Women Fight, Women Write

Texts on the Algerian War

Mildred Mortimer

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813942063
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Today, the "fight to write"—the struggle to become the legitimate chronicler of one's own story—is being waged and won by women across mediums and borders. But such battles of authorship extend well beyond a single cultural moment.

In her gripping study of unsung female narratives of the Algerian War, Mildred Mortimer excavates and explores the role of women's individual and collective memory in recording events of the violent anticolonial conflict. Presenting close readings of published works spanning five decades—from Assia Djebar's 1962 Children of the New World to Zohra Drif's 2014 Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter— Women Fight, Women Write traces stylistic and material transformations in Algerian women's writings as it reveals evolving attitudes toward memory, trauma, historical objectivity, and women's political empowerment. Refuting the stale binary of men in battle, women at home, these testimonial texts let women lay claim to the Algerian War story as participants and also as chroniclers through fiction, historical studies, and memoir.

Algeria's patriarchal norms long kept women from speaking publicly about private matters, silencing their experiences of the war. Still, the conflict has ceaselessly sparked creative work. The country's dark decade of violent struggle between the Algerian army and Islamist fundamentalists in the 1990s brought the liberation struggle back into focus, inspiring and emboldening many more women to defiantly write. Women Fight, Women Write advances the broken silence, illuminating its vital historical revisions and literary innovations.

1	WRITING WOMEN INTO HISTORY Danièle Djamila Amrane-Minne’s La guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962): Femmes au combat

An FLN militant during the nationalist struggle, a historian in the postcolonial era, Danièle Djamila Amrane-Minne brings a unique perspective of personal experience and objective analysis to the study of the Algerian War. Highly critical of the fact that women’s contributions to Algeria’s war for independence were increasingly overlooked, she set out in the late 1970s to obtain her doctorat d’état with a dissertation that would repair this omission and correct other misconceptions. Working over a ten-year period, she combed archives and conducted interviews to trace Algerian women’s participation in the nationalist cause. The results of her research appear in two publications: a historical text—originally her doctoral thesis—La guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962): Femmes au combat (The Algerian War [1954–1962]: Women in combat), published in 1993; and Des femmes dans la guerre d’Algérie (Women in the Algerian War), published in 1994, a collection of thirty interviews chosen from the eighty-eight she used for her doctoral research.¹

Commending Amrane-Minne’s efforts to restore Algerian women to their proper place in their nation’s history, her fellow historian Benjamin Stora writes: “It is that silence that she decided to break in a thick book where scientific intention is allied with the intimate knowledge that comes from the experience of the militant women committed to independence” (“Women’s Writing between Two Algerian Wars,” 88). The “thick book” not only draws upon archival facts and figures to correct inaccuracies and uncover hidden history; it represents an innovative approach to history by incorporating women’s voices, including those of women who had not usually been included in historical analyses—poor, illiterate, and often anonymous women—into the text. In this regard, she writes: “Seule la parole donnée à ces femmes peut révéler la profondeur de leur engagement et l’ampleur des sacrifices consentis” (La guerre d’Algérie, 215; Only these women’s voices can reveal the depth of their involvement and the extent of their sacrifices willingly borne). Thus, Amrane-Minne contributes to securing Algerian women their rightful place in history with a text that articulates the commitment, determination, and collective nature of women’s political engagement.

From Danièle Minne, Militant, to Djamila Amrane, Historian

Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, in 1939, Danièle Minne left France as a child with her parents, Pierre and Jacqueline Netter Minne, who accepted teaching positions in Algeria in 1948. Following the couple’s divorce several years later, her mother married Djilali Guerroudj, a militant in the Algerian Communist Party. Political activists committed to Algerian independence, they joined the liberation movement when the war began. They were arrested in 1957 as accomplices of Fernand Iveton, a French Communist convicted and guillotined for placing a bomb in Algiers to destroy the city’s gasworks. Although sentenced to death, they were not executed and spent the remaining war years in prison.²

Danièle, still a teenager, followed her family’s path of anticolonial resistance and joined the FLN. She became one of the bomb carriers in Yacef Saadi’s group during the Battle of Algiers.³ The historian Alistair Horne describes the mission she carried out on January 26, 1957: “The targets were the Otomatic, a favourite students’ bar on the Rue Michelet; the Cafeteria opposite (second time over) and the Coq-Hardi, a popular brasserie. [. . .] Placed in the ladies’ lavatory, Danièle Minne’s bomb in the Otomatic seriously injured a young girl and several others” (Savage War of Peace, 192). The young militant was arrested and tried, and like her mother and stepfather, she spent the rest of the war in prison, first in Algeria, then in Pau, France.⁴ While in prison, Djamila (the Arabic name she assumed during the war) prepared her baccalaureate. At independence, she began her university studies in Algiers. She completed a doctorate in history in 1988 at the University of Reims with a dissertation awarded the highest honors and subsequently published in both Algeria and France. After teaching for many years at the University of Algiers, she moved to France during the tumultuous and violent 1990s, Algeria’s décennie noire, to teach history and women’s studies at the University of Toulouse–Le Mirail. Upon retiring from university teaching, she returned to Algiers, where she lived with her husband, the physician Rabah Amrane, until her death on February 11, 2017.

If Amrane-Minne’s path to an academic career was unusual, her unique position as a participant in and analyst of this significant chapter in Algerian history raises the question of whether a former militant can assume an objective approach and apply a critical lens to a collective history in which she was personally implicated. Her response is a carefully documented and detailed historical work that traces women’s trajectory from bystander to supporter to activist-insurgent in the Algerian War. In a text that explores why women get politically involved in a nationalist movement, what their roles and missions are, and whether gender limits their actions, Amrane-Minne probes the ways women acquire agency within a patriarchal system during a turbulent period of political transformation. Thus, she grapples with the issue at the heart of this study, namely, the extent to which the experience of political engagement empowers women individually and collectively.

In her pursuit of historical accuracy Amrane-Minne used multiple sources: the Algerian ministry’s files on the combatants, the Algerian press of the period, her collection of eighty-eight interviews with Algerian women combatants, women’s personal written records in the form of diaries and poetry, and photographs of the period. These sources complement one another. Statistics gleaned from the archives provided the hard data concerning women combatants; the rest put a human face on events. Thus, as Amrane-Minne collected and interpreted both objective data and subjective narratives, she laid the groundwork for our study of historically based novels and memoirs. Archival sources allowed her to trace the militants’ political trajectory; oral testimony shed light on their psychological transformation. And in a text that emphasizes the collective nature of Algerian women’s political engagement, the collective voice that emerges not only articulates the struggle against French colonialism but challenges indigenous patriarchal structures as women express their vision of a new political and social order and show their willingness to fight for it.

Women at War: A Chronological Progression

Amrane-Minne begins her study by examining the position of women in Algeria before the revolution, then charts the emergence of women in the liberation struggle, and concludes with the reinsertion of the former women combatants into Algerian society following independence. This chronological progression allows her to trace Algerian women’s absence from political life in the postindependence era back to its origins, indigenous patriarchy and French colonial policy, both of which impeded their access to public space.

Faulting French colonial educational policy in part for Algerian women’s absence from public space, Amrane-Minne uses statistics to make important points. She notes that in 1954 in Algeria there were only six Algerian women doctors, twenty-five women secondary-school teachers, and no women in higher education. At the University of Algiers that year, approximately fifty Algerian female students were enrolled. These statistics are not surprising given that at the beginning of the liberation struggle nearly all Algerians were illiterate, with only 4.5 percent of women able to read and write. As a largely uneducated sector of the population, Algerian women were easily excluded from political life (La guerre d’Algérie, 27–29). Although they were granted the right to vote in colonial Algeria in 1947, the policy was not implemented until 1958, and only then in the vain attempt by the French colonial administration to turn Algerian women against the nationalist tide. Yet, to place the blame solely on colonial policy is, in Amrane-Minne’s view, too simplistic a response; she faults Algerian political parties as well.

Examining the policies of the Parti du peuple algérien–Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques (PPA-MTLD; Algerian People’s Party–Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberty) and the Parti communiste algérien (PCA; Algerian Communist Party) toward Algerian women, Amrane-Minne finds that while both parties glorified women in their traditional roles as mothers and educators, they neglected to bring them into positions of power (33). Because of women’s insignificant presence in male-dominated political parties, they were obliged to work within the framework of women’s organizations such as the Association des femmes musulmanes algériennes (AFMA; Association of Algerian Muslim Women) and the Union des femmes d’Algérie (UFA; Union of Algerian Women), a communist organization, in which they had a voice. Often collaborating, the two associations affiliated with the Fédération démocratique internationale des femmes (FDI; International Democratic Federation of Women) in 1952, and throughout the war they sent an Algerian delegation to the FDI conference (38). Although Amrane-Minne’s research confirms that Algerian women joined the struggle once the war began, it suggests that if the nationalist parties had prepared women better for the armed struggle, and not marginalized them politically, many more would have participated actively in the revolution.

Examining the Archives and the Local Press

As Amrane-Minne charts the emergence of women in the liberation struggle, delving into multiple sources, Algerian archives reveal important data. The files of the Ministère des anciens combattants (Ministry of Former Combatants) provided her with more than ten thousand dossiers on militants that contain sociological data as well details concerning militants’ military actions. With the help of this ministry, she was able to establish the number of women combatants, their roles, and their responsibilities. The ministry files revealed that among the 336,748 militants in its files, 10,949, 3.1 percent of all those taking part in active combat, were women. Of this group, 948 lost their lives (219).⁵ Although the percentage of active combatants might seem relatively small, it approximates the number of European women who actively took part in World War II (“Women and Politics in Algeria,” 62).

Affirming that women joined the war from its inception, Amrane-Minne parts ways with the anticolonial theorist and FLN representative Frantz Fanon, who in “L’Algérie se dévoile” (“Algeria Unveiled”) writes that only after a final series of meetings among leaders was a decision made to concretely involve women in the nationalist struggle. In Fanon’s view, women were brought in progressively as “l’urgence d’une guerre totale se fait sentir” (28; the urgency of a total war made itself felt [48]), and the male leaders arrived at that decision following much hesitation. He concludes: “Il faut donc exiger de la femme une élévation morale et une force psychologique exceptionnelles” (28; A moral elevation and a strength of character that were altogether exceptional would therefore be required of women [48]). Feminists today can read Fanon’s words as naïve at best, condescending at worst. Amrane-Minne refutes the political philosopher’s interpretation with her research and data. Examining the archives thoroughly, she finds no trace of discussions concerning women’s inclusion either in official FLN texts or in the writings of the FLN leaders (247).

Delving further into the question of women’s political engagement, she discerns the following motivations for their decision: the trauma of the massacre of Algerians in Sétif and Guelma in 1945; the popularity of the political leader Messali Hadj; ideas of nationalism circulated by the political parties and the medersas (religious schools); a family tradition of resistance; experience of poverty and hardship; revolt against injustice; and the shock of the Algerian War as it progressed (49). Two of these factors, the injustices of colonialism that she perceived, as well as a family tradition of resistance, were important motivations for Amrane-Minne herself. She concludes that women joined the war immediately, as their male counterparts did, sharing their primary motivation, the struggle for a better life, one not dominated by a colonial power (247). Significantly, their decisions seem to have been made on the basis of personal reflection, not external pressure.

If archives were one crucial source of information, French and Algerian newspapers of the period were another. El Moudjahid, the official journal of the FLN, confirms women’s importance to the struggle but gives scant information about their actual missions. Similarly, the French newspaper Le Monde traces the evolution of French opinion concerning the war, but like El Moudjahid, it pays little attention to daily events in Algeria. It was the local press in Algiers, read faithfully by the pieds-noirs (the French settler population), that provided Amrane-Minne with the daily record of events missing from the other two. If women militants missing from the pages of history were to be found in the newspapers of the day, their representation was often inaccurate and misleading. For this reason, she dismisses L’Echo d’Alger as too extremist and Le Journal d’Alger as too focused on political opinion for her study and chooses La Dépêche quotidienne d’Alger, reading it attentively for its reports of women combatants’ arrests, trials, and deaths.

Reading La Dépêche quotidienne d’Alger, Amrane-Minne finds omissions and factual errors. Reports of bombs and targeted assassinations that made the front page of the paper did not always specify the FLN militant’s name. For example, on October 17, 1958, the newspaper notes: “À Oued Fodda, une bombe cachée dans une valise explose près de la gendarmerie. L’auteur de l’attentat, une femme musulmane, est déchiquétée. Un gendarme est blessé” (96n1; At Oued Fodda, a bomb hidden in a suitcase exploded near the police station. The person who placed the bomb, a Muslim woman, was torn to shreds. A police officer was wounded). Probing the incident, Amrane-Minne traces the bomb to Yasmina Belkacem, an FLN activist who survived the explosion but was seriously injured. Here, through archival research, Amrane-Minne not only puts a name and a face to an incident that had remained anonymous but also corrects the journal’s account. The young militant, although severely wounded, did not die and years later gave the historian a full account of the incident.⁶

As she reads the journal, Amrane-Minne also finds a propensity for sensationalism. A case in point is the news report of August 14, 1957, an account clearly written to assure the European population that the French military was dismantling the FLN: “Grâce à une enquête particulièrement rapide menée par les paras du colonel Bigeard, onze fabricants et poseurs appréhendés. Trois femmes participaient au transport des engins qui explosèrent les 18 et 27 juillet à Alger” (107n3; A particularly rapid inquiry undertaken by Colonel Bigeard’s paratroopers led to the arrest of eleven individuals, those who had made the bombs and those who had placed them. Three women participated in transporting the devices that exploded on July 18 and 27 in Algi...