Assia Djebar, a highly acclaimed Algerian author, died earlier this year. I just finished her novel So Vast the Prison (1995). It does not read like a novel (certainly not a conventional or even non-conventional one). Judging from the brief bio info I’ve read, it is as much, or more, memoir and autobiography laced with historical fiction. The language is beautiful. It is perfectly titled. The way the universal plight of women is addressed takes no prisoners. Like some paintings I love, it is amorphous and fluid, and even confusing at times. But I stayed with it and realized my own limited perspective was getting in the way.

The novel covers a hundred years, or at least several generations, across France and Algeria. At times I was completely confused. Was this fiction? Was it a memoir? Some of the passages seemed to come straight from a journal. Or was it simply an epic poem? The narration starts with a long sequence about a lover, really an infatuation, never to return to this seemingly critical individual. It hops from generation to generation. Suddenly, it is all about making a film about a woman’s life, or the life for women, in Algeria. There are brothers and mothers (including in laws) and cousins and and aunts and uncles and sisters and friends appearing on stage, usually briefly. Men, as you may guess, don’t fare well. Husbands are brutal. Leaders are oppressive and dictatorial and battle-wagers.

But I had to go back to the title to “get it.” So Vast the Prison. That is the theme. That is what ties all of this together…tightly, unambiguously, unabashedly. Excepting perhaps a lucky few, the women of the world live in various forms of prison. Their bodies and child-bearing, prison. Their men keep them in prison. These same men maintain the cultural norms which perpetuate these life sentences. Other women, clinging to the traditional ways, fortify these prisons. Across generations, continents, and time, so vast is the prison.

Once again, this theme I’ve written about before (http://jasonmakansi.com/the-global-american-footprint-in-fiction/) emerges. Novels which are “big” outside America (and often highly acclaimed) address sobering issues, issues of life and death, survival, war, oppression, the human condition; meanwhile, the big American novels seem frivolous by comparison, dealing with the minutiae of life in the suburbs, the vagaries of popular culture, privilege, entitlement, or, as I often see it referred to these days, “first world problems.” More to the point, novels like So Vast the Prison deal with the impact of the first world’s footprint on the rest of the people living on this planet, in this case the colonization of Algeria by the French and the ensuring war for independence, as well as internal conflicts. But that’s just a backdrop for the Godzilla footprints of men all over women all across the ages.

So Vast the Prison is beautiful, lyrical writing. It may not have fit my notion of what a novel should be, but through it, I “felt” what a great deal of feminist literature has been trying to tell me for decades.