Fragments From a Transparent Page

Anissa Bouziane

In me there lives a slow-burning rage. It has been simmering at the root of my soul since I was a little girl. When I walk down the street and men look at me, shaming me into lowering my eyes as they run their lustful gazes over every inch of my body, that ancient rage begins to grow. My muscles tighten at the base of my neck and my legs feel stiff. My hands make secret fists. I want to hit them, these men with piercing eyes, but I know I am not allowed. Proper girls shouldn't walk down the streets, or if they do, their eyes should be lowered, for souls are tempted only by that which they can see.

I pass quickly through the street, but my shadow-self remains. She is shadow: invisible to the worldfree to fight. Her fists aim for lustful eyes, popping them out of their sockets. Her knees slam jaws shut, and her grip squeezes breathless apologies out of villainous mouths.

My shadow-self remains behind me as I walk away. I secretly cheer for her. She has done my bidding well. My pulse beats fast, as she runs swiftly back up the street and settles once again along side me. There are days when I am so angry that I can feel her growing taller and taller‹our rage rumbles deep inside me. On days like this, her legs reach down far into the earth, like powerful roots, and the red clay of the earth rises like blood to the tip of her outstretched arms. She can cross oceans, my shadow-self. She reaches high into the air and crosses the water like a far arching rainbow: blue like the sky, thin as the air. We are invisible, my shadow-self and I, but stronglike the wind racing over the highest peaks of the Atlas.

When I was little, my aunts would tell stories of Aļcha Qandisha‹an ogress who lived at the bottom of all wells and ate men up. No one knew what Aļcha Qandisha looked like, because she had long, thick, black hair that raced down her body from her head to her feet, concealing all of her flesh. One day, my youngest aunt told me that there was more to the legend of the ogress. Under all that mane of hair, Aļcha was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Yes, she did kill them and eat them up, my aunt whispered, but only those who wished to possess her beauty.

From that day on, I was no longer afraid of the tales of the evil ogress. I knew what must have happened to her: maybe she had gotten hurt one day, when her shadow-self was too small to protect her. So now she hid at the bottom of wells, and lived to punish those who dared come too close.

***
In Morocco, I grew up listening to the stones. The little girl I was did not share with other children in breathless chases through crowded market squares. A locked iron gate at the end of a long empty path shut me into a world of chastity. My heart beat slowed‹heavy with the sorrow of a lonely childhood. Solitude is the world of stones; the world of a memory deep and long, where a handful of moist dirt, held up close to your lips and nostrils, fills even a naive soul with the breath of ages past, and a rock, clawed out of the mud by a child's fingers, brings forth into the sunlight the shape of beings long lost from the face of the earth.

I stand in the shadow of the grandest stone: the gate to the Oudaia Kasbah. I am tired. My feet are aching. The crowds of people seem faceless to me. The traffic pounds in my head. I lean my head against the archway‹the stone is cold. It smells of dust. It draws my soul in through the thousands of tiny pores on its pox-marked face. I sink deep inside the stone, to beyond the time of pirate ships and cannons, long before the passage of caravans from the south, before the artisans carved the dreams of men and the words of God on the exposed surface of the rock. Follow me back the stone whispers: to when I was cliff, to before the cliff was carved by the rushing torrent. Farther still the rock beckons: to when the cliff was sand far beneath the waves, to when the sand was alive, and you and I were one.

Go home!