Assia Djebar’s Mourners

Abstract

To bid oneself farewell. (2) The posthumous homage that world has paid to one of its greatest figures, Djebar, who passed away on February 6, 2015, reveals the extent to which her oeuvre has shaped not only the history of arts and literature but also the history of ideas and the social sciences. From the old to the new world, to borrow a term that the novelist applied to the newly independent Algeria, this homage highlights the canonical force of a creation that, paradoxically, never stopped resisting the imposition of grand narratives and their normalizing power. Between history and literature, the disciplines in which she was trained, her scientific and aesthetic approaches take into account the intimate dimension of historical experience: her writing, like her camera, is turned toward the hidden, invisible face of events. Such is her exploration of which she observes at close range through the tragic history of colonial and post-independence Algeria. If, in the twentieth century, grief has emerged as a struggle between social and collective ceremony and the individual's private and intimate rituals, (3) Djebar anticipates this reconceptualization when she undertakes to hear, film, represent, and write grief in the feminine. What better way to do justice to her than to listen, with her, to these buried voices, murmurs, whispers, mutterings, and Tzarl-rit, (4) to the intimate ceremonies that women so often preside over and give voice to. For, in the face of the corpus of Djebar the Eternal--the metonym designating members of the Academie franijaise--is written in memoriam. The title that I have chosen, Assia Djebar's Mourners, should be understood in both senses of the possessive. It refers to the mourners portrayed in her works, whose purest incarnations are the daughters of Zoulikha, the woman without a tomb. Djebar herself appears as a thaumaturgist in her elegy, Algerian White. But it can also refer to us, her readers, mourning the disappearance of the author, absorbed by the works she left behind for posterity. It can even refer to the very act of reading, which, in her corpus, is conceived of as a process of mourning. Writing and Loss Not much demonstration is necessary to establish that death is at the very heart of Djebar's writing process. It is present from the beginning, in the extreme form of savage death, in one of her first novels, Children of the New World, published in French in 1962. The novel depicts not only the martyrs of the revolution, the major operations (5) of the War of Independence, the blood spilled during the demonstrations of May 8, 1945 (119-21), but also public ceremonial burials such as that of the elderly Aicha, and the personal mourning of Lila, an orphan who loses her six-month-old son (like Nfissa in The Naive Larks) (25-32). (6) It also includes the victims of violent crimes, of so-called honor killings, such as Touma, killed by her brother Tawfik for having frequented Europeans, and over whom only her tearful mother keeps vigil (170-92). The Naive Larks opens with the foreshadowing of its young heroes' violent deaths: the presumed deaths of Rachid and his brother, and Karim's all-too-real which is followed by a secret ceremonial in which Nfissa takes on the role of mourner (Larks 29-30, 35-36): Breaking dawn. Upright, the standing mourner Nfissa had not imagined that the body would be thrown in a ditch, without being washed, without a shroud, yet with prayers and a dirge slowly intoned, first a lamentation, then a song of triumph. [...] Karim! a voice within her repeated. In Arabic, this same voice sang, cried out: O my brother, my brother! An inexhaustible tenderness for Karim filled her, as if he had been younger and weaker than her but also still alive, no, not this mass enveloped in French army blankets, seized along with a weapons truck from a prior ambush. …