The "sensible," the maternal, and the ethical beginnings of feminist Islamic discourse in Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia and Loin de Médine

MLN - Modern Language Notes

Volumn 118, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 841-866

  Wehrs, Donald R ^a  

^a AUBURN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249599182     PISSN: 00267910     EISSN: 10806598     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mln.2003.0088     Document Type: Review

References (91)

1. Assia Djebar, Loin de Médine: filles d'Ismaël (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991) 79. All further references will be to this edition and cited parenthetically. All translations are mine
2. For accounts of the rise of Algerian Islamicist politics, see Phillip C. Naylor, France and Algeria: A History of Decolonization and Transformation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000) 164-251
3. Martin Stone, The Agony of Algeria (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 145-97
4. Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New York: Routledge, 1994) 209-22
5. Peter R. Knauss, The Persistence of Patriarchy: Class, Gender, and Ideology in Twentieth-Century Algeria (New York: Praeger, 1987) 118-40
6. For an account of fundamentalist terrorism directed at women, see Karima Bennoune, "S.O.S. Algerian Women's Human Rights Under Siege," in Faith and Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995) 184-208
7. For Djebar's own response to that terror, see Assia Djebar, Le Blanc de l'Algerie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996)
8. On interpretation through consensus or convention, see Kate Zebiri, Mahmūd Shaltūt and Islamic Modernism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 82-106, 128-37
9. and R. Marston Speight, "The Function of hadīth as Commentary on the Qur'ān, as seen in the Six Authoritative Collections," in Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur'ān, ed. Andrew Rippen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) 63-81
10. On fundamentalist interpretation, see Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Women in the Qur'an, Tradition, and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
11. on the relation of fundamentalist interpretation and government policy, see Haideh Moghissi, Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis (London: Zed, 1999) 64-124
12. Not all fundamentalism need be anti-intellectual or misogynistic, as Miriam Cooke's account of Zaynab al-Ghazali attests in Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001) 83-106, but the affiliation between fundamentalist thought and the repressive regulation of Algerian women is unmistakable (see Knauss 125-40; Stone 172; Katherine Gracki, "Writing Violence and the Violence of Writing in Assia Djebar's Algerian Quartet," World Literature Today 70 [1996]: 842). Such affiliations are not adventitious. In Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), Anthony Giddens notes that fundamentalism is a distinctively modern phenomena, which he defines as the effort to defend traditional ideas by traditional means in ways that refuse to enter into dialogue with the post-traditional conditions of modernity thus, an edge of violence, a willful indifference to voices one cannot be unaware of, shapes the fundamentalist relation to tradition (see 3-6)
13. Assia Djebar, unpublished interview, January 1992; quoted in Clarisse Zimra, "Not So Far from Medina: Assia Djebar Charts Islam's 'Insupportable Feminist Revolution,'" World Literature Today 70 (1996): 830
14. On the idealizing of female self-sacrifice during the 1954-62 war, and on the subsequent silencing and marginalizing of nationalist women by the postcolonial government, see Lazreg 118-65
15. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981) 62. All further references will be to this edition and cited parenthetically
16. Noting that Djebar's pen-name means "healer," Gracki stresses the effort to heal, to mend rupture, in "Writing Violence and the Violence of Writing in Assia Djebar's Algerian Quartet," World Literature Today 70 (1996): 825-43
17. Mildred Mortimer in "Assia Djebar's 'Algerian Quartet': a Study in Fragmented Autobiography," Research in African Literatures 28.2 (1997): 102-18, also notes the centrality of healing, but primarily in relation to healing the psychological wounds of the narrator
18. Assia Djebar, L'Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985) 11-12
19. Fantasia, An Algerian Calvacade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993) 3. All further references will be to these editions and cited parenthetically
20. See Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, rev. ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987) 31, 39, 41-42, 53-54
21. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley 1991) 49-81
22. Women's Rebellion and Islamic Memory (London: Zed, 1996) 109-20
23. M. E. Combs-Schilling, Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 92-95
24. Donald R. Wehrs, "Colonialism, Polyvocality and Islam in L'Aventure ambiguë and Le Devoir de violence," MLN 107 (1992): 1004-07
25. African Feminist Fiction and Indigenous Values (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001) 52, 64, 85-96
26. Knauss 4-8; Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972) 103-29
27. Knauss 5
28. See Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley 1992) 8
29. Richard L. Roberts, Warriors, Merchants, and Slaves: The State and Economy in the Middle Niger Valley, 1700-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) 89
30. Thus, arguments such as H. Adlai Murdoch's, that "Djebar writes woman as object of desire into woman as desiring subject" ("Rewriting Writing: Identity, Exile and Renewal in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia," French Yale Studies 83 [1993]: 75), cannot speak to how Djebar engages the intellectual heritage behind Islamic concerns about "desiring subjectivity," such as the classical ethical theorist Ghazali's (1058-1111) argument that "good character is achieved when the deliberative faculty of the human soul subordinates the irascible and concupiscent faculties of the animal soul," so that "the highest form of restraint ... is to refrain from anything in this world which does not directly aim at ultimate happiness"
31. (Mohamed Ahmed Sherif, Ghazali's Moral Theory [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975] 34-35, 64)
32. The ways in which apprehending women as "desiring subjects" reinforces patriarchal assumptions and practices are delineated in Fatna A. Sabbah's Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Pergamon Books, 1984)
33. and Abdelwahab Bouhdiba's Sexuality in Islam, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985)
34. For variations on the theme that Djebar subverts patriarchal, colonialistic discourse by turning that discourse against itself to show its violence, to uncover the presence of women it effaces, and to articulate plural, transgressive modes of emancipated subjectivity, see Jarrod Hayes, Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) 182-97
35. Mona Fayad, "Cartographies of Identity: Writing Maghribi Women as Postcolonial Subjects," in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics, ed. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida (New York: Palgrave, 2000) 85-108
36. Adrian V. Fielder, "Historical Representation and the Scriptural Economy of Imperialism: Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian," Comparative Literature Studies 37 (2000): 18-44
37. Valérie Orlando, Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999) 111-52
38. Rafika Merini, Two Major Francophone Women Writers, Assia Djébar and Leïla Sebber (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) 87-101
39. Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 77-87
40. See Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, 85-103
41. Wehrs, African Feminist Fiction and Indigenous Values, 85-96
42. Lazreg 52, 53, 54
43. See Knauss xii-xiv; Lazreg 80-97; Woodhull 14
44. See Dorothy S. Blair's Introduction to Djebar, Fantasia, An Algerian Calvacade, unpaginated; also see Combs-Schilling's account of "the play of the guns" (la'b al-harud) ritual, performed during first marriage ceremonies in Morocco, in Sacred Performances, 202-05
45. See Blair's comments on Djebar's French style in Introduction, Fantasia, An Algerian Calvacade
46. The trope of a self-assertive woman assuming masculine power associated with military horsemanship, resistance to colonialism, and a heroic but potentially impious pursuit of freedom is inscribed in the Algerian cultural imagination in the figure of El Kahina, "a Berber queen ... who unsuccessfully fought advancing Arab soldiers in the seventh century" (Lazreg 20). Djebar evokes El Kahina in the third volume of the Algerian Quartet, Vaste est la prison (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) 164
47. In L'Amour, la fantasia, Djebar describes French colonial forces participating in fantasias (61-70/49-57) as well as Algerian anticolonial forces (103-05/89-91). For both, fantasias provide an institutional space for masculinist self-aestheticizations, for ritually constituting identities whose self-fashioning requires the consumption of women (108-16/92-100). However, through descriptions that stress the genuine artistry of the rider's horsemanship as well as his self-aestheticization, Djebar distinguishes between self-fashioning as modern, aestheticizing self-love and self-fashioning as an ordering of the soul into rational freedom. The latter has a positive sense in Islamic ethics (see Sherif's Ghazali's Moral Theory, 30-65)
48. Indeed, the cultural significance of fantasias in Maghreb contexts becomes clear only if the display of horsemanship is understood as a symbolic reiteration of the hierarchies central to well-ordered souls and communities, as well as a celebration of the artistic skill such fashioning requires. Combs-Schilling notes, "The horsemen are the picture of manhood.... The horses represent nature, nature which men have to bring under control. More directly, the horses represent women, especially brides.... At all times, the men are in control - of themselves, their horses, and their guns.... [T]he gun play communicates and reinforces basic understandings and experiences of how the world is ordered and what kinds of postures, attitudes, and actions a man must adopt" (Sacred Performances, 203-04). By assuming a relation to the French language evocative of the relation of male rider to his horse, Djebar suggests that women may achieve a similar mastery, that the self-discipline involved may be both emancipatory and ethical, but by also emphasizing the power of language to shape the writer, Djebar suggests that self-affirmation may be disentangled from both traditional and modern forms of masculinist, colonizing self-aggrandizement
49. See Djebar, "Anamnesis in the Language of Writing," trans. Anne Donadey and Christi Merrill, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 23.1 (Winter 1999): 179-89
50. On corporeality, see Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 51-56, 68-81
51. Jeanne-Marie Clerc, Assia Djebar: Écrire, Transgresser, Résister (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997) 59-79
52. Hafid Gafaiti, Les Femmes dans le roman Algérien (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996) 167-78
53. Also see Jean Dejeux, La Littérature féminine de langue française au Maghreb (Paris: Karthala, 1994) 60-111
54. Gracki 836; also see Valérie Budig-Markin, "Writing and Filming the Cries of Silence," World Literature Today 70 (1996): 893-904
55. See Laurence Huughie, "'Ecrire comme un voile': The Problematics of the Gaze in the Work of Assia Djebar," World Literature Today 70 (1996): 867-76
56. The alienation involved in bringing the sensible into speech is increased, of course, by translating Berber or Arabic oral discourse into written French. However, the differentiation of spoken and written language is itself indigenous to Algeria, where the Maghrebi Arabic of daily speech and Standard Modern Arabic of print culture are quite distinct. Indeed, it is arguable that linguistic and cultural pluralism are integral to Maghreb identity (see Woodhull, ix-xxiv; Abdelkebir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel [Paris: Denoël, 1983])
57. See Stephen Greenblatt's account of non-colonizing "wonder" in Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 20
58. Julia Kristeva, Interviews, trans. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) 10. Kristeva argues "that because of women's determinative role in reproduction and the importance of the father-daughter relationship, women are more apt to respect social restrictions, are less inclined to approve of anarchy, and are more concerned with ethics. This may explain why women's negativity is not a Nietzschean fury" (98)
59. For accounts of the relationship between the maternal and the symbolic in Kristeva, see Anne-Marie Smith, Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable (London: Pluto Press, 1998) 49-76
60. Donald R. Wehrs, "The Site of Western Modernism in Postcolonial African Identity: Nanga, Gide, Kristeva, and the Overcoming of Betrayal," The Comparatist 25 (2001): 24-27
61. On this distinction, see Anne Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001) 51-54
62. On the ethics of an intellectual's mediation of postcolonial voices, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "French Feminism Revisited," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992) 54-85
63. For Spivak's reading of Djebar, see Spivak, "Echo," New Literary History 24.1 (Winter 1993): 28-30
64. "Acting Bits/Identity Talk," Critical Inquiry 18.4 (Summer 1992): 770-73
65. On the temptation to view fusion and homogenous unity as political ideals in Islamic contexts, see Fatima Mernissi, "Arab Women's Rights and the Muslim State in the Twenty-First Century: Reflections on Islam as Religion and State," in Faith and Freedom, 33-50
66. Alistair Home notes the Algerian proverb, "The Angel and the Man work for unity; Satan and the Woman for division," in A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-62 (New York: Viking, 1978) 402
67. Gracki points out the "doubling and merging of feminine identities" (838) among the protagonists of the three volumes of the Algerian Quartet so far published, which she attributes to "the solidarity and sisterhood principle" (841), but such merging intensifies rather than dilutes the responsibility of one for the other, much as the blurring of the self/other dyad in maternity grounds, for Kristeva, a "herethics" weaving together love and separation, and as the blurring of the dyad in paternity grounds, for Levinas, a fraternity irreducible to collectivism (see "Stabat Mater," in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1987] esp. 248-63
68. Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969] esp. 274-80)
69. See Ira M. Lapidus, "Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfillment in Islam," in Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of "Adab" in South Asian Islam, ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 38-61
70. Mernissi, Women's Rebellion and Islamic Memory 99
71. Annemarie Schimmel notes that rahma, derived from rahim, "mother's womb," is the root of "the constantly repeated divine names ar-rahman, 'The Compassionate,' and ar-rahim, 'The Merciful'" in My Soul is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam, trans. Susan H. Ray (New York: Continuum, 1997) 93-94
72. Woodhull reads this ending as denoting intense pessimism about Algerian culture (86-87)
73. See Cooke 64-70; Zimra 823-34; Budig-Markin 901-02
74. In "Anamnesis in the Language of Writing," Djebar describes the writer as rider and language as horse in terms that modify hierarchy, suggesting a back and forth between writer/rider and language/horse (see esp. 188). However, the image of writer as rider in L'amour, la fantasia, central to that novel's affirmation of self-assertion as integral to feminist emancipation, is reversed here by presenting the writer as the one "spurred."
75. See Cooke's account of Zaynab al-Ghazali and Fatima Mernissi (83-106, 70-75). In Shi'a Islam, the cleric (iman) functions as intermediary between God and the people, but Sunni Islam stresses the immediate accessibility of each believer to God. 37 Zebiri 18, 23, 21
76. Zeberi 129; also see Speight 63-81
77. Zeberi 133, 145; also see 132-80
78. Zeberi 131
79. Knauss 34, 44, Sheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis, El Chihab (November 1932); quoted in Knauss 44; also see Lazreg 80-92
80. Lazreg 210; also see Knauss 118-201
81. Abdellah Djaballah, in Kamel Hamdi, Ali Benhaji, Abassi Madani, Mahfoud Nalnah, Abdellah Djaballah. Différents ou différends? (Alger: Chibab, 1991) 31; quoted in Lazreg 211. Also see Knauss 125-40; Moghissi 68-73; Stone 155-74
82. See Bennoune 188-95; Stone 190-96
83. See Stowasser, Women in the Qur'an, Tradition, and Interpretation 5-7
84. Djebar's use of "fitna," denoting both rebellion and subversive, irreligious freedom, is double-edged, implying that fundamentalist misogynistic violence, exemplified by the Algerian Islamist fitna (rebellion, resistance) of the nineties, is reflective of all inter-Islamic civil war, itself the product of an egotistic rebellion
85. The term was coined by Djebar. In the italicized sections of the novel, she creates fictional female transmitters of tradition in an effort to imagine the oral female voices effaced by written male sources
86. See Cooke 66
87. See Levinas, Otherwise Than Being 92-93, 113-15
88. Mernissi, Women's Rebellion and Islamic Memory 81-82
89. The Veil and the Male Elite 118-20
90. See Julia Kristeva, Sens et non-sens de la révolte: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse I (Paris: Fayad, 1996) 186-88, 221-23, for one version of this process
91. Also see Smith's commentary in Julia Kristeva 70-76, 91-94