Algerian novelist, poet, scholar and filmmaker Assia Djebar will read from her latest novel, “Algerian White (Le Blanc de L’Algerie),” at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 6, at the University Book Store on State Street.
“Algerian White,” originally written in French, is a poetic tribute to Djebar’s three close friends who were murdered as civil strife and violence swept through her country in 1992. She dedicates the book to these friends; Mahfoud Boucebi, a psychiatrist; M’Hamed Boukhobza, a sociologist; and dramatist Abdelkader Alloula.
In a narration weaved from memoirs, reflections and conversations with the living and dead, “Algerian White” recounts the horrors of an ongoing battle between Algeria’s government and a fundamentalist Islamic party. At the same time, with varying moments of stark recollection and dreamlike stream of thought, Djebar reconstructs the final days of 19 Algerian writers and intellectuals.
She notes in the book: “I write and I dry a few tears. I don’t believe in their deaths; for me, their deaths are works-in-progress. Others speak of their beloved Algeria, a place they know and visit. For me, thanks to these few friends lying here in this text — and a few colleagues, vanished too soon — some of them still writing on their last day: poems, an article, a page of a novel that would remain unfinished — persistent, I resuscitate them or imagine doing so.”
Mediations on death, the meaning of language and conversations with her departed friends guide the reader through a political chronology of events during which Djebar’s peers unexpectedly lose their lives.
Educated in both Algeria and France, Djebar has written nearly 10 books in her 16-year career. Her other works translated into English include “So Vast the Prison” (1999), “A Sister to Scheherezade” (1993), “Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade “(1993) and “Women of Algiers in their Apartment” (1992).
Djebar has received a variety of honors for her contributions to literature: Germany’s Le Prix de La Paix in 2000, France’s Yourcenar Prize in 1997 and the Neustadt Prize for contributions to world literature from the journal World Literature Today in 1996.
After she wrote “Algerian White” in 1995, publisher Seven Stories Press commissioned David Kelley and Marjolijn De Jager to translate the book into English. It was released last month.
Said Alan Cheuse of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” of Djebar’s work: “From time to time, we hear about books that supposedly tear away the veil from the lives of Arab women. I don’t know anyone who has done this with more intelligence and passion . . . than Assia Djebar. That murmur beneath her images soon begins to sound like a roar.”
Currently Djebar is French and francophone literature professor at New York University. Her reading from “Algerian White” is free and open to the public.
