Character (or the Female Narrator)

¶ … character (or the female narrator) in Assia Djebar's Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, examine the relation between language and identity. In particular, analyze how language helps the main character construct her identity as a woman. Highlight how her experience with language shaped her awareness of herself and the world surrounding her.

Algeria was a French colony. After the French invaded the country, twenty-five years of war transpired, which ultimately resulted in the French domination of the land until Algerians claimed the land for Algeria once more, through the process of a military revolution. But the memory of colonialism cannot easily be erased from the minds of the Algeria's native colonialized inhabitants, no matter how much the French oppressors were and are despised and denounced.

Assia Djebar's book, entitled Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade suggests that it is easier, in some ways to erase the physical memory of oppression than it is to unlearn one's self of the power and the beauty of the French language, of the language of the oppressor, even if is that language of another who has wronged one's sense of nationality and of self. Language, in the author's view, has a unique power to imbue an individual with speech but also to construct an individual's sense of self and mind in a particular way. This is particular true because the author views the perspective of the construction of identity through the eyes of a developing writer, but also through the voice of a young woman, a gender whom has often been denied the power of linguistic expression cross-culturally.

According to the main character of Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, language is never simply language, never simply existing in the neutral tense. Rather, language is a unique interconnection of relationships that define the ethnicity and sense of self of her as a narrator and main character's 'femaleness.' At one point, the first-person speaker at the center of the tale says that the word, that is her two languages, both function as a "torch." In other words, her use of language, both her mother tongue of Algerian and her stepmother tongue of French, can and should be used to illuminate and to protect herself in the face of despair and confusion, "to be held up in front of the wall of separation," from what she loves. (Djebar 3)

The author writes in French, which may seem to contradict her claims of language as liberation. But the mere act of language, of speaking, she says does not "silence the voice, but awakens it, above all to resurrect so many vanished sisters." The narrator speaks to articulate the lost points-of-view in a country where women were ignored and oppressed for no reason other than their gender, as well as a nation that was denied its native language by the French. Women are forced to live a limited existence, she says, simply because of their lack of access to the public realm -- and to French. To liberate these women and to liberate the struggle of her own life into prose, paradoxically the narrator must use the colonialist's language of French, a language she uses with great force, power, and verve.

The narrator had an educated father who was, unique amongst Algerian father of his day, committed to educating his daughter formally in school, and ensuring she was able to express herself well. The reader encounters him first as a tall, Arabic man in a business suit and a fez, even in appearance encompassing the contradictions of his status. He was a primary school teacher, and thus wished his daughter to follow in his footsteps of education. This daughter, by following him hand in hand to school, hoped to become like him, like the language she heard from his lips, the language he spoke at the French primary school where he taught -- and yes, hoped to become like him, like a man.

However, this daughter also had a strong sense of the limits of language, because it was the language of the French, the nationals whom she came to despise for their tyranny against her nation. Her relationship with the language and with narrative structure itself thus infects her tale. The structure of Fantasia is, like its title suggests, not a linear narrative, but a fragmentary one. The narrative is piecemeal, almost suggesting that it mistrusts the language that unfolds it.

Rather than attempting to hide its constructed nature, it seemingly revels in it, takes pleasure in it, and draws attention to its construction as a narrative. This encourages the reader not to see the author disappearing behind a fictional mask, but assuming one quite deliberately. Characters themselves are not constructed, but exist as vehicles of meaning, as metaphors rather than having interior lives.

But how else could it be otherwise? For to pay homage to linear narration and to simply appreciate language without artifice, would be to validate the French language unquestioningly. More danger than love, states the narrator, at the beginning of her journey, lurks behind paper on which she writes and the walls she feels will hem her in, walls of national and gendered boundaries. It would have been easier for her to have remained "veiled," as she so aptly uses metaphor, behind the guise of Algerian, Muslim, Arabic femininity alone than to trod a dual linguistic and cultural path. But ease is not really an option open to her, as far as she sees it. (3)

For the reader, is also tempting to view words, as does the narrator initially, as something portable and something that can transcend walls. But even the act of speaking is to engage in specific cultural, and specific linguistic acts of enclosure. When one speaks in a particular language, one must categorize and create divisions between self and other. Thus to engage in the language-making process itself is to allow one's mind to be colonized. Yet what other alternative exists -- the existence in a world of silence and speechlessness behind the veil is not to be decolorized? Although this may seem more 'truly' Arabic and Muslim, to engage in such is to reduce one's self to a body, out of the language of liberation, and to subject one's self and identity to another kind of tyranny and oppression.

Question 2

Compare how the marginalized in Anita Desai's " the Rooftop Dwellers" and A.B Yehoushua's "Facing the forests" resist marginalization. Identify first those who are marginalized and how they are marginalized. Then you should move to the focus of your response, which is examining and comparing the methods of resistance in both texts. Based on whatever criteria you establish, is resistance effective, useless advised or else?

To be marginalized, to dwell in the peripheries of experience, can be both a limiting and empowering experience. On one had, to be socially and culturally marginal is limiting in the sense that it denies one's voice and the self from participating in larger acts of culture. However, marginalization can also enable the marginalized subject to have a powerful and unique perspective upon his or her own cultural tragedies and conflicts that he would otherwise not have.

For instance, in A.B Yehoushua's 'Facing the Forests', a fire-watcher's social and geographical isolation, because of his profession, causes him to feel personally isolated from other individuals in his world. All he can do, ultimately, is to surrender to something larger in nature, rather than to fully grapple with nature. For this, he is despised. The central character, also because of his location and destiny of a profession, is filled with a sense of tragedy at all times. Yet this perspective is also quite illustrative of the condition of the two peoples who dwell upon the land of Israel. All individuals find themselves engulfed in a cultural conflict that is larger than their own selves and destinies. They cannot ignore this conflict or declare themselves neutral to it or marginal to it in terms of their fundamental identity. However, they are marginal to this central conflict because no individual has control over the swells and tides of history, of the past.

Yehoushua's protagonist is always forced to remain without of the fold of normal society, and to experience a certain sense of helplessness in the face of larger events. This ultimately instructs him as a human being, however, that no individual can resist the tides of history and the tragic progress of events. Ultimately, his marginalization also fills him with compassion for those whom he might otherwise not identify with, and exclude, because they do must stand upon the margins in the face of the forces of nature and history.

Lastly, fire is an apt metaphor because fire burns, destroying all in its wake. It is a humbling of the land that is fought over by both sides. The fire destroys lives and destroys possessions that seem significant to human beings, in their limited understandings of their existences. But it also shows the fundamental transience of human desires and aspirations.

The protagonist's resistance is thus effective, psychologically in the sense that the fire-watcher has been given a gift that other members of society and the world might lack, a sense of his own personal ineffectuality, true, but also a sense of the ultimate transience of all human desires for boundaries and possession. This does not necessarily provide a solution to the problem of social marginalization, or of the historical conflicts presence in Israel and waged in the political sphere, but it does provide a certain ideological 'gift' to the marginalized man.

In contrast, Anita Desai's short story is more lighthearted in its analysis of cultural marginalization. In her story, the central protagonist travels to another city in India and establishes a career for herself, quite contrary to how she has been taught to live. The central, female protagonist does not fall into the conventional mode of simply marrying an acceptable boy, chosen as her husband. She seeks liberation through pursuing an apparently marginalized life that her parents and relatives would despise or find unacceptable.

Desai's story highlights some of the problems, however, of a woman finding liberation through the tools of modernization. When a woman rejects traditional modes of femininity, she must ask herself, what cultural modes of identity and the self can she accept? Often, the most available cultural accoutrements for creating a female identity however are equally superficial and limiting as traditional ones, revolving around the modes of dress and sexuality. Even the choice of a career and a new city where the protagonist is more anonymous is not necessarily liberating, because the new methods she chooses are not less culturally marked than traditional methods. However, the limited nature of travel and occupation, even education to create a new identity is also shown in a parallel male struggle to do the same through traveling to America.