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Danielle Marx-Scouras
Yale French Studies, volume 0, Issue 82, Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms, Volume 1 (1993), 172-182.
In 1957 […] Algerian revolutionaries found Djebar’s exclusive preoccupation with sexual problems indecent at a time when Algeria was subject to a merciless war (Abdelkebir Khatibi). How could Djebar dare to write about the discovery of sexuality, of feminine desire, in the midst of bombings and tortures? If the sexual overtones of La Soif were problematic, was it solely because of the apparent self-indulgence, and lack of revolutionary consciousness of the author?
If Djebar was stigmatized for “conjuring away Algerian reality,” (Mostefa Lacheraf) it was due to the fact that she was writing as a woman and voicing her sexual difference. National Liberation implied the sacrifice of the individual in the name of the common good. Djebar’s eccentric depiction of Algerian society brought back individual (female, sexual) preoccupations evacuated from the common good. Female sexuality, viewed as a Western, individualist concern apparently had no place in a revolutionary context. Nevertheless, it is symptomatic that the Westernization of the Algerian woman was exploited as a terrorist strategy by Algerian revolutionaries. It is impossible to forget the fundamental role played by Algerian women in the struggle for independence, and particularly the one of the bomb carriers during the Battle for Algiers. The Algerian woman was entitled to a sexual identity so long as it was for the revolution. Traditionally veiled and cloistered, she was now obliged to Westernize herself (light-skinned, blonde women were favored) and to negotiate her charms to French soldiers at the blockades in order to pass her bombs. In “undressing” for the enemy, the woman bomb-carrier was “unprotected” (dialectical Arabic for unveiled) in the most fatal sense of the term. In not wearing a veil, the Algerian woman completely exposed herself to the worst perils, “undressed,” she was now ready to risk her life for the revolutionary cause.
If an Algerian woman, like Djebar’s protagonist in La Soif, uses Western means to liberate herself for her own pleasure, she is scandalous; if she uses Western means to serve a male cause, she is worthy of respect. Sex must be in the name of the revolution, in the name of terrorism, that is. In Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, Djebar asks whether:
“The women bomb-carriers, the Djamilas chose to leave the harem by chance; for in exposing their bodies to the outside world they were themselves attacking other bodies. Actually, the women threw out these bombs as if they were removing their own breasts. These grenades backfired against them, for later some were tortured with electric shocks applied to their genitalia.”
In offering her body in the name of the revolution, the Algerian woman submitted to the worst perversions. Rape, an integral part of war and legitimated as such over the centuries, took on a new connotation in the context of revolutionary militancy and colonialist torture. A hushed, taboo subject was voiced and denounced by the courts and media. Yet what could be denounced in times of revolutionary warfare, once again became a taboo subject, silenced by national independence:
“It was as if the fathers, brothers, and cousins were saying, “We have already paid enough for this uncovering of words!” They forgot that women had inscribed in their murdered flesh this new assertion of independence upon which silence once more descended.” (Djebar, 188)
The heroines of war once again became victims of peace.
La Soif takes on new meaning today. The absence of any reference to the revolution implicitly refutes the claims of Algerian militants that national liberation would inevitably result in the liberation of Algerian women. It is as though Djebar were foreseeing, even if in spite of herself, that the reality of war that forced Algerian women to cross the security of the family threshold, would be the same one to send them back home subsequently. The tortured militants who screamed so as not to betray their brothers, were they not subsequently suffocated by these same brothers?
Despite all the horror they witness, all the pain they experience, the protagonists of Accad, Mechakra, and Djebar’s novels refuse to hate or to have recourse to violence. In the beginning, poetry and song must heal the wounds: « Songs – music and words – came out of my body like a long plantive shriek. They helped relieve the pain, anger, frustrations, and communicate my feelings to others ». (Accad, « Writing to Explore (W)Human Experience »)
Ultimately, the exiled language of love that springs up from the ravaged terrain otherwise on war, and therefore an urgent reminder that such a reality need not be one we must inevitably live through. « We shall continue to write the same old (his)tory, if we continue to speak the same old language, » argues Luce Irigaray (Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, p.205)
Relationships need not be based on violence and destruction, any more than the language that legitimates them need be the one that society continues to endorse and perpetuate.