Assia Djebar's contribution to Arab women's literature: rebellion, maturity, vision.

Accad, Evelyne

Young Arab women have unsuspected reserves of romanticism; too brutally thrown against men, they seldom regain their injured innocence. And their husbands will never know the exalted face of their adolescence. Only the dry look, barely touching, of submissive beasts, of the weak.

- Assia Djebar, La soif

For Arabic women I see only one single way to unblock everything: talk, talk without stopping, about yesterday and today, talk among ourselves . . . and look. Look outside, look outside the walls and the prisons!

- Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment

Women come and go, between Algeria and France, haunted by yesterday's war. . . . They come and go in their own way, . . . women who write, till the final adieu! Adieu I receive a little later, or much later, in the depth of today's death narrative, procession I organize, hoping thereby to unravel, in them, an irresistible flight.

- Assia Djebar, Le blanc de l'Algerie(1)

Fiction by women writers in North Africa and the Middle East goes back for sixty years.(2) In this relatively short time we can trace a remarkable pace - and breadth - of development in theme, form, and technique. Beginning with a preoccupation with bicultural anxiety and loss of identity (especially among the North African writers), the genre progresses to a self-empowering, inward look at problems and the search for the self. Although the works often seem to reflect the most self-centered aspects of romanticism, such preoccupation is understandable: in the face of legalized oppression and social degradation, it is not too surprising that the first concern of women novelists has been their female characters' private struggles for a personal identity, seen alternately as a search for personhood or an escape from "thing-hood."

What is particularly interesting, however, is that the fiction of women writers in North Africa and the Middle East does not stop at this stage of development, even though it might be expected to do so, given the general powerlessness of the group from which the characters of the genre are drawn. Instead, the romantic egotism of the 1950s and 1960s gives way, in the works of many of these writers, to clear rebellion in the face of newly recognized oppression. Personal rebellion, however, is of little use when the entire structure of the surrounding society militates against the exercise of individual freedom. Much of the fiction of these writers ultimately escapes this impasse by universalizing the questions of individual freedom that confront the female characters in this genre. In addition, the social milieu begins to be explored with a new clarity and frankness that moves it from the background to the front of the fictional stage. It becomes clear that not only individuals but also the society in which they live must be reborn.

Because of this overwhelming concern with finding a personal identity, Djebar's early works, along with other women novelists, were not always warmly received by the critics. In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a strong tendency to compare her works - either outright unfavorably or in an act of condemnation by association - with Francoise Sagan's Bonjour tristesse. In fact, it may well be that adolescent rebellion and the search for identity are not the stuff of the great novels of tomorrow; whether or not this is the case is irrelevant. What matters is that these works were in many ways authentic and necessary; you must know some basic things about yourself before you can begin to write about your place in the millennium.

The next stage in the evolution of the genre is rebellion in the face of the realization of the oppression that women must undergo in North Africa and the Middle East; this is a thing apart from the fairly universal human experience of rebellion on the way to maturity. The pattern is brutally simple in most parts of North Africa and the Middle East: women are born to fill the roles of daughter, wife, and mother, to be successively subservient to their fathers, husbands, and sons. Education for women is in most cases regarded as superfluous, few occupations outside the home are open to women, and in most cases the legal status of women is determined by the shari'a or Muslim religious code. In court, a woman's testimony is accorded only half the weight of a man's, a husband may divorce his wife without recourse to legal action, often merely by stating aloud that he repudiates her, and the law permits a husband or father to force his wife or daughter to remain at home, often literally under lock and key. Revolt against such customs and conditions leads to political awakening in the hope of finding solutions to women's problems through political commitment. Engagement is often mixed with a sense of nationalism and national identity, because the countries from which the women write are either struggling against foreign domination or are striving toward national identity and development.

Then comes disillusionment with the realization that political movements use women instead of serving or working together for their liberation. Those novelists who find a productive solution to this impasse usually do so by universalizing the feminist cause and expressing women's problems in the context of Middle Eastern and North African societies.

Assia Djebar exhibits all the stages mentioned above. She even goes one step further with her latest work, Le blanc de l'Algerie, in which she expresses a strong vision starting with the personal and the national to reach the political and the universal. It is because of this progression that I suggest that her fiction has achieved a true maturity, a realization that the self - and its freedom - cannot be separated from the entire social context. Obviously, this evolving vision has important political implications.

Djebar, a writer of middle-class Muslim and Algerian origins, was able to synthesize her traditional Muslim background and her European education. By the age of twenty-six she had published three novels (La soif, Les impatients, Les enfants du nouveau monde) and had obtained a licence (B.A.) in history from the Sorbonne. During the revolution she taught in Tunis and Rabat, where she completed a fourth novel (Les alouettes naives). She went back to Algeria after its independence, in 1962, and taught at the University of Algiers. In 1969 she co-produced a play, Rouge l'aube, for the Third Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, and her Poemes pour l'Algerie heureuse was published by SNED (the National Algerian Publishing House) - all signs that she had been accepted by and was willing to make peace with the authorities of her country. In 1969 she stopped publishing and producing and fell silent for about ten years, which led many critics to speculate over the reasons for her withdrawal. Clarisse Zimra probably gives the best analysis for this silence, which she sees as "a cycle that opens on an enlarged version of the female self. The resulting figure is one of disclosure rather than closure" (Zimra, "Writing Woman").

It was with a film, La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1979), that Djebar broke her silence. The film received the first prize at the Venice Film Festival. It was followed by a collection of short stories, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (1980), named after the 1832 Delacroix painting. She has since published three volumes of a quartet - L'amour, la fantasia (1985), Ombre sultane (1987), and Vaste est la prison (1995) - in a style increasingly worked out, refined, and perfected and in which she blends historical events with autobiographical elements in a complex sense of time and space. Loin de Medine (Far from Medina), which appeared in 1991, was an interruption, an interlude to her quartet and a reflection on the life of the Prophet Mohammed which we will analyze later. Another interruption, stirred by Djebar's desperate concern for the events in her country, was the publication in 1996 of Le blanc de l'Algerie, written after she was shaken by the death of a loved one.

The worst moment for me, the strongest, was in March of last year [1994], when a friend and relative, Abdel Kader Alloula, died. He was an extraordinary man . . . the only one in my opinion who, for the last thirty years, had forged an Arabic language between the popular language of the street and the literary one. . . . He died at the age of fifty-three. He was forging this language for us. It was a song at the crossroads of several traditions. The fact that this man was killed, a man who was also francophone, was for me - how shall I say - as if danger were being instilled, establishing itself in the heart of Algerian culture. My reaction was to close myself into my apartment for three months and to do my own anamnesia, going back into my mother's, my grandmother's memories, and into my own, of thirty years in which I lived pushed back and forth between Europe and Algeria. ("Territoires des langues," 73 74)

This recall of one's relatives and of one's own memory is at the core of Vaste est la prison, but grief also inspired Le blanc de l'Algerie, which is an amazingly courageous and honest narrative that raises vital questions about Algeria's present, past, and future political and cultural situation.

Djebar now spends most of her time in France as a practicing writer, film producer, and literary critic. This year she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature awarded by World Literature Today, a very prestigious award which, in the last twenty-five years, has seen eighteen of its laureates, candidates, and jurors subsequently receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Djebar was a Neustadt juror in 1990.) In the future we may increasingly see Djebar in the States, for she has been invited by various universities here as a lecturer and/or writer in residence.

I would like to trace the evolution of Assia Djebar's works from rebellion to maturity as expressed by the various plots and characters of her novels. Since a lot has been written on her recent works, I will dwell more on the early ones. I will trace the unifying themes of those early works which can be found again in her latest ones. I hope to show the evolution and progression into maturity of an author who can be considered one of the most important women writers in North Africa.

The central figure of Djebar's first novel, La soif (1957; Eng. The Mischief, 1958), resembles other bi-cultural characters in novels of that period. Nadia is the issue of a marriage between an Algerian man and a French woman. Because her mother died in childbirth, Nadia lives with her father and her half-sister's family. She has been educated in French schools, and her life-style does not appear to be circumscribed by traditional Muslim customs. She goes where she pleases, drives her own sports car, and associates with men. While the plot is often melodramatic and reminiscent of Sagan's Bonjour tristesse, at the same time the central figure espouses some of the qualities of Meursault in Camus's classic, L'etranger: her life was "placid, superficial, empty." Nor is this all, for Nadia is also capable of displaying a striking combination of fatalism and existentialism: "I wanted to think of nothing except the wind blowing against my temples and the restless course of my life. Hussein hated me, and Jedla considered me of no importance whatever. As for All, he was gone and I had forgotten about him. . . . Rage, violence, insults - life was made up of these. I would do what Jedla expected of me. (M, 77-78)

Briefly, the plot goes as follows: Nadia has a friend, Jedla, who is married to a lawyer, Ali. Nadia also has a boyfriend, Hussein, but she thinks that she is in love with Ali and flirts with both of them. When Jedla manifests psychotic behavior and attempts suicide, Nadia feels she must delve into her friend's psychological background. What she discovers is that Jedla once lost a baby through miscarriage and now fears that she will be childless. Childlessness is considered the supreme curse that can be visited upon a woman in the North African Muslim culture; not only is it a cause of social mortification, but it also constitutes grounds for the husband to terminate the marriage. The problem here has become exacerbated by Jedla's discovery that Ali once had a French mistress who bore him a son, since such proof of Ali's fertility places the stigma of barrenness squarely on Jedla.

The discovery of the French mistress has another effect, however, in that it makes Jedla insanely jealous and leads her to plot a complicated revenge on All. Nadia is to tempt Ali into a sexual relationship, whereupon Jedla will have an excuse to free herself from him on grounds of infidelity. It is a daring scheme for an Algerian woman to attempt and is probably indicative of the gradual breakdown of the old male-dominated culture in the face of European influences. Before this plot can be put into action, however, there is yet another turn of events: Ali goes off on a trip to France, and Jedla discovers that she is pregnant. Acting in accordance with cultural expectations, she is at first overjoyed with her pregnancy, an attitude for which the more liberated Nadia despises her: "Yes, she was just like the common run of women, so easily contented, so quick to submit to convention; she was morbidly anxious to proclaim her happiness from the rooftops and see it unfold, like a poisonous plant, in front of other people" (M, 93). She introduces doubt into Jedla's heart by telling her that even her pregnancy will not keep Ali from being unfaithful to her if he wants to be. Given Ali's background, there is probably a certain amount of truth to this, however despicable Nadia's intentions may be for pointing out the fact to Jedla. In any case, Jedla is easily convinced and asks Nadia to take her to the abortionist. Nadia is frightened at the consequences of her meddling and regrets her words. She tries to reason Jedla out of her decision by telling her:

"What I think is that you'd better take All as he is. There's no use loving him as an exception. You must show some understanding. . . . Almost any man, even All, can have his moments of . . . instability. . . .

"Don't be too proud! You ought to be content with your lot as a woman. I've come around, myself, to the point of view of our mothers and grandmothers. As long as women have a home of their own where they can serve and obey their husbands, they need ask nothing more. What if their husbands do have affairs on the outside? As long as their wifely position is respected, what does it matter? Of course they know that as they grow old, other and younger wives may take their place. But they're not jealous; they remain calm and submissive, and who's to say they haven't the right idea?" (M, 99-100)

Unfortunately, this litany of the old ways does not convince Jedla; on the contrary, it drives her to furious rebellion. She goes through with the abortion and dies as a result of the operation. When Ali returns from France to find that the wife he adored is dead, he turns to drink. Nadia, on the other hand, marries Hussein and tries to forget "the tumult of that summer when I was twenty years old" (M, 111). She is no longer thirsty for rebellion and notices that, "in the lethargy of my heart there is not even a trace of shame" (111). Her marriage is calm and banal, and in its anticlimactic mood there is an unconvincing attempt to create a moralized ending with the message: "What I possess is a certain physical well-being, the companionship of Hussein, and the sensation that life is running out, drop by drop, inexorably" (110-11).

In essence, however, the novel is not as superficial as it may seem from this summary of the main plot. In addition to the valid overtones of cultural conflict, at the center of the novel there seems to be the possibility of a beautiful friendship between Jedla and Nadia, a relationship which would transcend their day-to-day banalities and desires. Passages which describe this relationship manage to evoke a peaceful security and calmness, but without slipping into the spiritual flaccidity which characterizes Nadia's marriage to Hussein: "After establishing a great calm on the veranda, where we sat together, we went off to sleep, like sisters, in the same room. We pulled the beds close to each other, and often we whispered for long hours in the dark" (M, 63).

What precludes this gentle and sisterly relationship is the "thirst" (la soft) or "craving" which pervades the novel. Jedla is "thirsty" for a child, Nadia is "thirsty" for men. "Thirst," then, revolves around children and men, both of which are required by society before a woman can consider herself successful. Conversely, there is no social utility to prompt a deep friendship between two women. Jedla has been so well trained in her role as an Arab female that she thinks that a childless marriage is sure to drive away her husband; neither can the liberated Nadia escape the pressure to find the focus of her life through a man. But la soif also involves "rebellion" against this same slavery imposed by society. Speaking of Jedla, Nadia says: "What I had cared most for in her so far was her refusal to compromise and be like everyone else, her vaguely dissatisfied craving, which was even deeper than my own" (M, 92). But Nadia too has a "vaguely dissatisfied craving," and therefore she understands Jedla better than she thinks she does. It is this spirit of rebellion against society's norms which attracted her to Jedla in the first place. The tragedy of the novel arises out of the fact that the two women are enemies in their struggle or thirst for independence; it is essentially Nadia's thirst for All that leads her to incite Jedla to rebel against her thirst for a child. Unable to see the need to unite, they only exacerbate each other's problems. Nadia, had she been more mature, would have understood the necessity of uniting with Jedla instead of either admiring her blindly or trying alternately to persuade her to rebel or submit, depending on her own capricious moods. The weakness of Djebar's novel lies in her failure to stress the possibility of unity among women, and not in the book's sexual overtones, which the Algerian revolutionaries found indecent. The revolutionaries considered La soif's subject particularly inappropriate because the book ignored the revolution precisely at a time when the country was engaged in a fierce war. This reaction was more or less to be expected inasmuch as the political activists of Algeria have never been greatly concerned with the liberation of women. In fact, the political programs of Arab nationalists frequently call for a return to ancient Muslim social customs, including the cloistering of women.

In Djebar's second novel, Les impatients (The Impatient Ones; 1958), one can see a certain oblique response to the revolutionaries' criticism of La soif. This work depicts the awakening consciousness of a young Algerian gift rebelling against tradition. Djebar still seems unconcerned with the revolution taking place in her country, and the emphasis of Les impatients is as firmly centered on the problems of women as was that of La soif. This time, however, Djebar seems to have taken care to disarm her critics by setting the novel a few years in the past, thereby sidestepping any need to mention the revolution. As the title indicates, the emphasis of the novel is slightly less personal, slightly more social. Instead of dealing with a thirst, a feeling centered entirely in the individual, Les impatients deals with an individual's "impatience" with the existing social order.

Dalila, the heroine, is similar to Nadia in that she is French-educated. Both of her parents are dead, and she lives in Algiers with her stepmother, her brother's family, and a house full of other relatives. Like Nadia, Dalila is bored, but unlike Nadia, she is not free to go where she pleases. She is cloistered like the other women in the house, but occasionally she visits girlfriends, attends weddings, and goes to the Turkish bath. This humdrum existence gives her an insight into the desperation which drives cloistered women to seek adventure even at the risk of social disgrace.

Then I understood the agitation that drives women to say "yes." In the face of the confusion of their hearts, filled at the same time with sloth, compassion, and an inexplicable tenderness, in the face of the multiple void of their hearts, they give themselves to men, even if only by way of being raped, in order that, when the act is over they may rediscover themselves definitively, face to face with an image of themselves. (I, 121)

Even the meetings with her schoolmates during which they discuss important questions such as "the problem of the evolution of the Muslim woman, the problem of mixed marriages, the problem of the social responsibilities of women" (17) are empty because they are approached without sincerity: "They discussed these questions because it was fashionable to do so." Indeed, given the cloistered lives the girls are forced to live, such discussions could hardly be expected to have any greater effect than relieving boredom.

Dalila, however, finds a more effective means of combatting the flatness of life. Secretly, she starts dating the brother of one of her friends. Selim is an evolue, a "liberated man" who seems to share Dalila's convictions concerning the right of every girl to choose her friends and to exercise the freedom to come and go as she pleases. In order to see Selim more often, Dalila blackmails her stepmother Lella. Dalila has pieced together bits of conversations that she has overheard and has deduced that Lella was once an "easy" woman - in fact, she was Selim's mistress before she married Dalila's father. By threatening to reveal what she knows, Dalila forces Lella to lie to Dalila's brother whenever she wants to go out. It is of course heavily ironic, and indicative of the incomplete state of her "evolution," that Dalila is in effect using the sanctions of the old order to gain her own freedom.

Dalila's blackmail is very effective, because Lella, having gained respectability through marriage, now goes to great lengths to lead an exemplary life: "In our household the image of the exemplary woman has as much charm as that of the femme fatale has in the outside world. Perhaps it is more reassuring. Unfortunately it's just another image" (I, 224). Dalila, forgetting that it is this very image that makes it possible for her to deceive her brother and leave the house, takes Lella to task for hypocrisy and adherence to a double standard: "It's prostitution. And of the worst sort. . . . As I understand it, you don't even want to give it up. It has its advantages: security, honor, and all the attentions of men, not only those under this roof but others whom you imagine to be forever raising their eyes to your famous virtue, as to a flag" (152). Lella, on the other hand, is quite sensible of the advantages of the orderly though limited life which she leads. She begs Dalila to think twice before destroying this order, pointing out that this order is necessary to the happiness of others, even though it may not suit Dalila's purposes at the moment: "Before spreading trouble in this way, stop and think, be prudent. Don't upset anything in this house, in this order. . . . You are insensible to the unhappiness and disappointment of other people. You're nothing but an egoist" (153).

In fact, Dalila is selfish. Nevertheless, the reader admires her desire to break away from restrictive conventions at the same time that he is repelled by her underhanded methods. Dalila never does actually expose her stepmother's past, and when Dalila's father dies, Lella ultimately remarries and thus can no longer serve the interests of Dalila's petty blackmail. However, it is evident in the blackmail of her stepmother that the young girl who seeks her own freedom from custom and convention is not averse to using these same conventional forms for her own ends. Like Nadia in La soil, Dalila lacks compassion for and solidarity with the other women surrounding her.

Dalila also undergoes a process of disillusionment. When she joins Selim in Paris, where he has gone on business, she discovers to her great surprise that he has become extremely jealous and possessive. He even resents her friendship with a French girl. He slaps her when she goes out without telling him and locks the door of her room to prevent her from going out during his absence. The action of the novel takes a melodramatic turn when Dalila receives a letter from home informing her of Lella's remarriage. Selim leaves to meet secretly with his former mistress, and both are killed by her new husband. Dalila then realizes that she is at last alone but free.

Escape, freedom, what can that mean? Nothing. Suddenly there had been a scene which only a few days ago I would have found degrading. Now I accepted it the way one accepts something that happened several years ago. Even if that tempest should return, what did it matter to me, seeing that, immediately afterward, I could be perfectly happy in spite of it? Seeing that I could seize that pure, immobile exaltation by the throat and thus feel alone, sure of myself. (I, 230)

An inherent weakness of the novel arising from the melodramatic resolution of the plot is that Dalila gains her freedom through the fortuitous exercise of the very conventions against which she is rebelling. Not only was it possible for her to see Selim in the first place through the agency of blackmail arising from the sexual cloistering of women, but her final "freedom" from Selim is achieved when he leaves her to visit his former mistress and is murdered by Lella's new husband as an affair of honor. Like Nadia, Dalila achieves her ends primarily by negative means, by profiting from the misfortune of others. Even though the ends in Les impatients are more worthy and less selfish than those in La soif, the means the two women use are similar, and they both end up alienated from the other women around them. They are both stubborn, independent, and selfish, and both finally resolve their conflicts with society by submitting to life on a plane of reduced expectations.

Selim's death, while it is convenient for Dalila, constitutes a weakness in the novel because it overextends the reach of coincidence and thereby significantly reduces the meaning of Dalila's resulting "freedom." Djebar herself may have been conscious of this shortcoming, because she does not end the novel with Dalila's attainment of freedom but instead adds another event which substantially modifies and extends the meaning of the novel. In the closing scenes Dalila appears to move out of her egotistical isolation and toward a new consciousness of the world around her. She has returned home, and one day as she walks the streets of Algiers she sees a boy being arrested by the French police and hears him screaming out his innocence in Arabic, joyfully rebellious: "I asked myself whether it was only youth which lent to this joy overtones of hate, of despair. If it was not rather a kind of grace reserved for certain beings, certain people. . . . Had I lost that grace?" (238). She compares herself to the boy - perhaps guilty, perhaps innocent, but nevertheless screaming in revolt, "the chant of a child victorious under the strokes of the cane" (239). "Impatience," then, which was at first merely an expression of selfish desire, takes the form of courage and willingness to speak in the midst of injustice.

Assia Djebar's third novel, Les enfants du nouveau monde (The Children of the New World; 1962), moves further in the direction of the developing consciousness indicated at the end of Les impatients. Here she shows the awakening of a new nation and its people by describing the growing awareness of several women. Stylistically, in Les enfants du nouveau monde Djebar makes use of a circular technique reminiscent of the male Algerian writer Kateb Yacine.

Unlike Djebar's previous novels, this work deals directly with the Algerian Revolution. Not only does the action take place during that conflict, but the focus is upon the various reactions to the revolution in a small town adjacent to a guerrilla-held mountain range. In particular, Djebar focuses on the role of women under these circumstances. There are, for instance, certain necessary social adjustments to the fact that many of the men are off fighting: "In every house where, ordinarily, four or five families were living, one family to a room, there is always one woman, young, old, it doesn't matter, who takes charge" (E, 14). Some insight is also given into the attitude of the Algerian male, who, oppressed by the French, exhibits his helpless frustration by oppressing his wife at home. At the same time, returning to his cloistered wife provides the Algerian with a source of cultural identity.

Yes, to forget the French oppressor, that's almost easy, he thinks as he comes back home in the evening and looks at his wife which the other, the all-powerful master of the outside, will never know; "cloistered" they say of her, but the husband thinks "liberated." . . . That body which he embraces, a body which gives itself without flinching because it is unfamiliar with the language of glances. (17)

Although a number of women are described, Djebar focuses on Cherifa, the uneducated wife of Youssef, a merchant and also a member of the underground. Because she cannot have children, Cherifa is bored with her life and passes the time playing with the children of her neighbor Amna. Amna, also uneducated, is married to a police inspector, Hakim, a traitor to the Arabs who is also distrusted by the French police for whom he works. Cherifa's consciousness was awakened through the experiences of her first marriage. She had lived for three years with a man who had been forced upon her, "a man whom everything in her had rejected" (23). Every night for three years she had given herself to him like a cold statue, a possession worse than rape. Her decision to break away from him was not only her first act of rebellion but also the first manifestation of the consciousness of her own existence: "'I should leave,' and she thought with vehemence that it would be a lie to continue living there. This impetus which had pushed her, she felt it also as an awakening; yes, all her life before today had been only a long slumber" (27).

A second significant step in Cherifa's awakening takes place during the revolution. When she discovers that Youssef, her second husband, is in danger because of his clandestine activities with the underground, she leaves her home alone for the first time in her life and crosses town on foot to warn him of the imminent danger of his capture. This one act gives a significance to her life which it had never had before.

She herself had forgotten the danger; perhaps it was not the danger, in fact, which had driven her, but rather a cunning desire to know at once whether she could not perhaps consecrate herself to something besides waiting in her room, to patience and love. Besides, she had crossed town forthrightly, despite feeling so many hostile eyes upon her, and at the end of her walk she had discovered that she was not merely a target for the curiosity of males, a form which passes, a veiled mystery which the first glance solicits, a fascinating weakness which one ends up hating, spitting upon. . . . No, she did exist; a driving obsession had possessed her and thereby made her unstoppable. "Get to Youssef! He is in danger." (162)

Once Cherifa sees herself as an active agent, capable of taking initiative outside the home, she is a changed woman.

Djebar depicts another type of awakening through the character of Lila, a highly educated young woman whose husband Ali has left her to join the guerrillas in the mountains. Lila is sympathetic to the Arab cause, but she is too tied to her French education to be totally committed. In both personality and situation the twenty-four-year-old Lila resembles Nadia and Dalila in Djebar's previous novels. Like them she is an orphan, and like them she is bored, selfish, and lazy. Her friend Suzanne, a Frenchwoman married to an Arab lawyer who has left for France, thinks of Lila, "She conceived of friendship the same way she did of love: egotistically" (83). But unlike the central figures of Djebar's previous novels, Lila's selfishness and boredom are turned into positive action and courage. She is arrested because she hides Bachir, a relative who has just performed an act of sabotage. Significantly, instead of feeling sorry for herself because of her arrest, she rises above such selfish concerns and accepts her lot as the price she must pay for the honor of participating in the struggle for her country's independence. She forgets about herself and feels fulfilled: "What wonderful luck to finally be just anybody on an earth, in an age that will never be repeated" (217).

Another woman who exhibits a similar involvement in the national cause is Salima, a thirty-one-year-old teacher who is imprisoned for her participation in the underground. She too feels lucky to have been able to participate actively in the revolution. In prison, her past unfolds before her eyes: "Was it really just yesterday, that epoch? Here it is fifteen or sixteen years ago. . . . Then she was the only Muslim girl in town who pursued her studies. A father who just happened to die when she was at the age where she should have been cloistered, like the other girls; in other words, a stroke of luck" (128). During the night she cannot go to sleep because the guards are torturing a man in the next cell and she can hear him screaming. She shivers with horror, but she listens with all her might: "'This is the song of my country, this is the song of the future,' she murmured" (128).

To round out the picture of women in the revolution, Djebar also depicts Hassiba, a girl in her early teens who joins the guerrillas, and Touma, a "loose" girl, semi-educated in the French schools. The portrayal of Touma is particularly significant because her fate reveals the degree to which the "new order" of the revolutionaries is merely a continuation of the old order of Muslim Algeria: Touma's younger brother Tewfiq is required to kill her in order to clear the honor of his family before the guerrillas will permit him to join their organization.

Overall, in Les enfants du nouveau monde Djebar's orientation toward the condition of women is markedly different from her attitude in the previous novels. Here the female characters are made to feel that they should seek solutions to their problems within themselves. Their rebellion should be directed toward political goals, and such qualities as commitment, independent thinking, and decision-making are desirable for the sake of political change. While directing criticism at women's personal goals in life, Djebar makes it clear that society is no longer to be considered the culprit with respect to the condition of women, as was the case in her previous novels.

Critics generally praised Djebar for Les enfants du nouveau monde, which they found sensitive in its inner prise de conscience or grasp of the awareness of a people, of women as well as men. Further, this is the first North African novel in which a woman writer focuses on the inner conflicts of some of her male characters. Khatibi found that, whereas in other women's novels the heroines are occupied with private self-realization, the women in Les enfants du nouveau monde are seen to unite among themselves and with their menfolk for group solidarity, to create not a Third World society but a new society entirely, where women work beside men, though within their own roles (64).

Assia Djebar's early novels reflect a progression in her ideas from an insistence upon the necessity of self-preoccupation in a world hostile to women, to a recognition of the importance of awareness of others, to the resolution of personal problems through immersion in a national cause. Her first novel reveals a selfishly unhappy woman preoccupied with herself; her second shows one more aware of society but still bored and selfish; and finally, her third depicts women who lose themselves to gain their country's independence. This reflects the approximate path of women's liberation in Algeria, which lost almost all its impetus after national independence was gained. According to Fadela M'Rabet, women were simply used during the revolution, only to be pushed down to a lower level after independence. Reflecting occurrences in Algeria, Djebar's early novels indicate a simultaneous - and perhaps related - progression in the cause of nationalism and regression in the cause of women's rights. The nationalism which was so necessary for the revolutionaries to oust the French colonialists turned counterrevolutionary after the oppressor had been evicted. As part of this counterrevolution, traditional laws were reinstituted which deprived women of the rights they had enjoyed under colonial rule. Although Djebar's first novels give us the impression that she is revolutionary in her ideas of women's role and their liberation, her theoretical ideas presented to us at that time, in an introduction to a book of photographs called Women of Islam, showed her to be a moderate.

Djebar believed then that it was dangerous to speak of the Muslim woman, because she could be seen in so many contexts throughout the Islamic world. Even within the confines of Algeria, attitudes toward the liberation of Algerian women varied widely, often reflecting what the individual stood to gain or lose by such liberation. For example, there was the French-educated Muslim man who deplored the seclusion of women but married a European, or the Muslim father who was in favor of having his daughter receive a bicultural education but then became alarmed when she gained a wide knowledge of the world and began to behave like a European. Finally there was the feminist who decided that the dominating male to whom she happened to be married really possessed only illusory power! Neither did Djebar find true liberation to be an unmixed blessing. She pointed out, for instance, that the Eastern mindset tended to emphasize and value private rather than public life, in contradistinction to the Western approach, which tended to value the public display and outward control of others. Essentially, this was the difference between being and doing. Thus, according to Djebar, liberating a woman in an Eastern culture often resulted in thrusting her into a cruel and competitive world for which she was unprepared and in which she might have no wish to participate.

Djebar denied that in Islam women were inferior to men. Instead she insisted that they were complementary. Furthermore, she emphasized that women were in fact becoming emancipated as the traditional family disintegrated, a process which had reached the point where women were beginning to hold jobs outside the home. Djebar also noted, however, that this emancipation as a result of the disintegration of the family structure was creating problems rather than solving them.

In his study Women of Algeria David Gordon saw a similarity between Djamila Debeche's and Djebar's directions: if women were to be emancipated, the process had to be accompanied by harmony with society as a whole, for the liberating of women demanded the liberation of men as well from the framework of traditional Muslim thought (Gordon, 49). In short, while Djebar was acutely aware of and poignantly depicted the plight of the Algerian woman, she was far from convinced that total liberation of women - say by legislative fiat - would be a wise course of action for her country. Indeed, since she saw liberation primarily as a process of individual mindset adjustment, she would probably have viewed "legal" liberation as irrelevant.

In contrast to the few novels written by women in the Mashrek and the Maghreb which lashed out against brutalizing social conditions, the majority presented, in the first decades of women's literary production, a more moderated view. Often pampered and bored, the women writers of North Africa and the Middle East frequently began their careers by imitating the West. Djebar and Ba'labakki, for example, imitated Francoise Sagan in drawing melancholic characters and featuring plots filled with sudden outbreaks of violence and frequent violations of normal fictional causality. Later they tried to grasp more of themselves through increased sensitivity to their Eastern heritage, producing self-searching, introspective literature which revealed the inward turn of their rebellion. The critic Abdelkebir Khatibi tried to explain the reasons for this inwardness which characterized so many of the women writers of that period: "Considered, and perceiving herself, as an object, the woman is more sensitive, more centered on her own psychological problems. Bullied, obliged to be always on the defensive, she interiorizes her complexes and neuroses. This is why one finds in feminine literature this constant taste for introspection, this obstinate search for the other, this feverish puritanism" (Khatibi, 61-62). This preoccupation with the self may account for the writers' inability to engage themselves in political and social problems outside their own immediate environment. Thus it was that the writers of that period, while dwelling on their own oppression in some detail, generally lacked sympathy for and awareness of the sufferings of women from the lower strata of their own societies. A number of cultural problems which directly affected women found no expression in the fiction of women writers of that period. Little attention was paid to crimes of honor, for example. Djebar mentioned them in Les enfants du nouveau monde but passed no judgment on the act itself. It was merely mentioned in passing as evidence of traditional thinking among political revolutionaries.

The inability to express women's problems and to be heard by the public she wanted to reach, combined with personal problems and the dilemma over which language to use, rendered more acute through a search for cultural and national identity, can probably account for Djebar's long hiatus from writing and publishing after the release of Enfants. In a recent interview with Lise Gauvin she stated:

It seemed to me I could have been a poet in the Arabic language. Vaste est la prison starts with an introduction called "The Silence of Writing." I talk about why I went almost ten years without publishing. I show what I had not yet perceived in L'amour, la fantasia. In that book I was in a relationship between French and Arabic. French had liberated me from my body at the age of eleven. But it was also a Nessus tunic - meaning that I had been able to escape from the veil thanks to the French language, thanks to having a father in the French language. It was evident that at the age of sixteen, seventeen, I conceived of myself, externally, as as much a boy as a girl. ("Territoires des langues")

Language is a dilemma Djebar reflects upon in many instances. Like many North African novelists who have been outspoken on the topic,(3) Djebar also experiences bilingualism as a problem which "enriches only the one who truly possesses two cultures. And this is rarely the case in Algeria."(4) But unlike many of her male counterparts who express this dilemma in violent terms, Djebar has a more tender relationship with language.

I started by writing one day, on the first page of a notebook, a rule of behavior to myself: "To recover the Arab tradition of love in the language of Giraudoux." Then, after a few trials, I chose, as a defiance to myself a kind of: "Even though I write in French, can I be-as Arab as possible?" . . . Each time I find different justifications, the least of evils being to re-create in French a life lived or felt in Arabic. This movement from one language to another has probably helped some North African writers of French expression achieve a certain lyricism, others a tone of aggressiveness or, on the contrary, of nostalgia. As for me, my desire is to find, in spite of this movement, a profound fluidity and intimacy - which seems difficult. ("Le romancier dans la cite arabe").

Ten years of silence were broken with the film La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1979). Like the Senegalese writer and director Sembene Ousmane, Djebar felt she could reach her people at last, and especially the women, in a language understandable through spoken Arabic and through sounds and images. The film is a very beautiful one, with reflections on memory and portraying the gaze. A young woman plunges into her past and allows women to speak out, giving them a voice and telling their stories mixed with the stories of their ancestors and flashbacks of war. In it one already finds many elements of her future novels.

With the short stories of Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (Eng. Women of Algiers in Their Apartment), an offshoot from Djebar's film turned into narratives, women's voices come out even more strongly. It is as if millennial oppression had been finally unleashed, veils dropped, and bodies restored to their beauty and full integrity: "New women of Algiers, who have been allowed to move about in the streets just these last few years, have been momentarily blinded by the sun as they cross the threshold, do they free themselves - do we free ourselves - altogether from the relationship with their own bodies, a relationship lived in the shadows until now, as they have done throughout the centuries?" (WA, 2).

L'amour, la fantasia (Eng. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade) is a carefully worked-out narrative that functions on two levels, reflecting two journeys: one into the author's inner self, partly autobiographical, the other historical, tracing the history of Algeria from the conquest of 1830 to the liberation of 1962. It is also a reflection on language. These two themes, the autobiographical elements mixed with history and the reflection on language, are crafted beautifully within the narratives. They can be found again in the next two volumes of Djebar's quartet. In addition to these two levels, Djebar gives us interwoven narratives through various voices set into different time frameworks. For example, her reflections on language are in one voice, lyric passages in praise of Algerian women are in another. She successfully constructs a polyphonic narrative resembling a symphony; hence the allusion to Beethoven's Fantasia and her division of the novel into five parts, like a symphony. The condition of women is also very much present and continues in the line of her preceding works with more strength and determination to give them a greater voice and visibility. Djebar studied the archives and looked for women's achievements and participation in political and historical events. She demonstrates that women were active participants in the resistance against the French. As Mildred Mortimer has well analyzed:

By alternating historical accounts of the French conquest, oral history of the Algerian revolution, and autobiographical fragments, Djebar sets her individual journey against two distinct and yet complementary backdrops: the conquest of 1830 and the Algerian Revolution of 1954. The former introduced the colonial era; the latter brought it to a close. In this way, the narrator establishes links with Algeria's past, more specifically with women of the past whose heroism has been forgotten. Giving written form to Algerian women's heroic deeds, Djebar as translator and scribe succeeds in forging new links with traditional women of the world she left behind. ("Fleeing the Harem," 156-57)

In Ombre sultane (Eng. A Sister to Scheherazade) Djebar continues on the musical theme she started with L'amour, la fantasia, alternating the voices of two women - one traditional, the other liberated, married to the same man. The inner and outer journeys are still present but are reflected by the two women. Hajila, the traditional woman, decides to leave the confinement of her home and explore the city, whereas Isma, the emancipated one, embarks on a reflection of her past, her childhood as well as her married life. She resembles the heroines of Djebar's earlier works. It is almost as if La soif were being repeated in this novel, with Isma, like Nadia, choosing Hajila, who is submissive, as a second wife to her husband and then pushing her into a revolt that is bound to end in tragedy. But here the complexity of the narrative gives way to various interpretations, one of which is that Hajila could be the double of Isma or her subconscious. The intermingling of Scheherazade's story adds to this complexity and gives yet another reading of the tale. Specifically, it recalls the Arabian Nights, in which Scheherazade, a princess, tries to escape the fate a cruel sultan inflicts on all the virgins of the town. He has sex with them and at the end of the night kills them. Scheherazade succeeds in saving her life by inventing tales that never end, thereby keeping the sultan interested in hearing the next one every night. In order to do so, Scheherazade calls upon her sister Dinarzade for help. Dinarzade sleeps under the nuptial bed and helps her sister remember stories: "To throw light on the role of Dinarzade, as the night progresses! Her voice under the bed coaxes the story-teller up above, to find unfailing inspiration for her tales, and so keep at bay the nightmares that daybreak would bring" (SS, 95).

As for Vaste est la prison (Vast Is the Prison), it is probably the most obviously autobiographical work by Djebar, who recalls the memories of her mother, her grandmother, and herself, who talks about her father, who recalls her childhood and her adolescence. It is also a novel on Algeria's present situation with its frightening war. Djebar tells us:

The true interrogation of my last novel, and in which I have found myself for at least two years, is how does one explain, or give an account of blood. The conclusion of Vaste est la prison is called "The Blood of Writing." How does one explain violence? Autobiographical writing is necessarily a retrospective writing where "I" is not always "I." It is an "I/us" or a multiplied "I." But in Vaste est la prison there is a regression into autobiographical and historical time; the impetus of this book was the death of someone close, inscribed in the present, a violent death, an assassination. The last few pages of the novel bear on this interrogation: to know if, writing in Berber or in Arabic, I would be able to explain better, give an account of this violence, if I could inscribe it. . . . I would convert within six months to any language if it could account for blood. . . . Throughout the book, I have lived an interrogation I would call ethical. In writing, there is a sort of impossibility; writing runs away, it is replaced by screaming, it is silence. ("Territoires des langues," 87)

In a foreword to her narrative Loin de Medine (Far from Medina; 1991) Djebar tells us why she applies the label "novel" to this collection of tales, narratives, visions, scenes, and recollections inspired by her readings of some of the Muslim historians who lived during the first centuries of Islam. Fiction allows freedom in reestablishing and unveiling a hidden space. Through it, Djebar gives a voice and a presence to the many women forgotten by the recorders and transmitters of Islamic tradition. This is quite an ambitious undertaking, and Djebar does it well in her usual careful, sensual, well-worked-out language. In a beautiful style, she re-creates the lives of women who surrounded the Prophet Mohammed, the influence they had on his thinking and in the debates of the times. The unofficial, occulted history of the beginning of Islam becomes very real and present with its women through Djebar's powerful pen. There is Aisha, the Prophet's favorite wife, and Fatima, his proud daughter. They both died soon after him. There is Sadjah the woman prophet, Selma the healer, and so many others. They all seem to act freely and are not afraid to stand up for what they believe, especially when it pertains to their belief in the Prophet. The Prophet himself is described as soft-spoken and very kind to his women, whom he treats with respect and care and whose advice he takes seriously.

This is certainly a revolutionary outlook and program for women's role in contemporary Arab society, if it would take its tradition seriously as an example to follow. And I have no doubt Djebar intended it this way. Nevertheless, such a tactic raises many problems, not the least of which are to be found in the text itself. The final message is that one ought to leave Medina (as implied in the title of the novel): "If Aisha one day decided to leave Medina? Ah, far away from Medina, to rediscover the wind, the breathtaking, incorruptible youth of revolt!" (300). But actually, the whole novel is a paean to Medina, a glorification of the Prophet and of his women! This is the most problematic contradiction one finds throughout the book: if, in order to free oneself, one ought to leave tradition and its enslavement, then how can one look upon it as a beautiful past filled with role models?

Other questions raised by this narrative as it inscribes itself in today's contemporary Arabic and North African literature are: what message can today's writers give, and ought they give one? If, like Rushdie or El-Saadawi, they bring out the contemporary issues with clarity, frankness, and irony, are they doomed to ostracism, house arrest, threats of death, imprisonment, and persecution? Is there no middle way between glorification and reinterpretation of tradition to show how today's Islam has been twisted or radically transformed?

Djebar must have been aware of or unconsciously gripped by all these questions, because her latest work, Le blanc de l'Algerie (The White of Algeria; 1996), inscribes itself into the most daring, courageous, outspoken reflections of today's world problems and pressing conflicts, most specifically as enacted in the Algerian War. It dares look at the roots of the conflict and raises vital questions on the works and deaths of well-known writers, intellectuals, thinkers (Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus, Mouloud Feraoun, Jean Amrouche, Jean Senac, Malek Haddad, Mouloud Mammeri, Kateb Yacine, Anna Greki, Taos Amrouche, Josie Fanon, Bachir Hadj Ali, Tahar Djaout, Youssef Sebti, Said Mekbel, Mahfoud Boucebci, M'Hamed Boukhobza, Abdelkader Alloula), and others. Djebar associates the destiny of Algiers in 1957 with the present, noting that violence and carnage are taking the same form: "On both sides, death launchers, one in the name of legality, but with mercenaries, the other in the name of historical justice - or ahistorical, transcendental, therefore illuminated and with 'demons.' Between these two sides . . . a field is open where a multitude of innocents are falling, too many humble people and a number of intellectuals" (134). Djebar is not afraid to attack the powers that be: "Those who continue to officiate in the confusion of the hollow political theater . . . the well-kept, more firmly established every year, with their bellies, their self-righteousness, their ever larger spaces, their swelling bank accounts. . . . This is how the caricature of a past is amplified, with indistinctly sublimated heroes and fraternal killings all mixed together" (150). She wonders who is going to talk about all this now and in which language, noticing that the two who could have done so with irony, humor, and strength, Kateb Yacine and Abdelkader Alloula, are now dead and much missed. Indirectly, Djebar is setting herself in their place by giving us this strong, beautiful text.

Le blanc d'Algerie is also a reflection on death, and on the yearning, the possibility/probability of her own demise. The grief and sadness she feels over the death of loved ones and the destruction of her country leads her to express a death wish: "Desire takes hold of me, in the middle of this funeral gallery, to drop my pen or my brush and to join them, to dip my face in their blood (the blood of the assassinated)" (162). She barely resists the temptation, finally noticing that the earth calls her, that other countries invite her. She will heal, forget. I agree with Clarisse Zimra, who says:

"The White of Algeria" marks a turning point in Djebar's career, because it is the first time she has come publicly, in voice as well as in print, to an openly political position regarding current events in her country. . . . She indicts the official governmental policy that would render the complex and multilayered ethnicity of past and present-day Algeria into a single entity. But she also indicts a whole generation of writers and thinkers, herself among them, who have not spoken soon enough and loudly enough. Not any more. ("Introduction to Assia Djebar's 'The White of Algeria'")

The blunter and more open treatment of the oppressive aspects of North African societies that we find in the more recent literary inscriptions by Assia Djebar are not simply a more daring exercise of literary freedom - although we must never lose sight of the courage she has shown. Rather, the increasing clarity and frankness with which the social context is presented suggests that it is no longer merely a backdrop for the action of the story. In these works, North African society itself emerges as a character in the play, a character complete with principles of choice and action, and with both trivial and tragic flaws.

It is not necessarily the role of fiction to provide blueprints for concrete social action - and much bad fiction has resulted from attempts to do so - but the recent fiction of Assia Djebar, with its greater openness and its integration of individual struggle into the larger social context, may well become a force for positive and creative change in the Arab world and in her native Algeria, which so much needs it at this time and at this point in history.

University of Illinois, Urbana

1 Citations from La soif, Femmes d'Alger, and Ombre sultane are taken from their respective published translations: The Mischief, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, and A Sister to Scheherazade. All other translations from French sources are my own.

2 Fiction, the novel, is a relatively recent genre in the Arab world for both men and women. Its origins are usually traced back to the Egyptian Muhammad Husayn Haykal's Zaynab (Cairo, 1914). For more information on Arab literary history, see my book Veil of Shame.

3 See my articles on the topic: "Writing to Explore (W)Human Experience," Research in African Literatures, 23:1 (Spring 1992), pp. 179-85; "L'ecriture (comme) eclatement des frontieres," Postcolonial Women's Writing in French: L'Esprit Createur, ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, 33:2 (Summer 1993), pp. 119-28.

4 Interview, L'Afrique litteraire et artistique, no. 3 (February 1969).

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EVELYNE ACCAD, born and raised in Beirut, is Professor of French, Comparative Literature, African Studies, Women's Studies, and Middle East Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Among her scholarly publications are Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Contemporary Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World (1978) and Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (1990), and she has also published three novels, including L'excisee (1982) and Blessures des mots (1993). Additionally, she has published more than a dozen book chapters, nearly sixty articles, and an equal number of reviews, including some two dozen for WLT since 1974.