Fantasia - An Algerian Cavalcade by Assia Djebar

Annie Gagiano

The celebrated Algerian author Assia Djebar writes in French, but her creative and critical vision is steeped in the non-standard local Arabic and Berber cultures of her ancestry: "the Berber of the Dahra mountains or the Arabic of the town [Cherchel] where [she] was born" (204). Djebar, who was something of a child prodigy, wrote four novels between the ages of twenty and thirty. Her writing then lapsed for about a decade, during which she made films and taught history at the University of Algiers. She resumed her writing career with the text discussed here (to which I shall refer as Fantasia, for convenience) - the first of a quartet of novels. It appeared in French as L'Amour; La Fantasia in 1985 (the English translation came in 1988).

The word fantasia in the title requires some explanation, as it contains a cultural reference that recurs as a metaphor throughout the text. The primary meaning here is not the musical reference in the term, but an allusion to a group display by men on horseback - a sort of flourish, one might say - that goes to the edge of loss of control to show off consummate equestrian skill.

Fantasia is a very unusual and immensely sophisticated composition. Although it is presented and always referred to as a novel, it is nothing like the customary novelistic narrative concerning a main character or small group of characters. Instead, it alternates the two main strands of history and autobiography. On the one hand Djebar provides, in the earlier sections of the text, a history of the Algerians' colonisation by the French (from 1830) and of the resistance war of the 1950s - the latter in first-hand accounts of women participants, found in the final sections of the text. On the other hand, she gives us an autobiographical account of the author's childhood years and young married life and of the development of her imaginative vision, sometimes thinly disguised as a reported account. The whole effort of the text is bent towards bringing these "objective" and "subjective" strands together, and towards illustrating that breaking the colonial yoke in Algeria came from women as it did from men, in a society that remains unfree in the silencing and subjugation of its women.

The author includes in her text multiple passages where she grapples with and articulates her own metafictional purposes: "Writing in a foreign language … has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins," she writes late in the text (204). One could think of Fantasia as both a sort of "testament" of Djebar's cherishing love for the people of her country, expressing her compassionate commemoration of its bitter history of repeated waves of subjugation and courageous resistance, and as a "testimonio" - not only by the author, but also by the tough and loyal countrywomen to whose voices she gives space.

Predictably, Djebar's style includes a range from the austere and elegant reporting of historical fact (however gruesome the events) to passages of haunting lyricism and succinct, paradoxically-expressed meditation. There are also metaphors and images or verbal echoes that unobtrusively sew the fabric of the "impersonal" and "personal" chapters together, while some of the history is very lyrically written and some of the confessional sections very drily reported.

Great trust is put in the power and task of articulation - Djebar writes:

The word is a torch; to be held up in front of the wall of separation or withdrawal … Armed solely with the written word, our serious attention can never be distracted … And now I too seek out the rich vocabulary of love of my mother tongue … Love, if I managed to write it down, would approach a critical point: there where lies the risk of exhuming buried cities … But my sole ambition in writing is constantly to travel to fresh pastures and replenish my water skins with an inexhaustible silence. (62-63)

The struggle towards articulation, the drive to testify to her innermost selfhood, seems to require the (re-) discovery of her people and her culture, especially of its women, whose enduring silence must be both respected and resisted, Djebar suggests. Her text is uncomfortable and challenging, a very daring composition. In no way does she romanticise self, art, nation, history or femininity.

Fantasia opens, famously, on the scene of "A little Arab girl going to school for the first time, one autumn morning, walking hand in hand with her father" (3). The father's loving and liberating attitude (remarkable in a society where at that time most women are cloistered and very few have access to non-Koranic or further education) is noted, but towards the end of this brief preamble section the narrator has become aware that "we are cocooned by childhood" (4), and she takes her own liberation further in an act of severance: "Once I had discovered the meaning of the [mother's] words - those same words that are revealed to the unveiled body - I cut myself adrift," she testifies (4-5), and the chapter ends with a significantly altered echo of the opening sentence: "I set off at dawn, with my little girl's hand in mine" (5).

This image of the hand that is being led into an education links and contrasts with "the severed hand of an anonymous Algerian woman" (226) that was found by the French tourist-painter Fromentin in the wake of "a terrible siege" (by the French colonial forces) at an oasis in Algeria, on the edge of the desert, reported in the final chapter of Fantasia. "Later, I seize on this living hand, hand of mutilation and of memory, and I attempt to bring it the qalam [the pen/brush used in Muslim cultures]," Djebar then adds in one of the final references to her own text's genesis and purpose (226).

Algeria has, of course, been subjected to many succeeding invasions: by the Romans (who could never finally subdue the Berber tribes of the interior), Arabs, Moors, Turks and then the French. Djebar refers to its "geology stained with blood" (46). The work's "second opening" (the first note in the contrapuntal, historical strand of the text) occurs in chapter one (which follows the preamble that was discussed in the previous paragraph): this section opens on a beautiful, ominous scene as the fleet transporting the invading French army of 1830 sails within sight of Algiers. "As the majestic fleet rends the horizon the Impregnable City sheds her veils and emerges, a wraith-like apparition, through the blue-grey haze" (6).

Djebar emphasises the beauty of the Mediterranean city in "the intense silken light", describing "the milky dazzle of the terraced houses". Of one of the French observers she says that he "gazes at the city which returns his gaze" (7).

Many of the French observers and witnesses from whose documents Djebar quotes are writers and artists, perhaps the equivalent of present-day television reporters in contemporary theatres of war - her attitude towards them and their comments is not merely sarcastic or critical, since their statements and descriptions become a valuable resource available to her own, reassessing gaze. Yet she never trivialises, in her apparent acceptance of these distant, distancing accounts, nor fails to remind one of the tragic cost of conquest and resistance: "the silence of this majestic morning is but the prelude to the cavalcade of screams and carnage which will fill the ensuing decades," she writes at the end of this chapter (8).

The next chapter's shift to the narrator's little-girl village life (during school holidays) establishes the turn-by-turn personal/impersonal/personal (and so on) design of the text. The end of this chapter refers to the narrator's childhood friend, one of a trio of traditionally "cloistered" girls (who from puberty are not allowed to move outside the home on their own, and then only rarely, and have to be veiled) making a rebellious declaration: "I'll never, never let them marry me off to a stranger who, in the night, will have the right to touch me!" The narrator tells us that this gave her the "premonition that in the sleepy, unsuspecting hamlet, an unprecedented women's battle was brewing beneath the surface", again brought on by the girl's ability to write and thus to correspond clandestinely with "the outside world". Notable here is the author's suggestion of a parallel between the Algerian natives' resistance to colonisation and the beginnings of a women's challenge to local patriarchal norms.

Very restrained as her descriptions are, Djebar's evocation (mostly from the French perspective and, indeed, largely from the documentation of the events by the foreign military commander himself) of a particular atrocity that resulted in several "copy-cat" events, remains harrowing - I am referring to the deliberate asphyxiation of fifteen hundred Berber tribespeople (and all their cattle) who had gone into hiding from the French invaders in a network of underground caves (in the period following the fall of Algiers). The French, after the failure of their attempts to negotiate a surrender, made huge fires in every one of these caves' openings, keeping this up until nearly all within were dead. A much later, eerily lyrical passage in the text evokes an image of the author's "archeological" efforts (of the imagination) to recover the awareness of "this rising tide of ancient pain", efforts which require her "to lean over backwards, plunge [her] face into the shadows, … lend an ear to the whispers that rise up from time out of mind … [and to] face these images of darkness …" (46).

During the same campaign the soldiers of the French battalion insisted on shooting the two thousand prisoners that had been taken. In contrast, the author reports and adapts the description of two Algerian women whose corpses are found on the battlefield:

… the one in whom rigor mortis was already setting
in, still holding in her bloody hands the heart of a dead Frenchman; the second, in a fit of desperate courage, splitting open the brain of her child, like a pomegranate in spring, before dying with her mind at peace - these two heroines enter into recent history (18).

Djebar says of the French participants' accounts of the invasion that "a bitterness … clings to the well-turned phrases of [their] epistles" and that when they casually mention details such as the sight of a woman's foot, cut off in order to loot the ankle chain she had worn, "the barbarity of the natural scene [perhaps] contaminates these noble attackers …" (55). To the French, "the [Algerian] women's shrill ululation improvises for the fighting men a threnody of war in some alien idiom", heard by them as "half-human cries" and as a "cacophony" (56), but audible and intelligible to Djebar and (through her) to her readers as articulate expressions of woe, courage and accusation. Yet the narrator also declares: "I am strangely haunted by the agitation of the killers, by their obsessional unease." She nevertheless ironically juxtaposes the moments when the French wives, families and sweethearts of the invaders are "joining their hands as if in prayer" over the missives sent from the battlefield with those simultaneous events in the other country, when "the seducers [are] in the act of ravishing the opposite Mediterranean shore" (57).

Of her own writing and recording and discussions in the text, the author observes that the French words she uses in her account are simultaneously a torch with which she can light up her compatriots' lives and dignity (especially those of her "women-companions"), but the same foreign-language, outspoken words "divide me from them once and for all" (142); these women seldom speak out or speak up either within their own culture (which forbids this to women), or beyond it (behaviour which is seen as a form of cultural treachery). The very existence of her text is transgressive and inaccessible to most of those it is meant for, Djebar suggests.

She attempts to outmanoeuvre this impasse by building into the final section of her text a number of transcriptions, and of course translations, of first-person accounts by Algerian women who had participated in the Algerian liberation war (against the French occupiers) of the 1950s. Although the narrator confesses with some agony that she has "disguised" such indigenous voices in her French rendition, "without clothing [them]" (142), she elsewhere quotes an expression of the yearning to be heard by one of these very women - a yearning to which her own text is a response:

Alas! We can't read or write. We don't leave any accounts of what we lived through and all we suffered! …
You'll see other people who spent their time in crouching in holes and who, afterwards, told what they've told! (148)

The worst silencing is of the wartime rapes; attempting to get the women to speak of such experiences is the narrator/historian's most agonising task. Yet the blanket of silence drawn over such most intimate and searing damage indeed forms another index of the indigenous culture's inability to note, acknowledge or reward women's contributions in heroism and suffering to the perpetuation of their culture. For the narrator, it is her drive to write, to articulate and record her people's histories and "herstories" that enables her to discover and hone a written, writing and speaking self. So the French language is simultaneously a shirt of Nessus, a poisoning gift, and the opportunity, or rather solemn duty, of a mourning "song" that she owes to her compatriots and to which "they provide [her] orchestral accompaniment" (217).

Djebar's text has an exceedingly brief final chapter entitled "Air on a Nay" (the latter term is glossed as "a very old type of flute"). Although there is in this clearly another of the many musical allusions in the text, the other meaning of the word fantasia also resurfaces with tragic resonance. Picking up on an anecdote (earlier recounted by the narrator) of an Algerian woman whose jilted lover took vengeance on her by letting his courser kick her fatally as she stood in the audience observing a fantasia (a group display of fine horsemanship), Djebar here at the end of her text "foresee[s] the inevitable moment when the mare's hoof will strike down any woman who dares to stand up freely" (227).

Though many readers will feel that her act of so eloquently presenting her own text refutes that gloomy expectation, one should probably note the suggestion that it is within the local culture that punishment would follow such an assumption of freedom - and even the hint (in the detail of the "mare's hoof" - emphasis added) that it would not be only men engaging in such re-repression of the female voice. She also suggests, in the final sentence of her text, that the virile image of the fantasia, representing war and force, contains the warning message that actual liberty for her own (or indeed for any) society is not to be achieved by such means, and will come within reach only once women are allowed to be freely articulate, fully appreciated and extensively commemorated within their local culture.

While it is most definitely not an "easy read", Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade is a fascinating and memorable text, albeit (especially in Muslim cultures) a very controversial work, as uncompromising as it is compassionate.



LitNet: 30 June 2004

Have your say! To comment on this piece write to webvoet@litnet.co.za, and become a part of our interactive opinion page.

to the top

© Kopiereg in die ontwerp en inhoud van hierdie webruimte behoort aan LitNet, uitgesluit die kopiereg in bydraes wat berus by die outeurs wat sodanige bydraes verskaf. LitNet streef na die plasing van oorspronklike materiaal en na die oop en onbeperkte uitruil van idees en menings. Die menings van bydraers tot hierdie werftuiste is dus hul eie en weerspieël nie noodwendig die mening van die redaksie en bestuur van LitNet nie. LitNet kan ongelukkig ook nie waarborg dat hierdie diens ononderbroke of foutloos sal wees nie en gebruikers wat steun op inligting wat hier verskaf word, doen dit op hul eie risiko. Media24, M-Web, Ligitprops 3042 BK en die bestuur en redaksie van LitNet aanvaar derhalwe geen aanspreeklikheid vir enige regstreekse of onregstreekse verlies of skade wat uit sodanige bydraes of die verskaffing van hierdie diens spruit nie. LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf.