Never heard of her. Him? Her. Born in 1936 into French colonial Algeria, Assia was a novelist, documentary filmmaker, and feminist trailblazer whose work gave voice to the women native to her country. The first North African woman elected to the French Academy, she wrote over twenty books; she also worked as a translator, including her own novels, which were read all over the globe. And, yeah, I never heard of her. She died in 2015, and was often mentioned as a Nobel Prize contender – but how often does the accepted canon include female voices, let alone those of north African origin? Not often enough.
Her first novel was published in 1957; her last in 2008. You can read more about Djebar at the wiki link below. The first quote below is what caught my interest, and led me down the rabbit hole of who dat?! There is ever enough time for the books and films and humans I long to read, and know. But. There is time – at least enough to run down a few rabbits.
In Djebar own words:
“I write to shatter the silence that surrounds the lives of women like a prison.”
“How shall I find the strength to tear off my veil unless I have to use it to bandage the running sore nearby from which words exude?”
“Writing in a foreign language* – has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins.” (*French)
“Speaking of oneself in a language other than that of the elders is indeed to unveil oneself, not only to emerge from childhood but to leave it, never to return. Such incidental unveiling is tantamount to stripping oneself naked, as the demotic Arabic dialect emphasizes. But this stripping naked, when expressed in the language of the former conquerer (who for more than a century could lay his hands on everything save women’s bodies), this stripping naked takes us back oddly enough to the plundering of the preceding century. When the body is not embalmed by ritual lamentations, it is like a scarecrow decked in rags and tatters. The battle-cries of our ancestors, unhorsed in long-forgotten combats, re-echo across the years; accompanied by the dirges of the mourning-women who watched them die.”
“Sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure.”
“But my sole ambition in writing is constantly to travel to fresh pastures and replenish my water skins with an inexhaustible silence.”