Veiled Vision: Assia Djebar on Delacroix, Picasso, and the Femmes D'Alger

Abstract

This paper looks at the issue of representation of the female 'other' in the context of the reading made by contemporary Algerian writer Assia Djebar of Delacroix's 1834 painting, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, and its reworkings both by Delacroix and by Picasso. Djebar's approach to the French Orientalists on the one hand rehabilitates their vision of Arab women, one often condemned as a reductive assimilation to fantasized western notions of the exotic feminine. Her comments on Delacroix and Fromentin (who drew on the Femmes d'Alger for his description of a harem) assert the empowering effect of French artists' gaze on the women they represented, in a culture where the female body was (and often remains) hidden from view. On the other hand, Djebar herself paradoxically practises some of the 'sins of perception' commonly attributed to the Orientalists as she reduces other to same, assimilates autonomous being to submissive function, in her account of the Delacroix and Picasso paintings. Overlooking the black servant, she marginalizes this major compositional foil as an accessory function. Politically concerned to see Picasso's women of the war of independence years as free, Djebar (mis)reads him through a veil of historical association that eliminates the notion of enslavement, and she doubles that veil by reading Delacroix retrospectively via Picasso. Her cultural intimacy with the harem scene produces greater blindness to the 'second-degree' otherness it contains than does Delacroix's cultural distance which lets him embrace a plurality of otherness, in a depiction of African women where power and autonomy are located, against expectation, in the slave.