The novelist and historian Assia Djebar died in Paris on February 6, 2015. She rests in the cemetery of Cherchell in Algeria, facing the Mediterranean Sea that she loved so much. It is clear that she remains present in the Algerian and French cultural field, as evidenced by the numerous university studies, conferences, articles and other meetings on her dense and significant work. An intellectually rich life led her to be the fifth woman to enter the French Academy. It was a consecration for a novelist who has received so many awards on both sides of the Mediterranean and in the United States.
Through the strength of her writings and over time, she has become the symbol of friendship between the two shores, France/Algeria, despite a turbulent, tragic, deep common history. Her first novel La Soif was published in 1958 in the midst of the Algerian war and her last Nowhere in my father’s country was published in 2007. An autofiction in which Assia Djebar recounts her childhood and adolescence. Her training as a historian greatly influenced her fictional works in the sense that collective history has surreptitiously infiltrated into her stories, in relation to History, the history of women in Algeria, where the religious and the societal mingle. , with a relentless critique of religious fundamentalism. His characters come from his imagination as in L’Amour, la Fantasia where history and fiction intertwine and where “I” and “we” intersect.
In Ombre sultane, the couple, love, history, the female revolt against oppression takes on a large scale: psychology and history merge to stage the lived experience of women, as in Les Femmes d’ Algiers in their apartment where she happily diverts the famous painting by Delacroix painted in 1834 in Algiers. His novel Far from Medina responds to a difficult period for Algerian society when Islamism was beginning to take hold. The story gives free speech to the women of Medina who become actors in their history, a bitter denunciation of an intolerant fundamentalism which precisely falsifies History. This criticism is accentuated when the pain becomes intolerable after the assassinations of Algerian intellectuals by the Islamists during the black decade. She castigates and denounces the assassins in Le Blanc de l’Algérie, an Algeria where blood has always flowed, with a people who have always known how to resist.
Assia Djebar questions History as in Oran ville morte and Vaste est la prison. In Nowhere in My Father’s Country, an autodiegetic character, she describes her life as a child, teenager, and young woman. Assia Djebar’s style is poetic and realistic at the same time, because she takes the reader by the hand to introduce him to her family, to her intimacy, on the side of Cherchell the Roman. The territory of childhood is revisited, revealing her relationship with her mother, a woman of her time, whose only weekly outings were the hammam. The narrator describes with voluptuousness and finesse the orange and black ‘fouta’, hung at the entrance to indicate that the hammam is reserved for women. She recreates resonant conversations, gossip and secrets, the hammam, a space of freedom of expression.
Assia Djebar, whose real name is Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, did well at school because her father, a teacher, ensured her success. She describes him as a tolerant and traditionalist man at the same time and says that one day, with a neighbour, she learned to balance on a bicycle. Her father burst into the yard and ordered her to go inside, telling her that she couldn’t ride a bike because she was showing her legs. Five years old, this order and this argument were a trauma from which she had never recovered, pushing her later to always be the pioneer, to succeed in everything she undertook and to defy taboos.
She was one of the first Muslims to be admitted to Blida high school during colonization. She describes her first revolt when she was appointed by her Algerian comrades to be their spokesperson to the headmistress to protest against having meat, on the pretext that they were fasting. She humorously reports her highly relevant response to the headmistress who asked her what they wanted to eat at the time: “vol-au-vents”. The presence of two communities, living side by side, without mixing, shines through with its codes and values, and at the same time, she remembers her best French friend who shared with her her love of reading and literature.
The question of languages ??was at the heart of his speech, through his experience of colonial duality and his position vis-à-vis the fundamentalists who want to eradicate the French language, because this language remains a carrier of openness. During colonization, as a young girl belonging to the colonized community, the French language allowed her not to wear the “haïk” as she says: “I escaped the veil thanks to the French language, it that is, thanks to the father in the French language. The French language has always been perceived as a language of freedom. During the colonial period, Assia Djebar had studied very hard to be one of the first Algerian women to succeed in a particularly painful political context, because it was closed to “natives”. The same observation is made after independence, following a forced and unprepared Arabization, often supported by ideologies from another time, the novelist had grasped the ideological issues and thus she fought for multilingualism. In her novels she has staged women who defy taboos like Chérifa, Lella Aïcha, Salima, Amna, Touma, Suzanne, Hassiba, Lila, Malika, Nadia, Sarah, Nfissa or Isma, because she once said that “in Algeria even a stone would be feminist”. It is therefore no coincidence that she was often compared to Simone de Beauvoir and that she had received the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize, among other prizes. Assia Djebar was a committed woman in the good sense of the term, a woman who knew how to tell stories to liberate not only Algerian society, but all societies.
* Benaouda Lebdai is a university professor of colonial and postcolonial African literature.
