SOURCE: von Rosk, Nancy. “‘Exhuming Buried Cries’ in Assia Djebar's Fantasia.” Mosaic 34, no. 4 (December 2001): 65-84.

In the following essay, von Rosk draws upon French postcolonial theory to elucidate Djebar's efforts in Fantasia to recover the voice of Algerian women while writing in French, the masculine language of Algeria's colonial oppressor.

Described as “the most threatening person to Algeria's political chieftains” (Kadir 777), Assia Djebar has been hailed by many critics as the most important woman writer in North Africa, “the most gifted woman artist to come out of the Moslem world in our century” (Zimra 160). When she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1996, William Gass praised her for giving “weeping its words and longing its lyrics” (782). Indeed, Djebar's career has been a remarkable one and her creativity wide-ranging; trained as a historian, she is also an award-winning novelist and has written essays and poetry and also produced...