Writing Woman: The Novels of Assia Djebar

Abstract

IN 1957 A YOUNG UNKNOWN burst on the French literary scene with an insolently sensual story written on a dare. La Soif had everything: beautiful females, well-off males, fast cars, lazy days at the beach, and, to top it off, a botched abortion resulting in death. Its author, the proper daughter of a Moslem civil servant, was not quite twenty years old. To the Parisian pundits, the resemblance to young Franqoise Sagan's 1954 scandalous Bonjour tristesse, published by the same press (Julliard), was unmistakable. Praise poured in. Things had been heating up in the colonial war across the water, casting doubts as to the righteousness of France's imperial mission civilisatrice. Here at last was a subject of empire, one of them, who could write like one of us.