Postcolonial Literature and Feminist Identities: Children of the New World

Children of the New World by Assia Djebar, chronicles a day in the life of the Algerian rebellion of 1956, one of the years in which Algerians were attempting to wrest control of their nation back from the colonizing French. Algeria was a Muslim country; France was mainly Christian. Women played a decisive role in the struggle for liberation in many instances while others found their gender to complicate their relationship with their Algerian and Muslim nature. But advocating for rebellion from colonialism did not mean they were necessarily granted equality, as Djebar shows. All of the women in the novel have a complex relationship to nationalism, gender, and colonialism. Djebar simultaneously validates the women's right to speak and to have a very personal reaction to the war even while she shows the dangers of imperialism.

A good example of this can be seen in the case of Touma, a colonial informer. As a woman, she frequently feels powerless (such as when she is openly insulted by a waiter in a degrading fashion) and her status as an informant gives her a sense of self-aggrandizement. However, her actions cause her to run afoul of her brother, with tragic consequences. Her brother, a fiery anti-colonialist revolutionary takes vengeance against his sister in a kind of politically motivated honor killing: "Touma's body remained on the ground, resting, the circle of men ('Her brother!' 'Yes, it was her brother! He avenged his honor! May God have mercy on him!) had time to examine the slaughtered victim at leisure. Then they began to retreat, their ranks growing thinner" (Djebar 178). Her death is called a 'family matter' as if the death of a sister at the hands of her brother is outside of the reach of the law. On one hand, the killing highlights the terrible, dangerous side of patriarchy for women -- women's lives can be taken with impunity if it is regarded as a 'family matter' outside of the realm of the justice system.

In such a situation, women are in a double bind. On one hand, the colonial infrastructure is complicit with the oppression of Algiers. However, honor killings according to custom and the 'right' of men to take the lives of women as a cultural norm is profoundly frightening and degrading. This incident recalls the essay "Can the subaltern speak" by the postcolonial theorist G.C. Spivak in which Spivak details the phenomenon of wife-immolation, or sati, in India. Spivak's essay is famously complex but a very simple answer to the question she poses to her titular question is 'no.' Spivak notes how India's colonizers used the practice of wife-burning as a justification of colonial oppression, given the supposed savagery of the Hindus. The anti-British nationalists resisted this characterization and tried to defend it in their male-dominated discourse. However, the actual women, which Spivak calls the subaltern, were not permitted to speak.

Djebar's novel could thus be said to be an example of how women, or the 'subaltern' of Muslim culture are trying to speak. Their opportunities are often thwarted but they still strive to articulate themselves. Touma cannot find a way to have the power she desires and still retain her femininity: she cannot ally herself with her brother's culture and attitude but there is no third option so she finds herself naturally thrust into the arms of colonial powers. Similarly, the student Lila is frustrated by her husband's uncomplicated admiration for the anti-colonialist freedom fighters, which causes friction at home.

Ali persisted in wanting to shape Lila -- the now so rebellious Lila -- in projecting her as closely as possible onto the absolute form he had in mind. To this end he used a method -- perseverance -- a tactic that with greater perceptiveness or tenderness she would have found touching in its very blindness. But she had not yet detected Ali's inconceivable innocence; he was too virile, too authoritative; what struck her were only his arrogance and the madness of his demands, which had become the very essence of his passion (Djebar 22).

For Ali, controlling Lila is part of loving her, as it often has been viewed in male-female relationships. Lila is in search of identity outside of this narrow, patriarchal conception of both language and relations between the sexes. However, for many males, a loss of power over a woman is devastating, particularly in a colonial context where their power as a male has been impinged upon by Europeans. Emasculation in one realm leads to oppression of women...

Lila is hurt by Ali's jealous rages which are completely unjustified and seeks to placate them, not fully understanding from what wellspring his passion arises. "She believed with a twinge in her heart and in the same time with cruel inner detachment, that her entire life, 'her destiny' as she put it, with youthful emphasis, depended on the exact moment -- on the power she had to convince Ali when he accused her (of what? It didn't matter)" (Djebar 23). Lila is highly educated, a philosophy student with a clearly advanced historical and literary perspective upon her plight but she is unable to overcome a sense of culturally-imposed emotional inadequacy because of her inability to satisfy Ali.
This highlights, along with the Spivak article, the extent to which postcolonial conceptions of the feminine and feminism are not always harmonious. Feminism has tended to view all female interests as united, regardless of the nation-state in which they live. However, the status of a woman as a colonized subject complicates this issue. Women who seek to articulate identities outside of narrowly prescribed norms and traditional roles such as mothers, wives, and sisters, find themselves accused of insubordination. But women who do not find themselves in uncomfortable, stifling relationships where they are always seeking to please and have no power. That is why so many women in the novel feel they have no true autonomy, unless they align themselves with colonial interests. Furthermore, the home and the sphere of domesticity is under constant assault in the novel, as most poignantly illustrated in the example of an elderly woman who refuses to leave her home and is destroyed in the crossfire. When women cling to their own identities and resting-spaces, they find themselves wounded, hurt, and killed, given that these traditional roles cannot be supported in modernity, but the new identities they seek to explore are tainted with the colonial legacy in the eyes of their husbands, fathers, and brothers.

Djebar's work is clearly in the school of what has become to be known as postcolonial feminism, an ideology which questions the concept that feminism can be a universal movement and instead stresses the need for particularity. As Mishra (2013) notes, the perspective of postcolonial feminism is fundamentally that: "It is simplistic to believe that Western feminists can represent and justify the stand of women living in once-colonized countries. Since lives, experiences and circumstances of postcolonial women differ utterly from that of Western women, so feminists of postcolonial origin should come forward and make differences visible and acceptable across cultures; otherwise get ready to take on colonized garbs of identity" (Mishra 129). Feminism from the West cannot be blindly accepted, otherwise one finds one's self in the position of rejecting one's own culture and one's own people, but this does not mean that cultural self-examination is impossible in a postcolonial context.

The tension within postcolonial feminism is to relieve itself of charges that it is merely reinforcing norms that Europeans were right to 'carry the white man's burden' and to question all of the complex dimensions of the cultures they strove to assume, while offering an alternative vision of the future. "In their engagement with the issue of representation, postcolonial feminist critics, in common with other U.S. women of color, have attacked both the idea of universal 'woman,' as well as the reification of the Third World 'difference' that produces the 'monolithic' Third World woman" (Mishra 131). In other words, it is dangerous and misguided to say that the so-called Third World is so fragile it cannot be critiqued (which is effectively the position of many of the men in the novel Children of the New World) just as it is simultaneously dangerous to deny the powers of colonialism to define identity in a negative fashion.

Djebar's portrait of women is not entirely dark. Cherifa, for example, is able to escape a loveless marriage and eventually establishes some sense of autonomy for herself by marrying a man she truly loves. "She's not suffering. She's not rebelling. She says to herself automatically, 'I should pray to God, I should recite some verses of the Koran to accept my lot, to purify my soul'" (Djebar 189). Cherifa refuses to pray and ultimately insists on a marriage of equality with Youssef. But even then, Djebar seems to suggest that marriage is the primary means of…