Two Major Francophone Women Writers, Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar: A Thematic Study of Their Works.

Cordova, Sarah Davies

Rafika Merini. Two Major Francophone Women Writers, Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar: A Thematic Study of Their Works. New York. Peter Lang. 1999 (released 2000). 159 pages. $43-95. ISBN 0-8204-2635-0.

TAKING A SOCIOLITERARY APPROACH, Rafika Merini brings a native Moroccan sensibility to her "personal and autobiographical reading[s]" of the cultural ideologies expressed in the novels of Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar. After a summary introduction about the reception, the thematics, and a historical outline of francophone Maghrebian literature, Djebar is categorized as a writer from the generation of protest and Sebbar as identifying with without belonging to the group of Beur writers. Merini then attends to five works by Sebbar which open onto the question of female identity and selfhood. Parle mon fils, parle a ta mere and Le pedophile et la maman are treated in chapter 1, while the next three chapters concentrate on the novels constituting the Sherazade triptych, wherein the female protagonist subverts voyeurism as she seeks to achieve equality and access to the public sphere. The fifth chapter focuses on L'amour, la fantasia and the sixth on Les enfants du Nouveau Monde and Les alouettes naives, novels by Djebar which point to a necessary "sisterly" complicity between women and trace the contours of romantic heterosexual relationships as against love-hate rapports transposed from the exigencies of warrior mentality.

Merini treats these authors' problematics of writing as women who have grown up in Algeria with the question of their choice of language. Neither Djebar nor Sebbar espouses the stereotype of the Maghrebian woman as procreating machine (epouse-pondeuse), nor do these two authors follow any "female literary tradition." Expressing the position of seer and that of being seen, they both write against what Djebar calls the "evil eye" or voyeurism and double reductionism of womanhood with strategies which Merini labels "reverse voyeurism."

At times overly simplistic, and at others assuming familiarity with the subject, Merini's text serves a mixed readership. Although its chapters' internal organization could have benefited from careful editing and its reference system from clarification so as to avoid the impression of rapidly drawn conclusions on a number of points, this thematic study offers useful insights into Djebar's and Sebbar's works. For Djebar, who writes as Berber and Algerian, Merini finds that deciding on a language required "algerianizing" (my term) her French, for the French of the colonizer cannot reproduce the experience of the colonized. For Sebbar, whose texts most often express the life of Maghrebians born or having lived most of their lives in France, the language of expression resists this dilemma. Indeed, as she described her situation at a conference on autobiography (Aix-en-Provence, June 2000): "J'ai ecrit le corps de mon pere avec la langue de ma mere." Alongside allusions to the linguistic and the corporeal, this analysis also broaches the question of for whom do these female characters as (ex- or doubly) colonized subjects speak or exist on paper. Even though the narrative voice in Djebar rarely inhabits the first-person position, it often breaks into the narration and adumbrates a "nous" or a couple's selfhood, whereas Sebbar's Sherazade speaks for all Sherazades, past, present, and future, and offers a model for strong, independent, liberated women, ones not tied to motherhood.

Sarah Davies Cordova Marquette University