Promptbr: I thought it was interesting that you had this pre-conception. Can I ask why? I think perhaps it is a mark of pervasive Western prejudice that authors such as Djebar are consistently overlooked. I was astonished at the richness and complexity of the novel; (I think) not simply because she is “Algerian” (although perhaps this is not what you intended to say either?), but because it exudes a proclivity for the poetic, and offers a brilliant, expansive portrayal of the Algerian wars for independence, as well as the cloistered domestic scenes of women oppressed by Algerian patriarch. I read your review though, and liked it. I have been writing on the novel recently, and thought I’d share some of it here as well ……
In terms of
Fantasia as performance, I think many useful points can be made regarding its construction (or deconstruction?) of the (French?Algerian?Female?) identity of the protagonist/&author. In the novel can be seen precisely (what I call) the
effectivity of a (self-conscious) dialectic-as-linguistic-frame. The novel’s title itself insinuates what Dorothy Blair (in her introduction to the book) calls an ‘historical pageant’, the necessarily ‘contrapuntal’ relation between ‘the written (French) and the Oral (Arabic)’, made up of ‘personal accounts, [&] an inquiry into the nature of the Algerian Identity’. At first glance, the etymology of the title (at once a North African tradition; ‘a set of virtuoso movements on horseback executed at a gallop’, as well as then ‘a musical composition in which [...] “form is of secondary importance [...] usually contrapuntal’) seems to synthesize the African/European dichotomy of tradition (at “first glance” then, a process not unlike the Hegelian/Marxian ideal of the dialectic as a mode of constructive reason). However, a focus on the etymology of the term, as well as its foregrounding as the texts title, necessarily reveals its constituent elements to be heterogeneous, showing that it belongs to
both and neither community (community here the linguistically endowed community of
essential Europe and
essential Africa – the mistaken communities predicated on the assumption that a language is a ‘nation’s pedigree’). Thus, the title itself forbids a strictly Marxian reading, and moreover reveals the falsity of the structural assumptions imposed by way of merely regarding the stability of linguistic systems, as if they are historically containable, the unit of a word itself the homogenous
telos (or “absolute expression”). In short, I would say, if both the Arabic and the French/European were synchronously total, a merging of the two would indeed imply an ideal synthesis (the French-Algerian). The (Derridean) deferral of meaning however prohibits the initial homogeneity of the thesis, and thus scuppers a total identity.
This is an important point to be made when attempting to understand the book generally, for (I believe) it is precisely the textual nature of Djebarian hybridity (and specifically within
Fantasia) that gives rise to a type of postmodern (or “postcolonial”) subjectivity. A focus on intertextuality (the author’s appropriation of the colonial reportage of the Spaniard writing for the
Heraldo, for example), as well as the motif of the palimpsest (notably engaged with Pellissier, the French general, who ‘respects the law of silence’), necessarily foregrounds the author’s sensitivity to cultural “events”, her self-reflexivity; an agency continually engaged in historical dialogue with Colonial bias in the form of the accounts by officials in the oppressor’s military. In the very compilation of this account, inscribed, as it were, (in part) over Pellissier’s silence, intertextually bound with the half-utilized report of the Spanish officer, Djebar’s narrator indeed positions herself impossibly between the reader and the colonist, each of whose subjectivities implicitly
become self-reflexive by way of insinuating a reliance upon the Other’s account, as well as the relentless foregrounding of the narrativization of historical events. In this manner the “Spaniard” is re-inscribed, the “Algerian” corpse re-imagined, the “French” language (in which Djebar, an “Algerian” has chosen to write) palimpsestically inaugural, the implicit manoeuvre of which teases the semantic fluidity of selfhood, foregrounds the transient, and prohibits a definite structure to identity. To claim, as Blair gingerly does, that Djebar “Colonizes the colonizer’s language” is certainly crudely put, and yet there is a serious point to be made regarding the French language’s use, (again) in terms of the author’s “hybridity”. Such a use primarily asserts Djebar’s willingness to engage the Other, her keenness to be read more widely, and perhaps more importantly a demystification of language as something essential; inextricably bound to “race” or “nation”.
It is interesting, I think, because it is precisely Djebar’s agony at having to utilize the French language as a mode of expression (agony because she is “Algerian” and colonized by the “French”), that essentially gives rise to a paradoxically rich poetics of the performance.
To consider, briefly, a criticism of Gayatri Spivak’s, in which she notes the author’s ‘Staging’ of ‘herself as an Algerian Muslim woman’, we see precisely this
resilience to use of the “French” language as it is rhetorically inscribed in Djebar’s metaphor of ‘Identity as wound’:
‘The overlay of oral culture wearing dangerously thin... writing of the most anodyne of my childhood memories leads back to a body bereft of voice. To attempt an autobiography in French words alone is to show more than its skin under the slow scalpel of a live autopsy. Its flesh peels off and with it, seemingly, the speaking of childhood which can no longer be written is torn to shreds. Wounds are reopened, veins weep, the blood of the self flows and that of others, a blood which has never dried’.
The narrator’s so-called “wound” is thus ‘exposed by the historically hegemonic languages’, for one colonized and utilizing such a language is said by Spivak to enter into a ‘double-binding’ practice of “their” writing’. Spivak argues that, as ‘the sign of a
(l)earned perspective, not autobiographical identity’, the narrator positions herself rather in a ‘
divided field of identity’, that a ‘feminist-in-decolonization [...] can uncover ‘Khaldun’s sudden ... yearning to turn back on himself ... [to] become the subject and object of a dispassionate autopsy’. It is important to note, first and foremost, Spivak’s use of the term “staging”, for it is precisely to the figurative, and to the semantic “field” (to
différance and the Derridean), that she directs our attention. Herein, says Spivak, the notion of the “Algerian”, the “Muslim”, indeed also the “woman”, of the narrator, may necessarily be viewed as “staged”; contingent on the unnatural polarities rife in Orientalist discourse, not actually present, but always, as it were, to-come. Such categories, the nominal call-to-arms for communal assembly by way of expanding (yet divisive) paradigms, arguably limit our comprehension of identity, generally. And yet, in the Derridean/Spivakian conception, a “real” identity does not exist at all, is not possible, is paradoxically both abandoned in epistemological apathy as well as rigorously sought in the “staging” of a
French-Algeria.
Arguably what the novel points towards is the fact that there is
always already no such thing as an Algerian or a Muslim (indeed also a French person, or a woman/man); Djebar’s “staging” (as opposed to naturalizing) is (I believe) an integral manoeuvre in the self-conscious process of de-imperialization. Rather, it is ‘the relationship between the texts of the conqueror and the autobiographer’ as ‘part of the spectactular “arabesques” of Fantasia’, as well as Djebar’s taking-up of the “French”, her cultural and linguistic hybridity, that circumvents the legitimating tendencies of ideological rhetoric, prohibits precisely a stringent definition of either “French” or “Algerian”, “woman” or “man”. Her “staging” of the French, as well as her palimpsestic re-inscription of the Spaniard and various Colonial generals, are each also performative of this function.
I thought this might be interesting to consider when reading the novel as (I believe) Djebar is rigorously concerned with the dangers of identity (generally); what I think I already called the “collective call-to-arms”, for it is precisely the stringent definitions of identity inscribed (for example, in Colonial discourse) that give rise to the possibility of political separation and the metaphysical endowment of privilege to certain “races” in nationalism…