Bodies of Writing: Tragic Form in Assia Djebar's Oeuvre

Abstract

In her 1995 memoir Le blanc de l’Algérie, Assia Djebar called Algerian literature “unfinished.” Writing during what has come to be called the “intellectuocide” of Algeria, Djebar wondered how one could even begin to conceive of a “national literature” in Algeria when its most treasured writers, artists, poets and journalists were the victims of targeted assassinations. In order to address this grave situation, Djebar performs in her works various acts of literary recovery; acts that needed to draw closer, so she insisted, in a way that had not been attempted before, a writer’s body of writing with her very body, her corpse. Investigating this curious argument Djebar presents, my talk will consider Djebar’s particular formulation of “postcolonial tragedy” and demonstrate how her re-grounding of Algerian literature at the burial site of the murdered writer offers us a novel way to think through the relationship between writing, literary form, and death.