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.