ABSTRACT
MARTIN ORWIN Gallaire, Fatima b. 1944, Algeria playwright The Algerian playwright Fatima Gallaire was born in east Algeria and studied
literature in Algiers and cinema at Vincennes in France, where she now lives. Her professional career has been divided between fiction writing, drama, and cinema. Although she has published short stories in magazines and literary journals, most of the few novels she has written so far have not yet been published. Gallaire is mainly known for her plays, which have earned her popularity in French and Francophone theater. Many of her plays have been translated into English. Her most popular play is perhaps Princesses, ou Ah! Vous êtes venus, which was translated as You Have Come Back and performed by the New York Urbu
Repertory Theater in 1988. In her plays Gallaire deals with issues related to gender and patriarchy in the Maghreb (see gender and sexuality). She discusses polygamy and the ordeal of women in a polygamous marriage, the segregation between the sexes, and the place of women in patriarchal societies, where they are often conceived and represented as part of male property. In her plays, especially Princesses, Gallaire describes the wives in a polygamous family as furniture and the daughters as merchandise. Her plays are often dramatic attempts to question the subordination and objectification of women in patriarchal societies. In making the question of gender relations in the Maghreb central to her plays, Gallaire seeks to establish a vital link between her adopted French homeland and Algeria, the country of her birth.
