Assia Djebar Fantasia An Algerian Cavalcade 1985 Djebar

Assia Djebar Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985)

Djebar, 1936 -2015

Historical Context • Colonial and postcolonial Algeria • From the capture of Algiers in 1830 • to the Algerian War of Independence 19541962 • FLN in power • Civil war and Islamicisation

Structure of the novel • Highly experimental/virtuosic (virtuoso movements of horseback)—fusing various genres and modes of representation • Polyphonic structure--Musical movement, resembling a symphony (allusion to Beethoven’s Fantasia, and the novel’s 5 parts) • Chapters alternate between autobiographical accounts and Algerian history • History and memory

Writing/Righting History • Personal experiences (autobiographical voice of the narrator) interwoven with the historical account—”an inquest into the nature of identity” • Opening up the archive—obscure sources; fragmentary texts; letters, private journals of French painters, generals, bureaucrats, writers, war correspondents; reading Turkish and Arabic memoirs (Part 1) and oral testimony (Part 2) • “scribblomania”—French accounts of the conquest of July 1830 • P. 45: writing and power • The role of women in Algerian history • Said documentary

Colonial history as palimpsest • Palimpsest: a manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible • Narrator grateful for Pelissier’s account (78) • Re-reading the chroniclers

Hand/qalam • The narrator wants to close the novel by greeting the French painter Eugene Fromentin • Hand/qalam: play on words • The amputated hand comes to symbolise Algeria, mutilated by a history written by others—French historians, writers, artists • Algerian women amputated in their desire to write or express themselves

Subaltern history • How does one write the history of people (women, peasants, tribals) who have remained silent about their role, their agency, both because they could not write, but also because they were deliberately silenced/mutilated? ||

Small voice of history • Poetic imagination—creating the scene “I can imagine…”; “I slip into the antechamber of this recent past…holding my breath in an attempt to overhear everything…” (8) • “small voice of history” • Algerian peasant women: “Voice” • “the call of the dead”—p. 46 r • Kalam and the severed hand

The question of language • Written French versus oral Arabic (father, a teacher at a French primary school; colonizer, school teacher; and mother tongue) • “…thus the language that my father had been at pains for me to learn, serves as a go-between, and from now a double, contradictory sign reigns over my initiation” (4) • Using the colonizers’/father’s language • Education: “I cut myself adrift” (5)—exile, loss of connection

Writing/unveiling • Writing/unveiling—prison walls/prohibitions, inhibitions broken; giving voice; making visible; boundaries of decency/indecency • To write is to unveil; to enter freedom • Letter from the young boy—“rape” (4); Letters to the boy in French—“a double, contradictory sign” (4) • French/colonizer—language of love and intimacy • Reading and writing as subversive acts—the motif of the love letter: between public and private

The materiality of words • Words materialized: “whirling furtively around, about to twine invisible snares around our adolescent bodies”; “I had the premonition that in the sleepy, unsuspecting hamlet, an unprecedented women’s battle was brewing beneath the surface” (13)

Colonization and sexuality • controlling bodies, desire through colonization: “an obscene copulation” (19) • The city of Algiers “makes her first appearance in the role of ‘Oriental Woman’, motionless, mysterious” (6) role of Arab women fighting French forces in the 19 th c (Barchou: “Arab tribes are always accompanied by great numbers of women who had shown the greatest zeal in mutilating their victims” (18). • P. 18/19: “Thus these two Algerian women…”

Algeria as woman • Dominant images of the novel—rape and abduction—sexualise the colonial representation of Algeria, which becomes, in the final analysis, the female body. If it is on this body that the history of the French conquerors had been written, it is from this body that the decolonization of a people must be written • “to all the other women whom no word has reached” (59)