reappropriating the gaze in assia djebar's fiction and film

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Re appropriating the Gaze in Assia Djebar's Fiction and Film

By MILDRED MORTIMER Although Assia Dje- bar is known as Al- geria's foremost wom-

an novelist, her corpus also includes poetry, theater, essays, and film. She has used the image as well as the word to chronicle Algeria's transition from colonialism to independence and to foreground Algerian woman's struggle to redefine her role in postcolonial Algeria. Portraying Algeria's women as victims of dual oppression, French colonialism and Maghre- bian patriarchy, Djebar claims subjectivity for herself and her Algerian sisters by reappropriating language, history, space, and the gaze. She reminds her public, readers and viewers, that as French colonialism once sought to stifle voice and memory, denying the colonized the right to their own language and history, Maghrebian patriarchy still attempts to restrict movement and vision, denying Algerian woman her right to circulate freely in public space where she may see and be seen.

Despite the fact that Djebar's first novel, La soif (1957), represents a flight from the harsh realities of the Algerian War by depicting a love triangle set against the backdrop of Mediterranean beaches, her subsequent works chart woman's transformation from passive object under patriarchal and colonial rule to active subject of her own discourse. Her feminist commitment first emerged in Les enfants du nouveau monde (1962) and Les alouettes naives (1967), novels depicting woman's coming of age through direct or indirect participation in the Alge- rian War, and developed further in her film La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1977) and subsequent collection of short stories Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (1980). l The writer's appropri- ation of the camera to film La nouba, followed by her meditation on Delacroix's painting in the post- face to the short stories, an essay entitled "Regard interdit, son coupe," confirms the importance she attributes to woman's vision in a Maghrebian society in which patriarchy controls the female gaze. Finally, her most recent probing of the female gaze - and probably not her last word on the subject - occurs in

Vaste est la prison (1995), the penultimate volume of her Algerian Quartet.

Although Djebar's resistance to colonialism and patriarchy is multifaceted, involving language, history, space, the gaze, and (by extension) the female body, I will focus primarily on the gaze in this study, because it informs Djebar's conception of individual and collective identity on the one hand and concerns the relationship between the female artist and her craft on the other. Not only does this focus of inquiry cross genres, finding expression in Djebar's pertinent essay, her first film, and the latest volume of her quartet, but it also probes connections between the image and the word, both problematic for women under the sway of patriarchy.

For Djebar the gaze is crucial, because the prohi- bition against woman seeing and being seen is at the heart of Maghrebian patriarchy, an ideological system in which the master's eye alone exists; women challenge the patriarchal system by appropriating the gaze for themselves. She writes:

Qu'est-ce que le regard de PAutre dans une culture ou Foeil a d'abord ete des siecles durant mis sous surveillance? Un ceil unique existait, celui du maitre du serail qui interdisait toute representation visuelle et qui invo- quait le tabou religieux pour conforter ce pouvoir. ("Un regard de femme," 35) (What is the gaze of the other in a culture in which the eye has been under surveillance for centuries? Only one eye existed, the harem master's, which forbade all visual representation and invoked religious taboos to en- force this power.)

Thus, when the novelist temporarily abandons the novel for the cinema, recounting this experience in the second half of Vaste est la prison, written two decades after the film, she is fully aware of the sig- nificance of her transgression, her revolt against the dominating gaze.

The act of placing her eye behind the camera's eye elicits the novelist's meditation on Delacroix's painting Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, and more specifically the French painter's regard vole or stolen glance that resulted in the painting of an Al- gerian harem. Evoking the closed female space of the seraglio, the painting represents a Moorish interior with four Algerian women, one leaning against a set of cushions, two seated before a narguile (water pipe), and the fourth standing as she lifts a heavy curtain. By lifting the curtain, the fourth woman, a servant, allows the painter to gaze upon the odalisques and their cloistered chambers.2 Reflecting

Mildred Mortimer is Associate Professor of French and Fran- cophone Literature at the University of Colorado. She is the au- thor of Contes Africains, Mouloud Mammeri: Ecrivain algerien, and Journeys Through the French African Novel (1990). Her articles have appeared in French Review, Research in African Literatures, VEsprit Createur, Callabo, and the CELF AN Review > and she has regularly reviewed new works in francophone African literature for WLT since 1973.


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upon the portrait more than a century after the French painter first viewed the cloistered women, Djebar writes:

Prisonnieres resignees d'un lieu clos qui s'eclaire d'une sorte de lumiere de reve venue de nulle part - lumiere de serre ou d'aquarium - , le genie de Delacroix nous les rend a la fois presentes et lointaines, enigmatiques au plus haut point. (FA, 170)

Resigned prisoners in a closed place that is lit by a kind of dreamlike light coming from nowhere - a hothouse light or that of an aquarium - Delacroix's genius makes them both near and distant to us at the same time, enigmatic to the highest degree. (WA, 135-36)

She acknowledges Delacroix's talent, evident in his remarkable rendering of the sad and distant gaze of the captives of the enclosure and in his reproduction of the exotic interior with its luxuriant colors and textures, but categorizes the French painter's visit as a transgression. In her view, Delacroix, despite his genius, remains an emissary of colonial conquest, and the women whom he painted are victims of the patriarchal domination that preceded, then accompanied, and now postdates the French conquest of Algeria. Djebar states clearly that the man who agreed to allow Delacroix to enter his home was a chaouch, an Algerian in the employ of a French colonial official and therefore in a subservient position. Delacroix would never have been able to see these quarters before the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Arriving two years later, the painter joins in France's colonial venture; his gaze is therefore inex- tricably linked to the colonial conquest.

Recognizing Delacroix's genius and yet sensitive to his transgression, how does Djebar respond to the painting? An Algerian woman and therefore in- directly a descendant of the odalisques, she nevertheless conserves the role of spectator, not partici- pant, and writes: "Entre elles et nous, spectateurs, il a eu la seconde du devoilement, le pas qui a franchi le vestibule de l'intimite, le frolement surpris du voleur, de l'espion, du voyeur" (FA, 173; emphasis mine); "Between them and us, the spectators, there has been the instant of unveiling, the step that crossed the vestibule of intimacy, the unexpected slight touch of the thief, the spy, the voyeur" (WA, 137). Djebar positions herself not only as viewer who, like the painter, participates in the "stolen glance," but as informed art historian. Citing the progression in Delacroix's perspective from the first canvas of 1834 to the second exhibited in 1849, she explains that the women in the second version become more distanced and isolated, their universe more oneiric, their confinement more apparent. She also reflects upon Picasso's series of paintings and lithographs inspired by Delacroix and undertaken in 1954, when the Algerian War began. Picasso's Femmes d'Alger marks a radical departure from

Delacroix's painting by opening the cloistered chambers to sunlight and the outdoors.

Contextualizing Delacroix's painting within the historical framework of French colonialism's encounter with an Islamic world that refuses figurative representation but finds artistic expression in architecture, calligraphy, and decorative arts, she ex- plores the links between Delacroix's stolen glance and the Maghrebian patriarch's controlling gaze.3 She notes that as the Algerian nation became further dispossessed under colonial rule, Algerian men tightened their control over Algerian women. Colo- nial rule and colonialist dispossession joined to im- prison Algerian women doubly, a domination conveyed graphically via le regard orientalisant, the orientalizing look. Djebar writes:

Le regard orientalisant - avec ses interpretes militaires d'abord et ses photographes et cineastes ensuite - tourne autour de cette societe fermee, en soulignant davantage encore son "mystere feminin" pour occulter ainsi Phostilite de toute une communaute algerienne en danger. (FA, 183) The orientalizing look - first with its military inter- preters and then with its photographers and filmmakers - turns in circles around this closed society, stress- ing its "feminine mystery" even more in order thus to hide the hostility of an entire Algerian community in danger. (WA, 146).

Thus, the stolen glance of a remarkably gifted nine- teenth-century French painter is transformed by a series of lesser artists, first painters and then photographers, into the "orientalizing look" that reifies the Algerian woman and her world; she, oppressed by French colonialism as well as by Algerian patriarchy, becomes all the more vulnerable to constraints and confinement.4

The title of Djebar's essay, "Regard interdit, son coupe" ("Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound"), foregrounds Delacroix's stolen glance on the one hand and the inaudible conversation of the cloistered women on the other. By granting importance to the muted conversation, to women's silence, Djebar as- sumes the task completely beyond Delacroix's realm of competency, that of restoring sound to this silent study of Orientalist imagery. Moreover, by linking the reappropriation of the gaze to the word, the right to see (and be seen) to the right to speak (and be heard), the essay marks an important stage in Djebar's personal quest and explains her decision to become a filmmaker. On the one hand, her work will restore the lost sound of her maternal language; on the other hand, it will defy and oppose the male dominating gaze. Yet, by undertaking this task, Dje- bar is forced to think through her own position with respect to Delacroix's Orientalist representation.5 In addition, the circumstances surrounding the painting and the canvas itself set up a tension between


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disclosure and dissimulation - what to show versus what to hide - that occurs in the filming of La nouba and in Djebar's writing, particularly as her work has become increasingly more autobiographical in the volumes that comprise her Algerian Quartet.

When she films La nouba, Djebar views her ap- propriation of the camera as a challenge to colonial and patriarchal domination, an important political and symbolic event in the liberation and empowerment of Algerian women. It is, for her, the logical outcome of her rejection of the dominating gaze. If the project is crucial to the collective enterprise, it is also deeply personal as she undertakes the quest of reestablishing links with the maternal world of her childhood. In the attempt to restore severed sound, the maternal language of her past, she returns to her native region of Cherchell, revisiting the city situated approximately sixty miles west of Algiers and its neighboring countryside, the rocky coast, fields, and hills surrounding Mont Chenoua. There she cap- tures in image and sound the oral history of rural women and, via Lila, the film's fictional protagonist, charts the process of self-discovery and self-affirma- tion of a modern Algerian woman troubled by a war-scarred past and an unsatisfactory marriage.

In La nouba Djebar's camera follows lila on her dual itinerary: an exterior trajectory leading to a re- discovery of traditional rural life and an internal trajectory that becomes a meditation on memory. Re- turning to Cherchell fifteen years after the end of the Algerian War, Lila is obsessed by painful war memories: prison, torture, the loss of members of her family. Through encounters with rural women, following their daily lives, listening to their accounts of their own war experiences, and eventually recording their narratives, she finds the comfort she seeks and her psychological health is finally restored. Yet, despite her spiritual renewal, Lila is unable to repair her marriage. She remains saddened by the failure of her marriage and the pervading weight of patriarchy in postcolonial Algeria.

As Lila renews her contact with the rural Algeria of her childhood, her gaze encompasses landscapes, faces, architecture. Following Lila into the countryside, the camera's eye takes in panoramic views of Mont Chenoua and the hills overlooking the Medi- terranean. It lingers on landscape, capturing the reddish and golden hues of the rocks along the coast, and on the female collectivity, focusing on the rural women working in the fields. When the camera follows Lila home, however, to film the interior of the small house she shares with her husband and young daughter, it bears witness to tension, soli- tude, and the lack of communication within the couple. Thus, Djebar uses visual elements to convey Lila's double itinerary: one path toward the outdoors, her encounter with rural woman's life and

traditions; the other path introspective, the protagonist's meditation on intimacy and personal memory.

The importance of Lila's gaze is evident from the beginning of the film. In one of the first sequences the protagonist, her back to the spectators, her face pressed against the wall, cries out in anger: "Je parle, je parle, je parle" (I speak, I speak, I speak), then pauses to address Ali, her husband, who is in the room: "Je ne veux pas que Ton me voie; je ne veux pas que tu me voies" (I don't want to be seen; I don't want you to look at me). Thus, Lila comes before the camera proclaiming her right to speak and be heard and refusing the dominating gaze. Ali does not understand his wife's desire to see and speak for herself, her rejection of his control; the woman filmmaker does. In a close-up of Lila's head turned toward the wall, Djebar films Lila's revolt. Her eye behind the camera moves from Ali's gaze upon Lila to focus directly on Lila, recording the young woman's progressive journey to self-affirma- tion.

When she later describes the filming of La nouba in Vaste est la prison, Djebar explains that she attrib- uted her own words and gestures to her protagonist, who exclaims, "Je parle, je parle, je parle" (FP, 297). Lila's struggle for empowerment, her desire to speak coupled with her refusal to be gazed upon, reflects the filmmaker's personal identity quest and, as she explained in an interview preceding the publica- tion of the novel, attributes importance to the ap- propriation of speech.

J'aboutis a cette evidence, ou a cette interrogation: que le cinema fait par les femmes - autant cette fois du tiers monde que du "vieux monde" - procede d'abord d'un desir de parole. Comme si "tourner" au cinema repre- sente, pour les femmes, une mobilite de la voix et du corps, du corps non regarde, done insoumis, retrouvant autonomie et innocence. ("Un regard de femme," 37)

(I have reached this conclusion, or this inquiry: that women's cinema - as much in the Third World as in the "Old World" - begins with the desire for the word. As if "to film" means for women a mobility of voice and body, the body not gazed upon, but unsubmissive, retrieving its autonomy and innocence.)6

By affirming that the struggle to break the silence is a central concern of women's cinema, Djebar transforms an individual quest, her attempt to restore severed sound to her own world, into a collective one, thereby situating her personal struggle within a larger context, joining the common concerns of the community of women filmmakers.

Charting Lila's struggle for empowerment, Dje- bar introduces a later sequence that bears an important relationship to the first. Situated in the couple's bedroom, it foregrounds the importance of woman's eye behind the camera as it reveals the weakening of patriarchy. In this scene, Ali, temporarily confined



to a wheelchair because of an accident, gazes intent- ly upon his sleeping wife from the bedroom doorway. Asleep, Lila cannot refuse the erotic glance of which she, in effect, is totally unaware. Although his gaze expresses desire, Ali, infirm, is unable to rise from the wheelchair to approach her. Recording his failed attempt to lift himself from the chair, the camera, as the only mobile eye in the room, moves in his stead. Turning slowly around the room, its eye envelops the sleeping woman. In this way, the camera effects an important transfer of power, appropriating the control that eludes Ali, revealing the man's impotence. Her eye behind the lens, the woman filmmaker successfully challenges the patriarchal gaze.

Although Lila at first seems at peace in this scene, recurrent nightmares of war atrocities disturb her sleep. Thus, the tension apparent in the first scene, as Lila rejects Ali's gaze and he responds with mute silence, is reinforced in the second sequence, in which the wife's inability to bury the past is coupled with the husband's inability to act. Yet, as the couple founders, female bonding strengthens. Fleeing her unhappy home, Lila turns to the rural woman and their world for her cure. As the camera shifts its focus away from the somber interior space where Lila and her husband live in silence and misunder- standing to the bright outdoors, it again follows Lila's eyes rediscovering peace in the rural world of her childhood as she exchanges glances and then words with the women of Mont Chenoua.

By reaching out to the rural women, Lila is invit- ed to join in their world. This participation takes the form of an evening of traditional dances held in a local cave. Dancing with the women, Lila confirms her sense of belonging to the group. Moreover, the space in which the festivity takes place is significant. Dark, humid, mysterious, the cave where the women have assembled suggests a maternal womb and conveys a past history of tribal origins and earlier matriarchal power. Joining in the Berber women's oral tradition of music and dance, Lila accom- plishes the task that Djebar as writer and filmmaker set as her goal; she restores severed sound to her maternal past.

Although Lila's trajectory includes a voyage inward, a return to female space and to the female collectivity, it concludes with a solitary outward journey as Lila, alone in a fishing boat, sails out to sea. With a last glimpse of the shoreline, her eyes take in the beauty of the rocky coast and the blue expanse of the open Mediterranean Sea. Thus, she leaves behind both the house that conveyed unhap- piness and the women of Mont Chenoua who helped her move past painful memories.

Having filmed Lila's evolution, her coming of age by learning to see, Djebar later tells her readers of the

impact of her protagonist's maturation upon her own evolution. In Vaste est la prison she writes:

Au cours de ces mois de tatonnements, a la suite de mon personnage, j'apprenais que le regard sur le de- hors est en meme temps retour a la memoire, a soi- meme enfant, aux murmures d'avant, a Pceil interieur, immobile sur l'histoire jusque-la cachee, un regard nimbe de sons vagues, de mots inaudibles et de musiques melangees. . . . Ce regard reflexif sur le passe pouvait susciter une dynamique pour une quete sur le present, sur un avenir a la porte. (FP, 298) (In the course of these months of probing, following my protagonist, I learned that the gaze on the outdoors is at the same time a return to memory, to one's childhood, to earlier murmurs, to the interior eye, immobile on a history until then hidden, a clouded gaze of vague sounds, inaudible words, and blended music. . . . This reflexive gaze on the past could initiate the dynamic process for a quest in the present, and the future at hand.)

By filming Lila's story, the camera becomes a con- duit to the filmmaker's maternal past. Moreover, in a subtle reversal of images, the eye of the camera that offers panoramic views, opening the world by filming vast expanses, transforms itself into the interior eye probing the hidden, the immobile, the indistinct, the inaudible. When Djebar returns through memory to closed space and indistinct murmurs, she hints at sharing some common ground with Delacroix. However, in a reflection reminiscent of Picasso's response to Delacroix's canvas, Djebar turns to the past to vitalize the present, conceiving of a future where women are mobile and doors open to sunlight exteriors and not to darkened hallways.

If Delacroix's painting remains ever present in Djebar's consciousness, it is also because she, as an Algerian filmmaker, must come to terms with the question of interdiction: what to disclose, what to dissimulate. Critical of Delacroix, whom she termed a robber, a spy, a voyeur, she avoids transgression. Thus, she is careful to show respect for her hosts, for whom she, her actors, and her camera crew, all visitors from Algiers, are potential intruders. Her intent is to discover and explore without disturbing daily lives. For example, she knows that were she to film adolescent girls and young women without the consent of their fathers or husbands, she would cause serious problems within traditional Muslim families. The filmmaker decides, therefore, to sacri- fice certain images rather than attempt a stolen glance. Djebar later recounts in Vaste est la prison that she was unable to film a young woman she called "the Madonna" because the latter's husband was not available to grant permission. We may argue that she submitted to patriarchy rather than oppose its constraints, but for Djebar this woman came to represent those who, in the name of priva-


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cy, should be allowed to escape the camera's eye. In contrast, Djebar does not hesitate to film the very young and the elderly, the prepubescent girls and postmenopausal women who are free from Muslim society's restrictions upon women's enclosure. However, her camera skillfully acknowledges interdiction by capturing glimpses of veiled women slip- ping into the shadows of a doorway as well as hous- es with their windows shut tight.

Thus, Djebar's response to Delacroix and the painters and photographers he inspired is to eschew transgression and reject the Orientalist's attraction to darkness and immobility. Her only indoor footage is of actors and their fictional world; she films Algerian women outdoors and in movement. In this way, she distances herself from the regard orientalisant, the controlling gaze of the Other that Delacroix's painting Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement has come to represent.

It is important to note that Djebar's deconstruc- tion of the regard orientalisant points to a dual origin: Maghrebian patriarchy on the one hand, French colonialism on the other. If at first one eye alone existed, the harem master's, it was forced by political events, the conquest of Algeria, to make room for another, the colonizer's. Significantly, Djebar is charting the process of woman's empowerment in the postcolonial era. She herself has witnessed the dismantling of colonial empire and, with it, the departure of the colonizer. Yet, keenly aware of the presence and power of patriarchy throughout the Maghreb, she warns that although one controlling eye is gone, the other remains an active force in some areas of public and private life and risks being restored in others. Hence, as an Algerian writer and a feminist, she calls for the transformation of domestic space into a locus of positive relationships, a space no longer controlled by the male patriarchal gaze. In other words, she calls for an end to all ves- tiges of the closed and oppressive system of domestic organization Orientalists termed a harem.

An analysis of La nouba has shown that as the filmmaker distances herself from Orientalism, from Europe's intrusive and distorting eye, in her fictional world she foregrounds her protagonist's struggle to break free from the controlling gaze of Maghre- bian patriarchy. Her exploration of both forms of domination continues in Vaste est la prison. Incorpo- rating several strands of narrative, the novel begins with a first-person narrative that reworks aspects of Lila's struggle for empowerment and later turns to Djebar's reflections on her experience as filmmaker. Briefly, the first-person narrative (part 1 of the text) recounts a thwarted liaison between an Algerian woman - wife, mother, university professor - and the younger man to whom she turns in the belief he will rescue her from a stale marriage. However, illicit passion triggers violence. The wife's confession to

her husband of her desire for this other man results in her brutal beating and their eventual divorce. The narrator ultimately achieves independence, freeing herself from both husband and lover. She, like Lila, moves on alone and empowered.

Thus, the tension pervading domestic scenes in the earlier film explodes as violence in this text. To her exploration of the psychological mechanisms of passion and jealousy, the novelist adds the factor of domestic violence, an issue she had addressed once before, in Ombre sultane. However, she now gives the theme of violence against women yet another di- mension by including in this text incidents of at- tacks by Islamic fundamentalists against Algerian women whose dress and/or comportment they deem disrespectful of their religious tenets. Hence, the violence Djebar had depicted in earlier texts - Les enfants du nouveau monde, Les alouettes naives, L 'amour ; la fantasia - as brutality inflicted upon Al- gerians by an external enemy, the European colonizer, is refigured. Turned inward and self-destructive, this violence harms society and family life, trans- forming the Algerian nation into a divided society and the Algerian home into a prison where interrogation and intimidation replace communication and understanding.

Although the plot summary bears certain melo- dramatic elements, it nevertheless conveys the over- arching theme of Djebar's work: Algerian woman's struggle for empowerment in defiance of patriarchal constraints. Woman's right to see and be seen is again at the heart of the struggle; Isma's beating is crucial in this regard. When the irate husband at- tacks his wife, wielding a broken whiskey bottle, he aims for her eyes. Isma, the narrator, recalls:



Proteger mes yeux. Car sa folie se revelait etrange: il pretendait m'aveugler. "Femme adultere", gronda-t-il, la bouteille de whisky cassee en deux a la main; je ne pensais qu' a mes yeux, et au risque que representait la baie trop ouverte. (FP, 85) (Protect my eyes. His madness is strange: he wanted to blind me. "Adultress," he mumbled, the broken whiskey bottle in his hand; I could only think of my eyes, and the danger of the wide-open bay window.)

Beaten ostensibly for initiating an illicit relationship, Isma is in fact punished for daring to review her life and redefine it. Her husband claims the dominating gaze for himself alone. Threatened by his wife's gaze upon the world and others, he inflicts violence upon her body in his vain attempt to control her.

In her effort to fill an emotional void, Isma had entered into a game of seduction with her potential lover. By dancing seductively before him, she cap- tures his attention, and then feels validated by his presence, empowered by his gaze.7 She states: "Ainsi un homme m'avait regardee danser et j'avais ete 'vue'" (Thus a man had seen me dance and I had been "seen"; FP, 64). Isma further admits that she is prisoner of the male gaze when she exclaims:

. . . moi regardee par lui et aussitot apres, allant me contempler pour me voir par ses yeux dans le miroir, tenter de surprendre le visage qu'il venait de voir, com- ment il le voyait, ce "moi" etranger et autre, devenant pour la premiere fois moi a cet instant meme, precise- ment grace a cette translation de la vision de l'autre. (FP, 116). (. . . me gazed upon by him and promptly looking at myself in the mirror to see myself through his eyes, try- ing to seize the face he had just seen, as he saw it, this "me," the stranger and the other, becoming me for the very first time, at this very instant, precisely because of this displacement of the other's vision.)

By accepting the "displacement of the other's vision," Isma conforms to John Berger's analysis of the construction of a female identity that depends upon woman's internalization of the male dominating gaze. The art critic writes: "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This de- termines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves" (46-47).

After the relationship has ended, however, Isma is able to reexamine her relationship to the gaze of the man she had previously desired. Then, with the understanding that her self-image has depended upon his gaze mediating the process of her self-vali- dation, and that this dependency had in fact turned her, the female subject, into a passive object of male desire, she has the perspective necessary to free herself from his hold. Breaking the dependency, she reappropriates the gaze. No longer prisoner of another's projection, she is free to shape and articulate

her own experience, serve as her own mirror, see and be seen without the mediation of the Other.

Thus, Djebar situates Isma's reevaluation of the male dominating gaze within her evolution toward emotional maturity. For Isma, the process of self- hood begins with the recognition of a sterile marriage followed by a futile romance and concludes with her rejection of the controlling gaze. Although Djebar considers the "displacement of the other's vision" a legacy of Maghrebian patriarchy, originat- ing with the controlling eye of the master of the harem, Berger's comments concerning female dependency upon the male gaze are directed initially to the Occident, not the Orient. They become all the more pertinent, however, in Algeria, a society that has traditionally cloaked its women in veils and barred their entrance into public space.

Neither veiled nor cloistered, Isma never encounters the full weight of patriarchy. The protagonist retraces the novelist's trajectory and, like her, is sep- arated through schooling from the traditional world of the women of her childhood - her grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and mother - and from experiences of enclosure that mark their lives. At the age at which her cousins were veiled, Djebar's father sent her as a boarding student to a colonial secondary school. The break was not conclusive, however; she returned to her extended family every summer, reentering a world from which she became further distanced as she grew older. In the third part of the novel Djebar uses memory to bridge the gap between traditional women's lives and her own. Isma, her voice and life story merging with Djebar's, recalls episodes in the lives of her mother and grandmother that were clearly subversive and successfully challenged patriarchy and colonialism.8 As Isma expresses Djebar's struggle for self, she reveals that her female forebears were not resigned prisoners of the enclosure. She is following a path that earlier generations of women had already begun to trace.

First, Lla Fatima, Djebar's maternal grandmother, given in marriage at the age of fourteen to a wealthy, aged patriarch. As the narrator imagines the wedding night, she studies the child bride's eyes for signs of submission or revolt.

Elle garde les paupieres baissees, lorsque Phomme - son maitre - souleve, des doigts, la voilette, approche son visage gris des yeux de la jeune mariee . . . sa main tatonne, frole les pommettes, les yeux de Fatima qui, lentement enfln, regarde. (FP, 210) (She keeps her eyes lowered, when the man - her master - raises the veil with his fingers, his gray face ap- proaching the young wife's eyes ... his hand fumbles, strokes the cheek, the eyes that finally slowly look up.)

Although the girl's eyes convey submission on her wedding night, she subsequently, as the old man's wife, establishes control and, still an adolescent,


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manipulates the aged patriarch. Upon his death a few years later, she refuses to remain with his family. In later years, twice more widowed and then di- vorced, Lla Fatima secures autonomy and standing in Cherchell, where she is an important elder known for her wisdom and independence, and becomes a property owner as well.9

As Lla Fatima subverts patriarchal domination, her daughter Bahia challenges colonial authority. When the latter's son is sent to prison in France during the Algerian War, she sets out to persuade French authorities to allow her a private visit with her son. Traveling from Algiers to the prison in Al- sace, she knows that the fate of her mission depends upon a successful encounter with the French ad- ministrator. She will succeed if, under the scrutiny of the prison director's gaze, she is able to affect a certain "Europeanness." Isma explains:

Elle parlait maintenant sans accent; ses cheveux chatain clair, sa toilette de la boutique la plus elegante d'Alger la faisaient prendre (quarante ans, elle en paraissait dix de moins, un peu raidie dans son air "chic") pas telle- ment pour une Frangaise, plutot pour une bourgeoise dTtalie du Nord, ou pour une Espagnole qui serait francisee. (FP, 188-89)

(She now spoke without an accent; her light brown hair and her clothes from the most elegant boutique in Al- giers made her appear [at forty she seemed ten years younger, a little stiff in her "chic" appearance] not so much as a French woman, but rather an Italian bourgeoise, or perhaps a Spaniard who had become quite French.)

The Algerian mother is granted the visit to her son, an Algerian "rebel," because she meets criteria that place her outside indigenous space. In truth, the French prison director does not quite know where to situate her and asks himself as he looks her over: "Une Mauresque, cette jeune femme si bien habil- lee?" (A Moorish woman, this young woman so well-dressed? FP, 195). Her only trace of former veiling is the pair of dark glasses shielding her eyes.10

In this episode that foregrounds visual representation, Djebar conveys as well the importance of language skills to the performance, a test in assimi- lation. The Algerian woman must speak the colonizer's language flawlessly at the same time that she undergoes the scrutiny of his gaze. Yet when Djebar becomes narrator and scribe, using the French language to record her mother and grandmother's sub- version of patriarchy and colonialism, she enters lin- guistic space they do not share. Delving into the past to bridge the gap between their lives and hers, the novelist encounters the barrier of language. In colonial Algeria, her grandmother was not taught to speak French; her mother was not taught to read or write it.

In this regard, having examined the ambiguous nature of the French colonial educational experi-

ence in U amour, la fantasia, the text in which she recalls the crucial event of walking to school for the first time accompanied by her father, Djebar, in this work, recounts an equally significant episode: a scene constructed not from memory but from an image. At the age of four, the novelist is photo- graphed with her father in his classroom with his male pupils. On the one hand, the photo reveals the schoolteacher's intent to educate his children, to break social and cultural barriers and move his daughter into space formerly reserved for men and boys. On the other hand, it confirms the child's response, a steady and resolute stare back at the camera's eye; she accepts the challenge. The photo does not show - and cannot predict - either the subsequent process of social and cultural dislocation (the price one pays for challenging prevailing norms) or the powerful promise of discovery, formerly an ex- clusively male prerogative, that a move into new realms makes possible.

Finally, by combining narratives, adding her memories of childhood and adolescence to bio- graphical fragments of her mother and grandmother's lives, Djebar retraces a collective trajectory away from the enclosure. The writer reveals that although her father, deeply commited to educating his children, made her individual journey possible, women family members provided collective support.11 Interweaving several strands of narrative and fusing the voices of protagonist and novelist, Djebar widens the scope of autobiography to em- brace the collective female voice.12 Situating her discourse within the community of Algerian women, she, with their help, restores severed sound, the task she assumed from Delacroix, and in the process cre- ates collective autofiction. Hence, when Djebar recalls her experience of filming La nouba, she clearly defines her individual mission as a shared endeavor.

J'ai dit: "Moteur." Une emotion m'a saisie. Comme si, avec moi, toutes les femmes de tous les harems avaient chuchote: "Moteur." Connivence qui me stimule. D'elles seules dorenavant le regard m'importe. Pose sur ces images que j 'organise et que ces presences invisibles derriere mon epaule aident a fermenter. (FP, 74)

(As I said "Begin," I was seized with emotion. It was as if with me all the women of all the harems had whis- pered, "Begin." This complicity urges me on. What only matters to me from now on is their gaze upon the images I am organizing and which their invisible presence peeking over my shoulder helps develop.)

As Djebar's pen brought Algerian women's muted voice and veiled presence into public space, so does her camera; hence the symbolic value of giving the camera to a sequestered sister. Before concluding Vaste est la prison, Djebar states:

Cette image - realite de mon enfance, de celle de mon enfance, de celle de ma mere et de mes tantes, de mes



cousines parfois du meme age que moi, ce scandale qu'enfant j'ai vecu norme, voici qu'elle surgit au depart de cette quete; silhouette unique de femme, rassem- blant dans les pans de son linge-linceul les quelque cinq cents millions de segreguees du monde islamique, c'est elle soudain qui regarde, mais derriere la camera, elle qui, par un trou libre dans une face masquee, devore le monde. (VP, 174; emphasis mine) (This image - reality of my childhood, that of my mother and my aunts, my cousins who were often my age, this scandal that for me as a child was considered normal, here she is at the start of my quest; woman's unique silhouette, gathering in the folds of her drapery- shroud the five hundred million segregated women of the Islamic world; suddently she is staring at us, but from behind the camera, and through a free hole in a masked face she is devouring the world.)

Djebar's gesture of handing the camera to her sister is an attempt to encourage the latter's subjectivity at a time when any effort to reappropriate the gaze is considered by Islamic fundamentalist groups a provocation to be met with violence and oppression.13 However, too long a victim of colonial and patriarchal oppression, the Algerian woman is in movement, engaged in the process of liberation.14 As writer and filmmaker, Assia Djebar represents an important voice of resistance. In her rejection of the controlling gaze - be it individual or collective - she reminds her fellow Algerians that her nation must remain commited to pluralism; she claims for herself and her sisters the right to see and be seen, as they circulate freely in open space.

University of Colorado, Boulder

1 For the historical background to woman's participation in the Algerian War, see Amrane-Minne. 2 Aas-Rouparis interprets the role of the servant as a sign of confrontation with tradition. Zimra views her as the spy, the proxy of the master (WA, 209). 3 Beauge and Clement's edited work provides a series of inter- esting articles on the image in the Arab world as well as portraits of the Arab world by European travelers, painters, and photographers. 4 For a study of photographs as postcards of the exotic Alge- rian woman, see Alloula. 5 For a thorough and well-documented study of Orientalism, see Said. For an important study of Djebar's "dialogue" with Orientalists Delacroix and Fromentin in Ly amour, la fantasia, see Zimra (1995). 6 This translation and the translations from Vaste est la prison are mine.

7 Chikhi notes the importance of the dance in Djebar's work, particularly for its importance to say or hide certain things (105). For a detailed study of the role of women's dance in the Arab world, see Henni-Chebra and Poche. 8 For a theoretical discussion of the autobiographical pact, the promise to the reader that the textual and referential "I" are one and the same, see Lejeune and Lionnet.

9 Djebar dedicates a short story, "Les morts parlent" (Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement), to her grandmother, Lla Fatma Sahraoui.

10 Djebar's mother customarily wore the voile mauresque of urban Algerian women. See Gauvin, p. 78.

11 When the child goes off the school, she wears a "protecting eye," an amulet containing Koranic verses given to her by her grandmother (287). 12 In her study of L' amour, la fantasia Geesey provides an infor- mative essay on collective autobiography. 13 Djebar's latest work, Le blanc de VAlgerie, is devoted exclu- sively to the theme of violence and death in Algeria. She and her family members have close friends and relatives who have been assassinated by Islamic extremists.

14 For a further study of women in contemporary Algeria, see Lazreg.

Works cited

Aas-Rouparis, Nicole. "L'esthethique d'une memoire dans Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement d'Assia Djebar: Reconsti- tution et traduction." Revue Francophone, 8:2, pp. 5-17.

Alloula, Malek. Le harem colonial. Paris. Garance. 1981. Amrane-Minne, Daniele Djamila. Femmes au combat. Algiers.

Rahma. 1993. . Des femmes dans la guerre. Paris. Karthala. 1994. Beauge, G., and J.-F. Clement. LHmage dans le monde arabe.

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Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York. Random House. 1979. Zimra, Clarisse. "Disorienting the Subject in Djebar's U amour,

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