Voice and Silence in Assia Djebar and Adania Shibli

Abstract

This essay considers the works of two Arab writers, Assia Djebar and Adania Shibli, to examine how silences in their texts are signs of both oppression and of resistance and rebellion. It seeks to show how the silences as well as the cries and incomprehensible voices of the colonized defy colonial and hegemonic narratives by resisting incorporation into the order of the intelligible and recognizable. Both writers believe in the power of words, but their words, liberated from the function of signification, release silences as they release the voices of the colonized in their multiplicity. Djebar's texts present no binary opposition between silence and voice; in the continuous search for the voices of colonized women, voice and silence are inextricably intertwined. In Shibli's Minor Detail, as in many of Djebar's texts, the search for voices takes the form of a journey backward, but the voices of the colonized are not retrieved, and we are left with only their silence. Moreover, whatever audible voices there are in Shibli's text become markers of silence; it is thus silence that speaks in Shibli's text. By virtue of their very lack of discursive power, the silences and voices released in these writers' works retain the freedom that comes with transgression and remind us of the flight that writing can be.

In the writings of Adania Shibli and Assia Djebar, silence has a clear presence. These two colonized women writers write from, but not necessarily about, colonial situations, and, in Shibli's case, a continuing settler colonial situation that oddly enough includes the conditions of a postcolonial one at the same time. Djebar writes from a postcolonial situation, but her writing takes her back to the colonial encounter. In the work of both writers, there is a movement backward, a movement that seeks to retrieve colonized voices buried deep under thick layers of silence, which is itself buried under the noise of colonizing narratives.

Focusing on Shibli's Minor Detail and Djebar's Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade, this essay seeks to link, by way of conversation, two texts struggling with the erasures of the history of the colonized. It joins the two writers by posing a question about the possibility of retrieving past voices of suffering and resistance, and it notes how in both writers' texts such a retrieval necessitates a confrontation with colonial history, turning the texts themselves into battlefields. Thus, rather than making any claims about the possibility of retrieving colonized women's voices, the essay sheds light on the openings, obstacles, victories, and defeats that both writers confront in their quest to retrieve colonized voices.

Both Djebar and Shibli find themselves struggling simultaneously with silences and dominant colonial narratives. Their effort to unearth the silences obscured in colonial narratives points to the gaps and fissures in these narratives, challenging their claims to truth and exposing the colonial power relations at their foundations. Nevertheless, the battle with silence is an unending battle in both writers' texts. While in Djebar there is a persistent quest for silenced women's voices, their retrieval is shown to be partial, a retrieval that is constantly shaped by that which cannot be retrieved, by the silence that can speak only as silence; it thus speaks alongside words that become a protest against silence, but that do not obscure it. In Shibli, on the other hand, the battle against silence, the quest for the silenced voice, is an impossible one, but silences themselves speak, challenging any claims to truth in the dominant colonial narratives.

Forsaking the need to make intelligible, to write in a clear, recognizable language, both writers start from the marginal, the minor, that which is deemed insignificant. They manage to escape any will to knowledge that would reproduce the colonial and patriarchal relations that produce the voice of the colonized woman as victim. What they seek and end up with are words, words that carry the weight of violence, silence, and death.

Djebar has described her work as recording silence, and this process of recording sheds light on imprisoned bodies moving “and imperceptibly resisting.”¹ It involves bringing the body in its movements to light, realizing some kind of freedom: “Freedom is not necessarily a path, it is an ether into which one plunges, where one sleeps on one's feet. Where one dances either half bowing or scarcely bent without moving, where one merges with what was held back from ecstasy. Light fingering the whole body.”²

In Djebar’s novel So Vast the Prison (1995), following the movement of Djebar's silent characters leads back to memory, a return that makes “it possible to search the present, a future in the doorstep.” The return to memory involves a retrieval of deep buried voices of the past, for it is a return “to the inner eye . . . a gaze suffused with vague sounds, inaudible words and a mixture of various musics.”³ In this way, the retrieval of memory is a retrieval of sounds, words, songs, of women's voices. For Djebar, “to refuse to veil one's voice and to start ‘shouting,’ that was really indecent, real dissidence. For the silence of all the others suddenly lost its charm and revealed itself for what it was: a prison without reprieve.”⁴ In writing, the voice takes flight and thus transgresses the confinement and imprisonment of being a woman, becoming another form of freedom.

In Shibli, on the other hand, silence is not imprisonment; her text starts with a quest for the silent voice of a dead woman but ends by retrieving only silence. In another context, Marysia Lewandowska argues that there can be presence through omission; the absence of certain voices does not appear as a lack, she argues, but rather “as deafening silence.”⁵ The problem for Lewandowska does not lie in silence but in the lack thereof, in the noise that veils and obscures our silence. Silence in Shibli marks a continuous colonial oppression that connects the past to the present; marking this connection is also refusing to deny the processes of absenting and erasure on which the settler-colonial project is founded. This denial can be effected by giving a voice to the dead woman. The failure to give voice, to reconstruct the story of the woman, or to speak on her behalf, is an affirmation of these processes of absenting and erasure, a positive act of confrontation, a battle against the temptation of forgetting and the denial of what causes pain. It is a rejection of speech when speech functions to obscure the operations of colonialism.

Despite the different stances each writer takes in relation to silence, Shibli and Djebar have in common a refusal to speak over silence, to hide it. For even in Djebar's quest for women's voices, silence occupies a clear and visible place; we hear it in the gaps and blank spaces that punctuate her texts. As Trinh Minh-ha has argued, “Whether materially or immaterially manifested, the blank space remains alive with indefinite possibilities. It could be indicative of a profound determination not to forget, a means to leave evidence of repression, a tacit gesture to honor an absent presence.”⁶ In Djebar, when speech becomes impossible, silence speaks. As Latifa Mohammed demonstrates, “It speaks with words and indicates an absence.” In many instances, the cry becomes a protest against a persistent silence, a protest that affirms it rather than denying it: “cries of despair, cries of torn and anguished wailing. All these cries echo where the writing itself turns into a scream.”⁷

Writing without Representation

For Djebar, writing is “a path to open . . . writing to make present a life, the pain perhaps, but the life, the incurable melancholy.”⁸ Writing here is not a vehicle for expression or communication; it is rather an act and a force, one that stems from the body. It thus becomes a voice that reaches the surface and can be heard. Nevertheless, this voice from the body, which encompasses all the voices that are buried deep within the writer's body, the heritage of her kinswomen of Algeria, takes the form of the cry, the most subversive form a woman's voice can take.⁹

Women's writing, according to Trinh, always entails the question of the inexpressible, of the ability to say, of wanting to say, the need to struggle with the already named and said.¹⁰ When women write from a position where multiple oppressions meet and intersect, “the scream inhabits women's writings,” and silence is heard in the scream. Their words are mute, and one should read that which has not been said, or that which was said without knowing it, in the gap, in the interval between meaning and truth, “a break without which meaning would be fixed and truth congealed.”¹¹

Both Djebar's and Shibli's texts defy the function of representation. To see the act of writing as an act of representation is to posit a subject that requires its own object, the silenced colonized woman. According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the consciousness of those “outside (though not completely so) the circuit of the international division of labor” is irretrievable. To represent them as homogeneous Others is to refer “only to our own place in the seat of the Same or the Self.”¹² Representation requires an author rather than a writer, one who is objectified in an identity and who conveys a singular meaning, one who is able to make a claim to truth, the truth of the object of their representation. This also implies that, providing truth in this way, the author is no longer a writer as Trinh, following Roland Barthes and Helen Cixous, argues, but rather an object of their own acts of representation.¹³ Shibli and Djebar neither make a subject of the colonized woman who can speak for herself, nor seek to speak on behalf of the silenced colonized woman.

Not only does representation entail the objectification of the speaking subject (author and object of representation), but, in its claim to turn the colonized woman into a speaking subject, it is another act of colonization. For Spivak, the objectification entailed in acts of representation, rather than countering dominant colonial narratives, reproduces them, leaving the colonized women doubly colonized. To claim to represent or make a subject of the colonized woman becomes a disavowal of colonialism rather than a confrontation with it. As Trinh has demonstrated, to claim to allow people to speak for themselves, to give them a voice, is to presuppose a colonized without a voice; to give them a voice, then, is another act of colonization, for what it establishes is that the only voice the colonized could have is one that can be understood by and thus conforms to the dominant discourse. In this case, the writer/author who writes about the people takes on the role of a benefactor who admits and incorporates those who are voiceless without him.¹⁴

In Shibli, the dead woman cannot speak. Her story is a colonized one, told by the colonizer and written in the colonizer's news report; her silence is the refusal to disavow the colonialism that constructs her as its subject or victim. In Djebar, the writer speaks, but her speech is closer to what Trinh has called “speaking nearby”: “a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it.”¹⁵ Djebar's continuous claims of kinship to the women whose voices she seeks, and at the same time her continuous emphasis on how her ties with them have been severed by the effects of colonial civilizing missions, are her way of constantly subverting any authorial or representative role that she might lapse into. The reversal of the relation between the one who speaks and the one who listens, the constant reflection on the gaze and its reversal, and the reflection on every act of telling and writing, on the exchange of stories between the writer and the women, subvert the construction of a monolithic dominant narrative, and with it the possibility of constructing the colonized Algerian woman as its subject or object.

In So Vast the Prison, Djebar describes how her French education has severed her from Algerian women, but she also describes the battle through which she struggles against this severance, and thus against silence, her own as well as that of Algerian women. Comparing herself to Zureida, the Algerian woman stripped of her wealth by French colonialists, Djebar writes, “Like her, I have lost the wealth I began with—in my case, my maternal heritage—and I have gained only the simple mobility of the bare body, only freedom.”¹⁶ She acknowledges that she is a “fugitive,” but at the same time she reflects on how she wills herself not to know this fact too well, for such knowing would dry up the ink of her writing. Moreover, she describes her struggle between a “proud French presidio” that was established within her and an oral tradition that “resists and attacks between two breathing spaces,” which makes her both “the besieged foreigner and the native swaggering off to die, so there is seemingly endless strife between the spoken and written word.”¹⁷

In Fantasia, she writes of women's stories, giving them the title “Voice,” but she reflects that this writing of women's voices in the language of the enemy renders them naked while disguising them with French words.¹⁸ Such a reflection strips the voices of any authenticity, blocking any attempt to establish the writer as a representative or voice-giver, while at the same time the writer maintains the ability to write, not only because writing is an exercise of freedom, but also because writing brings these voices that inhabit her to her, and brings her to them, as part of her fight against severance and against an individualist freedom effected by the French language.

The search for oppressed voices or silences does not lead in either Djebar's work or Shibli's to the retrieval of an original, authentic voice. But the process of excavation, as Djebar describes it, leads in her case to a multiplicity of voices taking different forms, from songs to whispers to screams. These voices are also shards of stories passed from grandmother to granddaughter in an endless process of storytelling, a process that the writer joins, hoping to allow women's voices to fly over the walls of confinement, and perhaps to allow their bodies to move from the shadow of the doorway into the outside world. This is a hope for the future that creates a foundation for solidarity between women.¹⁹

In Shibli's Minor Detail, on the other hand, movement backward does not lead to the retrieval of the dead woman's voice, for this movement is obstructed by that which is present. But the movement itself creates that distance from the present; it reveals the continuity of processes of erasure and silence. In Shibli's text, the colonial archive cannot tell the story of a murdered Palestinian woman; it cannot tell the history of itself as colonialism. It is not only the colonial archive that fails in bringing out the story of the murdered woman, but oral history that fails as well. Silence comes between the narrator, who drives an Israeli vehicle on an Israeli paved road, and the old Bedouin woman walking on a dust road. The latter's presence is like that of a ghost or shadow—untraceable; only its erasure or absence can be traced. What is unearthed in Shibli's novel is the continuity of the occupation, the inability to disconnect the past from the present, and this unearthing in its own right is an act of resistance and a rejection of what is present, that is, a rejection of the colonial tearing apart of Palestine.

Silence as Prison in Assia Djebar

In Women of Algiers in their Apartment, Djebar paints a picture, or rather several pictures, of the silence suffered by Algerian women in the present of independence, in which women’s voices, like their gazes, are blocked from accessing the outside.²⁰ For Djebar, this silencing of women's voices is linked to a certain silencing of the past, the past of the revolution and the past of a century of French colonialism and Algerian resistance. In the past as in the present, women grieve and shriek silently and voicelessly; they carry their own prisons around inside themselves as long as they are unable to speak, unable to free themselves from all the veils in which they are entangled.²¹ Silence is also associated with an exclusion that was institutionalized after independence: Djebar thus seeks the voices of the women who were excluded from the songs of hope and of independence, the suffocated voices of humiliated and caged women buried under the rocks of silence.²²

These could be women on the extreme margins of society, so much so that none of the effects of independence reach them, like the water carrier in Women of Algiers. They are also the fire carriers who should have liberated the city, but whose past and present struggles and sufferings are muted. These women are now imprisoned behind the bars of memory; the bombs that women carried and that exploded in the face of the enemy are now exploding close to their own eyes, so that they no longer see the outside world. Like the war of independence of which they were a part, they are no longer able to carry or give birth to new life.²³

In Djebar's texts, silence is thus associated not only with imprisonment, but also with death, the absence of life. But Djebar insists in most of her texts that the dead speak, that their voices live through us, and that we carry something of their lives as we carry their voices.²⁴ The writer's plight and battle is to bring these voices out, restoring life to the present, a present that will allow for another future: “Every night I am tormented by the muscular effort of giving birth through the mouth this way, this silencing. I vomit something, what? Maybe a long ancestral cry. My open mouth expels, continuously, the suffering of others, the suffering of the shrouded women who came before me, I who believed I was only just appearing at the first ray of the first light.”²⁵

But this process of bringing out the buried voices of the past entails locating and uncovering silences. Thus it is not surprising that Sarah, Djebar's protagonist in Women of Algiers is on a quest for women's songs and chants, while the third part of Fantasia, titled “Voices,” in which women and the writer tell their stories, follows a musical movement in which silence is an integral component. Following this musical form, in which silences are seen and heard, but without any regularity, is also Djebar's way of refusing to allow her text to fall into representation, which would mean constructing another dominant or colonizing narrative.

Trinh argues that we should not think in terms of a binary relation between sound and silence, because both are opening and filling. Both belong to life and to death, such that “entering into life is also entering into the death process.” Music embodies this interplay of sound and silence; it is contained in and encompassed by both sound and silence; it allows us to see as much as it allows us to hear. The intangibility of music makes it “especially effective in bringing forth the tangible and the visible.”²⁶ Moreover, music does not represent, but through the blank spaces, the silences, that make it, it unveils the void of representation, that is, of any claims to truth or a singular meaning.

In Djebar, writing is like music in that it reveals silences, but she also uses words to point to silences, to protest against them, and to make them speak, without erasing or replacing them. And, as in music, their work is tangible, while being neither a work of representation or signification. Her words do not absent, but mark presences, including the presence of what was absented, making visible its absence. As I will show in the following sections, writing in Djebar is not conditioned by the separation entailed in signifying things, but rather by making present and linking back, discovering the roots, the connections, and the multiplicities of being and voice that are buried deep within the individual. This individual is at the same time plural, as Djebar reemphasizes the genealogical relation between herself and Algerian women, between her voice and their voices.

Rather than claiming the position of the representative, or of the one who speaks on behalf of her people, Djebar here describes her relationship to Algeria and Algerian women as one of descent, a relationship that is inscribed in the body, and in which the writer's own being cannot assume the false status of an individualized, autonomous subject. It is in this sense that I understand her search for the multiple voices of women and her effort to dig them out, for they do haunt her, only not as an external or alien force, but rather as one that lies and screams from within herself. This scream is made of blood that seems to be “rising again to splatter my writing and condemn me to silence.”²⁷ But what propels silence is also what forces her to seek out words: this is a struggle in which the writer is propelled to speak, or it rather becomes the cry of “ghost grandmothers.” For Djebar, what enforces silence, death, torment, and suffering is exactly what ends up making her write, even if what is written is a cry. And in this struggle, “words of the quavering, lost language rise up.”²⁸

For Djebar, then, the dead are not absent; they are witnesses; “they want to write through us.” Despite the impairment of words—the risk that they will absent instead of making present what they name—Djebar is driven to write by the particularity of a word that is faced with the imminence of disaster.²⁹ Writing becomes the way to express death, but writing is also what will take Algeria through sorrow, even if such writing is in blood.³⁰ Writing is thus neither an escape from death, nor a perpetuation of a process of silencing, but rather a transformation that needs to stand in the face of silence and death to have the potential to bring about something else.

Battling History

In Djebar's writing, silence and voicelessness pertain to the present and its power relations, for although history is about the past, it is reflected in the politics of the present. The marginalization of the fire carriers, their silence, and their transformation into “speechless revolutionaries” does not reflect their power or powerlessness in the past, but their loss of power in the present.³¹

According to Ghania Ouahmiche and Dallel Sarnou, Djebar's project is an effort to establish “an archive of loss, a site where the memory of loss and trauma is maintained in a kind of crypt.”³² In their reading, the women whose voices Djebar seeks become objects of her writing, objects of liberation, and ironically it is through this objectification that they see Djebar's writing as voicing these women's silence.³³ Valérie Budig-Markin, on the other hand, sees Djebar as recuperating from history, from feminine memory, from writing, and from the “silence of the nonwritten” “that which has been left overshadowed.”³⁴ But the silent and overshadowed is brought back in its silenced and overshadowed form, so that systems of oppression that intersect and combine in silencing Algerian women are exposed and made visible.

Writing past stories for Djebar is not an attempt to relieve trauma; it is a battle, one through which she seeks to subvert the dominant narrative of a monolithic official history, which belongs to the victor, to bring to the surface the differences, multiple perspectives, and shards of stories that are buried beneath this dominant narrative. Through the voices of the past, of the women of the past, in the different forms they take, she seeks a future liberated from masculinist colonial and nationalist narratives of history that are based on relations of domination and oppression that such narratives in turn reproduce.

Djebar describes how the transgression that women inscribed on their martyred flesh during the battles of Algiers is “penalized by a silence that extends all around.” After independence, “there is no seraglio anymore.” But “the structure of the seraglio” attempts to impose its laws in the new wasteland, “the law of invisibility, the law of silence.”³⁵ Djebar is not only talking about the veil as a piece of cloth but also about the erasure of women's presence in public space, the erasure of their voices, and the severance of their sounds. In this way, telling the stories of heroines of the past, the mujahidat, is a restoration of women's power; it is neither a restoration of the past, nor of an authentic voice, but a battle in which women become fighters again.

For Djebar, illiterate storytellers are the ones who can describe the details of the battles lost in the last century of colonialism: “the whispered voices of those forgotten women have developed irreplaceable frescoes from these, and have thus woven our sense of history.”³⁶ In Djebar, a sound that denies the voices of the past is a severed sound. Women cannot regain their emancipated voices by claiming “an often deceptive one-on-one with the man.”³⁷ A world that excludes or forgets the invisible, muted other women, can only be an autistic world: “This world of women, when it no longer hums with the whisperings of an ancillary tenderness of lost ballads—in short, with a romanticism of vanished enchantments—that world suddenly, barrenly, becomes the world of autism.”³⁸

In La Femme sans sepulture, Djebar writes the story of Zulikha, the fighter imprisoned and killed by the French colonialists without even a burial place. The story is told by multiple storytellers; it thus becomes a mosaic, made of fragments, of a multiplicity of voices, of colors and forms and details “accompanied by ambiguities and flaws.” Each fragment of the mosaic contributes to the construction of the whole image, but each leaves visible breaks and gaps that subvert the first image and suggest another, leaving the story unfinished with infinite possibilities of retelling.³⁹ In telling the story of Zulikha, the women storytellers traverse the centuries while retaining their glow.⁴⁰

In Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, Djebar sees in the story of Messouda more than “a variant on heroism and tribal solidarity.” The story is “connected with a body in danger (in completely spontaneous motion), with a voice that calls, challenges, and abrades.” The woman's cry and song, her physical presence in the battlefield, “heals the temptation to cowardice and allows a victorious outcome.” Her song is not made by the male or for the male; rather it “consecrates this happiness of women, completely inside a mobility that is improvised and dangerous at the same time, in short, that is creative.”⁴¹

The other Messoudas or Djemilas, the fire carriers, as Djebar calls them, were present in the anticolonial war without veils as long as the national war was going on, when the “Harem melted for a while into so many Barberousse prisons.”⁴² But these women warriors disappear after the war: “no more women warriors, no more women poets.” The only image of the woman during the war that survives is “the image of the tearful woman, lacerating her cheeks to the point of hysteria,” and women are again mute and invisible. Her whole existence is reduced to the relationship of “mother-son,” a reduction that only benefits men.⁴³ History has erased women as warriors, as sisters and lovers, and maintained only the mother-son relation. It is here that Djebar's quest lies, in the retrieval of women's voices, their stories, and their lives. As I argued above, for Djebar, in gaining a mobility that allows it to transgress walls, to take flight, the voice of the woman opens the possibility of the body's free movement beyond walls as well.

According to Maurice Blanchot, memory frees us by allowing us to call upon the past, to order it according to our present purposes. It is the present that dictates what we do with memory for Blanchot: “Memory is freedom of the past. But what has no present will not accept the present of a memory either.”⁴⁴ The absence of the present dictates the absence of the past; it is something that is repeated infinitely; it is without end, without beginning. It is without a future. Protesting against a stagnant, imprisoning present, Djebar seeks to bring back the voice of past battles and struggles, to retrieve the vibrations of yesterday's fires in an attempt to triumph over the amnesia and torpor of the present that have betrayed the struggles of the past. She does not seek to establish Zulikha as a monument of the past, to give her the status of a heroine, but rather is interested in how “Zulikha was able to find the means of organizing, of maintaining a network of women fighting against the enemy, despite the enormity of the forces of the adversaries she had to confront.”⁴⁵ She thus seeks to recompose a scenario in which women are freedom fighters, rather than passive, veiled, and silenced victims: a scenario whose value is for a future that is different from the present, one in which something of the past—the courage, defiance, and pride of Zulikha—can be found in new generations of Algerian women.

Subverting Colonial Archives

The epigraph to Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade points to the colonizer's inability to see the Arab as a human being. The colonizer needed a lot of experience to be able “to distinguish the footsteps and voices of the Arabs from the sounds made by the wild beasts.”⁴⁶ Nevertheless, Djebar does not seek to prove that the Arabs are as human as their colonizers; it is not recognition of the colonized woman as object/subject that Djebar seeks. In searching the colonial archive, she sheds light on colonialism itself. Using its own accounts of its cruelties, Djebar reflects on the reflections of colonial officials; she marks the colonial processes of silencing and their failures.

The colonialists used words as effective weapons: “Hordes of interpreters, geographers, ethnographers, linguists, botanists, diverse scholars and professional scribblers will swoop down on this new prey.” The function of these published writings was to “hide the initial violence from view.”⁴⁷ But writing always goes beyond any function intended by its author, who will have no control over what it reveals. For Djebar, the accounts of Algiers's invasion revealed the disquiet of the invaders in a city they imagined they had conquered.⁴⁸ It is the agitation of the killers, their obsessional unease, that Djebar says haunts her in the writings of the colonialists. The colonialists, as Djebar describes them, are infected by a veritable “scribblomania.” Djebar links this mania for writing to the letter-writing mania that afflicted cloistered girls: it is mainly an expression of a desire to escape from confinement, but in the case of the “fighting men” this urge for reliving their colonial atrocities in print could also be about their desire to “savour the seducer's triumph, the rapist's intoxication.”⁴⁹ We cannot know for sure, but what we know is that for Djebar “their words thrown up by such a cataclysm are . . . like a comet's tail, flashing across the sky and leaving it forever riven.”⁵⁰ For words cannot be taken back. Whereas memory can absent certain acts, putting them in written words inscribes them forever in the history of colonialism. Djebar searches in the documented stories of the colonization of Algiers, and she shifts the focus from those who are formally recognized as making wars and practicing politics to the people who live through and fight in the war: “I, for my part, am thinking of those who sleep through this night in the city. . . . Who will sing in days to come of the death throes of their liberty?”⁵¹

Djebar finds a means for murdered Algerian women to enter history in an account, narrated in an ice-cold tone, of a French eyewitness to a massacre committed by the colonialists. It is in this eyewitness's being “transfixed with revulsion by the terrible poetry of the scene” that his account marks the atrocities of colonialism, but can also shed light on Algerian women as not merely silent victims of colonialism: “Thus these two Algerian women—the one in whom rigor mortis was already setting in, still holding in her bloody hands the heart of a dead Frenchman; the second, in a fit of desperate courage, splitting open the brain of her child, like a pomegranate in spring, before dying with her mind at peace—these two heroines enter into recent history.”⁵²

Djebar records the image of the colonialist looking at the two women: “I scrupulously record the image: two warrior women glimpsed from the back or from the side, in the midst of the tumult, by the keen eye of the ADC.”⁵³ To read these writings from the perspective of the colonized, Djebar has to use the mirror of suffering. She imagines the inscription as if it were “reflected in Arabic letters, writ from right to left,” but this strategy cannot be sustained; against the foreign language of the invaders, against their accounts meant to be decorations of the colonial invasion, she has to mobilize her senses, through which she excavates the silences:

Writing does not erase. What is cruel and atrocious is there in the colonial archive; it cannot be suppressed. When a colonialist official describes how the foot of an anonymous woman “had been hacked off, ‘cut off for the sake of the khalkhal’ . . . ,” the ink in which these words are written does not dry, “because of the obscenity of the torn flesh that he could not suppress in his description.”⁵⁵ Djebar reads in the colonialists' letters the othering of Algeria, but she also reads the threat that this untamable colonized other has always represented for the colonizer: “Between the lines these letters speak of Algeria as a woman whom it is impossible to tame. A tamed Algeria is a pipedream; every battle drives further and further away the time when the insurgency will burn itself out.”⁵⁶

The colonizer as a colonizer can never recognize the wrongness of being one, and thus cannot understand the resistance of the colonized except as an act of fanaticism. The rebelling colonized is depoliticized through a humanist discourse that stresses the shabby, bedraggled character of the leaders of resistance and that makes them more suitable as objects of massacres than imaginable as freedom fighters. And when a humanist ideology cannot provide the necessary justification for the massacres, then silencing is the strategy.⁵⁷

Nevertheless, silence cannot be relied on as a strategy to bury the wrongs committed, for even from within the colonial apparatus, there will be those who may find comfort in confession, even while being too cowardly to take responsibility for telling what is relegated to silence. A private letter to family members or an article by someone who does not believe himself subject to the law of silence that governs the colonizing nation can scandalize by revealing what should have been buried and suffocated.

The law of silence does not really work for the colonizer, for he seeks recognition from his victims, something that he rarely attains and that prompts him to commit more atrocities. “He is determined to see the matter through”;⁵⁸ he seeks an end to something that does not end. But it is also writing that exceeds the intentions of the writer and that breaks the law of silence: “Pelissier made only one mistake: as he had a talent for writing, and was aware of this, he gave in his report an eloquent and realistic—much too realistic—description of the Arabs' suffering.”⁵⁹ In “the words of his routine report,” Pelissier has preserved the “Islamic dead” from oblivion, and the silence that was imposed on the massacre has frozen them, rather than annihilated them.⁶⁰ The words of reports, denunciatory articles, or troubled letters were engraved in letters of iron and steel that cannot be erased. Pelissier's verbose letter exhumed the dead and exposed them under the sun, scandalizing readers. Pelissier's report allows Djebar to reach for the dead and weave a pattern out of French words around them.⁶¹ It is for Pelissier's account that Djebar expresses gratitude. But this is not the gratitude of the colonized to their colonizer, but rather of the writer to “the foremost chronicler of the first Algerian War” who “brandishes the torch of death which illuminates these martyrs.”⁶²

Djebar appropriates French archives and views them as palimpsests in which she deciphers the traces of her people and especially of women. She subverts and decenters the colonialists' texts by focusing on the details, the gaps, and the silences within them.⁶³ Instead of constructing a history of heroism that excludes the details, the individual and plural stories of the anticolonial war, Djebar seeks to open a space for multiple and various stories of the war, displacing the center and the margin, and any fixed definition of the heroic, and thus dismantling the exclusionary foundations of colonial history and its monotony.

The Voice(s) of Silent Women

In Fantasia, Djebar includes shards of stories of how she is related to and severed from Algerian women as an effect of her French education. These stories are dispersed throughout the three parts of the book. Nevertheless, it is in the third part, titled “Voices,” that Djebar seems to battle this separation by making multiple attempts to include her voice as yet another voice among the voices of the women, and her stories as ones among others told by the women, without losing sight of their differences or her different and separate position in relation to them.

Throughout “Voices,” Djebar stresses the unveiling involved in telling one's stories in the language of the enemy. But, as I mentioned above, Djebar also realizes that this nakedness, her own as well as the women's, also follows from exposing the operations of colonialism, even while it points to the impossibility of reaching beyond the written. What is naked is also disguised by the French or flaked off in the vivisection that is writing one's biography in the colonizers' language, which brings back the history of colonialism as one of plundering: “Speaking of oneself in a language other than that of the elders is indeed to unveil oneself. . . . But this stripping naked, when expressed in the language of the former conqueror . . . takes us back oddly enough to the plundering of the preceding century.”⁶⁴

Telling women's stories is the telling of colonialism, and narrating colonialism entails listening to the echoes of ancestors' battle cries and the dirges of mourning women.⁶⁵ This is an opening of wounds, a weeping of the veins, a flowing of one's own blood and that of the other's.⁶⁶ But written in words that might be distorting, it also becomes a concealment of the body, a prohibition of gestures, which are too specific, so that only sounds remain.⁶⁷ Djebar's writing thus becomes a writing of cries. According to Zineb Chih, the grandchild will recreate the lost voices of the grandmothers as revenge against the silence that was imposed on them,⁶⁸ but at the same time this search for the lost voice is a way of rejoining mothers and grandmothers, and a struggle against the erasures of history and memory. As I have demonstrated and will further elaborate below, in Djabar's case, because she is severed from her kinswomen through her French education, these ancestral voices are haunting voices that inhabit her, and that she seeks to voice by reattaching herself to Algerian women who still speak the language of their grandmothers and repeat their stories.

Part 3 in Fantasia includes the stories of the women who fought in the war of independence. As Dorothy Blair demonstrates in her introduction to the book, it follows the structure of a musical composition, which allows for variation and polyphony:

According to Blair, it is in the third part of the novel that “the musical references are most insistent.”⁷⁰ This part is divided into five movements, with each movement consisting of different voices or stories written in different tones. In each movement, there are sections with the title “Voice,” interrupted by a section that might carry the title “Clamour,” “Murmurs,” “Whispers,” or “Dialogues.” In sections titled “Voice,” the women storytellers tell stories of French colonial oppression and their participation in the resistance against it. These voices are thus voices of suffering and resistance, of grief and cries for many unhealed wounds that started with colonialism but did not necessarily end with independence.

Each movement also includes Djebar's reflections on her relationship to the women, her kinship with them and her severance from them through recollection and the memory of her childhood, when she was not yet completely severed from her kin, or reflections on her present position as an Algerian writer who can only write in French, “enjoying” a freedom that is not available to the other women whose voices are included in the section:

While the quotation above emphasizes her being severed from Algerian women, stressing her freedom and their confinement, as I have been arguing, it is this affirmation of difference and separateness that provokes the battle for women's voices, chants, and cries in Djebar, as her way of reconnecting with them. Her attempts to reattach herself to them, or, more accurately, to embrace them by joining her voice and stories with theirs, takes place in sections titled “Embraces,” which tell stories that she read in the colonial archive and transform them from being part of a colonial written tradition into an oral tradition that is exchanged by women who pass them from generation to generation. In these sections, the writer also becomes a storyteller, creating a foundation of solidarity between herself and the women whose voices she seeks. Nevertheless, Djebar affirms, throughout the third part of Fantasia, women's differences, the impossibility of retrieving a complete story, an authentic voice, or a unified sound that will allow for the representation of all women.

The Persistence of Silence in Shibli's Minor Detail

The silence of death is perpetual in Adania Shibli. In Touch, “silence was all there was” of the dead, forever.⁷³ The picture of the dead is a still image, a freezing of time, an end to movement and change. The attempt to change what is now dead, something that was not as it should be from the past, is futile. “For some time now, her eyes had been staring at the still picture, in which they saw and would continue to see forever her brother's crooked necktie, because he hadn't taken more time, not much, to fix it.”⁷⁴

The little girl, the protagonist of Touch, would try bending her head when looking at the picture, so that what was crooked in the still picture of the past wouldn’t be, but changing the angle and direction of her gaze does not really change what is now a still picture of the past. Neither do the moving pictures of the television repair the flaws in the still picture.⁷⁵ The tie needs to and will remain crooked, and it is in its crookedness that the martyr in the picture does not become an idealized anonymous entity, that death does not completely erase his personality or individuality.

For Shibli, the past cannot be retrieved; nor can the wrongs and faults of the past be fixed. In Minor Detail, there is a quest for the voice of the past, but the quest fails. No historical truth is reclaimed in the text, and we see erasure taking place throughout the text, in the past and the present. Only minor details or fragmented parts remain as witnesses to the erasure, which connects the past and the present. In Shibli's text, only silence and erasure can be retrieved.

Darren Huang sees Shibli's novel as enacting a “return of the repressed,” in the Freudian sense. In this return, according to Huang, the story that takes place in the present reenacts the story from the past. The past story is unearthed in the present one, pointing to the continuation of the process of erasure that started in the Nakba but continues in the present.⁷⁶ However, rather than extracting the two moments from the colonial historical context of which they are a part, putting them in opposition to each other as past and present or as conscious and unconscious, I suggest we should instead see the two stories as surface and depth, connected by many minor invisible and personal threads. These are the minor details, little objects, sounds, and smells that connect the past and the present, rather than major events that would lead us to disconnect and create a binary opposition between the past and the present, or impose sameness on them, freezing time and history.

Shibli's text is about an attempt to retrieve the story of a woman who was raped and murdered by the Zionists in 1949, which was reported in an Israeli newspaper decades later. The text is split into two halves. In one half, the main protagonist is the captain of the Zionist brigade that committed the crime. In the second, it is a Palestinian woman who seeks the story of the murdered woman, motivated by a minor, personal link that she perceives between herself and the woman, which is neither their Palestinianness nor their womanhood, but that the date of the first woman's murder is the same date as the birthday of the second woman, twenty-five years later.

In both halves of the story, it becomes clear that to narrate something about the past and the present of colonialism in Palestine, one needs to look for what is secret, silent, hidden in the gaps, inhabiting the ridges, invisible, or appearing too minor to be visible, if one is not to further colonize Palestine. For the colonized in the world of colonialism and neocolonialism, the marginal and minor remain the space of freedom, the place where things can be known and seen differently. Dominant colonial discourses emphasize the civilizing mission of colonialism. They turn acts of erasure and uprooting into acts of planting, and transform massacres and murder through sophisticated machinery and weapons into a victory of the human. And while Djebar could find the proof for the atrocities and barbarity of colonialism in Algeria in the personal and poetic writings of the colonizers, the Zionist archive in Shibli's text contains no such proof. Shibli thus has to employ imagination. Against dominant narratives and their claims to truth, Shibli takes the position of the storyteller who, as Trinh describes her, is not limited by having to tell of what was and what is, because she also tells of what might be. She creates through imagination, and this is not an invention depending on an illusory imagination, but clairvoyance, a composition, made of “our remembering, understanding and creating,” a bringing out of that which is forgotten, lying in and between stones, woven with that which is of the present and the future.⁷⁷ It involves a making and remaking of the events of our lives.⁷⁸ At the same time, freed from any claim to truth, the story obliterates the opposition between the factual and the fictional, story and history, truth and lie, leaving us only to confront our will to knowledge, challenging us to see processes of effacement and hear those of silencing, and making visible the will to non-knowledge that constantly underlies the pursuit of rationalized knowledge.⁷⁹

In the first half of the text, we see the colonizer who has just occupied the Negev and cleared it of its Arab inhabitants, feeling estrangement on the land he has just claimed as his ancestors'. The land, its weather, its light, and its sounds are all indecipherable for the colonizer. In the land he has just colonized, the colonizer is confronted with empty darkness and indiscernible voices.⁸⁰ The captain is not haunted by the ghosts of the people he had massacred; any trace of guilt that might haunt him seems to be erased time and again by his obsession with cleanliness, the constant and detailed washing of his face, hands, and body after every movement he makes. This obsession with cleanliness is ironic, though, when one lives in a tent in the desert, becoming the victim not of its beasts or the Arab enemies, but rather of a little invisible insect, one the captain cannot see or capture. The colonizer cannot depend on his senses in the desert; they are blinded by the heat, the blackness of the night, and the overwhelming light of the sun. “Spots and lines of darkness danced in front of his eyes, followed by complete darkness, until he lost his balance and fell.”⁸¹ The dark spots are transformed now into mad insects jumping in front of his eyes.⁸²

As for the little marginal creature that the colonizing captain is trying to capture and crush, it goes into one of the ridges of the floor, slips in the gap between it and the wall and escapes into the wild.⁸³ And this little invisible creature becomes a ghost that haunts the captain, until he can no longer trust the tiniest movement on his body, including the slipping of one of his shirt buttons.⁸⁴ In an interview, Shibli said that survival under occupation requires keeping “a secret hidden zone that the oppressor finds so minor that they wouldn't bother to destroy it . . . a tree, a stone, endless minor objects.” Shibli describes her text as “perforated language,” a poetics (and ethics) of the minor, the hesitant, and the weak against the colonizer's overwhelming power.⁸⁵

The captain does try to capture the insect, but this is a personal, secret conquest, one that remains outside the realm of politics and war. It is his silent war. The insect as a minor, almost invisible creature engages in a constant subversion of man's control of nature, of the capitalist, colonial conquest that man has started since the colonization of the Americas. This employment of the minor and invisible creature is Shibli's way of pointing to the restless existence of the colonizer on colonized land, but also to the continuous, silent resistance of the colonized.

The first half of the book is about the colonizing captain and what we can see as a confrontation with the scandal of colonialism. The story of the murdered and raped girl can be seen and heard only through the colonizer's eyes and ears. Shibli here seems to be framing the colonizers' frame or, to use Roland Barthes's formula, “mythifying” the myth, repeating and reiterating every Zionist and colonial stereotype about a Bedouin Arab woman.⁸⁶ We thus see the colonizer seeing the girl as he sees the land and its objects, plants, and animals. She appears as a round black mass, her loud wailing always accompanied by the barking of a dog, mixing with it.⁸⁷ In the eyes of the colonizer, the girl looks like a dried dead plant.⁸⁸ The girl's hair evokes the grass in a dead camel's mouth, and the image of the camel gives rise to the image of the girl. We are even made to feel the disgust that the Zionist colonizer feels toward the girl and her smell.

The colonizer's attempt to make the girl over in his image fails the moment she speaks; her voice and undecipherable words make her alien, and so does the smell of gas they use to cleanse her of lice. The girl has no discernible voice. Her shrieks and screams as well as her rape and death remain associated with the barking of the dog, which in its turn becomes associated with silence. While blood and other evidence that bear witness to the murder are swallowed by the sand, the barking of the dog and the smell of gas are the only traces that remain. As in Djebar, there is in Shibli's text a condemnation of a humanist ideology that justifies colonialism and the massacres it perpetrates, rather than a call for inclusion within this ideology. Shibli also refuses to fall into the trap of giving voice or subjectivity to the colonized woman victim, turning her into a subject of rights in need of legal evidence to establish her oppression. In Minor Detail, the story instead traces the silence, the smell, and the sound of barking dogs, which become the main acting protagonists linking the past to the present and the markers of a continuous colonial oppression.

These traces that remain appear in the present in the second half of the story, in which the Palestinian narrator starts her quest for the story of the woman who was raped and murdered exactly twenty-five years before she was born. It is this minor detail, the date, that makes her obsessed with the story, although its main outlines can be described as tragic. But this minor detail leads to an illogical and unreasonable belief that there should be a connection between her birth and life and the death of the woman raped and murdered. It is as if this minor detail could reveal a connection between two Palestinian women, one from the past and one from the present—a connection that is related to, but also beyond, their gender and nationality, something very personal and very small, which reveals itself to be that invisible thread that would make sense of their shared destiny.

In Shibli, when tragic events, massacres, demolitions, and explosions become the ordinary conditions of life under occupation, speaking of them is part of the everyday noise that covers the silences of the colonized, while the silences themselves become the place where the ordinary and familiar are questioned and defamiliarized. Shibli's protagonist is not an ordinary person. She lacks common sense; she cannot recognize danger as danger, and even if she did, danger is so familiar to her that she would treat a situation of danger as one that does not require any exceptional situational behavior. She continuously transgresses boundaries, but not out of a rebellious consciousness so much as out of idiocy and imbecility.⁸⁹ But errancy is the realm of the colonized and the feminine; it is the place of the different that can stand in defiance of and as a challenge to the dominant.

Reason would dictate that Shibli's narrator not be the one to investigate the story of the murdered woman with her stuttering and fumbling, suggesting that “there is absolutely no use in feeling responsible towards the girl and that she is anonymous and will remain without a voice,” and that there is no need to look for misery in the past since there is enough in the present.⁹⁰ But an illogical link, such as the barking of a dog, drives what appears to be an illogical quest.

The narrator's idiocy and her lack of common sense, her focus on the shit of a fly on a painting instead of on the painting itself, proves to be prescient. For example, her rationalization of why she should be more concerned with the minor detail of dates than with the tragic events of rape and murder involves an allegory with plants: there is an invisible link “when a parcel of grass is pulled from the roots and one thinks that it is gone forever, it comes back as grass of the same kind in the same place after a quarter of a century.”⁹¹ What is shared between the plants and the narrator is vulnerability. Plants cannot resist; they surrender to the fact that they are vulnerable, that the wind can do whatever it wants with them, breaking them, messing with them and their leaves, passing through their branches, throwing them in all directions. The murdered girl could also be the plant messed up by the wind; for the Zionist captain, she does look like a dead plant lying on the ground.

The grass, the camels, the dogs, and the woman uprooted and murdered in the story’s first part appear and then disappear again in the second part. The play of appearance and disappearance is not final; the Nakba continues, the Zionist settler project has not managed to erase the traces of itself as colonialism, and colonialism has not realized itself as the end of history. The narrator will have to take the journey back to the place where the first murder took place to prove this truth, to find the evidence of the link between the past and the present, since the present of colonialism has become too familiar. One needs to step back from it, and travel the distance to defamiliarize it.

During her journey, the narrator struggles with different modes of knowing. She can follow the map of Palestine before colonialism, when all the villages and cities were still there, or she can follow the Israeli map, where most of the Palestinian cities and villages disappear and only new roads and Israeli settlements appear. Or she can follow a political map made by Palestinian research centers, one that shows checkpoints, the wall, and settlements in the West Bank. But at many critical points none of these maps are of use, and the protagonist's decision had to be made on the basis of different logics. She uses her knowledge of everyday life, of what people say or know about certain roads, or she merely follows the road taken by the Israelis which is longer but less dangerous.⁹²

The journey becomes a story of erasure, the erasure of the place and its familiarity. The narrator at many points cannot rely on her memory of the place; what she remembers is no longer there. In place of narrow, curvy roads there are now wide and straight ones, walled on both sides, and there are new buildings in settlements that she did not know existed or had not seen before. But now that most of the Palestinian villages have disappeared, she no longer knows where she is. It is only one old, secondary, closed road that she knows, and that assures her that she is on the right path.⁹³

During her journey, she achieves no connection; instead a feeling of estrangement rises up in her when she tries to locate erased villages that are on the pre-1948 map. All the changes that have been made on the ground only emphasize the absence of that which is Palestinian on the road signs, on Hebrew billboards, on the new buildings, even in the fields. Despite this picture of absence, “the fly comes back hovering over it,” and with it the minor details appear along the road to surreptitiously tell of the presence of that which is present but silent: hanging laundry, a slow car, a Doum tree standing alone in the fields and some shepherds with their flock on a distant hill.⁹⁴

And although the narrator locates absences and presences on the road during her journey, she still insists that she can find the story of the murdered girl in the Zionist museum. What she finds are images and films produced by the first Zionists.⁹⁵ She plays a videotape about the establishment of the settlement in the place where the military camp was. She replays the tape several times, trying to reach the starting point; in rewinding the tape, the settlers break the dancing circle, going back into the shacks they have just finished building. They dismantle them, and carry them over the carriages; they then exit the cadre. The narrator fast-forwards the tape again and then rewinds it, constructing and dismantling the settlement, but she realizes that this is a waste of time.⁹⁶

Susan Schuppli has written that repetition amplifies differences by emphasizing the gaps between successive repetitions. Repetition is also a “form of returning” in repetition malfunction, causing glitches, interruptions in the normal flow of things to appear.⁹⁷ But in the Zionist film, nothing is erased or interrupted; the narrative is clear and complete. The end point and the starting point show no Palestinians erased or returned, and thus no Palestinian voices to be retrieved.

As Shibli explains elsewhere, to locate silence here is to question the complete, well-articulated, and clear narrative of Zionism as domination.⁹⁸ One has to be on the side of the flawed, the fragmented, the marginal, and the inarticulate to be able to engage in such questioning. In Shibli's text, an articulate language, one that is free of any fumbling, stuttering, or turbulence, is the language of power; it appears as a thin line without any strain, one that won't be easy to cut.⁹⁹ And one would lose if one were to try to cut it. How could one retrieve the voice of a raped and murdered colonized woman beneath a slogan that reads, “it is not the cannon that wins but the human,”¹⁰⁰ without finding fault with the notion of the human itself? How can one find the truth of the story of the girl without questioning words like “trust” and “good relations,” used by the officer in the settlement to describe his relation with the remaining Bedouins?

In Shibli's novel, the flawed remains with the marginalized and silenced. It points to the failure of the colonized to mimic the language of the colonizer, and this failure is the writer's way of pointing to how colonialism conditions the knowledge of the colonized. All the narrator can do in the museum is engrave the machine gun used in the crime, known for its precision and controllability, into an old piece of wood. And despite any subversion that a mutilation of the gun in engraving might achieve, she cannot find any useful detail in the Israeli museum or settlement that can help in revealing the truth of the girl's story.

The journey adds nothing to her knowledge of the incident,¹⁰¹ but there from the other side of the Green Line, she can see the roofs of the houses in Rafah,¹⁰² and from this other side, listening to the explosions, she feels close to Gaza. She also longs to hear the sound of bombing more closely, to feel the dust of exploding buildings. Their absence makes her feel distant from all that is familiar, even the impossibility of returning.¹⁰³ Arriving at the place where the incident could have taken place, the narrator glimpses the shadow of a head that could be of a girl, but the shadow disappears, and the narrator's voice cannot reach the girl, for it is blocked by the barking of a dog, which intensifies by the end of the novel, connecting the end of one story of the past with the end of the present one. The narrator wants to follow the traces of the dog on the sand, to follow the shadow of the girl, but she finds nothing.¹⁰⁴

By the end of the novel, the narrator is no longer able to distinguish the real from the illusory. A mirage is the only moving thing; shadows appear and disappear; it is then that she spots an old woman, standing on the edge of the road. The woman, appearing to be the same age that the raped and murdered woman from the past would have been if she had lived, is silent. She goes into “a sandy path on the left of the road which cannot be noticed by those travelling on paved roads, or even imagined to lead anywhere.”¹⁰⁵ The narrator cannot find words to share with the woman; she cannot ask her about the story she is looking for. What the woman leaves the narrator with is only her absence. This could be the result of the idiocy of the narrator, who misses an important source of information, or, seen from another perspective, it could be Shibli's way of liberating the murdered woman, the narrator, and the older woman from a will to knowledge that is caught in the relations of colonial domination, which would further colonize and objectify all three women. In Shibli's text, the silence of both the narrator and the old woman, and ultimately the continuing silence of the murdered and raped girl, become sources of a resistance to and means of subverting a colonizing narrative.

During her journey, the narrator only manages to trace disappearances, erasures, and silences. The story of the raped and murdered woman is not revealed; neither is her voice retrieved. But in Shibli's text, the minor speaks, and so does silence. Instead of replacing silence with speech, Shibli makes silence rise to the surface, scandalizing but also transgressing the limits of language, exposing the erasures that colonial domination seeks to bury, while at the same time insisting on the continuous albeit colonized presence of that which is Palestinian, which even the green of the board of an Israeli classroom, where the word Palestine cannot be written, still invokes as it invokes the occupation and its massacres.

Conclusion

In the texts of Assia Djebar and Adania Shibli, there is an urge to write, an urge that is beyond reason, for what they seek are the voices of the dead, speaking without representation. This speech requires an undoing of the essence of language, a doing away with both the subject and the function of signification, while maintaining the freedom and pleasure of writing, the pleasure involved in the play of words in Shibli and the freedom involved in the voice or cry taking flight in Djebar. Nevertheless, while Djebar recognizes that all she manages to retrieve is a trace of women's shadows,¹⁰⁶ in Shibli, following the shadow(s) of a woman leads only to a blank and silent space, without traces, but this blank becomes the voice uttered in Shibli's text.

Djebar finds in the colonial archive as well as in Algerian women's stories a site for excavating silences. Her quest becomes a battle against history, a narrative that requires facts and verifiable truths of which the colonized woman cannot be a bearer. Her writing thus points to the gaps and fissures in a historical narrative that buries the voices of those who struggled and suffered under multiple forms of oppression. Djebar's quest is not one trapped in the past, escaping that which is present, but for her without releasing the silences of the past, there can be no releasing of the silences of the present; the past for her becomes the place from which the horizon of another future can be constructed. What she thus seeks to retrieve is the force of an anticolonial resistance in which colonized women are not mere victims of men's wars, a force that will allow women’s voices and bodies to move beyond imprisoning walls.

While in Djebar's texts freedom is inextricably linked to the releasing of silent voices, the exhumation of buried cries, which come out in the form of shards and fragments of stories, in Shibli's texts the search for the silenced voice seems futile. Such a voice cannot be retrieved or made to speak. The colonial archive is silent, and there is nothing to find in its silence, for the dominant Zionist narrative is tightly sealed, and the only gaps, the minor details through which Zionist colonialism is scandalized as one, exist outside the archive, in details that one might not think of as constituting any evidence of colonialism.

What Shibli thus accomplishes is a confrontation with the absence, erasure, and silence of the Palestinian. This does not mean that what is colonized or Palestinian no longer exists. It means that it exists outside what is formal and recognizable, in the marginal, or in a minor detail, in a place where one with a will to knowledge, where an urge to retrieve a lost or hidden voice, will necessarily fail.

Notes

Works Cited