . . and the neighborhood was disrupted by commotion outside until dawn.
“Almost nobody came to the funeral the next day, alas. And Mother, who knew everyone here, whom everybody loved so much! At that time, who would have risked going out and coming?”
Story upon story framing the everyday, intoning it. Like gray or black pearls, episodes counted off, one by one. The storyteller dreams, goes away.
Women who are victims because of their knowledge, their profession, or their solidarity feel the constant sting of anxiety. The story will go on, it will continue, haltingly, enduring afflictions, deceptions, quelled beginnings, and insults swallowed . . . the story—not silence, nor mourning submission. In spite of everything, these words furiously level the bitter pain and capture the drop of light that is to be harvested from terror’s ink. At times, death unveils its face, its grin slashed in a single motion.
What are so many Algerian women waiting for? The young and old ones go to do their jobs—to school, to the hospital, to the office, or simply to the market to stock up on supplies. They go with their hearts in their throats, their teeth clenching the shred of white or black cloth that masks their face. Many among them have bare heads, their hair blowing in the wind, their gaze defying the danger.
I would have liked to sketch their silhouettes here, to make something tangible of their walk, keep them out-of-doors, even if the sun has blackened. I dream for them, I remember myself “in” them.
For the most part, they don’t see themselves as heroines or victims. Whether they are veiled or not, whether they remain in chains or brave the risks, they are alive, palpitating before the fatal blow destroys a son, a brother, or their own body.
Sometimes I tell myself, “You grasp them from afar, write them by placing yourself somewhere that is closest to their bodies—their hearts! . . .” What good is it to write them down—she who will die, she who will take refuge, she who will close in on herself, or she who will keep quiet, with downcast eyes, in order to survive?
After all, whatever approach is used to write their shuddering, the blood of the tongue—their own blood—does not run dry, no matter what tongue it is, nor what rhythm, nor what words are finally chosen.
II
Fiction’s head shatters. As with Mina, in Algiers.
Are the nouvelles presented here really “news” or simply “short stories,” imaginary fragments? If I want to turn my back on tragedy and the fetid odor of its dead ends, do I only need to dream of the past, whose violence and battles across centuries no longer threaten to splash blood onto my fingers, onto my words?
But the present . . . a reality so close in its upheaval and its everyday routine, where a few laughs, a hummed song escaping through the half-open window reaches any one of my characters walking past. The present? He will turn onto the next road over; a little farther off, in front of him, a car explodes. My character gets by with a few scrapes, but at the sight of a body that has been rent apart, a child facing him on the path stares at him, eyes glazed over.
No! Not the shrieking spectacle of death, not
the brush with its pathos, not its duration, a trail of soot that stains a child’s memory forever . . .
Fiction, this madcap ballerina, cavorts in front of this drama. She spins drunkenly all around the disaster, beyond an invisible circle of vulnerability. She believes she has trapped one of life’s fireflies, glowing a second just before all is lost, a gap that vociferates or that grasps you. It reels, perhaps, but does not fall headfirst over the precipice!
For reality (in my case, Algeria) only brings back to me, in flashes, mutilated bodies, faces contorted for long minutes in the wind of terror, anonymous faces, the murderers and the murdered glimpsed along the edge of the Ouarsenis woods, the ones I know, which, just as soon as they were reforested over these past thirty years, were once again torched with napalm! Algeria, funeral mask at the bottom of a fire . . .
I suddenly think about the writer Francis Ponge—“the master of still life in poetry,” as Michel Butor described him—during the years of the German occupation. While he was taking refuge (“replié” or “refugié,” they said at the time) in the middle of France with his family, he set out to write in 1942 . . . on soap: “At the time,” he remembers, “we were in the midst of war, that is to say of restrictions of all kinds, and soap, real soap, was particularly missed. Could this have been one of the unconscious causes for what I have to call my inspiration of soap?”