Imagined Encounters: Assia Djebar’s Vaste est la prison

Abstract

This chapter explores the work of Algerian writer and member of the Académie Française, Assia Djebar. An historian by training, Djebar weaves fiction, autobiography and archival research into her writing in order to plug the gaps of historical record. She performs this task in a relatively understudied work in her corpus, Vaste est la prison (1995). This text uses invented memory to function as capital in the incomplete story of the Algerian conflict and it does so as a direct challenge to French histories of the Franco-Algerian war. More specifically, a short, discreet section of Djebar’s text explores encounters that took place between Africans and Europeans centuries before the colonial expedition that determines narratives in the present day. Djebar performs this movement by recasting official accounts of language and of writing in this region, thus positing translation and interpretation as an alternative means of understanding cultural memory.