Part I
Violence and war
The Algerian war story
1 Contesting violence and imposed silence
The creative dissidence of contemporary Francophone Algerian women writers
The creative voices of Francophone Algerian women writers have made their literary mark on the national, international and diasporic scene through a wide array of genres, including novels, poems, plays, short stories, autobiographies, chronicles, historical documents and testimonies. Inscribed within a socio-political context, this work spans the timelines of colonial and postcolonial Algerian history from the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 to the War of Independence (1954-1962) and the âblack decadeâ of the bloody civil war of the 1990s. While exposing and denouncing the violent historical traumas that have ravaged the country, these writers have also commemorated the courage and resilience of the Algerian people in their impassioned narratives composed of âtorch-wordsâ (Djebar 1993, 142); the fiery resonance of these âtorch wordsâ illuminates the impermeable traces of resistance and oppression found in Algerian history. At the same time, these women use literature as a medium to creatively stage their own gendered insurrections against the patriarchal roots of war and violence through their âwarrior voicesâ (Assima 1995, 138) that call for a re-reading of Algerian historicity from a gendered perspective. Through their writings, Algerian authors aim to âshatter the patriarchal spine of Algeriaâ (FarĂšs 1974, 75) by proposing more reflective and expedient gender and politically nuanced modalities.
In this chapter, I explore the ways in which three prominent Algerian women writers chronicle the painful trajectory and implicit silences of Algerian history as they offer their gendered perspectives that feminize and complicate Algerian historicity and postcolonial subjectivity. Algerian authors dispel monolithic representations of women as passive victims of colonial history or nationalist and religious ideology, even as they demonstrate how the masculinist ethics of war have ravaged the female body and womenâs history through violence, silencing and exclusion. The subtle interplay between fiction and testimony highlights their nuanced attempts to fictionalize reality through a brutal but necessary realism that interrogates the very âideaâ of the historical process. At the same time, these writings expose the violence of the past and mediate the horror (and successes) of the postcolonial present (Chaulet-Achour 2005, 195); they also expose the womenâs postcolonial rage. In so doing, these women reveal their literary commitment to postmodern preoccupations with identity, exile, historical omissions, gender affirmations, decolonial thought and female authorship, as they evoke the wounds and unresolved traumas that inhibit successful decolonization. As stated by Ranjana Khanna in Algeria Cuts, âthe figure of woman cuts into the masculinist frame of the Franco-Algerian relationshipâ (2008, xv) to both âelude and confound the dominant structures of colonial and postcolonial representationâ (5).
While Algerian and Franco-Algerian women writers as diverse as Assia Djebar, MaĂŻssa Bey, Hafsa ZinaĂŻ-Koudil, Malika Mokkedem, NaĂŻla Imaken, Nina Bouraoui, Fatima Gallaire- Bourega and LeĂŻla Sebbar underscore the traumas suffered by the nation as a whole, they are, at the same time, particularly sensitive to the aggressions experienced by women and children. These dually subjugated constituencies representing the âcolonized of the colonizedâ (Salhi 2008, 83) have been excised from colonial and nationalist discourses with the help of âthe vivisectorâs scalpelâ (Djebar 1993, 156) to preserve the sanctity of patriarchal myths related to power, honor and glory in the colonial and national archives. These womenâs creative dissidence exemplifies their efforts to transcribe the spectral echoes of these gendered silences onto the written page in an attempt to reveal historyâs transgendered scope. At the same time, these women decry the historical, national and religious mutilations that have scarred Algeriaâs landscape. They frame their work within a postcolonial feminist model that exposes the patriarchal intentionality of colonial, neo-colonial and religious exceptions.
The postcolonial feminist framework demonstrates how historical distortions and gendered seclusions have created ontological impasses in womenâs lives on the one hand, and provided the necessary impetus to confront interdictions and social taboos on the other. This discursive strategy disrupts patriarchal narrative dominance in Algeria and France by filling in the blank spaces â the fissures, erasures and omissions that have obscured Algeriaâs feminine face through the violence of exclusion and patriarchal collusions. The literary valiance of these âScheherazades in the age of inkâ (Djebar 2006, 210) thereby expresses itself in the creative resistance occasioned by their discursive transgressions. These narrative acts preserve historyâs maternal timelines through the life-sustaining nourishment provided by a primordial source, namely, âthe tongueâs blood that nevertheless refuses to run dry.â1 In other words, writing provides the medium to lift the many veils of silence and violence that have shrouded the lives of women in particular through their discursive âsang-voixâ (âbloodied/bloody voicesâ) decrying injustice, inhumanity and a triple colonialist, nationalist and religious culpability. These denunciations establish cartographies of gender relations that reveal the complexity of womenâs lives in Algerian history.
Assia Djebar compares the act of recovering and re-membering Algeriaâs silenced female historicity to âa very special kind of spelaeologyâ (1993, 77), in which writing is both a funerary act of exhuming absence and a decolonial palimpsest âon which I now inscribe the charred passion of my ancestorsâ (79). The task of creating life-presence from death, forgetfulness and erasure involves a special way of seeing, feeling, knowing and experiencing the universe, an ultra-sensitive consciousness that Chicana activist Gloria AnzaldĂșa characterizes as la facultad. She states:
It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind which feelings reside/hide. The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world ⊠Those who are pushed out of the tribe for being different are likely to become more sensitized.
(1987, 60)
This form of inner knowledge is similar to the Sufi concept of al basira, a deeply perceptive inner vision or insight that goes beyond the limits of physical or surface vision (Craun 2012, 2). I argue that the woman writerâs privileged access to la facultad, as a strategy to recuperate the obscured feminine words/worlds, is particularly vital when expressing the multiple lacks that punctuate the lives of women caught between the competing patriarchal configurations of colonial might, nationalist right and religious morality in Algeria. These texts are written to âassuage a lackâ (Djebar 2006, 215); they resonate with the tensions between coloniality and the articulation of gender, ânationalism and feminism ⊠decolonization and womenâs emancipationâ (Kalisa 2009, 12).
These tensions highlight the particular wounds inscribed on womenâs bodies as a result of historical fractures, traumatic memory and patriarchal ideology to demonstrate how it is impossible to disassociate gender from questions related to conquest and colonization, cultural and religious identity, âmodernityâ and historical violence. While scars are borne by men, women and children in shared histories of violence, the womenâs texts demonstrate how patriarchal objectifications of women and children in master discourses have made them vulnerable to a gender-ascribed antagonism found in mediated Orientalist representations, symbolic aggression and the physicality of palpable violence at the state and family levels. These corporeal wounds reflect broader historical wounds to show how the silenced physical and social mutilation of Algerian women and children has contributed to the overall maiming of Algeria in colluding acts of infanticide and femicide. In so doing, these women have exposed the many ravaged faces of Algeria to thereby subvert masculinist claims to successful colonization, accomplished decolonization and religious subjugation.
These writers can also be credited with the capacity to convert Algeriaâs multiple tragedies into a powerful repository of shared memories, survival and resistance stories, social documentaries and testimonials of denunciation, as they negotiate the ambiguity of using the colonizerâs language to contest the power-inflected political, social and religious excesses that compromise Algeriaâs integrity. Benjamin Stora highlights some of the major preoccupations that characterize these writings. He affirms:
Their representations have created ways to access this countryâs complex identity: how to preserve the private, family space against the encroachments of the State and the religious; how, at the same time, to do away with womanâs condition as recluse by entering into the public space; how to bring support to a masculine identity that has been disturbed by the dispossessions of history âŠ; how to overcome, again and again, the traumatisms linked to all forms of violence â colonial and postcolonial; how to affirm her condition as woman in societies that teeter, through wars, towards other national definitions.
(1999, 91)
In other words, Stora emphasizes the womenâs explicit postcolonial dissidence as they interrogate the tenuous borders between colonialism and postcolonialism, plurality and homogeneity, private and public space, trauma and memory, and other binaries that both inhibit and propel Algeriaâs struggle to move beyond coloniality.
These women, and Francophone Algerian writers in general, defend their decision to write in French as an explicitly feminist and political act to resist the totalizing impact of Arabization promulgated by the post-independence Algerian state ruled by the National Liberation Front (FLN) as well as the different factions of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). They contest the stateâs conforming âunion of singularitiesâ (Kristeva 1991, 132) based on the violent suppression of difference through their multilingual textual pluralities. They use literature to both contest and expose the singular vision of a state that refuses to acknowledge the following governing fact as explained by RĂ©da BensmaĂŻa:
A nation cannot be reduced to a mass of persons under the administrative iron rule of a state that has blurred not only every distinction between powers, but also every âdifferenceâ between ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups. Everything is happening as if, in Algeria, someone wanted to construct a system without incompatibilities, without contradictions, without contraries.
(1997, 91)
In opposition to a counter âcivilizing missionâ proposed by the Algerian state, Francophone writers insist that the use of French is in keeping with their ideal of supporting a plural Algeria; these women further indigenize French for their decolonial woman-centered agendas. The conscious decision to write in French is also an act of open defiance against the indiscriminate assassination of Francophone Algerian intellectuals during the black decade of âintellectual cleansingâ (BensmaĂŻa 1997, 86). This list included Tahar Djaout, Youcef Sebti, Abdelkader Alloula, LounĂšs Matoub and a host of other creative dissidents considered to be an infidel group of secularized elites by religious traditionalists.2
In their commitment to French, Algerian authors engage with AbdelkĂ©bir Khatibiâs notion of a pluralist Maghreb, a Maghreb Pluriel (1983), which favors critical negotiations of cross-cultural hybridity and multilingual exchanges within and across the geographical expanses of North Africa and the Mediterranean region. Khatibiâs theory delegitimizes purist returns to authentic pre-colonial origins espoused by both nationalists and Islamists, and the over-determined presence of orientalizing tropes in Maghrebi and colonial writing by calling for a double critique of both Western and indigenous paradigms related to language and identity. He states: âThe Occident is part of me, a part that I can only deny insofar as I resist all the occidents and all the orients that oppress and disillusion meâ (1983, 106).3 This positionality is a form of critical decolonial thought, une pensĂ©e autre, wherein Khatibi âproposes that instead of trying to erase one element of the current ethno-cultural landscape, Maghreb intellectuals should evaluate that very landscape according to what he calls a double critiqueâ (Amine and Carlson 2012, 239).
Accordingly, French occupies a conflicted interstitial space in Assia Djebarâs writing, existing as a source of creative freedom and existential alienation at the same time. She states: âSo it was for me with the French language. Ever since I was a child the foreign language was a casement opening on the spectacle of the world and all its riches. In certain circumstances it became a dagger threatening meâ (1993, 126). Representing access to a new, albeit dangerous world, the colonial tongue reveals, what I term, its paradoxical âintimate alterityâ as the symptom of a tenuous postcolonial condition. On the other hand, MaĂŻssa Bey stresses the inevitability of writing in French as the result of a French education that makes her âune enfant colonisĂ©eâ [âa colonized childâ]. Refusing to apologize for her linguistic choice, Bey affirms: âIl est bien plus rĂ©aliste de [la] considĂ©rer comme un acquis, un bien prĂ©cieux, et peut-ĂȘtre mĂȘme un âbutin de guerreâ ainsi que la dĂ©finissait Kateb Yacineâ [âIt is more realistic to consider (French) as an acquisition, a precious commodity and even perhaps the spoils of war as defined by Kateb Yacineâ], (Bouredji 2008, 2).
For Franco-Algerian author LeĂŻla Sebbar, French constitutes a naturalized mother tongue that nevertheless occasions the silencing of her fatherâs Arabic: âI write on silence, a blank memory, a history in fragments,â she confesses, thereby revealing the partiality of Frenchness and her own conflicted identity (1986, 160). In their personal negotiations of French, these writers reveal the duality of writing in the mother tongue that must be âconqueredâ and âsubverted,â and which yet could âalso be seen as the language of transgression, of flight and refugeâ (Stora 1999, 80).
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Assia Djebar4 is undoubtedly the most internationally renowned Algerian woman author of the twenty-first century. Elected to the prestigious AcadĂ©mie Française on June 15, 2006, Djebar remains the only Arab-Berber woman recognized by this institution for her literary distinction. The winner of numerous international awards and other forms of recognition, Djebarâs work encompasses the entire expanse of colonial and postcolonial Algerian history. Born in Cherchell, Algeria in 1936, Fatima-Zohra Imalayen adopted the nom de plume Assia Djebar, whose signification includes healing and consoling (Kelly 2005, 253). As a creative healer, Djebar uses the power of words to mend the bleeding wounds of Algeria in beautiful poetic narratives that focus most specifically on the unresolved traumas of women and their ambiguous status in history. The pseudonym enables Djebar to give public voice to womenâs private reflections and experiences, including her own, without violating cultural codes inhibiting female self-revelation. The veiled/unveiled âIâ problematizes the complicated trajectory of Algerian history in which identity is irrevocably linked to the broader scope of nationhood, cultural memory, multilingualism, fractured spatial geographies in relation to France, gender and coloniality. At the same time, these narratives are richly layered with the sensorial textures of memory. These memory-enriched narratives are endowed with a certain corporeality to position the female body as the dual site of oppression and contestation. While earlier novels such as La soif (1957), Les impatients (1958), Les enfants du nouveau monde (1962) and Les Alouettes naĂŻves (1967) engage in incisive critiques of patriarchy through a burgeoning feminist consciousness, later works such as Femmes dâAlger dans leur appartement (1980), Lâamour, la fantasia (1985) and La femme sans sepulture (2002) focus more precisely on the erasure of women in national and colonial narratives that remain male-centered, ethnocentric, Western-determined and written in scope.
The daughter of an Algerian resistor and school teacher who was brutally tortured and executed by the French in February 1957 during the War of Independence, MaĂŻssa Bey has used literature as a means of coming to terms with her fatherâs death while expressing her own sense of unresolved trauma and loss as a result of this violent experience. As O. Hind claims, âMaĂŻssa Bey est une femme blessĂ©e dans sa chair ⊠Elle est nĂ©e avec cette plaie, jamais cicatrisĂ©eâ [âMaĂŻssa Bey is a woman wounded in the flesh ⊠She was born with this wound that has never scarredâ] (2008). This painful trajectory is explored in fictionalized form in her novels, Entendez-vous dans les montagnes (2002) being a prime example. Using a pseudonym instead of her birth name Samia Benameur, Bey adopts an insider-outsider position in her work to demonstrate how the brutality of colonial rule, religious dogma and patriarchy lead to the corresponding brutalization of the lives of women and children in particular when they are denied speech, ignored, violated and relegated to the margins of society. In texts such as Nouvelles dâAlgĂ©rie (1998), Puisque mon coeur est mort (2010) and Cette fille-lĂ (2001), Bey explores the realm of the unspoken, or the non-dit, to uncover the hidden realities of women and children and their daily struggles against hopelessness and despair in a male-centered society. Her literary aspirations correspond to a more intimate politicized aspiration for a better future for Algeria through a creative reconstruction of the nation. One of her major objectives has been to secure the inclusion of womenâs intellectual contributions in the nationâs history through the development of womenâs associations such as Paroles et Ecriture, a feminist workshop devoted to literary proficiency and creative writing. For Bey, writing represents an epitaph against amnesia, silencing, violence and despair. These elements are further explored in a recent memoir, Lâune et lâautre (2009) in which she examines the multiple facets of her identity as a Francophone Algerian Arab Muslim woman writer who ironically uses the colonial language to sketch a self-portrait. Through writing and activism, Bey attempts to chronicle the making and un-making of Algerian history as the first step toward healing and reconciliation.
LeĂŻla Sebbarâs writings highlight the ambivalence of linguistic, cultural and historical hybridities, wherein the female body becomes the site of these conflicting affiliations and disaffiliations. Her work explores the linguistic exile that results from an over-identification with French, together with the familial alienations that are a part of the unequal cross-cultural exchanges between French and Arabic under colonial rule. In her novels, Sebbar explores the trajectories of the embattled female self that absorbs the trauma of an imposed French historicity while maintaining a sense of nostalgia for the...