Assia djebar biography of albert

Assia Djebar is a fiction writer, filmmaker, professor — currently at NYU — and a regular contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. She is known in the US for her novel So Vast the Prison and the story collection Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. Another collection, published in French as Oran, langue morte, recently appeared from Seven Stories Press with the title The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry.

For me, though, Djebar’s memoir Algerian White is a better book than any of these: more subtle, more artful, and finally more moving. Returning to Algerian White reminded me of the plaintive question posed at last year’s PEN World Voices Festival: Is Nonfiction Literature? (and if it is, why doesn’t it get more respect?).

Algerian White was written as a tribute to three men. Each was a friend of the author. Each was a writer himself, in addition to his regular profession. All three were killed in the space of less than a year, and the stories of each of their deaths are at the emotional heart of the book.

M’Hamed Boukhobza, a sociologist, worked late one night on a report for a meeting the next day. In the morning, three men rushed into his apartment, tied up his daughter, and left her to listen in another room while they tortured M’Hamed to death. She found him with his chest cut open, but although she was a medical student she could not save him.

Mahfoud Boucebi, a psychiatrist, arrived at his clinic one day to find the driveway blocked. Two men forced their way into his car and stabbed him in the chest and abdomen. He died at the hospital during surgery.

Abdelkader Alloula, a dramatist, was warned that a group had targeted him for murder. He did not tell his wife, mother, or sisters, and he did not change the date of a lecture he was scheduled to give. On the day of the lecture, he was shot twice at the bottom of his staircase. He lingered for several days in a coma, then died

Algeria (1936–2015)

Writes in French

Assie Djebar is the pen name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, an Algerian novelist, translator, and filmmaker heralded for her anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal work. Fatima-Zohra Imalayen was born in Cherchell, Algeria. She attended the French primary school where her father worked as a teacher before attending a Quranic school in Blida, later completing high school in Algiers. She attended the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in 1955, and was the first Algerian and Muslim woman to be educated there. In 1957 she published her first novel, La Soif, under the pen name Assia Djebar.  She lived for most of her adult life between Europe, North Africa, and North America, having taught at the University of Algiers, the University of Rabat, Louisiana State University, and New York University. In 2005, she was elected to the Académie française, making her the first writer from the Maghreb to achieve such an honor.

Algerian born French writers Albert Camus and Assia Djebar both employ their memories and experiences, and those of their family and friends, within French-Algerian landscapes, to construct travel narratives that blend myth with reality. Albert Camus’ Le Premier Homme, published posthumously in 1994, is a blend of fiction and non-fiction that can be described as a semi-autobiographical novel. Le Blanc de l’Algérie, published in 1995 by Assia Djebar, is a memoire on loss. Although written four decades apart and published one year apart, together their descriptions of physical and mental voyages demonstrate their unique representations of Algeria pre and post independence.

For Camus, writing during the colonial period, his Algerian journey is both literal and imaginary. For Djebar, having published before and after independence, this particular journey of the nineties describes Islamist conflict and civic turmoil and is predominantly political. In Le Premier Homme Camus, a pied-noir of French and Spanish ancestry talks about his impoverished childhood but he specifically contrasts his early travels in Algeria with his later travels from France to his former Algerian homeland in a deliberate attempt to trace his roots and visit his father’s grave. In Le Blanc de l’AlgérieDjebar, of Arab and berber origin, discusses the final journeys of her fellow Algerian friends and writers who lost their lives during the Algerian Civil War.

Travel within Algeria and between Algeria and France enables Camus and Djebar to discuss the effects of colonization and decolonization on their lives and the lives of their friends and families. I will demonstrate how travel facilitates their narratives to and from the Algerian nation as they expose the hybrid identities that exist in French-Algeria. Indeed, their travelling through Algerian space and time allows them to re-appropriate Algeria and overcome identity crises and displacement associated with their homeland.