SOURCE: Ghaussy, Soheila. “A Stepmother Tongue: ‘Feminine Writing’ in Assia Djebar's Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade.” World Literature Today 68, no. 3 (summer 1994): 457-62.

In the following essay, Ghaussy examines the French feminist concept of “écriture féminine” in Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, in which Djebar underscores the subjugation and marginality of Algerian women by appropriating the text-biased language of colonial France to reveal the physicality of traditional oral culture and its embodiment in female sexuality.

Ever since I was a child the foreign language was a casement opening on the spectacle of the world and all its riches. In certain circumstances it became a dagger threatening me.

Assia Djebar, Fantasia

The question of women's bodies and women's sexuality is a highly loaded one. It has implications both for politics—that is, for the relations of power and control that govern a society—and for literature, or the production of verbal...