Literary Birthday – 30 June – Assia Djebar

Assia Djebar Quotes

1. The word is a torch; to be held up in front of the wall of separation or withdrawal … Armed solely with the written word, our serious attention can never be distracted … And now I too seek out the rich vocabulary of love of my mother tongue …
2. Love, if I managed to write it down, would approach a critical point: there where lies the risk of exhuming buried cities … But my sole ambition in writing is constantly to travel to fresh pastures and replenish my water skins with an inexhaustible silence.
3. My father was a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue, and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French.
4. Sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure.
5. Writing in a foreign language – has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins.

Assia Djebar was the pen name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, an Algerian novelist, translator, and filmmaker. She is the author of Algerian White: A Narrative. Her novels, written in French, most often focus on women and their place in Algerian society. Djebar moved to the United States in 1995 and taught French literature at Louisiana State University and then at New York University. In 2005 Djebar was elected to the Académie Française.

Source for photo: Michel-georges bernard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Assia_Djebar.jpg,

by Amanda Patterson
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