In her novel Women of Algiers in their Apartment, Assia Djebar takes the first steps towards reconciling the effects of the postcolonial world with the history of women’s participation in the struggle for Algerian independence. As Clarisse Zimra notes in the afterword of the most recent translation of the novel, “(Djebar’s) entire corpus grapples with issues attending the passage from colonial to postcolonial culture: the definition of a national literature, the debate over cultural authenticity, the problematic question of language, and the textual inscription of a female subject within the patriarchal background.
There a place in the artist’s heart where all things are bearable, no matter how terrible, where experience is sifted through, consecrated, hallowed and transformed into something we call art.
The soft purring of the telephone woke Rose from a deep, middle-of-the-night sleep. It was her sister Sophia with the news. ‘Five minutes ago. The nurse has turned everything off. He’s gone…at last.’
One of the most challenging literary events of the last decade which took place in Athens was undoubtedly the lecture of Nadine Gordimer. It was a memorable experience to hear this tiny, silver haired lady speak with a soft but steady voice of some of her country’s unsolved problems: analphabetism and semi-alphabetism, poverty, racism, the transition from the racist regime to the democratic state,
Djelloul Marbrook
1. Question: Is there one school or philosophy of writing which is particularly compelling to you?
No. There are certain writers who have strongly influenced me. Among more recent writers I think of Glenway Wescott, Mark Helprin, Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and of course Hemingway. In a way, I missed my calling as a scholar. I was suited to the scholarly life, but not institutions. I get lost in a crowd of three people. I don’t have good enough filters to deal with more than two or three people in any circumstance, and so this unsuited me for universities. But I have read voraciously and eclectically all my life, even scholarly works. In my early 20s and throughout my 30s I tended to write experimental and often obscurantist poems. Some of them were published in literary journals, and I did receive some encouragement from poets like Rolfe Humphries and Alan Dugan. But in time I began to recognize that I didn’t want to be caught saying what I meant or meaning what I said.