Kärleken, kriget

1830: France invades Algiers. 1962: Algeria gains independence. (1936: Assia Djebar is born. 1984: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade is written.)

It's hard to call this a novel. It's not. I'd call it an essay, except at 284 pages that's stretching it. Orientalism aside, the quote on the front calling it a "mosaic" isn't far off. Djebar mixes her own autobiography with historical sources from the 19th century and discussions with women who remember the struggle for independence, and what came before and after it.

1950s: a 13-year-old girl joins the fight for liberty after seeing her brother gunned down. Captured by the French, she sneers "What are you going to do, execute a girl? Throw me in jail if you want, you won't be here long enough to keep me in it." 20 years later Assia Djebar interviews her, a prematurely aging woman, taking care of her husband's children. So it goes.

The central (and somewhat belaboured) metaphor here is the veil: the one women are expected to wear past a certain age, sure, but also the other veils. The one drawn over the victims of colonialisation by letting the colonialists write history. The one drawn by language, by the palimpsest of history (Algiers has Roman ruins, Christian saints, Turkish beys...) The things that are hidden by being made conspicuous, and vice versa. The freedom offered by untouchability.

While the man still has the right to four legitimate wives, we girls, big and little, have at our command four languages to express desire before all that is left for us is sighs and moans: 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: the body which male neighbours' and cousins' eyes require to be deaf and blind, since they cannot completely incarcerate it...

People are buried, not just in the ground (martyrs, victims, traitors, invaders) but in the language as well; some openly, with huge monuments, others quietly, so as to pretend they never existed. Or at least never needed a monument. Djebar writes of Algeria in French, the country that enslaved her people, the language that let her mother treat her father as an equal, the language that isolated her from the women of her own family.

Exposing myself by writing my autobiograpy in the language of the former enemy puts me at constant risk of burning myself up.

It's notable that even The Battle of Algiers puts men at the centre of everything. Meanwhile, European politicians want to solve a problem simply by banning a piece of cloth. And so layers keep being added, and all a writer can do is point them out.