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  Now I’ve strayed from that nation. It’s for that reason, that act of treason, that I’m in this camp.

  AT THE TIME, I was convinced that I was something else, something that my papers couldn’t prove. I had to look for it. I decided to protect myself with my mother tongue. Each day I learned a little bit more of it from recordings borrowed from the deepest reaches of libraries. I repeated out loud the lessons from the Berber primers of Mouloud Mammeri, and I dabbled at retranslating into French the Kabyle folk stories from a bilingual edition I found at a bookstore dedicated to the work of Taos and Jean Amrouche. First, I would read and reread the legends in their original language. Then, setting aside the French text, I tried to come up with more poetic versions, convinced that the translator hadn’t been able to uncover the depths of my mother tongue as well as I could. With headphones on, I would compose my attic poems in the rhythm of the Kabyle of Aït Menguellet, Slimane Azem, and Idir. Were these the necessary steps of apprenticeship? Like a rebel who must keep her activities secret, I thought of myself as being estranged from the world. In my isolation, these troubadours were my masters. They were beyond the struggle for power, they were as free as all great men. I wanted to be like them. I looked for more examples in history books. I found examples in literature. These were in all languages, except one. Arabic. No book in France taught about the deeds and the accomplishments of its peoples. So I never imagined that I was like them at all. And Islam—that religion that the people who spoke my language shared with the Arabs—was thus different for me. Due to the false impression I had then about knowledge and freedom, I ingested, not without interest and fear, all of the crap that people fed me about Arabs. They don’t know how to think, to read, they don’t know how to be free, they don’t know how to live, I thought. They had always been people who followed codes of living and ways of thinking of their own. About them, I retained only negative stereotypes that I’d heard spoken behind the doors of people who wanted to look out for me. I didn’t know a single Arab. Should I have thought differently? Without access to the work of several exceptional French intellectuals, and without books written by Arabs themselves, how could I have thought differently? What was this tragic situation that made me wait for the analyses of Western men concerning those peoples whom they had been conquering over and over, when they themselves had been the vanquished in the preceding centuries? It seemed to me that Western knowledge wanted to become universal, and if it became universal, that proved the West was good. It wanted to spread its glory everywhere. Again it was all about glory. I read nothing, I heard nothing, that granted any glory to the Arabs. And this absence proclaimed that they had none. They had given the world nothing. But who could reveal this lie for what it was? The Arabs, of course. But with what tool could they do so when it was clear that the book and all of its authority wasn’t bound up in an economy of ideas? I didn’t understand the impasse that I had reached. I was beside myself with rage.

  Vava el-Hadj, I came to you for a cure. You had dedicated your entire life to this other culture, to this other language. You learned a lot from this language. When you were young, you lived with Arabs. That was in those days when you didn’t pay attention to the new boundaries of this vast Muslim land that had until recently been controlled by the Turks. Our common experiences formed the source of our solidarity. Our solitude was the same. In your country, the promoters of Arabic distrusted you. They rejected your mother tongue like they had rejected the education available through French. The new men of the Maghreb wanted to be modern. They thought of you as archaic, out of step with the times, useless. They hunted down your poets, sending tanks into the halls of the university to get them. “A people can’t advance without a written language,” they said. These modernizers, who borrowed their politics from the West, didn’t bear in mind Fanon’s caution about how the colonized inflict violence upon themselves. They didn’t know how to untangle themselves from this colonial system—this colonialism, which wanted to construct an identity-based notion of the peoples of the Maghreb and their beliefs. Islam is your religion, Arabic is your language! We know what has happened because of this slogan. In its fight, in its desire to construct cultural cohesion throughout its lands, pan-Arabism found that it had only one tool, Islam. For city dwellers, for peasants, it pointed to the green book. It was their life, their history, and their future. Some people thought that there was something new to this approach. But did they know that the ink of books isn’t made from blood? Would they have to rebel against themselves? This pan-Arabic nationalism would culminate by killing off the people of the countryside. Vava el-Hadj, you never rejected the Arab world. Islam came to you in your mother tongue, and so you thought that it belonged to you as much as to others. You didn’t wish hate upon anyone. I left you in silence. I closed the door. Leaving you alone, I knew that you were passing your rosary through your fingers. I went back, alone, to France.

  Several weeks later, I found myself being kept alive on a respirator. My mother, having got up for morning prayers, found me collapsed on the bathroom floor’s tiles. I was vomiting white foam. In the courtyard, the emergency technicians pumped my stomach of the pills that I’d swallowed by the fistful. I was unconscious. The poison was attacking my body. Then, one day, I heard a voice. “What did you swallow?” asked a man in white, slapping my face, as he tried to rouse me from coma. “What did you swallow?” Everything seemed distant. I’d come back. I said, “The year 2000.” I remembered that much. I said, “The year 2000.” They put me into the general ward. From a catheter, they extracted my urine to analyze it. The poison was gradually passing through my body. One night, I wanted to get up. I pulled the catheter out. I stood up. I dressed myself. I fell. Hitting my back against the metal rails of the bed, I cried out. My legs no longer worked. They were like wool roving. “You won’t be able to walk straightaway,” the doctor said. “You have to get rid of everything you swallowed.” I didn’t talk to those who came to see me. I couldn’t speak. They looked at my face, then left. Even though they were sad or they cried, I couldn’t do anything for them. One day my sister yelled at me, “Why? Why did you do this?” “I didn’t want to live anymore,” I said. I was saved. I could speak again. I asked if I could leave the hospital. They said no. I insisted. I was going to die for good if I stayed there. I saw someone. They made me sign some consent papers. My mother held my hand all the way to the car. “I don’t want to answer any more questions from any of your children,” I told her. I had come back. I spent hours thinking about nature. Each day, I took more steps. I relearned everything. My house was my kingdom. There, reading, I found the peace that I had forgotten about. From then on, that’s how I wanted to live. I set aside the hatred and the anger that had fueled my indignation. I was no longer anyone’s plaything. Not even for those close to me. I wouldn’t be just an exile, an immigrant, an Arab, a Berber, a Muslim, or a foreigner, but something more. Despite all they might do to force me back into these categories, I wouldn’t return to these places. I would strive to find in these words whatever they had of the universal, of the beautiful, of the human, and of the sublime. The rest—the dark flip-side of the particulars—I would leave for those starving for identity politics. I would continue to love my mother tongue, and I would see how it linked me to Arab peoples, to Semitic peoples, to “Muslim,” and to “Jewish.” I wanted to learn everything that had been kept from me about these peoples and their language.

  Vava el-Hadj, I never saw you again. Your death was hard for us to bear. Everything that we are, everything that we know about ourselves, will now disappear with us. “The chain has been broken,” our mother told us. I wanted to preserve what I could.

  Your sweet face approaches me. Calm and serene, it gives me confidence. Your warm breath brings me back to life. I close my eyes. I say goodbye.

  The camp is now my refuge. My confusion abates. Will they remember what has been imposed upon us, upon Muslims and those forced to become Muslims? We’re evil. But my life has take
n an altogether different road. I’ve extended my heart toward the Arabs.

  Everything has a new resonance for me. Words, images, and their violence. My fear and isolation in France. I leave, I flee, as I must, toward the war and the soldiers.

  ACT IV

  DIALOGUE WITH A GOVERNMENT WORKER

  WHEN GUNS, WAR, BEARDS, veils, deaths, bombs, meat, words, shouts, women, children, tears, theft, hate, lying, stupidity, vulgarity, ignorance, rape, skin, soldiers, crying out, snapping of the jaws, disdain, abjection, infamy, destruction, and ignominy invaded, I was scared. Scared. But I also ached. All day long, they spoke only of them, and they had eyes only for them: Muslims. The Muslims. They didn’t make women, men, and children the worst abomination upon earth but simply the Muslims. And to make them as they would have them, in order to make themselves scared of them, they made them into a single menacing horde. I took it on the mouth. A hard, violent slap. Stinging. They didn’t separate me from the horde. I was inside it. “If they give me this name,” I told myself, “it is to make me a criminal.” But I didn’t want that.

  At first, I retreated. I left what was mine. Far from my people, I lived alone, in France. I waited for a vagabond people to find me. A people who could say, “That’s enough.” A people who would say, “I refuse to respond to these categories that they impose upon me.” But instead of a people visiting me, a government worker did. At my door, he said to me, “Everyone wants to know why you don’t show your face.”

  “Am I hiding?” I asked him. “We don’t ever see you.” “Should I go out more?” “We don’t know what you’re doing. What are you doing?” “Reading. Writing.” “Are you like the rest of us?” I looked at him. “It’s what I do,” I said. “Why do you live here? To be alone? Why?” “I like the calm. The light.” “Where did you live before moving to this house?” “In another house.” “But where?” “In the north.” “In this country?” “Yes.” “Where do you come from?” I couldn’t answer him. “Where were you born?” “I don’t have a country.” “You were born somewhere,” he said, putting his right foot on the next stair. I had to have come from somewhere, and even if I had been born in that country, it wouldn’t have been enough. “I’m countryless. Does that word mean anything to you?” I asked him. “But where? Which country?” “Even for the countryless? No one can go back to where I was born. I don’t remember it.” “Do you have a name? Do you have papers?” “Yes, I’m French.” “But what’s your name?” “It’s on record. At the town hall.” “But where do you come from?” “My name isn’t enough?” “I’ve nothing against you. I’m just doing my job. They asked me to come by and talk to you. It’s what I do. My role is simple. I’m a good worker. If they hadn’t asked me to come, I wouldn’t have. They told me to come here. That’s why I’m here.” “To protect me?” “I’m just doing my job. I’m just asking you what you’re doing, that’s it. I have to ask you if you work. They want to know how you live.” “OK, then, to answer you, I work.” “That has nothing to do with it.” “Look!You’re telling me about me!” “You want me to write that you work from home?” “Yes.” “And that’s it?” “Tell the people who sent you that they should stop worrying. I have a vegetable garden and some money. And whatever else I have was given to me by friends.” “And books? You buy books through them?” “They’re gifts from my friends.” “Apparently you have a lot.” “I get by.”

  The sound of talking took him back to his car. He walked up to the passenger’s-side door and took out a black plastic gadget with his left hand. Then coming back to me, he asked, “You know foreign languages as well? Many languages? You read all day long?” “When I’m not gardening and pulling weeds.” “Well, I don’t read much. I don’t have much time, and, anyway, when I do, I’m not about to read. I don’t read. My wife reads to me a little. Well, of course, she only reads in her language, but she tells me stories of what’s going on elsewhere. Do you read other languages?” “Some unimportant ones.” “That’s a lot of languages. You have a computer, I’m guessing. And the internet?” “Yes. Like everyone.” “You get letters, you send letters?” “Yes. Like everyone.” “At the post office, they told me that you get very little mail.” “I use email. It costs less, and it’s faster. My friends bring me packages, too.” “Yes, but that’s hardly the point. We don’t know what you’re doing here, you see? You can see how that worries us. We don’t know what you’re doing.” “I told you: I read, I write, I tend my garden.” “Everyone reads and gardens here. That’s not what we’re after. I would like to know what you write, for instance.” “You won’t understand. Right now, I’m editing a text by a Kurdish writer who was translated into Arabic for a publishing house in Damascus. I don’t know if this will help your report. I could give you several pages that you would have to have translated. You could read them and see.” “You can’t just tell me?”

  I hesitated to tell him about the story, but then I did. “It’s about a boy who returns to his village. Everyone thought he was dead, but he reappears. Years after leaving his homeland, he reappears. But no one recognizes him. Everyone wonders what has changed him. They want to know what changed him.” “What changed him?” “I’m translating right now. I can’t tell you yet.” “I see. You can say anything.” “You want to know more?” “You’re not going to tell me more today?” “I have to see you again? Well, then let’s tell the story like it should be told. Do you want a drink? Coffee or tea?” “I don’t drink on the job.” “When are you coming back?” “You won’t tell me now?” “Ask me questions. If I can answer, I will.” “Let’s have a coffee.” “Espresso or regular?” “Regular. I don’t like it too strong.”