Constance Quinlan
Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade by Assia Djebar
Postcolonialism can be understood as “a multifaceted and open process of interrogation and critique […] a process, a way of thinking through critical strategies [between self and other]” (Hiddleston, 2009, p.4). Assia Djebar’s Fantasia is emblematic of this task. Her “literature forms a site of experimentation, where diverse models are tried out and thrown into confrontation with one another in order to demonstrate the very difficulty of theorising post-colonial Algeria in terms of any single, straightforward framework” (Hiddleston, 2006, p. 4). As an author, she is conceptually dispersed, engaging with francophone, Arab and Berber, and Anglo-American postcolonial theory, as well as the postmodernism of French thinkers, such as Derrida and Nancy (Hiddleston, 2006, p.2). Fantasia itself is a multifaceted process of understanding the hybrid subject, a subject not only of systems such as gender, colonialism, or history, but also of the very linguistic structures that define it. Such a being is “continually self singularising […]never wholly anchored in a determinate location or moment” (Hiddleston, 2006, p.4). Fantasia explores the tensions of postcolonialism that result from the aforementioned ambiguities of identity and narrative in a society of infinitely diverse social, cultural, political, and historical developments.
It does not, however, resolve them. What Djebar and Fantasia perhaps achieve instead is a conceptual framework that can host the multiplicity of voices that characterise a postcolonial society. This essay will discuss three potential points of such a system following from Fantasia: language, voice, and subjectivity. Firstly, it will examine Djebar’s interrogation of the use of French and Arabic language, and how she explores the functionality and borders of language to voice the (female) postcolonial condition. Finally, it will question if, and how, Fantasia can be used to understand this experience, particularly with relevance to Algerian women.
Finding a Postcolonial Language: Between French and Arabic
French and Arabic, respectively referred to as the narrator’s ‘father’ and ‘mother-tongues’, have different resonances for Fantasia’s narrator, and offer different potentialities for expression. Arabic is wholly personal, intimate and familiar. Though at times it shrouds her, it is formative to “the circle that whispering elders traced around me and within me” (Djebar & Blair, 1993, p. 4). Her connection to French, on the other hand, “means that while she is allowed to express herself in ways that were not usually permitted, she also simultaneously cuts herself from singular memories that cannot be contained within the colonial language, associated with myths of self-assertion, as well as with clarity and logic” (Hiddleston, 2006, p.4). For example, she writes, “The French language could offer me all its inexhaustible treasures […] but not a single one of its terms of endearment would be destined for my use” (Djebar, 1993, p. 27). It also renders her “an exile to the cultural and linguistic sphere of nativist Algerians” (Blair, 1993, iv). ‘France’ has “ejected [her] from this theatre of feminine confidences” and weighed her with “the baggage of the “enemy’s language”, in writing in French, “one’s own blood flows and that of others, which has never dried” (Djebar, 1993, p.156).
Yet, French also serves the narrator: “a double, contradictory sign reigns over my initiation” (Djebar, 1993, p.4). Writing in French affords her a quasi-religious status, signifying new ways to understand and define, and thus control, her being: “She reads’ is tantamount to saying that writing to be read, including that of the unbelievers, is always a source of revelation: in my case of the mobility of my body, and so of my future freedom” (Djebar, 1993, p.180). France and French represent otherwise inconceivable ways of being a woman, and certain powers of transgression –- “she [narrator’s French acquaintance] was able to come and go as she liked […] just like a boy!”, though “for [the narrator], the French are still ‘the Others’, and I am still hypnotised by their shores” (Djebar, 1993, p.23).
The narrator’s person – and indeed, postcolonial society – must embody these apparent contradictions. Certainly, it could be argued that “the use of the language of the colonizer is what makes a literature “postcolonial”” (Von Rosk, 2001, p.66). This argument could understand the use of the colonial language by the colonised as an act of reclamation and retribution, “colonizing the language of the colonizers…[doing] violence to it, forcing it to give up its riches […] in compensation for the treasure looted from Algiers […] and also to compensate her personally for being dispossessed of her Arabic heritage” (Blair, 1993, iii). Djebar’s technical use of language reinforces this: she “arabizes French”, inscribing it within its concepts and words of oral Arabic (Von Rosk, 2001, p.81). What is perhaps nearer to Djebar’s preoccupation with French in Fantasia, however, is that the use of this language represents a preservation of colonial violence beyond the colonial era, namely, that her French writing exists at the cusp of where ‘post-colonial’ becomes ‘postcolonial’. Insofar as colonialism’s influence transcends any formalised distinction between the ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ era, as a ‘postcolonial’ writer, Djebar must grapple with the complex legacy of French and how “speaking of oneself in a language other than that of the elders is indeed to unveil oneself […] But this stripping naked, when expressed in the language of the former conqueror […] takes us back oddly enough to the plundering of the preceding century” (Djebar, 1993, pp.156-160). In wrestling with the use of the language she makes reference to how French is inseparably part of production in the colonial cultural economy: “This language was imported in the murky, obscure past […] Words of accusation, legal procedure and violence[…] This language was formerly used to entomb my people” (Djebar, 1993, p. 215). Nevertheless, French preserves its aforementioned values.
Language and Gender in Postcolonial Algeria
This struggle between French and Arabic is reproduced in the realm of gender. By associating Arabic with ‘mother’, femininity, nativity, and orality, and French with ‘father’, masculinity, and colonial institutional value, Djebar parallels colonial and gender violence. These ‘mother’ and ‘father’ tongues perform and reinforce their respective roles and are essential facets of the novel’s ‘gendered’ institutions, which include the harem, history, education, borders, homes: in short, whatever Djebar attempts to transcribe in Fantasia. The rules that define these distinct spheres are known, consciously and unconsciously, sometimes transgressed and, at other times, are impenetrable. In each sphere of ‘Arabic’ and ‘French’, language carries meaning (and therefore has power), thus transgression of these boundaries poses a meaningful challenge. This is one facet that makes Fantasia’s voicing of the woman significant, for example, as will be further discussed later.
This ambiguity of time and location centres the narrative not around an examination of history per se, but around these loci of memory, gender, and narrative which in turn interact with history.
The crux of Fantasia, however, is that it maintains a fluid approach to such boundaries; its antiphonal narrative fluctuates between different historical epochs, multiple women’s voices, and between traditional history and oral accounts. These accounts do not necessarily form a cohesive, let alone chronological, account of the Algerian experience, but rather include a multiplicity of experiences while eluding any definitive statement on Algerian history or subscribing to one particular authority or ‘voice’. Von Rosk writes, “In [Fantasia]…Djebar juxtaposes the ‘polyphony’ of Algerian women’s voices with the written texts of the French colonisers, creating a ‘dialectic’ between past and present, male and female, and writing and orality that examines the politics of language in an especially compelling way” (Von Rosk, p.66). This ambiguity of time and location centres the narrative not around an examination of history per se, but around these loci of memory, gender, and narrative which in turn interact with history. Disambiguated time and location eludes a cohesive national historical narrative, exceeding “the presumed certainties of a nationalist pedagogy […] multiple local temporalities remain discrepant from the broader framework of national time” (Hiddleston, 2006, pp. 15-16). It perhaps suggests relocating a postcolonial understanding of Algeria from definitive national narratives to a more transgressive or decentralised approach than those of more cohesive, formal institutions of collective memory- a task heavily intricated with voicing the woman.
A New Postcolonial Language
Given the formative influence of written language on the experience of women, the language of body in the novel, or wordless communication generally, has particular significance. As well as French, Arabic and Lybico-Berber, “The fourth language, for all females, young or old, cloistered or half-emancipated, remains that of the body: the body which male neighbours’ and cousins’ eyes require to be deaf and blind, since they cannot completely incarcerate it; the body which, in trances, dances or vociferations, in fits of hope or despair, rebels, and unable to read or write, seeks some unknown shore as destination for its message of love” (Djebar, 1993, p.180). As Von Rosk writes, “her grandmother’s voice and body give her a glimpse of what language obscures, denies, distorts, indeed refuses to signify” (Von Rosk, 2001, p.77).
The importance of extra-textual language is reiterated by other features of Fantasia. The fantasia of the very novel’s title may refer either to a North African horseback performance associated with ceremonial occasions and military triumphs, or a musical composition where “form is of secondary importance…usually contrapuntal…in which the character of the music suggested an improvisational character or the play of free fancy” (Blair, 1993, iv). The feminine language of body is also integrated with religion: “I remember how much this Quranic learning, as it is progressively acquired, is linked to the body […] the learning was absorbed by the fingers, the arms, through the physical effort” (Djebar, 1993, p.183).
This is interesting in a postcolonial reading of Fantasia. Firstly it complicates our understanding of Djebar’s act of ‘giving voice’ to Algerian women, underscoring her own troubles with writing in the colonial language and the potential omission of a local idiom. Secondly, it suggests that ways of self-understanding and self-expression beyond language are needed if the subaltern wishes to speak. As Von Rosk notes, “Besides emphasising women’s victimisation, Djebar’s treatment of the body […] calls attention to women’s ‘agency’, an agency not only for the silent subaltern woman but for the alienated postcolonial writer” (Von Rosk, 2001, p.78). The relevance of this ‘voiceless language’ to postcolonialism is significant here since, if Said’s postcolonial subject does not have “any status imaginatively, discursively, aesthetically, geographically, economically” and is inherently “in a permanently subordinate position” (Said, 1994, p.102), then it may be argued that what Djebar suggests here is that the postcolonial condition lies outside of language, perhaps at the same “[d]isjuncture between memory and narrative” (Hiddleston, 2006, p.6).
The influence and legacy of ‘France’ is ambiguous to the writer who personally exists as an Algerian woman caught in the “incipient vertigo”
There is therefore ambiguity – a ‘third space’ – in the postcolonial condition. Djebar writes, a “no-man’s-land still exists between the French and the indigenous languages, between two national memories” (Djebar, 1993, p.215). Here, a concluding review of the points of language, voice, and subjectivity that mark how Djebar seeks to express this understanding of postcolonial society may be attempted. The value of language, particularly French, is inconclusive in Djebar’s novel. Hiddleston writes, “The French language itself separates her from her Algerian compatriots and places her in an ambivalent position in relation to colonialism, and to Arabisation (Hiddleston, 2006, p.14)”. Moreover, Djebar can be seen as “suspended between cultures and influences, attempting to twist and rework the French language so as to account for the multiple experiences of Algerian women through history and to signal the presence of Arabic and Berber customs alongside the colonial experience” (Hiddleston, 2006, p.10). The influence and legacy of ‘France’ is ambiguous to the writer who personally exists as an Algerian woman caught in the “incipient vertigo” (Djebar, 1993, p.185) between Arabo-Berber origins and a Franco-European education. Her challenges apparently remain somewhat unresolved in Fantasia, or at least, unresolved within language.
Concerning voice, this polyphonic text demonstrates how, although various discourses work to position the hybrid postcolonial subject in a certain category, such as a colonial or national discourse, these subjects hover ‘in between.’ As Hiddleston writes, “the text also splits and fragments the collective identity that it wants to evoke […] not only does language gloss over the temporal and spatial displacement of each singular being, but also the collective feminine voice hides multiple differences, contradictions and contrasts” (Hiddleston, 2006, p. 71). Djebar “demonstrates how our sense of ourselves is always divided between knowledge of our situatedness (in her case, in relation to Algerian history, colonialism or Islam) and resistance to the tyranny of such determined positioning” (Hiddleston, 2006, p. 4). Fantasia, in oscillating between different and dispersed accounts, voices, and times, and in exposing the flaws of written narrative, highlights that what the novel perhaps suggests is the insurmountable flaw of a cohesive voice of Algeria: “Precisely because any discourse, including that of nationalism, inserts a gap between proposition and referent, any attempt at cultural identification finishes by leaving behind the diverse and changing people it seeks to determine” (Hiddleston, 2006, p. 15). In the end, Fantasia struggles to conclude its search for an Algerian identity (Hiddleston, 2006, p. 5).
Conclusion
Fantasia demonstrates that “Postcoloniality in Algeria is this anxious shifting between past and present, the haunting of other epochs and other cultures” (Hiddleston, 2006, p. 10). The complex legacies of colonialism create a cultural hybrid, or a sort of conceptual cosmopolitanism: an attempt to create a system that can incorporate the conflicting cultural claims of post-colonial Algerian society, the final framework seeking hybridity rather than a perhaps unattainable definitive statement on Algerian identity. Indeed, the universality of Djebar’s method and how the boundaries of history and voice are demonstrably always in motion, present the Algerian experience as a constant process. As Hiddleston points out, “Notions of a shared national past offer a vision that diverges from that of the heterogeneous people, who must constitute themselves without reference to a mythical origin or prior presence. The cultural differences of these people, who split and disintegrate the national discourse, are also themselves emergent, incomplete and evolving rather than adhering to a specified position” (Hiddleston, 2006, p. 16).
Nevertheless, though her voices of Algerian women may elude total representativity, Djebar’s ‘feminine language’ – her own ‘third-way’ between the Arab/ic-French dichotomy– also serves as a reminder that the voiced woman disrupts the gendered systems that both languages partake in. Fantasia concludes with the apprehension before “the inevitable moment when the mare’s will strike down any woman who dares to stand up freely […] I already hear…the death cry in the Fantasia.” (Djebar, 1993, p.227). This is notable in light of Said’s observation that “although the struggle for national liberation is continuous with national independence, it is not […] culturally coterminous with it” (Said, 1994, p.277), and perhaps makes a statement regarding the social, political, and cultural inclusion of women in postcolonial society.
Biliography
Djebar, A. and D.S Blair (trans.). (1993). Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade. Heinemann.
Ghaussy, S. (1994). “A Stepmother Tongue: Feminine Writing” In Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. World Literature Today, 68 (3).
Hiddleston, J. (2009). Understanding Postcolonialism. Routledge.
Hiddleston, J. (2006). Assia Djebar: Out Of Algeria. Liverpool University Press.
Jebari, I. (24.11.2020). “Gender and Writing” (NMU34151 Colonialism and Postcolonialism in the Mediterranean), Trinity College Dublin.
Von Rosk, N. (2001). “Exhuming Buried Cries” In Assia Djebar’s Fantasia. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 34 (4).
Image: Assia Djebar – mosaicrooms.org/event/remembering-assia-djebar/