Challenging Patriarcal Historical Discourses In The Works Of Assia Djebar And Isabel Allende

University of Kent

MA in Spanish and European Comparative Literary Studies
FR 856 Women Writers and the Family in Twentieth Century Literature

Lent Term 2003

Convenor: Dr. A. De Medeiros


THE POWER OF WRITING:
CHALLENGING PATRIARCAL HISTORICAL DISCOURSES IN THE WORKS OF ASSIA DJEBAR AND ISABEL ALLENDE


Julia Santafé-Marqués



INTENTIONS


Following Postmodernthought, which intends to question the ways in which we are used to comprehending reality and thus, making an effort to step away from the Western world as the model which everything else is measured up against, I have chosen to reflect upon two non-Western cultures: the Maghrebian, and Latin-American. Two women, Isabel Allende (Peru/Chile, 1942) and Assia Djebar (Algeria, 1936) featureoutstandingly as contemporary writers of postcolonial narrative. [i] Both are socially committed authors whose work aspires, among other things, to reconstruct the world they left behind. They attempt to do so through a careful analysis that seeks to transcend the hegemonic discourse by giving full protagonism to the lost voice of common citizens and the testimony of women, in particular. [ii] The perspectivethat exile has bestowed both of these women with, serves to illuminate their writing which aims to challenge and reinterpret the historic reality of their native countries depicted by official discourses as the one and only truth.
Assia Djebar’s gift to Muslin Postcolonial narrative is, therefore, that of creating a counterdiscourse concerning the imperialist penetration by the West Onethat refuses totalising descriptions of accounts concerning the period that spans from the French colonization of Algeria in 1830 to the War of Independence of 1954-62. Likewise, Isabel Allende’s commitment to Chile’s history is to attack the official discourse created and controlled by the military dictatorship in order to justify the brutal 1973 coup d’état staged against her uncle PresidentSalvador Allende’s socialist government. [iii] From among several of their novels which deal with the history of their countries, I choose to focus my essay on Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia (Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade, 1985) and Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits, 1982) [iv] Both of these books demonstrate the power of writing as a perfect vehicle for reclaiming the pastand reflect upon personal and national identity. [v] Both books simultaneously recall the history of the writer’s native country and the experience and memory of historical events passed on by generations of families. Djebar´s Fantasia can be considered an autobiography whereas Allende’s shuffling of various levels of factual reality and magical realism in La casa prevent this novel from beingconsidered an autobiography [vi] Both books remarkably achieve to bring light to social injustice and historical effacing of important information. They do so with respect and hope in the future and, therefore, invite the reader to question the past and reshape their concept of national identity and reality itself. In this essay I concentrate my analysis on four main ideas: the shifting fromtraditional hegemonic historical discourse to a Postmodernist historical counterdiscourse that embraces difference; writing as a responsibility for both Djebar and Allende; examples of how deconstruction of Western and patriarchal logic are represented in Fantasia and La casa; and finally, I show evidence of how these two writers emphasize the importance of learning from past mistakes in order to approachthe cyclical nature of history more wisely.

EMBRACING DIFFERENCE: TOWRDS A HUMAN COMMUNITY.


In his deconstruction of Western metaphysics, Poststructuralist Jacques Derrida identifies what he calls a binary structure of terms, which oppose each other. One represents the positive attributes, which thus constructs an “other”, or negative, which signifies all the negative or absence...