Stolen lives : twenty years in a desert jail by Oufkir Malika 1953-;Fitoussi Michèle & Fitoussi Michèle

Author:Oufkir, Malika, 1953-;Fitoussi, Michèle & Fitoussi, Michèle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Oufkir, Malika, 1953-, Women political prisoners
Publisher: New York : Talk Miramax Books/Hyperion
Published: 1999-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY YEARS IN PRISON

surrounded by darkness. As if I were a ball falling down a bottomless well and bouncing off the walls, boiti^, being, being.

We were becoming progressively immured in a silence broken only by the mouhazzins footsteps, their whisdes, the janghng of their keys, the singing of the birds, the braying of a donkey we called Cornelius, at around 4 a.m., or the rustHng of the palm trees in the wind. The rest of the day we didn't hear a sound.

We gradually forgot the hubbub of the city, the murmur of conversation in the cafes, the ringing phone, car horns, all those familiar sounds that are part of everyday life and which we had so sorely missed.

Mimi was the one who had an infallible sense of time. She calculated it from the sun's rays that filtered through our tiny window. Whenever we asked her the time, at any point in the day, she would poke her head out from under her covers and say:

'Ten past three,' or 'A quarter past four.'

She was never wrong.

We were allowed a small packet of Tide each month, with which we had to wash ourselves, our clothes and the pots and pans. We used salt to clean our teeth. At one point we had the bright idea of cleaning them with earth, as we sometimes did with the plates. But one morning Abdellatif woke up with his mouth purple and swollen and his tongue covered in white spots, so we stopped.

When the guards opened my ceU, I would rush over to the cold-water tap on the wall opposite to wash my hair with Tide. There was foam everywhere. The mouhazzin thought that it was thanks to this treatment that we had such straight hair.

They talked about it among themselves:

'She's got lovely hair. I tried washing powder on mine, but it didn't make any difference.'

Using washing powder as shampoo mainly made our hair fall out and gave us eczema.

We always wore the same clothes, which we called our combat gear. Mother salvaged the fabric from our old clothes and the covers of the foam mattresses. She made us trousers with elasticated waists.

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