Arrow of Silence

Enemy. In Arabic, the word is l’edou. In Algeria, l’edou signifies the French during their postwar occupation and whoever was on the other side during the more recent civil wars between fundamentalist Muslims and the military. But one day, in a small town at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, while accompanying her mother-in-law to the ritual baths, the narrator of Assia Djebar’s novel “So Vast the Prison” discovers a more startling meaning for l’edou: husband. “This word, l’edou,” she writes, “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. . . .”

As an “arrow of silence,” this polymorphously lyrical novel by a woman whose fiction, poetry and films have won her acclaim as Algeria’s foremost literary voice, penetrates many layers of storytelling. The crust of the book holds a story of an infatuation. The narrator, occasionally named Isma (“the name” in Arabic), has fallen in love. She is an Algerian woman, but she is a woman of the world as well. Born four years before the outbreak of World War II into a family whose maternal line boasts links to both Berbers and Andalusian moriscos expelled from Spain 200 years earlier.

At 37, this cosmopolite with a job in a research institute in a city on the north coast of Algeria, a husband who directs an international arts festival and a daughter who takes piano lessons is suddenly drawn to a journalist 10 years her junior. The Beloved, she calls him with the ambiguous melody of the Song of Songs. She chats on the telephone with the Beloved, as twilight descends outside their darkened offices. She turns up at his house on the beach. She dances for him, in the way Algerian women dance for one another, “dancing their grief and their need to get out, to fling themselves into the distance, into the beating sun.” And finally she admits her infatuation to her husband, who beats her until she’s bloody.

Yet there has been no adultery, no physical contact at all with the Beloved, not even the innocent cheek kisses that the French brought with them to the northern shore of Africa. Isma has not even admitted her love to the Beloved. It is an Isolde love, a transfiguring love that can find its release only in death. But death is not an option for an Arab woman. “Because there is no Isolde in Islam, because there is only sexual ecstasy in the instant, in the ephemeral present, because Muslim death, no matter what they say, is masculine.”

No sooner has Isma told her tale, however, then “So Vast the Prison” shoots into another layer, the layer of history, to the time of Cervantes, to the time of the Romans in Africa. Like the best novels, “So Vast the Prison” stretches well beyond the boundaries of story and character. Flashback becomes another name for the examination, not just of the story, but of the history, psychology, religion and the origins of the drama that led Isma’s mother-in-law and the other women in the baths to refer to their husbands as the “enemy.”

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Back and forth, down to one layer and then up again, Isma’s mind floats around the theme of colonization, from the Roman consul Scipio’s destruction of Carthage through the war of independence to Algeria’s most recent internecine barbarities. Yet, as she leaves her family for “exile” in France, colonization takes on fresh meaning for Isma. Not just the subjugation of one nationality by another, one religious group by another, colonization also covers the abduction and subordination of women by men, whether those men be husbands, fathers, sons or lovers.

Although the arrow of the novel seems to point to a feminist core, “So Vast the Prison” is so much more. Djebar’s book is tinted with a language that owes much to the Andalusian ancestors, to the colonial ambitions of the Arabs from the east and the French from the north and the frenzied wailings of Berber women mourning their own:

Meqqwer lhebs iy inyan

Ans’ara el ferreg felli!

cries a cousin from the mountains. “So vast the prison crushing me, Release, where will you come from?”

Release, of course, comes through language, all the languages that have come from and to this desert country, from the Punic language and culture that the Roman Senate thought to have buried forever with its famous vow “Carthago delenda est” to the language of observation, the language of the cinema that Isma adopts after she leaves her husband and becomes a film director. Observing instead of being observed, trading the narrow slit above the veil for the secret vantage point of the viewfinder. “Our most secret writing, as ancient as Etruscan or the writing of the runes, but unlike these a writing still noisy with the sounds and breath of today, is indeed the legacy of a woman in the deepest desert.”

So vast is this desert that it includes the France to which Isma and Djebar flee and perhaps the Louisiana where Djebar teaches. “For a long time I believed that writing meant dying,” the narrator confesses in her opening lines, “slowly dying, groping to unfold a shroud of sand or silk over things that one had felt trembling and pawing the ground.” By the end of the novel, in the verse that closes the book, both narrator and author know, in the vastness of exile in Paris, that writing means singing and dancing a ring around history, that language itself is the arrow pointed at the enemy.

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.

Is it any surprise that the most explosive literature is found on the fault lines between cultures, written by such lyrical fugitives?