Assia Djebar: In Dialogue with Feminisms (review)

It has always been difficult to pin down Djebar's relationship with feminism. She is frequently associated with women's writing movements, her novels are clearly focused on the creation of a 'genealogy' of Algerian women, and her political stance is virulently anti-patriarchal as much as it is anti-colonial. Djebar also reads French philosophy, theory and literature, and engages explicitly, if fleetingly, with thinkers such as Irigaray and Cixous, as well as with a history of representations of women in Islamic texts. Nevertheless, in Ces voix qui m'assiègent, Djebar overtly refuses to call herself an 'é crivaine' or to associate herself with a particular feminist movement, and close reading of all her works reveals that she is sceptical about notions of a feminine identity or community. Priscilla Ringrose's study of Djebar's dialogues with feminism insightfully charts direct links between the novels and the theories of, in turn, Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous, but fails to problematize those links in such a way as to convey the complexity of Djebar's 'feminism'. Ringrose carefully states that her intentions are to construct Djebar's connection with French feminisms as a mutual exchange, not as an interpellation but 'two subjects talking together on Althusser's street' (p. 7). Her strategy, however, is for the most part to summarize the main principles of the work of her chosen feminists and to locate demonstrations, or minor reworkings, of those principles, in Djebar's novels. The ensuing readings are, undoubtedly, provocative and thought-provoking. Ringrose suggests that Kristeva's three phases of the Symbolic, the Semiotic and their interpenetration can be used to interpret respectively Djebar's representation of the historical (the narrative of the colonial invasion) and the autobiographical, the poetical (the evocation of human cries and suffering), and the interplay of maternal and paternal languages in the final part of L'Amour, la fantasia. Next, Ringrose compares Djebar's conception of language as destructive with Cixous's assocation of writing and death, she describes Isma's relationship with 'l'Aimé' in Vaste est la prison according to the economy of the Gift, and conceives the evolution of some kind of feminine 'shared consciousness' in terms of Cixous's écriture féminine. This study also figures Hajila in Ombre sultane as the repressed maternal feminine, and suggests that the scene of complicity between Hajila and Isma in the hammam can be understood in terms of Irigaray's conception of otherness in relation, even though the text ultimately seems defeated by the weight of social and political realities. Though stimulating, however, these connections at times mask Djebar's nuances rather than revealing new layers. Ringrose's psychoanalytic feminist language seems removed from the complexity of Djebar's own poetics, and one cannot help but feel that she merely grafts theories onto texts rather than reading the texts in their own right. The context of colonialism and the war of independence is also somewhat eclipsed in this study, and the final chapter on Loin de Médine, and the depiction of Islam as a non-patriarchal religion sits uncomfortably with the French connections stressed in previous chapters. The work will certainly provoke readers to think through Djebar's relationship with feminism, then, but it also might warn us against forging links to the detriment of Djebar's highly sensitive treatment of women and men in colonial and postcolonial Algeria.