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L'Amour, la fantasia
Nous glissons du passé lointain au passé proche, de la troisième personne à la première ; extraordinaire évocation du père, instituteur de français, de la mère, des cousines, des femmes cloîtrées vives et dont le cri et l'amour nous poursuivent.
Assia Djebar, sans conteste la plus grande romancière du Maghreb, nous donne ici son oeuvre la plus aboutie.
Assia Djebar, sans conteste la plus grande romancière du Maghreb, nous donne ici son oeuvre la plus aboutie.
314 pages, Pocket Book
First published January 1, 1985
90 people are currently reading
3298 people want to read
About the author
Assia Djebar
38 books383 followersAssia Djebar was born in Algeria to parents from the Berkani tribe of Dahra. She adopted the pen name Assia Djebar when her first novel, La Soif (Hunger) was published in 1957, in France where she was studying at the Sorbonne.
In 1958, she travelled to Tunis, where she worked as a reporter alongside Frantz Fanon, travelling to Algerian refugee camps on the Tunisian border with the Red Cross and Crescent. In 1962, she returned to Algeria to report on the first days of the country's independence.
She settled in Algeria in 1974, and began teaching at the University of Algiers. In 1978, she made a feature film with an Algerian TV company, The Nouba of the Women on Mont Chenoua, which won the critics' prize at Venice. Her second feature, La Zerda, won a prize at Berlin in 1983. In 1995, she took up an academic post at the University of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and in 2002 was named a Silver Chair at New York University. She is a member of the Belgian Royal Academy and of the Academie Française.
She published her first four novels in France, between 1957 and 1967. These were followed by her Algerian quartet, of which three titles are complete to date, and by her three "novels of exile." Djebar has also published short stories, essay collections and two libretti. All of her writing is in French.
In 1958, she travelled to Tunis, where she worked as a reporter alongside Frantz Fanon, travelling to Algerian refugee camps on the Tunisian border with the Red Cross and Crescent. In 1962, she returned to Algeria to report on the first days of the country's independence.
She settled in Algeria in 1974, and began teaching at the University of Algiers. In 1978, she made a feature film with an Algerian TV company, The Nouba of the Women on Mont Chenoua, which won the critics' prize at Venice. Her second feature, La Zerda, won a prize at Berlin in 1983. In 1995, she took up an academic post at the University of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and in 2002 was named a Silver Chair at New York University. She is a member of the Belgian Royal Academy and of the Academie Française.
She published her first four novels in France, between 1957 and 1967. These were followed by her Algerian quartet, of which three titles are complete to date, and by her three "novels of exile." Djebar has also published short stories, essay collections and two libretti. All of her writing is in French.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 144 reviews
April 12, 2008
Assia Djebar wants you to write a term paper about her book. She wants you to deploy trendy crit theory terminology to unpack her overtly symbolic and extremely self-aware meta-narrative of historical readings, elided autobiography and tiresome, italicized hinge pieces. But she also wants you to learn about Algerian history, about life as an Arab woman and about the torturous process of forging an identity in the liminal space between a conquering and a conquered nation. Unfortunately, she has little faith in her readers and frequently interprets her own book to be sure that everyone understands how fractured she is, what “the other” has done, on how many levels the metaphor of being veiled can operate, or what a compromise it entails that she is writing in French.
When Djebar gives voice to the Algerian women who aided the native resistance or when she frames the observations of victorious Frenchmen, she shares memorable and moving stories. Her offering of Algeria’s history is absorbable and relevant, knit from carefully chosen details that contrast each other quite appropriately (for instance, the Frenchman observing the battle at an aesthetic remove, perving out at the spectacle and the Frenchman drily tallying the dead stand in pointed opposition to the women who report how often “France” burnt down their homes and destroyed the men of their community). Some of these retellings are gripping and devastating because when Djebar restrains her anger and allows history to speak for itself, the book sails.
I was considerably less interested in her autobiographical chapters, in the precocious observations of the privileged young child who escapes the veil through reading and scholarship. Similarly, the portion of the novel that shows a young Djebar being deflowered in Paris amongst great inward drama and traditional lament verges on melodrama and isn’t strong enough to stand up to the real tragedies in the book.
At one point, Djebar writes, “When writing, I have but one concern: that I should say enough, or rather that I should express myself clearly enough. Rejecting all lyricism, turning my back on high-flown language; every metaphor seems a wretched ruse, an approximation and a weakness.” Aside from the fact that those sentences contain numerous metaphors, Djebar is simply lying. How can she square that sentiment with, “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.” Or, “every language is a dark depository for piled-up corpses, refuse, sewage, but faced with the language of the former conqueror, which offers me its ornaments, its jewels, its flowers, I find they are the flowers of death—chrysanthemums on tombs!”
When Djebar works to “resurrect so many of (her) vanished sisters,” her book is unique and engaging; when she pulls back to be her own theorist and when she spotlights tiny moments of her personal development on the world historical scale of her novel, she weakens her project on the whole.
When Djebar gives voice to the Algerian women who aided the native resistance or when she frames the observations of victorious Frenchmen, she shares memorable and moving stories. Her offering of Algeria’s history is absorbable and relevant, knit from carefully chosen details that contrast each other quite appropriately (for instance, the Frenchman observing the battle at an aesthetic remove, perving out at the spectacle and the Frenchman drily tallying the dead stand in pointed opposition to the women who report how often “France” burnt down their homes and destroyed the men of their community). Some of these retellings are gripping and devastating because when Djebar restrains her anger and allows history to speak for itself, the book sails.
I was considerably less interested in her autobiographical chapters, in the precocious observations of the privileged young child who escapes the veil through reading and scholarship. Similarly, the portion of the novel that shows a young Djebar being deflowered in Paris amongst great inward drama and traditional lament verges on melodrama and isn’t strong enough to stand up to the real tragedies in the book.
At one point, Djebar writes, “When writing, I have but one concern: that I should say enough, or rather that I should express myself clearly enough. Rejecting all lyricism, turning my back on high-flown language; every metaphor seems a wretched ruse, an approximation and a weakness.” Aside from the fact that those sentences contain numerous metaphors, Djebar is simply lying. How can she square that sentiment with, “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.” Or, “every language is a dark depository for piled-up corpses, refuse, sewage, but faced with the language of the former conqueror, which offers me its ornaments, its jewels, its flowers, I find they are the flowers of death—chrysanthemums on tombs!”
When Djebar works to “resurrect so many of (her) vanished sisters,” her book is unique and engaging; when she pulls back to be her own theorist and when she spotlights tiny moments of her personal development on the world historical scale of her novel, she weakens her project on the whole.
March 25, 2025
My Body, my Land
Why am I reviewing this? Do I even understand it? No, not entirely, but I understand enough to know that it is a remarkable work, part philosophy, part personal statement, part a history of Algeria under French rule. Its very language a paradox: an Arab author writing in French, the language of the conquerors—but also the language that gives her freedom as a woman from the patriarchal oppression in her own land. And reading it in French as I did, I got an extraordinary sense of Djebar's writing, sonorous, richly colored, syntactically free, juggling unfamiliar terms and proper names. I attach a sample below;* not for nothing is she a member of the Académie Française. Her prose sometimes has the detachment of an historian, sometimes the immediacy of personal confession, sometimes the intoxication of a poet—but a normal novel this is not.
Look at the cover, a detail of a Delacroix painting, perfectly chosen. It is obviously influenced by Delacroix's visit to Algeria, full of colorful orientalism. But it also represents a rape, and the underlying theme of Djebar's book is surely the rape of a country and the repression of women. Indeed, for her, the failure to fully possess either her country or her own body are one and the same thing. The feminism of her writing is personal, political, and historical at one and the same time. Alternate chapters of the book tell the story of the French conquest of Algiers in 1830, the repressive and even genocidal campaigns against guerrilla resistance that followed, and the final wars before independence in 1962. But in the personal chapters that come in between, Djebar is as much concerned with male dominance as with colonialism.
Her opening scene, "Little Arab Girl's First Day at School," contains virtually the entire book in a nutshell. A woman walking her daughter to school realizes that the girl will learn to write, and that writing will both expose her to oppression and give her the means to overcome it. She remembers once receiving an innocent letter from a boy, and her father tearing it up unread. I'd like to offer the rest of the chapter in the English version by Dorothy S. Blair, translated as Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, because it shows Djebar's extraordinary enfolding of the feminist, political, and sexual in almost every paragraph:
And so to the title. The "Amour" is not going to be a history of the writer's romantic life, though she has a remarkable passage when the young bride's cry at the moment of defloration in a Paris apartment becomes like a rallying cry echoing across borders and through time. "Fantasia" is more complex: an allusion to the musical structure of the book, a specific term describing the cavalcades of horsemen with rifles that are features of Arab celebrations, and (by analogy with fantassin meaning "fighter") a symbol of armed resistance. Perhaps even a national ideal, noble but fated? The same ambiguity returns in the final section of the book, entitled "Tzarl-Rit." This is an Arab word for an ululation made by striking the lips with the hand (like a child's war whoop). Both Arabic-French dictionaries she quotes ascribe this only to women, but one calls it a cry of joy, and the other a howl of despair. There is much despair in this book, but joy too—and that is what makes it so extraordinary.
======
*
Here is a small sample of Djebar's French, sonorous images with few verbs, admittedly at the end of a short chapter entitled "Sistre" (sistrum), whose intent is both musical and poetic:
Why am I reviewing this? Do I even understand it? No, not entirely, but I understand enough to know that it is a remarkable work, part philosophy, part personal statement, part a history of Algeria under French rule. Its very language a paradox: an Arab author writing in French, the language of the conquerors—but also the language that gives her freedom as a woman from the patriarchal oppression in her own land. And reading it in French as I did, I got an extraordinary sense of Djebar's writing, sonorous, richly colored, syntactically free, juggling unfamiliar terms and proper names. I attach a sample below;* not for nothing is she a member of the Académie Française. Her prose sometimes has the detachment of an historian, sometimes the immediacy of personal confession, sometimes the intoxication of a poet—but a normal novel this is not.
Look at the cover, a detail of a Delacroix painting, perfectly chosen. It is obviously influenced by Delacroix's visit to Algeria, full of colorful orientalism. But it also represents a rape, and the underlying theme of Djebar's book is surely the rape of a country and the repression of women. Indeed, for her, the failure to fully possess either her country or her own body are one and the same thing. The feminism of her writing is personal, political, and historical at one and the same time. Alternate chapters of the book tell the story of the French conquest of Algiers in 1830, the repressive and even genocidal campaigns against guerrilla resistance that followed, and the final wars before independence in 1962. But in the personal chapters that come in between, Djebar is as much concerned with male dominance as with colonialism.
Her opening scene, "Little Arab Girl's First Day at School," contains virtually the entire book in a nutshell. A woman walking her daughter to school realizes that the girl will learn to write, and that writing will both expose her to oppression and give her the means to overcome it. She remembers once receiving an innocent letter from a boy, and her father tearing it up unread. I'd like to offer the rest of the chapter in the English version by Dorothy S. Blair, translated as Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, because it shows Djebar's extraordinary enfolding of the feminist, political, and sexual in almost every paragraph:
During the months and years that followed, I became absorbed by this business of love, or rather by the prohibition laid on love; my father's condemnation only served to encourage the intrigue. In these early stages of my sentimental education, our secret correspondence is carried on in French: thus the language that my father had been at pains for me to learn, serves as a go-between, and from now a double, contradictory sign reigns over my initiation. As with the heroine of a Western romance, youthful defiance helped me break out of the circle that whispering elders traced around me and within me. Then love came to be transformed in the tunnel of pleasure, soft clay to be moulded by matrimony.It is hard to know to what extent the book is autobiographical. The "I" might be Djebar herself, or at least as much as the real woman (Fatima-Zohra Imalayen) cares to reveal through her nom-de-plume. In the last half of the book, where the sections follow one another like movements in a piece of chamber music, enfolding themes and variations, she will introduce several different "I" voices—resistance fighters, exiles, torture victims in the last wars against the French—any one of which might have been her as a young woman, but one assumes were not. But she becomes all women, just as she becomes her whole country.
Memory purges and purifies the sounds of childhood; we are cocooned by childhood until the discovery of sensuality, which washes over us and gradually bedazzles us…. Voiceless, cut off from my mother's words by some trick of memory, I managed to pass through the dark waters of the corridor, miraculously inviolate, not even guessing at the enclosing walls. The shock of the first words blurted out: the truth emerging from a break in my stammering voice. From what nocturnal reef of pleasure did I manage to wrest this truth?
I blew the space within me to pieces, a space filled with desperate voiceless cries, frozen long ago in a prehistory of love. Once I had discovered the meaning of the words—those same words that are revealed to the unveiled body—I cut myself adrift. I set off at dawn, with my little girl's hand in mine.
And so to the title. The "Amour" is not going to be a history of the writer's romantic life, though she has a remarkable passage when the young bride's cry at the moment of defloration in a Paris apartment becomes like a rallying cry echoing across borders and through time. "Fantasia" is more complex: an allusion to the musical structure of the book, a specific term describing the cavalcades of horsemen with rifles that are features of Arab celebrations, and (by analogy with fantassin meaning "fighter") a symbol of armed resistance. Perhaps even a national ideal, noble but fated? The same ambiguity returns in the final section of the book, entitled "Tzarl-Rit." This is an Arab word for an ululation made by striking the lips with the hand (like a child's war whoop). Both Arabic-French dictionaries she quotes ascribe this only to women, but one calls it a cry of joy, and the other a howl of despair. There is much despair in this book, but joy too—and that is what makes it so extraordinary.
======
*
Here is a small sample of Djebar's French, sonorous images with few verbs, admittedly at the end of a short chapter entitled "Sistre" (sistrum), whose intent is both musical and poetic:
Soufflerie souffreteuse ou solennelle du temps d'amour, soufrière de quelle attente, fièvre des staccato. Silence rempart autour de la fortification du plaisir, et de sa digraphie. Création chaque nuit. Or broché du silence.
August 24, 2020
A Rich Mosaic of Fragments
This is the first novel written by an Algerian, man or woman, that I ever read. I suspect that could be true for many readers. As a new voice in my world of literature, then, it's an important book. I saw FANTASIA as a kaleidoscope, though, always producing patterns and colors, always arranged, but not always understandable. I found it very hard to judge this work because it has many facets, like a shifted kaleidoscope.
***** Five stars for the idea or conception of the novel, for language (if it is well-translated), for the whole effort of bringing a woman's perspective on colonialism, on revolutionary struggle, and on tradition. Djebar is obsessed with the "word", especially the written word and its strength. "The word is a torch; to be held up in front of the wall of separation or withdrawal..." Words preserve and pass on memories, tragedies, pain, love and lack of love. Words hold the keys to Algeria's past, the world shattered by the French invasion and conquest of the mid-19th century, when 25 years of war ruined the country. But the French conquerors wrote of it, much more than the Algerian defenders. Their words must be mined for the reality, we must forge the Algerian view from the 'ore'. Words again unite the Algerian women and men who fought France in the 1950s. But those very French words, the language of the conquerors and destroyers, are used to pass on here, in this novel, the very heartfelt, most intimate emotions of the author. She speaks of this. Perhaps silence is more powerful, implying resistance. "Writing does not silence the voice, but awakens it, above all to resurrect so many vanished sisters." Those are the sisters who didn't know French, who could not speak out from their cloistered existence.
****For bringing Algerian history to life from an Algerian perspective, and an Algerian woman's view at that, a woman who, through an educated father and schooling escaped the enclosed future that awaited her. The struggle, the never-ending resistance to the occupation of their land.
***The plot of a novel is a fishing line with some attractive hooks for catching readers. If this line is broken too often, no fish can be caught. The novel becomes a collection of beautiful fragments, leaving the reader to imagine what it could be if it were all joined somehow. FANTASIA suffers from a too intricate sub-division of the voices. It is a layered approach, the conflict between two worlds---a conflict that entered even into the author's soul--- it is effective poetically, but not as prose....we lose track of who is saying what, who is related to whom, where everyone fits in. Overall Djebar reaches us, but the novel has an abstract quality that does not emotionally involve us much with any characters. It's a strange but interesting work.
This is the first novel written by an Algerian, man or woman, that I ever read. I suspect that could be true for many readers. As a new voice in my world of literature, then, it's an important book. I saw FANTASIA as a kaleidoscope, though, always producing patterns and colors, always arranged, but not always understandable. I found it very hard to judge this work because it has many facets, like a shifted kaleidoscope.
***** Five stars for the idea or conception of the novel, for language (if it is well-translated), for the whole effort of bringing a woman's perspective on colonialism, on revolutionary struggle, and on tradition. Djebar is obsessed with the "word", especially the written word and its strength. "The word is a torch; to be held up in front of the wall of separation or withdrawal..." Words preserve and pass on memories, tragedies, pain, love and lack of love. Words hold the keys to Algeria's past, the world shattered by the French invasion and conquest of the mid-19th century, when 25 years of war ruined the country. But the French conquerors wrote of it, much more than the Algerian defenders. Their words must be mined for the reality, we must forge the Algerian view from the 'ore'. Words again unite the Algerian women and men who fought France in the 1950s. But those very French words, the language of the conquerors and destroyers, are used to pass on here, in this novel, the very heartfelt, most intimate emotions of the author. She speaks of this. Perhaps silence is more powerful, implying resistance. "Writing does not silence the voice, but awakens it, above all to resurrect so many vanished sisters." Those are the sisters who didn't know French, who could not speak out from their cloistered existence.
****For bringing Algerian history to life from an Algerian perspective, and an Algerian woman's view at that, a woman who, through an educated father and schooling escaped the enclosed future that awaited her. The struggle, the never-ending resistance to the occupation of their land.
***The plot of a novel is a fishing line with some attractive hooks for catching readers. If this line is broken too often, no fish can be caught. The novel becomes a collection of beautiful fragments, leaving the reader to imagine what it could be if it were all joined somehow. FANTASIA suffers from a too intricate sub-division of the voices. It is a layered approach, the conflict between two worlds---a conflict that entered even into the author's soul--- it is effective poetically, but not as prose....we lose track of who is saying what, who is related to whom, where everyone fits in. Overall Djebar reaches us, but the novel has an abstract quality that does not emotionally involve us much with any characters. It's a strange but interesting work.
September 26, 2015
L'Amour, la Fantasia est le genre de livre dans lequel on vit, on voyage, on rêve.. Au fond d'une Algérie ancienne, prise, violée, brûlée, Assia Djebar nous raconte des histoire qui peut-être ont échappé aux historiens, les misères, le courage, la solitude de tout un peuple..
August 6, 2014
1830: France invades Algiers. 1962: Algeria gains independence. (1936: Assia Djebar is born. 1984: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade is written.)
It's hard to call this a novel. It's not. I'd call it an essay, except at 284 pages that's stretching it. Orientalism aside, the quote on the front calling it a "mosaic" isn't far off. Djebar mixes her own autobiography with historical sources from the 19th century and discussions with women who remember the struggle for independence, and what came before and after it.
1950s: a 13-year-old girl joins the fight for liberty after seeing her brother gunned down. Captured by the French, she sneers "What are you going to do, execute a girl? Throw me in jail if you want, you won't be here long enough to keep me in it." 20 years later Assia Djebar interviews her, a prematurely aging woman, taking care of her husband's children. So it goes.
The central (and somewhat belaboured) metaphor here is the veil: the one women are expected to wear past a certain age, sure, but also the other veils. The one drawn over the victims of colonialisation by letting the colonialists write history. The one drawn by language, by the palimpsest of history (Algiers has Roman ruins, Christian saints, Turkish beys...) The things that are hidden by being made conspicuous, and vice versa. The freedom offered by untouchability.
While the man still has the right to four legitimate wives, we girls, big and little, have at our command four languages to express desire before all that is left for us is sighs and moans: French for secret missives; Arabic for our stifled aspirations towards God-the-Father, the God of the religions of the Book; Lybico-Berber which takes us back to the pagan idols--mother gods--of pre-Islamic Mecca. The fourth language, for all females, young or old, cloistered or half-emancipated, remains that of the body: the body which male neighbours' and cousins' eyes require to be deaf and blind, since they cannot completely incarcerate it...
People are buried, not just in the ground (martyrs, victims, traitors, invaders) but in the language as well; some openly, with huge monuments, others quietly, so as to pretend they never existed. Or at least never needed a monument. Djebar writes of Algeria in French, the country that enslaved her people, the language that let her mother treat her father as an equal, the language that isolated her from the women of her own family.
Exposing myself by writing my autobiograpy in the language of the former enemy puts me at constant risk of burning myself up.
It's notable that even The Battle of Algiers puts men at the centre of everything. Meanwhile, European politicians want to solve a problem simply by banning a piece of cloth. And so layers keep being added, and all a writer can do is point them out.
It's hard to call this a novel. It's not. I'd call it an essay, except at 284 pages that's stretching it. Orientalism aside, the quote on the front calling it a "mosaic" isn't far off. Djebar mixes her own autobiography with historical sources from the 19th century and discussions with women who remember the struggle for independence, and what came before and after it.
1950s: a 13-year-old girl joins the fight for liberty after seeing her brother gunned down. Captured by the French, she sneers "What are you going to do, execute a girl? Throw me in jail if you want, you won't be here long enough to keep me in it." 20 years later Assia Djebar interviews her, a prematurely aging woman, taking care of her husband's children. So it goes.
The central (and somewhat belaboured) metaphor here is the veil: the one women are expected to wear past a certain age, sure, but also the other veils. The one drawn over the victims of colonialisation by letting the colonialists write history. The one drawn by language, by the palimpsest of history (Algiers has Roman ruins, Christian saints, Turkish beys...) The things that are hidden by being made conspicuous, and vice versa. The freedom offered by untouchability.
While the man still has the right to four legitimate wives, we girls, big and little, have at our command four languages to express desire before all that is left for us is sighs and moans: French for secret missives; Arabic for our stifled aspirations towards God-the-Father, the God of the religions of the Book; Lybico-Berber which takes us back to the pagan idols--mother gods--of pre-Islamic Mecca. The fourth language, for all females, young or old, cloistered or half-emancipated, remains that of the body: the body which male neighbours' and cousins' eyes require to be deaf and blind, since they cannot completely incarcerate it...
People are buried, not just in the ground (martyrs, victims, traitors, invaders) but in the language as well; some openly, with huge monuments, others quietly, so as to pretend they never existed. Or at least never needed a monument. Djebar writes of Algeria in French, the country that enslaved her people, the language that let her mother treat her father as an equal, the language that isolated her from the women of her own family.
Exposing myself by writing my autobiograpy in the language of the former enemy puts me at constant risk of burning myself up.
It's notable that even The Battle of Algiers puts men at the centre of everything. Meanwhile, European politicians want to solve a problem simply by banning a piece of cloth. And so layers keep being added, and all a writer can do is point them out.
January 18, 2010
Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade is not a novel, or a memoir or an oral history, though it shares characteristics with all three genres. It's a piece of literature that defies easy categorization. It is, perhaps, best described as a meditation on history (Algeria's in this case), alienation and women based on sources from both the French and native sides of Algeria's recent, tragic history, including the author's own experiences (she fought in the last rebellion that ended in Algeria's independence).
There are passages that are intensely interesting and even moving; the reader gets swept up in Djebar's world but then she drops into an off-putting, deconstructionalist voice that threw me entirely out of the book. I would have enjoyed it more had she not found it necessary to pull back from the immediacy of the narrative to beat me over the head with its meaning. Djebar should have had more confidence in her audience, or put the metafictional part of her musings in a separate context.
I'm on the fence still with Assia Djebar. I'm impressed enough and respectful enough of her writing to be interested in reading further but I'm reserving a final opinion.
There are passages that are intensely interesting and even moving; the reader gets swept up in Djebar's world but then she drops into an off-putting, deconstructionalist voice that threw me entirely out of the book. I would have enjoyed it more had she not found it necessary to pull back from the immediacy of the narrative to beat me over the head with its meaning. Djebar should have had more confidence in her audience, or put the metafictional part of her musings in a separate context.
I'm on the fence still with Assia Djebar. I'm impressed enough and respectful enough of her writing to be interested in reading further but I'm reserving a final opinion.
March 11, 2012
My attempts to be more worldly with my reading sometimes lead to great discoveries, and sometimes they lead me here. Not that Assia Djebar is not a fine writer; her prose is lovely, if a bit joyless. I did not care for this book, however.
One thing I would have appreciated would have been Djebar establishing a stronger narrative through-line. There are many first-person narrators in this book, from all eras, and I couldn't keep them all clear. Is the one who played with her cousins in the opening chapter the same one who later got married in Paris? Whose brother died in the siege? Was it hers or someone else's, or maybe even someone's grandmother's?
Maybe the point Djebar intended to make her was that the land--Algeria--is the real star here. I definitely got a feel for the constant turmoil of the area, from the French invasion in 1830 up until their war for independence in the 1950s and 60s. Djebar weaves a nice correspondence between this land teeming with contradictory traditions and the Muslim women, full of conflicting emotions about their lives, their bodies, and their relationships with men.
But when the book moves back into the battlefield--oh, so boring. And the battlefield occupies at least 50% of the narrative. So, ultimately, not a win for me.
One thing I would have appreciated would have been Djebar establishing a stronger narrative through-line. There are many first-person narrators in this book, from all eras, and I couldn't keep them all clear. Is the one who played with her cousins in the opening chapter the same one who later got married in Paris? Whose brother died in the siege? Was it hers or someone else's, or maybe even someone's grandmother's?
Maybe the point Djebar intended to make her was that the land--Algeria--is the real star here. I definitely got a feel for the constant turmoil of the area, from the French invasion in 1830 up until their war for independence in the 1950s and 60s. Djebar weaves a nice correspondence between this land teeming with contradictory traditions and the Muslim women, full of conflicting emotions about their lives, their bodies, and their relationships with men.
But when the book moves back into the battlefield--oh, so boring. And the battlefield occupies at least 50% of the narrative. So, ultimately, not a win for me.
December 29, 2020
This is a book about giving a voice to those who are silent. And to those who have been silenced. Many people’s stories weave in and out of one another, a tangle of emotion that eventually forms the tapestry of a nation’s soul. The stories center on Algeria – France’s initial occupation of Algeria in the 1830s and Algeria’s war for independence in the 1950s.
Most of the voices heard in this book are those of Algerian women. The author herself, older war widows, young brides, outspoken women held in French prisons, silent watchers hidden behind their veils. Ms. Djebar (an Algerian writer and member of l’Académie Française) juxtaposes stories and images to communicate in an understated way: the freedoms of French women up against the brutality of French generals, the repression of the veil alongside the bravery of Algerian women during the desperate circumstances of the war, the heartwarming along with the savage.
As I was reading the book, I found it to be quite frustrating. It’s written almost entirely in the first person, but the narrator shifts without warning. In each chapter, it required effort to discover the identity of the narrator. At one moment the narrative is a memoir, at the next it’s a historical account, then it’s an interview with survivors of the war. This made for a very frustrating read at times, but in the end the pieces all came together like a mosaic, all the more beautiful and intriguing for the confusion and diversity of its materials. Ultimately I was left with the impression that it was less important for me to know the identity of each speaker than to know that their combined voices made up the pulse of their struggling nation – a heartbeat of shared experiences during a time of war and suffering.
Amid my frustration with the book’s form, it was the style of the language that kept me reading. The words and images struck me with force; each scene felt vivid and immediate. I was struck by the recurrence of the image of the veil: we see the veil not only as a garment that hides, covers, and secludes women in their own cloistered world, but also as a metaphoric covering or baring of emotions in daily interactions. Djebar points to the power of the veil as an image both when she describes a veiled face as a face tuméfiée and when she speaks of writing as a refusal to veil her voice.
Among the many stories, each told in its own unique voice, there is one chapter that brings an intimacy between the reader and the text that is almost hard to bear. It is written in the second person (in French the even more intimate tu form), and tells the story of a pregnant Algerian hostage on a French ship. She gives birth to a stillborn son and we feel her desperation as she senses that she no longer has a land in which to bury him. The immediacy given by the feeling that the story is being told about oneself gathers the reader up into the full storm of emotion in the Algerian plight. I can only end with the power of this woman’s words: Notre terre est à eux! Cette mer est à eux! Où arbiter mon fils mort? N’y aura-t-il plus jamais un coin d’Islam pour nous, les malheureux?
Most of the voices heard in this book are those of Algerian women. The author herself, older war widows, young brides, outspoken women held in French prisons, silent watchers hidden behind their veils. Ms. Djebar (an Algerian writer and member of l’Académie Française) juxtaposes stories and images to communicate in an understated way: the freedoms of French women up against the brutality of French generals, the repression of the veil alongside the bravery of Algerian women during the desperate circumstances of the war, the heartwarming along with the savage.
As I was reading the book, I found it to be quite frustrating. It’s written almost entirely in the first person, but the narrator shifts without warning. In each chapter, it required effort to discover the identity of the narrator. At one moment the narrative is a memoir, at the next it’s a historical account, then it’s an interview with survivors of the war. This made for a very frustrating read at times, but in the end the pieces all came together like a mosaic, all the more beautiful and intriguing for the confusion and diversity of its materials. Ultimately I was left with the impression that it was less important for me to know the identity of each speaker than to know that their combined voices made up the pulse of their struggling nation – a heartbeat of shared experiences during a time of war and suffering.
Amid my frustration with the book’s form, it was the style of the language that kept me reading. The words and images struck me with force; each scene felt vivid and immediate. I was struck by the recurrence of the image of the veil: we see the veil not only as a garment that hides, covers, and secludes women in their own cloistered world, but also as a metaphoric covering or baring of emotions in daily interactions. Djebar points to the power of the veil as an image both when she describes a veiled face as a face tuméfiée and when she speaks of writing as a refusal to veil her voice.
Among the many stories, each told in its own unique voice, there is one chapter that brings an intimacy between the reader and the text that is almost hard to bear. It is written in the second person (in French the even more intimate tu form), and tells the story of a pregnant Algerian hostage on a French ship. She gives birth to a stillborn son and we feel her desperation as she senses that she no longer has a land in which to bury him. The immediacy given by the feeling that the story is being told about oneself gathers the reader up into the full storm of emotion in the Algerian plight. I can only end with the power of this woman’s words: Notre terre est à eux! Cette mer est à eux! Où arbiter mon fils mort? N’y aura-t-il plus jamais un coin d’Islam pour nous, les malheureux?
September 28, 2020
I do not claim here to be either a story-teller or a scribe. On the territory of dispossession, I would that I could sing.
I would cast off my childhood memories and advance naked, bearing offerings, hands outstreched to whom? -no to the Lords of yesterday's war, or to the young girls who lay in hiding and who now inhabit the silence that succeeds battles... And what are my offerings? Only handfuls of husks, culled from my memory, what do I seek? Maybe the brook where wounding words are drowned...
August 27, 2022
"—Elle ne se voile donc pas encore, ta fille? interroge telle ou telle matrone, aux yeux noircis et soupçonneux, qui questionne ma mère, lors d'une des noces de l'été. Je dois avoir treize, quatorze ans peut-être.
—Elle lit ! répond avec raideur ma mère. Dans ce silence de gêne installée, le monde entier s'engouffre. Et mon propre silence. « Elle lit », c'est-à-dire, en langue arabe, « elle étudie ». Maintenant je me dis que ce verbe « lire » ne fut pas par hasard l'ordre lancé par l'archange Gabriel, dans la grotte, pour la révélation coranique... « Elle lit », autant dire que l'écriture à lire, y compris celle des mécréants, est toujours source de révélation : de la mobilité du corps dans mon cas, et donc de ma future liberté."
—Elle lit ! répond avec raideur ma mère. Dans ce silence de gêne installée, le monde entier s'engouffre. Et mon propre silence. « Elle lit », c'est-à-dire, en langue arabe, « elle étudie ». Maintenant je me dis que ce verbe « lire » ne fut pas par hasard l'ordre lancé par l'archange Gabriel, dans la grotte, pour la révélation coranique... « Elle lit », autant dire que l'écriture à lire, y compris celle des mécréants, est toujours source de révélation : de la mobilité du corps dans mon cas, et donc de ma future liberté."
December 7, 2018
الحب والفانتازيا صوت نسوي ينطق بلغة المستعمر ليعبر عن مكنونات صدر مثقل بقمع لغة الأب، يتسلل إلينا كما تتسلل الأرمادا الفرنسيةإلى الجسد الجزائري المنهوك فتملئه بلهاثها وحقيقتها... آسيا الجبار تتكلم لغتها - لغة المرأة - بدلالات لغة الغازي؛ لغتها لا تنتمي إلى قوانين الجغرافيا والقومية والحدود بل لقانون ساكن الحدود ومنطقة التماس: لغة تستحوذ على لغات العالم..
December 31, 2024
Read Around the World #3: Algeria 🇩🇿
no m’he enterat molt perq l’autora anava interferint en els capítols l’únic que sé esq puta frança
no m’he enterat molt perq l’autora anava interferint en els capítols l’únic que sé esq puta frança
February 20, 2025
Le premier livre d’Assia Djebar que j’ai lu. Fascinant, intéressant, et important. J’aimais les voix de femmes - beaucoup de femmes - qui unissaient pour raconter l’histoire et l’Histoire.
De temps en temps j’ai trouvé l’intrigue difficile à suivre, mais je pense que c’est ma faute et aussi peut-être (parfois) l’objectif de Djebar. L’histoire est compliqué mais elle doit l’être - c’est impossible de la simplifier (à mon avis). Je ne savais pas grand-chose à propos de l’histoire de l’Algérie et j’ai beaucoup appris en lisant ce livre. Un peu plus de familiarité avec le pays aurait pu être utile.
De temps en temps j’ai trouvé l’intrigue difficile à suivre, mais je pense que c’est ma faute et aussi peut-être (parfois) l’objectif de Djebar. L’histoire est compliqué mais elle doit l’être - c’est impossible de la simplifier (à mon avis). Je ne savais pas grand-chose à propos de l’histoire de l’Algérie et j’ai beaucoup appris en lisant ce livre. Un peu plus de familiarité avec le pays aurait pu être utile.
July 25, 2021
Revue de lecture de "L'amour, La fantasia"de Essia Djebbar : Je ne peux que m'incliner d'admiration au-devant de cette plume emplie de beauté et de finesse. "L'amour, La fantasia", écrit entre Juillet82 et Octobre84 est une oeuvre mi-historique, mi-autobiographique et que je perçois singulièrement féministe. L'autrice alterne entre un passé lointain et un passé proche. C'est l'histoire d'une fille arabe, d'un village du sahel Algérien. Son père 'Tahar' est instituteur à l'école française, un père moderne par rapport à son époque, portant un costume citadin au lieu d'un 'Bernous'. Cette fille qui avait le privilège de fréquenter l'école nous embarque dans son monde, tout au long de son enfance, adolescence et même adulte. D'autre part, l'histoire de l'invasion du colonisateur français des terres Algériennes et plus précisément entre juillet 1930 et juillet 1956 et plus. Violations, massacres, incendies, explosions, défaites, combats et confrontations où Kabyles, Ouled Riah, Frechich...et Cherif ben Mazaa, héros des montagnes n'ont cessé de militer et où caïds, beys ,deys…sont si ambigus. Le lecteur a fait un long voyage entre Oran,Tlemcen, Cherchell, Mostagameb, Milian, Ténès, et a visité les douars et les montagnes. Dans ces deux parties, la femme a eu la majeur partie. Différents portraits de femmes dans le monde de 'Djebbar'(famille, cousines, voisines, amies. ) nous sont décrits. La femme ensevelie, muette et silencieuse dans les harems et les hameaux. Là où claustration, oppression, frustration l'accompagnent dans un monde purement patriarcal et où valeurs et traditions de l'héritage Algérien dominent. Alors que dans la partie historique, la femme est présentée autrement. Cette dernière est guerrière, féroce, résistante, militante et combattante et sa participation et son rôle ont été importants dans sa manière de faire face aux envahisseurs. Toutefois, toutes ces femmes se retrouvent. Elles sont envahies dans leurs corps et leurs identités, elles sont assoiffées de liberté et de lumière face à cette opacité et cette obscurité et ont une envie acharnée de révolte. Ces femmes sont envahies et colonisés tel que leur pays. Par ailleurs, le texte est très riche à tout points de vue avec cette maîtrise fascinante de la langue française par l'écrivaine . Une langue parfaite que je perçois comme prose poétique. Aussi, les techniques narratives et leur usage qui parait dans la multiplicité des narratrices. Il y a un chevauchement entre la 1ere personne et la 3eme personne du singulier .Ceci se manifeste par les témoignages, récits et dialogues des (narratrice, femmes veuves des martyrs, militantes, cherifa, le belle Badra .) Des parties en italique qui symbolisent certaines idées féministes. De plus, le texte fragmenté et déconstruit ingénieusement dans sa structure, dans ses chapitres et leurs titres qui tournent autour du même champ lexical de l'expression et de communication (voix, cris, silence, muet, libre…)Des termes qui se répètent tout au long du récit. L'usage poétique des figures de styles et procédés d'écriture qui ornent de leur part le texte (anaphores, métaphores, comparaisons, redondances…) D'emblée, structure, images, histoire, fragmentation ect… ) ont toutes servis à nous faire part de l'avidité à s'identifier, à s'affirmer, à être en quête de l'identité. Identité du pays, de la femme et de sa plume. L'amour ce n'est que l'amour de la patrie, de la liberté, de l'identité tant souhaitée et de l'expression. La fantasia qui normalement désigne une pratique du patrimoine de la fête algérienne n'est autre que la Fantasia où Essia Djebbar nous a emportés dans son univers envoûtant d'écriture. C'est ma meilleure lecture de Essia Djebbar.
August 8, 2012
A book that I can honestly say I hated, from the first page to the very last one. I started reading it in English (part of a series of books for a class on Arab Women Writers), and got suspicious about it while reading the apologetic preface: here we had a translator writing about the “brilliant” style, the “luminous” effects of language, and how the English translation doesn’t do justice to the original French, etc. In short, this indicated to me that the translation was either pretty bad, or that the book itself was pretty bad. To confirm my suspicions, barely a few pages in, I realized I hated the reading this book. It takes a lot to get me frustrated like that. The writing was clunky, flowery and convoluted; like trying to read Victorian wallpaper! I got so frustrated with the writing style that I stopped reading the English version of the book and managed to get a hold of a copy in the original French at Powell’s. Reading the book in French was a great improvement, since French is a more pictorially poetic language than English. But, Gosh, darn it!, the book still consisted in disjointed and stylistically ethereal, pardon me, incoherent ramblings about the French invasion / rape of Algeria, a jumbled, meaningless amalgam of vague musings about the poetry / constraints of language, about women’s repressed / oppressed condition throughout the decades, etc. (snore). It was a struggle to find some shreds of direction towards a meaning of some sort. Reading it, I was grasping at straws, struggling to continue reading; each page turned a motivation to keep on going. It was the literary equivalent of a Bad Trip or a root canal. However, in all things there are positives: Today is a Good Day; I am done with this book and look forward to get rid of it, in French as well as in English! In French (L'amour, la fantasia).
May 21, 2019
3.5/5
This book is committed to a monumental undertaking, which is why I rounded up rather than down. In addition, I was nearly as bewildered by this as I was by Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, which may be a result of this Fantasia having an element of relatable bildungsroman, or that it politically wore its heart on its sleeve, or that it was highly informative when it came to one portrait of one example of nineteenth century Euro colonizing of non-Euro soil. IN short, I'm glad that my rather uncomprehending experiences with my first Djebar didn't scare me away from giving her a second chance with a more popular work. There won't be a third anytime soon, as I really do need to brush up on the history of Algeria before diving back into Djebar's words, even if this effort only manages to encompass the Algerian War of Independence. The problem with combating the mainstreaming of narratives is having to continually face yet another margin to track down to intellectually stalemate satisfaction, and Djebar is anything but mainstream.
Reading Beauvoir's third volume of autobiography gave me the closest, and likely most accurate, view of the Algerian War for Independence against France that I've ever encountered. Following it up with this was one of those fortunate coincidences put together by 2018 me's efforts to maximize on reading challenges while minimizing on number of books devoted across multiple directives, so in this reading I had that memory of the other side of the Mediterranean to cross examine and reference in juxtaposition to this work on Algerian soil. I liked the beginning the best, as I was both more and less familiar with the framework of the 1848 French Revolution to the point of desperately needing the context of the brutal conquest of Algeria that had occurred a decade or so prior. As I went on, the text unfortunately became increasingly rote in its narration, less unique in individual facts, and more enmeshed in a polyphony of borderline uniform testament, which is admittedly the point Djebar was driving at but still not my preference when it comes to imbibing (non/fic)tion. I also likely lost a great deal in terms of translation, as the sheer exuberance of the English text as embodied by the high flown choices in vocab makes it clear that Djebar was pushing the descriptive abilities of French to the point of forcing the translator into English to struggle to catch up. Not so pressing an observation that I feel compelled to track down a French edition, as Djebar was likely infusing Arabic into the tongue of her colonizers, and learning two languages for the sake of a single work is above my pay grade, especially when considering the dozens of other languages I own literature of. Real knowledge is always a struggle, and I am not ashamed of relying on the work of others to acquire it, for I am already fluent in one too many genocidal languages for my liking, and acquiring even one single other defeats the purpose of my efforts.
I wish this book had struck me more strongly than it ended up doing, but it is doing important work nevertheless, regardless of my own literary personal preferences. As I said, I won't be reading any more Djebar for a long while yet, or at least not until I've educated myself a fair deal more about her mother country. One can easily imagine this author in particular treating Algeria as mother, and that perhaps contributes to my reticence, for personal reasons all my own. In any case, I'm in the midst of a fork in the road that still hasn't been completely resolved, and there are pros and cons on either side of the penultimate decision. Neither of these compares to the choices Djebar's interviewed women had to make, but my uncertainty, and even fear, does allow me to sympathize that much more, as well as commit to working for a world where a people will never savage another in the manner of France with Algeria, or any other pair of conqueror and conquest. Lofty ideals understandably have long timelines, but Djebar just covered four and a half centuries in two and a quarter hundred pages, so the least I can do is focus on the big picture.
This book is committed to a monumental undertaking, which is why I rounded up rather than down. In addition, I was nearly as bewildered by this as I was by Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, which may be a result of this Fantasia having an element of relatable bildungsroman, or that it politically wore its heart on its sleeve, or that it was highly informative when it came to one portrait of one example of nineteenth century Euro colonizing of non-Euro soil. IN short, I'm glad that my rather uncomprehending experiences with my first Djebar didn't scare me away from giving her a second chance with a more popular work. There won't be a third anytime soon, as I really do need to brush up on the history of Algeria before diving back into Djebar's words, even if this effort only manages to encompass the Algerian War of Independence. The problem with combating the mainstreaming of narratives is having to continually face yet another margin to track down to intellectually stalemate satisfaction, and Djebar is anything but mainstream.
Reading Beauvoir's third volume of autobiography gave me the closest, and likely most accurate, view of the Algerian War for Independence against France that I've ever encountered. Following it up with this was one of those fortunate coincidences put together by 2018 me's efforts to maximize on reading challenges while minimizing on number of books devoted across multiple directives, so in this reading I had that memory of the other side of the Mediterranean to cross examine and reference in juxtaposition to this work on Algerian soil. I liked the beginning the best, as I was both more and less familiar with the framework of the 1848 French Revolution to the point of desperately needing the context of the brutal conquest of Algeria that had occurred a decade or so prior. As I went on, the text unfortunately became increasingly rote in its narration, less unique in individual facts, and more enmeshed in a polyphony of borderline uniform testament, which is admittedly the point Djebar was driving at but still not my preference when it comes to imbibing (non/fic)tion. I also likely lost a great deal in terms of translation, as the sheer exuberance of the English text as embodied by the high flown choices in vocab makes it clear that Djebar was pushing the descriptive abilities of French to the point of forcing the translator into English to struggle to catch up. Not so pressing an observation that I feel compelled to track down a French edition, as Djebar was likely infusing Arabic into the tongue of her colonizers, and learning two languages for the sake of a single work is above my pay grade, especially when considering the dozens of other languages I own literature of. Real knowledge is always a struggle, and I am not ashamed of relying on the work of others to acquire it, for I am already fluent in one too many genocidal languages for my liking, and acquiring even one single other defeats the purpose of my efforts.
I wish this book had struck me more strongly than it ended up doing, but it is doing important work nevertheless, regardless of my own literary personal preferences. As I said, I won't be reading any more Djebar for a long while yet, or at least not until I've educated myself a fair deal more about her mother country. One can easily imagine this author in particular treating Algeria as mother, and that perhaps contributes to my reticence, for personal reasons all my own. In any case, I'm in the midst of a fork in the road that still hasn't been completely resolved, and there are pros and cons on either side of the penultimate decision. Neither of these compares to the choices Djebar's interviewed women had to make, but my uncertainty, and even fear, does allow me to sympathize that much more, as well as commit to working for a world where a people will never savage another in the manner of France with Algeria, or any other pair of conqueror and conquest. Lofty ideals understandably have long timelines, but Djebar just covered four and a half centuries in two and a quarter hundred pages, so the least I can do is focus on the big picture.
'Pélissier made only one mistake: as he had a talent for writing, and was aware of this, he gave in his report an eloquent and realistic — much too realistic — description of the Arabs' suffering...'
May 1, 2020
Après avoir publié le recueil de nouvelles Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement en 1980 , et entre deux projets cinématographiques c'est avec L'amour , la fantasia que Djebar rompt un silence de cinq ans. Entre autobiographie ou plutôt semi-autobiographie et l'Histoire de la guerre d'Algérie, l'auteure juxtapose narrations entremêlées , regards du colonisateur comme celui du colonisé avec comme voix , des voix de femmes aux différents destins.
Le récit démarre avec la protagoniste qui sort de son corps pour se remémorer "fillette arabe accompagnée par son père" et commence alors à "se raconter" , Par la suite des chapitres on découvre une nouvelle narration qui s'ouvre sur les prémices de la guerre d'Algérie en 1830, une Histoire qui sert de décor et de toile de fond et qui est mise en parallèle des histoires des femmes , oppressées elles aussi et recluses comme l'est la patrie.
" Algérie-femme impossible à apprivoiser. Fantasme d'une Algérie domptée : chaque combat éloigne encore plus l'épuisement de la révolte. "
Entre éléments autobiographiques, discours rapportés et réécrits , Djebar déterre la mémoire collective pour mettre l'accent sur la mémoire individuelle des femmes. En résulte alors une chaîne de souvenirs fragmentés.
Assia Djebar use dans L'amour , La Fantasia une trame narrative hybride. Elle relate les événements historiques avec une narration objective , comme si elle ne faisait que les rapporter puis se saisit du "je" pour se glisser dans la peau d'une femme algérienne - qui n'est d'autre parfois , qu'elle-même - bousculant son récit-témoignage vers une poésie en prose où les sentiments prennent place et deviennent chant intérieur et cri révolté.
Elle reprend souvent les mêmes mots utilisés dans une narration précédente pour les conférer à une autre , parsemant le texte d'analogies implicites.
La lecture pour moi fut un peu perturbée , j'ai préféré les éléments autobiographiques et le récit hanté de Cherifa et Lia Zohra au regard du colonisateur même si ce composant reste essentiel à la structure innovante du roman.
C'est en racontant que l'auteure donne au récit son identité , l'écriture lui permettant de lever le voile sur les femmes ensevelies , de leur donner une "voix" et de ne pas les laisser s'estomper dans l'éphémérité de l'oralité. Elle raconte aussi comment l'écriture l'a libéré et comment les écrits des officiers français nous ont permis de laisser des traces des massacres effectués et de leur regard violeur et oppresseur.
Cela fait écho aux dires d'Hélène Cixous qui dit dans Le rire de la Méduse :
" ... Il faut que la femme s'écrive: que la femme écrive de la femme et fasse venir les femmes à l'écriture, dont elles ont été éloignées aussi violemment qu'elles l'ont été de leurs corps; pour les mêmes raisons, par la même loi, dans le même but mortel. Il faut que la femme se mène
au texte- comme au monde, et à l'histoire-, de son propre mouvement."
Le récit démarre avec la protagoniste qui sort de son corps pour se remémorer "fillette arabe accompagnée par son père" et commence alors à "se raconter" , Par la suite des chapitres on découvre une nouvelle narration qui s'ouvre sur les prémices de la guerre d'Algérie en 1830, une Histoire qui sert de décor et de toile de fond et qui est mise en parallèle des histoires des femmes , oppressées elles aussi et recluses comme l'est la patrie.
" Algérie-femme impossible à apprivoiser. Fantasme d'une Algérie domptée : chaque combat éloigne encore plus l'épuisement de la révolte. "
Entre éléments autobiographiques, discours rapportés et réécrits , Djebar déterre la mémoire collective pour mettre l'accent sur la mémoire individuelle des femmes. En résulte alors une chaîne de souvenirs fragmentés.
Assia Djebar use dans L'amour , La Fantasia une trame narrative hybride. Elle relate les événements historiques avec une narration objective , comme si elle ne faisait que les rapporter puis se saisit du "je" pour se glisser dans la peau d'une femme algérienne - qui n'est d'autre parfois , qu'elle-même - bousculant son récit-témoignage vers une poésie en prose où les sentiments prennent place et deviennent chant intérieur et cri révolté.
Elle reprend souvent les mêmes mots utilisés dans une narration précédente pour les conférer à une autre , parsemant le texte d'analogies implicites.
La lecture pour moi fut un peu perturbée , j'ai préféré les éléments autobiographiques et le récit hanté de Cherifa et Lia Zohra au regard du colonisateur même si ce composant reste essentiel à la structure innovante du roman.
C'est en racontant que l'auteure donne au récit son identité , l'écriture lui permettant de lever le voile sur les femmes ensevelies , de leur donner une "voix" et de ne pas les laisser s'estomper dans l'éphémérité de l'oralité. Elle raconte aussi comment l'écriture l'a libéré et comment les écrits des officiers français nous ont permis de laisser des traces des massacres effectués et de leur regard violeur et oppresseur.
Cela fait écho aux dires d'Hélène Cixous qui dit dans Le rire de la Méduse :
" ... Il faut que la femme s'écrive: que la femme écrive de la femme et fasse venir les femmes à l'écriture, dont elles ont été éloignées aussi violemment qu'elles l'ont été de leurs corps; pour les mêmes raisons, par la même loi, dans le même but mortel. Il faut que la femme se mène
au texte- comme au monde, et à l'histoire-, de son propre mouvement."
January 14, 2025
3,5
Ce livre était assez dur à lire, que ce soit par son vocabulaire compliqué, le style assez lourd de l'autrice ou encore par les thèmes assez pensants qui sont abordés. Quand je lis un livre comme ça, je n'ai pas réellement d'avis sur l'histoire en elle-même, tout simplement parce que c'est inspiré de faits réels et que je me vois mal critiquer des faits historiques, surtout des faits de guerre et de maltraitance de certains peuples comme dans ce livre. Je ne dirai pas que c'est une lecture que j'ai appréciée parce que c'était quand même assez dur de lire toutes ces horreurs, mais je pense que ce genre de lecture est très instructif! De plus, même si beaucoup qualifie ce livre de nouvelle, je l'aurais plus qualifié d'essai pour être honnête, parce que même si elle s'appuie sur des faits réels, elle défend de nombreuses idées comme l'importance de l'écriture pour s'exprimer, immortaliser l'histoire, elle défend aussi des idées assez féministes sur la place de la femme, elle parle de religion etc... C'est un livre vraiment complet au niveau de ses idéologies.
Ce livre était assez dur à lire, que ce soit par son vocabulaire compliqué, le style assez lourd de l'autrice ou encore par les thèmes assez pensants qui sont abordés. Quand je lis un livre comme ça, je n'ai pas réellement d'avis sur l'histoire en elle-même, tout simplement parce que c'est inspiré de faits réels et que je me vois mal critiquer des faits historiques, surtout des faits de guerre et de maltraitance de certains peuples comme dans ce livre. Je ne dirai pas que c'est une lecture que j'ai appréciée parce que c'était quand même assez dur de lire toutes ces horreurs, mais je pense que ce genre de lecture est très instructif! De plus, même si beaucoup qualifie ce livre de nouvelle, je l'aurais plus qualifié d'essai pour être honnête, parce que même si elle s'appuie sur des faits réels, elle défend de nombreuses idées comme l'importance de l'écriture pour s'exprimer, immortaliser l'histoire, elle défend aussi des idées assez féministes sur la place de la femme, elle parle de religion etc... C'est un livre vraiment complet au niveau de ses idéologies.
February 12, 2021
Listen, I read about half of this (not linear tho) and I've decided to DNF simply because I'm just....I can't bring myself to care enough to concentrate. It's well written, it's a good, important story. It's interesting to look at and discuss in class. We're also close to the one year mark of a global pandemic, I'm slowly going more and more insane, and I haven't payed attention in class for months now. So, that's what it is. I'm giving up.
March 21, 2018
3 stars.
Read for my Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Middle Eastern History class, not going to review.
Read for my Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Middle Eastern History class, not going to review.
Read
June 2, 2024Ich mochte die autobiografischen Kapitel sehr gerne, aber habe mich so durch die sehr detaillierten Erzählungen vom Krieg gequält, dass ich abbrechen musste. :(
November 5, 2025
An astounding autobiography / fiction / essay that asks : how to write about oneself without attempting to write a nation's history?
October 12, 2022
L'Amour, la fantasia est un livre qui, pour moi, sort de l'ordinaire. Djebar mêle auobiographie et récits historiques pour nous offrir à la fois un aperçu des guerres en Algérie mais également des guerres dans sa propre vie. La place du corps, de l'écriture (en français), de l'oralité, des guerres, des résistances sont quelques sujets abordés dans l'oeuvre.
Je dois avouer qu'il était parfois un peu difficile de suivre l'histoire/les histoires.
Je dois avouer qu'il était parfois un peu difficile de suivre l'histoire/les histoires.
December 22, 2024
Un livre impressionnant même si le style d'écriture était beaucoup trop compliqué pour moi. Un livre pour lequel on a besoin des informations privilégiées. C’est pourquoi je l’ai donné 2 étoiles.
April 21, 2010
Ethnically rich and inspiring in its descriptions, this 1985 collection of vignettes is an eye-opening look at a courageous North African country and people that have undergone an incredibly difficult history of colonization, war, and struggles against poverty, and oppression--of its women in particular. Assia Djebar is not easy to read in English translation much less in her original French. However, as I read the translation Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (original title: L'Amour, La Fantaisia), I realized I was actually doing both the author and myself a disservice. The French language is an integral part of this narrative because it brings out an ugly irony about colonization. One of Djebar's main themes that runs all through these varied stories on Algeria's difficult history is the oxymoron of communicating her passionately patriotic feelings for her country in the language of the conquerer/colonizer--France. So, why, then, didn't Djebar write the story of this painful history from 1830 to 1962 and beyond in Arabic? I believe she wanted her stories to reach a wider audience, particularly in France where she wished to remind readers of France's brutal treatment of her people in the mid-19th century and later during the bloody war in independence, 1954-62, as well as France's attempted absorption of the Algerian culture into its own. " . . . faced with the language of the former conquerer, which offer me its ornaments, its jewels, its flowers, I find they are flowers of death--chrysanthemums on tombs! (181) . . . This language was imported in the murky, obscure past, spoils taken from the enemy with whom no fond word was ever exchanged: French . . . . This language was formerly used to entomb my people; when I write it today, I feel like the messenger of old, who bore a sealed missive which might sentence him to death or to a dungeon" (215).
The collection of stories includes accounts of the original arrival of the French to Algeria's north Mediterranean shore in 1830, and provides vivid descriptions of the atrocities of the conquest--attempted genocide of Algerian tribes who hid in caves and died when French forces set fires outside the entrances to smoke them out. There are also tales of tragic outcomes of later 19th-century insurrections. (The Algerians did NOT want to be conquered by anyone!) Djebar also writes about her own childhood in the 1950s as well as tales of the painful aftermath of the independence for various widows and children.
The book begins and ends with the image Djebar had of herself as a small girl being led to a French school by her father, who had been privileged to receive an education and secure a position as a teacher at that school. He wanted to give young Assia the same advantage of education, the French language, and freedom from the Muslim veil that her young cousins were already forced to wear. But with privilege came guilt and irony. "At the age when I should be veiled already, I can still move about freely, thanks to the French school. . . Unlike [my classmates:] who haven't got cousins who do not show their ankles or their arms, who do not even expose their faces. My panic is also compounded by an Arab woman's 'shame.' The French girls whirl around me; they do not suspect that my body is caught in invisible snares" (179).
This collection is much more than just a self-analysis of Djebar's own identy. It's a whole saga of a country's centuries-long struggle to seize and maintin its identity and unique character despite its tragedy-laced history. As I said, not simple to read, but well worth the journey through Djebar's peculiar mode of expression.
The collection of stories includes accounts of the original arrival of the French to Algeria's north Mediterranean shore in 1830, and provides vivid descriptions of the atrocities of the conquest--attempted genocide of Algerian tribes who hid in caves and died when French forces set fires outside the entrances to smoke them out. There are also tales of tragic outcomes of later 19th-century insurrections. (The Algerians did NOT want to be conquered by anyone!) Djebar also writes about her own childhood in the 1950s as well as tales of the painful aftermath of the independence for various widows and children.
The book begins and ends with the image Djebar had of herself as a small girl being led to a French school by her father, who had been privileged to receive an education and secure a position as a teacher at that school. He wanted to give young Assia the same advantage of education, the French language, and freedom from the Muslim veil that her young cousins were already forced to wear. But with privilege came guilt and irony. "At the age when I should be veiled already, I can still move about freely, thanks to the French school. . . Unlike [my classmates:] who haven't got cousins who do not show their ankles or their arms, who do not even expose their faces. My panic is also compounded by an Arab woman's 'shame.' The French girls whirl around me; they do not suspect that my body is caught in invisible snares" (179).
This collection is much more than just a self-analysis of Djebar's own identy. It's a whole saga of a country's centuries-long struggle to seize and maintin its identity and unique character despite its tragedy-laced history. As I said, not simple to read, but well worth the journey through Djebar's peculiar mode of expression.
July 23, 2020
L’Amour, la fantasia [Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade] by Assia Djebar is a book about the female Algerian experience. It is just as much about colonialism as it is about patriarchy. The book is divided into movements, like a musical fantasia. The sections alternate between an account of the 1840s colonization of Algeria by the French, the involvement of women in the Algerian Revolution of the 1950s (which ended in 1962), and the author’s own childhood during the Revolution. Djebar’s prose style is also varied. Some parts are in prose poetry while others are in more traditional prose.
Assia Djebar is considered the greatest female Algerian writer of the 20th-century, and for good reason. L’Amour, la fantasia is a powerful exploration of a female Algerian identity shaped by cultures, languages, and religions. Although Djebar writes in the language of the oppressor, she interrogates the accounts left by the French conquerors of Algeria. The French language is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because it provided the author with educational opportunities; Djebar was the first Muslim woman to graduate from an école normale supérieure (essentially the French “Ivy League”) in France. A curse, because the effects of colonialism continue to be felt both in Algeria and in France.
This book is challenging in both its form and its content. The novel assumes a knowledge of people and places that the Western reader probably does not have. I believe that this is a deliberate strategy to de-center the European gaze. Postcolonial fiction, such as L’Amour, la fantasia, is always challenging for those of us who are unfamiliar with its history. Since reading this book, I have been inspired to learn more about both the conquest of Algeria and in the Revolution. I also hope to read more from Djebar in the coming months.
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Assia Djebar is considered the greatest female Algerian writer of the 20th-century, and for good reason. L’Amour, la fantasia is a powerful exploration of a female Algerian identity shaped by cultures, languages, and religions. Although Djebar writes in the language of the oppressor, she interrogates the accounts left by the French conquerors of Algeria. The French language is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because it provided the author with educational opportunities; Djebar was the first Muslim woman to graduate from an école normale supérieure (essentially the French “Ivy League”) in France. A curse, because the effects of colonialism continue to be felt both in Algeria and in France.
This book is challenging in both its form and its content. The novel assumes a knowledge of people and places that the Western reader probably does not have. I believe that this is a deliberate strategy to de-center the European gaze. Postcolonial fiction, such as L’Amour, la fantasia, is always challenging for those of us who are unfamiliar with its history. Since reading this book, I have been inspired to learn more about both the conquest of Algeria and in the Revolution. I also hope to read more from Djebar in the coming months.
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April 21, 2013
The book interspersed the history of the Algerian people in their fights against France, especially the 1830 invasion and the liberation war of the 1950s and 1960s, with personal vignettes of the author and other women who lived through these times. While it was often poetical and thoughtful, it was a tough book to read. Maybe if my French was as good as my English, I could have appreciated it more. Not just difficult French vocabulary but also Arabic and Berber vocabulary which weren't familiar. And maybe, if she had so chosen, Assia Djebar could have given us more help in being able to follow some of the narrative. Using Google and Wikipedia I was able to make sense of most of it.
While reading it, there was a danger of me finishing the book and thinking "Why did I bother?" but I didn't. Upon completing the book I thought about all she recounted and how pleased I am that I persevered. It wasn't a conventional novel or history. It was pieces, reflections and some well researched information about a subject many of us in the UK know little. The few Algerians I have met I have liked and because the country is not really open to western tourism, it has a certain mystery and appeal even. About three or so years ago, I read Ce que le jour doit à la nuit by Yasmina Khadra. That was a completely different story of Algeria, albeit one which also included quite a bit of history of 20th century Algeria. But it made me very interested in the country. I especially liked how Yasmina Khadra described the appeal of the small town of Rio Salade. Another book I have read which is relevant is L’art français de la guerre by Alexis Jenni which also intersperses personal vignettes with accounts of war. Jenni follows a French soldier who fought in WW2, Indo-China and Algeria. While Assia Djebar's book is very much from the female perspective, Alex Jenni's is most definitely from the traditional male viewpoint.
February 1, 2014
The grande dame of Algerian literature is hailed as a Nobel Prize contender, and one of only four women and the first writer from the Maghreb to have been admitted to the prestigious Académie française. She has won many prizes, and Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade is one of her most famous novels for good reason; Djebar artfully addresses themes such as the written, formal language of French versus the oral traditions of Berber tribes, the colonized Algerians versus the French colonizers, self versus the other, and cultural traditions - such as women wearing veils and staying indoors- versus self expression and emancipation. Experts have pointed out that the novel’s structure is like a musical fantasia with a “fugue” pattern that has two “melodic lines” which in turn also have a duality each, and interrelate and enhance each other. Indeed, there are two, dual narratives: The first is the “current” time with flashbacks of the narrator as a girl in colonial Algiers. The second is the storyline of “The Cavalcade,” focusing on the 1954-62 Algerian War of Independence as well as the French conquest of Algiers and environs in 830. Although most readers revel in this highly complex structure, I admire, but do not enjoy it. Simplistic as this may be, first and foremost, I want to be told a story of people I can relate to and empathize with so that all the history and insight into a culture will not only become meaningful to me as a person but will also lift me up to become a better, wiser me. While I am keenly aware of the chances of my being labeled a “blasphemist,” I have to be honest; as amazing an accomplishment as this novel is, this self-important and overly symbolic meta-narrative disappointed me in English as well as French.
December 27, 2019
This is a really beautiful book. Assia Djebar, first and foremost, wants to speak honest words and heal past traumas.
"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?"
She dissects Algerian identity, diaspora identity, how language feels for those who don't feel at home in a colonizer's language, nor their own mother tongue, resistance, the quiet suffering of MENA matriarchs who bear their burdens patiently, sexuality, religion, the memories of the women who lived through bloody colonization, and the memories of the women who came after, who have to deal with silent ghosts that are never seem to leave.
In the end, she almost writes resignedly that there is no end for the tunnel. You will never heal all those traumas, you will never be able to bandage all the wounds and maybe there is some truth to that but she gives the first stepping stone. We have the smallest chance, but a chance, at finding healing at the end of the tunnel.
"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?"
She dissects Algerian identity, diaspora identity, how language feels for those who don't feel at home in a colonizer's language, nor their own mother tongue, resistance, the quiet suffering of MENA matriarchs who bear their burdens patiently, sexuality, religion, the memories of the women who lived through bloody colonization, and the memories of the women who came after, who have to deal with silent ghosts that are never seem to leave.
In the end, she almost writes resignedly that there is no end for the tunnel. You will never heal all those traumas, you will never be able to bandage all the wounds and maybe there is some truth to that but she gives the first stepping stone. We have the smallest chance, but a chance, at finding healing at the end of the tunnel.
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