SOURCE: Accad, Evelyne. “Assia Djebar's Contribution to Arab Women's Literature: Rebellion, Maturity, Vision.” World Literature Today 70, no. 4 (autumn 1996): 801-12.

In the following essay, Accad provides an overview of Djebar's major works and thematic concerns—ranging from La soif to Le blanc de l'Algérie—linking the progression of Djebar's personal and literary maturation with that of her feminist and political perspective.

Young Arab women have unsuspected reserves of romanticism; too brutally thrown against men, they seldom regain their injured innocence. And their husbands will never know the exalted face of their adolescence. Only the dry look, barely touching, of submissive beasts, of the weak.

—Assia Djebar, La soif

For Arabic women I see only one single way to unblock everything: talk, talk without stopping, about yesterday and today, talk among ourselves … and look. Look outside, look outside the walls and the prisons!

—Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in...