I do not record, alas, the words from noubas. The language is too scholarly for me to write, but I remember them. Wherever I go, a persistent voice, either a sweet baritone or a reckless soprano, sings them inside my head while I stroll through the streets of some city in Europe, or even in the first few steps into the first street of Algiers, where I am immediately aware of every prison, whether open to the sky or closed.
I write in the shadow of my mother, returned from her wartime travels, while I pursue my own travels in this obscure peace composed of silent internal warfare, divisions within, riots, and tumult in my native land.
I write to clear my secret path. I write in the language of the French pirates who, in the Captive’s tale, stripped Zoraidé of her diamond-studded gown, yes, I am becoming more and more a renegade in the so-called foreign language. Like Zoraidé, stripped. Like her I have lost the wealth I began with — in my case, my maternal heritage — and I have gained only the simple mobility of the bare body, only freedom.
A fugitive therefore, without knowing it. Because knowing this too well would make me silent, and the ink of my writing would dry too soon.
Arable Woman I
ON DECEMBER 18 of that year, I filmed the first shot of my life: A man sitting in a wheelchair has stopped at the entrance to a room; he is watching his wife sleep inside. He is unable to enter: The two steps up to the room are impassable for his wheelchair. Room like a cave, hot, so near and yet so far: the bed is big and low, surrounded by numerous white sheepskins that soften the harshness of the high walls of this peasant’s house. The sleeping woman has wrapped her hair the old way, tightly in a red scarf. The immobilized husband watches from a distance. His torso moves; his hand rests on the doorframe for a second, and that is the end of the first shot.
The next three are from the man’s point of view (he is an actor with sad blue eyes). The camera pans slowly, very slowly around the bed: in my mind, and later in the soundtrack, a low-pitched music curls and spirals. The gaze of the paralyzed man: This is the dance of impotent desire.
The Arab woman seems asleep, an almost traditional image of her wearing a red scarf, an elusive image. The first “shots” of my work show a clear defeat for the man. I said: “Action.” I was gripped by an emotion. As if all the women of all the harems had whispered “action” with me. Their complicity excites me. Only what their eyes see matters to me from now on. Resting on these images that I assemble with the help of their invisible presence over my shoulder.
This gaze, I claim it as mine. I see it as “ours.” A single gaze piercing the walls of past centuries, escaping beyond the tomb-houses of today, concentrated, seeking a place to alight. Giving pause to the rhythm of things, slowing its pace.
My elation persists. “Action!” My voice neutral. Around me is a crew of nineteen people, fourteen of them technicians. Two, besides me, are women: the one who does makeup and the script girl. Julien, the friend who is supposed to be my photographer, will shoot some pictures of the set during the next break. It is dark, it is cold amid all the commotion of getting started, and I could feel alone. But no. The man is looking at his wife, a distant image, as she sleeps, and I look at him look at her.
Community of women shut away yesterday and today, an image-symbol that is the true action, the drive behind this hunt for images that is beginning. A female body completely veiled in white cloth, her face completely concealed, only a hole left free for her eyes. Ghost who, reversing appearances, is rendered even more sexual by prohibition; shadowy shape that has strolled along for centuries, never screaming that we were enshrouded, never tearing off the veil and even our skin with it if required. This image is the reality of my childhood, and the childhood of my mother and my aunts, and my girl cousins who were sometimes the same age as me. Suddenly this scandal that I experienced as normal looms at the beginning of this quest: a single silhouette of a woman gathering in the folds of this shroud, her linen veil, the five hundred million or so segregated women in the Muslim world. Suddenly she is the one looking, but from behind the camera, she is the one devouring the world through a hole left in the concealment of a face.
This hole is the only lance she has to throw out toward space. For me the eye, questioning from behind and in spite of all the screens, was no longer there just so that the wretched woman could see her way: just a bit of light, a gleam to see where to go and how to escape, as she walked away from man’s gaze.
“Because they spy, they watch, they search, they snoop! Smothered this way you go to the market, the hospital, the office, the workplace. You hurry; you try to make yourself invisible. You know that they have learned to make out your hips or your shoulders through the cloth, that they are judging your ankles, that in case the wind lifts your veil, they hope to see your hair, your neck, your leg. You cannot exist outside: the street is theirs, the world is theirs. Theoretically you have the right to equality, but shut up ‘inside,’ confined. Incarcerated.”
This artificial gaze that they have left you, smaller, a hundred, a thousand times more restricted than the one given you by Allah at birth, this strange slit that the tourists photograph because they think it is picturesque to have a little black triangle where the eye should be, this miniature gaze will henceforth be my camera. All of us from the world of the shadow women, reversing the process: We are the ones finally who are looking, who are beginning.
FIRST MOVEMENT: OF THE MOTHER AS TRAVELER
FOR A LITTLE OVER three months they had not heard a thing from Salim: no postcard from some little town in France — with that same illegible writing describing the weather or what he seemed to be studying; nothing, not even a telephone call like ones they had had two or three times, late at night, when a stranger’s voice said, in Arabic: “He is all right, he wants you to be told not to worry.” Nothing: silence from the mails, silence from the phones.
Though our mother was thinking about it, she did not dare discuss it with her husband. Every morning she would watch him go out very early for a few minutes and return with the two local newspapers. Anxiously he would skim them and she would end up by calmly asking, while she served him, “Nothing new?” They were both at that moment thinking of their son. The father was silent and then calmly replied, “Nothing!” He would, of course, discuss yesterday’s attempted assassinations, the military operations, or how the press assessed what was going on with his colleagues. She, however, would soon leave for the market there in the basement, under the housing project where they lived. They and two other families were the only native-born teachers living there among the hundred Europeans. She would take the occasion to visit with her French friend, the woman who ran the pharmacy next to the market — just taking the time between two clients to smile and say hello to her. That would reassure the mother!
Three months and more had gone by with no sign at all from Salim, from France. Eastern France, the father assumed, the one time he opened up about it in front of his wife and his brother-in-law who was visiting: “Yes, we are telling the neighbors, or at least the Europeans, when they make polite inquiries, that, yes, he is at university in Paris. But we know perfectly well that he is not in Paris anymore, or going to classes, even though he needs his student-identification papers for military deferment and to move around! We know … well, really, what can we know these days about our sons, about ourselves!”