A Sister to Scheherazade

Isma and Hajila are both wives of the same man, but they are not rivals.

Isma - older, vibrant, passionate, emancipated - is in stark contrast to the passive, cloistered Hajila. In alternating chapters, Isma tells her own story in the first person, and then Hajila's in the second person. She details how she escaped from the traditional restraints imposed upon the women of her country - and how, in making her escape, she condemns Hajila to those very restraints. When Hajila catches a glimpse of an unveiled woman, she realized that she, too, wants a life beyond the veil, and it is Isma who offers her the key to her own freedom.

Assia Djebar is considered as a major woman writer in Maghreb. By the time she was thirty, she had written four novels in French. In 1962, she abandoned fiction writing in French and devoted herself the teaching history at the University of Algiers. During the ensuing twelve years, she tried to tackle the problem of the transition from writing in French to writing in Arabic. She found a partial solution to this problem in the cinema with her film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, which was awarded the Critic's Prize at the Venice Biennal 1979. In 1980 Assia published a volume of short stories dealing with the lives of contemporary urban Algerian women: Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartemen. Assia Djebar's work has been known to the English reader primarily through the translation of her first novel La Soif (1957) under the title of The Mischief. L'amour, la fantasia, translated as Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade was published in 1985.