Fuckin' Family
Translated from the French by Matthew Brauer.
For a long time, family seemed to me to be a vast territory.
This is the first line that I ever spoke on stage. I have been working on this monologue—and preparing myself to deliver it—for a long time. The memory zone is lit up. Silence. The audience holds its breath. I can no longer hold back these words, stored away for so long, that pressure me to release them. They burst out, pouring out in an old tone of voice that I thought had faded away. It was impossible to stanch the flow.
For a long time, family seemed to me to be a vast territory.
It was exactly the same line that I’d given in response to Laïla, the first time she’d tried to understand my relationship with my family. It all started with that.
As a child, when I went to my aunt’s house on a dark, narrow street in the medina, I believed I was crossing a boundary that would lead to the other end of the world, that obscure place where my mother’s gentle sister, kind but quietly reserved, had gone. Whenever my uncle, a traveling salesman in France, found his way back, bringing lots of gadgets and a generosity beyond compare, I was filled with joy. It seemed to me that, through him, the hidden face of the world was finally revealed to me. When I was twelve, family still seemed like a familiar mare nostrum, where I could immerse myself without feeling hemmed in.
When I was fourteen, my grandmother died, and I began to read newspapers. They were running headlines about the economic collapse and the barbaric repression of the poor workers’ resistance. The city was upside-down. My grandmother’s funeral was, above all, a moment of communion outside this flow of events. There I was sheltered from the vicissitudes of this world here below, while an avalanche of stories about the Andalusian origin of our august ancestry tumbled forth.
What branch of the family do you come from, my son?
You’re the son of whom?
The family’s imposing and indiscreet forty-somethings, in French-style suits and ties, cared as much about their family tree, dating back to Córdoba and sacred Arabia, as their supposedly still-stiff penises. The sulālah (lineage). The nasab (pedigree). The family was a lovely, slender bush, amid a chaotic world beset by endless struggles. An unshakable trunk, where men alone, noble and valiant, had their say.
As a teenager, I still felt myself at the boundary between the sexes. Their absolute certainties, so deeply rooted, left me uneasy. Why don’t women appear in their family tree? Without women’s wombs, wouldn’t the men’s tree be barren of fruit? Why do women bear children, but children don’t bear their names? I was caught in an ancestral vise, without the tools to release myself from it. When we buried my grandmother below the ground, I realized for the first time that family could be unjust.
At fifteen, I watched my itinerant uncle, whose name was Sellam, take a second wife and get cheated on by the first one, while he was at it. I would never find out which of the two events came first. Did he take revenge on his first wife after she had betrayed him, or did she make him pay for it because he betrayed her? I derive from this incident an equation: 1 man x 2 women = familial mutism.
In the meantime, my father had bought me a nice transistor radio, which let me listen to the BBC ritually. The Israelis were venting their anger at Sabra and Shatila, by creating their own inverted concentration camp, a nonsensical translation of misery, laid bare by scavenging vultures. At the mercy of all the voices that reached me over the airwaves, my uncle transformed himself in my understanding into a voracious man whose thirst for vengeance against women knew no limits. I was still indebted to him for his generosity, but I suddenly felt that he was a stranger to me, even though he had for a long time symbolized the boundless expanse of family.
At sixteen, I learned that my beautiful cousin Abla’s hormones had gotten the better of the chaste morality that her mother had been inculcating in her, night and day. She lived in the dark cul-de-sac of the medina, the one that seemed to me like a bridge to the unknown. Her desire to let someone, whose name she kept secret, explore her body had been stronger than dead-end morals. Her father was uncompromising about the rules. She was chased from the temple of the family, commanded to drag her impurity elsewhere, far from the medina. At that moment, I witnessed the first schism, the first break in the circle. Family suddenly seemed to me to be a chain, a barrier to break in order to flee into the distance and recover the freedom that parents had confiscated.
Abla figured out very quickly that it would be best for her to look elsewhere, very far away, in the Arabian Gulf, for the domains of pleasure and wealth. Long before the hypermodern era of malls and mullahs, the Mecca of devotion and excess offered her the artifice to cover up her misfortune. I haven’t seen her again since she was twenty. She climbed the ladder, rung by rung: a cabaret in Sharjah, an English pub in Abu Dhabi, a four-star hotel in Dubai, a touristy overrated theater in Djeddah, in the shadow of the holy sites, an emir’s sumptuous villa in Qatar, finally the pilgrimage, then a total blackout.
When her brother Rahim died, I was twenty. He lost his mind before losing his life. In his rare lucid moments, he said he no longer had any reason to stay alive, surrounded by a family that scrutinized him, harassed him, and, when it had had enough, threw him into a dusty asylum beyond the bounds of civility. Rahim, the madman of the family, died more from mistreatment than insanity.
His father, the same man who had sent Abla packing, was the spendthrift son of a pasha, who had tumbled down the social ladder and wasted away morally. Rahim’s mother, my paunchy aunt with the malicious gaze, was a witch with the look of a deposed princess. From a crown villa that adjoined the sultan’s palace, they now found themselves in a dark dead end, trying to return to the light. Both had held it against Rahim that he was always reading and running off, while they were struggling to climb back up the slope, seeking a fortune already squandered.
When I turned twenty-six, my other cousin Bachir was thirty-two. The Iranian Revolution had taken place twelve years before and still had its adepts everywhere you went. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, leaving a cool, worrisome wind to blow. The first Palestinian Intifada was in full swing, even in our streets. The words “political prisoner” were no longer completely forbidden on television, computers were still huge, telephones were still immobile devices, and political zealots were just beginning their apprenticeship, in the shadows, especially in the universities. What, then, was the object of our disagreement? A large protest to emancipate women from male guardianship. It was to take place the following day.
I’m going, I told him.
Without me.
I don’t need you, to go myself.
You shouldn’t.
Pick a side?
No, go at all.
And why aren’t you going?
I’m a believer.
That doesn’t keep you from defending women’s rights, no?
No. But I’m a believer first. I have other priorities.
Such as?
Our brothers-in-arms. What about you?
What do I have?
Are you still a believer?
It’s not like you to ask such an awkward question.
I get the impression that you’ve gone too far.
Where?
Out of the frame, beyond the nation.
You’re off topic, Bachir. We’re talking about women.
Me too, about women who are subject to the nation’s ideals.
Women are bigger than the nation.
A nation’s laws are what guide women.
For you.
For us.
Us who?
Muslims who fight to exist in the eyes of the world.
You’re overdoing it, Bachir.
And you’re not doing enough.
We’ll have to leave it at that, then.
So we will.
Bachir’s mother was more sophisticated than Rahim’s, even though they were twin sisters. I had admired him for a long time, until that day when he appeared completely manipulative and intrusive to me. Bachir was too sure of himself. And Rahim, too unstable. He, at least, stayed close to me till the end of his life.
It was by coming to visit Rahim’s tiny room, with its moldy walls that smelled of feral cat piss, that I had discovered Charles Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage (Invitation to Travel) and Abū al-‘Alā al-Ma‘arrī’s Risālat al-ghufrān (The Epistle of Forgiveness). Rahim was wildly in love with life, but his despairing parents managed to convince him that he wasn’t at home in his own skin, that he needed to change in order to fit in the frame, to stand and smile in the family photo. To ward off bad luck, they took one every year, with and then without Abla.
Rahim ended up taking them at their word and tried to literally change his skin. He scratched himself all the time. He would bleed and keep scratching. Always scratching and bleeding. He wanted to dig into his bones and touch the unfathomable core of his being, hidden away beneath years of submission and silence. He wanted to pull off his skin without baring himself, simply build the walls of his metamorphosis with his sharp nails. His skin peeling masked his wild state. His cry within was smothered under the weight of this sad family that had condemned itself to try to recover its lost notability.
When Rahim wasn’t scratching off his skin, he would read. Without his realizing it, the pages of books became like feathers that adorned him with the identity of a dreamer. He would have very much liked to lose himself there. But his skin always recalled him to his material existence, and he would immediately start trying to rid himself of it again. He scratched and scratched. After a while, he started to stink. His parents couldn’t tell the difference between the smell of cat piss and that of his lacerated skin. They ended up throwing him and his cats out together. When he died, I went to retrieve his books, to remember that other soul that had inhabited him, which he never managed to let flourish. His mother was happy for me to rid her of them. And I was convinced more than ever that nothing drove anyone so crazy as a family off the rails.
It has been more than twenty years since Rahim died, and I have just now opened the box of his books. I’ve been paging through his favorite works. Don Quixote alongside the Qur’ān, Céline with Ibn Khaldūn. The books have all yellowed. Not a single one bears the identity of its deceased owner, but every one was marked forever by the hastily written phrase that Rahim underlined: “Fuckin’ family.”
The audience applauds. I am uneasy, rendered motionless by the confusion of my feelings. Was I in confession or on stage? Baring my soul or wearing a mask? I touch my cheek. Life continues. My memory hollows out my body. Each neutralizes the other. I go home. That’s the only thing to do after a performance. Go home, to remain intact.
* The original text "Putain la famille" was published in L'homme descend du silence, Ed. Al Manar, Paris, 2014.
