Gods and Soldiers (24 page)

I had not come across Achebe's work before, because of the terrible lack of translations into Arabic on the one hand, and the paucity of French translations of English-language African authors on the other. One legacy of colonialism is an artificial division of Africa between Francophone, Lusophone, and Anglophone regions, which is unfortunately carried through in publishing, distribution, and translation. Too often, readers have access only to writers from their own region, which is very limiting. Too often, Western critics who have read in one linguistic tradition make claims about all of Africa. I remember reading in more than one American newspaper that the magnificent
Things Fall Apart
was the first African novel—an absurd claim. We need more reading across regions.

If my experience is any indication, colonialism—and its love child, dictatorship—have had quite a bit to do with the way in which North African literature was read and taught from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s. Of course, things have changed somewhat since then, and nowadays these writers' works, as well as children's books in Arabic and Berber, are more widely available in bookstores. But now we are experiencing another great upheaval that is likely to affect our literature—globalization.

Large numbers of immigrants from Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and the Sudan now live abroad. Fleeing civil wars or dictatorship, or seeking greater economic opportunity, they have settled in Western Europe, America and even as far as Australia. The writers among them have begun to produce work written in the language of their host countries. Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, and Leila Aboulela write in English; Fouad Laroui and Edmond Amran el Maleh write in French; Abdelkader Benali and Hafid Bouazza write in Dutch; Amara Lakhouss writes in Italian; and the list goes on. Meanwhile, writers like Leila Abouzeid, Alaa Al-Aswany, Bahaa Taher, and Mohammed Berrada continue to live in their native countries and write in Arabic.

By and large, writers who live in North Africa have to be mindful of state censors, while those in the diaspora need not fear being thrown in jail for their work. But diaspora writers face another cost: being viewed suspiciously by the representation mafia. At a reading in Kenitra last year, a Moroccan reader of my first book asked me whether it had been published in America because it depicted the corruption of Moroccan society. During the back and forth of the discussion, the argument was soon turned into its opposite: that I had depicted corruption
in order
to be published. Although I am frustrated by such comments, I also understand that they are rooted in a certain reality. It is infinitely easier for a North African novel to be published in Europe or America if it trades in clichés rather than in complex fictional realities.

In addition, diaspora writers, particularly those who work in English, have greater access to translations and to large audiences, while those who live in North Africa have a hard time finding a wider readership. There are also great differences in setting, style, and literary influences. I sometimes feel I can hear echoes of George Eliot and Jane Austen in Ahdaf Soueif's work. Abdelkader Benali seems to me to owe a greater debt to Gabriel García Márquez than to his countryman Mohamed Choukri. Some of the younger writers, like Hafid Bouazza, might even resent being labeled as North African writers, rather than Dutch writers, or writers
tout court.

Because of this huge diversity, I think it is quite difficult to speak of one North African literature. It is even harder to speak of one African literature. Africa is made up of 40 nations, whose people speak a multitude of languages and belong to many different religious traditions and ethnic groups. The continent is larger than China, Europe and the United States put together. Just as world maps often shrink the size of Africa to that of South America for representational purposes, speaking of
one
African literature risks giving the impression that it is a monolithic literature. It risks pointing to a unique literary tradition. It risks equating Africanness with blackness. I think, therefore, that it is more proper to speak of North African and African
literatures.

It is, of course, possible to organize these literatures along certain lines, whether genre, temporal, stylistic, or thematic. For instance, because nearly all of the continent was under colonial rule in the 19th and 20th centuries, many novels originating in Africa share certain themes: the struggle for freedom, the pain of exile, the plight of immigrants and asylum-seekers. I can see many similarities between the French-educated Driss Ferdi in Driss Chraïbi's
The Simple Past,
and the British-educated Mustafa Sa'eed in Tayib Salih's
Season of Migration to the North.
In Muslim African literature, whether from Morocco, Egypt or Senegal, the foibles of a religious society have provided inspiration to many writers. Leila Abouzeid's
Year of the Elephant,
Alifa Rifaat's
Distant View of a Minaret
and Mariama Ba's
So Long a Letter
could easily be read together.

“All novels belong to a family,” the late Edward Said once wrote, “and any reader of novels is a reader of this complex family to which they all belong.” Whereas I was initially exposed to only a few members of this family when I was a child, my hope is that today's children will get to meet as many relatives as possible.

 

 

 

“HOW CAN YOU be one of the masters? A woman on her own cannot be a master, let alone a woman who's a prostitute. Can't you see you're asking for the impossible?”

“The word impossible does not exist for me,” I said.

I tried to slip through the door, but he pushed me back and shut it. I looked him in the eye and said, “I intend to leave.”

He stared back at me. I heard him mutter, “You will never leave.”

I continued to look straight at him without blinking. I knew I hated him as only a woman can hate a man, as only a slave can hate his master. I saw from the expression in his eyes that he feared me as only a master can fear his slave, as only a man can fear a woman. But it lasted for only a second. Then the arrogant expression of the master, the aggressive look of the male who fears nothing, returned. I caught hold of the latch of the door to open it, but he lifted his arm up in the air and slapped me. I raised my hand even higher than he had done, and brought it down violently on his face. The whites of his eyes went red. His hand started to reach for the knife he carried in his pocket, but my hand was quicker than his. I raised the knife and buried it deep in his neck, pulled it out of his neck and then thrust it deep into his chest, pulled it out of his chest and plunged it deep into his belly. I stuck the knife into almost every part of his body. I was astonished to find how easily my hand moved as I thrust the knife into his flesh, and pulled it out almost without effort. My surprise was all the greater since I had never done what I was doing before. A question flashed through my mind. Why was it that I had never stabbed a man before? I realized that I had been afraid, and that the fear had been within me all the time, until the fleeting moment when I read fear in his eyes.

I opened the door and walked down the stairs into the street. My body was as light as a feather, as though its weight had been nothing more than the accumulation of fear over the years. The night was silent, the darkness filled me with wonder, as though light had only been one illusion after another dropping like veils over my eyes. The Nile had something almost magical about it. The air was fresh, invigorating. I walked down the street, my head held high to the heavens, with the pride of having destroyed all masks to reveal what is hidden behind. My footsteps broke the silence with their steady rhythmic beat on the pavement. They were neither fast as though I was hurrying away from something in fear, nor were they slow. They were the footsteps of a woman who believed in herself, knew where she was going, and could see her goal. They were the footsteps of a woman wearing expensive leather shoes, with strong high heels, her feet arched in a feminine curve, rising up to full rounded legs, with a smooth, taut skin and not a single hair.

No one would have easily recognized me. I looked no different from respectable, upper-class women. My hair had been done by a stylist who catered only to the rich. My lips were painted in the natural tone preferred by respectable women because it neither completely hides nor completely exposes their lust. My eyes were penciled in perfect lines drawn to suggest a seductive appeal, or a provocative withdrawal. I looked no different from the wife of an upper-class government official occupying a high position of authority. But my firm, confident steps resounding on the pavement proved that I was nobody's wife.

I crossed by a number of men working in the police force, but none of them realized who I was. Perhaps they thought I was a princess, or a queen, or a goddess. For who else would hold her head so high as she walked? And who else's footsteps could resound in this way as they struck the ground? They watched me as I passed by, and I kept my head high like a challenge to their lascivious eyes. I moved along as calm as ice, my steps beating down with a steady unfaltering sound. For I knew that they stood there waiting for a woman like me to stumble, so that they could throw themselves on her like birds of prey.

At the corner of the street I spotted a luxurious car, with the head of a man protruding from the window, its tongue almost hanging out. He opened the door of the car and said,

“Come with me.”

I held back and said, “No.”

“I will pay whatever you ask for.”

“No,” I repeated.

“Believe me, I will pay you anything you want.”

“You cannot pay my price, it's very high.”

“I can pay any price. I'm an Arab prince.”

“And I am a princess.”

“I'll pay a thousand.”

“No.”

“Two thousand, then.”

I looked deep into his eyes. I could tell he was a prince or from the ruling family, for there was a lurking fear in their depths. “Three thousand,” I said. “I accept.”

In the soft luxurious bed, I closed my eyes, and let my body slip away from me. It was still young and vigorous, strong enough to retreat, powerful enough to resist. I felt his body bearing down on my breast, heavy with long untold years of his life, swollen with stagnant sweat. A body full of flesh from years of eating beyond his needs, beyond his greed. With every movement he kept repeating the same stupid question:

“Do you feel pleasure?”

And I would close my eyes and say, “Yes.”

Each time he rejoiced like a happy fool, and repeated his question with a gasping breath and each time I gave the same answer: “Yes.”

With the passing moments his foolishness grew, and with it his assurance that my repeated affirmations of pleasure were true. Every time I said “yes” he beamed at me like an idiot, and an instant later I could feel the weight of his body bear down on me, more heavily than before. I could stand no more, and just when he was on the point of repeating the same stupid question again, I snapped out angrily,

“No!”

When he held out his hand with the money, I was still wildly angry with him. I snatched the notes from his hand and tore them up into little pieces with a pent-up fury.

The feel of the notes under my fingers was the same as that of the first piastre ever held between them. The movement of my hands as I tore the money to pieces, tore off the veil, the last, remaining veil from before my eyes, to reveal the whole enigma which had puzzled me throughout, the true enigma of my life. I rediscovered the truth I had already discovered many years before when my father held out his hand to me with the first piastre he had ever given me. I returned to the money in my hand and with a redoubled fury tore the remaining bank notes into shreds. It was as though I was destroying all the money I had ever held, my father's piastre, my uncle's piastre, all the piastres I had ever known, and at the same time destroying all the men I had ever known, one after the other in a row: my uncle, my husband, my father, Marzouk and Bayoumi, Di'aa, Ibrahim, and tearing them all to pieces one after the other, ridding myself of them once and for all, removing every trace their piastres had left on my fingers, tearing away the very flesh of my fingers to leave nothing but bone, ensuring that not a single vestige of these men would remain at all.

His eyes opened wide in amazement as he watched me tear up the whole sheaf of bank notes. I heard him say:

“You are verily a princess. How did I not believe you right from the start?”

“I'm not a princess,” I said angrily.

“At first I thought you were a prostitute.”

“I am not a prostitute. But right from my early days my father, my uncle, my husband, all of them, taught me to grow up as a prostitute.”

The prince laughed as he eyed me again and then said, “You are not telling the truth. From your face, I can see you are the daughter of a king.”

“My father was no different from a king except for one thing.”

“And what is that?”

“He never taught me to kill. He left me to learn it alone as I went through life.”

“Did life teach you to kill?”

“Of course it did.”

“And have you killed anybody yet?”

“Yes, I have.”

He stared at me for a brief moment, laughed, and then said, “I can't believe that someone like you can kill.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are too gentle.”

“And who said that to kill does not require gentleness?”

He looked into my eyes again, laughed, and said, “I cannot believe that you are capable of killing anything, even a mosquito.”