Assia Djebar

Assia Djebar (born June 30, 1936, Cherchell, French Algeria—died February 6, 2015, Paris, France) was an Algerian writer and filmmaker whose novels, written in French, most often focus on women and their place in Algerian society.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Djebar was educated in Algeria and then in France at the Sorbonne (B.A.,1956) and at Paul Valéry University of Montpellier III (Ph.D., 1999). Her career as a novelist began in 1957 with the publication of her first novel, La Soif (The Mischief). It was followed by Les Impatients (1958; “The Impatient Ones”), which similarly dealt with young women within the colonial Algerian bourgeois milieu.

The novel Les Enfants du nouveau monde (1962; Children of the New World) and its sequel, Les Alouettes naïves (1967; “The Naive Larks”), chronicle the growth of Algerian feminism and describe the contributions of Algerian women to the war for independence (1954–62) from France. Djebar collaborated with Walid Garn, then her husband, on the play Rouge l’aube (“Red Is the Dawn”), published in the review Promesses in 1969. The collection Poèmes pour l’Algérie heureuse (“Poems for a Happy Algeria”) also appeared that year.

Djebar spent most of the war years outside Algeria, but afterward she taught history at the University of Algiers, was made department head of the French Section at the university, and became a filmmaker. Her movie Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua, the story of an Algerian woman engineer returning to Algeria after a long Western exile, was released in 1978. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980; Women of Algiers in Their Apartment) is a collection of novellas and short stories calling attention to the lingering disparities between the treatment of men and women following the decolonization of Algeria.

Later works such as L’Amour, la fantasia (1985; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade), Ombre sultane (1987; A Sister to Scheherazade), and Vaste est la prison (1994; So Vast the Prison) continue to explore themes of inequality by using a blend of autobiography, historical record, myth, and fiction. In the semiautobiographical Le Blanc de l’Algérie (1995; Algerian White), Djebar more explicitly addressed her personal story by re-creating the lives of friends lost to violent religious extremism and contrasting those tales with those of other Algerian intellectuals who had died. Her 2003 novel La Disparition de la langue française (“The Disappearance of the French Language”) mines the story of a returning Algerian expatriate for insights into the fraught relationship between the French and Arabic languages in Algeria.

Djebar moved to the United States in 1995 and taught French literature at Louisiana State University and then at New York University. In 2005 Djebar was elected to the Académie Française.