Some round trips at the heart of Assia Djebar's autobiographical work

Born in Algeria in 1936, studies in France and a first book in 1957 by the woman who was called the “Muslim Françoise Sagan,” return to Algeria, flight to France that becomes exile, teaching at major American universities, election to the Académie française in 2005… Here are a few episodes from the life of Assia Djebar, to which correspond the vicissitudes of the recent history of Algeria: colonization, the few privileged ones who gain access to the French lycée and then to studies in France, independence at last, the monolingual nationalism advocated by the new power, the assassinations of intellectuals and of women in the 1990s by the Islamists. The life of Assia Djebar — “fugitive” in relation to Algeria “and henceforth knowing it,” become “a stranger […] from the inside,” writing in the “language of the Others,” without being able to write in another language — long consisted of a series of round trips:

“between France and Algeria and vice versa, without finally knowing where the outward journey is, toward where to go, toward what language, toward what source, toward what hinterlands, without knowing either where the return would be situated, a return certainly impossible and quasi-mythical of the woman émigré, but also a return toward an original past, toward the language-origin of a mother rendered deaf and dumb. No: a return to come, a horizon-return that once again expels you.”

To be in the incessant round trip is to pitch and roll, to be installed only between two shores, between two — or several — languages. But also, for the woman Assia Djebar, it is to oscillate between the world of women and that of men. Even before leaving Algeria, it was from the world of women that she had separated, and it was to that world that she at one moment needed to return, without the irreversibility of her gesture of exit ever being able to be annulled. In these different in-betweens, the writer Djebar oriented herself toward a certain type of return, the one procured by the autobiographical undertaking. This has by definition a retrospective character: while life continues and projects us toward a future not yet come, one stops and turns one’s attention away from the present toward what is no more. The activity of research, of excavation, that ensues does not recover what was already known, as if writing contented itself with restoring just as they were the events of an existence: on the contrary, it rediscovers them, while bringing forth a meaning that had not been formulated at the time they occurred. In the case of Assia Djebar, the posture of return gives rise all the more to discoveries in that the inquiry becomes genealogical and, beyond, surpasses the history of the autobiographer and her family to embrace, at the end of a research that engages properly historiographical methods, the history of Algeria and its conquest. However, the deliberate retrospective attention will bear fruit only if, thanks to the writing process itself, something returns of itself and crosses, despite the self, the threshold of consciousness. The “returning to” is also a “letting return.”

In Assia Djebar, return is understood in multiple ways.

The return of Berber and the return to French: women and languages

After living in Tunis then in Rabat, Assia Djebar returns to Algeria as early as 1962 and delights in strolling freely through Algiers, “a city at that time at once cosmopolitan and of joyous disorder.” Very soon, however, she feels a discrepancy:

It was my city (Algiers) and I found myself outside it because I did not speak its language (…). After independence, there were people more Arab than us, us who did not speak Arabic. From then on I no longer knew where I was still Arab. I spoke French and I knew I was not French.¹

If dialectal Arabic is obviously her mother tongue, the one Djebar practices in her family, she has become accustomed to speaking in French with her friends and colleagues, without the name of this language designating her belonging. It is by the name of Arab that she identifies herself, she knows herself in solidarity with those who fought for it to be a sign of freedom, but she no longer spontaneously speaks the language with which they communicate. This dilemma is all the stronger in that, after the hundred and thirty years of colonization that expelled literary Arabic from the schools, official policy tends toward a “pseudo-identitarian monolingualism: a single language claimed as an armor, a carapace, a wall.” To be Arab would henceforth mean to speak, to write, in Arabic only. The unity of the nation incarnates itself in a linguistic unity, French being considered only as the language of the ex-colonizers. To fill the rupture provoked by colonization, the regime, inspired, according to Dominique Combe, by the pan-Arab Jacobin ideology of Middle-Eastern Ba’athism, brings in Egyptian or Syrian teachers, which tends to impose by force a standard Arabic.²

Like most writers of the new Algeria, Djebar cannot escape the question of whether she should write in Arabic. But to what Arabic should she return? The era is one of the “thunderous” word, of the “logorrhea of political prose” pouring forth from the radios and the televisions, “in classical Arabic, that is to say in pedantic language!” which contaminates “public French,” itself too “stiff, hidebound.”³ This Arabic has drawn away from the dialectal, it has become “a language that struck a pose. I felt this Arabic,” Djebar writes, “toward which, as a novelist, I would have very much liked to go, as a language that, in draping itself, lost its oxygen, its flesh, its deep rhythm.”⁴

In 1965, after the publication of Les Alouettes naïves (The Naïve Larks), Djebar ceases to write, and this “silence of writing” will last ten years. Among the reasons for this silence is the refusal of a literature of “trumpet (and) drum,”⁵ but also the fact that she can write only in French. She then returns to France, the country of the language of her writing, impossible for the moment, but where she is this time, for others, the “Arab.” Each time Djebar draws away from it, Algeria will be “perpetuated inwardly,” as if it were impossible for her not to write about it. But at this moment, it is above all impossible for her to write, for she can do it neither in literary Arabic nor in French. “And yet I needed,” she declares, “to express myself in a language that referred back to my mother’s language.”⁶

A first way out of this impasse will be a new return to Algeria in 1974, with a film project, half-fiction, half-documentary, accepted by Algerian television, which involved an important preparatory work of listening, of capturing sound, of the “raw language.” The heroine of the film is Lila, freed from prison after the end of the war, herself returning to the region of her childhood, the mountain of Chenoua, in search of testimonies about the disappearance of her brother during the war and, beyond, about the resistance of women. A theme all the more sensitive in that independent Algeria was once again becoming “a society divided in two, with a very strong sexual separation,”⁷ which the women had nonetheless pushed back during their participation in the war of liberation. This return of Djebar to Algeria is multidimensional. More exactly, it is not to Algeria that she returns thanks to the shooting of La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua), but to the region of origin of her mother’s family. Next, in listening to the women of her region, Djebar recovers the “Arabic of women,” as a “language […] of parallel, most often hidden, use in relation to ordinary Arabic, that of the community.” Beyond, this resumption of linguistic contact is for her a renewal of resources in the world of women itself: “I re-establish,” she writes, “the seam with the women of my childhood.”⁸ This listening, finally, will produce “a total immersion in feminine genealogy.”⁹ Later, in Vaste est la prison (So Vast the Prison), Djebar will construct the third part of her book by alternating the account of a few moments of the film’s shooting with chapters in which she reconstitutes the history of her mother and her grandmother. She does it by imagining how, from inside situations doubly constrained by colonization as by the status of women, her mother and her grandmother were able to take initiatives, to begin gestures of exit from confinement, but also how the misfortune of her great-grandmother was able silently to provoke the revolt of her grandmother: “a young bride” in 1896, “given in marriage, at fourteen, by her father — himself forty, hardly more — to an old man, the richest man in the town (of whom) she becomes the fourth wife,” Fatima found a way out which consisted, with the coming of age, in assuming in a severe and, in her granddaughter’s eyes, “terrible” manner, the power of widow, then of grandmother, that the patriarchal structure left her.¹⁰ A matron among matrons, entitled to the loud voice, the “voice of authority,” but also a “body dancing in the séances of trance” and transmitting the memory of the male ancestors of the tribe.¹¹

But in listening to the Arabic of the women of Mount Chenoua, it happens that, in the moments of emotion, in the funeral chants in particular, another language returns, still more subterranean, the Berber language. Voices rather than words, which resound carnally within her, reactivating traces buried since childhood. In resuming contact with the world of women, Djebar rediscovers an Algeria that is not monolingual, nor even bilingual, but indeed plurilingual: the diglossia of Arabic between the dialectal and the literary “finds itself doubled by […] a veritable secret fissure corresponding to the sexual segregation of daily life.”¹² But this “Arabic of women” rises against the background of the “language of immemorial Berber memory, an uncivilized, unmastered language, become a wild filly again…”¹³ The second part of Vaste est la prison turns around the inscription, in two scripts, of the mausoleum of Dougga, of which only one was preserved after the dismantling of the edifice in 1843 by the English consul in Tunis, in order to sell it to the British Museum. If the first is recognized as Punic or Carthaginian, the other, vanished, remained a mystery until the hypothesis formulated in the nineteenth century, according to which it would have been the lost Libyc alphabet, by means of which the Berber speech was written. At the end of a vertiginous use of historical sources, from which she tries to imagine and to make us imagine what the documents pass over in silence — in particular the resistance of the bey Ahmed at the moment of the fall of Constantine and his use of the Libyc alphabet as an encrypted script — Djebar touches a time that has reached us only through a legend, and that arouses her “dream”: that of “the royal Tin Hinan, the ancestor of the noble Tuaregs of the Hoggar,” who “long ago, in her flight, carried off the archaic alphabet, then entrusted its characters to her women friends, just before dying.”¹⁴ For the woman who presents herself as “a woman-writer, issued from a country, tumultuous and still torn Algeria,” such a reverie indicates that the women of Algeria are not doomed to the sole conservation of chants, of dances and of trances, but that they are also concerned with writing, with the project of leaving traces of themselves.

But this woman writes in French, the “language of the former colonizer,” and the paradox was that the return of Berber helped her to assume the “definitive choice of a Francophone writing […] the only one of necessity.”¹⁵ If, as for all writers issued from the formerly colonized countries, French is first of all this “stepmother” or “adverse” language¹⁶, marked forever by the blood of colonization, it becomes, against all expectation, a space of freedom in relation to the constraint of official Arabic, for, Djebar writes, it “does not exclude the other mother tongues that I carry within me without writing them.”¹⁷ The passage through the listening of these languages will allow the writer to invest this French — marginalized from the Algerian point of view — with the “Arabic — and sometimes Berber — sound” of her childhood memory.¹⁸ This choice, this unblocking, occurred once again in expatriation, in France where she goes again in 1979, while the Algerian critics vilify her film for not being sufficiently in conformity with socialist realism. There again, when, in the distance from Algeria, but also from French society, the decision to write is taken, it is to aim “at the very heart of Algeria.”¹⁹ After publishing the collection of short stories Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment), Djebar then forms the project of four books, the Algerian Quartet, of which the first will be L’Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade)²⁰, which is a “double autobiography, that of my person and that of Algeria invaded by the French soldiers, then by the colonists, then by the language.”

A return that never annuls the departure

Djebar having until then always felt strong reticence to recognize the partially autobiographical source of her first novels, L’Amour, la fantasia bears witness to a veritable “transmutation.” At a first level, to write in the first person, to return to necessarily singular episodes, was to defy directly the ideologico-political simplifications of official literature. But this assumed “I” also took on meaning in relation to the women to whom Djebar had drawn closer during the shooting of La Nouba. Even if she had there lived an immersion in a feminine genealogy, there is no possible return for her in the world of women. Djebar knows that their voices and their chants take place in a structure of relegation where only a collective voice or a stereotyped speech are authorized.²¹ She has definitively separated herself from all that, and she could not renounce singularization, expression in the first person, in her eyes potentially liberating for every woman. For her, it is to women that this sine qua non condition of freedom enunciated by Hannah Arendt is particularly suited — a condition that corresponded to the “status of free man” in the Greek city, thanks to which he was permitted “to move about, to leave his home, to go out into the world and to meet other people in deeds and in words.” In this instance, it is the French school and its language which, on the impulse of her father, a teacher at the French school for little Arabs, were for Djebar the first “door opened toward the outside, toward others, toward the entire world.”²² L’Amour, la fantasia begins thus:

“An Arab girl going to school for the first time, one autumn morning, hand in the hand of the father. He, a fez on his head, his silhouette tall and straight in his European suit, carries a satchel; he is a teacher at the French school.”

The “I” of Djebar’s writing is that of a woman who henceforth advances alone, as all the others should be able to do, and this advance is inseparable from French letters. It corresponds to “a woman’s body become mobile and, because it finds itself on Arab soil, having from then on entered into dissidence.”²³

It is not, however, a matter for the recognized and honored writer of affirming an individuality that would have cut every tie with the world from which it comes, nor of claiming to have had access to an autonomy definitively abstracted from its source, and still less of adhering to the status of an exceptional woman, all the more comforting the relegation of the others. “Autobiographical writing,” Djebar declares, “is necessarily a retrospective writing where your ‘I’ is not always the I, or it is an ‘I-we’ or it is a multiplied ‘I’.” It is traversed by multiple voices to which it gives passage: family figures reconstituted when the autobiographical retrospection becomes a genealogical inquiry, voices of the “vanished sisters,” forgotten heroines of the Algerians’ resistance to the French invader, in the nineteenth or the twentieth century, or, closer, the “dead of today” assassinated “in the darkness of the fratricidal struggles.”²⁴ Thanks to the author’s capacity to move outside herself through imagination, it happens that Djebar makes them recount their story in the first person, then pushing the “I” of the autobiographer into the background. The personal interrogation that had given the impulse to L’Amour, la fantasia orients Djebar toward her own childhood, as in any autobiography. But she was born in colonized Algeria, and so the exceptional character of her trajectory cannot take on meaning solely from her individual history: she must push the anamnesis further than her own person, not only toward her family genealogy but also toward History, toward the pre-memory.

What returns despite oneself

Djebar knows well the traps that lie in wait for any autobiography: the necessity of constructing a legible text, its character of linear succession, could give rise to the setting-up of “a chronological unfolding ordered after the fact” which gives life an appearance of continuity and coherence. Here is lodged what Bourdieu would call “the biographical illusion,” reinforcing that of a sovereign self believing itself to have all powers. Djebar escapes this illusion of mastery, for she does not cease to restore a series of “despite oneself” that come to thwart the megalomania of the self.

The autobiographical quest begins with a decision to return to such-and-such a moment of one’s life in order to reactivate its traces; it is explicitly animated by a desire to understand, to explain to oneself what was not explained at the time. Here, however, it is a matter not of saying but of writing. For Djebar, to set oneself to writing is a “push forward,” an impulse of the body toward a horizon that does not cease to recede as one approaches it — and which, for a woman, corresponds, we have seen, to a liberating impulse. This push forward is not oriented by the representation of a goal which, once fixed, would only ask the writer to dispose the means of attaining it. The push forward is that of writing, but the movement of the psyche goes backward and, in this recoil, it lets the unexpected occur, as if the writing process triggered the anamnesis to the point of allowing one to “relive in flashes” moments lived long ago. An interminable anamnesis, moreover, since from one book to the next, it happens that the writing process makes the same event live again otherwise, an event that will, from then on, be interpreted differently.²⁵ It is not a matter of automatic writing; Djebar truly invents a “form and a narrative structure”²⁶ which, while being meticulously constructed, always let one glimpse the intermittent functioning of memory, makes of it an element of the text itself, thus avoiding that it present itself as a chronological unfolding without snags.

The movement of self-understanding at the same time makes return the protagonists with whom the narrator once had to deal. To make it heard, Djebar somewhat diverts a passage from Beckett: “This voice that speaks […] It comes out of me […] it is not mine, I cannot stop it, I cannot prevent it from […] besieging me. It is not mine […] but (it) can only be mine since there is only me.”²⁷ In one sense, the others are suppressed at the moment one turns toward oneself, but, in another sense, this relational “void” in which one places oneself is the site where “other voices, familiar or unknown” come to resound — in the plural this time. They resound within oneself so that the self may carry them outside itself. The self of one alone who has ventured into the writing of the self is the prism through which they can be resurrected in the form of characters. The mother, the father, the grandmothers of course, but also, for example, Farida, an older young girl, a fellow student of the narrator at the lycée of Algiers. Daughter of a Muslim officer of the French army, she was a day boarder and arrived covered, like the peasant women, winter and summer alike, with a haïk, that heavy wool veil that she folded carefully in a room the concierge reserved for her before entering the courtyard of the lycée. Writing giving life again to Farida, the narrator can cry out: “now I understand, I understand her!” Farida, at the time, aroused her compassion, by comparison with the greater latitude that their fathers, traditionalist though they were, allowed to certain Muslim young girls of the lycée, who could go there dressed in the European manner. Today, however, Djebar understands better than then the joy manifested by Farida’s face when she entered the classroom: “she was going to learn, to listen, to reflect, to feel the emulation around her. She found herself again with all the others to the point of forgetting the preamble: the father, at dawn, inspecting and almost sniffing her clothes, the fall of her veil,” inspecting them too on her return in the evening. It is the movement of the narration that makes Farida return, that re-imagines her and restores her as a character, causing the divine surprise that every author of narration knows, “the miraculous instant […] when […] thanks to a detail, at the most unexpected moment, the character […] escapes you, slips between your fingers,” transforming the author into a “follower” of a shadow that is oneself and not oneself at once.²⁸ In the end it is not only the other who returns in the form of a “paper hero,”²⁹ it is the little girl, the young girl that I am no longer and who lives again too in the autobiographical text as a “creature of words.” On this “theater stage where everything is replayed, but for you alone,” writes Djebar, she becomes also the spectator of the child she was. A constitutive discrepancy of any autobiographical undertaking, between the author, the I who recounts the story, and the character drawn from me whose story is recounted.

Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (Nowhere in My Father’s House) is one of the most recent books of Assia Djebar, which she wrote shortly after the death of her father. Since L’Amour, la fantasia, after the tragedies of the 1990s, Djebar confronts “the cliff of no-return.” But Algeria is still what she aims at in the heart and, for her, definitively foreign, writing in the French language is the only territory from which to return to it.

Notes