In a small village surrounded by fruits trees, a group of women are talking under a walnut tree, resigned and dignified.
- That's it, all the oranges are gone.
- And the mandarines?
- Finished. His daughters-in-law's mothers
didn't even get given any...
- Damn, we've eaten everything.
Again.
- He's going to get mad.
- Yea but how much?
- Not more than last year when he
made her cook makrout
for him all summer, even during Ramadan...
- Her face and arms spent all summer
above boiling oil.
- ...and not less than the year he
discovered that the girl to whom he married his son is a moron.
- He should have known, beautiful but
never married at 29...
- Why don't any of you refuse his madness? Why don't you say no to him when he asks for crazy
things to punish you with?
- We can't !
- Why? What's the worse thing that
can happen?
- He'll stop speaking to us.
- What ?
- What ?
- He'll go silent.
- Your grandad refused to give in
once. He went ape, he stopped speaking to your gran, not a
word. Even once djeddim
died he didn't say anything to him. You can't imagine. He just...
stopped... speaking.”
It took that exchange
between my aunts and grandmother for me to realise that silence is
the form of violence they can bear the least. And men, just like women,
cannot stand it.
There are many forms of violence the world over, and we conceptualise them using various terms and degrees. Physical, conjugal, intellectual, street-based, clan-based. In Algeria, it is often administrative. Depending on context, violence, at least for the one who is abused, works on a scale of from, and to, the least and most bearable. I have heard many stories that illustrate each form, from the small humiliations of life, to the traumatising. Women aren't the only recipient of it either, men are also, and very often. But, seeing silence come top of the list of violence's cruelest form, did take me aback somewhat. What is it that they so fear when faced with it?
There are many forms of violence the world over, and we conceptualise them using various terms and degrees. Physical, conjugal, intellectual, street-based, clan-based. In Algeria, it is often administrative. Depending on context, violence, at least for the one who is abused, works on a scale of from, and to, the least and most bearable. I have heard many stories that illustrate each form, from the small humiliations of life, to the traumatising. Women aren't the only recipient of it either, men are also, and very often. But, seeing silence come top of the list of violence's cruelest form, did take me aback somewhat. What is it that they so fear when faced with it?
“Silence
is death. And you, if you talk, you'll die, if you stay silent you'll
die, so speak and die!”
– Tahar Djaout
In the context of Djaout's enjoinder to
speak out no matter the threat, silence did mean death, death by murder.
But when speaking leads to death, that death is due to unnatural causes. The laws of nature and life's natural order have been broken. Speech
means life. As in the ancient Mesopotamian myth of Creation,
the living make a great noise and won't let the gods sleep. Noise
doesn't even have to be intelligible words, it's got to be sounds,
gestures, proof of life. So it follows that silence, even an angered one, should be interpreted as death, a murder of the senses, a frightening pause to life indeed. In their apprehension, the equivalent of someone silent is finding a living-dead lunching
among the living. And wouldn't that be a gory sight.
So speak. And don't be ashamed to sneeze out loud.
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