So Vast the Prison Read online

  Copyright © Éditions Albin Michel S.A., 1995

  English translation © 1999 by Seven Stories Press

  Originally published in French by Albin Michel S.A., 1995, as Vaste est la prison.

  First trade paperback edition, May 2001.

  This translation published with the help of a grant from the French Ministry of Culture—Centre national du livre.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  http://www.sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Djebar, Assia, 1936–

  [Vaste est la prison. English]

  So vast the prison: a novel / Assia Djebar; translated by Betsy Wing.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-60980-305-6

  I. Wing, Betsy. II. Title.

  PQ3989.2.D57 V3713 1999

  843—dc21

  99-041329

  College professors may order examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles for a free sixmonth trial period. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com/textbook, or fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.

  v3.1

  TO SAKINA AND TO JALILA

  “So vast the prison crushing me,

  Release, where will you come from?”

  —BERBER SONG

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Silence of Writing

  PART ONE WHAT IS ERASED IN THE HEART

  1 The Siesta

  2 The Face

  3 Space, Darkness

  4 The Dance

  5 The Absence

  6 Before, After

  7 The Goodbye

  PART TWO ERASED IN STONE

  1 The Slave in Tunis

  2 The Renegade Count

  3 The Archeologist Lord

  4 Destruction

  5 The Secret

  6 The Stele and the Flames

  7 The Deported Writer

  ABALESSA

  PART THREE A SILENT DESIRE

  “FUGITIVE WITHOUT KNOWING IT”

  Arable Woman I

  First Movement: Of the Mother as Traveler

  Arable Woman II

  Second Movement: Of the Grandmother as a Young Bride

  Arable Woman III

  Third Movement: Of the Mother as Little Girl

  Arable Woman IV

  Fourth Movement: Of the Narrator in the French Night

  Arable Woman V

  Fifth Movement: Of the Narrator as an Adolescent

  Arable Woman VI

  Sixth Movement: Of Desire and its Desert

  Arable Woman VII

  Seventh Movement: Shadows of Separation

  PART FOUR THE BLOOD OF WRITING

  Yasmina

  The Blood of Writing—Final

  GLOSSARY

  About the Author and Translator

  THE SILENCE OF WRITING

  FOR A LONG TIME I believed that writing meant dying, slowly dying, groping to unfold a shroud of sand or silk over things that one had felt trembling and pawing the ground. A burst of laughter—frozen. The beginnings of a sob—turned into stone.

  Yes, for a long time I wanted to lean against the dike of memory, or against the shadowy light of its other side, to be gradually penetrated by its cold, because as I wrote I recalled myself.

  And life dissipates; its living trace dissolves.

  Writing about the past, my feet wrapped up in a prayer rug which was not even a jute or horsehair mat tossed down somewhere on the dust of a dawn road or at the foot of a crumbling dune under the immense sky at sunset.

  The silence of writing, the desert wind turning its inexorable millstone, while my hand races and the father’s language (the language now, moreover, transformed into a father tongue) slowly but surely undoes the wrapping cloths from a dead love; and so many voices spatter into a lingering vertiginous mourning, way behind me the faint murmur of ancestors, the ululations of lament from veiled shadows floating along the horizon—while my hand races on …

  For a long time I believed that writing meant getting away, or at the very least, leaping out under this immense sky, into the dust of the road along the foot of the crumbling dunes … For a long time.

  During that period, almost fifteen years ago, every Saturday afternoon, I used to go to the hammam at the ancient heart of a small Algerian city at the foot of the Atlas Mountains.

  I went with my mother-in-law, who would meet her friends there in the mist and the cries of children in the hot steam room. Some of these older women, matrons parading around in their striped tunics, made the bathing ceremony an interminable ritual, with its solemn liturgy and melancholy languor.

  There one encountered mothers also, humble, worn out, and surrounded by their brood, and there were sometimes also young, harshly beautiful women (whose behavior the distrustful bourgeois matrons viewed with suspicion). Ostentatiously immodest, they would remove every hair from their bodies but not the heavy gold jewelry that still sparkled around their necks and naked, wet arms … I would wind up being the only one to make polite conversation with them afterward in the large, cold room.

  Like many of the women, I felt the pleasure of the baths upon leaving them. Carpeted with mats and mattresses, the antechamber became a haven of delights where you were served peeled oranges, open pomegranates, and barley water to your heart’s content. Perfumes mingled above the bodies of sleeping women and engulfed the shivering ones, who slowly dressed as they spun their colorful threads of gossip.

  I stretched out, I dozed, I listened. My mother-in-law spread out her satin undergarments and taffeta robes. She kept a motherly watch over me as she greeted this or that neighbor or young beauty passing by. Then in a low voice she would recount for me the details of their ancestry. I surrendered to the hubbub and murmuring warmth. When finally my kinswoman began to unfold her creamy white wool veil and wrap it around herself, I in turn would get ready. The time to leave had come. Then I would play the role of silent companion. No veil, of course, but taciturn. Attentive, while the heavy door in the back opened slightly from time to time to exhale steam and distant sound like breath from a magic lair …

  One day an amply endowed lady in the splendor of her fifties, cheeks pink with heat and her forehead crowned with a white taffeta headdress fringed in shades of purple, began the lengthy formulas of farewell.

  My mother-in-law, who enjoyed her company, wanted her to stay longer.

  “Another fifteen minutes, O light of my heart,” she insisted.

  The other one, exasperated, made a face and excused herself in a scornful voice. This woman who seemed so expert in affectation ended her list of justifications by letting slip a stark expression.

  “Alas, unfortunately”—she sighed dramatically—“I am fettered.”

  “You, fettered?” her friend exclaimed, filled with admiration, as if she were in the presence of a queen.

  “Yes, I am,” retorted the lady through her immaculate veil. She then closed the matter by concealing her face entirely with a haughty gesture. “I cannot possibly stay later today. The enemy is at home!”

  She left.

  “The enemy?” I asked, slowly turning toward my mother-in-law.

  The word l’e’dou, resonant in Arabic, had sounded a dissonate note.

  My companion helplessly contemplated the complete astonishment that filled my eyes. She f
orced a half smile; perhaps she felt also at that moment a sort of shame.

  “Yes, ‘the enemy,’ ” she whispered. “Don’t you know how women in our town talk among themselves?” (My silence continued thick with questions.) “Don’t you understand? By enemy, she meant her husband.”

  “Her husband, the enemy? She doesn’t seem so unhappy!”

  My naïveté suddenly seemed to irritate my mother-in-law.

  “Her husband is no different from any other husband! ‘Enemy’ is just a manner of speaking. Women, as I said before, have called them that for ages … without the men knowing it. I, of course—”

  I interrupted her with a gesture as we stood up. My mother-in-law was a saint: Even had she had a real enemy, she would have called him “my lord.” As for her husband, a hard though fair man, she served him with unfailing dignity.

  This word, l’e’dou, I first heard in this way, in the damp of the vestibule from which women arrived almost naked and left enveloped head to toe. The word enemy, uttered in that moist warmth, entered me, strange missile, like an arrow of silence piercing the depths of my then too tender heart. In truth the simple term, bitter in its Arab flesh, bored endlessly into the depths of my soul, and thus into the source of my writing …

  Suddenly one language, one tongue, struck the other inside me. The voice of a woman who could have been my maternal aunt came to shake the tree of my hidden hope. My silent quest for light and shade was thrown off balance, as if I had been exiled from the nurturing shore, orphaned.

  The word spoken by the older woman in her veil who had been smiling just minutes before, certainly no victim, but comfortable in her role as a city-dweller, peaceable and somewhat affected, this word—not one of hatred, no, rather one of despair long frozen in place between the sexes—this word left in its wake within me a dangerous urge to self-erasure …

  This lady from the baths left in a dignified manner. Shortly afterward my mother-in-law and I followed. I, speechless and, as the next few years would show, stripped bare, drowned mourning for things unknown and for hope.

  Was that why I began to mistrust writing? It had no shadow? It dried things up so fast? I discarded it.

  Those years were not really years of silence or depression: Inside my ear and heart grated the gift of the unknown woman whose voice tormented me. Through her the mother tongue had shown me her teeth, inscribing within me a deadly bitterness … Where was I to find the thick undergrowth within from now on, how was I to open a narrow corridor into the warm, black tenderness, whose glowing secrets and gleaming words piled thick and deep?

  Would I not have to beg, plunged into the darkness of the lost language and its hardened heart that I had found at the hammam that day?

  PART ONE

  WHAT IS ERASED

  IN THE HEART

  “But what is becoming of me now

  that makes me dream of you?

  As streams bear me along,

  there—the end of something,

  something unfolding like Asia.”

  —HÖLDERLIN

  En bleu adorable

  Oh, is this your buried treasure?

  The light in the heart.”

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF

  A Haunted House

  1

  THE SIESTA

  A SIESTA, A LONG SIESTA, one day in early November … as if this rest came after six, nine months, no, a year, or to be precise thirteen months, thirteen months of soaking—the rising of an insidious flood with moments of inertia, a growing inner swell, swelling in imperceptible vibrations, in prickles. Moments of respite intervene, bright intervals of apathy, a flash of sudden winter sun inside the heart, and once again the fever rises, its exhausted gnawing away, its relaxation of laboring muscles … And the fierce refusals of I don’t know what, the repressed trembling, something obscurely digging away inside me, my hard refusal in no way conquering the urgent tide, softly violent, obstinate, an anonymous infiltrating passion carving its design. A mask, that’s it. Heroically I manage to keep the mask on. My words are veiled and I can make my laughter—when it’s not fake, when it’s not afraid to zigzag along—burst out higher up, along some beam of distant light, against the breaking seas of scattered conversations … Yes, after burying everything dug up deep inside me, the darkness of turmoil engulfed in civility, behind my everyday activities and my absent body’s comings and goings, after thirteen long, slow months passed in this manner, after all that, a siesta, just one siesta, one November day in the family house—an Andalusian song plays on the radio, a rebec hoarsely accompanying the baritone’s voice, and from the kitchen I can hear dishes clattering, the dull thump of cans, then a steady stream of water; they must be washing the tiles, at the door a jingling bell rings, whoever has just arrived stops and stands in the vestibule, a child whines, the polite voices of relatives intertwine their greetings; a moment later, in the room next to me, the rustle of an adolescent girl folding silky underthings, her light laughter cut short as she cautiously closes the nearby door. I doze throughout, my body crumpled in sudden lassitude as if exhausted from a race stretching on for days on end, nonstop, like breathlessness that has reached its limit, and I plunge irrevocably into the blur of a voracious nap.

  I am lying on a narrow divan in my father’s library; his prayer rug is tossed partly across a nearby chair; the shutters facing me are closed; behind them I feel the presence of the staircase to the little garden with its jasmine and hollyhocks flattened, no doubt, by the not yet fading sun. I can hear the dog outside, chasing flies—and I lose myself, sinking down into sleep inside this house that is also a boat. A two- or three-hour siesta. One sunny day in November. An unadventurous day.

  I awake to the layered silence of the house, which suddenly seems deserted. Someone must have thrown a rough wool blanket over me. Astonished, I sit straight up. What’s going on? A moment of uncertainty: the light coming through the window is different, not weaker, different. I make an effort to try to understand, then very gradually, uneasily, I sense finally with certainty, something both new and vulnerable, a beginning of something, I don’t know what, something strange. Is it color, sound, odor? How can I isolate the sensation? And this “something” is inside me and at the same time it envelops me. I am carrying some change inside me, and it floods through me.

  Everything around me, the furniture, the rustic library, the white room, everything seems lit by some pure iridescence. All because in that instant I feel new. I discover an amazing and abrupt revitalization within.

  Awake and happy at five in the afternoon. Awake, washed, arisen as if from a long illness. Azure space envelopes me, the air still. The facing window is still there, unchanged, behind it the stone staircase and its jasmine, its hollyhocks. The dog comes back, I hear him again … Life goes on, distant. The world stands still and trembles like some invisible, giant creature about to become a statue; I stare wide-eyed. Space gapes open around me; I sit, still dazed. In front of the shutters a diagonal strip of golden dust sparkles. Everything fits.

  Then life takes off once more, flooding; glissando. I feel I grasp its weave, the beating of a secret heart, bursting with darkness … There had been this brief halt to revive me! Here I am, awake now, resuscitated, my body intact and serene, at five in the afternoon.

  I get up from the divan. I contemplate the blank day. I make no plans, I move about for the sheer pleasure of it. I dress in order to feel my legs, my arms, my shoulders, my skin beneath the cool cloth. There is no need to look at myself in a full-length mirror. I walk through the other rooms greeting my relatives; I listen to the muffled and politely appropriate things they say. I answer, distant, but not at all absentminded, somewhat ceremonious myself in turn, but really there, satisfied with this conventional present moment yet seeing at the same time its precariousness. The others’ façades; they could be simulacra: bizarre projections, moving along and reveling in some ephemeral realm. Nonetheless I join in the usual things, ridiculous though they are, and, overcome by som
e unwarranted benevolence, I am amused by them. Perhaps we will all be caught up in a whirlwind, some instant dissolution: do we not in fact live on the edge of unforeseeable collapse, under the threat of imminent disaster?

  All this time I cannot forget the strangeness, the miracle of my awakening in the library. I gradually learn how to inhabit myself, in the first stages of calm stability: the reassuring density of others floods back, as well as the weight of things. I slowly confirm this for myself as if, before, their physical shape and substance had been their mere obstructions.

  One more instant and I might have thought I was the prisoner of some strange, huge picture projected against the void. What if I experimented by rebelling against appearances?

  Relief sweeps over me: I am no longer living “before,” I am no longer ill, I have left the dream. A thirteen-month-long dream. How comforting it is just to exist: an empty room; the distant voices of the family women; a visitor saying goodbye; outside, the sun setting suddenly, the first lamp glowing. I get dressed; I choose a new blouse; tonight I’m dining at the home of friends. Probably there will be people I don’t know: the ordinary events of social life—its reassuring little surprises!

  The evening is spent in chatter and smoke, in a lull of laughter and few words, in bursts of music that make you want to dance, and every now and then the vividness of my earlier vision as I emerged from my siesta returns. In this room, amid faces that are indifferent or polite, I can see that, ever since this afternoon’s awakening, I am free of influence, I am myself, full of emptiness, available and tranquil, starving for the outside and serene … Not like before! “Before”—what was that like? What was I then, what person? How was I incomplete? What obsession tormented me? What was that uncontrollable quivering of skin, of mouth, the fingers of a hand kept out of sight, the shawl suffocatingly tight … What was that, over and over, at least once a day, or ten times the same day? That was “before”: the inner opacity that had to be stifled deep inside and smothered. Before, there was a struggle with neither enemy nor object; before, there was passion fiercely denied, fervor churning through you and the heart reeling.