Gender and Identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and Feminism in Maghrebi Women’s Literature 9780755611010, 9781848854499

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To my mother Boulanouar Tata, a Moudjahidat; and in memory of my father Belkacem Cheref (1925–1961) who died fighting French colonial troops in the same region where the Emir Abdelkader (1808–1883) resisted French occupation of Algeria.

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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

I have to note that Arabic, the predominant language in the MENA region, and the language of the Qur’an, has its own alphabet. But in this book all the Arabic words have been transliterated into Roman letters without the use of diacritical marks that are used by the American Library Association and the Library of Congress. Some exceptions to this rule may apply. For the purposes of this principle, an Arabic word is generally rendered in Roman letters and the word is as a rule translated into a common English word.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It has been a wonderful and fascinating exercise writing this book whose research began as a PhD dissertation at the Programme in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, and then at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, at the University of Exeter in the UK. I especially owe a real debt of thanks to Dr. Mohamed-Salah Omri, at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who encouraged me to write this book. His serenity, patience, flexibility, true caring and concern, and faith in me have been of a great help in shaping this volume. I should also like to thank Dr. Mia Carter, at the University of Texas, Austin, for her tireless work which helped me flesh out the first version of this project in 1997. She has been inspiring, encouraging, and helpful. She has been a true friend. My knowledge and familiarity of gender, postcolonial ideas and texts would have been of no consequence and a lot thinner without the guidance of scholars like Barbara Harlow, Catherine Arens, and Mounira Maya Charrad from the University of Texas at Austin; Patricia Phillipy from Texas A&M; Valentine Moghadam from Purdue University; Anissa Daoudi and Emma Murphy from Durham University; Nadje al-Ali from SOAS, and Tim Niblock from the University of Exeter. I am especially grateful to the late playwright Abdelkader Alloula, and the novelist Rachid Mimouni for infecting me with their unfaltering optimism. Getting to know them and Tahar Ouettar, Abdelkader Djemaï, the poet Rabia Djalti, and the academic and novelist Amin Zaoui, has been an eye-opening experience.

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I am grateful to colleagues from the Department of English at the University of Oran in Algeria such as Mustapha Mebarkia, Kamal Kadi-Hanifi, Abbes Bahous, Fatiha Serrour, Fethi Hassaine, and Fadéla Zegrar Benzaoui. I am indebted to colleagues from the Department of French at the University of Oran such as the late Zoubida Haggani and Hafid Gafaïti for sharing their experience on Francophone texts. Special thanks are due to Haj Mililani for providing me with books. I must also acknowledge the critical support of my colleagues Jean Conacher, Pat O’Connor, Mike J. Griffin, Cinta Ramblado, David Coughlan, Zinaida Noureddine, Gisela Holfter, Marie-Thérèse Batardière, Frédéric Royall, Dominique LeMeur, Geraldine Sheridan, Liam Murray, Michael G. Kelly, Sinead McDermott, Barbara Geraghty and Yvonne Cleary from the School of Languages, Literature, Cultures and Communication at the University of Limerick. Special thanks are due to Amri Abdelkader, Brian Lee, Ronald Carter, Douglas Tallack, Jeremy Keenan, George Joffé, Mohamed Diniden, Alison Pargeter, Larbi Zitout, Safiya al-Marzooqi, Trudier Harris, Noam Chomsky, Rita Faulkner, Anne Cirella, Bernard W. Bell, Yvette Benayoun-Szmidt, Najib Redouane, Fatima Sadiqi, Moha Ennaji and Amine Boulanouar whose company and support I enjoyed. Many friends helped me through this labyrinthine experience with their unwavering friendship and affection. Among them, some of the steadiest have been Khiat Mourad and the late Azzedine Brikci, Linda and Fred Butler, Salah and Baya Dekkar, and Fouad and Patricia Berrahou in Austin, Texas. They opened their homes and their hearts to me. Without their help and support, this project might never have seen the light of day. Likewise I must gratefully acknowledge the supportive and crucial interest of the colleagues and students in various universities whose questions and discussion have sharpened up the manuscript significantly. I am especially grateful for the unflagging aid of Paul Auchterlonie at the University of Exeter’s ‘Old Library’, who saved me much time with regard to finding and consulting the available documents in the Library. With help and input from these many people, any shortcomings in the book can only be attributed to my own failings.

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I am also indebted to Janet Wilgus, Djamila Benyagoub, and Nadia Ouhania at USIS, Algiers, for their great cooperation and support, and to the Fulbright Program, whose grant made the initial research for this book possible. I would like to express my appreciation to Allison McKechnie and Jodie Robson, the first for copyediting and the second for typesetting the book. I am also grateful to Jenna Steventon, Senior Editor at I.B.Tauris, and Hamid Aouragh for providing a highly professional photo for the jacket. I am also indebted to the late Imam Sheikh Si Mohieddine Ferhaoui, Haj Benali Ferhaoui and Haj Benlaredj Mohamed for infusing in me the love of books. My last, but certainly, not least thanks go out to my family: Saliha, Fatima-Zohra, Belkacem CharafEddine and Mohamed El-Amine Mohieddine. I am forever grateful.

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PREFACE

Gender and Identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and Feminism in Maghrebi Women’s Literature engages with issues of gender and identity at a time when the visibility and salience of these issues has increased in several fields of research including cultural studies, the social sciences and the humanities. The book makes a major contribution to the comparative study of gender in the postcolonial Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) in a number of ways, not least in bringing together Comparative Literature, Postcolonialism, Francophone and Arabophone Literature, and Feminism. Abdelkader Cheref reveals with remarkable skill and sensitivity the predicament of Maghrebi women in the social setting of the post-independence Maghreb. He sheds light on the debates surrounding male/female relations in Maghrebi societies and on issues explored from different angles by women writers such as Assia Djebar, Leila Abouzeid and Souad Guellouz. Rather than attempting to provide a complete account of Francophone and Arabophone Maghrebi Literature, his objective is to open up a range of critical questions and to offer lines of analysis. Addressing the work of writers who find themselves at the crossroads of Western and Maghrebi perspectives and exposing a complex world that must be negotiated and redefined, Cheref situates his own analysis firmly within Frederick Jameson’s concept of ‘national allegory’. In suggesting that Third World texts be read as national allegories, he draws on Jameson’s philosophical and theoretical framework and shows how this premise opens the door to theorizing the intersection of literary production with nation and politics. His ground-breaking approach allows the author to embark on an in-depth discussion of

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gender literature in the context of social issues and national politics in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. He tackles issues of identity along with the marginalization of women’s voices and the narratives of women writers as enactments of resistance. Cheref ’s background has given him a unique perspective which contributed to the insights and the kind of consciously mediated comparative analysis that his book exemplifies. He grew up in Algeria, came of age at a time of political turmoil, and studied African and African American literatures in Algeria as well as in the UK and the US. His father died fighting French colonialism and his mother was a Moudjhahidat (freedom fighter) during the Algerian war of Independence (1954–62). Cheref turned to literature as a way of discovering how the personal, political and universal come together. He invites us precisely to join him and women writers in that kind of discovery in his book which is about culture, ideas, literature, history and women’s empowerment at the same time as it is cognizant of the dynamics of contemporary Maghrebi politics. The richness of Cheref ’s work consists in providing a deep understanding of the historical and politico-cultural background coupled with a critical analysis of texts. The book offers a significant historical, political and cultural contextualization for the reading of Francophone and Arabophone Maghrebi literature. It enriches our understanding not only of Maghrebi writers but also by extension of literature in other postcolonial contexts. It is a must read for scholars and students interested in these matters in the Maghreb and beyond. Dr Mounira M. Charrad, Associate Professor Departments of Sociology and Middle Eastern Studies University of Texas at Austin

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It is from those who have suffered the sentence of history – subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement – that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking. There is even a growing conviction that the affective experience of social marginality – as it emerges in noncanonical cultural forms – transforms our critical strategies. (Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture)

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Introduction

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INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents the research context of the book, its scope and limitations, and lays out the structure of the study. It also sketches out the genealogy of comparative literature (littérature comparée) as a discipline and underscores the possibilities that an association with postcolonialism and feminism opens. George Steiner affirmed the commonplace justification for comparative literature (1967: 27–8): Literature should be taught and interpreted in a comparative way. …The critic who declares that a man can know only one language well, that the national inheritance of poetry or the national tradition of the novel is alone valid or supreme, is closing doors where they should be opened, is narrowing the mind where it should be brought to the sense of a large and equal achievement. Chauvinism has wreaked havoc on politics; it has no place in literature. The critic … is not a man to stay in his own garden. This generous and humanist statement relies implicitly on the hope that somehow comparative literary studies will lead to greater international tolerance and understanding. One of the definitions that underscores supranationalism and cross-disciplinarity is offered by Owen Aldridge (1969: 1), who said that comparative literature ‘can be considered the study of any literary phenomenon from the perspective of more than one national literature or in conjunction with another intellectual discipline’.

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The exclusion of broad varieties of literature from comparative consideration was clear evidence that something was wrong with comparative paradigms. As far back as 1975, Roland Greene stated that the older ‘comfortable European perspectives’ were ‘parochial’ (Bernheimer 1995: 30). At the heart of the matter lies disagreement over what comparative literature is and should be. Comparative literature is … the practice of a vanguard among the literatures. It is the … workshop of literary studies, and through them, of the humanities. Comparative literature compares literatures, not only as accumulations of primary works, but as the languages, cultures, histories, traditions, theories, and practices with which those works come (Bernheimer 1995: 143–4). The comparatist / comparativist brings to the investigation of national literary texts and cultures appreciation of other literary texts and cultures, making it possible to interpret artistic performances more richly, more variously, more comparatively than is possible in a particular field. And if the act of comparison is a liberating act, a shaping enterprise that ceaselessly reconfigures its elements, the space of comparison has expanded way beyond literary texts, or even beyond artistic objects other than the literary, beyond the arts, beyond Western cultures, across borders separating genders, ethnic groups and so on. I agree with Charles Bernheimer (1995: 41–2) that the space of comparison today involves comparisons between artistic productions usually studied by different disciplines; between various constructions of those disciplines; between Western cultural traditions, both high and popular, and those of non-Western cultures; between the pre- and postcontact cultural productions of colonized peoples; between gender constructions defined as feminine and those defined as masculine; between racial and ethnic modes of signifying. Both Harry Levin and Roland Greene attribute the rapid growth of comparative literature to a new internationalist perspective that seeks

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‘larger contexts in the tracking of motifs, themes, and types as well as larger understandings of genres and modes’ (Bernheimer 1995: 28). But what is supposed to be compared to what, and how? For Rene Wellek (1963: 282) ‘The most serious sign of the precarious state of our study is the fact that it has not been able to establish a distinct subject matter and a specific methodology’. Thirty-two years later, the same could still be said. Peter Brooks (1995: 97) confesses that although he holds a PhD in comparative literature, he has never been sure what the field, or the discipline, is and never sure that he ‘could really claim to be teaching it or working in it’. In this context of misrecognitions and omissions, the Bernheimer perspective, with its endorsement of gender analysis, feminist and postcolonial theory, and cross-cultural topics, has found a warm welcome from many non-Western scholars. Mohamed-Salah Omri (2006: 15), for instance, concurs with the view that comparative literature is ‘a cultural practice with political and social agendas rather than a “purely” academic undertaking’. Thus, I should affirm, right from the outset, that like racial or class demarcations, gender divisions cross national boundaries and assume new definition and value in each culture. Gender studies, in short, should be comparative, i.e., women’s stories reflect the failings of each society, highlight patriarchal and gender ideologies, and undermine binaries such as colonial/postcolonial, urban/rural, traditionalism/modernism, and writing vs. oral tradition. Therefore, stressing the supranationalism and cross-disciplinarity of comparative literature, this book revolves around issues of postcolonialism, feminism, identity and ethnicity through the literature of writers working within three different national settings and using different languages (French and Arabic). The study encompasses a non-Western literature, i.e. the literature of the Maghreb1 (North Africa). Specifically, it studies in detail three major Maghrebi women novelists. This Introduction sketches out some of the ideas which emerge from the research process. I maintain that it is time to ‘switch gears’ and move away from a frequent emphasis on postcolonial Anglophone male writers and to concentrate on the study of gendered studies of literature and culture in Arabophone and Francophone geographical and historical contexts such as the Maghreb. Gender and Identity in North Africa contributes

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to the growing scholarship on Arabophone and Francophone writers from the Maghreb in general, and also to the elaboration of a postcolonial feminist framework that is both exploratory and analytical. Taking into account that the harsh social realities of women’s lives have led women such as Assia Djebar (Algeria), Leila Abouzeid (Morocco), and Souad Guellouz (Tunisia), to transcend the domestic and political localities in the cultures from which they emerge, this book suggests some shared contexts and sets of concerns among women in three countries that are economically and socio-politically different. These Maghrebi women have chosen more or less the same key words to depict their situation – inequality, subjugation and subservience. If inequality identifies what is denied to women and accorded to men, subjugation describes a sense of the burden pressing down on women; informing us not so much about the aberrations of female exclusion as the elaborate ideological, political and economic forces that collude to maintain women in their subordinate place. Subservience takes this one step further, identifying the agents in the operation. Women do not just happen to possess less than men; they are effectively subordinated by them. So these harsh social realities allow us to perceive and understand the way gender, as a social category, rather than a biological given, has been constructed in the Maghreb, and how, as a result, Maghrebi women define the issues of concern to them. In this respect, I explore gender not as an inconsequential aspect of postcolonial literature, but as an undeniable fundamental element. For postcolonial Maghrebi women’s writings are likely to be viewed as ideal paradigms of the ambivalence that is perceived by theorists like Homi Bhabha (1994) to be the main feature of postcoloniality. And as gender is becoming a determinant force in the current negotiation of national and cultural identities, women’s negotiation of these identities is a significant question, evident in the three narratives: Leila Abouzeid’s ‘Am al-Fayl (Year of the Elephant, 1983),2 Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade, 1987),3 and Souad Guellouz’s La vie simple (1975).4 It should be noted, though, that in the 1970s and 1980s feminism presented an energetic challenge to attempts to dissociate textual analysis from the material conditions and contexts – social, historical, and political – of literature’s production and reception. As more and

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more women entered the academic profession, for instance, their preoccupations with the marginalization of women’s voices in such distinct contexts as narrative representations, social arrangements and publishing practices introduced a set of questions which affect the study of the interchangeable relations of literature to experience, of aesthetics to ideology and of gender to power. Scholars have adopted a feminist approach committed primarily to exploring representations of women; and one of the reasonable ways to evaluate these women is by investigating the historical conditions that have shaped them. For history and politics have an important place in comparative literature, especially as it develops the scope of comparative analysis. History helps us to appreciate the context within which, and the audience for which, these Maghrebi authors have been producing literature. And even if politics brings to light the differences between these authors and texts, it also advances the work of genuine comparison by allowing us to identify elements that seem to make ‘apples apples and oranges oranges’! As Joyce Ladner (1971: 4) contends, only by comprehending the ‘broader socio-historical factors can we properly interpret [women’s] role today’. Fundamental to this approach is a liberal notion of representation, which operates on two levels. First, comparative literature should be representative not just of European or WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) literatures but also of the diversity of literary productions throughout the world, especially the Third World. (I am conscious that the term Third World is fraught with both positive and negative connotations. It may also have a ‘colonialist / othering’ dimension, but I use it to signify ‘developing nations’.) Second, do the selected works in this book typify the cultures in which they are produced? Are they informative ideological documents that faithfully reflect historical reality (Wade-Gayles 1984: 56)? Can fiction permit a clearer representation and restructuring of the world? Are these works authentic narratives about national allegory revealing both alterity and subjectivity (Jameson 1986: 68)? Scope, Rationale and Aims Since the book will perform a detailed analysis of three novels, a synopsis of each work is given in order to help sketch out the different issues these authors tackle in the specific novels. Before examining

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these novels and the issues they raise, however, I think it would be useful to chart the motivations that led to such a choice of academic discipline and authors. My ambition to stage such a reading is motivated by academic, ideological and personal idiosyncrasies. I came of age intellectually at a time of great historical upheavals. In the mid-1970s, under the hegemony of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the-one-party-system, I was a public high-school student in Oran, Algeria. After my Baccalauréat (High School Diploma), I wanted to study something relevant to myself and found an echo to this appeal in the humanities. I enrolled in the University of Oran, where I majored in English but fell under the magnetism of African and African-American Literatures. In this type of literature I discovered that the ‘personal’ becomes relevant and ‘universal’. I actually identify with the repressed no matter what their complexion is and as an ‘offshoot’ of Algerian history, I sympathize with the repressed no matter where they are. Frantz Fanon, Kateb Yacine, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, and Angela Davis’ militancy and works affected me positively in high school; but at university, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Joyce, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, C.L.R. James, Buchi Emecheta, Camara Laye, H.L. Gates, Jr., Walter Rodney, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Alan Paton, Es’kia (Ezekiel) Mphahlele, Nawal Saadawi, James Baldwin and Edward Said were for me the most outstanding twentieth-century writers. Having had an undergraduate experience that exposed me to a great deal of literature, I went on to postgraduate studies and defended my MA on selected novels by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. African-American literature has been eye-opening on the human condition. I could have been involved in political science. But as somebody whose father is a Shaheed – he died fighting French colonialism, and whose mother was, at the time of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) a Moudjahidat (freedom-fighter) and an agent de liaison, and bearing in mind the way the Algerian Revolution has been perverted, and how most of the Algerians have been disillusioned by the various post-independence governments, I resisted this choice. Instead, I chose literature. My ability to use Arabic, English and French fluently has enabled me to explore Maghrebi texts in their linguistic diversity. I should note

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here that in addition to Abouzeid’s work in Arabic and its translation into English, I have included two other Maghrebi women who write in French (Djebar and Guellouz). The knowledge of these languages is vital to understand and explore the puzzling issues inherent to Maghrebi literature. I understand comparative literature as a para-discipline; linguistic ability is an indispensable qualification for the field. The knowledge of foreign languages remains necessary but not sufficient to the comparatist’s raison d’être. To the same degree, ‘expertise in a national literature, which I understand to mean more than knowing the national language, should bring knowledge of the national tradition to bear on the illumination of the text’ (Omri 2006: 38). The end of the Cold War and the fall of ‘Communism’ have generated what has been called a ‘New World Disorder’, characterized by hegemonic ethno-nationalisms and ethnic cleansing.5 And now that many regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have reinforced their illegitimate seizure of power through fake democratic elections, comparative literature has become, paradoxically, ‘an especially hospitable space for the cultivation of multilingualism, polyglossia, the arts of cultural mediation, deep intercultural understanding, and genuinely global consciousness’ (Pratt 1995: 62). Extrapolating from these observations, I try to imagine the repercussions of statements such as this Qur’anic verse: Muslim men and Muslim women, believing men and believing women, obedient men and obedient women, truthful men and truthful women, steadfast men and steadfast women, humble men and humble women, men and women who give alms, men who fast and women who fast, men and women who guard their modesty, men and women who remember God much, for them God has prepared forgiveness and a mighty reward (Qur’an XXIII: 35). Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which points out that ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ (Article 1); or the point that ‘we hold these truths to be selfevident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by

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their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ (Jefferson [1776] 1967: 181). However, in this investigation, it appeared to me that the most complex and controversial socio-ideological picture of Maghrebi societies is the one that represents the complicated situation of women in societies where gender inequality propagates, endorses, and paves the way for political discrimination; and establishes it as the cornerstone of cultural existence, as identity. The critical focus of this book has developed from a concern with the importance of postcolonial studies, with critical perspectives developed from Arabophone and Francophone Maghrebi literature and with feminist critical practice. These central issues have been crucial in the choice of texts and approach. Gender has been a central issue in this specific choice of texts, for there are numerous psychoanalytical, political and economic similarities in the ways in which women have been and are addressed, constructed and empowered in the community, and epitomized in discourse. Silencing and subordination have been a common denominator for postcolonial Maghrebi women. The achievement of these Maghrebi women novelists is their ability to single out compelling political allegories and ideological debates in addition to representing women’s resistance to social and political injustice. Their narratives are vivid enactments of resistance from the perspective of the disenfranchised. In the light of widespread concern in the Middle East and North African countries for their culture, my intention in this book is to contribute to a genuine understanding and sympathy for the Maghrebis and their original contribution to universal literature. On the other hand, I highlight the significant shift of focus in literary study since the early 1980s away from the ‘intrinsic’, rhetorical study of literature towards the study of the ‘extrinsic’ relations of literature, its position within psychological, historical or socio-political contexts. As Hillis Miller (1989: 103) points out, now that deconstruction has lost its influence, ‘we can return with a clear conscience to the warmer, more human work of writing about power, history, ideology … the class struggle, the oppression of women, and the real lives of men and women in society as they exist in themselves and as they are “reflected” in literature’.

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Research and Methodological Contexts This book is not a broad-spectrum literary account of Arabophone and Francophone literature by Maghrebi women. To be more precise, I exemplify broad theoretical issues about the nature of Maghrebi postcolonial feminist literature by addressing the literary, cultural, political, and historical themes as tackled by three exemplary Maghrebi women writers: Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz. In investigating the female protagonists of these Maghrebi authors – Zahra in Abouzeid’s ‘Am al-Fayl (Year of the Elephant, 1983); Hajila in Djebar’s Ombre sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade, 1987); and Sadiya in Souad Guellouz’s La vie simple (1975) – as individuals in a community; as citizens of the Maghreb; as women (plain and simple); I draw on Frederic Jameson’s concept of national allegory as outlined in ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’. In discussing Third World literatures, Jameson (1986: 68) asserts that Third World cultures cannot be conceived as anthropologically independent or autonomous, rather, they are all in various distinct ways locked in a life-and-death struggle with First World cultural imperialism – a cultural struggle that is itself a reflection of the economic situation of such areas in their penetration by various stages of capital, or as it is sometimes euphemistically termed, of modernization. Women, whether in First or in Third World societies, have been marginalized, consigned a lower status, relegated to the position of ‘Other’, and, literally colonized, i.e., they are subjugated like colonized people, and subjected to systematic oppression and repression. And not unlike colonized people, they are compelled to voice their hard times in the language of their ‘masters’. ‘Women like postcolonial people have had to construct a language of their own when their only available “tools” are those of the “colonizer”’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 175). According to Jameson, this ‘life-and-death struggle’ with First World cultural imperialism makes the texts such societies produce, even those that appear on the surface to represent private sexual dynamics, political in nature:

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Third World texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic – necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society. Need I add that it is precisely this very different ratio of the political to the personal which makes such texts alien to us at first approach, and consequently, resistant to our conventional western habits of reading? (Jameson 1986: 69) Jameson’s work on narrative as a socially and politically emblematic act and his portrayal of literature as informed by the political unconscious has been the foundation for significant accounts of postcolonial aesthetics. The purpose of Jameson’s reading is ‘the unmasking of cultural artefacts as socially symbolic acts’ (Jameson 1981: 70). I argue that in postcolonial studies, Jameson’s paradigm of Third World national allegory has elicited a huge controversy. Aijaz Ahmad (1987), in ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’, criticizes this all-inclusive characterization. He considers it to be too reductive and argues that it seeks to define Third World literatures within a Western paradigm. He also indicates that a good deal of literature from the First World, particularly literature produced by the subaltern within the First World, can be national allegory. Ahmad also argues that the introduction of free enterprise and the emergence of a bourgeoisie can account for the emphasis on private rather than public issues in this literature. Ahmad writes: ‘there must be texts, perhaps numerous texts, that are grounded in this desolation, bereft of any capacity for the kind of allegorization and organicity that Jameson demands of them’ (1992: 107). Ahmad’s reaction to Jameson’s paradigm of Third World national allegory has also generated a chain of reactions. In ‘Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization’, Imre Szeman writes: ‘the presumption that it is possible to produce a theory that would explain African, Asian and Latin American literary production, the literature of China and Senegal, has been inevitably read as nothing more than a patronizing theoretical orientalism’ (2001: 803). Barbara Christian (2001: 321) observes that ‘critics are

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no longer concerned with literature, but with other critics’ texts’. Therefore, as I reveal in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, the three texts under study in this book are antagonistic towards Ahmad’s view. I maintain that Jameson’s suggestion that all Third World texts be read as national allegories has been one of the most significant attempts to theorize the correlation of literary production to nation and to politics. Insofar as an allegory is by definition a narrative where actions and characters are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself, i.e., that the underlying meaning has moral, social, religious or political significance, the three texts I explore in this book can be considered allegories. In fact, Jameson believes that in such texts, psychology, or more precisely, libidinal investment, should be read primarily in political and social terms. Therefore, from a literary and socio-political vantage point, the authors I have selected adopt a radical critical stance in the face of men’s blatantly anti-feminist sentiments. In these women’s novels, there is always someone who learns not only that the society must change, but also that the community’s attitude towards women must be exposed and amended. And it is in this context that I tackle the representation of women in nationalist discourse. This book partly aims at exploring the ways in which women come to represent or stand for the nation in nationalist discourse and how this is manifest in the Maghrebi texts under study. A postcolonial feminist reading of the three selected narratives reveals many thematic parallels. For instance, ‘the theme of the celebration of the struggle towards independence in community and individual’ is present in all three works (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 27). Similarities across these different postcolonial texts are not restricted to thematic parallels. Certain features such as the use of allegory, and discontinuous narratives, are common in these works. Besides, the persistence of these common themes and structural patterns is intentional. They actually reflect and argue for the common psychic and historical conditions that typify Maghrebi postcolonial society. Nevertheless, one may wonder how an understanding of literature can advance understanding of the nature and causes of women’s inequality in the non-fictional world, and help to change it. The answer is that literature creates a representation of that already existing reality by means of ‘words and form’. Literary texts, such

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as novels and autobiographies, and their powerful intellectual and emotional impact, can offer a special insight into the mechanisms of gender discrimination. Therefore, one should bear in mind that the Maghrebi novel stems from a synthesized combination of oral and literary traditions of Maghrebi culture. The Maghrebi novel is one of the genres that Maghrebi writers have borrowed from Western culture and utilized in their quest for power and identity in a hostile, biased and patriarchal society. The novel appeared to be the literary form that women writers first and most profitably made their own. Virginia Woolf makes clear why women writers have taken up this literary form: ‘All the older forms of literature were hardened and set by the time she became a writer. The novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands – another reason perhaps why she wrote novels’ (Woolf 1945: 77). This could well be applicable to the Maghreb. When one considers the number of novels produced so far, and the fact that novelists far outnumber poets or essayists, one may infer that it is the novel as a genre that has been given preference. For Yvette Benayoun-Szmidt (2002) ‘the novel is one of the literary genres that Maghrebi women writers have favoured. This choice has enabled them to speak, to share their own perception of the world, and to claim roles and liberties which have long been denied to women in their traditionally patriarchal societies.’ According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1981: 294), the novel, in its fictive presentation of contending social and ideological discourses, compels the acceptance that ‘language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – “overpopulated” – with the intentions of others’. In other words, language is never an objective transmitter of experience. It is always caught up in a value system. And this value system determines the writer’s choice of words and structures. To admit this is to admit that works of literature cannot simply reflect, but they are also a point of view. Bakhtin’s statement that ‘language is always half someone else’s’ (1981: 293) may be ascribed singular historical resonance in studies of Maghrebi narratives. For today’s Maghrebi authors, the enterprise of writing started as an endeavour to appropriate French

Introduction

13

language, which was ‘overpopulated’ with the ideological intentions of the dominant European (French) culture. Education, which was withheld from colonized people by law, was a perilous political accomplishment and, having achieved it, Maghrebi authors had to express themselves in a language that disavowed the very prospect of Maghrebi subjectivity. Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Maghreb Pluriel (1983) re-conceptualizes Maghrebi culture in terms of its connection with Mediterranean countries and the Middle East in general. This ‘carnal’ relation is indeed perceptible, for instance, not only in the various languages that Maghrebi use (Arabic, Tamazight,6 French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) but also in the linguistic sedimentation and in the complex mélange of colonial, cultural and religious histories, that has fashioned the Maghreb from the distant past to the present day. Many scholars simply overlook one of the most important dimensions of Maghrebi culture, what Khatibi calls ‘bilinguisme’ or, even more appropriately, ‘plurilinguisme’. In a recent critique, he provocatively affirms We spent a little less than a century to learn French to some extent, we spent fourteen centuries to somewhat learn Arabic, and we spent an eternity not to write Berber. It is necessary to analyze at this time the real and imaginary effects of this particular issue, which is writing in the history of Maghrebi culture, to understand the historical process of the concept of writing. And not only in terms of the theological, mystical, linguistic or political concepts of the Arabic language as it has been postulated for centuries in this place (Khatibi 1985: 55).7 (My translation) When the fight for independence in the Maghreb had forced the issue of independent states and distinct nationalities, and the three emerging Maghrebi nations had begun to be taken for granted, Maghrebi literature as a discrete literary canon also began to be acknowledged. Yet this emerging literature was viewed as a by-product of the ‘parent tree’ canon. As I show later, for many scholars there was no such thing as Maghrebi literature but a contribution to French literature; and even now ‘Maghrebi Francophone literature’ is still the clumsy term used for Maghrebi literature written in French.8

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Referring to French debates about postcoloniality, Alec Hargreaves (1997: 3) admits that the term Francophonie is a problematic one. Yet he sees it as ‘a possible uniting factor in referring to the postcolonial’. It seems to me as a Maghrebi – and an Algerian scholar – highly paradoxical that postcolonialism as a critical approach should be identified by a ‘uniting element’ imposed by colonialism: the language whose abrogation / appropriation itself is challenged by some postcolonial authors like Edward Glissant, Leila Abouzeid, Saro Wiwa or Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s seminal work, Decolonizing the Mind. It is worth mentioning that in this work9 Kenya’s major novelist declares ‘farewell’ to the English language and announces his return to his native Gikuyu tongue in his fiction. In Francophone Literatures: An Introductory Survey (1996: 17), Belinda Jack traces the etymology of the term ‘Francophone’ to the end of the nineteenth century, when it was coined and used to ‘designate both a socio-linguistic and geopolitical phenomenon: to describe French-speaking populations and to describe a French-speaking bloc’. Jack is careful to point out that in coping with written texts from ‘the Francophone world’, the term Francophone needs further elaboration when it comes to its literary designation. According to her, to identify a literary text as Francophone is to ‘distinguish it from a “French” text and therefore to emphasize a certain difference’ (17). One way of looking at this discrepancy is to see ‘the Francophone literary project as inherently subversive where language is concerned’. But, to paraphrase Kateb Yacine, whether they write in French or Arabic, these women ‘valent leur pesant de poudre’ [they are worth their weight in gunpowder].10 So a word should be said about the use of French because the critical issue of language as the key to cultural access, as a political tool, and as the determinant of personal identity cannot be overlooked. If it is significant that Abouzeid, who is trilingual, writes in Arabic rather than French; the other two Maghrebi writers (Djebar and Guellouz) examined in this book, use French in a twofold way. If the works of Djebar and Guellouz are ‘in (and) of French’ (Djebar 1969: 10), according to Mildred Mortimer, they ‘use the colonizer’s language as a revolutionary tool to express an ideology and aesthetics of difference’ (2001: 3–4). They articulate experiences and incidents

Introduction

15

that, for countless reasons, are bridled or muzzled by those in power in Maghrebi society. In a way that is similar to other Maghrebi writers, Djebar has always used French as a political tool in her creative writing. Although she masters this language perfectly, she confesses to difficulty in using it to depict the very depths of the Algerian being. She affirms that her ‘first exile is language’ (1969: 10). Yet she admits that her objective is ‘to achieve a bilingual artistic expression’ (Djebar 1968: 19), i.e., to ‘Arabize’ French through literature. The difficulty of classifying this literature emerged early on. Different names have been used to refer to Maghrebi literature in ‘French’. Right from the outset the term ‘Littérature coloniale’ was used because the literature produced by Robert Randau, Isabelle Eberhardt11 and Lucienne Favre in North Africa (the Maghreb) at the time was considered as an appendage to the literature of the French Métropole. Then ‘L’École d’Alger’ epitomized by Albert Camus, Emmanuel Roblès, Jules Roy and Jean Pélégri was in vogue in the mid-1930s. Modern Francophone Algerian literature emerged in the 1940s with Jean Amrouche’s l’Éternel Jugurtha (1946) and Djamila Debèche’s Leila, jeune fille d’Algérie (1947), followed by Mouloud Feraoun’s Le fils du pauvre (1950), Mouloud Mammeri’s La colline oubliée (1952) and Mohamed Dib’s La grande maison (1952). These writers, who are known as the ‘Génération de 1952’ (Mosteghanemi 1985: 13) blazed the trail for a new ‘littérature de combat’ which coincided with the Algerian War of Liberation (1954–62). The emblematic figures and works of the ‘Génération de 1952’ are Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (1956), Malek Haddad’s Je t’offrirai une gazelle (1959) and works by two poets of European origin, Jean Sénac’s Matinale de mon peuple (1961) and Anna Greki’s Algérie capitale Alger (1963). In the aftermath of Independence, Francophone Algerian literature developed with talented writers such as Mourad Bourboune (Le Muezzin, 1968), Nabile Farès (Le champ des oliviers, 1972), Assia Djebar (L’Amour, la fantasia, 1985), Rachid Mimouni (Tombéza, 1985), Leila Sebbar (Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, 2003), and scores of others.12 In Portrait du colonisé, Albert Memmi (1957: 17) maintains that ‘La littérature colonisée de langue française semble condamnée à mourir jeune’ [French colonial literature is condemned to die young].

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Gender and Identity in North Africa

After the independence of Algeria, several critics saw things the same way as Memmi and predicted the disappearance of ‘Maghrebi literature of French expression’ (Cheriet 1973: 56). Nevertheless, the sustained proliferation of Maghrebi literary texts, and the stylistic innovations of distinguished Maghrebi novelists such as the Algerians Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar and Yamina Mechakra; the Moroccans Driss Chraïbi, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Halima Benhaddou; and the Tunisians Hélé Béji and Fawzi Mellah, and many others, has run counter to this prophecy. In contrast, a significant new generation of writers arrived on the scene in the 1970s and 1980s such as the Moroccans Abdelkebir Khatibi, Nadjia Ajraoui, Siham Benchekroun, Badia Hadj Nasser and Fatima Mernissi; the Algerians Tahar Djaout, Fettouma Touati, Rachid Mimouni and Hafsa Zinai-Koudil; the Tunisians Souad Guellouz, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Jalila Hafsia, and scores of others. Many of these authors have been prolific. Conscious of the colonial overtones related to what is called nowadays ‘Francophone Literature’, I do agree with Kateb Yacine when he refers to this type of literature as ‘littérature de graphie française’ [a literature of French written word];13 Abdellah Cheriet (1973), Charles Bonn and Naget Khadda (1996) call it ‘Littérature d’Expression Française’ [a literature of French expression]. As for Phyllis Monego, it is ‘Maghrebian Literature in French’ (1984), and for Jean Déjeux it is ‘Littérature de langue française’ [a literature of French language] (1993). But Jean Pierre Koffel, the FrancoMoroccan novelist, refers to these Maghrebi (women) writers as: ‘des écrivain(e)s Franco-graphes’ [Franco-graph writers].14 Koffel, in an attempt to explain the dilemma inherent in this struggle with terminology, seems to be of the same opinion as Kateb and Djebar. This is an indication that each term remains inadequate because there are always scholars/authors who cannot and will not identify with it. These semantic changes reveal how language is indicative of power struggles, and this is certainly more than just a linguistic debate because three very important questions can be raised: Who is entitled to choose the names? What is their significance? Do they reflect a real historical progression? In a process of ‘decolonization of the mind’ (Khatibi 1971: 5), Djebar – just like her Maghrebi sisters – makes no tabula rasa of the past and opts for a sort of:

Introduction

17

de-territorialization from geographic, ethnic and cultural frontiers. Situated between the East and the West, at the intersection of Africa, Europe, and the Middle-East, the Maghreb constitutes a privileged geographic and cultural site for the dynamic interplay of different cultural traditions and mixed ethnic groups, of cultural pluralism and multilingualism (Marx-Scouras 1986: 8). Djebar, as much as Abouzeid or Guellouz, for instance, is attentive to and shaped by this hybridity: the fact of fitting into two or more cultures is perceived as a privileged vantage point and ‘something to be celebrated rather than lamented’ (Marx-Scouras 1986: 8). And even if she is highly committed to Algeria and acutely aware of the ways she is compromised by using the language of the colonizer, she celebrates her multicultural heritage and confesses in Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1980) that she is ‘a writer of French language … and … deeply Algerian’ (65). In her essay ‘The Experience of Evidence: Language, the Law, and the Mockery of Justice’, Ranjana Khanna echoes many Maghrebi writers and intellectuals with regard to the use of the French language: French paradoxically becomes the language of protest even as it carries within it the ghosts of the past. Perhaps the uncanniness of the language – its paradoxical status as the language of the Other and, simultaneously, as an elusive mother language that provided opportunities – has become the only viable alternative, however haunted it may be by its own colonial specters (2002: 134). It should also be noted that the use of French, ‘un butin de guerre’ as Kateb Yacine once styled it,15 enables Maghrebi writers to be read by ‘Others’. It makes it easier for diverse foreign universities, with no Arab / Middle East and North Africa (MENA) studies, to have access to Maghrebi material through their Romance languages departments. Unable to comprehend Arabic, many scholars around the world have

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Gender and Identity in North Africa

become familiar with the Maghreb today because of the accessibility of the French language. On this note, it is tiresome to hear some critics blaming the French language for the absence of contact with the masses (Mortade 1971), and completely ignoring the fact that Maghrebis speak French, Arabic, Spanish and Tamazight (Berber). Of course, many Maghrebis do not ‘know’ how to read, because they were not given the chance to learn. The regimes in the Maghreb, especially in Morocco (Khatibi 1985: 92), have not done enough to eradicate illiteracy or encourage the teaching of reading. And in Algeria and Tunisia, the creation of impressive cultural infrastructure such as ‘Maison de Culture’ and different cultural associations in every urban centre has not prevented these regimes from focusing more on the ‘personality cult’, folkloric and populist activities than on consolidating cultural infrastructures where people can thrive intellectually (Harbi 2005). In addition to the challenging language issue, I have to append a particular social context to women’s writing. If contextualization has become the watchword of the most influential approaches to literature, it seems to me that it is difficult to disentangle Maghrebi literature from its social and ideological milieu. The writing act by women, which some still call ‘the literature of long finger nails’ (Fawzi 1987: 65), is not considered, in the Maghreb, as one of the roles that women are supposed to perform. To a certain extent, it seems like a transgression of an interdiction. Women’s writing introduces to the domain of publishing and, therefore, the public sphere, elements such as psychology and feminine behaviour which are not traditionally displayed in public debate. Some male critics, as I show later, take no notice of women’s artistic accomplishments. In accordance with their prejudiced misogynistic agenda, and in the name of a dubious biological essentialism, these critics consider the production of literature as a male ‘thing’ and women writers are regarded first as women then as writers. Mary Ellmann (1968: 32) put this misogynistic mind-set in a nutshell: ‘there must always be two literatures like two public toilets, one for men and one for women’. Nevertheless, current fiction by Maghrebi women, with its exceptional openness and its assimilation of individual struggle into the wider social context, might develop into a force for affirmative and genuine social and political transformation

Introduction

19

in the Maghreb. Even if this were not the case, the production of fiction by Maghrebi women writers would be phenomenal for its diversity, critical and artistic merit, challenging as it does a society that has not tolerated such aspirations. Inevitably, the insights and analytical methods of numerous critical schools have informed this book, but my project is less theoretical than it is exploratory. Besides Jameson’s ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986), Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s groundbreaking and still leading primer The Empire Writes Back (1989) strikes me as the ideal critique for understanding the works of these postcolonial Maghrebi women writers, as I will show in the course of the study. Winifred Woodhull, in Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures (1993), provides the other theoretical paradigm which helps me comprehend the current issues related to Maghrebi postcolonial literature. Charles Bernheimer in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (1995) makes it viable for comparative literature to construct crucial connections with feminism and postcolonial studies. It does so by asking a completely different kind of question about identity and national literature in this age of multiculturalism where the emphasis on mutual respect and tolerance for cultural differences has never been as important: how does literature influence the definitions of gender and class? This book begins by looking at the contested definitions of feminism and the range of distinctive writers to be examined, acknowledging both their contextual differences and their diverse approaches to feminism. It also tackles the same writers from a postcolonial perspective. Thus, a definition of postcolonialism is necessary. Attempts at coming up with a single definition of postcolonial theory have proved somewhat controversial, but as a critical approach postcolonialism may be viewed as a response of ‘colonized’ people to the ‘colonial legacy’ by writing back to the centre. The term ‘postcolonial’ ‘does indicate the rationale of the grouping in a common past and hints at the vision of a more liberated and positive future’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 24). According to Anne McClintock (1992: 31–2), a country can be postcolonial, i.e. independent, and yet neo-colonial; in other words, still unable to get by without the economic relations and links with

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the former colonial ruler. Therefore, it is sometimes doubtful whether once-colonized countries can be viewed as properly ‘postcolonial’ because their political affairs and economies are still dictated and closely tied to the former colonial ruler. A close look at the nature of Maghrebi regimes reveals the pertinence of this view. It is very hard to conceive the existence and durability of these regimes without the support they get from the erstwhile colonial ruler. Undoubtedly, the strength and significance of postcolonial theory resides in its inherently comparative methodology and ‘the hybridized and syncretic’ reflection of the modern world this involves. In other words, this perception brings about a framework of ‘difference on equal terms’ in the bounds of which multi-cultural theories, ‘both within and between societies’, can be effectively assessed (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 36–7). Therefore, with the development of comparative postcolonial studies between two or more regions, what had normally been considered as nationally or regionally distinctive was revealed to be more commonly postcolonial. Although postcolonial theory, in its present form, came into its own only about 20 years ago, it has already made remarkable gains in its reach and influence. It started with providing a reading strategy for literatures of the erstwhile colonies such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, India, the US and the Caribbean, which, despite their noticeable differences, display common distinctive signs because of the shared tragic experience of colonialism. Any examination of Maghrebi women’s writing can rightfully start with the point that for most of the time Maghrebi women authors have been categorically refused not only literacy, and a proper education, but also the smallest chance of an acceptable human life. Therefore, if literacy itself was exceptional and opportunities for education were often minimal, it is not difficult to understand why only few accounts by Maghrebi women have survived the colonial period. In his landmark essay, L’Algérie: Nation et Société (1969) Mostefa Lacheraf reveals how the political, economic and social constraints of colonialism have historically hampered the resourceful lives of Maghrebi women and men. In addition to taking in and digesting the impact of colonial culture, these very literatures resisted colonial control and influence by affirming their ‘differences from the assumptions of the imperial

Introduction

21

centre’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 2). Since it helped create a paradigm that promised a wider application, postcolonial theory has so far moved away from the confines of the tangible historical experience of colonialism to involve other types of ‘colonialisms’, such as oppression legitimized by social mores, cultural practices, and / or linguistic power (Dhar 2003: 2). And this is the focal point in the works of most Maghrebi writers, as Réda Bensmaïa (2003) has suggested. As for my definition of feminism, which also illuminates my choice of these women writers, I construe feminism to be a political assessment based on two major arguments: a) that gender difference generates inequality between men and women, and b) that this inequality is a cultural construction. Thus, the objective of any feminist is to understand the mechanisms of this construction and then change them. Yet, as Pam Morris (1993: 2) warns, a male feminist can ‘recognize and deplore the structures of gender inequality, but he cannot experience them as a woman’. And I am quite conscious of such an argument. As I argue in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, women writers encode their experiences in a different way from men. Their creative world is expressed by means of a different type of representation. Their paradigms have taken form from various sources and experiences that are unsynchronized with those of male writers. On one hand, Maghrebi women writers like Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz celebrate the love of women for women as an empowering force within a debilitating nexus of abject poverty, discrimination and misogyny. On the other hand, it is also remarkable that some of the most significant literary accounts of the interconnection of class and gender have been made by these very same Maghrebi women writers: Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz. As Rosalind Coward (1986: 230) contends, ‘not all womencentred texts can be assumed to be consciously feminist texts in the sense of the definition of a political agenda’. But Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz have brought into play a range of narrative forms to examine the terrifying nature of institutionalized tyranny and humiliation, and their female characters’ fight for individuality, conceived alternately as a pursuit of a human entity and/or an escape from social commodification.

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Furthermore, I accept and develop the notion that all these Maghrebi writers expose sexism and sexist violence in their respective communities. But my ultimate objective, in selecting and focusing on three distinguished writers from three countries, is to examine the similarities and contradictions inherent in these societies. Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz communicate across their countries within the same world of literary discourse. These three female authors present similarities of character in their comprehension of women’s possibilities when they write about female autonomy and sexuality, domestic and national relations. They also adopt broadly different approaches to address these issues. It is clear that ‘engaging with the contested critical areas of both feminism and the postcolonial is bound to be fraught with difficulties and selection means much is omitted, largely because it does not fit the dual concentration on the postcolonial and gender issues, or for reasons of space and cohesion’ (Wisker 2000: 1). It is also commonly admitted that feminist perspectives have a greater significance in postcolonial criticism. In fact, the strategies of recent feminist and recent postcolonial theory share some common ground. Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz have all singled out a certain similitude between men and women’s relationships and the connection between the colonizer and the colonized. Most importantly, both feminist and postcolonial discourses aim to re-establish the victimized / marginalized in the face of the victimizer / dominant. Therefore, ‘postcolonial feminist literature foregrounds the presence and voices of women silenced by a history that discounts them and fails to consider their agency’ (Donadey 2001: 143). The intersection of both feminism and postcolonialism is central in the works of the three selected authors. It should be noted that most people, whatever their cultural and religious backgrounds, would acknowledge certain fundamental conditions for independence: equal rights under law, equal access to economic resources, and protection from different forms of human persecution such as physical abuse. But within these inclusive confines, every culture, every woman, has certainly the right to construct her own ‘feminist’ agenda using components from her own and other cultural traditions. In this respect, and with regard to the ethics of representation, I have to agree with H.L. Gates when he

Introduction

23

affirms that ‘the concern of the Third World critic should properly be to understand the ideological subtext which any [discourse] reflects and embodies, and what relation this subtext bears to the production of meaning’ (Gates 1992: 69). For Maghrebi women, as Djebar and Fatima Mernissi suggest in their respective works Loin de Médine (1991) and The Veil and The Male Elite (1991), the solution to the conflicting issues that affect them could be found in an unbiased reading of the Qur’an in its historical and social context. The Qur’anic precepts ought to be seen as a function of social dynamics rather than manipulated to legitimize illegitimate socio-political privileges. In the Qur’an, male and female Muslims are one and the same in faith and dignity: ‘Oh mankind we have created you of male and female, of nations and tribes so that you may know each other. The most honoured in the eyes of God is the most pious amongst you’ (Qur’an 49: 12). Many Muslim scholars attribute the state of subordination to which women have been subjected throughout the ages to the idea that men are ‘a cut above’ women. Djebar and Mernissi suggest that one has then to re-examine the original Islamic message enshrined in the spirit of the religion: a message of egalitarianism and gender balance. In ‘Daughters of Hagar: Daughters of Muhammad’, Sonia Lee contends that through her fictional investigation of women in Islam, Djebar endeavours to make a space for Muslim women ‘to reclaim the true law of God’ (Lee 60). For instance, Djebar explores the relation of the Prophet Muhammad with his daughter Fatima-Zohra with the purpose of making a statement about Islam’s fundamental caring stance vis-à-vis women. Lee construes Djebar’s authorial intentions in L’Amour, la fantasia as follows: Djebar seems to feel that Muhammad’s legendary love for Fatima-Zohra should have served as a model for Muslim fathers, an opportunity to improve their society, and to act upon the wisdom of the Koran. But instead of listening to their heart, they chose to perpetuate the law of their fathers, thereby yielding to their desire to preserve male prerogatives (Lee 1996: 54).

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Gender and Identity in North Africa

Organization of the Book Gender and Identity in North Africa is divided into four main chapters and a Conclusion. In every chapter, some historical and cultural background is sketched in, and I examine the conditions / reception of contemporary Maghrebi women’s writing in relation to earlier writings by Maghrebi women. The focus is essentially on writing by contemporary postcolonial Maghrebi women. In Chapter 1, ‘The Triumph of the Muzzled’, I establish the historical framework and map out the genesis and development of Maghrebi women’s literature, before briefly introducing some of the emblematic figures and their works. I examine the progress of Maghrebi women’s literature, which is relatively recent, and demonstrate how the interaction of geography, historical events, sociological motives and psychological circumstances has been significant in the inception of this literature. I also show how the novel, as a genre, has been an efficient means to denounce their socio-political situation. Women writers in the Maghreb are aware of their long and rich history, which encompasses occupation by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, the Spanish and the French. They are also aware of the significance and magnitude of the layers left behind in the identity. Other historical and literary factors that have affected Maghrebi women’s literature include the importance of ancestral figures like al-Kahina or Fadhma n’Soumer,16 the victimization women underwent at the time of colonization, and Armistice Day (8 May 1945) and its impact on the indigenous populations. Equally important are the postcolonial wars in the different countries of the Maghreb, the 1952 massacre in Casablanca, the emergence of Francophone literature, publication of Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma in 1956, post-independence disenchantment, and the election of Assia Djebar to the Académie Française in June 2005, making her the first Maghrebi to join the prestigious 40member French academy of letters. Chapter 2, ‘The Representation of the Subaltern and Importance of Community: Leila Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant’, draws attention to the combination of history and ‘her story’ and how women’s narratives, in Morocco, do challenge official historiography. In addressing Leila Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant, Chapter 2 highlights the importance of history in Morocco, and illustrates how individuals are formed /

Introduction

25

deformed by historical events over which they have no control. In blending the personal with the general and social, Abouzeid reveals Fanon’s exceptional and critical influence. In his pioneering work The Wretched of the Earth (1961 [1990]), Fanon, who was with Albert Memmi a ‘postcolonial’ writer avant la lettre, encourages the silenced and misrepresented peoples to find a voice and identity by recovering their past. And this is exactly what Abouzeid has done in her work. She considers that part of her cultural and literary mission as a writer is to bear witness to the predicament of her people. Significantly, Abouzeid explores the ‘representation of the subaltern’ in her community. Her female protagonist, Zahra, is iconoclastic, contemptuous of oppressive morals, and disapproving of archaic modes of thinking. This chapter also shows how Zahra is conditioned by her rigid and hostile milieu. The abrasive socio-political situation that prevails in her country largely defines her humanity. It is no wonder that she decides to prevail over the adverse situation that hinders her self-fulfilment. Above all, Abouzeid believes that the novel can play a part in the way in which history is made and remade. Her emphasis on neo-colonialism, poverty and women’s issues has enabled her to see the dialectical relationship between the novel and history. In Chapter 3, ‘Resistance and Self-Fulfilment in Assia Djebar’s A Sister to Scheherazade’, I reveal the resistance of the voiceless and show how some women engage in the cultural practices that engender inequalities for women in Algeria. In addition, Chapter 3 extends the discussion of the historical dimension, which I developed in the previous chapter, and tries through Assia Djebar’s A Sister to Scheherazade to highlight women’s resistance and ultimately their triumph over restricting and abusive socio-cultural practices in Algeria. I show in this chapter how Djebar explores the status and roles assigned to women in the Third World. Her fiction examines political issues, especially with regard to women’s resistance and selffulfilment, and addresses women’s agency and social justice. Djebar builds on Fanon’s ideas that ‘colonial racism is no different from any other racism’ (Fanon 1967: 88), and highlights the type of ‘mastersand-slave’ relationship that exists in Algeria. Like Abouzeid and Guellouz who examine, respectively, the plight of Moroccan and

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Gender and Identity in North Africa

Tunisian women at the hands of their men, Djebar’s task is to explore Algerian women’s liberation and the relationship between husband and wife. It is self-evident that Moroccan and Tunisian women’s experience of subjugation and marginalization as it falls through the cracks of class and gender is comparable to that of Algerian women. A Sister to Scheherazade engages in the impact of domestic violence, both physical and psychological. If colonial violence has affected local people whether in the protectorates (Morocco and Tunisia) or in the settler-invader colony (Algeria), and still haunts the Algerian collective memory, Djebar’s narrative concentrates on a new type of violence at the hands of indigenous people. A typically politicized voice, Djebar is fully aware that ‘decolonization’ is not only an individual development in a communal context, but a collective experience as well. She also insists that deliverance for women comes from affinities with other women. Women’s solidarity for Djebar can be lifesaving and can also generate an alternative reality and a course of action for the future. Chapter 4, ‘Women’s Life-writing: The Sense of Geographic, Cultural, and Social Displacement in Souad Guellouz’s La vie simple’, investigates the relationship of the individual to the collective. It also explores the way this autobiographer attempts to name and situate herself, and order her life within her postcolonial community in Tunisia. My comparative analysis of this autobiography reveals that it is an instrument of strategy through which a position of weakness is transformed into one of agency. The practice of autobiography is essentially an effort to conceive, confirm or stress a certain sense of identity. La vie simple not only confirms a sense of identity, but also emphasizes the personal development of the author. The salient characteristic of this major work is its female protagonist’s loss of innocence. From a range of perspectives, Guellouz’s life-story conveys the complex dynamics of experience through which the often conflicting values of her community forms or deforms individuals. In tune with the moral code of her community, Sadiya is at peace with herself. Moreover, in naming and situating herself within her national community, Guellouz offers a ‘collective autobiography’. It may seem that in this chapter the focal point is the individual,

Introduction

27

but in fact the individual is as important as the community. Guellouz’s La vie simple is a perfect enactment of themes of self and history, and self and place. The autobiography also highlights major issues such as the importance of family and exalts motherhood and the upbringing of one’s offspring. It also focuses on the pursuit of happiness, selfdevotion and self-help. To put it in a nutshell, this life-story aims at reflecting and expressing women’s challenges and aspirations vis-à-vis the ideology that prevails in post-independence Tunisia. In the Conclusion I bring together the various important findings of this book. I argue for postcolonial feminist literature as a model that underscores the presence and voices of Maghrebi women who have long been muzzled by socio-political circumstances. The three selected authors take a stand against harassment, women’s subaltern status, polygamy, divorce, and women’s mistreatment, in their respective Muslim communities. Through fiction or autobiography, their female characters (Zahra, Hajila and Sadiya) consciously assert their identities. These narratives present real-life situations of real women. I also highlight the striking similarity of these major works. Year of the Elephant, A Sister to Scheherazade and La vie simple focus on the same preoccupation, which is a woman’s journey towards independence. Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz opt for a conflation of personal and public experience. One woman’s predicament becomes an allegory for the collectivity. Gender and Identity in North Africa ultimately offers an interdisciplinary comparative assessment of the ways in which Abouzeid’s, Djebar’s and Guellouz’s works shed light on a number of key essential postcolonial feminist issues. And by underscoring the similarities, as well as the differences, between their respective writings, I argue for the usefulness of contextual analysis in exploring the intricacies of these texts. My own conclusion is that women are not a ‘special case’, but they can stand for ‘the human’. This fundamental fact underlies this book. Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz display the harsh experiences of Maghrebi women, but who also find out ways to endure, and resist fixed, dehumanizing identities, whether sexual or cultural. And there is only one viable way to better study and teach these representations. It is through comparison. Comparative literature

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illuminates the artistic and cultural paradigms within and between different communities; and with its focus on class, gender, and language it can be eye-opening on the human condition.

The Triumph of the Muzzled

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1 THE TRIUMPH OF THE MUZZLED

Introduction In the wake of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1952 [1967]), Albert Memmi’s Portrait du colonisé (1957), and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), postcolonial theory has exposed the vicious and destructive effects of colonial rule on local communities, and given a voice back to the muzzled and exploited masses. It has also underscored questions of representation in colonial narratives and the ‘agency of the natives’. Yet in giving voice to the marginalized, one has to take into account the difficulty of representation that Spivak addresses in her acclaimed essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1995). She argues that ‘speaking on behalf ’ of others always risks reinstalling the very oppression these writers/intellectuals aspire to challenge. The interest in postcolonial and nascent voices, as a response, has focused on undermining the postulate of colonial discourse, rewriting its history, and ‘subverting the master’s text’ (Young 1990: 209) from the perspective of the subaltern. ‘The celebration of the struggle towards independence in both community and individual’, a major theme of postcolonial literature, as described in The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 27), is prominent in the texts of Maghrebi writers such as Djebar, Abouzeid and Guellouz. I will explore this theme in more detail in the following chapters. This chapter aims at charting the genesis of Maghrebi women’s literature. It delineates the general background of Maghrebi women writers, and succinctly introduces some of the leading figures and their works. It is obvious that I have concentrated on a few authors, adopting the same modus operandi in my analysis for each one of

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them, while uneasily aware that they are not the only pebbles on the beach. This examination of selected women authors and texts will try to reveal how class and gender are the major concerns in these women’s quest for a distinguishable voice beyond the avatars of patriarchy. Whether these authors write in Arabic or French, they believe that their work can help change the lives of their community for the better. This is their commitment – to lay bare the abuse and oppression and contribute to the improvement of their people’s fate. The set of understandings that explains Maghrebi culture and represents Maghrebi consciousness has developed from a unique pattern of experiences and key events and situations such as colonization, independence, and post-independence disillusion and authoritarianism. And all these experiences have given rise to sedimentation of shared memories and frames of reference. Thus, the significance of Maghrebi narratives lies in the fact that they are more than vivid historical documents. For it is the writer’s remodelling of the world or reality from a particular vantage point that constitutes the distinctive meaning of imaginative narratives as ‘the basic categorical forms through which we apprehend realities in time’ (Jameson 1978: 510). A Mirror of Mutations and Syncretisms In order to fully explain the emergence of contemporary Arabophone and Francophone Maghrebi women’s literature, it is necessary at this point to give a succinct historical and political overview of its development. Maghrebi women’s literature is relatively recent. Yet, in the short period of its existence there has been a remarkable maturation in theme, form and technique. Right from its inception, and because of the historical specificity of the region, the focus has been upon bicultural tension and loss of identity. It is obvious that after so many centuries of being the spoils of several conquerors, such as the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantine, Arabs, Turks, Spanish and French, the identity issue in the Maghreb has a hybridized dimension. Many post-independence novelists have focused on the examination of this challenging question, for they have realized the significance and magnitude of the layers left behind in the identity. Maghrebi literature reflects all the mutations and syncretisms

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that have affected Maghrebi women and men alike throughout their history. Whether we like it or not, we have been in contact with other civilizations and cultures. This has occurred in violence and coercion. But this has been done and the mark is indelible. Other cultures joined universality through free dialogue and in peace. In both cases, the result is perceptibly the same on the practical level. Our rancour persistently stumbles over the terrible reality. Like a disfigured man, we reject the mirror and if we see ourselves in the mirror before us, the reaction is disturbing.1 Moreover, as the Maghreb is considered ‘one of the most multicultural areas in the world’ (Eric Sellin 1998), one must consider the interaction of geography, historical events, sociological motives and psychological circumstances to explicate the inception of Maghrebi women’s literature. The eruption in literature that revealed its power in the Maghreb, particularly in Algeria, can only be thoroughly comprehended from these vantage points. Besides, these women authors are fully conscious of their predicament. They know for sure that their suffering is not a clichéd matter. At the time of colonization, Maghrebi women were the first victims. For in the colonialist phantasm, to subdue Maghrebi women meant to control, to a certain extent, the whole Maghreb. In L’Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade, 1985), Djebar is on the same wavelength as Edward Said when she brings to light the French colonialist perception of Algeria. While revealing its ‘Orientalist’ dimension, Djebar describes the sexualization of Algeria as it is represented in the archives of the first ten years of the colonial period (1830–1840). In an unparalleled and flamboyant delineation of the moment prior to the French incursion, Algiers is represented as the mysterious, motionless ‘Oriental woman’, to be subjugated and ransacked, alternatively to be seduced and raped: Aube de ce 13 Juin 1830 … Il est cinq heures du matin. Devant l’imposante flotte qui déchire l’horizon, la Ville Imprenable

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se dévoile … Premier face à face. La ville … surgit dans un rôle d’Orientale immobilisée en son mystère … Silence de l’affrontement, instant solennel, … C’est un dimanche  ; bien plus, le jour de la Fête-Dieu au calendrier chrétien. … La ville barbaresque ne bouge pas. … (14–15). Les lettres de ces capitaines [français] … exposent parfois leur philosophie personnelle, ces lettres parlent, dans le fond, d’une Algérie-femme impossible à apprivoiser. Fantasme d’une Algérie domptée. … Le viol ou la souffrance des anonymes … Ce monde étranger, qu’ils pénétraient quasiment sur le mode sexuel … Y pénètrent comme en une défloration. L’Afrique est prise malgré le refus qu’elle ne peut étouffer (84–85). [13 June 1830 at the break of day … it is five o’clock. Facing the massive armada which rescinds the horizon, the inaccessible city unveils itself. First face to face. The city … comes into view in the position of an ‘Oriental woman’, at a standstill in her mystery … Silence of the confrontation, solemn instant, … It is a Sunday; moreover, it is a ‘day of God’ in the Christian calendar  … the Moorish city does not stir … (14–15). The letters of these [French] captains … sometimes reveal their personal philosophy; these letters speak, if truth be told, of Algeria as a woman whom it is impossible to domesticate. A controlled Algeria is a fantasy. … Rape or suffering of anonymous people  … This alien world, they penetrate in a quasi-sexual way  … Penetrate and deflower. Africa is taken despite the objection that she cannot suppress (84–85)] This passage clearly reveals the sexual dimension of the colonial invasion of Algeria. Rape, in this colonial context, is both real and metaphorical. In his book Orientalism ([1978] 2003) Edward Said brilliantly explores this linkage between sexuality and the colonial conquest. He argues, ‘A certain freedom of intercourse was always the Westerner’s privilege; because his was the stronger culture, he could penetrate’ the Orient (44). Besides, ‘the Orient as a geographical space [had] to be cultivated, harvested, and guarded. [These] images … of frank sexual attention to the Orient’ spread out rapidly in the

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nineteenth century. Hence, the Orient is viewed as a submissive and disposed woman validating its status as something inviting French interest, penetration, insemination – in short, colonization’ (219). Extrapolating from Said’s analogy, I may infer that this sexual-colonial conquest is deeply rooted in the colonizer’s mind, and that it is the nature of colonialism. The Algerian scholar Mostefa Lacheraf has unveiled in his study the colonial immorality revealed in the correspondence of the military officers whose mission was to ‘pacify’ Algeria between 1830 and 1870. Montagnac, one of the most zealous young officers of the Conquest, confesses to a friend: Vous me demandez … ce que nous faisons des femmes que nous prenons. On en garde quelques-unes comme otages, les autres sont échangées contre des chevaux, et le reste est vendu à l’enchère comme bêtes de somme … Voila, mon brave ami, comment il faut faire la guerre aux Arabes. Tuer tous les hommes jusqu’a l’age de 15 ans, prendre toutes les femmes et les enfants, en charger les bâtiments, les envoyer aux îles Marquises ou ailleurs; en un mot, anéantir tout ce qui ne rompra pas à nos pieds comme des chiens. [You ask me … what we do with the women we capture. We maintain some as hostages, swap others for horses, and auction off the rest like beasts of burden … This, dear friend, is how one must go about confronting Arabs: Slay all the men over fifteen years of age, seize all the women and children, load the vessels with them, send them off to the Marquises Islands or elsewhere  – in a word, exterminate everything that doesn’t grovel at our feet like dogs.]2 This is how those who were supposed to be the agents of a grand ‘mission civilisatrice’ regarded women. This predicament has remained engraved in women’s psyche along with all the other hardships they had to endure in the name of their own religion. Both experiences have found their way to their literature. The grievances articulated in the literature, the government’s failings, harassment and metaphysical anxiety revealed therein, are

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anchored in centuries of religious, cultural and political domination and conditioning. I have no intention of revising history, but it has to be mentioned that in the past the Maghreb saw the rise of several female historical figures such as Tin-Hinan in the fourth/fifth century AD, al-Kahina in the seventh century, Fadhma n’Soumer (1830–1873) who fought the French in 1871, and Zaynab Lalla (1850–1904) who ran the powerful Rahmaniya Sufi order in 1890s in the village of Zaatcha, in the Aures region (eastern part of Algeria). It has also been the cradle of a multitude of talented literary and intellectual figures, such as the medieval explorer Ibn Battuta (1303– 1384), the social historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) and Emir Abdelkader (1808–1883) the founder of the Algerian state, leader of the first Algerian resistance against French colonial rule, and a Sufi poet in his own right. Nonetheless, France’s early defeat by the Germans in 1940 bolstered ‘les Nord-africains’ and spurred them to put an end to their colonial status. The Maghrebis realized they had shed a great deal of blood on the European battlefields to liberate France as well as their respective countries, when most of the French themselves were either collaborating with the Nazis or tamed by Vichy’s government. Nevertheless, on Armistice Day, 8 May 1945, when thousands of Algerians took to the streets of Constantine, Setif, Guelma and Kherrata to express their joy, waving the Algerian flag, French troops responded with machine guns causing a blood bath.3 In her novel Les enfants du nouveau monde (1962), Djebar lucidly addresses the aftermath of the carnage: Ali racontait donc cet incident à Lila expliquant en même temps comment, après les manifestations du 8 mai 1945, les arrestations qui auraient suivi, la surveillance policière et les soubresauts des partis nationalistes dont la vie ne pouvait plus être qu’une écume de surface, non plus comme autrefois un travail de fond, coups de pioche enfoncés dans la croûte d’une terre durcie par l’épreuve, une torpeur apparente s’installait sur la ville ainsi que dans tout le pays, faux sommeil, nuit trompeuse dans les brumes de laquelle cependant mûrissaient, pour se sauver de l’asphyxie lente, les esprits des hommes.

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[Ali thus told Lila about the incident explaining at the same time how, after the demonstrations of 8 May 1945, the arrests which have followed, the police surveillance and the convulsions of the nationalist parties whose existence could no longer just be a superficiality, but a thorough work as before, blows of a pickaxe in the crust of a soil hardened by adversity, an apparent torpor settled in the city and all over the country, false slumber, misleading night in the duskiness of which matured, to escape from the slow asphyxiation, the spirits of men] (Djebar 1962: 171; my translation) This scene clearly reveals the rupture with the pre-Armistice Day period, especially amongst members of the educated political elite such as Ferhat Abbas,4 and the Francophone Algerian writers Mouloud Mammeri, Kateb Yacine,5 Mohamed Dib and Mouloud Feraoun, who tried to make their voices heard. Réda Bensmaïa has suggested that ‘Maghrebi francophone writers were precursors of the movement to re-evaluate nation, ethnicity, and authenticity in contemporary literary criticism and postcolonial studies’ (2003: 7). The events that occurred on Armistice Day should not be overlooked. They were symptomatic of the colonial plight that the Maghrebis were subjected to. Therefore, it was no surprise at all to see a ‘protest’ Maghrebi literature of French expression suddenly burgeoning right after the Second World War. Nor should it be surprising that this literary blossoming took place, for the most part, in Algeria, for the French colonial administration relentlessly invested in the ‘development’ of Algeria which was considered part and parcel of France, (i.e., un Département Français) and not a protectorate like Morocco and Tunisia.6 It is in Algeria, much more so than in Morocco or in Tunisia, that Maghrebi literature of French expression is profuse. It is because French occupation lasted longer, schooling in French language started earlier and the impact of French culture on the autochthonous outlook was particularly significant. Yet, women’s literary works during the period that followed the Second World War are somewhat scanty. The first feminist journal, L’Action,7 and the first novels by Algerian women: Djamila Debèche, Leila, jeune fille d’Algérie, and Taos Amrouche, Jacinthe noire, were published in 1947.

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These early works may have created literary art but they also surely emphasized the values and the paradigms of freedom, equality and justice. Their aim was to lift the Maghrebi masses to a better level. In creating new images and new heroes, these ‘pioneer writers’ created a tradition, and this is an indication of a progressive revolution. These authors believed in literature’s ability to change people’s consciousness. The writer then becomes a leader of the people and a maker of icons.8 For several French critics, it was amazing that native people: Arabs, Berbers9 and Jews could unexpectedly produce works of art. Biased colonial critics like Louis Bertrand (1866–1941), disregarded these new achievements because they firmly believed that nothing elaborate could come from this ‘barbarous, inferior, and backward lot of irrelevant humanity’ (Dunwoodie 1998: 167). It should be noted here that the Berbers were portrayed by classical writers as a ruthless ethnic group. The designation ‘Berber’ stems from the Greek ‘barbaros’, a name the Greeks and the Romans used to refer to all the newly conquered populations who spoke neither Greek nor Latin. The lineage of the Berbers continues to be a puzzle. Academic research has offered several hypotheses but no conclusive solution. They are a composite Caucasian stock composed of disparate ethnic elements. They also have their own specific language, Tamazight (Berber). Moreover, despite this age-old presence, of which the Berbers are rightly proud, Berber ‘literature’ has remained an oral tradition like the ‘Isefra’, or the ‘Ahellil’ of the Gourara tribes.10 Others, nonetheless, acclaimed this ‘assimilation’ of French culture, which was, according to them, ‘a triumph of colonization’ (Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876). Algerian critics also responded vehemently. Some of them rated this young literature as hollow and shallow (Brahimi 1977). As the movement for independence developed, some Maghrebi scholars were explicitly hostile in their judgments, claiming that only works that clearly helped the independence issue were legitimate and suitable (Lacheraf 1969). Others maintained, for different reasons, that these works of art did not faithfully picture Maghrebi society: they were intended for a French readership and were not dedicated to the cause of national liberation (Ben Cheikh 1977: 365).

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These criticisms were levied at both men and women writers. Refuting these criticisms, the critic Simone Rezzoug affirms that because Maghrebi women are usually considered to be disobeying or violating a taboo in taking up the pen and making women’s preoccupations the keynote of public debate, they have cultivated a writing approach in total conformity to their social environment. They display unpretentious discourses as a method of achieving recognition by the public and seeking the acceptance ‘of the female voice within and not against the male community. Indeed, the frequency of marks of sociability in the texts signifies the desire for participation and not … a declaration of difference’ (Rezzoug 1984: 86). Indeed, these women writers have favoured a prose that represents the validity of their positions; this is perceptible in the works of Assia Djebar, Fatima Mernissi and Souad Hedri, for instance. The other critical reproach made to these women novelists is their use of French as a means of expression in their creative writing – an issue I discussed in the Introduction and will address further in the following chapters. Evidently, local Arabic dialects are the enduring lingua franca in the Maghreb. And even though there is also a literary tradition in both Arabic and Berber languages which tells of both the rural and urban communities, because of French colonization in Algeria (1830–1962) and the protectorates in Morocco (1912–1956) and Tunisia (1881–1956), the use of French was compulsory.11 This engineered acculturation induced the emergence of a considerable literature in French rather than in Arabic, to the point that the number of Maghrebi authors published in French outnumbers those who write in Arabic (Déjeux 1982: 56). Maghrebi Arabs and Berbers could not really opt for one language. They studied French and so used it to voice their convictions and inform the ‘Other’ in the language s/he understands. As the major political event of the post-war period was the decolonization of the Maghreb,12 and, specifically, the Algerian Revolution (1954–62), a number of texts written in French by Arabs and Berbers became known in the 1950s and 1960s. The Tunisian Albert Memmi, the Moroccans Ahmed Sefrioui and Driss Chraïbi, the Algerians Mouloud Feraoun, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Mammeri, and Kateb Yacine were the most visible authors, who tried to analyze the implications of colonization and cultural hybridization. For

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almost a decade, Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (1956) was considered as a distinctive and influential work, worthy of comparison with world classics. In the meantime, the early brilliant works of the emerging Maghrebi woman novelist, Assia Djebar, La Soif (1957) and Les enfants du nouveau monde (1962) were overlooked.13 It was in the midst of the Algerian war of independence that Fathma-Zohra Imalayan (nom de plume Assia Djebar, b. 1936) launched her literary career with the publication of La Soif (1957). Her subsequent literary output of eleven novels, two collections of short stories, a play, a collection of poems, two films and many articles, earned her the reputation of the most outstanding woman writer in Maghrebi literature. Her strong feminist outlook has also earned her much praise. She won the Neustadt Prize for Contributions to World Literature in 1996 for her blending of history, autobiography and fiction. Her work has positioned her alongside Sara Suleri (Meatless Days, 1989) as a lucid critic of gender, history and subjectivity in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Her election to the Académie Française in June 2005 made her the first Maghrebi to join the prestigious 40-member French academy of letters. Djebar explains her need and duty to write as a form of struggle against vicissitudes such as silence and absence, death and oblivion that are often the lot of Maghrebi women. She is fully aware that to take one’s place as a writer is, usually, a manifestation of hope and enfranchisement; for the act of writing itself is regarded as a challenge, a rebellion against a woman’s past which is closely related to her community’s history. In a quest for an authentic discourse she has to confront two destinies marked by brutal colonial aggression: the writer is deprived of his/her mother tongue and the people are deprived of the right to live freely. After Algeria’s independence in 1962, when women’s emancipation was not accomplished, as expected, with the country’s freedom, the relevance of issues dealt with in the novel became apparent: the affective bond between spouses, the wife’s subaltern status vis-à-vis the husband, polygamy, and women’s apprehension of sterility and of ensuing repudiation. These generally unstated issues, which have come to bear on the life of Maghrebi women, permeate all of Djebar’s fiction, as does the challenging motif of woman’s discovery of her body.

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This trend appeared even before the Algerian war of independence, right after the Second World War. Maghrebi women’s literature has been marked by an open defiance in the face of an acknowledged bigotry. The best illustrations are Taos Amrouche, Jacinthe noire (1947), Djamila Debèche, Aziza (1955), Djebar’s first novel La Soif (1957) and the Moroccan Elisa Chimenti’s second novel Au coeur du harem (1958). These writers unequivocally showcase this defiance by universalizing the issue of individual freedom that challenges the female characters in their fiction. In addition to this concern with the individual, the entire society is so accurately scrutinized and exposed that it moves from the periphery to the centre of the narrative (Accad 1993: 82). Also, the increasing precision and candour with which the social fabric is displayed shows that society is no longer a backdrop for the plot. In these pieces of fiction, Maghrebi society is a character: a sound, emancipated character with both minor and pathetic imperfections. It is because of this development that the three narratives selected for in-depth analysis in this book, i.e. Djebar’s A Sister to Scheherazade (1987), Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Towards Independence (1984), and La vie simple (1975) by Guellouz, are perfect illustrations of what is really at stake in the Maghreb: the individual – and its liberation, cannot be alienated from the whole social fabric. Inevitably this revelation, which was first addressed by Driss Chraïbi (1972), has a profound political significance. Chraïbi writes: Et le noyau de la commune, c’est bel et bien la famille. Si au sein de cette famille la femme est maintenue prisonnière, voilée qui plus est, séquestrée comme nous l’avons fait depuis des siècles, si elle n’a aucune ouverture sur le monde extérieure, aucun rôle actif, la société dans son ensemble s’en ressent fatalement, se referme sur elle-même et n’a plus rien à apporter ni à elle-même ni au reste du monde. Elle devient non viable. [The nucleus of the commune is certainly the family unit. If within this unit women are locked up, veiled and sequestered, as has been the case for centuries, without any access to the outer world and without any vital role, the whole society is

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fatally affected and insulated. This society contributes nothing to itself or the rest of the world. It becomes non-viable] (1972: 175; my translation) Denouncing the Postcolonial Socio-Political Malaise Many critics consider the early 1960s as an interlude (Accad 1978). Since then, many works of fiction dealing with the war of independence have appeared, but there has been a shift in themes and an emergence of many new writers. They seem to revolve around three major considerations: how to depict the newly independent Maghrebi woman; what to express, and how to articulate it. Now that the struggle against the colonizer is over, these writers are facing themselves. They know that their new function, which is similar to literature’s, is to be the driving force for men and women to change the society in which they live and in so doing to change themselves. Mostefa Lacheraf has already warned: Le folklore et l’exploitation abusive de l’héroïsme guerrier sont devenus les deux mamelles de certains pays du Maghreb et remplacent successivement et sur une plus grande échelle encore la sous culture coloniale exotique et l’épopée légendaire et patriotarde par laquelle s’est prolongée chez nous la domination étrangère. [Folklore and the abusive exploitation of revolutionary heroism have become the two udders of some Maghrebi countries, and they have successively replaced on a larger scale the exotic colonial subculture and the legionary and excessively nationalistic epic through which French domination has been protracted amongst us.] (Lacheraf, 1982: 6; my translation) This new literature aimed at highlighting the egotistic heroism that had prevailed so far, but refused to perpetuate an anachronistic nationalism (Anderson 1983) that would alienate Maghrebis from their new reality. For the emphasis is on the post-independence socio-political malaise, and the necessity to denounce it.

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With regard to postcolonial nationalism and the place of women, it should be mentioned that the representation of women in nationalist discourse is far from unproblematic. In ‘Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation’ (1994), Deniz Kandiyoti argues that whether women are represented as guardians of tradition or as emblems of modernity, they are always identified as the ideological buffers and symbols of the nation, and as long as this persists their very social, legal and economic rights will remain precarious. And as I will show for Year of the Elephant, A Sister to Scheherazade and La vie simple, I agree with Kandiyoti that: [n]ationalist aspirations for popular sovereignty stimulate an extension of citizenship rights, clearly benefiting women. Since the emergence of women as citizens is also predicated upon the transformation of institutions and customs that keep them bound to the particularistic traditions of their ethnic or religious communities, the modern state is assumed to intervene as a homogenising agent which acts as a possible resource for more progressive gender politics (1994: 376). Moreover, the approach, noticeable in Yamina Mechakra’s La grotte éclatée (1979), of setting the story of a woman’s physical and moral abuse in the Algerian Revolution, a mesmeric point in the country’s history, urges the readers not to take women’s ill-treatment lightly (Amrane 1991). As Mechakra’s symbol of the shattered cave denotes the calamitous impact of French napalm explosives on the female and male Algerian freedom fighters who have sheltered there, it explicitly criticizes the ancestral custom of ‘burying women alive between four walls’.14 Jadis en Arabie ils enterraient les filles vivantes. Un père couvrait de terre sa petite … Sa femme aussi était enterrée vivante. Enfermée entre quatre murs … L’automne. Nouveaux bombardements sur la frontière [Algéro-Tunisienne]. Je ne me souviens de rien … Notre grotte éclata … Je la vis se remplir de fumée puis plus rien … Quant je me réveillai je n’avais plus qu’un bras, mon fils gisait au pied de Kouider méconnaissable:

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le napalm avait eu le dernier mot … Salah était enseveli sous les décombres. Un vide glacé m’habitait. J’étais inerte de tout mon corps, de tout mon être. [In the past, in Arabia, they buried girls alive. A father covered his baby girl with soil … His wife also was buried alive. Locked up between four walls … Autumn. New bombardments alongside the [Algerian-Tunisian] border. I do not remember anything  … Our cave was blown up … I saw it filled with smoke then nothing … When I woke up I had only one arm, my son lying by Kouider who was unidentifiable: napalm had the last word … Salah was buried under the debris. A frozen vacuum was growing inside me. Inert I was, body and soul] (Mechakra 1979: 51–94; ellipses mine)15 Abouzeid uses the same approach in Year of the Elephant, and so does Djebar in Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade. Iconoclastic, verbally disdainful of oppressive morals, and disrespectful of obsolete modes of thinking, Zahra in Year of the Elephant – as much as the other female characters – typifies a singular and abused Moroccan woman because of her experience in a rigid and hostile milieu that defines her humanity by socio-economic standards. She decides then to overcome the critical situation that hinders her self-fulfilment. In this regard, her trajectory is similar to that of her Maghrebi ‘sisters’. Because the repercussions of colonialism and sexism that conditioned, and continue to condition, their consciousness reveal a kind of ambivalence about their culture, and because the struggle for social justice persists, most contemporary Maghrebi women writers, just like their literary mothers, are still focusing on moral and sociopolitical concerns in their narratives. This is achieved through an intelligent synthesis of history and literary artfulness. Accordingly, they give importance to language, symbols and images in order to chart their own lives and to assert their own name and space. Yet, for Maghrebi women writers, and particularly for Algerians, to conjure the heroic period of the revolution is to emphasize women’s role in the struggle. Women want to reinforce their incontestable presence in the community. If this post-independence fiction presents some protest overtones, it is because the gap between women’s engagement

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in the struggle and their position in today’s society is considerable. It is also because of the frustration of seeing artificial barriers separating the public arena from the domestic space. Baya Gacemi (1997) explains this gap in an essay in Le Monde diplomatique: There has always been a lack of understanding between Algeria and its women. During the 1950s and 1960s, Algerian women were in the vanguard of the struggle for liberation. But, nowadays the relative freedom of the ‘sisters,’ famous for having ‘fought like men,’ has almost ceased to exist. It began to disappear in 1972 when the Family Code threatened to institutionalize male guardianship. Furthermore, when the veterans of the war of liberation wanted to build an independent state, how far did they include women in the state-building process? To put it simply, women were utilized in the war of liberation against the French, but were immediately forgotten at the end of the war and were de facto told, ‘thanks a lot, now get back in the house’. Women were thus treated either patronizingly or with outright hostility. As Valentine Moghadam put it, ‘the fact that women played a crucial role in the revolt did not prevent them from being discouraged, if not barred, from assuming prominence in the public sphere following victory’ (1994: 2). This shows, according to Kandiyoti (1994: 376), ‘the purely instrumental agenda of nationalist policies that mobilise women when they are needed in the labour force or even at the front, only to return them to domesticity or subordinate roles in the public sphere when the national emergency is over’. Such nationalist policies have triggered a deep feeling of disillusionment among the Moudjahidates. They are not only furious about the Catch-22 type of situation the country has been engulfed in, but they are also furious about the no-win situation their sisters find themselves in (Benallègue 1983: 25). Like the one-party government which emerged in Tunisia, and the monarchy which consolidated itself in Morocco, the FLN became the single ruling political party in Algeria after independence. The leaders of the FLN met in Tripoli (Libya) in June 1962 and adopted a ‘socialist political and economic platform’ for the independent Algeria.16 However, as I will show later, power has never been in the

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hands of the people; it has rather been in the hands of a privileged minority; the post-independence governments dismissed the socialist agenda agreed upon in Tripoli, and opted for a ‘savage state capitalism’ which destroyed the economy and annihilated social justice. Also, major global and local cultural events marked the Maghreb in the 1960s. The students’ revolt in Berkeley, California and the Paris student riots in May 1968 had encouraging effect on the local intelligentsia in both Algeria and Morocco. In Morocco, ‘the bard of Fes’, Abdellatif Laâbi, who was incarcerated for eight years as a political prisoner in the notorious Tazmamart penitentiary, founded the influential journal Souffles in 1966 but was banned in 1972 by what recent Moroccan resistance calls the Moroccan Makhzen.17 In Algeria, the intellectual and political activities of a group of nonconformist, rebellious young poets under the guidance of the poet Jean Sénac, who remained in Algeria after Independence, complained about censorship and refused to be muzzled. In June 1968, exactly three years after Colonel Houari Boumediene’s coup d’état (19 June 1965), they collectively signed and distributed a manifesto titled ‘Mutilation’ in which they called for ‘an open and free dialogue’. The Algerian authorities – who are not ‘free verse lovers’ – saw the document as an affront. And this led to the assassination of Jean Sénac by Colonel-President Boumediene’s18 notorious secret services, known in Algeria as la Sécurité Militaire (or la SM).19 After the Second World War, decisive moments such as the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), the decolonization process in the rest of the Maghreb, the meteoric rise of Souffles, the muzzling of the opposition,20 the denial of basic human rights and the assassination of Jean Sénac, Maghrebi literature, and particularly in Algeria, witnessed a major shift in both theme and style. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the late 1970s and 1980s, especially with the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS)21 as a grassroots movement, and the popular disavowal of the corrupt FLN-one-party-system (Garçon 1989: 6), led to a landslide victory for the FIS in the first free postindependence parliamentary elections in December 1991.22 But the Army toppled Colonel-President Chadli Benjedid (1979–1992), declared a state of emergency, cancelled the elections, incarcerated thousands of Islamists and non-Islamists in ‘concentration camps’23 in the Sahara desert, and launched an all-out war not only to eradicate

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Islamism but also to curtail the slight and short political post-October 198824 liberation. With a death toll in the order of 200,000 (Aggoun and Rivoire 2004: 92), the brutal civil war,25 triggered by the Algerian generals and the ‘Islamist Armed Groups’ (known under their French acronym GIA), has been going on since 1992 with an earth-shattering impact on literature. Renowned writers and academics such as Youcef Sebti, my colleague Bakhti Benaouda and Tahar Djaout were the tragic victims of this political violence; they were killed in cold blood.26 Scarcely a family has not been affected by these tragic events and many novelists (Latifa Benmansour, Abdelkader Djemaï, Habib Tengour), playwrights (Slimane Benaissa), poets (Zineb Laouedj, Rabia Djalti, Hawa Djabali), journalists (Salima Mellah, Malika Boussouf, Baya Gacemi), essayists (Abdelkader Djeghloul, Hafid Gafaïti, Benaouda Lebdaï), and critics (Dalila Morsly, Amin Zaoui, Christiane Achour) have gone into exile. Algerian writers who lived to tell the tale are tormented by the woeful socio-political situation and feel obligated to record it on paper and pay homage to those who have been murdered. For instance, Djebar’s literary production during these years has revolved around this national tragedy: Vaste est la prison (1995) and Le Blanc de l’Algérie (1995) were followed by Oran, langue morte (1997) which is a poignant tribute to the Oran-based playwright, theatre director and actor Abdelkader Alloula who was gunned down on a Ramadan evening in 1994, on his way to give a lecture on Bertolt Brecht. Malika Mokeddem, Des rêves et des assassins (1995), Leila Marouane, Ravisseur (1997) like Rachid Boudjedra, FIS de la haine (1992) and Rachid Mimouni, De la barbarie en général et de l’intégrisme en particulier (1992) have all examined the causes of the political violence and the nature of the warring factions; each according to his/her political colour.27 It should be noted that several women such as Saïda Benhabyles, former Minister of Solidarity (1992–93), Leila Aslaoui, former Secretary of State for Family and National Solidarity (1993–94), Khalida Messaoudi, current Minister of Culture (2002),28 and scores of others, point the finger at the FIS as a party opposing women’s progress. They also claim that the FIS harassed and assassinated feminists and intellectuals, and that the exile of writers was not a

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result of government oppression but rather the outcome of Islamist terrorist violence (Aslaoui 2000). And if the FIS, as a political party with its own agenda, opposed the ‘westernization’ of Algerian women and called for the implementation of Shari’a,29 the raison d’être of women like Benhabyles, Aslaoui, and Messaoudi was to oppose the real opposition led by women such as the Workers’ Party leader, Louisa Hanoune,30 and the feminist tradeunionist, journalist and Francophone novelist, Salima Ghezali.31 With regard to the assassination of feminists and intellectuals, there is strong evidence to suggest that the Services were responsible (Samraoui 2003).32 According to Rod Skilbeck (1995: 45) ‘women were murdered by political terrorists (this term includes the army and their allies)’. In fact, The GIA claimed responsibility for these killings. As an echo to the raging civil war, Susan Ireland, in her article ‘Voices of Resistance’, likens Maghrebi women to the mythical Scheherazade: surviving, remembering, and negotiating the impossible choices between destructive patriarchies of a military government and [its] ‘fundamentalist’ rebels, neither of which acknowledges women’s right to a voice in society despite their crucial participation in the fight for independence: ‘on one side, mad men in djellabas, on the other, the thieves in power’ (Ireland 2001: 172). The traditionally set inferiority of women is also highlighted regularly by the harsh customs that afflict them: arranged marriages, child molestation, wife beating, injunctions to procreate male progeny, and polygamy. In Algeria, for instance, in spite of a large and dynamic female enlistment in the Liberation War, the construction of a vernacular discourse on gender emphasized the supremacy of the conventional functions of women as wives and mothers (Benallègue 1983: 17). The paradigm is obvious: women are born to act the roles of daughter, wife and mother, to be consecutively submissive to their fathers, husbands and sons. In many regions education for women has traditionally been seen as worthless; very few important professional positions are

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accessible to women, and in most circumstances, women’s legal status is established by incoherent interpretations of the Shari’a.33 The Female Character as an ‘Agent de Rupture’ In societies such as Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia where economic malaise has led to a fundamental political reassessment, the answer for many men and women lies in an Islamic orientation, a return to Salafiya (orthodoxy) and a refusal of things ‘un-Islamic’. This reassessment is perceptible in the emergence of Islamist parties such as the FIS in Algeria, Ennahda in Tunisia, and Al-Adl Wal-Ihsane in Morocco. However, a decisive feminist strategy had been set up even before the civil war broke out in Algeria. It is perceptible in Djebar’s fiction and the scholarship of the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi. This strategy is based on the exploration of Islamic history and women’s involvement in early Islamic communities with the intention of promoting democratic ideals and in so doing responding to assertions by political and religious conservatives that they possess the authentic reading of the Qur’an and Sunna. For Winfred Woodhull, ‘feminists’ work reveals the error, hypocrisy, and intolerance of fanatics who pretend to be obeying divine law in enforcing the subjection of women and in attempting to impose their brand of authoritarian rule in the Maghreb’ (2003: 215). This is evident in Djebar’s Loin de Médine (1991) and Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite (1991) in addition to her Forgotten Queens of Islam ([1990] 1993). Such a judgment may seem commonplace but it underlines the fact that Islam, as a ‘divine religion’ and a legal framework, can liberate both men and women, and can also be an alternative for the masses and a route to empowerment. Western feminists have completely disregarded this religious (Islamic) dimension. But Djebar and Mernissi have been compelled to challenge this politically motivated neglect. They have demonstrated that Islam and gender are vital to the project of establishing a viable national identity. Besides, many postcolonial women have maintained that feminism is mainly a white, Westernized construct that does not take into account the vicissitudes of Third World women and their economic difficulties, and which also has some preconceived notions about motherhood, sexual and gendered relationships (Talpade Mohanty

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1988). When Assia Djebar’s first novel, La Soif (1957), came out, it was severely criticized for ‘bashing’ men for the benefit of a mainstream European reading audience; i.e., Djebar was condemned for defending women’s rights rather than harnessing them to the general emphasis on the liberation of Algeria.34 There is an important literature on this issue. Points of view vary. Susheila Nasta, for example, draws attention to the development of African and Asian women’s ‘feminism’ within the framework of gender equality: In countries with a history of colonialism, women’s quest for emancipation, self-identity and fulfilment can be seen to represent a traitorous act, a betrayal not simply of traditional codes of practice and belief but of the wider struggle for liberation and nationalism. Does the fact to be ‘feminist’ therefore involve a further displacement or reflect an implicit adherence to another form of cultural imperialism? (Nasta 1991: xv) By re-examining the foundational texts, i.e. the Qur’an and the Sunna, and by challenging some interpretations of Fiqh, modern feminists find in Islamic history role models who are used for encouragement and inspiration. These are the cases of Khadeeja, the Prophet’s first wife, well known for her economic independence, Aisha, the Prophet’s youngest wife, celebrated for her political expertise and religious knowledge, and Fatima-Zohra, the Prophet’s daughter, who stands for probity and enthusiasm. What Djebar and Mernissi have tried to do is to show how women’s status is governed not so much by Islamic precepts as by socio-political norms. While using different strategies, they are aware that it is only in conjunction with a systematically examined historical context that (Islamic) feminists are capable of exploring the issues that facilitate women’s equality and those that inhibit their progress. And it is not the promulgation of the Statut Personnel in Tunisia (1956), the Mudawana in Morocco (1958), and Le Code de la Famille in Algeria (1984), that can ensure liberation and equality. Maghrebi women have realized that for their respective governments they have become what Fatiha Talahite (1998) referred to as ‘the feminist alibi’. Maghrebi governments use and manipulate women’s

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cause and associations to mask their absolutist power and to show the West their modernist penchant. And one should bear in mind that in this denunciation campaign and attempt to rip open the ‘neo-patriarchal state’,35 the novel, as a genre, has been an efficient means to denounce and indict every form of vassalage and reveal the hypocrisy and intolerance of large segments of Maghrebi society. Nevertheless, the recent fiction by Maghrebi women, in comparison to earlier works, features a greater understanding of and dedication to the political, social, and sexual issues that Maghrebi women encounter today. This fiction manifests large thematic and stylistic scope, but displays a multifaceted approach to its subject matter. Some of the novels examined in Gender and Identity in North Africa explore characters in their correlations to the defining factors of the tradition-bound existence of Maghrebi women. However, within the same situation, authors show noticeable discrepancies of focus. One strategy emphasizes the social or political facets of the situation; e.g. La vie simple (1975) by the Tunisian Souad Guellouz, or Le printemps désespéré, vies d’Algériennes (1984) by the Algerians Fettouma Touati and Malika Mokeddem’s Des rêves et des assassins (1995). Another approach stresses individual growth; e.g. the Moroccans Halima Benhaddou in Aïcha, la rebelle (1982) and Leila Abouzeid in Year of the Elephant (1989), or the Algerian Myriam Ben Sabrina, ils t’ont volé ta vie (1985). Yet a third strand tries to justify the status quo, the Algerian Hafsa Zinai-Koudil Le pari perdu (1986), while a fourth uses the social background to examine general human issues; e.g. the Tunisian Souad Hedri, Vie et agonie (1979) and the Algerian 2005 Renaudot Laureate, Nina Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées (2005). Broadly speaking, Maghrebi women writers have tried, during the past four decades, to use different structures and styles that reflected their reaction to the rapidly moving socio-cultural reality. Contemporary Maghrebi women writers try to substitute individual apprehension and social fatuity with a new order of thinking, feeling and a sense of community. Djebar Abouzeid and Guellouz, for instance, avail themselves of a refined and inventive discourse and narrative style, combined with a politicized commitment to issues of gender discrimination. I will develop this aspect of their writing

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in more detail in the following chapters. These Maghrebi women writers, more than their predecessors, seem to share Wole Soyinka’s sentiments about the relation between literature and politics.36 These Maghrebi women novelists have realized that the sociopolitical impact of their literature should be their top priority. Besides, these women are nearly unanimous in their insistence that women’s emancipation cannot be separated from the emancipation of Maghrebi men. Their liberation relies on the emancipation of the whole community. The literary production of the Maghreb since the 1960s has been prolific, and several women writers from the region have achieved a worldwide reputation. Yet, in Morocco women have published very few novels. It is interesting to note that the first Moroccan woman to publish a novel was Halima Benhaddou, Aïcha la rebelle (1982). Jeune Afrique thought this novel was the best Moroccan literary work of 1983.37 This work was followed by Badia Hadj Naceur’s Le voile mis à nu (1985), Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle part (1985), and Farida Elhany Mourad’s La fille aux pieds nus (1985), which is an acerbic criticism of the Moroccan bourgeoisie. In Morocco, it seems to me, the emphasis is more on essay writing than fiction. This can be supported by the meteoric rise of many women essayists such as Fatna Ait Sabah, La femme dans l’inconscient musulman: Désir et pouvoir (1982), Nawal Yasmina, Les femmes dans l’Islam (1980), Hinde Taarji, Les voilées de l’Islam (1990), the columnist Fatima Alaoui, and the sociologists Fatima Mernissi and Ghita El Khayat-Bennaï, whose scholarly articles and essays on Muslim women’s emancipation are widely read and referred to as reliable sources for their insight and pertinence. In Tunisia, the feminist magazine Leïla, which appeared from 1936 to 1942, was inconsequential in the emergence of ‘feminine talents’ (Jean Fontaine 1977: 90), but the Personal Status Code in 1956 must have been a real incentive for many Tunisian women to make their voice heard. In Aspects de la littérature tunisienne (1975– 1983), Jean Fontaine (1985: 103) reveals that most of the women who were published in Arabic journals were short-story writers. The Francophone women novelists such as Souad Guellouz (La vie simple), Jalila Hafsia (Cendre à l’aube), and Aïcha Chaïbi (Rached), emerged in 1975.

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Already known to the general public through her outstanding essay, Désenchantement national: Essai sur la décolonisa­tion (1982) and her novel L’oeil du jour (1986), Hélé Béji emerged as a remarkable postcolonial writer. In a similar manner to the writing of Djebar, whose ‘overarching theme is Algerian women’s struggle for empowerment in defiance of patriarchal constraints’ (Mortimer 2001: 221), Hélé Béji’s texts expose the difficulties and tribulations of women’s liberation in Tunisia. Désenchantement national (1982) is a polemical and straightforward text on decolonization and political hypocrisy in which, as with nearly all of Djebar’s writing, the lifestory is unconcealed and indissoluble from the argument. Charles Bonn and Naget Khadda (1996: 12) consider this type of protest literature as ‘misleading, because insistence on the opposition is consistent with the expectations of the public. This situation of being in-between for the French language national writer, generally published abroad, urges him/her to say what, by tradition, he/she cannot say when he/she remains at home, within his/her country.’38 Other Tunisian women novelists, whether they write in Arabic or French, such as Nicole Ben Youssef, Aroussia Nalouti, Turkia Labidi Ben Yahia, Fadhila Chabbi, Amina Said, Aïcha Chaïbi, Hajer Djilani and Emna Belhadj Yahya also criticize Tunisian society for its limitations, patriarchy and flawed modernization (Mack 2003). Yet, the emergence of Zahra al-Jlasi (b. 1950), and her contribution to the feminist debate in the ‘Arab World’, with the publication in 2000 of al-Nas al-Mu’annath (The Feminine Text), is also worth mentioning. On the other hand, Algerian women writers remain the most prolific in the Maghreb during recent years. The tragic events generated by Algeria’s abysmal civil war are certainly the matrix for such a profusion of works which are considered as témoignages (testimonies): Malika Ryane, Chronique de l’impure (1994); Malika Boussouf, Vivre traquée (1995); Fériel Assima, Une femme à Alger: Chronique du désastre (1995); Malika Mokeddem L’interdite (1993) and Des rêves et des assassins (Of Dreams and Assassins) (1995); Leila Marouane, Ravisseur (The Abductor) (1997); Latifa Benmansour, La prière de la peur (1997); Hafsa Zinai-Koudil, Sans voix (1997); Salima Ghezali, Les amants de Shahrazade (1999).39 Algerian women writing in Arabic remain limited in number. One can mention Z’hor Ounissi, Rabia Djalti, Zineb Laouedj, and the

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much-acclaimed Ahlem Mosteghanemi. She is the author of the first novel to be published by an Algerian woman in Arabic, Dhakirat aljasad (1985).40 The novel was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, and in 2000 an English translation titled Memory in the Flesh was published by the American University in Cairo. Mosteghanemi gained fame in Algeria for her poetic late-night radio shows entitled ‘Hamassat’ (Whispers) in the 1970s, gained a BA in Arabic literature from the University of Algiers, and then moved to the Sorbonne where under the supervision of Jacques Berque, she earned her PhD in sociology of literature. Since Dhakirat al-jasad Mosteghanemi has produced Fawda al-Hawass (Chaos of the Senses, 1997), and Aber Sereer (Passing through Beds, 2003) which is the last novel in her trilogy. She has also produced two volumes of poetry, Ala Marfa’ Al Ayam (On the Harbor of Time) in 1972 and al-Kitaba Fi Lahzat Ury (Writing in a Moment of Nudity) in 1976; in addition to a collection of essays entitled Algérie, femmes et écritures (1985). To paraphrase Jean Déjeux (1973: 254), I would say that these women writers are somewhere on a spectrum between Assia Djebar and Djamila Debèche. These two authors have created a new emancipated woman, a woman-subject whose subversive conduct has shattered archaic traditions. Nevertheless, most of the novels that emerged in the 1990s do not equal the calibre and the ‘pen craft’ of the revered Assia Djebar, whose Les enfants du nouveau monde (1962) is a remarkable fresco. This work shows a whole range of representative characters such as students, bourgeois women, intellectuals and mothers, who claim their right to participate in the fight for a better society. Djebar, more than Rachid Boudjedra or Malika Mokeddem, produces a literature that clearly depicts feelings of disillusionment with the nationalist project, a literature which highlights the female character as an ‘agent de rupture’ (Nisbet 1980: 32). And this is manifest in her latest works such as Vaste est la prison (1995), Le Blanc de l’Algérie (1995) and Oran, langue morte (1997).

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2 THE REPRESENTATION OF THE SUBALTERN AND IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY: LEILA ABOUZEID’S YEAR OF THE ELEPHANT

Introduction In his groundbreaking work The Wretched of the Earth (1961 [1990], Fanon exhorts the silenced and misrepresented peoples to find a voice and identity by recuperating their past. Fanon’s work ‘enables engagement with debates about how ex-colonial subjects develop and seize their own identities and slough off the destructiveness of the colonial experiences, which represent them in a negative light’ (Loomba 1998: 147). Fanon also exposes the experience of displacement and dispossession – psychic and social – which addresses ‘the condition of the marginalized, the alienated, those who have to live under the surveillance of a sign of identity … that denies their difference’ (Bhabha 1990: 63). If Fanon ushered in postcolonial studies, challenged ‘universalist and imperialist notions’, and focused on ‘marginality, alterity, and agency as aspects of power’ (Grace 2004: 28), any discussion involving postcolonial theory includes an analysis of the distribution of power within society. And here I have to draw attention to the existence of two types of postcolonial literatures. ‘I see a diasporic literature of “metissage” as one … [and] I would call the other type national postcolonial literature. In this second category of texts’, the emphasis is on ‘issues of national importance such as neo-colonialism,

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government corruption, women’s issues, poverty, unemployment and social problems’ Anne Donadey (2003: 206). And as a novelist who writes under a kind of necessity and who has maintained from the beginning of her writing career that art is political (Bhabha 1998: 367), Abouzeid has considered part of her cultural and literary mission as a writer to bear witness to the predicament of Moroccans. Moreover, Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Toward Independence (1983 [1989]) is a vivid example of the potential for literature to intervene in dominant discourses such as colonialism, neo-colonialism, nationalism and patriarchy. In offering biting insights into the politics of oppression, and the art-politics nexus with regard to the events that took place in the 1950s, Abouzeid explores the value of a woman in Moroccan society and the true meaning of independence. Without doubt, Abouzeid perceives the writer’s undertaking as politically involved, i.e., to ‘bear witness or effect change … take cataracts off people’s eyes … enlighten and … strengthen’ (Jones and Vinson 2000: 183). I would like to suggest that this is one of the postcolonial1 dimensions of Abouzeid’s writing. The British critic Steven Connor (1995: 1–2) is right when he points out that the novel is not just ‘passively marked with the imprint of history’ but is also ‘one of the ways in which history is made and remade’. Leila Abouzeid’s fiction, written from the argument that the novel can play a part in the way in which history is made and remade, contributes to Connor’s observation of the dialectical relationship between the novel and history. In ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency,’ Homi Bhabha (1994: 172) asserts, ‘It is from those who have suffered the sentence of history – subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement – that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking’. I would also like to highlight the parallel between Abouzeid’s novel and some of the key events in Moroccan history. I thus historicize Abouzeid’s text in relation to the deportation of King Mohamed V, the 1952 Casablanca Massacre, and the independence of Morocco, all of which took place in 1950s. In Abouzeid’s work, the combination of history with story-telling and folklore, and the blurring of the boundaries between them, challenges official historiography itself. A case in point is Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia, an

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Algerian Cavalcade, 1985).2 Both Abouzeid and Djebar challenge the silencing and overpowering effects of dominant historiography, be it colonialist, imperialist, nationalist or patriarchal. Moreover, they both use appropriate narrative strategies such as the combination of modes of narrative and documentation, and multiple focalizers, in order to contend with these received modes of historiography. Like Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia, Year of the Elephant (1983) calls into question the official version of history and gives voice to the voiceless. Abouzeid, like her Maghrebi sisters, reveals that Maghrebis suffered from the brutal experience and legacy of colonialism and faced one type of totalitarian regime or another, whether military or monarchical. Their contemporary history is a history of many unfulfilled expectations, pervasive disenchantment with current corrupt regimes and their predatory ideologies. So, this widespread political malaise and hogra (institutionalized contempt)3 has prompted a re-evaluation of the political, cultural and moral direction of society by a growing number of people from different socio-economic strata (Azzam 1996: 217). The salient tendency in recent years has clearly been the Islamic orientation (e.g. Sheikh Abdeslam Yacine’s movement Al-Adl Wa-Al Ihssane),4 which, in its diverse manifestations, maintains that Islam should be the basis of law and identity. And the most decisive factor, for Abouzeid and others, is the question of Asala (authenticity)5 (Lotfalian 2001: 231), and how it remains operational in the community. Therefore, some historical background to the development of Moroccan nationalism is useful in understanding the genesis of Year of the Elephant. Naissance of Year of the Elephant The French and Spanish colonized Morocco in 1912 after bitter fighting. Less than a decade passed before Mohamed Ben Abdelkrim el Khattabi (1882–1963) led the Rif Revolt (1921–26). Nevertheless, right after the Second World War an anti-colonial nationalist movement sprang up. In 1953 King Mohamed V (1927–1953 and 1955–1961) joined forces with the Istiqlal (Independence Party), the major nationalist party of Allal el-Fassi (1944–1974), but was deported by the French. The event that historians see as the turning point in the conflict is the 1952 Casablanca Massacre, which claimed the lives of several hundred innocent civilians who were murdered in

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the street by the French Foreign Legion (Bernard 1968: 321). After this bloodbath, thousands of people – like Abouzeid’s protagonist – joined the liberation movement, which led to France and Spain recognizing Moroccan independence on 8 November 1956 and restoring its monarchy. This is the period that Abouzeid has chosen as the stage for Year of the Elephant. In this work, Abouzeid brings together two stories into a single poignant narrative. Set against the backdrop of the Moroccan independence struggle, Year of the Elephant is the story of an impoverished working-class woman, Zahra, her new beginning, and her sustaining faith. The title, as I will show later, refers to a wellknown battle described in the Qur’an where ‘heathen tribes’ were crushed in their attempt to drive out Muslims. After 20 years of marriage, her husband (unnamed in the text) has outrageously cut short their union with a brief and chilling note that reads, ‘Your papers will be sent to you along with whatever the law provides’. The 40-year-old Zahra, the main character, returns to her childhood hometown somewhere in Morocco. In her hometown, Zahra gets back the room she had leased to another woman a long time before. During the day, she goes to the local cemetery to visit the graves of her dead relatives, and she pays visits to the faqih (Sheikh)6 of the local shrine. Back in her room, she starts counting the nights like Scheherazade. And in flashbacks she recalls her grandmother’s advice that a woman has but her property and husband, ‘and that husbands should not be trusted’. She also remembers her arranged marriage and subsequent wedding procession. She had never seen her husband before that. He saw her once standing at her grandfather’s door watching a musical procession, and sent to ask for her hand. Her husband had just been transferred to Casablanca when the struggle for independence broke out. Zahra joined the nationalist cause and sold her olive trees and jewels to support it. The turning point came with the 1952 Casablanca massacre. She started smuggling arms, hiding resistants, distributing pamphlets, and preparing food for detainees. She became one of those anonymous combatants who perform the ordinary yet risky tasks behind the scenes of a popular rebellion. Comparing herself to ‘Asma, who took food to the Prophet Muhammad and to her own father Abu Bakr, when they were hiding

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from their enemies in a cave during their flight from Mecca to Medina’, Zahra truly believed in the sanctity of her cause. Abouzeid gives the Moroccan struggle for independence and its consequence for the nation, weightiness in Islamic history by equating it with a decisive battle in early Islam, when alien tribes riding thirteen elephants marched on the shrine at Mecca. The battle of ‘Year of the Elephant’, as it is recorded in the Holy Qur’an, was a victory, not because the Muslims outnumbered their enemy, but thanks to the backing of flocks of birds which miraculously ‘air-raided that army with small stones slightly bigger than a lentil seed … Such was the victory bestowed by Allah to the people of Mecca’ (Taqi-Uddine and Khan 1994: 56). ‘Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the owners of the elephants? Did he not make their plot go astray? And sent against them birds in flocks, striking them with stones. And made them like an empty field of stalks?’ (Qur’an 105: 5). Zahra’s activism led her to the capital, Rabat. Under the auspices of the ‘committed nationalist’ Hajj Ali (36), she collected donations, and organized strikes with Roukia, a fellow female resistant. Dressed in black djellabah to mourn the Sultan’s exile, Zahra and Roukia decided to burn the shop belonging to Pinhas, a Spanish ‘agent of colonialism’. Upon her return from her last mission, Zahra learned that her husband had been incarcerated in al-Adir prison, accused of organizing a strike. While he was in prison Zahra got him a djellabah and a veil and helped him smuggle out a resistant. This meant everything to Zahra. It was a chance to help liberate her people. On 18 November 1956, Independence Day, King Mohamed V returned to Morocco. After the French had been evicted from Morocco, Zahra and her husband settled in a luxurious government property that he acquired for nothing. He also had an affair with his secretary, and opted for a Western way of life. This marked the beginning of Zahra’s disillusionment. The struggle came to nothing. ‘Change came, but only for a handful of people’. (54) Back in her hometown, the divorced Zahra struggles to survive. Having to face a geographical, social and emotional misplacement, she finds comfort in the faqih, who shows her how to unburden her heart to Allah. However, she must confront the daily reality of post-independence life. She looks for a job in an oil factory, but the guard stops her. She refuses help from her sister and brother-in-law

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because as a divorcee she does not want to abide by custom and live with her sister. However, for a 40-year-old woman her options are very limited. Oddly enough, she succeeds in getting a job as a ‘house cleaner’ at the CCF (French Cultural Centre). If Abouzeid highlights the effect of both Moroccan history and Islamic heritage, it is for the sole objective of showing the importance and relevance of Zahra’s heritage. She recaptures historical, lived moments in Moroccan history to fill in the gaps, and give voice to voiceless people. Abouzeid’s narrative exposes various voices and perceptions that allow the community to assess versions of experiences, perceptions and representations. Her text, which focuses on gendered relations, women’s lives, motherhood, sisterhood, and most of all, the community, springs, to a certain extent, from oral storytelling – Halqa as it is called in the Maghreb, using recurring patterns, circularity and variation, and focusing on how, at different historical moments in different contexts, the strategies of representation construct, control and constrict people’s lives. These strategies of representation are explored through character and situation in Year of the Elephant. To put it in a nutshell, Abouzeid discards ‘the whole notion of character as static essence, replacing it with the idea of character as process’ (McDowell 1989: 61). The Representation of the Subaltern So, can a woman’s representation such as the one epitomized by Zahra, in Year of the Elephant, be a source of power and creativity to women, or is this just another example of women being silenced? In redefining social space and the artefacts of culture and tradition, does Abouzeid suggest that it is time for women to act as ‘agents of change’ (Wilentz 1992: xvii)? Whereas some critical practices have been inclined to focus on the ‘authority of the author’ and the ‘experience of the reader’, Gayatri Spivak’s practice aims at focusing on ‘the different representations of the subaltern’ as it is constructed in ‘discourses of race, class, gender and imperialism’ (Childs and Williams 1997: 170). Spivak argues that the postcolonial intellectual, who for the most part is employed in Western academia, is so disconnected from the experiences of subalternity, that s/he cannot properly or ethically represent or ‘speak on behalf ’ of the subaltern.

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As Abouzeid is engaged in recuperating history to assert her rights and human dignity, and to highlight a sense of her own and her community’s identity, I explore in this chapter the ‘representation of the subaltern’, through the construction of community and individual identity in Year of the Elephant. And here I have to refer to Nira Yuval Davis’ primer, Gender and Nation, in which she affirms that ‘it is women – and not (just?) the bureaucracy and intelligentsia who reproduce nations – biologically, culturally and symbolically’ (1997: 5). Women writers are seen as ‘custodians of traditions’ (Taiwo 1984); they are the pivotal part of the community. Nevertheless, for Deniz Kandiyoti, women bear the burden of being ‘mothers of the nation’ (a duty that gets ideologically defined to suit official priorities), as well as being those who reproduce the boundaries of ethnic/ national groups, who transmit the culture and who are the privileged signifiers of national difference. The demands of the ‘nation’ may thus appear just as constraining as the tyranny of more primordial loyalties to lineage, tribe or kin, the difference being that such demands are enforced by the state and its legal administrative apparatus rather than by individual patriarchs (1994: 376). And in Year of the Elephant Abouzeid properly shows how the nation’s administrative institutions legitimize and implement the constraining rules of patriarchy. Abouzeid also clearly highlights the role of Moroccan women in the liberation of the country. In the same way as Assia Djebar and Souad Guellouz, Abouzeid puts emphasis on community, the moral support of individuals for one another, the retrieval of traditional values, and the influence of the ancestor. And by examining various individuals as members of different social groups in all their diversity at different points in history, and using flashbacks, Abouzeid has broached a rich palette of the diverse lives of Moroccans. This is a positive recuperative project. Abouzeid’s sense of identity, as with Djebar, is not an objective that Maghrebi women can afford to thrust aside, and her literature can be viewed as a compelling preoccupation with both loss and

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reconstruction of identity and history. Nevertheless, her sense of identity is related to a sense of community, not individualism. It should be emphasized that for Abouzeid, identity is political in that it is always constructed on the community, the social group. Her interest lies in how identities are constructed historically and collectively in specific contexts. For this reason, it is not viable to discuss Abouzeid’s sense of identity without acknowledging her denunciation of Western humanist assumptions of ‘identity as fixed, unique and coherent’ (Peach 1998: 19). For Homi Bhabha (1994: 51), ‘identity is never an a priori, nor a finished product’. All identities are mutable and fluid. Fixing them, whether or not in a constrained ‘view of Islam, or race, or ethnicity’, is one of the most important concerns in this day and age (Lazreg 1998: 15). And as identity is a very complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to one dimension only, Abouzeid views the process of identity as historical sedimentation (Morris, 1994: 6). In Morocco, for example, identity has been established upon a troubled and ambiguous combination of Islamic traditions, Arabic culture, traditional power hierarchies and postcolonial modern realities. One needs to ask how the situation in which today’s Moroccan (Maghrebi) woman finds herself unequal, abused and oppressed, has come about. It is this adversity that Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant has tried to flesh out. Whether the abuse concerns Algerians, Tunisians or Moroccans, abuse has the same face. And despite the fact that it was published in the early 1980s, Abouzeid’s novel falls within a long tradition of postcolonial denunciation of and disenchantment with the nationalist project elaborated by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Chinua Achebe, Assia Djebar, Ayi Kwei Armah, Hélé Béji, Zoubida Bittari, Rachid Mimouni, Fadéla M’rabet, and scores of others. It should be made clear here that Fanon, as a Marxist, forewarned of the way newly independent states fell into a neo-colonialist phase under the new ‘native elites’. While Year of the Elephant is as virulent a novel as Souad Guellouz, La vie simple (1975), or Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade, 1987), its narrator, Zahra, epitomizes the valiant wife who interferes with the conception of a traditional family, and the vision of progressive post-independence nationalism. In Mia Carter’s terms, ‘these contemporary female cosmopolitans’ – who share a lot with Abouzeid, Djebar, and Guellouz:

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may be treacherous in ways that significantly complicate, and possibly even nullify, the traditional description of postcolonial cosmopolitans’ betrayals of local politics or Third World nationalisms. Each, in different ways, engages in battle with patriarchal and parochial belief systems (Carter 1997: 56). To what extent is Zahra, who is the result of a distinct tradition, a separate contingency? The author, in her fruitful endeavour to integrate her heroine’s enfranchisement and its inherent difficulties into the broader question of national independence and its complexities, illustrates this discrepancy. A woman’s ordeal is a trope for the whole community (Fernea 1989: xxv). This is a conception that has more to do with Maghrebi views of the significance of society than with Western notions of individualism. The story does not make a doctrinal assertion, but genuinely broaches in fictional form the tangible life condition of a real woman. This narrative ‘analyzes the past, including the symbolic heritage, in order to open up the possibilities of the future’ (Harlow 1987: 82). Year of the Elephant conveys a version of self-reliance that is so circumscribed by a misogynistic system that it is hard to see it as ‘feminist’. At this stage, it might be interesting to refer to Mai Ghoussoub’s landmark essay, ‘Feminism – or the Eternal Masculine – in the Arab World’, which points out the near impossibility of oppositional feminist politics in Muslim countries: The bitter reality is that Arab feminism, in the modern sense of the term, exists as a force only in the student milieus of Europe and America to which a privileged few can escape, and in a growing but still very modest academic literature. The double knot tied by the fatal connections in Arab culture and politics between definitions of femininity and religion, and religion and nationality, have all but throttled any major women’s revolt so far. Every assertion of the second sex can be charged – in a virtually simultaneous register – with impiety to Islam and treason to the nation (1987: 17). This novel analyzes the subjection of women and the constraints women negotiate in their daily life, and voices scepticism about the

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possibility of lifting these burdens. The work, which is set against sexist society’s structures and male / female relationships which constantly exclude ‘women’s feelings, sensitivities and creative self-awareness’ (Wisker 2000: 53), combines the aesthetic and the political – or the formal and the ideological, the private and public. The approach of inserting the story of a woman’s physical and moral abuse in the frame of the Moroccan struggle for independence, which recalls a captivating moment in the country’s and Moroccan women’s history, compels Maghrebi and non-Maghrebi readers alike to take women’s maltreatment seriously.7 Furthermore, Year of the Elephant, an ‘internally focalized’ narrative (Genette 1972), captures and re-visions a historical and cultural moment, restoring and re-writing a hitherto silenced and absent phase in Moroccan history. The novel presents a different perspective on Moroccan postcolonial standards of living, violence, poverty, suffering, power, male-female relationships, the role of religion and false promises. It also looks at the development of awareness, identity and relationships in a context of entrenched sexism.8 Without evading issues around power, rough treatment, and exploitation, Year of the Elephant tackles questions of personal freedom. Abouzeid’s heroine, Zahra, suffers but as she bonds with her community she becomes powerful, positive and creative. Throughout the novel Zahra is depicted as a victim of the lies about independence. She has bought into the cosmetic artifice of the period when political independence was supposed to bring about real freedom, but actually confined people to social and political ghettoes. Abouzeid reveals all the deceptive promises. Equality and freedom are false promises; people are actually ghettoized in poor areas with no way out. In the same way as Algerians, Moroccans have been sold a lie. As Zahra reflects on her past, the reader realizes how dedicated she has been to the resistance movement. She has fought fiercely against colonialism because she looked forward to the change independence would eventually bring. Nonetheless, soon after independence she has realized that this is not the case; instead of building on the revolutionary fervour and initiating genuine democratic change, the new rulers like Zahra’s husband have simply reproduced the inequalities of the colonial period. In underscoring the subjugation

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of women in post-independence Algeria, the Algerian novelist Malika Mokeddem has revealed in her semi-autobiographical novel, Les hommes qui marchent (1997), that ‘Au lendemain de l’indépendance, la première préoccupation des hommes était encore et toujours de cacher, de cloîtrer leurs femmes. Liberté oui, mais pas pour tout le monde’ [Right after independence, the major concern for men was to hide and confine their women. Independence, yes; but not for everybody] (1997: 246). For Zahra, this postcolonial period has unfortunately generated many troubles, as well as her divorce. As her husband is being promoted within the government bureaucratic machinery, he begins to think highly of himself and to regard himself as a better person than his ‘ex-fellow-fighter’, Zahra. He sees himself as a real ‘bourgeois’ and Zahra as a real ‘plebeian’. Therefore, he is no longer interested in an old-fashioned wife. While Abouzeid’s divorced protagonist, Zahra, epitomizes a destitute woman in post-independence Morocco, she implicitly denounces the socio-economic changes and the corruption of the new rulers, those who have replaced the French colonizers. Besides, she has been divorced, not because she is too liberal, but rather for the antithetical reason: she is too ‘old school’. For she declares: I don’t eat with a fork. I don’t speak French. I don’t sit with men. I don’t go out to fancy dinners … I’m nothing but an old coin fit only for the museum shelf. [Men’s] positions in society now call for modern women (8–9). Later, she would assert: ‘These days my husband needs a wife who will offer cigarettes to his guests and help pave the road to the top for him by any means necessary’ (54) [My emphasis]. The above quotation vividly illustrates the various issues that Year of the Elephant raises. These questions of language, decolonization, ‘modernité’, and European cultural hegemony are of direct relevance to contemporary postcolonial literary theory. And as far as language is concerned, it should be noted that Abouzeid first published Year of the Elephant in Arabic in 1983. As the US academic Elizabeth Fernea indicated in her introduction to Abouzeid’s novel, the publication of this work in English translation in 1989 was an ‘event in cross-

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cultural literary history’ (1989: xi). It was in fact the first novel by a Moroccan woman to be translated from Arabic into English. Unlike numerous Maghrebi writers who have favoured the use of French as a means of expression / creation, the significance of Abouzeid’s choice of language cannot be underestimated. She is trilingual, but she has favoured the use of Arabic, ‘for political and personal reasons’ (Abouzeid 1993: 8). Abouzeid has opted for Arabic as the language of her Muslim faith and the majority of her people. Omri (2006: 35) has clearly demonstrated ‘the reluctance on the part of critics to recognize and consider properly the spiritual elements in modern Arabic writing’. Therefore, her position on the use of French in the Moroccan context is unambiguous: I loathed this language. …That I now know was a divine grace that has protected me from writing in a foreign language that came to me with an army behind it. It is a natural attitude toward the language of people who had usurped my country, put my father in their prisons and practiced on him every means of torture (Abouzeid 1993: 8). For the Maghreb, the encounter with French occurred throughout colonization, which began with the invasion of Algeria in 1830. Unlike Algeria, Morocco was not colonized until 1912, but the role of French as a literary language in the Maghreb remained relatively important. This importance was underlined in 1987 when Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun was awarded the prominent Prix Goncourt for his controversial novel, La nuit sacrée (The Sacred Night). Such an interest in Francophone Maghrebi writing by European academics and critics suggests that this literature is an essential part of contemporary Maghrebi literature. However, Abouzeid and other Moroccan writers such as Mohamed Choukri and Abdelkebir Khatibi, who see Francophone literature for the most part as extraneous to current Maghrebi society, dismiss this outlook (Hall 1993: 379). In an interview Abouzeid indicated that not many Moroccan writers use French today, and contended that ‘the current interest in francophone writing in the West is largely the result of various prizes, sponsorships and publication deals afforded

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by the French in defence of “Francophonie” in their former colonies’ (Abouzeid 1993: 8). Choukri and Khatibi have also indicated that some Francophone Maghrebi authors, like Ben Jelloun, target European readership (Hédi 1992: 7). Besides, Maghrebi readers find their representation of Maghrebi society hollow and shallow and seem to dismiss texts in which ‘characters and their problems are more grounded in psychoanalysis and semiotics than in social reality’ (Hédi, ibid.). Their works are also condemned because they pander to a European taste for the ‘exotic’ and maintain Orientalist myths and clichés about Arabic culture. Choukri and Khatibi are much more in accord with Abouzeid when she vividly exposes the voracity, bribery, embezzlement and crass materialism that are the indelible marks of the postcolonial elite’s way of life. The only preoccupation for the happy few is getting richer and richer without regard for the unfortunate millions. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961: 92), Fanon has brilliantly explored this sordid practice in the early sixties, and history has proved him right, albeit years of independence have elapsed: [E]verything seemed to be so simple before: the bad people were on one side, and the good on the other. The clear, the unreal, the idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi-darkness that bewilders the senses. The people find that the iniquitous fact of exploitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one; and they raise the cry of ‘Treason!’ But the cry is mistaken; and the mistake must be corrected. The treason is not national, it is social. The people must be taught to cry ‘Stop thief!’ In their weary road towards rational knowledge the people must also give up their too-simple conception of their overlords. To illustrate Fanon’s significant remark, Zahra’s disenchantment is epitomized by her husband’s ‘share of the pie’, i.e. his willingness to move into a government property which used to be inhabited by a French settler. Zahra’s opinions, emotions and recollections show how history is individually experienced, how it is processed, and how it is represented. Zahra is almost homeless and unable to make ends meet after being

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a heroine during the armed resistance to the French. Abouzeid conceives a protagonist of an earlier period because she wants to capitalize on the symbolic significance bestowed upon women’s role during the Resistance to French occupation (1912–56). Leila Abouzeid’s Sense of Identity As I have argued in the introduction to this chapter, the novel is ‘one of the ways in which history is made and remade’. Abouzeid’s story can also be deciphered as questioning existing accounts of nationalism and history by creating a female identity for a militant within an armed resistance movement. The novel is located in an accurately researched historical and social context. To a certain extent, the text adopts realist norms in presenting details about Moroccan’s postindependence history as if from official documents. Therefore, the heroine is constructed in conventional fictional terms as a credible identity. In the last part of the narrative, Zahra becomes the real architect of her proper meaning. This type of construction of identity serves a ‘scrupulous visible political interest’ (Spivak 1988: 194). Zahra’s predicament relates her disenchantment and personal pathos to the failure and pathos of Morocco as it moves through its own labyrinthine history. For Fanon (1990 [1961]: 266), ‘what the contemporary [African writer] needs to do is rediscover history and reaffirm African identity and culture’. This is exactly what Abouzeid has done in Year of the Elephant. The Moroccan academic Assia Benadada reveals that the matrix of the narrative is the real life-story of Dhaouya Al Kahli. Benadada (1992: 68–73) affirms that neither the nationalist movement nor the role of women in this movement has been properly assessed. The official historiography has so far focused only on male participation and totally excluded women. According to Benadada, there are two phases in the resistance to the French. The first phase (1912–34) was marked by sporadic armed conflicts in different regions of the kingdom. Hundreds of women took part in Mohamed Ben Abdelkrim el Khattabi’s insurgency. Aicha el Amrania and Aicha Ben Abi Ziane had a significant role in the battle of Anoual in 1921, when the Spanish forces were defeated. What is also worthy of note is the power held by the women of the Romara tribe. These women simply filed for divorce when their husbands refused to take part in combat.

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The second phase witnessed the emergence of a predominantly urban political movement. It fought for political reforms (1930–44), then for independence (1944–53). However, this movement resorted to the armed struggle when the French deposed King Mohamed Ben Youcef (King Mohamed V) in 1953. To better understand the nature and objectives of this movement, it is worth exploring the histories of three women who, in some way, affected the movement. Malika Al Fassi (b. 1920) was one of the first women who joined the nationalist movement in 1937. She was a perfect product of the Fes bourgeoisie and sister of Allal Al Fassi, founder of the Istiqlal party. She headed the Istiqlal’s women’s organization, Akhawat alSafa (sisters of purity), and liaised between the nationalists and the Monarch. In 1944, she was the only woman to sign the Independence Manifesto. Fatima Ben Slimane (b. 1928) is the granddaughter of two former ministers, Al Guebbas and Benslimane. She went to French school with other privileged girls, and then furthered her education at the Higher Studies Institute, which was created by General Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934), a devoted colonialist commissary-general in Morocco. Fatima Ben Slimane’s activism focused more on social work than political campaigning. Dhaouya Al Kahli (b. 1930) was an illiterate from a very modest family. Both her brother and husband were nationalist militants. When King Mohamed V was exiled and a number of militants arrested, she joined an armed faction known as ‘The Companions of Mohamed V’ and went underground from 1953 to 1956. She affirms that right after the independence some members of the resistance wanted to set up an association to defend their interests but the government turned a deaf ear to their claims. As a result, her husband fell victim to a conspiracy and was murdered. Now destitute and widowed, she lives in a popular district in Rabat, her hometown. The first two histories are concerned with the fate of two educated and well-off women who avail themselves of the role played by their respective families in the nationalist movement. This is what the official historiography is about. On the other hand, the third history, which relates to an unpretentious woman who worked valiantly in the shadow of men, is simply occulted. This modus operandi of the nationalist discourse marginalizes and excludes women from

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Moroccan official history. This is the damage that Abouzeid wants to patch up, and this is the matrix of Year of the Elephant. The author is a product of the newly independent Morocco, and symbolizes the generation that came to adulthood under former King Hassan II’s despotic and misogynistic regime (1961–1999).9 This new generation has been living in a society that is antithetical to that of their parents. Consequently, Year of the Elephant broaches fundamental issues such as equal rights under the law, equal access to economic wealth, and legal protection from physical and moral abuse. According to the author, these questions are very important to postindependence Moroccan society. Abouzeid subverts the asphyxiating patriarchal system in her community, a subversion that materializes by exposing the post-independence political structure and ideology, thus making her female protagonist, Zahra, politically conscious. Abouzeid is unquestionably giving credit to her community for the attainment of Moroccan independence. Zahra becomes one of the flock of ‘cheap and insignificant humanity’ that made the difference in the undeclared war against French rule. The protagonist has sold her olive trees, jewels and ‘everything worth selling for the cause. Resistance took the place of emeralds and rubies in [her] life, and today, [she] feel[s] only contempt for such trinkets’ (20). Such has been the case with the blacksmiths, the housewives, the spice merchants, the rug merchants and the truck drivers. To those who are very often viewed in history books and Western media as ‘the rank and file’ or simply ‘terrorists’, Abouzeid confers faces and names.10 We come to know Rahal, the tall and thin spice merchant with ‘an eastern-style turban, and ‘a sixth finger like a tumor on his left hand’ (28); Hajj Ali, the ‘husky and enduringly cheerful blacksmith whose skill at his craft fuelled his happiness and glowed like live coals under the bellows of his forge’, and ‘whose love for his work was matched only by his love for his country’ (31); Safia and Roukia, the women who hide fugitives in their store houses; Walter, the ‘very fair skinned’ German ‘guard married to a Moroccan woman from Chtouka’ (43); the rug merchant with a Berber name, Moha ou Alla; and Faqih, the one-legged veteran of Dien Bien Phu. Year of the Elephant derives its force from a conflation of personal and public experiences, a historiographical mode in which ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ historical terms become inseparable. Such

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a historiographical narrative process occurs throughout the novel, ironizing both radical subjectivity and public objectivity by baffling the attempts of its readers to tell the difference between them. In this work the interior dramas of individuals reflect the post-independence disillusionment. From the opening chapter of the narrative, the author stresses the magnanimity of the people: ‘I dedicate this book to all those women and men who put their lives in danger for the sake of Morocco and did not expect to be rewarded or thanked for it’ (v). Abouzeid suggests that the majority of Moroccans took part in the struggle, including the monarch himself, King Mohammed V, who was deported by the French military authorities and thus became a national hero because of his collaboration with the major Nationalist party, Istiqlal (Independence). Zahra vividly describes this event: When they exiled him, a deep collective grief had fallen over the nation and I mourned with the rest of my compatriots. His exile had wrapped him in a sacred cloak, and for his sake, the people had joined the resistance, as if he had become an ideal or a principle. Had the French not exiled him, their presence in Morocco would have continued much longer; I’m certain of that (50). Historic events ‘animate’, but do not ‘dominate’ this text (Fernea 1989: xvi). Abouzeid’s narrative is set against the backdrop of Morocco’s resistance to French rule and its backlash against Moroccan women in particular. The political contestation is present, displaced most often by the gender outlook of the narrator ‘because the story of a woman’s selfhood is inseparable from her sense of community’ against which the ordinary events of the story take place (Benstock 1988: 43). These events consist of Zahra’s childhood and wedding, the missions of the underground movement in which she plays a very decisive part, the ultimate victory of nationalist forces, the new regime which has socially and politically promoted her husband,11 the change that benefited ‘a handful of people’ (54), her divorce, and ultimately her re-examination of what independence actually means.

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The idea of bitterness, frustration and even disenchantment is the desperate message of the opening statement of her narrative: ‘I come back to my hometown feeling shattered and helpless’ (1). This retreating movement, this back-to-square-one episode, reveals the false promises of progress and liberation that had been proclaimed by the nation’s leadership. It also gives the feeling that nothing has been achieved so far. And this is what keeps Zahra moving from city to city trying to achieve, as the subtitle of the novel shows, her independence, which she cannot equate with that of 18 November – the date of Morocco’s official independence from France. What makes Zahra’s resentment even more tragic is her divorce after 20 years of marriage. Her husband, wrapped up in his own self-image of an ancien combatant (a war veteran), and now a wealthy government official, has repudiated her. Nonetheless, this repudiation looks as if it is more than a ‘conjugal problem’. It is indeed the perfect example of Zahra’s exclusion as recompense from a country that she helped liberate. Her repudiation and disillusionment fuels her anger, which she expresses whenever she remembers how the news of the divorce was announced to her: He had simply sat down and said, ‘Your papers will be sent to you along with whatever the law provides’. My papers? How worthless a woman is if she can be returned with a receipt like some store bought object! How utterly worthless! Those few seconds destroyed the whole foundation of my being, annihilated everything I trusted. My jaw dropped as I stared at him. ‘Why?’ ‘I haven’t got a reason’ (1). Zahra is then confronted with a gloomy future. Since her husband has repudiated her, she has nobody to support her. Even the country’s political and religious legislation, exemplified in family and personal codes, is inadequate. It is worth mentioning that ‘Family Laws’ are at one with the dominant ideology of each Maghrebi state. If the situation in Tunisia is somewhat different, in the rest of the Maghreb a man has the absolute right to repudiate or divorce his wife without

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any valid reason. Besides, divorcees have no legal recourse and are extremely poor. ‘Whatever the law provides’. And what is that? Expenses for a hundred days. That shows the extent of the law’s regard for women. Throw them out on the street with a hundred days of expenses (11). Here, the author critically assesses the premise of man’s ‘superiority’ over women, frequently debated because of Qur’an 2:228, which states: ‘And they [women] have rights [over their husbands] similar [to those of their husbands] over them … but men have a degree [of responsibility] over them. And Allah is All-Mighty, All-Wise’, and 4:34, ‘Men are the protectors and maintainers of women’. This argument is unfounded because it is based on a flawed interpretation of the Qur’an, as Malek Chebel argues. What the Qur’an enunciates on man’s rank vis-à-vis woman simply affects his function as head of the family, i.e., the family’s provider and protector (Chebel 2007: 45). Concerning divorce, women have a say in the arrangement as it is revealed in Qur’an 65:1, ‘When you divorce women … fear Allah your Lord, and turn them not out of their [husband’s] homes, nor shall they [themselves] leave, except in case they are guilty of some moral turpitude. And those are the set limits of Allah. And whosoever transgresses the set limits of Allah, then indeed he has wronged himself.’12 In Year of the Elephant, the frequency of this statement, ‘whatever the law provides’, sounds like the chilling inexorability of a death penalty; and it is in fact a death penalty in the sense it limits Zahra’s survival to ‘one hundred days’. Then what is going to happen? What does Zahra do? Whom does she turn to? In a community where parents are, by tradition, the source of security for their children whether they are single, divorced, widowed, or in economic difficulty, parents appear to be her only refuge. Nevertheless, she cannot turn to them because they are dead. Subsequently, she returns to the nearest refuge, her hometown. After such a long absence, she finds it ‘a dying town’ that ‘is trying to fight off death with hope and miracles’, whose alleys are peopled by ‘broad-shouldered young men [who] stand leaning against dilapidated walls’ (53). It is here, in her hometown, that she

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still owns property; an inheritance from her parents that consists of one room in a house. She still recalls her grandmother’s observation that ‘a woman has nothing but her husband and her property, and that husbands cannot be trusted’ (13). The 40-year-old Zahra, who is ‘haunted by bitterness’, has been married for 20 years ‘without ever clearly seeing the man’ (1) she married. She had not even seen him before her engagement. He noticed her, instead, at her grandfather’s door watching a musical procession, and sent his parents to ask for her hand, basing his choice on her long hair and dark eyes. ‘And the family decided to marry [her] off without ever asking for [her] thoughts’ (17). Now, weary, alienated and broke, she comes back to her hometown, as a ‘stranger among strangers’. Feeling like a freed prisoner returning to prison, she ‘feels neither sorrow nor hatred, nothing but a vague awareness that something inside [her] has been extinguished, has finally come to a halt’ (1). When she asks the woman who occupied the room to vacate it, saying she has been divorced and really needs the room back for herself, the occupant is speechless. Her brow wrinkles as she opens her mouth, then shuts it again. For our people, divorce is a catastrophe, an absolute disaster. Any objection she might raise is shattered with one decisive blow. There is nothing more to add. ‘I’ll get out’ (6). ‘In my room, in my father’s house, I spend the second of my hundred nights, counting them as Scheherazade once counted her own’ (11). Zahra’s survival is a tribute to Scheherazade’s courage and strength of mind. The identification with Scheherazade enables her to speak out and, as a resistant, to capture and weave a history of independence that is poles apart from the official one. As a result, she assertively subverts the prevailing judgment that Third World, Muslim, uneducated, traditional women, are silenced and submissive. Like Scheherazade, she will live on to tell the whole tale. The Community’s Restorative Potential Keeping a grip on reality and community, Zahra goes to visit the

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Sheikh (religious leader) of the local shrine, whom she had known as a child. She is so thrilled by the eloquence of a Qur’anic verse that she thinks it is addressed to her. His Qur’anic recitation, ‘So despondent were they that the earth, for all its vastness and their own souls, seemed to close in upon them’ (Qur’an 9: 118) seems to convey her own plight. Zahra’s visits to the Sheikh seem to emphasize the liberating dimension of Islam. For her, Islam ‘remains the alternative for the masses and a route to empowerment’ as Yamani (1996: 11) says of Saudi women. For a non-religious Western feminist reader, this is barely credible; women facing such an impasse would go to a ‘shrink’, but would never be expected to go to a religious leader for assistance. However, despite such cultural discrepancies, Zahra’s sticky situation is the same as that of any woman in any community who is divorced, uneducated and without financial resources. Apart from ‘a maintenance allowance for three months and ten days’ (9), she is compelled to find a way to ensure her subsistence and a shelter. Given her particular circumstances, this is a strenuous task. There is, in spite of everything, a sentiment of misogyny in most Maghrebi countries. Nawal Saadawi could well be referring to the Maghreb when she asserts that men cannot stand an experienced and intelligent woman … the experience and intelligence of women are a menace to [the] patriarchal class structure, and in turn, a menace to the false position in which man is placed, the position of king or demiGod in his relations with women (Saadawi 1982: 77). The dismal picture painted by this quotation could be an echo to Abouzeid’s protagonist, Zahra. The exclusion of women, for instance from the matrimonial home after divorce, is but one of the manifestations of this gendered ostracism, which is condoned by most Maghrebi authorities. Zahra’s life as a small town woman, a guerrilla combatant and a housewife has not provided her with any background she can use in the demanding marketplace. Her brother-in-law informs her, ‘These days you need a high-school degree to get any work at all. Soon they’ll require a college degree, and some day soon a college degree

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won’t even get you a job sweeping streets.’ Zahra retorts, ‘I just want a job that will earn me an honorable living, I don’t care what it is’. And she adds defiantly, ‘I’m not looking for a government position’ (66), an affirmation of self-reliance in retaliation against the new culture of irresponsibility and indecency that hurt Zahra’s feelings and honour: Although her sister and brother-in-law attempt to take her in, she declines the invitation, ‘I’m not anyone’s inheritance’ … ‘Clearly she expects that like other divorced women I will abide by custom and live with her’ (65). This is in fact a powerful ‘proclamation of emancipation’ and an assertion of a positive identity. Nevertheless, when her sister perseveres, Zahra revolts: ‘Do you have legal custody of me?’ (66); a rebuttal that she knows will engender years of animosity between the two sisters, but she has decided to make her own way, to be herself. It should be noted, though, that the narrator’s disenchantment coupled with domestic violence first appeared at home when she discovered her husband’s love affair with his secretary. When she asked him bluntly whether the ‘finance department’ was paying the bills of the hotel that has been turned into a whorehouse, insinuating the corruption of the new regime, he slapped her: Holding my face with one hand, I pointed at him with the other and shouted with all my strength as if addressing an imaginary crowd. ‘And we are waiting for reform to come from the likes of these! You’re more dangerous than the colonizers!’ (55) This accusation expresses the fury of women as they witness the failings of those men who are supposed to spearhead the longpromised changes, and uplift the community. As the ‘official arrangement’ is made to meet the expense of only one hundred days, Zahra is compelled to embark on a complex struggle against the postcolonial bureaucracy with the intention of building a new life of personal and financial independence. Unable to find a suitable job in a factory and realizing that ‘secretaries and

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office boys are running the country’ (65), Zahra takes on a job as a cleaning woman in the CCF (acronym for French Cultural Centre). This is definitely a humiliating job in a number of ways, but at least it guarantees some bread on the table and, most of all, affirms her identity and financial independence – so crucial for a woman’s independence. For Patricia Ruddy, a range of regulations made to protect female integrity contribute to the persistence of women’s economic marginality. Women have hardly any choices but many restrictions: ‘if in order to improve her economic status … she seeks employment, she is labelled a “prostitute” or singled out as the cause of national “indiscipline.” If, on the other hand, she [decides] to be a housewife, she is economically marginalized’ (Ruddy in Florence Stratton 1994: 26). This job, as well as her room – the only possession that she can hold on firmly to – is symbolic of a personal space of freedom in addition to the integrity of her identity. By the end of the narrative, Zahra has developed a new freedom and balance, and dispelled her earlier resentment. She has started a new life. She informs her old friend, the Sheikh, that her life ‘is constituted of work [and] faith … The important thing is that I remember God and concentrate on this idea of mine that we are only passing through this life to build a road to the next one’ (68). Obviously the protagonist does not take any pride in the political achievement of her own country, which is ‘wallowing in filth’ (9), and where ‘misery flows through the air and mingles through our very breath’ (10). This is, by itself, eloquent. She expresses disenchantment in a Resistance that was the catalyst of the masses. ‘I … entered the struggle and carried out missions for my homeland. But now what does my homeland do for me? The struggle has come to nothing.’ (24) Though women took an energetic part in the Resistance, they have not necessarily been compensated with admittance to formal politics or an increased understanding of women’s matters. The narrator implicitly admits that there are no easy solutions to the predicament that is sadly gripping her newly independent fellow-countrymen. In the beginning of the Resistance, we believed the struggle would wash away all spite and malice, just as we thought that

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Independence would relieve our cares and heal our sores like miracle cures sold in the market. In fact, we loaded Independence down with a burden it could not bear (67). Fighting at the side of men to bring about independence does not offer an assurance of women’s insertion as equal citizens of the freed nation. Kumari Jayawardena’s authoritative study of feminism and Third World nationalism reminds us of this outrageous evidence: ‘Once independence has been achieved, male politicians who had consciously mobilized women in the struggle, pushed them into their “accustomed place”’ (1986: 259). In post-revolutionary Algeria, for instance, there has been a sort of ‘delegitimization of the heroine’ (Boutta and Cherifati-Merabtine 1994: 189) which is indicative of the sidelining of women after independence (Wilford 1998: 3). The exclusion and subordination of women is ‘naturalized’ within Maghrebi culture in general, positively depicted and endorsed as if evident and biologically determined. This, of course, OgundipeLeslie (1987: 133) questions: Women are naturally excluded from public affairs; they are viewed as unable to hold positions of responsibility, rule men or even be visible when serious matters of state and society are being discussed. Women are viewed to need tutelage before they can be politically active; politics is considered the absolute realm of men; women are not considered fit for political positions in modern [Maghrebi] nation-states, though their enthusiasm and campaign work are exploited by their various political parties. Besides, the emphasis on the solidarity of men and women in the struggle for decolonization postponed the crucial consideration of the discrepancies of power between men and women in Moroccan society. Year of the Elephant demonstrates that without the amendment of the latter, the prospect of radical transformations in postcolonial societies will remain unfulfilled. In her discussion of the liberation of women in Morocco, Abouzeid has favoured the national liberation discourse as a strategy to deal with women as part of the movement for political and economic decolonization. And if I consider the significance of women’s roles

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in the Moroccan struggle for independence, I am impressed by their determination. While women became more committed to Resistance and politics, their activities did not oppose the predominant gender expectations. They were normally ascribed the chores traditionally identified with women, like nursing, cooking, carrying weapons, and concealing guerrilla fighters. They executed strategies conceived by others but they did not take part in the decision-making discussions. As Judith E. Tucker (1993: 42) observes, ‘Instead of introducing new roles for women, the old ones were imbued with new respect’. Much more threatening than working outside the home, however, is women’s interest in politics. The point is explicitly presented in a Hadith which claims that ‘those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity!’13 Not only is this Hadith the lone piece of evidence manipulated by those who want to ostracize women from public life and relegate them to the household; but it is also of such great magnitude that it is virtually preposterous to address the issue of women’s political rights without mentioning it. For there are still some authorities in Islam who, in their endeavour to belittle women’s role in Islamic history, assert that ‘Muslim women played no role in public affairs, despite all the rights that Islam gave them’ (Muhammad ‘Arafa 1980: 149). They fail to notice, however, that millions of men in the ‘Arab World’ have not played any part in public affairs, either! Like other Moroccan women who have been kept away from political activism, Zahra bitterly remembers the time when very few could carry out the missions she has bravely undertaken: I fastened my belt, slipped the pistols wrapped in cloth inside my blouse and recalled my grandfather speaking of Asma, who took food to the Prophet Mohammed and to her own father Abu Bakr, when they were hiding from their enemies in a cave during their flight from Mecca to Medina. The comparison shook me and made me realize that the struggle has been the same down through the centuries, in that women, too, have always taken their part in it (39). This reminiscence clearly shows the protagonist’s awareness of her Islamic heritage. Zahra takes up as her role model one of the founding ‘mothers of Islam’, those progressive women who joined

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in the early religious conquests and whose contribution was decisive in the propagation of Islam. With those predecessors as her model, Zahra, like her secular sister Zhor Lazrag,14 regards her struggle as decisive for the survival of Islamic ideals and her achievement as redemptive of a tradition.15 Furthermore, Zahra means ‘to preserve and to redefine for the given historical moment the cultural images which underwrite collective action … of a people seeking to liberate themselves’ (Harlow 1987: 82). As Gayatri Spivak, Ben Okri, Kwame Anthony Appiah and others have pointed out, ‘indigenous religious, moral, and intellectual traditions in colonized countries were never as fully pervaded by colonialism as the authorities might have desired’ (Boehmer 1995: 245). The question that one might ask is to what extent can one (re) interpret the sacred texts, whether they relate to the behaviour of Zahra’s husband or any Muslim power structure? Not only have the Qur’an and Hadith always been manipulated,16 but their relevance has also been a justification of the power play in Muslim societies. Since every form of government, from the seventh century on, has been religiously validated, political groups and economic stakes prompted the devising of erroneous traditions. In this conjecture of political interests and socio-economic tensions, epitomized by the hegemonic position of the Moroccan monarchy and a postindependence parasitic bureaucracy, Abouzeid is questioning the whole official discourse. In this respect, Year of the Elephant stands against the official historiography and the authorities’ discourse as Abouzeid is articulating her identity instead of serving as an echo chamber for the Moroccan potentate. As Fatima Mernissi (1991: 21) points out, those who read in the seventh-century texts the necessity to deprive half of the Muslim population – women – of the exercise of their political rights, [are afraid of ] democracy, the exercise by all citizens, whatever their sex, of their public rights. Zahra emerges from these trials of subjugation and submission an even stronger woman. She becomes a self-reliant woman, but in a way that few feminists would idealize. Her experience undoubtedly does not correspond to that of most Western feminists. She is neither a

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Westernized woman nor a Western woman, but a Muslim Moroccan woman who finds satisfaction in Islam. For the narrator, Islam, truly comprehended, can be a catalyst for feminist change. In her approach to Islam in Year of the Elephant, Abouzeid is in tune with an increasing number of Arab and Muslim women writers who have been challenging European feminist discourse on women and Islam. Academics such as Fatima Mernissi, Assia Djebar and Leila Ahmed have reaffirmed the basic emancipatory message of Islam, and dismissed the assumption that Muslim women’s liberation can only be found in European feminist paradigms.17 The Empire Writes Back suggests that postcolonial literature is also about a ‘radical dismantling of European codes and a postcolonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses. (1989: 27). In the dialogues between Zahra and the Sheikh that take place all through the novel, Abouzeid questions European discourse on Islam by choosing to represent the Sheikh as an affectionate, supportive and genuinely pious individual rather than as a stereotypically domineering and misogynist character. The Sheikh is at odds with the shocking images of ‘throat slitters’ and ‘flag burners’ omnipresent in both Western academic discourse and Western media. The protagonist of Year of the Elephant shows the way to independence. Zahra tries to gain the upper hand in a community that reins her in. She is altogether a social worker, a determined guerrilla fighter, a fund-raiser, and a self-taught woman. Therefore she has achieved her goal of setting herself free, not only from colonial domination, but also from the fetters of political unawareness and ultimately from subordination. Zahra’s very last confession to the Sheikh is an articulation of a solid self-reliance: ‘I want to be content … as good as it can be’ (70). Such a compelling determination reveals a perfect lucidity that stems from a positive identity and a solid integrity. In a critical search for identity in a world that is more and more dominated by Western cultural symbols and practices, especially those emanating from former colonial powers, she seems to echo the Tunisian Hélé Béji (1982: 121) who admits that ‘la mort politique de mon identité n’est pas la mort de mon intégrité’ [the political death of my identity is not the death of my integrity]. To counter the nerveracking impact of dissolution that she perceives in her community,

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Zahra associates herself with some Islamic symbols, a form of Asala. Her repeated visits to the shrine, her identification with Asma, the daughter of Caliph Abu Bakr As-Siddiq (573–634), and her attachment to the emblematic Sheikh; all these elements are certainly a sign of a powerful rapport with one’s community, not an abject failure (Mernissi 1991). Zahra’s need of the Sheikh’s religious support is vital in the sense that she aims at fighting ‘pessimism of the intelligence’ with ‘optimism of the will’ (Gramsci 1988: 215). Thus, she succeeds in re-creating her split self by way of a twofold approach: sorting out and synchronizing herself with the sturdy representations of her identity. Conclusion Zahra’s tale asserts the importance of being a politically conscious individual in the face of the community’s limitations. In a similar way to Souad Guellouz’s protagonist, it also reveals how somebody can surmount these limitations and attain his/her own sense of self-invention. Zahra’s narrative is rooted in her attainment of independence, which allows her to thrive rather than being emotionally, psychologically, physically or socially overwhelmed. In fact, Zahra is portrayed as a rebellious individual who is ‘not going to take it anymore’, and refuses to passively accept an imposition of suffering as destiny. Indeed, Zahra is the valiant dissenter who audaciously refuses to surrender to asphyxiating social conventions and firmly believes she can escape from the limitations of her confined life and ‘invent herself ’. From a variety of perspectives, Year of the Elephant represents the complex dynamics of experience through which individuals are positively shaped, or impaired, by the antagonistic values of their respective communities. The confirmation of community values is apparent throughout the novel. Negatively, for instance, at the beginning of the novel, when Zahra is viciously abandoned by her husband; and positively, in the way the Sheikh provides Zahra with psychological help. As with the works of Djebar, notably Vaste est la prison (1995), Abouzeid engages in issues of how to live with and restructure history but at the same time move into the future. And Zahra has an extraordinary support in the community; she has the backing of

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the Sheikh to enhance her own identity. The Sheikh helps her recreate a positive version of her past, relationships and self. Finally, yet importantly, Zahra is aware of the significance of aligning herself with her community, its vitality and paradoxes. She does not alienate herself from her community’s values. Ultimately, Zahra learns that she cannot be truly ‘free’ without going through a process of liberation, described by Year of the Elephant as inevitably contextualized in her community. ‘Her decolonized subjectivity does not signify power over others, but empowerment within a context of communal support’ (Suero Elliot 2000). Year of the Elephant shows that attempts at self-liberation are unproductive when they are not established on the basis of reciprocal confidence between individuals or backing from community. Ultimately, this narrative is actually about how to effectively stand firm and, primarily, how to resist the injustice that blights post-independence Morocco.

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3 IS EVERY WOMAN’S NAME ‘WOUND’? RESISTANCE AND SELF-FULFILMENT IN ASSIA DJEBAR’S A SISTER TO SCHEHERAZADE

Introduction As I indicated in the previous chapter on Leila Abouzeid, this chapter also addresses women’s agency and social justice, but extends Fanon’s ideas. When Fanon declared that ‘colonial racism is no different from any other racism’ (1967: 88), he laid the grounds for one of the most challenging disciplines in humanities, which is postcolonialism, and triggered one of the most passionate debates which concerns the fates of millions of people. His work has actually revealed that questions of power relationships involving the colonizer / settler and the colonized / subjugated are usually comparable to studies on forms of ‘slavery’ and relationships between ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’. The latest reexamination of Fanon’s work maintains that his ideas are as important today as they were when written. Echoing Fanon, Abdi (1999: 53) argues, ‘today’s struggle is not to resurrect the past, but to change the unbearable present and the potentially bewildering future’. Also, to address Spivak’s (2003: 17) query about ‘how far should literature be read as sociological evidence’ I will argue in this chapter that Maghrebi writers such as Assia Djebar do tackle key social issues that are relevant to their respective communities. As ushers of postcolonial literature, they also deal with such issues as biological determinism, representation and nationalism.  Under

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these three headings, literature is generally regarded as a means for social investigation. And I show in this chapter how Djebar explores the status and roles assigned to women. Her fiction also examines political issues, especially with regard to women’s resistance and selffulfilment. A typically politicized voice, Djebar engages systematically in the ways in which cultural practices engender inequalities for women in Algeria. For this woman writer is perfectly aware that ‘decolonization’ is not only an individual development in a communal context, but a collective experience as well (Wisker 2000: 80). It is through this perspective that I focus on Djebar’s Ombre sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade, 1987). My argument is that in this novel, to apply Miriam Cooke’s insight, ‘one can most clearly see the individual creating alternative realities. Alternative does not mean separate or irrelevant. These reflections on personal experience and forays into fiction may provide the blueprint for the future’ (Cooke 2001: x). It should be mentioned here that postcolonial Maghrebi women’s experience of oppression and marginalization as it falls through the cracks of gender is similar to that of women in the ‘Arab World’ in general. A Sister to Scheherazade tackles the subject of violence, both physical and psychological, and draws attention to the impact of colonial violence on local people in the settler-invader colony (Algeria). This novel clearly shows how this violence still haunts the Algerian collective memory; yet it gives a vivid account of the psychic damage generated by a new type of violence at the hands of pitiable indigenous people. In her analysis of violence against women in Africa, Amina Mama (1997: 48) reminds us that ‘colonial penetration was both a violent and a gendered process’, and that the ‘colonization process also transformed African gendered relations in complex, diverse, and contradictory ways that we have yet to fully understand’ (1997: 53). Subsequently, I examine Krumholz’s argument of ‘national trauma’ (1992) as significantly informed by a colonialist violent past and a tough postcolonial present as epitomized in Djebar’s A Sister to Scheherazade. More to the point of my reading, the clarification above provides the necessary context or subtext for a better understanding of A Sister to Scheherazade. In this novel, which is set in post-independence

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Algeria, Djebar gives voice to the voiceless, and aims to set free the ‘odalisques’ (Talahite 1998), Isma and Hajila, who epitomize the concubines in the harem as imagined in Orientalist literature and paintings. These two women are compared to Scheherazade, the bride of the murderous king, and her protective sister Dinarzade, in the stories of The Arabian Nights. In this novel, Djebar puts side by side the lives of these two women, the modern Isma and the traditional Hajila. Both women, who actually appear in the story as ‘I’ and ‘you’, share a common experience: they have been married, at different periods, to the same man. Isma, the narrator, performs the task of the ‘conscientious first wife’ and, through Hajila’s mother Touma, she makes plans for Hajila to be a Dharra (second wife) for her ex-husband. Acclaimed by a large public for its brilliant and gripping narrative of Hajila’s submission, resistance and subsequent self-fulfilment, A Sister to Scheherazade has been one of Djebar’s best-selling novels. In this novel, the predominant voices are the ones of Isma and the Dharra, i.e., Hajila. This tale, which is narrated by Isma, covers a span of a few months, i.e. from Hajila’s encounter with Isma to her consciousness-raising and ultimate emancipation. From the opening chapter of the novel, and by making the heroines, Hajila and Isma, evolve in their natural milieu, Djebar brings us, as readers, closer to the genuine sordid circumstances that her characters endure. At first, Isma talks about herself and the life she had with her exhusband. She is an intellectual, a free woman who is able to travel between Algiers and Paris. Like Djebar herself, Isma was born in Cherchell, ‘a city peopled a long time ago by Andalusian refugees in the XVI century’ (1987: 41). As an infant, her mother dies from tuberculosis. Her aunt, on her father’s side, who only has sons, looks after her until the age of ten, when her father decides to put her in a boarding school. When she is 20 years old she gets married, living first in Algiers then in Paris. First she enjoys her new married life, and then she realizes it is but an illusion. From this marriage she has a six-year-old daughter, Meriem, who now lives with her father and stepmother, Hajila. Isma confesses to her aunt that she has been obliged to ‘work, teach, and have time for herself ’ (1987: 85). And now she returns to her hometown and her daughter’s birthplace. She comes back from Paris because she wants to reclaim her daughter.

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She does not want her daughter to be subjected to the typical fate of women in Algeria. She wants her to have an education, just as she herself did with the help of her father, and not to be reined in by ‘The Man’. A Sister to Scheherazade is the account of Hajila, a heartbroken, barely literate Algerian woman who attempts to evade, first, her merciless milieu and, later, the humiliation of her husband. The story is told fundamentally through Isma, who starts weaving her narrative by envisioning the feelings and actions of Hajila (‘little quail’ in Algerian dialect) (8). Using the second-person pronoun she writes, ‘This morning, Hajila, as you stand in the kitchen’ (7). Isma narrates Hajila’s life as if she were telling it to Hajila herself. But the latter knows nothing about Isma, apart from apprehending that she is ‘Meriem’s mother’. Isma examines and depicts the metamorphosis of Hajila, the traditional woman. She reveals that Hajila is a girl from a poor family living in the slums around Algiers, whose widowed mother is happy to marry her to such a rich and sophisticated sonin-law. The outdoors is the thrilling idea that germinates in Hajila’s mind. She carries out this thought in the chapter, which is rightly titled ‘Outdoors’. Six months after her marriage, Hajila sneaks out of the sumptuous apartment, at first veiled and thankful for this concealing outfit of unbleached wool. Transgression is her only pleasure. She loves getting out of the luxurious residence when her husband is at work and her stepdaughter at school. Outdoors, Hajila sees an ‘unveiled woman’, and she too, wants a life ‘beyond the veil’. She removes her veil and wanders off ‘totally naked’. ‘The Man’, so far absent from the narrative, emerges in the fourth chapter. First, Isma talks about his impotence, and then he starts raping Hajila. When Isma comes to take back her daughter, Meriem, Hajila informs her about her pregnancy but, thrilled by life outdoors, she decides to have an abortion. After Meriem’s departure, ‘The Man’ discovers Hajila’s escapades. One night, inebriated and fuming, he tries to tone down his anger by battering his wife and wounds her with a broken whiskey bottle. Eventually motivated by the sympathetic support by which Dinarzade helps her sister Scheherazade to prevent her death sentence (58), Isma hungers for a lasting freedom for her sister (and alter ego)

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Hajila. She makes plans to meet her at the Hammam (traditional Turkish bath),1 the only place for women to move ‘freely naked’ and to have respite. Hajila and Isma exchange a ritual kiss, and wash each other’s backs; then Isma presses into Hajila’s hand an extra key to the apartment. Hajila is now free to leave her ‘prison’ whenever she wants. The key theme of A Sister to Scheherazade indicates Djebar’s desire to envision a positive outcome in life, even under the harshest conditions. Like Abouzeid, who explores the fate of Moroccan women at the hands of their men, Djebar’s contribution to Maghrebi literature undeniably lies in her examination of women’s liberation and the relationship between husband and wife. As with Zahra in Year of the Elephant, Djebar ‘dramatizes’ the ‘real and metaphoric’ rape of Hajila by The Man (her husband), and shows how insignificant the difference is between the two abused wives. In Monego’s terms, Djebar ‘lays bare the conflicts that spring forth from woman’s … soul and catch her in a struggle between affirming her independent existence or finding that affirmation only by yielding her will to the authority of a man’ (1984: 143). How far does A Sister to Scheherazade identify the intermingling of patriarchy and abuse? In its portrayal of uprootedness, exclusion, spousal abuse and alienation, to what extent is A Sister to Scheherazade comparable to Year of the Elephant or La vie simple? Why is it that all three novelists insist that deliverance for women comes from affinities with other women? Bearing in mind that ‘fiction is often a mirror of reality’, in this narrative, it is the ‘masculine peril’, epitomized by ‘patriarchy’,2 which ought to be overpowered, and ultimately metamorphosed. Oppression in A Sister to Scheherazade A Sister to Scheherazade, with its highly symbolic title, is an examination of contemporary experience, both political and personal, public and private, and that no(wo)man’s land in between. It is concerned with the relationship between the body and the body politic (Jack 1996: 172): By constructing ‘I’ (Isma) and ‘you’ (Hajila), both an autobiographical self and a fictional self, Djebar shows the latter

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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 (Mortimer 1997: 110). To begin with, it is worth mentioning that Djebar concentrates her efforts on producing texts that bear witness to the Maghreb’s long and rich history of linguistic, religious, cultural and political diversity and to the absurdity of attempting to wipe it out, whether in the name of nationalism, pan-Arabism or Islam. Literary works such as L’Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade, 1985); Ombre sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade, 1987); Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Algerian White, 1995a); Vaste est la prison (So Vast the Prison, 1995b) and Oran, langue morte (1997), epitomize this approach. So Vast the Prison is remarkable for its ‘pluralizing’ effects. It takes Abdelkbir Khatibi’s concept of ‘Maghreb pluriel’ a bit further. It brilliantly maps out the multifarious interactions between the Maghreb and other Mediterranean cultures. It stretches from ancient Greece, Rome and Carthage, through the period of Arab conquest, the return of the Andalusian Moors, and on into the epoch of French colonial conquest, anti-colonial war and the current state of political violence and subsequent assassination of intellectuals and exile forced on Djebar and many of her fellow citizens. Djebar has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Prize in literature. She taught history for many years at the University of Algiers. She won several international prizes for her significant contributions to world literature. In 1997, she was appointed Professor and Director of the Center for French and Francophone studies of the Louisiana State University. Since autumn 2001, Djebar has been Silver Chair Professor of French and Francophone studies at New York University. Djebar, already a member of the ‘Académie Royale de Langue Française de Belgique’, became in 2005 a member of the French Academy. She is the first Maghrebi woman to become an Immortel, a lifetime member of the renowned Academy, instituted by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 in the reign of King Louis XIII, ‘to protect and monitor the French Language’.

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This mark of distinction draws attention to her constant literary importance as Algeria’s most prolific and iconic woman writer. If her acceptance of the appointment rekindled the disconcerting polemics associated with neo-colonialism and nationalism, not to mention the issue of Maghrebi writers writing in French, her work powerfully epitomizes her avant-gardism. Djebar’s writing resonates with current issues that reflect the course of Algeria’s cultural, social and political changes. Nevertheless, in the eyes of Algerian government officials, Djebar is a ‘Westernized’ expatriate whose feminist books in French misrepresent women’s condition in Algeria. The very success of her book La Soif (1957) subjected the novelist to caustic criticisms (Mortade 1971). Without a doubt, Djebar’s novels are feminist and significantly analytical of women’s condition in Algeria. Her fiction has ‘broached an area of interrogation … that calls into question not only tradition, convention, and religion but the modern uses of power in post-independence North Africa as well’ (Harlow 1986: xxi). In the vein of The Arabian Nights, Djebar’s novel A Sister to Scheherazade empowers women’s presence and experience. Anticipating Spivak (1988), Djebar does not claim to ‘speak for’ the Algerian women, but to ‘speak next to’ the language that would be spoken by ‘incarcerated bodies’ (Grace 2004: 139) as they first secured their liberty. For women to liberate themselves from the inflicted silence and the patriarchal chains, they have to ‘retrieve a voice that has been driven into silence’ (Spivak 1988: 122) and ensure it speaks for them. Both a plain-spoken writer and movie director, Djebar is mainly concerned with women’s voice, memory and language, and the position of women in Algerian history. Djebar, in conjunction with other women novelists such as Leila Sebbar, Yamina Mechakra, Malika Mokeddem and Nina Bouraoui, has ‘brought the issues of women’s identity and freedom into a contemporary context, in which women seek to define themselves as more than a colonial or patriarchal “other”’ (Grace 2004: 131). As Valerie Orlando (1999: 20) states, ‘these authors find themselves at the intersection of French and North African feminist viewpoints, exposing a complicated world that must be re-negotiated and re-defined’. This re-negotiation and

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redefinition are the novel’s main concern. For Djebar (1985) warns us that A Sister to Scheherazade, which poignantly presents itself as a ‘cluster of strangled cries’ (1985: 59), is written in the language ‘used formerly to entomb my people’, (1985: 215) the colonial language.3 As noted in the previous chapter, Djebar contends with the language issue in a way that is not fundamentally different from that of many Maghrebi writers. Yet it is worth mentioning that after Algeria gained independence, Djebar was severely criticized for writing in French because Algerian writers were expected to shift to the official (national?) language, Arabic. In the 1970s, Djebar started studying classical Arabic to broaden her literary expression. Yet, her long literary silence in the 1970s was, to a certain extent, attributable to her growing interest in non-literary art forms such as movie making, and her recognition that she was not going to be an Arabic-language author. Briefly, her collection of short stories Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1980), was a defining moment in Djebar’s career as a writer: ‘I had just turned forty. It’s at that point that I finally felt myself fully a writer of French language, while remaining deeply Algerian’ (1980: 65). In a multilingual country such as Algeria, Djebar is attentive to the risky stand she takes in opting for the use of French language. In fact, Djebar, in a similar manner to Kateb Yacine, describes her appropriation of French as ‘one of the spoils of war’ (Djebar 1980: 45), but she has also taken Kateb Yacine’s motto a step further. She may write in French, but she is not writing in the language of the ‘Other’ because she has artistically manipulated the French language, giving it the sounds and rhythms of both Tamazight and Arabic. In short, she has ‘translated’ French into her mother tongue (Ghaussy 1994: 460). Accordingly, Djebar has sought to ‘foreignise / domesticate’ French (Toler 2001: 25), both with the intention of making this language her own, and to subvert the colonizer’s idiom, the language, which ‘used … to entomb [her] people’. Djebar’s grappling with the language issue and her endeavour to give French an Arabic/Tamazight dimension is perceptible in her work. In her essay ‘Ces voix qui m’assiègent: en marge de ma francophonie’ (1999: 29), Djebar makes it clear how the use of French language develops into a manifesto for the subversion of language, and a process to give voice to the voiceless:

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Oui, ramener les voix non francophones …jusqu’un texte français qui devient enfin mien… Oui, faire ré-affleurer les cultures traditionnelles mises au ban, maltraitées, longtemps méprisées, les inscrire, elles dans un texte nouveau, dans une graphie qui devient «mon» français. [Yes, to bring back the non-francophone voices … to a French text which becomes finally mine …Yes, to restore the banned, maltreated, and much disparaged traditional cultures; record them in a new text, a transcription which becomes ‘my’ French.] Djebar creates a kind of ‘mutability’ in her language – she makes use of expressions that are closely related to her mother’s Tamazight heritage, ‘which crosses cultural divides, and creates “a continuum of intersections” breaching divides of time, space and gender’ (Grace 2004: 231–2). One perfect example of such a strategy is in A Sister to Scheherazade when Hajila is contemplating herself in the mirror: ‘“The face of sorrow,” you murmur to yourself in Arabic, to your solitary, mute self ’ (9). Another illustration is in So Vast the Prison, when referring to the cruel nature of the Algerian powers that be, she writes, ‘Ceux qui commandent … ceux qui ont la Solta! … Dhiab fi thiab! …Des loups dans des vêtements d’hommes !’ [Those who are in control … those who have the Solta! … Dhiab fi thiab … wolves dressed as people] (1995: 311). This approach is actually one in which ‘language is taken to “bear the burden” of one’s own cultural experience … to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 38). Djebar’s concern with language in A Sister to Scheherazade, and also in most of her recent works, has actually been acclaimed for its superb re-creation of the Algerian dialect. This is Djebar’s art and one of her major concerns: French stuffed with her mother tongue’s imagery. She identifies and breathes life into ‘les cris and l’écrit’ [the screaming and writing] (Goodman 1995: 1) of all the women who have been silenced throughout history for having challenged the status quo (Cooke 2001: 34). Djebar observes that the language a woman uses is more or less subjective, but powerful:

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I could say: ‘stories translated from …’ but from which language? From Arabic? From the colloquial Arabic or from feminine Arabic: one might as well call it underground Arabic (1999: 29). For Djebar, this female language – this feminine Arabic, goes beyond national and linguistic borders, for no matter what the words are, ‘they always belong to an “excoriated language” that has never appeared in the daylight’ (Grace 2004: 140–41). By couching on paper the pathos and thoughts of these two women, in A Sister to Scheherazade Djebar self-consciously blurs the boundaries between history, autobiography and fiction. A biographical element may both explain and shed some light on Djebar’s major literary concerns. The second text of her quartet, Ombre sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade, 1987) no longer deals with the historical concerns of L’Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade, 1985) and Vaste est la prison (So Vast the Prison, 1995).4 Yet, like these two novels, which hint at the various ‘prisons’ Algerian women have been kept in, A Sister to Scheherazade also addresses the ordeal that women have experienced in these various prisons. This novel is in fact an ingenious yet despondent reaction to the ‘Arabian Nights’, as I argue below. A Sister to Scheherazade focuses on one narrator, Isma, drawn from Djebar’s previous novel, Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade (1985). Isma/Djebar, the narrator – who bears a great resemblance to Djebar herself – (Mortimer 1997: 110) a liberated, Westernized/ modernized, veil-free, and French-educated divorcee, comes back home to reunite with her six-year-old daughter and to look after her husband’s oppressed second wife, Hajila. The submissive Hajila is ‘veiled in despair’ after six months of marriage. Like Djebar’s subsequent ‘narrators who openly wonder at their physical as well as emotional desires’, Hajila’s rebelliousness, after being raped by her drunken husband, ‘exposes her sexuality and abuse with a liberating honesty’ (Rogers 2005: 32). A Sister to Scheherazade is a novel that confronts the oppression of women by articulating a sharp scepticism about the power of Western feminism to transform social relations in contemporary Algeria. It is also an attempt to highlight the submission, resistance and self-

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fulfilment of two women in post-independence Algeria: Two women: two wives: Hajila and Isma … a strange duet: (they) are not sisters, not even rivals, although … they are both the wives of the same man – The Man – … This man does not come between them, but … does not turn them into accomplices (1). Isma has chosen Hajila and hurled her into ‘the marital bed’. For she wanted to ‘act as a matchmaker to her own husband; thinking naively to free herself from her own past … and from the stalemate of the present’ (1). Hajila and Isma meet only three times, at the end of the narrative. But the elder (Isma), in brooding upon the daily existence of the younger (Hajila), attempts to redefine the terms of a possible bonding and tries to examine the complex domain of women’s solidarity, a central theme in the second part of the novel. What Hajila notices around her is a subdued atmosphere where women mumble. The harem no longer exists, but its practices, the law of silence and invisibility impose themselves. Woman’s voice is suppressed and her space restricted. The theme of confinement permeates the whole novel. Hajila ignores the joy of open space, as do Djebar’s earlier nonconformist heroines such as Nadia in La Soif (1957) and Dalila in Les Impatients (1958), but is constantly secluded, walled in. ‘Here, in this country, they annihilate you by shutting you up behind walls and windows hidden from view. No sooner do you set foot outside than you feel exposed’ (80). Is Every Woman’s Name ‘Wound?’: Defiance and Self-Affirmation Rebellion against tradition and family is one of the main subjects of the novel. Unlike other women who are frequently confined to their ‘apartments’ and have their deeds prescribed by society or by male authority, Hajila rebels against the asphyxiating restrictions put into practice by first her mother and later her husband, who practically sequesters her and supervises every action of hers, in the name of shielding the family honour. In The Harem and Its Cousins, the French anthropologist Germaine Tillion (1966: 55) vividly describes this bendable notion of honour.

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Around the house: high windowless walls surmounted by broken glass; around the village: every kind of natural protection, ditches, hedges of prickly pear; around the tent: a pack of halfwild dogs, but rendered even more impregnable than by the dogs – the whole vicinity has been ‘sacralised’ and cannot be violated without violating that most sacred of all concepts: horma – honour. Nevertheless, Djebar implies that the woman’s soul is in motion even if her body and actions are restricted by veiling and sequestration. It is possible that contemporary Algerian women will cross the boundary and ‘deliver themselves … completely from the shadow that has been cast over their own bodies for centuries’.5 Right from the beginning, the narrator concedes: ‘Scarcely the plot has started to unfold then it slowly disintegrates’ (1). This is an obvious narrative strategy which reflects the lives of the characters. Isma, the narrator, speaks successively in the first person about her own life and in the second person to Hajila, whose marriage is quite distressing. Although ‘The Man’, their husband, is an ‘ambiguous border’ between them, he is nonetheless referred to as a ‘common wall’ connecting the private and the public space, security and peril, restraint and liberty. Throughout the novel, the husband remains unnamed. The only references that the author used are as follows: Ask ‘him’, p. 17; ‘the man’ begins p. 23; ‘the man’ still sleeps, p. 25; this ‘son in-law’, p. 46; ‘the man’ had started drinking again, p. 71; ‘the man’ who has the power of life and death listens, p. 98; etc. It is worth mentioning that ‘the man’ is not named in Leila Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant either. Through a socially accepted role of authority, ‘The Man’, in A Sister to Scheherazade or Zahra’s husband, epitomizes long-established attitudes and behaviours of ‘male family members’, whose raison d’être is to oppress women. Djebar vividly depicts The Man as a major obstacle to women’s struggle for equality and liberty. So, their husband, who is never named in the text, is first depicted as a sexual predator. Moreover, Hajila’s tragic solitude is ‘a union consummated by force, with a brutality of rape’ (119), i.e., The Man’s apathy and animalistic behaviour:

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Rape! Is this rape? People assert that he is your husband, your mother always refers to ‘your master, your lord’ … He has forced you down on to the bed, you try to fight him off, finding unsuspected sources of strength … When the man’s penis ruptures you, with one rapid sword-thrust, you scream out in the silence, breaking your own silence, ‘No! …No!’ You struggle against him, he castigates you, you try to return to the surface. … ‘He can see my legs! He can see my blood! He has paid for this right!’ (57–8) This passage clearly shows that the husband acts like a rapist; the novel’s depiction of the couple’s sexual relationship is daring for the Maghreb when one considers the times and the culture, for the discussion of sensual pleasures is still a taboo. In most Maghrebi regions, tradition enjoins arranged marriages determined by family status and wealth, in which love, as a catalyst, is superfluous. Djebar ventures to electrify the Algerian temperament, though to Western readers her articulation of sensuality might be considered trite. The husband would cough: the indication for you to bring him an ashtray. You would enter that bedroom. There was a new bed, made of mahogany like the wardrobe. It was too high for you; like a throne? Or a platform? You would lie down, next to that other body. Careful not to brush against anything. A hand would fondle your breasts in the darkness, and you would try to draw in your stomach to avoid his groping fingers … You would hold your breath, lying quite still, waiting, wide awake. A little later, you would get up in the dark and go to lie on the mattress on the carpet at the foot of the modern bed (17). For Djebar there is a patent irony in this relationship. Though the couple has to be intimate in a ‘modern bed’, the liaison between the spouses is not that ‘modern’. This passage explores the couple’s vicissitudes and the falsehood on which their relationship lies, and the narrative, as a whole, compels ‘The Man’ to rationalize his relationship with his woman. This, in Monego’s words, implies that ‘there are ties to be broken and bridges to be built’ (Monego 1984: 138).

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For Djebar, this locus classicus is also a paradigm of Tamkin,6 which is commonly about the woman’s obligation to comply with the sexual demands of her husband all the time and his ‘divine’ right to physically batter her if ever she refuses to comply. Mai Yamani (1996: 15) examines this notion of Tamkin with close reference to the Qur’an (49: 13). Through a meticulous analysis of the background and real meaning of the verse, she argues that Tamkin should be reciprocal between husband and wife and that ‘there are several alternatives to each situation depending on the circumstances or natural inclination of the woman’. Djebar’s vision of religious issues is singular and aims at subverting the established order and undermining fixed sexist meanings. She debunks established religious beliefs through a language that is clearcut and stripped of superfluous phraseology, yet embellished and highly wrought. As I will argue shortly, God is a real presence for Djebar and her heroines. And Djebar is as much engaged in Islam and Islamic feminism as the Moroccans Leila Abouzeid and Fatima Mernissi, or the Egyptian Nawal Saadawi. Moreover, Djebar does actually tap into a long tradition of writers who have either denounced the fallacy of religion such as Nawal Saadawi, or who have challenged religious beliefs such as Fatima Mernissi and Hinde Taarji. In A Sister to Scheherazade, Hajila is physically and psychologically shattered because of The Man’s rape. Through an Islamic-feminist prism, Djebar equates the sanctity of marriage with rape. For Djebar to associate religious issues with the negative sexual experience of her character is startling and unusual. In her writing, Djebar examines the struggle for socio-political liberation and the manifold Muslim woman’s world. Djebar’s strong Islamic-feminist stand has received honourable mention. However, in Death of a Discipline (2003: 87), Spivak reduces the importance of Islamic feminism, claiming that bringing Islam into feminism is but another form of ‘ghettoisation’. Yet Islamic feminism is a significant approach that is rooted in the religion of millions of men and women. For Miriam Cooke, the phrase ‘Islamic feminism’ elicits concerns like ‘what it means to have a difficult double commitment: on the one hand, to a faith position, and on the other hand, to women’s rights’ both inside and outside the home (Cooke 2001: 59).

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Bringing into play both the Qu’ran and Sunna (the authenticated Hadith 7 – Sayings and Deeds of the Prophet Muhammad as compiled in the Sahih of al-Bukhari and Muslim 8 and which constitute the foundation of Islamic law), some Islamic feminists like Leila Abouzeid, Fatima Mernissi and Assia Djebar explore the gendered construction of Islamic epistemology. These women do not challenge the sacrality of the Qur’an, but they do analyze the temporality of its exegesis. Like Abouzeid and Mernissi, Djebar does not consider women’s oppression as something ingrained in Islam but as a sociopolitical perversion of power. Abouzeid, Mernissi and Djebar are taking possession of ‘religious authority and social power [drawing on] religious authority as both guide and shield in their efforts to claim the right to shape public reality’ (Buchanan, cited in Cooke 2001: xiii). In A Sister to Scheherazade, Djebar clearly demonstrates that the laws, as they exist today, are founded on arguments that are not credible. Although these laws are said to be derived from the Qur’an and the Sunna, male legislators have distorted these laws according to their own interests. The various post-independence governments have always chosen to construe Islam in a way that fails to recognize women’s rights. Hajila, Isma, and Zahra in Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant are vivid illustrations of such a misrepresentation. Under the various Maghrebi personal status laws, there is no way out of marriage for a woman whose husband refuses to let her go, despite the Islamic order ‘Do not retain them (i.e. your wives) by force’ (Qur’an 2: 231). On the contrary, most Maghrebi personal status laws make divorce quite trouble-free for men but make it troublesome for women to get out of an unbearable marriage. In such circumstances, Mai Yamani’s analysis of women in Saudi Arabia is fitting: ‘the marriage contract becomes for the woman akin to a form of bondage to her husband that cannot be revoked by her will alone’ (1996: 17). Later in the narrative, The Man seems so violent and desperate that he tries to dilute his anxiety in alcohol. One night in a fit of anger, the loutish husband – who has a lot in common with Zahra’s husband in Year of the Elephant, disfigures Hajila, his wife, with a jagged whiskey bottle. We also learn that both women are frequently subjected to The Man’s violence and paranoia, as Isma confesses:

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‘Like you I have lived through fifty beginnings, fifty interrogations, I have faced fifty charges! Like you, I thought I had been responsible’ (85). And owing to this scene about domestic violence, we are, as Djebar’s readers, made aware of an excruciating social problem that is badly affecting Algeria nowadays. This scene is definitely an insider’s account about abuse, mental exertion, and psychological misery. Like thousands of her confined fellow countrywomen, and deprived of any form of authority over her eventual destiny, she thinks she has to take the blame. And while Djebar shows the meeting point between Hajila’s story, her growing self, her life of suffering and gradual self-assertion, it is interesting to note that Hajila’s complete metamorphosis takes place in the enigmatic space of the dimly lit and soggy Hammam. A place of respite or amaranthine garden. The sound of water obliterates the walls; bodies are liberated under the wet marble. Every night the Turkish bath serves as a dormitory for countryfolk in transit and so becomes a harem in reverse, accessible to all – as if, in the melting pot of sweat, odours and dead skin, this liquid prison becomes a place of nocturnal rebirth. And of transfusion. Here, women can communicate by signs; here, a split second glance, a barely perceptible touch, will seal their secret collusion (148). Djebar’s focal point here is the experience of sympathy and concern between women, and their need to triumph over the sensation of enmity that has been infused by ‘patriarchy’. Through this trope of the Hammam, Djebar’s also suggests a breakout from ‘male space’ into a breathing space where unrelated women can meet and be free from ‘male’s voyeurism’ (to paraphrase the Algerian poet and essayist Malek Alloula 1986: 56) and communicate wholeheartedly (Erickson 1998: 310). Djebar’s depiction of the public bath, the Hammam, offers an alternative women’s space similar to what Homi Bhabha calls (1994: 62) ‘in-between spaces’ of negotiation that are beyond the politics of polarity. Thus, the Hammam is the sole momentary respite from the harem (Rothe 1993). It offers a secret solace to sequestered women, ‘such as organ music offered in former times to forced religious

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recluses’ (Djebar 1987: 152). This provisional maternal cocoon contributes to the deliverance from the lustful quarters of captivity. For Djebar the Hammam is the space where a locus of nurturing relationships among women are cultivated, a refuge from homes that have become prisons where questioning and terrorization have replaced true communication and genuine respect between husbands and wives. As is the case with Year of the Elephant and Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade, the text provides the route to liberation epitomized as a key that Isma gives to Hajila with the intention that she may run away from her apartment, i.e., her classy dungeon (1985: 45). However, the narrative closes on a solemn note, as Isma expresses her fear that women’s self-affirmation will be overwhelmed. She remarks: Can we women resuscitate our lost childhood, we who were mutilated in our adolescence, our happiness excised, cast out from the enclosing warmth of a home? … Where shall we find a resting place? Our peals of laughter have faded; our dances degenerated into a confused stampede; what sun or what love will offer us stability? O, my sister, I who thought to wake you, I’m afraid. I’m afraid for all women, not just we two or three, Isma, Hajila, Meriem, but all women – barring midwives, barring mothers standing guard and those carrion-beetle-matriarchs, I fear lest we all find ourselves in chain again, in ‘this West in the Orient,’ this corner of the earth where day dawned so slowly for us that twilight is already closing in around us everywhere (160). Djebar/Isma describes how fear is passed on from generation to generation: ‘the seraglio has been emptied but its noxious emanations have invaded everything’ (145). Hajila, physically weakened, is unable to continue to fight for herself. Djebar here, like Abouzeid and Guellouz, voices an unambiguous condemnation of patriarchy, one that calls out for an end to the animosity between women because it subverts women’s solidarity. To apply Mortimer’s insight (1988: 38) what if, Djebar suggests, the two rival women try to have good relations and support one another as sisters.

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Considering the socio-political situation in Algeria, the apprehensions articulated in A Sister to Scheherazade are corroborated by the national context. And because the circumstances are so difficult and the stakes so high, it is crucial today to confirm ‘Algerian women as subjects in their own right’ (Abdelkrim-Chikh 1988a: 276). But, how is liberation achieved for Hajila in these circumstances? The narrator suggests the framework of The Arabian Nights as a possible explanation. For Fedwa Malti-Douglas (1991: 5) Little did Scheherazade know when she stepped into the textual world of The Thousand and One Nights [Arabian Nights] that she would one day become a pawn in this game of gender politics. Little did she know that she would engender (in both senses) modern texts that would recast her own story. Little did she know that her control of narration … would be used to argue in favor of the Arab woman’s access to discourse. Thanks to the vigilance of her sister Dinarzade / Ombre / Hajila, the beloved storyteller Scheherazade / sultane / Isma could defer the death sentence. ‘Eyes are opened, hearing sharpened by anticipation or encouraged by sisterly solidarity’ (Djebar 1987: 159). This is an illustration of a perfect symbiosis: two bridged destinies. If Dinarzade sleeps, Scheherazade is offered up as a sacrifice; i.e., if women fail to protect their ‘sisters’, every woman becomes a victim. What if her sister, whom she had installed as a precaution under the bridal bed, had fallen asleep? What if the sister had thus relaxed her guard and the sultan’s bride for one night had been delivered up to the executioner? … What if this one neglected to keep watch, neglected her duty to wake her sister, prepare the strategy and ensure the sole road to salvation? …What if, at every present and future dawn, once or a thousand and one times, every sultan, every beggar, who is a prey to the ancestral fear that leads to violation, were still satisfying his need for a virgin’s blood? (Djebar 1987: 143) Djebar judiciously reveals that Isma, too, is obedient in several ways,

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and that her narrative is not meant to replace Hajila’s. If Isma, ‘the impossible rival, haphazardly (weaves) a story to free the concubine’ (139), she also confesses, ‘I neither invent you nor pursue you. I can scarcely even testify; I simply stand here in your presence’ (157). Moreover, Woodhull writes The inequality between Isma and Hajila in the frame narrative is offset by the reciprocity of the relations in the secondary narrative between the characters of Scheherazade and her sister / servant, who love and give pleasure to each other as well as offering mutual protection from mortal danger (Woodhull 1993: 85). When Isma and Hajila meet for the first time, Isma refers to Hajila as ‘my daughter and my mother, my half-sister, my reopened wound’ (147). Evidently, the Arabic word for co-wife, Dharra, is the same as the word for ‘wound’.9 Djebar’s narrative turns the Dharra (cowife) into a sister and a confidant, and presents the tongue-tied and submissive Hajila, who has been refused a position as subject in the community, as a woman who ‘tells herself she too has a history. (41). For Hajila, as for Scheherazade, the ‘bed of love and death’ becomes a ‘storyteller’s throne’ (143). Yet Hajila and Isma reject their oppression and realize that their liberation lies in their union. ‘Our two lives merge: the body of the man becomes the party wall separating our lairs, which house a common secret’ (82). I may say that Hajila’s environment is a closed one, ‘of women always in waiting’; ‘sad caged bird women’ (131) living like captives in ‘that rarefied atmosphere of close confinement’.10 Besides, the barely audible violence that runs through the novel is partly related to Hajila’s ordeal. Lonely, neglected, battered, sequestered, first by her mother and later by her husband, the young woman discovers and details a new universe that she has not perceived so far. Using the apartment key that Isma has given her, Hajila manages to break away from her ‘tight spot’ and flee from her ‘classy dungeon’; unveiled, she experiences freedom in sunny Algiers. As indicated by the author, deliverance comes from affinities with other women: their empathy, their devotion, and their shared oppression. When Isma hands the apartment key to Hajila to help

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her escape her sticky situation she is echoing the King in The Arabian Nights when he lifts the death sentence and tells Scheherazade: ‘Je veux que vous soyez regardée comme la libératrice de toutes les filles qui devraient être immolées [au] juste ressentiment [d’un homme]’ [I want you to be reckoned as the redeemer of all the young girls who were to be immolated to [a man’s] just resentment] (Mille et une nuits 3: 482). Thanks to female solidarity womankind is therefore liberated from male tyranny. In other words, women are required to opt for sisterhood in order to liberate themselves from the fatal outcome imposed on them by some misogynists, triumph over the aged-old ‘female enmity’, and look after each other, just like Scheherazade and Dinarzade in The Arabian Nights. Djebar’s writing has never been so articulate and so accurate in staging the ecstasy and rapture of being ‘naked in the world outdoors’ (26): You are ‘going out’ for the first time, Hajila. You are wearing slippers like an old woman, your head muffled in the heavy wool; your face completely hidden, leaving only one tiny gap exposed through which you peep to see where you are going … ‘O All-Highest! … O gentle prophet! I stand still, I take a step forward, I glide through the air, I no longer feel the ground beneath my feet, I … O, widows of Mohammed, come to my aid!’ (19) In one of the passages dealing with Hajila, Isma sketches Hajila’s emergence from the prison of domesticity where her husband has sequestered her: a luxurious apartment with a ‘new kitchen that is like a tomb’ (85). Here, the novel parallels Fantasia in depicting the female universe as a ‘sarcophagus’ from which women must emerge. Like the implacable Amazighs’ descendants in Fantasia, these ‘anonymous women who remain hidden from sight’ (79) must break the age-old silence. To be a woman is, as Djebar suggests, ‘to refuse to veil one’s voice and to start shouting’ because this is real dissidence. Those who do not cry out in protest are in ‘a prison without reprieve’ (Djebar 1985: 204). As I argued earlier, much of the account is arranged in an opposition between spaces of confinement and spaces of liberation. Isma, the

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narrator, catapults Hajila from the house to the streets, away from the fetters of her unhappy wedlock, from the shelter/prison of the veil into the sunlight, and from a ‘maternal cocoon’ (152) to the wide world: You make your sudden decision to take off that veil! As if you wished to disappear … or explode! …You the new woman, you who have just been transformed into another woman … You tuck the haïk [veil] under your arm; you walk on. You are surprised to find yourself walking so easily, at one fell swoop, out into the real world! (30–31) Thus, Hajila brutally discovers that happiness is possible outside while being audaciously unveiled. On her way back from her parents’ home, she witnesses, in a public garden, a scene that really takes her aback: A woman with a pushchair has just sat down on one of the benches. She leans forward and picks up a baby; she is right in front of you. She stretches out her bare arms as if to throw the infant up in the air; this unknown woman gives a peal of uninhibited laughter, her evident delight clearly legible on her face, which is framed by a halo of red hair. The baby wriggles; the woman laughs (27). According to Fanon (1967: 42), who attributes to the veil a ‘historic dynamism’, dream data reveals that the veiled woman is bewildered when she appears unveiled in public space; i.e., she has difficulty evaluating distances outdoors and in marking out her own silhouette: ‘The unveiled body seems to get away from itself, to go to pieces. There is an impression of being improperly dressed, even nude.’ Fanon affirms that during the Algerian Revolution, the female combatant in Western garments infiltrated les quartiers européens (the European districts) of the city ‘completely‑nude’, and thus had to ‘relearn her body, reinstall it in a totally revolutionary way’. It should be mentioned, though, as Fanon points out, that at the beginning of the Algerian Revolution, which lasted eight violent years

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(November 1954 to July 1962), wearing the veil suggested women’s loyalty to cultural traditions and their resistance to French aggression. Consequently, female combatants began concealing weapons and explosive devices under their veils. Later, Algerian women continued their guerrilla activity in Western dress, hiding bombs in their bags rather than in the folds of their veils. The disclosure accomplished by Fanon’s essay explicitly empowers the Algerian woman to ‘relearn her body [and] reinstall it in a totally revolutionary way’ (1967b: 42). In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha (1994: 62–63) picks up Fanon’s analysis to argue that the veil is a form of power that is exercised at the very limits of identity and authority, in the mocking spirit of mask and image; it is the lesson taught by the veiled Algerian woman during the revolution as she crossed the Manichaean lines to claim liberty. In Fanon’s essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’ the colonizer’s attempt to unveil the Algerian woman does not simply turn the veil into a symbol of resistance; it becomes a technique of camouflage, a means of struggle – the veil conceals bombs. The veil that once secured the boundary of the home – the limits of woman, now masks the woman in her revolutionary activity. Djebar’s interest in the Algerian woman’s body is in itself a rebellion against the harsh injunctions of ‘Muslim society’ that recommend the veiling of the female body, for it is considered a source of sacrilege, debauchery and dishonour. The body is thus the locus of woman’s alienation.11 Furthermore, Djebar is conscious that ‘woman’s body is indeed problematic’. Like many ‘modern feminist authors in the Arab World’, she knows that if she wants to ‘achieve [her] right to literary speech, [she] must begin by re-conquering [her] body’ (MaltiDouglas 1991: 110). It should also be mentioned that the image of the veil today is ambiguous. Whether this ‘piece of cloth’ is compulsory or favoured, millions of women daily assume this garment, conscious of the symbolism it carries. ‘Daily, the veiled woman has a multiple consciousness of herself, as she sees herself, as her community sees her, and as outsider men and women see her. She must continually negotiate the symbolism of this piece of cloth, which can both

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imprison and liberate’ (Cooke 2001: 136). For Fatima Mernissi (1995: 44): Since the abolition of slavery, only women and minorities are left as a test for the Maghrebi state to modernize itself and to bring its laws into conformity with the principle of equality it claims as a fundamental value. This is why most of the debate on democracy in the Moslem world circles around the explosive issue of women’s liberation, and also why a piece of cloth, the veil, is so loaded with symbolic meaning and so powerful as a source of violence within Moslem territories.12 Furthermore, the veil institutes between Western and Third World feminisms a perimeter that most contemporary feminist activity is reopening, in both politics and scholarship. Germaine Tillion (1964: 29), for instance, argues that ‘on the Muslim side of the Mediterranean’, the veil forms not just an exotic outfit, ‘but a veritable border. On one side of this border, female societies stagnate; on the other side there lives and progresses a national society which, by virtue of this fact, is but half a society’. Here, Tillion tackles the issue of women’s connection to nationalism in contemporary Maghrebi societies in terms that, today, hinder as much as they promote feminist investigation of the question. Tillion’s conception represents a whole range of Western scholarship on women in post-independence Algeria, which places the traditionbound woman’s universe in conflict with the postcolonial state and emphasizes women’s exclusion from affirmative action in Maghrebi societies. For instance, David Gordon (1968: 61) affirms that ‘with the dawn of independence’ the atmosphere was ‘confused and economically ominous’ and ‘the expectations of and for women were high. But the force of the legacy of centuries was soon to make itself felt. The gap between promise and reality, law and fact, was to widen.’ In fact, the promise of social justice for women was dropped right after independence in 1962. Thus, this democratic deficit by the country which served as a starting place of much writing on decolonization and postcoloniality and which had played an admirable role in anti-colonial wars worldwide caused an excruciating malaise

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(M’rabet 1969).13 Subordination of women to ‘tradition’ and their subsequent exclusion from public life is perceived by feminists to be a betrayal both of the women freedom fighters and of the Algerian Revolution itself. Such a treachery is also manifest in Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant. In this respect, Catherine Delcroix (1986: 139) presents this issue in dichotomous terms. She affirms that ‘in view of the Algerian’s woman higher level of education today, her under-representation can only foster frustration and obstruct the evolution of her personal status, and thus, of her emancipation’. Delcroix argues that the electorate’s traditionalist mentality is as accountable for women’s exclusion as ‘the ideological system itself, which doesn’t sufficiently mobilize the female population for fear of seeing woman transgress her role as guardian of traditional values’ (138–9). This argument echoes Tillion’s identification of the veil as ‘a veritable border’, similar to ‘the ideological system’ which prevents women from significant participation in the country’s development. However, Peter R. Knauss’s (1987: 137–41) investigations of current male-female relations reveal that the state-backed practices not only emasculate women but also ‘contain the social consequences of significant changes that have taken place in education and employment’. This is done in the name of ‘patriarchy which has become part of the warp and woof of Algerian political culture’. This is perceptible in the permanence of traditional social customs ordained by regressive interpretations of Shari’a and promoted by cynical political regimes ever since independence. These disempowering traditions have been confirmed in constrictive laws like the ‘Family Law’ of 1984.14 Kandiyoti may well have the Maghreb in mind when she notes that reformist legislation affecting women [is] frequently sponsored by authoritarian and ‘dirigiste’ regimes whose ultimate aim [is] not to increase the autonomy of individual women, but to harness them more effectively to national development goals. Typically, women’s independent attempts at political organisation [is] actively discouraged and considered divisive (1994: 386).

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This has been the case in Algeria where Louisa Hanoune’s Trotskyite Workers’ Party was banned at the time of Colonel-Presidents Houari Boumediene (1965–1978) and Chadli Benjedid (1979–1992); and under Colonel-President Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali (1987) in Tunisia, where Sihem Bensedrine and Souhair Belhassen were incarcerated because of their political activism. Regimes as diverse as the Moroccan monarchy and the autocracies in Tunisia and Algeria ‘have in common their stress on national consolidation and unity and the development of a modern centralised bureaucracy’ (Kandiyoti 1994: 386). According to Evelyn Accad (1990: 14) many Arab feminists are now conscious that nationalism remains the most pernicious and oppressive factor against women. Novelists like Rachid Mimouni in Le fleuve détourné (1982) or Malika Mokeddem in L’Interdite (1993), for instance, show that the FLN (the National Liberation Front) has cultivated and upheld many of the most reactionary and archaic values of Islamic traditionalism out of opportunistic nationalism. The post-independence FLN State has simply ‘turned back the clock on the socially transformative potential the revolution offered’ (SharpleyWhitting, cited in Grace 2004: 134). This reveals that women’s stake in nationalism is very complex: On the one hand, nationalist movements invite women to participate more fully in collective life by interpellating them as ‘national’ actors: mothers, educators, workers and even fighters. On the other hand, they reaffirm the boundaries of culturally acceptable feminine conduct and exert pressure on women to articulate their gender interests within the terms of reference set by nationalist discourse (Kandiyoti 1994: 380). Thus, in cases where feminists in Muslim communities tie women’s debate to class struggle, nationalism or anti-imperialism, it is fundamental to explore the post-revolutionary cultural changes. Conceding the nationalists’ treachery towards women in postindependence Algeria and underscoring the alliance of women’s movements in the Third World, Nayereh Tohidi (1991: 260) declares:

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Alone, a woman’s movement can never transform the foundations of sexism and sexual oppression. Neither can a revolution, which seeks to transform class relationships, meet its goals if it does not incorporate the question of women’s oppression. Specific demands of women must be incorporated into the national anti-imperialist movement and class struggle right from the beginning. The women’s question should not be relegated to the days after the revolution. And this is precisely what Djebar has been trying to achieve in her various works. She suggests that women should not consider each other as potential foes, but must direct their attention to the fact that they share a common fate. According to Djebar, this is the sine qua non condition for women’s liberation. A Sister to Scheherazade powerfully epitomizes a bonding between women who are fully aware of their prisons. For even unveiled women, such as Isma, are entangled in invisible veils. Therefore, the question that one might ask is how the change for the Algerian woman will be achieved? Djebar responds: ‘to talk among ourselves and to look. To look outside, to look beyond the walls and persons!’15 This answer may sound derisory considering the prevailing socio-political situation in Algeria. While she exhorts her heroines to progress with determination and audacity, she provides them with no pragmatic agenda to emancipate themselves. Thus, her revelations of the circumstances that have maintained women in bondage would probably have no significant impact on most Algerians. For Djebar, it seems that the Algerian woman’s emancipation is simply like an ebb and flow or, in Djebar’s terms, ‘the past paralyzed in the present and the present as mid-wife of the future’.16 Challenging this attitude, Marie-Blanche Tahon (1981: 114) castigates Djebar for her ‘prudent’ approach and her ‘flimsy’ attitude as an expatriate intellectual whose existence is different from that of her heroines. Confronting the gist of the novel, Tahon explains the author’s difficulty, as she understands it: ‘[Djebar] is immediately suspected of wanting to deny the Arab-Islamic values, those of her people, in order to promote Western values, those of the occupier’ (Tahon 1981: 114). And as I indicated in the Introduction, Djebar had a bitter experience with the reception of her first novel, La

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Soif (1957), and since then has adopted a very different strategy to women’s emancipation. Thus, her later novels may seem incapable of articulating fervent appeals to construct a new, equal society. Djebar’s earlier novels delivered a daring call for a mutual comprehension and a true communication between the sexes. A Sister to Scheherazade reproduces no such aspiration. Djebar discards this issue in favour of a bonding between women. Evelyne Accad (1978: 47) says that Assia Djebar’s fiction reflects The exact path of women’s liberation in Algeria which stopped dead after independence. …A reflection of her country’s line of action, Assia Djebar’s novels indicate a progression and a regression, because like Algeria’s revolution, Djebar’s was not a total and profound one. The rebellious rage voiced in the fifties and sixties has given way to a moderate whimper. The nationalistic spirit so necessary for the revolutionaries to oust the French colonizers became counter-revolutionary after the oppressor had been evicted, in that traditional laws were reinstituted which deprived women of the rights they had enjoyed under colonial rule. However, these women challenge the disempowerment and marginalization the social order imposes on them; and their protest takes the form of a ‘sorority’ that liberates and empowers them. Though it is improbable that Hajila (the Dharra) welcomes Isma, her husband’s first wife, from whom she has learnt about sisterhood, Djebar seems to be in dialogue with Abouzeid, for ‘women acting with women on behalf of women are turning to alternative communities where their identities and roles will not be fixed and subordinated’ (Cooke 2001: vii). Isma then seems to wish for the sense of community that emanates from the ‘encountering in [Hajila’s] voice [of ] what [she] believes [is] the sound of [her] own’ (Benstock 1988: 85). In the end, the friendship of the two women prevails and, for Djebar, this is the most important achievement.  According to Djebar, women should band together to help each other. When Isma helps Hajila, just as the Sheikh is of assistance to Zahra in Year of the Elephant, she is performing a militant act; she is achieving what Fedwa Malti-Douglas (1991: 15) calls ‘homosociality’ – a major

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trope in A Sister to Scheherazade. Homosocial must be differentiated from homosexual. It is not a libidinous relationship, but rather a social relationship between two persons of the same gender. I should say here that homosociality is a way out of abuse, pain, torture and subordination.17 Owing to this endeavour, Hajila is unconsciously triggering an emotional recovery process that would salvage her inner self. For Miriam Cooke (2001: 35), this powerful agency is not only a catalyst of women’s resourcefulness in spite of their abuse, silence and misrepresentation, but it also allows women to be part and parcel of a women’s network through time and space. Yet ‘there is a tendency in the West to interpret examples of homosociality as indexes of latent or overt homosexuality. But this is really a reflection of the obsessional relationship of Western culture with homosexuality, and the culture’s homophobia, since the later Middle-Ages’ (Malti-Douglas 1991: 15). As in Year of the Elephant, A Sister to Scheherazade, which very much like Abouzeid’s novel depicts a post-independence period, sees Hajila liberate herself from her husband’s oppressive domination.18 Her struggle and ultimate triumph over this subjugation is coupled with a growing self-confidence perfectly illustrated in her decision to leave the home – the sarcophagus. And empowered by her association with Isma, the poor, depressed and oppressed ‘veiled woman’ steps into the shoes of a new woman who has retrieved her voice. Hajila is then able to liberate herself from a burdensome, loveless marriage and to reveal an empowered self. She has skilfully surprised herself and subdued the silence in herself. Hajila’s affirmation of her own identity, and the significance of her life, is a radical move for somebody crushed under the triple burden of patriarchy, prejudice and class oppression. Every incident of Hajila’s story represents her evolution from a muzzled victim of rape to a woman who tries to subsist and to inform others about her life. Accordingly, Hajila’s narrative of submission, resistance and self-fulfilment delineates the victory of willpower over back-breaking restrictions that seem initially to be inexorable. Patriarchy is not the focal point, but sexual prejudice evolves as the cause of social violence in the narrative, i.e., males subduing females, and the latter seeking deliverance through bonding.

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In Les femmes dans le roman algérien, Hafid Gafaïti (1996: 181–3) construes Ombre sultane [A Sister to Scheherazade] as a ‘roman à thèse’. According to Gafaïti, Djebar makes use of both the Arabian Nights intertext and Isma as a ‘monolithic narrative voice’ to generate a ‘reductionist feminist novel’ that thrusts aside a ‘plural reading’. It seems to me that Gafaïti has two major problems with the novel. Firstly, he cannot stomach the novel’s representation of ‘The Man’ (the husband) as the Other, and the minor role this very husband plays in the narrative; and secondly, he cannot put up with the intentional shift that Djebar is making in this particular novel. In her adaptation of the Arabian Nights intertext, Djebar conspicuously reassigns emphasis to solidarity between women rather than focusing on the couple. Because, for Djebar (1987: 158), ‘[m]en no longer exist, or rather, they do exist, they stamp their feet, they are everywhere, obstructing our path. They spy on us endlessly with unseeing eyes.’ Unlike Gafaïti, who seems to bemoan that ‘The Man’ is not the centre of attention in A Sister to Scheherazade and considers the approach taken by the novelist to be ideologically ‘reductionist’, I argue that Djebar is deliberately not doing the accepted thing. She is actually flying in the face of an immovable literary and cultural convention. And this is not an unusual position for her. As a matter of fact, she opts for the same modus operandi in her movie, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978), which won the International Critics Prize at the 1979 Film Festival in Venice, and where relationships between women are the centre of attention. Admirably, this second novel in the quartet puts side by side the lives of two women, both married to the same man, in order to examine tradition and modernity in post-independence Algeria. While telling Hajila’s story/history, A Sister to Scheherazade conflates the personal with the political and presents a case of a woman’s effort to define her own identity and independence. As the educated Isma chooses the semi-illiterate Hajila as a second wife for her ex-husband, the novel tackles issues such as loneliness, freedom, and (un)veiling; but for the most part it examines the involvement of the educated elite in contemporary Algeria. Currently the Army rules the country with a rod of iron19 and Algerian nationalism has become a tyrannical dogma in the hands of myriad corrupt government notables and a reactionary ‘elite’.20 The

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opposition movements that surfaced after the October 1988 riots against unemployment and corruption,21 and the Islamists, challenge the military-backed government. This compelled the Army to amend the constitution and consent to the formation/legalization of political parties that were to take part in what proved to be a hapless electoral process. In these circumstances, I believe it is irrelevant to construe Algerian fiction as a self-sufficient aesthetical discourse, especially if it involves political polemics in Algeria. I suggest that the literature’s nexus to its matrix, i.e., Algerian society, should rather be substantiated. Now that Algeria has experienced the hardships of a free but tragic postelectoral process, in addition to the scenes of carnage that were a consequence of the 1992 coup, and taking into account the dramatic socio-political situation in Algeria, I can simply maintain that the national context substantiates the anxieties traceable in Djebar’s fiction. For instance, the issue of domestic violence that Djebar has underscored in A Sister to Scheherazade has taken another disastrous dimension. Violence wreaked on all the Algerian ‘Hajilas’ by ‘The Man’ in Algeria has taken on an ominous precedent in Vaste est la prison, as the novel closes with ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ assassination of Yasmina’, a 28-year-old teacher of French and proof-reader on Le Soir d’Algérie, a leftist Algerian daily. Elle accompagnait ce jour de fin juin 1994, une visiteuse étrangère – une Polonaise. «Le danger est partout, invisible mais partout» leur dit un voisin, alarmé de les voir si jeunes, si pleines de vie. Il ajouta, sans doute le regrettera ensuite : «Désormais, sur cette terre, le danger a une odeur.» [She was accompanying, on that day at the end of June 1994, a foreign visitor – a Polish young girl. ‘Danger is everywhere, invisible but everywhere’, a neighbour told them, troubled to see they were so young, so full of life. He added, without a doubt regretting it later, ‘from now on, in this country, danger has a smell’] (Djebar 1995: 343) As it was difficult to roam around Algiers in those terrible circumstances, Yasmina’s friend decided to leave the country. On

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their way to the airport, Yasmina stopped at a petrol station. A group of men, in police uniforms, asked to see their papers. When the men took the Polish young girl away, Yasmina challenged them. The men then searched Yasmina Drici’s handbag and discovered her press card. Her friend was released on the spot. The next day, passers-by found Yasmina’s body with her throat slit. La jeune Polonaise, lui parlerai-je jamais? Libérée, elle quitta l’Algérie le jour même et sans voix: elle fuit, elle fuira, je le sens, aux quatre coins du monde. Elle témoignera auparavant, en quelques mots brefs, avant de disparaître – elle pour qui une seconde femme, spontanément, a donné sa vie – que, jusqu’à la fin, jusqu’à sa dernière seconde de souffle, Yasmina nargua, insulta, défia ses meurtriers: sa voix de colère, de fierté impuissante, fut interrompue seulement par son râle, sous le couteau! Cette voix de Yasmina – ‘Fleur de Jasmin’ – je l’entendrai aux quatre coins du monde … [The young Polish girl, will I ever talk to her? Released, she left Algeria the very same day and speechless: she escaped, she will escape, I feel it, to the four corners of the earth. She will testify before, in a few words, before she disappears – for her another woman, spontaneously, has given her life – until the very last minute, until she breathed her last, Yasmina flouted, insulted, defied her murderers: her voice of anger, of hopeless dignity, has only been cut short by her agony, under the knife! This voice of Yasmina – ‘Jasmine Flower’ – I will hear it in the four corners of the earth … ] (Djebar 1995: 344) (Italics mine). Yasmina’s ruthless assassination gives an indication of the brutality facing Algerian women who refuse to give in to silence and subordination. As a voice of and from Algeria, Djebar ingeniously and compassionately makes a way into the dangers of self-examination. Both her male and female Algerian contemporaries, who try to belittle her accomplishment by blaming her use of ‘the colonizer’s language’, as I have argued, not only fail to notice her multifaceted

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and imaginative aesthetics, but also try to add force to the violence, void and amnesia that Djebar writes against. Conclusion In examining Krumholz’s argument of ‘national trauma’ as significantly informed by a violent colonialist past and a harsh postcolonial present, represented in A Sister to Scheherazade, Djebar highlights the cardinal importance of women’s solidarity and reveals how misogynist traditions can be successfully subverted. Intense friendship between women has always been viewed as detrimental to the patriarchal basis of society, like any political agitation against a given discrimination (Morris [1993] 1994: 39). Conceivably, the most adamant and optimistic quality of Djebar’s writing is this acknowledgment of friendship, devotion and affection, which exists between women (Todd 1980). It is worth mentioning that this sense of solidarity with other women, or this sense of sisterhood, has been the most important drive for many Maghrebi women writers to ‘bear witness’; and to use their narratives to denounce oppression and domination imposed on women by extremely brutal events and/ or regimes. Djebar’s work plainly discards women’s subaltern status, emphasizing the potential and stoicism of Algerian women. Yet her major concern is this impossibility of discarding women’s subaltern status. She tries very hard to give voice to the marginalized but is extremely alert to the difficulties of this venture. Through the title of her novel – an adaptation of The Arabian Nights – and her skilful use of intertextuality, Djebar reveals her attachment to an important female literary tradition inaugurated by Scheherazade and Dinarzade in the fourteenth century. A Sister to Scheherazade is a captivating novel, which combines realism and the imaginative. For Djebar, the personal is both a political and an artistic statement. In addition, when one looks at her writing from a stylistic point of view, one notices self-awareness, a sophisticated and innovative discourse and narrative style, combined with a politicized commitment with issues of gender discrimination. Djebar, who was in 1955 the first Algerian woman to study history at the École Normale Supérieure of Sèvres, taught modern and contemporary history for many years at universities in Rabat and Algiers, and her ultimate aim is to inform

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and shed light on periods of history that are veiled and censored. Also, Djebar’s handling of religious issues suggests a conscious commitment to liberate her community from destructive patriarchal mores that have for long clearly imprisoned women. Such misogynist traditions are engraved in indigenous religious practices, i.e., Islamic, and aim to consolidate and validate women’s oppression and abuse.

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4 WOMEN’S LIFE-WRITING: THE SENSE OF GEOGRAPHIC, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL DISPLACEMENT IN SOUAD GUELLOUZ’S LA VIE SIMPLE

Introduction The slogan ‘the personal is political!’ is as valid now as when it was thought up in the 1960s. It still insists that an imaginary line be identified and re-evaluated – the line which demarcates the private from the public, and defines the double standards which suffuse our ways of thinking, speaking and being. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the public and the private (political) spheres in women’s autobiographies. The benefit of bringing together the communal and personal is that it shows how they impinge on each other. According to Leigh Gilmore’s work on women’s autobiographies, ‘self writing for women’ as une mise à nu [stripping naked] ‘texualises the female subject ideally through autobiographical narrations’ (1994: 4); and a woman’s autobiographical narrative, as Bella Brodski and Celeste Schenck have noted (1988: 11), ‘replaces singularity with alterity’. To paraphrase Hélène Cixous, this is an effort that explains why several Maghrebi women have ‘come to the word’, to present their life stories and to describe their experiences. This chapter adopts the definition of autobiography developed by Philippe Lejeune (1989: 4) who is indisputably one of the best-

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known theorists of autobiography. He describes it as ‘retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’. Nevertheless, not all theorists would confine autobiography to the form of retrospective prose story. For Karl Weintraub (1975: 821) ‘autobiography is a major component of modern man’s self-conception: the belief that whatever else he is, he is a unique individuality, whose life task is to be true to his very own personality’. However, an autobiography is established by what Lejeune calls ‘the autobiographical pact’. It must be a real person named on the title page, who looks back on his/her life as a development of his/her personality. Subject and object of the narrative are in a way similar, i.e. the storyteller and the story come together. For Lejeune the genre, at the end of the day, is determined by an act of faith, the crucial point being the reader’s certainty that the subject and the object of the text are in a certain way identical. In addition, if this conviction is present, it matters little whether the prose narrative is imaginary or factual; whether they are ‘true facts [or] reinterpreted facts’ (Kelly 2005: 37). The work of Souad Guellouz, as discussed in this chapter, mediates between the freedom of imaginative creation on the one hand and the constraints of biographical fact on the other. It thus illustrates what Lejeune calls ‘the paradox of the literary autobiography’ (1989: 27), i.e. that it is an ‘unadulterated’ discourse and a work of art at the same time. He thinks that this discrepancy between referential precision (‘document’) and aesthetic re-creating (‘art’) accounts for the formal richness of the genre as a whole. The autobiography under study is a perfect example of these two major narrative modes: the biographical and the novelistic. In Souad Guellouz’s La vie simple (1975) the real name of the narrator is deliberately used, i.e. Sadiya El Gabsi instead of the pseudonym Souad Guellouz. Does this signify that the author is inviting the reader to sign the pacte autobiographique described by Lejeune? Particularly rich and analytical for the case of Maghrebi life-stories, in general, is an essay on Chicano autobiography by Ramón Saldivar. The general idea of Saldivar’s article is that the history of the self is an ‘unscathed document’ of cultural consciousness:

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Because of its fundamental tie to themes of self and history, self and place, it is not surprising that autobiography is the form that stories of emergent racial, ethnic, and gender consciousness have often taken in the United States and elsewhere. (1985: 25) What is being argued here is that autobiography may spring from a sense of powerlessness on the part of the subject. The autobiography thus becomes an instrument of strategy through which a position of relative powerlessness or marginality is transformed into something able to challenge or occupy the centre. In addition, the autobiography, as in La vie simple, can help exorcise pain – Guellouz reveals in her work what she has endured, failed and survived. She highlights issues that are common to many Maghrebi narratives such as the importance of the family and the upbringing of one’s offspring. She also focuses on the pursuit of happiness, self-devotion and self-help. The most powerful depictions in this autobiography are those of Guellouz’s mother and grandmother. In La vie simple Guellouz celebrates her grandmother’s dexterity, piety, clairvoyance and selfdenial. A similar development is noticeable in the works of several Maghrebi women writers, especially Djebar who gives paramount importance to her own mother and grandmother. Djebar also gives substance to ancestral figures like al-Kahina and Fadhma n’Soumer, and celebrates her literary ancestry by highlighting the impact of Arab and Berber women such as Tin-Hinan and Zaynab Lalla. This concern is also central in her Vaste est la prison, 1995. Place and Displacement La vie simple is a narrative at variance with the dominant ideology. It might be suggested that autobiographical writing provides a vantage point from which an author can claim her subjectivity, especially in response to the disparaging and essentializing discursive practices that typify colonialist, and misogynist, representations of women. Thus one is led to the conclusion that autobiography may be an empowering act. La vie simple is the autobiography of Sadiya El Gabsi, later known as Souad Guellouz. The narrative is an earnest and lucid retelling of the chaotic events of her life, from childhood to youth. It takes

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the reader from Sadiya’s birth in the coastal region of Tunisia in the 1950s, to the somewhat inhospitable city of Tunis where she endures several unpleasant incidents that make clear to her the sinister nature of being a poor, uneducated woman in a postcolonial country. This autobiography, which culminates in Sadiya’s new role as an assertive mother to her daughter, is an answer to the question of how a Tunisian girl can grow up in an oppressive system without being scarred by it. In the book Guellouz indicates right from the outset that the main character, Sadiya, still lives where she was born, in her grandmother’s home in the small village of Thamar. She remembers her grandmother, Oumi Sal’ha, as a generous, energetic and honest woman who has had a lasting influence on her. She describes her father (unnamed in the text) through the prism of her grandmother – a lazy man, a failure who spends much of his time sipping tea with his friends. The eight-year-old Sadiya does not have a high opinion of her father, but she evokes her mother as a woman of good judgment, industry and physical strength. Whenever possible she works in the fields, something the grandmother has never accepted. Her mother handles a pickaxe as well as any man – and better than her husband. When Sadiya is 13 her mother, Zohra, decides to get rid of her headscarf; Oumi Sal’ha is outraged, but when she discovers the burned fabric in the wood stove, she realizes that her daughter has made up her mind. The months of October and November are the olive-picking season, and Sadiya recalls the days when her parents had to go to the fields separately, because it was an outrage for the village to see a man and his wife together. Only at the water fountain were young girls and boys permitted to be together. Apart from her grandmother and mother, the other person who marks Sadiya’s childhood is her sister Mahbouba, seven years older than her. Sadiya describes Mahbouba as an inconsiderate and aggressive girl who used to slap her face, tear up her clothes, and beat her little brothers. Sadiya confesses that Mahbouba has never liked their mother, who for two long years suffers greatly from the elder daughter’s wickedness, and ultimately dies. Sadiya is only ten years old when she is sent, with her sister, to an aunt’s place, where a cousin

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of hers, a young woman of 23, has to take care of them. Two months after the death of her mother, her grandmother takes her in; but growing up in her grandmother’s house is not stress-free – she misses her mother and brothers, and her father, who remarries a month after his wife’s death. At the age of 17, Sadiya realizes that life could be different. She becomes aware of the class system in her community – in the village of Thamar there are three powerful families: the M’Rad, the Ben Mahmood and the richest, the Lagha. And one afternoon, during the hot month of July, Hédia Lagha makes a short visit, and offers Sadiya some Swiss chocolate. Sadiya confesses that it is the first time she has ever seen balls of chocolate. She is also enthralled by Hédia’s independence and education; but when she returns her visit, she realizes the gap between the rich Lagha family and her own. Frustrating and humiliating as it is, she finds out that Hédia’s visit was not to befriend her – rather, she had been sent to ask Sadiya to work for her family as a maid. Against her grandmother’s will, Sadiya goes to live with the family in Tunis, where, just like her mother before her, she decides to come out as ‘unveiled’. Another significant turning point in her life is her meeting with her ‘childhood waterfountain friend’, Habib Ben Ramdane. She marries him and settles back in Thamar where, having made peace with herself, she is now a self-assured and compassionate mother. She comforts and protects her own daughter. Thus, the fundamental concern of the autobiographer presented here is that of finding and defining her own identity, and situating herself within her original community. As with the Algerian writer Assia Djebar, who endeavours to recover a submerged history through women’s testimonial voices, it should be stated that ‘testimonial’ (Amireh and Majaj 2000: 173) also characterizes Guellouz’s autobiography. In fact, Guellouz offers a ‘collective autobiography’ (Geesey 1996: 153), highlighting the significance of women’s communities, integrating herself into a female tradition and a group of subjugated women (Donadey 2001: 148). It should also be mentioned that most Maghrebi women writers entered the world of literature through the door of their autobiography. This legacy goes back to Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430), ‘the African Latin Church Father’ who ushered in the

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tradition of Western autobiography, and who lived and died near the western borders of Tunisia (in Souk-Ahrass, Algeria). For Djebar Saint Augustine also faced un drame linguistique, i.e., he was a North African who wrote his autobiography in la langue adverse – Latin, the language of the dominant power of the time. Guellouz can also claim to share in the heritage of Ibn Khaldun,1 who was born in Tunisia in 1332 and died in Cairo in 1406, and whose autobiography is a scholastic treatise (Merad 1956). My analysis will be informed by several critical questions: Does Guellouz’s narrative merely offer a transparent critique of women’s own matriarchal culture? How does it reinforce the very notion of identity and community? How is Guellouz’s sense of geographical, cultural and social displacement exposed in the sexist society in which she lives? How might the reader react to a litany of these dismal conditions? Does the choice of language for writing (Arabic or French) involve a modification of narrative strategies? The publication in French of Guellouz’s La vie simple was a landmark in post-independence Tunisian literature. The autobiography signifies a sense of bravado and hope with regard to women’s situation in Tunisia. In other words, this life-story aims at reflecting and expressing women’s challenges and aspirations vis-à-vis the ideology that prevails in post-independence Tunisia. But Winifred Woodhull (1993: 78) alerts us to the fact that while it may be acknowledged that women’s demonstrations of feminist ideologies are necessary and valuable, it is assumed that they are only marginally pertinent to literary activity per se, that is, the process of interrogating the conditions of possibility of meaning and disrupting the fixed meanings that underwrite the existing social order. 1975 witnessed the emergence of three major works written in French: Jalila Hafsia’s L’Aube, Aïcha Chaïbi’s Rached, and Souad Guellouz’s La vie simple. Guellouz, born in 1937 in Ariana, was a high-school French teacher. She wrote her autobiography in 1958, two years after Tunisia gained its independence from France, but only published it 17 years later, in 1975. Les jardins du nord (1982) is in the nature of a

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sequel to her first work. This is how she actually reveals the incentive behind her autobiography: Beaucoup d’hommes, beaucoup de femmes consacrent des livres entiers à décrire ce qui s’est passé dans leur cœur à telle ou telle époque de leur vie. Moi, je ne pourrai jamais écrire de livres mais je crois que même si j’avais su écrire, je n’aurai pas osé raconter ma vie. Car ma vie est simple, trop simple pour intéresser une autre personne que moi-même. Mais elle est ma vie. Et j’aime me la raconter. D’ailleurs je n’ai pas qu’une seule vie, je veux dire, je n’ai pas que ma vie extérieure limitée par des faits précis. J’ai plusieurs vies que je me suis tissées le long des jours pour moi seule, desquelles je retranche et auxquelles j’ajoute sans avoir de comptes à rendre à personne … Et maintenant faut-il que je raconte la suite ? … c’est si long une vie qu’on s’oblige à raconter. Mais puisque j’ai entrepris de le faire, j’irai jusqu’au bout. Et puis, j’aimerai tant voir claire en moi-même. Ce récit m’y aidera peut-être. [Many men and many women devote whole books to depict what happened in their heart at some point of their lives. As far as I am concerned, I will never be able to write books, but if I could write, I think I would never have dared to relate my life. Because my life is simple, too simple to be of interest to anyone else except myself. But it is my life. And I like recounting it to myself. Besides I don’t have my life only, I want to say, I don’t have only my external life ordered by specific events. I have several lives that I have woven for myself throughout the days, from which I remove and insert without being accountable to anybody … And now do I have to recount the rest? … A life is so long that one feels oneself obliged to recount it. Since I have already started doing this, I’ll go on to the end. Besides, I would like to see more clearly. Maybe this narrative will be of some help.] (Guellouz: 47 and 89; my translation)2 Such a confession reveals that the practice of autobiography is essentially an effort to conceive, confirm or stress a certain sense

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of identity. The autobiographer is thus driven by the wish to assert his/her position among others, his/her cultural background, or his/ her social or political environment (Van Leeuwen 1998: 27). La vie simple not only confirms a sense of identity but also emphasizes the author’s personal development. Right from the outset, I should point out that the beginning of many an autobiography provides a psychological entry. Guellouz’s autobiographical text is no exception to this tendency, as it reveals a psychological trauma: Je ne sais ni lire ni écrire et … je m’étais résignée à être une illettrée … Si j’avais su écrire, j’aurai pu commencer à raconter à du papier blanc ma simple histoire … Alors … je vais me raconter mon histoire à moi-même ou bien, je vais imaginer que ma fille, qui a six ans, soit déjà une grande jeune fille et qu’elle m’écoute. (7) [I don’t know how to read and write and … I’d resigned myself to being illiterate … if I knew how to write, I would have been able to start recounting my simple story to some white paper … so I’m going to tell myself my own story, or maybe I’m going to imagine that my daughter, who is six years old, is already a grown-up girl and is listening to me.] This is a conventional beginning for many autobiographies. A case in point would be the life-story of the Moroccan Arabophone writer Mohamed Choukri’s al-Khubz al-hafi (For Bread Alone):3 Surrounded by the other boys of the neighbourhood, I started crying. My uncle is dead. Some of them are crying, too. I know that this is not the same kind of crying as when I hurt myself or when a plaything is snatched away. Later on I began to see that many people cried. That was at the time of the great exodus of the Rif. There had been no rain, and as a result there was nothing to eat. (Choukri 1973: 7)

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These beginnings also allow the reader to localize the event and date it. This dating is not done in accordance with any official historiography but in line with the chronology of a destitute, illiterate, displaced and frightened soul. Djebar is no exception to these stark beginnings. In the first three volumes of her Algerian Quartet, L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), Ombre sultane (1987) and Vaste est la prison (1995), she starts her own autobiographical work on a somewhat dismal note: For a very long time, I believed that to write was to die, to die slowly. Awkwardly unfolding a shroud of sand or silk over what we have known to be alert and palpitating. A burst of laughter – frozen. The beginning of a petrified sob … Writing about the past, my feet entangled in a praying rug, which would not even be a plait of jute or hair, randomly thrown on the dust of a path at dawn, or at the foot of a friable dune, under the immense sky of a setting sun. (Djebar 1995: 11) As Salah Natij has remarked, the beginnings of works such as Mouloud Feraoun’s Le fils du pauvre (1950), Driss Chraïbi’s Le passé simple (1954), Zoubida Bittari’s O mes soeurs musulmanes, pleurez! (1964), Fatma Amrouche’s Histoire de ma vie (1968); Abdelkebir Khatibi’s La mémoire tatouée (1971); Tassadit Imache’s Une fille sans histoire (1989), Malika Mokeddem’s Les hommes qui marchent, (1990), Leila Abouzeid’s Ruju ila alTufula (1993), Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass (1994), Assia Djebar’s Vaste est la prison (1995)4 and Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (2000) ‘formulate a world, draw the lines of an environment and foreshadow a destiny’ (1992: 70). It should also be mentioned that Maghrebi women authors have long been confronted with unambiguous limits to self-expression imposed by a society that still attaches importance to segregation, to a vague conception of honour and to family life, and resists openness in politics, sexuality and religion. Writing a life-story signifies violating privacy, and in Berber-Arab-Islamic society, where intimate feelings and thoughts, private and family life are sanctified, this is (especially for women) a precarious mission. The very act of composing her autobiography is a sacrilege – an anathema. Social constraints and pressures on an author are much more effective than the political censorship of a local despotic regime. Thus, writing has so far been

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concentrated on short stories and novels which avoid the intimate details of genuine autobiographical works. It was only in the 1970s that genuinely liberated autobiographies were published. This can be partly explained by increasing interest among the reading public in Arab and Berber women’s self-portrayal. A word should be said about the title of Guellouz’s autobiography. It is clear that it has a literary precedent. La vie simple is almost a word-for-word reconstruction of Driss Chraïbi’s autobiographical work Le passé simple (1954). Moreover, the candour that permeates Chraibi’s work is also noticeable in Guellouz’s text, which is divided into three distinct parts bringing to light the heroine’s existence: her destitute childhood in the village of Thamar; her breakthrough into the world of rich people, with its concomitant failure to befriend another moneyed girl; and her marriage. Guellouz’s story has a pronounced epic dimension. The protagonist goes from one unknown world to another which is far beyond her conceptual horizon. What happens during the journey reveals, bit by bit, the evolution of the heroine’s self, ‘who must attain a precise degree of maturity before the formal literary structure is complete’ (Coe 1984: 39). In her quest for self-reliance and personal dignity, Sadiya goes through different initiations and excruciating stages. She experiences ‘the dehumanisation of forced removal–relocation–reeducation, the humiliation of having to falsify [one’s] own reality [and one’s] voice’ (Minh-Ha 1995: 264). Yet, in moving from a situation of semi-orphanhood to one of motherhood, she also matures through several phases of self-awareness. In other words, the raising of her consciousness equates with her geographical displacement from Thamar to Tunis. Here, I have to indicate that [a] major feature of postcolonial literatures is the concern with place and displacement. It is here that the special postcolonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective defying relationship between self and place … A valid and active sense of self may have been eroded by dislocation, resulting from migration, the experience of enslavement … or ‘voluntary’ removal for indentured labour. (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 8)

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The alienation of vision and the personality crisis that this dislocation produces permeates the narrative of Guellouz. She describes the split in her family and the subsequent return to her grandmother’s house after her mother’s death: J’avais dix ans … On nous envoya ma sœur et moi, chez une tante où ma cousine, une jeune fille de vingt-trois ans, devait nous garder … Deux mois après la mort de maman, ma grand’mère vint nous voir chez ma tante. Elle avait vieilli de dix ans. Mon grand frère Béchir l’accompagnait. Nous nous retirâmes dans une pièce, ma grand’mère, mon grand frère, ma sœur et moi … ‘écoutez-moi bien les enfants. Maintenant que votre mère est morte, votre vie va changer’. (19) [I was ten years old … we were sent, my sister and me, to an aunt’s place where my cousin, a girl of twenty-three, was to take care of us … Two months after Mama’s death, my grandmother came to see us at my aunt’s. She had aged by ten years. My big brother Béchir was with her. We withdrew into another room, my grandmother, my big brother, my sister and I … ‘Listen to me carefully, children. Now that your mother has died, your life is going to change’.] Guellouz does not have a high opinion of the girl’s father. The passage that reveals the father through the prism of the grandmother is a case in a point: Mon père était, selon ma grand’mère, un paresseux, un raté. Je crois que si on l’avait écouté, jamais ma mère n’aurait épousé mon père. Plus tard, je me rendis compte moi-même que mes parents n’étaient pas faits l’un pour l’autre. Ce qui avait poussé ma mère à épouser ce garçon palot, légèrement voûté, c’était une sorte de pitié. Et puis, ma mère très sur d’elle, pensait le régénérer. A une de ses amies qui lui avait dit: ‘Mais enfin où as-tu la tête ? Ouvre les yeux, Zohra’, ma mère avait répondu: ‘Tu verras, j’en ferai un homme’. (9)

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[My father, according to my grandmother, was a lazy man, a failure. I believe if they had listened to her, my mother would have never married my father. Later, I realized that my parents were not made for each other. What had pushed my mother into marrying this pale, slightly hunchbacked, lad was a kind of pity. And my mother, sure of herself, thought she could strengthen him. To one of her friends who said to her: ‘But what’s wrong with you? Open your eyes, Zohra’, my mother retorted: ‘You’ll see. I’ll make a man out of him’.] Maternal Linkages and Female Solidarity The strongest representation in Guelllouz’s autobiography is of the admired characters of her mother and grandmother. In La vie simple the author conforms to the ‘home training’ and modest teachings of her grandmother, Oumi Sal’ha. Guellouz remembers her generosity, energy and honesty and, most of all, how she affected her life: Aussi loin que remontent mes souvenirs, ma grand’mère m’apparaît généreuse et exubérante. C’est d’elle que je tiens ce que dans ma famille on appelle mon ‘piment’ … Quand [ma grand’mère] aimait quelqu’un elle ne tarissait pas d’éloges sur son compte, mais quand on lui déplaisait …il valait mieux avoir de bons rapports avec elle. Contrairement à toutes les vieilles que j’ai connue par la suite, elle était dépourvue de ces petites manies agaçantes bien qu’elle aimât l’ordre et la tenue. Elle m’a légué ses goûts …Si je parle tant de ma grand’mère c’est qu’elle a eu beaucoup d’influence sur ma vie. On dit que grand’mères et petites filles se ressemblent plus que mères et filles. Pour nous deux, c’était vrai. (8–9) [As far back as my memories go, my grandmother appears to me generous and exuberant. It is from her that I have what in my family they call my ‘temperament’ …When my grandmother loved somebody she didn’t stop praising the person, but when somebody displeased her …better to have good relations with her. In contrast to all the old women I have known, she lacked those small nasty obsessions, although she liked order and good manners. She bequeathed me her tastes …

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If I speak so much about my grandmother it is because she had a tremendous influence on my life. They say grandmothers and granddaughters bear more resemblance to each other than do mothers and daughters. For us two, it was true.] Guellouz describes her grandmother as an independent woman who valiantly sustains her grandchildren. Throughout the autobiography, Oumi Sal’ha plays a significant role, both as sheltering and fostering icon and as a paragon for her granddaughter. Ultimately, at the end of the story, Sadiya becomes a mother herself and confidently accepts her new role in the community. Besides her grandmother’s influence over Sadiya, it is worth mentioning the positive impact other women have on her, for instance her meeting with Hédia ‘qui m’a marquée plus qu’aucun mari n’aurait pu le faire’ (‘who has won me over more than any husband could have done’ (86), and the love they felt for one another. The importance of Hédia’s unsparing influence should not be undervalued. Her independence and education deeply affect Sadiya’s character. Sadiya in fact still recalls an ‘existentialist’ exchange she has with her wouldbe friend Hédia, when she relocates with the Lagha family: Ainsi, moi qui aurais pu être simple, bête et heureuse, j’ai trouvé le moyen de me compliquer à tel point l’existence que plus jamais je ne connaîtrai la paix, la lourde paix des femmes de chez nous … il y aura toujours en moi cette angoisse que tu as implantée le soir ou tu as dit: ‘Qui te dis que moi, qui te parle, j’existe  ? Qui te dit que ton âme vivra éternellement? Qui te dit qu’il est préférable d’être musulman au lieu d’être chrétien?’ (67) [So, I, who could have been simple, stupid and happy, found a way of complicating my life to the point where I would never again know peace, the heavy peace of our women … There will always be inside of me that anguish you implanted in me the evening you said: ‘I’m talking to you, but who can say that I exist? Who can say that your soul will live for ever? Who can say that it’s preferable to be a Muslim instead of a Christian?’]

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Hédia, in fact, performs two significant functions: tutor and healer. She supplies the uneducated Sadiya with a strategy for drawing upon internal resourcefulness for self-healing: these ‘lessons in living’ form part of the comprehensive education the young girl acquires for life as a Maghrebi woman. Sadiya wants the virtues and convictions these ‘lessons’ hold to secure her identity. It should also be mentioned that her mother, a woman of great personal potential and inventiveness, is a source of fascination and emulation. From her mother, Sadiya gleans increased self-confidence; she becomes more dynamic and begins to affirm herself through action. She forges an identity and begins investigating the confines of her cage through hasty exploratory escape. She still thinks of her mother’s good judgment, industry and physical strength: Ma mère faisait aussi des ouvrages en ‘chebka’ qu’elle vendait. L’argent qu’elle en retirait était sacré. Elle le plaçait dans une boite à biscuits, toute rouillée …Ma mère n’y aurait touché pour rien au monde. C’était l’argent de ses enfants. Quand elle le pouvait, elle allait travailler aux champs, ce qui scandalisait ma grand’mère. Elle maniait la pioche aussi bien qu’un homme et à coup sur, mieux que mon père …Ma mère faisait – c’est une chose que je me rappelle – la sieste hiver comme été. Elle disait que sa force lui venait de ces heures de sommeil. Car elle était forte. (11) [My mother also made ‘chebka’ handicrafts that she used to sell. The money she got from this was sacred. She put it in a rusty biscuit-box … My mother would never have touched that money, no matter what – it was her children’s money. Whenever she could, she would do some work in the fields, which appalled my grandmother. She handled the pickaxe as well as any man – and certainly better than my father. Something I always remember, my mother used to take an afternoon nap, winter and summer. She used to say that she got her strength from these naps. Because she was strong.] What is clearly to be understood here is that Guellouz subverts the widely held conception about women in the Maghreb and the rest

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of the ‘Arab World’. She acerbically criticizes the age-old patriarchal views of women as physically weak and as eternal minors. Guellouz’s work, as a pioneering and, to an extent, premonitory venture has revealed frustration at the fact that progressive personal status laws have not encouraged a change in negative attitudes towards women. This, combined later with the rise of state conservatism,5 was a fundamental catalyst in the founding of an association and the publication of the periodical Nisa’a.6 Both forums broached debates about the way in which personal experiences are also political: a philosophy considered a novelty in Tunisia and the rest of the Maghreb. They also underscored the importance of comprehending these experiences as part of a wider social and political preoccupation with development and democratization. During its first year of publication, Nisa’a, in a similar manner to Guellouz’s La vie simple, engaged with issues of sexism, violence against women, sexuality and desegregation, and with the conservative backlash against the 1956 Tunisian Personal Status Law. Lately, two other structures with a feminist agenda have come into view. One, the Tunis Association of African Women Researchers, was formed in 1989 to ‘highlight the role of women in development … and create favourable gender focused development’.7 The second was Women Democrats, which ‘works to integrate women in society and to build up a new society based on men and women working together’ (Tucker 1993: 8). If these Tunisian women seem to be growing more direct in their critique of the current socio-political arrangements, it is hard to believe that their conceptions of gender relations have repercussions on all social groups. Yet it appears that such an investigation has, at least, a substantial middle-class public. For there are still contrary voices, like that of Muhammad Tal’at Harb, which rise against women’s emancipation: All revealed laws agree that the woman is weaker than the man, that she is his inferior in body and comprehension, and that ‘men are superior to women.’ Thus, men rightfully have supremacy over women … and women’s submission to men is part of God’s order. …Women were created for men’s earthly pleasures and in order to take care of domestic affairs; God

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did not create them to attempt to defeat the men, nor to give opinions or establish policies. If God had wanted to do so, He would have given women courage, intrepidity, chivalry, and gallant audacity, which is not the case. And if women wanted to behave like men and carry heavy burdens to be his equal … would this not be a shirking of the duty assigned them by the Almighty? (Muhammad Tal’at Harb 1978: 279; italics mine) This execrable citation powerfully configures a kind of orthodox misogyny in the Maghreb. For example, scraps of Qur’anic verses are used out of context to suggest, ‘men are qawwamun (superior) to women’ (Qur’an 4: 34) without mentioning the rest of the verse that clearly clarifies both the context and the reason behind such a statement. ‘Beat them [your wives]’ (Qur’an 4: 34) is often used to justify the abuse of women. Such Qur’anic verses are deliberately used to attack the dignity of women but they also reveal the Machiavellianism of some religious and political authorities when they use the Holy Qur’an to their own ends. In fact, there is not a single Qur’anic verse that allows men a degree of superiority over women in either intellect or religious conviction. The following verse is a case in point: ‘If any one does deeds of righteousness, be they male or female and has faith, they will enter heaven, and not the least injustice will be done to them’ (Qur’an 4: 24). Muhammad Tal’at Harb’s line also illustrates ongoing insults and hierarchialization of women’s status in the entire MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Moreover, such a perspective is based unambiguously upon an ideal of patriarchal domination that authorizes women’s subjugation and exacerbates the vulnerability of Tunisian women in a dangerous and unpredictable socio-political context. In light of the autocratic regime that prevails in Tunisia, where even Tunisian men have very limited fundamental rights, one cannot expect women to enjoy full citizenship. Class, Society and Archaism In Guellouz’s work, attachment to the land and constant involvement with nature are basic to the tone and imagery of the autobiography. Guellouz vividly describes the olive-picking season.

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Au mois d’octobre – novembre, quand la récolte d’olives était bonne, nous allions tous faire la cueillette. Mon père possédait dix pieds d’oliviers, ma mère avait hérité de sept pieds à la mort d’un oncle. C’était relativement peu … Et c’était ainsi pendant des jours et des jours jusqu’à ce que la récolte fût terminée. Alors nous emmenions les sacs d’olives au pressoir. [In October and November, when the olive crop is ripe, we will all contribute to the olive picking. My father had ten olivetrees; my mother had inherited seven from a deceased uncle. It was relatively a little … Olive-picking lasted several days until the harvest was over. Then we had to take olive bags to the oilpress.] (11–12) As she helps in olive-picking, Sadiya has firsthand experience of the back-breaking work of the labourers in the fields. In Thamar, ‘Partout les hommes travaillaient aux champs, partout les femmes battaient leurs gosses et criaient après leurs maris. Partout les jeunes filles, dès l’âge de treize ans, rêvaient au mariage.’ [Everywhere men worked in the fields; everywhere women battered their children and shouted at their husbands; everywhere, young girls, from the age of thirteen, dreamt of marriage] (31). Guellouz not only depicts the ruthless realities of life but also reveals class antagonism in Thamar and poverty in post-independence Tunisia, ‘au village, toutes les familles que je connaissais se ressemblaient. C’était partout la même misère.’ [In the village, all the families I know are the same. Misery was everywhere] (31). Guellouz vividly depicts the class system in her microcosmic community: Au village de Thamar il existe trois grandes familles : les M’Rad, les Ben Mahmoud et les Lagha. Des trois, la famille Lagha était sûrement la plus riche … C’était chez eux qu’il y avait le plus d’enfants qui faisaient des études … je m’étais dit que je me sentirai gênée chez eux, vu qu’ils étaient riches et que leur vie devait être très différente de la notre … J’ai longtemps était ainsi. Je n’aimais pas fréquenter des gens qui différaient de moi

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… Bien que nous ne fussions pas riches ma mère ne nous laissait manquer de rien. Elle veillait à tout. Nos vêtements étaient souvent rapiécés mais toujours propres. [In the village of Thamar there are three famous families: M’Rad, Ben Mahmoud, Lagha. Amongst the three, the Lagha family was surely the richest. It was this family who had a good number of educated children … I thought to myself I would be discomfited in their place, considering they were rich and their way of life was very different from ours … I have been like this for quite a long time. I did not like to meddle with people who were different from me. Although we were not that rich my mother provided for everything. She took care of everyone. Our clothes were often ragged but always clean.] (10–29) Here the autobiographer’s critique targets the evils of class society. Nevertheless, one has to understand social and historical phenomena in terms of ‘an underlying system of structural relations, which because it contains within it internal mechanisms, tensions and contradictions, is the source of historical transformation’ (Bloch 1983: 155). Moreover, the concept of class in the postcolonial narrative is a ‘category occasioned by more than an economic structure; it is a discourse traversed by potent racial and cultural signifiers’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 76). Under pressure from the vigorous domino effect of these tensions and contradictions, Sadiya holds herself together with honour and selfrespect. She proceeds towards independence, blending an awareness of self, an understanding of the political realities of the Tunisian postindependence socio-political situation, and a consciousness of the obligation that such an appreciation presupposes. Guellouz’s narrative does not fall into the trap of making ‘tradition’ or ‘modernity’ the only two choices available to Tunisian women. She is very alert about her sense of self-identity; her autobiographical tale is not really a quest for that identity, but instead it may read as an account of how other family members, especially her sister Mahbouba, were compelled to accept her life on her own terms. One of the major themes developed in Guellouz’s autobiography is the conflict between the archaic backward village (Thamar) and

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the liberal modern city (Tunis), a conflict which is staged as a psychological tension between the two selves of the narrative: the naive child hero and the mature narrator. Guellouz illustrates such an archaism where modernity and tradition collide, when she reports on the atmosphere after her mother’s death. ‘Dans mon village il y a une tradition stupide … Cette tradition consiste à donner à manger au groupe de cinquante personnes et parfois plus, qui viennent lire un peu de Coran le deuxième, troisième et quatrième jour de la mort de quelqu’un … On a l’impression d’une fête.’ [In my village there is an absurd tradition … this tradition consists of preparing meals for the group of fifty people, and sometimes more, who come to read bits from the Qur’an the second, third and fourth day after somebody’s death … we have the feeling it is a celebration.] (19) In another instance, Guellouz recalls the days when, with her parents, she had to go to the fields during the olive-picking season. ‘Mon père, ma sœur et moi descendions d’abord. Ma mère et mes frères suivaient, car il ne fallait surtout pas que l’on vit un couple traverser ensemble le village. Cela choquait à Thamar.’ [My father, my sister and I get down first. My mother and my brothers would follow us because it could be shameful to see a couple going across the village. This would be an outrage in Thamar] (11–12). The autobiography assumes the centrality of the family and society to the elaboration and enforcement of specific views of male and female behaviour in the public space, as well as the issue of how women and men should interact. One might infer the weight and hegemony of a ‘traditional’ family, defined and regulated by ‘Islamic law’, but this varies according to class and place. Guellouz actually does challenge the relevance of the family to the daily construction of gender roles and relations. This also brings to mind quite a significant passage in the Tunisian Souad Hedri’s novel Vie et agonie (1978), when Aida reveals to her mother the full love story of her sister Leila, the protagonist. The mother decides to marry Leila to Hedi, for this is the fate of ‘toutes les filles honnêtes’ [every virtuous girl] (32). To this wily reflection, Leila retorts that she is free to do whatever she wants with her life. But her mother reminds her ‘Mais tu ne peux pas être libre Leila, tu appartiens à une famille qui tient à son prestige, sa dignité. La société ne pardonne pas’ [But you cannot be free Leila, you belong

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to a family that clings to its reputation and dignity. The community does not forgive and forget.] (32) However, tradition, rigidly followed, can imprison and enslave women. My reading of Guellouz’s autobiography suggests that the author shows an acute awareness of the benefits and limitations of traditional beliefs. Writing about female autonomy and sexuality in a Third World context is no easy task. In picturing the material and subjective reality of a woman in a Maghrebi country (Tunisia), and advocating a feminist and social liberation, it seems that Guellouz denounces ‘a tradition [loosely] founded on the sacred, which muzzles and even asphyxiates women’ (Abdelkrim-Chikh 1988b: 237). It should also be mentioned that the problem of women finding their place between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ reveals the extent to which nationalist discourse frequently harnesses traditional practices in order to challenge the ‘West’. And if the emancipation of women is associated by nationalist movements with modernity I cannot agree more with Kandiyoti’s suggestion that the ‘definitions of the “modern” take place in a political field where certain identities are privileged and become dominant, while others are submerged or subordinated’ (1994: 382). The Difficulty of Developing a Positive Self-Image In framing her own autobiography, and in dealing with both her socio-economic and physical limitations and the realities of her condition, the narrator feels alienated and dislocated from the larger world. Sadiya confesses8 A quinze ans, déjà, j’avais commencé à maigrir. A seize ans j’étais très mince … et je me tenais très droite. Ma grand-mère m’appelait ‘l’échelle de chez les M’Rad’. Les M’Rad étaient nos voisins. Ils possédaient une échelle connue de tout le village pour sa hauteur. Mais je n’étais pas jolie. J’avais un visage long que ma coiffure – une seule natte dans le dos – allongeait encore. Mon teint était terreux, presque vert. (26–7) [At the age of fifteen years, I started losing weight. At sixteen I was very thin … and I had an upright stature. My grandmother used to call me ‘the M’Rad’s ladder.’ The M’Rad were our

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neighbours. They had a ladder known to the entire village for its size. But I was not pretty. I had a long face that my hairstyle – only one plait in the back – extended more. My complexion was earthy, almost green.] Besides, Sadiya does not have the chance to ‘cultivate her intelligence’. While working as a ‘maid’ for the wealthy Lagha family she felt frustrated and hungered for an education because, as Gayatri Spivak says, ‘the oppressed, if given the chance … can speak and know their conditions’ (Spivak 1995: 25) Jusqu’à aujourd’hui, je n’arrive pas à croire que le miracle ne se reproduira pas, que jamais je ne saurai lire. Mon désir d’apprendre est toujours aussi vivace et j’ai eu trop faim chez les Lagha pour délaisser une occasion de m’instruire même si elle se présente à quarante ans. J’ai parlé de faim … la souffrance des illettrés conscients de leur manque n’est comparable qu’a la souffrance des affamés. Et tout cela bien sur, ferait sourire ceux pour qui l’instruction est chose naturelle. (77–8) [Until this very minute, I cannot believe that the miracle will not take place, and that I would never be able to read. My desire to learn is still strong and I was too hungry at the Lagha to relinquish a chance to educate myself even if it is at the age of forty. I spoke about hunger … the suffering of illiterates who are conscious of their deficiency is only comparable to the suffering of the famished. And all this of course would amuse those for whom education is a natural thing.] Guellouz reveals a sense of frustration and humiliation when the rich Lagha family send their youngest daughter, Hédia, to ask Sadiya to work for them as a ‘maid’. Sadiya still remembers the trivial and paternalistic explanation ‘Madame Lagha’ has given her. ‘Je ne compris pas grand chose à ses explications, mais tout de même je retins que je ne devais pas me considérer comme une bonne, mais comme la sœur de ses filles et que je serai payée dix mille francs par mois’. [I did not understand much of her explanations, although I

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had realized that I did not have to think of myself as a maid but as a sister to her daughters and I would be paid ten thousand francs per month] (59). However, when she reports this episode to Oum Sal’ha – her grandmother retorts ‘Travailler comme une bonne? Tu perds la tête, dis ? [Working as a house cleaner? Are you insane?’] (45). Sadiya moves to Tunis, an episode which is a significant turning point in her life. Moving to the city is Sadiya’s audacious endeavour to surpass the impediments and constraints forced upon her. ‘Unveiled’, Sadiya’s escapades enable her to get away from the never-ending and debilitating chores (72). Caught between her father’s lack of concern (Sadiya’s father is depicted as somebody who could neither understand her mother nor his second wife (26) and takes pleasure in spending the whole afternoon sipping tea with his friends ‘et à parler légèrement des petits potins du village’ (10) [and speaking evil about the townspeople]), and her new life with Hédia’s wealthy family in Tunis, she finds out that ‘Hédia est d’un autre monde, un monde très différent du notre’ (43) [Hédia is from another world, a world very different from ours]. Yet this awareness does in fact have a positive consequence on Sadiya’s identity-building experience. Equally important are the intimate trials of self-image and sexuality that burden Sadiya. Guellouz is not articulate about her sexual encounters. She finds it reprehensible to discuss her relationships with men. This reserve in writing about sex and desire in an autobiographical way is common to many Maghrebi women writers. Djebar’s works show a significant development in relation to this issue. While sex and desire have always been at the centre of her literary writing since her first novel, La Soif in 1957, it was only with her groundbreaking 1995 autobiographical account Vaste est la prison that she was ultimately able to write about sex and desire in a directly autobiographical way. For Guellouz, sexuality is addressed within the frame of marriage: J’ai pensé à me marier … c’était une issue, la seule pour mois. J’y voyais ma justification et la fin de mes malheurs … J’envisageais le mariage avec ce Habib Ben Ramdane qui semblait tant tenir à moi … Le mariage se présentait comme quelque chose de neuf qu’aucun passé n’avait déterminé. (83)

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[I thought of getting married … it was the only way out. I saw there my justification and the end of my misfortunes. I considered marrying this Habib Ben Ramdane who seemed to be so attached to me … marriage looked like something new that no past had determined.] It should be mentioned that Islam and Maghrebi culture do not conceive of a union out of marriage; therefore, ‘marriage is ideally the place where individual desire finds public sign and body’9 (Eagleton 1986: 21). Yet, when Sadiya ultimately marries her longtime childhood playmate, l’Habib, she refers to him as ‘Habib, mon mari, cet étranger … parce que Habib a le don de m’énerver … il y a une résistance au fond de moi que je ne peux pas surmonter (78–9, ellipses mine) [Habib, my husband, this stranger … because Habib has the knack of bugging me … there is a resistance inside of me that I cannot overcome]. This trope permeates most postcolonial Maghrebi women’s literature. In Vaste est la prison, for instance, Djebar refers to the husband as l’e’dou [the enemy]. Isma, the narrator, evokes an incident when, in the company of her mother-in-law in the Hammam, she overhears the latter’s friend talking about her husband, ‘L’ennemi est à la maison!’ [The enemy is at home!] (1995: 13). Just like the unnamed husband in Leila Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant (1989), ‘The Man’ in Djebar’s A Sister to Scheherazade (1987), or ‘cet étranger’ in La vie simple, this word, l’e’dou, triggers devastating effects. Isma, the narrator in Vaste est la prison, recounts This word l’e’dou that I thus got in the sticky vestibule where women entered almost naked and left covered from head to toe, this word ‘enemy’ voiced in this soothing heat, smashed into me, a strange torpedo; as a silent arrow that sliced open the depths of my still tender heart. In fact, this simple word, acerbic in its Arabic skin, indefinitely pierced into the depths of my soul, and thus the source of my writing … (14) Nevertheless, La vie simple ends on a note of optimism. Having set her mind at rest, Sadiya is now a confident and compassionate mother. She tries to comfort and protect her own daughter: ‘Je ne

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mourrai pas … J’avais cru tout ce temps où je racontai mon histoire que j’allais mourir très bientôt … Mais je ne mourrai pas. J’attendrai des nouvelles de Hédia, j’essayerai d’aimer Habib, je verrai grandir mes enfants … Mais je ne mourrai pas. Je vais recommencer à vivre’ (91). [I would not die … during all this time when I was narrating my story I thought I would die very soon … but I would not die. I will wait for the news from Hédia, I will try to love Habib, I will see my kids grow up … But I will not die. I will start living again.’] Expressing the Self In La vie simple, Sadiya comments on a heated discussion between Hédia and her sister Zohra, but she has no clue about the cause of the disagreement because ‘elles parlaient tantôt Arabe tantôt Français’ [they sometimes spoke Arabic and sometimes spoke French] (60). Therefore, there is still the crucial problem of language to trouble us even more. The autobiographical subject needs language to both represent and construct itself. While postcolonial studies have been prompt in comprehending language as ‘the most potent instrument of colonial control’, and therefore as ‘a fundamental site of struggle’ for postcolonial discourse (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 283), Anne Donadey (2000: 25), in her seminal article ‘The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature’, informs her reader about the multilingual context of Maghrebi Francophone texts. She demonstrates how Arabic and French interact in Assia Djebar’s corpus. I have to point out that Guellouz, along with Tahar Djaout, Rachid Mimouni, Malika Mokeddem, Jalila Hafsia, Halima Benhaddou and many others, uses the same strategy. As Alison Rice argues (2003: 15), this is comprehensible in the sense that ‘the postcolonial subject is in many cases a bilingual individual, proficient in both a mother tongue tied to the native land and a second language imposed by the colonizer’. As a legacy of French acculturation, a significant number of Maghrebi writers use French as their first language. However, the danger for any Maghrebi writer in using French is that, to some critics, s/he is preserving the erstwhile discriminatory relationship of colonizer/colonized (Armitage 2000: 39). However successful the Maghrebi writer may be, s/he can never be anything more than ‘un petit singe, habillé à l’européenne’ [a little chimp, dressed in a European style] (Déjeux 1973: 285).

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In an essay published in 1990, Jean Déjeux comments on one of the most frequently held views of Maghrebi women’s autobiographies written in French. This view claims that Maghrebi women write in French because it is more ‘liberating’ for them when they address socio-political taboos and Arab-Berber culture. Déjeux indicates that Maghrebi women’s life-writings stress the female protagonists’ right to exist as individuals. His study pays tribute to Maghrebi women’s autobiographies yet at the same time subverts the possible reception of these works by indicating that they should be read as sociological documents. He points out that ‘even if these works do not possess a great literary value, they are useful for learning more about the forceful character and personalities of their authors’ (42). Déjeux concludes his essay with the remark that the fact these Maghrebi women’s texts are written in French and not Arabic, even after Morocco and Tunisia’s independence in 1956 and Algeria’s independence in 1962, leads to one inevitable conclusion. ‘It would seem that French gives these writers the possibility to tell of themselves as they wish to be and to dream of a world where they would be fully liberated’ (43).10 Evidently, for Déjeux Maghrebi women’s decision to write in French and to state publicly their subjectivity in the language of the former colonizer is due to the oppressive nature of Arabic and Arab-Muslim cultural paradigms. In accord with Déjeux, Mildred Mortimer (1997: 102) maintains that Maghrebi writers can express themselves more freely in French than in their mother tongue. That is because ‘Islamic culture is bound to the non-dire, or unspoken, in other words, to silence; it prohibits personal disclosure’ (103). Sherif Hetata (2003: 124) states that, ‘The reluctance to reveal one’s self is particularly powerful in the Arab region. […] The author’s self remains carefully hidden. The self, the inner, secret self, is something a man (or a woman) in our region does not write about.’ Refusing to go along with such a biased perception, and in tune with her political and cultural convictions, the Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid has decided to compose her works exclusively in Arabic. But then again, which Arabic should Maghrebi writers fall back on? The answer could very well be in Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie (1995b). What is particularly remarkable about Le Blanc de l’Algérie is Djebar’s regular reference to the varieties of Arabic spoken in Algeria. The situation is comparable to the rest of the Maghreb.

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Djebar makes a clear-cut distinction between ‘un arabe littéraire d’élégance, de beauté’ [a literary Arabic of elegance and beauty] which generates ‘une nostalgie … de cette langue maternelle que je n’écris pas, langue étincelante devant moi telle une fugitive en robe diamantée de poésie!’ [a nostalgia for this mother tongue which I do not write, a language shining in front of me like a fugitive in a dress studded with diamonds of poetry!] (Djebar 1995b: 32); and the institutionally imposed Arabic ‘dit moderne, qu’on enseigne à la jeunesse sous le terme pompeux de “langue maternelle”’ [socalled modern Arabic, which they teach to the youngsters under the pompous title of ‘mother tongue’] (Djebar 1995b: 273). She also depicts the language spoken by the much-lamented playwright Abdelkader Alloula11 as an ‘Oranais’ (from the city of Oran) form of Arabic with a rural flavour (Djebar 1995b: 47); or the concierge, who witnessed the assassination of Mouloud Feraoun and his companions, and who testified in a southern Algerian dialect (115). As far as French is concerned, Djebar simply perceives it as ‘une langue de travail’ [a language of work] (Djebar 1995b: 39). For Djebar, as for many other Maghrebi writers and ordinary people, French is therefore a functional language used in writing and in inter-communal dialogue. Used internationally more than Arabic, it has given Maghrebi Francophone writers the chance to gain a wide international readership. Nevertheless, according to Djebar, Francophone writers do not live in a world of ‘monolinguisme stérilisant’ [a sterile monolinguism] (Djebar 1995b: 274). Maghrebi writers such as Kateb Yacine are‘d’emblée entre deux langues: son écriture française côtoyant l’arabe maternel [between two languages, his written French borders on his Arabic mother tongue] (Djebar 1995b: 180). Nearly all Francophone writers live in a milieu that contains more than just Arabic and French, with different native and non-native languages blending together in a sort of ‘linguistic mosaic’. Referring to the Algerian Taos Amrouche, who grew up in Tunisia, Djebar says: Taos has been immersed, right from the start, in a bath of languages: those of the street, Italian, Sicilian, the Arabic dialect of Tunis, the language of school, French, of course, which she

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reads and writes, and finally the language of exile and of family secrets, Berber of Kabylia (Djebar 1995b: 202). In order to understand the way the French language has been used in the Maghreb – for the present case in Tunisia – and to understand Guellouz’s sense of difference, ‘we need to distinguish between what is proposed as a standard code, [French] (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre), and the linguistic code, [French], which has been transformed and subverted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 8). To underscore her distinctive self and community, Guellouz’s conscious technique of using some Tunisian-dialect words in her autobiography is also a means for conveying the sense of cultural distinctiveness. As Ashcroft points out, ‘such a device not only acts to signify the difference between cultures, but also illustrates the importance of discourse in interpreting cultural concepts’. The intentional utilization here of Tunisian-dialect words constitutes a specific sign of a postcolonial discourse and is a ‘clear signifier of the fact that the language which actually informs the [autobiography] is an/Other language’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 64). In L’Amour, la fantasia, Djebar has adequately demonstrated how problems of autobiography are related to language, particularly for an ‘Arab woman’. Writing her autobiography can be twice as dangerous: it is written in ‘la langue adverse’ [the enemy’s language] and by a woman (Djebar 1985: 215). In quoting Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430), ‘the African Latin Church Father’ and initiator of Western autobiography as a tradition, who lived and died in Souk-Ahrass, Algeria, Djebar points out that he was also an Algerian who wrote his autobiography in a language other than his own, the language of the dominant power of the time. Ashcroft et al. (1989: 38) argue that ‘the crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that postcolonial writing define itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place’. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, one has to use the masters’ tools to dismantle his house (1981: 99). Therefore, this process of ‘abrogation’ and ‘appropriation’ characterizes most Maghrebi narratives. ‘This literature is … written out of the tension between the abrogation of the received [French]

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which speaks from the centre, and the act of appropriation which brings it under the influence of a vernacular tongue [or] the complex of speech habits which characterize the local language’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 39). Guellouz, very much like Djebar and most postcolonial writers, frequently introduces words from her mother tongue, the Arabic dialect of Tunisia; sometimes replacing a French term with what she feels is a more apt Arabic one. With regard to this use of ‘interlanguage’, Lejeune argues that both self and life-story are culturally determined constructs. ‘The private speech of the individual engaged in the autobiographical act is, accordingly, derived from a public discourse structured by class, code, and convention’ (Eakin 1989: xxi). Among the Arabic words that Guellouz uses are some that occur in various Maghrebi texts, such as ‘l’assida’ (8); ‘chebka’ (9); ‘ferrachia’ (11); ‘tabouna’ ‘k’china’ (12); ‘m’hamess’ (32); ‘seda’ (33); ‘roumiettes’ (36); ‘Jenoun’ (54); ‘meyda’ (57); ‘souri’ (70). More than the texts of any other Francophone author, Malika Mokeddem’s first two works, Les hommes qui marchent (1990) and L’Interdite (1993) are peppered with many Arabic terms, for which she gives their meaning either in footnotes or glossaries. Also, Guellouz likes to give her characters names which are self-referent such as Sadiya (Happy), Oumi Sal’ha (Mother of Virtue) for her grandmother, Mahbouba (Beloved) for her sister, Hédia (Gift) for her unexpected friend, and l’Habib (Beloved) for her husband. Names give characters in Maghrebi works a Maghrebi identity, and some writers tend to choose them carefully to convey certain meanings. This is to say that Maghrebized French and the choice of specific subjects and names is what distinguish ‘la sensibilité Maghrébine’, and these Maghrebi writers from native French writers. The socio-linguist John Edwards (1985: 16) explains this phenomenon in terms of a clear distinction between the ‘communicative’ and ‘symbolic’ uses of language. In the first case, speakers are capable of expressing themselves confidently in the mother tongue, but in the latter, they integrate words and expressions from the mother tongue into the dominant language. Not being articulate in the mother tongue or able to write in it with poise does not put into question their loyalty to their mother tongue or their cultural heritage.

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Conclusion It could well be argued that La vie simple epitomizes the social mobility of Tunisian society. The autobiographer is depicted as poor and wilful and her text embodies a success story where the little child-and-thenteenage-heroine prevails over an emotional and social handicap before the breakthrough that coincides with maturity. The discourse, set in a sexist and chauvinistic milieu, is obviously dominated by the demands for women’s personal freedom and social equality with men. Lejeune seems to echo this perspective when he affirms ‘autobiography is a human right. Become the owner of your life! Everyone is invited to become the owner of the individual property of one’s life, to build a house of writing on one’s little plot of existence’ (1989: 224). I think the writing of autobiography is a conscious affirmation of identity, in this case the manifestation of an alternative translation of reality perceived from the vantage point of a Tunisian woman. The striking feature of Guellouz’s La vie simple is her heroine’s loss of innocence. From a variety of perspectives, Guellouz’s autobiography expresses the complex dynamics of experience through which the often conflicting values of her community form or deform individuals. Mediating between artistic creation and biographical facts, La vie simple is a personal history of a woman from a marginalized segment of society whose history does not correspond to the official prevailing history. In Robert Smith’s terms (1995: 61) this new history is written so that the margin becomes a site of intervention.

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CONCLUSION

In this book I have used the framework of postcolonial feminist literature to explore the fiction and autobiographies of three Maghrebi women writers. In fact, this model of postcolonial feminist literature, as I suggest, underscores the presence and voices of Maghrebi women who have been muzzled by socio-political circumstances and critiques their subaltern status. I have asked myself, in this book, what these Maghrebi women want. Their works are not ‘art for art’s sake’ or ‘text for text’s sake’. Leila Abouzeid (Morocco), Assia Djebar (Algeria) and Souad Guellouz (Tunisia) want to communicate something very specific to the men and women of their respective societies, and Maghrebi society in general. They are taking a stand against harassment, women’s subaltern status, polygamy, divorce, women’s mistreatment, in their respective Muslim communities which condone these acts. Through autobiography or fiction, their female characters (Zahra, Hajila and Sadiya) consciously assert their identities. These narratives present real-life situations of real women that examine ‘the past … in order to open up the possibilities of the future’ (Harlow 1987: 82). For in these narratives, women who tell stories to and/or about themselves express not only their attempted masteries of life and time, but also the anxieties they feel as their stories’ light flickers uncertainly against encroaching darkness. And by virtue of a universal imagination and while writing their own stories, these Maghrebi writers are also ‘writing one immense story – the same story, for the most part, with different parts of this immense story coming from a multitude of different perspectives’ (Walker [1983] 1984: 5).

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And the only possible way to better study and teach ‘this immense story’ is through comparison. ‘Comp Lit’ explains the artistic and cultural paradigms of similarity and contrast which are embedded both within and between different communities, and it thus gives comparatists an inestimable contrastive picture of societies’ ethos, and their literatures. ‘Comparative Literature must always cross borders. And crossing borders … is a problematic affair’ (Spivak 2003: 16). Besides, if ‘Literature is what escapes the system’ (Spivak 2003: 52), comparative literature as a venture that highlights resemblances, contrasts, and juxtapositions, and with its academic, ethical, and political focus on class, gender, language, race and religion, can be eye-opening. Charlotte Brontë once complained about women’s visibility in these terms: ‘if men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them’ (Charlotte Brontë Shirley [1848], cited in Pam Morris 1994: 13). The objective of this book is not to ‘misapprehend’ but to ‘read’ these Maghrebi women ‘in a true light’. In his seminal essay ‘On Ethnographic Authority’ James Clifford (1980: 8) revealed that anthropologists’ ‘native informants’ could now speak for themselves to ‘us’ without the intercession of the anthropologists and their ‘science’. To similar ends, Edward Said ([1978] 2003) drew attention to ‘orientalism’ – the history of those images of the ‘Orient’ constructed to facilitate the West’s domination of the East, and in which what non-Westerners expressed about themselves was systematically discredited. It is within this frame of mind that the authors studied in the book display the experiences of Maghrebi women, who are shown to suffer in the world but who also discover ways to endure and thrive, in psychological or material ways. Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz find in their respective folk material the knowledge and the means for their characters to resist fixed, dehumanizing identities, whether sexual, racial, or cultural. In Death of a Discipline, Spivak discusses the reason why she has ‘written largely about women’. She writes: ‘because women are not a special case, but can represent the human, with the asymmetries attendant upon any such representation. As simple as that’ (Spivak

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2003: 70). This is the premise which underlies this book and through which I set out to identify what bonds Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz as women writers. In the course of Gender and Identity in North Africa I demonstrate that the striking similarity, or I should say, the common denominator of these major works, Year of the Elephant, A Sister to Scheherazade and La vie simple is their delineation of the same preoccupation: a woman’s journey towards independence and its critical outcome which is a conflation of personal and public experiences. One woman’s predicament becomes an allegory for the community. Yet the fundamental difference stems from the strategies as well as the political agenda each text manifests. In the Introduction I asked whether the works under study are authentic narratives about national allegory revealing both alterity and subjectivity (Jameson 1986: 68). And in investigating the texts of these Maghrebi authors I have drawn on Jameson’s concept of national allegory as outlined in ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ and shown that in the ‘interweaving of the specific and personal with the general and social’ (Ashcroft et al. 2000: 101), Jameson’s crucial concept is of considerable importance to these Maghrebi women writers. Each of these works, through the tribulations of impoverished working-class women, not only depicts women’s journeys towards independence, but also highlights the protagonists’ loss of innocence. By putting the texts in dialogue it becomes clear that from a variety of perspectives, Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz reveal in their respective works the complex dynamics of experience through which individuals are formed/deformed, by the often conflicting values of their respective communities. This enables us to realize that these works are not only about Zahra, Hajila and Sadiya, but they are also about the cultures that generated them. Furthermore, ‘living to tell about it’ becomes a strategy of control. Narrating facets of their personal history, these heroines – Zahra, Hajila and Sadiya – engage in a constant process of demythologizing that makes new consciousness and change possible. They remember to recover and restore. They try to validate and sustain the initial bond of care and connection experienced with other women in their oppressive male-dominated family and/or community. In

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other words, these narratives reveal a mental map of psychological alienation or rupture of their protagonists. These heroines ‘have been resurrected, created, and recreated to illuminate the joys and sorrows of those who are poor, black, and female’ (bell hooks 1984: 342). The comparative investigation of these narratives reveals their similar treatment of male characters. For the limitations within the male personality as the indirect but horrible repercussion of cultural abuse are staged in all these narratives. Men are portrayed as sadistic, emasculated, violent, fragile and vicious. Most of the male characters in these works remain entangled in their platitude. They also, as characters, elicit an image of males immobilized in a situation of permanent inanity. In contrast to such a portrayal, the female characters are pictured as subversives of patriarchy; they intrude upon the established socio-political order. Therefore, and despite such a negative depiction of men, nothing could be more pertinent to the current hegemonic dominance of ‘men’ in ideological and cultural processes than Marx’s well-known observations on ‘ruling ideas’: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it (Marx and Engels 1974: 64). Besides the terrible effect of these ‘ruling ideas’, all these authors conspicuously use metaphorical values of enclosure. This aesthetic trope signifies in literary form the experience of marginalization and domination. Like Hajila, who is literally sequestered in a luxurious apartment, Zahra and Sadiya find themselves immured within a series of imprisoning structures, such as their illiteracy, their class in society, and the prevailing sexism. The study shows as well that all the characters in these works find themselves walled in and constrained by prevailing circumstances that condition who they are, how they view themselves, and how

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they act. Even the routinization of everyday life, expressed in the monotony of the house, is combined with the repeated images of privation to express a nearly unavoidable sense of marginalization and hopelessness. Mary Helen Washington’s comment on the loneliness of African-American women applies equally well to Maghrebi women: When I think of how essentially alone African-American women have been – alone because of [their] bodies, over which [they] have had so little control; alone because the damage done to [their] men has prevented their closeness and protection; and alone because [they] have had no one to tell [them] stories about [themselves] … It is absolutely necessary that African-American women writers be permitted to discover and interpret the entire range and spectrum of the experience of African-American women and not be stymied by preconceived conclusions. Because of these writers, there are more models of how it is possible for [postcolonial people] to live, there are more choices … to make, and there is a larger space in the universe for us (1975: 8). A further attempt is made in this book to show how these narratives also reveal the authors/autobiographer’s sense of geographic, cultural, and social displacement. The quest is not only for survival but also for an authentic, self-defining Maghrebi female identity, one that reveals care and concern for other women. Moreover, the most powerful personalities in these (life) stories are the venerated figures of mothers, grandmothers, co-wives and friends. These figures empower the female characters and give them the impetus to settle their respective lives. Because of the encouragement and direction provided to them by these characters, they are better equipped to resist various confrontations within their own societies. Zahra, Hajila and Sadiya grow out of the passive stage and begin to think for themselves, forging new identities, learning increased self-reliance and asserting themselves through action. All these female characters strike out openly against duplicity, speak up, and celebrate their own identity and empowerment as women, mothers and sisters. These new identities are also constructed on the support they gain from the community. When Zahra, for instance, as a ‘rule-breaker’,

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becomes aware of this historical nexus with the community, and the community’s mores, she is saved. With a solid ‘substratum’ in the past, Zahra’s identity proves to be significant, and constructive. Zahra seems to believe that she can create for herself an identity that is in harmony with her community and social expectations. Therefore, her life – existentially ‘authentic’, is also meaningful and bears a lasting essence. Her yearning to be unconventional does not leave her alienated but strangely enough it inspires her to hit the mark. With her triumph, Abouzeid epitomizes the climactic end of individual women who attempt to function outside their respective communities. The systematic comparison between these works undertaken here reveals a further shared paradigm, namely rape, a trauma inflicted by an abusive husband on a defenceless wife. Therefore, the rape of Hajila and her subsequent tragic solitude is like Zahra’s dramatic divorce, and Sadiya’s fateful alienation. It prompts a phase of profound identity crisis. For Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz rape is also a critical rape of integrity. Rape for these writers is not only a physical trauma but also a psychological blow and a violation of identity. And this leads to reflection about writing and the body. The mistreatment these female characters initially endure is transformed into a textual inscription; writing functions as an approach for psychological survival by bringing into existence a second body, unimpaired by physical force. Clarisse Zimra’s insight on Maghrebi writers is pertinent. She writes: ‘what triggered in them the urge to write in the first place: their shared linguistic alienation, a sense of not quite owning nor controlling their craft and, thereby, the anxiety of not quite owning themselves’ (Zimra 2006: 80). This insight has led me to explore the language issue, for the postcolonial linguistic field in the Maghreb is still thorny and problematic. Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz have quite distinct stands. These Maghrebi writers have realized that Language not only constructs and colours our experiences of the world; it can also be used to marginalize, to constrain, or to enable. It is mainly for this reason that the right opportunity to speak and write out, to publish and to express in creative writing is so powerful for all peoples. It is particularly so for

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those whose colonized experience has rendered them absent, silenced, marginalized, and for whom the discourse of imperial and colonial rule has been one relegating their own experiences to a subordinate position (Wisker 2000: 24). Today Maghrebi writers work in a range of languages, indicating that the oppositional stand regarding language is a thing of the past. They no longer feel hampered by having to use ‘French’ (the master’s tools). To paraphrase Kateb Yacine, they are no longer ‘dans la gueule du loup’ [in the wolf ’s maw]. They are using their ‘butin de guerre’, i.e., their war booty. So, we read about ‘women whom Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon lionized in the 1960s’ (Cooke 2001: 30), but whose voices were hardly ever heard. And Djebar, just like her Maghrebi sisters, is aware that she too must write/speak with the intention that her own as well as these women’s writings/voices will not be squandered. In order to mark her imprint and not be one of the forgotten, Djebar feels she must speak/write even if this requires a ‘blood price’: ‘the blood of my writing? Not yet, but my voice? My voice leaves me every night’ (Djebar 1995: 337). Denied any right to the privacy of their bodies, and sentenced to ‘vocal exile’, Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz manage to express themselves in public by becoming ‘talking books’, taking on their bodies’ rape, and physical abuse that would otherwise be addressed to other women, their ‘sisters’. This sisterhood or this bonding is echoed by all the female protagonists’ rejection of their subjugation. They have realized that their salvation lies in their unity. Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz find ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ by getting ‘men’ off their shoulders and by loving other women. As relationships grow and develop among women, each woman upholds and stimulates the other. Emphasizing sisterhood, Abouzeid, Djebar and Guellouz assume a relational basis for self-definition that determines and confirms woman bonding. However, this sisterhood can only be significant if its ‘alter ego’ – the brotherhood of men – is not thwarted in its quest of growth and acceptance. What bell hooks (1984: 17) affirms about the US is also valid for the Maghreb. She indicates that the discourse of equality is simplistic and hypocritical: ‘Since men are not equals in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class structure which men do

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women want to be equal to?’ bell hooks advances another alternative: feminism as a struggle to end sexist subjugation. Feminism, she maintains, will concentrate more directly on the other types of mistreatment, and thus bridges the politics around gender, class and ethnicity. The ways in which women are discriminated against, abused and repressed, lies on the association of all the three abovementioned factors. Finally it is also fundamental to note that this book ascertains the dialectical relationship between the democratic deficit in the Maghreb and gender-based inequality. Many of the rights that women are fighting for are simply the rights of citizens that are also denied to men. Unless there is an uncompromising rule of law, a genuine freedom of expression, and an authentic pluralism, the existing power structure will remain intact. Barriers between classes and genders must be smashed down. And as most Maghrebi women writers are conscious of the political realities surrounding them, they attempt to implement the truth that Luce Irigaray (1985) has highlighted: ‘democracy begins between two’. Change is only possible when domestic and institutional violence is reined in, and when egalitarianism and equal opportunity take the place of women’s subaltern status. With regard to my short-term research agenda, there are fundamental questions closely related to the topic of Gender and Identity in North Africa that need to be meticulously tackled. These issues revolve around nationalism and literature, ethnic and religious minorities in the Maghreb, re-writing history, and representation and subjectivity in Maghrebi postcolonial Arabophone and Francophone literature. They will also address the way identity, language and corporeality are related in the novel, and the relationship between cultural and personal identity. However, because of strict limitations of space and as it is beyond the scope of this book to include other linguistic, and literary contexts, my allusion to some Maghrebi Arabophone and Francophone male writers in Chapter 1 denotes my interest in these authors as a future research project. Thus, additional possibilities of research consist of the application of the principle I use in this book to other exemplary postcolonial Maghrebi texts by authors such as Fawzi Mellah and Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia); Abdelkader Djemaï, Amin Zaoui and

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Rachid Mimouni (Algeria); and Tahar Ben Jelloun and Mohamed Choukri (Morocco). Through these writers’ respective texts I will examine issues such as cultural roots and hybridity, nationalism, marginalization and silencing. These writers’ works appeal to my intellectual interest and I feel they would be a stimulating object of critical inquiry. A project based on these representative Arabophone and Francophone Maghrebi novelists would address the authors and the intricacies of their post-independence situation. It would also engage in these authors’ literary strategies and ideological affiliations. The most important objective of this comparative study would be to show how works of fiction are rooted in collective histories and ideological constructions. For, ‘postcolonial literature and its study is essentially political in that its development and the theories which accompany this development radically question the apparent axioms upon which the whole discipline … has been raised’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 196). In addition, if ‘theorizing postcoloniality as subversion is a fruitful point of departure’ (Donadey 2003: 146), the works of other Maghrebi writers, whether they write in French or Arabic, should definitely be highlighted and systematically analyzed.

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NOTES

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Introduction What is known today to literary scholars as the Maghreb (adj., Maghrebi), refers collectively to Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Maghreb, which also serves as the Arabic word for Morocco, comes from the Arabic word Maghrib, meaning the place where the sun sets, or the western region; as distinguished from the Mashreq, or Eastern part of the ‘Arab World’. Because of the linguistic bonding with France, the term Maghreb is used alternatively with ‘North Africa’ [Afrique du Nord], which means the former French colonies. The term ‘North Africa’ is evocative of the colonial past. Leila Abouzeid, Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Toward Independence, Trans. Barbara Parmenter (Austin, Texas: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1989). This work was originally published in Arabic, in Al Mithak daily (Rabat, Morocco) in 1983. Assia Djebar, A Sister to Scheherazade (London: Quartet, 1987). This novel is the second volume of a quartet. The first novel is Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade, (London: Quartet, 1985). Souad Guellouz, La vie simple (Tunis: Maison Tunisienne de l’Edition, 1975). I have to admit that with the fall of the wall of Berlin, I had hopes that the world would be a better place. But in light of all the tragedies that are taking place around the globe, e.g., a profound post-9/11 islamophobia; the invasion of Afghanistan; consolidation of autocracy after an increasing display of random political violence in Algeria, beginning with the invalidation of the first democratic legislative elections in January, 1992 and the subsequent civil war; the invasion of Iraq, not so much the consequence of President Saddam’s ‘mulishness’ but the hypocrisy and the greed of Western powers; terrorist bombings in London, Madrid, and Casablanca; Guantanamo; human trafficking; and political violence in different parts of the world; it seems to me that

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the world bipolarization had some positive aspects in the sense that it maintained some kind of ‘check-and-balance’ in world politics. 6 The term ‘Tamazight’ designates the language of the Amazigh (Berber) people. With its various regional dialects, Tamazight is the native language of the Maghreb. Vast regions in Algeria and Morocco still use it as the only medium of communication and, in recent years, especially after the ‘Berber Spring’ (the demonstrations which took place in Algiers, Bejaia and Tizi-Ouzou in 1980), there has been a sort of cultural renaissance. Using the Tifinagh alphabet – still used by the Touaregs in the Sahara Desert – Tamazight used to be written down in the past. With Arabization, the Arabic alphabet was used for some time until fairly recently (1980s) when in the midst of a huge controversy figures like Mouloud Mammeri decided to opt for Latin characters (see Mammeri, 1995; Basset, 1952; Sadiqi, 1997; Chaker, 1995). 7 ‘Nous avons mis un peu moins d’un siècle pour apprendre le français à peu près, nous avons mis quatorze siècles pour apprendre l’arabe à peu près et nous avons mis un temps immémorial pour ne pas écrire le berbère. Il faut analyser les effets réels et imaginaires, cette chose forclose qu’est l’écriture dans l’histoire de la culture maghrébine pour comprendre le processus historique du concept d’écriture, ici même et non seulement par rapport aux concepts théologiques, mystiques, linguistiques ou politiques de la langue arabe telle qu’elle s’est pensée elle-même depuis des siècles par rapport à ce lieu’ (Khatibi 1985: 55). 8 It is interesting to note that the British critic Mathew Arnold once made the same declaration about the existence of American Literature. He simply denied its autonomous existence and viewed it as a contribution to British Literature. In Edward Said’s terms, Arnold makes ‘an active identification between culture and the state’ (see Said, 1983, p. 174). This denial of American Literature brings to mind the ongoing debate about the absence of postcolonial ideas from American Studies. And there is almost no agreement within scholarship regarding the postcolonial dimensions of the US culture (see for instance, Schueller, 1998; Mackenthun, 2000). Yet, the authors of The Empire Writes Back pertinently referred to the United States as a post-colonial paradigm, dating its postcoloniality to the revolutionary period, i.e., 1776. According to Bill Ashcroft et al., ‘the literatures of African countries … are all postcolonial literatures. The literature of the USA should also be placed in this category. Perhaps because of its position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its postcolonial nature has not been generally recognized’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 2). 9 See Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics and Language of African Literature (London: James Curry, 1986). 10 In his preface to Yamina Mechakra’s La grotte éclatée ([1979]; Algiers:

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ENAL, 1986), Kateb Yacine observes that ‘à l’heure actuelle, dans notre pays, une femme qui écrit vaut son pesant de poudre’ [at present, in our country a woman who writes is worth her weight in gun powder] (8). See Sebbar, 1988. For an effective/affecting novel that explores the complexities and contradictions of this era, especially in regard to gender, conflicting community-individual imperatives, and ‘the woman question,’ see Myriam Ben, Sabrina, ils t’ont volé ta vie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985). Kateb Yacine, « Ecritures et Méditerraneité, » Conférence Internationale, Institut des Langues Etrangères, Université d’Oran-Sénia, 15–17 Avril 1987. Jean Pierre Koffel, ‘Friends of the Arabs’, Al-Jazeera TV Channel, 11 September 2005. Yacine, 1987. Kateb’s statement brings to mind another declaration by Aimé Césaire: ‘la langue française me colonise, je la colonise à mon tour’ [French language colonizes me, in turn I colonize it]. Cited in Gauvin, 1997, p. 41. See Chapter 1 for further details of these figures. Chapter 1 Benmiloud, 1964 (my translation) Quoted by Mostefa Lacheraf, L’Algérie: Nation et société (Paris: Maspero, 1969), pp. 255–56 (my translation). The Algerian historian Mohamed Harbi, ‘ En finir avec le mensonge’, Entretien avec Nadjia Bouzeghrane, El Watan, samedi 14 mai 2005. In this interview Harbi dissects the conditions that led to the massacres of 8 May 1945 and highlights the Maghrebi dimension of the combat: ‘Dans Les Damnés de la terre, Frantz Fanon constate que  “le langage du colon quand il parle du colonisé est un langage zoologique” . Cette assimilation de l’homme à l’animal, assimilation caractéristique des situations de domination, qu’elle soit coloniale ou de classe, met la force brutale au centre des rapports humains, tout particulièrement dans les périodes de crise. L’utilisation de la force d’une manière ostentatoire, en mai 1945, trouve sa source dans le refus des Algériens de se soumettre. … Les nationalistes avaient déjà manifesté le 1er mai [à Oran et à Alger]. Il s’agissait pour les Amis du Manifeste et des Libertés (AML), et principalement pour le Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA), locomotive de l’alliance nationaliste, de montrer aux Américains, qui doutaient de leur influence politique sur le mouvement national et dans la classe ouvrière, leur force. C’est une des raisons pour lesquelles le cortège nationaliste, qui comprenait une pléiade de futurs ministres marocains (Abdelkrim Khatabi, Abdelkebir Al Fassi, Boucetta, Belabbès, Diouri)

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Gender and Identity in North Africa et tunisiens (Ahmed Mestiri, Driss Guiga), ne s’est pas fondu dans le cortège avec les communistes.’ In 1931, denouncing ‘100 years of French colonial rule’ and in a challenging and ardent reply to Louis Bertrand, the French writer and fervent ideologue for settler colonialism, the nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas (1899–1985) argues for the Algerians’ sovereignty and dignity: ‘Nous sommes chez nous. Nous ne pouvons aller ailleurs. C’est cette terre qui a nourri nos ancêtres, c’est cette terre qui nourrira nos enfants. Libres ou esclaves, elle nous appartient, nous lui appartenons et elle ne voudra pas nous laisser périr. L’Algérie ne peut vivre sans nous. Nous ne pouvons vivre sans elle. Celui qui rêve à notre avenir comme à celui des Peaux-Rouges d’Amérique se trompe. Ce sont les Arabo-berbères qui ont fixé, il y a quatorze siècles, le destin de l’Algérie. Ce destin ne pourra pas demain s’accomplir sans eux’ (Abbas, 1931, p. 143). ‘Il est inutile de rappeler l’importance des événements de mai 45 sur la vie, les idées, la sensibilité du jeune Kateb. L’écrivain n’a jamais cessé de répéter que ce fut là l’une des sources fondamentales de son inspiration. Ces événements orienteront sa conviction profonde que l’action des masses populaires est le moteur réel et le plus puissant de l’histoire.’ Classiques du Monde: Kateb Yacine, textes présentés par Mohamed Ismail Abdoun (Alger: SNED, 1983), p. 37. It is worth mentioning that France invaded Tunisia in 1881 and ruled the country for 75 years, until 1956. The difference in colonial administrative systems and educational policies resulted in an assimilationist programme in Algeria but not in Morocco and Tunisia. Resistance to the French protectorate led to the first nationalist party – Destour – and la Société des Ecrivains d’Afrique du Nord emerged in 1920. The Destour mouthpiece al-Badr opened its pages to all those who write in Arabic, but those who write in French could turn to La Kahena – the publication of la Société des Ecrivains d’Afrique du Nord. Since 1956, Tunisia has been through three different political regimes: the end of French colonialism on 20 March 1956; President-for-Life Habib Bourguiba’s republic (1957–1987); and his eviction by ColonelPresident Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali and entrée of ‘the rule of law’ since 7 November 1987. L’Action, No. 1, 25 Septembre 1947. In ‘Nations of Writers’, Réda Bensmaïa (1999: 173–76) claims that Algerian literature has gone through three phases: a period of ‘reformism’ still trapped in the framework of ‘French Algeria’; a counterhegemonic phase whose ultimate objective is to consolidate the ‘unitary myth of the nation’; and finally a discordant phase which disrupts this ‘unitary myth of the nation’ by revealing its imagined foundation and bringing to the surface the ‘voices of multiple communities’. It ought to be mentioned here that some Arabophone and Francophone women

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writers like Djebar, Myriam Ben or Z’hor Ounissi have taken part in each phase of this development or moved through all three phases in their literary career. See Mouloud Mammeri, 1987, pp. 53–55; also Kaddache, 2003. The Gourrara region is part of the Grand Erg Occidental. It is the area around Timimoun about 1250 km south-west of Algiers. As a result, institutions that encouraged Arabic and Islamic teaching such as Al-Zaytuna Mosque in Tunis and Al Karaouine in the city of Fes in Morocco, have been swept away. Reformists like the Tunisians Tahar Haddad (1901–1935), Abu-elKacem Al-Chabbi (1909–1934) and Mahmoud Messa’adi (1911– 2004); the Algerian Sheikh Abdelhamid Ibn-Badis (1889–1940) – a poet, essayist, and polemicist; and the Moroccan nationalist Allal AlFassi (1910–1974), who later became the leader of the Istiqlal Party, saw their aspirations of self-determination partly fulfilled after the Second World War. ‘Favorablement accueilli par la critique française, essentiellement pour ces qualités littéraires, mais durement malmené par les intellectuels maghrébins engagés dans la lutte nationale, La Soif, son auteur l’a quelque peu désavoué, affirmant qu’il ne s’agissait que d’un exercice de style. En fait, sensible au tribunal de l’opinion, Assia Djebar a dû, pendant de longues années, dissimuler la grande tendresse qu’elle avait pour son premier roman, attendant de nouvelles générations de lecteurs capables de comprendre que “pour le personnage de La Soif, la découverte du corps est aussi une révolution importante.”’ (Chikhi 1990, p. 7).  Sequestration of women at home is referred to in the Maghreb as ‘burying women alive between four walls’. At the beginning of the French conquest of Algeria, hundreds of men, women and children sought refuge in the caves of the Dahra Mountains. In 1845, in one of these caves, over 800 people died from suffocation when the French Army filled the mouth of the cave with faggots and set them on fire. In Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade (1985), Assia Djebar also refers to this carnage, ordered by the French colonial officer Pélissier. This platform, known as the Tripoli Programme (1962) delineated the ideological orientation of independent Algeria: The armed struggle must be followed by the ideological combat, and the struggle for national independence must be followed by the people’s democratic revolution  … [which] is the conscious construction of the country within the framework of socialist principles and with the power in the hands of the people. The word ‘Makhzen’ literally means ‘warehouse’ in classical Arabic but carries a heavily negative connotation in Moroccan Arabic dialect,

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referring to an obsolete and hermetic type of government based on absolutism, nepotism and corruption. As a pillar of the Moroccan monarchy it consists of the clientele which evolves around the monarch and includes top-ranking military personnel, tribal leaders, royal notables, rich landowners and security service commanding officers. The term is now used in the Moroccan media to illustrate or denounce the absence of democracy and human rights abuses. (Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makhzen) 18 In the aftermath of the 19 June 1965 Coup, which was carried out with the active support of what used to be called ‘l’Armée des Frontières’ – a heavily armed faction which had political and military supremacy over the former Algerian War of Independence guerrilla fighters who were based near Oujda on the Moroccan borders with Algeria – Houari Boumediene combined the posts of Defence Minister and Head of State (1965–1978), and after the assassination of Mohamed Khemisti (1930–1963), a brilliant Foreign Affairs Minister, the newly established military oligarchy, which still rules Algeria, awarded the prestigious Foreign Affairs post to Abdelaziz Bouteflika (1963–1979), whose role in the 1965 coup d’état was crucial. See Ferhat Abbas, L’Indépendance confisquée (1984), which is a virulent denunciation of authoritarianism, corruption and bureaucracy in post-independence Algeria. See also Mohamed Harbi, Une vie debout: Mémoires politiques, tome 1, 1945– 1962 (Paris: La Découverte, 2001). 19 In the midst of the Algerian War of Liberation, the exile provisional Algerian government (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA), established in 1958 the MALG (Ministère de l’Armement et des Liaisons Générales). This very important ministry was headed by Abdelhafid Boussouf (1926–1980). In 1962, when Algeria gained its independence, the MALG just like the GPRA’s mission was brought to an end, but this took another direction. Most of the members of the MALG were appointed as high civil servants, and the MALG, as a body, evolved into the Sécurité Militaire (SM), or military intelligence. It was in fact one of Boussouf ’s collaborators, Kasdi Merbah, who set up the Sécurité Militaire and remained at its head until 1987. If at the time of the War of Liberation the MALG was necessary to secure arms for the freedom-fighters, and counter the intelligence of the French colonial army and its Algerian collaborators, the situation has been totally different in the post-independence period. It has become obvious that the Algerian authorities have replaced the MALG with la Sécurité Militaire, a Stalinist paramilitary organization whose raison d’être is to hold sway over the Algerian people. The Sécurité Militaire and its successor organization the DRS (Département pour le Renseignement et la Sécurité) have simply emulated the KGB and the

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former East-German political police, Stasi, and remain of overwhelming importance in Algerian politics today. At least 13 Chief Executives, 20 ministers, 15 Generals and hundreds of colonels have turned out to be active and influential members of the ‘MALG / Sécurité Militaire / DRS triptych’ which ultimately emerged as the cornerstone of the military-backed regime in Algeria. (See Harbi, 1994.) Abed Charef clearly shows that given the tough socio-political conditions that prevailed in post-independence Algeria, no distinguished secular or Islamic scholar has surfaced with the exception of Malek Bennabi, who was from the previous generation (Charef 1994: 36). French acronym for Front Islamique du Salut. ‘Le 26 décembre 1991, ce jour là, malgré l’arrestation, six mois plus tôt de ses deux principaux dirigeants, Abassi Madani et Ali Benhadj, le FIS a obtenu, sous la houlette de Abdelkader Hachani, 48% des votes. Il remporta 188 des 231 sièges que compte l’Assemblée, le FFS 25 sièges et le FLN 15 sièges, et les candidats indépendants ont remporté 3 sièges. L’avènement du FIS n’était plus qu’une formalité, celle du deuxième tour prévu le 16 janvier 1992 n’aura jamais lieu.’ In the legislative elections of 26 December 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) obtained a majority of seats in the first round. This success induced a military coup that overthrew Colonel-President Chadli Benjedid, called off the second round of elections and incarcerated thousands of Algerians in concentration camps in the Sahara. Though it seemed that the FIS would not get the two-thirds majority indispensable to change the Algerian constitution, the Army acted on the pretence that they were opposing the establishment of an Islamic state, fearing that a FIS victory would mean the end of their privileges, the government’s nepotism, and the Nomenklatura’s bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption that have been tolerated ever since independence (Benchikh 2003: 248). I use this term in reference to the Nazi use of Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps to eradicate Jews, and the Stalinists who also used the gulags in Siberia in order to incarcerate hundreds of opponents such as Alexander Soljenitsyne, André Sakharov and scores of others. The Algerian powers that be are but a Stalinist military clan with the same modus operandi as the Gestapo, KGB and the former East German political police, the Stasi. According to the latest report of the non-governmental Algerian Human Rights League (Ligue Algérienne de Défense des Droits de l’Homme – LADDH), the number of those who had been incarcerated in Ain M’guel, Oued Namous, and Reggane, i.e., in the Sahara desert, is more than 19,000. See, Salah-Eddine K., ‘Les internés des camps du Sud veulent “leurs droits”,’ Le Quotidien d’Oran, 09 Août 2009. The alienation and anger of the Algerian population have always been

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fanned by the widespread perception that the government had become corrupt and aloof. The waves of dissatisfaction peaked on 5 October 1988 when a series of strikes in Algiers degenerated into rioting. When the violence spread to other major cities like Oran, Constantine, Annaba and Béchar, the government declared a state of emergency and began using force to crush the unrest. By 10 October the security forces had restored a semblance of order; more than 500 people were killed and more than 3,500 arrested. The military intervention was traumatic for it was the first time in post-independence Algeria that the Algerian armed forces fired at other unarmed Algerians. What is also referred to as the ‘Couscous Revolt’ was attributed to an unacceptably slow pace of political and economic reform, as well as serious food shortages caused by the 1986 oil price drop and subsequent decrease in hydrocarbon export revenues. Per capita income dropped from $2,600 to $1,600, unemployment rose to 30 per cent and social conditions deteriorated rapidly. Economic regression blew apart the legitimacy of the state socialism. (See Djeghloul 1989: 14; also Cheref 2005: 12; Leveau 1995; Harbi and Stora 2004). 25 Referring to Hannah Arendt, the Algerian sociologist Lahouari Addi asserts that ‘les sociétés qui sont dans le pré-politique sont celles qui règlent leurs différends par la violence’ [communities which are in the pre-political state are the ones to resort to the use of violence to sort out their disagreement] (Addi 1994: 181). 26 Habib Souadia recounts the assassination of Tahar Djaout in his book La Sale Guerre. According to Souadia, Tahar Djaout was asked to work for the System, but when he turned down the offer, one of the officers in charge of his recruitment told him: ‘Alive you refused to work for us, dead you will work for us’ (Souadia 2001: 85). 27 ‘L’actuelle situation de violence en Algérie prend racine dans les multiples erreurs du parti-état FLN [National Liberation Front] au pouvoir durant plus de trente ans. L’extrémisme religieux n’est point la conséquence d’une sorte de crise mystique qui se serait emparée d’une partie de la population, mais le résultat de politiques myopes, ayant sacrifié les enjeux culturels et symboliques au nom d’un dirigisme économique noyé dans la corruption et les intérêts des clans … L’Algérie est entrée progressivement, depuis 1991, dans la voie suicidaire de la guerre civile. A la violence institutionnelle et à la crispation du pouvoir en place répondent la violence islamiste et la volonté de conquérir l’Etat par la force … Le populisme, hégémonique au sein du FLN, lorsque celui-ci accéda au pouvoir en 1962, fut marqué d’une faiblesse congénitale résultant de la combinaison, en son sein, d’un projet volontariste d’administration autoritaire du pays. Les raisons de cet échec sont connus: code de la nationalité, distinguant nationalité d’origine

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définie par l’appartenance musulmane et nationalité par acquisition; délaïcisation de l’école par l’introduction de l’enseignement religieux et par la volonté de faire de l’arabisation un instrument démagogique de contrôle social; consécration de l’exclusion des femmes; extension du réseau des mosquées; répression des organisations à vocation démocratique … Contradiction criante entre les prêches socialistes et l’ostentation d’une nomenklatura sans racines, à la mentalité d’arriviste, issue de l’affairisme d’Etat et des pratiques maffieuses qu’il autorise’ (Harbi 1994). 28 Khalida Messaoudi is a former high-school maths teacher and member of the PAGS, the Algerian Communist Party. She was one of the organizers of a series of 1992 demonstrations allegedly against the establishment of an ‘Islamic state’. But she began her career as an activist in 1981 when she helped spearhead opposition to Algeria’s restrictive Family Code and was a founding member of the Independent Association for the Triumph of Women’s Rights. Khalida Messaoudi is one of Algeria’s most controversial feminists and women leaders. She has been critical of the Algerian opposition, especially the Socialist Forces Front (FFS) and the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Amine Alibhaye writes of her in L‘Algérie et l’intégrisme laïque (Paris: La Découverte, 2001): ‘Khalida Messaoudi? Qui est-ce? Est-elle apte à évaluer le rapport armée-peuple? Que représente t-elle sur l’échiquier politique algérien? Khalida Messaoudi, candidate à la députation, alors que le FIS gagnait les élections en 1991, fut créditée de moins de 1% de vote à Alger. Elle a été, depuis, “nommée” députée puis ministre par l’Armée.’ [Khalida Messaoudi? Who is she? Is she qualified to evaluate the relationship between the Army and the people? What does she represent on the Algerian political scene? When she ran for the Algerian National Assembly (parliament) in 1991, she got 1% of the votes in Algiers, while the FIS was posed to win the elections. For now, she has been ‘appointed’ Member of Parliament and then Minister by the Army.] 29 Shari’a is the Arabic word for the Islamic religious code. Islam draws no distinction between spiritual and secular life. Shari’a encompasses both religious rituals and everyday socio-political and economic activities. Nevertheless, conservatives have focused on the literal word rather than the message, and thus moved away from truly comprehended Islam. In my opinion, there must be an ongoing Ijtihad, i.e. a continuous reinterpretation of the foundational Islamic texts, the Qur’an and Hadith. Though conservative Muslims state, on the one hand, that ‘presentday Muslims’ do not have the education and the know-how in Islamic law to perform Ijtihad, liberal movements within Islam, on the other hand, generally maintain that any Muslim can conduct Ijtihad. They make a case in calling attention to the absence of an accepted clerical

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hierarchy or bureaucratic organization in Islam. (See Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, Cambridge: Islamic Text Society, 1991; Abdelwahab Meddeb, La maladie de l’Islam (Alger: Editions Chihab, 2002); Yussuf al-Qaradawi’s homepage, and Muhammad Said al-Ashmawy, L’islam politique (1987), trans. Richard Jacquemond (Alger: Laphomic, 1990). 30 Louisa Hanoune is the spokesperson for the Trotskyite Workers’ Party, the only political party in Algeria – or anywhere else in the Middle East and North Africa, for that matter – to be led by a woman. She openly condemned the brutal repression that the military regime resorted to in order to crush the Islamist insurgency. No one was surprised when Algeria’s most radical Islamist leader, Ali Benhadj, paid a visit to Louisa Hanoune as soon as he had completed his twelveyear prison term. If today, amidst the devastated political landscape of the Algerian opposition, the Workers Party is still present, it is largely because its spokesperson has imposed respect and consideration. She also displays steadfastness and political coherence, qualities that are somewhat rare in the Algerian political community. In the early 1980s, she campaigned with other feminists against the Family Code. As a member of an underground, far-left party, the Workers Socialist Organization (OST), she was arrested and tortured in 1983 and spent six months in prison. Following her incarceration, Louisa Hanoune stepped up her political commitment, openly defying the authorities, handing out OST flyers in broad daylight, and travelling the world to speak on behalf of international causes like the cancelling of Third World debt and the recognition of people’s social and economic rights. For Valentine Moghadam, she has come to incarnate ‘the shift from nationalism to feminism and the rise of militant women’s organizations that has been a striking feature of the 1980s’ (Moghadam 1994: 5). 31 Salima Ghezali is a prominent feminist and trade unionist whose courageous journalism places her in constant danger. In a country where more than 60 journalists and media workers have been killed since 1993 – the highest number anywhere in the world – she is the editor of the leading Algerian French-language weekly La Nation, making her perhaps the only woman responsible for a newspaper in the Arab-Islamic world. She was arrested and detained for her activities on this paper, which has been prevented from publishing since December 1996, for refusing to comply with government censorship. Salima Ghezali audaciously and regularly revealed the abusive and criminal nature of the Algerian Nomenklatura and exposed their ‘war on terror’. The powers that be could not stomach the reports of La Nation, especially the op-eds signed by Salima Ghezali and Abed Charef. Besides her journalistic bravery Ghezali is also known for her feminist

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activism. She founded the Association for Women’s Emancipation, in 1989, created the feminist magazine Nissa, and was among the founding members of Women of Europe and of the Maghreb, of which she is vice-president. Ghezali constantly condemns the Pouvoir’s attacks on freedom of expression, human rights, and the behaviour of Islamist groups and parties. She was also awarded the ‘Best 1997 Chief ’s Editor’ prize by the World Press Review, and was a recipient of the Sakharov Prize awarded by The European Parliament in 1997. At present, she writes, campaigns and travels the world to defend the cause of peace. ‘Choisir son camp, c’est simplement choisir ses victimes’ [when you choose your side, you simply choose the side of the victims], she declared in October 1993. She has made it quite clear that all sides are to blame, but in January 1992 the Government ‘made a clear choice for violence to control society’. (See ‘SALIMA GHEZALI – L’honneur sauvé de l’Algérie’, by Kerchouche Dalila, L’Express, 24 August 1985.) See also ‘Ali Bin Hajar Yarwi lil-Hayat Tajribatahu Dakhil al-Jama’ah alMusallah wa-tafasil Inshiqaqihi Anha’ [Ali Ben Hedjar tells the Londonbased al-Hayat of his experience inside the Islamic Armed Group [GIA] and details his split from the group], al-Hayat, 5 February 2000, p. 8; Nesroulah 2000); Bedjaoui et al. 1999; Sweeney 1998; ‘Algeria: neither among the living nor the dead: state-sponsored disappearances in Algeria’, Human Rights Watch, February 1998; and Sane, 1997. In the current debate about political Islam in the Maghreb, it is interesting to note the views of Muhammad Abduh, the Egyptian modernist and the Grand Mufti (theologian) of Egypt (1899–1905), who was one of the advocates of the back-to-the-Qur’an-and-onwardto-modernity movement. He explained that Islam is compatible with modernity. As he delineated women’s subjugation by men, in his own society, in terms of a depravity that affected the whole society, Abduh stressed many signs of this persecution, most importantly the practice of polygamy. It was this point that led him to his most brilliant Qur’anic interpretations, in which he sought the abrogation of polygamy in Islam. He claimed that while polygamy was a healthy practice among the pious early believers, it had evolved into a vile habit of uncontrolled lechery in his own epoch. ‘A nation that practices polygamy cannot be educated. Religion was revealed for the benefit of its people; if one of its provisions begins to harm rather than benefits the community … the application of that provision has to be changed according to the changed needs of the group’ (Abduh n.d.: 117). For an enlightening discussion of this episode, see Marx-Scouras 1993: 172–82. Hisham Sharabi coined the term ‘neo-patriarchal state’. It perfectly illustrates the nature of Maghrebi states. According to Sharabi, unlike

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Gender and Identity in North Africa liberal or social democratic societies, in the ‘neo-patriarchal state’ the ruler, state, or ruling party plays the role of the patriarch (Sharabi 1988). Wole Soyinka, ‘This Past Must Address This Present’, Nobel Laureate Address, 8 December 1986. Catherine Eyquem, ‘La foi et l’écriture’, Jeune Afrique (Paris), n°1157, 9 mars 1983. In an interview, Halima Benhaddou stated that her novel, which is a love story set in the time of the Spanish occupation of the Rif, is a blend of the real and the imaginary (‘Aïcha c’est l’héroïne, mais la rebelle c’est moi’, Interview with Khadîdja Zeroual, Sindbad (Rabat), n° 4, 15–30 novembre 1982). ‘Des textes du malentendu, car l’insistance sur l’opposition correspond surtout à une attente du public, pour qui la situation d’entre-deux de l’écrivain national de langue française, édité le plus souvent à l’étranger, le met en devoir de dire ce qui, par conformisme de groupe, on ne peut pas dire quand on reste entre soi, à l’intérieure du cercle nationale’ (Bonn and Khadda 1996: 12). These novels are depicted as ‘romans de l’urgence’. For Christiane Chaulet-Achour, ‘ces œuvres sont prises dans une tension entre création qui demande distance et médiation esthétique et urgence qui tire vers l’immédiateté du témoignage et les degrés zéro ou tragique de l’écriture’ (Chaulet-Achour 1999: 188). Dhakirat al-jasad is a stream-of-consciousness type of novel dedicated to the writer’s father and to the late Francophone Algerian novelist and poet Malek Haddad (1927–78), who once declared that ‘French language’ has always been his ‘exile’, and decided not to write in French after independence. As Mosteghanemi indicates in her dedication, Malek Haddad ‘died as a loving martyr of the Arabic language’ (Mosteghanemi 1985: 232). Chapter 2 I apply the prefix ‘post’ to signify the obvious implication ‘after’, which in this context stands for the period subsequent to the political liberation of Morocco, as a nation, from French rule in 1956. For an interesting discussion of this aspect of Djebar’s writing, see Erickson (1998). This is an Algerian dialect term commonly used to refer to the contempt and disparagement that Algerians have felt ever since the post-independence governments failed to bring about social justice. Former President Ahmed Ben Bella (1962–1965) also once popularized the term when King Hassan II’s army launched a land attack on the western part of Algeria in July 1963 to get back what he claimed to be Moroccan territory. In a speech broadcast on the radio, Ben Bella used

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the term ‘Hagrouna’ in reference to King Hassan’s opportunism and the Moroccan Royal Armed Forces brutality. (See also Adjerid 1992). 4 This association, which is not legal but tolerated by the Moroccan monarch, advocates the implementation of Shari’a and the establishment of an Islamic state. On 2 June 2005, Sheikh Abdeslam Yacine’s daughter, Nadia Yacine, the current leader of the Movement who also heads the feminist branch of the association, declared in an interview with the Moroccan weekly paper Al Ousbouiya Al Jadida that she believed monarchy is not appropriate for Morocco. Consequently, Nadia Yacine and two reporters from the paper faced charges for defamation of the monarchy. 5 Asala comes from the Arabic word ‘Asl’ meaning origin, roots, and stem. For Mazyar Lotfalian, it is one of those ‘keywords’, such as ‘Sahwa’ (awakening), which have a huge significance in the Islamic world in the context of the political discourse of modernity (Lotfalian 2001). 6 Somebody trained in fiqh is called faqih or fqih (plural fuqaha), a term that means a Muslim holy man. Fiqh is also a natural development of Shari’a. It contends with the observance of rites, ethics and social legislation. There are actually four major schools of fiqh for Sunni Muslims and two schools for the Shi’a. The social historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) describes fiqh as ‘knowledge of the rules of God which concern the actions of people who … obey the [divine] law respecting what is required (wajib), forbidden (haraam), recommended (mandūb), disapproved (makruh) or merely permitted (mubah) (see Berg 2000). 7 A comparable approach is evident in the Algerian Yamina Mechakra’s La grotte éclatée (Algiers: ENAL, 1979 [1986]). 8 An issue elaborated in much more detail in Abouzeid’s last work The Last Chapter (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2003). 9 See Serfaty 1992; Oufkir 1999; Feehily 2006. 10 In his introduction to the new French edition of The Wretched of the Earth, Gerard Chaliand points out, ‘Fanon sees the urban dispossessed as the “fer de lance urbain”’, [urban spearhead], ‘cette cohorte d’affamés détribalisés, déclassés, les plus radicalement révolutionnaires d’un peuple colonisé’ [this cohort of undernourished, detribalized underclass, the most radically revolutionary of the colonized people]. The Wretched of the Earth (Paris: Collection Folio, 1991), p. 28. 11 Throughout the narrative, the name of the husband is withheld from the reader. It only appears for the first, and last, time at the end of the text. A similar technique is used in Assia Djebar’s A Sister to Scheherazade. 12 Few issues have provoked as much discussion and interest as the subject of women and Islam. Yet, when engaging in such a debate one has to bear in mind that one is very likely to be identified as a Muslim fanatic or an enemy of Islam. The whole issue is so charged with passion and

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Gender and Identity in North Africa paranoia that attempting a rational assessment of just what are the rights of women in Islam is no easy matter. But if one gets back to the foundational texts of Islam one can see that a woman too has the right to repudiate her husband. Bukhari reports in his Sahih Muslim that the Prophet Muhammad felt sad for Buraira’s husband and valued his love for her. So he went to her and asked her to go back to her husband. She asked the prophet, ‘Are you ordering or interceding?’ He answered that he was interceding. She said, ‘Then I am not going back.’ This example shows that the mere fact of a woman deciding to leave her husband is sufficient grounds for legal separation between them. This should be contrasted with Zahra’s fate and all the Family Laws that forbid a woman to seek divorce. So, any careful analysis of the teaching of Islam or the history of Islamic civilization will show clear evidence of women’s equality with man. There is also another Qur’anic verse that clearly stipulates the principle of human egalitarianism, including sex equality, and eliminates all discrimination due to sex, race, colour, nationality, caste or tribe. As all humans spring from only one source: ‘O Mankind, keep your duty to your Lord who created you from a single soul and from it created its mate (of the same kind) and spread from these too many men and women’ (Qur’an: IV, 1). Al-Bukhari, Al Sahih (Collection of Authentic Hadith), (Beirut: Dar alMa’rifa, 1978), Vol. 4, p. 226. Through a historical and methodological investigation of this Hadith, Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi has established that it is a ‘weak’ Hadith. It alludes to a woman who had taken power among the Persians between AD 629 and 632 (Mernissi 1987 [1991]: 49–50). Head of the Islamic Studies Department at the University of Rabat, Morocco, a renowned scholar of tafsir and widely published. See, for instance, Bessis and Belhassen 1992. Nafisa, a descendant of Imam Ali who was such an eminent authority on hadith that Imam al-Shafi’ sat in her circle in al-Fustat, when he was at the summit of his reputation. And Shaikha Shuhda, who lectured in public in one of the principal mosques of Baghdad to large audiences on literature, rhetoric and poetry, and was one of the leading scholars of Islam. Such is the heritage to which women like Abouzeid are increasingly turning to for inspiration. This rich tradition offers modern women a wide range of models that motivate intellectually and culturally as well as politically. This whole approach contributes to an emphasis on women’s rights and boosts their dignity as part of an overall struggle to better their status and affirm their identity (Roded 1994: 221). In The Veil and the Male Elite, Fatima Mernissi describes the process by which the Hadith was transmitted. ‘The prophet received Allah’s

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message orally and transmitted it orally’ (29), and after the death of Prophet Muhammad it turned out to be crucial to write down the Hadith, or ‘everything that [the Prophet] is supposed to have said or done. His opinions, his reactions to events, the way in which he justified his decisions had to be put in writing so that they could be drawn upon and referred to later’ (34). Thus, the Hadith transcribers started collecting ‘the testimony of those who had heard the Hadith directly’ such as the Companions, or indirectly such as the Followers, and established the Isnad, i.e. ‘the chain of people who transmitted it from its source’. The Hadith transcribers also had the task of authenticating the credibility and integrity of the source. Nevertheless, due to their unwritten nature, the Hadith are ‘extremely varied because there are various versions of the same event’ (35). 17 See Mernissi 1991b; Ahmed 1992; Assia Djebar, Loin de Médine, 1991. 1

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Chapter 3 A type of steam bath which, unlike the sauna, can be categorized as ‘wet’. The method involved in taking a traditional Turkish bath is almost the same as that of a sauna, but has a lot to do with the ancient Roman bathing practices. At first the bather has to relax in the warm room which is permanently heated by a flow of hot dry air which encourages perspiration. Then, the bather moves to the hot room where he/she performs a full body wash and gets a massage. Finally, the bather retires to the cooling room to have some rest and relaxation. ‘The self-sustaining structures of power, by means of which women’s interests are always ultimately subordinated to male interests, constitute the social order known as ‘patriarchy’, a designation that applies to almost all human societies, past and present’ (Morris 1994: 4). Patriarchy is often used as a figure of speech, a paradigm of power imbalance and the cause for the predicament of colonialism and neocolonialism. The colonial language – in Djebar’s terms, the ‘step-mother tongue’ [Le français m’est langue marâtre] Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia, p. 240. The novel’s title is from the Tamazight song, ‘So vast the prison crushing me/Release, where will you come from?’ ‘se delivrent-elles … tout a fait du rapport d’ombre entretenu des siecles durant avec leur propre corps’, Djebbar, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, p. 9. A Sister to Scheherazade examines a number of Islamic-feminist issues such as obedience to one’s husband (Tamkin); insubordination towards one’s husband (Nushuz); maintenance (Nafaqa); and polygamy (Ta’adud Ezawdjet).

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The four major schools of fiqh for Sunni Muslims consider Hadith collections as significant mechanisms in determining the Sunna. On the one hand, the intended meaning of Hadith in the Islamic tradition is something attributed to Prophet Muhammad, rather than the Qur’an, and on the other hand, the majority of Muslims consider Hadith to be an indispensable appendage to and clarification of the Qur’an. See Lucas, 2004. 8 The Sahih of al-Bukhari and Muslim, as it is commonly referred to, is one of the six major Hadith collections of Sunni Islam. It is a compilation of the authenticated Prophet Muhammad’s Hadith collected by the Muslim scholar Muhammad Ibn Ismail al-Bukhari (810–870) and published during his lifetime. In fact, the title of this collection, commonly referred to as Sahih al-Bukhari, is: al-Jaami’ alSaheeh al-Musnad al-Mukhtasar min Umoor Rasool Allah wa sunanihi wa Ayyaamihi. This can be translated as: The Abridged Collection of Authentic Hadith with Connected Chains regarding Matters Pertaining to the Prophet, His practices and His Times. Most Sunni Muslims consider this book as their most trusted collection of Hadith and it has been referred to as ‘The most authentic book after the Qur’an’. 9 ‘The word used in Arabic to denote the new bride of the same man, the first wife’s rival; this word means “wound” – the one who hurts, who cuts open the flesh, or the one who feels hurt, it’s the same thing! … In our land, the man has a right to four wives simultaneously, as much as to say, four … wounds’ (Djebar, Scheherazade, p. 90). 10 Djebar, Femmes d’Alger, p. 171: ‘Femmes en attente toujours [dans] cette atmosphère raréfiée de la claustration.’ [Women always on standby [in] this rarefied atmosphere of cloistering]. 11 In Le corps dans la tradition au Maghreb (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984), p. 23, Malek Chebel views corporeality in the Maghreb in dichotomous terms: ‘compared to the complete liberty of expression left to the male body, the young girl’s body is very early submitted to a repertory of prohibitions … The young boy can roll around in all directions, raise his legs in the air, proceed to a complete uncovering of his body, and appreciate precociously its possibilities and its limits. The girl, in contrast, can neither lie down as she would probably have a tendency to do, imitating her little brother or creating original positions, nor raise her legs in the air, nor open her thighs, nor spread her knees when she is seated, nor jump if she is older.’ 12 The veil is a sign of belonging to a religious community. The best illustration could be the African-American women who entered the Nation of Islam in the 1960s. Far from being disempowered by the veil, or what they sometimes called the ‘uniform’, these African-American women used it to reject their previous sexual objectification and to

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signify their independence and social worth in their community. (In this respect see Moxley Rouse, 2004.) But in the MENA region, I have to note that the Lebanese Nazira Zin al-Din (1908–1976), daughter of a Mufti (Muslim authority), reveals in her Unveiling and Veiling (1928) that men have historically framed Muslim prescriptions for women, particularly concerning the veil. See Shaaban 1995. Reference is also made here to the military junta that has ruled Algeria ever since Colonel Houari Boumediene’s 1965 coup. (See Cheref 2005: 13.) This confiscation of power by new indigenous ruling classes in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia has led to catastrophic results. The rule of law is totally absent, but the personality cult is a form of government. As the Tunisian poet, Salah Garmadi has put it: ‘Il est formellement interdit de créer des chefs-d’oeuvre et absolument obligatoire d’adorer les chefs d’Etat.’ The Algerian military dictatorship, despite its cosmetic democracy, has siphoned off billions of dollars from the oil revenues, repressed thousands of opponents, and waged a civil war to remain in power. Algerians are in no way better off than in the 1930s. In many ways the situation is comparable to the absolute tyranny of the Makhzen in Morocco and the reactionary and totalitarian regime of Tunisia, except that the Maghreb is, for what the word may suggest, ‘postcolonial’. See also Della Suda, 1988 And Addi, 2003. A benchmark of feminist struggle, Family Law (Code de la Famille) has been among the highest agenda items of Islamic and secular women’s movements. The notorious Code de la Famille was concocted in 1984 by the reactionary and cynical government of Colonel-President Chadli Benjedid. Under this law, women remain legal minors; a woman’s decision to marry must be authorized by a guardian; and it is difficult and disadvantageous for women to initiate divorce. Moreover, there is actually no national consensus that Algeria’s Code de la Famille, as reformed in 2005, incarnates the ideal interpretation of Shari’a principles. Algeria thrust aside Islamic law a long time ago in favour of French-inspired law, except in the case of personal status matters. Assia Djebar, Femmes d’Alger, p. 68: ‘Parler entre nous et regarder. Regarder dehors, regarder hors des murs et des prisons.’ [To talk among ourselves and look. Look outside, look out of the walls and the prisons]. Djebar, 1967, pp. 38–9. It is interesting to note that in her illuminating reading of Toni Morrison’s Sula, Elizabeth Abel remarks that ‘friendship in Sula is the vehicle and product of self-knowledge, the uniquely valuable and rigorous relationship. By combining the adolescent need for identification with the adult need for independence, Morrison presents an ideal of female friendship dependent not on love, obligation, or compassion, but on an

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Gender and Identity in North Africa almost impossible conjunction of sameness and autonomy, attainable only with another version of oneself ’ (Abel, 1981, p. 429). Besides the numerous artistic qualities they share and the way their works resonate with current issues that address the course of their communities’ cultural, social and political changes, both Djebar and Abouzeid have had almost the same marital history. During the Algerian Revolution and while in Tunisia with hundreds of Algerian Resistants, Djebar married Ahmed Ould-Rouïs, a member of the Resistance, in 1958. However, the marriage ended in divorce after independence, and in 1980 she married the poet Malek Alloula, whom she divorced recently. See Addi 1995. ‘Dans l’Algérie indépendante, le Pouvoir politique ne s’est pratiquement jamais trouvé en face d’intellectuels contestataires.’ Youcef Zirem, ‘Intellectuels Algériens: La sempiternelle compromission’, La Nation 130 (16–22 January 1996), p. 21. ‘Les événements d’Octobre 1988 révèlent précisément la manifestation de la conscience de soi d’une société désirant s’affranchir d’un … assujettissement … vécu par tous comme le résultat d’une politique autoritaire.’ (Barkat 1990: 74). Chapter 4 See for instance Enan 1946. All other translations are mine, unless otherwise stated. This book first appeared translated into English by Paul Bowles as For Bread Alone in 1973. The Arabic version was published ten years later. About the circumstances that led to this aberration see the interview with Mohamed Choukri in Alif, No. 6, Spring 1986. However, the sequel al-Shuttar was first published in Arabic in 1993. As many critics have noted, Djebar’s literary production follows an itinerary that goes from anti-autobiographical writing (La Soif 1957) to autobiography (Fantasia 1985), followed by Ombre sultane (1987) and Vaste est la prison (1995). ‘La 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 collectif ’ [Djebar’s literary production is made clear by the idea that history of the subject is a text inscribed within the general field of history … the ‘I’ carries an expression and a message that are not only personal but collective.] (Gafaïti, 1991). Despite the apparent freedom that Tunisian women witnessed during the reign of President Habib Bourguiba (1957–1992) also known as ‘The Supreme Warrior’, the situation under Colonel-President Zine AlAbidine Ben Ali (1987) is not encouraging.

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The Cultural Club established in 1984 was named after Tahar alHaddad, the first male advocate of the liberation of women in Tunisia, and in 1985, the women’s magazine Nisa’a came into existence. 7 Society for International Development, ‘Report on Middle East and North Africa Region: Tunis Symposium‘, 64th Governing Council Meeting, 17–18 November 1989, Document 1, p. 7, in Tucker 1993. 8 Overall, the description of the body is absent from Tunisian women’s literature and Guellouz is no exception. No explicit depiction of women’s body is articulated, only generalizing statements (Fontaine 1985: 108). However, Naima Essid (La reptation and Frissons de rêve) was the first woman to produce brash and enterprising texts. 9 What Eagleton is saying about sixteenth-century England is relevant to twentieth-century Tunisia. 10 If Jean Déjeux indicates that Maghrebi women’s autobiographies are exclusively affected by the author’s own concerns, Charles Bonn has more recently alluded to the politics of the French publishing industry as being a decisive factor in the proliferation of Maghrebi women’s autobiographical discourse. Bonn notes that Maghrebi women’s writing has been effectively ‘ghetto-ized’ by the French publishing industry (Bonn 1994: 99). 11 In Oran, langue morte (1997) Djebar pays a poignant tribute to the Oran-based playwright, theatre director and actor Abdelkader Alloula, who was gunned down, according to the Algerian government version, by ‘Islamists’ in 1994.

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Abbas, Ferhat. Le jeune algérien. Paris: Éditions de la Jeune Parque, 1931. — L’Indépendance confisquée. Paris: Flammarion, 1984. Abdelkrim-Chikh, Rabia. ‘Les enjeux politiques et symboliques de la lutte des femmes pour l’égalité entre les sexes en Algérie’, Peuples Méditerranéens 48–9 (Juillet–Décembre 1988): 276. — ‘Les femmes exogames: Entre la loi de Dieu et les droits de l’homme’, Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 27 (1988): 237. Abdi, A.A. ‘Frantz Fanon and Post-Colonial Realities: A Temporal Perspective,’ Wasafiri Autumn 1999: 53. Abdoun, Mohamed Ismail. Classiques du Monde: Kateb Yacine. Alger: SNED, 1983. Abduh, Muhammad. al-Islam wal-Mar’a fi Ra’y al-Imam Muhammad Abduh. Muhammad ‘Imara (ed). Cairo: n.d. Abel, Elizabeth. ‘(E)merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women’, Signs (Spring 1981). Abouzeid, Leila. Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Toward Independence (1983). Trans. Barbara Parmenter. Austin, Texas: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1989. — ‘An Interview with Leila Abouzeid’, Ad-Dad: A Journal of Arabic Literature (1993): 8. — The Last Chapter. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2003. Accad, Evelyne. Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Modern Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World. Sherbrooke, Quebec: Editions Naaman, 1978. — Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle-East. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

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Glossary

195

GLOSSARY

Ahellil / Isefra: forms of oral literature dominant among the Gourara tribes around Timimoun. Akhawat al-Safa (sisters of purity): the first Moroccan women’s association which appeared in the 1940s. Al-Adl Wal-Ihsane (Justice and Charity): a Moroccan Islamist association, founded by Sheikh Abdeslam Yacine. ‘Am al-Fayl: refers to the battle of ‘Year of the Elephant,’ as it is recorded in the Holy Qur’an 105:5. Amazigh: according to Leo Africanus (1494–1554?), Amazigh meant ‘free men’ and is used to refer to Berber people, the autochthones of present day Maghreb (North Africa). Asala: this word which means authenticity comes from the Arabic word ‘Asl’ meaning origin, roots, and stem. Dharra: this Algerian dialect word whose origin is form classical Arabic is used to refer to the new bride of the same man, the first wife’s rival. This word also means injure, hurt, or damage. Djellabah: a traditional long, loose-fitting outer garment with long sleeves worn in the Maghreb. Traditional Djellabahs are in general made of two types of fabric, cotton for summertime wear and coarse wool for winter. They are also in different shapes and colours. Men’s Djellabahs are generally baggy and plain and women’s Djellabahs are tighter but both styles (male or female) have a baggy hood. The religion of the region, i.e., Islam is a significant factor in determining people’s way of dressing. Djellabahs envelop the whole body and are thus a suitable modest garment.

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Ennahda: the Arabic term which means ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Awakening.’ It is also the name used by many political parties in the MENA region. Fiqh: an Arabic term meaning substantial comprehension of the divine law. In theory it means Islamic jurisprudence. Hadith: that which is new, modern, innovative, fresh; also a piece of information conveyed orally. But in Islamic terminology, the term Hadith refers to sayings related to the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, or about his tacit agreement of something said or done in his presence. Haïk: Algerian dialect word for the light or heavy, woollen fabric in which Algerian women used to cover themselves once outdoors, leaving only one eye visible. Halqa: a type of oral storytelling in the Maghreb when the storyteller is in the centre and the audience is around in circle. Hammam: traditional Turkish bath in the Maghreb. Hogra: Algerian dialect term meaning mistreatment, contempt, and abuse. Isnad: the chain of people who transmitted the Hadith all the way from its source. Istiqlal: Independence. Ijtihad: a technical term that describes the process of interpreting the foundational Islamic texts, the Qur’an and Hadith. L’e’dou: an Algerian dialect word which stems from classical Arabic meaning ‘the enemy.’ Moudjahidates: women freedom-fighters during the Algerian Liberation War (1954–62). Mudawana: Arabic term used in Moroccan legislation to designate personal status law based on the Maliki school of Sunni Islam. Nafaqa: maintenance provided for a divorced woman and her minor children. Nisa’a: the plural Arabic word for women. Nushuz: insubordination towards one’s husband.

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197

Qawwamun: this term is used in Islamic jurisprudence to refer to the authority of man in providing for his family; it also means to be in charge, liable, and accountable as it is revealed in Qur’an 4.34 Sahwa: awakening and Islamic revival. Salafiya: refers to the adoption of the early ways of Islam as a paradigm to breathe new life into the glories of the past and its richness. It is eventually a call to revert to the rule of Islamic orthodoxy. And a Salafist is one who adopts the Salafiya. Shari’a: the Arabic word to designate the Islamic law as it is prescribed in the Holy Qur’an and Sunna. As Islam draws no difference between spiritual and secular life, Shari’a encompasses the religious rituals and everyday sociopolitical and economic activities. Sheikh: a title given to a man well-versed in Islamic matters. Sunna: the authenticated Hadith – sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad that constitute the foundation of Islamic law. Tafsir: the Arabic word for ‘interpretation.’ But in the Islamic tradition Tafsir refers to exegesis or commentary of the Qur’an. Tamazight: with its various regional dialects, Tamazight is the native language of the Maghreb. Ta’adud Ezawdjet: polygamy. Tamkin: obedience to one’s husband, but it is commonly used to refer to a woman’s obligation to the sexual demands of her husband all the time and his ‘divine’ right to physically batter her if ever she refuses to comply. In Feminists and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives, Mai Yamani (1996: 15) examines this notion of Tamkin with close reference to the Qur’an (49:13).

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Index

199

INDEX

Abbas, Ferhat, 35 Abdelkader, Emir, 34 Abdelkrim-Chikh, Rabia, 100, 136 Abdi, Ali A., 83 Abouzeid, Leila, 4, 7, 9, 14, 17, 21, 22, 25, 27, 29, 39, 42, 49, 53-81, 83, 87, 94, 96, 97, 99, 106, 109, 110, 125, 139, 141, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153 Académie Française, 24, 38 Accad, Evelyn, 39, 40, 107, 109 Achebe, Chinua, 6, 60 Achour, Christiane, 45 Adjraoui, Nadjia, 16 Agency, 22, 25, 26, 29, 53, 54, 83, 110 Aggoun, Lounis, 45 Ahellil, 36 Ahmad, Aijaz, 10, 11 Ahmed, Leila, 79 Akhawat al-Safa, 67 Al-Adl Wal-Ihsane, 47 Al-Bukhari, 97 Al Fassi, Malika, 67 Algeria, 4, 6, 16–18, 25, 26, 31, 32, 35, 43, 44, 46–8, 52, 63, 76, 84–6, 89–90, 92, 93, 98, 100, 104, 105, 107–9, 112, 113, 122, 141, 143, 147, 154 Algerian authorities/government/powers that be, 44, 89, 91 Algerian Civil War, 45–7, 51 Algerian literature, 15

Algeria (continued ) Algerian women, 26, 35, 43, 46, 51, 86, 89, 92, 94, 100, 104, 108, 113–14 Code de la famille, 48 Contemporary Algeria, 92, 94, 111 Invasion of Algeria, 32, 64 Post-independence Algeria, 63, 93, 105, 107, 111 Sexualization of Algeria, 31–4 Algerian War of Independence/ Algerian War of Liberation/ Algerian Revolution, 6, 15, 37–9, 41, 43, 44, 103, 106, 109 Al-Jlasi, Zahra, 51 Al-Kahina, 24, 34, 119 Al Kahli, Dhaouya, 66, 67 Allal el-Fassi, 55, 67 Alloula, Abdelkader, 45, 142 Alloula, Malek, 98 Alridge, Owen, 1 Alterity, 5, 53, 117, 149 Amireh, Amal, 121 Amrane, Djamila, 41 Amrouche, Jean, 15 Amrouche, Fatma, 125 Amrouche, Taos, 35, 39, 142 Andalusian, 85, 88 Anderson, Benedict, 40 Arab, 17, 24, 30, 33, 36, 37, 65, 79, 88, 100, 119, 126, 141, 143

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Arab feminism, 61, 107 Arab World, 51, 61, 77, 84, 104, 131 Arabia, 42, 97 Arabian Nights, The, 85, 89, 92, 100, 102, 111, 114 Arabic culture, 60, 61, 65 Arabic language, 3, 6, 7, 13, 14, 17, 18, 30, 37, 50, 51, 52, 63, 64, 90–2, 101, 122, 140–2, 144, 155 Arab-Islamic, 108, 125 Arabism (Pan-Arabism), 88 Arabophone, 3–4, 8–9, 30, 124, 154, 155, 124 Arabophone and Francophone literature, 9, 154–5 Arafa, Muhammad, 77 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 6, 60 Armitage, Anne, 140 Asala, 55, 80 Ashcroft, Bill, 9, 19, 20, 21, 29, 91, 126, 134, 140, 143–4, 149, 155 Aslaoui, Leila, 45, 46 As-Siddiq, Abu Bakr, 80 Assima, Fériel, 51 Azzam, Maha, 55

Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 16, 64, 65, 154 Benmansour, Latifa, 45, 51 Ben Slimane, Fatima, 67 Bensmaïa, Reda, 21, 35 Benstock, Shari, 69, 109 Ben Yahia, Turkia Labidi, 51 Ben Youssef, Nicole, 51 Berber, 13, 18, 36, 37, 68, 119, 125, 126, 141, 143 Bernard, Stephan, 56 Bernheimer, Charles, 2–3, 19 Berque, Jacques, 52 Bertrand, Louis, 36, 160 Bhabha, Homi, 4, 53, 54, 60, 98, 104 Bittari, Zoubida, 60, 125 Bloch, Maurice, 134 Boehmer, Elleke, 78 Bonn, Charles, 16, 51 Boudjedra, Rachid, 45, 52 Boumediene, Houari, 44, 107 Bouraoui, Nina, 49, 89, 125 Bourboune, Mourad, 15, Boussouf, Malika, 45, 51 Boutta, Cherifa, 76 Brahimi, Himoud, 36 Brodski, Bella, 117 Brooks, Peter, 3

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12 Baldwin, James, 6 Béji, Hélé, 16, 51, 60, 79 Belgique, 88 Belhadj Yahiya, Emna, 51 Ben, Myriam, 49 Ben Abi Ziane, Aicha, 66 Ben Ali, Zine Al-Abidine, 107 Benallègue, Nora, 43, 46 Benadada, Assia, 66 Benaissa, Slimane, 45 Benaouda, Bakhti, 45 Benayoun-Szmidt, Yvette, 12 Ben Cheikh, Djamel Eddine, 36 Benchekroun, Sihem, 16 Benhabyles, Saïda, 45, 46 Benhaddou, Halima, 16, 49, 50, 140 Benjedid, Chadli, 44, 107

Camus, Albert, 15 Carter, Mia, 60–1 Césaire, Aimé, 6 Chabbi, Fadhila, 51 Chaïbi, Aïcha, 50, 51, 122 Chaulet-Achour, Christiane, 45 Chebel, Malek, 71 Cheriet, Abdellah, 16 Childs, Peter, 58 Chimenti, Elisa, 39 Choukri, Mohamed, 64, 65, 124, 155 Chraïbi, Driss, 16, 37, 39, 125, 126 Christian, 32, 129 Christian, Barbara, 10 Cixous, Hélène, 117 Clifford, James, 148 Coe, Richard N., 126

Index Cold War, 7 Colonial, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 53, 62, 79, 84, 89, 90 Anti-colonial, 55, 88, 105 Colonial control, 20, 140 Colonial conquest, 32, 33, 88 Colonial literature, 15 Colonial narrative, 29 Colonial period, 31, 62 Colonial racism, 25, 83 Colonial rule, 20, 29, 34, 109, 153 Colonial violence, 26, 84 Colonialism, 6, 14, 20–1, 33, 42, 48, 54, 55, 57, 62, 78 Colonialist, 5, 31, 55, 67, 84, 114, 119 Colonization, 24, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37, 64, 84, Decolonization, 16, 19, 26, 37, 44, 51, 63, 76, 84, 105 Neo-colonialism, 19, 25, 53, 54, 89 Comparative Literature, 1–-3, 5, 7, 19, 27, 148 Connor, Steven, 54 Cooke, Miriam, 84, 91, 96, 97, 105, 109, 110, 153 Cosmopolitanism, 60–1 Coward, Rosalind, 21 Davis, Angela, 6 De Beauvoir, Simone, 153 Debèche, Djamila, 15, 35, 39, 52 Déjeux, Jean, 16, 37, 52, 140, 141 Delcroix, Catherine, 106 Dhar, Tej N., 21 Dialect, 37 Algerian dialect, 86, 91, 142 Arabic dialect, 37, 142, Tunisian dialect, 143, 144 Diaspora, 54 Dib, Mohamed, 15, 35, 37 Dispossession, 53 Djabali, Hawa, 45 Djaout, Tahar, 16, 45, 140

201

Djebar, Assia, 4, 7, 9, 14, 15–17, 21–7, 29, 31, 34, 35, 37–9, 42, 45–9, 51, 52, 54, 55, 59, 60, 79, 80, 83–115, 119, 121, 122, 125, 138–43, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153 Djeghloul, Abdelkader, 45, 164 Djemaï, Abdelkader, 45, 154 Djilani, Hajer, 51 Donadey, Anne, 22, 54, 121, 140, 155 Du Bois, W.E.B., 6 Dunwoodie, Peter, 36 Eagleton, Terry, 139 Eakin, Paul John, 144 Eberhardt, Isabelle, 15 Edwards, John, 144 El Amrania, Aicha, 66 El Khattabi, Mohamed Ben Abdelkrim, 55, 66 Ellison, Ralph, 6 Ellmann, Mary, 18 Emecheta, Buchi, 6 Ennahda, 47 Erickson, John, 98 Essentialism, 18 Ethnicity, 3, 35, 60, 154 Exile, 15, 45, 57, 67, 69, 88, 143, 153 Fadhma n’Soumer, 24, 34, 119 Fanon, Frantz, 6, 25, 29, 53, 60, 65, 66, 83, 103–4, 153 Farès, Nabile, 15 Favre, Lucienne, 15 Fawzi, Mahmud, 18 Feminism, 1, 3–4, 19, 21, 22, 47–8, 61, 76, 92, 96, 105, 154 Feraoun, Mouloud, 15, 35, 37, 125, 142 Fernea, Elizabeth, 61, 63–4, 69 Fiqh, 48 FIS (Islamic Salvation Front), 44, 45–6, 47 FLN (National Liberation Front), 6, 43, 44, 107

202

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Fontaine, Jean, 50 France, 34, 35, 56, 70, 122 Francophone literature, 9, 13, 14, 16, 24, 64, 154 Francophonie, 14, 65, 90 Fromentin, Eugène, 36 Gacemi, Baya, 43, 45 Gafaïti, Hafid, 45, 111 Garçon, José, 44 Gates, Henry Louis, 6, 22–3 Geesey, Patricia, 121 Gender, 2–5, 8, 19, 21–3, 26, 28, 30, 38, 46, 48, 58, 69, 77, 84, 91, 97, 107, 110, 119, 131, 135, 148, 154 Gender and identity, 3, 24, 27, 49, 59, 149, 154 Gender and Islam, 47 Gender discrimination, 12, 49, 114 Gender inequality, 5, 21, 25, 154 Gender politics, 41, 100 Gendered ostracism, 73 Gendered process, 84 Gendered relationships, 47, 58, 84 Genette, Gérard, 62 Ghaussy, Soheila, 90 Ghezali, Salima, 46, 51 Ghoussoub, Mai, 61 Gilmore, Leigh, 117 Goodman, Joanna, 91 Gordon, David, 105 Grace, Daphne, 53, 89, 91, 92, 107 Gramsci, Antonio, 80 Greene, Roland, 2 Gourara, 36 Greki, Anna, 15 Guellouz, Souad, 4, 7, 9, 14, 16, 17, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 29, 39, 49, 50, 59, 60, 80, 99, 117–45, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153

Hachani, Abdelkader, 63 Haddad, Malek, 15 Hadith, 77, 78, 97 Hadj Nasser, Badia, 16 Hafsia, Jalila, 16, 50, 122, 140 Hall, Michael, 64 Halqa, 58 Hanoune, Louisa, 46, 107 Harbi, Mohamed, 18 Hargreaves, Alec, 14 Harlow, Barbara, 61, 78, 89, 147 Hassan II, King, 68 Hédi, Abdel-Jaouad, 65 Hedri, Souad, 37, 49, 135–6 Hetata, Sherif, 141 History, 5, 8, 13, 22, 24, 25, 27, 31, 34, 38, 42, 48, 54–5, 59, 60, 65, 72, 80, 88, 91, 114–15, 118–19, 148 Algerian history, 6, 41, 89, 121 History and politics, 5 History and the novel, 25, 54, 66, 92 Islamic history, 47–8, 57, 77 Literary history, 64 Moroccan history, 54, 58, 62, 66, 68 Recuperating history, 59 Re-writing history, 29, 154 Tunisian history, 145 Hogra, 55 hooks, bell, 150, 153–4 Hybridity, 17, 20, 30, 37, 155 Ibn Battuta, 34 Ibn Khaldun, 34, 122 Identity, 3, 8, 12, 14, 19, 24–7, 30, 41, 47–9, 53, 55, 59–60, 62, 66, 74–5, 78–81, 89, 104, 110–11, 121–2, 124, 126, 130, 134, 138, 144, 145, 149, 151, 152, 154 Imache, Tassadit, 125 Ireland, Susan, 46 Irigaray, Luce, 154 Isefra, 36

Index Islam, 23, 47, 50, 55, 57, 60, 61, 73, 77, 78, 79, 88, 96, 97, 139 European discourse on Islam, 79 Islamic culture, 141 Islamic epistemology, 97 Islamic feminism, 48, 96, 97 Islamic fundamentalism, 44, 112 Islamic heritage, 58, 77 Islamic history, 47, 48, 57, 77 Islamic law, 97, 106, 135 Islamic orientation, 47, 55 Islamist terrorist violence, 46 Islamism, 45 Islamist, 44, 46, 112 Islamist Armed Groups (GIA), 45 Islamist parties, 47 Istiqlal, 55, 67, 69 Jack, Belinda, 14, 87 James, C.L.R., 6 Jameson, Frederic, 5, 9–11, 19, 30, 149 Jayawardena, Kumari, 76 Jefferson, Thomas, 8 Jews, 36 Jones, Bessie, 54 Joyce, James, 6 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 41, 43, 59, 106, 107, 136 Kelly, Debra, 118 Khadda, Naget, 16, 51, 168 Khan, Muhammad Muhsin, 57 Khanna, Ranjana, 17 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 13, 16, 18, 64, 65, 88, 125 Knauss, Petr K., 106 Koffel, Jean Pierre, 16 Krumholz, Linda J., 84, 114 Laâbi, Abdellatif, 44 Lacheraf, Mostefa, 20, 33, 36, 40 Ladner, Joyce, 5 Laouedj, Zineb, 45, 51 Laye, Camara, 6 Lazrag, Zhor, 78 Lazreg, Marnia, 60

203

Lebdaï, Benaouda, 45 Lee, Sonia, 23 Lejeune, Philippe, 117, 118, 144, 145 Les Mille et une nuits, 102 Levin, Harry, 2 Libya, 43 Loomba, Ania, 53 Lorde, Audre, 143 Lotfalian, Mazyar, 55 Louis XIII, King, 88 Lyautey, Hubert, 67 Mack, Beverly, 51 Maghreb, 3–5, 9, 12–13, 15, 17–20, 24, 30–1, 34, 37, 39, 40, 44, 47, 50, 51, 58, 64, 70, 73, 88, 95, 106, 130–2, 141, 143, 152, 153, 154 Languages in the Maghreb, 13 Maghrebi authors/writers, 5, 9, 12–15, 17, 21–2, 29, 37, 64, 65, 83, 89, 90, 140–2, 144, 147, 149, 152, 153, 155 Maghrebi consciousness, 30 Maghrebi countries, 40, 73 Maghrebi culture, 12–13, 30, 76, 139 Maghrebi Francophone literature, 13 Maghrebi Francophone writers, 35, 142 Maghrebi governments/ regimes/ state, 20, 48, 70, 105 Maghrebi literature, 7, 13, 15–16, 18, 30, 35, 38, 44, 64, 87 Maghrebi narratives, 30, 119, 143 Maghrebi novel, 12 Maghrebi postcolonial Arabophone and Francophone literature, 154 Maghrebi postcolonial feminist literature, 9 Maghrebi postcolonial literature, 9, 19

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Maghreb (continued ) Maghrebi postcolonial society, 11 Maghrebi society, 8, 15, 36, 39, 49, 64, 65, 105, 147 Maghrebi subjectivity, 13 Maghrebi texts, 6, 11, 16, 144, 154 Maghrebi women, 20, 23–4, 27, 29, 31, 37–38, 40, 46, 48, 49, 59–60, 88, 117, 121, 138, 141, 148–9, 151 Maghrebi women’s autobiographies, 141 Maghrebi women’s literature, 24, 29–31, 39, 139, 141 Maghrebi women novelists/ writers, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 38, 42, 49, 50, 115, 119, 125, 147, 154 Maghrebis, 18, 34–5, 40, 55 Maghrebized French, 144 Majaj, Lisa Suhair, 121 Makhzen, 44, 161, 162, 173 Malti-Douglas, Fedwa, 100, 104, 109–10 Mama, Amina, 84 Mammeri, Mouloud, 15, 35, 37 Marouane, Leila, 45, 51 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 6 Marx, Karl, 150 Marxist, 60 Marx-Scouras, Danielle, 17 McDowell, Deborah, 58 McClintock, Anne, 19 Mechakra, Yamina, 16, 41–2, 89 Meddeb, Abdelwahab, 16, 154 Mediterranean, 13, 88, 105 Mellah, Fawzi, 16, 154 Mellah, Salima, 45 Memmi, Albert, 6, 15, 16, 25, 29, 37, 60 Merad, Ali, 122 Mernissi, Fatima, 16, 23, 37, 47, 48, 50, 78, 79, 80, 96, 97, 105, 125 Messaoudi, Khalida, 45, 46

Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 7, 8, 13, 17, 132 Miller, Hillis, 8 Mimouni, Rachid, 15, 16, 45, 60, 107, 140, 154 Minh-Ha, Trinh T., 126 Moghadam, Valentine, 43 Mohamed V, King, 54, 55, 57, 67 Mokeddem, Malika, 45, 49, 51, 52, 63, 89, 107, 125, 140, 144 Monego, Phyllis J., 16, 87, 95 Morocco, 4, 18, 24, 26, 35, 37, 44, 47, 50, 54, 55, 56, 60, 64, 66, 67, 69–70, 147, 155 Morocco as a Protectorate, 26, 35, 37 Moroccan monarchy, 43, 57 Moroccan women, 50, 76 Mudawana, 48 Post-independence Morocco, 63, 68, 81, 141 Morris, Pam, 21, 60, 114, 148 Morsly, Dalila, 45 Mortade, Abdelmalek, 18, 89 Mortimer, Mildred, 14, 51, 88, 92, 99, 141 Mosteghanemi, Ahlem, 15, 52 Moudjahidat, 6, 43 Mphahlele, Es’kia (Ezekiel), 6 M’rabet, Fadéla, 60, 106 Mudawana, 48 Muhammad, Prophet, 23, 48, 56, 97 Multiculturalism, 19 Muslim, 7, 23, 27, 50, 56, 57, 61, 64, 72, 77, 78, 79, 96, 97, 104, 105, 107, 129, 141, 147 Nalouti, Aroussia, 51 Nasta, Susheila, 48 Natij, Salah, 125 National allegory, 5, 9-10, 149 Nationalism, 40, 48, 54, 55, 83, 88, 89, 105, 107, 154, 155 Algerian nationalism, 111 Ethno-nationalism, 7 Moroccan nationalism, 55

Index Nationalism (continued ) Nationalism and history, 66 Postcolonial nationalism, 41 Post-independence nationalism, 60 Representation and nationalism, 83 Supranationalism, 1, 3 Third World nationalism, 61, 76 Nisbet, Anne-Marie, 52 Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara, 76 Omri, Mohamed-Salah, 3, 7, 64 Orientalism, 10, 29, 32, 148 Orlando, Valerie, 89 Other/Otherise/Othering, 5, 9, 10, 17, 37, 89, 90, 111, 143 Ounissi, Z’hor, 51 Paton, Alan, 6 Patriarchy, 30, 51, 54, 59, 87, 98, 99, 106, 110, 150 Peach, Linden, 60 Pélégri, Jean, 15 Personal Status Law, 97, 131 Postcolonial literature, 4, 19, 29, 53, 79, 83, 126, 140, 155 Postcolonial studies, 8, 10, 19, 20, 35, 53, 140 Postcolonial theory, 3, 19–20, 21, 22, 29, 53 Postcolonialism, 1, 3, 14, 19, 22, 83 Postcolonialism and feminism, 1, 3 Postcolonialism as a critical approach, 14 Pratt, Mary Louise, 7 Qur’an, 7, 23, 47, 48, 56, 57, 71, 73, 78, 96, 97, 132, 135 Rabia, Djalti, 45, 51 Randau, Robert, 15 Representation, 5, 11, 21, 22, 27, 29, 58, 80, 83, 111, 128, 148, 154

205

Representation (continued ) Representation of women, 5, 11, 41, 119 Representation of the subaltern, 24, 25, 58–66 Rezzoug, Simone, 37 Rice, Alison, 140 Richelieu, Cardinal, 88 Rif Revolt, 55 Rivoire, Jean-Baptiste, 45 Roblès, Emmanuel, 15 Rodney, Walter, 6 Rogers, Lynne, 92 Rothe, Arnold, 98 Roy, Jules, 15 Ruddy, Patricia, 75 Ryane, Malika, 51 Saadawi, Nawal, 6, 73, 96 Said, Amina, 51 Said, Edward W., 6, 29, 31, 32–3, 148 Saint Augustine, 121, 122, 143 Salafiya, 47 Saldivar, Ramón, 118 Samraoui, Mohamed, 46 Schenck, Celeste, 117 Sebbar, Leila, 15, 89 Sebti, Youcef, 45 Second World War, 35, 39, 44, 55 Sefrioui, Ahmed, 37 Sellin, Eric, 31 Sénac, Jean, 15, 44 Sexism, 22, 42, 62, 108, 131, 150 Sexist meanings, 96 Sexist society, 62, 122, 145 Sexist subjugation, 154 Sexist violence, 22 Sexuality, 22, 32, 92, 125, 131, 136, 138 Shari’a, 46, 47, 106 Silencing, 8, 55, 155 Skilbeck, Rod, 46 Smith, Robert, 145 Soyinka, Wole, 50 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 29, 58, 66, 78, 83, 89, 96, 137, 148

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Steiner, George, 1 Stratton, Florence, 75 Subaltern, 10, 25, 27, 29, 38, 53, 58, 59, 114, 147, 154 Suero Elliot, Mary Jane, 81 Sufi, 34 Suleri, Sara, 38 Sunna, 47, 48, 97 Szeman, Imre, 10 Taarji, Hinde, 50, 96 Tahon, Marie-Blanche, 108 Taiwo, Oladele, 59 Talahite, Anissa, 85 Talahite, Fatiha, 48 Tal’at Harb, Muhammad, 131–2 Talpade, Mohanty, 47 Tamazight, 13, 18, 36, 90, 91 Taqi-Uddine, Muhammad AlHilali, 57 Tengour, Habib, 45 Third World, 5, 9, 10, 11, 23, 25, 47, 72, 105, 107, 136 Third World literature, 9, 10, 19, 149 Third World nationalism, 61, 76 Tillion, Germaine, 93, 105, 106 Tin-Hinan, 34, 119 Todd, Janet, 114 Tohidi, Nayereh, 107 Toler, Michael A., 90 Touati, Fettouma, 16, 49 Tucker, Judith E., 77, 131 Tunisia, 4, 18, 26, 47, 50, 70, 107, 120, 122, 131, 132, 133, 136, 142, 143, 144, 147, 154 Post-independence Tunisia, 27, 134 Personal Status Law (Statut Personnel), 48, 131 Tunisia as a Protectorate, 26, 35, 37 Tunisian government, 43 Tunisian society, 51, 145 Tunisian women, 26, 50, 51, 131, 132, 134, 145

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 7 Van Leeuwen, Richard, 124 Vernacular, 46, 144 Vinson, Audrey, 54 Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi, 6, 14 Wade-Gayles, Gloria, 5 Walker, Alice, 147 Washington, Mary Helen, 151 WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), 5 Weintraub, Karl J., 118 Wellek, Rene, 3 Wilentz, Sean, 58 Wilford, Rick, 76 Williams, Patrick, 58 Wisker, Gina, 22, 62, 84, 153 Woodhull, Winifred, 19, 47, 101, 122 Woolf, Virginia, 12 Wright, Richard, 6 Yacine, Abdeslam, 55 Yacine, Kateb, 6, 14, 15, 16, 17, 24, 35, 37, 38, 90, 142, 153 Yamani, Mai, 73, 97 Young, Robert, 29 Yuval Davis, Nira, 59 Zaoui, Amin, 45, 154 Zaynab Lalla, 34, 119 Zimra, Clarisse, 152 Zinai-Koudil, Hafsa, 16, 49, 51