SOURCE: Green, Mary Jean. “Dismantling the Colonizing Text: Anne Hébert's Kamouraska and Assia Djebar's L'amour, la fantasia.” French Review 66, no. 6 (May 1993): 959-66.

In the following excerpt, Green examines Djebar's use of history, autobiography, and narrative disjunction in L'amour, la fantasia as a mode of reinterpreting Algerian colonial experience.

“La Carence la plus grave subie par le colonisé est d'être placé hors de l'histoire et hors de la cité” (121). These words of Albert Memmi point to a central effect of colonization and explain why the effort to recover and take possession of their own history has been a major focus of the writers of postcolonial cultures. Quebec writers made the reconstruction of their history a central preoccupation of the nineteenth century, in response to a conquering British presence which termed them, in the words written by Lord Durham in 1839, “a people with no history and no literature...