Decolonization of Sisterhood, Solidarity and Space
“Women of Algiers in Their Apartments” by Assia Djebar
“Imagine the terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one’s gaze can be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the other way when necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, ‘Look at me when I talk to you.’ Only the child is afraid to look. Afraid to look but fascinate by the gaze. There is a power in looking”
“writing; a commitment of language. The web of her gestures, like all modes of writing, denotes a solidarity”
Algerian-born writer and film-maker Assia Djebar in “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment” (1980), a collection of six short stories from 1958 to 1978 that is accompanied by a short essay, which is inspired by two of Delacroix’s paintings, is her first book to be translated in English. The book consists of six short stories, as well as, an elaborating essay “Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound” in which Djebar critiques and deconstructs the three infamous paintings; Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment from 1834 and 1849, and Women of Algiers (1955) by Picasso in terms of Algerian female representation from the perspective of Third World feminism. The stories are interwoven with the lives of Algerian women from different ethnic, cultural, linguistic, social, and economic backgrounds struggling for independence and freedom from colonial, imperialist, nationalist, and conservative modes/ narratives of female subjectivity, embodiment, and corporeality, some of them dwell in the colonial state, others in the post-independence Islamic regime of Algerian State. Djebar delicately captures the lives of intersectional and multigenerational women that live in the differing political, temporal and spatial state; colonial, and postcolonial, yet all of them carry their own wounds. In some cases the wounds are visible, physical wounds; Sarah’s war scare on her body, in some others, it is not revealed to the phallocentric eye; just as Anne’s stateless position for she belongs to no-where, neither colonialist France nor theocratic Algeria. Sarah, Anne, Leila, and their mothers and mothers of grandmothers, all struggle, yet still fight against the penetrating patriarchal system, whether it is imposed by the imperial colonial force, and its institutional presence, or by the internal-colonial power/knowledge structure. “Women’s of Algiers in Their Apartment” is one of a women’s battle against the binary division of outer/inner space to inscribe the third space; a female space in which multiplicity of voices/subjectivities, of bodies, of languages, and of narratives by the Algerian women for the Algerian women can coexist. By means of Djebar’s female protagonists and their struggles, the submissiveness and resilience of the Algerian female body and culture are centered at the heart of the story.
Behind the peculiar history of Algeria, invaded six times, including three decades of Ottoman Empire invasion until it was colonized by France in the 1830s. Algeria, then, remained under colonial rule for one hundred and thirty years until the end of the Algerian Independence War that is lasted in 1962. There have been political unrests, armed resistance, explosions, casualties, massacres, achievements and failures, heroes, and traitors; depending on which side one takes part, every war has one of these. Furthermore, just as in almost every war, there is the untold/ unheard history of Algerian women. Even though they had spoken, they were muted and discarded by the colonial, Euro-centered, patriarchal autocrats as they have never been recognized as subjects by themselves. Their presence is served as the objects of colonial inquires in which the objects almost always has to come out as the passive, submissive, exotic, illiterate, backward, and conservative race/gender/ethnicity/language/religion/nationality, or else, as barbaric, violent, primitive, irrational and inferior race/gender/ethnicity/language/religion/nationality. The experience of Algerian women; Arab, Berber, Kabyles, Pied-Noirs, and other marginalized women minorities, in regards to their corporeality as well as of subjectivity, there is a complex web of patriarchal and colonial power relations have played a part. Indeed, there is a history of violence; epistemic, linguistic, imperial, and colonial embedded in the history of all Algerian minorities, yet, there are also histories of struggle, resistance, and resilience that come within the context of colonial history, particularly, in colonial and postcolonial Algerian.
For colonialism cannot be thought of without the effects of Enlightenment; the rise of reason, dominance of European centric knowledge, economic, and hegemonic power, and political structures as well as the history of Euro-American expansionism, it is sufficient to note that Euro-centered actors present the idea of modernity and rationality in order to be able to suggest “a universal paradigm of knowledge”, which is formalized and came to an existence as a tool of claiming superiority over the ones who were dominated, not just externally but also internally as Peruvian theorist Aníbal Quijano points out (2007, 172). The Enlightenment; the age of European epistemological expansion of the late 17th century and 18th century, is decoded as a celebration of reason, secularism, progress, and individualism has drastically and inevitably changed the way we produce, distribute, circulate knowledge and what is deemed as Truth, Human, in turn, whose modes of thinking and doing deemed as knowledge by the hegemonic power/knowledge structures. Meanwhile, reason motivated, development, and progress orientated modes of knowledge take over the indigenous, local, subaltern modes of knowing, new modes of standardization, systemization, and classification of knowledge dominated the human psyche. Quijano coins the term “coloniality of power” to argue that colonial power not only stems from political oppression, which is not dominant as a political ideology anymore, but also stems from its repressive power on producing knowledge, modes of thinking, ways of imagining, as well as establishing a canonical order within itself and within a broader hierarchy, which can still be traced within new dominant structures on the world (Coloniality, and Modernity/ Rationality, 171).
However, before delving into the depths of “coloniality of power” and its curial role in constituting the post-colonial world, it is worth noting the ways in which colonial power has had its effects on the beings, doings, makings and knowing of the self, on the self-making, as well as, on the structuring of the subject/object dualism, of the universal paradigm of knowledge and of the normative, patriarchal and binary codes of gender. The discursive field of colonial power and “coloniality of power” has undeniable importance within the context of Algeria, Algerian female embodiment and psyche, as well as within the context of “Women’s of Algiers in Their Apartment” as Djebar de-centers the patriarchal and colonial notions of history, space, and subjectivity through the narratives of female protagonists. For many scholars of postcolonial and decolonial theories such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Walter D. Mignolo, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, coloniality is the ideology within its consistency with and constitution of European imperialism, capitalism, and within the rise of the ideology of “rationality/modernity’ that former has expanded upon. Due to the invention of the compass, the advent of mining techniques, the lack of natural resources, the rise of imperial power, modernity/rationality and Industrial Revolution, imperialist forces of Europe; such as, Portuguese, Britain, France, and Spain, The Other has emerged from the locations where European imperialism and colonialism hasn’t laid their power yet which means they haven’t been the superior yet. The encounter of European to the non-European world has marked the matrix of power, subjectivity, and knowledge/meaning-making in the colonized world and remained as the structuring system in cultivating certain modes of thoughts, of being, being in the world as well as in obliterating Others.
In the broadest terms, three steps that have been taken by the dominant actors, who were, first, constituted by the colonizer and the settlers, and then transformed into European imperialism for European cultures has been encoded to be the universal models of thought, thinking and being in the process of colonization. At the beginning of the colonial expansion, the colonized people were deprived of producing knowledge and meaning. The colonized 3rd World was deprived of producing knowledge and meaning and has become the exotic, mysterious, threatening objects of Eurocentric inquires in which they are encoded as cultural and racial Other. Afterward, they are partially given some opportunities to take part in the process of meaning-making in order to assimilate them into the dominant power structures. Lastly, “Cultural Europeanisation” has been signified as a tool to reach power, hence, its emphasis transformed as a synonym of cultural development and progress (Quijano, 169). The imposed principles of Western culture inevitably drove a path through the re/production and ways of expressions of those cultures, who were dominated by the colonial, imperial knowledge/power relations and labeled and re-staged as exotic, authentic, and oriental. In the name of civilizing and taming the non-European, colonial powers had first need to destroy the sense of self, the “I”, and belonging as in being belong to a community of shared beliefs, language, land, class, and culture, so that the colonizer can establish himself as the superior. The emblematic and hegemonic notion of “knowledge as a product of subject-object relation” is problematic because it sets a distinction between the knowledge, not only as an outcome of a relationship between two individuals, but also the knowledge in which each individual performs its own presence, and a knowledge that simply aims to reach something for its own needs ( Quijano, 172). In other words, the knowledge that tries to make out something from the object in a way that is ideologically purposeful. Therefore, the presence of the Other takes a form of whatever is not familiar to Western cultural capital and can either be absent within the structure of universal knowledge or can only be an object of its inquiry, who cannot accomplish its full presence. This means the deprival of colonized people from means of production, of knowledge-making, of sense-making, and of life making as one might also trace its marks in “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment”.
Decolonial critique offers a method to think of how we can create bodies of knowledge and theories that will challenge the hegemonic interpretation of colonialism as had happened, passed, and frozen in time and history, therefore, has no more power or role in forming and informing the contemporary regimes of being, knowledge, and institutions. As Walter D. Mignolo (2011), whose research interest is to explore ways of de-linking from the political, epistemic, and cultural structures and power relations of modernity/coloniality, argues that decoloniality is not an abstract universalism to claim superiority or inferiority of one thing, being, knowledge over other but a “third force” that de-links itself from all existing epistemes and paradigms. Therefore, it requires epistemic disobedience (“Geopolitics of Sensing and knowing: on (de)coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience”, 282). Indeed, the colonial and patriarchal oppression is the leading power paradigm in Djebar’s book, as well as, in the lives of women who the author has fictitiously re-presented in the short story, an urge for decolonization, a “de-linking” from the male history, gaze and space is a prominent sense that the stories evoke (Mignolo, Delinking; The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality). Sarah, one of the protagonists of the story, works at the Institute of Musicology as a researcher to capture post-colonial Algeria with voice records and visual images. As a rejection of the hegemonic modes of thoughts, of expression, forms of history-writing and documenting of the colonial/patriarchal knowledge system, Sarah chooses to capture her side of history; her/story, in the ‘haoufis’ which refers to female oral poetry that Djebar uses interchangeably with female modes of singing and narrating (Glossary, 157). In the search of her version of Algeria, of someone who belongs to the marginalized, ostracized side of the male/female, West/East, irrational/rational, underdeveloped/developed binaries, as someone who has been fought for her will to freedom and for her country, Algeria, to be liberated from the colonial French occupation. Yet, despite the independence, she has found herself still disconnected and alienated. Sarah returns to songs and poems of those women singing in French, Berber, Arabic, Amazigh who were obliterated from the ears and language by the colonial/patriarchal history. Sarah’s disconnectedness, apart from being physically and mentally violated by patriarchal colonial forces, emerges from the disappointment that is caused by post-independence Algeria; its political, cultural, and social structure which quickly after Algeria’s emancipation has clung to patriarchal, nationalist ideology and to the Arabization over its multi-ethnicity. Although Frantz Fanon (1965); a leading psychiatrist, philosopher, and scholar of colonialism and decolonization theories, speaks of new Algerian men and women who “resemble neither those of 1930 nor those of 1957. The old Algeria is dead”, unfortunately, in Algeria, the paternalistic, hegemonic, hierarchal and patriarchal structures have gained power in time (27). Post-independence Algerian women, now, had to struggle against the male ruling class, against new patriarchal, paternalistic, Arabization and Islamification policies of Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN); a militarized political party that have had primary significant impacts on the independence of Algeria. Every aspect of every-day life; spatial as well as temporal, gender roles, languages, cultures, and traditions are codified in order to de-colonize Algeria by the one-party socialist state of FLN, however, “the image of the woman is still perceived no differently, be it by father, by the husband, and more troublesome still, by the brother and the son” as Djebar critiques (138). To delink herself/her work from the hegemonic patriarchal narratives of Algiers, from the European and patriarchal writing of History, Sarah by means of listening to those women goes back to “the reservoirs of ways of life and modes of thinking that have been disqualified by Christian theology since the Renaissance continue through secular philosophy and sciences” and by the fundamentalist patriarchal states such as FLN and (Mignolo, 2011, 275). Instead of the colonial, patriarchal, Euro-centered, text-centered making of History, Truth, and Subjecthood, Sarah re-appropriates and reclaims the oral history of Algerian women as an expression of female subjectivity, and as a means of resistance to patriarchal and colonial narratives of history. By means of listening to Haoufi, she becomes solely attuned to the female experience, their wounds, and their voice. Not only that but also, through the memory of these women Sarah faces her own wounds and alienation, therefore, evokes the notions of sisterhood that is built through a shared experience. Metaphorically by means of her research, as well as, literally by means of the appearances of two old friends Anne; a Pied Noir woman, a childhood friend, whose family before independence has left for France, and Leila, a sister, a fellow comrade from the resistance. To capture the city, the city that Sarah dwells in and makes sense of the world, she listens to the women of the Algiers, in doing so, her methods and psyche lead to the “de-colonial epistemic shift (that) bring to the foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding “ (Mignolo, 2017, 453). In doing so, Djebar and protagonist Sarah decentralize phallocentric colonial and Islamic patriarchy, thus, resituates the female experience and centralize the subversiveness of female embodiment, space, oral culture, and sisterhood.
Although female solidarity is one of the arching themes of the story, there is a thin line in which Djebar and the protagonist Sarah situate themselves as against the understanding of unconditioned, universal sisterhood that is emerged from the discourse of Western Feminist scholarship. In her notorious book “Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity”, Mohanty explains the ways in which Western Feminist discourse has re/produced the colonial/patriarchal and monolithic assumptions on 3rd World Women as a homogenous group; all of them are being submissive, illiterate, conservative, mysterious, exotic, domestic, or oppressed. Through the logic of categorization, rationalization, and progress, the Western Feminist discourse created a body of knowledge that scrutinize the 3rd World Women as the victims of male violence, colonial oppression, fundamentalist state regimes, and barbaric religious doctrines. Women, especially Third World Women are all seen as victims of male violence and control. All women are defined as powerless, and all men are defined as powerful. In doing so, the discourse of hegemonic feminism has continued to do the work of colonial expansion. For this reason, she argues, ‘beyond sisterhood there still racism, colonialism and imperialism” that obliterates the experience of 3rd World Women, ‘robs them of their historical and political agency”, thus, constitutes and reapplies the hegemonic power/knowledge structure. (Mohanty, 36) All labor is given, in Mohanty’s book, to lay out the importance of feminisms that are explored and analyzed in terms of the particularity of location, race, class, gender, and sexual formations that specified in their temporal and spatial conditions, as well as, of building up feminist solidarity based on “oppositional alliances” rather than the assumptions of common oppression. Although there is a shared feeling of disconnectedness from the male world that protagonists of “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment” share; Sarah, Leila, Anna, the water carrier, they are not indeed connected through the identical experience of oppressions or even alienations. Their solidarity does not depend on the identical experience of being subjugated or on identical culture, religion, class/or ethnicity but on the understanding of “oppositional alliance” among “oppositional agencies”, that is to mean, who is “anchored in the history of specific struggles” (Mohanty, 82). Sarah, after prison, where she is sentenced to a political prison under the colonial regime, dedicated herself to education to avoid marriage and she invested herself in the intersection of documentary, musicology, and history. She is married to Ali, a doctor, has a job and a son; Nazim. It can be said that she belongs to a bourgeois class. Yet, Sarah is, also, a woman who has fought for the liberation of Algeria only to be obliterated in space and time at the post-independence by her brothers. Behind her happy life, she utters “when others talk to me, their words aren’t connected… They float around before they reach me! Is it same when I talk, if I talk? “(Djebar,7). There is a sense of connection and nostalgia still embedded in Sarah’s world but to those who and what are not present anymore; her connection to the past, nostalgia to the rebellious days.
On the other hand, Anna leaves France and her family behind to commit suicide in Algeria where she was born, however, after an unaccomplished attempt, she stays and gets involves with locals. She is the first woman cytologist in France and becomes a part of a science team that receives the Nobel Prize (Djebar, 25). Yet, in the first moments of her appearance Anne speaks of the disconnectedness she feels against her family and her life in France. Sarah is unwilling to open up her wounds to Anne. Nevertheless, for Sarah, “Anne knew nothing about the city during the period of fire and murders just past: women outside under attack by submachine guns, white veils with bloodstained holes…” (Djebar, 34) Therefore, she was not going to be able to grasp what it meant to have that mark, what that mark gave and took away from her. This was something that only her sister comrades can comprehend, the fire-carries, the unknown heroines of revolutionary struggle, just as Leila. Yet there was Anne, a daughter of a French Settler, a Pied Noir, who, first and foremost, has not experienced the Algerianness as Sarah, Leila, or the water carrier did. Nor she did experience the Frenchness as someone who was born as an Anglo Saxon male for many Pied Noirs was originally consisted of Spaniards, Italians, Maltese, Swiss, or North African Jews that had gained French citizenship under colonial rule. However, the origin of the word Pied Noir, what and who is referred to remains uncertain, the word is primarily associated with people of “French origin living in Algeria during French rule, and to those who returned to Europe” (Oxford Dictionary). During the Algerian Independence war, many Pied Noirs and European expatriates living in Algeria had to face the tremendous and mostly violent resistance from revolutionary groups for being French citizens, thus, the constitutive body of French colonialism. Many Pied Noirs, just as Anne’s family, had to return to France to be repatriated and assimilated into French society, moreover, to be integrated into the cheap workforce. Having gone back to their native land, Pied Noirs, only to find themselves ostracized both culturally, socially, and economically, they have been distanced and alienated from both their native and adopted lands. Mohanty points out;
“Being home refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; ‘not being home’ is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself” (90)
As Pied Noirs who has faced with a similar state of in-betweenness as migrants and exiles for neither of them has been able to belong to one place, Anna has lived in this state of homelessness for she was neither Algerian nor French. She was exiled from both culture, space and time, and identity. Palestinian author/scholar who lived and died in the US, Edward Said (2012) explains in his book “Reflections on Exile and Other Essays” that exile is an existential and epistemological condition, is a spatial and temporal state of being, and belonging and becoming. That is to say, exile is not a state of being that is static, identical, or completed, in fact, it is in transience, and transition, a state of emergence that is constituted by the continuity and rupture in time and space, therefore, in the self. It is a condition of resentment to boundaries, to borders, to hegemonic cultures, and power relations. Anne’s alienation from both Culture and History, thereby, the people who have part of hegemonic Culture and History, derives from the lack of connectivity that occurs when healing, excepting, empowering, and mutual bonds appear between agencies. Her spatial and temporal detachment from Algeria, thus, from women of Algeria, of her past comes together with her disconnectedness from her French identity, self, and familial relationship, therefore, deprives her of being surrounded by a community founded upon solidarity, oppositional alliances against the patriarchal systems of thoughts, modes of being and making; making the History, memory, Geography, Science, and Arts. She is sentenced to isolation.
The moment where Anne can establish a deem of connection with herself and her past is when she has attempted to commit suicide, but even though she came there to die she still called Sarah and is saved by her. As Anne tells the story of her life, Sarah keeps it for herself, yet she seems to start to establish a connection, a particular bond between her and Anne’s story. As she hears Anne’s word, as Anne speaks to and of her, in her inner monologue, Sarah thinks “Is it trite? It’s trite” (Djebar, 8). Anne and Sarah feel confined by the familial relations in which their role as mothers, wives, daughters are ascribed to them by patriarchal gender power relations and by the coloniality of power. Having realized how much, in time, Anne was estranged from her birthplace, the streets, people, and culture, she is still eager to share an experience, a history with her female counterparts and to have a connection with her past. However, on the other hand, Sarah’s alienation and disconnectedness push her into isolation in a different way that appears as longing for the past times, yearning for the sisterhood, the “sacred friendship between adolescents in revolt” that once she had experienced during the independence war (Djebar, 27). The post-independence life hasn’t been the one Sarah was fighting and hoping for nor the one she has believed in. Under the Arabization and fundamentalist policies of post FLN from 1965 and on, the presence of women and the marginalized minorities of Algeria is re-confined and re-separated into particular spaces; hammam, harem, female exclusive arenas, and time; certain hours and days for women to use and appear particular public spaces. In longing for the time of her/their struggle for liberation, her psyche is taken by memories of the solidarity, the mark of the particular history, time, and location. She is not so much occupied by the male world, by their words, or events but by Sarah, by her mother, or by Leila; the only connection that she seems to have with her history, with her agency. Yet, Sarah is not without boundaries against Anne, for there were borders in between them when Sarah was fighting for her life for years, not until she has faced with what she has been longing for, the sisterhood; Leila.
Leila is first introduced to the reader through a male voice, the painter; a friend of Ali, a former brother, and a rebel when he finds about the incarceration of Leila; “The Great Leila, the heroine” by chance at the mental hospital where he went to draw for the patients (21). Leila is released with the help of the painter from where she was prisoned because of her war trauma, which pushed her to drug addiction. Within the discursive level, this scene in which the painter tells Ali about how he has found Leila draws important notes in terms of the tragedy of war, its impact on the female psyche, knowledge/power structure, and the institutional attitude of the post-independence Algerian State in the ’60s and afterward towards women and female freedom fighters. Leila's disconnectedness from norms, as well as, from her insurgents derives from the trauma of being violated, abused, and relegated not only by colonial forces but also by the brothers of their solidarity, by the fellow insurgents, by the internal/colonial forces. Just as Sarah, Leila, too, hunted by the past wounds. As she sees in her nightmare aunts and grandmothers from the past, veiled in black and white, crying over her “dismantled memory “she cries for the help of her sisterhood, “ where are you, you fire carriers, you my sisters, who should have liberated the city “ (Djebar, 44). Their trauma derives not only from shared pain and the betrayal of their brothers but also from survival, and a shared experience of struggle against colonial/patriarchal power structure. When Sarah asks her to stop talking about the war, Leila utters the words that break the long-time silence inside Sarah “on the contrary, I have got to speak, Sarah! [ …] I’ve dried up, I’m the shadow of my former self.” (Djebar, 45) They connect through their precarious situatedness in History, in the solidarity that is founded upon the patriarchal agency, and the post-independence world. Moreover, through the sharing of their wounds as Sarah, too, uncovers her wounds to Leila; opens her shirt. The act of sharing evolves to a mutual and healing bond, their precariousness evolves to female solidarity.
Fanon explains the ways in which female subjectivity and female bodies are used both to colonize and de-colonize Algeria. In order to invade, dominate and assimilate Algeria, Algerian man and land, the female body, and psyche should become a battlefield for French imperial/colonial rule. The practice of veiling of Algerian women, then, has been marked by the colonial/knowledge structure, in turn, has been turned into a tool to set distinctions between East and West, us and Others, modern and unmodern, conservative and secular. In Orientalism (1978), Said explains how East played a crucial role in creating the East as its Other, its contrasting values, images, and orders, and the concept of Orientalism by which Western, particularly European colonizers historically constructed the East as exotic, strange, subjugated, exciting, dangerous, silenced, tamed, to be exhibited, and to be liberated. Construction of East’s backwardness and oppression has come to negotiated on Algerian body, in doing so, the veil as a historically constructed site is used for ensuring the West’s progress, invasion of and intervention in the Muslim world and Muslim female bodies. The discourse of veil has been used to separate those who belong and who are not to the Eurocentric patriarchal universalism of Western white men where the superiority of thought, Western life, and existence sweeps over, discards other ways of thinking, being and being in the world. Therefore, the act of unveiling and the discourse of emancipation by French colonialism serves to signify not only the emancipation and progression of the Muslim female body but also to signify the secularization, assimilation, and Westernization of the East. As Yegenoglu (1998) puts “the colonial desire to unveil the Muslim woman’s body is not only linked with the discourse of Enlightenment, but, coincides with the emergence of the “scopic regime of modernity.” A regime that she explains as “a desire to master, control, and reshape the body of the subjects by making them visible. Since the veil prevents the colonial gaze from attaining such visibility and hence mastery, its lifting becomes essential.” (57-60)
However, the meaning of the practice of veiling as a symbol of submission, subjugation, and oppression by Western colonialism has been turned upside down by the “fire carriers”, when Algerian women used the veil as a means of protection, struggle, and liberation. During the independence war, the veil has been ascribed new meanings and threats. For the French colonial forces, it does not pose threat only because it was opposed to his universal power/knowledge regime but also because it conceals what is behind the veil, a possible threat of danger. On the other hand, for Algerian male liberation forces, it meant a battlefield of national and cultural identity as well as a military medium that helps them and most importantly women of Algiers to throw off colonial forces by means of threatening and warding off the colonial gaze. In order to liberate and decolonize Algeria, the female body that is loaded with explosives has been turned into a gun against colonial France. That is to say, the female body has been turned into a medium for salvation as well as invasion by the patriarchal forces. “Whereas in the previous period the body had to be made slim and disciplined to make it attractive and seductive, it now had to be squashed, made shapeless and even ridiculous. This, as we have seen, is the phase during which she undertook to carry bombs, grenades, machine-gun clips.” (Fanon, 62) Leila, just as Sarah and her fellow freedom-fighters, has turned her body into a medium for the independence of Algeria which, in time, turned into the rule of Islamic fundamentalism that sentenced her to another confinement, and relegated the Algerian women backward to her traditional gender role. Her disconnectedness takes place at a different level than Sarah or Anne. Her presence is obscured not only through the patriarchal family structure but also by the patriarchal and hegemonic scientific discourse. After her role in the liberation war, she is now discarded as a mad and addicted female, in other words, she is not recognized as a suitable representation of normativity, Algerianness, femininity, or even humanity, thereby, she should not be visible anymore. She should cease to exist from the public and life, as well as from the memories and records just as the women of the past did and the women who are lying beside her will be. However, her encounter with Sarah, the connection with her past; the times also that has caused her trauma and delirium, unfolded into a situation in which both women are faced with their disappointment and raged against the solidarity of their fellow brothers, who are responsible from Algerian women’s suffering; their own suffering. However, Sarah remained silent in the face of Leila’s outburst, she grows a sense of intimacy;
“She ran her fingers over her forehead, the arches of her eyebrows, she would have liked to start licking that face and so weep over he, crush her emaciated body with warm vehemence, that body with its hunched shoulders, those scrawny arms, those childlike wrists, that head all angular and corpselike… She felt a purely sensual rush…” (Djebar,45)
Not being able to find her words to express the kind of love and friendship that Sarah carries in her heart and memory to Leila with the language of hegemonic, patriarchal power/knowledge structure, she remains quiet, yet, not quite passive nor static. Through the corporeality of war, and their embodied experience, and the temporality, and spatiality of their shared struggle, Sarah re-finds the world of female friendship. The short moment of their encounter transforms into the healing bond of a feminist alliance, empowering female friendship and solidarity that is built upon her-story of survival from a patriarchal war, as well as, a her-story of struggle against the patriarchal and colonial power/knowledge structure, against the coloniality of power.
Through the encounter with Leila, who has been seen as speaking nonsense by others and by the institutionalized scientific discourse, Sarah re-discovers the power of speaking that takes place between female counterparts. Sarah understands that through the act of speaking to and of each other that one starts to heal. That is to mean, to reclaim her voice and her connection to the female world. Before she tells Anne about her-story; the patriarchal relationship among her family members, loss of her mother, her imprisonment, and isolation, disappointment and despair, Sarah says;
“I see no other way out for us except through an encounter like this; a woman speaking in front of another one who’s watching; does the one who’s speaking tell the story of the other one with devouring eyes, with the black memories, or is she describing her own fark night with words like torches and with candles whose wax melt too fast? She who watches, is it by means of listening and remembering that she ends up seeing herself, with her own eyes, unveiled at last…” (Djebar, 47).
In saying so, Djebar through protagonist Sarah, once more remarks on the subversiveness of speaking among female agencies, of female oral history and embodiment. In other words, she centralizes the idea of de-linking the history of Algerian women from the patriarchal/colonial discourses of Algerian history.