So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar

Author:Assia Djebar
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781609803056
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-04T06:00:00+00:00

When mid-July arrived in 1959, the father, emotional over letting them go on such a long trip alone, accompanied the mother and his daughter to the boat. During the crossing in their second-class cabin the mother watched over her daughter, the daughter watched over her mother—she was elegant and seemed so young. The pieds-noirs passengers, especially, thought the adolescent, would never guess that this lady in a flowered summer suit just a few weeks earlier, in Caesarea, had been just as elegant but in a different way. Reigning in the first rank of guests seated like gods around the musicians as they celebrated the seventh day after the birth of her youngest nephew, she was an Andalusian Moorish woman! In which place are we playing a role? Is it there among the family or here on this boat among these passengers who think we are tourists like themselves? And the mother, who stayed in the cabin, absolutely convinced that she was going to be seasick despite the sea’s being clear and so calm, the mother advised her young daughter, who wanted to go up on deck, “Be careful! Don’t talk to strangers, but if it becomes unavoidable then don’t mention the real reason for our trip, that is, your brother! Not that you should be ashamed, to the contrary! We are proud of it! But you never know. We are two women alone, and among ‘them’ they might take us for what they call fellaghas! Remember, we are going for our health to a treatment center in the Vosges, and besides, it’s really the truth!” She delivered her advice in Arabic, then lay down. It had been bound to happen: Unable to sleep, nauseated, she would not doze off until they took the train from Marseilles the next day. Her daughter acquiesced and went up on deck, where she stayed alone for hours, filling her eyes full of the night that made the waves sparkle.

Two days later, silent, united, and so weary, they arrived at the clinic at Trois-Épis. They expected to spend three weeks there. The first week they expected the letter from Metz. It came.

Salim had written them (in his splotchy handwriting, stamped over here and there by the prison censor) advising them not to come see him. He was well; he said so two or three times. But he explained that the present conditions of detention were very harsh, that his “brothers” (that was his word, just before something deleted by the censor), “forty of them” he said after the crossed-out word, which his young sister finally read or guessed at, “are organizing!”

“Yes, I’m sure that what he wrote is that they are organizing, and those men, the administration, crossed out the word!”

“Which means?” the mother asked, and her daughter tentatively explained that probably the prisoners were going on strike, they must be demanding political rights or even just a better quality of life.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to see us,

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