Vaste est la prison: Assia Djebar tracing a new path – writing the Algerian woman out of her confinement

The present paper is part of a longer project examining national allegory and variations on the topos of nation as woman in modern and postmodern novels by Arab women writers. The question of how novelists such as Assia Djebar of Algeria use this Arab narrative tradition once employed mainly by Arab men writers is explored. How Djebar uses the embodiment of nation as woman is examined in relation to the gaze and women's body, voice, and sexuality some 30 years after Algeria and its women were supposed to be liberated in a war of independence against colonial France. In reality, at the time of writing, Algeria had sunk into a bloody civil war. In this study of metaphors linking land and body, psychoanalytical images and terminology come to the fore, as Djebar employs psychoanalytical theory to delve into the layers of history, personal, collective, and national, that lead her to repeat and elaborate with her own variations upon these archaic comparisons, which she relates to her own symptoms of hysteria. While the novel, Vaste est la prison [So vast the prison] reveals, in general, the home and the nation to be a prison for women, it also calls into question the image of Algeria as a savage woman, an ogress devouring its people. Djebar rattles the bars of many prisons, those of language and the imaginary, if not, thus, those of reality, with her novel, using the image of the fleeing fugitive and her movement in space and towards the light of day to escape the chains of her mental and linguistic confinement, including being subject to an allegory of a savage female Algerian nation. In this way, the novel both appropriates and subverts images of nation and land as woman.