Quotes from Assia Djebar

Sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure.

small things comes in big packages.*

Je suis féministe parce que je suis Algérienne

Since they weren't sleepy and nothing had been left unsaid, they began to read poetry to each other, taking turns like children and enjoying it. Bachir had a lovely voice, one that was already that of a man. He knew many poems by heart. He lovingly recited Victor Hugo, with warmth Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre, and poems written by young people going into battle; he then moved on to the poets of liberty - Rimbaud again, Eluard, and Desnos.

My father was a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue, and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French. Except

Il faut écouter les autres dans leurs langues et dans la forme spontanée de leur fureur.

How shall I find the strength to tear off my veil unless I have to use it to bandage the running sore nearby from which words exude?

Love, if I managed to write it down, would approach a critical point: there where lies the risk of exhuming buried cries, those of yesterday and as well as those of a hundred years ago. But my sole ambition in writing is constantly to travel to fresh pastures and replenish my water skins with an inexhaustible silence.

Dante compares this language—which is like yours, when you come back to me intangibly—to the "perfumed panther," the mythical animal of medieval bestiaries. He adds, and I quote for all three of you: "Hearing the call of the panther, the other animals follow it wherever it goes, attracted by so much fragrant softness.

Writing in a foreign language - has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins.