Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade

Revising Colonial Constructions of History
Djebar revises traditional history in the novel using several techniques which successfully decenter the colonizer's version of history and make space for the participation of women in the struggle for national independence. Djebar first presents colonial history in the form of letters, diaries and published accounts of French soldiers and officials, searching through them to find places where women bubble up to the surface and their participation is recorded despite history's determination to erase their contribution and existence. In addition to finding moments in which the colonizers are forced to confront the problematic existence of women revolutionaries, Djebar presents the words of women freedom fighters themselves, translating them from Arabic to French. Recording the women's stories in sections of the novel titled "Voices," Djebar troubles the split between the spoken and the written, suggesting the limitations of traditional history and the richness of her culture's oral traditions. Considering the French invasion of 1830 and the twentieth century War of Algerian Independence, as well as adding pieces of her own autobiography, Djebar complicates the notion of linear history, presenting an alternative view of the interdependence of the personal and the national, the past, the present and the future.

Subjectivity and the Subaltern
The intellectual movements of the 20th Century, including Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, have continued the move away from the 18th and 19th century notions of the universal subject, contesting the unified "I" and replacing it with fractured, multiple subject positions. Feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Gayatri Spivak and others are interested in theorizing female subjectivity in all its diversity and multiplicity in answer to phallocentric constructions that continue to figure subjectivity as masculine and female consciousness as lack. In "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak summarizes her project of constructing a new model of female subjectivity, a project Djebar takes up in L'Amour, la fantasia : "My readings are, rather, an interested and inexpert examination, by a postcolonial woman, of the fabric of repression, a constructed counternarrative of woman's consciousness, thus woman's being, thus woman's being good, thus the good woman's desire, thus woman's desire" (299). Djebar joins her own voice and life story with the stories and voices of Algerian women revolutionaries, replacing silence and the colonizer's version of history with a celebration of female experience and expression. Speaking neither for nor to her subaltern sisters, Djebar speaks with them, emphasizing the collective nature of female expression. Djebar realizes the ways in which her own story is intimately linked to the forgotten and silenced testimonies of other women: "Can I, twenty years later, claim to revive these stifled voices? And speak for them? Shall I not at best find dried-up streams? What ghosts will be conjured up when in this absence of expressions of love (love received, 'love' imposed), I see the reflection of my own barrenness, my own aphasia" (Djebar 202). In telling their stories, Djebar and the women revolutionaries reclaim not only their individual and collective voices, but their bodies as well.

Speaking the self is linked in important ways to speaking the experience of female embodiment. Sidonie Smith articulates the intersection of subjectivity and body that occurs in autobiographical projects: "When a specific woman approaches the scene of writing and the autobiographical 'I,' she not only engages the discourses of subjectivity through which the universal human subject has been culturally secured; she also engages the complexitites of her cultural assignment to an absorbing embodiment. And so the autobiographical subject carries a history of the body with her as she negotiates the autobiographical 'I,' for autobiographical practice is one of those cultural occasions when the history of the body intersects the deployment of subjectivity" (22-23). Djebar's treatment of the veil, her own escape from cloistering, and her subsequent access to academia and writing suggests that the female body is a locus of potential power, rebellion, and knowledge that threatens the status quo of male privilege: "The fourth language, for all females, young or old, cloistered or half-emancipated, remains that of the body: The body which male neighbors' and cousins' eyes require to be deaf and blind, since they cannot completely incarcerate it, the body which, in trances, dances, or vociferations, in fits of hope and despair, rebels, and unable to read or write, seeks some unknown shore as desination for its message of love" (Djebar 180). The image of the dismemebered hand at the novel's conclusion suggests the connection between body and voice, subjectivity and embodied experience: "Later, I seize this living hand, hand of mutilation and of memory, and I attempt to bring it the qalam" (Djebar 226).

Feminist Challenges to Discourses of Nationalism
The story of Djebar and the women freedom fighters is also the story of Algeria and the journey from colonization and subjugation to independent nation. Djebar's text refigures nationalist strategies by replacing history written by the colonizer with a history of heroic women. The re-writing of history is a common step in the project of nationalism, but most often the revised history of a colonized nation continues to be a male-centered history. By moving women from the margin to the forefront of her recreated history, Djebar documents women's historic roles as revolutionaries and makes the case that they deserve status as full citizens in the new nation they have helped to build. Danielle Marx-Scouras draws connections between Djebar's themes of subjectivity, body, voice and nationalism as they relate to Djebar's feminist political agenda: "The amputated hand symbolizes Algeria, mutilated by a history written by the hands of others (French historians, writers, artists) but, perhaps more importantly for Djebar, it also represents Algerian women amputated in their desire to write or express themselves. The dominant images of the novel -- abduction and rape -- sexualize the representation of Algeria, which becomes, in the final analysis, the female body. If it is on this body that the history of the French conquerors has been written, it is from this body that the decolonization of a people must be written -- be they men or women" (176). The nation that women have helped to make independent has a durty to recognize the issues and concerns of women's oppressions. Djebar's project seeks to "resurrect so many vanished sisters" (204), to restore them to their rightful place within the new nation, to have their voices speak and be heard as full participants in the project of decolonization and nation-building.

Assia Djebar

Biography

1936 Born in Fatima-Zohra Imalayen in Cherchell, Algeria on August 4.

1957 Publishes first novel, La Soif, under pen name Assia Djebar.

1958 Publishes second novel, Les Impatients. Marries Walid Garn. Works toward advanced degree in history at University of Algiers.

1962 Publishes novel Les Enfants du Nouveau Monde.

1967 Publishes novel Les Alouettes Naives.

1969 Rouge l'Aube, a play written in collaboration with husband Garn, performed at the third Panafrican Cultural Festival held in Algiers. Publishes volume of poetry, Poems pour l'Algerie heureuse.

1977 Directs her first film, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua.

1979 Directs second film, La Zerda ou les chants de l'oubli, a documentary juxtaposing French newsreels of World War I and II and Algerian women singing traditional songs.

1980 Publishes short story collection, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement. Marries Malek Alloula, Algerian writer, and they reside in Paris Appointed to Algerian Cultural Center in Paris.

1985 First novel of projected quartet published, L'Amour, la fantasia.

1987 Second novel of projected quartet published, Ombre sultane.

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

Assia Djebar has been the Silver Chair of French at New York University since fall 2001. She previously held the post of Distinguished Professor of French and Director of the Centre for French and Francophone Studies at Louisiana State University (1997-2001). She is the author of numerous books, including Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartment (Des femmes, 1980, in translation Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, UP of Virginia, 1992), LХamour, la fantasia (J. C. Latt’s, 1985, in translation Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade, Quartet, 1985), Vaste est la prison (Albin Michel, 1995) for which she was awarded the Prix Maurice Maeterlinck in 1995, and Ces voix qui m’assiegent (Albin Michel, 1999). She also received the Prix de la Critique Internationale in Venice for her film, La nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua, 1979, the International Literary Neustadt Prize (1996, USA), the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar for her collection of short stories Oran, langue morte (1997) and the Prix international de Palmi (1998, Italy).

Algerian 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.

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 Lycйe Fйnйlon in Paris, she became the first Algerian woman to be accepted at the Йcole Normale Supйrieure. She joined in the Algerian student strike of 1956, in the early years of the Algerian independence struggle, and in 1958 she married Ahmed Ould-Rouпs, 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.

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 westernised 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 the reader encounters a serious study of psychological development. The book was compared to Franзois Sagan's Bonjour tristesse, but in Algeria it was condemned for ignoring the political realities of the day. LES IMPATIENTS (1958) was set before the independence struggle and centres upon a young woman, Dalila, who feels herself trapped in a family environment of domineering men and frustrated women. In 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 NAПVES (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 independence, Djebar was criticised 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 NAIПVES, 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.

Djebar'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 theatre and film.

LES FEMMES D'ALGER DANS LEUR APPARTEMENTR (1980) 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 a 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. It was made up almost entirely of conversations between women and used a new vocabulary of sounds borrowed from the film, L'AMOUR, LA FANTASIA (1985) 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). LOIN DE MЙDINE (1991) explored the lives of the women in the life of the prophet Mohammed.

Djebar has often looked pessimistically at 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 civilisation the Berbers were once compared to. The narrator is 36-year-old Isma, a musicologist and filmmaker, who realises: "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 Centre for French and Francophone studies of the Louisiana State University. 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, romanciиre algйrienne, cinйaste arabe by Jean Dйjeux (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, Rйsister by Jeanne-Marie Clerc (1997); Escritura dos silencios Assia Djebar by Vera Lucia Soares (1998); Islam and the Post Colonial Narrative by John Erickson (1998) - 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 naпves, 1967
Les alouettes naпves, 1967
Poиmes pour l'Algйrie 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 йtй algйrien, 1993
Le blanc de l'Algйrie, 1995
Vaste est la prison (So Vast the Prison), 1995
Le Blanc de l'Algйrie, 1996
Oran, langue morte, 1997
Les nuits de Strasbourg, 1997
Ces voix qui m'assiиgent, 1999

from the back of Algerian White

"A hymn to friendship and the enduring power of language, [Algerian White] is also a requiem for a nation's unfinished literature." – Leslie Camhl – The New York Times

"Assia Djebar ...has given weeping its words and longing its lyrics." – William Gass in World Literature Today

"There is not one line of theory in Algerian White. Its point goes much further. it whispers that time passes, but not only time, life also, stolen by terror, a white life, of this white in which all vivid colors merge and vanish." – Le Point

My phone cards

Asian calling card

Our shop provides You with the cheapest Prepaid Phone Cards for international
and domestic use. The greatest advantage of our service is ONLINE purchase and
ONLINE instant PIN delivery.

Select, pay and start calling anywhere anytime!

It's cheap- online phone cards are cheaper than collect calls and
operator assisted calls

It's fast - You receive PIN number and Access number instantly at
any time and any place where You have an access to the Internet

It's convenient - there is a wide choice of phone cards in one
place, you can find the best offer.

Also You can buy Permanent PIN and then refill you card. There are many other
features as PIN-free access and balance transfer opportunity.Our cards are the
best choice for long distance calls!