Assia Djebar, the celebrated Algerian novelist, passed away this weekend.
Djebar, whose real name is Fatima Zohra Imalayène, wrote in French and was often mentioned as a contender for Nobel Prize. She won many pretigious prizes, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2000. Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories are among her works that have been translated into English.
She was commended as a “great intellectual” by French President François Hollande, and she is acclaimed for her exploration of the lives of Muslim women in her fiction. She is also notable for her work as a film-maker, historian and academic.
Alison Flood wrote an obituary for Djebar for The Guardian, with a statement from Seven Stories Press, her American publisher:
“It is with extreme sadness that we mourn the great Assia Djebar, who passed away this week,” said the publisher in a statement. “Her novels and poems boldly face the challenges and struggles she knew as a feminist living under patriarchy and an intellectual living under colonialism and its aftermath. Djebar’s writing, marked by a regal unwillingness to compromise in the face of ethical, linguistic, and narrative complexities, has attracted devoted followers around the world.”
Arabic Literature quoted a 2010 interview in which Djebar explains what inspires her to write:
In some of my earlier books (So Vast the Prison, Algerian White, etc..) memory was often the first impulse to write, or rather the sudden urgent need to record the spontaneous testimony of someone close … Because a sudden fear seized me of seeing this shard of life, this moment of real life – with its grace, or the hollow of despair in an anonymous story, yes, sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure.
All Africa compiled a timeline of important dates in Djebar’s life:
1936: Born Fatma-Zohra Imalayène in Cherchell, west Algeria;
1955: First Muslim-origin woman to be admitted to France’s prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure;
1957: Publishes first book La Soif (published as The Mischief in English);
1958: Publishes Les Impatients;
1959: Studies modern history of the Maghreb at Morocco’s Rabat University;
Book details
- Women of Algiers in Their Apartment by Assia Djebar
EAN: 9780813914022
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- The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories by Assia Djebar
EAN: 9781583227879
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Image courtesy of African Success