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, 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 Mr. 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
entitled 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.”
So God is going to be consulting this Vizier, is that the idea? No one in the
mullarchy seems to have noted the irony of the All-Wise consulting the
All-Ignorant.
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 anti-government 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 Mr. 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.
Mr. 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.