Chapter Three
Silence Is the Real Crime

Not only the arms but indeed also the speech of women must never be made public; for the speech of a noble woman can be no less dangerous than the nakedness of her limbs.
Francesco Barbaro, On Wifely Duties (1417)

In Algeria many, including myself, kept silent for a whole decade after independence. We gave those in power the time to strengthen and organize and enforce discriminatory laws against women. . . . Of course we congratulated ourselves on the freedom that women had gained during the struggle. We were inside the myth talking about the myth.
Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas (1990)

If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.
Nadezhda Mandelstam (1971)

I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. . . . To show that I can and that I will write, never mind their admonitions to the contrary. . . . Finally, I write because I'm scared of writing but I'm more scared of not writing.
Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back (1983)

These epigraphs talk of the prohibition on women's voices everywhere and at all times. They call for an end to this silence that has been imposed on all women, but particularly on those who have

acted and then been repressed. The story of the Algerian war of independence from the French is a story about silencing. Throughout the 124 years of French rule, the Algerian people—both men and women—resisted but did not speak out. Finally in 1954 they mobilized in the cities and mountains and—after over seven years of fighting—they won. They were free to create the government and the society of which they had dreamed. But dreams turned reactionary: revolutionary leaders became conservative rulers. National liberation did not bring social emancipation, particularly not for women. For women, the silencing persisted.

The Algerian cause was adopted by committed revolutionary intellectuals worldwide. The war became emblematic for the struggle of the colonized, cowed but not crushed, against the colonizer. The Algerian government after 1962 fashioned a radical self-image as a "beacon of the African Revolution. For Algeria was the only Arab, African nation to have waged a protracted war against a former colonial power in order to gain independence" (Knauss 1987, xi). Violence was sanctioned. Intellectuals like the Martiniquais psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who died a year before the end of the war, and the French writers Simone de Beauvoir and Giselle Halimi went to Algeria to witness the uprising and to make what Winifred Woodhull calls "cultural political intervention[s] in a historical process whose outcome . . . remained uncertain. . . . [They were trying] to enable the liberation of Algerian women in a form that complements nationalism and simultaneously challenges Western ideologies" (Woodhull 1993, 22).

These foreign intellectuals were as fascinated by Algerian women as had been their colonizing predecessors. In Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade , Assia Djebar quotes a French woman prisoner deported to Algeria in 1852 who had said of Algerian women that some were "treated as beasts of burden, and others [as] odalisques in rich men's harems" (Djebar 1993 [1985], 223).^[1] Marnia Lazreg documents attempts by the French in the nineteenth century to co-opt Algerian women by, for instance, trying to make them wear Frenchstyle clothing. Those who could resisted, even if only "passively." Others were less able to retain their distance, and Lazreg explains how the French indulged in "sex tourism, which turned dancers

from the South, who had been free to marry men of their choosing, into prostitutes." The practice then became widespread. Lazreg concludes that the "French implicit promotion of prostitution and nationalists' objections to it reveal the extent to which both groups understood the crucial role played by women in maintaining cultural integrity. The traffic in women was a daily reality that gave the colonial administration a powerful tool of social control of the indigenous society" (Lazreg 1994, 45, 55, 59). The Algerians were well aware of the ways in which the French were trying to infiltrate their homes, trying to tear apart the fabric of their culture. Women disappeared from spaces where the French might appear.

Like all colonial adventures, this French one was accompanied by a drive to educate segments of the "native" population who might thus become useful to the colonizers. The question of literacy in French at the expense of the mother tongue become vital. Lazreg writes that by 1954, the first year of the war of independence, there were over 200,000 boys and 80,000 girls attending schools—but among them were no more than 1,014 women in high schools and only 51 in college (Lazreg 1994, 62, 96). She accounts for the comparatively small numbers of girls by explaining that throughout the nineteenth century the French had concentrated on the education of boys, especially those from notable families. Isolated attempts to open French schools for girls were so poorly funded and the curriculum so poorly conceived that few girls went beyond the equivalent of the seventh grade (Lazreg 1994, 63–79). So what kind of girls did get education? Fadhma Amrouche's autobiography, My Life Story: The Autobiography of a Berber Woman , published in French in 1968, chronicles her education at the end of the ninteenth century. As an illegitimate child, she was sent away to French schools for girls to avoid the opprobrium of her society. These schools were usually run by some Catholic order and they were often interchangeable with orphanages. School was thus often less a privilege than it was an asylum. Amrouche is clearly grateful to the French for intervening in what she calls "brutal customs," that included honor executions, as well as for providing her with the opportunity to be educated. Although she describes some of her experience as very difficult, Amrouche seems able to talk about the

faults of her own society as well as of the French without fear of reprisal. Maybe it was her advanced age at the time of writing that allowed her to conduct this double critique, the privilege of the strong.

This much education for girls would not seem to make much difference, yet some critics saw even this as being the cause of the "underdevelopment of Algerian society" (Mosteghanemi 1985, 31–32). In a situation where it was evident that women were pawns between French and Algerian men, any intervention in their lives was seen as threatening. It mattered little how many women were being educated and to what level since, as Lazreg writes, apart from a small group of elite urban women most Algerian women were illiterate at the time of the outbreak of the war. What counted was the perception. Some men must have feared loss of control at home, others may have felt threatened economically. Fatna A. Sabbah explains that the "invasion by women of economic spaces such as factories and offices, which is an economic fact of development, is often experienced as erotic aggression in the Muslim context, where the female body . . . has been neutralized by the traditional restructuring of space" (Sabbah 1984, 17). Algerians and particularly the men rejected French attempts to modernize women's lives, as Woodhull writes, "women are the guarantors of national identity, no longer simply as guardians of traditional values but as symbols that successfully contain the conflicts of the new historical situation " (Woodhull 1993, 11).^[2] By the mid-1950s, the French made a last desperate effort to intervene in Algerian family life. Between 1957 and 1959, they passed ordinances and decrees designed to alleviate "women's oppression," as they patronizingly framed their intentions. But these attempts to strengthen women's legal positions by insisting on their right to consent in marriage and to divorce as well as complicating men's ability to divorce came too late. The resistance movement had taken off, and the leadership of the Front de Libération Nationale was outraged that the French should presume to continue to meddle in their most intimate affairs (Lazreg 1994, 132).

War had broken out on 1 November 1954. Norms gave as the war raged on. Many women—mostly rural because much of the

fighting took place in the countryside—joined the ranks to fight for their nation. Centuries-old traditions were broken for the space of the war. Frantz Fanon writes, "Fathers no longer had any choice. Their constant fear of shame became illogical in the great tragedy which the people were living" (Fanon 1975 [1959], 94). The commands of the leaders of the nationalist opposition overrode the fathers' authority. Fanon writes that during the war men's attitudes toward all women, and particularly the fighters, changed. The women fighters, like Hassiba Ben Bouali—who died during the 1957 battle of Algiers—and Jamila Buhrayd, were revered.^[3] Those who had not only fought but had also experienced prison and torture—like Jamila Boupacha and Zohra Drif—became revolutionary heroines. Fanon seems awed by Algerian women's swift adaptation to guerrilla activities: "The woman ceased to be a mere complement for the man. Indeed it might be said that she had pulled up her roots through her own exertions" (quoted in Horne 1979, 402). In their jointly written book, Djamila Boupacha (1962), which traces liberal French attempts to champion the revolutionary endeavor and focuses on the case of one of the heroines, de Beauvoir and Halimi demonstrate what they describe as Jamila's growth in feminist consciousness.

Women's War Stories

These women, who had been so important to the revolution, were swiftly suppressed. How was this possible—particularly if de Beauvoir and Halimi were right to describe at least some of them as having experienced a transformation in consciousness? Novels written in French by Algerian men and women during and after the war suggest an answer. At the time of the war very few intellectuals wrote in Arabic. Arabic had been so long excluded from the Algerian educational curricula that only those seeking a religious formation had competence in literary Arabic. These writers therefore shared an educational background and an existential dilemma: in the revolt against the French the only language they could use was the language of the enemy. (In the 1980s and early 1990s more Algerians wrote in Arabic—novels including Dhakirat al-jasad

[Body memory, 1993], said to be the first Arabic novel by a woman, Ahlem Mosteghanemi—but these works do not figure in the following analysis.)

The first novel of this war was Aziza (1955) by Djamila Débèche, a middle-class French-educated woman. As Algeria's representative at the 1947 International Women's Congress in Paris, she was one of only a handful of Algerian women to be actively concerned with western-style feminist issues, and therefore her views cannot be considered to be broadly representative. In 1947 she founded the feminist socialist literary journal L'Action, stating that her goal was to "look into the conditions under which our least privileged Muslim sisters live" (Lazreg 1994, 199). She also demanded that Arabic be taught to Algerians and that women be given the vote. Débèche was adamant that in Algeria, religion and traditions were not antithetical to modernization. There was no contradiction, she claimed, between wearing a veil and going to school (Débèche 1946, 143). Her novel Aziza is her fictive articulation of a plea for the integration of French and Algerian cultures. The French-educated Aziza is married to a poorly educated nationalist lawyer. Like many male revolutionaries in women's literature, he mouths pious phrases about the emancipation of the Algerian woman while keeping his wife, his possession, under lock and key. As his political preoccupations increase, his time for Aziza decreases and he dispatches her to his village. After an initial rebellion that brings immediate retribution from all, even her French-speaking women friends, she submits. Despite Aziza's capitulation, the novel was condemned as antinationalist, since it focuses on women as social problems rather than as symbols of opposition to the French. Nationalists rejected the implication that male oppression is more painful than the biculturalism born of colonial oppression; they demanded that the feminist struggle be subsumed under the revolutionary struggle. They also deplored the focus on upper-middle-class women.

In 1960 Marguerite Taos Amrouche (1913–76), a Kabyle Berber and the daughter of Fadhma Amrouche, published La rue des tambourins . Like Débèche, Amrouche is concerned with the struggle of a young woman faced with a choice between her French

education and her traditional upbringing (Bamya 1982, 207). She recognized the privilege in her university education, yet she is the first to acknowledge that her freedom is skin deep only. Algerian society is not yet ready to integrate the educated women. Amrouche later endowed a chair of Berber literature and society at the University of Algiers.

This passive pessimism resurfaces in the oeuvre of the leading Algerian woman writer, Assia Djebar (born 1936). In all her works, even those that deal with the war directly, Djebar explores love in the hidden, oppressed world of women. She published her first novel, La soif (1957), three years after the outbreak of the war. In June 1956 students from the University of Algiers staged a strike with the Front de Libération Nationale. Djebar participated. Within a month she had written La soif . Eight months later it was published and successfully sold. Djebar denies any autobiographical references, claiming that the novel was not supposed to be a reflection of the war but rather the escape from it. La soif focuses on the social mandate for sons; it also describes some women's tentative rebellion. When the protagonist Jedla has a miscarriage, she fears that her husband will divorce her. Yet when she becomes pregnant again, she listens to her childhood friend Nadia, who encourages her to have an abortion because her husband would surely not be rendered loyal merely by becoming a father. It is only when Jedla dies from the abortion that Nadia realizes the consequences of her thoughtless words. She repents and reforms, having "lost her thirst for independence." The revolution is not mentioned. Djebar's harsh indictment of a patriarchal system that turns women into their own worst enemies and oppressors was criticized for what was considered to be blatant unconcern for revolutionary reality. Joan Phyllis Monego writes, "Only after independence, when the expected liberation of women was not effected with the liberation of the country was the seriousness of problems raised in the novel appreciated: the affective relationship between spouses, infidelity, women's fear of sterility and of subsequent repudiation, the subordination of the wife to the husband" (Monego 1984, 134). A year later, Djebar published Les impatients (1958). This time the writing took three months. Again there is no mention of the revolution. The impatient

individuals of the title are cloistered women chafing against their segregation. Instead of attacking the system, they use deceit against one another to gain individual freedom. Djebar has said of Dalila: "I wanted to show how in a calm world, where objectively nothing had yet changed, there was developing a process that allowed one to guess at future upheavals" (Monego 1984, 136).

In 1959 Djebar left Algeria for Tunisia. There she wrote "Il n'y a pas d'exil," a short story she did not publish until twenty-one years later. The protagonist is a young woman, a divorcée who has lost her child. She hears the lamentations of her neighbor whose son has just been run over. She is plunged back into the misery of her own loss. While she is thus brooding, some women come to visit. They are looking her over for their son and brother. She remains aloof during the interview in which she is supposed to participate only in silence. When the visitors demand a decision from her mother, who acquiesces nervously, the protagonist blurts out: "I don't want to marry!" (Djebar 1980, 94). Everyone is shocked and she is hurriedly led away. But her remonstrance has come too late and her mother has agreed; the decision has been made without consulting her. This was normal, even though she was an adult woman who had already been through this ritual before her first marriage. As she ponders her refusal, she seems surprised at the vehemence of her reaction. She was already coming to terms with her fate: "Who cares! I don't know what got into me just then. But they were all talking about the present and about how so much had changed and how unfortunate they were. I said to myself: "What's the point of suffering far from our country, when I have to continue doing as I did in Algiers" (Djebar 1980, 95). During the revolution it made little difference whether one was in Algeria or outside; women were still expected to remain silent and to have all decisions made for them. The cynical pessimism of this piece and its feminist tone may explain why Djebar waited until 1980 to publish. But written as it was in 1959 in the middle of the war, it is a vivid depiction of women's continued powerlessness and silence during the war.

From Tunisia Djebar went to Morocco, where she reported on the fate of Algerian refugees. Her journalism gave her a perspective on the war and its participants. Her next two novels, derived from

encounters with refugees, were Les enfants du nouveau monde (1962), which came out during the last year of the war, and Les alouettes naïves (1967). The protagonists have become conscious of their political role in the country's reconstruction. Yet they remain silent: "A body submits silently because the dialogue of mutual contact is missing" (Djebar 1962, 18).

Les enfants du nouveau monde focuses on the experiences of several women and men in Blida (Djebar's home village) during a twenty-four-hour period. For some of the women, love is still a major motivation. French-educated Lila is ready to oppose the nationalist endeavor because she fears the loss of her husband. Participation in the fighting is involuntary, not willed. Such participation serves as an antidote against the boredom of their lives, making it possible for them "to stop thinking of love only" (Djebar 1962, 143).

There are others whom the war shocks awake. When her husband, Youssef, is in danger, Cherifa leaves her house by herself for the first time. She crosses the city, lightly protected by her veil, to warn him (Djebar 1962, 137–50). This foray into the city is presented as a journey filled with significance, almost a rite of passage into adulthood. In the maquis—the area of thick scrubby underbrush where Youssef must go—there are women, as Cherifa knows, but she does not demand to be taken there. It is enough that she has acted and that she has "discovered that she was not merely a prey to men's curiosity . . . but that she existed" (162).

Others weigh their love against the mandates of the nationalist endeavor. Suzanne is a French intellectual married to Omar, the last Algerian lawyer left in Algiers. Omar wants to leave the country and it is the French Suzanne who insists that he stay. The following day Omar leaves, saying: "I'll write. I'll give you my address in France" (Djebar 1962, 16). Suzanne's response is that she will stay "even if [the war] goes on for ten years. If I leave you some day I'll only divorce you at the end, when it's all over and the country is free." Her resolution and patriotism are as strong as that of the nationalist Youssef, who as a young man had discovered that "homeland [patrie ] is not only common land, nor merely shared misery, but blood shed together and on the same day" (194). Suzanne is an

anomaly in Algerian writings. Most writers present foreign women as incarnations of the temptations of the West. By presenting a foreign woman positively, Djebar is emphasizing women's steadfastness in contrast with the men's fickleness. (Even male Algerian writers acknowledge women's greater steadfastness; Haddad's war novels each deal with men who have left Algeria during its time of greatest trouble to live in Paris while the women remained to fight or just to stay.)

The illiterate Amna, who has had countless children, is another nationalist without being on the "front lines." She lives next to Cherifa and Youssef and knows of the latter's clandestine activities. One day she finds herself involved, almost in spite of herself. When her husband, who is a police inspector working for the French, asks about their neighbor's revolutionary activity, she lies: "May God forgive me, I lied to him and I don't regret it at all" (86). When she tells Cherifa, the two women sharing in this subterfuge feel themselves strengthened by their opposition to the corrupt law, personified by a husband. She calls Cherifa her sister because it was as if "the same blood joined us, as if we had drunk milk from the same mother" (84). Linked by blood and milk in a powerful sisterhood, these two uneducated women isolated in their homes and far from the action represent a first step toward the identification of a growing feminist awareness.

Then there are the women who seek liberation through military action. There are the heroines. A thirty-one-year-old school teacher, Salima, works as a go-between for resistance fighters and their families and is imprisoned. Although she longs to be married and to be like other women, her motto is, "Act like a man!" (94). She does and finds herself in prison.^[4] Her story foreshadows Djebar's later work in which she reflects on women's silence while they were still active in the resistance. For ten days, Salima is tortured and forbidden to lie down. Her courage impresses a guard, who tries to help her. He is concerned for her, but when he asks her how she is, she "notices that she no longer has a voice" (97). The guard calls her "sister" and ironically thanks her for not talking. But the reader begins to suspect this speechlessness. Salima already, while yet participating, is losing her voice.

The heroines are not the only ones to have become actively engaged in the resistance. There were others who did so in a way that many could not understand and certainly not accept. Touma was such a one. It was she who was responsible for Salima's arrest. In a 1987 interview Djebar calls Touma one of the "misguided" feminists who thought that it was enough to look western; worst of all she believed that she had the right to sacrifice the nationalist cause for personal reasons. What could be worse than to work for the authorities as an informant? Djebar explains that she had used Touma to exemplify the ways in which the French were trying to westernize Algerian women. The only outcome of such a program was to turn the seduced women into prostitutes and traitors.^[5] The men in their families were "compelled" to kill these women to redeem their lost honor. When I first read Les enfants du nouveau monde, I was struck by how partial was the picture it drew of those women warriors and how ambivalent was Djebar in her assessment. In many ways Cherifa, still veiled, still secluded, seemed to embody nationalist ideals more fully than women like Salima who paid so dearly for their involvement.^[6]

Ambivalence about the significance of women's mobilization recurs in a ten-page testimonial written by Zohra Drif, a woman who had been a member of the terrorist network of the Armée de Libération Nationale and was later known as a heroine. "La mort de mes frères" (1961) describes Drif's arrest in 1957 and her subsequent detention in the women's section of Barberousse prison. She is coolly realistic about what it meant to have been so intensely implicated. She flatly rejects Malraux's definition of terrorism as a "search for absolute personal realization, pushed to heroism, understood as individual exaltation. [Such a definition] contradicts the reality we are experiencing in Algeria" (Drif 1961, 3). She justifies her attitude by describing the ethos of the Algerian army, which repudiated the value of individual action and heroism in favor of subservience to the group. Like any other soldier, these warriors did not see themselves as individual terrorists but rather as soldiers with a responsibility to the group, and this group ran regular war risks, such as torture and death. She writes: "In this Algerian war in which all, civilians included, are participating in the

struggle for liberation, my participation as a young woman student is natural and fairly common" (6). Her insistence on the naturalness of women's military action and of its commonness is reiterated by women writers as well as by fighters.

In 1971 Jamila Buhrayd gave an interview to Walid 'Awad for Al-Hawadith magazine. Throughout 'Awad calls her a heroine and glorifies her role in the revolution. Her unvarying response is to downplay what she did and to insist that it was no more than other women had done: "I'm not really sure why all the publicity ended up centering on me. For there were many women in the prison with me, subjected to the worst kinds of torture, and they didn't betray their comrades either. Each of them deserves pages and pages from the poets. All of us, all of us Jamilas were parts in the whole. Individuals don't make a cause you know." When 'Awad deafly persists in idealizing her, she exclaims: "I am not a case. Please. I simply played a small part in one period of the Algerian struggle" (quoted in Fernea and Bezirgan 1977, 257, 259).

The Stories the Men Wrote

While the women were talking and writing uncertainly about their military participation, male writers like Kateb Yacine, Mohamed Dib, and Malek Haddad filled their works with ideal types. They infused all women's actions and their temporary change in status with significance. They wrote not so much out of admiration as of dread. The reader senses the fear that women are gaining control and that the danger they pose to the social order, their fitna (an Arabic word that means both women's physical attraction and political unrest), is about to be unleashed.

The first major war novel by a man was Nedjma by Kateb Yacine (1929–89).^[7] It appeared in Paris in 1956, namely in the year when the Moroccans and the Tunisians gained their independence from the French, and when the British and French attacked Egypt over control of the Suez Canal, and two years after the outbreak of the Algerian war. Kateb Yacine claimed that it was the war that made French publishers realize that Algerian literature might be written by Algerians and was not restricted to what was written by French

colons like Albert Camus (Yacine 1991, xxxi). The novel is set in Bône, a coastal town in Algeria, between Armistice Day, 8 May 1945, and the early days of the war of independence. The plot involves four young Algerian men, an omnipresent patriarch Si Mokhtar, and the beautiful Nedjma.

Many critics have read Nedjma as a transparent symbol for Algeria. Some are more guarded. For example, Louis Tremaine writes that "the conception of Nedjma as a direct symbol of Algeria is no longer tenable, for the simple reason that the text will not support it. There are too many descriptions of her as sterile, disdainful, false, fatal, and capricious which conflict with such an understanding." Such a caveat notwithstanding, he then goes on to call her "the tribally created illusion of fulfillment and significance, and her continued pursuit only prolongs the group's inward violence and outward 'absence of itinerary' or inability to act meaningfully to restore direction and significance to the world" (Tremaine 1979, 156, 157). Woodhull emphasizes the significance of the name Nedjma, which in Arabic means star. This name, she writes, "evokes the modern 'warriors'—Algerian immigrant workers—who in the 1930s formed the secular anticolonial movement called the Etoile Nord-Africaine [North African star]. Yet as a 'star' Nedjma recalls not only the tribal bond whose renewal in the Etoile Nord-Africaine is to propel the forward-looking nationalist struggle, but also the atavistic aspect of that bond." The convergence of the atavistic and the utopian "functions now to mobilize the male protagonists in their collective struggle, now to immobilize them in endless reverie or condemn them to aimless wandering and random violence." Woodhull may consider Nedjma a symbol of the nation, but she rejects the other common assumption made by critics that Nedjma represents the ideal woman, as though ideal means secluded and silent. She points out that far from being submissive, Nedjma struggles with the men who want to imprison her. She praises Yacine for "successfully stag[ing] some of the processes by which women are constituted as actors in history—and are limited in their ability to act in nationalism's confrontation with colonialism" (Woodhull 1993, 27–28, 30, 3).

My reading goes further to propose that Nedjma—who appears first on page 65 in the naming of her house Beausejour as Villa nedjma—is better interpreted as representing the new women produced by the revolution. In fact, the men describe her as uncomfortably modern. Mustapha tells Mourad that when he first saw Nedjma, she was wearing "a pale blue silk hood such as recently adopted by emancipated Moroccan women" (Yacine 1956, 72). She is modern in appearance and also in behavior. Mustapha notes that while still in her teens, she was supposed to have asked her cousin Mourad to leave school, marry her, and take her to Algiers so that she might escape Bône and "realize her young girl's dreams of becoming 'enlightened'" (84). But Mourad declined the offer and she had to remain in her native town. Most important for our present purposes, Nedjma is once described as revolutionary. As though in passing, she is called the "amazon of the attic" (78).

Although Yacine does not develop the allusion to legendary military women in this novel, he does do so in his play Le cadavre encerclé , which he wrote at the same time that he penned Nedjma , that is, in the late 1940s, but which he did not publish until later. Nedjma is heroine in all three plays.^[8] In Le cadavre encerclé , this other Nedjma leads the women to war, exclaiming: "It's now or never! This is war! Let's take our freedom!" She exhorts these women to throw away their jewelry, material symbol of their worth in a traditional society, and to take up arms. Yacine was also deeply interested in the Kahina, a Berber woman from the Djarawa tribe of the Aurès who in 702 C.E. was killed after organizing a resistance to the Arabs who were bringing Islam from the East.^[9]

Nedjma in the eponymous novel is neither nation nor ideal woman. Rather than a Penelope who quietly awaits the return of her men, she is a seductively dangerous woman who sows "discord everywhere . . . the femme fatale, sterile and fatal, a woman worth nothing, through the passionate night ravaging all the blood that was left us, not to drink it and thus to liberate us . . . but just to disturb" (146, 187). Lakhdar, the brave, who had stood up to the French, pursues Nedjma fearfully: "Nedjma is the physical form of the lover who awaits me, the thorn, the flesh, the kernel, but not

the soul, not the living unity where I could melt without fear of dissolution" (247). As I shall elaborate below when discussing Mohamed Dib's 1962 work, this fear of dissolution in the feminine terrifies men during war.

She is also the "femme sauvage" who figures so prominently in Yacine's plays.^[10] When she is three years old, Nedjma is adopted by Lella Fatma, a Kabyle woman. She grows up a wild child whom "her educators gradually agreed to surround with barriers" (185). She is married against her will to what turns out to be a half brother, lamenting: "They isolated me the better to vanquish me, isolated me when they married me off. Since they love me, I hold them in my prison. In the end it is the woman prisoner who decides" (67). Nedjma demands acquiescence and is cruel to "those who do not play her game." When Rachid meets Nedjma, he is immediately fascinated and frightened, and he is then devastated when he loses sight of her. Si Mokhtar warns him that should he "find her again, you would be scorned, betrayed, and cheated" (68, 110). As though looking for help in his search, Rachid joins Si Mokhtar on the pilgrimage. It is then that he learns that Nedjma is his half sister; their mother was a French woman raped by four men, among whom were Si Mokhtar and Rachid's father, whom Si Mokhtar may well have murdered. Si Mokhtar warns Rachid against ever thinking of marrying Nedjma (129) and then asks his help to kidnap her so as to free her from her incestuous marriage. They want to take her to the Nadhor, the seat of the ancestral Keblout. Their scheme fails. Rachid is torn between desire and dread for his "evil star, the Salammbo who was to give meaning to the sacrifice . . . she was the sign of my loss, a vain hope to escape. . . . I know no one who has approached her without losing her . . . the ogress who died of hunger after eating her three brothers" (176–80).

Nedjma is an unlikely symbol for Algeria. But the four suitors, to whom the largest part of the novel is devoted, may well represent the ways in which the Algerians launched their resistance. Rachid, Mustapha, and the half brothers Lakhdar and Mourad struggle to survive under the unscrupulous rule of the French who have come to Algeria to get rich. They are day laborers in a village working

under the supervision of the mean-spirited Monsieur Ernest. Lakhdar attacks him, is arrested, and quickly escapes. Later, Mourad kills another Frenchman while the man is beating his maid. Mourad is arrested and the three others escape the village. Their stories are fragmented but always linked to the distant, almost silent Nedjma, to whom Rachid and Lakhdar are related. This is indeed a tight tribe, bonded by incest. Incest is necessary to their survival but it is also an unfailing promise of tragedy. They all know that "incest has been our link, our principle of cohesion since the exile of the first ancestor. The same blood carries us irresistibly to the mouth of the passionate river close to the siren whose responsibility it is to drown her suitors rather than choose among the sons of the tribe—Nedjma completes her game of a fugitive, hopeless queen until the husband's appearance." Their only solution is to "link in their friendship, conjoining their rivalries the better to circumscribe her . . . they were all planning their vengeance," because they are afraid of "Nedjma, our ruin, the evil star of our clan" (186–88). No longer merely Rachid's evil star, she has come to occupy the place of dread in the lives of all around her.

Si Mokhtar, the hovering ancestral presence, may represent some aspect of Algeria; after all he was asked to be the representative for Algeria "tout entière" during the pilgrimage he undertakes with Rachid (112). This almost legendary figure has fathered countless offspring, including Nedjma, her husband, and one or more of her suitors. He knows he has wronged women and that they have poisoned "his death drop by drop, weighed down his body with the long, sticky tears that he had blindly scattered" (99). Fadela M'Rabet is referring to Si Mokhtar when she writes, "today—and this is one of the 'infantile diseases' of decolonization—the ancestors came back to life; as Kateb Yacine says, 'their ferocity is redoubled.' Why? because the 'ancestors are in the streets—they are us'" (M'Rabet 1983, 247). Is it Si Mokhtar whom Rachid targets when he rails against "the fathers who sold their land to the French, thus contributing to their ruin of the ancestral creation" (Yacine 1956, 146)? Kristine Aurbakken calls Si Mokhtar a "parodic incarnation of an identity whirling in the void and an unconscious catalyst of

a future . . . demise of the old order to make room for the new" (Aurbakken 1986, 128). Most of all, Si Mokhtar stands for the corruptness of the past.

Nedjma is no purer. The illegitimate child of a French woman and Si Mokhtar, she is the product of the coupling of the colonial system with local blood. We read here Yacine's implementation of what the Moroccan writer Abdelkabir Khatibi thirty years later was to call a "double critique" (Khatibi 1983). This two-pronged attack simultaneously targets the western heritage imposed by colonialism and local patrimony. It is only through such a double critique that we may come to some understanding of how subjects are formed in the postcolonial era. Here already in the first years of the war, we read a man hinting at what was to come in reality as well as in men's later literature: the men formerly terrorized by powerful women, "femmes sauvages" (see Sbouai 1985), would want, indeed need to control them.^[11]

Mohamed Dib's Qui se souvient de la mer —translated as Who Remembers the Sea (1985 [1962])—enacts a woman's transformation from wife into warrior. Nafissa is the wife of the bemused narrator, and it is their relationship and its dissolution that form the plot of this novel. Dib compares his surrealist oneiric discourse with Guernica , Picasso's masterpiece on World War II. Held within the rigid frame of the war, the narrative loops a tale of terror and abstraction, as people turn into stone, and stone into snakes.

Whereas in his earlier trilogy, La grande maison (1952), L'incendie (1954), and Le métier à tisser (1957), Dib depicted women as social victims always acted upon and never acting, in Who Remembers the Sea women are strong. It is they who initiate action and remain active and alert throughout the anarchy (Dib 1985 [1962], 51). Their action takes place against the background of the sea with which they are often connected. Sometimes as a group they become a sea, they are a "sea of women wrapped in snowy veils" (66). He had at first confused these veiled women with the howling iriace, horrifying mythical creatures that circle above the new constructions. The presence of wild, mythical beings like the iriace intensifies the libidinal atmosphere. Theweleit quotes Freud's Interpretation of Dreams: "It might be said that the

wild beasts are used to represent the libido, a force dreaded by the ego and combatted by means of repression" (Theweleit 1987–89, 1:194). At other times, they are the gentle life givers, the seamother-women who prepare the men for the fight they could not otherwise undertake: "Without the sea, without the women, we would have remained orphans permanently. They covered us with the salt of their tongue and that, fortunately, preserved many a man among us! It'll have to be acknowledged some day" (Dib 1985 [1962], 10; cf. 30, 38). The narrator associates Nafissa, his children's mother (mère ), with the sea (mer ) of the title. This homophonous association recalls the male fantasies and anxieties that Klaus Theweleit locates in fascist men's writings of the between-world-wars period. Quoting Sandor Ferenczi, Theweleit writes: "Mothers should actually be seen as symbols or partial substitutes for the ocean. . . . First comes la mer , then la mère . First streams, then their lesser equivalent, incest . . . and the coupling of erotic woman and water [happens with] the pure woman without boundaries" (Theweleit 1987–89, 1:292, 420). Clearly such an association is deeply troubling, for it epitomizes the narrator's loss of control. However, beyond the awesomeness of Nafissa's transformation, the alternative reading of the title of the novel—not Who Remembers the Sea but Who Remembers the Mother —indicates the author's awareness that however strong these women may be, however much the men rely on them and fear them, this association may not last. Already in 1962, Dib was warning Algerians that the mother, the most honored role for women within Algerian society, was going to be forgotten.

Nafissa is never clearly delineated, but as the novel progresses she becomes more and more elusive. Even when all seems to be well between the narrator and his wife, he feels threatened by her simple smile, which is accompanied by "defiance in her eyes" (Dib 1985 [1962], 25). He describes her absences—we presume she is out on some military mission because on one occasion there is an explosion where she is—as "black holes" into which he is sucked. In her association with water, the coupling of erotic woman and water, her strength and power, disguised as fragility, become most evident: "Nafissa's voice overwhelmed me with its water, cradled

me. . . . Had the world hardened into one great block of concrete, it still would not have formed such a rampart as we find in this fragile water" (19). Nafissa's voice is at once as fragile as water and as hard as a concrete block. Dib celebrates women's voices as forces of nature, vulnerable and tough.

As the novel progresses, Nafissa and the sea become interchangeable; the growing fear that each inspires is palpable (37–38). Nafissa is more and more "indistinct, peaceful, motionless, and absent. She looks around her and leaves me powerless" (51). The narrator grows dependent on her for survival at the simplest level. He needs her to "transfuse her energy into him" (63). This is not a totally benign energy because it empowers her to conquer "the universe, establishes her dominion over everything, and then uses her smile to put my worries to rest. . . . I will never find out through what channels Nafissa acts upon me" (74). He is out of control, he knows he is out of control, but he does not know how it is that he got out of control, except that Nafissa is responsible. Nafissa, whose name derives from the Arabic word for soul, represents an atavistic impulse, the "soul that designates our line of descent" (80). She is a part that he needs to survive and to function. But a part that he cannot control. Medusa-like, this femme-soldat turns him into stone, hardens him. And she alone can depetrify him, soften him, and save him from his paralysis (18). This description recalls Freud's Medusa's Head: "For becoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is in possession of a penis, and the stiffening assures him of the fact." But he must beware lest, as Theweleit writes, "Contact with erotic women would make him cease to exist in that form" (Theweleit 1987–89, 1:198, 244). Nafissa is just such an erotic woman who plays with her man as she wills. When the city burns, she carries him aloft above the devouring flames. When he suggests that he might accompany her on one of her missions, she refuses. She compels him to play the role that had been hers before the war: to wait passively.

The narrator submits to his new fate and justifies it as a communal necessity: "The guiltiest are those who distrusted the sea, who failed to place their confidence in her" (Dib 1985 [1962], 103).

All have to recognize that the sea, that women, are "preparing the coming of another world" (106). They are the architects of the brave new world that they will shape and cover, as the sea, at the end of the novel, covers the whole of existence. Theweleit writes that such floods do not signify a Jungian "oceanic feeling," but rather a threat that "may be combatted with 'erections': towering cities, mountains, troops, stalwart men, weapons" (Theweleit 1987–89, 1:402). And these are precisely the scenarios that Dib delineates. The coming flood presages the last stage in the narrator's loss of control, his social boundaries are eroded and undermined by a flood of feeling. He can no longer distinguish himself from the woman, the wife as well as the vulnerable feminine within himself. The woman has deprived him of control, of identity, and of life.

The anxiety that informs this novel runs through Malek Haddad's works, Je t'offrirai une gazelle (1978 [1959]), L'élève et la leçon (1960), and Le quai aux fleurs ne répond plus (1961). To discover how Haddad explores the role of writing during the revolution, how the revolution shapes identity, and how women increasingly subvert that identity, we need to read these novels in the order in which Haddad wrote them. In his first novel—a metatext that questions the fate of the book that he is writing as though it were written and submitted to a publisher—his narrator lyrically denies the significance of writing: "Writers who have nothing more to say invent stories or dive deep into the blase depths of their skills. They have nothing more to say because they have not understood the need for silence, this silence that allows for the contemplation of the other. They exist too much. Their novels encumber them" (Haddad 1978 [1959], 26). Later a friend writes from Algeria assuring him that the fighters could not care less "about your gazelle" (120), namely, his book. While still writing, the narrator anticipates an apathetic reception. In Je t'offrirai une gazelle , women play a minor role to the narrator's self-obsession. At will, he collects and rejects women of all nationalities. He describes the veiling of his compatriot women as being "not only modest, it's also very elegant" (123). The ironic tone reveals the author's contempt for this man who still sees women as objects to be possessed.

A year later, Haddad published L'élève et la leçon . His portrayal of women has changed. The first line of the novel is: "I did not know that my daughter was so beautiful. Insolent and aggressive." The careless romances of Je t'offrirai une gazelle have given way to the intensity of a father-daughter relationship. The protagonist has no power over Fadila who "has come not to explain. She had come to demand her due and to condemn." In a description reminiscent of Dib's Nafissa, the father-narrator compares Fadila to night, dark and frightening and incomprehensible. She smokes and he can do nothing, even though he "does not like women who smoke. Especially when they're Algerian" (Haddad 1960, 13, 16).

The novel is in the form of an interview between father and daughter. The narrator rarely speaks but only dreams in response to his daughter's urgent request. Fadila is a fighter who associated closely with men. She is having an affair. Her father condemns her immoral behavior so as to ease his own guilt—it is better to be in Paris writing than in Algeria whoring. But the worst is yet to come. Fadila has come to him not as a father, the father who left Algeria when her mother died, but as a doctor. She wants him to perform an abortion on her since she cannot have a child "under these circumstances" (18). She has to be fit to fight, and for the first time in her life she has sought his help (63). His daughter's nationalism forces the narrator to confront his own inadequacy. He admits to himself that he was "nothing but a vulgar egoist without a nationalist conscience, without any conscience. Being partial to easy solutions, I took refuge on the other side of the sea, on the other side of History" (19–20). Hypocrite that he is, he chastises Fadila for not caring for the unborn baby's father. Not knowing how to treat a woman who is both a nationalist and a "prostitute" he seeks acceptance while condemning her. When she includes him in a "chez nous" that refers to their Algeria, he is almost unbelieving: "So she hasn't completely excluded me from her community" (43). He has given Fadila the right and therefore the power to accept or to exclude him, to make him Algerian or to confiscate his birthright. He cannot understand and can "never forgive that they [Fadila and Omar] had thought of getting rid of that child that they alone had invited. That they asked me the father, me

already the grandfather, me almost the father-in-law, to get rid of the child" (62). Yet, remonstrances notwithstanding, he agrees. He understands that his act goes beyond his relationship with his daughter. By acceding to her impossible demands, he has empowered her and others like her. It is now the "Fadilas [who have] the final word" (99). The novel ends with the completed abortion. It is not clear whether performing the abortion has allowed the narrator to feel more Algerian because he is freeing up a fighter for the war, or whether it has served to exacerbate the loss of control and dignity.

In Le quai aux fleurs ne répond plus (1961), ambiguity about women who have participated in the revolution gives way to deep distrust. Like his predecessors, this narrator, Khaled Ben Tobal, goes to Paris. He has chosen to write and not to fight. In Paris, he finds himself surrounded by other Algerians, but they do not even write. Writing becomes his passport. He hopes to become a fighting Algerian through his Parisian poems that are "read in the maquis, in the prisons. That gave him no pride, no joy. But fear. Panic. Was he as good as the men, as their explosions, their historic vocation? Does he know their fear, can he despise heroism as much as they who do not acknowledge that they are heroes?" (Haddad 1961, 29). He knows that he is deluded to believe that writing can give identity, can replace speech, can give authority. The reality is that writing, which demanded physical separation from Algeria, is a form of exile.

Throughout his time in Paris and his affair with the French woman Monique—his best friend's wife—Khaled longs for his wife, Ourida. Like so many women in this literature, she stayed in Algeria when her husband left: "Ourida watches the rain, in Algeria. In France, Khaled looks straight into the eyes of boredom, his own" (35). Why did Khaled leave? Was he afraid? Or did the need to write override all other feelings? Writing and his love for his wife—whom he identifies with Algeria—became his bonds with his country. He dreams of her as loyal and unchanging. He cannot imagine that his departure could change anything. The ironic end is prefigured in a report of a hit-and-run accident: "The car did not slow down. . . . The man and the woman were no

longer embracing. The wild fig tree culled the lovers' blood on its broad leaves" (106). Haddad then flashes back to Khaled who is still singing to Monique of his undying, unshakable love for Ourida. Next day he opens the newspaper, and he turns to the Trivial News section. He reads: "In Constantine, Boulevard of the Abyss, terrorists assassinated a Muslim woman and a lieutenant paratrooper. The unfortunate victim had confirmed her belief in a French Algeria by participating in a tour with General X. Several months before, she had separated from her husband, the pseudo-writer Khaled Ben Tobal who is only permitted to continue writing because of the absence of authorities" (116). Two dreams—his love and his self-worth as writer and long-distance nationalist—shattered in an instant, and Khaled realizes that his "only distinction will have been to have believed in shit. To be shit" (119). The fragmentation of the end of the novel into shorter and shorter paragraphs is mimetic of Khaled's own dissolution. His wife and his country had ceased to be his when he left. In this last war novel, Haddad explicitly states that when an Algerian leaves the war zone, he forfeits his birthright. All attempts to construct an identity by claiming to write for Algeria are part of a tragic farce. And although Ourida might be dead, she would live on forever as a testament to Khaled Ben Tobal's incalculable insignificance.^[12]

Postbellum Constructions

Between 1962 and 1967 intellectuals began to shape the War Story. It was a great victory. Although many men, particularly those writing in Arabic, produced encomiums to the war and particularly to the women who participated, the women writers remained skeptical. A well-known example is Zoubeida Bittari's O mes soeurs musulmanes, pleurez! (1964). Many are quick to point out that this is not a major work; they cite the schoolgirl French and the simplistic autobiographical style. Yet is this not a familiar criticism of any work that unsettles status quo by chronicling women's experience?

Bittari scarcely mentions the war, yet the story—written in exile in France—tells an otherwise almost inexplicable growth in fem-

inist consciousness. The heroine is married at the age of twelve, she is persecuted by her mother-in-law, and then, she is repudiated. Contrary to expectation, she does not feel helpless; her new independent status gives her insight into her situation and a sense of power. She even works for a French couple. When "the husband" comes to reconcile we can read her strength. Whereas until then she had referred to him with the distance of the third person, she addresses him on page 146 with the almost contemptuous familiarity of the second person. Calling him an "imbecile," she mocks his overtures and ends up taking him to court. She is awarded custody of her son, and she warns him that he will "learn how a mother who is separated from her son suffers. . . . You thought that being a man you were strong. But French justice does not allow you to oppress the weaker sex. You must respect it. Obey it" (Bittari 1964, 149). Woman, she announces defiantly is "not born to be a servant, but to be man's equal" (164). She helps others to reach this awareness. Despite misgivings about her stepmother, she defends this woman against her natural father. Written two years after the end of the war, the novel indicts traditional values and calls for awareness of oppression and for women's community.

Bittari's work foreshadows later literature that criticizes the revolution and its reactionary outcome that included increase in polygamy and divorce. The French who had been the enemy are surprisingly recuperated by some writers as being Algerian women's supporters. It is as though after 130 years of colonial rule and French integration into Algerian society, it was no longer possible for the Algerians to divorce themselves entirely from their colonial past. To be authentic no longer equaled conformity to some originary identity. To strip Algerian identity of French influence would not uncover a pure authenticity but rather a multiply layered identity that comprised Arab, Berber, and various tribal elements in addition to the French. Bittari's novel is one of the first to recognize a French participation in constructing Algerian history and identity, a participation that was not always bad.

Soon after the revolution the sociologist Fadela M'Rabet published La femme algérienne (1964) and Les algériennes (1967). In the first study, she seems to praise President Ahmed Ben Bella for

his inaugural speech at the July 1964 Congress when he claimed that the "liberation of women is not a secondary matter to be appended to other objectives. It is a problem whose solution must precede any form of socialism" (M'Rabet 1983, 12). In Les algériennes , she quotes another apparently profeminist official declaration. On International Women's Day 1966 President Boumedienne reassured women that the projected Personal Code would not deprive them of their rights, "our policy in connection with women is clear . . . and in the interests of Algerian society. Our revolution will only be complete when everyone, including women, participates effectively" (239–40). M'Rabet exposes these statements as well as the 1962 Tripoli Program and the 1964 Algiers Pact, which claimed to recognize women's contributions and rights, as empty rhetoric: if men are not prepared to change and allow women to act out their potential, all the lovely words in the world will make no difference (86, 246). Why not, she asks, form "brigades of military women to guard over women's peace and security"? (87). Later, she remonstrates with those men who "gliby repeat that Algerian women won all their rights during the war" (237). No woman in her right mind would say such a thing. M'Rabet cites many true stories she has been told and letters she has been sent to convince the reader that these rights are far from won. In Les algériennes , she targets an Islam that has been misinterpreted by men as tradition and she asserts that such a tradition is a "collection of prohibitions" (225). Indeed, patriarchy benefited from the revolution.

What is striking about both these works is that they scarcely allude to the war. M'Rabet demands attention to women without compelling a remembering of the war as a time when the women had been needed and had been effective. She is writing about women, not about women's stories with the war and particularly not about the transformation brought about when experience is recorded. She scarcely reflects about the reasons for the suppression of the importance of women's participation in the War Story. Her primary concerns are those of feminists anywhere: education (or the lack thereof), bad and arranged marriages, prohibition on women marrying foreigners, persistent polygamy, overpopulation because of women's ignorance (M'Rabet 1983, 229), the importance of

breaking the link between femininity and maternity. When she does refer to the war it is in negative terms: since independence polygamy and divorce have increased (105, 181); no research is being conducted into women's high suicide rates (165–66). Yet she does presage the later writings that decry women's silence when she writes, "If to be human, as opposed to being vegetable or mineral, is defined by speaking [la parole ], freedom of action, of planning, of deciding, then women are not human . . . women's language, like that of animals is reduced to the expression of emotions. Just as one does not converse with a parrot so one does not converse with a woman. . . . Deprived of speech, of rights, reduced to the state of nature, women . . . find themselves excluded from political action" (14–15). It is unthinkable that such creatures might change. By 1967, in Les algériennes , M'Rabet demonstrates that the silencing has become quite virulent: "In February 1965, a week before the celebration of International Women's Day, the only program on Algerian Radio that gave a forum to women's problems was closed down. The director has ordered that the growing number of letters women are sending to the broadcasting station be thrown out" (161).

In the same year that Les algériennes was published, Djebar brought out Les alouettes naïves , a novel she had written between 1962 and 1965. Flashbacks, abrupt changes in narrator and in type face, volatile tenses, many reflexive verbs—all point to a carefully crafted text. It is a reflection of a "war [which] is often only a life led according to a disharmonious rhythm" (Djebar 1967, 228) and in which what is "essential is not the memory of the fighting but of its rhythm . . . the greatest curse is a kind of torpor" (410). In this novel Djebar writes of those, like Omar, "whom History has devoured" (397). Five years have elapsed since independence and writers are beginning to take stock. Who really won? What did winning entail? What happened to those who fought and sacrificed? Les alouettes naïves revolves around the lives of three couples who participated in some way: Nessima and Omar, the intellectual narrator with whom Djebar identifies;^[13] Julie and Farid; and, finally, the legendary lovers, Nafissa and Rachid, Omar's brother.

In Alouettes naïves we do read of heroines—Lila, Fatouma, and Nadjia (see Cadi-Mostefai 1978, 163)—modeled on women like Jamila Boupacha and Jamila Buhrayd, and politics are indirectly evoked.^[14] But the focus of this novel is personal relations. Like their predecessors in Les enfants du nouveau monde , all three women are preoccupied by love and their need for a man and an escape from personal failure (Djebar 1967, 334). At university Nafissa meets Karim, falls in love, and becomes engaged at the age of nineteen. She accompanies him to the maquis, where he is killed. Later she meets Rachid and falls passionately in love. Rachid reciprocates but finds himself adored by Julie. Julie's husband, Farid, maintains a low profile as Julie pines for the man she knows she can never have. Finally, Nessima longs for Omar, who longs for Nafissa (as he does for all the women whom Rachid has loved). The declarations of the lovers to the reluctant beloveds are uncontrolled and often banal (240, 254, 280–89, 330). Throughout Djebar reiterates the explicitly erotic bond that holds Nafissa and Rachid together (e.g., 164–88).

The space around these Racinian couples is filled with shadows, most of them veiled. Again and again, Djebar introduces women as veiled, belonging to a world apart (79, 101, 147). This world and those veils are not described as oppressive but rather as seductive and safe: they encompass the one who sees but is not seen (e.g., 102, 104). They evoke a special ephemeral femininity. When Nafissa wears the veil for the first time, she "was proud to demonstrate that she could drape the veil with confidence. . . . Nafissa followed her companions through the dark streets. Her gait became more harmonious: she discovered a hitherto unnoticed majesty " (102; my emphasis). The hammam (public bath) is a "kingdom of whispering shadows" (129; my emphasis). When she leaves the hammam , Nafissa feels as though "she had returned from an enchanted world that did not know the others; that is, the men" (132). The veiled women are described as "alone, they glide along in the twilight like translucent goddesses" (194). In each case, the segregated past is imbued with majesty and sanctity. Is Djebar admiring women's strength and solidarity? Structure seems far from meaning, since the context militates against such an interpretation: women's bliss is said to derive precisely from their ignorance. Nessima tells Nafissa

that she envies her un liberated mother: "You walk on with eyes closed, listening only to your instinct. In the desert, that is the only way one has a chance of arriving" (294–96).

The book ends in despair with a visit to a psychiatric hospital full of "women recently returned from the front" or from the forests of the maquis (414, 415). The women fighters have lost their minds. Djebar develops the theme in the short story "Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement" (which she published with collected essays in 1980). Djebar revisits the "fire carriers against whose eyes and stomachs the bombs still explode" (Djebar 1980, 61–62). The fighters have become drug addicts and prostitutes. Participation forced women into the public realm so that people could say: "Our women are our men" (230). But then when they return no one knows what to do with them; they are not quite ostracized, yet they are not integrated. They find themselves on the razor's edge, neither virtuous nor dishonorable, while being both. Their families were proud of their heroine daughters, their "real Muslim daughters" (407). At the same time they could not come to terms with these "good Muslims" who were also part of their families. Neither vestal nor virgin, they became marginalized. What had been a strength during the war became a liability in peace. At the beginning of Alouettes naïves, Nafissa and some other femmes-soldats (44) are ambushed by the French. When the French realize who their captives are they exclaim: "Ah! There they are!. . . . The larks [allouettes ]!" (39). This line is echoed almost 400 pages later when the reader is told that the alouettes naïves of the title are "the prostitutedancers . . . symbols at once of an external decline and an altogether anonymous internal light" (423). These are the women who participated and about whom Omar mused, as though echoing the sentiments of Haddad's narrator in L'élève et la leçon: "I don't know how, but thinking of today's heroines, I remember yesterday's prostitutes . . . maybe because they are unexpected. Yet they are not prostitutes, nor are they part of a respectable harem of cloistered wives. What is to be done with these war heroines? How are we to act with them?" (235). How, indeed can these women be fitted into prewar categories? They cannot. For the time being, they are in the "Heroines' House" (237). In their splendid isolation they are exceptionalized and can eventually be forgotten.

It is not only in literature but also in reality that they were neglected: in 1970 Algerian radio adapted Djebar's play Rouge l'aube (written in 1960) and omitted all references to women's struggle in the war. By 1971 women's participation could not only be omitted but also denounced. Moustapha Toumi published a poem, entitled "Femme, femme, femme" in El-Moudjahid in which he criticized women whose behavior he considered unseemly and praised those who were conservative. Djebar describes these conservative women metonymically, they are the "veils" that had never before dared to appear in public (Djebar 1967, 424). So that is what happened to the women: the fighters were locked away so as to make room for the "veils." The women who had stepped into the public realm had opened a crack; they had paid the price and now others were beginning to emerge.

At this transitional phase there is considerable ambiguity about women's roles and power. The men in Les alouettes naïves , like male protagonists in Algerian men's literature of this revolution, register a loss of authority, even of identity. When Julie asks Omar, "What are you looking for?" using the intimate and singular tu , he replies: "I? During this war I've become so used to saying 'we'" (389). When Omar realizes that he has truly lost Nafissa, he is angry: he cannot hope to possess her because she had become "like others of her sex, independent" (329). Si Othman also is disturbed by these new independent women, represented by his daughters. He feels that he who had once been the "master, was today merely a man who trembles" (408). The women, however, do not see themselves in this light. The men's perceived loss of authority is not paralleled by women's growing sense of power. Djebar describes in this novel what can be read in earlier novels by both men and women: there is radical dissonance between male and female perceptions of gender roles consequent to the war. While the men are threatened, the women remain unaware.

During the 1970s Algerian women began to reassess what they had done during the revolution and how they had been treated afterwards. An interesting interim work that links the early unre-

flective mode with women's later recriminations about their silence is Yasmina Mechakra's La grotte éclatée (1986 [1979]). This novel, in the form of a nurse's journal, was written in 1973 but not published until 1979. It chronicles the events of November 1955 (when the author was one year old!) through July 1962. Kateb Yacine's introduction explains that as a child Mechakra had seen her father tortured and killed. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the first vignettes should be particularly grisly: "I dragged myself to the bloody corpse. My lips brushed the gaping throat, slowly I licked the blood of the beast that had fed off the flesh of a man who was sleeping somewhere in the shade of a rock, his stomach exploded by a shell" (Mechakra 1986 [1979], 17). The narrator has been hiding out in the maquis for a week with two men; they are starving and she finally nerves herself to share with a jackal the fresh blood of a human corpse. She endures the same hardships as the men, and at one point describes herself as "bold, red-eyed from lack of sleep, hard-lipped, and the earrings hanging from her lobes made her look like a real mountain brigand" (26).

The novel romanticizes the resistance as existing beyond the "laws of impure men" (33). It condemns the intellectuals and the pacifists for their cowardice (60). The narrator marries an "authentic revolutionary, an illiterate who had learned the Revolution one night in November 1954, when he watched his mother throw off her veil" (69). There are moments, however, when the reader begins to suspect the wide-eyed wonder of this child of the revolution. When the nineteen-year-old narrator becomes pregnant, she talks enthusiastically of her body renewing the fighters, but then the cave in which they were hiding is blown up. There is little of romance in what follows: she loses an arm and her two-month-old baby son is brutally maimed by the napalm, and in a perversely ironic move the mother turns to the shreds of this tiny body to renew herself (95, 107). The heavy irony continues as we read of the ways in which her contributions to the war have been recognized: stars are pinned to her armless shoulder, while bandages protect her napalm-burned legs; she is promoted to the rank of lieutenant, and she is named "heroine" (100). She adopts Algeria, its mountains, and its cities as her sons. But it is her destroyed son,

gradually going mad from his injuries, who is her "Ariadne's thread into the future centuries" (121). The last third of the book is an elegy and a plea that there will be more children (more like her maimed son or more like her adopted country?) to hold on to the memories. Images of explosions recur throughout, as though to emphasize the violent action and the lack of control. The narrator praises the resistance as though men only constituted it, while she is by turns the woman masquerading as male fighter and poet or the mother grieving for her son destroyed by napalm or the wife mourning the death of her revolutionary husband. She acts out all the roles the war demanded of her as though these multiple duties were not in any way anomalous. But the tone of the frame undermines the content. When she returns home after the war, she is hobbling, "my feet cratered with napalm, my naked carbonized feet. I gently embraced the burning earth of my country" (173). The last we see of her is her grotesque attempt to walk as she hallucinates the earlier explosion, realizing that only she and nature survive. Even after reading the novel for the second time, I was not sure what was more important: the sacrifice for the country, or the sacrifice.

Toward the end of the 1970s women were recognizing and condemning their silence during the war. But too late. In 1976 Aicha Lemsine published La chrysalide: chroniques algériennes . This novel presents a feminist dystopia. Khadidja is dismayed at her husband's collusion with his mother against her. She is recently married and cannot conceive. When traditional methods do not cure her infertility, Khadidja goes secretly to Marielle, the boycotted French woman doctor. She is amazed to find herself spontaneously drawn to this foreign woman as though "united by the same ancestral evil" (Lemsine 1976, 39). I cannot agree with the Algerian critic Ahlem Mosteghanemi, who idealizes this relationship between two individuals who "have only their sex in common" as being the "struggle for the cause of Woman" (Mosteghanemi 1985, 104). Mosteghanemi also lauds Khadidja's courage and innovation in turning to French medicine in an environment where it was profoundly distrusted (198). Her struggle, however, is un-

availing. At last Khadidja gives birth to a son but her husband takes a second wife after discovering that childbirth left his wife barren, unable to bear another son.

Khadidja takes the second wife, Akila, into her confidence. She needs companionship and help in her loneliness. The reader who remembers Celie and Shug's friendship in Alice Walker's Color Purple might well expect this friendship to symbolize the beginnings of a community of women. But here again, structure is far from meaning; women's solidarity merely serves to darken the tragic conditions in which these women continue to live. It seems to me that Mosteghanemi exaggerates when she describes Khadidja as a "unique case in Algerian literature." She goes on to describe her as a woman who "has the courage to defend all oppressed women in her entourage, even her rival" (Mosteghanemi 1985, 198). In fact, Khadidja cannot even defend herself; she must rely on her son. She is gratified when he goes off to the maquis to fight. This Patriotic Mother now has the courage to stand up to her husband. When he suggests taking on a third wife, she explodes: "Have you not understood the lessons of this war we're living?" (Lemsine 1976, 108–12). Mosteghanemi reads this passage as a strong feminist statement. She quotes: "Assuming the anger of Akila, Faiza, Malika, and Hamia, the anger of all women, she roared. She became 1,000 women!" (Mosteghanemi 1985, 198). Khadidja manages to dissuade her husband from taking the third wife. But for herself and for all the women on whose behalf she "roared," she gains nothing but the honorific title, Lalla Khadidja. Contra Mosteghanemi, I do not read this demand as feminist: she does not aim to subvert the system in which she lives. She wants, and gets, reward within the status quo!

If there is no hope in the older generation, what of the new? Who is the chrysalis of the title? It is Faiza, Akila's daughter. She teaches herself to read and write. When Mouloud, her half brother and Khadidja's son, returns from the war, he takes her to the university (Lemsine 1976, 163–69). By 1965 she is doing brilliantly in medical school. Although her half brother has been a staunch supporter, he is no feminist. One day he announces his

engagement to an uneducated girl. Faiza is amazed, especially when Mouloud confesses that he has always been somewhat afraid of highly educated women (191). Faiza comes to terms with the marriage and moves in with the young couple. She continues her studies and considers herself the equal of any man (213). Then one day Faisal walks into her life and Faiza feels like "the traveler who has finally reached his goal . . . she knew that he was the one she had always awaited" (219). Until this book it was only male writers like the Egyptian Ihsan Abd al-Qaddus and the Lebanese Habshi al-Ashqar who had written so eloquently of the futility of women's education. There is not enough irony in the following exclamation: "Fortunately, there are men in this country. They know how to get rid of the powerful foreigner. They'll know how to control you, my daughters!" (239). The melodrama reaches its climax when Faisal is killed. Faiza is pregnant and she decides to have the baby in the village, where she finds support for what before would have been punishable by death. Such romanticism stretches credulity: can the liberated brilliant woman really prefer to live in a village with the illegitimate child of an impossible love rather than to pursue a career?

During the 1980s Djebar published the first two volumes of her quartet.^[15] In Ombre sultane (1986) the romance of the harem—a place of female bonding—inexplicably persists. Djebar writes again of the drama of unveiling: how strange it was "to be able to let go of the edge of the material, to look with face uncovered. Even to look up to the sky, as I did when I was ten" (Djebar 1986, 27). How wonderful to unveil, but also how dangerous; it entails exclusion (53). In 1986 she calls militantly for universal unveiling, for an assertion of individuality (42). The protagonist's daughter challenges her mother in the following terms: "No. It's your fault, Mom. Your fault. If only you did not run to him every time he hits the slipper on the floor to summon you. If only you did not even stand up" (143). In this literature, activism on behalf of women's rights seems to be in its infancy.

Djebar hints at the reasons for the neglect of women's revolutionary accomplishments: silence. At the time no one, not even the women, spoke out on behalf of women. It was only in retrospect

that awareness dawned. Although in Les alouettes naïves Nafissa warns, "I'm forgetting the war" (Djebar 1967, 298), she is alone in her perception. By 1980 this neglect by women of the war and its impact on women has become a leitmotiv. In Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, a collection of essays written during and soon after the war but not published until 1980, Djebar constantly reiterates the lack of, and the need for, the feminine voice: "My voice does not reach them. It stays inside. . . . I am the collective voice . . . that touches one, embraces another" (Djebar 1980, 15, 145). Women must speak, must ask if there had ever been brothers, must tell the world of their experiences of prison and torture. A young woman muses: "I've always had problems with words" (62–63). Later she tells of her time in the Barberousse prison: "I howled silently. . . . All the others could see was my silence" (65). Yet once she does talk, it is as though talking has made her realize both the importance of talking and the dangers of silence. She announces categorically: "There's only one way Arab women can unblock everything. They must talk. They must keep on talking of yesterday and today!" (68). If they do not talk, they will get nothing. In "Les morts parlent" (written in 1970 and 1978 but not anthologized until 1980), another young woman is described as having "Kept a morose silence during the war" (126).

In her autobiographical novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1993 [1985]), which is also the first volume of her quartet, Assia Djebar searches through the word-corpses of the past to understand this silence. In a mix of history, fiction, interviews and autobiography, Djebar strives to make some women visible and above all audible, so that they might cease to be "bodies bereft of voices" (Djebar 1993 [1985], 156). This three-part novel, which is primarily concerned with her relationship to her father, is presented as a musical arrangement whose third part is organized as a symphony harmonizing eight of the many lost voices of women fighters. Some clamor, some murmur, some whisper, some dialogue, some soliloquize, and several embrace. The novel is about the Algerians' unremitting refusal of the French colonial presence, the constant role of women in the resistance, everyone's silence about women's participation, and the crime of this silence: she remembers her

grandmother with tenderness but also with pain: "Only her former silence continues to hurt me today" (197). How can she change a culture that demands of women that they be resigned and silent, that deprives them of the ability to tell their stories in the first person until they are old when "they use this 'I' against the younger women so as to control them" (15)? How is it that girls must be silent when they have been given the gift of four languages: "French for secret missives; Arabic for our stifled aspirations towards God-the-Father, the God of the religions of the Book; Lybico-Berber which takes us back to the pagan idols—mother-gods—of pre-Islamic Mecca. The fourth language, for all females, young or old, cloistered or half-emancipated, remains that of 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" (180). She is celebrating a linguistic hybridity that should empower women to speak and communicate with many; but she is at the same time lamenting the multiple and multilingual silences.

The women in the first resistance to the French were silent in the 1830s, so were their granddaughters in the war of independence, and so had she been. How can she understand her past silence? She compares her experiences with those of women during two periods of Algerian national resistance to the French: the first, during the fifteen years following the French landing on Algerian shores in 1830; the second, during the revolution. Her sources for the nineteenth century are thirty-two flowery, formal chronicles written around the 1830s campaigns by little known French captains; for the revolution, she uses interviews she conducted with women fighters; for her own story, she pieces together written and spoken records with vignettes from her own past. But she finds the truth of her past mixing and blurring with the stories of these other women whom she had actually heard or those whom she had only imagined. She struggles to hold on to a multilingual past that the tyranny of French threatens to reduce to sameness, strangeness: "Autobiography practiced in the enemy's language has the texture of fiction, at least as long as you are desensitized by forgetting the dead that writing resurrects. While I thought I was undertaking a

'journey through myself,' I find I am simply choosing another veil. While I intended every step forward to make me more clearly identifiable, I find myself progressively sucked down into the anonymity of those women of old—my ancestors!" (216–17). How can she, "twenty years later, claim to revive these stifled voices? And speak for them? Shall I not at best find dried-up streams? What ghosts will be conjured up when in this absence of expressions of love, I see the reflection of my own barrenness, my own aphasia" (202). Her silence is intimately tied up with her body and its pathological inability to produce. It cannot produce another body, it cannot produce a voice. The association of body—both living and dead—and voice is a theme resonating throughout this novel. Sometimes the voice is a living being, sometimes it is a stinking cadaver.

After their long silence these women did not know how to speak; their voices were mutilated. Djebar describes a woman, herself perhaps, in the late 1960s walking down a street in Paris. A man is following her and she is surprised by the sound of her own voice that issues as a stranger from her throat after years of imprisonment: "One single, prolonged, interminable, amorphous tear-drop, a precipitate congealed in the very body of my former voice, in my frozen larynx; this nameless coagulate is washed away in a trail of unidentifiable rubble. . . . This nauseating network of sounds seems scarcely to concern me; viscous syrup of rasping gasps, guano of old hiccups and choking sobs, smelling of some strangled corpse rotting within me. The voice, my voice (or rather the voice that issues from my open mouth, gaping as if to vomit or chant some dirge) cannot be suppressed. Perhaps I ought to raise my hand in front of my face to staunch this invisible blood?" (115). This voice is disgusting, putrid because it has lived and died as a separate suppressed entity inside her. The fetus-voice that should have sought its freedom outside her body had died and rotted within. The dead voice manifests itself in numerous forms: it can be seen as a congealed teardrop washed away with some rubble; it can be tasted like syrup; it can be smelled for it is both guano and decomposing flesh; its liquidity can be touched as coagulated teardrops, viscous syrup, vomit, and blood; it can be heard as rasping gasps,

old hiccups, choking sobs, attempted chanting. The narrator is in shock at what she has involuntarily produced.

But this sound, these cries (les cris ), are not so different from their homonym, the written (l'écrit ). I have found it useful to compare this passage with one written by the French literary critics Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to describe Kafka's interest in the notion of sound without meaning, one that signals the straightening of a head bent in submission. This sound, they explain, is "always connected to its own abolition , a deterritorialized musical sound, a cry that escapes signification, composition, song, words, a sonority that ruptures in order to break away from a chain that is still all too signifying." The chain in this case is of course the chain of silence, and the cry can be quickly absorbed, abolished. Deleuze and Guattari even use the same language as Djebar does to articulate the process of deterritorialization initiated by the cry: "He [Kafka] will turn syntax into a cry that will embrace the rigid syntax of this dried up German. He will push it toward a deterritorialization . . . even if it is slow, sticky, coagulated. To bring language slowly and progressively to the desert. To use syntax in order to cry, to give a syntax to the cry" (Deleuze and Guattari 1986 [1975], 6, 26). That is indeed the answer: to catch the revolutionary moment in the sound-straightened head and turn it into writing. The constant juxtaposition of these homonyms thus translates into a mandate to turn the cries into writing, les cris into l'écrit . She must preserve in ink the transient outburst, transfigure uncontrol but also anger and fear into a symbol of power that can be circulated among others. Only thus can les cris empower others.

The Frenchman ceases to be a menace in comparison with the fear inspired by the narrator's own voice. Gently, he interrupts her reverie about her "involuntary lamento ," protesting: "Please, Madame, please don't cry out like that!" (Djebar 1993 [1985], 116). This predator has acquired humanity. How? Ironically, through his voice which is described as "warm, vibrant, quavering slightly from the urgency of his request." When he walks away, she describes that strange encounter as a "fantasy embrace." The potential rapist has become the possible lover! But this remains a love that divides her against herself. It is with her people, with her brothers and her

lover-friends that "I finally recover my power of speech. . . . At last, voice answers to voice and body can approach body" (129). A stark contradiction? The French gave her writing which then took her voice; Algerian men will be the ones to restore it.

The novel begins in the early 1940s with Assia's hand in that of her father, the teacher at the local French school. It is her father who introduced her to French, he who is thus made responsible for her being cut off from her mother tongue. She is deeply ambivalent about her relationship to her father, an Algerian man who introduced her to the language of the colonizer. He cuts her off from her mother's words, "the rich vocabulary of love of my mother tongue" that is the only language in which love can be expressed (4, 62, 128). This autobiographical project is in some ways her attempt to reconnect with her mother's language.

Writing and voice are constantly juxtaposed and contrasted. Writing, necessarily in French, is "denial of my body," (59) that is connected with voice. But it provides a "relief from deep inner hurt" (154). Writing can enable voice. In this case, her writing of the voices of the silenced, segregated women of her society can empower both the writer and those written: "What if the maiden does write? Her voice, albeit silenced, will circulate. . . . As if the French language suddenly had eyes, and lent them to me to see into liberty; as if the French language blinded the peeping-toms of my clan and, at this price, I could move freely, run headlong down every street, annex the outdoors for my cloistered companions, for the matriarchs of my family who endured a living death. . . . I know that every language is a dark depository for piled-up corpses, refuse, sewage, but faced with the language of the former conqueror, which offers me its ornaments, its jewels, its flowers, I find they are the flowers of death—chrysanthemums on tombs!" (3, 181). Swept away by the enthusiasm of the writing act, she gives herself a license to speak for others until she is suddenly caught by her realization of the cut between French writing and their Arab and Berber voices. She sees once again that the voices have been killed. How can she stop her language, her French, from destroying their Arabic and Berber languages? How can she turn the freedom she gained with French into freedom for others?

Writing defies men's prohibition on women's voices. It is the way to trespass on men's space by annexing "the outdoors for my cloistered companions, for the matriarchs of my family who endured a living death." French offers her ornaments that turn out, however, to be flowers of death. Then, in yet another paradox, she claims these flowers of death as a salvation: they "brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins. Writing does not silence the voice, but awakens it, above all to resurrect so many vanished sisters " (204; my emphasis). Writing in French allows her to respond to the peasant woman who had lamented to her: "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 crouching in holes and who, afterwards, told what they've told!" (148).

Djebar writes a reality out of the fragments of the past that will contest those other fragments from crouching cowards by showing their very fragmentedness. Writing re-members what others have mutilated. Writing creates connections. She writes with amusement about the daughters of the local religious leader who wrote love letters to strangers all over the world, hoping that one of them would come to save them from their dark and dreary fates (11–13). Writing is dangerously enmeshed in love; it helps "to lift the veil and at the same time keep secret that which must remain secret. . . . The word is a torch" (62). Later, she intensifies the ambivalence of these "torch-words which light up my women-companions, my accomplices; these words divide me from them once and for all" (142). To write is to have a silent voice. Djebar is rebelling against what happened to women, yet her only route to freedom is the production of this contradictory autobiography, in which she negotiates the borderlands between her two cultures. Writing the body locates the space between memory and language, a space that will always remain removed. Djebar is simultaneously creating and questioning her identity; she is writing to find voices—her own and those of others—that had been silenced. She is writing into the fissures and the gaps that she has uncovered in the French men's colonizing discourse produced a century and a half earlier.

Writing connects, resurrects, creates, but it is always also the tool of those who would dominate, oppress, and silence. Somewhere between these two incompatible instrumentalities, Djebar is looking for a writing location that will allow her to protect her healing words from co-optation while assuring the effectiveness of her contestatory words. As the literary critic Mary Jean Green writes, it is in her style that the author finds such a middle way, in the "narrative constructed by Djebar the texts of the colonizers themselves appear only in fragmented citations, interwoven with her own words: the text itself thus creates the possibility of a dialogue absent from the historical record" (Green 1993, 962). Djebar reads the French failure into their records of "rape" of a "motionless and mysterious" woman "impossible to tame" (Djebar 1993 [1985], 7, 56–57). Contempt rings loud in her description of these messengers of the mission civilisatrice as French peasants who "only know how to milk a cow" (24). They wrote to savor "the seducer's triumph, the rapist's intoxication. . . . And words themselves become a decoration, flaunted by officers like the carnations they wear in their buttonholes; words will become their most effective weapons . . . to hide the initial violence from view" (44–45). Djebar claims to be "strangely haunted by the agitation of the killers, by their obsessional unease" (57). She even goes so far as to thank Pelissier, the leader who ordered the massacre of hundreds of Berber villagers in a cave during the 1830s, because he had written of an event she would otherwise not have discovered. He had had remorse and had "looked on the enemy otherwise than as a horde of zealots or a host of ubiquitous shadows" (78). He had demanded that the corpses be brought out, and in the heat of the sun they were "transmuted into words" (75). It is as though Pelissier had personally handed her these corpse-words. These are the words that she is now using against the scribes.^[16]

She is looking for the history of her people in the gaps and spaces of these men's writings. Women, too, should beware lest the love that they commit to paper be thus examined and then used against them. Writing should be used rather to disguise love (58) because it cannot express "the slightest heart-felt emotion" (128). Writing

means to "travel to fresh pastures and replenish my water skins with an inexhaustible silence," this silence which is as rich and as heavy as "brocaded gold" (63, 109). Writing reveals the fear that it is trying to repress.

Invisible eyes watch these envoys of the French Revolution whose paradoxical project is to deprive North Africans of their liberté, fraternité, égalité (16, 39). Djebar may not have access to these women's words but their invisible presence haunts her thoughts about nineteenth-century Algerian history as well as about the revolution. The writer is suspended between these men, whose language will become hers to write, and the "invisible eyes," whose silent voices she is trying to hear across the chasm of more than a century. These women may not have left any written records but that does not mean that they were not there. She writes them into her story as witnesses to the invasion whose eyes plant the vessels "above the glassy surface of the water" (8). She knows they were there, not only because they obviously were (where is the society without women?), but also because she has read accounts of two women who so terrified some Frenchmen that they recorded their actions in a text that otherwise systematically erased all mention of women. These two ferocious tribal women prefigured the "future Muslim 'mater dolorosa'" (18–19). One had ripped out a Frenchman's heart and the other had crushed her baby's skull when she was hit lest the French capture it. During the revolution the voyeuses are "allowed into the party as spies." But what happened afterwards was that these women, like their daughters, "in their own domain, began to impose the veil on others" (204–5). Above all, amongst themselves they told and continued to tell tales that allow Djebar to question the women-erasing French written record. In the first section entitled "Capture of the City," Djebar mixes the Frenchmen's historical narratives of naval blockades of Algiers and the Battle of Staoueli with her personal memories of going to school for the first time and of visits to a village in the summer. She thus reframes the colonizing text in a subversive collage that draws on testimonies of actual women who had fought during the 1950s and 1960s.

The women fighters were tough, tougher than the men who gave in to pressure and especially to torture (138, 147). A peasant woman who had been taken a prisoner of war reported that the men had told her: "Come back here with one of your sisters; we need you up here!" (118). She escapes to them in time to see her brother shot. When she comes back at night after helping the maquisards , her mother says nothing. This war allowed transgressions of social norms of segregation; the most nubile of women could wander freely among men in the dark because they were fighting for their country. Djebar calls this peasant woman Cherifa, like the Cherifa of Les enfants du nouveau monde . The choice of the name connects these two novels written about the same subject but at an interval of twenty-three years. In 1962, the veiled Cherifa timidly ventures out of her house when her politically engaged husband is in danger and she is the one who must inform him. She has done her duty and does not feel that this act has changed her. The 1985 Cherifa reminisces about the men's expressed need for the women. She is there in the melee, sees her brother killed, and makes sure, Antigone-like, that his body is washed so that it will not remain unsanctified, even if she cannot bury it. She knows that she was needed and remembers what her special contribution was.

Djebar contrasts revolutionary women in the war of independence with the nineteenth-century men, particularly the goumiers , a term used to designate the Algerian men who had enlisted with the French. She is critical of those who merely mouthed the party line. A peasant woman complains: "All the men I used to depend on, all those men have gone" (200). A woman in Paris with her fiancé insists on returning to Algeria to fight. Like the French Suzanne in Les enfants du nouveau monde , this is an Algerian woman who feels the draw of the land. Her bourgeois revolutionary boyfriend objects that there are no other women student fighters, only "peasants used to the forests and brambles." She counters, "were not the Nationalist leaders anxious to make it known that all were equal in the struggle?" But her boyfriend is no socialist; he is unwilling to mix with the peasants in a "homeland [that] seemed no more real than a sunken city or a desolate ruin" (103–4).

Djebar's writings of the late 1970s and 1980s betray a cautious, highly fraught attraction to the French. She seems to feel that since Eugène Delacroix—whose painting gave her the title for her 1980 collection of short stories and showed, Djebar believed, unusual understanding of Algerian women's circumstances—French men have understood Algerian women in a way that the Algerian men never did, perhaps because they could not. Djebar is less concerned than Palestinian women to dance through the minefields of competing allegiances to nation, culture and gender. She is not afraid to admit her fascination: "For me, these French homes gave off a different smell, a mysterious light; for me, the French are still 'The Others', and I am still hypnotized by their shores" (23). Yet these men can also be called the "vilest of men from the dominant society" who could never assume "the cloak of seducer in women's eyes" (128). So what of the Frenchman who had pursued her and with whom she had exchanged the fantasy embrace? And what of Eugène Fromentin, whose painting helped her to fit another piece into the puzzle of her past? In 1853 he visited an oasis where a massacre has taken place and "picks up out of the dust the severed hand of an anonymous Algerian woman. . . . Later, I seize on this living hand, hand of mutilation and memory, and I attempt to bring it the qalam " (226). The last unglossed word means pen. It was Fromentin's vision that put her in touch with an unknown heroine. A French orientalist painter actually presents her with a dead woman's hand that she can imagine herself reviving and empowering to record its experience. She can give this unknown soldier a silent voice.

Women's texts on the war of liberation indicate that strong, self-conscious heroines during the war were more or less a fiction. Even critics like Mosteghanemi, who try to portray the blossoming of feminist consciousness, admit that the revolution "did not shake the social structures" (Mosteghanemi 1985, 222–30). Hélie-Lucas writes that "even in the hardest times of the struggle, women were oppressed, confined to tasks that would not disturb social order in the future. Although these tasks were essential, they should not have absorbed all female energy. One woman bore arms, none was in a decision-making position! sixty-five dealt with bombs in the

urban sectors [probably carrying spare parts!], and there were two political commissaires!" (Hélie-Lucas 1990, 107). So much for Fanon's and others' myth of Algerian women liberated along with their country. Only later did women acknowledge the participation of other women and perceive its potential significance to feminist consciousness.

Interviews with women fighters from other parts of the world suggest that involvement in some aspect of war does not necessarily entail raised feminist consciousness. D'Ann Campbell explains that after World War II women were not "coerced en masse to 'return' to the home: most of them had never left it to begin with, and those who had shared the domestic dreams of those who had not" (Campbell 1990, 7). A Jewish woman who fought the British in Palestine said: "And anyway, we girls weren't fighting to prove anything. . . . I have no hang ups about feminism. I fought when there was no choice, but when I was no longer needed in that role I was happy to move on to something else" (Saywell 1985, 189).

In Algeria novelists like Débèche, Amrouche, Djebar, and Lemsine as well as poets like Nadia Guendouz, Anna Greki, Danièle Amran, and Leila Djabali wrote during the war, but they wrote alone and without commitment to a women's cause that could stand side by side along with, but not under, the nationalist cause. Unlike the Beirut Decentrists who wrote as a "group" on the Lebanese civil war (Cooke 1988), or the Palestinian women who wrote of the need for a women's agenda as they saw the Intifada erode their roles (see below), the Algerian women writers did not share a sense of moment. The war was not so much a consciousness-raising event as an exciting interlude in the gray monotony of an unchanging routine. In Les alouettes naïves Djebar describes the women who fought feeling "as though they were playing a game." Nafissa exclaims: "In the maquis I was alive. Here I'm dreaming" (Djebar 1967, 37, 110). As though anticipating this sentiment, Jean Bethke Elshtain quotes a French woman who said of World War II: "You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have not felt alive before or since" (Elshtain 1987, 10). The fictive Algerian woman

and the real French woman both recall the war as an experience of alive-ness.

A brief survey of men's writings after the revolution indicates a change in male portrayal of women who participated. The anxiety of the war years has dissipated. Mouloud Mammeri's L'opium et le bâton (1965) is a highly acclaimed dramatization of the revolution that was written three years after independence. Characters are reduced to stereotypes who act out highly determined roles, even including a male Touma who rejected his own culture and religion in the hopes of profiting from the French. The anguished self-questioning of Malek Haddad's intellectual in Paris has given way to formulaic rejection of writing and advocacy of militancy. Bashir, Mammeri's intellectual who is a doctor, is shown at the beginning of the book and the revolution as being almost trapped into marriage by Claude, his conniving French girlfriend. The revolution is his salvation. The threat posed by women is restricted to a dream in which Bashir sees his mother with her cold eyes and her right hand "furiously spurring on her horse" and her left hand "furiously shaking a rattle" (Mammeri 1965, 46). Nevertheless, Mammeri does include women who stayed in Algeria while husbands and sons left for Paris (80).

The women fighters are no longer frightening. Farroudja—her name means chick (!)—is used as a decoy. She is shown to be dumb and innocuous since under torture she has nothing worth telling (125, 130). Women are army prostitutes (204), and stereotypes of bitch goddesses are returning en masse (211). Itto, the activist, no longer cares what people think of her: "Tomorrow I shall be gone . . . with you . . . or alone . . . or with some other man. You're crazy! You're married! Do you believe that? Well, take it easy, everyone! I don't plan to abandon him. In a month—no, in 29 days I'll go back to him" (226–27). She is less heroine than camp follower (295). The veil commands everyone's respect: "In the tram the Europeans gave up their seats for veiled women. They used to call them Fatmas, now they said: Please, Madam" (249). Women's attachment to nature, to the trees, is almost mocked (258). Yet it was this very attachment that had made them

stay. Then there are women like Titi who have lost their sons and who accept their fate with the stoicism of a Spartan mother by Henri Rousseau dit le Douanier (266). In L'opium et le bâton , women are once again helpless victims of men's craving for power.

In 1969 Rachid Boudjedra wrote La répudiation . The war is merely alluded to, glimpsed in the interstices of flashback, memory, hallucination, and in the violent staccato of its language. This memoir of a crazy, disillusioned fighter traces through the development of misogyny in the son of a woman repudiated at thirty by her hypocritically religious husband. In an often gratuitously obscene language, Boudjedra documents the sexual experiences and fantasies of a boy born at the end of World War II. This Oedipal tale illustrates the fine line that Algerian women once again walk—the line between lust and disgust. The only woman to be granted a measure of humanity is the repudiated mother. In her moment of greatest pain and with "death on her face" (Boudjedra 1969, 63) she prepares the marriage of her husband to his second wife, and her son finally relates to her not as a sexual being but as an individual. Otherwise women are contemptible: "All the women in the country were organizing clandestinely to march on the seat of government" (242). So they must be threatening! What was their plan? To "Suffocate the president with their farts!" (242). So much for women's power and threat in 1969! Yet tension remains, for the obscene fantasies of women's unbridled sexuality finally drive the protagonist into a psychiatric hospital.

What is the reader to make of the contrasting images of women found in men's and women's writings both during and after the Algerian revolution? Is it possible to claim that any one of them is more correct than another? I think not. The crucial difference lies in perception. In the women's wartime writings, female protagonists are focused on love. When they recognize their oppression, they fight in nonthreatening ways to assert themselves in a traditional world. During the war, and even after, the women seemed oblivious to the import of their actions, unaware that they were challenging the social fabric. The only woman writer to indicate awareness of this dissonance is Assia Djebar. In Les alouettes naïves

she hints at the gap between men's and women's perceptions of the significance of women's participation. For the men who wrote during the revolution, the specter of radical change overshadows a new world in which male protagonists lie in anxious wait for what the future will unfold. Their women are no longer theirs to control. This incongruence in men's and women's perceptions of women's power during war can be seen in post-World War I English and American writings. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar reinterpret English and American literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a battlefield where women and men are fighting for literary primacy. They argue that the increasing numbers of women professionals constituted a threat men tried to parry through their writings. They maintain that the fact that "women have been less confident may seem paradoxical, in view of the resentment with which such men as W. S. Gilbert, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer reacted to what they perceived as unprecedented female power. Yet when we turn to works by women who were contemporaries of these men, we find that the female writers have often felt even more imperiled than men did by the sexual combat in which they were obliged to engage. For as is so frequently the case in the history of sex relations, men view the smallest female steps toward autonomy as threatening strides that will strip them of all authority, while women respond to such anxious reaction formations with a nervous sense of guilt and a paradoxical sense of vulnerability" (Gilbert and Gubar 1988, 66, 72).

Since the Algerian women did not recognize the men's trepidation and the impact of their new roles, they did not exploit their opportunity. When the war was over, the men imposed neotraditional demands as part of national self-assertion. They encountered no resistance and quickly patched up their tattered egos. The moment was lost.

You weren't
a symbol
Fatiha Iratni
weapon in hand

dressed in khaki
that should have been
white
as your purity
you are the forgotten one
from the days of glory
you will be the reminder
of happy days
19 years
without a cry
without a tear
in the maquis
you fell
dead in the village of honor
dead and forgotten
but during this feast
a friend of yours
gave me your name
it's so easy
to render you homage
in our hearts
. . . . . . . . . .
I salute you Fatiha Iratni (Guendouz 1968)

In 1968 Nadia Guendouz was lamenting women's silence. In the 1980s Algerian women are asking themselves why they did not speak and write while they were still active and needed. How was it that over two decades later the women finally spoke up? My hunch is that they were listening to women in comparable situations elsewhere, women who saw and refused the familiar pattern of marginalization. Palestinian women in the Occupied Territories in particular were beginning to speak out in an unprecedented manner. They were demanding attention to the fact that since 1967 they were the ones who had invented a special way of resisting the Israelis and that it had worked. By 1982, with the removal of the Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters from Beirut to Tunis and away from contiguity with Israel, the resistance moved to the Occupied Territories, where women had long been "shaking off" the Israelis. Their sporadic unorganized confrontations had

minimized the impact of what would otherwise have been a crushing occupation. By the mid-1980s their proto-intifadas became a magnet for the international press. Algerian women, poised on the edge of civil war, heard their Palestinian sisters insist that they must learn the Algerian Lesson, a lesson that they themselves had absorbed: Speak while you are on the stage—silence is the real crime.