Dispatches from the Republic of Letters by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Translation from the German by William Riggan

Barbara Frischmuth (b. 1941) is an Austrian writer of novels, short stories, and plays as well as a translator. Two of her novels and a selection of short stories have appeared in English translation by Ariadne Press.

Assia Djebar’s Lyrical Longing and Pitiless Pen

William H. Gass

The lyricism which comes through the French to us is indeed like a painter’s light and falls softly through a curtain on Assia Djebar’s affecting scenes, as if we were supposed to see a woman bathing in a Pierre Bonnard or a dancer in a Degas and not a woman weeping in her kitchen, calling out to Allah for relief, the light letting us wonder what her trouble is since she has a shower and a sink—a porcelain sink and a pink marble tub, built-in cabinets to boot—good fortune could not have a broader smile—and a husband with the easy name of “he” whose feet at least come and go, go, god be praised, into the masculine monitored streets on masculine business concerning masculine affairs, into those vast spaces a male god made.

Assia Djebar makes it clear to us, who have a different history and live in a different time, what, for an Algerian woman, her apartment is—her whole small world—because even when she leaves it, she is not allowed to touch that great outdoors, ideally not even with her eyes.

In Afghanistan unveiled women have been beaten with radio antennas ripped from parked cars; adulterers will be stoned as in the good old days; surgeons are forbidden to operate upon female bodies, bodies which have been turned into sheeted ghosts more menacing than lepers; women’s schools are closed; and in Iran, bicycle seats, since they resemble saddles, are denied a woman’s weight. And why are saddles denied them? They may not rise so high or ride astride a stallion. The gradient of oppression is long and steep; the climb, in those layered gowns, is difficult. In every country, someone no longer a child is swaddled, another injustice is suffered, varied tyrannies are endured.

In their apartments, even those women whose senses have been awakened by love can only carry them like bedclothes into the courtyard to be aired. How many paces from one room to another? How many days will pass before, at night, the cool air comes? Here escape is measured by degrees, as though digging a tunnel: how far shall she walk before removing her veil? It is a world where women watch women, where mothers try to tie their daughters to custom as much as the men do. A curse, a prayer, jostle for the same breath, and both are useless. Was it better when there was no alternative to be dreamt, to be glimpsed on television, to be encountered in some city square?

Assia Djebar, compelled by circumstances to write about the daily life of Algerian women (her inherited subject) in a tongue which is not theirs, has, nevertheless, with her novels and stories, her poetry, a play, and her films, exposed the plight of her countrywomen to the wide world.

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