Assassinated in May 1993, Tahar Djaout
published four novels and two poetry collections before his
murder. Djaout's fiction was marked throughout by his
uncompromising stance toward corruption and what he
considered to be a betrayal of history and of the Algerian
Revolution's ideals. In addition to being a poet and
novelist, Djaout was a highly regarded journalist living and
working in Algiers. His dedication to exposing the truth
about Algeria's real difficulties and political and social
realities led him to collaborate on the creation of an
independent weekly newspaper in January of 1993 entitled
Ruptures. One of more than a hundred Algerian
"intellectuals" to have been killed since 1992, Djaout
produced fiction that is characterized by an insistence upon
the existence of universal values and truths. His fiction at
first appears deceptively simple; the plots involve journeys
or itineraries, and his narrators avoid bitter tirades about
politics and religion. Djaout's work stands out within the
scope of recent Algerian fiction because of its originality,
sincerity, and humanist values.
In The Last Summer of Reason, first there comes
the frighteningly hypnotic sermon, monotheism unto monolatry
in a mere four pages. Fire and brimstone fulminating today
from the pulpits of countless mosques just as it once did at
witch burnings and entreaties to join the Crusade, and still
does from the pulpits of countless revival tents in the
religioeconomic deserts of fundamentalism. The sermon is all
the more frightening because it starts with reasonable
assumptions and ends in apoplexy -- as does any conduct
system in the hands of monolaters. The object of the sermon
is, yes, the sinner wavering from the True Path; but more:
the Self in both its manifestations: the urge to be
individual, and the proclivity to ornament. Both, say the
sermon, stray one's mind from the True Vision of God.
Or to rephrase that: (1) Our Truth. (2) Our Vision. (3) Our
God. Water this trinity from a pulpit and watch the potted
death plants grow. The history books are littered with the
shards of the broken pots the plants outgrew.
The year is 1992. Boualem Yekker lives in a revivalist
version of 1984. The usual alpha males of
society dominate Boualem's with a governance that prospers
as a creosote plant prospers, poisoning everything around
itself because that is the only way it knows how to survive.
But Boualem is no mouse hiding behind go-along-with-it
conformity. He is a bookseller -- a knowledge dispenser --
amid an ethos trying to exterminate knowledge. The
Last Summer of Reason is the story
of his progress: not of his life, but of his soul.
Tahar Djaout was a good enough writer to borrow but not
mimic. His is a 1984 of religious fanaticism in
Algeria. He daubs just enough of the right taints to give
you the idea: "VBs" (Vigilant Brothers) in lieu of the
Thought Police; "Reign of Equity" in lieu of Big Brother --
without overdoing it on the colors. Convincing details
convey just how far the insanity of a-priori
can go when men of the same priori try to outdo
each other in interpretive fervor: In Boualem's world, spare
tires are banned because God's will alone ordains whether
you should or should not get to your destination. Husbands
who "serve" their wives must enter the bed right foot first
so to be one step ahead of the Devil. Why are priests so
preoccupied with other men's sexual styles?
Resist the urge to pick on bearded mullahs in all this. Fear
of Satan is fear of Self and Self is not of one time or one
place. The Great Cultural Revolution brandished the Little
Red Book. The Reign of Terror in France renamed the months
to absurdities like "Brumière" because February was
the month of fog and mist. The saffron fanatics of India
today burn Christians alive in their jeeps. Buddhist monks
fan the populace of Sri Lanka, and therefore the
politicians, into flames of an ethnic war; and in fact have
been doing so for 2,200 years. Point no fingers at the
mindset that forces women to wear burqas until you've had a
look at what centuries of priests have dreamed up for nuns.
The double-standard misogyny at a party-frat beer bust or
the locker room at The Citadel is little different from the
misogyny that sliced off the breasts of Saint Anne. The
mullahs are not new at this, just an easy diversion from
Christianity's own historical record. A man who wants to
kill will create his cause first and later call it just. His
insecure followers will pave the road to truth with body
counts, and the aides-de-camp of political correctness will
turn nuisances of corporals into colonels of cruelty.
Algeria and the Arab lands differ in this: The desert is a
spirit of place. It is about danger, uncertainty,
colorlessness, life on a thread, an immense tremor of the
sky spawning the immense tremble of the wind. It is above
all irrational, and so does it mold minds. After the mind so
made, comes history.
Over the last half-century, extreme reactions to extreme
provocation -- from overlords, moneylords, landlords and
classlords -- became brokendream business plans in Dhaka,
Kuala Lumpur, Karachi and Riyadh, to name but a few.
Algeria's struggle for liberation from the "4-lords" of
France lasted from 1954 to 1962. The victory resulted first
in a flirt with socialism; then during the 1980s a romance
with privatization and liberalization; and in 1989 an
arranged marriage with multiparty democracy.
The clandestine tryst, however, was with the veil:
Arabization. A political program to impose Arabic and
Islamic cultural values on a land made of many other values
besides Arab and Islam. Off Djaout's pen, this political
setting was shaped into a religious 1984 that
became this novel.
The values, though, resisted, and a decade-long civil war
resulted. One value was pre-Islamic Berber
maraboutism -- venerating marabouts or saintly
mystics and teachers who supposedly possess special
spiritual powers. Maraboutism gave rise to secret
brotherhoods with their own rituals and rites. It appealed
to simpler folk who lacked the education to assimilate the
complex ideas and linguistic delicacies of the Qur'an.
Because of maraboutism's disdain for authority, Islamists
tried to restrict its influence. Conservative Muslims found
themselves clashing with maraboutists, left-wing students,
and emancipated women's groups, all more or less at once.
The result was extreme defensiveness and an equally extreme
lash-out in consequence. By 1990 the power of the pulpit had
proved stronger than the press and the ballot and
fundamentalist imams (prayer leaders) gained control of
Algeria's major mosques.
In the post-1990 tumult Tahar Djaout wrote two searing
novels: Les vigiles (Early Warning Signs of
an Illness) in 1990 and The Last Summer of
Reason in 1992-93. Professor Patricia Geesey of the
University of North Florida aptly sums up the Algerian
literary climate of his time:
"Algerian writers consciously attempt to transcend basic
political references as well as the immediate need simply to
bear witness to current events, in order to engage the
reader in a compelling exchange. Recent Algerian novels do
not so much directly and concretely speak to current
political and social issues in Algeria as evoke an
atmosphere of urgency, terror, and confusing contradictions
in which the very sacredness and dignity of human life are
callously discarded. .... By focusing on creating a portrait
of a society in which a reign of terror is suggested by the
climate of bureaucratic confusion, nearly anonymous
violence, and physical constriction, many Algerian novelists
transcend a 'reactive' impulse by creating works of fiction
that are hauntingly effective in making the reader feel the
consequences of living under siege."
Tahar to a "T". The Last Summer of Reason is
less a novel than a flow-path, for there is no "plot" in the
linear form of A B C and D: He gets killed/married/the new
job/rides off into the sunset. The first six chapters thread
a linear line: Yekker drives a road, reflects disconsolately
in his bookshop with his only friend Ali Elbouliga, strums a
mandolin that can no longer be publicly played (aside from
the unGodliness of pleasure there is the matter of the
instrument's obscene resemblance to a woman's belly). He
reminisces about a family vacation amid nature, endures a
stoning by neighborhood children and reflects on the
difference between himself, "... who had read some thousand
books or more from Plato to Kawabata, by way of Mohammed
Iqbal, Kazteb, Yacine, Octavio Paz, and Kafka," and the
mullah entitle Vizier of Reflection, who got his post by,
"answer[ing] that he forbade himself any reading
other than the Holy Book; that novels, essays, and other
perverse ramblings were nothing but fancy notions he
disdained and whose accounts he would settle on the day that
the Almighty, keeper of the secret of hierarchies, gave him
the opportunity."
The next chapter, "The nocturnal tribunal," is the book's
turning point. It describes a police blockade in which
Boualem is taken prisoner and discovers that his own son is
one of his accusers. In a moment of madness, Boualem grabs
his son's gun and kills him, and ... wakes up from the
nightmare. Literal, yes; symbolic the more, for Boualem
thereafter is not the same.
At this point, save for two instances, the narrative slips
away from a continuum of narrated events into a continuum of
awarenesses that meanders over vast segments of mental and
literary landscape, all in the few cubic centimeters of
Yekker's brain which link metaphysics with his reference
points in memory. Both those instances are death threats,
one friendly -- an appeal to relinquish his willfulness
before it is too late -- and the other -- well, what do you
expect from a death threat?
The end is not the ghastly mangling of an all-but-anonymous
Mr. K, or the thousands of defenseless Algerian men, women
and children whose throats were slit by antigovernment
fanatics all across the 1990s, but a 17-page
dreamday-become-real and realday-become-dream. It
disconnects Boualem Yekker from the incongruity of an
overheated belief system which extols the beauty of nature
as evidence of the divine while turning that divinity into a
furion of vengeance and punishment; and reconnects him with
what humanity is before all else: the source of a will to be
one's own creator:
"It is true that a single lifetime is too short to
accomplish all that you want. There are so many deformities
you would like to correct, so many events you would like to
approach from another angle, so many trails you would like
to cover over, so many wounds or affronts you would like to
erase: at least one other life is needed to do this .... he
conjures images and memories that seem to come from so far
away, from a time immemorial. To reach him they snake in and
out between endless summers, miles and miles of icy winds,
valleys, rivers, mountains. Beautiful and nostalgic music,
music sad enough to make you weep, music from the magic and
merciless time in which birth and death, separation and
reunion are wedded .... You feel like blocking every exit of
the universe so that time will remain your prisoner, so that
the whirlwind that pulls you to your death will be
stopped."
What Tahar started as a story he ends as an exile's
soliloquy on the metaphysics of what it means to be human,
what it means to know a reason, what it does to see a bird
fly, the sun set. Boualem Yekker merges the poet he thinks
he is into the poet he really is:
Only dreaming is still allowed, to those who
know how to find refuge in themselves. It is the only
autonomous area that keep the prison wards at a distance.
And so, for the lack of having a life, Boualem Yekker
dreams. He replaces people with ghosts. He replaces the
dwarfed history [of the Reign of Equity] limping
along in its little shoes with the grandiloquent myth
that lifts the world's wings with the breath of
poetry.
On that song of his soul, self becomes nil. Religions are
about self; spirituality is about self; transcendence --
epiphany, moksha, nirvana -- is about the nil.
Tahar had a lovely, moving, evocative style. He slips in and
out of omniscience, one page the narrator, another the
clairvoyant, thence to reporter, then the mystic whose seed
of conditionals -- the woulds and coulds of faith and faith
not -- all of these rake Boualem Yekker across the velvet
verbs of his soul. He resists the urge to smirk at
totalitarianism's silliness. Instead he inks with a delicate
brush: "Weather forecasts have been banned from television
and no newspaper is authorized to publish them," one
character announces, "... for how can one argue and quibble
over patterns known only to God."
Inevitably, however, he reaches a point where conviction --
in both senses of the word -- overtakes the ability to
narrate and the narrative drive slips away into an extended
paean of grief:
To go through life as you swim through a
current: the water foams and roils unendingly, forbidding
any face to become fixed, any memory to linger. You reach
the other shore completely destitute, a memory in pain
the only relic of your crossing.
Page after page after page of this. Greatness on those
pages, compassion, understanding, lyricism. Seen with eyes
of steel and said with a tongue of silver. Shortly after
writing these words in 1993, Tahar Djaout was assassinated
by a man who admitted acting on behalf of religious
militants.
***
Again Professor Geesey: "Out of the nearly one dozen
Algerian novels in French that have been published since
early 1991, four novels in particular share a common thread:
the centrality of the human body. The body is omnipresent in
much recent fiction from Algeria. The very real threat of
horrible violence done to the body is clearly a source for
the corporeal theme in Algerian writing; bodies at risk of
decapitation, emasculation, shooting, bombing, stabbing,
rape, or incarceration are recurring images. For virtually
all the novels published since the civil crisis began, the
metaphor of Algeria the nation as a body suffering from
illness, cancer, or gangrene also manifests the authors'
anxiety about the 'health' of the nation and its
citizens."
The days will vanish that seemed so pure. Then the ache
begins at how much was lost. Expectations drain each moment
of its life while the eye seeks desperately for the better.
When the better arrives, we find it is a future that's
already been trampled. Then our words have to explain why.
Time knowingly watches us as we plan the next ruse. |
March 2002
Dana De
Zoysa has a passion for developing-country authors. He
commutes between Bombay and his writer's paradise in
Mirissa, Sri Lanka. He can be reached at DanaDeZoysa@hotmail.com.
