…when the brothers were applauding I thought… (she laughs).
Were there ever really any brothers… tell me, were there?...
You …even then, they already called you the silent one…They
never knew the carefully listed details of your own tortures.
Afterwards they took care of you as they do now of me, they
thought you were left with just a few scars, they never knew…(45)
Leila again faces the notion that her “brothers” abandoned her after the war. The familiar unit that the citizen warriors of Algeria formed in their resistance to French occupation was false and that the “brothers” never had any notion or intention of creating an egalitarian state at the conclusion of the war. The tortures of which Leila speaks are undoubtedly intimate: the torment of being a woman in the resistance and the psychological toll that it took on women who were forced to straddle the position of both soldier and mother. In the context of Algeria during this period, these social identities being adopted by women were assumed to be like mixing oil and water, and indeed, they were proven to be incompatible. Certainly Leila is referring to the care of the women in the post-war climate with a sneer, as she herself was confined to an asylum and Sarah was returned to her own pre-war position and the mould that was established for her at birth.
One particular point of interest in Djebar’s discussion of Leila is the use of the word “heroine” to describe her. Indeed, Leila is a heroine of the Algerian war for independence but she is also addicted to the opiate. By referring to her as a “heroine” she is at once both a hero and a victim of war. Thomas de Quincy, author of Confessions of an English-Opium Eater wrote: “Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle and mighty opium.” The Paradise that Leila assumed she would be able to partake of on earth through liberation of her nation and gender, is only now plausible through her transformation from heroine to opium addict.
During the course of the war, women were imprisoned, tortured, and even executed for their roles in the Algerian resistance. In Djebar’s novel, a Frenchwoman, Anne, witnesses the impact of war on her Algerian friend and freedom fighter, Sarah’s flesh. When Sarah’s “wide, bluish scar (34)” is revealed, her friend Anne’s own naïveté is revealed concerning the impact of war on Algerian women. Having been schooled in the French system, Anne is unaware of “women outside under attack under submachine guns, white veils with bloodstained holes (34)” fighting for independence. Sarah contemplates telling Anne the truth about her scar, that it was a “war injury” (34) but she refrains from doing so, leaving Anne as an unwitting representative of the French public, blissfully unaware that the women they made aesthetic subjects of tourism had leapt from their postcards and joined in the push towards independence.
In her train of thought pertaining to the war, Sarah’s mind also describes how her girlhood was spent in stark contrast to that of Anne’s blissful coming-of-age in cosmopolitan France
How had Sarah squandered her youth? Somewhere, this
way, in these open streets, then, in prison crammed
together with other adolescent girls. (34)
Above is the second glance into Djebar’s construction of the neo-harem that was created as the result of the war. At first, Sarah is confined to the streets of Algiers which is the larger, more opulent of her experiences of seclusion because she is given the right of mobility (albeit in a moveable harem in the form of the veil) and then upon the start of the war and her revolutionary activities, she is confined to a crude harem: a prison cell with other warrior women. Suddenly the harem of the streets loses its charm and the wartime prison becomes the new apartments of the women of Algiers. They are confined to prison cells: the harem of the colonial occupier is unmasked as being a dungeon rather than the lush imaginings of a Parisian artist and his voluptuous muses. Two particular passages articulate this unmasking where the reader can draw from these revelations the notion that indeed the women of Algiers are constantly having their apartments reinvented and then at the conclusion of the war, the walls are fortified again.
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