Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women's Cinema

1 Assia Djebar’s Transvergent Nuba

43 Prelude Shahrazad’s tales included other tales in a mise en abyme that deepened as the Nights unfolded. Contemporary Maghrebi women’s filmic narratives often follow a similar pattern. The resulting films offer a complex narrative web of embedded tales. In Barakat, for instance, the surface narrativeofthequestforadisappearedwomansoonrevealsanothernarrativeembedded within it:the story of a past mujahida(woman freedom fighter). Shahrazad also embedded political messages in her narratives: this Sultan whose story I am telling you, she whispered to the caliph prettily, is “fair,” is “wise,” and acts in a politically courageous way. Similarly , Rachida, for instance, tells a fictitious story focused on one female protagonist that embodies the plight of Algeria during the 1990s (see chapter 3); and Bab al sama maftouh/Une Porte sur le ciel/A Door to the Sky by Farida Benlyazid, for instance, tells a fictitious story focused on one female protagonist whose spiritual and feminist choices reach into thehistoryofwomenintheMaghreb,andshowshowtomakesignificant personal/political choices. Yet the narrative mise en abyme of Maghrebi women directors seems even more whimsical than Shahrazad’s: it plays with the possibility of one narrative before skipping circuitously to another, peripheral, one and returning to the original one. Assia Djebar’s Nuba points to sevAssia Djebar’s Transvergent Nuba: The Nuba of the Women of Mount Chenoua (Algeria, 1978) 1 44 Transnational Feminist Storytellers eral other narratives that resonate in the Algerian landscape beside the narrative of the mujahidat’s (women freedom fighters’) resistance to the French occupier. She resurrects musical echoes of Bartok’s Algerian pieces, but also places myths side by side with archival footage and blurs the boundaries between history and legend. Yet at no point does she remain fixed in one particular narrative genre. At no point does she validate one narrative over the other. Rather, in a flowing motion, she traverses the various possible narrative realms, alights here and there, and weaves a meta-narrative, which is, in essence, “transvergent”: it is beholden to no specific regime of truths. In the end, both intertexts and narrative genres end up contaminating the very format of her film. The film’s lack of resolution also adds to the fluidity of the transvergent narrative enterprise: the film itself does not adhere to its own regime of truths and awaits a pen or a camera to pick up the story line where it was and keep on writing/filming. Acclaimed novelist Assia Djebar’s adventure with cinema yielded two films: Nuba nisa al djebel Shnua/La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chénoua /The Nuba of the Women of Mount Chenoua (1978) and La Zerda ou les Chants de l’oubli/The Zerda or Songs of Oblivion (1982). Cinema is not her customary mode of expression, and yet, in what may superficially look like a Sembène-like move,1 she one day decided to take up the camera instead of her French-writing pen to communicate with her “clan”: the women of Algeria – not the French-educated women (like herself) butpeasantwomen,mostofthemilliterate,mostofwhomhaveneverset foot in a cinema. “At the end of the 1970s, in Algerian cities, movie theatres were patronized by an audience that was almost exclusively male. Atthesametime,mostwomenofallages,ofallwalksoflife,wouldwatch television. This is why The Nuba of the Women of Mount Chenoua was produced,originally,byAlgeriantelevision–when,infact,itdeservesto beseenonalargescreen.”2 Ifthisfilmbreaksthesilencesurroundingthe women’s Algerian revolution fifteen years after the fact, while the government headed by the victorious FLN (Front de Libération Nationale/ NationalLiberationFront)isbusysingingtheexploitsofitsmaleheroes, it does not monumentalize women as heroic subjects. (The Algerian war of independence, 1954–1962, which ended the French occupation of the country that had started in 1830, was headed by the FLN. The latter has Assia Djebar’s Transvergent Nuba 45 been ruling Algeria ever since.) It does not tell a straight story either. Rather, it builds a narrative as a succession of various echoes of the centralnarrativeoftheroleofwomenintheliberationstruggle .Withitsmix of fiction, documentary, reconstructions, and archival footage, along with its use of a female voice-over and of music as both structure and sign, the deeply experimental form of the film did not win praise among the established critics in Algiers, as was evident by the reviews after its airing as part of the Téléciné Club program on TV. It was so controversial that, after its first screening at the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (the International Film Festival of Carthage, Tunisia) that year, Algerian filmmakers had...