Marcela-Cristina Oţoiu, Assia Djebar and Identity Dilemmas entre

Assia Djebar and Identity Dilemmas
entre-des-langues
Marcela-Cristina Oţoiu
North Univeristy Centre Baia Mare
Abstract: The paper analyses the relationship between language and gender
identity in Assia Djebar’s work. Constantly juggling between Arabic, a language
of the implicit and allusive, and French, that gives way to free expression,
Djebar finds herself adopting a hybrid (and empowering) identity, in the
context of post-colonial French-Algerian relationship.
Keywords: hybrid ethnic identity, language mediation, feminism, sense of self,
the body
Born Fatima-Zohra Imalayen in the harbour city Cherchell (Césarée) in
Tipasa province (the setting of Albert Camus’s Noces à Tipasa) of Algeria, the
writer Assia Djebar, considered today one of the most original francophone
voices of Maghreb, had from the beginning a complicated relationship with her
language of self-expression. Though the Imalayen family spoke Arabic –
besides Berber, used for local communication – Fatima’s father decided that his
daughter should attend the French school. The first pages of Djebar’s An
Algerian Cavalcade (L’amour, la fantasia) represent a plunge in the author’s
personal memory, which betrays the identity dilemma that Fatima-Zohra had to
face from her earliest years:
A little Arab girl going to school for the first time, one autumn morning, walking hand-in-hand with her father. A tall, erect figure in a fez and a European
suit, carrying a bag of school-books. He is a teacher at the French primary
school. A little Arab girl in a village in the Algerian Sahel. [« 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 este instituteur à l’école française. Fillette arabe
dans un village du Sahel algérien. »] (Djebar 1995: 11)
However, on a revised counting, the languages of her childhood and
adolescence appear to be not three, but four:
Four languages to convey our desire, to grunt it: the French for a secret writ, the
Arabic for the sighs towards God we hold back, the Libyan-Berber for the
moments when we imagine we rediscover our oldes of out mother idols. The
fourth language [...] remains that of the body, that the gaze of neighbours and
cousins claims to make deaf and blind [...]. The body that [...] mutinies and, like
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an illiterate, seeks like the destination – on what distant coast? – of its message of
love. [« Quatre langues pour exprimer notre désir, pour l’ahaner : le français pour
l’écriture secrète, l’arabe pour nos soupirs vers Dieu etouffés, le libyco-berbère
quand nous imaginons retrouver les plus anciennes de nos idoles mères. La
quatrième langue […] demeure celle du corps que le regard des voisins, des
cousins, prétend rendre sourd et aveugle, […]. Le corps qui […] s’insurge,
cherche en analphabète la destination, sur quel rivage, de son message d’amour.]
(Djebar 1995: 254-255, my emphasis)
This confession from The Algerian Cavalcade captures the origin of the
identity trouble that the young woman had to face, as she was caught between
the conservative community of the little Arab town and the inhibiting liberties
promised by the French school. When the young woman wished to express her
desire (both in the erotic sense and the sense of identity fulfillment), none of
the three linguistic media seemed fit. Her feminity suffered distorsions and
ocultations within each of these linguistic traditions. For the time being, her
only compass remained the ineffable an-alphabetic language (or pre-alphabetic
language,as Gheorghe Crăciun had it) of the body – even if camouflaged and
muted in the Islamic tradition –, that is shared secretly by the great community
of Muslim women. Let us follow the evolution of Assia Djebar’s attitude to the
two major languages of her formation, Arabic and French.
When she attended, for a short while, the Koranic school, the young girl
rediscovered the refinement of the Arabic language. Arabic speaks directly to
the body –
When I study thus, my body coils itself, and find some secret architecture of the
city. [Quand j’étudie ainsi, mon corps s’enroule, retrouve quelle secrète
architecture de la ville] (1995 : 260)
and to the memory –
This language requires a body in a posture, a memory that should lean to it.
[Cette langue … nécessite un corps en posture, une mémoire qui prend appui.]
(1995 : 260)
In a dialogue with Wole Soyinka, the author recalled with emotion the
literary Arabic that she had learnt in school as being
a language of nostalgia, (...) but also of lyrical beauty. We were learning poems,
we were learning the mo’allaquat, the suspended poems that have so many words
to tell your love. [pour moi l’arabe littéraire était la langue de la nostalgie (…), de
la beauté poétique. On apprenait des poèmes, on apprenait les ‘mo’allaquat’, les
poèmes suspendus où il y a des mots innombrables pour dire l’amour] (Soyinka
and Djebar 2006 : 156)
Her being snatched away from the Arabic language caused in her ambivalent
reactions. The little Arab girl sent to the French school felt abandoned into the
hands of the enemy,
Does this mean that my father, the teacher for whom teaching the French
language meant his escaping the family poverty, had “given” me to the enemy
camp? [Ainsi le père, instituteur, lui que l’enseignement du français a sorti de la
gêne familiale, m’aurait-il « donnée »… au camp ennemi?] (Djebar 1995 : 298)
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The immersion in the francophone school millieu was resented as a rupture
from the mother tongue by the little girl, who was
silent, torn from my mother’s words through a mutilation of memory
[silencieuse, coupée des mots de ma mère par une mutilation de la mémoire]
(1995 : 13)
Before long the teenager began to realise the limitations that the tradition
embedded in the Arabic languages erected before the individual. “I have
forgotten the Arabic!” said at some point Marie-Louise, one the the
geandarme’s daughters, and her simulated forgetting (the author notes that “she
pretended not to understand” the language) amounts to her declaration of
relinquishing to what was, after all, but a borrowed language. Fatima however,
did not forget her mother tongue, but seemed to lose the grasp of the cultural
context within which it operates. Schooled in the French spirit, the girl is
startled now by the semantic veilings of the Arabic language. Thus, in the oral
Arabic of the community, women never refer to their husbands by their names,
and use instead the pronoun corresponding to him, and this “allusive speech”
[“le parler allusif”] causes all the men in the family to get “confounded in the
anonymity of the masculine gender” [“confondus dans l’anonymat du genre
masculin”] (1995: 15). And when, surprisingly, the auhtor’s mother abandoned
this “nominal omission of the spouses” [« omission nominale des conjoints »]
(54) and called her husband by his name, her action acquired the signification
of an insolent „liberation of the language.” [« une telle libération du langage »]
(55).
Fragilized „under the weight of the taboos that I carry within me as my
legacy” [« sous le poids des tabous que je porte en moi comme héritage »] (298),
burdened by a “heritage that gets in my way,” [« alourdie par un héritage qui
m’encombre »] (304). Djebar perceives now the mother tongue as a language
that dooms the Arab woman to obedience and silence:
This language had once been the sarcofagus of my folk; now I carry it within
myself the way a messenger dispatches the the sealed envelope that contains his
condemnation to silence or jail. [« Cette langue était autrefois sarcophage des
miens; je la porte aujourd’hui comme un messager transporterait le pli fermé
ordonnant sa condamnation au silence, ou au cachot.»] (300).
And at the moment when she chose the French as the language of her
expression and decided to “speak about herself outside the language of the
ancestors,” the writer senses that not only does she quit her childhood, but also
that “she exiles herself from it once and for all.” Paradoxically, the one who
abandons her mother tongue feels that actually it was
my mother tongue… that abandoned me on the sidewalk and ran away [« ma
langue mère disparue, qui m’a abandonné sur le trottoir et s’est enfuie »] (298).
As Priscilla Ringrose has shown in a remarkable application of Julia
Kristeva’s theory (Ringrose 2006: 36-93), Fatima appears from the very
beginning in the father’s shadow, which amounts to a paternal identification
and, implicitely, a rejection of the maternal model. Her identity will thus be
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structured on a fatherly model, in which a significant element is her preference
for the French language, the “father tongue” that she adopts as a promise of
intellectual career, at the expense of the Arabic, the mother tongue relegated to
the status of a vernacular associated with the feminine spaces of the household.
At the same time, as Roswita Geyss has observed, the schooling in French
becomes a catalyst towards the hatching of the auhtor’s identity:
reading, writing and studying definitely set the young girl free, even if she still
has to struggle to remove one after the other all the metaphorical veils that
forbade her to say ‘I’ overtly and without a false sense of shame. [« Ainsi, la
lecture, l’écriture, les études libèrent définitivement la jeune fille, même si elle
doit encore lutter pour enlever successivement tous les voiles métaphoriques qui
lui interdisent de dire ouvertement et sans fausse honte « je ». »] (Geiss 2009 :
76).
However, as the author was to discover soon, the taboos of the Arabic were
not just frustrating barriers, but also protective veils. The taboo of referring to
yourself, a woman, in the first person discourages not only public exposure, but
also private self-examination. When attempting to write her autobiography, the
author infringes the principle of feminine “modesty” sanctioned by the Islam.
Besides, by attempting to do this by using “only the French words,” she
implicitly adopts the analytical spirit of Descartes’s language, causing her to feel
that “under the slow scalpel of raw autopsy” she exposes “more than the skin,”
the torn flesh of “childhood talk that can no longer be written.” [« Tenter
l’autobiographie par les seuls mots français, c’est, sous le lent scalpel de
l’autopsie à vif, montrer plus que sa peau. Sa chair se desquame, semble-t-il, en
lambeaux du parler d’enfance qui ne s’écrit plus… »] (Djebar 1995: 224). The
autobiography in borrowed language has thus become a double removal of the
veil.
Before this unveiling, Fatima had discovered the liberating latencies of the
written language. Her writing of letters to some Arabs outside the family is like a
lifting her veil before strangers. Similarly, Fatima’s mother had to resort to
writing letters to her husband in order to express her feelings.
Once she started to assimilate the French language and culture, the author
feels that “during this formation, my body was also occidentalizing itself in its
own way” [« et mon corps, durant cette formation, s’occidentalisait à sa
manière »] (181), freed from the cover of the veil and discovering the thrill of
practising outdoor sports. At the same time, the French language lent the
adolescent something of its own vision – as if, all at once, the French language
had eyes, which she lent me to see in liberty – but also a certain invisibility to
the voyeur eyes of Arab patriarchy – as if the French language were blinding
the voyeur males of my clan. [« Comme si soudain la langue française avait des
yeux, et qu’elle me les ait donnés pour voir dans la liberté, comme si la langue
française aveuglait les mâles voyeurs de mon clan… »] (256).
We should however note that these newly acquired eyes remain – at least for
a while – blind to the painful reality of war-torn Algeria. Published in 1957, in
the middle of the Algerian liberation war, Djebar’s debut novel, The Thirst (La
Soif), was accused by Algerian intellectuals of “ignoring the reality of
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contemporary Algeria,” (Hiddleston 2006: 23-24) while later critics deplored its
“disregard for the upheavals of 1950s Algeria betrays a somewhat narrow field
of vision.” (Hiddleston 2006: 27)
Yet young Djebar’s relation to the French language also proves to be
difficult, as she discovers in that episode of “amorous aphasia,” when she feels
that
“the written words, the learnt words [of the French language] were retreating
before me the moment the slightest impulse of the heart sought to express
itself.” [« Une sorte d’aphasie amoureuse : les mots écrits, les mots appris,
faisaient retrait devant moi, dès que tentait de s’exprimer le moindre élan de
mon cœur. »] (183).
While eavesdropping to the love chat of a francophone couple, she notices
the ludicrous apellative „pilou chéri” and concludes:
the French language could offer me all its inexhaustible treasures, and yet not
one single love word, not the least of love words was there for me. [« la langue
française pouvait tout m’offrir de ses trésors inépuisables, mais pas un, pas le
moindre de ses mots d’amour ne me serait réservé. »] (43-44)
Elsewhere she „finds herself deserted by the songs of Arab love,” [« …je me
retrouve désertée des chants de l’amour arabe »] (298) whose ardour makes the
French amorous discourse look “arid.”
Compared to the Arabic language, the French language seems devoid of
sensuousness and even of corporality.
“Outwardly, I write and speak in French; yet my words fail to load themselves
with carnal reality; (…) for me all vocabulary becomes absence, exoticism
without mystery.” [« J’écris et je parle français au-dehors : mes mots ne se
chargent pas de réalité charnelle. (…) tout vocabulaire me devient absence,
exotisme sans mystère… »] (261).
This “emotional sterility of the French language” may also be interpreted as a
symptom of “the emotional ‘autism’ associated with the paternal language”
(Ringrose 2006: 64; 68). This revelation will be not without consequences at the
level of identity awareness, as Ringrose has shown, “because the order of
language constructs identity, the emotional sterility at the level of language is
projected onto a damaged sense of self.” (64)
Further difficulties arise from “the exercise of autobiography in the language
of yesterday’s adversary” [« de l’exercice de l’autobiographie dans la langue de
l’adversaire d’hier »] (300), in which the colonised’s identity clashes the
coloniser’s language, forcing the indigenous and the alien to an awkward
cohabitation. Hence the peril of identity confusion, since “to strip naked in this
language poses me in a permanent danger of deflagration” [« Me mettre à nu
dans cette langue me fait entretenir un danger permanent de déflagration. »]
(300). Yet another peril exists, namely that the borrowed raiment might lend
the indigenous experience the air of exotic fantasy:
The autobiography practised in the adverse language weaves itself as fiction, at
least as long as the forgetting of the dead carried away by the discourse does not
operate its anesthesia. [« L’autobiographie pratiquée dans la langue adverse se
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tisse comme fiction, du moins tant que l’oubli des morts charriés par l’écriture
n’opère pas son anesthésie »] (302)
To these dangers, one should naturally add the considerations on the
morality of the act of writing about the suffering of a people in the very
language of its former oppressor. The author perceives this language as being
blood-stained, “barely clotted,” and senses it shrouding her “all the way from
my childhood, like the coat of Nessus” [« La langue encore coagulée des Autres
m’a enveloppée, dès l’enfance, en tunique de Nessus »] (302). French cannot be
merely “my language for writing,” but it is as well an “adverse language,” since
this
“is for me – an Algerian woman – the language of the invaders and soldiers, the
language of male struggle and hand-to-hand combat, in short the language of
blood” [« Or celle-ci m’est aussi pour moi, Algérienne, langue d’envahisseurs et
des soldats, langue du combat et des corps à corps virils, en somme langue du
sang. »] (Djebar 1999: 148-149).
It is at such moments that the author rediscovers the strength of the Arabic
and ponders nostalgically on „the luxuriance of this language,” on „the verbal
consolation” it offers, while deploring its „lost riches.” [« …luxuriance de cette
langue… consolation verbale… richesse perdue… »] (Djebar 1995 : 298)
All this oscillation between the two languages and at the same time between
their identity spaces can be clearly traced in Assia Djebar’s biography. The
period of her writings that ignore war-torn Algeria (between 1957 and 1962)
was followed, after the granting of the country’s independence in 1962, by a
period during which the author turned the back on France, and when Djebar
the artist was eclipsed by Djebar the historiographer, who taught history at
Algerian universities and directs documentary films such as La Nouba des femmes
du Mont Chenoua and La Zerda et les chants de l’oubli (1962-1980).
During this Algerian decade, Djebar was passionate about oral history and
embraced the vernacular spoken by the closed communities of women that she
was filming. She was to confess later: “I have thought I could become an Arab
writer,” on condition that she might “recover the orality and the Arab sound.”
[« J’ai pensé que je pouvais devenir un écrivain de langue arabe. Il fallait que je
me réapproprie l’oralité, le son arabe. »] (qtd in Kelly 2005: 255). The project
failed (“literature would not give me this,” she comments dryly), and the
finished film project achieved “what I was not able to do as poet, an Arab
poet, of course.” [«la littérature ne m’a pas donné ça », « J’ai fait au cinéma le
travail que je n’avais pas pu faire comme poète – comme poète arabe bien sûr.»]
(qtd in Kelly 2005 : 255).
Djebar’s subsequent return to prose writing was to mean her reconciling
with the French language – “I have made peace with [the idea of] writing in
French,” she stated –, a French language that will be now obliged to accept not
just the poetry but also the burden of real-life Algeria. At last, the somber ‘90s,
marked by the upsurge of Islamism, were to cause the author to face the
present horror of Algerian state-sponsored terrorism and to experience the final
loss of her ideal Algeria of the spirit.
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Nearly all of Assia Djebar novels contain either a preamble or an epilogue
that broaches – sometimes in lyrical and alluding terms, sometimes with the
clarity of the social thinker – the issue of the language. Djebar often presents
herself as torn between the Arabic – her “mother tongue” with all its baggage
of ancestral tradition but also with her own sensuous memory of childhood –
and French – „the step-mother tongue” (langue marâtre), with its expressibvity,
refinement and opening to the world. The definitive option for either of these
would mean not just a betrayal of the other, but also an impoverishment of the
concrete experience of the 150 years of coexistence of the colonised and the
colonisers on the Algerian soil.
On the plane of personal history, Djebar perceives the two languages as two
poles of the male/female and maternal/paternal oppositions. The Arabic is the
language of the harem, of the closed gynaeceum, of the thrice-locked women
(in the women-only apartments of Arab houses, in the shadow of the veil, and
in the language that denies them the expression of their subjectivity). The
Arabic is thus the language of the mother, the language of feminity. The Arabic
– has shown Ringstone, taking over arguments from Johnstone – is a language
based on rhythm, aliteration, repetition and „cumulative paralelism,” which
marks it as being “in Kristeva’s terms a language that is inherently more
maternal than French” (75). In other words, for Djebar the Arabic is “twice
maternal,” both as her mother’s language and in its feminine spirit.
The French language – which in Algerian Cavalcade was the “foster
language”or the “step mother tongue” – was to be eventually “identified in her
work with the father […] who bestowed this ambiguous gift upon her through
her schooling” (Kelly 2005: 252). The French language turned into “the father
tongue,” the language of Fatima’s exiting her treble confinement, of her
schooling that were to lead to her liberation, to enable her “to conquer step by
step the male space” [« conquérir, à petits pas, l’espace masculin »] (Geyss 2009:
82) and to gain the body’s physical freedom.
As Roswitha Geiss has noted, the hesitation between these two poles made
adolescent Fatima transgress the frontiers of her sex: “at sixteen or seventeen, I
conceived myself outwardly equally as a boy and a girl,” hence the sensation of
being an “androgynous creature” engendered by this “androgynous language.”
[« à seize ans, dix-sept ans, je me concevais dehors autant en garçon qu’en
fille »] (qtd in Geyss 2009: 82). We might say that there is a subterranean
connection between the linguistic identity assumed by the author and gender
identity (male/female), as the hesitations about the former seem to have a
certain correspondence in the uncertainty about the latter.
The awareness of the fact that, for the Algerian people, the French is also
the language that accompanied the colonial aggression and shaped the
subsequent acculturation causes Djebar’s francophone writing to be marked by
the remains of such violence. As she admitted in her speech upon her winning
the Peace Award of the German Editiors and Booksellers in 2009,
I write, and I do it in French, the language of the former coloniser, the language
that nonetheless has become irreversibly the language of my thinking, while I go
on loving, suffering and praying (when I happen to pray) in Arabic, my mother
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tongue. [« J’écris donc, et en français, langue de l’ancien colonisateur, qui est devenue néanmoins et irréversiblement celle de ma pensée, tandis que je continue
à aimer, à souffrir, également à prier (quand parfois je prie) en arabe, ma langue
maternelle. »] (Djebar 2000)
Meanwhile Djebar has realised that her personal linguistic dilemma is at the
same time the dilemma of modern-day Algeria, in whose identity the BerberArab tradition can no longer be separated from the contribution of French
culture.
After over a century of French occupation – which has ended recently into a
tearing apart – a territory of language stil remains between the two nations,
between two memories; the French language, both body and voice, installs itself
within myself like a proud fortress, while the mother tongue, all orality, in
tattered clothes, resists and attacks. [« Après plus d’un siècle d’occupation
française – qui finit, il y a peu, par un écharnement – un territoire de langue
subsiste entre deux peuples, entre deux mémoires; la langue française, corps et
voix, s’installe en moi comme un orgueuilleux préside, tandis que la langue
maternelle, toute en oralité, en hardes dépenaillées, résiste et attaque. »] (Djebar
1995: 299)
The solution for which Assia Djebar has opted is that of the conscious
coming to terms with this uncomfortable position. A whole chapter in her
book These Voices that Besiege Me (Ces voix qui m’assiègent) deals with what she calls
“writing between the languages” (écriture « entre deux langues »). Rather than
resenting her own position either as a fracture or as a frustrating ambivalence,
Djebar views it as a privileged locus that provides a simultaneous panoramic
view of the two linguistic spaces. We have here an apology of the margins and a
rejection of the centre, as all “centered” perspectives – such as eurocentrism,
francocentrism, phalo(go)centrism – fail to grasp the complexity of the
(post)colonial world:
Why not dwell at the edge of language [...] and why not refuse to go to its
centre, its hub, its fire. [...]
To stay at the margins of one, two or three languages [...] in what is obviously a
borderland, one that is dangerous, marshy and uncertain, an ever-changing and
fertile zone [...]. Between-two-languages, for a writer [...] means to place oneself
into the nervous, unnerved, painful and mysterious area of any language.
[« Pourquoi pas sur les marges de la langue […] et refuser d’aller jusqu’à son
centre, à son moyeu, à son feu. […] Rester sur les marges d’une, de deux ou
trois langues […], c’est évidemment un terrain-frontière, hasardeux, peut-être
marécageux et peu sûr, plutôt une zone changeante et fertile […]. Entre-deuxlangues, pour un écrivain ne pouvant être autrement qu’un écrivain, c’est de se
placer dans l’aire nerveuse, énervée, désénervée, douloureuse et mystérieuse de
toute langue. »] (Djebar 1999 : 30)
This entre-deux-langues or entre-des-langues in which the author settles
determinedly is something different from the solutions of bilingualism or of
multiculturalism, solutions that evade the still unsolved historical tensions
between ethnic groups. Instead, “once we scrutinize the l’entre-deux-langues or
l’entre-des-langues, we are reopening the graves [...], we are ravaging the tombs, we
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are scattering the ashes” [« Or, dès que nous scrutons l’entre-deux-langues ou
l’entre-des-langues, nous rouvrons les fosses, […] nous bousculons les tombes,
nous éparpillons les cendres. »] (Djebar 1995: 30). From a political viewpoint,
Djebar sees her position as one which, at the end of an era of violence, might
test if between the two languages, once hostile to each other, there still runs “a
stream, a current,” a movement “of the bodies, the voices, the eyes and the
music.” [« expérimenter le passage entre les langues […] le flux, le courant, la
navigation des corps, des voix, des yeux, des musiques. »] (30).
Unfortunately this test was failed by the Algeria at the turn of the century
(1990-2000), when, succumbing to fundamentalist Islamic and Arabizing
policies, the country refused the communication between cultures. The
government promoted an illusory “national language” by “restricting by
autoritarian means the living space of the other langues” and, by stifling the
“diglossia proper to the Arabic,” installed in its stead “a sterilizing
monolinguistic juice” [« promouvoir la « langue nationale » en restreignant
d’autorité l’espace vivant des autres langues; puis, en ce jus monolinguistique
stérilisant, la diglossie propre à l’arabe… »] (Djebar 2009:244). Djebar
comdemns this “cultural dictatorship” that produced “a sham identity
monolinguism, ” that imposed “a single language claimed as an armour, a shell,
a wall.” [« un monolinguisme pseudo-identitaire : une seule langue revendiquée
comme une armure, une carapace, un mur! »] (1999 : 32-33).
To speak about the languages obscured by this cultural dictatorship, Assia
Djebar suggests a metaphor, that of the lost alphabet, whose story is told in Vast is
the Prison (Vaste est la prison). This is one of the oldest writing systems in the
world, the tifinagh alphabet of the Berber language, older than the Etruscan or
Runic alphabets. This ancient alphabet was lost, and its loss was forgotten on the
entirety of its territory, with the sole exception of the Tuaregs. Used as a
metaphor, the lost alphabet speaks of the way a language devoid of written
representation has its access to universality denied and is forcibly relegated into
orality and parochiality.
In These Voices that Besiege Me, Djebar also explains the sense of that apparent
silence in which she sank during her Algerian decade, after the Independence;
her work of documentary film-maker enabled her to access and recover the two
types of diglossia the Arabic has: vertical diglossia joining high (or literary) Arabic
and low (or popular, vernacular) Arabic, on the one hand; and on the other
hand horizontal diglossia between the language of the agora, reserved to men, and
the language of the harem, the province of women. The rediscovery of this
“language of women” – the “clandestine and occult” language of her early
childhood, that is also used in the intimacy of gynaecea – was the great gain of
these years of authorial mutism. This rediscovery was actually a physical one, as
Djebar has recorded dozens of hours of conversation with the women from the
mountains of her childhood, of which only three minutes made into her final
film La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (cf. Djebar 1999: 36-37). Once she
recovered the reluctant, allusive character of this „langue des femmes”, with its
litotes, its tenderness and roughness, Djebar’s work was to be fertilized and
revitalized by this influx of authenticity. From now on, starting with Women of
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Algiers in their Apartment (Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement), each of the
subsequent Djebarian novels was to be enriched with the two types of diglossia
mentioned in These Voices... – the rural vernacular and the women’s language.
Djebar discovers now how expressive their devices can be: ruptures of rhythm
and perspective changes that result from the introduction of genuine voices of
Arab or Berber women, whose monologues will alternate with the artistry of
the author’s refined and lyrical discourse. Speaking from a perspective confined
to the horizon of their village, memorializing the cruel experiences of the
Algerian war without the Europeans’ bias, recounting brave maquis actions with
no awareness of their heroicism, the voices of these women – forgotten even
by their communities – enrich considerably our knowledge of this world that is
still alien to us.
We shall dwell subsequently upon another Djebarian dilemma, that relates
to its positioning in the problematic yet fertile space of the entre-des-langues: how
can an author writing in French approximate this “femine particularism [sic] of
my languages of origin” [« ce particularisme féminin de mes langues d’origine »]
(1999: 37)? In other words, how could the French suggest this treble threshold
and this treble effect of defamiliarization – the former resulting from the alien
language (be it Arabic or Berber), the second resulting from its oral and vernacular
character, and the third to the particular inflexions of that „langue des femmes”?
This is a treble challenge for transcultural translation, rendered even more
complicated by the multiple distances among these linguistic universes.
The solution favoured by Djebar is not that of “local colour,” that is specific
of exoticizing literature, which would entail embedding Arab or Berber words
into the fabric of the French discourse. Instead of this easy solution, the author
seeks to shape the French language upon the Arab Weltanschauung, to fluidize
the French according to the logic of Arab rhetoric and even to “melodize” the
French after the musical schemata of the Arab. Instead of a mere lexical
decoration, Djebar attempts something far more courageous, namely a melting
down of the logical, rhetorical and melodic structures of the French and its recasting onto the internal logic, the rhetorical and the musical patterns of ArabBerber dialects. And this is done without mutilating the language and without
compromising its comprehensibility.
Assia Djebar is not the first writer that has attempted such a radical
reshaping of a European language in contact with an indigenous culture. Similar
solutions have been adopted by postcolonial writers from India, Jamaica or
sub-Saharian Africa. With regard to the francophone spaces of West Africa, this
practice has been amply described by Chantal Zabus in her book The African
Palimpsest (whose first edition appeared 2001, followed by a second edition in
2007). After she had discarded terms such as transference, transmutation or even
blood transfusion, Zabus opted for the term of relexification, taken over from
Loreto Todd, where it was presented as a way of “using English vocabulary but
indigenous structures and rhythms” (qtd in Zabus 2007: 112). In Zabus’s more
generous approach, relexification is described as “the making of a new register
of communication out of an alien lexicon” (112), where alien refers to one
European language not yet assimilated by the indigenes, whereas lexicon is to be
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taken very loosely, as including even semantic and syntax. One should note that
Zabus seems to have coined this concept in order to refer specifically to an
instance of literary practice (that is, to the deliberate act of a creative individual),
rather than to linguistic phenomena related to the community – whether in a
natural way (as in the case of the interference with the mother tongue, of
linguistic calque or of loan translation), or as a result of artificial interventions,
like in the case of decolonizing policies (such as africanization or
indigenization). Even if such phenomena might shape it to a certain extent,
relexification results nevertheless from a deliberate creative effort and may lack
correspondence with the actual spoken language. What results is a “a new
European-based novelistic language wrung out of the African tongue” (113). The
presence of the word novelistic hereclearly identifies that relexification is
designated as the result of an artistic act.
Therefore relexification as defined by Chantal Zabus is neither translation,
nor loan-translation; neither is it linguistic calque, even if the “shadow” of the
indigenous language looms large in the English (or the French) text. Before
being designated as such, relexification had already been suggested in the
literary creeds of many African authors mentioned by Zabus. Among the
francophones, the Cameroonian Francis Bebey spoke of his intention to
“extract the essence of Douala and put it alongside the essence of French so as
to attain a very enriched cultural level” (qtd in Zabus 2007: 114)”; similar to the
Nigerian Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who called his novels “translations from Kikuyu
into English,” the Senegalese Cheikh Hamidou Kane sensed that his French is
modelled on the spirit of the Peulh culture (cf Zabus 114). Without calling it as
such, Daniel Okara gave the clearest formula of the device and its
rationalization:
“As a writer who believes in the utilisation of African ideas, African philosophy and African folk-lore and imagery to the fullest extent possible, I am of
the opinion the only way to use them effectively is to translate them almost literally
from the African language native to the writer into whatever European
language he is using as his medium of expression.” (qtd in Zabus 2007: 136).
By doing so, the postcolonial writer does nothing but to activate a latency.
Africa has been known to Europeans especially through the texts written in
European languages (English, French, Portuguese); yet from behind these, one
can get a glance at another text, Africa’s original text. This is why the
Europhone literatures of Africa may be descibed through the metaphor of the
palimpsest:
They are indeed palimpsests, in that, behind the scriptural authority of
african language, the earlier, imperfectly erased remnants of the African
language can still be perceived. (Zabus 2007: 3)
This “lurking” of the eclipsed text, a mere palimpsestic latency in the case of
a passive reading, will be activated and dynamized by the textual device of
relexification.
Zabus makes a clear-cut distinction between relexification and selftranslation. An author’s translation of his/her own work (a frequent occurence
in postcolonial literature) always starts from an original text. Yet in the case of
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relexification, such an original text simply does not exist. Instead we have two
languages that coexist synchronically (in a way that renders impossible the
establishing of interlinguistic switch points) rather than come one after the
other diachronically. The same distinctions individualize relexification from the
process of transcodage.
”What distinguishes relexification from translation is not only the absence of a
separate original. Relexification takes place, as already suggested, between two
languages within the same text. Although these two languages are unrelated,
they interact as dominant vs. dominated languages or elaborated vs. restricted
codes, as they did and still do to some extent in West Africa where the
European language is the official language and the medium of prestige and
power.” (Zabus 2007: 118)
Our rereading of Zabus’s text was prompted by Priscilla Ringrose’s
identification of relexification as operating in certain sections of Asia Djebar’s
novels. These are the sections that display a striking orality, such as the
monologues of the Arab women in Algerian Women in their Apartment or in The
Tombless Woman (La femme sans sépulture), which on the surface appear to be mere
translations and transcodings of sets of testimonials made by the “mothers of
the revolution” in Arabic or Berber, many of which have also been taperecorded (either by the author herself or by ethnographer characters). And yet
the French into which these testimonials have been “translated” displays an
alien cadence and phrasing, a reduced and even minimalist vocabulary; at times
the French is simply gramatically wrong. It is as if the translator had been
contaminated by these women’s raw simplicity and had prefered a literal
translation over a literary-minded one. Relexification thus infuses the texts in
which the voice of the translator-narrator is overwritten like in a palimpsest
over the voices of the scores of silenced Arab women, such as Chérifa. In the
sections entitled « Voix » (Voices), “this technique allows not only the recovery
of a repressed identity but also, as Zabus suggests, the recovery of a repressed
language” (Ringrose 2006: 82). Ringrose lists some of the peculiarities of these
sections: the use of the generic “La France” when referring to the colonists,
their army or justice; the syntagm „ceux de la montagne” for “mountain
people;” the use of repetition (the verb „brûler” used invariably whenever some
other house is burned down by the French); the tactics of slow accumulation of
detail; and paraphrase.
Here is an example from the narrative of the widow Zohra Oudai:
Une fois que Zoulikha avait trouvé abri chez moi, voici qu’enfla inopinément le
danger. Nos demeures se remplissent en un éclair des fils de France. (Djbar 2002:
77)
In the above excerpt there are several peculiarities. In such a sentence, the
inversion predicate–subject “enfla... le danger” is unusual in French. As the verb
enfler is usually transitive („le vent enfle les voiles”), and seldom reflexive („la
chétive pécore s’enfla si bien qu’elle creva”), the intrensitive usage – „le danger
enfla” – is wrong; such a collocation is not documented in current usage.
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Demeure is a very formal term and its use in the sense of house or home is
awkward. “Les fils de France” instead of “les Français” sounds archaic.
To this we might add the disarming simplicity of the expression in the
climactic moments of the drama, as in
La France arriva jusqu’à nous […] La France est venue et elle nous a brûlés.
(Djebar 1995: 167)
A careful analysis of these particularities, carried out from the perspective of
the native speaker, was given by Najiba Regaieg, who noted the use of the
ethical dative („ils me brûlerent la maison”), of the synechdoche („la France
nous brûle”), of linguistic calques (épaules, shoulders, in the sense of “support”)
and of religious invocations („que Dieu éloigne de nous le mal!”) (cf. Regaieg
1995: 251-253).
The relexification of the French language appears to mean a reappropriation of the discourse, as suggested by the following confession made
by Assia Djebar:
Yes, to bring back the non-francophone voices – the guttural ones, the wild
ones, the unsubdued ones – into a French text that at last becomes mine. These
voices have brought in me their turbulence, their turmoil, in the rhythm of my
story, in the narrative style that is not truly chosen by me. [« Oui, ramener les
voix non francophones – les gutturales, les ensauvagées, les insoumises – jusqu’à
un texte français qui devient enfin mien. Ces voix qui ont transporté en moi leur
turbulence, leur remous, davantage dans le rythme de mon écrit, dans le style de
narration que je ne choisis pas vraiment. »] (Djebar 1999: 29)
Translated into literary French, Arab-Berber “oral-ity” becomes thus ”or-aliginality.” (the pun was used by Zabus to refer to The Palm-Wide Drinkard, a
book by the the first practitioner of relexification, Amos Tutuola) (cf. Ringrose
2006: 133).
In the moments when Djebar rearranges the syntax of the French language
to fit the pattern of the Arabic, she comes close to Daniel Ocara’s radicalism, as
manifest in The Voice (we should note the similarity of these titles) described by
Zabus as “the only conscious experiment in syntactical relexification in West
African europhone literature” (Ringrose 2006: 141). Both in the Djebarian
« Voix » and in Okara’s The Voice, we may view in this deconstruction of syntax
„a radical form of decolonization” (Ringrose 2006: 142).
Thus relexification enables Assia Djebar to introduce, in the very core of her
discourse in French, a vibration in a different wavelength, that of the Arabic.
What ensues from this is neither literary French, nor Arabic, but the
interference of the two, able to invoke the alterity of the Indigene from within
the language of the Colonizer. Insofar the discourse of the Other has enough
force to destabilize the discourse in the language of France, we have here an
opening of the book towards Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism and heteroglossia.
The multivocal character of Djebar’s oeuvre, her rejection of monologism and
her closeness to Bakhtin have also been described by Lobna Ben Salem (cf
Salem 2011: 71-72).
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At the same time, on the plane of strict biography, the relexified passages
liberate the author’s memory of her past inhibitions, enabling her to access
strata of the self that her French education had long covered. Assia Djebar thus
confronts the two faces of her identity, – the French intelelctual superstructure
and the sensuous Arab foundation – yet refuses programatically to opt for
either.
I write therefore, and I do it in French, the language of the former coloniser,
that has nevertheless become irreversibly the language of my thought, while I
continue to love, to suffer and to pray... in Arab, my mother tongue. (Djebar
2000).
Thus, Djebar not only appears as a hybrid identity, in the sense proposed by
postcolonial theorists (most prominently Homi K. Bhabha), but her books even
stage the drama of this hybridity.
Therefore, the strategy of relexification offers Assia Djebar a compromise
solution to deal with her hesitation about these languages, that have been
successively eclipsed, forgotten, rediscovered and thriving: a linguistic space
where these are no longer separate, but may coexist in an unstable balance, in
an osmotic rediscovery.
References
Djebar, Assia. 1994. Vaste est la prison. Paris : Albin Michel.
Djebar, Assia. 1995. L’amour, la fantasia. Paris : Albin Michel.
Djebar, Assia. 1999. Ces voix qui m’assiègent. Montréal : Les Presses de l’Université de
Montréal.
Djebar, Assia. 2000. “Idiome de l’exil et langue de l’irréductibilité”, discourse of
acceptance of the Peace Prize of German Editors and Booksellers, online.
Djebar, Assia. 2002. La femme sans sépulture. Paris : Albin Michel.
Djebar, Assia. 2009. Le Blanc de l’Algérie. Paris ; Albin Michel.
Geyss, Roswitha. 2009. « L’écriture entre deux langues des auteures maghrebines de
langue française et des auteures de l’entre-des », in Altérnative francophone, vol. 1,
2, pp. 63-69.
Hiddleston, Jane. 2006. Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria. Liverpool : Liverpool University
Press.
Kelly, Debra. 2005. Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African
Postcolonial Writing in French. Liverpool : Liverpool University Press.
Regaieg, Najiba.1995. De l’autobiographie à la fiction ou le jeu de l’écriture : Étude sur l’Amour,
la fantasia et Ombre sultane d’Assia Djebar, unpublished doctoral dissertation
defended at Université Paris-Nord.
Ringrose, Priscilla. 2006. Assia Djebar: In Dialogue with Feminisms. Amsterdam/New
York : Rodopi.
Salem, Lobna Ben. 2011. „I shall Intervene, With Nomad Memory and Intermittent
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Soyinka, Wole and Assia Djebar. 2006. „Eighth Dialogue: Powers that Be and Words
that Will,” in T.J. Cribb (ed.), The Power of the Word/La Puissance du Verbe:
Cambridge Colloquia, Amsterdam/New York : Rodopi, pp. 137-161.
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