Assia Djebar (1936-2015): Home in France, Heart in Algeria

 

Assia Djebar has been problematic for some Arab intellectuals, both when she became an "immortal" or a life-long member of the prestigious French Academy and when her name was frequently mentioned as a Nobel Prize contender. Her death on February 6 2015, proved no exception. As her body lay in one of Paris’ hospitals, the same questions arose: Why were her works not translated enough into Arabic? In contrast, her novels were translated into scores of other languages. That is a valid question. In an ironic twist, Le Figaro's French paper suggested that Djebar was denied the Nobel Prize for Literature because she didn’t write in her “mother tongue.” So why did she choose to write in her former colonizer’s language? This has led some even to question her intellectual integrity. Why would Djebar be selected by an institution whose primary purpose is "to protect and monitor the French Language?" A prominent Syrian intellectual, Subhi Hadidi, comes unintentionally and indirectly to her defense: “The Academy has chosen a novelist whose works examine a central issue, the writing in French by the sons and the daughters of previous colonies, and Djebar uses the language of the colonizer to document its savagery and some of its bloody memories.”

 

Born Fatma-Zohra Imalayene in 1936 to an Arab Algerian father and a Berber mother, she changed her name to Assia Djebar in 1957 after she published her first novel, “The Thirst,” at age 21. A student of the renowned French orientalist Louis Massignon, Djebar became a prominent poet, essayist, novelist, and filmmaker whose works reflected consistent concern for individual human rights in Algeria. The writer never abandoned her interest in Algerian and Arab Maghrebian causes, including the struggle for independence, the preservation of culture, issues of gender, and identity.

 

Was she a feminist? Some Arab critics actively attempt to deny Djebar’s “feminism,” as if it stains her reputation. One critic wrote, “Her literature did not have a feminist tendency to challenge a ‘masculine’ tendency or the ‘literature of man,’” adding that Djebar’s literature cannot be placed within “gender” categories, for her concern centered on women as human beings and as social victims of their jalads or executioners, which include man, the state, and society. The fact that three institutions, rather than one, control women appears to reassure this critic.

 

Djebar will return to Algeria one final time to be buried, by her will, in Cherchell, the town of her birth.