In Algerian White, Assia Djebar weaves a tapestry of the epic and bloody ongoing struggle in her country between Islamic fundamentalism and the post-colonial civil society. Many Algerian writers and intellectuals have died tragically and violently since the 1956 struggle for independence. They include three beloved friends of Djebar: Mahfoud Boucebi, a psychiatrist; M'Hamed Boukhobza, a sociologist; and Abdelkader Alloula, a dramatist; as well as Albert Camus. In Algerian White, Djebar finds a way to meld the personal and the political by describing in intimate detail the final days and hours of these and other Algerian men and women, many of whom were murdered merely because they were teachers, or writers, or students. Yet, for Djebar, they cannot be silenced. They continue to tell stories, smile, and endure through her defiant pen. Both fiction and memoir, Algerian White describes with unerring accuracy the lives and deaths of those whose contributions were cut short, and then probes even deeper into the meaning of friendship through imagined conversations and ghostly visitations.
Translated by David Kelley and Marjolijn de Jager
In Algerian White, Assia Djebar weaves an epic tapestry out of her intimate connection to a group of Algerian writers and intellectuals whose lives were cut short since since the 1956 struggle for independence. They include Mahfoud Boucebi, a psychiatrist; M’Hamed Boukhobza, a sociologist; and Abdelkader Alloula, a dramatist—the beloved friends to whom she dedicates the book—as well as Albert Camus. She records the horrors of her country’s civil wars and untangles the complex political and social issues that led to the long trail of the blood. This unique book grows from conversations remembered and imagined, meditations on her fallen literary peers and predecessors. Yet for Djebar, they cannot be silenced. They continue to tell stories, smile, and endure through her defiant pen. This cultural and political history of Algeria’s cross-cultural reality and its fight against colonization is infused with the oral tradition of Djebar’s Berber roots.
“A hymn to friendship and the enduring power of language, [
Algerian White ] is also a requiem for a nation's unfinished literature.”
–Leslie Camhi, New York Times “Assia Djebar has given weeping its words and longing its lyrics.”
–William Gass “There is not one line of theory in
Algerian White. It goes much further. It whispers that time passes, but not only time, life also, life stolen by terror, a white life, of this white in which all vivid colors merge and vanish.”
–Le Point
