Prof Margaret Majumdar, Professor of Francophone Studies, University of Portsmouth
Assia Djebar, who has died in Paris in the early hours of Saturday February 7th 2015, was not just a great Algerian woman but a writer and film-maker of international stature, who took her seat in the Académie Française in 2006 and received world-wide recognition and honours for her work. Like many of her compatriots, she did not perhaps receive the honour she deserved in her own country in her lifetime. In death, however, she will now be received back in Algeria with the full panoply of state ceremony.
She will be truly mourned, however, by her ‘sisters’, the Women of Algiers, whose voices and words from both past and present she endeavoured to bring out of the silence in which they had been confined . Her lifelong work has played a major role in de-exoticising North African women and extracting them from the shadows of the past and their seclusion, bringing back to life the hidden histories they have transmitted across the generations.
The Wassila/ Avife network, concerned with sexual violence and the mistreatment of children, along with other feminist groups in Algeria, will play a major role in the tributes to this courageous great lady, as will men and women across the globe. For Assia Djebar, while deeply rooted in her own country and its history, was someone who was attuned to the wider world and inspired by the need to ‘prendre le large’, as she would say. Fearless in her celebration of desire and the transformative, life-affirming power of the erotic, she was also someone who understood and championed the interconnections linking people from different backgrounds, challenging crude conceptions based on a simplistic duality, even in the darkest days of colonial and recent Algerian history.
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You may also be interested to read an obituary for Assia Djebar written by Prof Beïda Chikhi (Sorbonne).