How does Djebar, as an excluded woman from the traditional

woman's world, speak for the "other"?

Exile from maternal space:

One day Assia Djebar’s father, a teacher in the French colonial educational system,
accompanied his daughter, “a little Arab girl going to school for the first time, one
autumn morning, walking hand in hand with her father” (Fantasia, p. 3). That day
he set her on a journey that would transform her into a bilingual and bicultural
intellectual, a woman whose experiences would differ greatly from those of other
women of her generation. Her world, she noted, would be one of “the outdoors and
the risk, instead of the prison of [her] peers” (Fantasia, p. 184). This opening scene
in the novel is recalled more than 40 years after the event by a woman aware that this
first school day marked her initiation into a new space and a new language. When
Djebar finds herself liberated from the female enclosure that Orientalist painters such as
Eugène Delacroix first depicted as the North African harem, she discovers that the price
she pays for freedom is exile, specifically from the maternal sphere. As a child she
becomes aware that her French education and freedom of movement in public space
have moved her beyond the traditional world of her aunts and female cousins.

Reestablishing links with the maternal world:

Reviewing the events of Algerian war from an adult perspective, Djebar considers her
personal experience an ambiguous one. Liberated from the female enclosure of her
Algerian sisters, she reached maturity haunted by the weight of exile. Djebar came to
believe that the process of Western acculturation, resulting in her mastery of the
colonizer’s language and excess to public space, excluded her from most, if not all,
aspects of traditional women’s world. She views her ‘Algerian quartet’ as a project to
reestablish links with the maternal world from which she felt distanced but in fact a
realm she never lost when she first grasped her father’s hand to walk with him to the
European school.

Djebar’s use of pen to liberate silenced Algerian women:

In Fantasia, Djebar reestablishes bonds with the maternal world she left behind. She
restores these bonds by assuming the multiple roles of translator, interpreter, scribe,
and historian for Algerian women who had been silenced by both Algerian patriarchy
and French colonialism. The small hand that grasped her father’s on the way to school
was given a pen, which it learned to use as both a creative instrument and a weapon in
the struggle to liberate Algerian women. Djebar would express varied components of
Algeria’s female world.
The act of writing becomes Djebar’s way of forging and maintaining links with her
individual and collective past as well as opposing the silencing of women’s voices
throughout the Arab world today. By committing her experiences to the printed page,
the writer removes the veils of privacy that some Algerians, particularly Islamic
fundamentalists, consider necessary.

use of French language to give voice to silenced women:

By including French archival documents in Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Djebar
reconstitutes the horror of two separate incidents in which recalcitrant Algerian clans
were burned to death when French officers Pélissier and Saint-Arnaud ordered their
soldiers to set fire to the caves in which the clans sought refuge. More than a century
later, Djebar describes the scene with emotion, refusing the role of objective historian,
writing history into her novel as she deems fit: “Pélissier, speaking on behalf of
fifteen hundred corpses buried beneath El-Kantara, with their flocks unceasingly
bleating at death, hands me his report and I accept this palimpsest on which I
now inscribe the charred passion of my ancestors” (Fantasia, p. 79).
The search for hidden historical events and for Djebar’s individual identity converge. As
French soldiers once dragged out charred corpses, Djebar now excavates the female
self buried under colonial and patriarchal myths: “The date of my birth is eighteen
hundred and forty-two, the year when General Saint-Arnaud arrives to burn down
the zaouia of the Béni Men-acer, the tribe from which I am descended” (Fantasia,
p. 217).
In the process, Djebar is forced to come to terms with her attitude towards the French
language, which has simultaneously liberated her from the harem and brought her face
to face with colonial injustice. She uses French to recall her maternal world, and to
inscribe the suffering and injustice inflicted upon Algerians by the colonial conquest:
“This language was formerly used to entomb my people” (Fantasia, p. 215). She
uses it today, constructively, to render history through an Algerian consciousness and to
give voice to silenced women.

Fusion of narratives separated by language and gender:

Djebar contrasts male French narratives of the French conquest with women’s
narratives of the Algerian Revolution. Combining oral narrative with colonial military and
administrative reports and correspondence, she fuses narratives separated by language
—French and Arabic—and by gender—colonialist male and indigenous female. More
exactly, she acknowledges two languages that have informed her past—the Arabic of
the town and the Berber spoken in the rural regions (Ghoussey, p. 458). Moreover,
Djebar appropriates a traditionally male medium—writing—to tell women’s stories.
The rural women speak of hiding in the woods, being captured, jailed, and tortured,
expressing fear, pain, and triumph as they relive these memories. Djebar has noted that
“the greater the woman’s suffering, the more concise and almost dry manner she
had in speaking about it” (Djebar in Mortimer, “Entretien,” p. 202). She is struck by the
women’s sincerity and simplicity, and by the difference in their style from the male
official discourse: men tend to construct heroic tales, and women to speak of their daily
lives.
Even more pronounced than the dichotomy between Algerian male and female voices is
the contrast between French colonial writing and modern Algerian women’s voices. The
female Arabic oral narratives appear exceptionally stark, concise, and filled with
understatement when juxtaposed with highly embellished nineteenth-century French
prose.

Conclusion:
Djebar uses the book’s symphonic and fan-tasialike structure to blend her own voice
with those of traditional Algerian women. Harmonizing with these female voices rather
than imposing her own on them, she pays tribute to the maternal world of her past. As
translator and scribe, giving written form to Algerian women’s heroic deeds, the writer
manages to renew her bonds with the women of her past and return to the world that
she left behind that first day when, as a small child, she grasped her father’s hand as he
walked her to school.