SOURCE: Gracki, Katherine. “Writing Violence and the Violence of Writing in Assia Djebar's Algerian Quartet.” World Literature Today 70, no. 4 (autumn 1996): 836-43.

In the following essay, Gracki explores the overlapping elements of autobiography and history in L'amour, la fantasia, Ombre sultane, Le blanc de l'Algérie, and Vaste est la prison, drawing attention to Djebar's portrayal of female suffering as physically and psychically inscribed through the violence of patriarchy and colonization.

My writing does not feed on rupture, but mends it.

—Assia Djebar, “To Write, Disinherited”

In the opening pages of the after word following Marjolijn de Jager's translation of Assia Djebar's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, Clarisse Zimra recounts an interesting anecdote about Djebar's hasty selection of a pen name when her first novel, La soif, was accepted for publication (WA [Women of Algiers in Their Apartment], 159-60). After asking her fiancé to recite the ninety-nine ritual modes...