Rewriting Writing: Identity, Exile and Renewal in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia

Abstract

The invasion and conquest of Algeria by the French in 1830 provided an enabling context not only for the development of a multilayered system of repression on the part of the colonizing power, but also for the elaboration by the colonized of patterns of resistance which arose as a reciprocal response to this subjection. The cultural and subjective duality which are the primary manifestations of the colonial encounter-the product of simultaneous processes of cultural subordination and assimilation whose displacements render both colonizer and colonized subject to the colonizing process-tends to inscribe postcolonial literary discourse within a context of alienation and dislocation, as the authors seek to devise strategies which will mediate the demands of a colonial legacy which, inter alia, compels them to inscribe subjectivity in the language of the colonizer. The effect of colonial domination on the literary production of the colonized is thus of a plural nature. Further, the problems implicit in the (re)construction of identity through writing raise questions of discourse and signification germane to the production of autobiography, where identity itself may be read as a construct subject to external patterns of connotation. The result of this desire for discursive identity is the adoption of narrative forms which tend to displace and subvert the norms imposed by the colonizer upon the colonized; the divisions and pluralities of the colonial heritage are subsumed into the narrative matrix and turned to the determination of a postcolonial identity-