ABSTRACT
Ironically it is not until this, the third instalment in Djebar’s ‘Algerian Trilogy’ (after Fantasia and A Sister to Scheherazade), that the reader gets any real purchase on the author’s mother. I cite this highly complex text briefly in order to signal some of my interests in this chapter. As always in Djebar’s work, ‘the author’s mother’ is an approximate designation, although her narrative fits chronologically and in terms of its geographical movements. Bahia is presented as a ‘traveller’, first moving to Caesarea (Cherchell) as a child and ‘leaving the Berber language’ for Arabic (231). She later travels to France to visit her imprisoned son during the Algerian war: by this stage she speaks French and can pass as a Frenchwoman (194). Bahia is linked through her linguistic and geographical displacements with (among other women) Tin Hanan, a fourth-century Berber princess, and Kahina, the Berber queen who resisted the Arab conquest. In 1925, Djebar relates, Tin Hanan’s tomb was discovered with inscriptions in the ancient, now indecipherable tifinagh script. The narrator imagines that the text was passed by Tin Hanan to her female friends, perceiving traces of it in contemporary women’s ideolects, embroidery, and music (174). Bahia also transcribes, in Arabic, couplets of the noubas of ancient Andalusia before French soldiers, misperceiving the songs as ‘the message of some nationalist complicity’, destroy them (175). Djebar presents an already palimpsestic Maghreb pluriel (see Khatibi 1983) further layered by women’s voices historically marginalized by Arab, French, and other dominant cultures in the region. The narrator ‘write[s] in the shadow of my mother’ (177) to disinter an archive of traces that Bahia attempts to record and even embodies.
