You smile, as if relieved to have found me, and ask me not to spend so much time alone. Your brother used to love reading and would isolate himself in this way. Legend has it he died without a sound, a book in his hand. Do you fear such a fate for your daughter?
“I’m reading a book.”
I say this sentence to you in your language. As for the word “painting,” your culture doesn’t know it. I say in Berber, “Arghigh thakthab fla painting.”
You come closer to me and I show you some of the pictures.
“Helghenth,” you say.
You don’t see that they’re one person. All sick, you tell me. Yet it’s the same face painted in each portrait. Jeanne Hébuterne, the painter’s lover. You find her pale. When her beloved died, she killed herself. Jumped out the window, a child in her belly. On the Rue Amyot, according to the book.
“Themuth.”
She’s dead. Again in your language.
I show you another woman. The only foreign face. A brunette in a black hat. The Jewess.
You tell me her face is soaked with soot.
“Akathoumiss eoudheegh.”
Which also means a hard surface marked by time.
From the shadows, thick layers of paint unearth barely parted red lips, skin covered by a gray dust, mysterious eyes drawn in charcoal, and brown hair under a black hat meant for the outdoors. She’s not a passerby, she’s posing in an empty space. To provoke you, I say, “Thskar.”
She’s drunk. Hearing this word, you tell me it’s not good for me to look at such women.
“Nequente bnadem.”
They destroy people. They discourage them, you tell me before retreating.
Your distrust of things foreign to your culture influences me less and less. All your warnings, your taboos, are unwanted. I can’t want them. I’m looking precisely for the things denied me. I look in every corner. And it’s by accident that you lead me down that first path toward freedom.
I love Jeanne Hébuterne’s face—her sky-blue gaze, her sadness, the vestige of self-preservation—for what remains on the surface, a world extinguished despite its light. Whether or not the editor consciously selected these paintings, aware of the painter’s consistent choice of model, Jeanne Hébuterne reminds me of the foreigner’s face. The Jewess. And if these portraits impose a semblance of life on the painter’s lover, it’s because her own has vanished. She committed suicide.
By this time I understand the resonance of the word “Jew.” I grasp it on my own. The moment I learn what took place in Europe marks my first disillusionment.
Paintings, pictures, images—words I can’t translate for you and whose varied significations your language ignores—preoccupy my life. You’re worried. You warn me about them. But your fears arouse an obsessive curiosity within me whose provenance and motives elude you. For an image, I will defy my father. I want, as he does, to watch television. One day, I want more than just the TV news broadcast finally permitted. To witness in his presence the stream of advertisements and, why not, a nightly television show. Once the news is over, I take my sister’s hand, I hold her back, we stay. What is bound to happen, happens. The naked woman. The Cadum soap one. The Dove of the era. We can only see her stomach, water dripping, soap bubbles forming, maybe a breast, she’s holding a child, also naked. I feel flushed, I’m still holding my sister’s hand, I don’t move. My stunned father stares at me. I walk into the storm. I don’t yield, I don’t lower my eyes.
“Afriyi ssiagui. Afriyi ssiagui, athakahbith.”
Get out of here. Get out of here, you’re nothing but a whore, he says.
I refuse. “Effagh, fagh!” Get out, out! I tense up, I say nothing, I remain silent, I muster my courage, I keep my eyes on the screen. And you, Maman, you’re in shock. Your daughter has just tarnished a man’s honor.
“Del felam.”
Shame on you, you say.
I understand from your words that you reproach me for revealing myself, for expressing a desire. I don’t feel like I’ve exposed myself and I tell you, “I’m staying! I’m staying in this room just like him!”
I’m barely thirteen and I tell you, so he can hear, that the one who’s embarrassed should go. “He should go, he should leave the room!” I hold my sister’s hand with all my might and I ask her to not give in, to hold on, to stay seated like me, an affront that paralyzes her. She’s twenty years old. Forgotten. A time bomb. A child of war, anxious and fearful, suffocated by her own desires. She flaunts her good behavior, a symptom of her denial, and unleashes vengeful barbs at me, the one who insists she be more than brave. Her words will shatter me on countless occasions, but this time I shake her resolve. She freezes. My father is powerless. He leaves the living room.
I am a girl, I have two obedient sisters, six brothers, and a father who blames me for being born. Nineteen sixty-two, in Algeria. He stayed, he says, for me. It’s only when he escaped from prison to come to France that I would meet him, in 1967.
A depraved world, he says. And yet he carried me into the thick of it.
“You brought me to this country. Here I am, and here I’ll stay!”
It’s my first victory. I’m proud of it, very proud. I’ve always watched television in secret. I want him to know. As for the world? This televised storyteller is how I learn about it.
“Nothing in this country should be forbidden me. If we’re here, it’s your fault.”
At this moment I want to cloak my father in shame. I’ve just won a battle. And I spend the whole night in front of the TV screen, alone, thinking about my victories to come. But which ones? I’ve suddenly entered the world of adults. My father has labeled me definitively. “You’re nothing but a whore,” he tells me with his eyes. Males humiliate us to vanquish us. A cowardly, immoral act that kills the child within. It’s through this death that they make women out of us. Impure bodies that need to be purged of their filth by consent or by force. Starting in childhood, our bodies, which haven’t done anything and are guilty of nothing, have to be disciplined, confined by the prudish values indissociable from our gender. We are forced to reject things we can’t even imagine. Evil demons who feed on pure minds, so powerful that we have to constantly watch for their insidious presence amid the colorful backdrop of our human community, learning to see the intrinsic perversion in a look, a smile, an article of clothing, makeup, a hairstyle, a book, a movie, a crowd, a classroom, a landscape, to hear it in a lyric, a sound, a song, a score, and to feel it in all the objects we touch. I have to walk, eat, drink, dress, listen, touch, watch, speak, gripped by this fear. A paranoia that sees evil everywhere. Before, I could ignore this alienation. But now all the girls in my class are starting down the path to independence. Mine was just cut short. For me, this is the gravest of insults. I am not a girl. I have become a woman. I will accept this, but on my terms. It is only much later that I will understand the strength and violence of my actions. I disappear. I become a ghost.
Maman, you still believe. You hope I will accept this life that has been chosen for me. But I refuse to give in. I reject the rules you want your children to respect. There is no letup, you, my father, everyone wears me out. It’s agony. First I shut out your words and suspicions. Then the strain drives me to challenge obligation with violence. I’m in constant pain, it erupts at the slightest touch, submerging me. I scream angrily at all of you. Expulsing my manic thoughts, I slam my head against the mirror, glimpsing the damage inflicted by my father. I condemn myself. You become frightened. You tell me that while the upheavals of recent history are partly at fault, the ones your ancestors recounted to you weren’t any gentler.