The painter introduces the reader to the allegory of Algeria as a woman who has sinned and committed zina within the parameters of fundamentalist jurisprudence. Zina crimes in the Shari’a are defined as those crimes which are violations of a sexual nature: they compromise the fundamental virtues of a pious Muslim, including chastity and modesty. Broadly defined, zina refers to any action that may take place that is considered to be haram. Narrowly defined, it refers to adultery and sexual transgressions, in some contexts resulting in so-called crimes of honor. This said, the painter’s statement about the nation’s “exploited mothers” may be referred back to the Prophet Muhammad’s statement that: “There is no sin after shirk (polytheism) greater in the eyes of Allah than a drop of semen, which a man places in the womb which is not lawful for him.” The French colonial forces therefore assume the position of penetrating an unlawful womb: Algeria. The culture that is produced as a result of this union is bastardized because it is an unlawful and un-Islamic conception of the indigenous culture. It has been infused with the haram and as such, the generations who are the product of this fusion are also bastardized. It is only through a process of reunification and a kind of ethnic cleansing that the nation can be purified. Women perpetuate the bastardization and as long as French influence remains in Algeria, the women of Algeria who may be giving birth to Algerians and who are good Muslims, are still reproducing the culture that was the result of Mother Algeria’s “indiscretions.”
Following the painter’s revelations about the status of the nation and the condition of the great Leila, the author begins her own reverie that reads as the conquest of women, but it is really the conquest of the feminine Algeria. Within this reverie, she occasionally breaks it with references to “the monkey faced layer of evil. (39)”
Is it me—me?—It is me they have excluded, me whom they
have barred
Is it me—me?—me they have humiliated
Me whom they have caged in
Me whom they’ve sought to subdue, their fists on my head, to
make me drown while standing straight, all the way down to the
monkey-faced layer of evil, me within the marble halls of mute
distress, me inside the rocks of silence of the white veil… (39)
She again refers to “the monkey-faced layer of evil” on the following pages, writing
Me—is it really me?—they wanted to break me, they
claimed they would plunge me headfirst into the blackish crust
of monkey-faced evil… (42)
In many world literatures, such as in Hindu and Chinese folktales, the monkey is often a deity and a character that is revered for defeating evil incarnate. Oftentimes the image of the monkey is associated with the phrase “See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil.” Yet in the case of Assia Djebar, she has reversed the image of the monkey so that it no longer retains a certain sense of innocent cunning and valiant behavior in the face of evil. Rather, she is referring to the monkey as its partially human incarnation, assuming a kind of evolutionary perspective; the monkey is related in part to human beings. Evil is related in Islam to Satan, who refused to bow down to the man that Allah created and as such was “monkey-faced.” But what is this “monkey-faced evil” that she refers to? In the context of the allegory it is undoubtedly colonialism which extends itself from not only a faith with a shared Abrahamic lineage and belief in the devil, but it is also the faith that denied and defied the rise of Islam and cast Muhammad in some critiques as the antichrist. As such, Djebar combines and manipulates these multifaceted notions of theology and applies them to the construction of social evils for which women are punished by being “plunge(d)… headfirst into the blackish crust of monkey-faced evil. (43)”
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