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Algeria

Carol Drinkwater explains how she “found my favourite place in the Med…Algeria.”

I had not known what to expect. Camels and sand dunes, of course, but the hand-beaten jewellery, the tattooed tribeswomen, the bridges of Constantine, the breathtaking landscapes, the generosity, the fine classical ruins and the silence of the Sahara made this one of the most intoxicating experiences on earth. To see this extraordinary country before tourism imprints, one visit will simply not do. – from “How I Found My Favourite Place in the Med…Algeria,” by Carol Drinkwater, The Guardian

Algeria

Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, by Assia Djebar (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992; first published in 1980)

Assia Djebar’s collection of stories takes place between 1958 and 1979, during Algeria’s war of independence and oppressive aftermath. Addressing “the cloistering of women, the implications of reticence, the connection of language to oppression, and the impact of war,” Djebar’s stories depict “the plight of urban Algerian women who have thrown off the shackles of colonialism only to face a postcolonial regime that denies and subjugates them.” Enlightening, disturbing, and poignant, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment illuminates, what is to many of us, a "too little-known world.”

“For Arabic women I see only one single way to unblock everything: talk, talk without stopping, about yesterday and today, talk about 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!...” – from “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,” in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, by Assia Djebar

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Assia Djebar

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