Two Major Francophone Women Writers, Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar: A Thematic Study of Their Works (review)

2002 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-195
Author(s):  
Anne Donadey
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Leila Sebbar

scholarly journals In the Father’s House: Language and Violence in the Work of Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Annedith Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Colonial Education ◽  
Leila Sebbar ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Fathers And Daughters ◽  
Personal Value ◽  
Simple Tool ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Relationship

This essay examines autobiographical writing by two women who grew up in colonial Algeria; it considers how the relationship between fathers and daughters is marked by linguistic conflict. For each of these writers, language is not a simple tool, but instead a problematic inheritance that shapes her world and her relationship with her father. Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar, who were children in colonial Algeria of the late 1940s and early 1950s, examine their relationships to Arabic and French in terms of their relationships with their families and in particular with their schoolteacher fathers. The fathers, who benefitted from French colonial education, fail to understand the different risks inherent for their daughters in transgressing conservative community and linguistic boundaries. Each writer, even as she acknowledges the benefits of the colonizer’s language, also describes the language as a scene of violent trauma for which she holds her father responsible. With language and paternal love so tightly entwined, this essay argues that even in highly politicized colonial contexts, the national value of a language can only be understood if the familial and personal value of the language is also taken into account.

scholarly journals The Teacher as Performer and Activist in Assia Djebar’s “La femme en morceaux”

1970 ◽  
pp. 40-47
Author(s):  
Christa Jones
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Francophone Literature ◽  
Assia Djebar ◽  
The Political ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
Societal Issues ◽  
Political Stance

Francophone literature from the Maghreb has been characterized as littérature d’urgence by Maghrebian novelists and critics alike, a term that has also been used by Assia Djebar (Bonn & Boualit, 1999; Chaulet-Achour, 1998; Djebar & Trouillet, 2006). In Sartrian terms, it is a littérature engagée, writing that takes a political stance by addressing a variety of critical societal issues, including female oppression, patriarchy, education, religion, terrorism, mono-versus multi-linguism, and violence – in this case the murder of a French teacher in 1990s Algeria. In keeping with postcolonial theory, it is also a literature of resistance and rebellion by taking up the cause of Arab women writers, many of whom have fought to make themselves heard in what remain largely patriarchal societies that view women writers with suspicion (Ireland, 2001; Segarra, 1997; Morsly & Mernissi, 1994). I propose to explore the political, societal, and educational stances played out in “La femme en morceaux” (1996), a piece of Assia Djebar’s collection of short stories titled Oran, Langue Morte.

Lecture empathique et trauma de la guerre d’Algérie chez Assia Djebar, Boualem Sansal et Leila Sebbar

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 49-74
Author(s):  
Kirsten Husung
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
The Other ◽  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Leila Sebbar ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Imaginative Resistance ◽  
Algerian War Of Independence ◽  
Moral Convictions

This article analyses the narrative processes and literary strategies that seek to engender the reader’s empathy for the main characters in three Francophone texts that depict the trauma of the Algerian War of independence. Each text starts from a real event by intertwining historical facts and the present with fiction, allowing for a better understanding of the postcolonial situation. These expectations are reinforced by Djebar’s and Sansal’s paratexts. Drawing on the theories of Suzanne Keen and Fritz Breithaupt empathy can especially be favoured by internal focalization, the characters’ empathic interpersonal relationships as well as polyphony. The imaginative construction of the other is emphasized as necessary, while the detailed description of historical facts may rather provoke feelings of pity. A fortiori, empathy can decline or be blocked in the passages, which go against the moral convictions of the reader. This imaginative resistance is due to the fact that these passages concern reality and not fiction

Revolutionary Memoirs: Assia Djebar and Latifa al-Zayyat

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tahia Abdel Nasser
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Algerian War Of Independence ◽  
National Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Nation

This chapter focuses on the autobiographical novels and memoirs of two important twentieth-century Arab women writers who provide models for the adaptation of the genre in colonial and postcolonial cultures: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade and Nowhere in My Father’s House, two Francophone autobiographical novels by Algerian writer Assia Djebar, and The Search: Personal Papers, a memoir in Arabic by Egyptian writer Latifa al-Zayyat. By framing autobiographical production in anticolonial national movements, Djebar and al-Zayyat rework the genre to comment on postcolonial cultures. Both writers contest colonial formations and offer revolutionary representations of solitude in the postcolonial nation: the Francophone Algerian writer’s challenge to the French archive of the Algerian War of Independence and the Egyptian writer’s reexamination of national culture and the history of the 1940s student movement. In the chapter, solitude is read as an emancipatory opportunity when the writers rethink the language of the new nation through autobiography.

Imprisonment, freedom, and literary opacity in the work of Nawal El Saadawi and Assia Djebar

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-187
Author(s):  
Jane Hiddleston
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Direct Form ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
Colonial Oppression ◽  
The Right

In her astute study of contemporary Arab women writers, Anastasia Valassopoulos begins by noting the pitfalls of much existing criticism of writers such as El Saadawi and Djebar in the West. Citing Amal Amireh’s article on the fraught history of the reception of El Saadawi in Egypt and in Europe, Valassopoulos comments that Arab women’s literature tends to be seen as ‘documentary’, and this obscures the ‘core issue of representation’ as it is explored and challenged by women writers. In the face of this omission, the present article explores a selection of works by El Saadawi and Djebar from an aesthetic perspective. El Saadawi and Djebar use literary writing as a means to escape the constraints placed upon them by patriarchy, as well as by colonialism, and uphold creativity and poetry as a possible release from imprisonment. This article also uses Glissant’s and Bhabha’s concepts of literary opacity and the right to narrate as a partial framework for a reading of the relation between writing, freedom and aesthetic form in the works of El Saadawi and Djebar. El Saadawi and Djebar purposefully deploy a form of self-effacement, both in their autobiographical representations and in their portraits of female characters, also akin to Trinh Minh-ha’s strategy in Woman, Native, Other. Minh-ha’s dissemination of the writing voice, and the affirmation of collective solidarity between multiple but internally fragmentary feminist positions, serves, then, as a further theoretical backdrop for El Saadawi’s and Djebar’s use of opacity and the right to narrate as tools in an active feminist resistance to sexist and racist discourses. Both El Saadawi and Djebar use their writing to conceive women’s liberation from various forms of imprisonment, and they figure women’s fractured, convoluted and at times opaque self-expression as a direct form of resistance to both patriarchal and colonial oppression.

scholarly journals Decolonising Language: Towards a New Feminist Politics of Translation in the Work of Arab Women Writers, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Nawal al Sadawim, and Assia Djebar

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Nuha Ahmad Baaqeel
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Wide Field ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
Relative Lack ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
The Social

This paper argues that the Anglophone academy’s relative lack of appraisal of Ahlam Mosteghanemi as an Arab woman writer is not incidental. I assert that, for many Arab women writers, authorship is strategic engagement; in other words, they develop strategies that bring together formal experimentation with the social effectivity of authorship. In an attempt to present fully the aforementioned complexities at hand, this paper compares Mosteghanemi’s work with that of two other eminent women writers from the Arab world: Egyptian women’s rights activist and novelist, Nawal al Sadawi, and Algerian writer and historian, Assia Djebar. This comparative analysis is structured into three sections that take up the questions of the politics of literary form, language and decolonisation, and finally, translation. In the critical reception of their work outside their region, Arab women writers all too frequently find themselves caught up in the dynamics of a hegemonic Eurocentric feminism that already constructs them as new representatives of an Orient, one that further stubbornly refuses to dissolve under the action of rigorous critique. I argue that the underwhelming international reception to Mosteghanemi’s writing serves as a reminder that colonialism remains real, even in a world of independent nations, while decolonisation remains on the theoretical horizon in the postcolonial world. It is these two interrelated points that map the wide field of effectivity that is brought into play in the reception of Mosteghanemi as a writer.

scholarly journals Violência, gênero e poder na literatura de Assia Djebar e Leïla Sebbar

2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-82
Author(s):  
Vera Lucia Soares
Keyword(s):  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Leila Sebbar

Este artigo estuda as representações da relação entre violência, gênero e poder na escrita literária de Assia Djebar e Leïla Sebbar, que desconstroem a imagem de fanatismo e barbárie que o Ocidente faz do Oriente árabe-muçulmano.

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