Born: Aug 4, 1936, Cherchell, Algeria
Assia Djebar is an Algerian writer and motion-picture director, known for her works about women in the Islamic societies of North Africa. She is one of a generation of female writers offering a view of history that gives women a central role. Central concerns in her work include voice, memory, and language.
Djebar was born Fatima-Zohra Imalayen in Cherchell, a small coastal town west of Algiers, to a schoolteacher father and a mother who died while Djebar was a child. She finished her early studies in Algeria, then became the first Algerian student to be admitted to the prestigious L’École Normale Supérieure de Sèvres in France. In 1957, she earned a degree in history from the Sorbonne in Paris. She went on to teach history at the University of Rabat in Morocco, and later studied history in Tunisia and taught at the University of Algiers.
Djebar’s first novel, La Soif (1957; translated as The Mischief, 1958), received both critical and popular attention. It was followed by Les impatients (The Impatient Ones) a year later, which drew criticism for its eroticism and bourgeois (middle-class) values. Two more novels followed: Les enfants du nouveau monde (The Children of the New World, 1962) and Les alouettes naives (The Innocent Larks, 1962). She also worked in theater, coproducing the play Rouge l’aube (Red Dawn, 1960), and wrote poetry, collected in Poemes pour l’Algerie heureuse (Poems for a Happy Algeria, 1969).
Djebar then stopped writing for several years, citing discomfort from writing about subjects too close to her own life-especially in a traditional society where women did not speak of the self. During this period, she concentrated on filmmaking, creating Walid Garn (1977), which deals with women’s responses to liberation struggles. She then made a controversial feminist film, La nouba des femmes de Mont Chenoua (The Festival of the Women of Mt. Chenoua, 1979), for Algerian state television. The film weaves together what Djebar called “”a polyphony of women’s voices.”” In her next film, La Zerda et les chants de l’oubli (Zerda or the Songs of Forgetting, 1982), Djebar superimposed Algerian women’s songs over French news reels of World War I (1914-1918) to document women’s participation in the war.
Djebar resumed writing with a collection of stories and an essay, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980; translated as Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1992). Her next novel, L’amour, la fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, 1985), alternates two women’s voices as they explore historical boundaries. With this work, Djebar began challenging the assumption that women’s private life should never become public, and the symbolic act of unveiling becomes a recurring theme. Ombre sultane (1987; A Sister to Scheherazade, 1989), the second work in a quartet that begins with L’amour, la fantasia, alternates narratives from two women, one emancipated and one traditional. Loin de Medine: filles d’Ismael (Far From Medina, 1991) addresses questions that Islam and the Qur’an (Koran) pose for women. Her novel Vaste est la prison (Vast is the Prison) was published in 1995 and in 1996 she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
