Dissident Writings of Arab Women

Brinda J. Mehta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317911050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature du Moyen-Orient

Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices Against Violence analyzes the links between creative dissidence and inscriptions of violence in the writings of a selected group of postcolonial Arab women.

The female authors destabilize essentialist framings of Arab identity through a series of reflective interrogations and "contesting" literary genres that include novels, short stories, poetry, docudramas, interviews and testimonials. Rejecting a purist "literature for literature's sake" ethic, they embrace a dissident poetics of feminist critique and creative resistance as they engage in multiple and intergenerational border crossings in terms of geography, subject matter, language and transnationality. This book thus examines the ways in which the women's writings provide the blueprint for social justice by "voicing" protest and stimulating critical thought, particularly in instances of social oppression, structural violence, and political transition.

Providing an interdisciplinary approach which goes beyond narrow definitions of literature as aesthetic praxis to include literature's added value as a social, historical, political, and cultural palimpsest, this book will be a useful resource for students and scholars of North African Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Francophone Studies, and Feminist Studies.

Part I

Violence and war

The Algerian war story

1 Contesting violence and imposed silence

The creative dissidence of contemporary Francophone Algerian women writers

The creative voices of Francophone Algerian women writers have made their literary mark on the national, international and diasporic scene through a wide array of genres, including novels, poems, plays, short stories, autobiographies, chronicles, historical documents and testimonies. Inscribed within a socio-political context, this work spans the timelines of colonial and postcolonial Algerian history from the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 to the War of Independence (1954-1962) and the “black decade” of the bloody civil war of the 1990s. While exposing and denouncing the violent historical traumas that have ravaged the country, these writers have also commemorated the courage and resilience of the Algerian people in their impassioned narratives composed of “torch-words” (Djebar 1993, 142); the fiery resonance of these “torch words” illuminates the impermeable traces of resistance and oppression found in Algerian history. At the same time, these women use literature as a medium to creatively stage their own gendered insurrections against the patriarchal roots of war and violence through their “warrior voices” (Assima 1995, 138) that call for a re-reading of Algerian historicity from a gendered perspective. Through their writings, Algerian authors aim to “shatter the patriarchal spine of Algeria” (Farès 1974, 75) by proposing more reflective and expedient gender and politically nuanced modalities.

In this chapter, I explore the ways in which three prominent Algerian women writers chronicle the painful trajectory and implicit silences of Algerian history as they offer their gendered perspectives that feminize and complicate Algerian historicity and postcolonial subjectivity. Algerian authors dispel monolithic representations of women as passive victims of colonial history or nationalist and religious ideology, even as they demonstrate how the masculinist ethics of war have ravaged the female body and women’s history through violence, silencing and exclusion. The subtle interplay between fiction and testimony highlights their nuanced attempts to fictionalize reality through a brutal but necessary realism that interrogates the very “idea” of the historical process. At the same time, these writings expose the violence of the past and mediate the horror (and successes) of the postcolonial present (Chaulet-Achour 2005, 195); they also expose the women’s postcolonial rage. In so doing, these women reveal their literary commitment to postmodern preoccupations with identity, exile, historical omissions, gender affirmations, decolonial thought and female authorship, as they evoke the wounds and unresolved traumas that inhibit successful decolonization. As stated by Ranjana Khanna in Algeria Cuts, “the figure of woman cuts into the masculinist frame of the Franco-Algerian relationship” (2008, xv) to both “elude and confound the dominant structures of colonial and postcolonial representation” (5).

While Algerian and Franco-Algerian women writers as diverse as Assia Djebar, Maïssa Bey, Hafsa Zinaï-Koudil, Malika Mokkedem, Naïla Imaken, Nina Bouraoui, Fatima Gallaire- Bourega and Leïla Sebbar underscore the traumas suffered by the nation as a whole, they are, at the same time, particularly sensitive to the aggressions experienced by women and children. These dually subjugated constituencies representing the “colonized of the colonized” (Salhi 2008, 83) have been excised from colonial and nationalist discourses with the help of “the vivisector’s scalpel” (Djebar 1993, 156) to preserve the sanctity of patriarchal myths related to power, honor and glory in the colonial and national archives. These women’s creative dissidence exemplifies their efforts to transcribe the spectral echoes of these gendered silences onto the written page in an attempt to reveal history’s transgendered scope. At the same time, these women decry the historical, national and religious mutilations that have scarred Algeria’s landscape. They frame their work within a postcolonial feminist model that exposes the patriarchal intentionality of colonial, neo-colonial and religious exceptions.

The postcolonial feminist framework demonstrates how historical distortions and gendered seclusions have created ontological impasses in women’s lives on the one hand, and provided the necessary impetus to confront interdictions and social taboos on the other. This discursive strategy disrupts patriarchal narrative dominance in Algeria and France by filling in the blank spaces – the fissures, erasures and omissions that have obscured Algeria’s feminine face through the violence of exclusion and patriarchal collusions. The literary valiance of these “Scheherazades in the age of ink” (Djebar 2006, 210) thereby expresses itself in the creative resistance occasioned by their discursive transgressions. These narrative acts preserve history’s maternal timelines through the life-sustaining nourishment provided by a primordial source, namely, “the tongue’s blood that nevertheless refuses to run dry.”¹ In other words, writing provides the medium to lift the many veils of silence and violence that have shrouded the lives of women in particular through their discursive “sang-voix” (“bloodied/bloody voices”) decrying injustice, inhumanity and a triple colonialist, nationalist and religious culpability. These denunciations establish cartographies of gender relations that reveal the complexity of women’s lives in Algerian history.

Assia Djebar compares the act of recovering and re-membering Algeria’s silenced female historicity to “a very special kind of spelaeology” (1993, 77), in which writing is both a funerary act of exhuming absence and a decolonial palimpsest “on which I now inscribe the charred passion of my ancestors” (79). The task of creating life-presence from death, forgetfulness and erasure involves a special way of seeing, feeling, knowing and experiencing the universe, an ultra-sensitive consciousness that Chicana activist Gloria Anzaldúa characterizes as la facultad. She states:

It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind which feelings reside/hide. The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world … Those who are pushed out of the tribe for being different are likely to become more sensitized.

(1987, 60)

This form of inner knowledge is similar to the Sufi concept of al basira, a deeply perceptive inner vision or insight that goes beyond the limits of physical or surface vision (Craun 2012, 2). I argue that the woman writer’s privileged access to la facultad, as a strategy to recuperate the obscured feminine words/worlds, is particularly vital when expressing the multiple lacks that punctuate the lives of women caught between the competing patriarchal configurations of colonial might, nationalist right and religious morality in Algeria. These texts are written to “assuage a lack” (Djebar 2006, 215); they resonate with the tensions between coloniality and the articulation of gender, “nationalism and feminism … decolonization and women’s emancipation” (Kalisa 2009, 12).

These tensions highlight the particular wounds inscribed on women’s bodies as a result of historical fractures, traumatic memory and patriarchal ideology to demonstrate how it is impossible to disassociate gender from questions related to conquest and colonization, cultural and religious identity, “modernity” and historical violence. While scars are borne by men, women and children in shared histories of violence, the women’s texts demonstrate how patriarchal objectifications of women and children in master discourses have made them vulnerable to a gender-ascribed antagonism found in mediated Orientalist representations, symbolic aggression and the physicality of palpable violence at the state and family levels. These corporeal wounds reflect broader historical wounds to show how the silenced physical and social mutilation of Algerian women and children has contributed to the overall maiming of Algeria in colluding acts of infanticide and femicide. In so doing, these women have exposed the many ravaged faces of Algeria to thereby subvert masculinist claims to successful colonization, accomplished decolonization and religious subjugation.

These writers can also be credited with the capacity to convert Algeria’s multiple tragedies into a powerful repository of shared memories, survival and resistance stories, social documentaries and testimonials of denunciation, as they negotiate the ambiguity of using the colonizer’s language to contest the power-inflected political, social and religious excesses that compromise Algeria’s integrity. Benjamin Stora highlights some of the major preoccupations that characterize these writings. He affirms:

Their representations have created ways to access this country’s complex identity: how to preserve the private, family space against the encroachments of the State and the religious; how, at the same time, to do away with woman’s condition as recluse by entering into the public space; how to bring support to a masculine identity that has been disturbed by the dispossessions of history …; how to overcome, again and again, the traumatisms linked to all forms of violence – colonial and postcolonial; how to affirm her condition as woman in societies that teeter, through wars, towards other national definitions.

(1999, 91)

In other words, Stora emphasizes the women’s explicit postcolonial dissidence as they interrogate the tenuous borders between colonialism and postcolonialism, plurality and homogeneity, private and public space, trauma and memory, and other binaries that both inhibit and propel Algeria’s struggle to move beyond coloniality.

These women, and Francophone Algerian writers in general, defend their decision to write in French as an explicitly feminist and political act to resist the totalizing impact of Arabization promulgated by the post-independence Algerian state ruled by the National Liberation Front (FLN) as well as the different factions of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). They contest the state’s conforming “union of singularities” (Kristeva 1991, 132) based on the violent suppression of difference through their multilingual textual pluralities. They use literature to both contest and expose the singular vision of a state that refuses to acknowledge the following governing fact as explained by Réda Bensmaïa:

A nation cannot be reduced to a mass of persons under the administrative iron rule of a state that has blurred not only every distinction between powers, but also every “difference” between ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups. Everything is happening as if, in Algeria, someone wanted to construct a system without incompatibilities, without contradictions, without contraries.

(1997, 91)

In opposition to a counter “civilizing mission” proposed by the Algerian state, Francophone writers insist that the use of French is in keeping with their ideal of supporting a plural Algeria; these women further indigenize French for their decolonial woman-centered agendas. The conscious decision to write in French is also an act of open defiance against the indiscriminate assassination of Francophone Algerian intellectuals during the black decade of “intellectual cleansing” (Bensmaïa 1997, 86). This list included Tahar Djaout, Youcef Sebti, Abdelkader Alloula, Lounès Matoub and a host of other creative dissidents considered to be an infidel group of secularized elites by religious traditionalists.²

In their commitment to French, Algerian authors engage with Abdelkébir Khatibi’s notion of a pluralist Maghreb, a Maghreb Pluriel (1983), which favors critical negotiations of cross-cultural hybridity and multilingual exchanges within and across the geographical expanses of North Africa and the Mediterranean region. Khatibi’s theory delegitimizes purist returns to authentic pre-colonial origins espoused by both nationalists and Islamists, and the over-determined presence of orientalizing tropes in Maghrebi and colonial writing by calling for a double critique of both Western and indigenous paradigms related to language and identity. He states: “The Occident is part of me, a part that I can only deny insofar as I resist all the occidents and all the orients that oppress and disillusion me” (1983, 106).³ This positionality is a form of critical decolonial thought, une pensée autre, wherein Khatibi “proposes that instead of trying to erase one element of the current ethno-cultural landscape, Maghreb intellectuals should evaluate that very landscape according to what he calls a double critique” (Amine and Carlson 2012, 239).

Accordingly, French occupies a conflicted interstitial space in Assia Djebar’s writing, existing as a source of creative freedom and existential alienation at the same time. She states: “So it was for me with the French language. Ever since I was a child the foreign language was a casement opening on the spectacle of the world and all its riches. In certain circumstances it became a dagger threatening me” (1993, 126). Representing access to a new, albeit dangerous world, the colonial tongue reveals, what I term, its paradoxical “intimate alterity” as the symptom of a tenuous postcolonial condition. On the other hand, Maïssa Bey stresses the inevitability of writing in French as the result of a French education that makes her “une enfant colonisée” [“a colonized child”]. Refusing to apologize for her linguistic choice, Bey affirms: “Il est bien plus réaliste de [la] considérer comme un acquis, un bien précieux, et peut-être même un ‘butin de guerre’ ainsi que la définissait Kateb Yacine” [“It is more realistic to consider (French) as an acquisition, a precious commodity and even perhaps the spoils of war as defined by Kateb Yacine”], (Bouredji 2008, 2).

For Franco-Algerian author Leïla Sebbar, French constitutes a naturalized mother tongue that nevertheless occasions the silencing of her father’s Arabic: “I write on silence, a blank memory, a history in fragments,” she confesses, thereby revealing the partiality of Frenchness and her own conflicted identity (1986, 160). In their personal negotiations of French, these writers reveal the duality of writing in the mother tongue that must be “conquered” and “subverted,” and which yet could “also be seen as the language of transgression, of flight and refuge” (Stora 1999, 80).

***

Assia Djebar⁴ is undoubtedly the most internationally renowned Algerian woman author of the twenty-first century. Elected to the prestigious Académie Française on June 15, 2006, Djebar remains the only Arab-Berber woman recognized by this institution for her literary distinction. The winner of numerous international awards and other forms of recognition, Djebar’s work encompasses the entire expanse of colonial and postcolonial Algerian history. Born in Cherchell, Algeria in 1936, Fatima-Zohra Imalayen adopted the nom de plume Assia Djebar, whose signification includes healing and consoling (Kelly 2005, 253). As a creative healer, Djebar uses the power of words to mend the bleeding wounds of Algeria in beautiful poetic narratives that focus most specifically on the unresolved traumas of women and their ambiguous status in history. The pseudonym enables Djebar to give public voice to women’s private reflections and experiences, including her own, without violating cultural codes inhibiting female self-revelation. The veiled/unveiled “I” problematizes the complicated trajectory of Algerian history in which identity is irrevocably linked to the broader scope of nationhood, cultural memory, multilingualism, fractured spatial geographies in relation to France, gender and coloniality. At the same time, these narratives are richly layered with the sensorial textures of memory. These memory-enriched narratives are endowed with a certain corporeality to position the female body as the dual site of oppression and contestation. While earlier novels such as La soif (1957), Les impatients (1958), Les enfants du nouveau monde (1962) and Les Alouettes naïves (1967) engage in incisive critiques of patriarchy through a burgeoning feminist consciousness, later works such as Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980), L’amour, la fantasia (1985) and La femme sans sepulture (2002) focus more precisely on the erasure of women in national and colonial narratives that remain male-centered, ethnocentric, Western-determined and written in scope.

The daughter of an Algerian resistor and school teacher who was brutally tortured and executed by the French in February 1957 during the War of Independence, Maïssa Bey has used literature as a means of coming to terms with her father’s death while expressing her own sense of unresolved trauma and loss as a result of this violent experience. As O. Hind claims, “Maïssa Bey est une femme blessée dans sa chair … Elle est née avec cette plaie, jamais cicatrisée” [“Maïssa Bey is a woman wounded in the flesh … She was born with this wound that has never scarred”] (2008). This painful trajectory is explored in fictionalized form in her novels, Entendez-vous dans les montagnes (2002) being a prime example. Using a pseudonym instead of her birth name Samia Benameur, Bey adopts an insider-outsider position in her work to demonstrate how the brutality of colonial rule, religious dogma and patriarchy lead to the corresponding brutalization of the lives of women and children in particular when they are denied speech, ignored, violated and relegated to the margins of society. In texts such as Nouvelles d’Algérie (1998), Puisque mon coeur est mort (2010) and Cette fille-là (2001), Bey explores the realm of the unspoken, or the non-dit, to uncover the hidden realities of women and children and their daily struggles against hopelessness and despair in a male-centered society. Her literary aspirations correspond to a more intimate politicized aspiration for a better future for Algeria through a creative reconstruction of the nation. One of her major objectives has been to secure the inclusion of women’s intellectual contributions in the nation’s history through the development of women’s associations such as Paroles et Ecriture, a feminist workshop devoted to literary proficiency and creative writing. For Bey, writing represents an epitaph against amnesia, silencing, violence and despair. These elements are further explored in a recent memoir, L’une et l’autre (2009) in which she examines the multiple facets of her identity as a Francophone Algerian Arab Muslim woman writer who ironically uses the colonial language to sketch a self-portrait. Through writing and activism, Bey attempts to chronicle the making and un-making of Algerian history as the first step toward healing and reconciliation.

Leïla Sebbar’s writings highlight the ambivalence of linguistic, cultural and historical hybridities, wherein the female body becomes the site of these conflicting affiliations and disaffiliations. Her work explores the linguistic exile that results from an over-identification with French, together with the familial alienations that are a part of the unequal cross-cultural exchanges between French and Arabic under colonial rule. In her novels, Sebbar explores the trajectories of the embattled female self that absorbs the trauma of an imposed French historicity while maintaining a sense of nostalgia for the...