Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool University Press - Contemporary French & Francophone Cultures)

222 Pages·2006·1.52 MB·English

by  Jane Hiddleston

Assia Djebar
Out of Algeria
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures 6
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Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
Series Editors
EDMUND SMYTH
Manchester Metropolitan University
CHARLES FORSDICK
University of Liverpool
Editorial Board
LYNN A. HIGGINS MICHAEL SHERINGHAM
Dartmouth College University of Oxford
MIREILLE ROSELLO DAVID WALKER
Northwestern University University of Sheffi eld
This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contem-
porary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published
in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures refl ect a wide variety of
critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellec-
tual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past
few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone
culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular
culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate
on key aspects of contemporary culture.
1 Chris Tinker, Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel: Personal and Social
Narratives in Post-war Chanson (0-85323-758-1 cloth,
0-85323-768-9 paper)
2 Debra Kelly, Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity
in Postcolonial African Writing in French
(0-85323-659-3 cloth)
3 Matthew Screech, Masters of the Ninth Art: Bandes dessinées and
Franco-Belgian Identity (0-85323-938-X cloth)
4 Akane Kawakami, Travellers’ Visions: French Literary Encounters with
Japan, 1881–2004 (0-85323-811-1 cloth, 0-85323-730-1 paper)
5 Nicki Hitchcott, Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration
(1-84631-028-8 cloth)
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JANE HIDDLESTON
Assia Djebar
Out of Algeria
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
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First published 2006 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2006 Jane Hiddleston
The right of Jane Hiddleston to be identifi ed as the author
of this work has been asserted by her in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 1–84631-031-8 cased
ISBN-13 978-1–84631-023-7 cased
ISB
Typeset in Sabon by Koinonia, Manchester
Printed and bound in the European Union by
Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 The Early Years 21
2 War, Memory and Postcoloniality 53
3 Feminism and Women’s Identity 80
4 Violence, Mourning and Singular Testimony 120
5 Haunted Algeria 158
Conclusion 181
Notes 186
Bibliography 202
Index 212
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Acknowledgements
Some of the material in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 originally appeared in
French Studies, Research in African Literatures and Law and Litera-
ture. I would like to thank the editors and publishers of these journals
for allowing me to reprint these sections. I am also grateful to Anthony
Cond at Liverpool University Press for his effi ciency and support in
bringing the book to fruition. I would like to thank members of the
Department of French Studies at the University of Warwick, who
managed not to overburden me in my fi rst years as a lecturer, so that
I was able to fi nd time to work on the book. Assia Djebar herself
engaged with work related to the book, and I am grateful to her
for her encouragement. Finally, I am indebted to various friends and
colleagues who supported my work on this project generally, or who
offered advice on particular sections: Andy Merrills, Nick Harrison,
Colin Davis, Azzedine Haddour, Sam Haigh, Charles Forsdick, Emma
Wilson, John Harrington, Helen Watanabe. My family has also, as
ever, been a constant source of strength.
J.H.
Exeter College, Oxford
January 2006
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Introduction
L’expatriation au présent ne peut être objet d’écriture, ni point
d’appui: elle est son contraire; son mouvement aveugle, ses élans
contrariés et multiples fi gent l’intérieur de l’être alors que le corps
marche, que le regard quête, que le dos se courbe ou se redresse…1
Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria is a book about expatriation, and the
constant, necessary revisiting that follows. Algeria remains a focus,
an object of desire throughout Djebar’s corpus, but it is also a point
of departure, and excludes the writer more often than it grounds or
defi nes her. Her only locus of identifi cation or belonging, Algeria is at
the same time fi gured as broken, war-torn, unfamiliar and irrevocably
lost. A potential symbol of difference in contradistinction to colo-
nial infl uence, Djebar’s Algeria is also diverse, divided and ultimately
destroyed. Driven by the urge to recover her country’s history, Djebar
repeatedly returns to Algeria’s past only then to interrupt the narra-
tive of its shaky development. The native land is the object of a quest,
inciting the writer to invent an identity and a genealogy, but it also
resists and eludes that quest. It offers glimmers of familiarity, hints
of a home, but under closer inspection shatters and disseminates the
cultural security that Djebar strives to create and represent. As the
quotation reproduced above suggests, this sense of alienation may
not be a straightforward or completed movement of expatriation, but
the writing is constantly jolted by its movement, by a sense of doubt
concerning its author’s enclosure within a secure set of borders or a
defi ned locus of identifi cation.
At once preoccupied with and severed from her native land,
Djebar writes from within this tension. Her novels all set out to tell
the story of Algeria’s experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism,
but the writing at each juncture falls short of its task. Djebar hopes
to trace through the writing process the line of her country’s trajec-
tory, a meaningful narrative of its battles against colonialism, and
latterly, resurgent Islamism, but the possibility of a coherent, ordered
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2 Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria
version eludes her. Although she is educated in the French system,
and is only able to write in detail using the French language, she
fi nds that this language glosses over the multiple, intricate Arab and
Berber resonances of her cultural history. Anti-colonial narrative
becomes deformed and indeed compromised when created in the
language of the coloniser. In addition, the increasing instability of
Algerian society, and her personal sense of exclusion from its newly
Islamicised culture, disrupt the positioning of her narrative voice.
Djebar’s ‘expatriation’ cannot be a secure, logical stage in a reasoned
chronology, but the vanishing point in her evolution, the reminder
that the narrative of her country’s history necessarily circles around
experience and fi nishes by excluding it. In searching for a new history
of Algeria, then, and in hoping to chart the development of Algerian
women’s roles, Djebar gradually, increasingly, fi nds that her native
land is lost to her. Algeria turns out to be plural, fractured, composed
of multiple confl icting voices, and its contemporary society is ravaged
both by the traumatic aftermath of colonialism, and by the recent
emergence of Islamic terrorists seeking to reshape Algerian identity
according to new oppressive ideals. Furthermore, the writer’s expe-
rience of losing any sense of possession and belonging means that
her writing too becomes an artifi ce disconnected from the land she
sought to recreate.
I want to conceptualise Djebar’s progressive struggle and dissatis-
faction with the notion of Algerian identity by referring to a number
of contemporary theoretical concepts. Currently living and working in
New York, Djebar participates in francophone, Arab and Berber, and
Anglo-American schools of thought, and it is this crossroads between
French philosophy, multiple Algerian traditions and Anglo-American
postcolonial theory that will shape my analysis of her gradual, partial
‘expatriation’ in this book. Most importantly, my investigation will
situate Djebar’s thinking in relation to recent French philosophy, and
make connections between her understanding of subjectivity and
individuation and those produced by contemporary thinkers working
in France. Despite her affi liations with Arab Algerian culture, and
her obvious use of local oral tradition, some of Djebar’s most visible
reference points are French infl uences gleaned from her education in
the French colonial system. Her works are littered with references
to European literature and thought, as well as to Arab and Berber
sources, and her self-conscious essays in Ces voix qui m’assiègent
name writers such as Derrida, Camus, Blanchot, Duras and Irigaray
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Introduction 3
more often than Algerian fi gures such as Mohammed Dib or Kateb
Yacine. References such as these show that her anxieties about the
writing process derive not only from her sense of alienation in the
colonial system, but also from her readings of metropolitan thinkers
who problematise notions of language and subjectivity more broadly.
Such engagements may be seen by some readers to compromise her
position, demonstrating her affi liation with the colonial culture, but
her European heritage is itself a crucial part of her ambivalence.
Analysis of the connections between her work and French philo-
sophy will also help to conceptualise Djebar’s evolution in terms that
develop and critique notions of postcolonial individuation prevalent
in existing criticism.
I intend to argue that Djebar’s depictions of Algerian history can
be seen to display both Foucault’s critiques of societal infl uence, and
Derrida and Nancy’s more elusive conceptions of the disseminated
subject. Her trajectory dramatises a struggle between a search for
specifi city in Foucault’s sense, and an increasing awareness of the
dissolution of any such specifi city as a result of the ruptures and
discontinuities of Algerian history. Foucault argues that the specifi c
subject is constructed by the power relations operating on him or
her at any one time.2 Although he rails against these determinations
and promises that such constituted subjects also resist their imposing
limits, he concentrates on processes of classifi cation and social organ-
isation as well as on what lies beyond. It is important that this model
of individuation is not necessarily determinist, since although indi-
viduals are shaped by networks of social relations, these do not neces-
sarily succeed in pinning being down to a single, imm utable position.
Subjects are ‘specifi c’ because they continually renegotiate their rela-
tions with social imperatives rather than adhering automatically to
set patterns. In Peter Hallward’s words, ‘Foucault moves away from
an impossibly literal or immediate experience of a singular “outside”
[dehors] (madness, death, language-in-itself), toward the composi-
tion of specifi c histories of how our experience has been specifi ed
and confi ned’.3
Unlike Foucault, however, philosophers such as Derrida, Lacoue-
Labarthe and Nancy stress the limits of the concept of the subject and
of our possible knowledge of its coordinates. For Derrida, processes
of différance mean that the singular being is infi nitely shifting away
from its classifi cation in language, and the attempt to determine
subjectivity results in a sense of absence and lack. The subject is
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