Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (review)

Assia Djebar's important literary production has won her international recognition and has been a fertile ground for scholarly debates. Critics and scholars have hailed her work for its complexity, theoretical sophistication, aesthetic dimension and delicate blending of genres. From the very beginning, Djebar's fiction has transcended narrowly defined genre categories and national boundaries to open up the field of postcolonial literatures to more complex transnational formations and questioning.

But how might we read her corpus as a whole? What sustains her writing? What unites it? How has it evolved through time and historical conjunctures? In raising these questions, Jane Hiddleston's study, Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria, assesses Djebar's development as a writer, charting her writerly journey from the early youth narratives to the later disenchanted and more politically critical novels.

In the opening page, Hiddleston states that "Out of Algeria is a book about expatriation," in which she sets out to explore how Djebar's work as a whole narrates both obliquely and allegorically the aching rhetoric of identification and (un)belonging. In the author's view, Djebar's narratives have all been traversed and chiseled by a deep sense of departure and loss. Algeria, the native land, the mother country remains a distant object of desire, a loss that haunts (but also enables) Djebar's literary creation.

The tensions between a specific subject (or object of desire) and the plurality of its representations become not only a literary motif but also the locus of a sustained theoretical questioning. Because Djebar's works are both creative and experimental, self-reflexive and theoretical, questions of speech and writing, fiction and nonfiction, history and story, official history and communal memory, specificity (in Foucault's sense) and Algeria's endless plurality (in Derrida's sense) themselves become subjects of fiction. This metanarrative impulse has thus taken her writing to a high level of aesthetic experimentation, critical transformation and theoretical conceptualization.

Hiddleston's comprehensive study also highlights the theoretical ramifications that inform Djebar's texts and trajectory. Foucault and Derrida remain an indispensable frame of reference. Located at the crossroads between Foucault's critique of societal influence and Derrida's conception of the disseminated subject, Djebar's project thus juxtaposes diverse and sometimes conflicting models of subjectivity. In examining these different models and how they inform her literary and personal development, Hiddleston concludes to the "difficulty of theorizing postcolonial Algeria in terms of any single, straightforward framework" (4). She sees Djebar's work as charting a movement away from a specific form of identification with Algeria towards a new configuration that turns the native land into a "severed, diverse and haunted by its past" (181). Images of spectral Algeria, narratives of loss, tensions between remembering and forgetting, specters of dead friends are all symptomatic of the irreducible untranslatability of the past, as well as define the writer's diasporic pathos.

In the first chapter, the author argues that Djebar's first novels already set the stage for the experimentation and theoretical reflection that will characterize her later work. Les Alouettes naïves, La Soif, Les Impatients and Les Enfants du Nouveau Monde all declare entry into individual subjectivity and constructed identity, thereby sketching a philosophy of singularity, while at the same time engaging the question of women's position in contemporary Algeria.

This link between the particular and the collective is further investigated in the second part where Hiddleston examines how Femmes d'Alger dans leur Appartement and L'Amour, La Fantasia deepen the quest for a meaningful Algerian history and for an understanding of women's role within that history. This second chapter entitled "War, Memory and Postcoloniality" shows how Djebar's investigation gives rise to an alternative mode of historical writing, one that attempts to sound "the plural rhythms of postcolonial Algerian women's identity" (54), and to fashion a feminine language that would convey their particular experiences. But the representation process, Hiddleston adds, holds "destructive and distorting effects" (67), for the singularity of the women's experience is...