Explorations/Excavations of History:

Explorations/Excavations of History:
Knowledge, liberation and the quest of the
writer in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia
and Vaste est la prison
Debra Kelly
University of Westminster
La repossession de l’identité ne peut passer que par l’Histoire. Il faut rétablir la
dialectique passé-présent. Assia Djebar1
The novels, theoretical work and films of Assia Djebar have brought her to deserved
prominence as a writer and intellectual not only in the field of Francophone Literature,
but more widely in the debates concerning oppression, liberation and, particularly, the
place of women in the postcolonial world. Here I will focus on two volumes of her
« Algerian Quartet »: L’Amour, la fantasia (1985; reprinted 1995; translated as
Fantasia. An Algerian Cavalcade), which has received much critical attention mainly
focussing on the re-writing of the history of the colonisation of Algeria undertaken by
Djebar in the text, and Vaste est la prison (1995; translated as So Vast the Prison).
In this study of these two texts I will take up the theme of « exploration » in the sense
of the exploration of history undertaken by Assia Djebar in order to facilitate a new
relationship with the past. The exploration of history becomes bound up with the quest
of the writer for the creation of a new place in the world for the postcolonial subject.
The question of the liberation of the individual and of the collective, and the strategies
the writer uses to achieve that liberation, are bound up with the types of knowledge
(about history, about language, about cultural and individual identity), and of selfknowledge, that are necessarily at work in the development of a discourse of identity in
the colonial and postcolonial contexts.
I will therefore be considering the ways in which Assia Djebar seeks a path to the
liberation of self and of the wider community (particularly the community of women,
both past and present) through the re-examination of history and the relationship of the
individual and of the collective to their histories. Other critics have done this before
me, but I will focus especially on the writing strategies employed in the two texts in
order to uncover these other histories, and will consider particularly Assia Djebar’s
own relationship to the task of the writer, « exiled », « fugitive et ne le sachant pas » as
she says of herself.2 I will finally suggest that her works chart the way in which the
possession of knowledge provides the possibility of resolving conflicts that may allow
a different way of being in the postcolonial world. Or, at least a different way of being
1
Assia Djebar, « Une femme, un film, un autre regard », Demain l’Afrique, n°1, septembre
1977.
2
Assia Djebar, Vaste est la prison, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995, pp. 167-172; see also the end of
the text, pp. 347-348 where she becomes finally « fugitive et le sachant, désormais ».
© La Chouette, 2000
20
for the writer, for although Assia Djebar certainly creates for herself the role of
spokeswoman for the wider community – and especially for those women, both
historically and in the contemporary world, whose voice has not been, or is still not,
heard – and is a very real political voice, there is no doubt also that she remains
quintessentially interested in what literature – the written – can do.
The role of the written word is made more complex however, for Assia Djebar because
of the conflict between the oral maternal language, and the written paternal language
(for by the time she writes Vaste est la prison, French has changed from being
famously the « stepmother » tongue to being wholly identified with the father who
bestowed this ambiguous gift upon her)3 ; and the conflict between these two modes of
expression remains at the heart of her identity as a writer, her strategy as a writer, and
her very being as a writer.
In L’Amour, la fantasia she describes the power and the danger of the very act of
writing in French:
Écrire la langue adverse, ce n’est plus inscrire sous son nez ce marmonnement
qui monologue ; écrire par cet alphabet devient poser son coude bien loin
devant soi, par-derrière le remblai – or dans ce retournement, l’écriture fait
ressac.
Langue installée dans l’opacité d’hier, dépouille prise à celui avec lequel ne
s’échangeait aucune parole d’amour….. Le verbe français qui hier était clamé,
ne l’était trop souvent qu’en prétoire par des juges et des condamnés. Mots de
revendication, de procédure, de violence, voici la source orale de ce français
des colonisés.
Sur les plages désertées du présent, amené par tout cessez-le-feu inévitable,
mon écrit cherche encore son lieu d’échange et de fontaines, son commerce.
Cette langue était autrefois sarcophage des miens ; je la porte aujourd’hui
comme un messager transporterait le pli fermé ordonnant sa condamnation au
silence, au cachot. Me mettre à nu sans cette langue me fait entretenir un
danger permanent de déflagration. De l’exercice de l’autobiographie dans la
langue de l’adversaire d’hier…4
Yet, she continues to undertake the endeavour, to persevere with the act of writing
despite of, in defiance of, or perhaps because of, the ever-present mortal danger
inherent in such an act, and in so doing she develops what may truly be called both a
politics of identity and a poetics of identity.
3
« Le français m’est langue marâtre. Quelle est ma langue mère disparue, qui m’a abandonnée
sur le trottoir et s’est enfuie? » Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia, [J-C Lattès, 1985], Paris:
Albin Michel, 1995, p. 240.
4
L’Amour, la fantasia, op.cit., p. 241.
Debra Kelly
21
The (Re) Possession of Knowledge: the relationship to history
…. L’histoire est utilisée dans ce roman comme quête d’identité […]. J’aborde le
passé du dix-neuvième siècle par une recherche sur l’écriture en langue française.
S’établit alors pour moi un rapport avec l’histoire du dix-neuvième siècle écrite
par des officiers français, et un récit oral des Algériennes traditionelles
d’aujourd’hui. Deux passés s’alternent donc.5
The (re) possession of historical knowledge is the first and most clear of the writer’s
quests in the pursuit of the types of knowledge she seeks in the establishment of this
politics and poetics of identity. It is also the first writing strategy in the development of
this poetics, and the one to have received most critical attention – the re-reading and
re-writing of historical discourses, what I have termed here the re-possession of
knowledge, the knowledge that allows the relationship of the collective and of the
individual to history to be re-defined. The most obvious of Djebar’s writing strategies
is the recuperation of a lost history of Algeria and especially of the women of Algeria
literally from between the lines of official history (here Pélissier’s account of the
suffocation of the tribes and their animals in the caves of the Dahra mountain region):
Pélissier, l’intercesseur de cette mort longue, pour cinq mille cent cadavres
sous El Kantara, avec leurs troupeaux bêlant indéfiniment au trépas, me tend
son rapport et je reçois ce palimpseste pour y inscrire à mon tour la passion
calcinée des ancêtres.6
The re-composition of history as an element both of collective and of personal history
alternates in the text with the childhood experiences of the main narrative voice,
adding depth and layers to the writing strategy. This is also the most obvious way in
which the power of knowledge functions. Assia Djebar herself has said that the repossession of identity can only be achieved through an understanding of history. In
L’Amour, la fantasia, two inter-linked histories are used, taking the reader from the
colonisation of Algeria from 1830 onwards based on archival research, to the War of
Independence, based on the oral testimonies of women from the Chenoua region of her
maternal ancestors who participated in the struggles (and incidentally providing an
internal coherence within her work, from the film work of the 1970s to Vaste est la
prison, in the third part of which this experience is explicitly evoked.) Assia Djebar –
firstly very much the historian – uses the archives of eye witness accounts by officers,
camp followers and other correspondents in official documents, in private diaries, in
letters home, in articles for the French readership, and which relate the actual events
during the brutal process of colonisation. She also sheds light on the often ignored
sufferings of women, those caught in the « fumigations » of tribes in the Dahra caves,
the anonymous women whose hands and feet were severed for their jewels, the story of
the Bride of Mazuna, and almost at the end of the book, she adds the voice of the
Frenchwoman Pauline Rolland, deported to Algeria in 1852 for taking part in the 1848
revolution. This is a key moment in the text, and a key moment for the type of
knowledge that Assia Djebar’s writing promotes, for it is knowledge that not only
empowers through the new relationship to history, but it empowers through its ability
to allow communication. For Assia Djebar uses history, certainly to disrupt monolithic
5
Assia Djebar, interview with Mildred Mortimer, « Entretien avec Assia Djebar, écrivain
algérien », Research in African Literature, 19: 2. Summer 1988, pp. 197-205.
6
L’Amour, la fantasia, op. cit., p. 93.
Debra Kelly
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images, but also to promote connections between cultures, especially female cultures,
rather than using alternative histories as markers of difference. Pauline Rolland
becomes a point of cultural connection. As one critic writes:
In the letters she wrote to friends in France, Pauline Rolland speaks of her
contact with Algerian women, as she shares their condition of imprisonment,
homeless wandering and menial labour. Djebar comes to see Pauline Rolland
as a true ancestor of the women of Algeria whose stories she herself has been
telling. By expanding the French documentary resources to include the words
of this sister in oppression, Djebar has found a gap in the hegemonic
perspective which opens the possibility of real communication. 7
And to quote Djebar in the text:
J’ai rencontré cette femme sur le terrain de son écriture : dans la glaise du
glossaire français, elle et moi, nous voici aujourd’hui enlacées. Je relis ces
lettres parties d’Algérie ; une phrase me parvient, calligraphie d’amour,
enroulant la vie de Pauline.
“En Kabylie”, écrit Pauline, en juillet 1852, “j’ai vu la femme bête de somme
et l’odalisque de harem d’un riche. J’ai dormi près des premières sur la terre
nue, et près des secondes dans l’or et la soie…”
Mots de tendresse d’une femme, en gésine de l’avenir : ils irradient là sous
mes yeux et enfin me libèrent.8
Yet this reconciliation in the French language is temporary in the ambivalent
relationship to it that Djebar experiences, and the liberation glimpsed here is not yet
fully achieved. The quest of the writer for a resolution of the many conflicts that
besiege her identity is multiple and complex.
Strategies for Self-Knowledge: the history of the self
La langue encore coagulée des Autres m’a enveloppée, dès l’enfance, en tunique de
Nessus, don d’amour de mon père qui, chaque matin, me tenait par la main sur le
chemin de l’école. Fillette arabe, dans un village du Sahel algérien.9
In considering the re-writing of historical discourses, it is already clear that part of the
writing strategy in L’Amour, la fantasia is the production of a metaphorical discourse
of great complexity and variety. The palimpsest-like structure which is elaborated
through the re-reading and re-writing of the French male accounts of the colonisation
of Algeria is in itself one large, all-encompassing metaphor. The act of writing itself in
the image of the severed hand is another metaphor for the past history of Algeria and
for the occultation of women from that history. It is equally a metaphor for the literally
physical danger the narrator runs in bringing to light this history. Indeed the metaphor
of the act of writing is so all-pervasive throughout the text in a myriad of forms, both
as explicit statement and as implicit imagery, it is impossible often to separate the
7
Mary Jean Green, « Dismantling the Colonizing Text: Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska and Assia
Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia », French Review, 66: 6, May 1993, pp. 964-965.
8
L’Amour, la fantasia, op. cit., pp. 250-251.
9
Ibid., p. 243.
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metaphor from the text, form and content are inextricably bound together. The body of
Algeria itself is present, at once as a physical, geographical body, as the body of the
collective of Algerian women, and of the body of the narrator herself engaged in the
act of writing and all subject to actual or potential violence. In addition to the use made
of metaphor, Assia Djebar employs myth through the technique of re-using wellknown myths and mythical figures as part of the textual structure (what Ernstpeter
Ruhe has suggestively called the « mythomorphoses » of Assia Djebar).10 It is in these
writing strategies that the politics of identity becomes truly a poetics. These mythical
and metaphorical images help us to see more clearly into the mystery of individual
identity and into the (re) construction of it in all its complexity, as Djebar chooses her
myths and metaphors on the route to self-knowledge. In her work, in addition to the
retrieval of a collective identity, there is the elaboration of a very particular individual
identity in the chosen signs and symbols. In a similar way to the re-writing of history,
and in the exercise of writing it, the re-appropriation of history, there is a
deconstruction and re-writing of myth in the apprehension and elaboration of the self.
As Ruhe points out, this deconstruction of mythical figures in order to create what he
calls « models of feminine autonomy », is carried out in the knowledge of the potential
punishment which may be meted out to the writer, punishments like those visited upon
Echo, Prometheus, and in the story of Hercules and the Shirt of Nessus.11
The myth of Nessus is promoted to the level of allegory in which the torment of the
Shirt of Nessus is the torment of « wearing » the French language. This poisoned gift is
drenched in the blood of ancestors, yet given in love by the father, and it makes its
explicit appearance towards the end of the text, inviting the reader to reconsider the
whole project of L’Amour, la fantasia in the light of this now founding myth of a
personal identity since it is explicitly linked to the opening scene of the text:
Fillette arabe allant pour la première fois à l’école, un matin d’automne, main
dans la main du père. Celui-ci, un fez sur la tête, la silhouette haute et droite
dans son costume européen, porte un cartable, il est instituteur à l’école
française. Fillette arabe dans un village du Sahel algérien. 12
The reader is therefore forced at the end of the text to recognise the dangers that the
woman writer runs, not only in telling the stories of others, but also in telling her own
story. And overlaid in the postcolonial context is the knowledge that this language in
which she writes has become the tomb of her ancestors and that she is condemned to
write in a language stained with that blood. The postcolonial writer, to take up the
terms of the myth of the Shirt of Nessus, is condemned to fight against the sevenheaded hydra of competing histories, and to equip him or herself for the task with a
pen-arrow dipped in language-blood, without inflicting a mortal wound on him or
herself.
10
Ernstpeter Ruhe, « Les mots, l’amour, la mort : les mythomorphoses d’Assia Djebar »,
A.Hornug & E. Ruhe (eds), Postcolonialisme et Autobiographie, Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA:
Rodopi, 1998, pp. 161-177.
11
According to Greek myth, the centaur Nessus tried to abduct Hercules’ wife Deianira after
offering her a ride across a turbulent river. For his treachery Hercules killed Nessus with an
arrows dipped in Hydra venom. The dying centaur tricked Deianira into saving his blood for a
love potion that would ensure Hercules’ fidelity to her, but the hero died in agony after he put
on a shirt dipped in it that he was unable to take off.
12
L’Amour, la fantasia, op. cit., p. 11.
Debra Kelly
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No wonder then, that in Vaste est la prison, the writer will devote a key section to the
exploration of the potential of another alphabet, a lost alphabet, one that would allow
the formulation of the written word in the mother tongue denied to it and allow a return
from battle, from exile, and access to true liberation and reconciliation.
The Quest for liberation: the history of writing
J’imagine donc la princesse du Hoggar qui, autrefois dans sa fuite, emporta
l’alphabet archaï que, puis en confia les caractères à ses amies, juste avant de mourir.
Ainsi, plus de quatre siècles après la résistance et le dramatique échec de Yougourtha
au Nord, quatre siècles également avant celui, grandiose, de la Kahina – la reine
berbère qui résistera à la conquête arabe – , Tin Hinan des sables, presque effacée,
nous laisse un héritage – et cela, malgré ses os hélas aujourd’hui dérangés –: notre
écriture la plus secrète, aussi ancienne que l’étrusque ou que celle des “runes” mais
contrairement à celles-ci, toute bruissante encore de sons et de souffles d’aujourd’hui,
est bien legs de femme, au plus profond du désert.
Tin Hinan ensevelie dans le ventre de l’Afrique!13
Assia Djebar does not deny that the language of the oppressor/the gift of the father
became for her the language of individual liberation, and is consequently the language
of a collective liberation through her writings. Yet, the wound remains, the French
language is literally a double-edged sword, but the only weapon she is equipped with
in the mortal endeavour in which she is engaged. Vaste est la prison opens on the link
between death and writing: « Longtemps, j’ai cru qu’écrire c’était mourir, mourir
lentement ». In this text however, she embarks on a new quest, a quest that would
allow access to a written form of a truly maternal tongue. The whole of the second part
of the text « L’Effacement sur la pierre », is Djebar’s version of the story of the lost
alphabet of the Berber language, the history of a writing, not merely a historical quest,
but an archaeological one both literally and metaphorically, in the ruins at Dugga as
she retraces the discovery of a bilingual inscription on a mausoleum discovered there
by various travellers, eventually sold to the British Museum by Thomas Reade, the
consul general of England in Tunis in 1842, and where it remains to today, two tablets,
squared off but which fit together, kept in the Ancient Near East Study Collection, the
left hand side measuring 70cm high, 116cm wide in the Punic alphabet; the right hand
side 70cm high, 93cm wide, with a script identified there as Numidian.14
The meditation on the stone inscription developed in the text reveals the possibility
that this lost alphabet could effect the return from exile, not only for herself, but for
many others:
Combien sont-ils encore – combien sommes-nous encore – toutes et tous à
chanter, à pleurer, à hululer, mais aussi à aimer, installés plutôt dans
13
Vaste est la prison, op. cit., p. 164. Tin Hinan was an ancient Tuareg queen so revered that
the gold in her tomb was never looted. La Kahina, a Berber high priestess who claimed
conversion to Judaism and opposed the Arab conquest in the 7th century AD, but evetually
surrended to Umayyad Khalif.
14
The stone tablets are not on general display (although they have been in the past) but can be
seen in the study collection. References Dugga (or Thugga) Inscription LH 125226 / RH
125225.
Debra Kelly
25
l’impossibilité d’aimer –, oui combien sommes-nous, bien qu’héritiers du bey
Ahmed, des Touaregs du siècle dernier et des édiles bilingues de Dougga, à
nous sentir exilés de leur première écriture?15
But, the words inscribed in stone are desecrated and carried off, there are stories of
another such inscription, totally erased. A further meditation closes the section with the
legend of Tin Hinan and a lost alphabet which would be a maternal language, the
« legacy of a woman ». And most tellingly for the quest of the writer, there is an
identification with Polybius, the Greek historian under the Roman Empire and the
chronicler for Scipio Aemilianus of the destruction of Carthage, whose writing is:
…nourrie à tant de chutes concomitantes – lui, le témoin du feu de Carthage,
du bris des statues de Corinthe par milliers abattues ou emportées, lui qui,
pour finir, aura bientôt à contempler l’incendie de Numance et les morts
espagnols convulsés d’héroï sme grandiose – que cette écriture, inscrite dans
une langue certes maternelle, mais épousée par les esprits cultivés de
l’Occident d’alors, court sur les tablettes, polygame!16
Djebar certainly identifies with this quest, yet again there is the danger of erasure. She
continues:
Est-ce pourquoi son oeuvre comme la stèle de Dougga, après avoir alimenté,
plusieurs siècles, l’appétit de savoir et la curiosité des successeurs, d’un coup,
inopinément, par larges plaques, s’efface?
Car, du témoignage de Polybe sur Carthage, sur Corinthe, sur Numance, ne
restent désormais que des débris épars, que des ombres d’ombres dans les
miroirs tendus d’épigones d’une stature moindre, Appien, Diordore de Sicile,
quelques autres.
Comme si cette poussée scriptuaire sécrétait un risque, une accélération vers
l’inévitable effacement!17
If the alphabet is to survive, it must be entrusted, following the example of Tin Hinan,
to others. Assia Djebar wrote Vaste est la prison at a time in the early/mid 1990s when,
as she herself has said, she feared that the recent history of Algeria would be erased. A
text written in the urgency of the moment, and in the urgency of the self, these 50
pages in the middle of the story of an individual women, were, she says, her
« anchorage », and Polybius her « consolation ». The construction of identity
necessitates the individual to be able to situate him or herself in time and space; there
must be a constant work of affirmation. Through her exploration/excavation of history,
Assia Djebar provides a mythical time and space that secures a place for the exiled of
history in the here and now. A new way of being is created, through a reinvented
relationship to language, to history, to other, to self. A return from exile and a
liberation that must be constantly re-negotiated certainly, but that bestows an ethics as
well as an aesthetics on the work of literature.
Debra Kelly
15
Vaste est la prison, op. cit., p. 150.
16
Ibid., p. 158.
17
Vaste est la prison, pp. 159-160.
Debra Kelly