Her writing is erased. No one can read it, so now it is useless. She is indeed the first Algerian woman to write — Zoraidé who meets, if not with Don Miguel, then at least with Don Quixote’s captive. The writing of a fugitive: a writing whose very essence is ephemeral. And the Knight of the Sad Countenance will be her first witness in the Christian world, while the language buzzing or written all around her will, for the present, allow her only a silent gaze. Which is, consequently, the end of the initial dialogue, if not of the dazzled, then of the dazzling, presence of the traveler.
All up and down the Mediterranean this is the way the first exchange takes place: a portentous intermingling of the sexes — first of languages, then gazes, before the bodies collapse into each other. An ambiguous transmutation of roles: the woman free and the man a slave, the first image of the couple in this shift in worlds, that will — after numerous fluctuations, including a twofold and simultaneous servitude — result in a different equilibrium. The couple will be composed of the strange, foreign, Moorish woman — a Christian wife who is neither free nor a slave — and the soldier freed from his chains, but not at all from wretchedness and uncertainty …
From the start the dominant theme of this loosely connected tale concerns a woman writing in Arabic, writing that on several occasions takes on weight by the addition of a gift of gold. The woman who writes is the one who pays, but she is also the thief and traitor in the eyes of her father and her family. She is the woman who, in the country garden in the Sahel of Algiers, dreams up the plot and sets it in motion, then, in the middle of the night, collapses in the arms of the stranger, and yet persists in her wish to run away. The journey she began wearing a gown studded with diamonds will end with her in the clothes of a pauper; her face veiled as it had been at home, she will make her way riding on the back of a donkey: and so exoticism creates a backwash.
Zoraidé’s story, told, with her present but silent, by the former captive to the guests at a country inn where Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are staying, is indeed the metaphor for Algerian women writing today — among them myself.
My family’s city, the former Caesarea, was repopulated by hundreds of Moriscos, the people who were expelled en masse in Cervantes’s time, in a final and profound bloodletting inflicted by Spain on itself at the beginning of the seventeenth century. They found refuge in the cities of the northern Maghreb, one of which was my very ancient little city, the romanized ex-capital.
These families, therefore, made Zoraidé’s journey, but in the opposite direction, bringing with them the Mohammedan faith that for three or four generations, since 1492, they had been practicing in secret. Amid the general pushing and shoving of the exoduses and sea adventures, they in turn will look like renegades …
The women of my city in those days, these refugee women, in the modest patios of impoverished houses, make jasmine and lemon trees bloom again, while their men, when they do not choose to cultivate trees on the surrounding mountainous slopes, return to the sea for expeditions of revenge and pillage, as new pirates …
Three centuries after these journeys from which they will never return, just before the 1920s, my mother was born there, in the midst of these families who, with a naïve pride, still displayed the keys to their lost houses in Córdoba and Grenada. What was this legacy that she inherited and what did she transmit to me of this memory already covered in sand? A few details about the embroidery of women’s costumes, some residual accent distorting the local dialect, Arabic-Andalusian speech kept as long as possible … Above all, the music known as andalouse that was called “classical,” the music that simple artisans — Muslim and Jewish cobblers, barbers or tailors — practiced conscientiously whenever they gathered in the evening. At the same time, among the groups of women, the cantilenas of women musicians with their graceful, languorous rhythms maintained rhetorical figures, an old-fashioned prettiness, and the sweetness that masked the pain of the glorious epoch created by the intermingling of races, languages, and knowledge back there.
Thus I spent the summers of my early childhood surrounded by women who sang or embroidered. These odalisques young or old of a city closed in upon itself, where only the lute could complain out loud, passed on to me this still flickering light from the women’s Andalusia that still provided us with a little nourishment across the centuries.
My mother, accompanying my father, who taught French in one of the new villages of colonization, found herself isolated as a citydweller. Among all the articles of her trousseau, the velvet caftans, the ancient jewels, the rare boxes, my mother set the greatest store by her books of music. Though she could not write French, only later learning to speak but not write it from the Frenchwomen who were her neighbors and later from her children, she would open these notebooks where, as an adolescent, she had written down the poetry of the noubas of Andalusia. She knew the couplets by heart, and could read and write them in Arabic, so she could not be classified as illiterate, though otherwise she might have been so in our circle.
During the years of the Algerian war this writing would prove to have a meaningful destiny! One summer, a summer of journeys for my mother, who had removed her traditional veil to visit her only son in France, where he was imprisoned in Lorraine, French soldiers broke into our apartment (shut down while she was gone), to search the place. At the height of the wanton destruction usual in such cases, they ripped up the books of Andalusian music, interpreting this writing that they found mysterious as the message of some nationalist complicity …
In the first days of independence my mother told me with tears in her eyes the grief she felt over the violent attack on this writing. Her sorrow might have seemed incongruous during those days when all around us so many women were weeping — some for a son, others for a brother. Nevertheless because this writing had come so far, navigating from beyond the centuries and shores, having been transmitted from woman to woman, some of whom were in flight, the others locked up, I in turn felt my heart in a stranglehold.
“You knew those texts by heart,” I said faintly.
“But I had written them.” She sighed. “I was fifteen at the time; I cared more about them than about my jewels!”
My mother, who wrote Arabic but had shifted to oral French, probably saw herself as no longer able to write the language of her learned culture with as sure a hand. Although she no longer wore the veil, either on her face or on her body, and although she had traveled from one end to the other of France to visit its prisons, my mother, the bearer of this ancestral legacy, suddenly saw the legacy erased and felt an ineffable sadness.
The end of a woman’s writing, as if, as her body begins to move, no longer wearing her grandparents’ veil, her writing hand then lost both its passion and its sense of its own destiny! Zoraidé has thus returned, but in the opposite direction; with a new tale of the Captive that could have been about the son freed from yesterday’s French prisons but which becomes the tale of the daughter taking on the mother’s status …
Fugitive without knowing it, or rather without knowing it yet. At least up to this precise instant in which I am relating these comings and goings of women in flight from the long — ago or recent past. Up to the moment in which I become conscious of my permanent condition as a fugitive — I would even say: as someone rooted in flight — just because I am writing and so that I write.