Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (Caraf Books Series) » (1st Edition)

Assia Djebar is also the author of several novels and a play. Her novel Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade won the Franco-Arab Friendship Prize and she has written and directed two feature-length films: La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, which won first prize at the Venice Festival, and La zerda et les chants de l'oubli. Djebar is director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Louisiana State University.

Marjolijn de Jager has published numerous translations of literary works.

Clarisse Zimra is Associate Professor of English in Modern Literary Theory and Criticism and Comparative Literature at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

The cloth edition of Assia Djebar's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, her first work to be published in English, was named by the American Literary Translators Association as an ALTA Outstanding Translation of the Year. Now available in paperback, this collection of three long stories, three short ones, and a theoretical postface by one of North Africa's leading writers depicts the plight of urban Algerian women who have thrown off the shackles of colonialism only to face a postcolonial regime that denies and subjugates them even as it celebrates the liberation of men. Denounced in Algeria for its political criticism, Djebar's book quickly sold out its first printing of 15,000 copies in France and was hugely popular in Italy. Her stylistically innovative, lyrical stories address the cloistering of women, the implications of reticence, the connection of language to oppression, and the impact of war on both women and men. The Afterword by Clarisse Zimra includes an illuminating interview with Djebar.

Publishers Weekly

Like the 19th-century Delacroix paintings of harem women from which it takes its title, this collection of six stories and an essay--published in 1980 in French--depicts moments in the lives of Algerian women. More than a century after Delacroix, and three decades after Algeria won its political independence from France, these Muslim women are still cultural prisoners. In the long title story, Sarah is only one of many characters straddling past and present: scarred from years of torture and prison, now married (to a man she chose for herself) and making a documentary about Algiers, she still goes to the Turkish baths and participates in the old rituals. Like her creator, she can ``see only one single way to unblock everything: talk, talk without stopping . . . '' The author of seven novels and the scripts for two films, Djebar records the talk: ``Fragmented, remembered, reconstituted conversations . . . Fictitious accounts . . . uttered from lips beneath a mask.'' Even in translation the prose can be vividly pictorial as well as poetic, but it also tends to be opaque, and--aside from those of one or two shorter pieces--the story lines are hard to follow. In an essay and an interview with Djebar, Zimra provides biographical information and also conveys Djebar's intense personal voice. (Nov.)