Before this working dialogue begins, I am aware, as I reflect for a moment, that I am directing silently and humbly; I am happy to be working with a natural actor, and I direct him by being an accomplice.
Yes, for a moment, noticing this, I am happy and regal. I have a calm power that comes from my sense of being forty (the age when every day one lives all the ages; the age of political majority, according to the Romans; the age for verbal prophecy, thought the Arabs; and for me, as it happened, the age when I entered into filmmaking, “realizing” through image and sound). I “direct,” therefore the way that, in bed, I would show the motions of love to someone, whose inexperience I would pardon, happy to lead him because I feel secure in the kingdom of fluidity. What strange work, what peace!
All the technicians are on the set. The generators that power the projectors deafen us with their constant rumbling. Silence inside me. I seem cold, neutral; just barely friendly. In any case, the others think of me as an “intellectual.” I know they are disoriented, of course, because for the first time a woman is “boss.”
But that is not where the distance between them and me lies. There is no one here who suspects that, after the months of preparation as I thought about this work, now, at the moment of “filming”—that is, of creating some new space — I am working as a woman. My quest is immersed in my physical rhythm, and listens to my ever more subtle sensations. What does “filming” mean for me if not trying to look every time with the first look, listen with the first listening? “Filming”: that is, first closing the eyes to hear better in the dark, and then opening them again only for the flickering instant of birth.
Two or three months before starting this work, I heard the news of Pasolini’s death on the radio. I was getting ready for a voluptuous siesta one Sunday afternoon after an excursion into the Sahel of Algiers along the blue-gray November roads. Pasolini dead. Instantly this bed was a place of confinement.
Ax stroke in my personal history (admittedly, the previous few months had been lived in conjugal blur … No! I thought to myself, if only the man I loved so much, who loved me so much, had made some gesture, a word, an impulse: Yes, Pasolini is dead and I am going to love you, — if he had kissed my eyelids as he murmured, Yes, Pasolini is dead. Grief-stricken, I told myself again, Good Lord, even couples have brotherly shadows, or else, what is the use? We would just see ourselves turn into the two sides of an oyster that closes! No, not my personal history! Never again the dream that lets its light drain away.
It may seem ridiculous that an Arab woman, one in love and loved too long — alas beloved and cursed with loving — one day decides, No, I will no longer make love this way because I have just learned that Pasolini was murdered! I do not care, they can make fun, you can make fun of me and say, “An Italian homosexual filmmaker has been murdered and you think you have somehow been the one hit …” I went on: Because they are going to rush to spit on his corpse: they killed him and they will aim to smear him. The fine moral order spreading its display all over the world! …
That is how it was. From that moment on I wanted one way or another to break the glass panes behind which I had too long been coiled.
Why Pasolini? That is how it was, there is no more to it than that … I, an Arab woman, writing classical Arabic poorly, loving and suffering in my mother’s dialect, knowing that I have to recapture the deep song strangled in the throat of my people, finding it again with images, with the murmur beneath images, I tell myself henceforth, I am beginning (or I am ending) because in a bed where I was preparing for love, I felt — twenty-four hours later and with the whole Mediterranean Sea between us — the death of Pasolini like a scream, an open-ended scream.
I also remember how, ten months later, my mother wept over the death of an Andalusian singer who was popular in Algiers: Dahmane Ben Achour. It was the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan. As the news was announced on the radio, a few minutes before the breaking of the fast, she simply wept, sitting up straight at the table, and we ate our dinner in the silence … I knew then, because of my mother’s long pedigree, that an artist does not die, not on the day of his death. Afterward, perhaps, after the mud and violence of others … My mother wept while the others broke the fast. And I wanted to hold on to the tears of my suddenly younger mother. I wanted to delve into the song … but how, with what unreal choreography: images of women’s bodies floating across patios, in the air trembling between marble statues, with the modulations of the baritone voice of the man who had just died!
I am really moving toward the work of image and sound. My eyes closed, I grope in the dark, seeking the lost echo of the lamentations that made tears of love flow, back at home. I seek this rhythm in my head … Only afterward will I try to take the gaze inward, see the essence, the structures, what takes flight beneath matter.
SECOND MOVEMENT: OF THE GRANDMOTHER AS A YOUNG BRIDE
OF THE GRANDMOTHER as a young bride: At fourteen she is given in marriage by her father — who was scarcely more than forty — to an old man, the city’s wealthiest man, and she becomes his fourth wife … Was she a little girl? Not at all. For four years she has been nubile. She lived up in the mountain hamlet near the most ancient sanctuary in the region, the one honoring Saint Ahmed or Saint Abdallah, the most firmly entrenched saint in local history. Her father is his descendent and is therefore the mokkadem, the man whose religious baraka is respected and who administers it naturally, petty nobility of the region, proud, stubborn, and calculating. Coming down into the city from her hamlet, she is proud as can be to be wearing the veil worn by city-women of the day, the veil that swallows up shoulders, bust, hips, on a body already wearing wide, puffed — out pants, obliterating the outline of the legs, the ones they call the “going-out sarouel.“ Wool on wool, the wide pleats that slowly fall and that take so long to prepare just before one goes out across the thresholds: wool on wool, even in summer. Silk and moiré will only replace rough and opaque wool twenty or thirty years later, at the end of the First World War!
So the little girl Fatima is like a normal adolescent as she comes to the city. It is 1896 and barely fifty years since the little city (called Caesarea, because it was formerly “Caesar’s city,” destroyed and brought back to life several times) became French, with a community of colonists from Provence and a small population of fishermen from Malta who live separately and are just barely beginning to put down roots. Ferhani, her father, has property, sharecroppers on the nearby hills, but a rather ordinary house in the ancient heart of the Arab quarter, sheltered by the ancient wall around it. He does not live there, except when he comes down on market day and spends just one night in the city. It makes him unhappy not to have a home in the city that is worthy of his rank. The people there (so many of them upstarts in these oppressive times) have absolutely no idea that up in the hills — that is, throughout the Dahra all the way to Miliana in the south and Ténès in the west — anyone who knows anything (naturally not the vagabonds and starving people wandering more and more along the roads, alas) recognizes him as the son of his father and of his father’s father and so on all the way back to the thirteenth-century saint, Ahmed or Abdallah! Consequently they kiss his hand; consequently they pay him rent when they come to the cradle of the family at the zaouia. As for Fatima, even as a young girl she had inherited a bit of her father’s pride, a less ostentatious version: timidity mixed with aloofness.