Muslim Page 3

  I waited ten years. Ten years to return to my family. The Little Poucet had to save his family. I had to defeat ogres. I had to return to the ogres of the fairy tales of my childhood, I had to press them into the forgotten words of my mother tongue that alone was capable of defeating them. My mother tongue. The Little Poucet returned to me. The language of my childhood, my other language, that of my mother, a minor language that claimed me again. The language that I had abandoned on the Night of the Elephants.

  I know its grip over me. So how had I lost it entirely? The living woman who approached me in the hallway asking me what I was doing out there was no longer my mother. I remember how I sat facing the closed door of my room. I looked at her feet as she talked to me; I understood but I didn’t say anything. I no longer talked to her in that language. She asked me what I was doing; I knew what she was asking me. It was daybreak. It was early. She had got up and washed before praying; she was asking me what her daughter, drenched in sweat, was doing in the hallway, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t talk to her anymore. So I just listened. I understood. I was in a world that only existed when she spoke to me in that language. I understood her. And if I still understood, that was because I had known that language from my earliest days. But in France this language took me to somewhere forbidden; it was not what that country wanted of me. I couldn’t escape this conflict. I had never had a guardian angel. Only an angel who asked me to speak. Throughout all this time, the angel that should have watched over me in that country never showed his face. All I had was my language. I had to take it back.

  I know about the loneliness of a displaced child. You have to leave all you know and wander forward like a blind person. You are asked to keep moving forward into the vast unknown.

  Your language is dead, the books said. I knew the words, but they were locked behind doors. I learned that a language never dies. Languages don’t die. I was born in a little, narrow land. People chase after me. They always chase after me, and so I run, I find the door, I close the door, I turn the key. I’m saved. I have to live behind locked doors. When I was fifteen, I asked my mother in her language why the women were chasing after me. She said, “They’re kids. It’s kids chasing you. You went to meet up with them, and then you came running back.” “And what about his scar above my left eye?” “It was the kids.” “Which kids? All I see are old women, it’s old women who chase after me. I want to know why. Why do I only see old women? Tell me why. It’s always them, behind me, like the toothless hags in Spanish paintings.” “It was kids. Only kids.” “No, it was old women. I know! I saw them!”

  I ran so much.

  I always ran when scared. Ran to escape the army, to evade soldiers. Ran to avoid a stick, or a stone, or a hand raised to strike me. Ran to escape the person talking to me loudly in a language I didn’t understand. Do people understand what that means? A soldier yelling at a child in a language that she doesn’t understand? I ran to the door. I always looked for doors. To leave, to get out, to flee. To find a door, a shelter, to lock behind me.

  ONE DAY I SWALLOWED an orange seed. My mother wasn’t there. I don’t know why. It might have been when she was at the hospital. She was delivering my brother. My brother who took her over. She wasn’t around during the day, and I never went to see her. I was in France, but I didn’t have the right to see her. My father kept us inside. He said that you can’t trust anyone in this country. But I had an orange seed stuck in my throat. I had to save myself. I ran to my older sister’s house. I ran fast. I couldn’t breathe. The orange seed was stuck at the base of my throat; I had to get it out or it would fall into my stomach. “Houria, Houria, it’s going to fall into my stomach. It’s going to take over my voice. I’ll die. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” My sister rubbed my chest. She said, “Swallow.” “I can swallow the seed? Into my stomach? It will sprout a tree,” I said. “No, you won’t become a tree. I have a seed in my stomach too, but look at me.” “I won’t become a tree?”

  This story proves that I understood my mother. She had told me the story of the Magic Nut, a fairy tale about adversity.

  —

  ONCE UPON A TIME, there lived a princess whose beauty was so uncommon and so fine that they decided to build a palace to match her beauty point by point. It would comprise everything beautiful in the world. “You must not leave the palace,” her family told her, “lest your purity be corrupted.” Every morning before going hunting, her brothers and her father took her to her palace. There they left her, along with everything that they had arranged for her. It was said that her voice was like birdsong and that she had learned her songs from the birds. All the animals understood her. She sang to the animals. They loved her dearly, and they walked with her in the palace gardens. Flowers bowed to her as she passed by, and certain ones bloomed more fully in her presence. They became more vibrant and attractive. And the trees and the bushes responded to her as well. With free hearts, they told her all their secrets in a language only she understood. Nature kept no secrets from her. The wind came to sweep the pathways free of dust, and the rain followed. Nature refreshed itself in this way to stay pleasing and refined. Thus nature presented itself to the girl every morning in the most charming raiment because she, and she alone, could lift it toward virtue and sweetness.

  One day a man came to her door. She refused to open it. Each day he would tell her, “The world you live in won’t last. Adversity will find its way here, too.” She would say nothing. And she spoke to her brothers and father about none of this. They would have told her to never open the door. Every evening, in her palanquin of silk and gold, the princess would be taken back to her parents’ house by her loyal servants. In her absence, the palace was tidied. The servants rushed about, cleaning the mirrors and the birdcages, then the garden paths. They lit incense nearby benches, armchairs, and tables, and, as they picked up fallen leaves and flower petals, they massaged pure milk into the plants. They combed perfumed unguents into the palace’s decorative pelts, and, before finishing up, they set the table with every food one could desire. The princess lived in an enchanted world. Her family wanted her to know nothing of death and suffering.

  But the man came back every day. He said, “Do you want to know now or later what you will have to endure? You will know unhappiness. This life that you lead will end one day. Do you want to know? Tell me, do you want to know, or will you ignore the truth?” He came back every day. And every day, he repeated the same question, “Do you want to know?” Finally the princess gave in. She said to herself, “If I have to know about unhappiness, I want to know the suffering my loved ones will know. If I learn about that when I’m old, I’ll never survive the blow.” The man returned. None of her brothers came to check on her that night. Just before daybreak, she ran to her family’s palace. What she had seen had terrified her. Desolation upon desolation.

  She couldn’t walk fast enough through the grand halls. On the throne, she found her father dead, a spear through his heart. She ran to her brothers’ rooms, they too were dead. Her mother was collapsed on the floor, dead. The princess began to cry. She cried without end. “I’m responsible for their deaths,” she thought. “I could have warned them.” She wanted to die, but her sadness wouldn’t let her go. Several days passed. The man returned. She couldn’t stand to look upon him. “Now that you know,” he said. “What will you do?” She didn’t know how to answer him. “You’ll die if you stay here,” he said.

  “Go back to my palace and bring me one thing,” she said to him. “Just one thing. Go to the Tree of Adversity. Pick the most beautiful fruit and bring it to me.” She described the tree to the man. He went to do as she had asked. He returned. With his face concealed, he held out his hand and gave her the fruit. “Wait for me outside,” the princess said to him. The man calmly left. She picked up a knife, cut the fruit, and took out its nut. She threw it into the fire and held it against the grille with a poker. “Endure what I’ve endured,” she said to the nut. But the nut jumped ou
t of the fire. She picked it up. “Endure what I’ve endured,” she said again. But the nut escaped again. She picked it up and put it back in the fire, holding it in place with the poker. “Endure what I’ve endured,” she said, but the nut didn’t want to burn. It leapt out again. This happened seven times. She put the nut into the fire, and it leapt out. Finally, she took the magic nut and, placing it in her gown next to her heart, she went to her father’s throne. She saw him sitting there with his ministers. She went back through the grand halls. She heard her brothers and their wives talking. One was calling out the name of her husband. She passed through the halls as she sought her mother’s chambers. A servant announced her arrival. Her mother was alive. The doors were opened, and she ran toward the windows. There in the distance she saw the ghost of the man who had predicted the deaths of her family members. She rushed toward her mother with open arms. “What are you doing?” her mother asked. “I know you wanted to protect me,” the princess said. The Tree of Adversity had revealed its secret: Child, the world around you is an illusion.

  “It’s nothing, nothing,” Houria said. “It’s just an orange seed. You have to swallow it. Swallow. Don’t believe in crazy stories.” But swallowing was what I didn’t know how to do. I had suckled at my mother’s breast until there was nothing left. I survived childhood strapped to this endless language that nourished me.

  ACT III

  MY MOTHER TONGUE REFUSES TO DIE

  I WAS BORN INTO a minor language and escaped from a distant nowhere that didn’t want me. An oral language clings to the body, hooks into the body, conforms to the body. In these times of solitude and renunciation, I turn to her to survive. In France, my teachers never heard me talk in my mother tongue. They didn’t even know it wasn’t French. I had never spoken it at school. I stopped speaking it. I spoke only French. I put everything I had into learning French. This language wasn’t mine from birth. We arrive from everywhere, coming to it as though to a mother. She’s one reason why we leave. She takes you, guides you to her, seduces you, then, if she thinks you’re unfaithful, she insults you in every way possible. It’s narcissistic, but it’s her capriciousness that gives her power. There’s no chance of irreverence with her. Her will is indomitable. You just have to survive her. Above all else, don’t doubt her benevolence and her intentions. No other language is allowed. She’s very jealous! Because of my straying, she threw me out. Outside. Alone. Without.

  My mother tongue was nothing but a charnel house of words. Thousands of bits greeted me without any manual. How lonely and far away it felt! What I learned in childhood was through her. She was inside me. She was inside my brothers, born with them. But to know her again as a language? Who could speak it to me? Was it already too late? Who could teach me? Who knew it? Had anyone ever known it? There was no language course for it, but no one seemed to notice. I’d lived in a language that had no primer.

  I looked for people who knew it. I went out of my way to find them. My language had gone into exile. She had spread to every continent. Its people had left, and had left in great number, to spread across the world. They had left in such great number that my mother tongue, though scattered, might be able to be born again. I picked up the pieces. She told me that she wanted to live. To live even without a homeland. To live everywhere in this world with its vagabond people. My mother tongue hardly showed herself. In order not to die, she knew how to make herself heard. She’s in me. In me, in others, in those who know her. Even separated from her trees, her roots, her hills, she survived. She followed me in my wandering, and so she survived.

  My mother tongue looks for me here. At night, she remembers me. She tells me, “Look at what you were. Do you want to lose it?” I tell her that I’ve lost nothing. I’ve lost nothing that was mine. I left at night. I’m far away. I have her with me. And in this camp where they want to kill me, I bring her back. A language always speaks.

  Listen to how she helps me escape my tin shack. I leave for days, for nights. I’m protected by an outcropping of rocks. There are several old men here. I stay with them, and I leave with them. On the ground, in the center, there’s an earthenware pitcher. We’re on high ground, and there’s no way down. There’s nothing but wasteland in front of us. Days pass. We don’t talk. We don’t think. Then on the twentieth day, their faces change. They gather themselves, then their sleeping mats, and they sit at the back along the sheltered wall. They sit close together. I sit with them. Suddenly a strong wind penetrates the shelter. A jackal appears. The animal approaches the pitcher. The animal begins circling the pitcher. It winds around the pitcher, its fur bristles, it circles the pitcher, it circles, and then, suddenly, it knocks the pitcher over with its muzzle. Water spills out. Water flows out in a steady stream that disappears into the cracks in the ground, and it carries away the beast. The men rest leaning against the wall. The water flows. Twenty more days go by. The water is still flowing. On the fortieth day, there’s no longer a wasteland in front of us but a huge river bursting its banks. We have to leave. To leave this place. The desert is no more. I know what happened. It was the people of my mother tongue. They waited for it to rain. And the animal came. It smelled their rotting flesh, and it came, thirsty. And the water took it away.

  I wake up. There’s someone next to me. Right there, sitting in front of me. In my lonely cell, someone has come for me. What was that dream about? That cave. A country legend about which my mother had told me? An annual rite to fight back the dry season? She had often repeated to me the tale about the very last man left to die while he waited for the jackal that never came. “He had to die,” she told me, “leaving behind his family and his lands. He was one of the elect. Grown old, he climbed up to the cave. He knew that one day he would wait for the animal, and if it didn’t come, then after the fortieth day his family would come looking for him. They would take him back and bury him in a sepulchre.” I don’t know if it was this dream that brought me this person.

  Me, so alone, speechless, I think about the desert at night. In keeping with the legends of my people, I wait for the jackal to be swallowed so that the world can be reborn. And then there’s someone next to me. I recognize him. It’s my great uncle, the one they called Vava el-Hadj, the wisest of the wise.

  “When things were at their worst,” my mother would tell me—and you have to listen to how bad things got for her as a woman, mother, and wife during the Algerian War—“one night all my ancestors appeared before me. Dressed in white, men and women, elegant and dignified, came to my door. You kids were all asleep, and death prowled nearby. As a group, they forced me to walk high up a hill. ‘Look,’ they said, ‘all the houses are burning, but there will come a time when even the dead can no longer be buried. Prepare yourself. We’ll save you.’ Before leaving, each one said to me, ‘My daughter, we’ll protect you.’ It was their trust that raised me from the indignity in which I’d lived. Long before we fled, I knew the dangers to come. I was ready to do anything to save you.”

  Vava el-Hadj doesn’t. He won’t. I know the limits of my mother tongue. The dead don’t speak. But we can recall them and tell them how after they were gone words lost their meaning.

  “Vava el-Hadj, it’s to satisfy my family that I’ve come here to see you in Algeria. You were sitting next to Emma Yasmine, your wife. You had known me as a child. I came back fifteen years later. I entered your house through the low door. It seemed like a refuge, painted in whitewash. Light came in through a crack between the stones. You were sitting with your legs crossed, up on the ledge inside your home. On top of your close-cropped hair, you were wearing a delicately embroidered cap. You were wearing a long white djellaba that opened in front, and your arms and feet were bare. You held in your hands a rosary of black pearls that you passed through your fingers. You said, ‘Come, my daughter.’ I kissed your forehead, and your wife’s. I sat at your feet and leaned against the wall. You were expecting me. I was the little girl of Emma Halima. Your sister. My mother’s mother died after we’d left, and we
never saw her again. You placed your hand on my head. I could tell you were crying. Emma Yasmine left the room. We sat there in silence for a while. You were crying again over the ravages of the war and this girl come to see you, asking you not to treat her like a stranger. You were the theologian, the learned one, the man from your village who had completed the pilgrimage to Mecca. When you were young, you had learned French and Arabic, and you had walked several times to Mecca. I remember your long stories about your travels. They had been the lullabies of my youth. It was in the madrasas, you told my mother, that she could learn about your trips. Each time you came back, you would speak on Friday, the day of prayer and communion. It wasn’t time that separated us but the places of our lives. Your face, I remember it, was calm and sad. Your world had already disappeared. Your mosque, the place where everyone used to find you, had been closed. A new structure went up. The government sent in an imam trained in their schools. He spoke about Islam in Arabic. All of Algeria was forced to become more Arab. Not just to speak Arabic, but to become Arab. Your disciples no longer knew to which saint to devote themselves. In fact, no one talked about saints anymore. The rigor of Saudi Arabia was the new law of the land. You were no longer peasants, the desert was your surroundings and determined your seasons, but its joyful festivals and its rituals had fallen by the wayside. Your brothers, people with whom you had shared bonds for centuries, no longer counted. Now people came to your house seeking advice, still asking about the path of truth. The others told them that God speaks only in Arabic, and that it was blasphemy to speak about him in any other language. You sensed the unwelcome intrusion of power. You understood that in attacking your language, they were attacking your people’s customs, your social bonds, and your education system. Your culture was well aware of those of others. You knew the dangers of political Islam and, for this reason, your experience was brushed aside. The religion that you loved, that you knew, would die in the torments of ignorance and violence. They told me that except for some old men and for the government workers convinced of the good governance of Algiers, few people went to the new mosque, that women and youth no longer went there. Before entering your house, I saw the youth. They were there, standing, silent, in the shade of the big eucalyptus trees. Their presence there suggested that it was the former festival grounds where people used to meet and where you used to converse with them. They were waiting for words that would no longer come. The youth were thinking about refusing Arabic. You, who knew what it meant to know that language, and to translate it, you knew it was a lie. You knew what it was they were holding onto. They didn’t want to give up their culture, and they didn’t want to be ruled by anyone. Whatever anyone could say about them, they weren’t able to think of themselves as nonbelievers, and that was because of who they were, Kabyles and not Arabs. They accepted that they must share their land with others, but they refused to be cut off from it. Had they not been brought to this point by religious precepts? Whom had they mocked? Weren’t they the same people who had given to the country the most upstanding of their men? In the last century, it was in the name of Allah that the chiefs of the Berbers had called their people to revolt, without knowing that fighting this colonization would lead to their leaders being imprisoned and lead to a life of unending misery for the rest. Vava el-Hadj knew all of this about the youth. No one could forget the legend of the first of the Sons of November. The man already called Colonel Amirouche who, from 1945, had been training his Kabyle brothers in revolution and armed resistance. That army drew sustenance from its people’s constant support. You saw that they were trying to eradicate the community and the values that you believed in. I’ve heard the legends of how great your desire for justice had been, and your desire to do good for others. You were among the generation of elders that had so fascinated the Orientalists. You didn’t dismiss the warmongers and their intentions, but you believed you would be able to rein them in and moderate them. The God that you knew was enough for you. Good conduct was your guiding principle. You thought that it would serve as an example for others. Still clear in your faith in God, you refused to renounce what Islam had taught you. You couldn’t and didn’t want to use force, to use compulsion. Your conviction was strong. Your flock never left your side. And it was for them that you decided to take refuge. You closed the doors of the old mosque. A new man for a new mosque, you said. I don’t know how long I stayed with you. Your eyes were small, like those of an old man, and they were gray and dull. I cried with you. This country that I’m seeing again for the first time, when I was young, I’d thought of it as a native place to which I could return at any time. In the silence of our confusion, you taught me that it wasn’t mine. I’d been free to return, but I heard nothing but complaints about the places of my earliest youth. Its people were unhappy. In France, I lived through my own revolution. I hated my father. I blamed him for our miserable lives as French-Arabs, which we weren’t. “If only we were Arabs!” I reproached him, “If only we were …” But we weren’t. If only we were immigrants, but we weren’t. If only we were French, French for generations. But we weren’t. We lived holed up in a little bit of the French countryside. Sheltered behind the high walls of our house, my father worked at surviving. He couldn’t do anything for us, his children. I began to hate all the labels that clung to us like crabgrass to the earth. Arabs, immigrants, exiles, Muslims—I saw us as living in a malignant universe where even the most miserable of us nevertheless had to be satisfied with this life. To think of myself as an immigrant would have meant a return of shame. Though even worse off than me, the immigrants maintained their serene and proud faces that I couldn’t fake. I didn’t know Arabs. I didn’t spend any time with them for fear of drowning. And I was gradually beginning to understand how to deal with the French. For the lax, it became a source of anguish and questions. When it was time to enter high school, they asked me for my nationality. I stood confused before the teacher. “What do I have to do?” I wondered. “What’s your nationality?” he asked me. I didn’t know what to say. I told him I’d been born in Algeria. “Do you have papers?” I showed him my French identity card. “So you’re French. Put ‘French’ for nationality,” he told me. I didn’t know what the word “nationality” meant. It filled me with anxiety. I didn’t know what to make of my papers. Having them was not enough. Later, I would dismiss them altogether.