by Assia Djebar

Assia Djebar was born Fatima-Zohra Imalayen in 1936 in Cherchell, Algeria (a small coastal town 60 miles west of Algiers), where her father was a schoolteacher. Djebar was encouraged by her father to continue her studies beyond the age at which most Algerian Muslim girls were withdrawn from school by their families. She completed secondary school in Algeria, then began her university studies in Paris, becoming the first Algerian woman to be admitted to the prestigious École Normale Superieure de Sèvres. Djebar interrupted her studies in 1956 during the Algerian student strike that affirmed student solidarity with Algeria’s independence struggle. Instead of taking her final exams, she wrote her first novel, La Soif (1957; The Mischief, 1958), which was followed by Les Impatients (1958). Both works deal with a young Algerian girl’s coming of age in colonial Algeria. Her two subsequent novels...