by Ria Faulkner, World Literature Today, 1996
Frantz Fanon uses the image of the unveiling of Algeria in A Dying
Colonialism in drawing a connection between the land, the nation, women,
and their bodies. Assia Djebar twists that image in her story
"Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement" and in the
"Postface" to the collection of the same name. Djebar uses the
space of the city of Algiers rather than that of the whole nation.
Twenty years after Fanon's polemic, Djebar examines the place of
women in Algeria under the patriarchal nationalists, finding
women's bodies and minds imprisoned by physical walls and mental
veils. In a different kind of war, through her discourse, she seeks to
contribute to the liberation of Algerian women, their gaze, and the
voices which emanate from their material bodies.
Fanon's project included the liberation of women, within the
nationalist project of Algerian liberation. However, he also makes use
of the ancient metaphor equating land with women and women with land
which can be found in texts ranging from the Koran (Surah II, verse 223:
"Your women are a tilth for you [to cultivate] so go to your tilth
as ye will"), to ancient Western, to modern Arabic literature. That
this metaphorical relationship between land and women is shared in both
the French and Algerian psyches is argued by Winfred Woodhull in
Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and
Literatures: "The cultural record makes clear that women embody
Algeria not only for Algerians in the days since independence, but also
for the French colonizers. . . . In the colonialist fantasy, to possess
Algeria's women is to possess Algeria" (16). This cultural
fantasy extends, she maintains, even to French intellectuals, who,
"like their military and administrative compatriots, make of
Algerian women key symbols of the colony's cultural identity"
(19). Algerian women were "at once the emblem of the colony's
refusal to receive France's 'emancipatory seed' and the
gateway to penetration" (19). Thus, not only was Algeria imagined
as a woman to be possessed, but possessing (conquering, penetrating) an
Algerian woman was a step toward possessing Algeria. As Fanon's
title "Algeria Unveiled" indicates, this equating of land and
woman is especially focused on the veiled woman. Woodhull concurs in her
analysis of French colonial fantasy: "Whether the imagined contact
between races or peoples involves a perilous siege or easy pleasure, a
key point of contact, where Algeria is concerned, is the veiled or
secluded woman" (20).
Fanon outlined the resistance by the colonized Algerian males (in
collusion with Algerian women) to a purported colonial plot to defeat
the Algerian nation by unveiling its women. In this work Algeria is
depicted as a veiled woman, threatened with unveiling, which is
tantamount to rape. In the collective psychology, according to Fanon,
this leads to Algerian/male dishonor due to colonial domination either
of the land or of the nation.
Fanon, a Martinican, Marxist, existentialist, and FLN (Algerian
National Liberation Front) supporter, celebrates in A Dying Colonialism
the liberation and newfound power he claims Algerian women have fought
for and won through their participation in the Algerian Revolution (as
bomb carriers, for example). At the time of writing, year five of the
revolution (1959), Fanon believed the newly won position of respect and
apparent equality held by the female combatants (as described and,
presumably, perceived by him) was permanent, an augury of the future
"modern," socialist, revolutionary Algeria. Assia Djebar,
eleven years his junior, was twenty-three in 1959, and in fact worked at
approximately that time as a writer under Fanon, the then editor of the
revolutionary newspaper El-Moujahid (Zimra, 190). She would undoubtedly
have been familiar with Fanon's ideas, and in fact may have
influenced them, for she could well have been an informant regarding the
rare female students he describes who grew up not wearing the veil
(Fanon, 39). I don't think there is any doubt that Djebar would
have been familiar with Fanon's widely read monograph, A Dying
Colonialism (orig. L'an cinq de la Revolution Algerienne, 1959).
Djebar's collection of short stories Women of Algiers in Their
Apartment (orig. Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, 1980)
answers Fanon (1925-61), who did not live to witness the condition of
Algerian women in postrevolutionary Algeria. Djebar has lived through
this period and, twenty years after her collaboration with Fanon, takes
stock of the place of women in the new society in her fictional and
essay accounts, revealing the limitations but most especially the
richness of the women's oral tradition, cutting through both
traditional myths eulogizing the role of mothers and modern myths of the
new woman standing equal to men. She maintains that, in this new role
(by no means generalized to all Algerian women), women have often merely
exchanged one autism for another (Djebar, WA, 148).
Fanon, in contrast, from an earlier moment in history, extols the
virtues of the revolution and its positive consequences for women. In
the following excerpt Fanon outlines, from his outsider (non-Muslim,
non-Algerian) / insider (FLN militant) view, the ideological struggle
over Algerian women's dress (their bodies, hearts, minds) in the
"discourse of the veil."
We shall see that this veil, one of the elements of the traditional
Algerian garb, was to become the bone of contention in a grandiose
battle, on account of which the occupation forces were to mobilize their
most powerful and most varied resources, and in the course of which the
colonized were to display a surprising force of inertia. Taken as a
whole, colonial society, with its values, its areas of strength, and its
philosophy, reacts to the veil in a rather homogeneous way. The decisive
battle was launched before 1954, more precisely during the early
1930's. The officials of the French administration in Algeria,
committed to destroying the people's originality, and under
instructions to bring about the disintegration, at whatever cost, of
forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality directly or
indirectly, were to concentrate their efforts on the wearing of the
veil, which was looked upon at this juncture as a symbol of the status
of the Algerian woman. (Fanon, 36-37)
Fanon has established the wearing of the veil as symbolic in the
colonial struggle and the perceived status of the Algerian woman as a
field of battle. He paraphrases the political doctrine of the colonial
administration as follows: "If we want to destroy the structure of
Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all
conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they
hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of
sight" (37-38). The contention is that the French wished to gain
control of women's thinking about the veil and thus in a sense gain
control of their bodies. This control of their bodies, which was at
least in certain aspects the prerogative of Algerian men, of fathers,
husbands, brothers, and sons, was to be lost to the Algerians and,
according to Fanon, was believed would lead to an end to the
country's resistance to the colonization, a defeat. (It must be
granted that Fanon, even in a nongendered context, considers the
occupation of land tantamount to "occupation" of its
inhabitants: "There is not occupation of territory, on the one
hand, and independence of persons on the other. . . . Under these
conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed, an occupied
breathing" [Fanon, 65].)
The struggle nevertheless is over penetrating women's minds in
order to uncover their bodies. In baring women's bodies, Fanon
surmises, perhaps due to discourses alluded to above in French and in
Arabic (a language which he would not have understood), that women would
be symbolically raped because they would be gaping open to a ravishing conqueror: "Every rejected veil disclosed to the eyes of the
colonialists horizons until then forbidden, and revealed to them, piece
by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare. . . . Every veil that fell,
every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the
haik, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of
the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was
beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the
colonizer" (42). Thus, women who do not wear veils are equated to a
ravaged and colonized country. In fact, these particular women are not
raped. It is the country with which they are confused which is said to
be raped.
Fanon uses what in his paraphrase of a work by Sartre is a rather
vague term, "an aura of rape." Sartre employed this phrase in
reference to Jewish women and the unconscious, presumably a
"collective unconscious." Fanon, a practicing psychiatrist,
takes it up in reference to either Algeria or Algerian women, or both.
Fanon's reference is as follows:
Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Reflections sur la Question Juive, has shown
that on the level of the unconscious, the Jewish woman almost always has
an aura of rape about her.
The history of the French conquest in Algeria, including the
overrunning of villages by the troops, the confiscation of property and
the raping of women, the pillaging of a country, has contributed to the
birth and the crystallization of the same dynamic image. (45)
Fanon registers this cultural confusion of the "rape" of
the country and the rape of its women, and he himself contributes to the
continuance of the inter-penetration/confusion of the two terms.
As a practicing psychiatrist, Fanon studied the dreams of both the
colonized and the colonizers, and I suspect he was interested in
delimiting some of the parameters of the "collective
unconscious." In his analysis of the European men's dreams he
makes a direct link between personal relations with individual women and
the relations of one group, the colonizers, with the other group, the
colonized: "Whenever, in dreams having an erotic content, a
European meets an Algerian woman, the specific features of his relations
with the colonized society manifest themselves. . . . With an Algerian
woman, there is no progressive conquest, no mutual revelation. Straight
off, with the maximum of violence, there is possession, rape,
near-murder. The act assumes a para-neurotic brutality and sadism, even
in a normal European" (45-46).
Fanon infers this conclusion from his dream data: "Thus the rape
of the Algerian woman in the dream of a European is always preceded by a
rending of the veil. We here witness a double deflowering" (45). Do
we? Or is Fanon himself contributing to this sexualized discourse of the
veil? While so-called colonial "rape" is confused with literal
rape, unveiling is equated with rape. If indeed this description of the
interaction of the "collective colonial unconsciousness"
(Algerian and French) is accurate, the resulting digging in of the heels
by Algerian men in reaction is precisely what Assia Djebar is battling.
In fact, this "digging in" is precisely what Fanon had already
detailed.
We have seen that on the level of individuals the colonial strategy
of destructuring Algerian society very quickly came to assign a
prominent place to the Algerian woman. The colonialist's
relentlessness, his methods of struggle were bound to give rise to
reactionary forms of behavior on the part of the colonized. In the face
of the violence of the occupier, the colonized found himself defining a
principled position with respect to a formerly inert element of the
native cultural configuration. It was the colonialist's frenzy to
unveil the Algerian woman, it was his gamble on winning the battle of
the veil at whatever cost, that were to provoke the native's
bristling resistance. (46-47)
On the one hand, Fanon allows that the Algerian male response is
reactionary, but at the same time he puts the onus of responsibility on
the colonialists and finds the end result, "bristling
resistance," a necessary antithesis in the Marxist struggle, which
he outlines as irreversible (27).
Fanon concludes that a woman's wearing of the veil is an
indication of her patriotism or dedication to the struggle. He argues
that the wearing of the veil by the female fighters was instrumental. At
one point in the struggle it was removed so that Algerian women could
carry unsuspected guns and bombs in handbags and baskets. They returned
to traditional dress when strategy dictated they carry larger arms. Yet
for fighters or not, he claims, "The attitude of a given Algerian
woman with respect to the veil will be constantly related to her overall
attitude with respect to the foreign occupation" (47). A woman,
then, may not hold an opinion on the veil, or an attitude toward her
body (an opinion that overrides her commitment to the national struggle)
which is at variance with that of the resistance - which Fanon states
did not have an official policy on the veil (47). Fanon's
generalization is a result of his di-alectical thinking, which posits
the wearing of the veil as a resistance to French cultural hegemony,
just as he viewed the Negritude movement as a reaction to Western
Manichean racism (47).
Fanon tries to get inside the mind of the young Algerian woman, but
perhaps he projects some of the colonized male's views.
The Algerian woman, the young Algerian woman - except for a very few
students (who, besides, never have the same ease as their European
counterparts) - must overcome a multiplicity of inner resistances, of
subjectively organized fears, of emotions. She must at the same time
confront the essentially hostile world of the occupier and the
mobilized, vigilant, and efficient police forces. Each time she ventures
into the European city [as a bomb carrier], the Algerian woman must
achieve a victory over herself, over her childish fears. She must
consider the image of the occupier lodged somewhere in her mind and in
her body, remodel it, initiate the essential work of eroding it, make it
inessential, remove something of the shame that is attached to it,
devalidate it. (52)
Again, the shame attached to rape in this patriarchal society (I am
not referring to shame on the part of the criminal rapist) is confused
with a colonizing of the mind which cannot be separated from the body.
If shame is felt because a person is a colonial subject, it should not
be lightly transformed into the shame women are made to feel as victims
of rape. Perhaps this catachresis is a result of men feeling feminized
in the face of colonial domination. Djebar's work continues
Fanoh's efforts to depenetrate - to unfuck - to decolonize the
mind, but it contributes as well toward a depatriarchalization of the
female mind and body, another kind of territorial invasion and
appropriation of resources. For, twenty years later, the Algerian woman
was still not at ease in the streets, and the shame she felt attached to
the mobility and exposure of her body was not due merely to the colonial
"penetration," which had long since withdrawn.
Djebar corroborates twenty years later the relationship between the
veil, the body, and self-image which Fanon details in describing what he
calls "the new dialectic of the body and of the world" (59)
for the revolutionary woman. For comparative purposes, here is Fanon on
the subject, followed by Djebar's 1979 explanation of the
experience of the casting off of the veil. First, Fanon:
The veil protects, reassures, isolates. . . . Without the veil she
[the recently unveiled woman] has an impression of her body being cut up
into bits, put adrift; the limbs seem to lengthen indefinitely. . . .
The unveiled body seems to escape, to dissolve. She has an impression of
being improperly dressed, even of being naked. She experiences a sense
of incompleteness with great intensity. She has the anxious feeling that
something is unfinished, and along with this a frightful sensation of
disintegrating. The absence of the veil distorts the Algerian
woman's corporal pattern. She quickly has to invent new dimensions
for her body, new means of muscular control. She has to create for
herself an attitude of unveiled-woman-outside. She must overcome all
timidity, all awkwardness (for she must pass for a European), and at the
same time be careful not to overdo it, not to attract notice to herself.
The Algerian woman who walks stark naked into the European city relearns
her body, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion. (Fanon,
59)
Fanon's formerly veiled woman experiences the veil as holding
her body in a defined space. In addition, she equates the part with the
whole, the veil with her clothes. Without the veil, she feels not only
naked but not whole. She senses no lines of demarcation between herself
and her environment, the exterior world beyond her body. This sense of
intermingling with the outside world is not a positive experience and is
a source of anxiety. Yet, as Fanon is writing about revolutionary
transformations, his statement that she "re-establishes her body in
a totally revolutionary fashion" is, for him, I believe, a positive
valuation of unveiling. The Algerian woman is in the process of being
"repatterned" from feudal serf to the woman of the socialist
future.
Djebar also affirms the newly unveiled woman's sense of her
nudity, and her anxiety in response to it. Accustomed to perceiving
herself in need of male protectors, she views her clothing as protection
against the gaze of marauding males not within the intimate circle of
family and marriage.
The most visible evolution of Arabic [sic] women, at least in the
cities, has therefore been the casting off of the veil. Many a woman,
often after an adolescence or her entire youth spent cloistered, has
concretely lived the experience of the unveiling.
The body moves forward out of the house and is, for the first time,
felt as being "exposed" to every look: the gait becomes stiff,
the step hasty, the facial expression tightens.
Colloquial Arabic describes the experience in a significant way:
"I no longer go out protected (that is to say, veiled, covered
up)" the woman who casts off her sheet will say, "I go out
undressed, or even denuded." The veil that shielded her from the
looks of strangers is in fact experienced as a "piece of clothing
in itself," and to no longer have it means to be totally exposed.
(WA, 139)
Djebar, in fact, will go on to make the point that when the Algerian
exposes her eyes and mouth to the world, she is perceived by males as
exposing other orifices, and therefore as symbolically naked,
dishonoring the male whose duty it is to "protect" her (138).
Whereas in 1959, according to Fanon, the danger is perceived as the
woman's being seen by the colonizer and Algerian men are virtually
unaware of the veiled woman, Djebar's postface essays in Women of
Algiers reveal a different perception in 1979. Again, I present these
two views back to back.
This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer.
There is no reciprocity. She does not yield herself, does not give
herself, does not offer herself. The Algerian man has an attitude toward
the Algerian woman which is on the whole clear. He does not see her.
There is even a permanent intention not to perceive the feminine
profile, not to pay attention to women. (Fanon, 44)
Thus, there is another eye there, the female gaze. But that liberated
eye, which could become the sign of a conquest toward the light shared
by other people, outside of the enclosure, is now in turn perceived as a
threat; and the vicious circle closes itself back up again.
Yesterday, the master made his authority felt in the closed, feminine
spaces through the single presence of his gaze alone, annihilating those
of other people. In turn, the feminine eye when it moves around is now,
it seems, feared by the men immobilized in the Moorish cafes of
today's medinas, while the white phantom, unreal but enigmatic,
passes through. (Djebar, WA, 138)
The "woman who sees without being seen" arouses fear in the
now passive Algerian male caught by the eye of a mobile Algerian woman
in a public place. The "unreal and enigmatic" woman is no
longer the Orient or its unveiled women in a romantic painting, but the
veiled postrevolutionary Algerian woman. Djebar stages here an
unexpected reversal in her attempt to analyze and turn around the
situation of Algerian women through her manipulation of the discourse.
If women are feared, they at least have some power through their gaze,
even if the reaction will be to repress the feared behavior. Djebar, in
her analysis, reveals that power.
In the above quotation Djebar links light with the outside, sunlight
with women's liberation. Fanon, on the other hand, has made the
point that women's seclusion in the home has nothing to do with an
attempt to avoid the sun. He also argues that women themselves chose
this interior existence as a means of national struggle.
The Algerian woman's ardent love of the home is not a limitation
imposed by the universe. It is not hatred of the sun or the streets or
spectacles. It is not a flight from the world.
. . . The Algerian woman, in imposing such a restriction [the veil,
seclusion] on herself, in choosing a form of existence limited in scope,
was deepening her consciousness of struggle and preparing for combat.
. . . All alone, the woman, by means of conscious techniques,
presided over the setting up of the system. (66)
Although this interpretation proclaims women's agency, as well
as a gender-united front, Fanon is quick to point out that there is an
aspect of sclerosis in tradition (66). Fanon, however, wants to believe
that in the process of the revolution all imbalances will be righted and
the nation, already equated with its female population, will be
liberated, as will its women (99, 100). Fanon is optimistic that through
the revolutionary process the question of the veil will fall by the
wayside: "We are able to affirm even now that when Algeria has
gained her independence such questions will not be raised" (47-48).
Djebar's work points out that all has not been righted for women,
that the injustices suffered by women in Algerian patriarchal society
have not been eliminated through the revolutionary struggle by 1979, and
that in some instances what was positive about the past - going back
beyond the resistance to the colonizer and the Algerian woman's
Marxist "entry into history" (Fanon, 107) - has been or is in
the process of being lost.
Juliette Minces, in her article "Women in Algeria," takes a
less positive view of women's role in the French-Algerian War than
Fanon and gives credence to Djebar's "fictional" claims
about the succeeding years. She contends that women were utilized in the
war, albeit willingly, as auxiliaries and adjuncts. She maintains that
relatively few women entered the battle on their own initiative (162).
Moreover, she views women's role as essentially that of
replacements, even as "sincere" and courageous bomb carriers:
"That is, it was chiefly in the capacity of wife, sister, or
daughter of this or that man that they became involved, especially among
the lower classes" (163).
As regards the position of women in Algeria after the war, Minces
claims that there has been scarcely any change in the role and status of
women: "No profound campaign of liberation had been undertaken
among women, much less among men" (166). The wearing of the veil
was still prevalent, as "those who refused to wear the veil or be
confined, those who wished to find salaried work, unless they belonged
to the nascent administrative bourgeoisie, were rapidly labeled and
often rejected" (168). Although women do have the political right
to vote, the family law is restrictive, and the Algerian woman is still
considered a minor in need of permanent guardianship (Minces, 168-69).
Minces concludes as regards an Algerian feminist movement:
Women are superfluous as producers [partially due to the high rate of
male unemployment] and neglected as citizens, arousing only defiance or
irritation when they try to make themselves heard. They are too little
conscious of themselves as a group. It is thus improbable that an
effective feminist movement can be born in the near future. (170)
In Assia Djebar's short story "Women of Algiers in Their
Apartment" the traditional structure of colonial national allegory
is subverted to create a re-configured female body with a voice and a
subject's gaze. As in the previous model, as outlined by Fanon,
woman's body is confused with the land and the country. In
Djebar's fictional text, set in the postwar period, the city is at
first depicted as a space which encloses women behind walls and balcony
bars, like the prisons which enclosed the freedom fighters during the
revolution. One oppressor has been ousted, but another remains; the
Algerian patriarchy has not yet been overthrown. In the end the city is
depicted as an unveiled woman, revealing herself without complexes, open
to the world, an open port baring her orifices without shame in the
light of day - one model for an ideal liberated Algerian woman at ease
with and in control of her own body. A repeated motif in the story, and
in the collection of the same name, is the veil, which covers the female
body and, according to Djebar, muffles the voice of the woman inside
(2). Women are contained in enclosed spaces behind veils, physical walls
and mental walls, in houses with barred windows like those of a prison.
The female body as object of the male gaze must be covered. Its
uncovered orifices, starting with the mouth and eyes, are a threat to
male honor and result in female shame (awra). To take the subject
position as the one who gazes, to see outside, is to revolt, to assert a
certain power. Djebar links speaking and looking to the claiming of
public space by the removal of the veil or other barriers, mental or
physical. This claiming of a space and a language in which to speak is a
second revolution undermining male patriarchal hegemony. Djebar
translates women's colloquial Arabic, which is muffled by the
dominant discourse of modern standard Arabic imposed by the
revolutionary FLN (a male patriarchy), into the colonizer's
language, French, a process which brings this women's discourse to
light in written form. Women are to be seen and heard. Liberation, as
described by the character Sarah, begins with women seeing and hearing
one another (64), to effect an inner liberation and empowerment.
Djebar, in view of these circumstances of women's lives in the
postwar period, plays with many of the themes of Fanon's discourse
and the realities of the French-Algerian War. A female war victim of
"medical torture" is transformed from a victim to a powerful
healer; the French torture doctor is transformed into a highly
specialized "native" physician, and finally, that physician is
replaced by a "native" woman doctor. A dream of torture taking
place in an operating room evolves into a "real-life" failed
operation performed by the Algerian doctor, Ali, an operation ending in
the death of an alcoholic nationalist leader. This dream of medical
torture is Ali's, about his wife Sarah, who was a bomb carrier for
the FLN and a torture victim. The scene in the "operating"
room is overlaid with a scene of a burning village (douar), site of a
French commando raid, including the bleating of a goat about to be
sacrificed and the voices of children. Thus, female victimization is
linked to national victimization, a violence done to the land. Both the
nurses and the patient/victim wear "masks," although the
victim's "mask" is alternately described as a blindfold or a white bandage. A torture machine is about to be applied, and the
victim, at first associated with the goat, is likened to a child:
"Again a child whimpers nearby, or could it be Sarah blindfolded,
holes where eyes should be" (6). Similar images are evoked in the
scene at the death of the cirrhosis patient.
In the operating room, a blindfolded head, a profile of stone
overturned. The patient has died on the operating table. The
anesthesiologist redoubles his efforts for a few more minutes. The
oxygenation machine rumbles. Hollow silence among the six or seven white
masks. Gestures of gloves in an unreal burst of speed. Irrevocably a
corpse. (WA, 20)
The patient wears a blindfold, the medical corps wear masks. The
torture machine is replaced by a life-giving oxygenation machine, but no
life can be breathed into the decadent FLN leader by the high-tech male
Algerian doctor who is having difficulties in communicating with his
wife and son.
The dream of torture finally evolves into the successful treatment of
a victim of the patriarchy (a structure upheld by the nationalists) who
was not liberated by the war. Due to family brutality as well as
colonial brutality, she had ended up at Independence as a prostitute,
later to do the backbreaking work of a water carrier in a hammam (public
bath) for paltry remuneration and no security. This "Fatima"
(colonial name for an Algerian woman) is operated on by Ali's
colleague, an "equal," a woman physician whose veil/surgical
mask has an instrumental medical function. The elderly Fatma, in her
delirium, has rejected her mask/veil: "It is me - me? - It is me
they have excluded, me whom they have barred . . . Me whom they have
caged in . . . me inside the rocks of silence of the white veil"
(WA, 39; italics in original). She refuses what she views as burial in
the shroud of a veil, yet she still hallucinates under medication that
the operating room is a torture chamber and the scalpels and knife
blades might be instruments of torture rather than of healing (39). In
the end, however, that masked woman who focuses fully upon her (43) is a
healer and not a torturer, who removes her mask/veil when it is no
longer functional and, tired from her effort, smiles broadly (46). The
female victim of the first scene has thus been transformed in
Djebar's discourse into an "operator" with healing
powers. The confined space of Ali's nightmare, the prison/operating
room, is turned into a series of positive images as that surgically
masked woman saves the day.
Related to the motif of torture is that of the prison. Following the
war, the return to the veil for Djebar is a kind of prison for women.
The link is directly made by the ex-bomb-carrier Sarah, who says she was
a voiceless prisoner: "A little like certain women of Algiers
today, you see them going around outside without the ancestral veil, and
yet, out of fear of the new and unexpected situations, they become
entangled in other veils, invisible but very noticeable ones. . . . Me
too: for years after Barberousse I was still carrying my own prison
around inside me" (47-48). In addition, the architecture of the
city (some of it modern) serves to imprison women. Women's bodies
and voices are suppressed, either literally or psychologically. Women
are, generally, not allowed to "circulate" freely within the
city, living behind walls, balcony bars, and/or veils. In "Women of
Algiers in Their Apartment" Djebar places special emphasis upon the
effect of modern architecture on secluded women's lives. In the
past, secluded women enjoyed the sun from their courtyards, they had the
right to leave the house to go to the baths, and, in villages, they went
to the fountain, to fetch water. With the advent of indoor plumbing and
vast subsidized housing projects, women's lives became even more
secluded, as the following excerpt from the women's conversation in
the public bath indicates: "The unknown woman intervenes: 'In
a socialist village (and she cites her references: a daily paper in the
national language that her little boy of ten reads to her every day),
peasant women have broken the faucets so they can go to the fountain
every day! . . . such ignorance!'" (32). The term socialist
indicates a critique of this system which Fanon believed would bring
both modernity and liberation. The woman who speaks of other
women's ignorance is herself illiterate, at least in' standard
Arabic, which has been imposed from the top down by the pan-Arabists of
the revolution. Like so many of the other women in the stories, she is
dependent upon her son in this regard. (For those others, dependence is
especially economic.)
Baya, a highly educated young woman, nevertheless defends the village
women's "ignorance": "What wouldn't I break,
inside of me or outside if need be, to get back with the others? To get
back to the water that streams, that sings, that gets lost, that sets us
all free, if only bit by bit" (32). The union with other women, the
flowing, the intermingling through the intermediary of water is one
thing lost in the new mixture of traditional and modern.
In the "Overture" to Women of Algiers Djebar speaks of
translating the voices of women she has been listening to since 1958
from a nonstandard Arabic, a "women's language," into
French. This language is placed in opposition to the standard Arabic of
the revolutionary patriarchy. Djebar wishes to record this
"underground" women's dialect and expose it to the light
(WA, 1), because the language has taken the veil, has become muffled.
Like the covered body, it is associated with darkness, the cave.
Although it cannot be readily heard, its voices are defiant. One
impediment to speech is the set of sexual taboos imposed on the female
body and its sounds. Still, although women's bodies may be
imprisoned (by governments, by patriarchal customs, by veils),
women's minds are not incarcerated (2). Djebar questions
nevertheless whether the modern woman who circulates in the streets is
truly liberated, or whether, in speaking, she remains intimidated by the
male voyeur, "the eye through the peephole" (2).
In contrast, the public bath is a place of communication between
women. It is the traditional space outside the home where women meet. In
keeping with Djebar's introduction (the "Overture"), this
site where so many women's voices are heard is described as
"the mystery of a universe of subterranean water" (29). The
physical contact between the women seems maternal, sisterly, yet
sensual. In fact, Djebar seems to identify her work of recovering
women's voices with that of the old water carrier and masseuse,
Fatma. In the French version, instead of calling herself a water dowser,
as the English translation has it, Djebar asks herself how she might
work as a sorceress to bring to life the voices suspended in the
silences of yesterday's harem (the paraphrase/translation is my
own). Fatma the masseuse is described in this way: "Under the light
that came down in oblique rays from the skylight, her villager's
face, aged before its time, was turning into the mask of an oriental
sorceress" (WA, 30). That release of voice, even if melancholy, is
revealed in the following passage:
The bather who was singing near the marble slab continued her somber
threnody.
"What is she singing?" Anne asked under her breath.
"It's just one word she keeps repeating. . . . A lament
she's modulating," Sonia said after a minute. "She's
improvising."
"It's more that she's consoling herself," Baya
added. "Many women can only go out to the baths. . . ." (30)
Thus, women are shown to be confined by the architecture of the city
and the customs of their society. One older type of architecture and
nonmodern custom is the public bath, which allows women to come together
and to express their inner concerns through the intermediaries of
massage and water.
Djebar's character Sarah wishes also to recover the voices of
her ancestral past, the songs of women. She dreams of undertaking a
documentary on the city and asks herself, "How to put an entire
city to music" (16). Yet the source of this liberating excavation
is her experience of the city as imprisoning: "Was she working on
this ostensibly artistic project, a documentary of the city, in order to
answer the interrogation that had begun to take possession of her these
days? The city, its walls, its balconies, the shadow of empty
prisons" (34). The project of bringing past voices "to
light" (both Sarah's and Djebar's) is a liberating
process, whether the walls be those of the prison or the harem.
Leila, a bomb carrier like Sarah, is drugged, not due to physical
pain as is Fatma, but due to psychic pain. She is in a delirium. Her
delirium is entitled "For [Toward?] a divan of the fire
carriers." (In Arabic, a diwan is a collection of poetry as well as
a divan, in the sense of a davenport. Leila is lying down.) Leila, the
former bomb carrier and torture victim and probable rape victim, speaks
out strongly against the physical and mental prisons of the city of
Algiers. She herself has not been able to live up to the hopes for and
the heroic image of the new woman Fanon depicts in his revolutionary
optimism of the late fifties, a woman "bursting the bounds of the
narrow world in which she had lived without responsibility, . . .
participating in the destruction of colonialism and in the birth of a
new woman" (Fanon, 107).
Leila, in her diwan and in conversation with Sarah, asks about this
new woman Fanon described to the world: "Where are you, you fire
carriers, you my sisters, who should have liberated the city. . . .
Barbed wire no longer obstructs the alleys, now it decorates windows,
balconies, anything at all that opens onto an outside space" (WA,
44). The seclusion imposed by the Algerian patriarchy is like the state
of siege once associated with the colonizer. The city is a prison for
women. Leila complains too of the use made of the female body during the
war for propaganda purposes: "In the streets they were taking
pictures of your unclothed bodies, of your avenging arms in front of the
tanks. . . . Your bodies, used only in parts, bit by little bit"
(44). She reveals, in contrast to Fanon, a less than ideal attitude
toward the female body and its expedient functions and uses for the FLN,
even in the early days. Perhaps she is even calling into question the
editorial decisions of FLN propagandists such as Frantz Fanon.
Sick in bed, Leila is still in prison. She is still reliving the war,
for she cannot escape the war wounds her society does not help her to
heal. In fact, the destruction of a war has not stopped for women in
Algeria. She tells Sarah, "The bombs are still exploding . . . but
over twenty years: close to our eyes, for we no longer see the outside,
we see only the obscene looks, the bombs explode but against our bellies
and I am - she screamed - I am every woman's sterile belly in
one!" (44). Women are still being damaged by the society's
high valuation of women's reproductive capacities above all other
qualities and capacities, making infertility a common reason for
repudiation, leaving unmarried women to suffer due to their reduced
status.
Leila even questions the entire premise of the war, that the enemy,
the bombing victims, were radically other and separate, deserving of
their fate. Like the Frenchwoman Anne, who sees herself connected to
Algerian women, Leila feels a connection with her victims. She certainly
questions whether the ideals for which Fanon claims the war was fought,
human liberation both male and female, have been met (44).
As a prisoner and torture victim, a woman in Leila's situation
would probably have been raped. Leila seems to have refused to keep her
"shame" a secret and, in the interest of publicizing enemy
atrocities, apparently spoke of it publicly. In so doing, she has only
increased her public humiliation. In the long run she became a shameful
outcast rather than a victim who sacrificed for her country (45). She
does not even refer directly to what her countrymen would be ashamed of;
she only underscores the lack of solidarity between men and women after
the war. She laughs bitterly because times have changed, the tables have
turned, and rape, then barely speakable, is once again unspeakable. Her
speaking of it in public has brought shame upon her and erected walls
between her and others, imprisoning her. Her speaking may have led to
her fever, but Sarah, who has always been silent, finds that speaking
is, finally, a release and a cure for her: a woman who listens to and
truly looks at another woman "ends up seeing herself, with her own
eyes, unveiled at last" (47).
Sarah was finally able to open up to the Frenchwoman Anne, whose life
she had saved (in contrast to her former death-dealing military
activities). She speaks of her mother's death while she was in
prison, of her inability to weep. Not only veiled women have trouble
finding voice, are imprisoned. Removing the veil, then, which Djebar
claims muffles the voice, does not necessarily give a woman her voice.
Deeply ingrained psychological encumbrances remain, or new ones are
created by her circulating freely in a space which is not ready to
receive her. Sarah, no longer a prisoner in the dreaded Barberousse
prison, and circulating unveiled, still had psychological bars to
contend with. Those psychological bars were related to the restricted
life of her closest role model, her mother, who had but one daughter.
She was very quiet and feared repudiation, perhaps because she had no
sons. Unlike Sarah, a "fire carrier," her mother was a
"water carrier" and foot washer to her husband - to Sarah, a
sign of her subservience (49). Even though, as an adult, Sarah
consciously rejected this role model, her mother's lack of liberty
was like a phantom. Thus, she had no overt role model, which caused her
to question her own freedom of movement and, inevitably, to follow her
mother's example and suppress expression of her inner feelings.
Fatma, the downtrodden water carrier who gained little, if anything,
from the revolution and who is to be treated by the woman surgeon, like
Leila is delirious. She sees herself as powerful, without a veil, moving
through the city in an ambulance, bringing forth women's music and
voice, as the character Sarah and the author Djebar hope to do (38). She
finds her voice in the light of day in the center of the city. This
city, to be represented by Sarah with women's voices, is also
figured as a woman by Djebar, as a courtesan, a more sexually free woman
who is proudly open to the world, a pride far different from the male
honor "lost" to the artist Delacroix and his powerful friend,
who invaded a defeated nineteenth-century corsair's harem with
their gaze ("Postface," WA, 134) to paint romantic
masterpieces still on display in the Louvre. This pride, if not honor,
is linked nevertheless with the corsair alluded to at the end of
"Women of Algiers in Their Apartment," in association with the
proud courtesan/city (52).
In the end, Anne, the Frenchwoman, decides not to take the plane to
France, not to separate from her Algerian friend Sarah (51). As she and
Sarah ride back from the airport, they, French and Algerian, like Fanon
seeing the country as a woman, view the city as a woman, but reverse the
possessive fear-of-rape theme. Their focus is on the positive aspect of
her sensual opening upon the world.
In the old jalopy, on the road that led to the flat part of town,
open as a courtesan seemingly easy to get, before it turned into the
arcade-lined avenue that carries high its tight, white heart, the women
- first one, then the other too - were humming.
"One day we'll take the boat together," the first one
said. "Not to go away, no, to gaze at the city when all the doors
are opening. . . . What a picture! It will make even the light
tremble!" (WA, 51-52).
Instead of the shame associated with "being easy," the city
claims its "body," its sensuality, its pleasure in itself. The
open city poses no threat to the women, but rather offers a beautiful
picture of trembling (orgasmic?) light, a liberating light so highly
valued in Djebar's prose (see also L'amour, la fantasia, 79,
256, et passim). The city will be looked upon, the women will gaze upon
it. There will be no shame in this city's/female's display of
beauty, which is contemplated to the sound of female "voices"
in unison across nationalities and cultures. The patriarchal structures
under which Anne and Sarah have been living may not be the same, but
they are sufficiently similar to provide them a sense of solidarity.
Djebar's women of Algiers, if they are like this last depiction
of the city, resemble those in Picasso's lithograph collection of
the same name (WA, 151). Those women open onto the light, heavily and
unashamedly taking their space, revealing breasts, buttocks, and navel,
"speaking" boldly, gazing out at the spectator proudly and
joyously like the renegade pirates of the corsair tradition which Sarah
and Anne hope to emulate at the end of "Women of Algiers in Their
Apartment" (52; thereby confusing the whole issue of male honor and
female pride). These new women are neither fire carriers of destruction
nor water carriers of submission. Rather, they carry the light of the
sun and, perhaps, the water which binds life.
Thus, Djebar has inverted the paranoid metaphor of a nation as a
literally and culturally subjugated woman to that of a city as woman,
free to determine her own sexual availability. In doing so, Djebar has
passed from the enclosed space of the harem penetrated by the Western
eyes of Delacroix's Femmes d'Algers dans leur appartement to
the open space of Picasso's lithograph series of the same name, in
a discourse which, like Fanon's, both uses and subverts European
texts. They are both discourses manipulated in the cause of human
liberation - in Djebar's case, in the cause of women's
liberation from Algerian patriarchy twenty years after that
country's nationalist war of liberation.
Woman and land/place are still confused, but this new confusion seems
less deleterious (and ideologically less sanguine) for the condition of
women than that of Fanon and so many others before him. The rape of a
woman and the violent colonization of a country are such grave matters
that perhaps the distinctions should not be blurred. The confusion seems
only to provoke masculine fears of impotence and castration to the
possible detriment of real, live women, while Djebar's subversion
of the theme seems to fly in the face of such male illusions as the
possessing of a woman as an object (land, nation) which represents
one's honor. In contrast, Djebar's representation is of a
woman as human subject, in possession of herself, even as that woman is
an embodiment of the city of Algiers, a new variation on national
allegory representing the land or nation as woman.
WORKS CONSULTED
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