from Research in African Literatures Volume 28, Number 2

Assia Djebar's Algerian Quartet: A Study in Fragmented Autobiography

Mildred Mortimer

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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 going to school for the first time, walking 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.

With the publication of L'amour, la fantasia, the novelist announced an autobiographical project: "Dans mes premiers livres, j'avançais voilée. Dans le quatuor je me montre" 'In my first books, I went veiled. In the quartet, I expose myself' (Gardenal 40). Yet initial traces of her narrative "unveiling" had already appeared in Les alouettes naïves (1967), a novel depicting the sexual and political awakening of a young woman during the Algerian war. Reflecting upon the earlier text, Djebar has acknowledged her uneasiness with self-representation at the time: "J'y ai intégré un tel apport autobiographique que cela m'a gênée comme femme arabe" 'I had included such an autobiographical component that it bothered me as an Arab woman' (Dossier 75).

The novelist comes to autobiography fully aware that subjectivity in life and fiction are transgressions in Algerian culture. Unlike Western civilization which, Foucault reminds us in his Histoire de la sexualité, delights in the public airing of all private matters--desires, sins, suffering--Islamic culture is bound to the non-dire, or unspoken, in other words, to silence; it prohibits personal disclosure. If a Muslim woman is to be neither seen nor heard in public and divulges private matters, revealing in public the secret world neither men nor women should ever reveal, she is, in effect, involved in a double transgression.¹ If the female writer dares to preserve for posterity the very secrets not be revealed in public, is she not committing a triple transgression? As a woman writer of the Arab world, a novelist whose quest for self-definition encompasses self-revelation, Djebar is forced to come to grips with the thorny issue of the non-dire.

Uneasiness with autobiography led Djebar to autofiction and collective autobiography. In L'amour, la fantasia, she interweaves autobiographical fragments with other strands of narrative (colonial history, oral narrative, lyric poetry), using polyphonic discourse to blur the boundaries between fiction and experience. And she widens the scope of autobiography to embrace the collective voice, inserting her discourse within the community of Algerian women.² Autobiography becomes Djebar's way back to the cherished maternal world of her past, where she seeks healing and reconciliation for a self fragmented by the colonial experience. At the same time, her writer's pen allows Algerian women's muted voice and veiled presence to emerge into public space.

Because the writer's own experience of Western acculturation gave her mastery of the colonizer's language as well as access to public space (neither of which were available to most Algerian women of her generation), she foregrounds language and space in the three texts. Djebar uses French, the colonial language, to chart her own life story and to recover--via translation--her oral tradition, the maternal legacy of song, legend, and women's stories. And she reinterprets traditional female space so that it is no longer controlled by the male patriarchal gaze but is transformed instead into the locus of relationships.³ Finally, her appropriation of language and space leads to a confrontation with two patriarchal discourses, one French, the other Maghrebian. On one hand, the novelist explores French colonial archives in order to rewrite the history of France's conquest of Algeria by reinserting women into the pages of history. On the other hand, she challenges the Muslim patriarch's dominating gaze so as to empower Algerian women and restore their subjectivity. However, Djebar's distinct approach to self-representation raises several questions: Does the autobiographical process comfort and heal the fragmented narrating self? Does it effectively challenge patriarchal structures and ideology or merely create nostalgia for a lost Eden in which women are the jealous guardians of tradition?⁴ In other words, does Djebar achieve her goals?

Before beginning the quartet, Djebar, trained as a historian, undertook an oral history project that involved probing Algerian women's collective memory. In the mid-1970s, she interviewed women in her native region of Cherchell who had participated in the independence struggle. The majority had been young women during the war, facing danger and hardship with male soldiers in the maquis.⁵ Djebar used selections of their narratives in L'amour, la fantasia, juxtaposing women's oral history of the Algerian war with historical accounts of the French conquest of Algeria taken from French archives.⁶ As scribe and translator of oral history, she writes: "Dire à mon tour. Transmettre ce qui a été dit, puis écrit" (187) 'It is now my turn to tell a tale. To hand on words that were spoken, then written down' (164). Through her efforts, rural women whose contribution to the independence struggle had been overlooked, forgotten, or simply not known emerge as active participants in the Algerian war.

By combining "herstory" (oral narrative) with "history" (colonial military and administration reports, memoirs, correspondence), Djebar links kalaam, "word" in Arabic, to écriture, "writing" in French, expressing the relationship between colonized and colonizer in terms of language and gender. The oral narrative is female and Arabic (or Berber); the written narrative is male and French.⁷ Yet, as Soheila Ghaussy aptly notes, by transcribing into French those conversations spoken or imagined to be spoken in Arabic (or occasionally in Berber), she not only uses her acquired paternal language to give voice to Algeria's maternal tongues, but appropriates men's instrument of writing to tell women's stories, thereby blurring the boundaries of the spoken and the written (458). An Arabic speaker who never learned her ancestral Berber language, Djebar acknowledges two maternal languages: Arabic, spoken in the city of Cherchell where she was born, and Berber, spoken in the neighboring rural region of Mont Chenoua.

In L'amour, la fantasia, Djebar links her personal quest for woman's oral narrative to her historical search for occulted written text, a project Winifred Woodhull considers the significant counterpoint to colonial violence (82). For example, as historian, Djebar uncovers the barbarous act of enfumade. In 1845, the French military officer Pélessier set fire to caves in the vicinity of her native Cherchell, smothering to death 1500 rebellious Berber men, women, and children. Revealing a macabre respect for detail, Pélissier, in the administrative report Djebar finds more than a century later, explains how he meticulously carried out a body count, forcing his men to extract all the corpses from the cave. Rejecting the role of objective historian, Djebar describes the incident with subjectivity and emotion, affirming her ties to the victims. Their agony is hers:

Pélissier, l'intercesseur de cette mort longue, pour mille cinq cents cadavres sous El Kantara, avec leurs troupeaux bêlant indéfiniment au trépas, me tend son rapport et je reçois ce palimpseste pour y inscrire à mon tour la passion calcinée des ancêtres. (93; emphasis added)

Pélissier, speaking on behalf of this long drawn-out agony, on behalf of fifteen hundred corpses buried beneath El-Kantara, with their flocks unceasingly bleating at death, hands me his report and I accept this palimsest on which I now inscribe the charred passion of my ancestors. (79; emphasis added)

Here the search for occulted historical truth, forcing the historian to delve into Algerian collective memory, and the individual identity quest, inciting the writer to probe personal memory, come together. As Pélissier's soldiers once dragged out the bodies, Djebar now excavates the elements of the female self, buried under colonial and patriarchal myths. More than a century after the French military commanders Pélissier and Saint-Arnaud had defeated the Berber tribes, Djebar, a descendant of those buried in the caves, returns to the site in the attempt to metaphorically bring to light Algerian women's experience--her own and those of her Algerian sisters. This act of unearthing hidden history compels her to write near the end of her text: "Je suis née en dix-huit cent quarante-deux, lorsque le commandant de Saint-Arnaud vient détruire la zaouia des Beni Ménacer, ma tribu d'origine . . ." (243) 'The date of my birth is eighteen hundred and forty-two, the year when General Saint-Arnaud arrives to burn down the zaouia of the Beni Menacer, the tribe from which I am descended . . .' (217).

By interweaving autobiographical fragments with historical accounts of the French conquest and oral history of the Algerian revolution, Djebar contextualizes her own life story within the framework of her nation's history: the evolution of a Third World woman writer from childhood in colonial Algeria, when she was first given a pen, to adulthood during the independence struggle, when she began to exercise the craft of writing. The resulting text attests to the violence of two eras: the French conquest of Algeria, 1830-71, introducing colonial occupation; the Algerian Revolution, 1954-62, bringing it to a close. Djebar captures the brutality of the first period by rereading colonial archives and that of the second by recording Algerian women's voices.

In neither political struggle is woman a passive bystander or an odalisque in a harem. French colonial officers' reports of 1830 attest to her presence on the battlefield, and taped interviews of the 1970s confirm her participation in the liberation struggle. Examining written and oral accounts to uncover hidden truth and forgotten events, Djebar reconstructs incidents of terror and brutality, never flinching from the violence. For example, describing two women whose deaths were graphically depicted in Baron Barchou's memoirs, she writes: "Je recueille scrupuleusement l'image . . ." (29) 'I scrupulously record the image . . .' (19), placing herself on the battlefield with the dead and dying. As Patricia Geesey notes, Djebar reads Algerian woman's body metonymically. Fallen in battle, she represents the conquered Algerian nation, dismembered and then distributed as trophies for French soldiers and colonists (163).

Given the legacy of colonial violence, it is not surprising that Djebar approaches the colonizer's language with ambivalence. Although French represents personal liberation for the writer trained in the colonial school, it carries the weight of repression for the Algerian nation defeated in 1830 and subsequently subjected to 132 years of French colonial rule. Clearly, she appropriates la langue adverse not only to recuperate the maternal world and forge her personal links to it, but to inscribe the suffering and injustice inflicted upon Algerians by the colonial conquest. She concludes: "Cette langue était autrefois sarcophage des miens; je la porte aujourd'hui comme un messager transporterait le pli fermé ordonnant sa condamnation au silence, ou au cachot" (241) 'This language was formerly used to entomb my people; when I write it today I feel like the messenger of old, who bore a sealed missive which might sentence him to death or to the dungeon' (215)

In contrast to L'amour, la fantasia, in which interwoven strands of history and autobiography allow the narrator to examine her own relationship to Algeria's past, Ombre sultane combines a first- and second-person narrative of parallel lives and female bonding, creating links between autobiography and fictional narrative. In this study, Isma, an emancipated Algerian woman who has found her own voice and begun to tell her own story, helps liberate her traditional sister, Hajila, using the latter's revolt as support in her own quest for self-understanding. Djebar reminds her readers that Sheherazade, storyteller of the Arabian Nights, needs the complicity of her sister Dinarzade, the voice under the bed announcing each dawn, to succeed in telling tales so inventive that the Sultan spares her life. The novelist reconfigures the legendary complicity between sisters in the relationship between Isma, the autobiographical self, and Hajila, the fictional self.

Having foregrounded history and language in L'amour, la fantasia, Djebar highlights space in Ombre sultane. The text is structured in large measure by an opposition between open liberating space and confined enclosures. Hajila, cloistered and veiled, forms a new relationship to the world when she traverses spatial boundaries. She escapes her confining kitchen to discover the "frémissements du dehors" (94) 'thrill of the outdoors' (85), to physically encounter the outer visible tangible world from which she has been excluded by traditional patriarchy. Experiencing freedom by venturing unveiled into the sunshine in Algiers, Hajila cannot resume her former passive role. Moreover, with the liberty to circulate in new space comes the progressive discovery of language. Her words are recorded by Isma, who captures each scene and interprets each stage of Hajila's trajectory, with its physical and psychological dimensions. Yet once Isma realizes that she and her cloistered sisters are all constrained by the patriarchal order and that the dialogue between men and women--fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters--founders because of the imbalance of power within patriarchal social structure, she is able to speak with Hajila, not merely write for her.

Isma's recognition of the constraints upon her comes in the form of memory as she recalls a confrontation with her father when she was barely an adolescent. Accompanied by a young male cousin to a fair in one of the European quarters of her town, they take a ride on one of the fair's attractions, a huge metal swing. Experiencing an exhilarating feeling of weightlessness as she is lifted into the air, the young girl stands up, her pleated skirt whirling around her bare legs. At that very moment, her father emerges from the crowd to take her home. He is filled with rage because "sa fille, sa propre fille, habillée d'une jupe courte, puisse, au-dessus des regards des hommes, montrer ses jambes!" (147-48) 'his daughter, his own daughter, dressed in a short skirt, could show her legs to all those men staring up at her, down below!' (136). By supporting a young woman's right to education, the father frees his daughter from some, but certainly not all, of Algerian society's conventions. The ambiguous position of the indigenous schoolteacher in colonial Algeria is all too evident. On the one hand, he assumes the role of progressive educator, a catalyst for social change; on the other hand, he is still capable of collaborating with the Muslim patriarchal order. Bringing to mind the scene of her painful humiliation, Isma states: "Ce jour-là, je m'exilai de l'enfance; les mots paternels m'avaient projetée ailleurs, plus haut que la balançoire des forains, ou au plus profond d'un gouffre étrange" (148) 'That day, I left my childhood behind for ever; my father's words had projected me into another world, higher than the fairground swing, or into the depths of a strange abyss' (137).

Thus in the process of speaking for Hajila, Isma articulates her own story. As she recalls memories of her own struggle against social proscriptions that confine woman's body, restrict her physical presence in public space, and support the patriarch's refusal of any other masculine gaze, she now identifies with her traditional sister. Moreover, by responding to the lure of the outdoors--"des frémissements du dehors"--both women incur punishment. Isma, an adventurous adolescent, is ordered by an angry father to take her meals in seclusion. Hajila, a timid newlywed, is beaten by a husband convinced his wife's desire for the outdoors is a cover for marital infidelity.

Whereas Hajila's story is a fictional representation of the woman Djebar might have been had she not pursued a European education, Isma's narrative bears distinctly autobiographical traces. Djebar grew up in Cherchell (which she calls Césarée, alluding to its Roman origins), attended high school in Blida, and completed her education in Algiers and Paris.⁸ By constructing "I" (Isma) and "you" (Hajila), both an autobiographical self and a fictional self, Djebar shows the latter influencing the former; Hajila, the fictional narratee, allows the self-referential narrator to come to terms with her buried past, her hidden self. Isma and Hajila, one existing beyond the pages of the book, the other dwelling exclusively within the text, both express the struggle of the female self to become the subject of her own discourse. Together they dramatize the process that Françoise Lionnet calls the emancipation of the "I" being triggered and actualized by the voice of the "she" taking shape on the page (263). Hence, Isma and Hajila mirror the pact between the legendary sisters Sheherazade and Dinarzade. Isma needs Hajila just as the narrator of the Arabian Nights requires Dinarzade's presence, the muffled voice under the bed that Sheherazade alone will hear and heed.

Bonding between Isma and Hajila occurs in the traditional ritualized space of the hammam, where women bathe together free from the masculine presence. There Isma gives Hajila the key that will allow her to come and go freely from her apartment and with this gesture participates in her liberation. In Djebar's fiction, the Moorish bath is a refuge from patriarchy, a space for female bonding and eventual liberation. The hammam also serves to link her two most recent texts: a scene at the public bath concludes Ombre sultane and opens Vaste est la prison. In the most recent text, Isma, the narrator, recalls an episode when, having accompanied her mother-in-law to the hammam, she overhears the latter's friend say of her husband, "L'ennemi est à la maison!" 'the enemy is at home!' (13). ⁹ 'E'dou, a word the narrator had never before heard applied to one's husband, initiates her narrative quest:

Ce mot, l'e'dou, que je reçus ainsi dans la moiteur de ce vestibule d'où, y débouchant presque nues, les femmes sortaient enveloppés de pied en cap, ce mot d' "ennemi", proféré dans cette chaleur émolliente, entra en moi, torpille étrange; telle une flèche de silence qui transperça le fond de mon coeur trop tendre alors. En vérité, ce simple vocable, acerbe dans sa chair arabe, vrilla indéfiniment le fond de mon âme, et donc la source de mon écriture . . . . (14)

This word 'edou that I thus received in the humid vestibule where women entered practically naked and left covered from head to toe, this word "enemy" uttered in this relaxed heat, struck me, a strange bomb; it was like a silent arrow that pierced the depths of my still tender heart. In truth, this simple word, bitter in its Arabic skin, attacked indefinitely the depths of my soul, and thus the source of my writing . . . . (14)

For the narrator, a frequent visitor to the world of traditional women, but a visitor nonetheless, the Arabic word 'edou resounds ominously, disturbing a tranquil realm: "la langue maternelle m'exhibait ses crocs, inscrivait en moi une fatale amertume . . ." 'the maternal language bared its fangs, inscribing a fateful bitterness upon me . . . ' (15). Isma fears that her husband, like her father, may one day collaborate with the patriarchy, and she is aware that the hammam remains merely a temporary refuge for secluded women living under patriarchal rule.

The text that follows, a first-person narrative that spans the first third of the work, recounts an unconsummated love affair in which narration--the wife's confession to her husband of her desire for another man--results in separation and eventual divorce. Unlike Sheherazade who, by spinning imaginative tales skillfully recounted and artfully interrupted, manipulates the Sultan's desire and thwarts his impulse toward violence, Djebar's narrating "I" incites her husband's violent rage by confessing to love and desire for another man. Hence, 'edou takes on new significance as the husband, beating his wife, inscribes its meaning on her flesh.

Violence in the form of wife-battering is a theme Djebar had not touched upon before Ombre sultane. For example, conforming to the notion of violence inflicted by the colonizer upon the colonized, the first short story in the collection Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (1980) begins with an Algerian doctor's recurrent nightmare of his wife's torture at the hands of French soldiers during the Algerian War. Similarly, in L'amour, la fantasia, the novel published five years later, violence is contextualized historically in power struggles between the French colonizer and the colonized Algerian. However, beginning with Ombre sultane, in which Hajila is beaten for leaving her apartment without her husband's permission, Djebar reconfigures violence as domestic abuse, exploring this theme in Vaste est la prison when Isma is beaten by her husband following her confession of love for another man. Finally, violence inflicted upon Algerian women by Algerian men assumes another even more sinister configuration in Vaste est la prison, as the text concludes with Islamic fundamentalists' murderof women they judge to be defying religious tenets.

Since husbands may use corporal punishment to "correct" their women's behavior in Algeria, it is unfortunately all too clear that brutal attacks upon women by Islamic fundamentalists originate in a form of behavior that has been allowed to go largely unpunished in this patriarchal society (Lazreg 187). From the destruction of Fort l'Empereur, which, in 1830, opened the capital to rape and plunder by conquering colonial soldiers, to present-day incidents of domestic and political violence, aggression depicted in Djebar's texts bears sexual connotations: Algiers was taken by force, as were--and are--Algerian women.

Consequently, in contrast to the hammam, a locus of nurturing relationships among women, homes scarred by domestic abuse become frightening prisons where interrogation and intimidation replace communication and understanding between husbands and wives. As Hajila and Isma face drunken brutality, Hajila recalls that her father never struck her mother; she therefore does not experience this battering as a ritual of marriage, but rather as a traumatic transgression. Isma, despite the pain and fright of her beating, experiences a form of psychological liberation from the husband she knows will no longer be able to keep her in his prison.

When Hajila's husband attacks her in the kitchen, he threatens to blind her with a broken bottle, shouting: "Je t'aveuglerai pour que tu ne voies pas! Pour qu'on ne te voie pas!" (96) 'I'll put your eyes out and you'll never see again! And no one will ever see you either!' (87). The same elements--drunken rage, a broken bottle, vulnerable eyes--compose the scene of Isma's beating in her Algiers apartment in Vaste est la prison:

Protéger mes yeux. Car sa folie se révélait étrange: il prétendait m'aveugler.
"Femme adultère," gronda-t-il, la bouteille de whisky cassée en deux à la main; je ne pensais qu'à mes yeux, et au risque que représentait la baie trop ouverte. (85)

Protect my eyes. His madness is strange: he wanted to blind me.
"Adultress," he mumbled, the broken whiskey bottle in his hand; I could only think of my eyes, and the danger of the wide open bay window.

By inscribing into both texts the scene of the jagged broken bottle menacing the terrified woman's eyes, Djebar foregrounds the importance of the gaze. Isma is not only beaten for initiating an illicit relationship but for daring to review her life and redefine it. Similarly, Hajila is not punished solely for strolling unveiled in the city but for appropriating the right to see and be seen. In both passages, the husband claims the dominating gaze for himself alone and, threatened by his wife's gaze upon the world and others, inflicts violence upon her body in order to control her.

For Djebar, the gaze is crucial: the prohibition against women seeing and being seen is at the heart of Maghrebian patriarchy, an ideological system in which the master's eye alone exists. Women challenge the phallocentric system by appropriating the gaze for themselves. Thus, when the novelist temporarily abandons the novel for cinema (an experience she recounts in the second half of Vaste est la prison), she emphasizes again the importance and necessity of her transgression, the revolt against the masculine gaze.

Through the scenes of domestic violence, Djebar's readers are made aware of a social problem plaguing Algeria--as well as other nations--today. In my view, her exploration of domestic violence also counters Marnia Lazreg's judgment that the Algerian novelist lacks political awareness: "The litany of complaints about 'tradition' and Islam stifles her characters' voices and turns them into pitiful, empty-headed puppets" (201). Although published in 1994, Lazreg's The Eloquence of Silence does not cite any volume of the Algerian quartet, thus overlooking Djebar's foregrounding of domestic abuse as an issue creating common ground, touching women of all social backgrounds.

If the repetition of domestic violence in Ombre sultane and Vaste est la prison informs readers of an acute social problem, it also reveals textual parallels and doubling in the novels. We learn that Isma, the autobiographical self, and Hajila, the fictional self, fall victim to the same man's fury; he had been married to both women, but at different times. In addition, in Ombre sultane, Isma specifically acknowledges Hajila as her replacement: "Le soleil te regarde, ô Hajila, toi qui me remplaces cette nuit" (94) 'The sun is watching you, O Hajila, as you stand in for me tonight' (85). Yet because their relationship to space and language differs significantly, so do their forms of transgression and expressions of revolt: Hajila struggles to claim public space; Isma attempts to recover her inner world of affect, imagination, spirituality. Hajila is neither articulate nor self-assured; Isma, in contrast, articulates every step of her psychological journey, analyzing her feelings of desire, love, pain, and guilt with clarity and insight.

When Isma's marriage reveals an emotional void, she turns to a man she believes will rescue her and restore her sense of self. Capturing her lover's gaze by dancing seductively before him, Isma feels validated by his presence, empowered by his gaze: "Ainsi un homme m'avait regardée danser et j'avais été 'vue'" 'Thus a man had seen me dance and I had been "seen" ' (64). Her behavior confirms John Berger's analysis of the interplay between the masculine gaze and the construction of female identity; it depends upon woman's internalization of the dominating gaze:

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. (46-47)

Isma further confirms her imprisonment in the male gaze when she exclaims:

. . . [M]oi regardée par lui et aussitôt après, allant me contempler pour me voir par ses yeux dans le miroir, tenter de surprendre le visage qu'il venait de voir, comment il le voyait, ce "moi" étranger et autre, devenant pour la première fois moi à cet instant même, précisément grâce à cette translation de la vision de l'autre. (116)

. . . [M]e gazed upon by him and promptly looking at myself in the mirror to see myself through his eyes, trying to seize the face he had just seen, as he saw it, this "me," the stranger and the other, becoming me for the very first time, at this very instant, precisely because of this displacement of the other's vision. (116)

Only after the relationship has ended can Isma reexamine the gaze of the man she had previously desired. Then, with the understanding that her self-image has depended upon a masculine gaze mediating the process of self-validation, and that this dependency in effect turns the female subject into a passive object of male desire, Isma frees herself. She does so by moving the memory of her former lover to a new and different space; the masculine "other" becomes her closest relative--le plus proche parent. By reclaiming "l'Aimé" as a member of the family, she places him in the maternal world, in the imaginary space of her buried past where, as a child, before awakening to sexual desire, she felt the initial desire for freedom.

Djebar contextualizes Isma's problematic relationship to the dominating gaze within her evolution toward emotional maturity. The process of emerging self-awareness encompasses the protagonist's recognition of a sterile marriage followed by a futile romance and concludes with rejection of the masculine gaze; the latter ceases to be the mirror for woman's self-validation. Moreover, as a quester whose journey to self-knowledge requires a voyage out and a series of trials before reintegration, Isma completes her journey to selfhood by returning to her initial point of departure. Thus, a year after the rupture, she awakens one afternoon from a long nap, serene and restored in her parents' home. The interior journey has brought her back to her initial point of departure, the home from which she first ventured forth, "[f]illette arabe allant pour la première fois à l'école, un matin d'automne, main dans la main du père" (11) 'a little Arab girl going to school for the first time, walking hand in hand with her father' (3).

Has Isma regained the intimate space of childhood, Bachelard's espace heureux, where memory and imagination recreate a lost Eden as an anchor against a painful present? Has she, in effect, retreated to paternal protection? Her words confirm the contrary as she announces a new beginning: "Je suis moi-même, pleine de vide, disponible et tranquille, affamée du dehors et sereine . . . Pas comme avant!" 'I am myself, filled with emptiness, ready and tranquil, hungry for the outdoors and serene . . . Not like before!' (22). As a woman "filled with emptiness," Isma claims the "empty" space that Claudine Hermann defines as woman's space, where respect for personal boundaries is encouraged, in contrast to "full" space--the locus of male domination, hierarchy, and conquest. Hence, with the eclipse of her lover, Isma is free to shape and articulate her own experience.¹⁰ No longer prisoner of the male gaze, Isma may serve as mirror for herself.

Awakening in her father's library, a room containing his Muslim prayer rug and French texts, Isma identifies with a parent who, like herself, negotiates between East and West, and pays tribute to her father, the teacher who launched his daughter on the bicultural journey that resulted in her appropriation of language and space. At the same time, Djebar's autobiographical self reopens the space of narration to paternal language (although not necessarily to the patriarchal order), using la langue adverse to recall and record instances in which the women of her maternal lineage challenged traditional patriarchy and colonial domination: first, her grandmother's defiance of patriarchal order by refusing to remain with her husband's family upon his death and insisting upon returning home; then, her mother's successful struggle against French colonial administrators unwilling to grant her permission to see her son, a prisoner in France during the Algerian war; finally, her own experience of making her first film, "La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua." Djebar views her appropriation of the camera as a challenge to colonial and patriarchal legacies and an important political and symbolical event in the liberation and empowerment of Algerian women. It is clearly the logical outcome of her rejection of the dominating gaze.

Although Djebar's decision to work in cinema originates in her quest to reappropriate the patriarchal gaze, it involves her relationship to language as well. It followed her failed attempt to write in Arabic:

J'ai pensé sincèrement que je pouvais devenir écrivain arabophone. Mais pendant ces années de silence, j'ai compris qu'il y avait des problèmes de la langue arabe écrite qui ne relèvent pas actuellement de ma compétence. C'est différent au niveau de la langue de tous les jours. C'est pourquoi, faire du cinéma pour moi ce n'est pas abandonner le mot pour l'image. C'est faire de l'image-son. C'est effectuer un retour aux sources au niveau du langage. (Qtd. in Fanon 3)

I sincerely thought I could become an Arabic writer. But during these years of silence, I understood there were problems relating to written Arabic that went beyond my competency. Everyday language is different. That is why for me filmmaking is not abandoning the word for the image, but creating a sound image. It is a return to the source via language.

Thus, as L'amour, la fantasia explores links between personal and collective history, and Ombre sultane blends autobiography with fictional narrative, Vaste est la prison probes the relationship of autofiction to cinema. Evoking the filming of "La Nouba . . ." in a series of chapters interspersed in the novel, Djebar shares with her readers her thoughts concerning cinema and her role as director as she recalls, 20 years later, the experience of working with the actors and film crew as well as her rapport with the rural population.

In La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, her camera follows a young Algerian woman on a dual itinerary: an exterior trajectory leading to a discovery of traditional rural life; an internal trajectory, a meditation on memory. Having returned to her native region fifteen years after the end of the Algerian war, Lila is obsessed by memories of the war. Through encounters with rural women--following their daily lives and listening to their accounts of their war experiences--the woman's psychological health is eventually restored. Yet despite this spiritual renewal, Lila is saddened by the failure of her marriage and the pervading presence of patriarchy in postcolonial Algeria.

The importance of the gaze is evident from the beginning of the film. In one of the first scenes, Lila, her back to the spectactors, her face pressed against the wall, states angrily: "Je parle, je parle, je parle" 'I speak, I speak, I speak' (197), then pauses to address the man in the room: "Je ne veux pas que l'on me voie; je ne veux pas que tu me voies" 'I don't want to be seen. I don't want you to look at me' (197). Thus, Lila comes on stage proclaiming her right to speak and be heard and refusing the gaze of the Other--husband and camera. Her husband does not understand her desire to see and speak for herself; the woman filmmaker does. In a close-up of Lila's head turned to the wall, Djebar films Lila's revolt. Her eye behind the camera moves from Ali's gaze upon Lila--"l'image de la femme pour l'homme arabe" 'the image of woman for the Arab man' (297)--to focus directly on Lila, the first step in charting the young woman's progessive journey of self-affirmation.

In the text, Djebar explains that except for one detail (the husband in the room), this scene is autobiographical; she is attributing to her protagonist her own words, gestures, and frustration, when Lila exclaims: "Je parle, je parle, je parle" (297). Significantly, in an earlier article, Djebar had already linked her désir de parole to the woman filmmaker's quest:

J'aboutis à cette évidence, ou à cette interrogation: que le cinéma fait par les femmes--autant cette fois du tiers monde que du "vieux monde"--procède d'abord d'un désir de parole. Comme si "tourner" au cinéma représente, pour les femmes, une mobilité de la voix et du corps, du corps non regardé, donc insoumis, retrouvant autonomie et innocence . (Un regard de femme 37)

I have reached this conclusion, or this inquiry: that women's cinema--as much in the Third World as in the "Old World"--begins with the desire for the word. As if "to film" means for women a mobility of voice and body, the body not gazed upon, but unsubmissive, retrieving its autonomy and innocence.

By situating the individual désir de parole within the larger context of woman's cinema, Djebar opens autobiography to embrace the collective voice; she shares the concerns of other women filmmakers.

Responding to Lila's solitude within her marriage, Djebar's camera shifts its focus from somber interior space where Lila and her husband live in silence and misunderstanding to the bright outdoors. There, amid sunlight and rugged expanses, the camera's eye follows Lila's eyes as she rediscovers the natural beauty of the rural world of her childhood and exchanges glances and words with the rural women of Mont Chenoua. Filming Lila's evolution, her coming of age by learning to see, Djebar discovers the impact of her protagonist's evolution upon her own life. In Vaste est la prison, she writes:

Au cours de ces mois de tâtonnements, à la suite de mon personnage, j'apprenais que le regard sur le dehors est en même temps retour à la mémoire, à soi-même enfant, aux murmures d'avant, à l'oeil intérieur, immobile sur l'histoire jusqu-là cachée, un regard nimbé de sons vagues, de mots inaudibles et de musiques mélangées . . . . (298)

In the course of these months of probing, following my protagonist, I learned that the gaze on the outdoors is at the same time a return to memory, to one's childhood, to earlier murmurs, to the interior eye, immobile on a history until then hidden, a clouded gaze of vague sounds, inaudible words and blended music . . . .

Filming Lila's story, the camera becomes a conduit to the cherished maternal world of the writer's past. Just as Djebar's pen brought Algerian women's muted voice and veiled presence into public space, so does her camera; hence, the symbolic value of giving the camera to a sequestered sister. She writes:

Cette image--réalité de mon enfance, de celle de ma mère et de mes tantes, de mes cousines parfois du même âge que moi, ce scandale qu'enfant j'ai vécu norme, voici qu'elle surgit au départ de cette quête; silhouette unique de femme, rassemblant dans les pans de son linge-linceul les quelque cinq cents millions de ségréguées du monde islamique, c'est elle soudain qui regarde, mais derrière la caméra, elle qui, par un trou libre dans une face masquée, dévore le monde. (174; emphasis added)

This image--reality of my childhood, that of my mother and my aunts, my cousins who were often my age, this scandal that for me as a child was considered normal, here she is at the start of my quest; woman's unique silhouette, gathering in the folds of her drapery-shroud the five hundred million segregated women of the Islamic world; suddenly she is staring at us, but from behind the camera, and through a free hole in a masked face, she is devouring the world.

The filmmaker's gesture repeats a process begun in the first text, the giving of a gift. In L'amour, la fantasia, the young child entering school receives her first books and school supplies, including a pen with which to challenge colonial and postcolonial discourse. Isma, in Ombre sultane, gives Hajila the key to her apartment so that the sequestered woman may leave the enclosure for free and open space. Finally, in Vaste est la prison an Algerian filmmaker passes a camera to a veiled silhouette, the cloistered sister who, by peeking through the lens, may reclaim her subjectivity. Each object, in effect, is an important signifier in the quartet, a corpus which, we have seen, first foregrounds language and history, then space, and then the gaze.

I noted earlier in this study that Djebar's approach to self-representation raises two important questions: Does the autobiographical process heal the fragmented narrating self? Does it effectively challenge patriarchal structures and ideology or merely create nostalgia for a lost Eden in which women are jealous guardians of tradition? I believe both questions have been answered affirmatively. All three texts have revealed that the process of placing an individual autobiographical project within a collective experience has resulted in the successful maturation of the individual and the artist. Moreover, by reevaluating the past colonial experience with honesty and probing the complexities and contradictions of present day Algeria with lucidity, Djebar, an outspoken critic of oppressive forces endangering Algerian women, has become a major voice of francophone Maghrebian literature.

Djebar's polyphonic texts containing autobiographical fragments mark a new approach to autobiography as they blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, and ignore the autobiographical pact, the promise to the reader that the the textual and referential "I" are one and the same.¹¹ However, as Lionnet explains:

To read a narrative that depicts the journey of a female self striving to become the subject of her own discourse, the narrator of her own story, is to witness the unfolding of an autobiographical project. To raise the question of referentiality and ask whether the text points to an individual existence beyond the pages of the book is to distort the picture. (260)

Djebar's narrative "unveiling" will surely continue and lend itself to new scrutiny with the publication of the next volume. Until then, readers can only speculate as to how the writer will negotiate the path between self-revelation and concealment in the concluding text of her Algerian Quartet.

NOTES

1. Nilüfer Göle explains in Musulmanes et modernes: Voile et civilisation en Turquie that the veil, symbolizing what is private as well as forbidden, expresses the difference between Western and Islamic social organization (see 40-45).

2. For an excellent study of collective autobiography in L'amour, la fantasia, see Patricia Geesey.

3. Gillian Rose's discussion of the masculine gaze and landscape provides important insights for Djebar's writing on the gaze of the Other. See Feminism and Geography, ch. 5.

4. Noting that Djebar tends to promote her mother's maternal lineage, which through the illustrious Beni Menacer gives the writer national authenticity, Monique Gadant asks whether Djebar is assuming too conservative a stance, portraying women as the mainstay of tradition (100-04). Marnia Lazreg criticizes the Algerian novelist for promoting a nostalgic view of colonialism (201).

5. For detailed documented studies of Algerian women's participation in the liberation struggle that also includes oral interviews with women participants, see Djamila Amrane-Minne.

6. Djebar used selections of the oral histories in her first feature-length film, "La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua," before including them in the novel.

7. Djebar notes that the accounts of the conquest recorded in Arabic by the conquered disappeared, and written records only reach us through European archives.

8. Djebar prepared "hypokhâgne" (preparation for the "grandes écoles") in Algiers and was the first Algerian female student admitted to the prestigious Ecole National Supérieure de Sèvres in Paris.

9. All translations of the text Vaste est la prison are mine.

10. Hermann writes: "Physical or mental, man's space is a space of domination, hierarchy and conquest, a sprawling, showy space, a full space. Woman, on the other hand, has long since learned to respect not only the physical and mental space of others, but space for its own sake, empty space" (169).

11. For studies of the autobiographical pact, see Philippe Lejeune.

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