Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Women, Veils, and Land

Abstract

By RITA A. FAULKNER Frantz Fanon uses the image of the unveiling of 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 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 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: cultural record makes clear that women embody 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 (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 once the emblem of the colony's refusal to receive France's 'emancipatory seed' and the gateway to penetration (19). Thus, not only was imagined as a to be possessed, but possessing (conquering, penetrating) an Algerian was a step toward possessing Algeria. As Fanon's title Algeria Unveiled indicates, this equating of land and 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 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 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 twentyhree 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. Uan 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 tradiRita A. Faulkner holds degrees in French and comparative literature from Purdue University, has studied Arabic in Tangiers, has taught English at Kuwait University and the University of Bahrain, and is currently a doctoral student in comparative literature at the University of Illinois, specializing in francophone, Arabic, and English colonial and postcolonial literatures. The present article was written during her tenure as Traveling Scholar at Indiana University.