(1936- ) novelist, playwright, filmmaker, short-story writer
An Algerian writing in French, Djebar has produced compelling novels that express Arab women’s voices in the postcolonial world. She launched her writing career with the acclaimed novel, La Soif (1957; published in English as The Mischief, 1958). She and her ex-husband, Walid Garn, wrote a play, Rouge l’aube (1969) (Red Dawn), about the Algerian war of independence. During the 1960s, Djebar taught history at the University of Algiers. In the 1970s, she embarked on a filmmaking career, in part to reach Algerian women who could not read her work in French, but she returned to fiction writing in the 1980s.
Her intense, lyrical, often sensual prose articulates the voices of Arab women, as individuals and as members of a community with a specific political history. In Far from Medina (trans. 1994; originally published as Loin de Medine: filles d’Ismael, 1991), she tells of the participation of Muslim women in the first days of Islam. Her rich, intricate historical novel, L’amour, la fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, 1993), tells the history of Algeria from the French colonial onslaught in 1830 to the war of independence, ending in 1961.
Djebar alternates between formal French accounts and oral histories that are based on her field interviews in Arabic with Algerian women who participated in the independence struggle but whose voices are not included in any official history. Djebar conceived the story as part of a quartet that includes its prequel novel, Ombre Sultane (1987; A Sister to Scheherazade, 1993). “If Algerian Woman in all her complexity and historical reality is the protagonist of Assia Djebar’s most ambitious and original work of fiction,” writes her translator Dorothy S. Blair in the introduction to Fantasia, “this is also an attempt to wrest her own identity as an Algerian woman from the warring strands of her Arabo-Berber origins and her Franco-European education.”
Djebar went to primary school in Algeria, attended college in France, and lives in Paris and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she directs the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Louisiana State University. She won the Venice Bi-ennale Critics Prize for her film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1979), Prix Maurice Maeterlinck (1995), Neustadt Prize for Contributions to World Literature (1996), and the Yource-nar Prize (1997).
Other Works by Assia Djebar
Algerian White. Translated by Marjolijin De Jager and David Kelley. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
So Vast the Prison. Translated by Betsy Wing. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.
Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. Translated by Marjolijin De Jager. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
Works about Assia Djebar
Merini, Rafika. Two Major Francophone Women Writers: Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar: A Thematic Study of Their Works. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
Mortimer, Mildred P. Journeys Through the French African Novel. Westport, Conn.: Heinemann, 1990.
Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001.
