Assia Djebar's Short Stories and Women

Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar, University of Florida, United States of America

Abstract: Writing after Fanon and after independence, Assia Djebar brings women and their experiences of war into sharp
focus. Her collection of short stories, Women of Algiers in their Apartment offers glimpses into the daily lives of women
ignored by mainstream writers. She continues Fanons goals to prevent the cultural unveiling of Algerian women, but extends
her exclusion to both French and Algerian men. Djebar addresses another kind of territorial invasion and appropriation
of resources. For twenty years later, the Algerian woman was still not at east in the streets, and the shame she felt attached
to the mobility and exposure of her body was not due merely to colonial penetration, which had long been with drawn
(Falukner 848). Djebars work challenges Fanons predictions of the position of women in the new order and solidiies the
problems facing the oppression of Algerian women. Although many would contend that her position as a native intellectual
is suspect, the fact remains that Djebars efforts to write the untold narratives does lend agency to the lower classes of Algerian women. Even writing in French is a deliberate choice for an author whose chief concern is to have these unknown
lives dealt with in a vast readership. The subaltern sections of Algerian women gained a voice in the writings of Assia
Djebar.
Keywords: Research Focus

ORN IN ALGERIA, of Arabic descent, but

educated within the colonial French system,
Assia Djebar is a writer whose texts provide
a varied lens through which to understand
the female experience during and after Algerian independence. In her iction and non-ictional writings,
Djebar explores womens speech and memory to
complicate readings of womens lives by colonial
and nationalist ideologies. As Anne Donadey explains, Djebar's privileged upbringing is foreign to
many of her ictional characters yet her background
serves to underscore the tenuousness of the Algerian
conception of women and the position of the native
intellectual within the postcolonial setting of North
Africa (xix). In her work Djebar also employs oral
Arabic phrases and words which problematize the
smooth embedding of her narrative into a master
discourse, conditioned by her use of the colonizers
language, French. The inclusion of Arabic within
French sentences creates new space for the bifurcated
identity of the colonized subject. Djebar's early iction has been criticized by Lazreg and others for not
having nationalist concerns and even for having a
"nostalgic view of colonialism" (201). With closer
examination however, Djebar's iction reveals the
issures between the national struggle for independence and the more personal circumstances of everyday life. She captures the lives of women in Algeria
and reveals their personal and emotional lives. Her
writing provides a marked contrast to the ways women were being used by nationalists to further the
political struggle both literally and ideologically.

Anne Donadey argues that the use of two languages, overlapping allows for meaningful slippage
and mimics the constant state of negotiating occurring in the colonized space where languages, cultures,
and traditions compete for dominance (28). For critic
Veronica Best, Djebars use of Arabic within French
phrases allows her characters to uncover the mental,
physical, real, and fantastic experiences of women
which were not present in the public sphere of their
patriarchic societies, both colonial and native. Extending beyond the view of the colonial or patriarchal
view point, Djebar's work deterritorializes the conventional French and creates new possibilities for
expression which are not present within the writings
of her contemporary, psychiatrist, revolutionary, and
cultural theorist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). Fanon's
work A Dying Colonialism and within that volume
his essay, "Algeria Unveiled" approaches the issues
of women, resistance, and nationalism with a limited
polemic that succumbs to traditional metaphors and
roles for women. Women are assigned a role in the
national story and their role is a supportive one fueled
by their bodies which also serve as visual and cultural
metaphors for the purity and protection of the mother
country, Algeria herself. Given Djebar work as a
journalist with Fanon as the paper editor, the intertextuality of their works provides space for examining the various ways in which women were conigured in Algerian discourse. Djebar continued to
write after Fanons death and was equipped with the
relaties of the post-independence state for women.
Her work offers a more complete and less idealized
voicing to the stories of women within the homes

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 4

and private spaces they inhabited. Whereas Fanon's

essay, "Algeria Unveiled" addresses women in their
public roles, their veiled or unveiled movements
outside the home and the political signiicance of
both, Djebar's iction presents the interior lives of
women, the emotional, social, and domestic parameters in which decisions were made. Fanon's work with
female Algerian subjectivity centers around the
presence and presentation of her physical body in
public spaces and the degree to which both are used
to serve the further the cause of revolution.
Since Antoinette Burton's Dwelling in the Archive
critics have engaged more fully in the feminist argument theorizing the domestic space as an ideologically saturated site where history and culture meet.
Djebar's writings focus on the interior dialogue of
women's stories, those told within the spaces of their
homes, her narratives highlight the interplay for Algerian women between the claims of nation, self,
and home (Best 873). Critic Veronica Best describes
the women in Djebar's narratives are "buried alive"
within the framework of their societies and suffering
an "incarceration" due to their inability to express
themselves before the start of the story (873).
Fanon's co-opts the female experience by inscribing it as secondary narrative in light of the larger
ideals of the resistance movement. The role of women in this freedom struggle is painted as having
vitality and agency and would extend after the independence of Algeria: "Fanon believed the newly won
position of respect and apparent equality held by female combatants (as described and, presumably,
perceived by him) was permanent, an augury of the
future "modern," socialist, revolutionary Algeria"
(Faulkner 850). The society Fanon imagines furthers
the premises of revolutionary ideals and allows all
citizens to engage in public life. His envisioning of
the independent Algeria serves as a type of iction
within the midst of his theorizations. Idealized pieces
of the national story within the context of women's
lives emerge throughout "Algeria Unveiled." In one
such scene, for the sake of nation building, the father
and neighbors of a female freedom ighter embrace
her decision to move outside the house unveiled:

honor, as well social practices regarding womens

behavior. Fanon's romanticism continues: "Behind
the girl, the whole familyeven the Algerian father,
the authority for all things, the founder of every
valuefollowing in her footsteps, becomes committed to the new Algeria" (60). Although the power
Fanon ascribes to the revolutionary woman is considerable, her power is within the context of the new
Algeria and exclusively furthers the creation of the
new nation state.
The language of power for Fannon's female revolutionary extends the power she has in her body so that
her body becomes a weapon. Women handled bombs
and other ammunitions, served as messengers, and
furthered the cause of nation-building through their
physical presence at key moments. Women participated through their bodies and actions surrounded on
both sides by men who manipulated them as symbols; their country men used and discard veiling
practices in order to disguise and transport notes,
bombs, and supplies to one another across colonial
lines whereas colonial men tried to disrobe women
from the veil in an effort to acculturate them and inscribe a colonial identity. Fanon narrates women's
entrance into the conlict not as a moment of female
agency but male appropriation of their labor in order
to further the cause of the greater national story. The
female revolutionary's entrance into the struggle is
a subplot to the larger resistance action; her position
is of a necessary but secondary character in the larger
scene:

The father was sooner or later informed.

Different persons would have claim to have
seen "Zohra or Fatima unveiled, walking like
a My Lord, protect us! " The father would
then decide to demand explanations. He would
hardly have begun to speak when they would
stop. From the young girl's look of irmness the
father would have understood that her commitment was of long standing. The old fear of dishonor was swept away (60)

In light of the master narrative of the Revolution, the

male leaders strategize using women in the name of
nationalism. Implicit is the assumption that if Algerian men had the ability to resist successfully on their
own, they would have never asked the women to
become involved.
Fanon associates the veil with the nation, further
extending allegorical nation language to include the
covering of the female body as part a central cultural
idea in need of preservation during the struggle of
independence. He describes how the nation must
resist the unveiling of its women because through
this resistance, the nation itself remains protected

The scene that Fanon describes overwrites the ight

for independence on top of personal and familial

The decision to involve women as active elements of the Algerian Revolution was not
reached lightly. But deciding to incorporate
women as essential elements, to have the Revolution depend on their presence and their action in this or that sector, was obviously a
wholly revolutionary step. After a inal series
of meetings among leaders, and especially in
view of the urgency of the daily problems that
the Revolution faced, the decision to concretely
involve women in the national struggle was
reached. (48-49, 51)

MOHANALAKSHMI RAJAKUMAR

from the dominator's gaze. The interplay of the colonizer attempting to uncover the woman's body in
order to place her in a European mode of dress versus
the insistence of the colonized male that she cover
her body with the traditional veil, the body of the
woman serves as the site for colonization as well as
resistance and national identity. Women are transposed from serving as the carriers of revolutionary
messages to becoming the cultural symbol for the
revolution through their dress.
The veil and the body it hid igured prominently
in the Algerian resistance movement functioning as
a marker for both sides; its use and disuse was the
daily choice of the women that chose it in a small
sense, but in the larger arena, those daily choices
were governed by masculine ambitions trained toward further the cause of the new Algeria. At certain
moments veils were discarded in order for women
to attire themselves in Western dress and participate
in the sabotage of the French parts of the city. But,
at other moments, the veil severed as the cultural
stronghold for the pressurized nation. Fanon's insistence that women serve as the igures of national
resistance gave women a limited sense of agency,
empowerment, and involvement in the struggle for
independence the particulars of which were determined by male leaders as well as to the extent their
families allowed their participation. Yet, this sense
of power was limited, only those women who maintained the same attitude toward veiling practices that
the resistance movement prescribed were ensured of
practicing in the national narrative.
Writing after the revolution in the midst of the
reality of the new Algeria, Djebar provides prospective that Fanon may have gained if given the time,
but nonetheless lacked. Djebar's position in independent Algeria as a French educated Arabic woman allowed her access to a more inclusive language and
broader ability to construct a three dimensional subjectivity for women. Her ictional writings and essays
highlight a more complicated and woman-centered
use of language through which she explores rather
then assess the experiences of Algerian women.
Djebar's polemic of the unveiled female eye threatening the masculine gaze by returning its privileged
sight highlights the discomfort of the freed female
body for Algerian men; the unveiling behavior
without productive necessity becomes undesirable.
For Djebar, the conlict is not primarily an international or political one, but rather the more personal
domestic struggle for the woman of postcolonial
Algeria. They need no longer fear colonial "rape" as
Fanon described the French intention of unveiling
women, but the Algerian woman becomes threatened
from her own countrymen who object to the nonveiled post-revolution female body: "The body
moves forward out of the house and is, for the irst

time, felt as being "exposed" to every look: the gait

becomes stiff, the step hasty, the facial expression
tightens (139). Djebar voices the contradiction of the
return to conservative values towards Algerian women, their bodies, and social movement. At the expense of the nation-story, women become socially
and politically static after independence and Algerian
men replaced the colonizer in the cultural system
only without any recourse to ight.
The visions and versions of history and representing women's lives ruled by patriarchy are two recurrent themes in Djebar's work. Veils, the female body,
and self-image all igure prominently in addition to
representations of the sexual exchange (Nagy-Zekmi
1). The short stories found in the collection "Women
of Algiers in their Apartments," Djebar brings into
discussion the private female Algerian narrative
previously unvoiced by nationalistic theorization
such as Fanon's work (Faulkner 847).
The title of Djebar's collection Women of Algiers
in their Apartments echoes the title of a painting by
the French artist Eugene Delacroix of three Algerian
women lounging under the watchful gaze of the foreign male artist. Delacroix sold the piece and others
like it as representative images of the woman of the
Orient previously inaccessible to the gaze of nonrelatives. The image of women as painted by
Delacroix typiies the colonial interest in veiled Algerian women and unveiling them; in the proit exchange between two men, the painter and the owner
of the piece, the women serve as subjects deined
and conined by their bodies on both sides. The
isolated gazes of the depicted women, their eyes
averted, show a universe where women are sterile,
self-alienated and subservient to the assumed masculine Western gaze. Complicit in the consumption of
these images were Western women, equally appropriating these processed presentations of women in
the East. Thus the colonized women was imprisoned
not only by the conines of the domestic harem but
additionally by the perception of her own body, as
Veronica Best theorizes, women's bodies and the
subsequent veiling practices served as a means of
imprisonment within clothing (875). Djebar's use of
Delacroix's title expresses her intention to examine
the perception of women within their domestic spaces
in her collection. Through the individual stories in
the collection she discards the privileged masculine
colonial gaze of the painter and replacing it with the
voices of the women themselves, telling their own
stories in an empowering voice. Through the female
characters in her short stories Djebar enters the previously male dominated and written discourse extending the ablityt of women to"take the subject position
as one who gazes, to see outside," and by doing so
to also "revolt, to assert a certain power" (Faulkner
849).

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In the title story, "Women of Algiers in their

Apartments," the characters Sarah and Anna exposit
the need for feminine expression within the context
retelling personal stories during moments of national
signiicance. Sarah, a female revolutionary imprisoned for her role in the resistance movement,
attempts to reconcile herself to the memories of violent torture she experienced. The dificulty she underwent at the initial moment and the subsequent feelings of trauma are both beyond the scope of Fanon's
idealist participant. Sarah's recollections of losing
her ability to express herself as she retells her time
in prison introduce new theories about the female
Algerian freedom ighter : with every moment,
my body ran into wall. Silently I was shrieking I
was a voiceless prisoner" (47). Sarah's conclusion
moves beyond the physical action of the resistance
and instead advocates a seemingly non-active course.
She believes in the power of communication, the
ability to not only do but to state as the answer to
moving beyond the restriction of the body:
For Arabic women I see only one single way
to unblock everything: talk, talk without stopping, about yesterday and today, talk among
ourselves, in all the women's quarters, the traditional ones as well as those in the housing projects. Talk among ourselves and look. Look
outside, look outside the walls, and the prisons!
the Woman as look and the Woman as voice
...not the voice of the female vocalists whom
they imprison in their sugar-sweet melodies.
but the voice they've never heard. ... (50)
Sarah ruminates to her friend Anne about the life her
mother's generation led, and the underlying cultural
implications that governed their lives:
she whod never declared her fears out loud,
or her joy whod never cursed anyone, nor
nosily choked down any sounds, my mother, it
was as if I couldnt manage to set her free!
I can go out all I want, lead my life on day at a
time, improvising as I go and in whatever way
I see it really, try as I might to enjoy all my
freedom to call it by its true name but one
single question keeps plaguing me, this freedom, is it really mine? My mother died without
even conceiving of the idea of a life like mine,
with its twists and turns ... Anne, what should
we do? Lock ourselves in again, begin to weep
for her again, live for her? (49-50)
Sarahs frustration with the voicelessness of her
mother underscores the silent modes of womens
lives in a patriarchal system. The contrast between
the freedom Sarah and Anne experience and the
reality of a life of service as endured by their mothers

is a startling one but not surprising given the goals

of revolution. The subject that Djebar wishes to focus
on is a unique one not celebration of the newly
found voices, but rather a bemoaning for the voices
that were lost or submerged for generations. The responsibility now falls on the young women to interpret and give breadth to the experiences of their
predecessors, however inadequate this might seem.
Since Sarahs mother is dead, it will be impossible
to fully recover her experience, but that is not the
intention. Rather the emphasis is on reclaiming the
stories of these women, which can be done by retelling their lives through shared experience. For women, the danger is that with the abolition of colonialism one oppressor has been ousted, but another
remains; the Algerian patriarchy has not been overthrown. Absent of colonialism but within the context of Algerian patriarchy women's narratives have
no place in political or social discourse except as the
invisible presence within the home. Djebar's iction
opens a space for neglected women's tales in the
larger discourse of Algerian history making. Sarah's
pain, frustration, and anguish enter into the previously one dimensional perspective of the female revolutionary and place her perspective within the larger construct of generations of women whose perspectives are lost.
In the short story, There is No Exile, characters
reveal the extent to which modernity and warfare
isolate them from other human beings. The main
character hears the weeping of the women next door
and interprets the other womans story solely on the
cries themselves: The cries began around ten
oclock, more or less. They were coming from the
apartment next door and soon changed into shrieks
(61). The impact of modernization, rather than
bringing women out of isolation, created more seclusion by sectioning them into nameless apartments
spaces. With the elimination of the village, communal life for these women shrunk to whoever lived
within their particular rented space. The traditional
grief sharing or visiting that would occur in their prerevolution environment was eliminated by modern
apartment life and the chaos of war.
The neighboring cries of grief are the only expression of grief that the mourning women are allowed
for their dead, All three of us, recognized it by
the way in which the women received it: it was the
death (61). As the story continues, the narrator is
required by her family to contain her grief over the
death of her children contrasted by the lamentations
from the adjoining apartment. The stiled narrator is
fascinated by the expression of the cries: Id begun
to listen to the sobs outside that hadnt ceased, would
surely not cease before nightfall. There were ive or
six women in the Smain family, and they were all
lamenting in chorus, each one settling, forever it

MOHANALAKSHMI RAJAKUMAR

seemed, into the muddled outbreak of their grief

(62). The narrator covets the openness of a grief
shared with others, expressed without reservation,
and struggles against her voicelessness in the name
of preservation. Her family conspires to replace her
grief with another marriage and thus the hope of
more children which continues her story as a wife
and mother rather then childless widow.
The story is framed by the grieving cries of the
neighboring women: At noon, The weeping
continued. Id attended to the meal while listening
to the threnody and its modulations. I was growing
used to them (63). Djebars insistence on drawing
the narrators and the readers attention back to the
grieving women gives prominence to the womens
experience of war. The loss that these women have
suffered is often overshadowed by the events of
political conlict, but in Djebars narrative, she retraces loss in order to give feminine voice to this side
of the revolution. The narrators fascination with the
cries heightens her own inability to cry:
The sobs outside seemed more mufled, but I could
still distinguish their singsong.
Their gentle singsong. This is the moment, I said
to myself, when grief becomes familiar and pleasurable, and nostalgic. This is the moment when you
weep almost voluptuously, for this gift of tears is
gift without end. This was the moment when the
bodies of my children would turn cold fast, so fast,
and when I knew it. (65)
As the story progresses, the narrator continues to
dwell on the cries of the women next to her and their
cries become substitutions for her own.
Although in exile from Algeria, this family adheres to tradition and arranges a marriage for the
narrator without her knowledge. In the midst of her
grief for her husband and children, the narrator is
expected to marry another man in order to restore
the status of all the women of the family as having
purpose and vitality within the traditional social order. At the anticipated introduction of the prospective
in-laws and groom, the narrator fails to cooperate
with the project of domestic reconstruction. The push
to reclaim a role that is no longer hers enables the
narrator to voice her private pain and doubt:
I dont want to marry, I said. I dont want
to marry, I repeated, barely shouting. Its
not because of your son, I said. But I dont
want to get married. I see the future before my
eyes, its totally black. I dont know how to
explain it, surely it must come from God.
But I see the future totally black before my
eyes! I said again, sobbing, as Aicha led me
out of the room in silence. (71)
The narrator inally inds her voice during this central
moment in the text but still to no avail. For while

she enters the room, her mother promises her hand

in marriage to the visitors, regardless of her daughters wishes. The inclusion of the personal loss and
emotion of this story colors the overriding cause of
independence with the humanity and dificulty of
individual concerns. The important act of the female
character speaking, for her resistance to register
audibly, provides a new function and space for language in the midst of nationalist discourse
The picture Djebar paints of women in revolutionary and independent Algeria is vastly different from
the militant igure of Fanons works. Hers is more
nuanced, personal, delving into the emotional and
psychological. Given Fanon's background as a psychiatrist it is surprising that a iction writer would
have richer humanistic texts but his theorizations
deal with ideals rather then individuals. In the short
story, The Dead Speak the narrator, Aicha, reveals
the pressures of life during wartime which do not
include any of the revolutionary fervor of Fanon's
ictitious female liberator. The emotional toll of war
as Aicha experiences it is considerable:
Aicha, the irst name of an open lower, has
been broken and wilted since time immemorial.
During that way, no one counted the days or
months. And the time before the war seems a
time swallowed up, of which even the memory
has been erased. (75)
Aicha presents a revision of Fanon's account of the
female freedom ighter. Hers highlights the personal
cost to the women who participated:
facing all the women of the city, those who
for all these years under the burned mountain,
rigid with hope, had formed the foundering or
trembling choir, those who, all their veils
swollen, scurried through the alleys while the
soldiers were searching for who-knows-what
terrorist, those who closed doors of obscure
hallways and who, breathless, their ear against
wood, recognized the rhythmic step of the army
rabble. (84)
Seeing women as the trembling choir or who are
running with their ear against wood destroys the
image of woman as warrior that Fanon was idealistically insistent upon but equips them with a fuller,
more truthful and personal voice.
Djebar is particularly interested in reclaiming the
stories of women who have not been included in institutional records because of the absence of such
women from the historical record; the written records of [H]istory represent the version of those in
power (Nagy-Zekmi 7). In the short story Nostalgia
of the Horde, a storyteller recounts the narrative of
her grandmother-in-aw. The narrative is an excellent

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example of Djebars great sensitivity toward subjects left out of the oficial historic records while
she creates the other version of history (NagyZekmi 9). This telling gives the dead womans life
agency because her story comes to life in a way that
was never allowed by her society:
During those days of constant fear, Mma Rkia
gave birth to a daughter. Outside they could
hear the noise of the carnage and the bullets,
but by her side her sister-in-law had begun to
curse the new mothers fate: A daughter!
Youve given us a daughter! only good
enough for the race of slaves! Felling deeply
ashamed, Rkia thought: Is that my fault
Suddenly, my new born daughter uttered a irst
moan interrupting the silence, then a second
one that longer and more distinct, then she died.
(129)
The death of the female infant in this narrative underscores the silencing of women by society. Other than
the obvious gender favoritism shown by members
of the extended family, Rkia experiences the horrors
of a climate where women are not allowed literally
the space to breathe. By including this vignette at
the end of the story, Djebar give prominence to the
unspoken life of the child as well as validity to the
mother and reveals her commitment to:
Lend voice to the sufferings of her fellow Algerians and to those who have struggled to bring
about a just and integrated society. Her deep
solicitude in regard to the individual tragedies
of those of whom she writers projects ultimately
onto the question of nationhood. (Nagy-Zekmi
10)
In the short story, The Woman Who Weeps, a
woman ind she her voice while talking to a complete
stranger on the beach. The narrative is brief but
powerful a woman and a man meet three days in
a row on the same spot of a beach. The man I silent,
but the woman speaks. By their third and inal
meeting, the woman has fully found her voice, and
releases into print the story of so many middle class
women:

On the third day, while she was talking, but in

a whisper now (those years of bourgeois marriage) But at long last she was confessing,
mumbling, letting it all low out, as the sea
continued its chant of a woman in coninement
and she was talking, inally opening herself
up. (56)
Here in this scene, Djebar manifests her desire for
the unspoken, the unwritten womans voice to come
into existence and sound out her life. To have a
middle class woman as the principal character and
focus of a story, in which nothing really happens
other than her musing was a bold thematic step for
Djebar and a movement away from plot driven narratives. Through such narratives, Djebar demonstrates her concern and commitment to empowering
other women to gain their places in public discourse.
Writing after Fanon and after independence, Assia
Djebar brings women and their experiences of war
into sharp focus. Her collection of short stories,
Women of Algiers in their Apartment offers glimpses
into the daily lives of women ignored by mainstream
writers. She continues Fanons goals to prevent the
cultural unveiling of Algerian women, but extends
her exclusion to both French and Algerian men.
Djebar addresses another kind of territorial invasion
and appropriation of resources. For twenty years
later, the Algerian woman was still not at east in the
streets, and the shame she felt attached to the mobility and exposure of her body was not due merely to
colonial penetration, which had long been with
drawn (Falukner 848). Djebars work challenges
Fanons predictions of the position of women in the
new order and solidiies the problems facing the oppression of Algerian women. Although many would
contend that her position as a native intellectual is
suspect, the fact remains that Djebars efforts to write
the untold narratives does lend agency to the lower
classes of Algerian women. Even writing in French
is a deliberate choice for an author whose chief concern is to have these unknown lives dealt with in a
vast readership. The subaltern sections of Algerian
women gained a voice in the writings of Assia Djebar.

References
Best, Victoria. Between the Harem and the Battleield: Domestic Space in the Work of Assia Djebar. Signs 27.3 (2002):
873-881.
Djebar, Assia. Women of Algiers in their Apartments. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1980.
Donadey, Anne. Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds. Studies in African Literature. New Hampshire:
Heinemann, 2001.
_____________. The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature: Assia Djebars Algerian Palimpsest. World Literature Today 74.1 (2000): 27.
Fanon, Frantz. Algeria Unveiled. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press. 35-63.
Faulkner, Rita A. Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Women, Veils, and Land. World Literature Today 70.4 (1996): 847-856.

MOHANALAKSHMI RAJAKUMAR

Lazreg, Marnia. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York:Routledge, 1994.
Nagy-Zekmi, Silvia. Tradition and Transgression in the Novels of Assia Djebar and Aicha Lemsine. Research in African
Literatures. 33.3 (2002) 1-13.

About the Author

Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar
Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar was born in Chennai, India but has lived abroad since the age of 4. She recently
served as the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs for Georgetown Universitys School of Foreign Service in Doha,
Qatar. Her research interests include Postcolonial Literature, speciically Muslim womens literature. She also
publishes iction, including a short story Dasi in the Sierra Leone Pens recent anthology, Book of Voices,
about widows in India. In addition to Dasi, four other stories from Mohanas irst short story collection, Weeds
and Other Stories, have been published including Baby, Tree, Truth and Plates. Mohana is inishing
her PhD in Postcolonial Literature from the University of Florida.

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