by Annie Hawes
Jean-Pierre has given Gérard some useful names and addresses, friends to call in on – not only in Mali, but in the south of Algeria, too. Even, as luck would have it, one in Timimoun itself. Hadj Mouloud is a prominent citizen there, he says, a most hospitable and well-informed man, who loves to put up passing Europeans. Jean-Pierre stayed with him a couple of summers ago, and he’s already sent him a note warning of our imminent arrival. He’s sure we will be more than welcome. Timimoun is the most beautiful of the oasis towns, he says. And the area is more or less untouched by all the religious-political trouble going on up here in the north. That, unfortunately, is why the Pouvoir is sending all its Islamist prisoners down there! Timimoun’s palmeraie, its palm grove, is massive: nearly half a million palm trees on it, and green and beautiful in spring, as we’ll soon see. It stretches a whole thirty kilometres along the bed of what was once a river, though not even the archaeologists can say when there was last visible, surface water there: it vanished long before written history began, and maybe even before the oases were first inhabited. We must make sure not to miss the fouggaras – the amazing system of underground channels, a thousand kilometres of them and more, that stretch out across the desert. They carry water to the palm groves using gravity alone – from places miles away beneath the sand dunes, where the water table is higher. Keep an eye out, Jean-Pierre tells us, for lines of what look like wells stretching across the desert: they’re the openings for inspecting and repairing the tunnels. Hadj Mouloud has diagrams of how they work, done by some team of scientists who came investigating the system – don’t forget to ask for a look. There is absolutely nothing natural about the existence of Timimoun and its companion oases: they are entirely, one hundred per cent, a feat of human ingenuity. Archaeologists say the fouggaras were built well over a thousand years ago, probably by some of the earliest known inhabitants, who – strange though it may seem – were Berbers of the Jewish faith.
Naturally we request more information. Jewish Berbers?
We’re out of luck. The band starts up now, with a scream of strings and a roll of drums: no more conversation. Cha’abi turns out (to my ignorant ears, at any rate) to be a close relation of Rai – Arabic–Western fusion. Lots of heartfelt balladry to pounding oriental drum rhythms, punctuated by tinkling lutes, wailing violas – and saxophones. Here in the cha’abi repertory at least, Algeria’s multicultural identity is being celebrated to the full: the first song was written by an Algerian Jew, Lili Boniche (a man, says Jean-Pierre, in spite of this feminine-sounding name, and definitely nothing to do with the Berbers of Timimoun! They all converted to Islam some centuries ago.) The next is by a certain Matoub, a Berber from Kabylia, sung in a mixture of Tamazight and French – and now for a song in Arabic, which I insist on having translated, because the name Bob Marley keeps cropping up in it, along with a hint of reggae in the percussion section. It turns out to be a sort of lament addressed to Marley, tongue in cheek, chastizing him for smoking cannabis, for inducing young men to rip their jeans, and young women to do much worse, and recommending that Marley take a trip round the marabouts of Algeria to cure him of his bad behaviour. Can this music, with its pleasingly bizarre patchwork of languages, cultures and religions, be the modern Algerian manifestation of the Peoples of the Book: united and productive once more?
Farida and Kamal now decide, over a round of double-strength gin-fizzes – we try not to boggle – to give us an exposé of the endemic corruption in this country – how you need a connaissance, a connection, just to do the simplest thing. You can’t even get a parking permit, or a copy of your birth certificate from the town hall, much less a passport, unless you know someone who knows someone.
Sounds just like Italy, then, I say.
But I am very wrong, according to Kamal. Algeria is not like Italy, because Italians know how to work: they know what capitalism is. Algerians don’t. They have been spoilt by the state, got into bad habits. Because until recently everything was free, or almost free, here – medicines, schooling, housing. They expect to get everything for nothing. But if they want to get rich, all they have to do is work. That’s what a free-market economy means!
Farida and Lamia both find this sally completely hilarious and start calling their friend ‘Kamal la Science’: Kamal the Science. Fortunately we have Jean-Pierre on hand to explain that this insider joke is a reference to a minister in the now-defunct Algerian government, a certain Abdelhamid Brahimi, an obsessive free-market supporter who constantly appeared on TV, as unemployment burgeoned around him, claiming that what the Algerian economy needed was more ‘science’. Earning himself, naturally enough, the ironic nickname ‘Abdelhamid la Science’.
Nice to see that, privileged though they may be, the girls don’t go along with Kamal’s nonsense. I decide to share my favourite free-market quote with them: from an Egyptian prime minister, aptly enough, of the mid-nineteenth century. The freedom of the market, he said – unless all participants were equal, which in the real world was never the case – amounted to nothing more than the freedom of the fox in the chicken run.
Good, eh? He knew this from bitter experience. The Egyptians had had the effrontery to start building a cotton-mill in Cairo, and Britain, defending her freedom to buy raw cotton from Egypt for the Lancashire cotton-mills – whose cloth she would then re-export to the Egyptian market at a fine profit – sent in gunships to bombard the city. The Egyptians, trapped in their chicken run, had no choice but to give in. And go on buying British cloth.
‘Only faith in God can allow us to escape the vicious cycle of underdevelopment and neo-colonialism: to achieve global social reform,’ says Hamida.
She is translating the Arabic words on the huge poster in the Islamists’ window for me. The FIS offices are just a couple of blocks up the road from where she works: you can see the place from here. Each of the eight women sitting at the sewing machines in this dressmaking co-op has a little bottle of vinegar and a twist of rag next to her. With the Islamists’ offices so near, they have to be ready for the gas lachrymogène, the tear gas, they say. Last week there was a car-bomb: they threw bundles of offcuts down from the window, to help tie the wounds of the injured. Meanwhile they make bright kaftans on their machines, and sober jellabas: not exactly high-tech industry, says Hamida, but safe, because however bad things get, people still need to cover their bodies!
And, looking on the bright side, adds Latifa, the stronger the Islamists get, the more metres of covering a woman needs – and the better for this all-female workplace. Worse luck for them!
I’m relieved, I say, to see that the Islamists do actually talk of something other than women. That poster gives me some idea, at last, of why Algerians might want to vote for them. Since we arrived in the Maghreb, all I’ve ever heard about is their attitude to women: no hint of what else they stood for – if anything.
The Islamic duty of rulers to consult with the ruled, says Latifa. Their duty to be honest and straightforward in their dealings, and to provide social justice. All of which, she explains, is an Islamist way of talking about putting an end to corruption, and to the privileged elite that runs this country. The irony, though, is that the only success they’ve had is on women. Because the Pouvoir, sucking up to the FIS – or trying to steal their thunder, depending on how you look at it! – has kowtowed to them on women, but nothing else. Obviously, that’s the only part of the Islamists’ programme the government can possibly steal. They can’t shout about vicious cycles of neo-colonialism when they’re practically snuggled up in bed with France. And they can’t do anything about the privileged, corrupt elite, either, can they? They would be cutting their own throats!
That’s how this country has ended up with both its main parties supporting the new Puritanism, says Hamida. In fact, she adds, what she and the girls should really have done is open a cinema in this building, not a clothing enterprise. The cinema is the only boom industry in Algiers at the moment! Thanks to the government’s bring-back-Islamic-morality cam
paign, it’s the only place couples can spend some time together in the whole of the city. With the housing shortage, every home is packed to bursting: there’s no chance of privacy there. Bars, cafés and restaurants are no longer woman-friendly, let alone courting-couple-friendly! And now there’s no more canoodling in the park, either. God forbid the police should see you so much as holding hands in public, never mind kissing! You’ll get bundled straight into the back of the black van.
Hamida’s fellow workers are all in their twenties and thirties. Amina is a widow; the others say they couldn’t dream of marrying. Marrying here involves your whole family: it isn’t something you go off and organize all by yourself. And their families are organizing nothing. Where are the men who could afford the dowry – and provide the home? They would have to live with their parents or parents-in-law; available apartments are virtually non-existent, or unaffordable. Then what when the children came along?
They all live at home with their parents, and all are suffering badly in the new climate of intolerance. Still, they refuse to wear the veil, or even the khimar, except for Khalida, who says she wears the headscarf for personal reasons, and Hamida, whose area is too dangerous. But it is scary just travelling to work every morning, putting up with remarks, holding your head high, fearing violence. And as for the evenings, they hardly go out any more. There are no public places open to women. Where can you go these days? And why risk your life to do it? They could afford a flat together, they agree when I ask. But have I forgotten? A woman has to live under the protection of some male relative. One woman living alone through no fault of her own is committing fitna, becoming a source of discord. A group of women who had intentionally chosen to live like that would be a red rag to a bull.
And first, says Hamida, they would have to find a responsible male to give them permission to do it! A woman’s legal status here is the same as a child’s, since the Pouvoir rejigged the constitution to make itself seem as shari’a-friendly as the Islamist opposition. You need a responsible male’s permission to do anything – get a passport, marry, leave the country, even to visit your own parents, once you’re married. They were actually trying to allow a man to cast the vote on his wife’s behalf at one point, though luckily they lost on that one! There are still a few men of principle in the FLN. But look at Zorah, over there, on the machine by the window – she’s twenty-eight years old, and whenever she goes out with her fiancé, she has to carry a letter from her father, to say that he has given his permission!
Zorah nods and smiles her agreement. But it’s partly because she refuses to wear the veil, she says. That’s why she gets stopped so often by the forces of law and order and needs the letter. And meanwhile, busy harassing lovers to enforce the laws on public decorum, the police leave the trabendos, the contrabandists who are making vast fortunes from smuggled goods in these days of private enterprise, in peace to do what they like, no hassle at all.
And there are more trabendos every day, says Latifa, who works at a hairdresser’s on her day off. Once upon a time all their clients were francisants, wealthy ladies from the educated classes, but nowadays you get many loud newly rich clients, trabendo wives of flamboyant taste, filling up the place and ordering you about. Meanwhile, the manageress has had to take all the signs off the façade and move the salon to the upstairs rooms at the back, because hairdressers here are as badly out of favour as barbers. There have been threats to declare a fatwa on beauty salons. Women aren’t supposed to wear make-up, or do their hair, according to the barbus. That just entices men to commit a fault in spite of themselves.
What a very odd idea these Islamists do have of themselves and their sexuality, I say. But nobody else thinks it’s odd. Latifa explains, like little Aisha and Zeinab did back in Oujda, that men can’t help themselves; they’re not like us.
Time for lunch. They eat in here, they say: it’s cheaper – and anyway, why run extra risks? They are getting the food together as we talk, onto a big brass tray: sesame-seed flatbreads, a chunk of sharp-flavoured white cheese speckled with red chilli, a pile of olives, slivers of roasted red pepper doused with oil and thyme, some stuffed vine-leaves. There’s a lovely secret courtyard in the heart of this building, benches round its green-and-blue tiled walls, pots of ferns and aspidistras around a central well, to sit in while we eat. No plates, just a knife each. The bread is your plate: you tear it open and use fragments of it to pick up the garnishes. We have a beautiful big bowl of fruits for dessert, another bowl to fill from the courtyard tap to rinse them.
As we eat, my new friends regale me with more tales of horror. Amina first. She is a Kabyle, and so was her husband, who passed away a few months ago from cancer. In the hospital where he was waiting to die, the Islamists did their best to drive her away from his bedside. She sat with him a few hours every day, doing her best to comfort him, chatting away in Tamazight and in French – the languages they had always spoken together – but after a while the orderlies began saying she was in their way, she shouldn’t stay so long, her visits weren’t good for her husband. And when she still kept coming, and staying, finally they brought in the hospital imam to tell her that if she couldn’t speak Holy Arabic to her man, she had best be gone. Her heathen languages, he said, were burning her dying husband’s soul . . .
Latifa has a fifteen-year-old sister, a brilliant singer, who has been playing with a cha’abi band since they were all kids, but now she doesn’t dare sing in public any more. First, she’s a girl, and second, they disapprove of all music, except chanting the Koran. They stopped her and threatened her. The Koran is God’s perfect work, and that is all we need.
Zorah tells me of a local stallholder near her home who sold women’s clothes, stocked tight stretch jeans. They warned him once, but he didn’t take it seriously. The next time they cut his throat.
Next horror: a kindly taxi-driver, Dalila’s best friend’s uncle, who always used to drive them to the beach at weekends, ever since they were children. They would have such a laugh in his car, music turned up loud, lots of jokes and horseplay. Then suddenly he stopped looking them in the eye, started lowering his head whenever there were women about, wouldn’t have music on the radio any more, and finally, he categorically refused to take them to the beach at all. In January he was arrested as the ringleader of a whole gang of intégristes. It makes her skin crawl. She was so fond of him!
Now we go back to the Pouvoir. They talked of outlawing the taking of second and third wives, says Amina, and then did nothing. Your husband doesn’t have to consult you, or even inform you, if he’s taking another wife. It happened to her elder sister, he just appeared at the house one day with a new woman, a good twenty years younger than her, and relegated Samira to the back room. She asked him to divorce her, but he wouldn’t – he didn’t want their grown-up children to think badly of him, he said! A man can divorce at will, no explanation necessary, but there are hardly any legal grounds for a woman to divorce her husband. Ill-treatment and violence don’t count. She should practise Islam: submission, in the literal sense. But impotence does! Samira could hardly claim that, though, since the new wife had a baby on the way in no time! So now she’s stuck in the back babysitting, while her husband and his new wife whisper sweet nothings in the other room. Amina can hardly bear to go round any more. Who knows what it’s like for Samira, having to live there?
Hamida doesn’t think the FLN has any principles at all any more. They don’t stand for anything – certainly not for Independence, now they’re ready to sell half the country up to the first comer. All they care about is staying in power. Except maybe Mohammed Boudiaf. He has dared talk about corruption – and has even actually begun charging people! High-up people, too, not just petty officials! Who knows, maybe he’ll do something for women as well?
But Boudiaf or not, the government is still pandering to Islamism. On the news it always calls the killers maniacs or criminals, never Islamists – as if their violence was nothing to do with their religious beliefs. B
ut it is. They are drogués de la religion – religion-addicts.
And the women who support them, then? I ask. Brainwashed? Or just dragooned into agreeing with their husbands and fathers?
Heated debate in Arabic as the fruit bowl is handed round. Nothing so straightforward, is their conclusion. Women join the FIS because they can, says Dalila. A girl’s family can refuse to allow her to get a job, go to college, get married, but they can’t forbid her to throw herself wholeheartedly into her religion. Now she has a role, recognition, status; she can participate, respected, in the debates at the mosque. And at any sign of opposition from the family, a whole mosque-full of honourable men of religion is ready to take her side!
More than that, says Latifa. There’s another kind of fulfilment involved, too, if we won’t think the worse of her for mentioning it! Join the FIS and all the biggest obstacles to sexual fulfilment in this country are gone at a stroke. It may be impossible for ordinary young women to flout their parents and marry, or have any kind of love-life, in this country, but it’s another thing entirely among fellow fundamentalists. Islamists argue for women to submit to their families in everything else, but it’s fine to rebel against them to join the FIS. And once the two families are out of the equation, so is parental permission for marriage – and the need for a dowry. They don’t even need a home to set up in. Their imam will give them his blessing regardless.
Hang on! I say. So in a country where men and women can’t even get to know one another unless they’re close relations, and where marriage is a horribly complicated thing involving business negotiations between two sets of parents, all young people have to do to break free is to become supporters of radical religion?
