There is something daunting about writing an homage to an artist who just died. One is faced with questions of proximity, expertise, and knowledge: questions on how to evoke the person and oeuvre without giving oneself too much prominence, questions on the intended audience and adequate tonality as well as the standpoint one is speaking from. This is especially true with the Algerian writer, filmmaker, historian, and playwright Assia Djebar: “As a Moslem woman, educated in the French system while her country was still under de-facto colonial rule and witness to eight years of brutal war while still in her twenties, Djebar is the only writer of her sex and her generation who has managed an impressive output both before and after her country's accession to independence” (Zimra, Afterword 163). As Clarisse Zimra further reminds us in “A Daughter's Call,” “By the time of her death, Assia Djebar had been writing for nearly sixty years.” The range of her training, her professional experience on three continents (Africa, Europe, North America), and her practice of different genres are just as impressive. She received several prestigious awards, including the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1979 for her film La nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (1978; “The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua”) and the Neustadt Prize (1996), often considered a gateway to the Nobel Prize (for which she was short-listed twice). Elected to the Académie Française in 2005, she is, as Zimra remarks, “une immortelle.”