Assia Djebar's qalam: the poetics of the trace in postcolonial Algeria

Abstract

ABSTRACT Postcolonial francophone writers have in common a denunciation of the French colonial policy of assimilation. Although assimilation was a hollow promise to the majority, it nevertheless entailed enduring political and cultural damages to the colonized. These writers recognize that assimilation was pre-eminently enforced through the compulsory use of the French language, which racialized the Other in direct ratio to their mastery of French. In their writings, they delineate specific processes of disalienation that vary depending on the location and time of the diagnosed acculturation. In this article Weltman-Aron concentrates on the work of the Algerian writer Assia Djebar and her interrogation of the possibility of idiomaticity in a postcolonial context, specifically Algeria. Idiomaticity (to the extent that it can ever happen) has an impact on the possibility of justice, reparation and representation. Djebar's writings can be productively linked to Jean-François Lyotard's notion of the differend, and to Jacques Derrida's reflection on the trace and on language as ex-appropriation. Weltman-Aron also examines Djebar's position regarding idiomaticity in connection with other Maghrebian writers, such as Abdelkebir Khatibi, who write on bilingualism and diglossia. With the use of transliterated Arabic words like qalam in her French text, Djebar contributes to the assessment of Algeria as a multilingual space by Algerian writers. In addition, Djebar's aim of ‘writing for the trace’ is a way of inscribing a dual resistance: to colonial appropriations, but also to claims of authentic self-recovery after independence. By focusing on scenes of ‘vanishing inscriptions’ or ‘writing under erasure’, Djebar presents an Algerian site that is haunted by a past that is produced poetically or in fragments.