One

Djebar, perhaps more than any writer I have yet encountered, squirms under the pressure of representation. A sensitive and subtle thinker, Djebar understands the danger, and thus the delicacy required, of exhibition: unveiling herself and her desires, rewriting history, representing others, and echoing their voices in another language. Her novel struggles under its incessant self-assessing gaze. In text Djebar and her novel’s narrative voice shift about, so much so that on my first read of L’Amour, la fantasia, I was incapable of summarizing Djebar’s political stance. Indeed the word stance sounds a discordant note in a discussion of the author and her fluid novel, the aesthetic density of which seemed to prevent straightforward political interpretation. Despite, or rather because of this wriggling, however, Djebar and her oeuvre live, with few exceptions, within a tight circle of postcolonial, francophone, and feminist scholarship. The opacity of her prose and its relentless fiddling was intended, at least in part, to forestall what Clarisse Zimra calls “representational tokenism.”Footnote ⁶ It is thus ironic that this opacity has contributed to her strict categorization. The elusiveness of her first-person speaker is itself grounds for tagging her the quintessential postcolonial feminist.

Scholarship on Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia is overwhelmingly approbative. Literary scholars praise Djebar as a daring writer. They describe her as a champion of the silenced—an Arab feminist brave enough to exhume atrocities of the past. Doubly resistant, writing against systems of both patriarchal and colonial oppression, Djebar “swims up time’s stream, dares to follow in her ancestors’ tracks, unearths their imprints left and overlooked by time, and fights against their erasure.”Footnote ⁷ Djebar excavates buried and silenced female voices. She “subverts preconceived notions and fills in gaps.”Footnote ⁸ Djebar revises, re-appropriates, and re-visions history and French, refusing the totalizing and reductive representations imposed by colonial and masculine authority and destabilizing the binary between personal and collective. She grapples with collective memory and substitutes so-called minor discourses for those ossified and univocal. She unveils herself in writing, comes to terms with her subjectivity and all the complications that entails. Wrestling with her own unfurling in French—both a liberating and ideologically drenched system—Djebar ultimately transcends the trauma of exile through repossessing what Salman Rushdie once memorably named the wells of language poisoned by “vocabularies of power.”Footnote ⁹ Academic work on Djebar univocally celebrates her writing, in particular her historiography, as crucial, revisionary, and visionary.

Djebar, a lifelong walker on politically thin ice, certainly has merited such praise. As Soheila Kian notes, an Algerian woman who exposes herself as an individual with a body destabilizes codes of gender, especially as they relate to space: “This unveiling of myself as a self constitutes a serious violation and Djebar knows it.”Footnote ¹⁰ Leïla Slimani, a 2016 winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, sent shockwaves through contemporary North Africa with her exploration of Moroccan women’s vie sexuelle, Footnote ¹¹ eliciting both praise and alarm for the audacity of her subject matter. Thirty years before, however, Djebar dared to unveil herself, her sexuality, and the history of feminine resistance during the Algerian War for Independence, a fearless challenge to several centers of power, and one hitherto unheard of in the North African Francophonie. Subsequently criticizing the campaign to unify the country under a single Arab-Islamic banner, Djebar chose exile over probable death. The danger was indeed immediate: as Dominique Fisher notes in Ecrire l’urgence, Islamic extremists assassinated many celebrated Algerian writers in the 1990s, including Abdelkader Alloula, Tahar Djaout, and Youssef Sebti.Footnote ¹²

Risky, urgent, and innovative, Djebar’s oeuvre also fits well into the critical vision of what postcolonial creativity ought to do. L’Amour, la fantasia threatens binaries and undermines master narratives. Its redaction of colonial history upsets the untrue tale of French soldiers carrying civilization into untamed Algerian spaces. Like her Moroccan peer, Fatema Mernissi (1940–2015), Djebar resists Europe’s hegemonic representation of the literal and metaphoric female harem by inverting the colonizer’s gaze, then multiplying it. Djebar gives voice to the subaltern, mimics the once and still master, and displaces her voice from the periphery to the center of history.

Scholarly praise is well deserved, and it is only fitting that postcolonial theory informs the novel’s critical reception. A survey of this scholarship, however, reveals a troubling degree of homogeneity. In responding to Djebar, postcolonial, francophone, and feminist scholars discuss many of the same themes and, for the most part, these scholars draw from the same well of voices: Foucault, Fanon, Spivak, Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Said. Already, scholarly work often circulates only within an elite and economically advantaged population. Djebar’s critical reception seems to pull the circle still tighter. In its insistence on instability and mélange, the uniformity of this academic work is made all the more striking.

As a salient example, consider the self-checking with which scholars begin their analyses of Djebar’s work. The possibility of repeating, deepening, and extending structures of power or Orientalist modes of thought looms large in the postcolonial critical mind. This possibility encourages an apologetic overture. Critics often admit, in an apophasis, of sorts, to their complicity in systems of power. Anne Donadey wonders, “Isn’t the radical potential of scholarship written in the ‘West’ always already limited by its location in the centers of power?”Footnote ¹³ Similarly, John Erickson writes, “I have often asked myself the question whether my own subject position … can elude colonizing (im)positions.”Footnote ¹⁴ One of the hallmarks of postcolonial theory is to foreground “the thickness of the investigator,” the subject’s “unavoidable presence in mediating the voices of silenced others.”Footnote ¹⁵ Postcolonial literature is one that “must, of necessity, account for its own complicity in structures of domination.”Footnote ¹⁶ This also applies to postcolonial literature’s critical reception, stitched through with anxiety about the scholar’s determining position. Without doubt, at least in part, these anxious critics are responding to Djebar’s own “investigative thickness.” Though increasing self-awareness in the academic research is an unquestionably positive development, the ubiquity of such self-checking also signals a lack of theoretical diversity in critical responses to Djebar.

Part of this theoretical homogeneity, and for the purposes of this paper, an important part, has to do with the treatment of literary devices. By literary devices I refer to the tools with which an author builds her book and sculpts its ornamentation. As a pithy summary of the way in which critics treat aesthetic tools in L’Amour, la fantasia, I turn to Fisher:

Here Fisher suggests aesthetics is a box to be checked by an author. Djebar “fills” the aesthetic requirement, though these aesthetics, Fisher implies, are more productively marshaled into a political battle. Some scholars go further: Erickson suggests, “Postcolonial and postmodern authors are both marked by authorial self-reflexivity and self-referentiality … that results in the author focusing on the writing process rather than the narrative elements of character, plot, and setting.”Footnote ¹⁸ It is the “rather than” that I find problematic, although his claim that postmodern authors focused more on writing than on narrative elements is contestable. Erickson implies that the narrative elements of postcolonial authors are accidental and that postcolonial writers spend their creative energies on self-reflexively contemplating the creative act, rather than shaping their work with literary devices.

Academic work on Djebar primarily turns its attention to genre, narrative and movement, character, and mood—terms that ought to get at the particularities of a text—to explain their capacity to disrupt and destabilize regimes of power. In regard to genre, theorists, understandably wary of the potential for autobiographies to reduce colonized subjects to consumable slices of knowledge, Footnote ¹⁹ praise Djebar’s novel for mixing generic boundaries: history, memoire, and fiction jostle together, disrupting the frontiers of discipline and categorized form.Footnote ²⁰ Erickson asserts that the form of postcolonial texts, of which Djebar’s novel offers just one example, works to “delegitimize the master narratives” of European origin, Footnote ²¹ engaging in Wittgensteinian language games to subvert these dominant models.Footnote ²² Donadey claims that one of the three characteristics of postcolonial literature is the “fragmentary, exploded nature” of a novel’s narrative that cannot and does not “seek to create new master histories.”Footnote ²³ In the words of Robert Elbaz, with Djebar’s text “we are indeed far from the representational French-Occidental novel, a form that unrolls according to a reductive linearity.”Footnote ²⁴ Djebar belongs to the literary resistance, those who choose “an aesthetic that smashes the canons of European culture.”Footnote ²⁵

The archetypal, idealized form against which critics measure Djebar is perhaps Flaubert’s realism or Zola’s naturalism. Yet artists interrogated, refashioned, and subverted these forms throughout the twentieth century in Western as well as postcolonial contexts. Arguably, generic instability characterizes the most quintessentially “modern” texts, the canons of European culture—Woolf’s Orlando or Joyce’s Ulysses. The French “nouveau roman” movement, championed by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Ricardou, had rejected so-called established features of the novel twenty-five years before Djebar wrote her book.Footnote ²⁶ Disruption of form, multiplicity, experimentation, boundary pushing, idiosyncrasy, and the attempt to “smash” the novel place an artist in the tradition of twentieth-century avant-garde art. Conceiving of the genre of L’Amour, la fantasia in such a way misses what is distinctive about the book.

When describing the texture of Djebar’s text, critics often suggest its polyphony carries intrinsic political meaning. Milò considers this plurality of voices a result of her historiographical task; L’Amour, la fantasia works out a “nouvelle Histoire,” one that employs a wider set of material and multiple perspectives.Footnote ²⁷ Donadey considers “the complex intertextual matrix”—text suspended in a network of other works—as characteristic of the postcolonial project and a result of their revisionary goals. Intertextuality allows for the contestation and reinvention of tradition.Footnote ²⁸ Erickson considers the “univocal,” like linear plot, an aspect of European “master discourses.”Footnote ²⁹ Both Kian and Donadey conceive of Djebar’s use of citation and scattered epigraphs as politically motivated. Epigraphs simultaneously legitimize a text and “serve to subvert the hegemonic text… . Even the usage of the epigraph, a text marked by marginality, is the perfect vehicle for the marginal perspective of postcolonial authors.”Footnote ³⁰ Connecting to Jane Hiddleston’s idea of the kernel of an Algerian subject that continually obfuscates itself, “the singular being … infinitely shifting away from its classification in language,”Footnote ³¹ polyphony—citations, epigraphs, proliferating voices—is a way to hide behind a mask.Footnote ³²

The analyses cited previously should not be dismissed; indeed the slipperiness of Djebar’s first-person speaker and the novel’s unstable generic category, nonlinear movement, and polyphony testify to important postcolonial realities. As more and more scholarship in the field emphasizes, however, praiseworthy postcolonial literature is not just politically useful. Conceiving of L’Amour, la fantasia’s relationship to its generic designation requires more subtle verbs than “smash” or “subvert.” The form of L’Amour, la fantasia is neither broken (like postcolonial society) nor impossibly opaque (like the self ). Rather, as its curator Djebar places vignettes and extended meditations next to one another like paintings in a museum.

I ultimately think it is more interesting to consider the particular way Djebar is using, adapting, and reimagining what a novel can do, rather than reducing her aesthetics to a few key words, such as resistant, transgressive, and visionary. I would like to read L’Amour, la fantasia for its craft—the logic of the work, its weave and order—and pay close attention to the detail of its composition. We could be more careful with the novel’s strings, trace where they go and how they knit together, and do so without ignoring the political implications of such embroidery. In Djebar’s own words, writing “n’est pas simplement témoigner.”Footnote ³³

In “Ces voix au fil de soi(e): le détour du poétique,” Françiose Lionnet discusses Djebar’s historical dissertation and its intersection with the aesthetic: a stubborn and vexed problématique Lionnet considers fundamental, even constitutive, of postcolonial discourse. Aesthetics might connote luxury, superfluity, immobilization, and ataraxia: “the idea of art existing for its own sake or of literature appealing to some transcendent human experience”Footnote ³⁴ that postcolonial theory so soundly rejects. Yet, suggests Lionnet, aesthetics might also offer a brief truce, or an advantageous pause, one that restarts a discussion or announces an opening. She wonders, “How might we design the contours of a space where the political and aesthetic do not cancel each other out?”Footnote ³⁵

To academics working on L’Amour, la fantasia, the space and opening that Lionnet imagines could suggest a way to retrieve Djebar from relative obscurity. As I argue in this paper’s third section, scholars in the humanities have a special role in curating—caring for, guarding, and protecting—histories and narratives that might otherwise slip into oblivion. One effective way to curate a text is to convey it: open up what threatens to become an echo chamber and translate the text into different contexts. L’Amour, la fantasia is a precious artifact, yet the book has several barriers to entry: the novel is undoubtedly difficult. Its English translation is cumbersome. Scholarship that ought to be thickening the book’s net and expanding its network remains redundant for those fluent in postcolonial theory while being very opaque for the uninitiated. These theoretical conversations need not disappear, but they could be supplemented by other kinds of writing. The leveling of politics and aesthetics—or, more precisely, the discovery of a space in which the two might more equally coexist—offers one way for scholars to revitalize discussion on Djebar: to circulate her text into different contexts.

In an article aptly entitled “Hearing Voices, or, Who You Calling Postcolonial,” Zimra rearticulates the “representational demands” Djebar experienced as a public persona. Her real challenge, Zimra insists, was to refuse the “representational prescriptive of the postcolonial.”Footnote ³⁶ Zimra ends her article with a hope and a challenge for scholars: to judge Djebar’s writing “qua writing.”Footnote ³⁷ Returning to an irony expressed at the beginning of this section, the accusation Zimra levels at postcolonial studies involves appropriation. The critical reception of L’Amour, la fantasia hails Djebar as the paradigmatic postcolonial author—elusive, mobile, she who forestalls appropriation—and in its praise neatly positions her within the borders of postcolonial studies. Granted, one wonders what Zimra had in mind when she evoked “writing qua writing,” as the majority of twentieth-century theories of reading start from the idea that all literary judgments rely on assumptions and expectations. I am, however, deeply sympathetic to Zimra’s call for a more diverse set of expectations.

Two

The following section conducts an experiment. I offer one reading of L’Amour, la fantasia with Lionnet’s imagined space in mind. In particular, my analysis will tune its ear to phonic and metaphoric rhyme. Rhyme and the extended family of concepts relating to “modified repetition”—recall, echo, imitation, mirror—bridge words and thoughts. They connect ideas, yet make their connection seem uncanny. Challenging memory and provoking rereading, modified repetition offers an aesthetic perspective from which to view the novel’s structure, but one that does not ignore its politically revisionary aspects. This paper’s third section will consider the need for such experimentation.

Djebar is interested in modified repetition because her model of writing prioritizes the voices of others, in particular, other Algerian women. In “holding [her] breath to hear everything again,”Footnote ³⁸ Djebar fashions her work into a sort of hollow, or cavityFootnote ³⁹ in which other voices clang about. Appropriately, in Djebar’s words and the minds of her critics, echoes, disembodied voices, represent women: the pale, frail phantomsFootnote ⁴⁰ murmuring around and within her. The “primary woman-reality is voice,” a sensory presence that “enters everyone, like a perfume.”Footnote ⁴¹ The circulation and collision of feminine sounds within the space of her writing is here compared to the diffusion of a fragrance. The source of an echoed sound or sweet scent is uncertain, yet everyone in the enclosure experiences its ambient effect. The slippery, protean, and plural “je”s in Djebar’s text reverberate like atmospheric utterances; feminine echoes multiply in the vast spaces of Djebar’s prose.

Critical interest in modified repetition divides into two camps. Echo is noteworthy either as Djebar’s method of representation or as one of her subversive strategies. In regard to representation, one way to describe the material of Djebar’s fiction is to call it the product of silence, or the textual result of listening and recording others.Footnote ⁴² A “mise en écho,” Djebar’s writing reflects a “compulsive need to record the voices all around us, those that fly away and dry out.”Footnote ⁴³ Ernestpeter Ruhe smartly elaborates these ideas, imagining Djebar as the postcolonial incarnation of Ovid’s echo: “Giving voice means grasping the words of others to craft her own,” or using her novel as the workbench on which to build theirs.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the second camp, scholars like Donadey, gesturing toward Bhabha’s work on mimicry, insist that echo flips the power dynamics of knowledge and its discursive diffusion. Postcolonial literature re-appropriates mimicry, a nineteenth-century colonial strategy in which repetition reinforced dissimilitude.Footnote ⁴⁵ Writing from the margins of empire, Djebar reproduces a French general’s ghastly descriptions of imperial atrocity in order to highlight the hollowness of his echo.

My intervention acknowledges echo’s ability to both represent and subvert, though I am primarily interested in “modified repetition” as a formal technique within each of the novel’s three parts and across them. In fact, “echo” as an ordering feature suggested itself after several close readings of the text. The novel struck me as particularly onirique: dreamy, misty, and mystical scattered with sharp vignettes. Detailed moments—the button torn from a Frenchman’s uniform, thrust forward by the hand of a dying prostitute—sparkle in the larger whirl of the novel. The book’s lucidity happens in spite of sequential understanding, and the messiness of sequence is, at least in part, orchestrated by relentless recursivity. In L’Amour, la fantasia, as in dreams, precision of scene and indistinct ordering comingle. New images subtly recall earlier moments, making many of the later episodes seem uncanny: strange and new, yet strangely familiar.

Surprising couplets, a series of vignettes linked together by “hook” words that suggest each couplet’s relation and conceptual importance, as well as formal and conceptual doubling characterize the novel’s first part. The structure of these vignettes follows a logic. The scenes begin, appropriately, at dawn (aube), followed by two confrontations (combat) and their ensuing destruction (explosion). Curiously, Part One ends with a twin ouverture. Breaches that open into beginnings, these two final sections describe the mixing that results from the destruction of external and cultural walls: the penetration of a city’s citadels and her parents’ culturally illicit, written declaration of love. The movement of this logic—a beginning (aube) that culminates with another beginning (ouverture) that doubles as an opening, initiation, and mixing—is already presented in the first two scenes of the book, what I consider to be the novel’s exposition.

In “Violence de l’autobiographie,” Djebar announces, “the most crucial component of any text, whether autobiographical or fictive, is its movement … and in a certain way, l’essentiel is a text’s first phrase: a rhythmic début.”Footnote ⁴⁶ “Fillette arabe allant pour la première fois à l’école,” the novel’s first phrase and title for the first section of its contrapuntal first part, moves in unexpected ways. After a series of nominal phrases, the novel slides away from the protagonist, meditating on the consequences of her education. Djebar relates how she received a love letter written in schoolboy French and saw it subsequently destroyed by her father. Narrative time again accelerates. French, given and censored by this patriarch, becomes the language of her secret correspondences. This section’s mobile wordsFootnote ⁴⁷ push forward one final time to rest on the moment in which Djebar, at her writing desk, turns back and considers her childhood. In two pages the little girl going to school has grown under our eyes. Her adult self wheels away from the present and settles into this early memory, one smoothed and shined by time’s tide. Djebar takes her memory in hand and together they leave at dawn. They stride from dawn to dawn, the hook word offered as a stepping-stone, and land in 1830. On the morning of July 13, Djebar and her younger incarnation examine the French invasion of Algiers.

Circular movement characterizes the text. The first section doubles back; it springs from and lands on dawn, just as the novel’s first part begins at dawn and concludes with an ouverture. The final, fifth movement of the book’s third part, just pages before the novel’s conclusion, returns to its opening image: “The father, straight silhouette and a fez on his head, walks through the village’s streets.” His hand pulls Djebar along.Footnote ⁴⁸ Compactly prefigured by the movement of its first, sharp section, the novel’s denouement settles in the same neighborhood as its exposition, though we learn a great deal as the book clouds, twirls, and expands. The novel, at least in its first two parts, splits and moves like a coupled dance next to which chronological lines and plot rails rest obsolete. Djebar acts as the point from which memories ripple outward.

The two outermost concentric circles, the conquest of Algeria and a little girl’s acquisition of French, has one woman’s quiet and generous mind as their steady center. Concerns of love, language, representation, and femininity surge and subside; ideas resurface in modified form, like variations of a musical motif. Indeed, the novel’s movement can be more accurately mapped on vertical axes; motifs change key, and any given arrangements of ideas and concerns vary according to the place in the book.

This circuitous movement—the novel’s obsessive doubling-back paired with Djebar’s elusive prose—synchronizes with the first and second parts’ couplet structure as well as their thematic doubling. For example, the little girl’s initiation into French, “a double sign, contradictory,”Footnote ⁴⁹ doubly marked by liberation and occlusion, happens under the twin aegis of patriarchy and colonial legacy. And the first part’s second dawn is the backdrop for the first “face à face”Footnote ⁵⁰ between the feminine city of Algiers and masculine French soldiers: a “double découverte,” “the blindness of mutual love at first site.”Footnote ⁵¹ This encounter is itself dually described as a performance for a lover and the violent and murderous penetration of a place and a culture. A faint echo of this first ambivalent face-to-face encounter with the European Other sounds in “La fille du gendarme français.” The spouse of a French gendarme and the mother of Djebar’s three young cloistered friends stand “face à face.” The large and rigorous silhouette of the woman from Burgundy approaches the willowy, dry, and muscular face of the Arab-Berber mother. The French woman extends her hand in farewell, and to this salutation the Algerian woman responds with quick kisses on each of the woman’s shoulders. The women embrace “like two peasants.”Footnote ⁵² Formal doubling, the yoking together of scenes within a couplet schema, as well as the novel’s circular movement, corresponds to the novel’s intense, even overwhelming, production of conceptual doubles.

Even Djebar’s prose style speaks with two tongues. Her description of the mutual discovery of France and Algeria circles back to, repeats, and modifies the type of Orientalist discourse that twentieth-century postcolonial scholars so rigorously exposed and denounced. Her lovely description of Algiers, one example of this layered discourse, is worth quoting in full:

Verbs, like plots, work both as engines and structuring agents. The stillness of this encounter, like the single breath after the lights dim and before the action begins, is to be found first in the grammar of the description. Here and elsewhere, Djebar personifies the city as a languid woman lounging in a rich and sensuous landscape. The French imperial fleet slides toward her, performing “a sumptuous ballet”Footnote ⁵⁴ in a theater of seduction. And the role of the Impregnable City is to play, “all in lace and delicate colors,”Footnote ⁵⁵ “an Oriental woman immobilized in her mystery.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Djebar attributes to this woman a surreal, ghostly kind of purity. Both her purity and attraction seem mythic; the city’s epithet—“spectral whiteness”—suggests it exists more in legend than in reality. The darkened, shadowy greenery on which this Oriental woman languidly lies evokes a murkier, more mysterious and corrupt Eden. The painting contains just a sketched barrier. Hurtles to the possession of the city are hinted at, but their flimsiness is assured.

In this passage Djebar plays with modes of representation; she, a scholar of Delacroix, evokes the kind of mythic, and imagined, indolent female body that so charmed European artists at the height of imperial activity. Yet the irony of this evocation is equivocal. For Djebar’s description of Algiers is itself quite enchanting; its painted portrait contains the problematic ideas of colonial power but articulates them in a sonorous way. In fact, the precision of this colonial gaze suggests wonder and appreciation. Djebar packs into prose the idea that the remembering of this first encounter must literally speak with two tongues. The lover’s whisper and the murderer’s rage must be thought together in rhyme; the duality cannot be further resolved.

The novel’s doubling—recursive narration, forked-tongue discourse, face-to-face encounters, and thematic mirroring—match the couplet structure of its first and second part. But what can we make of each seemingly incongruous couplet? In the second historical section, discussing one of the first violent engagements in the French colonial march, Djebar notes, “a kind of aporia arises from this clash between two peoples. Is it rape, is it love suppressed, even disavowed, vaguely perceived in its bared and culpable wanting?”Footnote ⁵⁷ Aporia, like ambivalence, forces a reader to combine two ideas without the prospect of resolution. Tense and competing impulses scar the social and political issues that spur this author into creative prose. The couplet structure of her first two parts formally enacts the kinds of ambivalence she thematically explores.

In the critical reception of L’Amour, la fantasia, the point has often been made that Djebar alternates between collective memory and individual memoire. In Ces voix, Djebar considers her writing as an alternation between voice and body, and a “pitching and tossing”Footnote ⁵⁸ among languages. Scholars consider the alteration a jostling between history and the individual, written and oral accounts, and masculine and feminine modes of accounting. Zimra argues that the book formally explores an opposition between the “lived and written, the re-remembered and the unsaid”; the novel itself emerges from a conflict between “the History of the invader (the said and written) and the history of the invaded (the unsaid and unwritten).”Footnote ⁵⁹ Similarly, Elbaz describes the couplet structure as the “va-et-vient between an autobiographical discourse and a historical one,” “overlapping discourses that follow and correct one another.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Like the sonic layering of Arabic and French in her 1982 film, La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli, Djebar piles up the lettered accounts of French male officers, those who composed the official history of nineteenth-century Algeria, and transcribed female voices during the War for Independence.Footnote ⁶¹ In her written work, Djebar approaches simultaneity with quick shifts between French and Arabic, masculine history and feminine orality.

Critics are correct in conceiving of alteration in this way, yet in their descriptions they tend to gloss over the particular nature of each vignette and how each of a pair relates to its sister scene. The couplet rhyme scheme of these first eight sections, like lines in a poem, forces the reader to yoke together the unexpected. The yoking together of these scenes separated by time, scale, and intensity is often surprising, and the pairing often grotesque. The rhyming is not, however, a simple ironic gesture or an attempt to disrupt a linear narrative. Just as Djebar engages with rather than erases Orientalist modes of representation, these incongruous couplets speak back and forth to one another. Djebar works ambivalence and aporia into the novel’s structure.Footnote ⁶²

The combat presented in “Trois jeunes filles cloîtrées” is a hushed, feminine revolt humming under a sleepy hamlet in northern Algeria. Djebar rhymes the fervor with which three girls write love letters with the violence described by a French officer. He claims an Arab woman hysterically ripped the heart out of a French corpse on the battlefield. Another smashed “the skull of her child like a spring pomegranate”Footnote ⁶³ to prevent him from falling into enemy hands. The third autobiographical section features a series of small cultural explosions. How does a reader compare culture shocks and the exchange of recipes between two women to the destruction of Fort Emperor, the “heap … of torn cadavers,”Footnote ⁶⁴ and J. T. Merle’s description of native Algerians as “savage head-cutters”?Footnote ⁶⁵ Similarly, how do we understand “la révolution” of “Mon père écrit à ma mère,” a chapter in which the narrator’s father commits “the most audacious manifestation of love,” he “dared to write the name of his wife,”Footnote ⁶⁶ next to final “prise” and pillaging of Algiers?

Making sense of the couplet pairing, the rhyming between scenes and across history, is relentless and required work for Djebar’s reader. Softer, exciting, and extraordinary moments of cultural interaction—an awkward good-bye between mothers, a moment of mutual and open love—exist in rhyming relation with violent and amorous and harrowing scenes of conquest from more than a century ago. The two, argues Djebar, must be taken together. Productive, entangled, but curiously liberating moments in the author’s twentieth-century autobiography must be yoked with bloody scenes of an earlier and darker age. The aporia Djebar formally threads together insists that contemporary Algeria must be recalled in tandem with the horror of its previous histories. The couplet form uses rhyme to force connection and focus attention.

Part One uses modified repetition in the form of rhyme; conceptual hook words chain together incongruous scenes, forcing a relation between two vignettes separated by both time and intensity. The logic of Part Two’s rhyming couplets is quieter; repetition with a difference involves internalization. In each of the paired sections, the horrific deeds of French officers in the external world of nineteenth-century Algeria—namely, the embalming in smoke of entire tribes—reverberate inside the narrator’s mind. The historical chapters of Part Two offer a plummet by which the narrator measures the depth of her self and her speech; colonial history sounds against, and thus defines, the contours of Djebar’s internal landscape. The historic and richly metaphoric cave—concurrently figured as a wound, aperture, cemetery, and site of potential redemptionFootnote ⁶⁷—is a curiously creative hollow, one that captures the ambivalence of reopening old scars. Considering the thematic resonance of the cave, its exploration, and the uncovering of its forgotten contents, it is unsurprising that the novel’s structural patterns play with the external and internal: what is outside and what is kept in.

To offer just one example, “La Razzia du capitaine Bosquet” describes a razzia, or looting, conducted by the French in 1840. In the autobiographical chapter that follows, Djebar, on vacation in Normandy, receives an erotic letter from her husband during a prolonged period of separation. Djebar guards the letter in her wallet, but a rejected admirer rummages through her affairs, finds it, and then reads it. The razzia of captain Bosquet beats again through Djebar’s lived experience. Bosquet’s description of the poetry of the Algerian landscape and her husband’s letter demonstrate that there is something loving, erotic, yet imperial in using words to detail an environment. Recalling the careful gaze of the imperialist fleet gliding toward Algiers, Bosquet’s letter is tinged with ardor. And the ardent gaze of Djebar’s husband lays claim to the body he describes. Both episodes involve theft; Bosquet’s troops steal goods, jewels, and the precious lives of seven Algerian women. In the autobiographical section, the original erotic pillaging of Djebar’s body is followed by two additional thefts, an assault on Djebar’s sense of privacy, and the departure of love from Djebar’s first marriage: “intimate words became the harbinger for intimacy’s death.”Footnote ⁶⁸

The most structurally complex section, Part Three splits into four movements that subdivide into six sections, a two-section fifth movement, and a three-section finale, Tzarl-rit. In her short essay, “Violence de l’autobiographie,” Djebar acknowledges that, with the design of the third part, she wanted to remove the novel from the “double structure” into which it had “comfortably settled.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In broad strokes, the third part presents an orchestrated confusion of first-person speakers, anecdotes, images, and settings. One way that we might read each movement is like a sentence that carries sense only after each of its components has been read. The style of her story’s telling could be described as cubist—the reader receives six points of view. Six idiosyncratic visions sketch shadow, depth, and detail into one singular landscape. The story comes into focus only after all six sections have been assembled in overlay.

Modified repetition in the form of recursive imagery structures the third part’s echo chamber. Scenes and images resurface in modified form in a way that creates a delicate network of itinerate echoes, what Zimra calls a “constellation” built by repetition and variation.Footnote ⁷⁰ For example, Djebar finds something revelatory in the image of ruins charred by fire. She suggests that the fire that made the ruins can illuminate them as well. As Lla Zohra cries, “My farm was burned three times,”Footnote ⁷¹ the reader recalls Chérifa from the novel’s first movement, a woman who tells Djebar, novelist-witness, how “France came and she burned us… . Then the soldiers returned; they burned us again.”Footnote ⁷² Stretching back to Biffure, a reader remembers how Djebar describes the section’s cave as hazed by “the aura of flames from successive fires.”Footnote ⁷³ These charred ruins reappear with Nacmaria, then resurface, in Part Three, with the broken and blackened walls of Lla Zohra’s farm, as well as the ruined zaouia of Beni Ménacer. Djebar identifies “words” with fire;Footnote ⁷⁴ both can clarify, destroy, and lead her onward. From the glare of these fires, Djebar “one century later” escapes the harem.Footnote ⁷⁵ Thus Djebar, postcolonial Prometheus, steals Saint-Arnaud’s fire and French—his mots torches—to rescue herself and her past.

Fire and scorched rock, delirious elderly women in the backroom, grotesque and active limbs that subtly respond to Delacroix’s famous tableau, and rhythms that start with a mortar and pestle, transform into tambours, syncopate with the moans of an ecstatic dancer and a knock on the door, and momentarily “suspend … the sewing machine’s lullaby”Footnote ⁷⁶—these are the echoes that fill Djebar’s novel. Her aesthetic privileges the drawing of relations within and across the novel’s parts. These echoes blur boundaries without dissolving distinction; they gesture toward connectivity while maintaining the particular circumstance of, say, the prostitute Khadidja and the pious, but poor Lla Zohra. Echo is the method with which Djebar builds her third part, and through echo she creates her onirique atmosphere. In tracing echoes a reader traces the way Djebar threads characters and situations together. Echoes create routes through a text ordered, not according to linearity, but according to connection.

Three

Modified repetition offers just one of the possible tools for sketching Françoise Lionnet’s imagined space.Footnote ⁷⁷ In studying its composition—its rhythms, rhymes, and echoed imagery—I do not, indeed cannot, ignore the political and social realities the text explores.

The objection from which this paper begins is widely acknowledged. Over the past few decades, literary scholars, convinced that the previous century’s theorizing had neglected form, have reassessed the zeitgeist. John Su, citing Deepika Bahri, explores the “remarkable lack of a sufficiently developed critical framework” for discussing the formal aspects of postcolonial texts.Footnote ⁷⁸ Elleke Boehmer calls for a “re-vision” in postcolonial practice of the “too-little-examined notion of a postcolonial aesthetic.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Wole Ogundele argues that “literary discourse in Africa” has so perfectly “coupled literature to politics that discussions about their relationship” have “settled into orthodoxy.” In “African literature,” he continues, “the aesthetic impulse has remained under the controlling influence of the political imagination.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Scholars like Boehmer and Bahri, as well as Ato Quayson, Robert Young, and Jahan Ramazani, continue to reinvigorate postcolonial conversations through their astute attention to formal device and style.Footnote ⁸¹

As evinced by such scholarship, contemporary aesthetic inquiry need not aim for general theories of beauty. Attention to form, the theoretical application of which Nicholas Gaskill correctly identifies as confused and diffused, Footnote ⁸² means attention to a text’s singularity. Formal analysis requires a writer “to designate something peculiar to this work and this work only.”Footnote ⁸³ Studying a novel’s aesthetic requires slow reading and sustained attention. Formal analysis traces a text’s creative composition, interrogating the elements that make it a “literary” text and distinguish the work from, say, an argumentative essay.

Though the inequitable treatment of aesthetics in literary studies has already entered the critical conversation, I am wary of a resuscitation of interest in structure in order to arrive at an idea of the “postcolonial aesthetic.” Boehmer wonders whether we might discuss this aesthetic as scholars discuss a modern or romantic aesthetic. She questions whether “there is something intrinsically postcolonial about certain kinds of writing qua form.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Although I am sympathetic to Boehmer’s attention to formal concerns, I believe that the study of a text’s singularity is characteristic of an inquiry into aesthetic form. The move to describe formal commonality across such a bulky, imperfect category of creative writing threatens to invite the same sort of hasty readings and broad generalizations that characterized much of Djebar’s critical reception. Echoing Gaskill’s remark, “the whole point” of an aesthetic interpretation is to study formal technique in order to showcase the text’s particularity.Footnote ⁸⁵

Some suggest that attention to form offers a backdoor entry into a deeper understanding of postcolonial political and social realities. Boehmer, drawing from David Scott in Conscripts of Modernity, suggests, “It might help to shed light on the politics of the postcolonial text if we looked more closely at its generic and stanzaic forms.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Similarly, Ogundele argues that beginning one’s critique “from the political end,” rather than the literary one, “misses [a text’s] essential political value.” Ogundele believes that attending to the “literariness and specificity of the literature” serves to increase the text’s subversive political power.Footnote ⁸⁷ Within Ogundele’s logic, greater attention to form sharpens the aesthetic blade, which is once again conscripted into the fight against hegemonic power.

In my reading of Djebar, I attend to formal matters because her aesthetic, which seems fluid and spontaneous, is in fact exquisitely constructed. The fine manner in which she orders the text contributes to its genius, and the details of this structural complexity—the careful order under the seemingly chaotic surface—have been overlooked in our haste to celebrate the text’s political subversions. Reading for modified repetition, a method recommended by Djebar’s own interest in echo, serves as a kind of homage to an author who I believe to be underappreciated and read only within a very particular context. Attending to formal rhyme allows for a generous reading that includes the political but not exclusively so. Finally, tracing the particulars of her formal use of modified repetition, somewhat paradoxically, opens up new possibilities for comparison.

An Amazon review on Djebar evinces the need for such critical experimentation:Footnote ⁸⁸ one francophone reader calls Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartements a “disappointing book.” The reviewer condemns the text as “a mess of spluttering words” with “mangled” syntax.Footnote ⁸⁹ Assia Djebar, the post says, “still needs to learn… . She needs to learn grammar… . Perhaps she ought to reread Boileau … or go back to school.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Despite the accumulation of consistently laudatory critical texts, evidently some readers still misapprehend the point of Djebar’s project. Some still think that Djebar has not yet perfected the master’s language. Granted, this review is a single data point. Yet, it is sufficient to call into question the reach of what has hitherto constituted Djebar’s critical reception.

Academics have a unique role in preserving and caring for histories and narratives threatened by oblivion. As expressed by Rita Felski in a recent edition of New Literary History, caring for a piece of cultural heritage involves connection. The past is never preserved like jars of marmaladeFootnote ⁹¹ or conserved within airtight postcolonial circles. Drawing energy from connection, texts need to breathe; they are “made meaningful in relation to the concerns of the present.”Footnote ⁹² Thus, preserving a text requires conveying it: communicating, transporting, and translating cultural heritage.Footnote ⁹³

Literary scholars, as stewards, preserve texts by writing about them: thickening their interpretive nets and building those nets through connection and comparison to other works, theories, and ideas. The scholar’s role is creative; in creating connection, she preserves. Rephrasing an idea first expressed by Quayson in Calibrations, Boehmer writes, “the particular in art as a threshold of meaning always opening out to other levels.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Paying attention to the particular in Djebar’s text—for example, echo as its structural motif—simultaneously directs us to new comparative horizons.

In his concluding pages of Hybrid Muse, Ramazani asks a series of provocative questions: “What happens if we hybridize our canons,” if we placed third world poets “cheek by jowl alongside confessional poets and poets of the Movement, neoformalists and experimentalists?”Footnote ⁹⁵ What if we placed Djebar on a syllabus of modern literature? What new insights would result from situating Djebar beside Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, and Sylvia Plath? Could we consider the structure of L’Amour, la fantasia in parataxis with Rachel Cusk’s Outline or Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?

These comparisons, aside from increased exposure, would encourage more careful attention to what is distinctive on both sides of the comparison. They might work to dispel the myth that literature in so-called third world contexts is didacticism, disguised, or that postcolonial novels are metonyms for postcolonial political agendas. Aesthetic threads might stitch together canonical authors with more marginalized names, reinvigorating our understanding of renowned writers and encouraging our students to critique the very notion of the canon. Despite the fact that she is widely considered Algeria’s most renowned contemporary creative mind, Djebar remains a marginal figure. The politicization of her aesthetics has at least contributed to this marginalization.

In the same year that Djebar wrote L’Amour, la fantasia, she composed an essay entitled “Why write?” Simply stated, Djebar maintains she “write[s] against death, against forgetting … write[s] in the (piddling) hope of leaving a thread, a shadow, a scratch on quicksand.”Footnote ⁹⁶ It is the scholar’s unique role to take up Djebar’s thread and knit it into a larger pattern of thought. The author herself offers a model for productive, preserving comparison. Djebar wove together stories of feminine resistance, intertwining Pauline’s story with that of an anonymous Algerian, linking her maternal grandmother’s trances to her paternal grandmother’s silent gestures, and coupling these narratives to her own, tentative autobiography. In drawing connections, Djebar revitalized all parties in the relation. For the preservation of her text—alive only insofar as it is being read—as well as the histories of the women inscribed within, postcolonial scholars might consider modes of comparison that extend beyond the sociopolitical.

In times of mass migration and crisis, when the “interpenetration of cultures and languages increases, the old demons of purity and anti-métissage fight back, light up those hellish spots that burn the surface of the Earth.”Footnote ⁹⁷ One way to fight these demons is to extend the idea that selves are stitched into what Eva Hoffman calls the “fabric of larger signification.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Djebar teaches her readers that we are insofar as we relate. For those working in postcolonial theory, this lesson has never felt more relevant.