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The Rebel's Daughter - Algerian Novelist Maissa Bey - Bey Interview
The Rebel's Daughter - Algerian Novelist Maissa Bey - Bey Interview
The Rebel's Daughter - Algerian Novelist Maissa Bey - Bey Interview
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Women's Review of Books
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INTERVIEW
WRB: Your father's family was all but wiped out in the war for MB: Until rather recently, there were as many girls as boys in school, right
independence. through university, and the girls had a higher success rate. But since the recent
events that shook Algeria, we have noticed that a greater number of young
MB: My father and two brothers were killed right away. The last brother died
women and girls are leaving school-more for economic than for religious
three years later in combat. My grandfather lost all his sons. He died right after
reasons. If you can't afford to educate all your children, of course you'll favor
the war, of grief, people said. My mother also lost a brother in the war. It took a
your son or your sons, and economic hardship is often offered as a pretext,
big toll on us.
especially in rural areas. [A 2003 study found that 30 percent of Algerian
WRB: Assia Djebar [see page 31 says that for Algerian women writers, it women had never been to school, as opposed to 16.9 percent of men.]
helps to have a European mother, because "les interdits viennent de la me're"
WRB: Your early novel, Au Commencement etait la Mer [In the beginning
["prohibitions come from the mother"] Do you agree?
there was the sea] (Marsa, 1996) is a shocker by any standards. Nadia, a
MB: My mother was thirty, with five small children, when she was widowed. seventeen-year-old girl, has a brief love affair and a clandestine abortion,
She never remarried. Despite all her suffering, she did not raise us in a culture described in cool detail, and is stoned to death by her Islamist brother. That
of hatred for France and the French. But as a widow she was very frightened of was your first published work. Did you go out of your way to break taboos ?
the consequences of her behavior and afraid people would point the finger of
MB: As the threats and prohibitions multiplied, this paradoxically unleashed in
blame at her daughters. The social pressure on women is tremendous. Women
me a desire to write in order to be read. I published under a pseudonym at first,
are under constant scrutiny from all sides. She was relieved to see us married.
to protect myself and above all to protect my family. [Bey's real name is Samia
WRB: You taught yourself to read at an early age, during evening adult Benameur; read in France, she went public as a writer in Algeria only in 2000.1 I
literacy classes your father gave. didn't deliberately set out to break taboos, but I felt I was becoming more and
more deeply mired in silences and compromises, and I wanted to break free. I
MB: "She's always got her nose in a book," they said about me. I wasn't interested
wasn't aware of the "violence" of what I had written until I reread it.
in games, in making friends, or in meeting people. I read instead-indiscriminately.
Since I couldn't afford books, I read comic strips, photonovelas, and romance WRB: Hundreds of Algerian intellectuals-writers, reporters, scientists,
novels. I read the Thousand and One Nights when I was ten. I didn't understand musicians, doctors-were executed under Islamist fatwas in the mid 1990s.
everything. But it fed me. Reading is a form of nourishment. Some losses must have hit you especially hard.
WRB: Algeria is recovering from a decade of horrendous violence-the second MB: Salah Chouaki was an educator, an exceptional man, tremendously erudite
Algerian War, it's sometimes called. Over 200,000 people perished, thousands and cultured and forceful. He knew he was targeted for assassination. He
disappeared, and many professionals emigrated, including 35,000 teachers. disguised himself. He dyed his hair and made it sound like a game. [He was
How did you, a French teacher in a lyce'e [high school], live through those shot in his car on his way to work in September 1994.1 After his death, I began
years, when French teachers in particular were a target of Islamist terror? to write my first novel.
MB: The extremists wanted to bring the country to a halt. Our resistance was at WRB: The tragic story Sofiane B, Vingt Ans, [Sofiane B., Twenty Years Old]
the level of daily life. Going to work, opening your store in the morning, going to from the collection Nouvelles d'Algerie [Stories of Algeria (Grasset, 1998)]
the lycee to teach each day, hoping it would not be your last. The terrorists would
zeroes in on a young man who leaves home to join a terrorist group and
have forbidden the teaching of French-also music, sports, and drawing. As an winds up dead at the age of twenty. Among Algerian novelists, only you and
unveiled woman, I was well aware that my "flaws" were numerous. But I never Salima Ghezali (Les Amants de Shahrazade [Scheherezade's Lovers], Editions
worked as well with my students as in those years. Together we made each de l'Aube, 1999), it seems, have explored the sexual or psychological
lesson a little island of resistance. I encouraged dialogue. I taught not only French confusion, the father-son conflict, that might drive a young man to join a
but the values I believe in. terrorist group.
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MB: I hesitated for a very long time before writing. Unlike
many authors in my country or elsewhere, I didn't want to
focus my efforts on lamentation nor on celebration of the
inevitably glorious past raised to the level of a guiding myth
for future generations.
MB: Freedom by the power that writing can give one: that is, the ability and the
desire to transmit a story, but above all, simply to speak. These women, most of
whom really existed, have no other voice than that of a narrator in search of her
own history. In this novel I wanted to liberate captive voices and inaudible
screams-"minuscule lives," to borrow the term coined by French writer Pierre
Michon-to bring them into written history, because just as they are, they vJf; iic; 6113
California Institute of Integral Studies
represent the underside of a society that claims, quite hypocritically, that it has
California Institute of Integral Studiess
freed itself from all forms of oppression.
now offers the following degrees in a flexible format of
WRB: Your latest novel, Don't Look Back, [Surtout ne te retourne pas] (Editions
ONLINE COURSES, WEEKEND COURSES,
de l'Aube, 2005), which will be available in English soon, celebrates the
AND A SUMMER INTENSIVE
survivors of Algeria's 2003 earthquake. A young amnesiac finds shelter and
sustenance in a tent city where women have taken the lead in restoring a
semblance of normal life. Isn't that what you're doing in your hometown of Sidi M.A. and Ph. D . in
Bel Abbes, in a region hard hit by the 1990s violence? The Islamists who won the
municipal elections of 1990 shut down the town's public library. With the help of
Philosophy and Religion
a 50,000-euro grant from the European Union, you and your colleagues in the
with Concentration in
women writers group Paroles et Ecriture [Speech and Writing], have replaced it
with beautiful new library that opened last November. How did you do it? Women's Spirituality B
Core Faculty
MB: We had a very hard time winning acceptance for the idea-just the idea-
of a space open to all, where the shelves could hold, side by side, books in every Areas of Study in Mara Lynn Keller, Director
language-French, Arabic, German, English, and others-of every literary Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum,
genre, and available to everyone who longs to renew the contact-lost decades
Women's Spirituality Arisika Razak,
ago in our country-with the physical reality of books. Women in World Religions and Charlene Spretnak
We faced disapproval of us personally-as emancipated women minus Feminist and Ecofeminist Philosophy Adjunct faculty, teaching onli
complexes or veils-and bureaucratic obstacles: promises made and
Women's Mysteries and Sacred Arts or weekend courses in 2006-08
immediately rescinded, rejection, humiliation, full scale interrogations about
include
our hidden aims and our stated goals, and sarcasm and snares. Finally we Body Wisdom/Women and Healinginld
Paula Gunn Allen, Jennifer Berezan,
managed to obtain first a locale and then a functioning library, really open to all
Archaeomythology/Eco-Social Anthropology Susan Carter, Carol P. Christ,
and startling in its simplicity, its intentional sobriety and clarity.
Rose Wognum Frances,
WRB: Finally, I'd like to bring up a subject that drives Americans to rage and Peace and Partnership Studies! Susan Griffin,Tricia Grame,
despair these days: torture. Your brief novel Entendez-vous dans les Montagnes... Justice, Community, Sustainability Joan Marler, Peggy Reeves Sanday,
[Do you hear it in the Mountains...] (Editions de l'Aube, 2002) confronts your Luisah Teish, and Sara Webb
father's death head-on. On a high speed train between Paris and Marseille in Up to 17 of the required 36 units
1995, an Algerian woman meets an elderly French physician, who as a very ma b tke olie FOR MORE INFORMATION
Contact Allyson Werner,
young army recruit in Algeria in 1957 witnessed her father's torture. Torture For more curricular information, Office of Admissions
harms not only the victim but his entire family. There is no healing. This must visit www.ciis.edu/academics/wse 415.575.6155 * awerner@ciis.edu
have been a difficult book to write. www.ciis.edu
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