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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | Assia Djebar's 'Algerian Quartet': a study in fragmented autobiography |
| Author: | Mortimer, Mildred |
| Year: | 1997 |
| Periodical: | Research in African Literatures |
| Volume: | 28 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Pages: | 102-117 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Algeria |
| Subjects: | literature autobiography |
| About person: | Assia Djebar (1936-) pseud. for Fatima-Zohra Imalayène |
| Link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3820446 |
| Abstract: | The Algerian writer Assia Djebar considers her experience with the French colonial educational system in Algeria as ambiguous. She came to believe that the process of Western acculturation, resulting in her mastery of the colonizer's language and access to public space, excluded her from most, if not all, aspects of the traditional woman's world. This sentiment of exclusion led to her 'Quatuor algérien', a writing project to reestablish links with the maternal world from which she felt distanced. To date, three of the four projected volumes of the Algerian quartet have appeared: 'L'amour, la fantasia' (1985), 'Ombre sultane' (1987), and 'Vaste est la prison' (1995). In 'L'amour, la fantasia' Djebar interweaves autobiographical fragments with other strands of narrative (colonial history, oral narrative, lyric poetry). 'Ombre sultane' combines a first and second-person narrative of parallel lives and female bonding, creating links between autobiography and fictional narrative. 'Vaste est la prison' probes the relationship of autofiction to cinema by evoking the filming of 'La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua' in a series of chapters interspersed in the novel. Djebar's polyphonic texts containing autobiographical fragments mark a new approach to autobiography as they blur the boundaries between fact and fiction and ignore the promise to the reader that the textual and referential 'I' are one and the same. Bibliogr., notes, ref. |
