by Annie Hawes
Hamida laughs at me. It’s not quite that simple, or she and her workmates would all go and join! It may be a kind of liberation, but think of the downside: being married to a barbu for the rest of your life!
Dalilah says that lots of women silently go along with the Islamists because women are so vulnerable here. It’s a matter of life and death to remain respected and respectable. They can’t allow themselves to take the side of anyone who breaks ranks, in case it reflects on them. She herself has heard a pair of ordinary middle-aged housewives talking about a woman who’d been raped: it was her own fault, she had committed fitna, created discord, by allowing a man into the house when she was alone. The Islamists’ promise is simple: a bigger, better and stronger version of the traditional family. It’s hard to imagine any other source of livelihood and security, if all you’ve ever known is the family. How could an abstraction like ‘rights’ keep you safe? Women are told – and maybe believe – that people like my present company of seamstresses, women who talk of women’s rights, are nothing but deluded mouthpieces of the West. Western ‘rights’ will turn them into degraded and defenceless sex-objects, shunned and scorned, make them lose the only protection they know, their male relations, and put nothing at all in its place.
Who would take the side of a bunch of hussies like us, anyway? asks Zorah, laughing.
Speak for yourself, says Latifa. We know how much time you and your fiancé spend up at the cinema!
Shrieks of laughter, and suddenly, as we start on our fruit course, everyone falls to discussing love and men, like a bunch of sex-starved teenagers in a school playground. Soon we are covering the charms of various film stars, singers, actors, mostly unknown to me, and even the occasional boy they have dated in real life, as well as times they’ve managed to hold hands in public, a hidden corner of a certain green and leafy park where you can steal a quick kiss if you’re lucky. We’re all peeling our fruit now, sitting in a giggling circle, knives in hand. Dangerous stuff. Let’s hope no handsome Egyptian slave walks in.
Gérard and Guy have returned from Guy’s second nostalgia-at-one-remove mission. They have met Mohammed – yet another Mohammed – Guy’s father’s friend from the Post Office. Mohammed, once he realized who Guy was, leapt upon him and embraced him so hard he squeaked. Then Guy burst into tears, and Mohammed did too. They went into the house and were made much of, and Mohammed kept telling Guy to thank his father, he had made them so happy, they loved the house so much, it had changed their lives . . . Which Gérard thought was insane, he says, because Guy’s father hadn’t really done anything, had he, since they could just have taken the house next day anyway? Terrible state of affairs when a man doesn’t realize that things have changed for the better thanks to the efforts of his own people, but believes it’s down to the charity of a pied-noir!
Guy says Gérard is an old cynic, and it makes a huge difference if somebody gave you something willingly or unwillingly.
And anyway, says Gérard, interrupting, they were taken into the house and made much of, and Mohammed still has an old armchair that Guy’s family left behind, weird because they sit on rugs and cushions round it so the chair looks like some strange fetish they’re worshipping. They made Guy sit in it – you should have seen his face, says Gérard, with everyone sitting at his feet: just what he was hoping for! – and they made a huge fuss of him and brought out tea and cakes, and they are certainly not intégristes because Madame Mohammed came and sat with them too, and invited them to stay in the house as long as they wanted. A very mad idea, according to Gérard, because the place seemed to be packed to the limit already with members of the family. Still, now Gérard sees what Ismail’s girl cousins meant about visiting ex-colonials. Guy and he were outrageously well treated. You would never believe anything bad had ever happened between the French and the Algerians. But then obviously it didn’t, he says hastily, seeing that Guy is about to protest. Not between Guy’s dad and Mohammed, at any rate. And then he and Guy left and went for a wander round the quartier and found a little park that was exactly the same as in one of Guy’s family’s films. Except that nowadays there is a monument right in the middle of it to the million dead of the War of Independence.
Before we have even reached Timimoun, we will begin to hear of street fighting in the quartiers populaires of Algiers. Within the year, Europeans will be warned not to go anywhere near the area. The Islamists are in full control there. I will write three times to Hamida and only receive an answer to the first. I pray that she and her friends and family may still be safe and sound. There is still hope, even at the darkest hour, when the Groupe Islamique Armée declares a nationwide fatwa on all unveiled women. I have saved the testimony of one woman from that morning. She has always refused to wear the veil, and has brought her daughter up likewise, but should she abandon her principles now, and force her teenager against her will to cover herself when they walk to school today? Does she have the right to risk her daughter’s life, as well as her own, to fight what she calls ‘barbarity and obscurantism’? Her neighbour steps in from the courtyard, dressed to the nines, hair beautifully coiffed. If she is going to meet her death this morning, she says, she wants to do it in style. With daughter and neighbour behind her, our heroine opens the street door, heart in mouth, legs trembling. They are going to be the only females unveiled in the quartier, in the city, in the whole country: they are going to die.
But now she looks up the street, and there they are! Everywhere! Bareheaded women – brown hair, black hair, hazel, henna-red. They have not been intimidated, they are at her side! As she steps across her threshold, she hears, she says, mingled with the you-yous of all the generations of her women ancestors, the low roar of the walls of intolerance crumbling.
17
Before we head southwards for the desert and Timimoun, we can’t resist a quick detour along the coast, curious to see the Rif Berbers’ Algerian cousins, the Kabyles. It’s a short ride eastwards to Tizi Ouzou, the Berber capital, only an hour from Algiers, but we’ve paused on the way to take in the atmospheric Roman ruins of Tipasa, right at the water’s edge; a favourite spot of Albert Camus in his youth, and of Guy’s parents when they were courting.
Here the salt-white ruins stand eroded and gap-toothed among wild shrubs and long grass, outlined against a purple-blue sea, with not a fence or a signpost anywhere. Magically wild; we feel as if we’ve just discovered them ourselves. Guy clambers onto a rock to declaim his favourite quote from Camus. ‘Life can only be understood looking backwards,’ he says ‘but alas, it must be lived looking forwards.’ We pass an amphitheatre, two temples and a villa, to find, right by the water’s side, the ruins of what The Little Cunning One says was once a factory for garum, that mysterious sauce or seasoning to which the Romans were so addicted that they felt food was virtually inedible without it. It was made by fermenting salted fish, a process so stinky that under the Byzantines its manufacture was banned from inhabited areas. Even the experts know little about the exact recipe for the stuff. Intrigued, I inspect the factory’s ruins minutely, but alas, an unable to add anything at all to the sum of human knowledge on this topic. Gérard wonders whether the positioning of a famously odoriferous factory here, right on the path the townsfolk would have had to take to get to the fourth-century Christian basilica, might, in its time, have had some political significance.
After the splendours of Ancient Rome and its mysteriously smelly condiments, purposely sited to annoy the Christians or not, and a quick tour round what was once the Phoenician trading port, now reduced to a few local fishing boats, we jump onto the next cranky bus. Onwards to Tizi Ouzou. A friendly city, but certainly not splendid. Kabyles may have the same reputation for stubborn resistance here in Algeria as the Rif Berbers do in Morocco, but, unlike Chefchaouen, their major city has certainly not fought off the depredations of modern architecture. Naturally, enough, say my companions. Tizi Ouzou, unlike Chefchaouen, is a colonial creation. It was set up by France in the 1870s, conceived as
a new home for some of the hundred thousand refugees from Alsace-Lorraine, who had recently arrived in France, fleeing the Franco-Prussian war.
From Alsace to Algeria! That must have been some culture shock. Still, I’m not sure this excuses their terrible taste in architecture – or that of the Kabyles, who took over from them.
We get ourselves a delicious walkabout lunch of merguez frites here, a dish I am so used to meeting at roadside snack-stops in France that I genuinely had no idea that the merguez was an Algerian beef sausage, and not a French pork one at all. I am well up to speed on the topic now, after a lengthy lecture from the horrified proprietor of the stall – French sausages? Are you mad? – backed by polyphonic harmonies of Mais non! from Gérard and Guy.
And is the place really full of fair-skinned freckled people with reddish hair who look just like me? No. But the colouring here is certainly on the light side for North Africa, and we spot several sandy-brown-haired individuals, plenty of freckles and even a few pairs of greeny-blue eyes, black-lashed and startling in golden-brown faces.
Gérard has heard, he says – speaking of blue eyes – that there is, or once was, a statue to Adolf Hitler somewhere here in Tizi-Ouzou. The Nazi leader, apparently, was once viewed by some of the city’s inhabitants in a positive light. According to Gérard’s informant, Hitler planned – once he had achieved World Domination – to take North Africa out of the hands of the upstart Arabic peoples and return it to its original rulers, the Aryan Berbers. Gérard is dying to ask someone if this statue really exists, but when it comes down to it, none of us has the nerve to ask such a thing. What if the story is a complete calumny? It certainly doesn’t fit with the image of the Kabyles today: the most liberal and progressive group in Algeria, who don’t just fight like their Moroccan cousins to get their language recognized as a national one, in which their children have a right to be educated, but also refuse to have any truck with the intégristes of Islam, and are known for demanding equal rights for Algerian women. Moreover, they carry quite a bit of clout in the country, especially since their uprising of 1980 – the ‘Kabyle Spring’ as they call it – which threatened to topple the government. A ray of hope, maybe . . .
We wander with our unFrench sausages into a street lined with market stalls: lots of Kabyle countrywomen here, in outfits even better than the Rif ones. Layer upon layer of bright flowered chintz – so much for not copying the perfect designs of Allah! – with loads of contrasting ric-rac braid, hung about with all manner of brightly coloured belts, shawls, scarves, twisted silk cords, all contrasting and clashing and looking wild and fabulous, topped off with chunky ethnic jewellery in amber and silver. Wound around their heads are scarves with long dramatic fringes – hot pink interwoven with silky yellow strands is the fashion of the moment, it seems – arranged so that the fringes fall about their faces in a most becomingly coquettish manner.
These Kabyles take my fancy so much that, once we bump into the chintz dresses on a stall at a market, and regardless of anything rude I may have said to Guy on the topic of his burnous, I am unable to resist buying one – in a pale pink with big green, blue and yellow chrysanthemums. And so bold have I become that I offer the salesman a mere half of what he asks without batting an eyelid. Gratifyingly, we eventually arrive at a price half way between the two prices first named. I could easily get a taste for bargaining: an exhilarating sport, involving much subtlety of expression. You need to look as if you know everything there is to be known about the range of commodities in question, whilst also looking meek enough to deserve a bargain. So proud am I of this new-found skill that, minutes later, I also have to buy the pink-and-yellow shawl. Not such a bargain, sad to say; it turns out not to be made of loose-woven cotton, as I’d imagined, but of acrylic. From Taiwan. Still, if that doesn’t bother the seductive Kabyles, why should it bother me? Further on is a stall of what I now recognize as make-up accoutrements – how far I have come since Tetuan! – where I also buy one of those tiny leather kohl-bottles. I say leather, but I think the stuff is really some sort of internal organ tissue: hard and semi-transparent. Mine, the stallholder said, is the Tuareg nomads’ version: it is decorated with tiny appliqué stripes of some sort of short, smooth black-and-brown fur. They also come in black wood ornamented with tiny strips of brass and copper. A hard decision. I manage to apply the kohl right away, no mirror, but luckily I can’t quite work how to put on the fringed scarf without looking, and tie it round my waist, rather than my head.
I say luckily because, when I finally do come across a mirror, a day later, and try it on, the effect is appalling. I have never, ever owned a single hot-pink-and-golden-yellow garment until now; I should have known that there was some good reason for this. Worse still, after seeing nothing but brown eyes all this time, my own light-coloured ones, outlined in their black kohl, far from being the attractive feature I’ve imagined, are the exact opposite. Positively terrifying. Like a pair of scary white holes in my head. Off with the kohl.
Next most irresistible item on those Tizi-Ouzou market stalls: door-locks made out of wood. A big square block of beautiful, satiny olive wood, with a sliding tongue within, and a key made of – wood! A kind of giant wooden toothbrush with half a dozen wooden bristles, each one corresponding, as the lock-maker demonstrates – though we have no language in common – to a reciprocal hole somewhere in the innards of the block. Amazing workmanship! I love it, I want it, and even without haggling the price is minuscule. But good sense prevails. I don’t need it for anything, and I would have to lug it right down to the Sahara and back again. I resist the temptation. Idiotically. Where or when will I ever see one of those again? I have regretted it ever since.
Checking out the Kabyle countryside, camouflaged in my pink Berber chintz, I discover that the heartlands of Kabylia own even more spectacularly green mountain roads than does the Rif, some of them sliced right into the sides of cliffs, with a sheer and unprotected drop to seaward. And that the village houses out here in the Djurdjura mountains, unlike the town ones, are close relations of Khadija’s drystone village in the Rif. Many of the villages are suffering, by the looks of things, from serious depopulation, with half the housing biodegrading back into the hillsides, and only old people left. Sadly reminiscent of many isolated mountain villages in Italy: several dozen houses and only three old ladies still in residence, stoically hoeing away at their vegetable patches.
But then, I suppose this depopulation must mean, looking on the bright side, that there are more opportunities in Algeria than in Morocco to find an easier life than subsistence farming up a recalcitrant mountain. Does it?
Even Gérard doesn’t know. It might be that, or it might be a result of the destruction of all traditional ways of life under his countrymen. He’s read that less than half of those three million villagers who were trucked off to the camps ever went home, once they were released from their eight-year-long imprisonment. Conditions of life in the countryside here must have been worse than anything we saw in Khadija’s village: there was no viable life to return to. Then, if you uproot people from their land, even only for half a generation, so much knowledge about how to survive on it will be lost that maybe it’s not recoverable. The villagers just headed for the cities, it seems, seeking work. Algeria began its new life doubly handicapped – with no technicians and managers to keep the country running, and its cities flooded with hundreds of thousands of bewildered peasant farmers, uprooted and illiterate.
But more of that later. At the moment we are in a state of shock. We have just been chased out of a tiny hamlet in the hills by its inhabitants, for no reason at all that we could determine. And they didn’t just chase us, they actually hurled stones at our retreating backs to hasten our departure.
We had been dropped off by yet another kindly car-owner at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere – a very dry, stony, dusty and rocky nowhere too, with not a spring leaf to be seen anywhere on the broad scree slopes all around us. This, he told us, was part of the once hea
vily forested area napalmed by the French to eliminate the hidden bases of the Algerian fighters. The vegetation has come back in some places, though nothing you could call a forest, of course. But some parts have just stayed like this.
It certainly was moonscape-like here. We could see for miles in every direction. But ironically enough, an entire village can still lurk undetected, even in these barren surroundings. Gradually, as our eyes became accustomed to the grey-brown emptiness – a depressing contrast to the luxuriant green of the foothills further north, through which we’d been travelling all morning – it dawned on us that half way up the dusty slope opposite us was a series of rectilinear arrangements of the rocks and stones that could not be accidental. Buildings. A village, as dry and leafless as its surroundings.
I suppose the point of the napalm was not to destroy the buildings, though. As long as succour and support were gone, the guerrillas would have had to move on. Taking the water away from the fish – that’s what the French military called it. There is certainly no hint here of plant or animal life on which the villagers could possibly have continued living, never mind feeding and sheltering a guerrilla army.
The place was obviously uninhabited. No sign of any modern amenities, no glass in the windows, no electricity pylons. Had the villagers just left, their livelihoods destroyed along with the local ecosystem? Or been trucked off to the camps, never to return? Intrigued, we set off to investigate their abandoned homes, scrambling up the stony slopes towards the buildings.
Guy had arrived at the first house, somewhat isolated from the others, and actually stuck his head in through the window, when, all of a sudden, faces began to appear in doorways further uphill: women’s faces in bright, fringed headdresses. Now an old man and two younger ones, their robes and chèches as dusty as the narrow pathway between the decrepit buildings, came from nowhere to stand stock still, staring. A bunch of small children began gathering, shouting and gesticulating. Taking this for a welcome, we continued towards them, until several more men appeared, and we began to realize that the shouting was not intended amicably at all. They were warning us off. Almost eye to eye with them by now, hot and breathless, we stopped and stared, open-mouthed. We had met with nothing but friendly welcomes in this country so far; we could hardly take it in. It was Gérard who registered the bad situation first. Turn around, he said. Leave! Quick! We’re not wanted here.