SOURCE: Geesey, Patricia. “Women's Words: Assia Djebar's Loin de Médine.” In The Marabout and the Muse: New Approaches to Islam in African Literature, edited by Kenneth W. Harrow, pp. 40-50. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996.

In the following essay, Geesey examines Djebar's metafictional, feminist rereading of early Islamic history in Loin de Médine, drawing attention to the novel's multiple female voices and narrative structure, modeled on traditional Islamic forms of oral transmission and authentication.

Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.

Hélène Cixous

Born in the coastal city of Cherchell in 1936, Assia Djebar is Algeria's most renowned and prolific woman novelist and filmmaker. Her literary career began in 1957 with the publication of La soif; three more novels followed and then, a ten-year period of near silence. Djebar returned to public life in 1977 with the...