L’Amour, la fantasia, Albin Michel 1995 Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Heinemann, 1993 Reviews from the US
Gayatri Spivak ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture London: Macmillan, 1988 And reprinted in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, Gareth Griffeths (ed). London: Roueledge, 1995 … Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy, and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo-political determinations.’ The much publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject…
This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denegations, belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor. It is impossible for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the debate of the production of that Other, supporting of critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to put the economic ‘under erasure,’ to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified.
The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subjectivity.
[…]
This is not to describe ‘the way things really were’ or to privilege the narrative of history as imperialism as the best version of history. It is, rather, to offer an account of how an explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one…
Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced centre) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat. According to Foucault and Deleuze (in the First World, under the standardization and regimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem to recognize this) the oppressed, if given the chance (the problem of representation cannot be by passed here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here) can speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the following question: On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?
Fantasia – An Algerian Cavalcade by Assia Djebar, book review on line « Lit Net » column by Annie Gagiano, June 2004. Fantasia is a very unusual and immensely sophisticated composition. Although it is presented and always referred to as a novel, it is nothing like the customary novelistic narrative concerning a main character or small group of characters. Instead, it alternates the two main strands of history and autobiography. On the one hand Djebar provides, in the earlier sections of the text, a history of the Algerians' colonisation by the French (from 1830) and of the resistance war of the 1950s - the latter in first-hand accounts of women participants, found in the final sections of the text. On the other hand, she gives us an autobiographical account of the author's childhood years and young married life and of the development of her imaginative vision, sometimes thinly disguised as a reported account. The whole effort of the text is bent towards bringing these “objective” and “subjective” strands together, and towards illustrating that breaking the colonial yoke in Algeria came from women as it did from men, in a society that remains unfree in the silencing and subjugation of its women. The author includes in her text multiple passages where she grapples with and articulates her own metafictional purposes: “Writing in a foreign language … has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins,” she writes late in the text (204). One could think of Fantasia as both a sort of “testament” of Djebar's cherishing love for the people of her country, expressing her compassionate commemoration of its bitter history of repeated waves of subjugation and courageous resistance, and as a “testimonio” - not only by the author, but also by the tough and loyal countrywomen to whose voices she gives space. Predictably, Djebar's style includes a range from the austere and elegant reporting of historical fact (however gruesome the events) to passages of haunting lyricism and succinct, paradoxically-expressed meditation. There are also metaphors and images or verbal echoes that unobtrusively sew the fabric of the "impersonal" and "personal" chapters together, while some of the history is very lyrically written and some of the confessional sections very dryly reported. […] Very restrained as her descriptions are, Djebar's evocation (mostly from the French perspective and, indeed, largely from the documentation of the events by the foreign military commander himself) of a particular atrocity that resulted in several “copy-cat” events, remains harrowing – I am referring to the deliberate asphyxiation of fifteen hundred Berber tribes people (and all their cattle) who had gone into hiding from the French invaders in a network of underground caves (in the period following the fall of Algiers). The French, after the failure of their attempts to negotiate surrender, made huge fires in every one of these caves' openings, keeping this up until nearly all within were dead. A much later, eerily lyrical passage in the text evokes an image of the author's “archaeological” efforts (of the imagination) to recover the awareness of “this rising tide of ancient pain”, efforts which require her “to lean over backwards, plunge [her] face into the shadows, … lend an ear to the whispers that rise up from time out of mind … [and to] face these images of darkness …” (46). http://www.litnet.co.za/africanlib/fantasia.asp
« Acting Bits/Identity Talk », Gayatri Spivak in Critical Inquiry Summer 1992 Avec l'amour, la fantasia, Assia Djebar s'inscrit dans la chaîne des grands autobiographes tels qu'Augustin, le Berbère qui écrivit non seulement sa théologie mais ses Confession dans la langue de Rome; et Ibn Khaldoun, fils d'une famille qui fuit l'Arabie du Sud, et écrit non seulement son histoire, mais son Ta'arif – « Identité » - en arabe. En se mettant en scène, femme algérienne musulmane, Assia Djebar donne L'identité: une blessure exposée par les langues historiquement hégémoniques, pour celles qui ont appris la “pratique” doublement liante (double-binding) « de [leur] écriture » (p. 181).
[…]
Le mouvement final de l'Amour, la fantasia s'achève en trois courts morceaux: ce qui reste d'une autobiographie quand elle a été dévidée fil par fil. D'abord dans un hommage à Pauline Rolland, la révolutionnaire française de 1848, exilée en Algérie, véritable
« Elle a rallumé le vif du passé » « L’écriture-palimpseste d’Assia Djebar », Anne Donadey, Postcolonialism & Autobiographie, Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe (eds.) Atlanta-Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
Comme l’ont souvent remarqué les critiques, l’oeuvre d’Assia Djebar parcourt une trajectoire qui, partie de l’écriture anti-autobiographique de La Soif (1957) où l’auteur écrit pour sortir de soi, s’approche de plus en plus de l’autobiographie, surtout avec L’Amour, la fantasia (1985) et le tout récent Vaste est la prison (1995). Assia Djebar elle-même a souvent fait allusion au fait que, dans le contexte maghrébin, l’autobiographie féminine, surtout dans la langue étrangère, est une entreprise dangereuse. Cette difficulté, associée à une conception différente du sujet parlant ainsi qu’au projet féministe de ramener les femmes dans l’histoire, se traduit dans toute l’œuvre d’Assia Djebar par un mélange constant entre projet autobiographique et projet historique, mélange dans lequel l’intertextualité, l’intratextualité et la mémoire (individuelle et collective) jouent un rôle primordial. C’est cela Hédi Abdel-Jaouad appelle la pratique de « l’autobiographie au pluriel »(Hédi Abdel-Jaouad, « L’amour, la fantasia : Autobiography as Fiction, » CELFAN Review 7. 1-2, 1987-88) : 25-29). Nous avons choisi ici de n’aborder l’aspect autobiographique de l’œuvre que de manière oblique, par le biais d’une étude sur la récriture de l’histoire à travers le travail de la « mémoire qui fermente » (L’amour, 63). Ainsi que l’indique Hafid Gafaïti, « [l]a production de Djebar est éclairée par le principe que l’histoire du sujet est un texte inscrit dans le champ général de l’Histoire. … le « je » est porteur d’une expression et d’un message qui ne sont pas seulement personnels mais collectifs » (« Ecriture autobiographique dans l’œuvre d’Assia Djebar : L’Amour, la fantasia, » Itinéraires et contacts de cultures 13.1, 1991 : 95-101 ; 96-97).
[…]
Tout au long de L’Amour, la fantasia, Assia Djebar établit une relation en palimpseste entre la récriture des archives de la colonisation française et l’utilisation de la tradition orale féminine, afin de reconstituer des événements datant du siècle dernier. Historienne de formation, elle utilise des documents d’archives qui forment la base historique de sa reconstitution du passé. La plupart de ces archives sont des rapports militaires ou des lettres d’officiers français. Par exemple, sur les trente-sept descriptions de la prise d’Alger en 1830, trente-deux sont en français ; deux seulement en arabe (et toutes furent écrites des hommes) (L’Amour 55). Ces documents ne sont ni objectifs ni factuels ; loin d’être le reflet de la vérité historique, ils véhiculent un imaginaire et une idéologie coloniale qui obscurcissent la réalité algérienne autant qu’ils la révèlent. […]
Pour les peuples dont l’histoire a été effacée, cette récriture prend une dimension particulièrement urgente. Comme l’a montré Françoise Lionnet dans son livre Autobiographical Voices. Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (p. 25, ma traduction), les femmes venant du pays colonisés « ressentent le besoin de retrouver leur passé, de retracer une généalogie qui leur permettra de vivre dans le présent, de redécouvrir les histoires occultées par l’Histoire » C’est précisément ce genre de récriture auquel se livre Assia Djebar.
Hafid Gafaiti, “Assia Djebar ou l’Autobiographie Plurielle”, Itinéraires et contacts de cultures, Paris, L’Harmattan et Université Paris 13, 1° semestre 1999. (Texas Tech University)
[…] l’apport décisif de Djebar à réflexion sur la relation entre l’autobiographie et la situation postcoloniale consiste dans le rapport que, dans le contexte de la littérature francophone et de la réalité de l’Algérie indépendante, par son oeuvre, progressivement, la femme établit avec l’écriture elle-même.
En effet, si dans le champ socio-culturel constituent le référent des textes de Djebar, la tradition orale est importante, particulièrement dans l’expérience féminine, le texte a néanmoins une valeur fondatrice. Dans la culture arabo-musulmane, dès la naissance, le corps est fait texte. Le passage du texte sacré dans le corps se fait par le rituel consistant à faire boire au nouveau-né l’eau versée dans le bol dans lequel un verset coranique a été écrit auparavant avec de l’encre faite à base de plantes marécageuses.
Katherine Gracki, “The Algerian Quartet, the Blood of Writing” World Literature Today, 70 (Autumn 1996).
“Resisting Silence in Arab Women’s Autobiographies”, Magda M. Al-Nowaihi, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 33, no. 4 (November 2001): 477 - 502.
Fadwa Tuqan, Assia Djebar, and Latifa al-Zayyat are three Arab women who are well known for their literary and artistic creativity, as well as for their political activism.
[…]
On the surface, an autobiography appears to be a celebration of the achievements and accomplishments of its writer, an act of narcissism announcing that one’s character and life are worthy of sharing with the world. Yet an honest autobiography inevitably exposes aspects of one’s life and character that are not entirely praiseworthy and often becomes an exploration of vulnerability and loss.
In other words, each of these women sees writing, and writing specifically and unabashedly about the self, as an extremely significant process that allows them to examine, interrogate, and attempt to bring about change. It is both a private activity crucial for analyzing, understanding, and maybe even reinventing the self, and a public activity that enables them to interact with and re-create the world around them. Yet they also understand writing – and, more specifically, writing an autobiography – as a relinquishing of power. The arbiter, the silent partner of the contract – that is, the reader and the critic – assumes certain privileges of power because, as Michel Foucault suggests, “the site of confession or self-exposure dramatically reverses power’s conventional dynamics: the one who remains silent and who listens exerts power over the one who speaks.”
Similarly, a staged self-silencing may be an extremely powerful form of public opposition, denoting rejection and even rebellion. In writing these autobiographical works, the authors are speaking out against their silence and against the forces and mechanisms that produced it, but they are also acknowledging its power by incorporating certain silences in their writing and reproducing their narrative voices as sites of contradiction and ambivalence.
Although the general silencing of women appears to be an almost universal phenomenon, cutting across different periods and places, it is nevertheless a phenomenon that needs to be dealt with contextually. (p. 479)
Djebar brings up an additional dilemma in these sections: how to speak on behalf of others without rendering them even more voiceless. She is extremely sensitive to the fact that the writing of history itself is often responsible for covering up the plight of the mute victims of the past, and she is anxious about falling into the same trap herself. In addition to relying heavily on contemporaneous documents, she constantly and consistently problematizes her own role as historian and draws our attention to her positionality vis-à-vis the events she is narrating. In the following quotation, for example, her intervention is made patently clear to the reader, whom she gently invites to direct his or her attention to other onlookers who will be severely affected by the events being played out, but whom no historian has bothered to write, or maybe even wonder, about:
“As this day dawns when the two sides will come face to face, what are the women of the town saying to each other? What dreams of romance are lit in their hearts or are extinguished forever, as they gaze on the proud fleet tracing the figures of the mysterious ballet?…I muse on this brief respite; I slip into the antechamber of this recent past, like an importunate visitor, removing my sandals according to the accustomed ritual, holding my breath in any attempt to overhear everything.”
But Djebar is well aware that it is not only the now long dead and forgotten victims of France who are ‘bereft of voices’, but also those many living women who are victims of poverty, ignorance, and patriarchy, and whom she curiously labels “voices from the past” (italics mine). As one of these women puts it, “Alas! We can’t read or write. We don’t leave any accounts of what we lived through and all we suffered!”
« Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet: A Study in Fragmented Autobiography » Mildred Mortimer in Research in African Literature, Vol. 28, Number 2, 2000. Lien : www.iupjournals.org/ral/ral28-2.html The day that Assia Djebar's father, a teacher in the French colonial educational system, first escorted his daughter to school, he set her on a bilingual and bicultural journey that resulted in her development as an artist and an intellectual. Djebar recalls the scene in L'amour, la fantasia: “Fillette arabe allant pour la première fois à l'école, un matin d'automne, main dans la main du père” (11) “A little Arab girl walking to school for the first time, one autumn morning, hand in hand with her father” (3). More than four decades after the event, Djebar considers her personal experience an ambiguous one. Liberated from the female enclosure of her Algerian sisters, she reached maturity haunted by the weight of exile. Other Maghrebian writers have acknowledged the same ambiguity vis-à-vis the French colonial school. In Le polygone étoilé, Kateb Yacine equates his educational experience with being thrust into “la gueule du loup” “the jaws of the wolf” (181). Abdelkébir Khatibi uses autobiographical fragments combined with poetry and parable in La mémoire tatouée to express his uneasy alliance with the French language and culture. Yet Djebar's experience, in contrast to theirs, is distinctly gendered. She came to believe that the process of Western acculturation, resulting in her mastery of the colonizer's language and access to public space, excluded her from most, if not all, aspects of traditional woman's world. The sentiment of exclusion led Djebar to her “Quatuor algérien,” a writing project to reestablish links with the maternal world from which she felt distanced--but in fact a realm she never lost--when she first grasped her father's hand to walk with him to school. To date, three of the four projected volumes of the Algerian quartet have appeared: L'amour, la fantasia (1985), Ombre sultane (1987), and Vaste est la prison (1995). All three are polyphonic texts that combine personal and collective memory. The first and third juxtapose autobiographical fragments with Algerian history; the second replaces history with myth, recalling the legendary Sheherazade. By delving into her individual and collective past, Djebar adds her own voice to those of her maternal ancestors, both historical and legendary.
“Autographie et Je/jeux d’espace, Architecture de l’imaginaire dans le Quatuor d’Assia Djebar” Clarisse Zimra, Postcolonialism & Autobiographie, Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe (eds.) Atlanta-Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998: 117-8.
Il semblerait que Fantasia nous mette à moisir sur de fausses pistes qui n’aboutissent point, proposant aussi d’autres modèles de lecture que l’auteur, dans ces entretiens étalés sur deux longues années (1990-92), n’a point retenus. Hommage ambigu à la virilité équestre et, pour la femme, meurtrière, des guerriers d’autrefois, Fantasia commence, on le sait, par mettre en exergue Adorno et Beethoven, la musique et l’esthétique, offrant tour à tour l’entrelacs de voix coupé par le jaillissement du cri (le cri de la mort dans le cri de l’amour, comme le souligne l’emprunt à Fromentin) ; le thrène des combattantes où les silences des horreurs non-dites syncopent le rythme, traduction textuelle d’un désespoir hoquetant de rage, voire toutes les « notations » musicales en accentuant le caractère polyphonique.
(Note de bas de page: L’armature musicale de l’imaginaire du quatuor est à relever par quelqu’un qui possèderait à la fois de solides bases de composition occidentale et une non moins solide connaissance de la musique traditionnelle algérienne, Djebar ayant d’une part étudié le piano, et de l’autre poursuivi tout un grand projet d’ethnomusicologie lorsqu’elle enseignait à l’université d’Alger ; intérêt qui transparaît dans Femmes d’Alger, anime le projet de film sur Fadhma A.M. Amrouche, et donne son titre à la dernière longue œuvre, Vaste est la prison, vers emprunté à une chanson berbère.)
« A Global Feminist Travels, Assia Djebar and Fantasia », Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2003.
Scholars and critics have hailed Assia Djebar’s Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade (1985) as a successful bridge between Western feminism and the experiences and philosophies of women living beyond the United States and Europe. Soheila Ghaussy’s enthusiastic response to the text celebrates Djebar’s blend of Western and French feminisms and her careful attention to the politics and lives of Arab women: « Djebar’s écriture féminine re(dis)covers woman ; it voices the protest of Arab women, it escapes the confines of the harem, it gives body to the oral accounts of women, it inscribes woman’s unspoken name » (1994, 461). By means of a complex blending of genres and voices, Djebar’s novel successfully represents what was formerly silenced and absent from representation, the participation of Algerian women in resistance struggles against the French colonization of Algeria, and politicizes the everyday experiences of Algerian women in their global and historical contexts. Ghaussy and other critics such as Mildred Mortimer (1997), Anne Donadey (1993, 1996, 2000), and Mary Jean Green (1993), among others, analyze the complexity and theoretical sophistication of Fantasia that they argue results in its successful representation of Algerian women.
Fantasia’s ambitious project borrows strategies from a variety of genres to create a multifaceted, multilayered, multivocal text. The genre that most critics have overlooked but that nonetheless shapes the political and textual achievement of Fantasia is travel writing. Quoting nineteenth-century French travel accounts, invoking and reworking travel genre tropes, including Orientalist representations of harems and veiled women, and representing Algeria as a « contact zone » (Pratt, 1992) where French colonial and Algerian cultures, languages, and people clash. Djebar uses travel writing strategies to promote a global feminist political and social message.
Djebar’s use of travel writing answers critic Caren Kaplans call for the necessity of inventing « out-law genres » to express the experience of marginalized women (1992, 136).
[…]
Travel serves as a powerful tool for Djebar, operating as a trope for her recovery of Algerian women’s history, which involves literal and metaphorical journeys through colonial archives, Algeria’s battle-scarred countryside, and through her own lived experience of her homeland as both colonized and newly independent. Travel and travel writing also provide Djebar with a set of generic conventions that she can exploit and manipulate to replace texts that produce Algeria as a commodity with a nuanced and complex portrait that emphasizes individual and national agency.
Ultimately, travel functions as a model for global feminist praxis for Djebar ; her journeys to collect and represent women’s voices allow them to be heard and to become shapers of discourse and agents of social and political change. The result is a dynamic exchange as Djebar does not position herself merely as a translator or scribe for other, silenced women, but illustrates the process whereby their stories inform her own search for voice and self. Representation becomes a deliberately political act for Djebar, as she insists on difference and multiplicity as the necessary starting point for coalition, community, and ultimately, for political and social action. Travel functions as a crucial strategy to connect women with each other and with historical and present-day strategies of resistance.
“Père-fille: écriture et interdit dans l’autobiographie d’Assia Djebar” Anna Rocca in Patriarcat et écritures de femme du Maghreb, 2004
Assia Djebar a souligné à maintes reprises son impossibilité à exprimer les mots de l’amour dans une langue étrangère impose par le colonisateur. Toutefois, il y a, outre la langue, un autre élément à considérer: le rôle du père dans l’éducation de sa fille et, en particulier, le rôle du père en tant qu’instituteur arabe qui enseigne le français et s’oppose à la violence de la colonisation.
Dans le texte de la fille, la figure du père-juste domine toutes les autres, mais en même temps se confond avec celle du père-loi. En tant que père-juste, il est le sauveur, celui qui la libère du harem en la faisant étudier. Il est aussi le guide, le maître, en raison de l’intégrité que lui confère son emploi d’instituteur arabe en français, langue que la narratrice apprend comme une arme contre le colonisateur dans une certaine mesure. En tant que père-loi et malgré sa modernité, il est souvent identifié par la fille à un père-interdit qui la protégé du regard du colonisateur et s’occupe de sa moralité en accord avec les règles plus traditionnelles de la société patriarcale arabe. Dans ce cas, il se constitue en tant que figure limite: limite soit à l’expression de ses émotions, soit à une écriture amoureuse.
[…]
La première lettre amoureuse, reçue par la narratrice, déchirée par le père, puis reconstituée par elle-même, symbolise la lutte contre l’ombre du pouvoir patriarcal et de l’interdit qui transcende le père réel et est assimilé par la fille dès sa naissance. En même temps, en acceptant la punition de son père, la narratrice comprend le danger d’une écriture amoureuse et commence à écrire loin du “je”, sans dévoiler aucune émotion personnelle.
[…]
Voilà que l’incapacité à exprimer des mots d’amour en français se lie indissolublement à la problématique d’une écriture autobiographique, puisque l’écriture en soi renvoie toujours à la vie personnelle, ainsi que le souligne l’auteur,
“… even though I thought I was writing as far away from my own self as possible, my fiction had suddenly caught up with me. I could not help it. My life as a woman tripped me up. […] I understood that writing always brings one back to oneself, to that inner core or heart, as you justly call it, I felt as if… as if I was exposing myself doubly. First, because as an Algerian, one living – or so it seemed – as a Westerner, I was somewhat exposed already. Second, because writing about my innermost self felt like exposing myself further: I more or less chose silence. As if I could not get past that inner core, as if… to write was to commit suicide.” (“Afterword”, in Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, interview with Clarisse Zimra, p. 184)
Clarisse Zimra, « Le Quatuor ou le Cadastre de l’imaginaire », Nomade entre les murs, 2005 Une construction en dédoublement-redoublement se retrouve dans L’amour, la fantasia, soulignée très clairement, cette fois, dans l’agencement des chapitres, l’ordre dans lequel ils se dévident (comme un écheveau), et le quinconce intercalaire de leurs titres. Entrelacée dans un effet de miroir, chaque partie alterne italiques et chiffres romains dans la proportion exactement inversée les unes des autres. Si chaque détail en rappelle un autre, chaque trait en annonce un autre, c’est pour mieux souligner que leur auteur a souvent conseillé à ses lecteurs de plonger dans l’oeuvre au gré de leur fantaisie. En effet, « la première partie du premier livre (L’amour, la fantasia) peut aussi bien se lire le long de la première partie du deuxième livre (Ombre sultane), qu’amener la deuxième partie du premier livre (L’amour, la fantasia) » disait-elle encore à Yale. Si bien qu’à parcourir ce Quatuor « comme un édifice à découvrir », rien n’empêche de flâner en l’ouvrant à la page qu’on voudra, pour y découvrir un subtil jeu de strates.
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