Assia Djebar
1936 - 2015Assia Djebar (Arabic: آسيا جبار) was the pen name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen (30 June 1936 – 6 February 2015), an Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker. Most of her works deal with obstacles faced by women, and she is noted for her feminist stance. She is "frequently associated with women's writing movements, her novels are clearly focused on the creation of a genealogy of Algerian women, and her political stance is virulently anti-patriarchal as much as it is anti-colonial." Djebar is considered to be one of North Africa's pre-eminent and most influential writers. She was elected to the Académie française on 16 June 2005, the first writer from the Maghreb to achieve such recognition. For the entire body of her work she was awarded the 1996 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was often named as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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La zerda et Les chants de l'oubli
Assia Djebar
For Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting, Assia Djebar and her co-author Malek Alloula spent half a year in the Pathé and Gaumont film archives watching footage shot by French documentary filmmakers between 1912 and 1942. Their montage sifts through these “images of a deadly gaze” for the reality they conspicuously elide, for the resistance that has retreated “behind the mask”. The soundtrack blends together poetry, recitations, and experimental music into a polyphonic swan song to colonial violence.
Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting
La nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua
Assia Djebar
Writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar explores Algerian history, the psychological impact of war, and post-colonial female identity in this 1979 classic of film literature. Named for (and taking its structure from) a traditional song with five distinct movements, the film combines documentary-style observation with loose narrative form to tell the story of Lila, an Algerian expatriate returning to her country 15 years after independence has been won. In comparing her life with the lives and experiences of rural Algeriennes, Lila is able to put her childhood demons to rest and discover a new history -- one written in the ongoing strength of generations of women. Like much of Djebar's writing, the film has a strong subtext dealing with resistance to patriarchy and women's desire to appropriate the means of power and expression -- one of which, of course, is the filmmaker's camera.
The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoa
