by Annie Hawes
Gérard is asking about Liamine’s degree. Did he study here in Tlemcen? In French or in Arabic?
He did Exact Sciences. In French. At the University of Tlemcen, they’ve come up with a cunning way of getting around the political problem with the French language – you get to choose between ‘Arabic’ and ‘Latin’ for your courses! They’re making out it’s the two great classical cultures that are in question. And French is a Latin language, after all, so nobody can disagree! But he hasn’t got a job out of it anyhow. He is a haitiste just like everybody else here – a wall-propper. A waste of time, Liamine says. Nobody can be bothered going to college any more. Except girls – over half the students at the university these days are girls. They’re happy to study, even if there is no job at the end of it. It’s about the only way they’ll get allowed to spend whole days at a time away from the parental home!
Gérard laughs. Do we remember hearing about Yazid’s daughter, who wanted to go and study medicine in Spain? He’s sure that must be why. To get away from her father’s incessant telephone surveillance!
Yes, indeed. And also, who knows, to continue the long and honourable tradition of liberal scientific exchange between the Maghreb and the Iberian peninsula?
A big pile of mixed golden-fried whitebait, squid rings, little tiny flatfish and fresh prawns arrives. It looks delicious. It smells delicious. And I’m told it tastes delicious. But alas, I can hardly eat more than a few morsels of mine. Following my fellow diners’ example, I have liberally sprinkled a tablespoon of some vaguely tomato-looking sauce all over it – stuff that sits on the table in a little glass bowl. And it was not tomato at all, but pure red-hot chilli. After a couple of mouthfuls, I am in agony. I have never been any good with chilli, however hard I try. And this stuff is lethal. Why on earth didn’t anyone warn me? How could anything possibly be this hot?
But it’s harissa, says everyone, including the French component of the dinner party. What else would it be but harissa, in an Algerian restaurant?
Nobody, it seems, could have imagined that I didn’t know. Everyone’s heard of harissa!
Not, I say crossly, still trying to catch my breath, if they happen to come from an Algerian-restaurant-free zone like I do. There may be millions of Algerians in France, but they are pretty few and far between in England. And in Italy too. Do Gérard and Guy know what an onion bhaji is?
No, they say, puzzled. Why? What is it?
I rest my case. It’s all down to who you colonize. And now, thanks to Britain having chosen the wrong part of the world to oppress, leaving my nation in darkest ignorance in the matter of harissa, I can only pick at the few bits of fish round the edge of my plate – and occasionally other people’s plates – that happened to escape the drenching. As I begin filling up with bread, faute de mieux, the serving woman reappears at our table and enquires why I’m not eating.
I offer her a choice of any one of my fiancés she fancies, if she will just give me a few more of the lovely prawns, chilli-free. No luck. She thinks they’ve just about run out. But she’ll see what she can do.
While we eat – or, in some cases, don’t – Gérard busies himself with more news-gathering: as usual, about the Front for Islamic Salvation. What, if any, is its connection with the green-paint attack on the shrine of Sidi Boumedienne? And what made Ismail and Liamine vote for it?
He would once have supported the Front for National Liberation, Liamine says, for all its defects. After all, it’s thanks to them that Algeria is a free nation at last. But what clinched it for him was when the hypocrite West and its United Nations launched their attack on Iraq. The Islamic Front responded by calling for mass demonstrations against Western intervention in Arab affairs, while the FLN government not only did not protest, but sent in the forces of law and order to drive the 100,000 angry demonstrators off the streets!
It wasn’t that Algerians had any time for Saddam himself, Ismail says. This country was the very first to condemn his invading Kuwait. Here in Algeria he was nicknamed Khaddam – which means ‘lackey’. That’s how popular he was!
Or else Haddam, says Liamine, which means ‘destroyer’, and not in a good way! But then, for an Algerian government not to speak out when the West rode roughshod over the Arab nations, and gave them no chance to solve the problem among themselves, without the pointless massacre of thousands of Iraqis! When Algeria itself had been the prime mover in trying to set up peace talks, too! It’s pathetic. If it was left to the Pouvoir, Algeria would end up a banana Islamic republic like Saudi Arabia, grovelling to the two-faced United Nations – who claim to stand for impartial international justice, when they’ve never bothered – since 1967! – about Israel occupying lands the UN itself agrees rightly belong to three sovereign Arab nations. What else could you do, if you had any self-respect, but vote for the Islamic Front?
And in the end, says the optimistic Ismail, the result is still a good one. Who has the Pouvoir had to call in, in its desperation to give some legitimacy to this emergency government, but Mohammed Boudiaf! A good man, from the old, honourable guard of the FLN, who has already spoken out straight against corruption and promises to do something serious about it. You can tell his heart’s in the right place, because, when he addresses the nation, he doesn’t do it either in French or in highbrow classical Arabic, but in ordinary everyday Algerian Arabic.
The green-paint attack on Sidi Boumedienne’s shrine is another matter altogether, they say. There are rumours of a new Groupe Islamique Armée: real hardcore intégristes who believe that the only way to restore the Caliphate – the true Islamic government, or at least, their version of it – is to take over the state first, with violence and force of arms, and to impose shari’a institutions from above. People like the so-called Afghans, or the Takfir wa l’Hijra, who think that anyone who does not support them deserves to die, because they have broken with Islam, excommunicated themselves. They didn’t stand in the elections, of course, because they don’t agree with what they call alien Western democracy. They want the country run by some sort of traditional-style djema’a, the olden-day Councils of Elders from before the French. This latest fiasco will have strengthened the anti-democracy lot, too. What credibility does that give to democracy, calling elections and then bringing in the army when you don’t like the results! Liamine fears the ranks of the intégristes will be swelling by the minute.
The lovely serving lady now reappears with something on a plate, which she slips onto the table in front of me. It’s certainly not prawns, though. A pair of sizzling kebabs on metal skewers. They smell delicious.
Some white kidneys for you, she says, with a conspiratorial wink.
Fantastic. I take a little bite. No idea what a white kidney may be, but it’s going down well. Tender, tasty meat, and not so much as a hint of chilli. I grab more bread and get tucked in.
She gives me a kindly pat on the shoulder. That should keep your strength up for the wedding party, she says.
Grrrr.
Some time later, it is revealed to me that the phrase ‘white kidneys’ is a polite euphemism for testicles.
Mid-morning next day, and we are at the foot of some beautiful rocky cascades a few miles outside the city, admiring the limpid pools below and the impressive iron bridge away above us, crossing the high ravine, designed and built by a certain Monsieur Eiffel. It looks rather a lot like his tower, too, but tipped over sideways. Apparently he built another bridge, way down in the Sahara. I’m looking forward.
We’re at the little shack of a café-bar that serves the picnickers and swimmers who frequent this spot, the Cascades of El Ourit, along with Ismail and Liamine, and three of Ismail’s cousins, who are over visiting from France. Two of the cousins, teenage girls in jeans – and ‘in hair’ – startled us when we arrived here by leaping from their seats, throwing their arms around us, and thanking us in the most heartfelt manner for existing. If it wasn’t for foreigners and tourists coming to this town, they said, life here would be completely im
possible. The only places a woman can sit out in public are those frequented by enough foreigners to make it unremarkable.
The girls, born here, but now used to the ways of Paris, are disgusted with their home town. They love Tlemcen, they say, and have looked forward to coming home for years, but still they are threatening never to return. This is their first visit back as young adults – and teenage girls here have no life at all! Everyone has it in for you, and you’re criticized left, right and centre for having forgotten your roots, for not being Algerian enough! In fact, they say, all these nostalgic old French people who’ve started coming back to visit the happy haunts of their youth get a lot better reception in this town – in spite of what France did to this country – than do real Algerians like themselves, who were brought up in France!
(I check Guy out: he does not seem to have taken that remark about the old nostalgics to heart.)
The cafés of Tlemcen town, it appears, are not at all female-friendly. They actually refuse to serve you at all if there’s no man with you, or, if you do have a man with you, still insist on your going upstairs to sit in a special family room! When the whole point of sitting at a café, as everyone knows, is to be out on the street watching the world go by! But not here in Tlemcen! Only men are allowed to do that! And foreigners!
Worse still, when the girls gave in yesterday and went upstairs to this so-called family room, it turned out to be the haunt of a couple of local prostitutes, who didn’t want them there either! So, they say, any woman who goes out for a coffee must be a prostitute, and if you’re not a prostitute, don’t even dream of going to a café! Even this place, here at the Cascades, has a bit of a louche reputation – too many underdressed bodies by day, and by night the clientèle is certainly not of the most respectable or pious! They wouldn’t want their aunt to know they’d been here, no way!
Gérard and Guy sympathize deeply, huffing and puffing about how awful it all is, as if nothing like that had ever been heard of in their own country. Another example of that short-European-memory syndrome! What are they on about? It certainly isn’t very long, I say, since respectable females wouldn’t dream of going into English pubs – or French bars, either. Men were still staring and muttering at the sight of unaccompanied women in my very own living memory! Probably still are in small country places. Accompanied women – just like here in Tlemcen – had a special separate bar. I don’t recall hearing anybody citing Christianity as a reason for our exclusion in my own lifetime – we’ve emptied the religion out of it now, call it sexism and disapprove of it – but in the granny’s Good Old Days, it was certainly Christian morality that was invoked against the fallen women and shameless hussies who brazenly frequented public hostelries.
The girls are not interested in ancient history, though – or in other people’s religions. They want to tell us about their cousin Jamila, and how even more vile it is for people who actually have to live here full time. Jamila couldn’t even come here today in case somebody saw her and told her mother! And listen to this! She was grabbed a couple of weeks ago, walking down the street en cheveux – the way she always has done, all her life – by a man who stuck his face right up to hers and grabbed her arm, really hurt her too, she had a big bruise on it, and hissed that it would be the worse for her if he saw her out again in such an immodest state of undress. He seemed like the classic neighbourhood barbu, the girls says, a ‘bearded one’, which is slang for a fundamentalist. But then, when Jamila took a second look at him, she realized it was her old physics teacher from school, who had turned intégriste! Imagine that! Your own teacher threatening you with violence – and he used to be such a nice man, too, Jamila said.
We all wander off among the rock pools, trailing greenery, warm sun, toes in water. There are level areas of cherry orchards and apricot trees further down, beside the river. What we’re seeing is nothing, our hosts tell us, compared to the seven massive waterfalls that once roared down the rockfaces below the Eiffel bridge, before Tlemcen built a dam to save the water for the city. Still, it’s perfectly beautiful enough for us, with the warm sun and golden rocks, the babbling brooks and tufts of tiny pink flowers in the crevices. A corner of paradise.
Except that now, distracting us completely from the beauties of nature, Liamine, Ismail and the cousins launch a major campaign to convince us to convert to Islam. I think this is actually some sort of accolade: when religious people get fond of you, they start to worry about your soul, and want to save you. I have had many brushes with concerned Italians trying to save me by converting me to Catholicism over the years. Never make the mistake of admitting to having no religion at all. Your evangelist will go into overdrive, desperate to save you from burning in hellfire for all eternity.
Liamine and Ismail’s great hope, naturally enough, is that an Islamic Algeria might return to the tolerance and greatness of the dynamic days of Sidi Boumedienne, not head off into the darkness of the benighted intégristes, while the girl cousins launch into an Aytan-type critique of the West and its materialism; the famous freedom of the West is great, yes, but at bottom it’s only a freedom to get something better than your neighbour has! They know all about it, because they’ve seen both sides of the coin! The West is no paradise on earth. What about community, charity, and social justice?
What, though, I ask, about the violent bearded moralists they’ve just been complaining about, and the women-in-cafés veto?
But all that has nothing to do with true Islamic values, says everyone in chorus.
Do I know about Khadija, wife of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him? Mohammed’s own example, say the girls, proves that the intégristes are completely wrong in their interpretation of the Koran.
Mohammed’s love story, now told by our hosts and their teenagers while I quietly dabble my toes in the water, really is a revelation to an ignoramus like me. For a start, I had no idea how fully documented his life was. There is none of the vagueness and mystery that surrounds the life of Jesus. That, I suppose, is the advantage of being born 700 years later, and into a much more literate society.
So, to the strains of sweet music . . .
When the couple first set eyes on one another, Khadija was an independent woman: a wealthy merchant in her own right, twice married and twice widowed, and a good ten years older than Mohammed. A brilliant businesswoman, by all accounts, whose acumen in matters of trade was evident from the fact that her camel-trains of merchandise were twice as long as most of the others leaving Mecca. Khadija needed someone trustworthy to accompany one of her caravans to distant Syria, so she put the word out among her family. Mohammed, some sort of distant cousin, though she did not know him personally, was recommended. She offered him the job. And so utterly fabulous was the powerful Khadija that it never entered Mohammed’s head that she could be interested in a mere penniless stripling like himself: it was Khadija herself who made the first move, through a mutual cousin. Moreover, it was she who supported him financially, and not vice versa, for most of their life together. And though he later married several more wives, he never thought of another woman while she was alive – not until after she died, aged sixty-five.
And in case all that isn’t enough to convince me that sexism is not an obligatory part of Islam, one of Mohammed’s later wives, Aisha, is the recognized source of at least half the sayings in the Hadith, the book of interpretations of the Koran which is the second Muslim holy text.
Voilà! says Liamine. How can anyone think that Mohammed, peace be upon him, wanted women to be shut up in the house, powerless and illiterate? It makes no sense at all!
True. As far as I can see, Islam is like all the great religions of the world: it can mean almost anything to almost anybody, and its scriptures can be interpreted in a thousand and one different ways. That, I imagine, is how any religion stays great.
Where on earth, Guy wants to know, do the back-to-the-veil people get their ideas from, then?
Just old customs from before Islam was even born, it see
ms, ancient traditions that have got mixed up with the religion, like the one about women not going into pubs, which nobody sees as part of Christianity any more. Or nobody but a few mad fundamentalists.
Gérard has heard that the custom came from the East, where the veil was used by the privileged classes alone. An invisible wife, with no need to go out and about, or dirty her hands with work, was the sign of a rich man, as Yazid and Tobias told us back in Morocco. Soon everyone was aping their betters, as we humans so often will.
And a few generations later, I suppose, people were stuck with it. A woman didn’t look decent unveiled; she looked shameless and argumentative. A tradition was born.
15
The city of Algiers sits on a magnificent Mediterranean bay ringed by hills; it looks like a giant’s version of Nice. All along the seafront is a showcase city of broad ex-colonial boulevards, imposing Beaux-Arts arcaded buildings, brilliant white apartment blocks with blue slatted shutters and wrought-iron balconies. We are downtown, having breakfast at a boulevard street café, just like any you’d find in Nice, though there are certainly a lot more women in those beaky white half-kerchiefs than you’d normally find on the Côte d’Azur. My French companions need fear no famine here in Algiers, where the cafés provide not just croissants, but also pains au chocolat and pains aux raisins – the whole gamut of French breakfast pastries; though I’m sorry to say that things in Algiers have gone too far along the road to modernity for there to be any sign of Momma’s old-style breakfast bowls.
Our ways are to part for a few hours. Gérard is off to pay a call on some friend-of-a-friend who is teaching here in Algiers. Jean-Pierre used to teach as a co-opérant down in the south of the country, and in Mali too, and has advice, addresses and contacts for the boys’ onward trip towards the River Niger.
Guy wants to go alone to look at his old family home. He isn’t sure, he says, what his reaction will be. Or maybe he just won’t have a reaction? We have already checked out his father’s ex-work-place, just up the road from here: the central post office, a massive white edifice in a rotund Franco-Muslim-medieval style, three huge, tall archways filling almost the whole of its monumental façade. Guy stood and stared at it, mesmerized. It seemed, er, improbable, he said . . .
