The Forbidden Woman

by Mokeddem, Malika; Marcus, K. Melissa

• ISBN13: 9780803282407
• ISBN10: 0803282400
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

The Forbidden Womantells the story of Sultana, an Algerian woman doctor who, after years spent living in France, returns to her native village in order to attend the funeral of a former lover. The clash between her origins and the Westernized life she now leads is explored in telling detail against the backdrop of current events in Algeria. A work that combines insight into both political and personal matters,The Forbidden Womandevelops a complex portrait of a country torn between progress and prejudice, secular life and Islamic fundamentalism. In this passionate book, Malika Mokeddem places special emphasis on the position of women in modern Algeria. The frequent indignities and injustices suffered by the narrator reflect the plight of women in a society marked by patriarchalism and religious fundamentalism. Yet the novel also suggests that, along with modernization, there are emerging demands for women's rights in Algeriademands that might well signal a vastly different future for this tormented nation.

Author Biography

Malika Mokeddem was born into an illiterate nomad family in Kenadsa, Algeria. She had the opportunity, rare for a Moslem female, to attend the university in Oran. Later she completed her medical studies in Montpellier, France, where she currently practices medicine. The Forbidden Woman is her third novel. Melissa Marcus is an associate professor of French at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of The Representation of Mesmerism in Honoré de Balzac’s “La Comédie Humaine” and the translator of Nina Bouraoui’s Forbidden Vision.

Excerpts

Chapter One

SULTANA

I was born on the ksar's only dead-end street. A nameless dead end. This is my first thought in light of the immensity of what I will have to face. It envelops my turmoil with a cascade of silent laughter.

    I would never have believed it possible to return to this place. And yet I've never really left it. All I have done is incorporate the desert and the inconsolable into my displaced body. They have split me in two.

    From the top of the passenger steps, I look at Tammar's small airport. The building has been enlarged. The runways too. Tammar ... in the whirlwinds of light, the years topple over and pile up to present time. It makes my heart sink. My oasis is a few kilometers from here. A ksar made of earth, a labyrinthine heart, bordered by dunes, fringed by palm trees. I see myself again as an adolescent girl leaving the region for Oran's boarding school. I remember the painful circumstances of that departure. As flight becomes rupture, as absence becomes exile, time itself shatters. What remains? A rosary of fears, the inevitable baggage of exodus. But when distance unites with time, you learn to conquer the worst fears. They tame us. So that we and our fears live together in the same skin, without being too torn. At certain moments, you can even jettison the inner conflict. Not just anywhere. In the most burning moment of guilt. When regret is most hidden. A privileged place of exile.

    Blinking her eyes in the painful glare, the stewardess, with a smile, invites me to go down the few steps in front of me. I'm holding up the passengers.

    Why this sudden desire to reestablish contact? Is it because I was sick of the world? A nausea resurfacing from things forgotten, through disenchantment with somewhere else and other places, in the harsh light of lucidity? I still found myself undone by everything. Once again, my detachment had erased my features, pinned a forced smile to my mouth, banished my eyes to the nether regions of meditation.

    Or is it because Yacine's letter had been mailed from Aïn Nekhla, my native village?

    No doubt a combination of all that.

    It was on a very windy day. The violent north wind thrust the beginning of autumn's harsher weather into the warmth of a Montpellier caught off guard. It was also a day when nostalgia blew hard. Nestled in its howls, I listened to the north wind, I heard in myself the sand wind. And suddenly the need to hear Yacine, to be with him in that house, started to stir in me behind my censoring bars. Something still not subdued burst brutally forth from my prolonged lethargy. My thoughts, outward bound, suppressed my nausea, rekindled my homesickness. North wind outside, sand wind inside, my resistance dropped. Telephone, search, ringing, and this unknown voice:

    `Who is this, please, Madam?'

    `Sultana Medjahed, a friend of Yacine's. Is he there?'

    `A very close friend?'

    `Uhh ... yes, why?'

    `Madam, where are you calling from, please?'

    `I'm in France. Why all these questions? Isn't Yacine there?'

    `Madam, I regret to inform you that he died last night.'

    `Died? Last night?'

    `Yes, Madam, may Allah rest his soul. We discovered him in his bed. He looked like he was just sleeping. He, the athlete, in the best of health! Yesterday afternoon he played soccer with the village kids for a long time. I'm the nurse who works with him. We're waiting for the doctors from Tammar, the next town.'

    `Died last night.' My nausea had started to boil, to cook me. To calm it, I rocked myself in the blowing of the north wind and the sand wind mixed inside me. I lied to myself: This is only a nightmare, a black ram who has broken into the white field of my indifference. These are just lies or hallucinations, born of the meeting of two demented winds. These are nothing but reminiscence, the past lashing out against the desert of the present. Tomorrow nothing will remain of them. Tomorrow the sand wind will have buried the fears of childhood and adolescence. Tomorrow the north wind will have swept my Midi. Tomorrow my indifference will have once again filled in its gaps.

Suitcase in hand, I go toward a taxi.

    `Can you take me to Aïn Nekhla please?'

    `Whose daughter are you?' inquires the driver in a curt tone of voice, as he puts my suitcase into the trunk, amid the heap of tools and grease-stained rags.

    `No one's.'

    I get into the car and loudly slam the door to discourage the interrogation that I sense coming. He pushes back his chechia, stares at me, scratches his forehead, spits on the ground, and finally consents to take his place behind the steering wheel. He starts up the engine, glancing at me frequently in the rearview mirror. Little burning glances, hungry glances that size me up as if I were a puzzle all in pieces that he didn't know how to begin.

    `So, whose place are you going to in Aïn Nekhla?'

    `No one's.'

    `There's no hotel in Aïn Nekhla. How can you go to no one's place? Here, even a man can't go to "no one's place"! "No one" doesn't exist here!'

    I have forgotten nothing. Neither this biting curiosity nor this meddling that asserts its rights over all.

    When the inquisition is posed as civility, these questions are like a summons, and remaining silent is the admission of dishonor. The man stares at me in the rearview mirror and yells, `"No one" doesn't exist! And there's no hotel!'

    I have forgotten none of my past terror either. Under its influence, I closed my eyes to everything, banishing even those who showed me compassion. Only two women had been able to approach me and conquer me: an elderly neighbor and Emna, a Jewish woman from the mellah. Mine was an isolation armored with silence.

    This harassment makes me tense. I can no longer see the desert. I bring my eyes back to the man. Now I think I recognize him. One of the anonymous grimacing faces from the horde that used to persecute me. One of the faces of hatred. In that moment I withdraw. A moment from which I exclude him. I carefully envelop myself in my dissident and different Sultanas.

    One is nothing but emotions, exaggerated sensuality. Her voluptuousness is painful, and bursts of sobs split her laughter. A tragedienne having so worn out her sorrow that it tears at the first assaults of desire. Unsated desire. Impotent longing. If I let her run free she would annihilate me. For now, she devotes herself to her favorite pastime: ambiguity. She swings the pendulum between pain and pleasure.

    The other Sultana is sheer will. Demoniacal will. A curious mix of insanity and reason, with an outer layer of contempt and the sword of provocation permanently raised. A fury that exploits all, cunningly or ostentatiously, starting with the weaknesses of the other. Sometimes she delights me, only then to terrify me all the more. Vigilant and rigid, she coldly scrutinizes the landscape and with her goad keeps me at a respectful distance.

    A gaping inner rictus distorts my attention.

    Having arrived in Tammar, the cabbie stops his heap in front of a grocer's store. He gets out without a word. I look at the street in alarm. It's crawling with people even more than in my nightmares. It shamelessly inflicts its masculine plurality and its feminine apartheid. The street is pregnant with every frustration possible, is tormented by every type of insanity and dirtied by all of its misery. Its ugliness hardened by a sun whitened with rage, it exhibits its welts, its wrinkles, and splashes about in the sewers with all of its urchins.

    Some of them immediately congregate around the taxi. `Madam! Madam! Madam! Madam!'

    Long French-sounding onomatopoetic tirades from which emerge, here and there, a few rare words identifiable in Algerian and French: `I love you ... fuck ... dick,' accompanied by gestures that couldn't be any more suggestive.

    I have not forgotten that the boys of my country had a sick and gangrenous childhood. I have not forgotten their clear voices that ring only with obscenities. I have not forgotten that from the youngest age, the opposite sex is already a ghost among their desires, a confusing menace. I have not forgotten their angelic eyes, when they simper and pour forth the worst insanities. I have not forgotten that they viciously beat dogs, that they hurl stones and insults at passing girls and women. I have not forgotten that they are aggressive because they have never learned what a caress is, be it only that of a look, because they have never learned to love. I have not forgotten. But memory never shields one from anything.

    The cabbie returns. He glances complicitously at the children before starting up the car. They grab onto it. Laughing, the man accelerates. I'm so afraid of an accident that I cry out. His face lit up by laughter, one of the children calls at me before letting go.

    `Whore!'

    I start. `Whore!' More than the sorrowful spectacle of the street, more than the view of the desert, this word drives Algeria into me like a knife. Whore! How many times as an adolescent, still a virgin and already wounded, did I have this word vomited onto my innocence. Whore! Treacherous word, for a long time I was able to write it only in capital letters, as if it were women's only destiny, their only divinity, the lot of rejected women.

    With satisfied eyes, the man observes me in the rearview mirror. Our eyes are glued to each other, size each other up, confront each other. Mine defy him, tell him how vile he is. He's first to lower his eyes. I know he'll hold this offense against me. I try to concentrate on the countryside.

    How many years did I travel this road twice a day? In the morning, to go to the secondary school. In the evening, to return to Aïn Nekhla. A twenty-kilometer stretch between my village and the town. Twenty kilometers of nothingness. I have forgotten none of this nothingness, either. The straightness of its tarred line. Its threatening sky that scorches the poetry of the sand. Its palm trees, poor exclamation points forever unquenched. The endless scrawl of its gravel deserts. The wind's sardonic fifths. Then the silence, the weight of eternity consumed. I even recognize those little dunes over there ... How silly of me! From their crescent shape, I've just realized they're shifting dunes formed by sandstorms. They move about at the mercy of the wind.

    The hardly audible sound of a flute flows in me. It took me some time to notice it, to hear it. Its slitherings reach me, overtake me entirely. I don't know what it's saying.

    The man drives so erratically that he elicits strange moaning sounds from the dying transmission. The shocks are so worn that I'm shaken about as if on a racing camel. When the wheels dig into the side of the road, a breath of sand sweeps through the taxi. The scent of this sand is the only welcoming embrace. It's perfumed with a plant that bubbles in cracked wheat soup.

    `Has it rained lately?' I can't help suddenly asking.

    `Yes, a little,' answers the man, his eyes wide open with surprise.

    Three drops of rainfall suffice for a low-growing plant to conquer the dryness and immediately explode two days later into yellow flowers with a heady fragrance. I still don't know its French name.

    Encouraged by my question, the man makes a fresh attempt: `So, you, where do you come from?'

    In Oran I had learned to scream. In Oran I always held myself in a position ready to fend off attacks. The anonymity of large foreign cities has taken the edge off of my anger, moderated my retorts. Exile has softened me. Exile is the territory of that which cannot be seized, of rebellious indifference, of the confiscated look.

    I resolutely keep my face turned toward the car window. I let myself go in the bath of my familiar scents. I tune my ear to this tenuous flute hidden within me. The car swerves. My fear makes the man laugh jeeringly. With big turns of the wheel he does it again. Now the rearview mirror shows me the look of an insane man. It's only then that I notice the beard that blackens his face. I should have distrusted him.

    `Nobody's daughter, who's going to nobody's house! Are you trying to fool me, or what? Since you refuse to speak, you might as well wear a veil!'

    I feel a sense of relief at the first glimpse of Aïn Nekhla's houses in the distance.

    `Can you drop me off at the hospital please?'

    `Are you the tabib's sister? He's the only foreigner, a Kabyle!'

    I don't respond.

    `But you, you don't look like a Kabyle. They say he's not married ... Maybe you're his ...?'

    Is he going to dare say his whore? I challenge him with my look. Turning his eyes away from the rearview mirror, he mumbles, `Why did this Kabyle come here? Even the Sahara's children go north or abroad when they become doctors or engineers. People don't come here unless they're in prison or because of some punishment! We in the south, we are a punishment, a prison cell or a garbage can for all of the Tell's nabobs. They only send us the country's riffraff. The proof is that he's in with the RCD, the tabib is! But he died two days ago. They're going to bury him this afternoon!'

    Beyond the vengeful tone that triumphs in his voice, I hear `They're going to bury him this afternoon.' That empties me of all indignation. I had counted on the fact that here the dead are buried the same day, the very afternoon of their death. I deliberately put off my trip for two days. But the doctor undoubtedly had the right to special treatment. Yacine awaited my arrival.

    I think of this burial at the end of my travels. A yoke of fatigue crashes down on me. I lose the sound of the flute, wild and immodest in my innermost being just a short time ago, before I had recognized its melody.

    `The city tabibs cut into him just like a sheep. I hope they put him in the refrigerator the day before yesterday; if not, he's not going to smell like a sheep but more like a hyena!'

    With disgust he spits out the window and continues in his surly tone. `They were looking for the cause of his death, so they said! Does God need to justify taking back what he's given?'

    I ought to slap this vile person. The fire of this wish passes through me and goes out. I content myself with careful observation of the man. His jacket is dirty and torn. His eyes, crazed in the rearview mirror, have two drops of pus in their corners. A fly leaves one eye only to go to the other. His eyelids are red and swollen. Conjunctivitis, I think with detachment. How many children is he responsible for? Eight? Nine, ten? How many women has he worn out?

    My staring irritates him. He turns away and continues his monologue. His voice is no longer any more than a distant annoyance. Everything seems so distant to me. The memories coming back to me have merely a bland, faded taste. I try to retrieve the lost serpentine sounds of the flute.

    A moment goes by before I realize that the car has completely stopped. The volleys of words have gotten the better of my last vibrations of emotion. After fifteen years of absence and a haunting nostalgia, I've arrived in Aïn Nekhla without even noticing. Had this man not been here, I would have burst out laughing. I have the horrible feeling that my reunion with this region is going to lead straight to confrontation, and that a thousand nostalgic sentiments are still more tolerable than Algerian reality.

    On my right, the hospital, just a little smaller, just a little more dilapidated than I had remembered. I pull myself out of the taxi. My suitcase has already been thrown to the ground. I had had the time to change a little money during the brief stopover at the Algiers airport. I give two bills to the man. He pockets them and sticks out his hand again.

    `How much do I owe you?'

    Now he's the one who remains silent. I take out a third bill. He seizes it and quickly leaves. Three hundred dinars? It's way too much. He undoubtedly thinks that my misconduct is worth at least some sort of ransom. If only this trip would cost me in money alone.

I'm right in front of the hospital. In some places, the low wall encircling it is almost entirely covered in sand. Men are crouching or standing along the whole length of the building. They stare at me. Here, present time seems to me nothing more than a decrepit past, my memories broken and dusty. It must be noon. I can't check the time. My watch is in my bag, and I feel hypnotized. My heart is in my head and bangs away.

    I end up climbing the four steps to the landing. I push open the heavy wooden door. A shadowy light, like that in a mosque, fills the entryway. To the right I recognize the door of the consultation room, to the left those of the two waiting rooms. The scraping sound of a chair being pushed back reaches me from the back room, the treatment room. A man in a white smock appears. He comes toward me.

    `Hello, madam.'

    `I'm a friend of Yacine's.'

    Taken aback, he looks at me for a moment.

    `Did you call from France, the day before yesterday?'

    I nod my head.

    `Ah! That's fine, that's fine. I'm glad you're here, madam. I'm the nurse. In his death, I believe, Dr. Meziane will be glad to know that you're here. He had no family left.'

    `No. They were all killed during the war. He had only his mother. She died about two or three years ago.'

    `The Tammar doctors were also his friends. They did an autopsy on him. He was in good health. They said "sudden death." That was quite a sudden death all right! The ambulance brought him back this morning. He's just had the last ablutions. He's being buried at three o'clock.'

    His eyes fill with tears. He turns his back to me and says, `Come!'

    I leave my suitcase and follow him. At the very end of the hallway, next to the treatment room, he opens the door to the morgue. The enormous form of a body lies wrapped in a shroud. Another one, a child, lies on a board on the ground. The odor of cadavers is strong.

    `If you want to see him one last time, I can uncover his face.'

    `No!'

    My panicked cry sounds out of place in the silence. I'm ashamed of it. The nurse looks at me. I move toward the table. I hold out my hands and grab the form by its feet. Two or three layers of starched cloth separate me from it. I feel like I'm touching cardboard. What have I come to look for? The certainty that I'll never see him again, never again? Suddenly, Yacine appears before me, the way he would meet me in the hallways of the Oran hospital when we were students. He's in black corduroy pants and a green shirt, the same dark green of his eyes. His smile digs a broad dimple into his chin. He opens his arms to greet me. I rush toward him. But the atmosphere cuts into my breath. The shroud's whiteness burns my eyes. I hate this white, a scar in the half light. I hate this silence where the unspeakable explodes. I hate this stench. I would like to be able to scream, scream. My breathing blocked, I can't manage a moan or a word. I leave the room.

    The nurse is at my heels and grabs my suitcase.

    `I'll drive you to my house. My wife will take care of you. It's better that you go there.'

    `No. I'm staying here. I'll go to Yacine's after the burial.'

    `They won't let you attend his funeral. You know that women aren't allowed at funerals.'

    `We'll just see who's going to stop me!'

    `The mayor belongs to the FIS. He didn't like Dr. Meziane, but he'll come. He won't miss an occasion so favorable to his propaganda. They're a few guys all stirred up and doing their best to enroll a populace dozing in its misery and taboos.'

    I can't think of anything to say. I turn the door handle of the examination room. Everything is like before, except perhaps, for the examining table. A long white smock hangs behind the desk.

    `Okay, you can just wait there, but ... have you eaten?'

    `I'm not hungry.'

    `I'll make some coffee, at least.'

    Visibly disappointed, he disappears without waiting for my answer. I close the door. My eyes go around the room. The window with its eternal mosquito net projects the light here and there, on the partly rusted X-ray machine, on the lead apron whose big tear is mended with adhesive tape, on the little glass-windowed metal cabinet where the few small bottles seem orphaned, on the cart emptied of its instruments, on the old tile flooring. The hanger. The long smock. Over there, the body under the shroud. An abandoned shroud here, in a heap of whiteness. To one side of the desk, an old armchair, to the other, three fake leather chairs. At the end of the room, the examining table. I'm going to sit down in the armchair. I back it up to the wall. The smock brushes lightly against my back, my shoulders, my neck, my head. I caress it, sniff it, bury my face in it. Is this Yacine's odor? I no longer know what his odor was like. The cadaver's odor is still blocking my nose.

    The hospital door opens abruptly. I immediately hear the nurse exclaim, `Si Salah!'

    Salah Akli? Yacine's best friend?

    In the entrance hall, the two men exchange a few words. Suppressed sobs strangle their voices. I hear them going toward the morgue. A moment later they're back, and they come into the consultation room. I had seen Salah on only a few rare occasions. He was studying medicine in Algiers at the time, and I had always invented a thousand pretexts so as to avoid his meetings with Yacine. Was it out of jealousy? Was it out of fear? His jaundiced gaze is unforgettable.

    `Madam ...?' the nurse asks me.

    `Sultana Medjahed. Salah Akli and I know each other.'

    `Oh, very good, very good.'

    Quite obviously reluctant, Salah shakes my hand, looking at me with his mysterious cat's stare, while the nurse slips out.

    `You never bothered to visit him or even answer his letters. But you arrive in time for his burial! He carried you in him like a deep abscess. Maybe that's what killed him! I've always wondered what he found in you that another less complicated woman couldn't have offered him,' he mutters between his teeth.

    His words suffocate me. I'm looking for a stinging retort when Khaled returns carrying the coffee. For the moment, I rein in my anger. The man hands us the cups. The three of us drink in silence.

    `Did you buy the sheep, Khaled?' Salah asks.

    `Yes, I sacrificed it yesterday. This evening I'll take some plates of couscous to the mosque. I asked the talebs to be there.'

    `Thank you. Let me know what I owe you.'

    `There's already a crowd in front of the hospital.'

    `Yes, there are a lot of people outside,' answers Salah.

    `Now we're just waiting for the city doctors and the officials from here.'

    Khaled hasn't finished his sentence when we hear a commotion in the hallway.

    `Here they are!'

    The office door opens on a group of men who block the entryway. Some of them move toward the end of the hallway. A droning sound of muffled voices, a dull sound of trampling feet, and Khaled reappears at the doorstep.

    `Let's go!'

    Salah and I leave. Outside, a male crowd. A broad age span, but predominantly young. The stretcher, carried by four men, bursts through the wide open door. They take their places at the head of the funeral procession, lining up with the men first, and a large number of adolescent males and children crowding in behind.

    `La illaha ill'Allah, Muhammad rassoul, Allah!'

    The oneness of Allah, chanted, is the signal to leave. The procession gets underway. Khaled, Salah, and I follow. In the lead group, a man turns around several times. The fire in his eyes is unequivocal. He ends up retracing his steps and coming toward me.

    `It's the mayor,' Khaled whispers to me.

    `Madam, you can't come! It's forbidden!'

    Salah takes me by the arm. `Forbidden? Forbidden by whom?'

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE FORBIDDEN WOMAN by Malika Mokeddem. Copyright © 1993 by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle.
Translation copyright © 1998 University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.