SOURCE: Donadey, Anne. “The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature: Assia Djebar's Algerian Palimpsest.” World Literature Today 74, no. 1 (winter 2000): 27-36.

In the following essay, Donadey provides a linguistic analysis of Arabic words and phrases in Djebar's fiction, most notably in L'amour, la fantasia, Ombre sultane, and Vaste est la prison. Donadey argues that Djebar's use of Arabic—ranging from specialized and obscure terms to hybrids of French and Arabic—creates an alterative, cross-cultural feminist discourse that subverts the language of French colonialism while demonstrating the problematic complicity of post-colonial francophone writers.

Je considère que la langue française nous traduit infiniment plus qu'elle nous trahit.

—Mouloud Mammeri¹

I condone this bastardy, the only cross-breeding that the ancestral beliefs do not condemn: that of language, not that of the blood.

—Assia Djebar²

La question du langage, je la considère souvent comme le problème numéro un de...