Assia Djebar > Quotes

“small things comes in big packages.*”
― Assia Djebar

“Je suis féministe parce que je suis Algérienne”
― Assia Djebar

“Since they weren't sleepy and nothing had been left unsaid, they began to read poetry to each other, taking turns like children and enjoying it. Bachir had a lovely voice, one that was already that of a man. He knew many poems by heart. He lovingly recited Victor Hugo, with warmth Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre, and poems written by young people going into battle; he then moved on to the poets of liberty - Rimbaud again, Eluard, and Desnos.”
― Assia Djebar, Children of the New World

“My father was a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue, and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French. Except”
― Assia Djebar, The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories

“Il faut écouter les autres dans leurs langues et dans la forme spontanée de leur fureur.”
― Assia Djebar

“_ (Omar ibn el Khattab) lorsque j'ai entendu le Prophète, que la grâce de Dieu lui soit assurée, nous dire: "Aujourd'hui j'ai parachevé mon bienfait à votre égard", certe oui, j'ai pleuré. Ce même jour d'Arafat, le Prophète m'a demandé la raison de mes pleurs, j'ai répondu: " Ce qui me fait pleurer, c'est que, jusqu'à présent, nous étions dans un accroissement constant dans notre religion, mais si, à présent, elle est achevée, il faut dire qu'il n' y a pas de choses qui atteignent leur plénitude sans que, par la suite, elles ne s'amoindrissent!" Et le Prophète m'ayant écouté a répondu après un long moment: "Certes, Omar, tu as dis vrai!”
― Assia Djebar, Loin de Médine

“How shall I find the strength to tear off my veil unless I have to use it to bandage the running sore nearby from which words exude?”
― Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade

“Love, if I managed to write it down, would approach a critical point: there where lies the risk of exhuming buried cries, those of yesterday and as well as those of a hundred years ago. But my sole ambition in writing is constantly to travel to fresh pastures and replenish my water skins with an inexhaustible silence.”
― Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade

“My oral tradition has gradually been overlaid and is in danger of vanishing: at the age of eleven or twelve I was abruptly ejected from this theatre of feminine confidences - was I thereby spared from having to silence my humbled pride? In writing of my childhood memories I am taken back to those bodies bereft of voices. To attempt an autobiography using French words alone is to lend oneself to the vivisector's scalpel, revealing what lies beneath the skin. The flesh flakes off and with it, seemingly, the last shreds of the unwritten language of my childhood. Wounds arc reopened, veins weep, one's own blood flows and that of others, which has never dried. As the words pour out, inexhaustible, maybe distorting, our ancestral night lengthens. Conceal the body and its ephemeral grace. Prohibit gestures - they arc too specific. Only let sounds remain.

Speaking of oneself in a language other than that of the elders is indeed to unveil oneself, not only to emerge from childhood but to leave it, never to return. Such incidental unveiling is tantamount to stripping oneself naked, as the demotic Arabic dialect emphasizes. But this stripping naked, when expressed in the language of the former conquerer (who for more than a century could lay his hands on everything save women's bodies), this stripping naked takes us back oddly enough to the plundering of the preceding century. When the body is not embalmed by ritual lamentations, it is like a scarecrow decked in rags and tatters. The battle-cries of our ancestors, unhorsed in long-forgotten combats, re-echo across the years; accompanied by the dirges of the mourning-women who watched them die.”
― Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade

“Death without End Nothing can stand in the way of glory, solitary and solar,
the virtues of a man or a people reduced, primarily by analysis,
to no more than a hollow vessel...but the shame that remains,
after a life of betrayal, or even a single act of betrayal,
is more certain and less likely to be injurious than glory... A people that is remembered only by periods of glory or men
of virtue, will always be in doubt about itself, reduced to being
an empty vessel. The crimes of which it is ashamed are what
make its true history, and for a man it is the same. JEAN GENET (Letters to Roger Blin on The Screens)”
― Assia Djebar, Algerian White

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― Assia Djebar

“« Tout auteur de narration (sinon de poésie) sait bien que l’instant miraculeux est celui où, grâce à un détail, au moment le plus inattendu, le personnage ou la force en action, en masque, vous échappe, glisse entre vos doigts, n’est plus mécanique - c’est vous soudain, non plus l’auteur, mais le suiveur, l’obligé, le serviteur, l’aimant d’amour, par ombre portée de l’Autre, cette fumée, cette ombre-sœur et ennemie en mots et en voix, laquel e est vous et n’est pas seulement vous...

La vie - même quand elle n’est pas de chair, mais réduite à des mots mobiles - la vie que vous osez ou croyez ressusciter, vous, l’espace d’une seconde, métamorphosée en Dieu-le-père et en Dieu-la-mère à la fois, auteure donc, pleine de la semence ou de la douleur de la gestation, puis de son accomplissement - oui, la vie du Texte résiste, se rebiffe, se rebelle : au terme de votre entreprise, vous voici en train de devenir, au cœur de cette mise en œuvre, lecteur (lectrice) aussi, par humilité ou dévouement à ce mélange, à ce magma : un livre, un parmi des milliers, des millions que le temps réduira ensuite en poussière ou à une architecture arachnéenne faite de multiples silences, symphonie d’un rêve évanoui, mais obsédant. »”
― Assia Djebar, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père

“As I listened, I discovered the deep shame which we suffer before the spectacle of other people's sorrow.”
― Assia djebar, la soif

“Dante compares this language—which is like yours, when you come back to me intangibly—to the “perfumed panther,” the mythical animal of medieval bestiaries. He adds, and I quote for all three of you: “Hearing the call of the panther, the other animals follow it wherever it goes, attracted by so much fragrant softness.”
― Assia Djebar, Algerian White

“« Comment ai-je pu ensuite continuer à vivre, à sentir, à languir ou à me passionner alors qu’est restée enfouie au fond de moi, brûlant à petit feu, cette braise inentamée me dévorant en dedans, non, plutôt cette obscurité tournoyante qui a persisté, des décennies durant - oui, des décennies au cours desquelles le cœur s’est immobilisé, l’esprit, non, la sensibilité aux autres demeurée ouverte, vulnérable ? »”
― Assia Djebar, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père

“Words, words.”
― Assia Djebar, la soif

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― Assia Djebar