Le Blanc de l'Algérie

During the 1990s Djebar's work becomes increasingly, immediately politically engaged. While Loin de Médine returns to the early days of Islam in order to denounce the misuse of the past by resurgent Islamists at the end of the 1980s, Djebar's next group of texts focuses overtly and pointedly on the present. As the political climate in Algeria becomes steadily more fraught, reflections on femininity and genealogy are superseded by a direct engagement with current confrontations and losses, and Djebar's horror at the upsurge of Islamist terrorism leads her to interrogate more pointedly the contemporary disintegration of her native land. Bearing witness to a sudden swathe of murders and attacks against writers, journalists and many others who dared to speak out against the newly oppressive interpretations of Islamic doctrine, Djebar criticises forms of religious and political discourse that prescribe an artificial, monolithic and backward-looking set of rules. Looking beyond the question of women's position in Algeria at this point, she revolts not only against new forms of gendered oppression but also against cultural and linguistic tyranny more generally. She then uses her own literary writing both to uncover the oppressed multilingualism and multicultural creativity of Algerian art and literature and to search for a narrative of mourning that might somehow encapsulate the intractable horrors that FLN or Islamist ideologies have tried to deny. It is at this point, however, that Djebar relinquishes any lingering quest for Algerian specificity as she reacts against the FIS's appropriation of Algerian identity as radically Islamic and Arabic.