So Vast the Prison Book

In So Vast the Prison, Assia Djebar takes full advantage of the novel as a flexible art form, moving majestically between narrative and history, bending the book's shape to reflect its concerns. In rich, poetic prose, she describes the women of Algeria and their inner lives of faith, longing, and grief. Aside from their aesthetic value, Djebar's innovative narrative strategies create an additional poignancy, as the artistic freedom she enjoys rubs against the restrictions placed on the women whom she portrays. The novella-sized first section begins in the capital city of Algiers, in the world of a post-colonial middle class that straddles French and Algerian cultures. The narrator, an educated married woman, is consumed by love for a younger man who works in her office building. This secret, platonic love could happen almost anywhere: her actions are restricted less by the Islamic society than by her emotional commitment to her marriage and "the watchmen of bourgeois respectability." But when the narrator confides her hidden feelings to her husband, his response makes clear Algeria's very different history and culture. He struck and I slipped to the floor.... then I heard him, as if echoing from within a prison cell in which he found himself, in which he wrestled, in which he was trying to keep me. From inside this nightmare space, inside this bodily fear, my eyes closed, and hidden under my arms, under my lifted elbows, under my already bloody hands, I heard and I would almost have answered with a laugh, not a madwoman's laugh nor one of tearfulness, but the laugh of a woman who was relieved and struggling to free herself. "Adulteress!" he repeated, "Anywhere, except this city of iniquity, you would deserve to be stoned!" The book's focus then shifts to a historical account of the relationship between Muslim women and the lost languages of North Africa (enigmatic traces of which have survived), as Djebar explores the symbiotic relationship that women have had with words, serving as the culture's literary caretakers, "preserv[ing] the writing while their men wage war in the sun or dance before the fires at night." Djebar combines themes of narrative and erased histories in the third section, as the narrator seeks to "recapture the deep song strangled in the throat of my people"--that is, to convey (and thus preserve) the lives of the contemporary Algerian women who have been veiled and silenced. The section's short narratives, mingled with the experiences of the narrator while making a film in rural Algeria, are fascinating and inspiring. This Algeria is a world of women-only ritual dances, bride thieves, gossip in the hammams (public baths), sorceresses, and an unforgettable 8-year-old shepherdess who gazes at the narrator "without real curiosity but with fond indulgence." In Djebar, these stories have found a courageous, gifted teller--though one who is sadly aware that her voice is a lonely substitute for what should be a chorus. --John PonyicsanyiRead More