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Assia Djebar (1936-2015) - pseudonym of Fatma-Zohra Imalayène |
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Algerian novelist, translator, and filmmaker, one of North-Africa's best-known and most widely acclaimed writers. Assia Djebar explored the struggle for social emancipation and the Muslim woman's world in its complexities. Because of her strong feminist stance, Djebar faced considerable hostility from nationalist critics in Algeria. She also published poetry, plays, short stories, and directed two films. "I understood it yesterday at dawn, as I came out on deck: the boat was coming in to the shore. Everyone was looking at the white city, its archades almost diving into the water, its leaning terraces. Facing this long-awaited scene, I was crying without even knowing it, and when I did realize it, the only words that came to me-despite the splendour out there-were: 'My God, I've come here to die!' It all seemed so obvious to me: this city where I apparently was born, which I had forgotten, even when yesterday's newspapers were talking about it all the time, I come back here for the end. . . ." ('Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,' in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment by Assia Djebar, Translated by Marjolijn de Jager, Afterword by Clarisse Zimra, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999, p. 8; originally published as Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, 1980) Assia Djebar was born Fatma-Zohra Imalayène in Cherchell, a
small coastal town near
Algiers. She was the eldest of three children of Taher Imalayène, who
taught in the French grade school at Mouzaïa, and Baya Sahraoui, who
came from a family of nobles. As a child, Djebar attended Qur'an school
and the school where her father taught, and completed her baccalauréat in classics and philosophy. She was a brilliant student. After a year at the Lycée Fénélon in Paris, she became the
first Algerian
woman to be accepted at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure of
Sèvres. There Djebar joined the
Algerian student strike of 1956, in the early years of the Algerian
independence struggle. During the war French soldiers burst into her
mother's apartment and tore her books. Djebar's brother was prisoned
in France. Partly because of the strike, she was expelled from the
École Normale. Later, she earned a doctoral degree in Literature at the
Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier. In 1958 Djebar married Ahmed Ould-Rouïs, a member of the Resistance.
She moved with him first to Switzerland and then to Tunisia. They
divorced in 1975. Djebar's second husband was the poet Malek
Alloula; this marriage also ended in divorce. While living in Tunisia Djebar wrote the short story 'There is No Exile' but did not publish it until 1980 in Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, a collection of six short stories, as though she did not want to voice her doubts about the war at the time. Djebar returned in Algerian White (1995) to the aftermath of the struggle and the deaths of her three friends. Between 1957 and 1967 Djebar wrote four novels, making her debut with La soif
(The Mischief). This work was written in two months during the student
uprising in 1956. The novel was published by Juilliard in Paris. Fearing her father's disapproval, she adopted the pen
name she kept ever since. The protagonist of the story,
half-French, half-Algerian Nadia is a westernized Algerian girl. She
lives a carefree life, and tries to
make her boyfriend jealous. Below the surface reader encounters a study of identity and psychological
development: "the novel carries the undercurrent of racial and sexual
politics, elements that haven’t always been given the attention they
deserve." ('Re-Covered: The Mischief' by Lucy Scholes, The Paris Review, December 2, 2019) La soif was compared to
François Sagan's Bonjour tristesse,
which had appeared three years earlier. Djebar herself did not take her
work seriously. In Algeria it was condemned for ignoring the political
realities of the day. Les impatients (1958) was set before the independence struggle and centers upon a young woman, Dalila, who feels herself trapped and revolts against tradition, her environment, her family. During her stay in Morocco, Djebar wrote her third novel Les enfants du nouveau monde(1962), which explored the awakening of Algerian women to new demands. The central character, Lila, is in the collective action for political change. Les alouettes naïves (1967), about love and war and young Algerians, was called by one reviewer as "the drama of a lost generation". After completing the book, Djebar temporarily stopped from writing and turned her attention to film – she felt she had exposed enough of her innermost self. During the liberation war Djebar collaborated with the anti-colonial FLN (National Liberation Front) newspaper
El-Moujahid by conducting interviews with Algerian refugees in
Morocco and Tunis. At that time the editor of the newspaper was Frantz Fanon,
with whom she befriended. It is very possible that Fanon used
some of the material she collected on female students in his account of
the Algerian war, A Dying Colonialism (1959). Djebar pursued her work in the history as a teaching
assistant at the University of Rabat and participated in various
Algerian cultural activities. After Algeria had gained independence in 1962, Djebar was criticized for
writing in French – writers were expected to switch to the national
language, Arabic. Djebar held that French and Berber should be allowed
to an official status as national languages and denounced the policy of
ignoring the Berber heritage. Djebar taught North African history at the Faculty of
Letters and worked with the Algerian press and radio. In the 1970s Djebar studied classical Arabic to enlarge her ways of
expression. Later in her novels she manipulated the French
language, giving it the sounds and rhythms of Arabic, and turning the
language of the colonizer into language of resistance. When Djebar
began to work with her autobiographical novels, she had to overcome the
"impersonality of French" and the fact, that she was using "the
language of the Others". To reach those
who cannot read, Djebar also turned to cinema. She made two films for Radio-Télévision Algérienne (RTA). The first, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua
(1979, The Nouba of the Women of Mont Chenoua), focused almost
exlusively on women. The film stirred so much controversy, that it was
shown on
television only once and excluded from the official competition at the
Carthage film festival in Tunisia. However, La Nouba won the International
Critics Prize at the 1979 Film Festival in Venice. La Zerda et les chants de l'oubli (1982,
Zerda and the Songs of Fortune/The Songs of Forgetting), made with
Malek Alloula, was chronicle of life in the Maghreb from the early to
the mid-twentieth century. The film begins with words on a screen: "La
Mémoire est corps de femme" (Memory is body of woman). Djubar's long literary silence in the 1970s was partly due to her
recognition that she was not going to become an Arabic-language writer
and her interest in non-literary art forms. She worked as an assistant
director on a number of productions. In 1973 she directed her own
adaptation of Tom Eyen's play about Marilyn Monroe, The White Whore and the Bit Player.
Upon returning to the University of Algiers, Djebar began teaching
theater and film. "My work in film puts me in a creative relationship
with Arabic as a living language, a language in space," she told in
1987. "My confrontation with the language of my childhood came in
making films. Now I can write in French without feeling cut off,
without any bad conscience." ('Djebar, Assia,' in World Authors 1980-1985, edited by Vineta Colby, New York: H. W. Wilson, 1991, p. 215) Women of Algiers in Their Apartment marked a turning point in Djebar's career as a
writer. Describing her return to French she said in an interview: "I
had just turned forty. It's at that point that I finally felt myself
fully a writer of French language, while remaining deeply Algerian." ('Woman's Memory Spans Centuries: An Interview with Assia Djebar,' in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment by Assia Djebar, translated by Marjolijn de Jager, 1992, p. 168) Coming after an silence of ten years, Djebar was welcomed in critical circles. The book took its title from the famous Delacroix's painting and depicted the cloistered Algerian women, who are still imprisoned in the harem. However, Djebar gave her characters dignity and wisdom, deprived from them by the artist's intrusion into their private space. The second version of the work from 2002 contained a supplemental novel in addition to the first version. L'Amour, la fantasia (1985, Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade), winner of the Franco-Arab Friendship Prize, mixed autobiography, historical accounts of the French conquest of 1830, and the Algerian War. It was the first volume of the Algerian quartet about Maghrebian women, which continued in (1987, A Sister to Scheherazade), a story of two women. Djebar often looked pessimistically women's ability to change an overbearing patriarchy. Loin de Medine (1991, Far from Medina)
told about the lives of Muslim women shortly before and after the death
of the Prophet of Islam. This book was prompted by the fundamentalist
street riots in Algeria. When excerpts were published, "the bearded
ones" wanted to burn her and "the beardless ones" defended her,
as Djebar later summarized. ('Afterword' by Clarissa Zimra, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, p. 166) Vaste est la prison (1995, So Vast the Prison) was written in the form of a journey. The female narrator, 36-year-old Isma, a
musicologist and filmmaker,
links her own life as a modern, educated Algerian woman, with the
traditions of her female notable ancestors and the history of Carthage,
a great civilization the Berbers were once compared to. She realizes:
"We think the dead are absent but, transformed into witnesses, they
want to write through us." (So Vast the Prison, translated by Betsy Wing, New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999, p. 357) Djebar taught history for many years at the University of Algiers. During the 1980s, she moved to Paris to work at the Center for Algerian Culture. She won the Neustadt Prize for Contributions to World Literature in 1996 for perceptively crossing borders of culture, language, and history in her fiction and poetry. In 1997, she received the Yourcenar Prize and in 2000 the prestigious Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. Djebar was appointed in 1997 professor and director of the Center for French and Francophone studies of the Louisiana State University. From 2001, Djebar held the position of Silver Chair Professor of French and Francophone studies at New York University. Djebar was a member of the 'Académie Royale de Langue Francaise de Belgique. In 2005 Djebar became the fifth woman to be elected to the French Academy. Throughout the decades, no publisher dared to take the risk of
publishig her novels in Arabic in her native Algeria, but at the same
time English
translations were read by a wide audience in Europe and in North
America. Many of her friends were assassinated by Islamic terrorists as
a result of their political views. Djebar was regularly mentioned as a candidate
for the
Nobel Prize in Literature. She died on February 7, 2015, in a Paris
hospital. For further reading: Assia Djebar: romancière algérienne, cinéaste arabe by Jean Déjeux (1984); Les romans d'Assia Djebar by Beïda Chikhi (1990); 'Djebar, Assia,' in World Authors 1980-1985, edited by Vineta Colby (1991); Two Major Francophone Women Writers: Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar by Rafika Merini (1995); Assia Djebar: Ecrire, Transgresser, Résister by Jeanne-Marie Clerc (1997); Assia Djebar's 'Algerian Quartet': A Study in Fragmented Autobiography by Mildred Mortimer (1997; Escritura dos silêncios: Assia Djebar e o discurso do colonizado no feminino by Vera Lucia Soares (1998); Islam and the Post Colonial Narrative by John Erickson (1998); Recasting Poatcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds by Anne Donadey (2001); Assia Djebar's L'Amour La Fantasia and the Historiographic Approach by Laura Aletti (2004); Assia Djebar: In Dialogue with Feminism by Priscilla Ringrose (2006); Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria by Jane Hiddleston (2006): Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present by Ranjana Khanna (2008); Remembering the (Post)Colonial Self: Memory and Identity in the Novels of Assia Djebar by Jennifer Murray (2008); Gender and Identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and Feminism in Maghrebi Women's Literature by Abdelkader Cheref (2010); Representing Algerian Women: Kateb, Dib, Feraoun, Mammeri, Djebar by Edward John Still (2019); The Algerian Historical Novel: Linking the Past to the Present and Future by Abdelkader Aoudjit (2020); Assia Djebar: le manuscrit inachevé, ed. Mireille Calle-Gruber, Anaïs Frantz (2021); White Tongue, Brown Skin: The Colonized Woman and Language by Maya Boutaghou (2024) Selected works:
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