1997: Assia Djebar

Assia Djebar (1936- ) - pseudonym of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen

assia_djebarAlgerian novelist, translator, and filmmaker, one of North-Africa's best-known and most widely acclaimed writers. Djebar has also published poetry, plays, and short stories, and has produced two films. In her books Djebar has explored the struggle for social emancipation and the Muslim woman's world in its complexities. Her strong feminist stance has earned her much praise. Several of her works deal with the impact of the war on women's mind.

Just so I could have worries that never change whether it's peace or wartime, so I could wake up in the middle of the night and question myself on what it is that sleeps in the depths of the heart of the man sharing my bed... Just so I could give birth and weep, for life never comes unaccompanied to a woman, death is always right behind, furtive, quick, and smiling at the mothers... (from 'There Is No Exile' in Women in Their Apartments, 1980)

Assia Djebar was born in Cherchell, a small coastal town near Algiers. She attended the primary school where her father taught French, and completed secondary school studies in Algiers. After her studies at the Lycée Fénélon in Paris, she became the first Algerian woman to be accepted at the École Normale Supérieure. She joined in the Algerian student strike of 1956, in the early years of the Algerian independence struggle. In 1958 she married Ahmed Ould-Rouïs, a member of the Resistance. The marriage ended in divorce, and in 1980 she married the poet Malek Alloula. In Tunis she wrote the short story 'There is No Exile' but did not publish it until 1980, as though she did not want to voice her doubts about the war at the time.

'"The other women have grown silent," I said. "The only one left to weep now is the mother... Such is life," I added a moment later. "There are those who forget or who simply sleep. And then there are those who keep bumping into the walls of the past. May God take pity on them!"' (from 'There Is No Exile')
As a novelist Djebar made her debut with LA SOIF (The Mischief) in 1957. The novel was written in two months during the student uprising in 1956. Fearing her father's disapproval, she adopted the pen name she has kept ever since. The protagonist of the novel, half-French, half-Algerian Nadia is a westernized Algerian girl. She lives a carefree life, tries to seduce her friend's husband in order to make her own boyfriend jealous. Below the surface reader encounters a serious study of psychological development. The book was compared to François Sagan's Bonjour tristesse. 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 in a family environment of domineering men and frustrated women. LES ENFANTS DU NOUVEAU MONDE (1962) explored the awakening of Algerian women to new demands. The heroine is in the collective action for political change and the themes of love and war, the past and the present, continued in LES ALOUETTES NAÏVES (1967), which depicted a woman's rebel against patriarchy.

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. She pursued her work in the history as a teaching assistant at the University of Rabat and participated in various Algerian cultural activities. During her stay in Morocco Djebar wrote her third novel, LES ENFANTS DU NOVEAU MONDE (1962), a vivid fresco of village life, where domestic drama was interwoven with war.

After Algeria gained gained independence, Djebar was criticized for writing in French, when writers were supposed to switch to the national language, Arabic. She taught North African history at the Faculty of Letters and worked with the Algerian press and radio. In 1967 appeared LES ALOUETTES NAIÏVES, a drama of lost generation set among the refugee communities.

In the 1970s Djebar began to study classical Arabic to enlarge her ways of expression. In her later novels she has manipulated the French language, giving it the sounds and rhythms of Arabic. She also turned to cinema to reach those who cannot read. Her first film, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1979), won the International Critics Prize at the 1979 Film Festival in Venice. La Zerda et les chants de l'oubli (1982) was chronicle of life in the Maghreb from the early to the mid-twentieth century.

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. When Djebar returned to the University of Algiers, she began teaching theater and film.

LES FEMMES D'ALGER DANS LEUR APPARTEMENT (1980, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment) was a collection of short stories, and meant a turning point in Djebar's career as a writer: "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." Coming after an silence of ten years, the book was welcomed in critical circles. It 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. The second version of the book from 2002 contained a supplemental novel in addition to the first version.

"Then Anne chronologically pours out a story, a predictable one. "Her" story; the husband, the three children, fifteen years of a strange life contained in one hour of words: Is it trite? It's trite." (from 'Women of Algiers in their Apartment', trans. by Marjolijn De Jager)

L'AMOUR, LA FANTASIA (1985, Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade) won the Franco-Arab Friendship Prize. The work mixed autobiography, historical accounts of the French conquest of 1830, and the Algerian War. It was the first novel of a proposed quartet about Maghrebian women, which continued in OMBRE SULTANE (1987, A Sister to Scheherazade), a story of two women. LOIN DE MÉDINE (1991) explored the lives of women in the life of the prophet Mohammed.

Djebar has often looked pessimistically women's ability to change an overbearing patriarchy. In the autobiographical VASTE EST LA PRISON (1995, So Vast the Prison) the narrator 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. The narrator is 36-year-old Isma, a musicologist and filmmaker, who realizes: "We think the dead are absent but, transformed into witnesses, they want to write through us."

Djebar taught history for many years at the University of Algiers. 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. Since Fall 2001, Djebar has been Silver Chair Professor of French and Francophone studies at New York University. Djebar is a member of the 'Académie Royale de Langue Francaise de Belgique. Her major novels have not been translated into Arabic in her native Algeria, but English translations are read by a wide audience in Europe and in North America.

For further reading: Assia Djebar, romancière algérienne, cinéaste arabe by Jean Déjeux (1984); Assia Djebar by Mildred Mortimer (1988); Les romans d'Assia Djebar by Beida Chikhi (1990); Two Major Francophone Women Writers: Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar by Rafika Merini (1995); Assia Djebar: Ecrire, Transgresser, Résisterby Jeanne-Marie Clerc (1997); Escritura dos silencios Assia Djebar by Vera Lucia Soares (1998); Islam and the Post Colonial Narrative by John Erickson (1998); Recasting Poatcolonialism by Anne Donadey (2001) - For further information: Dr. Assia Djebar - Assia Djebar - Interview d'Assia Djebar - Assia Djebar's Algerian Quartet by Mildred Mortimer - So Vast the Prison (Seven Stories Press)

Selected works:

La soif (The Mischief), 1957
Les impatients, 1958
Women of Islam, 1961
Les enfants du nouveau monde, 1962
Les alouettes naïves, 1967
Les alouettes naïves, 1967
Poèmes pour l'Algérie heureuse, 1969
Rouge l'aube, 1969
La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, 1969
La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, 1979 (film)
Les Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment), 1980
La Zerda ou les chants d'oubli, 1982 (film)
L'Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade), 1985
In Ombre sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade), 1987
Loin de Medine (Far from Medina), 1991
Chronique d'un été algérien, 1993
Le blanc de l'Algérie, 1995
Vaste est la prison (So Vast the Prison), 1995
Le Blanc de l'Algérie, 1996
Oran, langue morte, 1997
Les nuits de Strasbourg, 1997
Ces voix qui m'assiègent, 1999
Filles d'Ismaël dans le vent et la tempête, 2002 (musical drama in five acts)
La Femme sans sepulture, 2002
Femmes D'Alger dans leur appartement, 2002