Assia Djebar and the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria: mimicry and subalternity in Nowhere in my Father's House

Abstract

Assia Djebar's autobiographical Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007) portrays a conflicting relationship with her father which breaks with the sympathetic image in her early L'amour, la fantasia (1985). This paper examines their complex relationship by exploring the main character's sense of place, represented by the home and the school, where dominates the authoritative figure of her father. The latter's identity emerges as that of the assimilated native, constructed by the ideological forces of French colonialism and fostered by its state-controlled education. The conclusion shows that the protagonist's feeling of female invisibility, spelt in the very title of the novel, and her discomfort at her father's subaltern and mimic identity underline the historical, political, as well as cultural impasse of the French colony in Algeria, and function as an indirect indictment of the presumably positive legacy of the colonial past.