Tag Archives: Assia Djebar

Books, Intersections, Role of the intellectual, Struggle & Movement, Violence

Algerian White

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Djebar_AlgerianWhite_HC_largeThis was beautiful.

A meditation on death and loss, lives taken in the struggle for freedom against the colonial power, against fundamentalism. A meditation on writing and all of its risks, language and all of its meanings, Algeria and all of its tragic complications.

Love and loss, hope and despair.

A travel through memories, like this one:

I took off for Kader’s Oran, the city and its deepest depths, which he had sketched out for me… we drove around the town, splattered with cries and laughter, full of youths (oh, the youths of Oran, everywhere, leaning against a wall, on the vertical, in the sun, at every street corner, watching, laughing, cautious!), our tour was gradually fed by Kader’s memories. (21)

A town to be loved. I had only just finished The Plague, also set in Oran. Albert Camus writes, with the eyes of a European that must always be comparing the rest of the world to an ideal of home:

The town itself, let us admit, is ugly. It has a smug, placid air and you need time to discover what it is that makes it different from so many business centres in other parts of the world. How to conjure up a picture, for instance, of a town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves — a thoroughly negative place in short? … Our citizens work hard, but solely with the objective of getting rich. (1-2)

There are no Arabs in the Oran found in these pages, though Camus does write of walking through the Negro district (and what does that word mean to him exactly?), ‘steep little streets flanked by blue, mauve and saffron-yellow walls… (79) He writes of the plague starting in the poorer and more crowded outskirts, but there are only Spaniards and Frenchmen.

This absence is possibly one of the largest presences in the literature I have read.

To Kader, returning to Oran, Djebar writes:

You must have often unveiled for others the naked, tumultuous and impulsive, raucous, mocking town. (22)

This town and the town of the Plague — two Orans, two visions of what a city could and should be.

Camus is in Algerian White as author. His lack of understanding of the complexities. His effort to make peace. His early death in a car accident. She later writes:

Camus, an old man: it seems almost as unimaginable as the metaphor of Algeria itself, as a wise adult, calm at last, at last turned toward life, ordinary life… (103)

I think it true that ordinary life escaped him, you see it in his words.

But he is really the least among this pantheon of writers, too many of whom I still know almost nothing, despite all my recent reading.

But first we return to the theme of dust:

Three Algerian days.

White with dust. The dust you didn’t notice, on any of these three days, but which seeped its way in, unseen and fine, into all those who came together for your departure.

A dust slowly forming, which gradually makes that day grow fainter, further away, a whiteness which insidiously effaces, distances, and makes each hour almost unreal, and the explosion of a word, the gasp of an ill-repressed sob, the bursting spray of chants and litanies from the crowd, all of the excessive on the day itself, from then on paled, worn hollow to the point of evanescence.

So, white days of that dust in which tens of witnesses, friends, those around you, who went with you to the graveside, they the followers, thereafter caught up; clothed in it stiffly and awkwardly, unknowingly. Dust of oblivion which cauteriuzes, weakens, softens, and …. Dust.

Three days white with that dust and that mortal fog. (51)

I cried for the death of Mouloud Feraoun, his words still live with me, I almost feel as though I know him. Feraoun, one of six murdered together in two sets of three, machine gunned down, with 109 9 mm cartridge cases found. The son of another there, Jean-Phillipe Ould Aloudia, spent thirty years investigating, identified the assassins granted amnesty by the French State.

Nothing could be done to them.

There is Djebar’s chance meeting with Mouloud Mammeri in Algiers, 1988:

‘Before I saw you in the distance, I was walking with my head in the clouds.. How lovely this city is, iridescent like this! I can’t get enough of it: as if it were the first time! I never tire of the facades or the balconies of the houses, and especially not of the sky!… (139-140)

I learned about Emir Abdelkader, who fought the colonial invasion, whose bones have been fought over:

Abdelkader, if he has truly come back to this land where he was first a soldier, will be better able than I to make the list of those who write and who, like so many others, are persecuted, silenced, pushed to suicide, to suffocation, or–through the intermediary if desperate youth, transformed into paid killers–killed by a single blow. (225)

There are Franz and Josie Fanon, Jean-el and Taos Amrouche, Kateb Yacine, M’Hamed Boukhobza, Mahfoud Boucebci, Anna Greki, Abdelkader Alloula among many  others. And, like Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, a return to language, nationality, home…the tangle of words and the limits language and culture place on what can be expressed.

Algerian literature–we must begin it with Apuleus in the second century and continue to Kateb Yacine and Mouloud Mammeri, passing Augustine, the emir Abdelkader, and Camus–has continuously been inscribed in  a linguistic triangle.

–a language of rock and soil, the original one let’s say.  Libyco-Berber, which lost its alphabet momentarily except among the Tuareg:

Berber

–a second language, that of the prestigious exterior, of Mediterranean heritage–Eastern and Western–admittedly reserved for lettered minorities…

Arabic and then French

–the third partner in this triangle presents itself as the most exposed of the languages, the dominant one, the public one, the language of power: that of the harangues, but also the written one of the forensic scientists, the scribes and the notaries.(227-228)

This has been Latin, Classic Arabic, Turkish, French, again Arabic…

These are just a few quotes I liked, there is so much more here, particularly for someone who knows more of these writers and the recent history. I am setting out to learn…

Perhaps the best of all, though was this (a facebook update from July 28th, as I mix my social media)

Today on the tube I met a Maori who asked how I came to be reading Assia Djebar and I told him a quick summary of the long story about this article I can’t finish and he told me how in New Zealand his university classes on colonialism had featured a professor who studied violence in Algerian women’s fiction, and then we talked about Djebar and Feraoun and Fanon and Paris and damn but did it bring happiness to my day.

For more on the struggle in Algeria…


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Books, Intersections, Writing

Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade

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457864I quite loved this raising of women’s voices that plays with the deeply collective nature of their experience. It acknowledges the strengths of an enforced world of women hidden away behind veils and walls,  but also its high walls and limitations, examining the fractures in that world as women support the independence struggle, receive an education, travel to Paris. They are both joyful and devastating fractures. This narrative from multiple viewpoints in time and space struggles with an undifferentiated mass of understanding, survival of a life cycle where freedom of streets and speech end before puberty and all else folds in on the family and other women, but also those women who have been torn like splinters from it, whether through education or the freedom struggle. There is pride in this heritage, and also frustration. Nothing is easy and nothing is entirely one thing or the other.

She writes:

How could a woman speak aloud, even in Arabic, unless on the threshold of extreme age? How could she say ‘I’, since that would be to scorn the blanket-formulae which ensure that each individual journeys through life in a collective resignation? . . .

my oral tradition has gradually been overlaid and is in danger of vanishing: at the age of eleven or twelve I was abruptly ejected from this theatre of feminine confidences — was I thereby spared from having to silence my humble pride? in writing of my childhood memories I am taken back to those bodies bereft of voices. to attempt an autobiography using French words alone is to lend oneself to the vivisector’s scalpel, revealing what lies beneath the skin. the flesh flakes off, and with it, seemingly, the last shreds of the unwritten language of my childhood. (156)

The complications of relationships around gender fold into the complications of the colonial relationships fold into the complications of being a writer and a women emerging from then women’s world of illiteracy and oral tradition. It is a swirl of what is lost and what is gained negotiating all of these sides, and a needed counterpoint to the more straightforward narratives of the French/Algerian struggle narrated so eloquently by Mouloud Feraoun,  and Alistair Horne.

It is the French as the Other:

The policeman and his family suddenly seemed like transient ghosts in this locality, whereas these images, these objects became the true inhabitants of the place! For me, these French homes gave off a different smell, a mysterious light; for me, the French are still ‘The Others’, and I am still hypnotized by their shores.

Throughout my childhood, just before the war which was to bring us independence, I never crossed a single French threshold, I never entered the home of a single French schoolfellow… (23)

It is the French use of language, and their imprisoning within their own ideologies and stories, contrasted with young Algerian women:

But what is the significance behind the urge of so many fighting men to relive in print this month of July 1830? Did their writings allow them to savor the seducer’s triumph, the rapist’s intoxication? These texts are distributed in the Paris of Louis-Phillipe, far from Algerian soil…Their words thrown up by such a cataclysm are for me like a comet’s tail, flashing across the sky and leaving it forever riven.

And words themselves become a decoration, flaunted by officers like the carnations they wear in their buttonholes; words will become their most effective weapons. Hordes of interpreters, geographers, ethnographers, linguists, botanists, diverse scholars and professional scribblers will swoop down on this new prey. The supererogatory protuberances of their publications will form a pyramid to hide the initial violence from view.

The girls who were my friends and accomplices during my village holidays wrote in the same futile, cryptic language because they were confined, because they were prisoners; they mark their marasmus* with their own identity in an attempt to rise above their pathetic plight. The accounts of this past invasion reveal a contrario an identical nature: invaders who imagine they are taking the impregnable City, but who wander aimlessly in the undergrowth of their own disquiet. (45)

It explores the collectivity of women created by time and tradition and strict rules. One of the narrator’s sits outside of this, she receives a love letter and somehow feels it is for all:

those women who never received a letter: no word taut with desire, stretched like a bow, no message run through with supplication. (60)

There exists the fact that husbands always referred to as ‘he’ and not by name because for each woman there can be only one he, a multitude of unnamed men to match the multitude of women present. A tradition that beats individuality off with a stick, disciplines human being into the roles laid out for them.

You escape Algeria momentarily for Paris, the uneasy relationship, love found between two young people there, even as they remain trapped in the webs of revolutionary fratricidal violence:

The couple continued to roam the streets, chatting together, momentarily free of the others and the ‘Revolution’; nevertheless, even if their embraces in a doorway could not claim that they were making history, still their happiness was part of the collective fever, and they were always on the look-out to see if they were being shadowed and to throw the police off their trail. But the police were not seen to be the greatest danger…the couple knew that the secret fratricidal struggle was all around them….

As they strolled through the Paris streets together, at every crossroads the girl’s eyes instinctively avoided the tricolour flag whose red reminded her of the blood of her compatriots recently guillotined in a Lyons prison…(102).

Here a woman finds freedom and expression and space in the streets without being the prostitutes idealised by Breton or Soupault, without being the flaneuse or nightwalker.

A woman walks alone one night in Paris. Walking for walking’s sake, to try to understand…Searching for words and so dream no more, wait no longer.

Rue Richelieu, ten, eleven o’clock at night; the autumn air is damp, To understand . . . Where will this tunnel of interior silence lead? Just the act of walking, just to put one foot energetically down in front of the other, feeling my hips swinging, sensing my body lightly moving, makes my life seem brighter and the walls, all the walls vanish . . .

While the solitude of these recent months dissolves in the fresh cool tints of the nocturnal landscape, suddenly the voice bursts forth. It drains off all the scoriae of the past. What voice? is it my voice, scarcely recognizable? (115)

Some find voice in the city streets of Paris. Some find voice in the French language. But always it comes at a cost:

As if the French language suddenly had eyes, and lent them to me to see into liberty; as if the French language blinded the peeping-toms of my clan and, at this price, I could move freely, run headlong down every street, annex the outdoors for my cloistered companions, for the matriarchs of my family who endured a living death. As it . . . Derision! I know that every language is a dark depository for piled-up corpses, refuse, sewage, but faced with the language of the former conqueror, which offers me its ornaments, its jewels, its flowers, I find they are flowers of death… (181)

And yet…

To refuse to veil one’s voice and to start ‘shouting’, that was really indecent, real dissidence.

Writing in a foreign language, not in either of the tongues of my native country…writing has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins.

Writing does not silence the voice, but awakens it, above all to resurrect so many vanished sisters. (204)

Nothing can sit easily here. Nothing avoids contradictions.

After more than a century of French occupation — which ended not long ago in such butchery — a similar no-man’s land still exists between the French and the indigenous languages, between two national memories: the French tongue, with its body and voice, has established a proud presidio within me, while the mother-tongue, all oral tradition, all rags and tatters, resists and attacks between two breathing spaces. In time to the rhythm of the rebato, I am alternately the besieged foreigner and the native swaggering off to die, so there is seemingly endless strife between the spoken and written word (215)

A story comes near the end of the book, interspersed with an old woman telling of her hardships in supporting the freedom struggle, the house burned down about her, tramping into the hills. Burying her sons. A young woman joining the struggle. Burying her brother. This story of a wedding, a celebration of women to which uninvited guests can come and watch but cannot remove their veils and join in.

As if they were finding a way of forgetting their imprisonment, getting their own back on the men who kept them in the background: the males — father, sons, husband — were shut out once and for all by the women themselves who, in their own domain, began to impose the veil in turn on others. (205)

It mourns and celebrates the opening up of this world, the freeing of women and men from these bonds, and looks uneasily into the future and the crushing of contradictions and the voices that they made possible.

I wait amid the shatter sheaf of sounds, I wait, forseeing he inevitable moment when the mare’s hoof will strike down any woman who dares to stand up freely, will trample all life that comes out into the sunlight to dance! Yes, in spite of the tumult of my people all around, I already hear, even before it arises and pierces the harsh sky, I head the death cry in the Fantasia.

Paris/Venice/Algiers
(July ’82–October ’84)

*severe malnutrition characterized by energy deficiency.

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