Afterword, Clarisse Zimra

Children of the New World,

English translation by Marjolijn de Jager

Feminist Press, 2005

            On July 1, 1962, Algerians were casting their ballots in a referendum to establish the nation’s independence from France, throwing off a colonizer’s yoke that had lasted one hundred and thirty-two years. The previous day, Assia Djebar had celebrated both her twenty-sixth birthday and the publication of her third novel, Les Enfants du nouveau monde (Children of the New World).

“The New Algerian Woman”

            Assia Djebar had already published two novels, La Soif, in 1957 (published in English the following year as The Mischief) and, in 1958, Les Impatients (The Impatient ones), composed within months of the first. These were amazing accomplishments considering the fact that, in 1958, the young author was on the run; her new husband was wanted by the French police, and her young brother had already been incarcerated for several years as a political subversive. The war raging on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea made her return home impossible. By the time Les Impatients was published in Paris and The Mischief was reviewed in the Sunday New York Times, Djebar was a fugitive. […]

            Married in March 1958, the newlyweds had escaped to Tunis by way of a clandestine passage through Switzerland. Meanwhile, worsening conditions in her native land provoked several political crises on both sides of the Mediterranean. …

            In Tunis, Djebar worked on the FLN political newspaper El Moudjahid, whose editor was the revolutionary West Indian writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon; visited refugee camps where she gathered details on the war; and finished a graduate degree in history with Louis Massignon, the highly acclaimed Islamic scholar. Her M.A. Thesis dealth with a Muslim female mystic of the Middle Ages, Lla Aicha el Manoubia, the twelfth-century patron saint of the city.  The thesis examined the ways in which ancient cultural practices survive and, often, subvert established religion. … The end of 1959 found Djebar in Rabat, teaching North African history at the national university while continuing her work with refugees. Out of her time in Morocco would come a play, Rouge l’Aube (Red is dawn), a collection of poems, Poèmes pour l’Algérie heureuse (Poems for a happy Algeria), and this third novel.

            That same year, 1959, the formerly disobedient student was reinstated to the Ecole Normale de Sèvres by General de Gaulle himself, on the grounds that she had too much talent as a writer to be deprived of her right to the finest education in the world (Cyril Bensimon, “Une Algérienne à l’Académie française”, Le Monde, 22 juin 2005, on-line edition). …

[Set in Blida, a colonial city]

            Much of Children, in obvious dialogue with real life, cuts close to the autobiographical bone. It was triggered by the story of an elderly neighbour lady killed by shrapnel inside her inner courtyard, as reported to Djebar by her own mother-in-law, a Blida native. This clever symbol of a war’s senseless cruelty, which could reach everywhere and everyone, even the most feeble and the most innocent in the most secure of enclosures, makes for a stunning opening to the novel. It was, we now know, something that had actually happened. …

            Through a tightly Aristotelian structure (unity of time, place, and plot), the third novel marks an evolution, an ambitious expansion of her writing skills, and engages a much larger social canvas. Children moves our attention away from the rebellious singular of the first two novels to the collective plural – in and out of the occupied town, in and out of the embattled mountain, in and out of French jails. Although we witness scenes of pain, humiliation, betrayal, torture, and death, there is no single hero here – only the suffering of a people. The struggle is framed by two contrapuntal scenes of great beauty in which a filmmaker’s eye is already at work. Indeed, Djebar’s 1979 film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua reproduces such scenes and follows the dialectical movement we are given in the novel’s opening, between the cloistered space of women praying inside traditional houses and the expanding horizon of their menfolk fighting in the mountains. If the beginning gives us the absurd death of a feeble-minded old woman on her doorstep, the ending moves us upward, physically and spiritually, with the arrival of guerrilla fighters on a reclaimed mountaintop that stands, potentially, for an entire country: free at last.