So Vast the Prison

Despite the fact that I rarely stick with reading challenges Reading Around the World really appeals to me. So I decided to give it a shot this year. I started in Afghanistan with A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear. That worked well, so I moved on to Algeria. Then the pandemic hit and the library closed before the book I chose came in. Typical. But, six months later, the library slowly began to reopen by fulfilling holds that were placed before the pandemic. So I finally got to read my Algerian book pick: So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar.

Algeria

I don’t know much about Algeria, except that it’s a Muslim, former French colony in North Africa. I’ve had the documentary The Battle of Algiers in my Netflix queue for literally years, but haven’t watched it yet. As part of the #BecauseWeveRead book club, I read Black Skin, White Masks in 2018. And early this year I interviewed the sweetest young man from Algeria for a story about LGBTQ+ refugees. That story was eventually killed by Covid, but I will never forget the horrible experiences that gentle young man survived. So you could say that when it comes to Algeria, I was starting from scratch.

Assia Djebar

As I read around the world, I’m focusing on fiction, prioritizing newer works, and whenever possible, I’m choosing female authors. So far I’ve been looking for books from war-torn Muslim countries. That means that it is not only difficult to find female authors, even most of the male authors are writing from exile. Coincidentally, both authors I’ve read so far lived in France when writing the books I read. Fortunately, both authors have been overtly feminist.

Assia Djebar is a prolific novelist, filmmaker and academic of Berber descent who grew up in Algeria under French colonial rule. She has worked in France and the U.S. I chose her 1995 novel So Vast the Prison because it was the only one of her books available from my library.

So Vast The Prison

It says “a novel” on the cover. But it doesn’t read like one. So Vast the Prison is a story in parts. Sometimes those parts seem completely unrelated, other times there are loose connections. Eventually, they do come together to form a whole. It’s still fragmentary, like a mosaic, but it’s a portrait of sorts of a colonized country chafing under foreign oppression while yet confining and oppressing one half of its own population. And, as the title references a song sung at a funeral, it’s also a song of sorrow for all the pain and lost opportunities caused by such oppression.

Part One

The book begins with an imagined affair, the married narrator’s unfulfilled crush. Stylistically it’s dreamy and slow, with intense focus on fleeting emotional moments.

If there is true skill in the writing, it’s in completely convincing the reader that it is not fiction. Everything about it: the selective memory, wobbling between bare-all detail and obscurity, a squeamishness about identifying facts, feels like memoir. The outline of the story is consistent with the author’s own biography as a divorced Algerian woman living in France. It’s hard not to suspect it’s a memoir marketed as fiction.

But the embarrassing personal details do serve a larger literary purpose. In the way the narrator fails to act on her attraction, her husband’s overreaction to her noncrime, the details reveal things about women in Islam.

Part Two

Much more to my taste than the confessional, this shorter section also reads like nonfiction. In it she details the history of a bilingual stele through the ages. She talks about wars and emperors with the familiarity that European writers would mention The War of the Roses or Waterloo, but they are almost all entirely new to me. The narrative arc follows relatively modern attempts to decipher the unknown second language on the stele. The twist is that it’s the written form of a language that is still in use. All they had to do was to ask a local. But for centuries, no one thought to do so. Colonialism in a nutshell.

Part Three

The thickest part of the book flips back and forth between the author/narrator’s own life – especially her development as a filmmaker finding her voice – and the history of the women of her family. It’s a story of oppression and liberation; the oppression of women through Islamic culture and of Algeria through successive colonializations; and liberation through the voice, whether oral tradition, writing, or filmmaking.

But the story is nonlinear and nonchronological. Djebar repeatedly mentions the oral histories passed down by women, specifically the details they remember that men forget in the official, written records. Form follows function. In this section, I was reminded of nights during my own childhood when my grandma came to visit. She and my mother and I would sit on her bed (my bed) and I would listen to them trade oft-repeated family stories about people who died before I was born as if it was today’s gossip.

Each vignette is poignant and vivid, but assembling a coherent history or overall narrative is nearly impossible.

Part Four

The final, very short section of the book makes explicit what was implied in the loose chronology of Part Three. Djebar, writing in 1995, was reviving memories of past violence in Algeria during a period, mostly unremarked in “the West”, of renewed violence in her home country. Early on the book implies that she is writing as an expatriate, in the last pages of the book, it is clear that she is in exile. She is a type of refugee, a fugitive, first fleeing the physical dangers of a disintegrating marriage, later unable to return due to the physical dangers of a disintegrating nation.

I thought that, by dint of writing about those who died last century in my country in flames, the blood of men today (the blood of History and the oppression of women) was rising again to splatter my writing and condemn me to silence.

So Vast the Prison p. 347

Conclusion

I’m not sure if this so-called novel is thinly veiled biography, or if it’s a testament to the quality of writing that I have a hard time imagining the details as fiction. Whether or not the events described actually happened, the telling is extremely literary. At times, the sentences are more like poetry than prose and I got caught up in the words, losing the meaning.

The title comes from a song about grief, and the themes of oppression, grief, and voicelessness are consistent even when the structure and storytelling are not. In tone, I’m reminded of Colette, in the way that entire pages are dedicated to fleeting emotions or impressions, giving them more weight in the telling than they had in the actual experience. That’s not really my favorite mode of storytelling.

But compared to Black Skin, White Masks, this was a much better book to read to get a sense of the human impact of history and colonialism on Algeria, and for creating a feeling of the culture. Unfortunately, however much respect I have for that culture’s intellectual and artistic achievements, I can never become comfortable with its treatment of women. It is heartening to read the voice of a woman from within that culture who can mourn the subjugation and violence against her country at the same time that she condemns the subjugation and violence it perpetrates against women.

Details

So Vast the Prison
Assia Djebar
Translated from French by Betsy Wing, 1999
Seven Stories Press, 1995
363 pages