Algerian White by Assia Djebar

Algerian White Reviews

• 
  Mona Kareem

  A very important book on algeria between the revolution and the civil war. Beautifully and painfully written. Greatly informative. Djebar in general is a must-read if you are interested in Berber culture, feminism, and Algerian studies. Am working on reading all her works. She is a filmmaker too.
• 
  Abdelhak Chetbi

  En relisant ce récit, j’ai découvert au fil de ces pages pas mal de choses que je ne connaissais pas ou des choses que ceux qui m’ont en parlé ou que j’ai lus n’ont pas nuancés au point où cela ne m’a même pas marqué.
  Au travers de ces pages je sens la souffrance qui a déchiré ce pays, et divisé ces hommes et ces femmes. L’histoire se répétant toujours, l’armée détient toujours les clefs et les richesses de ce pays, et les hommes pour le pouvoir s’entre-déchirent et s’éliminent. Quelque part on souhaiterait voir, ces Algériens comme auparavant, mener une vie d’ascète, sans aucune couleur, et ne rien réclamer. Ces mêmes Algériens qui ont sacrifiés leurs vies pour iriser celles de leurs enfants.
  Assia Djebar a su faire partie des deux mondes. Celui des vivants, où elle assistait de jour en jour à la déchéance de ce pays ‘malade de sa république et de sa démocratie’ comme le disait Feu Said Mekbel. Et celui des morts, ou la longue procession de ses amis ‘’tués’’ reviennent toujours la visiter et continuer à échanger des joutes verbales ou à défaut laisser un sourire, une image.
  La culture, qui reste un danger pour toutes les personnes régnantes, ne s’élève pas très haut. Dès que les idées de l’un de ces penseurs ou écrivains, prend de la hauteur ; celles-ci sont considérées comme ‘subversives’ et de fait, étêtées.
  Nous autres Algériens sommes très pudiques. Nous n’osons jamais avouer notre amour à nos proches ou aux êtres, qui nous sont chers. Ce n’est que lorsque nous faisons face à leur départ et au vide qu’ils ont laissé, que nous aurions souhaité montrer, notre faiblesse, notre amour, notre humanité
• 
  Mounia Farida

  It was very hard for me to read this book. I was in Algiers during the events taking place in the book/Algiers.
  It brought back a lot of memories as well as enlightened me on many events behind the scenes that the regular citizens didn't know about..
  
• 
  Sara Salem

  Haunting book about Algeria post-independence. I couldn't help compare it to Fanon's writing about Algeria pre-independence and how the traumatic battles continued but in new forms. I love Djebar's writing style and always find her work beautiful to read.
• 
  Andrea

  This was beautiful.
  
  A meditation on death and loss, lives taken in the struggle for freedom against the colonial power, against fundamentalism. A meditation on writing and all of its risks, language and all of its meanings, Algeria and all of its tragic complications.
  
  Love and loss, hope and despair.
  
  A travel through memories, like this one:
  

  I took off for Kader's Oran, the city and its deepest depths, which he had sketched out for me... we drove around the town, splattered with cries and laughter, full of youths (oh, the youths of Oran, everywhere, leaning against a wall, on the vertical, in the sun, at every street corner, watching, laughing, cautious!), our tour was gradually fed by Kader's memories. (21)

  
  A town to be loved. I had only just finished The Plague, also set in Oran. Albert Camus writes, with the eyes of a European that must always be comparing the rest of the world to an ideal of home:
  

  The town itself, let us admit, is ugly. It has a smug, placid air and you need time to discover what it is that makes it different from so many business centres in other parts of the world. How to conjure up a picture, for instance, of a town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves -- a thoroughly negative place in short? ... Our citizens work hard, but solely with the objective of getting rich. (1-2)

  
  There are no Arabs in the Oran found in these pages, though Camus does write of walking through the Negro district (and what does that word mean to him exactly?), 'steep little streets flanked by blue, mauve and saffron-yellow walls... (79) He writes of the plague starting in the poorer and more crowded outskirts, but there are only Spaniards and Frenchmen.
  
  This absence is possibly one of the largest presences in the literature I have read.
  
  To Kader, returning to Oran, Djebar writes:
  

  You must have often unveiled for others the naked, tumultuous and impulsive, raucous, mocking town. (22)

  
  This town and the town of the Plague -- two Orans, two visions of what a city could and should be.
  
  Camus is in Algerian White as author. His lack of understanding of the complexities. His effort to make peace. His early death in a car accident. She later writes:
  

  Camus, an old man: it seems almost as unimaginable as the metaphor of Algeria itself, as a wise adult, calm at last, at last turned toward life, ordinary life... (103)

  
  I think it true that ordinary life escaped him, you see it in his words.
  
  But he is really the least among this pantheon of writers, too many of whom I still know almost nothing, despite all my recent reading.
  
  But first we return to the theme of dust:
  

  Three Algerian days.
  
  White with dust. The dust you didn't notice, on any of these three days, but which seeped its way in, unseen and fine, into all those who came together for your departure.
  
  A dust slowly forming, which gradually makes that day grow fainter, further away, a whiteness which insidiously effaces, distances, and makes each hour almost unreal, and the explosion of a word, the gasp of an ill-repressed sob, the bursting spray of chants and litanies from the crowd, all of the excessive on the day itself, from then on paled, worn hollow to the point of evanescence.
  
  So, white days of that dust in which tens of witnesses, friends, those around you, who went with you to the graveside, they the followers, thereafter caught up; clothed in it stiffly and awkwardly, unknowingly. Dust of oblivion which cauteriuzes, weakens, softens, and .... Dust.
  
  Three days white with that dust and that mortal fog. (51)

  
  I cried for the death of
  Mouloud Feraoun, his words still live with me, I almost feel as though I know him. Feraoun, one of six murdered together in two sets of three, machine gunned down, with 109 9 mm cartridge cases found. The son of another there, Jean-Phillipe Ould Aloudia, spent thirty years investigating, identified the assassins granted amnesty by the French State.
  
  Nothing could be done to them.
  
  There is Djebar's chance meeting with Mouloud Mammeri in Algiers, 1988:
  

  'Before I saw you in the distance, I was walking with my head in the clouds.. How lovely this city is, iridescent like this! I can't get enough of it: as if it were the first time! I never tire of the facades or the balconies of the houses, and especially not of the sky!... (139-140)

  
  I learned about Emir Abdelkader, who fought the colonial invasion, whose bones have been fought over:
  

  Abdelkader, if he has truly come back to this land where he was first a soldier, will be better able than I to make the list of those who write and who, like so many others, are persecuted, silenced, pushed to suicide, to suffocation, or--through the intermediary if desperate youth, transformed into paid killers--killed by a single blow. (225)

  
  There are Franz and Josie Fanon, Jean-el and Taos Amrouche, Kateb Yacine, M'Hamed Boukhobza, Mahfoud Boucebci, Anna Greki, Abdelkader Alloula among many others. And, like
  Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, a return to language, nationality, home...the tangle of words and the limits language and culture place on what can be expressed.
  

  Algerian literature--we must begin it with Apuleus in the second century and continue to Kateb Yacine and Mouloud Mammeri, passing Augustine, the emir Abdelkader, and Camus--has continuously been inscribed in a linguistic triangle.
  
  --a language of rock and soil, the original one let's say. Libyco-Berber, which lost its alphabet momentarily except among the Tuareg:

  
  Berber
  

  --a second language, that of the prestigious exterior, of Mediterranean heritage--Eastern and Western--admittedly reserved for lettered minorities...

  
  Arabic and then French
  

  --the third partner in this triangle presents itself as the most exposed of the languages, the dominant one, the public one, the language of power: that of the harangues, but also the written one of the forensic scientists, the scribes and the notaries.(227-228)

  
  This has been Latin, Classic Arabic, Turkish, French, again Arabic...
  
  These are just a few quotes I liked, there is so much more here, particularly for someone who knows more of these writers and the recent history. I am setting out to learn...
  
  Perhaps the best of all, though was this (a facebook update from July 28th, as I mix my social media)
  

  Today on the tube I met a Maori who asked how I came to be reading Assia Djebar and I told him a quick summary of the long story about this article I can't finish and he told me how in New Zealand his university classes on colonialism had featured a professor who studied violence in Algerian women's fiction, and then we talked about Djebar and Feraoun and Fanon and Paris and damn but did it bring happiness to my day.
• 
  Clara

  À travers ce livre, Assia Djebar rend hommage à un grand nombre d'écrivains, poètes et intellectuels algériens, qu'elle a connu personnellement ou plus vaguement, tous décédés de diverses causes (allant de la maladie aux assassinats par les terroristes dans les années 90).
  J'ai appris énormément de choses, découvert certaines figures intellectuelles que je ne connaissais pas, et bien évidemment toujours autant apprécié la plume d'Assia Djebar.
  C'est un livre à lire si vous êtes intéressés par l'histoire de l'Algérie, malgré sa complexité par moment il est d'une grande richesse !
• 
  Sarah

  Eh. I didn't care much for this book. (I read it for my French class). While it was sad and eye-opening to learn about all the authors and artists who were killed by the French during the Algerian movement for independence, I think it would have been more impactful if I knew who all the authors she mentioned were before I read the book. I really only connected with the assassination of Mouloud Feraoun because we read one of his books earlier in the semester.
• 
  Meg

  A Beautiful Eulogy
  
  My second Assia Djebar work. She brings each writer to life memorializing them in their deaths. Tribute to the Algerian writers murdered in the war for independence and the Civil War, but so much more. She weaves together their tales and those of others in a patchwork quilt if writing that captures the interconnectedness of Algeria's people and intellectuals. However, many of the allusions were lost on this non-Algerian reader.
• 
  Sarena

  Like Djebar’s other books, this one is an important testament to memory, history, and witnessing. However, it just didn’t resonate with me as much as her other works, which I think was due to the disjointed structure and the fact that, even though she was honoring various writers, their stories only connected over the décennie noire.
• 
  Bel

  Ma première lecture de Assia djebar, j'ai trop adoré .
  Une merveille . Elle raconté les détails des assassinats de ses chers amis, raconté la guerre ou le combat passés durant la colonisation française et d'autre part la lutte pour l'identité amazigh et le terrorisme. Je le recommande vivement.
• 
  Sami Belhaj

  Un récit plein d'encre et du sang !
• 
  Tiffany Vicars

  Algeria
• 
  Amira Aggoune

  (3.5)
  C'est douleureux
• 
  Dylan

  This was a sweet, sad, poetic book. I want to read it again out loud.
• 
  Dirk

  I loved the premise, but I could not handle the disjointed accretion of clauses and parentheticals, which produced such an arrhythmic flow of words that I stopped 30 pages into the book.
• 
  Kate Throp

  I found this very heavy going. Her style of writing did not make for an easy read - particularly the first 50 or so pages which were a sort of stream of consciousness. A very sad litany of deaths and so personally written but I found it very difficult to follow the who and why of it all. I guess it was just not quite what I was expecting.
• 
  Rob Prince

  Having re-read this book and many others on Algeria, I have had my misgivings for giving it such a strong recommendation earlier. The problem with the book is not so much that the horror described - the assassinations of so many Algerian intellectuals and democrats - is not accurate. What is missing is any sense of who was behind these killings. The impression given in the book is that all this was the work of crazed Islamic fundamentalists...over the past decade however, it has become clearer that these crazed Islamic fundamentalists were infiltrated and run by what is called `the DRS' (Direction de Recherches et Securite) - Algeria's internal security apparatus; there is nothing in Assia Djebar's writing to suggest the extraordinary degree to which the Algerian Civil war of the 1990s was manipulated by the military-security junta that ran the government then and now. And as such, it distorts the history of that period.
• 
  Nora

  Djebar's musings on the consequences of war in Algeria - friends lost, ideals shattered - are beautiful and tragic and magnificently expressed. She has powerful insights on love and language; I cried reading them.
• 
  Tina.

  There's just something about Assia Djebar's writing that rubs me the wrong way. Some beautiful passages and heart-breaking meditations on death, but, overall, I'm just underwhelmed.
• 
  Dana

  A book filled with beautiful language that describes the horrors that have been taking place in Algeria.
• 
  Catherine

  An incredible book about writers and poets and journalists and many more important persons during historical time of the Independence and the more recent tumultous years 80's and 90's