Nulle Part Dans La Maison Research Articles

Assia Djebar and the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria: mimicry and subalternity in Nowhere in my Father’s House

ABSTRACTAssia Djebar’s autobiographical Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007) portrays a conflicting relationship with her father which breaks with the sympathetic image in her early L’amour, la fantasia (1985). This paper examines their complex relationship by exploring the main character’s sense of place, represented by the home and the school, where dominates the authoritative figure of her father. The latter’s identity emerges as that of the assimilated native, constructed by the ideological forces of French colonialism and fostered by its state-controlled education. The conclusion shows that the protagonist’s feeling of female invisibility, spelt in the very title of the novel, and her discomfort at her father’s subaltern and mimic identity underline the historical, political, as well as cultural impasse of the French colony in Algeria, and function as an indirect indictment of the presumably positive legacy of the colonial past.

‘Auto-analyse’ and the Ethics of Memory in Assia Djebar's Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007)

Recent transdisciplinary attempts to theorize an ethics of memory have centred on concepts such as melancholia, haunting and trauma. Despite being pathological states, they have paradoxically been posited as markers of ‘remembrance’ that signal the subject's ethical refusal to ‘move on’. If Algerian author Assia Djebar's literary output has, since 1995, been concerned with such tropes, I argue that her most recent narrative, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007), marks a shift away from such thinking. Rather than focusing on the spectralized others of Algerian history, Djebar's autofictional narrative enacts a return to the self. In doing so, it postulates a new model of relationality between self and other that moves beyond the limitations of melancholic possession, haunting and the traumatic acting out of the past. Drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler, this article demonstrates how Djebar's narrative seeks an ethical mode of remembrance that refuses to fetishize the traumatic condition.

Assia Djebar: In Memoriam

For Clarisse Zimra This contribution was written shortly after the death of my beloved A friend, Assia Djebar, on February 6, 2015. Her former partner, Malek Alloula, died only eleven days later. As Etienne Balibar remarked to me: quasi-simultaneous departure does say something about the remembrance of things past. (1) I met Assia Djebar in 1991 at a Cixous conference in Canada. I am grateful to Mireille Calle-Gruber for having brought us together. Something magical passed between us. The second time we met, on a long walk through the streets of Paris, Djebar called me her twin sister. I was overwhelmed that she dedicated her last book, Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere, to me. (2) At Cerisy, in her presence, I tried to understand what that dedication meant. Apart from an early play, it is the only work by her that has been translated into Arabic. She has been gone just over a year, and I remember still the times that she came to stay with me in my apartment and how she was always going exactly the wrong way so that I had to rescue her from the clutches of the New York map, how she would leave umbrellas behind on rainy days. A lot of laughter. I have been remembering how we drove together to upstate New York and shared a room in a tarted-up nineteenth-century inn, where we had two days of absolute delight, eating well, talking nonstop from politics to love affairs. I miss her not only in my intellectual life but also in my affective life. I cannot think that I will never hear her voice again. I will now quote from a piece that I wrote for a volume on how to teach Assia Djebar. (3) This was when she was already somewhat in decline. She never saw the finished essay. For me, it is difficult to restrict Djebar to any one approach or any one context. Commenting on some archive footage of the 1960s anti-colonial struggles in Mozambique and Angola, I wrote: Although liberation struggles force women into an apparent equality--starting with the 19th century or even earlier--when the dust settles, the so-called post-colonial nation goes back to the invisible long term structures of gendering. The most moving shot in this footage is the black Venus, reminding us of the Venus of Milo with her arm gone, who is also a black Madonna, suckling a child with bare breasts. This icon must remind us all that the endorsement of rape continues not only in war but also, irrespective of whether a nation is developing or developed--in women fighting in legitimized armies. Colonizer and colonized are united in the violence of gendering, which often celebrates motherhood with genuine pathos. (4) I realized later that this entire insight came to me from Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound, the closing section of Djebar's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. (5) This is the nature of my debt to Djebar. In many different contexts, lessons learned from her writings crop up to help me think. Who can forget such tremendous insights as the locked steel car with the modern Algerian woman driving, as still a veil? Beyond the veil, the insight travels into the gated community as prison. Her most important stance is against identitarianism. If you cannot say yes to the enemy, you cannot practice freedom--this is imaginative activism. Thus in the beginning of Fantasia, she tries to gaze at her hometown as the conqueror had. (6) You cannot enter the conqueror's mind-set--capture his gaze--without sympathy. This is the opening of her book, and it makes a tremendous impact on the careful reader--invites her to a sort of imaginative activism, which is a com-plicity, a folded-togetherness between metropolitan French and Francophony, if you like. Her embrace of Camus, full of nuanced detail, is a mark of this com-plicity. (7) The double bind of Francophony for an Arab woman of her generation, denied entry into written Arabic, is part of Djebar's theme. …

Djebar’s Odyssey

Silence sur soie' ou l'ecriture en fuite: the title of the afterword of Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere (445), Assia Djebar's final and most autobiographical book, in double entendre as an ultimate tribute to her relationship with the French language, reveals that Silence sur soie could have been the secret, alternative title of the novel. For her, writing on oneself, like rememoration, despite its harshness and splitting effect, represents an exercise that leads less to torture than to silky outcome, a du 'soyeux' et non du torturant (445). Ecriture en fuite, or Writing on the responds to Silence sur soie (silence on silk or self), tying together the two meanings of the French verb that inspired her writing: filer. Filer as in to trail, run, slip away, and, in more literal sense, to spin. To the moving writer who wrote as she walked (1) corresponds the weaver. In this double entendre that we can discern patterns of resistance that traverse Djebar's work and in which patterns, recalling the evocations of veils, canvases, of women spinning, sewing, stitching, point to Djebar's incessant desire to reveal the textile within the text. (2) In Djebar dwelled rhapsode. A rhapsode, that is, like the performer traveling from town to town to sing epic poems, musician and storyteller, recognizable by his mantel and his stick (the rhabdos), vocalizing the written word, the rhapsodist who (that is what rhapsdidein means) sews songs together. Songs, or voices, stories, memories. It is part of this art I wish to recall, with stories and memories of peculiar kind, all of which revolve around odd visits and strange returns. It could begin with this scene. A woman, foreigner not so foreign, pas tellement etrangere (Femme sans sepulture 77), has returned to her hometown, again. In Caesarea (Cherchell), where she was born and raised, she stays this time, without really knowing why, in the city's only hotel. But before spending the first night in her luxurious room, she rushes to the local museum where, in front of Roman mosaic she had forgotten from her previous stays, she stops playing the tourist and has an epiphany of sorts. On the strange mosaic, three birdlike women are on shore, contemplating in the center of the scene large vessel floating over the waves. These beautiful creatures, she contends to the two women she visits later, are from Caesarea, the only women to be immortalized in stone in the region. But her younger friend corrects her: these bird-women are both locals and strangers--the mosaic was discovered in the 1930s, on the farm of poor settler, petit colon, and its title is revealing: Ulysse et les sirenes, un episode fameux de L'Odyssee (117). This revelation lies at the core, in the exact center (3) of La Femme sans sepulture, one of Djebar's last novels. It tells the story of female narrator, whose resemblance to the author is striking; like her, she has returned again to her hometown of Caesarea/Cherchell after having come back in 1976 and 1978 to make film dedicated to Zoulikha Oudai (and Bela Bartok) (Femme sans sepulture 14-17), barely veiled reference to Djebar's film La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (1978). As if presenting the pages that Djebar stopped writing during her decade of scriptural silence to make movies, the novel recounts her search for Zoulikha, the renowned, almost legendary female resistant, moudjahidda who fought in the maquis during the Algerian War of Independence. The book, as Djebar asserts in her avertissement, is itself composed like feminine fresco, mosaic: J'ai use volonte de ma liberte romanesque, justement pour que la verite de Zoulikha soit eclairee davantage au centre meme d'une fresque feminine--selon ie modele des mosaiques si anciennes de Cesaree de Mauretanie (Cherchell) (9). If the book is composed after the model of mosaic, we can only find uncanny the particular mosaic Djebar chose as its metonymy. …

Feminism in the “Father Book”: Complicating the Emancipation Narrative in Assia Djebar’s Nowhere in My Father’s House

But you--I am speaking to myself, like a sarcastic stranger--, where have you gotten, you who began your life through intervention of father, father and his supposedly or truly beloved daughter--and who declares, suddenly, to nearly whole world: in my father's house? Dispossessed? Really? And what goads you into writing that? Why shout it to four winds? Mais vous--je me parle a moi-meme, comme ferait une etrangere sarcastique--, ou en etes-vous, vous qui avez commence votre vie par l'intervention du pere, du pere et de sa fille pretendument aimee ou reellement aimee--et qui declarez soudain presque a la face du monde : > ? Depossedee ? Vraiment, et quel aiguillon vous incite a l'ecrire ? Pourquoi vouloir ainsi le clamer a tous vents ? --Assia Djebar, Nowhere in My Father's House (1) If passing of Algerian novelist Assia Djebar in 2015 has been occasion for scholars to revisit a number of issues in her extensive corpus of novels, plays, and films, then I begin by raising a question that Djebar herself asks in passage above, taken from her final work, Nowhere in My Father's House (Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere, 2007). What compels her to publicly declare that she is nowhere in her father's house? This preoccupation is apparently so central that it appears as title of this autobiographical novel retracing her childhood and adolescence in colonial Algeria. In asking titular question, Djebar addresses herself in second person as a stranger or foreigner (etrangere), emphasizing cultural estrangement caused by her personal and professional trajectory. This estrangement is directly linked to figure of her father, who was only native (indigene) (2) schoolteacher in colonial school in Algeria where she began her French education, a formation that ultimately enabled her to develop her prestigious literary career. Publicly claiming estrangement from her father is thus a symptom of self-doubt, as if, writing between Paris and New York, she has no right to criticize man who started it all. This self-doubt reflects larger tensions in Djebar's work that relate primarily to her status as an Algerian woman intellectual who writes almost exclusively in French and whose greatest literary success has been in Europe. (3) Born Fatima-Zohra Imalayene in town of Cherchell in 1936, Assia Djebar spent much of her life writing novels and holding teaching appointments in France and United States. After working for Algerian nationalist newspaper El Moudjahid during Revolution and teaching history in Algiers after independence, she increasingly distanced herself from her home country, first because of National Liberation Front's cultural policy of Arabicization in domain of education, and then because of waves of violence and political unrest that shook country in 1990s, resulting in deaths of at least 150,000 Algerians. She moved to United States in 1995, where she became a professor, first at Louisiana State University and then at New York University. Her last visit to Algeria occurred that same year, when she attended her father's funeral. Though most of her novels concern her country of origin, she is known only in certain milieus there, largely because Nowhere in My Father's House is her only novel to date to be translated into Arabic. (4) But if, as Jane Hiddleston asserts in Out of Djebar's relationship to her homeland grew increasingly fraught and distanced over years (181), I would agree with Mildred Mortimer that rather than continuing along this path out of Algeria, Nowhere in My Father's House instead marks a decisive return (114). Composing this novel of return--to both Algeria and her father--appears to have posed a significant challenge. In an interview conducted in 2006 by Daniel Simon, she stated that she was working on what she described as the father book and anticipated that it would be final work in Algerian quartet, (5) a series of novels focusing on women's experiences in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Algeria. …

Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance

Research Article| January 01 2015 Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance Madeleine Dobie Madeleine Dobie Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2015) 106 (1-4): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-106.1-4.1 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Madeleine Dobie; Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance. Romanic Review 1 January 2015; 106 (1-4): 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-106.1-4.1 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2015 The Trustees of Columbia University2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Writing the Personal: The Evolution of Assia Djebar’s Autobiographical Project from L’Amour, La Fantasia to Nulle Part Dans La Maison de Mon Père

Examining Djebar’s autobiographical project as a quest for truth—and an interrogation of “truth”—I chart the difficult process of self-disclosure in the three published texts of the Algerian Quartet: L’amour, la fantasia (1985) (Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade); Ombre sultane (1987) (A Sister to Scheherazade); Vaste est la prison (1995) (So Vast the Prison) then show that Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007) (No place in my father’s house), draws closer to the autobiographical pact. Probing the shift in Djebar’s autobiographical writing from a collective project to express community concerns to a singular voice, I argue that Nulle part dans la maison de mon père reformulates the writer’s trajectory as a circular movement, circling back to episodes of previous works, in the attempt to achieve a more truthful self

De la Révélation de Soi à L’auto-Compréhension : Assia Djebar , L’amour , la Fantasia et Nulle Part dans la Maison de Mon Père

A writer of fiction since the late 1950s, Assia Djebar began introducing autobiographical elements into her texts with her fifth novel, L’amour, la fantasia , (1985) published in English as Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade (1985). Fully aware that subjectivity in life and fiction are often considered transgressions in Algerian culture, the novelist responds to by implementing narrative strategies in the text that signal an original approach to autobiography -- fragmented autobiography, polyphonic discourse, and autofiction. Two decades later, Djebar offers her readers, Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere (2007), a personal history that sheds further light on a life story that is both exemplary and unique. This text is crucial to our understanding of the novelist’s autobiographical project for several reasons. First, we can now view Djebar’s narrative unveiling as a two-stage process that began as a collective project but has resulted in the production of a singular life, a singular voice. Second, her previous focus upon unearthing occulted colonial history is now a personal quest, as she recovers, through memory, hidden personal history. Third, we see more clearly the ambiguous relationship between the young girl and the father who is alternately liberator and censor, a conflict that reflects, in part, the tension between the writer and the French language. Fourth, as we witness the unfolding of the autobiographical project, we become aware that Djebar, trained as a historian, is first and foremost a novelist, someone for whom the construction of a literary persona is a cornerstone of her craft, the blending of fact and fiction an important component of her writing. Finally, her approach to self-representation forces readers to consider two related questions that concern the Algerian writer’s work in particular and the realm of women’s autobiography in general: Does the autobiographical process heal the fragmented narrating self? Does it effectively challenge patriarchal structures and ideology or merely create nostalgia for a lost Eden in which women are jealous guardians of tradition?

Assia Djebar in the twenty-first century: Rewriting identities

ABSTRACT Assia Djebar's novels of the twenty-first century, particularly La Femme sans sépulture and Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, are centered on a traumatic experience, but the “detours, circles, and meanders” that delay the description of this experience play another role of equal importance in Djebar's most recent writings: the reframing of an “Algerian” identity forged during the war of liberation. Drawing on her training as a historian, Djebar uncovers a regional identity that transcends the post-independence focus on Arabic as sole language and ethnicity. Including even the European residents of colonial Algeria, who now share her own exile from her homeland, Djebar extends her sense of belonging to a larger North African region—and even to the Mediterranean basin—including within it the many peoples, languages, and cultures that have crossed paths within this richly diversified area.

Writing as wounding and healing in Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père

In Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007), the narrator recalls a suicide attempt which she made as an adolescent shortly before the outbreak of the Algerian war of independence. This article explores the motives behind the narrator’s death wish. Djebar portrays a woman who has moved through two cultures, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized, but feels exiled from both; this feeling is summarized by her sense that she has ‘no place’ in her father’s house. At the same time, the narrator connects the suicide attempt with the role of the father in her formative years; he and her first boyfriend, together, are jointly responsible (‘deux responsables’) for her inability to lead the kind of life she believes would have brought her fulfilment. But rather than pin the blame on these two individuals, she fits lost opportunities within a wider social and political context, in which not only she, but her parents had been caught up in the tensions of colonized Algeria that were soon to explode into violence. Meanwhile, the whole text is impregnated by nostalgia for the lost paternal grandmother, and everything she represented for the narrator’s younger self.

The mother as other: intimacy and separation in the maternal memories of Assia Djebar's Nulle part dans la maison de mon père

The figure of the mother is a prominent one in francophone Maghrebian literature, and, through the association with the motherland and the mother tongue, is often presented as a source of anxiety in this context. This article focuses on Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere (2007) [Nowhere in My Father’s House] and demonstrates the potential complexity of the mother–daughter relationship and the inadequacy of existing models of motherhood. A number of North African male writers have tended to fetishize the role of the mother, for better or for worse, as the bearer of tradition, and feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Marianne Hirsch have argued that the Oedipus myth provides a highly limiting account of motherhood. Djebar’s depiction of her narrator’s mother in Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere conversely at once captures the intimacy of the mother–daughter relationship and preserves a respectful distance. This simultaneous communality and separation can be conceived using Jean-Luc Nanc...

“Silence on Silk,” or Writing in Flight

In the epilogue to her most recent book, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père , published in English translation here for the first time, Assia Djebar reflects upon the stakes of her latest autobiographical narrative and upon her constant movement between silence and confession. (Translated by Farida Abu-Haidar).