Vast is the Prison, Assia Djebar. Palimpsest Project
Abstract
Assia Djebar’s situation can be described as one of cultural contact. Of Algerian origin, she chose to settle in France as an act of protest against repression in Algeria. In her writing project, cultures intersect and interact in complex ways, while seeking to transcend geographical, linguistic, and symbolic borders.
The notion of the palimpsest acquires particular importance in her work, notably in the novel Vaste est la prison (1995). It refers to a superposition of fragmentary narratives in which traces emerge that may signify “something else.” This process allows the writer to follow little-explored paths in order to give an account of a controversial History, which she deterritorializes and reterritorializes so as to offer a critical reinterpretation.
In this presentation, we focus on the palimpsest understood as a process of erasure, as well as on the writing strategies deployed by the author to construct her own Francophone path—and voice—which she herself designates as “Francography.”
The aim is to identify forms of history elaborated by literary fiction in order to analyze how the dialectic of identity and otherness unfolds, through an examination of the strategies by which Djebar constructs a textual space imbued with profound consolation. This space awakens the subject to an awareness of a power that is uniquely her own and grants her the legitimacy of a recovered authority: the power to create new texts.
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