Djebar’s Odyssey

"Silence sur soie' ou l'ecriture en fuite": the title of the afterword of Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere (445), Assia Djebar's final and most autobiographical book, in a double entendre as an ultimate tribute to her relationship with the French language, reveals that "Silence sur soie" could have been the secret, alternative title of the novel. For her, writing on oneself, like a rememoration, despite its harshness and splitting effect, represents an exercise that leads less to torture than to a silky outcome, "a du 'soyeux' et non du torturant" (445). "Ecriture en fuite," or "Writing on the run," responds to "Silence sur soie" (silence on silk or self), tying together the two meanings of the French verb that inspired her writing: filer. Filer as in to trail, run, slip away, and, in a more literal sense, to spin. To the moving writer who wrote as she walked (1) corresponds the weaver. In this double entendre that we can discern patterns of resistance that traverse Djebar's work and in which "patterns," recalling the evocations of veils, canvases, of women spinning, sewing, stitching, point to Djebar's incessant desire to reveal the textile within the text. (2) In Djebar dwelled a rhapsode. A rhapsode, that is, like the performer traveling from town to town to sing epic poems, musician and storyteller, recognizable by his mantel and his stick (the rhabdos), vocalizing the written word, the rhapsodist who (that is what rhapsdidein means) sews songs together. Songs, or voices, stories, memories. It is part of this art I wish to recall, with stories and memories of a peculiar kind, all of which revolve around odd visits and strange returns. It could begin with this scene. A woman, a foreigner not so foreign, "etrangere pas tellement etrangere" (Femme sans sepulture 77), has returned to her hometown, again. In Caesarea (Cherchell), where she was born and raised, she stays this time, without really knowing why, in the city's only hotel. But before spending the first night in her luxurious room, she rushes to the local museum where, in front of a Roman mosaic she had forgotten from her previous stays, she stops playing the tourist and has an epiphany of sorts. On the strange mosaic, three birdlike women are on a shore, contemplating in the center of the scene a large vessel floating over the waves. These beautiful creatures, she contends to the two women she visits later, are from Caesarea, the only women to be immortalized in stone in the region. But her younger friend corrects her: these bird-women are both locals and strangers--the mosaic was discovered in the 1930s, on the farm of a poor settler, "un petit colon," and its title is revealing: "Ulysse et les sirenes, un episode fameux de L'Odyssee" (117). This revelation lies at the core, in the exact center (3) of La Femme sans sepulture, one of Djebar's last novels. It tells the story of a female narrator, whose resemblance to the author is striking; like her, she has returned again to her hometown of Caesarea/Cherchell after having come back in 1976 and 1978 to make a film dedicated to Zoulikha Oudai (and Bela Bartok) (Femme sans sepulture 14-17), a barely veiled reference to Djebar's film La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (1978). As if presenting the pages that Djebar stopped writing during her decade of scriptural silence to make movies, the novel recounts her search for Zoulikha, the renowned, almost legendary female resistant, a moudjahidda who fought in the maquis during the Algerian War of Independence. The book, as Djebar asserts in her avertissement, is itself composed like a feminine fresco, a mosaic: "J'ai use a volonte de ma liberte romanesque, justement pour que la verite de Zoulikha soit eclairee davantage au centre meme d'une fresque feminine--selon ie modele des mosaiques si anciennes de Cesaree de Mauretanie (Cherchell)" (9). If the book is composed after the model of a mosaic, we can only find uncanny the particular mosaic Djebar chose as its metonymy. …