Assia Djebar: In Memoriam

For Clarisse Zimra This contribution was written shortly after the death of my beloved A friend, Assia Djebar, on February 6, 2015. Her former partner, Malek Alloula, died only eleven days later. As Etienne Balibar remarked to me: "Their quasi-simultaneous departure does say something about the remembrance of things past." (1) I met Assia Djebar in 1991 at a Cixous conference in Canada. I am grateful to Mireille Calle-Gruber for having brought us together. Something magical passed between us. The second time we met, on a long walk through the streets of Paris, Djebar called me her "twin sister." I was overwhelmed that she dedicated her last book, Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere, to me. (2) At Cerisy, in her presence, I tried to understand what that dedication meant. Apart from an early play, it is the only work by her that has been translated into Arabic. She has been gone just over a year, and I remember still the times that she came to stay with me in my apartment and how she was always going exactly the wrong way so that I had to rescue her from the clutches of the New York map, how she would leave umbrellas behind on rainy days. A lot of laughter. I have been remembering how we drove together to upstate New York and shared a room in a tarted-up nineteenth-century inn, where we had two days of absolute delight, eating well, talking nonstop from politics to love affairs. I miss her not only in my intellectual life but also in my affective life. I cannot think that I will never hear her voice again. I will now quote from a piece that I wrote for a volume on how to teach Assia Djebar. (3) This was when she was already somewhat in decline. She never saw the finished essay. For me, it is difficult to restrict Djebar to any one approach or any one context. Commenting on some archive footage of the 1960s anti-colonial struggles in Mozambique and Angola, I wrote: Although liberation struggles force women into an apparent equality--starting with the 19th century or even earlier--when the dust settles, the so-called post-colonial nation goes back to the invisible long term structures of gendering. The most moving shot in this footage is the black Venus, reminding us of the Venus of Milo with her arm gone, who is also a black Madonna, suckling a child with bare breasts. This icon must remind us all that the endorsement of rape continues not only in war but also, irrespective of whether a nation is developing or developed--in women fighting in legitimized armies. Colonizer and colonized are united in the violence of gendering, which often celebrates motherhood with genuine pathos. (4) I realized later that this entire insight came to me from "Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound," the closing section of Djebar's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. (5) This is the nature of my debt to Djebar. In many different contexts, lessons learned from her writings crop up to help me think. Who can forget such tremendous insights as the locked steel car with the modern Algerian woman driving, as still a veil? Beyond the veil, the insight travels into the gated community as prison. Her most important stance is against identitarianism. If you cannot say yes to the enemy, you cannot practice freedom--this is imaginative activism. Thus in the beginning of Fantasia, she tries to gaze at her hometown as the conqueror had. (6) You cannot enter the conqueror's mind-set--capture his gaze--without sympathy. This is the opening of her book, and it makes a tremendous impact on the careful reader--invites her to a sort of imaginative activism, which is a com-plicity, a folded-togetherness between metropolitan French and Francophony, if you like. Her embrace of Camus, full of nuanced detail, is a mark of this com-plicity. (7) The double bind of Francophony for an Arab woman of her generation, denied entry into written Arabic, is part of Djebar's theme. …