Century of Locusts by Malika Mokeddem (review)

1 62Women in French Studies Mokeddem, Malika. Century of Locusts. Trans. Laura Rice and Karim Hamdy. European Women Writers Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp [i]-xvi; 272. ISBN 0-8032-3254-3. $55.00 (Cloth). ISBN 08032 -8306-7. $24.95 (Paper). Century of Locusts, Malika Mokeddem's second novel and her third to appear in English, is a very welcome addition to her work in translation. Mokeddem was bom in the Algerian desert, the descendant of a long line of Bedouin nomads. Raised on her grandmother's stories from her tribe's oral tradition and schooled in the French system at a time when the other girls in her village were deprived of any official education, Mokeddem left Algeria to pursue the dual vocations of author and physician in France. Her fascinating life story, recounted in Les Hommes qui marchent and La Transe des insoumis, has provided the setting, characters, and inspiration for much of her writing to date. Century of Locusts evokes the desert of Mokeddem's childhood, inscribing it with multiple meanings, and weaves elements of her grandmother's oral legacy into a fast-paced tale ofevil, heroism, vengeance and legend. This edition of Century of Locusts, which is a translation of Mokeddem's revised 1996 version of Le Siècle des sauterelles (originally published in 1992), contains a brief introduction by the translators and an indispensable glossary of the North African terms used in the text. The introduction provides a short presentation of the author, drawing on information from interviews and the autobiographical La Transe des insoumis, and places the novel in the context of Mokeddem's literary career. It also points out interesting correspondences between the author's own life and that ofher heroine Yasmine and of Isabelle Eberhardt. Eberhardt appears in this novel as a legendary vanguard whose efforts to achieve freedom for herself in a world dominated by men are as important a legacy for Yasmine as the world of Western literacy passed on to her by her father Mahmoud. Set in Algeria's empty steppes and desert dunes in the first half of the twentieth century, the plot of Century of Locusts revolves around the poet Mahmoud's twin quests—to fetch his grandmother's bones from his tribal lands now occupied by French settlers in order to return them to his tribe, and to avenge the rape and murder of his wife. The colorful figures of El-Majnoun (the demented) and his malevolent sidekick Hassan weave their way into both quests, frustrating Mahmoud's attempts and filling him with self doubt. This actionpacked plot with its poets and bandits owes much to Mokeddem's oral tradition, and sets this text apart from some of her more thematic novels. The themes that have preoccupied Mokeddem in her other texts are nonetheless at work in Century ofLocusts: in the story of Mahmoud and his beloved daughter Yasmine, Mokeddem evokes the injustices of French colonization in Algeria and its complex legacy; the situation of women in Algeria who as girls are suffocated by their family and society in the interest of privileging males; the power of the word, both oral and written, to provide an escape from rigid gender roles and cultural constraints. Yasmine, having witnessed the murder of her mother, retreats into a world of silence where her only lines of communication are the Book Reviews163 words she etches into the sand. The love and education provided by Mahmoud protect her against the tribe that would have Yasmine fulfill her destiny of submissive, uncomplaining, and unloved wife. While the Western literary tradition is able to shelter Yasmine and Mahmoud from the prejudices and constraints of their society, it also condemns them to isolation and exile. The translation appears somewhat stilted in places, at times due to a mixture of registers, as in: "What sibylline project does he have in mind, thinking he has found in me an irreplaceable partner? I can no longer bear the logorrhea of this consummate majnoun. Khayi, does he really believe I'm in the same sticky situation as he is?" (99). The stilted nature of some of the text is most probably due to the...