Abstract
By HAFID GAFAITI Women and Writing. The social and cultural contexts at the center of Assia Djebar's work seem to privilege oral traditions, but written traditions are equally if in different ways essential. Indeed, in Arab-Muslim culture, the body, from birth, is textually given. Thus a newborn child, sipping from a bowl of water infused with scripture (traced with a vegetal ink), literally drinks sacred passages from the Koran. Lacan has allowed us to interpret this ritual in a new way. According to him, because social norms are based on Law (or the rule of the father), and because social power is always naturalized in writing, this rite of passage marks the infant's status as object of the father's law. Girls and women who seek to challenge these conventions, who see themselves as agents of power rather than as objects of paternal law, are able to do so through their mastery of writing.2 In her Journeys Through the French African Novel Mildred Mortimer notes:
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