Representing Algerian Women

Kateb, Dib, Feraoun, Mammeri, Djebar

Edward John Still

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110583861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This monograph explores the ways in which canonical Francophone Algerian authors, writing in the late-colonial period (1945–1962), namely Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri and Assia Djebar, approached the representation of Algerian women through literature. The book initially argues that a masculine domination of public fields of representation in Algeria contributed to a postcolonial marginalization of women as public agents. However, it crucially also argues that the canonical writers of the period, who were mostly male, both textually acknowledged their inability to articulate the experiences and subjectivity of the feminine Other and deployed a remarkable variety of formal and conceptual innovations in producing evocations of Algerian femininity that subvert the structural imbalance of masculine symbolic hegemony. Though it does not shy from investigating those aspects of its corpus that produce ideologically conditioned masculinist representations, the book chiefly seeks to articulate a shared reluctance concerning representativity, a pessimism regarding the revolution's capacity to deliver change for women, and an omnipresent subversion of masculine subjectivity in its canonical texts.

1Introduction – Une dissymétrie s’évoque

La fausse vierge toute nue

On lui voit les genoux

Si délicate

Elle doit taper sur les machines d’où sortent les procès les discours et les guerres – Kateb Yacine1

The complicity of vertreten and darstellen, their identity-in-difference as the place of practice can only be appreciated if they are not conflated by a sleight of word. – Gayatri Spivak.2

Frantz Fanon, in his oft-cited work on the Algerian insurgency and its struggle for independence from French rule, Sociologie d’une révolution (L’An V de la révolution algérienne) (1959), comments on a “repatterning” of Algerian women engendered by their embodiment of unprecedented revolutionary roles in the conflict.3 He describes a phenomenological and symbolic transformation, a disruption of the feminine incarnation and symbolization of traditional meanings which would frame women as repositories for honour and national identity, relegating them to regulated private space. For Fanon, this transformation depends on women’s establishment of a bodily connection with a revolutionary public space, on their leaving behind rigid psychogeographical and traditionalist conceptual divisions as they take on new, traditionally “masculine” roles outside of the private sphere. Moreover, Fanon describes a rupture in traditionalist social norms initiated by an understanding of the necessity of women’s inclusion in revolutionary struggle. He famously writes, for example, in reference to women’s public engagement that “le père lui-même n’a plus le choix. Sa vieille peur de déshonneur devient tout à fait absurde, eu égard à l’immense tragédie vécue par le peuple”.4

Certainly when one reads Fanon’s description of a feminine “unveiling”, despite occasional inaccuracies and reproductions of a masculine gaze,5 alongside both reports of women’s involvement in the fight against colonialism and affirmations made by representatives of the Algerian state to come, one begins to appreciate the late-colonial period and especially the period of the Algerian war (1954–1962) as productive of a picture of progressive social change that promised greater gender equality.6

On August 2nd, 1956, the FLN, (Le Front de Libération Nationale, the predominant independence movement that then formed the Algerian state government), issued the Soummam Platform which outlined women’s new roles as:

a) Providing moral support to fighters and resisters; taking care of intelligence, liaison, food supplies and sanctuary.

b) Helping families and children left behind by those at the front, in prison or in detention camps.7

Indeed, we know that women’s active involvement in the war of independence went far beyond these parameters as thousands took responsibility for the implementation of key revolutionary tactics in both urban and rural settings. The details of women’s involvement in the war have been meticulously inscribed in the works of historians and critics like Natalya Vince, Fadéla M’Rabet, Marnia Lazreg and Djamila Amrane-Minne, with Amrane-Minne seeking in particular to redress a lack in the documentation of women’s revolutionary engagement:

Ayant personnellement pris part à la guerre de libération nationale, j’ai gardé en mémoire l’image de toutes ces militantes que j ’ai connues pendant la “bataille d’Alger”, au maquis et dans les prisons. Et il m’a paru d’une injustice profonde que l’histoire de ces sept années de guerre s’écrive en faisant abstraction d’une moitié du peuple algérien : les femmes.8

Through personal testimonies, photographic and anecdotal narration, and statistical evidence, Amrane-Minne gives important flesh to our understanding of women’s crucial role in the war, detailing the wide variety of responsibilities over which women took charge: the supervision of hiding places and food collections; the collection of funds, medicine and ammunition; acting as guides or liaisons; nursing; cooking and washing; terrorism. Amrane-Minne crucially emphasises the fact that women were important agents in the violence carried out by the armed insurgency. In discussing, for example, the historical events that took place during the battle of Algiers (1956–1957) prior to the seizure of the iconic revolutionary Ali La Pointe, inscribing the actions of revolutionary women such as Maliha Hamidou and Hassiba Ben Bouali, she writes that “il est incontestable que les femmes, outre leur rapport déterminant dans les liaisons et l’intendance, jouèrent un rôle actif et décisif au sein même des groupes armés”.9

With the creation and fulfillment of these decisive and unprecedented revolutionary roles came new forms of respect and praise for feminine figures. Miriam Cooke informs us that “the women fighters, like Hassiba Ben Bouali […] and Djamila Bouhired, were revered” whilst “those who had not only fought but had also experienced prison and torture – like Djamila Boupacha and Zohra Drif – became revolutionary heroines”.10 11 Moreover, in the introduction to Les Femmes algériennes dans la guerre, Amrane-Minne, having noted the dearth of historical texts that cover women’s involvement in the war, begins her work by impressing upon the reader the importance of Djamila Bouhired as a revolutionary figure, citing the films, books and songs dedicated to her whilst attributing to her the status of “le symbole de tout un peuple en lutte”.12

Lazreg informs us that revolutionary women and men referred to each other as “brother” and “sister” and Alistair Horne claims that, “on the whole the FLN woman was treated with respect never experienced before – either from her menfolk or from even the most liberal French emancipators”.13 Moreover, once independence had been obtained and the FLN took power following the signing of the Évian accords in 1962, Lazreg indicates that the new administration’s early post-war stance on gender equality promised much with Algerian socialism purporting to “pursue the gains made by women in encroaching on the collective conscience of their countrymen”.14 Indeed, President Ben Bella was apparently “wont to threaten men who harassed women on the streets with forced labour in the Algerian desert!”.15 And, if one looks at speeches made by the party in these years, examples of their progressive rhetoric would indicate that the socialist FLN central discourse on women purported to establish them as meriting equal standing in the new state. In his inaugural speech at the July 1964 FLN Congress, President Ben Bella said that “[l]a libération de la femme n’est pas un aspect secondaire qui se surajoute à nos autres objectifs, elle est un problème dont la solution est un préalable à toute espèce de socialisme”.16 Then, for example, on International Women’s day 1966 Houari Boumédiène, following his coup in 1965, stated: “Notre politique, particulièrement dans le domaine de la femme, est une politique claire, elle ne peut être celle de la ruse, de la fourberie et de l’intrigue […] Notre révolution ne sera une révolution entière que lorsque tous les membres de la société y prendront part, et lorsque la femme y participera d’une manière efficace”.17

What is clear, however, is that though FLN rhetoric and legislation appeared in part to seek to legitimate the new status-construct of the revolutionary Algerian woman, the nature of the historical, cultural and political context, of the socio-symbolic background to our period for study, ensured that she occupied a singularly conflictual conceptual space in late-colonial and post-colonial Algeria. 18 19 As Anne McClintock puts it, “the Manichean agon of decolonization [was] waged over the territoriality of female, domestic space”.20 A discussion of Algerian women’s socio-political representation must thus carefully acknowledge the oppositional nature of socio-symbolic relations between colonised and colonial communities and authorities in this context and the impact of these relations upon socio-political rhetoric and discourse concerning women and their societal roles. If one focuses on one side of this symbolic conflict, on French colonial concerns, one notes that the fight for control over the Algerian woman, often conceived of as the manipulation of her self-identification,21 had long been viewed as a potentially decisive battleground, gaining an even greater degree of importance in a period of counter-revolutionary struggle. To again refer to Fanon, he determines an aggression implicit in the colonial relationship towards the Algerian woman thus:

Convertir la femme, la gagner aux valeurs étrangères, l’arracher à son statut, c’est à la fois conquérir un pouvoir réel sur l’homme et posséder les moyens pratiques, efficaces, de déstructurer la culture algérienne.22

Many critics have discussed the reactions that aggressive assimilatory practices provoked and it is likely that in perceiving certain “liberatory” acts and stances as colonial, having been brandished tactically by the French, a cleaving to retrograde traditionalist and masculinist conceptions of women’s roles took place, both prior to and during the establishment of an Algerian nation. 23 24 As McClintock remarks, referring to Benedict Anderson’s work Imagined Communities, nations are “not simply phantasmagoria of the mind; as systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community, they are historical practices through which social difference is invented and performed”.25 Concordantly, one can argue that the identity of a notional Algerian state was, for those invested in its establishment, to be articulated in part through the performance of those conceptual and real sites that stood in opposition to the colonial Other, with the conceptual space devoted to women being chief among them. Lazreg, for example, goes so far as to suggest that the FLN were willing to compromise their own espoused political approach to women’s freedoms due to the provocation of policies and attitudes of assimilation characterised by the action described in footnote 23, writing that “responses to colonial policies focusing on women […] were consciously distorted by casting women’s civil rights as a Quranic issue” despite the fact that the religious establishment was seen as “a native arm of colonial domination of the Algerian people”.26

However, to whatever extent one considers the calibration of Algerian women’s status to be a function of oppositional socio-political relations, relating above all to French colonial discourse and policy, both in pre and post-independence Algeria, the question of women’s emancipation and whether promises of greater gender equality were broken is certainly a fraught one. Some, like Khalida Messaoudi, report that the typical experience of a moudjahida entailed a stymied emancipation that began before the end of the war. She records what is, according to her, a representative statement from one such fighter who argues that “[o]ur return to the ‘inside’ didn’t begin in 1962, but, rather, before independence. Little by little, during the war, the FLN removed us from the real fighting zones and sent us to the borders or overseas. Our role was defined from that movement on. We didn’t have any place in the world of the ‘outside’”.27 Other writers, like Natalya Vince, might argue that class structures in fact played a decisive role in determining women’s capacity to acquire and maintain social power and that the period can be understood as a site of uneven social development, as indicated in her chapter ‘1962: Continuities and Discontinuities’ in Our Fighting Sisters.28 What one can certainly argue is that there existed a gendered deficit of influence with regards to the structural planning and discursive interventions staged by the FLN. Detailed in many accounts is the lack of women in the FLN’s leadership (0.5% inside the country, 0% in exile in Tunis), in particular in forums dedicated to position papers and policy development.29 And, supporting this claim, Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas writes that “even in the hardest times of struggle, women were oppressed, confined to tasks that would not disturb social order in the future. Although these tasks were essential, they should not have absorbed all female energy. One woman bore arms, none was in a decision-making position!”.30

Upon independence, as will often be alluded to throughout this monograph, women as a whole did not acquire the status that progressive rhetoric and active involvement in the war had appeared to augur. As one example amongst many, Hélie-Lucas indicates that “official agencies did not encourage women to register [as veterans]” and testimony provided by Djamila Amrane-Minne from her early study La Femme algérienne et la guerre de libération nationale (1954–62), which is cited in Hélie-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Avant-Propos
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction – Une dissymétrie s’évoque
• 2 Kateb Yacine – Nedjma as Woman
• 3 Mohammed Dib: From one Gender to an Other
• 4 Mouloud Feraoun – Humility in the Representation of Women?
• 5 Mouloud Mammeri – A Dissenting Masculine Perspective
• 6 Assia Djebar – Movements Towards Self-reflexive Representation
• 7 Conclusion – Women’s Postcolonial Representation
• 8 Bibliography
• Name Index
• Index of Theoretical Terms