Algerian White: A Narrative - Hardcover

Djebar, Assia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 158322050X ISBN 13: 9781583220504

Publisher: Seven Stories Press,U.S., 2001

Synopsis

In Algerian White, Assia Djebar weaves a tapestry of the epic and bloody ongoing struggle in her country between Islamic fundamentalism and the post-colonial civil society. Many Algerian writers and intellectuals have died tragically and violently since the 1956 struggle for independence. They include three beloved friends of Djebar: Mahfoud Boucebi, a psychiatrist; M'Hamed Boukhobza, a sociologist; and Abdelkader Alloula, a dramatist; as well as Albert Camus. In Algerian White, Djebar finds a way to meld the personal and the political by describing in intimate detail the final days and hours of these and other Algerian men and women, many of whom were murdered merely because they were teachers, or writers, or students. Yet, for Djebar, they cannot be silenced. They continue to tell stories, smile, and endure through her defiant pen. Both fiction and memoir, Algerian White describes with unerring accuracy the lives and deaths of those whose contributions were cut short, and then probes even deeper into the meaning of friendship through imagined conversations and ghostly visitations.

About this title

About the Author:

A beloved author, translator, and filmmaker, Assia Djebar (1936-2015) was born Fatima-Zohra Imalayen in the Algerian town of Cherchell. Her novels and poems boldly faced the challenges and struggles she knew as a feminist living under patriarchy, and as 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, attracted devoted followers around the world, and received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Venice International Critics' Prize, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Yourcenar Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and a knighthood in France's Legion of Honor. She was the first Algerian woman to be admitted to France's prestigious École Normale Supérieure, and the first writer from the Maghreb to be admitted to the Académie Française.

Synopsis:

At times strikingly lucid, at others stirringly implicated, this history of Algeria from its 1956 struggle for independence to the present day, records the horrors of civil war and the complex social and political issues that have drowned the country in bloodshed. Living in exile, Djebar expresses her guilt for fleeing murder when so many of her colleagues have been killed and, in a work that is part history and part memoir, expresses universal truths about the pain of loss

About this edition

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press,U.S.
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 158322050X
• ISBN 13: 9781583220504
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 242