Still Beseiged by Voices: Djebar's Poetics of the Threshold

Summary

When, in 1999, Assia Djebar decided to publish Ces voix qui m'assiègent, she gathered under one cover the majority of her critical essays, pieces that had, until then, not been readily accessible. Some were in newspapers; some in reviews; some circulated by determined scholars from copies made of the writer's own draft notes, notes misplaced after they had been delivered. Ces voix became the requisite document for which the Université de Montpellier awarded her a doctorate that same year, and the scholarly Canadian periodical Études françaises, a prize.

The compilation offered an ‘Avant-propos’, a Foreword, whose defiant first sentence sounded like a declaration of war: ‘L'écrivain est parfois interrogé comme en justice’. Her confident answer challenged those who would contest her right to the French language: ‘Pourquoi écrivez-vous en Français? Si vous êtes ainsi interpellée, c'est, bien sûr, pour rappeler que vous venez d'ailleurs’ (Djebar, 1999: 7).

The Althusserian term ‘interpellée’ carries the full brunt of a police interrogation intended to put one in one's place. In turn, the collection of essays that follows is designed to put questioners in their place. It is combative, it is authoritative, it is articulate. It is indeed the most conceptually challenging record we have to date as to the elaboration of her poetics. As such, it deserves translation into the many languages in which her fiction has already been translated. For it constitutes the indispensable dialogical document as to the nature of her craft.