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VEILED TRUTH:
Reading Assia Djebar from the Outside 

 Elizabeth Morgan
Eastern University
U. S. A.

Editor's Note
The Algerian Context
Djebar's "Fragmented Autobiography"
Reading from The Outside
Endnotes
References

Morgan, E. (2002). Veiled truth: Reading Assia Djebar from the outside. Christianity and Literature, 51 (4), 603-620. 

Veiling, in Algerian history and in the work of Djebar, who began her academic career as an historian, is like a palimpsest, a rich and complex “text” on which multiple messages are inscribed, overlaid, and intertwined. It is an issue that invites outsiders to overcome their estrangement from the other by recognizing estrangement from self, particularly as a study of veiling reveals how persons separate themselves from intimate exchange. Djebar’s writing provides a provocative location of estrangement, a place where national history, personal history, and aesthetic recreation converge. It is, among many other things, a place where Christians in the West are able to ponder anew the complex layering of revelation and tradition, the two con­sistent cornerstones of the Church, particularly as they relate to the complexities of gender construction. These connections will be explored by way of allowing Djebar’s texts to defamiliarize both cultural and theological precepts that we often accept without questioning them.  [paragraph 2]

The Algerian Context

Algeria is a country that has been “covered” multiple times by foreign empires, all projecting their shadows over the land and culture. In 146 B.C. Rome destroyed Carthage and soon conquered coastal Algeria. By the end of the fifth century A.D., the Berbers and Vandals had descended into Algeria and eroded Roman control. In the early sixth century the Byzantine Empire established a thin veneer of unity and order over North Africa. Then, in the seventh and eighth centuries, Muslim Arabs conquered the Byzantines. In the fifteenth century Spain removed the Muslims, not only from its own land but from the coastal cities of Algeria as well. With help from Turkish pirates and the Ottoman Empire, the Spaniards were then sent packing, and Algeria became part of yet another empire. The French entered in 1830 and had established almost total control by 1847. During World War II Algeria came under the Vichy government but later housed the Free French government of Charles De Gaulle. After a long and bloody struggle Algerians vot­ed for independence in 1962, after which began a complex period of power struggles among Berbers, Francophone Algerians, Islamic fundamentalists, and socialist ideologues. Algeria’s political and social woes—the plight of the still disaffected Berber population and complaints by international hu­man rights agencies about the government’s ill treatment of Islamic militants—are in the news today, the country’s cultural identity still a matter of layer upon layer of ethnic transcript.   [paragraph 3]

The veiling of Algerian citizens is thus a complex physical and symbolic act. Women are the obviously veiled subjects, but all citizens are veiled in so many ways. Psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, author of the stark, anticolonial classic The Wretched of the Earth but also of the lesser-known “Algeria unveiled,’ published in A Dying Colonialism, does much to problematize the issue. As he argues, the function of veiling in Algerian society changed radically as the French sought to unveil Algerian women and as Algerian women began to participate in the struggle against colonialism, thus complicating the very idea of “woman.”   [paragraph 4]

It was true at the time of the struggle for independence, and is still true, that the West often sees the veiling of Muslim women as the ultimate sign of women’s oppression under Islamic religious law. This plays into the West’s tendency to see all Muslim societies as monolithic, totalitarian regimes need­ing Western enlightenment (meanwhile ignoring the history of female “covering” that permeates Jewish and Christian tradition). The French colonial powers counted on this unitary thinking and attempted to unveil Algerian women in an effort to impress the international community with their “civilizing” intentions and to drive a wedge between men and women seeking independence. Fanon represents the colonial mindset in this way: “If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight” (“Algeria” 38). What the French did not realize, however, is that any attempt by an outsider to “see into” the Algerian woman’s world would be perceived by nationals as violent denuding and cultural rape. As Rita A. Faulkner describes Fanon’s psychological concern, such unveiling “leads to Algerian/male dishonor due to colonial domination either of the land or of the nation” (847).   [paragraph 5]

Fanon thus came to see the wearing of the veil as a symbol of solidarity with the colonial struggle, and, according to Faulkner, Djebar, and others, he seemed less concerned with the fact that this too was a form of unitary thinking that rendered the Algerian woman a battlefield. It was, indeed, a battle over women’s bodies. If the French could control the way women thought about the veil, they could “possess” them, therefore bringing shame to Algerian men and increasing their ability to control them. “Women would be symbolically raped because they would be gaping open to a ravishing conqueror” (Faulkner 848); Algerian fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons would lose their cultural prerogative and be vulnerable to defeat. For Fanon, then, wearing the veil became a sign of an Algerian woman’s patriotism, a sign of her “resistance to French cultural hegemony” (Faulkner 849).  [paragraph 6]

In the face of this controversy, it becomes hard to assess the participation of women in the struggle for independence. Did they enter battle on their own initiative, or were they driven to participate to prove their loyalty and usefulness? At times women, particularly lower-class women, were used as replacements for men who had become wounded or killed. At others they took on the courageous task of smuggling bombs under their amply obscuring veils. Paradoxically, when the French discovered how “strategic” the veil could be, Algerian women loyal to the struggle for independence began to wear Western dress and carry bombs in their purses, reverting to the veil when this tactic too became suspect (Woodhull 20). More than signaling loyalty to nation and providing cover for bomb-carriers, however, the veil became a symbol that Algerian women embraced their own culture, that they believed in the sanctity of the extended family, and that they accepted the sexual power of their own bodies. Wanting to validate this “marking” of commitment to non-Western cultural modesty, Fanon writes of the disorientation that he believes is part of the unveiling of the traditional woman. He claims that she would not have “the normal mobility before a limitless horizon of avenues, of unfolded sidewalks, of houses, of people dodged or bumped into” (“Algeria” 49); she would commit “errors of judgment as to the exact distance to be negotiated,’ not to mention feeling “improperly dressed” (“Algeria” 50).  [paragraph 7]

Djebar, herself a participant in the struggle for Algerian independence and respectful of Fanon’s anticolonial stance, nonetheless argues that the return to the veil as a patriotic “necessity,’ both during and after the war, is a prison for women: “'Women have merely exchanged one autism for another'” (qtd. in Faulkner 848). In all of her writing she argues this point, while readily admitting that there are multiple reasons for veiling and for feeling bereft of traditional female life if one does not veil. Algerian women do so as a mat­ter of genuine piety and of solidarity with other women. Veiling establishes continuity in a woman’s life—with her tradition, with her roots. It can be simultaneously a public affirmation of modesty, of not being a sexual ob­ject, and a public declaration of disenchantment with the prevailing politi­cal order, or with the West. It is a way of keeping peace in the community and of resisting scrutiny. Women in Algeria also veil for financial reasons— namely, to secure their husbands’ economic support, even as they pursue jobs on their own. The veil allows women to circulate in public without recognition, mitigates their husbands’ anxieties about such circulation, reduces clothing costs, and at the same time permits them to assert class status (Woodhull 4-5). As Fadwa El Guindi points out recently in Veil: Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance, the word “veil” connotes at least four different kinds of covering: the material (clothing and ornament), the spatial (a screen dividing physical spaces), the communicative (language as concealment and silence as invisibility), and the religious (seclusion from the world and sexual intimacy) (6). All make their way into Djebar’s analysis of why women veil and refuse to veil.  [paragraph 8]

The issues surrounding motivations for veiling are similarly complex in Iran where the Ayatollah’s crackdown following the Revolution in 1979, setting Iranian human rights for women back a century, caused educated upper-class women to declare solidarity with their lower-class sisters by voluntarily wearing the veil, even as the new laws affronted religious women who charged that they changed “what had been a freely chosen expression of re­ligious faith into a rote act imposed on them by the state” (Nafisi 10). Young girls in Iran have taken to using the veil as an instrument of protest, leaving part of their hair showing or giving glimpses of colorful clothing underneath. If a primary motive for veiling is to avoid inflammation of the male erotic imagination, these young women are giving the veil its own seductive power.  [paragraph 9]

Egyptian activist and writer Nawal El Saadawi emphasizes that the veiling of women in Egypt, a practice she has refused for herself and consistently critiques, is never far from issues of social class, although with many ironies. There a woman hidden from the world within her home is perceived to be the wife of a well-off man and the envy of peasant women. She takes her enclosure out into the world in the form of heavy veils and male escort, and she suffers illness rather than allowing a doctor to see her body. Thus her advantage becomes her entrapment, and she may well envy, in turn, the laboring peasant woman. Meanwhile, Sherifa Zukur declares that, as the conservative movement gains ground in contemporary Egypt, piety in dress has become in part a matter of privacy and control, crossing class lines as a woman’s way of seeking personal sanctuary in an overcrowded and often intrusive society.  [paragraph 10]  

Ultimately, whatever regional complications prevail, the social power of the veil seems to hinge on the power of “looking.’ Who gets to see, and who or what is seen? In her “Postface” to The Women of Algiers in Their Apart­ments (1980), Djebar beautifully illustrates this by comparing Eugène Delacroix’s and Pablo Picasso’s renderings of Algerian harem women during the colonial period. Delacroix, invited into the home of a wealthy man in 1832, painted his host’s women in their apartment. Although he never would have been invited into their quarters before the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, he joined the colonial venture by participating in the colonial right to gaze. Picasso’s Women of Algeria, however, opened the cloistered chambers to sunlight. It is this painting that most captured Djebar’s attention as a young writer.  [paragraph 11] 

By way of a revealing parallel, it is interesting to note how contemporary American poet Julia Kasdorf, both interpreting and writing her way out of the confines of Mennonite theology and culture, chose to use as the cover of her first book of poems, Sleeping Preacher, a painting that depicts a young girl (herself?) sleeping under a traditional quilt as a large, black-hatted Amish man looks down on her (from a window? a second painting on the wall?). As the author explains the irony of this jacket art in a subsequent book of essays, “Pull the quilt off the cover of Sleeping Preacher, and this painting is a pastiche of traditional nudes, such as Titian’s Venus[.. .] Pull the plain dress off of an Amish or Mennonite person, and there is only a human body; behind the veil of my ethnic identity articulated in Sleeping Preacher is only a woman” (Body and Book 51). In her second collection of poems, Eve’s Striptease, Kasdorf allows this “woman” to come into the dazzling light of a contemporary Eden and speak her stories.  [paragraph 12] 

Djebar’s “Fragmented Autobiography” 

Like Picasso and Kasdorf, Djebar’s desire is for sunlight. She “turns to the past to vitalize the present, conceiving of a future where women are mobile and doors open to sunlight exteriors and not to darkened hallways” (Mortimer, “Reappropriating” 862). Descended from freedom fighters burned and buried in caves by the invading French, she retells their story in Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985) in order to bring into the light the experiences of Algerian women past and present.  [paragraph 13] 

Born into the middle class, Djebar was “privileged” to have a father who, teaching in the colonial educational system, could unilaterally decide that his daughter would not be veiled and that she would receive the same education as a son. Although Arabic was the “mother tongue” used in Djebar’s home, she was educated in a French boarding school. Because French was the language of business and public debate at the time of her pre-independence childhood, it was unusual for an Arab girl to be initiated into its world. While Djebar admits to a deep gratitude for her father’s gesture of freedom and encouragement, she also admits to feeling alienated from the rich exchange that goes on among traditional women in gatherings of matrons referred to as “the harem,’ and to maintaining a love-hate relationship with the French language.  [paragraph 14] 

Taking an advanced degree in history, Djebar began to publish both fiction and nonfiction until she was thirty and the muse deserted her. After ten dry years she broke silence with a film titled Nouba (1979) and has been writing prolifically since that time, completing three of the four novels projected for her Algerian Quartet.  [paragraph 15]

Although the basic facts of her life are known, Djebar gives interviews sparingly, favoring a “fragmented autobiography,’ as Mildred Mortimer refers to it, available through fiction. At the end of Fantasia Djebar thus admits, “My fiction is this attempt at autobiography, weighed down under the oppressive burden of my heritage” (218). Because of the burden of this heritage, she has taken a pseudonym that both protects her family from what she writes and that veils herself from public scrutiny. Asking her fiancé to recite ritual modes of address, she chose “djebbar” for her name, a word indicating praise of Allah. Transcribing the Arab word into French script, however, resulted in “djebar;’ meaning “healer,’ which has remained her added burden ever since.  [paragraph 16]

Because of her education Djebar must cope with the stigma of being a westernized Algerian woman, an unveiled sexual object, a turncoat among her own people. Such women are expected to think in terms of imported ideas, desiring to “transgress what is sacred and based in nature and culture” (Bouatta and Cherifati-Merabtine 195). For Djebar to tell her story in fragmented fictional form is to admit how fragmented her life has been. To read it is to admit how fragmented our own lives are and to agree for a few brief moments to raise the veil of self-enclosure for the sake of looking out and letting the light of her words in.  [paragraph 17] 

The Women of Algiers in Their Apartments introduces themes key to Djebar’s continual disclosure within obscurity. The city of Algiers is presented as a place where women are kept in wraps, enclosed within their apartments and woolen veils. The only truly unveiled woman appears to be the city itself, “revealing herself without complexes, open to the world, an open port baring her orifices without shame in the light of day” (Faulkner 852). Even the women of Algiers who are unveiled seem to be afraid of their freedom and anxious “to become entangled in other veils, invisible but very noticeable ones” (48). To walk suddenly free is to risk Fanon’s projected malady of not being sure of where the edges of one’s body are: 

The body moves forward out of the house and is, for the first time, felt as being “exposed” to every look: the gait becomes stiff, the step hasty, the facial expression tightens.  

Colloquial Arabic describes the experience in a significant way: “I no longer go out protected (that is to say, veiled, covered up)” the woman who casts off her sheet will say, “I go out undressed or even denuded.” The veil that shielded her from the looks of strangers is in fact experienced as a “piece of clothing in itself,’ and to no longer have it means to be totally exposed.(139) [paragraph 18]

Nevertheless, there is desire in all such acts that open the self to scrutiny and danger. Djebar posits that, for a certain kind of Arab woman, the only way out of shame and intimidation appears to be to talk, breaking the shrouded silence that so often is her lot—to talk without ceasing, to talk to one another in the traditional women’s quarters, and in city housing projects as well (50). For Djebar language—any language, even the colonial language—is the way out, a theme that she develops in all of her subsequent works. The speech may be colloquial, may be Berber or Bengali, may be muffled, but it must never be in another’s stead (2), which is why the story of the water-carrier in the women’s steam bath is so poignant. She, the Excluded One, has finally begun to tell her life, and she may never stop. In spite of her own periods of silence, Djebar too has found her life in words.  [paragraph 19]

These words and their contexts become a complicated world in Fantasia, where women’s participation in the resistance to French conquest and in current Algerian life are woven together around the double meaning of “fantasia” as virtuoso movements on horseback by triumphant warriors and the improvisational characteristic of musical compositions. The work is a palimpsest of layered historical renderings and of language systems. Interviews conducted with female freedom-fighters in Arabic are transcribed into the conqueror’s tongue, only to be translated into English and other colonial tongues upon original publication in French. The protagonist, living like Djebar on the line between French and Arabic culture, senses herself existing both inside and outside the protection of the harem, symbolically veiled while avoiding the veil itself. When flattered by a man, she pulls back, attempting to render her body as invisible as those beneath the cloth: “I became again, in my own way, a [v]estal virgin who had wandered into an outside world stripped of its magic” (126). That her speech has become westernized, that her body has become westernized, is irrelevant; the old shame lives, and she remembers how as a child, removed from the cloister, she draped herself in veils as a form of “fancy dress.’   [paragraph 20] 

Freedom-fighters and current Algerian women alike, they all come to see the connection between veiling and silence, driving the protagonist to conclude that the nubile adolescent girl should be wrapped in veils, if there is no way for her to speak and be heard: “Make her more unseeing than the sightless, destroy her every memory of the world without [. . .]. The jailer who guards a body that has no words—and written words can travel—may sleep in peace” (3). For all of her anger, Djebar comes to see writing as her liberation, even as it presents a form of masking all its own. To write is to shout, to refuse to be wrapped up, regardless of physical circumstances: 

Yes, there is a difference between the veiled women, a difference that the eye of the foreigner can’t discern; he thinks them all identical—phantoms roaming the streets, staring, examining, surveying all about them, but they possess an inherent streak of inequality: between the one who shouts, sending her voice soaring over the confined area of the patio, and the one on the other hand who never speaks, who contents herself with sighing or lets herself be interrupted until her voice is permanently stifled[. . .]. The only really guilty woman, the only one you could despise with impunity, the one you treated with manifest contempt, was “the women who raises her voice.’ (203)  [paragraph 21] 

To write in French is both a veiling and unveiling. Speaking of oneself is always an act of revealing; to speak of oneself in a language unknown to “the elders” is to strip oneself naked; and to speak in the language of the conqueror is to flirt with the threat of plunder. Crossing the line into a foreign tongue gives one freedom of movement as well as anxiety, like the veiled spy at a wedding feast; it allows the writer to turn autobiography into foreign fiction and thus to journey through the other and the self simultaneously. Nakedness turns to cover, and cover allows for free speech. When the protagonist of Fantasia “translates” the story of guerrilla fighter Cherifa into French, she is well aware that she has both shrouded the tale and simultaneously forced the language she has appropriated to open up to the violence its ordinary syntax would obscure.  [paragraph 22]   

When we come to A Sister to Scheherazade (1987), a more focused fictional narrative, the centers of ambiguity shift to harem and hammam—to all that can take place in the cloistered world of traditional women and to an eavesdropping westernized woman who revels in her freedom while longing to step “inside” the experience she has left behind. In this double narrative by Djebar, a liberated woman not only tells her own story but also imagines the life of the traditional second wife who has replaced her in the home of her ex-husband. The narrator, Isma, is the shadow behind the new marriage, the one struggling to understand her relationship to the second wife whom she herself has chosen.  [paragraph 23]                      

Isma begins to weave her tale by imagining the thoughts and actions of Hajila.  Using the intimacy of the second-person pronoun – "This morning, Hajila, as you stand in the kitchen” (7)—Isma tells Hajila’s life as if she were telling it to Hajila. The latter, however, does not yet know Isma, except as a vague projection of “Meriem’s mother,’ a woman Hajila only thinks about with “passive curiosity” (10).  [paragraph 24]   

Isma is, like Djebar herself, the fortunate “unveiled” daughter of a progressive father, who has made sure that she is fluent in French and can make her way in the wider world outside Algeria. Falling in love with an Algerian businessman who has international connections, she has taken up a life of travel, weaving European thought and experience with Arab/Muslim tradition. One of her “gifts;’ in addition to her freedom from the veil and her linguistic mobility, is that she has married for love, rather than custom or expediency, and experiences almost obsessive pleasure with her husband— “The Man.’ It is this all-encompassing intimacy that ultimately comes to frighten Isma and to make her feel that she is not as free as she at first thought she might be.  [paragraph 25] 

Eventually Isma resists sexual intimacy with The Man altogether, part of that resistance stemming from an expanded understanding of the meaning of veiling and disclosure. Living without the veil has set her free, but it has also stripped her of the intimacy of the harem and the anonymity of complete disguise, without freeing her from the social masking that accompanies any attire and the psychological veiling that she has experienced in relationship to her husband: 

I was to jeer at him, “Are men ever really naked? You are never free of fetters, you are bound fast by fears of the tribe, swathed in all the anxieties handed down to you by frustrated mothers, shackled by all your obsessions with some ill-defined elsewhere! [...] Show me one really naked man on this earth, and I will leave you for that man!” (86)

While she strips herself naked in body and soul every time they make love, he remains shrouded, and so she leaves him, not for some mythically unshrouded man but for what she believes to be the naked truth of herself.  [paragraph 26] 

First, however, she fulfills the role of the responsible first wife and arranges for her “second,’ a girl from a poor family whose widowed mother, grateful for such a wealthy and worldly-wise son-in-law, is sure to be an accomplice in the arrangements. Then she constructs lengthy scenarios in which Hajila sneaks out of the apartment, at first veiled and happy for this disguise of unbleached wool. Later Isma imagines an encounter between Hajila and an unveiled woman with henna hair (she could not then have been French) playing with her child out of doors, and she “watches” Hajila remove her veil in order to move about with dangerous freedom: “You tuck the haik under your arm; you walk on. You are surprised to find yourself walking so easily, at one fell swoop, out into the real world!” (31). [paragraph 27]                         

Eventually inspired by the empathetic accompaniment by which the sister to Scheherezade stayed the storyteller’s execution, Isma desires a more permanent freedom for her sister (and alter ego) Hajila and so arranges to meet her in the hammam, the steam bath, the one place where Arab women can be freely naked and vulnerable. They wash one another’s shoulders and backs, exchange a ritual kiss; then Isma presses an extra key to the apartment into Hajila’s hand. Hajila is now as free as she can possibly afford to be, and it is a deft writer’s hand that allows Hajila’s final act—imagined or real? accident or chosen? desperate or bold?—to remain open to conjecture.  [paragraph 28]   

Isma returns to the village of her birth, and Hajila sets out for. . . who can imagine? Their roles have crossed over in ways that will never be fully unraveled, and we readers from outside, eavesdroppers all, are introduced to the power not only of speech but also of watching and being watched. Isma watches Hajila’s every move, even ones she has constructed for her. The veiled women stare at Hajila walking freely through the city. In an internal story titled “The Outcast,” a young wife’s dreams are brutally destroyed by the surveillance of family and neighbors. Veiled, she cannot be seen but is constantly watched.     [paragraph 29]                    

In So Vast a Prison (1995) Djebar continues to explore the connection between the gaze and the veil. In this three-part narrative we meet a contemporary Algerian woman struggling with issues of passion and fidelity, hear stories of the early wars of conquest, and accompany the protagonist into her first attempts at filmmaking. Like the protagonist of Fantasia, she admits that as an unveiled adolescent she assumed a psychological disguise whenever a man, stranger or friend alike, complimented her. Only later was she to realize the full power of being seen:

    Thus a man had watched me dance and I had been "seen."
    And even more than that, I was keenly, consciously, happily aware of myself (nothing to do with self-love, or narcissistic vanity, or laughable interest in one’s appearance […]) as being truly “visible” for this almost adolescent young man with the wounded gaze.
    Visible for him alone? My visibility for him made me visible to myself. (64)

It is a terrible power and an energizing one that she recognizes in herself, yet it does not protect her, at the point of “losing” this young man, from feeling every bit as psychologically quarantined as cloistered village wives, nor does it save her from recognizing how disempowering the male gaze can be for traditional women in these villages and everywhere. [paragraph 30]

Perhaps the most liberating scene in the entire work is the one where, in the process of filming, the protagonist realizes how much the triangular eye slot for the veiled woman is like a camera lens, with all of the complications pertaining thereto. Veiled women, covered so they cannot be seen (and thereby triggering erotic imaginings on the part of passing males: “They have learned to make out your hips”), have the odd advantage of being able to observe anonymously (a power in itself: “They spy, they watch, they search, they snoop!” [179]). Tourists aim their cameras at these women, finding them picturesque, but when the camera is placed in their hands, when the camera is lifted to their triangular “eyes," their hidden power becomes real: “We are the ones finally who are looking, who are beginning” (180). Like historian, novelist, and filmmaker Djebar, this protagonist and her veiled sisters are looking, talking, writing, and those of us who have believed we were freer than they are learning valuable lessons.  [paragraph 31]

 Reading from the Outside

 Addressing the Western obsession with veiling in African and Asian cultures, Sondra Hale speculates that our habits of binary thought (“honor/ shame, patron/client, public/private”) have caused us to draw sharper gender distinctions for Middle Eastern and Muslim cultures than they often do for themselves. Exacerbating the problem are historical writings that depict Muslim women as “secluded, mysterious, and erotic.’ She references a book by Malek Alloula titled The Colonial Harem that reproduces a collection of photographs (some turned into postcards) of “over-eroticized/exoticized Algerian women,’ claiming that a common pose is that of a veiled but bare-breasted woman (3). Guindi terms this collection of studio portraits a “quest for the exotic inferior other,’ a quest that has lived well beyond French colonial fantasy (45), yet Hale points out that only approximately 16% of women in the Middle East are physically veiled. Thus, emphasis on material veiling may tell us more about the West than the East. It forces the other to remain visibly other, all of which calls us to examine the stereotypes we perpetuate and our reasons for holding them dear.  [paragraph 32]

Saadawi tells a wonderful story of attending an international women’s conference at which a French scholar held forth that the veil was linked exclusively to Islam (in spite of Jewish and Christian roots). To Saadawi’s questions she responded, “I am Christian, but I am not veiled,” at which point Saadawi noticed that the woman was wearing a thick coat of make-up. “She was not aware that she herself was also wearing a veil” (170).  [paragraph 33]

This may be why the writings of Djebar are so valuable. Not only do they unmask and problematize the pain of seclusion for Algerian women, past and present, but they also invite the reader from outside to be honest about her own history. They invite her to think about the ways that young girls everywhere are silenced and made to feel ashamed. They allow her to unmask cultures where seven-year-old girls diet and where many women become estranged from their bodies, judging them deficient by the ideal body fantasy. They cause her to assess the current craze in the West for tattoos and piercings, identity markers of multiple urban and suburban “tribes." They provoke her to think about the glances she receives on the street, whether they are truly compliments or invasions, and to recognize the internalized male gaze accompanying her everywhere, so that even when alone she judges her own body as an object.  [paragraph 34]

Reading Djebar, women tired of perpetual competition with other women long for a safe place like the hammam, where comfort in real bodies might start a healing process that would allow them to be finally at home in theirs. Still, unmasking the Western beauty industry, with its advertisements for cosmetic surgery, skeletal models touting grapefruit breasts, and gyms full of lycra-clad bodies, is a start—the beginning of resistance. Now the reader can question whether the fact that men are increasingly the targets of beauty ads is a sign of equality or raw consumerism. And her own self-questioning can change from “How do I look?” to the deeper critical one: “How have I been taught to see myself?” To see the cultural strings pulling her would be a dawning, like the one experienced by Hajila and that described by Patricia Foster: “It has taken me years to understand how my own culture has constructed myths that have denied women power over and respect for our bodies and have repressed the urge to speak. For a long time I couldn’t see this. I thought my failure was simply personal” (6).  [paragraph 35]

The clear connection between body dis-ease and lack of voice rings true everywhere. In Western culture, according to philosopher Susan Bordo, the construction of femininity requires a woman to embody an impossible contradiction: on the one hand, to be compliant, small, and self-sacrificing, unobtrusive in every way; on the other hand, simultaneously to be confident, in control, and able to assert herself successfully in the public sphere. Western women reading Djebar can relate to Hajila’s sense of shame in unveiling, which leaves her speechless, and to her “obligation” to raise or lower her eyes in the presence of perceived authority figures according to complex unwritten codes. Women everywhere can empathize with her inability to resist unwanted sexual experience because she cannot speak out. They can understand the safety afforded by traditional ideas of femininity and the rewards of remaining the “good” and “nice” girl.  [paragraph 36] 

The recognition that readers from the “outside” find in Djebar’s writings, however, goes even further and deeper than cultural mores. Her words, like Saadawi’s, hold up a mirror to Western Christianity that all too often castigates Islamic “barbarism” without seeing the made-up face and silencing gaze of its own religious past and present. The prayer veil, while always an act of piety in the Mennonite community, did not become an ordinance until 1960, and, as Kasdorf points out, has always marked women as subordinate to men as well as differentiating Mennonites from the rest of society. Another denomination is contemplating a return to the forced wearing of hats by women to church. The ordination of women is still hotly debated and resisted in Catholicism and some Protestant denominations, and women in all denominations are silenced in age-old ways. From Augustine’s bidding that women be veiled because of their sex, to the glossing over of women’s stories in the Bible, to the current debate over inclusive language for God, Christian women know a history of silencing, even if they cannot articulate it. They are surprised to learn that traditional theology’s definition of sin as pride and willfulness may reflect the gender of the male theologians who dominate the history of Christian thought, even as it simultaneously masks what may hold truer for women: sin as passivity resulting from lack of voice and agency, a redefinition suggested by current women theologians. If having voice means “having ability to express oneself and the right to be heard [...,] knowing one’s mind and will and trusting that one can express oneself in one’s community” (Hess 69), then to speak on God’s behalf in communities of faith that maintain women’s silence (blatantly or subtly) may be radical resistance to sin.  [paragraph 37]

As Kasdorf admits and Djebar clearly points out, exposing one’s thoughts, one’s words, is a way of exposing one’s body, one’s material presence in the world. The cultural shame brought on by such transgression, however, can be paralyzing. Kasdorf thus speculates, “Perhaps there is some connection between a sense of modesty in dress, including my choice to wear the prayer veil as a young woman, and the feelings of shame and depression that I used to get after giving public readings, especially those that seemed to have been successful” (Body and Book 72). What we all conceivably seek, then, is neither modesty nor prideful assertion but rather a deeper experience of radical humility, something greater than any shame-based cultural marker can supply.  [paragraph 38] 

As is our habit in the Christian West, we look to Scripture for illumination of the difference between “cultural modesty” and “radical humility,’ yet we first have to face the fact that our text is itself veiled truth. For Djebar, the colonial language of French is both liberating and violent; ultimately, however, we must realize that all language is violent, especially language for God, and one does not have to be in a postcolonial situation to feel its strictures. As philosopher John Caputo says, each concept of the divine that we verbalize “seizes God round about, measures the divine by humanly comprehensible standards, [...] and cuts off the infinite, incomprehensible depths of God” (132). But since we must talk about ultimate realities, theological and otherwise, the real feat is not to seek a non-violent, pure discourse but to give in to the discourse at hand generously, making it do unusual things, letting metaphors proliferate.  [paragraph 39]

When one thinks about biblical texts written over hundreds of years and in several languages, then translated over and over again, one realizes not only how many gaps exist among and within the narratives but also how many interpreters have entered those gaps. (Just read as many contemporary versions of a single biblical narrative as you can find to grasp the point.) To the intrinsic veiling of linguistic markers is added the palimpsestic “cross texts” of human, albeit inspired, translators—liberating and obscuring, unmasking and reconfiguring, the face of God all the while. If there is no unmediated divinity, then, if it all comes through the text, we had better prepare ourselves for the hard work and the often surprising joy of glimpsing, discerning, uncovering, recovering truths to live by, all the while conscious of our inevitable personal misreadings and the necessity of participating in trusted interpretive communities.  [paragraph 40]

This said, we find that the Qur’an and the Bible do not have strict laws about veiling—only random events to be deciphered. The creation myth in the Qur’an shows us a simultaneous creation of the sexes, such that there is no gender primacy. Both male and female participate in the fatal temptation, yet a biological difference emerges as central to Islamic views of modesty in that the womb is seen as a safe place—a sanctuary, if you will. Both men and women’s dress is defined as an extension of this sacred privacy; however, since it is women who actually possess wombs and shelter children there, their dress becomes the more pronounced marker of safety, “linking women as the guardians of family sanctuaries with the realm of the sacred in this world” (Guindi 96). The question asked by those pondering the present isolation of women in many Islamic cultures concerns when protection of the divine became a source of women’s vulnerability and an imperative for total concealment, particularly as the Qur’an forbids men and women to be veiled during worship (112).  [paragraph 41]

In Judeo-Christian Scripture we find a creation story already talking about male primacy in creation and gender strife as a result of sin.¹  Both Adam and Eve cover themselves out of shame, but veiling as a discrete motif enters the story later and, at first, erratically. When Rebekah approaches Isaac in Genesis, she asks: “Who is that man in the field coming to meet us?” (24:65). And when the servant answers, “He is my master:’ she takes her veil and covers herself, removing it only after marriage. Later in Genesis, Tamar uses a veil to disguise herself toward the end of deceiving her father-in-law into sleeping with her (38:14, 19). In the first book of the Bible we thus see the veil used for women’s modesty (reminiscent of Paul’s New Testament admonitions about head coverings) and trickery.  [paragraph 42]

When Scripture gets into discussions of revelation, veiling becomes even more paradoxical and cross-gendered. Moses is veiled when he returns from speaking with God on Mount Sinai (Exod. 34), which seems to suggest that as temporal beings, seeing through a glass dimly, we cannot behold God face to face, nor even receive fully the experience of another. Matthew 10:26, however, no less than 1 Corinthians 13:13-16, promises that this will not always be the case: when we finally see God “face to face,’ “there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed [unveiled],” and we will know or see God even as we are known by Him, knowing ourselves fully for the first time. Paradoxically, in 2 Corinthians 4 we are told that the gospel is veiled only to those who are perishing, suggesting that God has blinded the eyes of unbelievers. Are we to assume that there are layers of spiritual insight at play here, that none see absolutely but that some, by faith, see far more than others? How might these “secondary veils” be removed?  [paragraph 43]

In the gospels of Matthew (27:51) and Mark (15:38), the veil dividing the Holy of Holies splits from top to bottom at the death of Jesus, and in Luke (23:45) during the Crucifixion. Hebrews 10:20 refers to this as the rending of the veil of Jesus’ flesh, allowing for new life for the faithful. Is God thus unveiled? Is this the ultimate proof that God was revealed through Jesus: His person, His words, His deeds—all of them veiled references of sorts but ultimately unmasked through the rending of the body itself? We are told that only Hagar, Sarah’s slave girl and Abraham’s concubine, the marginal woman, was allowed to see God face to face, to name the God she saw, and to live. (The likeness of Sarah and Hagar’s relationship to that of Isma and Hajila, including the clarity that comes to the most obscure “sister” in the pair, is remarkable.) Did those who saw Jesus after the Crucifixion, then, have their sight veiled for their own safety?  [paragraph 44]

Such reflection leads to the most interesting question of all: does every significant unveiling (the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as prime examples) involve, of necessity, a further veiling? Isma leaves The Man for the truth of herself, but that truth is revealed only through the veil of her stories. Is there a truth here that cuts to the heart of all revelation? In personal correspondence biblical scholar John Linton asks: 

Is the idea of revealing the truth a disclosure, an unveiling? Does every revelation involve a further veiling in the sense that God’s subjectivity is never an objectivity? That is, God does not reveal predicates that apply to the noun God as much as events happen that compel some to trust God because a glimpse of God allows them to excitedly use predicates that are no substitute for the glimpse. Predicates don’t reveal naked subjectivity. 

This would seem to imply that when we speak of God we give God a body, a moving, acting body that captures the limited amount of God’s glory we can grasp in any one telling. We never see the fullness of God entire—our sight is veiled for our safety, lest we die; however, we desire to give what we do see, what we do know, materiality; and we do so, at our best, with full awareness of the blessing and vulnerability that action requires. In such a dynamic we may be both discovering and responding to a profound humility in the person of God, a reluctance of God to force God’s self on creation, in lieu of an invitation to humanity to respond to pervasive clues that God is present and real—clues that are seen more clearly on some days than others, by some persons more than others, but that speak both the glory and the sorrow of our world’s sustainer and that can speak us into faith. Is it possible to say, then, that God assumes a veil toward the end of bringing God’s creatures into the light, which might well mean bringing them from behind the cultural markers they construct both to keep each other in the dark and to hide from the threat of the other?  [paragraph 45]

One thing is certain. When women and men have the biblical texts opened to them, they come to see that they can engage Scripture as subjects in conversation with it. They may even become empowered to question old interpretations, knowing that the God who accompanies them is always revealing God’s self while remaining graciously veiled.  [paragraph 46]

Djebar’s works take us inside the world of the harem and hammam where Algerian women seek this kind of intimate security. This is the gift she gives us at considerable risk to herself and her relatives. She asks in return that we become outsiders to our own cultural past and institutions, seeing them with similar scrutiny and puzzlement, allowing new messages to be inscribed over old assumptions. All truth is veiled; all cultural and religious histories are palimpsests. That is the kind of oblique world in which we live. However, where clues of the divine Other can be glimpsed and articulated in surprising and life-giving ways, where thinking and rituals can be creatively reconfigured to let in more light, to bring cultural ideas of modesty closer to radical humility for male and female alike, we would be fools not to try.²  [paragraph 47]

Endnotes 

1. My reflections here on Scripture are particularly indebted to John Linton.

 ^2. This essay was conceived and developed within the context of the Women’s Studies May Term of the Oregon Extension of Houghton College, where feminist theorist Nancy Linton, poet Julia Kasdorf, biblical scholar John Linton, and I engaged in long and lively conversations. Portions of this essay were previously published in my Aeroplane Mirrors: Personal and Political Reflexivity in Post-Colonial Women’s Novels.       

References 

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Boutta, Cherifa, and Dorea Cherifati-Merabtine. “The Social Representation of Women in Algeria’s Islamist Movement." Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective. Ed. Valentine M. Moghadam. Boulder: Westview, 1994. 183-201.

Caputo, John. “How to Avoid Speaking of God: The Violence of Natural Theology" Prospects for Natural Theology. Ed. Eugene Long. Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of America P, 1992. 128-50.

Djebar, Assia. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. 1985. Trans. Dorothy S. Blair. Portsmouth (NH): Heinemann, 1993.

--- A Sister to Scheherazade. 1987. Trans. Dorothy S. Blair. Portsmouth (NH): Heinemann, 1993.

--- So Vast a Prison. 1995. Trans. Betsy Wing. New York: Seven Stories, 1999.  

--- The Women of Algiers in Their Apartments. 1980. Trans. Marjolin de Jager. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992.

Fanon, Frantz. “Algeria Unveiled." A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove, 1965. 35-67.

--- The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 1986.

Faulkner, Rita A. “Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Women, Veils, and Land.” World Literature Today 70 (1996): 847-55.

Foster, Patricia, ed. Minding the Body: Woman Writers on Body and Soul. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Guindi, Fadwa El. Veil: Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance. New York: Berg, 2000. 

Hale, Sondra. “The West and Veiling." UCLA Forum “On Veiling and the Media." Sponsored by UCLA’s G. S. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University, and Columbia University. 20 May 1998.

Hess, Carol Lakey. Caretakers of Our Common House: Women’s Development in Communities of Faith. Nashville: Abingdon, 1997.  

Kasdorf, Julia. The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

--- Eve’s Striptease. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998.  

--- Sleeping Preacher. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992.

Morgan, Elizabeth. Aeroplane Mirrors: Personal and Political Reflexivity in Post­Colonial Women’s Novels. Portsmouth (NH): Heinemann, 2001.  

Mortimer, Mildred. “Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet: A Study in Fragmented Autobiography." Research in African Literatures 28.2 (1991): 102-17.  

--- Reappropriating the Gaze in Assia Djebar’s Fiction and Film." World Literature Today 70 (1996): 859-67.  

Nafisi, Azar. “The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Theocracy’s Fear of Females." The New Republic 22 Feb. 1999. 30 Jan. 2001 <wysiwyg://110/http://www.tnr.com/archive/0299/022299/nafisi022299.html>.  

Nussbaum, Martha “The End of Orthodoxy.” Rev. of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, by Edward Said.  New York Times Book Review 15 Feb. 2001: 28.

Saaadawi, Nawaal El. “Women and Islam.” The Nawal El Saadawi Reader. London: Zed, 1998. 73-92.

Woodhull, Winifred. Transfigurations of the Magreb: Feminism, Decolonialization, and Literatures. Minneapolis: U. of Minneapolis P, 1993.

Zukur, Sherifa. Revealing Reveiling: Islamist Gender Ideology in Contemporary Egypt. Albany: State U of New York P, 1992.  

Elizabeth Morgan, Ph.D., is a professor of literature and women in development  at Eastern University.  She has written on the creative process, global poverty (Global Poverty and Personal Responsibility, 1989), and refugee issues; and has made documentary films for Public Television on repatriation in El Salvador (El Salvador: Portraits in a Revolution, 1992) and on follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, winning a regional Emmy for the film entitled Beyond Beijing: Women and Economic Justice (1996).  Her book, Aeroplane Mirrors: Personal and Political Reflexivity in Post-Colonial Women’s Novels (2002), was published by Heinemann Press as part of their Studies in African Literature series.  (Contact the author at bmorgan@eastern.edu)

Morgan, E. (2002). Veiled truth: Reading Assia Djebar from the outside . Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education [online], 4 (2), 47 paragraphs <Available: http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2002fall/morgan.html> [your access year, month date]