The Problem of Women Fighters
Out of the harem #Algeria #booksbywomen
Assia Djebar was surprised when the first book she published after ten years of silence, which she’d written as an Algerian for Algerians, was acclaimed everywhere else but in her own country. Women of Algiers in their Apartment was not well-received there at all.
She shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d misbehaved, after all, broken taboos, violated the tacit agreement that even the women fighters were obeying: don’t stir up shit, ladies, we got our independence.
After 130 years of French colonization, the Algerian War of Independence succeeded at a terrible price. One in ten Algerians were killed during the eight years (1954-1962) of combat. Many more were physically and emotionally scarred. The war haunts Algeria to this day.
As a young woman, Assia Djebar spent the war years in neighbouring Tunisia, working as a journalist among the refugees from Algeria, hearing their pain first hand.
As if often the case in wars against colonial powers, different rebel factions united, from atheist socialists to fundamentalist Islamists, who had very different attitudes toward woman’s roles. Before the war, women, and remember this is in the mid twentieth century, were mostly illiterate and cloistered, restricted to harems and ladies’ day at the bath house, veiled all in white whenever in the presence of men.
The Women Fighters
But the war demanded setting aside tradition, and thousands of women fought alongside men, unveiled. Others carried explosives under their veils, unchallenged as they went past French checkpoints. Many more did the work that women always have in war: nursing, sheltering and feeding men.
These women fighters believed that when independence was won for the country, it would also be won for women. Nobody would expect them to be cooped up all day in their room, or at best a woman’s courtyard for the multiple wives of better off men.
Instead, women fighters were seen as a problem, an irritant to the traditional values held by many men and even more so the Islamist faction. The problem was solved by erasing their role from history. And for years, they didn’t object. Even the women fighters who’d been captured by the French, imprisoned and tortured, stayed silent for the sake of the country they loved, which was trying to rebuild. Only when the next generation of women began to fight for their rights, did they break their silence and move to the forefront of protest in the 1980s.
Silenced
Their silence coincided with Assia Djebar’s. The public reason she gave for her silence was the issue of language. She wrote her early novels in French, the colonizer’s language. But what was the alternative? She loathed the post-war policy of Arabization, which imposed classical Arabic (also called formal or literary Arabic), an import from other Arab countries at the expense of Algerian Arabic, Berber languages, and Bedouin.
Algeria is a multicultural country. Assia Djebar comes from a Berber family. (I’m using “Berber” because that’s the word she chose, which is what the Ancient Romans called them, meaning “barbarian.” In their own language they are Amazigh people.) These are the original inhabitants of North Africa, whose lands were conquered by Arabs in the early Middle Ages. Today, they form about a quarter of the population of Algeria and consist of a number of tribes with different, related languages.
Educated in French, Djebar spoke the Berber language of her tribe and Algerian Arabic. She read classical Arabic but was never comfortable writing in it. She could only write in French. But French! The language of the torturers!
The difficulty was that she considered herself a feminist, not in the western sense, but her own definition of it, fighting oppression on two fronts: colonial and patriarchal. And part of the Arabization policy—maybe to placate the Islamist faction—was the uplifting of Islamic values, mostly meaning returning women to the veil and the cloister.
But there was another, deeper reason, the personal one. She was born Fatima-Zohra Imalayen. In her early twenties, she chose Assia Djebar as her pseudonym, hoping to protect herself from discovery, but almost immediately everyone she knew—her parents first!—realized it was her. And she was afraid of revealing herself:
to write about oneself is to put oneself in mortal danger…The upbringing that I received from my own mother and others around me had two absolute rules: one, never talk about yourself; and two, if you must, always do it “anonymously”…The taboo still persists today.
- Assia Djebar (“Afterward,” Women of Algiers in Their Apartment)
Finding The Voices
During the years of silence, Djebar returned to the mountain villages of her family’s Berber roots and made a film, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, putting women front and centre. Doing so, reignited her creativity. She realized that “a woman’s memory spans centuries” because stories are passed down for generations through the stories of women.
Listening to her [mother-in-law], I thought to myself, “I shall write a collection of short stories.” I wanted to show the world that I was starting in a different key, catching my second breath as a writer. Once the decision was made, I suddenly felt reconciled with myself.
- Assia Djebar (“Afterword,” Women of Algiers in their Apartment)
This was Women of Algiers in their Apartment, the book where she finds her voice and her material in her own life and in intimate connection to the voices of the women of Algeria, who were then beginning to emerge from the cloister and soon to join forces with the women fighters of the war to push for their rights.
Are they really speaking in truth as they dance, and not thinking how they’ll always have to whisper because of the eye through the peephole?
- Assia Djebar (“Afterword,” Women of Algiers in their Apartment)
This is a reference to the origin of the title of this collection, a painting by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, who, in the early years of colonization was shockingly admitted to the entrance of a harem—despite the taboo—by an Algerian pirate.
This painting was reconceived by Henri Matisse and by Picasso, who did a fifteen-piece series over a number of years, much admired by Assia Djebar, who writes about the paintings and the colonial and patriarchal gaze in her Postface in Women of Algiers in their Apartment.
One of my favourite scenes in Djebar’s book takes place in the title story. In the bath house, a space where the woman are naked, physically and emotionally, they take tender care of each other with hands gently washing, as well as with confiding words. Some of the women are cloistered but here unveiled (in Arabic, “denuded.”) One of them, uneasy and wearing a bathing suit, is the French friend of Sarah, an Algerian woman who is an academic, researching the oral tradition of women through their songs. Sarah was a fighter during the War of Independence. Captured and imprisoned, she still bears burn scars. The bath house’s water carrier, who also massages the women, is an elder who sings the traditional songs as she massages.
The stories often make reference to the Aurès mountains, where the most famous Berber woman, Al-Kahina (meaning the diviner, also known as Dihya), originated. She was a warrior queen, who united the mountain tribes and fought off the Arab invaders for years until she was killed in battle.
Her spirit is reflected in the character of old Hadda, whose dignity and independence is revealed by the memories of a mountain man in the story, “The Dead Speak,” which was inspired by the author’s grandmother.
Djebar’s solution to the language issue was to continue to write in French, but to subvert French literary traditions. She inserts Arabic and Berber vocabulary and syntax, and her style is polyphonic, the plain spoken narrative broken into by emotional poetic interludes and points of view (for example a shroud’s!). In the title story, while the water carrier is in an ambulance, the intensity of her life experience becomes a divan, a traditional form of song.
Translation was a challenge, which the translator, Clarisse Zimra, writes about in an extended essay in this edition published by University of Virginia Press. Even more interestingly, she has had extensive interviews with Djebar, which she refers to and quotes as she explores Djebar’s life and work. This edition was originally published in 1992. At that point, Djebar had published the first two novels in her autobiographical quartet, which she wrote after Women of Algiers in Their Apartment.
Algerian Women Today?
In 1984, Algerian’s Family Code eroded women’s rights. A matrimonial guardian—father or close male relative—had to consent to the marriage, not the bride. A man could have up to four wives, no consent of other wives required. The husband could repudiate his wife at will. Marital rape was not a a crime. The act was modified in 2005 to require the bride’s consent to marriage and to allow her to obtain a divorce under certain conditions, like impotence or (serious) immorality, but domestic violence is not listed among the conditions.
The 1984 Family Code didn’t satisfy the Islamist Faction. A civil war broke out in Algeria that lasted from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, when the government finally triumphed. And yet, there is still anxiety about the Islamist Faction, and there are still efforts to placate it.
Much has changed for women in Algeria in the last sixty years. Literacy rates have shot up from 10% to 75%. Women form the majority of students at university—where, interestingly enough, the language of instruction is still French! (The government is currently aiming to replace it with English. If still an imperial power, Britain wasn’t theirs, I suppose, and the Algerian government says that English is used more widely in the world.)
Women are also at least equal in numbers to men in many professions, even if there are only a handful of women in government. However the influence of Islamists is still evident.
In a reddit thread from 2022, a young woman—age twenty-five—from a strict family, was asking for dating advice, because she wants a committed relationship. About half of the people responding were supportive or sympathetic, a couple of them young men in similar situations. The other half of redditors scolded her:
Dating is haram (forbidden)! The only men who are respectable and committed will only marry you through your parents! If a man wants to date you, tell him to go to your parents! If he won’t, he is bad, and you’d better run, run fast!
I wonder what Assia Djebar would make of this?
Sources:
“Afterword” by Clarisse Zimra, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, University of Virginia Press, 1992
What is my language? Filming after independence: Assia Djebar
This piece was beautiful. I love seeing progress. I hope that these women will continue to move forward. Thanks for writing it.
Lilian, you are doing such important, even noble work here, with your research and your sharing. Thank you.