SOURCE: Mortimer, Mildred. “Assia Djebar's Algerian Quartet: A Study in Fragmented Autobiography.” Research in African Literatures 28, no. 2 (summer 1997): 102-17.

In the following essay, Mortimer argues that Djebar's juxtaposition of autobiography, fiction, and history in L'amour, la fantasia, Ombre sultane, and Vaste est la prison effectively challenges Algerian patriarchal tradition and colonial rule.

The day that Assia Djebar's father, a teacher in the French colonial educational system, first escorted his daughter to school, he set her on a bilingual and bicultural journey that resulted in her development as an artist and an intellectual. Djebar recalls the scene in L'amour, la fantasia: “Fillette arabe allant pour la première fois à l'école, un matin d'automne, main dans la main du père” (11) ‘a little Arab girl going to school for the first time, walking hand in hand with her father’ (3). More than four decades after the event, Djebar considers her...