The Tunic of Nessus: Part II.

Writing the enemy's language is more than just a matter of scribbling down a muttered monologue under your very nose; to use this alphabet involves placing your elbow some distance in front of you to form a bulwark - however, in this twisted position, the writing is washed back to you.

  This language was imported in the murky, obscure past, spoils taken from the enemy with whom no fond word was ever exchanged... French, formerly the language of the law courts, used alike by judges and the convicted. Words of accusation, legal procedure, violence - that is the oral source of colonized people's French.

   As I come to the inevitable ceasefire at the end of every war, my writing is washed up on the deserted seashores of the present day and looks for a place where a linguistic armistice can be arranged, a patio with fountains playing where people come and go.

  This language was formerly used to entomb my people; when I write it today, I feel like the messenger of old, who bore a sealed missive which might sentence him to death or to the dungeon.

   By laying myself bare in this language I start a fire which may consume me. For attempting an autobiography in the former enemy's language....

After five centuries of Roman occupation, an Algerian named Augustine undertakes to write his own biography in Latin. Speaks of his childhood, declares his love for his mother and his concubine, regrets his youthful wild oats and tells how he was eventually consumed with passion for a Christian god .  And his writing presses into service, in all innocence, the same language as Caesar or Sulla - writers and generals of the successful 'African campaign'.

  The same language has passed from the conquerors to the assimilated people; has grown more flexible after the corpses of the past have been enshrouded in words... Saint Augustine's style is borne along his ecstatic search for God. Without this passion, he would be destitute again: 'I have become to myself the country of destitution.' If this love did not maintain him in a blissful transport, his writing would be a self-laceration!

  After the Bishop of Hippo Regius, a thousand years elapse. The Maghrib sees a procession of new invasions, new occupations... Repeated raids by the Banu Hilal tribesmen finally bleed the country white. Soon after this fatal turning point, the historian Ibn Khaldun, the innovatory author of The History of the Berbers, as great a figure as Augustine, rounds off a life of adventure and meditation by composing his autobiography in Arabic.  He calls it Ta' arif, that is to say, 'Identity'.

   As with Augustine, it matters little to him that he writes in a language introduced into the land of his fathers by conquest and accompanied by bloodshed! A language imposed by rape as much as by love...

  Ibn Khaldun is now nearly seventy years of age:  after an encounter with Tamerlane - his last exploit - he prepares to die in exile in Egypt.  He suddenly obeys a yearning to turn back on himself: and he becomes the subject and object of a dispassionate autopsy.

For my part, even where I am composing the most commonplace of sentences, my writing is immediately caught in the snare of  the old war between two peoples.  So I swing like a pendulum from the images of war (war of conquest or of liberation, but always in the past) to the expression of a contradictory, ambiguous love.

   My memory hides in a black mound of decomposing debris;  the sound which carries it swirls upward out of reach of my pen. 'I write', declares Michaux, 'to undertake a journey through myself.' I journey through myself at the whim of the former enemy, the enemy whose language I have stolen...

   Autobiography practised in the enemy's language has the texture of fiction, at least as long as you are desensitized by forgetting the dead the writing resurrects. While I thought I was undertaking a 'journey through myself', I find I am simply choosing another veil.  While I intended every step forward to make me more clearly identifiable, I find myself progressively sucked down into the anonymity of those women of old - my ancestors!

I am forced to acknowledge a curious fact:  the date of my birth  is eighteen hundred forty two, the year when General Saint- Arnaud arrives to burn down the zaouia of the Beni Menacer, the tribe from which I am descended, and he goes into raptures over the orchards, the olive groves, 'the finest in the whole of Algeria', as he writes in a letter to his brother - orchards which have now disappeared.

   It is Saint-Arnaud's fire that lights my way out of the harem one hundred years later: because its glow still surrounds me  I find the strength to speak. Before I catch the sound of my own voice I can hear the death-rattles, the moans of those immured in the Dahra mountains and the prisoners on the island of Sainte-Marguerite; they provide my orchestral accompaniment.  They summon me, encourage my faltering steps, so that at the given signal my solitary song takes off.

The language of the Others, in which I was enveloped from childhood, the gift my father lovingly bestowed on me, that language has adhered to me ever since like the Tunic of Nessus:  that gift from my father who, every morning, took me by the hand to accompany me to school. A little Arab girl, in a village of the Algerian Sahel...

Assia Djebar, "Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade".  Published originally in French, in 1985.

From "Fantasia: an Algerian cavalcade". by Assia Djebar

 Fifth Movement:  the Tunic of Nessus.  (Part I)

My father, a tall erect figure in a fez, walks down the village street; he pulls me by the hand and I, who for so long was so proud of myself - the first girl in the family to have French dolls bought for her, the one who had permanently escaped cloistering and never had to stamp and protest at being forced to wear the shroud-veil, or else yield meekly like any of my cousins, I who did deliberately drape myself in a veil for a summer wedding as if it were a fancy dress, thinking it most becoming - I walk down the street, holding my father's hand. Suddenly, I begin to have qualms: isn't it my 'duty' to stay behind with my peers in the gynaeceum? Later, as an adolescent, well nigh intoxicated with the sensation of sunlight on my skin, on my mobile body, a doubt arises in my mind: 'Why me? Why do I alone, of all my tribe, have this opportunity?'

I cohabit with the French language. I may quarrel with it, I may have bursts of affection, I may subside into sudden or angry silences - these are the normal occurrences in the life of any couple.  If I deliberately provoke an outburst, it is less to break the unbearable monotony, than because I am vaguely aware of having been forced into a 'marriage' too young, rather like the other little girls of my town who are 'bespoke' in their earliest childhood.

  Thus, my father, the schoolteacher, for whom a French education provided a means of escape from his family's poverty, had probably 'given ' me before I was 'nubile' - did not certain fathers abandon their daughters to an unknown suitor, or, as in my case, deliver them into the enemy camp? The failure to realize the implications of this traditional behaviour took on for me a different significance:  when I was ten or eleven, it was understood among  my female cousins that I was privileged to be my father's 'favourite' since he had unhesitatingly preserved me from cloistering.

   But marriageable royal princesses also cross the border, often against their will, in terms of treaties which end wars.

French is my 'stepmother' tongue. Which is my long-lost mother-tongue, that left me standing and disappeared? ... Mother tongue, either idealized or unloved, left to fairground barkers and jailers!...Burdened by my inherited taboos, I discover I have no memory of Arabic love-songs. Is it because I was cut off from this impassioned speech that I find the French I use so flat and unprofitable?

  The Arab poet describes the body of his beloved; the Andalusian exquisite composes treatise after treatise, listing a multiplicity of erotic postures; the Muslim mystic, dressed in woolen rags and satisfied with a handful of dates, expresses his thirst for God and his longing for the hereafter with a surfeit of extravagant epithets... The prodigality of this language seems to me somewhat suspect, consoling with empty words... Wealth squandered while they are being dispossessed of their Arab heritage.

  Words of love heard in a wilderness.  After several centuries of cloistering,  the bodies of my sisters have begun to come out of hiding here and there over the last fifty years; they grope around, blinded by the light, before they dare advance. Silence surrounds the first written words, and a few scattered laughs are heard above the groans.

  'L'amour, ses cris (s 'ècrit): my hand as I write in French makes the pun on love affairs that are aired; all my body does is to move forward, stripped naked,  and when it discovers the ululations of my ancestresses on the battlefields of old, it finds that it is itself at stake:  it is no longer a question of writing only to survive.

Long before the French landed in 1830, the Spanish established their presidios (garrison posts) as strategic points along the Maghribin coast - Oran, Bougie, Tangiers, Ceuta; the indigenous rulers in the interior continued to resist and the occupying forces frequently found their food supplies cut off; thus they adopted the tactics of the rebato: an isolated spot could be chosen from which to launch an attack, and to which they could retreat and use in the intervals between hostilities for farming or for replenishing supplies.

  This type of warfare, rapid offensives alternating with as swift retreats, allowed each side to continue fighting indefinitely.

After more than a century of French occupation - which ended not so long ago in such butchery - a similar no-man's land still exists between the French and the indigenous languages, between two national memories: the French tongue, with its body and voice, has established a proud presidio within me, while the mother tongue, all oral tradition, all rags and tatters, resists and attacks between two breathing spaces. In time to the rhythm of the rebato, I am alternately the besieged foreigner and the native swaggering off to die, so there is seemingly endless strife between the spoken and written word. 

From Assia Djebar, "Fantasia: an Algerian cavalcade".

"When I am growing up, shortly before my native land throws off the colonial yoke - while the man still has the right to four legitimate wives, we girls, big and little, have at our command four languages to express desire before all that is left to us is sighs and moans:  French for secret missives; Arabic for our stifled aspirations toward God-the-father, the God of the religions of the Book; Lybico-Berber which takes us back to the pagan idols - mother-gods - of pre-Islamic  Mecca.  The fourth language, for all females,  young or old, cloistered or half-emancipated, remains that of the body;  the body which male neighbors' and cousins' eyes require to be deaf and blind, since they cannot completely incarcerate it; the body which, in trances, dances or vociferations, in fits of hope or despair, rebels, and unable to read or write, seeks some unknown shore as destination for its message of love".

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