Sisterhood and Rivalry in-between the Shadow and the Sultana: A Problematic of Representation in Ombre sultane

[T]he movement animating my characters—the people of my genealogy as well as their shadows who, in a sense, are looking at me, challenging me, expecting me to pull them, to make them enter, in spite of myself, in spite of themselves, into the house of this foreign language—this movement becomes my principal thrust, the central core of my novelistic form.

—Assia Djebar, "Anamnesis" 188

This paper examines the narrative tactics in Assia Djebar's Ombre sultane, a novel that primarily involves the representation of one woman by another. Isma, who recounts the story in her role as narrator, creates herself and her husband's second wife, Hajila, through discourse. In analyzing the narration, this study examines the intersections of forces of desire and power in the quest for representation in this novel. It engages other prominent readings of Djebar's text to subsequently return to the larger context of representation and its implications within colonial/postcolonial contexts. ¹ The suggestions of ironic narration converge with Georg Lukács's proposal of irony being indicative of "the pitiful failure of the intention to adapt to a world which is a stranger to ideals, to abandon the unreal ideality of the soul for the sake of achieving mastery over reality" (86).

While "otherness" is at the very center of the analyses accomplished here, this study does not, at the outset, posit difference based on class, gender, race, or some incommensurable cultural difference. It has to do, initially, with the very fundamental necessity of constructing an "other" in the process of creating a text. However, this constructed "other" is shown to be axiomatic to the narrative tactics of the narrator, Isma. The process of "splitting," proposed by Julia Kristeva, of the writer into "subject of enunciation" and "subject of utterance," becomes essential to the creation of this specific narrative. ² In the particular case of Djebar's text, this doubling process that puts forth the narrative occurs twice, as we shall see: first a "metamorphosis," to use Kristeva's term, of author into narrator (Isma) and then of Isma-narrator into the characters of her story (Isma and Hajila). The "narration (beyond the signifier / signified relationship) [is] a dialogue between the subject of narration (S) and the addressee (A)—the other" (Kristeva 74). The writer must lose his or her worldliness, as it were, in the process of writing: "The subject of narration (S) is drawn in, and therefore reduced to a code, to a nonperson, to an anonymity (as writer, subject of enunciation) mediated by a third person, the he / she [here I] character, the subject of utterance" (74). The writer is the "possibility of permutation from S to A [. . .]. He [sic] becomes anonymity, an absence, a blank space, thus permitting the structure to exist as such" (74). This zero point is where "the other" (the he / she—here I), the first addressee, so to speak, is created. For Kristeva, it is "the addressee, the other, exteriority (whose object is the subject of narration and who is at the same time represented and representing) who transforms the subject into an author" (75). As mentioned, this process occurs twice: first in the creation of Isma, and subsequently in Isma's creating Hajila as addressee (literally with the use of tu 'you'), and it is this addressee who transforms her into the creator of the discourse. This "dialogue," as it were, is the focus of the analyses that follow.

Bakhtin understands the dialogism that is intrinsic to the "word" itself in the following manner:

On all its various routes towards the object, in all its directions, the word encounters an alien word and cannot help encountering it in a living, tension-filled interaction. [. . .] [I]t is precisely this internal dialogism of the word [. . .] that cannot be isolated as an independent act...