Analysis Of The Narrative Structure Of A Nightmare Passage From Women Of Algiers In Their Apartment By Assia Djbar

This passage is taken from Ali’s nightmare, placed at the very beginning of the first chapter in Assia Djbar’s collection of short stories, Les Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Ali, who formerly served the Algerian National Liberal Front during the Independace War in Algeria, is presently a surgeon and has a nightmare, featuring a tortured blindfolded woman whom he believes to be his wife Sarah, prepare for a sacrifice or an operation. The nightmare is narrated in first person by Ali and so is filtered through a male gaze. Given that it is a dream, it is therefore a construction of Ali’s subconscious. Djebar’s choice to open her short story with a nightmare sets the tone for the rest of the collection; this passage therefore acts as a prologue or a foreword.

In Ali’s nightmare, Djebar confronts the reality of post-war Algeria by illustrating how the subconscious refuses to forget a traumatic past of violence and war, through imagery and symbolism. By using the un-conscious mind to blur time panes, Djebar creates a past-present; a past that is still relevant to the present. Through style and tone, Djebar draws similarities between the equally toxic and oppressive gaze of the western coloniser and the Algerian patriarchy that have imprisoned the female body. Whilst the intensity of the passage gradually increases, there are momentary shifts of power from Ali to Sarah, and then eventually back to the western coloniser.

The mise en scène of the beginning of the text recalls Eugene Delacroix’s orientalist painting, Les femmes d’Alger (1834). For example, elements such as the lack of light and the hazy fog creates an oneiric setting, ‘le broillard de la piece etroite…fumee s’evant en volutes’. This description is reminiscent of the soft glow that Delacroix deploys in his painting of the Algerian women which creates an ethereal mood in the harem. Due to the lack of clarity in the space, all we receive from Ali’s description is an outline of the woman, creating a mysterious barrier which puts distance between the narrator and the woman. Ali deciphers the silhouette of Sarah’s silhouette, and traces the shape of her body, like a sketch whilst she is blindfolded. Ali is able to consume Sarah’s image with his eyes whereas she remains blind and therefore voiceless, objectified by Ali’s voyeuristic session. Moreover, Sarah’s body position is submissive and unnatural, ‘tête de jeune femme aux yeux bandés, cou renversé, cheveux tirés’. Sarah’s skin is described as ‘transparente’, which presents her as an empty, dehumanized and anonymous and ghost-like object in Ali’s eyes.

Ali’s dream is a constructed image out of his imagination, as is Delacroix’s painting, and by placing both the colonised and the coloniser on the same side of the lens, both male figures violate the female body as onlookers and fail to empathise with the her mind. However, Ali’s silent observation is interrupted by his own anxiety, ‘elle a dû le mette elle-même, elle va l’arracher, elle va pouffer de rire et éclater de vie devant moi, elle…). Here, Ali fears for position of security and is anxious about getting humiliated and outsmarted by Sarah, his inferior. His agitation could possibly reveal his guilt in observing Sarah’s body freely in his dream. Ali’s description of Sarah potentially lashing out is a stark contrast to the initial depiction of her as an isolated and submissive figure. She becomes active and challenges his masculine gaze by snatching her own gaze momentarily; this moment culminates the turning point of the passage. As soon as Ali fears her reaction, he starts to lose the full control that he had at the beginning of his dream. This is evident in the way that his sentences remain unfinished and his stream of conscience delineates, ‘Son coupé…Sarah…L’appeler, trembler dans l’appel pour prévenir le sacrifice le sacrifice…’. His language and command of language breaks down and changes the structure of the piece. Ali’s linguistic malfunctions introduce gaps and therefore more ambiguities in the text, thus creating a more fragmentary description of his dream.

Despite the disintegrating coherence of Ali’s language, the movement of the passage accelerates and tensions intensify. To create a sense of chaos within the reader, Djebar evokes the reader’s senses, which ironically contrasts to Sarah’s blindness and muteness. For example, the scene breaks into a cacophony of disjointed sounds, ‘enfin bruits de la chambre…Bêlement d’une chèvre; à sa suite, tout un poulailler en musique de piccolo…des enfants pleurant au loin’, as well as the sound of the ‘gégenne’ which all work together to create a jarring soundscape of pain and distress. Although blindfolded and unable to speak, her silence becomes more pronounced in the vocabulary that Djebar uses to describe Sarah’s inability to make a sound, ‘le son coupé, les hoquets en arrêt dans la gorge…son coupé’. The assonant and repetitive ‘c’ and ‘q’ evokes the reader of Sarah’s discomfort and desperation to make noise. Sarah’s persistent gagging reminds us that she is being oppressed physically and intellectually.

The images of torture and distress are disturbing and vivid, reminding us of the bitter violence that was endured by all Algerians in the War of Independence against France between 1958 to 1979. As well as Sarah, Ali becomes more and more distant from the scene, unsure of whether he is present or not, ‘Je n’opère pas car je ne suis pas là’. The text therefore becomes more symbolic, in order to articulate the rest of Ali’s subconscious. The ‘cou tendu’ of the goat is mirrored by Sarah’s ‘cou renversé’ and highlights the fact that neither the bleating goat or the blindfolded woman have agency over their bodies. The sacrifice of Sarah on the operating table and the appearance of the goat recalls the story in the Qur’an where Ibrahim is asked to sacrifice his son, Ishmael to show his loyalty to Allah. Lindsey Moore suggests that ‘women are trans-historically, sacrificial victims in transactions between men’. Perhaps this suggests that women were sacrificed as a commodity into the hands of the western colonisers rather than seen as an individual, or recognised as a human being by their own nation.

The use of religious imagery could perhaps also be a critique of the role of religion strengthening patriarchy in Algerian society. However, the distressing imagery is literally washed over by a fountain, ‘une source plutôt, l’eau éclaboussant l’herbe naissante…Tout près…l’eau de la fontaine submerge tout en flots nourris de délivrance’, representing a vitality which nourishes the ‘l’herbe naissante’, extinguishing the impending and torturous operation. The freshness of the water and the ‘un ciel tout blanc…tout neuf’ opposes the anguish and darkness that clouded the earlier lines of the passage. Perhaps the white sky symbolises a desire for liberation and freedom of female body and mind from societal imprisonment which will, ‘anéantir’ the male nurses. The fluidity of the spring is perhaps a contrast to the rigidity of the power structures that Algerian woman were subject to. This moment of brightness and movement contrasts to Sarah’s contorted and mutilated body. This moment in the nightmare could be seen as a foreshadowing of Sarah’s autonomy that she finds at the end of the short story when she is no longer captive in a harem.

Although, the passage returns to darker and cynical tone once again as the power is transferred away from female potential, and sucked back into the hands of the western coloniser. This is since Sarah looks at Ali once more with, ‘les yeux bandés, les yeux troués’ and the motor starts whirring again, presumably in the coloniser’s grasp, triggering memory of violence and trauma from the Independence War that still resides in Ali. The image of the blindfolded woman with cut-out eyes is a haunting image as the woman is paralysed in a mutilated body, and is forbidden to see. The woman’s body forces Ali to confront the reality and induce his guilt of being a complicit agent in the subjugation of woman. The ending is left open and ambiguous, nevertheless leaving an impact on Ali but also bringing the mistreatment of women to the back forefront of the text.

To conclude, this passage explores how past trauma and suffering manifest themselves in the subconscious mind, and carry their aftershocks into the present. By delineating and fragmenting the narrative structure of the passage, Djebar illustrates how trauma dismantles any time pane. Furthermore, by placing Ali’s nightmare at the beginning of the Les Femmes D’Algers, the oppression of the Algerian woman by patriarchal and colonising power structures is in the foreground of the rest of the collection. By shifting power from Ali to Sarah and eventually back to those alike to Delacroix, Djebar suggests that the cycle can be broken by confronting national history rather than being a complicit accessory, like Ali.