Children of the New World

Afterword

9 AFTERWORD ... On July 1, 1962, Algerians were casting their ballots in a referendum to establish the nation’s independence from France, throwing off a colonizer’s yoke that had lasted one hundred and thirty-two years. The previous day, Assia Djebar had celebrated both her twenty-sixth birthday and the publication of her third novel, Les Enfants du nouveau monde (Children of the New World). The July 1 celebrations followed a brutal war of liberation that had pitted nationalists against their colonizers for eight long years. The conflict had been particularly gruesome. Torture and mutilations were freely and openly practiced by both sides on combatants and civilians alike; terror was systematically used in the cities as well as the countryside. The world-famous 1966 film The Battle of Algiers is historically accurate. It shows insurgents coldly depositing bombs in public places, including those likely to be patronized by women and children, to maim all who happen by. It also depicts French soldiers recklessly destroying blocks of fragile century-old buildings and their occupants to get at a few suspects hidden within. The hinterlands fared even worse than the capital city. Completely devastated by the conflict, rural farms and villages endured the razing of crops, widespread famine, and the forced relocation of nearly two million villagers—out of a total population of barely nine million —into “pacification camps.” 201 If, to an American reader, such details seem eerily reminiscent of the war the United States fought in Vietnam, this is no coincidence. France had been trounced at Dien Bien Phû in May 1954 and forever lost its foothold in Asia—a lesson not lost on Algerian nationalists . A few months later, on November 1, 1954, the Algerian insurrection began with a series of attacks on armed French outposts— including in the city of Blida, where this novel takes place.1 Those French officers who had made it out of Indochina would soon serve in Algeria, using the same ruthlessly repressive methods they had honed against the Vietcong. But on July 1, 1962, defeated in Asia and Africa, the Empire was in its last throes. And the Parisian world of letters prepared to fête its returning star. ... While Assia Djebar was already well-known in France when her third novel was published in French, it would be nearly three decades before she gained similar status in the English-speaking world. In the United States, Djebar has sometimes been paired with Moroccan-born Fatima Mernissi, a sociologist who has taught in that country; or, more often, with Nawal al-Saadawi, the Egyptian medical doctor and writer. Djebar took it upon herself to oversee the 1983 French publication of Saadawi’s Ferdaous (Woman at Point Zero), for which she also wrote an introduction. As authors who challenge their Western readers to disentangle their own ideological investments in the Islamic world, a culture that they may perceive as other, Djebar, Saadawi, and Mernissi do share a concern for the difficult position of Muslim women writers within the Judeo-Christian West. The English-speaking Saadawi has more easily gained international fame through her willingness, early on, to address such unmentionable topics as female genital mutilations, her time in Egyptian prisons, and her relentless persecution by her own government . In contrast, Djebar, who is fully at ease in French but not in English and prefers to keep a low media profile, has long put her priAFTERWORD 202 vate life ahead of her professional one, and done little to actively promote her own literary work. When she decided to resume publishing in 1980 after a ten-year silence, René Julliard, the owner of the Parisian press that had championed her and tamed the media for her, was dead. She has yet to acquire a literary agent, a fact that has perplexed publishers and restricted her entry into the American market. She has also been slowed down by the uneven quality of the British translations of the two novels that first made her reputation in the West (Sister to Sheherazade in 1988 and Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade in 1989), undertaken much too quickly and without Djebar ’s final control—a fact the writer still regrets, since she reads English well. The bewildering variety of her original publishers in Paris, some with copyright policies applied idiosyncratically if at all, discouraged foreign publishers. In the United States, general reviews tend to steer her potential readership away from...