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Unlocking the Female in Aḥlām Mustaghānamī
Author(s): Ellen McLarney

Source: Journal of Arabic Literature, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2002), pp. 24-44
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4183445
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UNLOCKING THE FEMALE IN AHLAM MUSTAGHANAMI
I. The Male Literary Voice
Ahlam Mustaghanami has recently faced the worst ignominy that can
a woman writer: the accusation that a man actually wrote her first novel
Dhdkirat al-Jasad (Memory of the Body, 1993).1 An article in Al-Quds al-
'Arabi describes her sense of disappointment and betrayal at the allegation
that the Iraqi writer and poet Sa'di Yfisuf was the novel's true author
(Ribahi, 1). This contention strips the work of its claim to fame as the first
Algerian novel written in Arabic by a woman, robbing the text of its pow-
erful symbolism as a female incursion into the "father tongue" of written
Arabic.2 Regardless, the assertion by the anonymous author in Al-Khabar al-
Usbfi'i is the most superficial interpretation of the novel possible, associat-
ing a masculine narrator with a masculine author, ignoring the current
debates in Maghrebi literature over issues of voice and subjectivity, writing
and gender, language and identity.
Through the narrative structure of Dhdkirat al-Jasad, Mustaghanami engages
in an extensive study of the nature of the masculine narrative voice. The
novel, fictitiously written by its male narrator, is an imitation and emulation
of the masculine authorial perspective. In Dhdkirat al-Jasad, Mustaghanami
literally hides behind this voice, pushing it to the forefront while she
remains on the edges of the narrative, a silent, and perhaps silenced, par-
ticipant. In the novel, the principal female character is a writer named
"Ahlam" (Dreams), and though she is endlessly discussed, interpreted, and
analyzed, she rarely enters center stage.3 Rather, her voice is principally
I The American University in Cairo Press has recently published an English translation
entitled Memory in the Flesh (1999). While more idiomatic, it loses the ambiguity of
Mustaghanami's title of the remembering of the body versus the body that is being remem-
bered, active and passive, male and female. All translations from Dhakirat al-Jasad, Fawda
al-Hawdss, and Algerie: femme et ecritures are my own.
2 The Moroccan sociologist and novelist Abdelkebir Khatibi asserts that written Arabic has
been alienated from its feminine, oral side, a theory a number of critics of Maghrebi litera-
ture have taken up, following his lead. See Khatibi (1983: 182-193), Basfao (1985), and Bonn
(1988). Note that Arabic transcriptions of names are only used when referring to Arabic
works, as reflected in the bibliography. Mustaghanami spells her name "Ahlem Mosteg-
hanemi," while the AUC translation of Dhakirat al-Jasad spells her first name as "Ahlam."
3 Within the text, this character has two names, Ahlam (Dreams) and Hayat (Life), one
granted by her father and the other by her mother. Though Khalid, the narrator, thinks of her
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002 Journal of Arabic Literature, XXXIII,I
UNLOCKING THE FEMALE IN AHLAM MUSTAGHANAMI 25
heard through the narrator Khalid's recapitulations of their dialogues, as

he imposes his own version of the events upon the narrative. Though the
work is composed in the form of a dialogue, as an address in the second
person, Ahlam remains essentially unresponsive; her works are not "read" as
Khalid's text is read. In this respect, the female, or feminine, voice remains
little more than a shadow throughout Dhakirat al-Jasad, vicariously experi-
enced. The effect of this structure is that Khalid's voice eclipses that of
Ahlam, and she is buried under layers of abstracted images, metaphors, and
symbols. Within the novel, Mustaghanami likens this mode of representation
to veils, as it disguises her authorial identity, and simultaneously situates her
within the parameters of a particular literary and social tradition. Such an
approach might have the effect of obscuring her persona to the point of era-
sure, a possibility demonstrated by the recent accusation against her. In
other, later writings, she reflects on the internalized marginalization of her
own voice, a suppression that she likens to repression.
Dhdkirat al-Jasad is not only a reflection on, but a reflection of the
modes of representation that have come to dominate the field of contempo-
rary Algerian literature, dominated by male writers. Through her male nar-
rator, Mustaghanami meditates on the nature of the authorial voice as it has
developed over the last five decades, outlining its characteristics and its
inherent faults. She bounces back particular images of herself as an Algerian
woman, gleaned from her own extensive study of contemporary Algerian lit-
erature in her critical work, Algerie: femme et ecritures (Algeria: Woman
and Writings, 1985). There are fault lines in this mirror through which her
voice gleams, however fragmented and partial. It is precisely through these
cracks that the writing subject reveals herself, in the sense intended by
Lacan. "Ainsi l'inconscient se manifeste toujours comme ce qui vacille dans
une coupure du sujet-d'ou resurgit une trouvaille, que Freud assimile au
d6sir-desir que nous situerons provisoirement dans la metonimie denudee
du discours en cause, ou le sujet se saisit en quelque point inattendu."4 The
coupure du sujet is the dialectic within the text between male and female
voice, male and female desire. But only through resistance, female resis-
tance against the dominance of the male voice, is the coupure born, and
with it, the trouvaille of desire and the expression of the subject. Through
as Ahlam, her "real" name is Hayat, her pen name, and the name by which friends and fam-
ily address her. The name Ahlam has been used here because it reflects Khalid's vision of the
character, the viewpoint that dominates the text. It has also been used to emphasize the con-
nection intended by Mustaghinami, linking the character with the author.
4 "Thus the unconscious always manifests itself as that which vacillates in the break in the
subject-from where resurges a finding that Freud identifies with desire-desire that we pro-
visionally situate in the denuded metonymy of the discourse in question, where the subject
grasps himself at some unexpected point" (Lacan, 1973: 29). Translation mine.
26 UNLOCKING THE FEMALE IN AHLAM MUSTAGHANAMI
these gaps in the narrative, flashes of Mustaghanami's voice, and literally,

her desire, shine through. But it is only at the points of refusal of Khalid's
vision that her own vision begins to emerge, in an assertion of her own will.
While Dhdkirat al-Jasad can be truly considered the metonimie denudee of
the mode of discourse developed in Algerian literature, the coupure is not
complete; her resistance is faint echoes in the text. Only through a broader
reference to Mustaghanami's oeuvre, Algerie: femme et ecritures, the sequel
to Dhdkirat al-Jasad, Fawdd al-Hawass (Chaos of the Senses, 1998), and
her essay "Writing Against Time and History" (1994), can her struggle for
fuller expression be understood. She achieves this with Fawdd al-Hawdss,
standing naked and desirous before the reader.
Joseph Zeidan remarks in Arab Women Novelists that conformity to the
male literary tradition characterized the early pioneers of women's literature
in the Mashriq. Because women writers had no predecessors, they worked
within the parameters of the extant literary tradition, going through a period
of conformity and imitation. Only later did they move toward a more par-
ticular expression of their social experience, focussing in closely on the self
and the body. For Zeidan, such expressions of individuality were an essen-
tial first step in defiance of the exigencies of society. During this second
stage, however, critics often viciously attacked women writers for their sup-
posed lack of political awareness and social commitment. This could be
considered equally true for Algerian author Assia Djebar as it is for Harlem
Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, both of whom were criticized for
their narcissistic self-absorption during periods of radical social change.5
For what might be called the second generation of women writers, social
change begins at the level of the self, in the body and consciousness. The
sequence of Mustaghanami's two novels, Dhakirat al-Jasad and Fawdd al-
Hawdss, reflects the progression of these generations as described by Zeidan.
Fawdd al-Hawdss is narrated by a woman author, the very same character
marginalized in Dhakirat al-Jasad.
Dhdkirat al-Jasad begins with homage to Mustaghanami's male prede-
cessors in its epigraph. The novel is dedicated first to the Algerian writer
Malek Haddad, then to her father. "This book is his book," she writes, already
providing fodder for her detractors (1993: 5). Nevertheless, the dedication
itself casts doubt upon the strength of the literary tradition's patriarchal
heritage, in keeping with the novel's content. Although Mustaghanami's
father was a poet, he could neither read nor write Arabic. Similarly, Haddad
is famous for having declared himself "in exile in the French language."
A prolific writer before independence, he stopped writing altogether,
5 For a discussion of the critical attacks on Djebar's early works, see Accad (1985).
"becoming the first martyr to the Arabic language, the first writer who ch
to die silenced, vanquished, and in love with her" (1993: 5). Haddad can be
considered the main prototype for Khalid, himself described as in exile in
Paris.6 As Mustaghanami observes in Algerie: femme et ecritures, Haddad's
work is characterized by symbolic representations of women, as emblems of
nation, city, land, or the revolution, tropes that Khalid obsessively and
repeatedly recycles to depict Ahlam (1985: 177-80). These images will
become burdens weighing down Ahlam, leading her to dispense with them
and to dispense with Khalid.
Dhdkirat al-Jasad is a literary reformulation of many of Mustaghanami's
observations in Algerie: femme et ecritures. This work, based on her doc-
toral thesis, "La femme dans la litt6rature algerienne contemporaine," is a
nearly complete review of contemporary Algerian literature written in both
Arabic and French. The first part surveys the early literature, roughly span-
ning the twenties to the sixties of the twentieth century, works composed
principally by male authors. While there are a few female authors in this
section, such as Zhour Ouanissi, their themes and motifs largely parallel
those of the male authors, reflecting Zeidan's schema. Mustaghanami's crit-
icism is divided into the different "types" of women that appear in the lit-
erature: the mother, the foreigner, the militant, the woman-object, and the
woman-symbol. In many cases, she criticizes these portraits of women as
unrealistic and reductionist, though each of these kinds of women appears
in Dhdkirat al-Jasad. Khalid is perhaps modeled on Malek Haddad in par-
ticular, but more likely on contemporary Algerian male authors in general,
as Mustaghanami situates herself within the writing tradition. The second
part of Algerie: femme et ecritures describes a later generation of women
writers, in particular, Assia Djebar, and how their writings altered images of
women entrenched in Algerian literature. Mustaghanami describes a kind of
writing that echoes Elaine Showalter's descriptions of a nascent female lit-
erature in Victorian England, when the novel moved "in the direction of an
all-inclusive female realism, a broad, socially informed exploration of the
daily lives and values of women within the family and the community"
(1999: 29). While Mustaghanami embraces this approach in Algerie: femme
et ecriture, she does not employ it in Dhdkirat al-Jasad. Rather, the novel
emulates the style described in the first part of Algerie, reproducing her
experience in reading the male authors. Because of his misrepresentations
and dissimulations, the author does not capture his audience, the supposed
reader Ahlam.
6 Mustaghanami (1993: 30) explicitly alludes to two of Haddad's works, both of which
contain motifs that resurface within Dhakirat al-Jasad, the protagonist Khalid living in Paris
in Le Quai aux fleurs ne repond plus (1961) and the dominant bridge trope in La Derniere
impression (1958).
Ahlam remains unresponsive to Khalid, mainly because his art fails to

"speak" to her. In the text, Khalid is a painter by profession, and Mustagha-
nami uses painting to elaborate on his modes of expression. When Ahlam
sees Khalid's portraits of her, she remarks that there is no "relation" (qardba)
between herself and his representation of her. By using the word qaraba,
Mustaghanami intimates not only a certain representational relationship, but
also a kinship and spatial relationship.7 Khalid depicts Ahlam as a bridge, a
figure that reflects his desire to bridge the temporal and spatial gaps between
them and establish a physical relationship. The temporal divide between
them is significant, with twenty-five years separating their ages. His failure
to apprehend Ahlam through the image of this bridge turns her away from
him, essentially severing their relationship. The bridge fails in its function
as communication and linkage, becoming a symbol of Khalid's artistic
impotence, his inability to reach his audience.8 In this respect, Khalid's work
is partial and incomplete, aesthetically unconsummated, its parts left un-
joined.9 This is represented most forcefully in the text by the artist's in-
ability to establish a viable dialogue with Ahlam. She remains an object of
address, without ever becoming a subject.
II. Romanticizing the Past
Khalid's perception of the present is governed almost exclusively through

reference to the past. The novel's title, Memory of the Body, evokes this
temporal relationship, of the past ingrained into the lived experience of the
body. Yet the title is purposefully ambiguous, intimating both "the body's
memory" and the remembrance of a certain body, Ahlam's, as "memory
7 Qaraba can simply refer to closeness in the spatial sense. Qaraba can also intimate
nasab, or relation by marriage, versus hasab, relation to the patriline, as indicated by one's
name. Stafania Pandolfo discusses the different natures of these types of relation in her
ethnography Impasse of the Angels (1997: 104-31), associating nasab with the feminine and
hasab with the masculine. Khalid fails at joining the masculine with the feminine, his name
with her name.
8 In the Al-Quds al-'Arabi article, an anonymous intellectual quotes the emir Khalid, a
descendent of 'Abd al-Qadir, saying that "Algeria is a nation that castrates its Iliterary] stal-
lions" (Al-Jaza'ir umma takhsi fuhfilaha) (Rib&hi, 1). The parallels between this image and the
thematics of Dhakirat al-Jasad are striking, particularly the gender inversion and the assertion
of literary impotence. The quote positions Mustaghanami among the stallions, her aim in writ-
ing in the male voice, but simultaneously equates the charge that the man wrote the novel
with "emasculation," in accord with the image of Khalid himself. The similarities between the
quote and Mustagha-nami's literary vision raise the possibility that it comes from the writer
herself, or at least, someone who thinks in the same vein.
9 Architectonics is the study of "how entities relate to each other," of "joining," of which
aesthetics is a subset. According to Mikhael Bakhtin, "Aesthetics concerns itself with the par-
ticular problem of consummation, or how specific parts are shaped into particular wholes." See
Holquist (1990: 150).
incarnate," or Khalid's, before the amputation of his arm during the war of
independence. These bodies are confused within the text's imaginative land-
scape: as Khalid projects his desires onto Ahlam, she begins to embody
them both literally and figuratively. The temporal framework of the text is
most succinctly expressed through Khalid's body itself, wounded and disfigured
in the present, leading Khalid to nostalgically romanticize the past as a time
of wholeness and harmony. The belief in the perfection of the past shapes
not only his perception, but the way he represents reality, both in writing
and painting. Mustaghanami uses Khalid's painting as a means of criticiz-
ing certain static approaches to writing that glorify the past at the expense
of realistic treatments of the present, a subject she also addresses in Algerie:
femme et ecritures. In Mustaghanami's estimation, this romanticization of
the past is characteristic of masculine literature, while women writers seek
renewal and change.10 In contrast to Khalid's repeated insistence on mem-
ory, hla)dm's own novel is entitled Mun'ataf al-Nisydn (The Bend in the
Road of Forgetting), emphasizing her desire for change and a clean break
with the past." Ahlam sees writing as a means of "finishing with those peo-
ple that have become burdens on our lives... of emptying of them," while
Khailid sees writing as a means of "immortalizing those we have loved"
(1993: 18-19). The notion of the fullness of the past, versus the emptiness
of the present, dominates the novel's imagery and is expressed through var-
ious kinds of nostalgia, for mother and childhood, for homeland, and for the
high ideals and unity of purpose of the revolution. This longing is shaded
by love (for mother, Ahlam, and Khalid's commander in the war Si Tahir),
giving the nostalgia its corporal form, as emanating from the body.
Khalid transposes each of these types of nostalgia onto the image of
Ahlam, as she becomes associated with imagined perfection. The book pro-
gresses through a series of flashbacks leading further and further back into
Khalid's past, with Ahlam as a chain of transmission through them, like a
madeleine leading him back through time and space. The temporal and the
spatial are superimposed in Khalid's perception, for he has been living in
self-imposed exile in Paris for over a decade. For him, the past is a place,
10 Khalid is eventually won over to her perspective, but not until the end of the novel (386).
For a critical discussion of the novel as perpetually new, modem, and changing, see Allen
(1994). This may be Mustaghanami's point in making Ahlam principally a novelist and Khalid
a painter.
11 Pandolfo observes that the Arabic roots for "women" and "forgetting" are similar, just
as the root for "male" is the same as that for "memory." "Nsa, nasya: to forget, to obliterate,
to fall into oblivion. And nisd', women. Two different words, phonetically akin to each
other.... Nasya, then, becomes the feminine root of oblivion, as against dhakara, the mas-
culine root of memory. Dhakara, to remember, to be mentioned, to be male; dhakira, com-
memoration, dhakar, the masculine sex. Yet, perhaps (as for the opposition hasab and nasab),
any remembrance implies a certain forgetting, anything found, a certain loss" (168).
Algeria, Constantine, his childhood home. His preoccupation with the

bridges in his paintings represents his desire to traverse this breach in time
and space. When he first meets Ahlam in Paris at an exhibit of his work,
she is standing next to his earliest painting, Hanin (Nostalgia), depicting the
view from his childhood home in Constantine. Ahlam is closely associated
with this painting: she not only stands next to it during their crucial moment
of connection at the exhibit, but was born around the same time it was exe-
cuted. When Khalid paints her later, he reworks the Hanin painting, then
goes on to render her as a series of eleven paintings of the bridges of Constantine.
Hanin represents the central juncture of the novel, between a whole and
truncated body, between home and exile, between past and present, between
ideal and real. While recovering from the amputation of his arm in Tunis,
Khalid painted Hanin in an attempt to combat the depression that afflicted
him, dreaming of escape from his pain, loneliness, and homesickness. In this
sense, the painting is an imaginative transport, a spatial, temporal, and phys-
ical return to a more whole, harmonious world.
In Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes about the meaning of the body wounded
by war as a temporal sign pointing both backward and forward. Just after
war, the physical reality of injured bodies is complemented and explained
by the rhetorical context of war, still seared on the minds of the nation and
its citizens. As Khalid observes, the only time he felt unconscious of his
amputated arm was just after the war. "Those were years of respect. You
carried your memory on your body and that required no explanation" (1993:
72). As Scarry observes, wounds carried on the body commemorate the
ideals fought for in war, "until there is time for the issues to be universally
acted on and in this way made real." She continues:
Injuries-as-signs point both backward and forward in time. On the one hand
they make an activity that is past perpetually visible, and thus have a memo-
rialization function. On the other hand they refer forward to the future to what
has not yet occurred, and thus have an as-if function. This might be called
their 'fiction-generating' or 'reality-conferring' function, for they act as a
source of apparent reality... until the postwar world rebuilds that world ac-
cording to the blueprint sketchily specified by the war's locus of victory. (121)
For Khalid, the beliefs fought for during the war have not prevailed; the
blueprint was not executed. As the nation thus moves further away from the
war in time, the explanatory context of his wound has faded and people
have forgotten its purpose. Scarry similarly notes that without the rhetorical
context of the war, injuries are mere deficiencies. Only when standing next
to his paintings, Khalid says, is he again (like just after the war) uncon-
scious of his handicap. His art completes him and renders him whole by
recalling a vision of an idealized Algeria. His bridges similarly recall the
context of his amputation, of the war, and of his first painting Hanin. His
art, through its reality-conferring and fiction-generating function, is a me

of creating a blueprint for Algeria. However, Khalid's blueprints point
exclusively backward in time, rather than forward. Through Khalid's paint-
ing, Mustaghanami is commenting on Algerian writers' preoccupation with
and idealization of the war of independence that she observes in Algerie:
femme et ecritures. The constant return to the war and its ideals is a means
of recreating the rhetorical context of war, to provide an explanatory con-
text for the wounds that continue to plague Algerian society.
Ahlam is a living embodiment of Khalid's past, and her significance
within his story derives primarily from this association with the various peri-
ods of his life. The principal temporal framework of the book is the period
of the romantic relationship between Khalid and Ahlam and its anguished
aftermath. Their first meeting ever, however, is twenty-five years earlier, in
1957, after Khalid was wounded in the war of independence and evacuated
to Tunis to have his arm amputated. Upon departure from the front, Khalid's
commander, Si Tahir, entrusted him with a name to be delivered for his
daughter, newly born in exile in Tunis. After the amputation of his arm and
the subsequent painting of Hanin, Khalid visits Si Tahir's family and holds
the baby Ahlam on his lap. Born at the outset of the war, she is emblem-
atic of the hopes and dreams for the new generation. It is no coincidence
that her birth coincides with the breach in Khalid's life, since the gap is also
between generations, between the old Algeria and the new. For Khalid, how-
ever, Ahlam is emblematic not of the dreams of the future, but the dreams
of the past and of the period of the war. When he sees her at the opening,
she is wearing the traditional bracelets of Constantine that his mother used
to wear. He exclaims to himself, "0 child wearing my memory, wearing my
mother's bangles on her wrist. Let me gather up all those I have loved in
you. Looking at you, Si Tahir's features come back to me in your smile and
the color of your eyes. How beautiful is the return of martyrs in your look.
Hovw beautiful is the return of my mother in the bangle on your wrist. And
the nation returns in your arrival" (66-7). His nostalgia for Si Tahir and for
the ideals of the revolution is intertwined with his nostalgia for his mother
and childhood. Childhood, with the mother at its head, becomes the symbol
of perfection in the past, and it is this period that is the root of Khalid's
nostalgia. He tries to graft his hanin, the view from his childhood home and
the image of his mother, onto Ahlam, a vision she ultimately rejects.
Throughout the text, Mustaghanami uses names to spell out her charac-
ters' roles in the text. Tdhir, meaning "virtuous, righteous, unblemished, and
blameless" epitomizes Khalid's idealization of the revolutionary virtues.
Similarly, khdlid, meaning "eternal, undying, unforgettable, glorious," de-
notes the character's preoccupation with the past (Wehr, 1976: 254, 571). Mus-
taghanami most exploits the semantic and morphological value of "Ahlam."
This name is never articulated within the text, but is only spelled out and
described. Her name is a "singular-plural" noun, being both the plural of
dream (hulm), meaning "dreams," but also denoting "utopia" or "irreality"
(Wehr, 1976: 202; Mustaghanami, 1993: 37). However, this name is not her
"real" name in the novel. In her father's absence, her mother named her "Hayat,"
meaning "life." Although her official name is Ahlam, registered in the
municipality, everyone calls her Hayat, and it is the name she uses as an
author. The concreteness of this name starkly contrasts with the nebulous-
ness of Ahlam, a contrast between the real and the ideal that is at the crux
of the novel's thematics. Mustaghanami deconstructs and subsequently
reconstructs Ahlam's name by spelling it out.
Between the alif of pain and the mim of pleasure was your name. The hd' of
burning and the lam of warning divided it. How could I not be cautious of
your name, a small blaze born among the first fires of that war? How could
I not be cautious of a name that begins with the 'ah' of both pain and plea-
sure? How could I not be cautious of that singular-plural noun like the name
of this nation (watan)? From the start I knew that the whole is always cre-
ated in order to be separated. (37)
By joining the first and last letters of Ahlam's name, the alif and the mim,
Mustaghanami forms the word umm (mother, source, origin, foundation, essence,
original version), recalling Khalid's association of Ahlam with his mother
(Wehr, 1976: 25). The word also connotes an idealized original, while
Ahlam is repeatedly described as a "copy" of Si Tahir, of Khalid's mother,
of Constantine. This passage is essentially a birthing image, of the young
Ahlam/Hayat being "born among the first fires of that war," the nation that
is simultaneously the "watan" and the "umma," male and female.'2 Khalid's
nostalgia is largely for the umma and the umm, an idealized community of
the past, and an idealized woman of the past. By idealizing the mother and
associating her with Ahlam, Khalid strives for a complete union with a
woman, like that of child with mother, and through this image, a return to
childhood and a return to the womb. Implicit in this image, too, is a rela-
tionship with a woman that is virtually sexless, an image of woman that
Mustaghanami also criticizes in Algerie: femme et ecritures. However, Khalid's
images of unity, permanence, and stability contain within them their own
fault lines, their own process of dissolution. Through these cracks, Mustaghanami
dismantles these idealized, perfected images of women, and it is through
12 For a discussion of the embracing of a secular understanding of the nation as the watan
versus the religious nationalism of the umma, see Sabry Hafez. To a certain extent, Musta-
ghanami alludes to these issues, disparaging the nostalgia for this idealized religious commu-
nity of the past. This stance, relevant when she finished the novel in 1988, is even more so
today, after nearly a decade of civil war over this very issue.
these fissures that her own vision, however subtle, shines in the text. The
word hall, formed from the middle two letters of the name A-hl-am, not
only denotes dissolution and breaking up, but also freeing, liberation, and
release (Wehr, 1976: 199). Through this birthing image, she shows that the
natural progression is not of return to the mother and the womb, but of sep-
aration. This separation is not just of child from mother, but of the present
from the past. For women, this means liberation from the roles of their
mothers, individuation and independence.
III. The Veil of Metaphor
Ahlam not only embodies Khalid's memory, but also takes the shape of his
personality, his hopes and dreams. This requires that the artist play god to
a certain extent, as an omnipotent creator. There are allusions in both
Dhdkirat al-Jasad and in Faw.d al-Hawdss to Pygmalion, the demi-god
who sculpted his ideal woman (1993: 166, 1998: 275). This type of creation
requires that she be malleable clay in his hands, a blank template, and an
empty container, all of which are metaphors used to describe her. As a
writer in her own right, Ahlam is hardly the passive, blank page Khalid
wants her to be. When Khilid sees her across the room at his exhibit in
Paris, he contemplates (ta'ammala) her like a painting, identifying her as
"the white color" because of her dress, a blank canvas on which he paints
with his eyes (51-2). This whiteness and blankness is also essentially
Ahlam's virtual silence in the text, required in order for Khalid to impose the
entirety of his vision upon her. When he begins painting her, he says, "You
were suddenly clay that took the form of my masks (qinda'adt) with the form
of my future ambitions and dreams... [the painter] only presents to us a
design of himself, revealing (kashafa) to us the broad strokes of his new
features. You were my next design. You were my new features" (155-6). In
Arabic, the juxtaposition of the masks or veils of qind'dt with the revealing
or unveiling of kashafa is extremely evocative, and alludes to the novel's prin-
cipal theme of revealing and concealing. In Dhdkirat al-Jasad, Mustag-
hanami demonstrates how the images of women drawn by male authors
have the effect of veiling their subjects. What is ultimately revealed (in the
sense of unveiling, exposing, or baring) is simply what Khalid projects onto
her-himself, his own image.
When Ahlam visits Khalid's studio to see his portrait of her, she is dis-
appointed, denying that this image has any relation to her. She says, "You
are dreaming," evoking the name Ahlam, as a utopia or irreality. She asks,
"How can you find any relation between that bridge and myself... I would
have preferred that you paint me and not that bridge" (167-8). At this
pivotal scene in the book, Khalid's dreamscape clashes harshly with the
reality presented by Ahlam/Hayat. Through this injection of the voice of

Hayat, of life and reality, the reader perceives the disjuncture between
Khalid's perspective and Hayat's. Her rejection of this vision within the text
is the most powerful assertion of her voice, a rejection that is also a refusal
of Khalid himself, as she begins to turn away from him. By drawing this
contrast between reality and irreality, realism and romanticism, Mustag-
hanami evokes a central debate in contemporary Arabic literature. The early
impetus for innovation drew on romanticism as a poetic doctrine, especially
in its elevated depictions of women. However, in the early nineteen-fifties,
this romantic attitude was deemed inappropriate in the face of the political
upheaval in the Middle East, the establishment of Israel, the revolution in
Egypt, and the struggle for independence in the Maghreb. Instead, a new
generation of critics called for political commitment through literary real-
ism."3 Mustaghanami addresses the issue of realism in depth in Algerie:
femme et ecritures, as she observes Algerian authors' preoccupation with the
war of independence and its glorification. While these authors may perceive
their romantic depictions of the war as politically committed, they are essen-
tially false portraits, Mustaghanami asserts, that exacerbate the ills facing
contemporary Algerian society. She quotes Nabile Fares who observes that
Algerian literature "uses the theme of the war to mask current realities, pre-
venting a viable reflection on the revolution" (114). In Dhdkirat al-Jasad,
Khalid sees himself as committed, belied by the fact that he has completely
withdrawn from Algerian political and cultural life, living in comfort in
Paris. Khalid is contrasted to Ziyad, a Palestinian poet who rejects the com-
forts of Parisian life, returns to fight in the Intif.da, and eventually is killed.
Through her allusions to Khalil Hawi, the Lebanese poet who committed
suicide after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Mustaghanami implicitly
compares the two. What is unique to Mustaghanami is her application of the
notion of literary realism to political commitment to women's emancipation.
Women must be depicted realistically, she asserts, in order for there to be a
"viable reflection" on their status and position (1985:114). This realism in-
cludes reflections not only of an "informed exploration of the daily lives
and values of women within the family and the community" in Showalter's
sense (29), but frank depictions of their bodies, desires, and sexuality.
At Khalid's exhibit, and again in his studio, Ahlam notices that there is
only one realistic representation of a woman, that of Khalid's French lover
Catherine. It is with such realism that Ahlam wants to be depicted, not with
13 Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi argues that the attitude toward women appropriate to poetry is
adulation in Al-Khayal al-Shi'ri 'ind al-'Arab (1996: 60-82). For a discussion of literary real-
ism and political commitment, see 'Abd al-'Azim Anis and Mahmfd Amin al-'Alim in Fi al-
Thaqdfa al-Misriyya.
the abstraction of a bridge. When she expresses this desire, Khalid is aston-
ished, thinking, "Did I then paint a false copy of you? Is it true that there
isn't any likeness between you and that bridge? Isn't that bridge a copy con-
forming to the original in my memory? In the end, your dream is to becom
a copy of Catherine, to become an ordinary painting, exposed (maf4duh)"
(169). When talking about this painting, Khalid disparagingly remarks that
Catherine is a woman "painted only with realism." The key words used to
describe this realism are "completely exposing" (tafad.daha tammaman),
metonymically repeating the root fadaha (93). Khalid uses the verb fadaha
in the sense of disclosing or revealing, but there is also the implied mean-
ing of dishonoring or shaming through such exposing, in the sense of a
fadiha, shaming, degradation, debasement, or disgrace (Wehr, 1976: 717).
Khalid associates the realistic depiction of ordinary women with compro-
mised honor. The symbolization of women is thus a means of elevating and
protecting them from their inherently base (sexual) nature. It also has the
effect of concealing their bodies and sexuality. In Algerie: femme et ecrit-
ures, Mustaghanami notes that only foreign women are depicted realistically
by male Algerian authors. As a result, she writes, "only the foreign woman
is able to evolve" in Algerian literature. She discusses Algerian authors'
difficulty in representing the sexuality of Algerian women, due to what she
calls "the quasi-general tendency, due to the circumstances of colonial occu-
pation, to worship the body of the Algerian woman, a factor that contributed
to placing the Algerian writer in front of a practically empty feminine pres-
ence" (78). The literary dishonoring of Algerian women was considered akin
to exacerbating Algeria's already compromised national honor. "One doesn't
trifle with the honor of Algerians," Mustaghanami writes (78-9). While the
association between national honor and women's honor is an ancient polit-
ical and literary concept, the linking of the two was particularly strong in
Algeria, for reasons too diverse and complex to be discussed in depth here.'4
In the classical Arabic poetic tradition, the explicit naming of a woman
was a way of bringing disgrace to her, her family, and her tribe. The mere
mentioning of her name served as a means of effecting vengeance on an enemy
14 The various parameters of the association between women and land have been addressed
in a number of different works. For a general discussion of the understanding of women, fam-
ily, and home as the sacred preserve of cultural values in colonized societies, see chapters six
"The Nation and Its Women" and seven "Women and the Nation" in Chatterjee (1993: 116-
157). For a discussion of French colonial attempts at gaining mastery of the nation by win-
ning access to its women, see Lazreg (1994: 135) and Woodhull (1993: 16-20). For a dis-
cussion of the personal statute (and women's status) as the definition of Algerian citizenship
and cultural identity under colonialism, see Charrad (1996: 15-32), Borrmans (1971: 447), and
Berque (1967: 357-8). For a discussion of the organization of Algerian power structures and
its conceptualization of women's social roles, see Charrad, forthcoming.
tribe through exposure, and thus of shaming its women. In Dhdkirat al-
Jasad, neither the name Ahlam nor Hayat is articulated until the very end
of the text. Khalid does not expose Ahlam, because he loves and respects
her, as opposed to Catherine. He says, "I do not paint the faces of those that
I really love. I only paint something that inspires me in them, a look in the
eye, the wave of the hair, a piece of a woman's clothing or her jewelry. Those
details that stick in the memory even after you have left her. Those things
convey her without exactly exposing her; the painter isn't a photographer
pursuing reality" (92-3). Later in the book when Ahlam gives Khalid a pho-
tograph from which to paint another portrait, he remarks that the photograph
does not resemble her at all. In Fawdd al-Hawdss, Mustaghanami rewrites
Khalid in accordance with her own dreams and desires, he is a photojour-
nalist, working in the most realistic of the artistic media. While Dhikirat al-
Jasad is primarily a treatment of trends in contemporary Algerian literature,
Mustaghanami demonstrates some of its roots in the classical tradition. The
novel itself opens with Khalid contemplating the memory of Ahlam over the
ashes of an extinguished cigarette ("nostalgia's last cigarette"), much like
the poet of classical tradition, mourning over the ashes of the abandoned
campsite, carrying on a dialogue with the phantom (tayf al-khaydl) of his
past (9). But Khalid, the representative of the contemporary Algerian writer,
most resembles the classical poet in his cloaking of women in layers of metaphor.
In the canon of pre-Islamic poetry that served as a model for subsequent
generations, the bodies of women were further and further abstracted
through long strings of similes and metaphors (as a camel, an oryx, a gazelle,
a palm tree, a lightening bolt, etc.).'5 In this respect, Khalid conforms to
these parameters, both social and literary, that protect the honor of the
female subject. For Mustaghanami, however, this mode of representation reflects
social values that are no longer relevant, and are actually damaging to the
conception of women and women's roles in society. In both Dhdkirat al-
Jasad and Algerie: femme et ecritures, she calls for a renewal of these forms
through more frank treatments of women's bodies. In her estimation, they
are not to be hidden and disguised, but expressed.
IV. The Exposure of Realism
Khalid mentions Delacroix as an artist who, like him, worked largely from
memory (162). He resembles Delacroix in other key respects: in his expo-
sure of Catherine, his romanticization of Ahlam, and his desire for artistic
immortality. Assia Djebar discusses these issues in her essay "Forbidden
1s See Sells' (1994) discussion of semantic overflow and dissembling simile.
Gaze, Severed Sound" to demonstrate how both exposure and romanti-

cization dovetail in Delacroix's manipulations of image and perception.
Djebar particularly criticizes the artist's double position of dominance, as
both conqueror and man, as he painted the women in his work Women of
Algiers in Their Apartment. This stance is both revealed and reified through
his portrayals, his viewpoint enshrined in his art. As conqueror, Delacroix
moved into the inner domain of an Algerian household, penetrating and
violating borders just as the French conquerors had recently done to the
Algerian nation. Yet his purpose was hardly the liberation of these women,
as colonialist rhetoric would assert. Rather his purpose was subjugation, and
his depictions of the submission and resignation of women of the harem
gave expression to his position of dominance. On one hand, his painting is
a kind of exposure of the inner life of the conquered. However, his roman-
ticization of the women, cloaking them in veils of orientalist exoticism, has
the effect of further imprisoning them in realms of difference and strange-
ness. The heavy curtains and exaggeratedly decorated walls enclose and en-
frame them in the painting as "resigned prisoners in a closed place... a
place without exit" (Djebar, 1992: 135-7).16 The painting emphasizes their
restricted movement, their submission and resignation symbolic of the Algerians,
also prisoners in their own home.
The principal images that express Khalid's perspective in Dhdkirat al-
Jasad, those of nostalgia (hanin) and dreams (ahldm) appear in Djebar's
characterization of Delacroix as well. Describing Women of Algiers, she
writes: "The distant and familiar dream in the faraway eyes of the three Algerian
women, if we make an attempt to grasp its nature, makes us in turn dream
of sensuality: a nostalgia or vague softness, triggered by their so obvious
absence" (137). This absence/presence is exactly the role Ahlam plays in
Dhdkirat al-Jasad, just as in Khalid's painting. Although she is the subject
of the work, she is very obviously absent, described as empty or blank (102).
Khalid, like Delacroix, seeks to artistically immortalize (khulud, takhlid) his
subject, both in his painting and in his writing (19, 295). Djebar writes that
Delacroix felt "the need to touch his dream, to prolong its life beyond the
memory, to complete what is enclosed as sketches and drawings" (135).
The painting's sense of timelessness freezes the women in its frame, render-
ing them immobile and eternal.
It is indisputable that Mustaghanami has a close familiarity with Djebar's
work. In her chapter "La Femme s'affirme" in Algerie: femme et ecritures,
16 For Mitchell, "enframing" is the colonialist desire to control and organize, limit and con-
tain. Pictorial representations of the colonized had the effect of giving pleasure to the colo-
nialist observer. In this way, they could "see without being seen," scrutinize without being
scrutinized (1998: 26).
she discusses Djebar's complex treatments of her women characters' com-

ing to sexual and political consciousness. In her opinion, dealing with the
body and sexuality is one of the most important first steps in women's lit-
erature and the "women's awakening." Her discussion of this subject opens
the second part of the book, "La Femme en marche vers son majorit6" that
deals with women's literature. Mustaghanami describes realistic depictions
of women's bodies and sexuality as a literary unveiling. "Until then," Musta-
ghanami writes, quoting Franz Fanon, "'the body of the young Algerian
woman was only revealed by her nubility and the veil.' Later, however, we
witness an upheaval in the young girl's life. Her body is henceforth revealed
by unveiling and no longer by veiling" (204). This quote recalls Khalid's
discussion of the artistic process, whereby Ahlam is revealed (kashafa) only
by the shape of Khalid's veils (qind'dt) (155-6). In the chapter "Forbidden
Gaze, Severed Sound," Djebar contrasts Picasso's version of the Women of
Algiers in Their Apartment to Delacroix's, observing how the stifled and
imprisoned women are now "bursting out into an open space" (149). She
portrays the painter as unveiling and liberating the women from the harem,
"as if Picasso was recovering the truth of the vernacular language that, in
Arabic, designates the 'unveiled' as 'denuded' women. Also, as if he were
making that denuding not only into a sign of an 'emancipation,' but rather
of these women's rebirth to their own bodies" (149-50). Djebar describes
this unveiling as breaching the "law of invisibility, the law of silence" in
painting and in writing. She urges an opening of the harem, of the secret,
taboo domains of society: "only in the door open to the full sun... do I
hope for a concrete and daily liberation of women" (150). Both Djebar and
Mustaghanami embrace this kind of emancipation in both their critical and
literary writings. Yet it is truly through their images of open doors and win-
dows, of light streaming in, of exposure and revealing that they most elo-
quently and succinctly express their visions for this project.
The idea of rescuing women's bodies from the obscurity of darkness and
liberating them into the light is a recurrent motif in Dhdkirat al-Jasad.
Khalid is repeatedly described as writing about Ahlam in the darkness, with
the doors and windows shut (11, 13, 25, 41). When he begins writing in
Constantine, the "habitual sounds" of the city wake him. The sudden bright-
ness of the morning sun
lights up my depths, despite myself... In that moment, I hate that inquisi-

tive and embarrassing aspect of the sun. I want to write about you in the
gloom. My story with you is a film (sharit musawwir) that I fear the light
will burn up and erase, because you are a woman who grew up in my secret
antechambers... because you are a woman whom I possessed with the law-
fulness of secrecy (shar'iyat al-sirriya)... I must write about you after I
close all the curtains (sitd'ir), and lock the windows of my room. (41)
This frame for the context of writing elucidates the themes of opening th
doors that have been closed on women. Mustaghanami plays on the multi
ple significations of her words to elaborate on Khalid's stance. On the sur-
face, musawwir refers to the camera film, yet it connotes "creator" in the
sense of artist, but also in the grander sense of God. By shaping the figure
of Ahlam in his own image, like Pygmalion, he is playing the role of
Creator. The light discussed by Djebar and Mustaghanami threatens that
fragile impression, like an exposed film picture, or like opening the door on
a screening. Khalid's vision requires darkness, secrecy, and closed spaces.
By using the word shar'iya (lawfulness), Mustaghanami refers to the shari'a,
the code of Islamic law and contemporary debates over seclusion and veil-
ing (with sitd'ir also denoting "veils"). This scene recalls Dela-croix's paint-
ing of secret, darkened chambers with heavy curtains, but it also evokes the
debate about the nature of the literary canon. Khatibi and his followers,
drawing on Lacan, refer to the Doxa or Law of the tradition of writing,
passed on by the father through the patriline. In the Arabic literary tradition,
this law has its origins in the language and eloquence (fasaha) of the
Qur'an, making Arabic writing, in Khatibi's estimation, immutable and immune
to change.17 Mustaghanami thoroughly disagrees with this assessment of
Arabic writing. Within the text of Dhdkirat al-Jasad, she expresses this
through Ahlam's understanding of the nature of writing, a perspective that
radically differs from Khalid's. While he talks about the khuluhid (perpetuity,
eternity, and immortality) of writing, she talks about killing off the dead
weight in her life and opening the doors to let in some fresh air (18).
When Khalid first begins to perceive her apart from his idealization of
her, he is disappointed, considering her ugly, wearing the "clothes of ugli-
ness" (thawb al-radda) (17). The etymological connotations of the word
radda resonate with the themes of the novel. The diacritics are not marked
in the text, leaving the word open to another reading, as ridda (apostasy), a
turning from the lawfulness of religion. By linking ridda with "clothes," the
author returns to the same sense of exposure, of shame and embarrassment,
of lifting the curtains and the veil. In addition, the connotation of radd
(rejection, reply, or answer) capitalizes on a number of the novel's motifs.
17 Khatibi considers writing in French a transgression of this Law, but also a space in
which he is relatively exempt from its pressures, including its prohibitions on the feminine
parole (an attitude with which French feminists would certainly disagree). He describes writ-
ing in French as oedipal, as usurping the law of the father and embracing the feminine (1983:
182). Charles Bonn asserts that although writing in French might have been "against the law"
of Arabic letters, Kateb Yacine re-established that law, to a certain extent, by becoming the
father of Algerian literature, "Et c'est en ceci que l'6criture rejoint la doxa, la parole pater-
nelle de la loi... la Langue du Pere" (1988: 452).
For Khalid, Ahlam has become ugly because she has rejected him, he con-
siders her photograph on the jacket of her book ugly because of its ordinary
realism. Her own book could be considered the reply or answer to Khalid's
address. For him, this reply and her refusal of his representation of her are
a kind of apostasy as she deviates from his established image of her and
from the aesthetic standards he has set. Djebar refers to this as returning
the gaze, of becoming a subject, rather than simply an object of the male
gaze and an object of representation. The semantic range of radd also in-
cludes the "reflection of light" (Wehr, 1976: 334). As Mustaghanami writes
in Algerie: femme et ecriture, this "reflection of light," in the sense of a
response and a refusal, is a crucial first step in women's writing. With the
awakening of the new generation, women writers "seek to discover their
bodies long deprived of the light of the sun" (202).
V. The Key to Emancipation
Despite Mustaghanami's blueprint for a liberated women's literature out-

lined in Algerie: femme et ecritures, she herself does not fulfill her own sug-
gested requisites. She is so preoccupied in Dhdkirat al-Jasad with portray-
ing the image of women in male writing that Ahlam is never depicted with
any realism. Her criticism is woven into the fabric of Dhakirat al-Jasad as
she lays bare the literary process of veiling, enframing, and enclosing. In
Fawdd al-Hawdss, Hayat is the narrator, and said to be the writer of
Dhdkirat al-Jasad. At the novel's outset, she reflects on the writing of
Dhdkirat al-Jasad (which she is said to have written in the second work),
lamenting the "stealing" of her voice and vowing to rewrite the story
according to her own measure. "At that time," Hayat reflects, "I had learned
the lesson well. I tried to create a new language in accordance with his
model ('ald qiydsihi)," a word that also has legalistic connotations as "anal-
ogy, example, scale, or measure" (Mustaghanami, 1998: 17; Wehr, 1976:
804). She later adds that "I found that I possessed no language except his
language" (72). Fawdd al-Hawdss could even be seen as an attempt at
rewriting Dhdkirat al-Jasad, but from Hayat's perspective. The two novels
contain many of the same elements, including the same characters. The man
that she meets and falls in love with in the course of the novel is Khalid
Bin Tawbal, the narrator from Dhdkirat al-Jasad, transformed. In Fawdd al-
Hawdss, she fashions him according to her own model, her own dreams and
desires. In this novel, she shapes, rather than being shaped. While ruminat-
ing on writing (and implicitly on the writing of Dhdkirat al-Jasad) Hayat
says, "The universe [of that story] did not correspond to my life (haydti) .. .
Perhaps I secretly hoped that if that man were mine, he would be accord-
ing to the shape ('ala qiyds) of my silence and my language, corresponding
to the mood of my melancholy and my desire (shahwa)" (27). In a
metonymic repetition of qiyds, Mustaghanami moves from his measurem

and his scale to her own, one that more closely corresponds to her life,
on a linguistic level, her name. Her new language is articulated accord
to her life, her name, and her desire, expressed here in the more carnal
of shahwa, rather than hanin, which also denotes desire. In Fawda al-
Hawdss, Khalid is a pianist, rather than a painter, with sensitive fingers that
have given pleasure to many women, and by profession, a photojournalist
(176). Mustaghanami selects these characteristics with care, as emblems of
a man who lives in the present, music and photography being media of
immediacy. When he approaches Hayat, it is with a naked declaration of his
desire, with little subterfuge. Hayat responds in kind, with frank professions
of her own desire.
With Mustaghanami, expression of sexuality is a kind of political cause.
In an autobiographical essay on writing, she ruminates on her own courage
as a young girl reading romantic poetry at a 1973 poetry festival. At that
time, she was also the announcer of a nightly radio program of romantic
poetry called Whispers. She writes:
In essence, this program was a challenge to the Algerian national character,
which was used to neither hearing nor reciting love poetry... In reality, we
were a people suffering from lack of romance for complex historical rea-
sons... I made love and the beautiful word my primary cause, believing that
the Algerian character was sick and empty within, that the edifice and the
revolutionary slogans erected around it after independence would not help to
construct it. (82)
At the festival, she is both cheered and condemned "for my femininity,"

criticized for her lack of "political commitment" to the national cause and
especially the war of independence. In response, her father, a poet of French
expression and an ex-mujdhid, stands to defend her (83). In Fawdd al-
Hawdss, she plays with the lexicon of revolutionary images, bending them
to her own "cause" of love. While she is on her way to meet Khalid for the
first of their secret meetings, in June of 1991, she must pass through a
crowd of demonstrating Islamists to reach his apartment. To disguise and
protect herself, she wears the traditional aba with a shawl over her head,
borrowed from her maid. Moving undetected in the garb of piety, she passes
by the Milk Bar, the caf6 that Jamila Bou Hayred famously bombed. This
incident, and others like it, is one of the most celebrated images of the war
of independence, described and analyzed in Franz Fanon's essay "Algerian
Unveiled" and portrayed in the film The Battle of Algiers. The "disguise"
was European clothes, as Bou Hayred infiltrated enemy territory, leaving a
bomb behind (Fanon, 1965: 58). Mustaghanami uses the same image, but
virtually inverts it, as Hayat moves through enemy territory to carry out her
mission, to visit her lover. In this scene, Mustaghanami satirizes the national
preoccupation with the war of independence that she criticizes in Algerie:
femme et ecritures. "After forty years, here I am the legitimate heir of

Jamila Bou Hayred as I pass by the very same caf6, undetected in the
clothes of piety ... that disguise a lover, hiding a body ensnared with desire
under an aba" (171). Just as in Dhdkirat al-Jasad, Mustaghanami meditates
on the nature of revealing and concealing, though this time she controls the
disguises and the masks, manipulating them to her own ends.
In her essay "Writing Against Time and History" in In the House of Silence,
Mustaghanami returns to the theme of opening doors to secret rooms with
images that recall Khalid and Delacroix.18 When she reflects on the writing
of Dhakirat al-Jasad, she realizes that she had not succeeded in opening her
secret rooms, but had left them closed. But her image is not just of closed,
but of locked rooms, intimating the sense of imprisonment suggested by
Djebar. In the essay, she quotes Louis Aragon saying, "The novel is the key
to forbidden rooms in our house." In writing Dhdkirat al-Jasad,
I discovered that I had spent my life bypassing those forbidden rooms within
me, believing that they did not concern me since I lived somewhere else. In
reality, I did live in other rooms and it was they that inhabited me and occu-
pied the largest domain of my inner space and my space on paper. Thus their
keys controlled me and their locks were the holes to my freedom and my
servitude. (86)
In this passage, the other rooms are the outer rooms, alluding to a more
public persona, the outside image presented to the world. This external
image is, to a certain extent, the socially acceptable persona that conforms
to certain requisites. In writing Dhdkirat al-Jasad, it is this image and this
persona that was put down on paper, although Mustaghanami expresses this
as being "locked" in this particular room. In Aragon's formula, the novel is
the "key," and Mustaghanami uses the word in this sense. Yet she refers to
their keys and their novels as locking her up, denying access to the forbid-
den rooms. She uses Aragon's image, intended as a metaphor of opening
and liberation, in its opposite sense, as closing and imprisonment. In order
to open these doors, she needs her own key, her own novel. Dhakirat al-
Jasad is not wholly her own in this sense, since she draws so heavily on
the "master key" of her predecessors, keys which continue to lock her up,
as evidenced by the quote. In Fawda al-Hawdss, another key metaphor
opens up the meaning of Mustaghanami's repeated evocations of secret
chambers and forbidden rooms. When Khalid and Hayat finally engage
in intercourse, it is depicted through a single metaphor, as Khalid "inserts
18 This essay was originally published in Al-Katiha magazine in April, 1994. Fadia Faqir
later translated and edited the essay, including it in her collection of autobiographical essays
by Arab women writers.
UNLOCKING THE FEMALE IN AHLAM MUSTAGHANNAMI 43
his keys into the secret locks of my body" (262).19 Mustaghanami finally
uses her own novel to open up the female body, exposing it to the light of
day, depicting the details of women's most intimate emotions and sensa-
tions. For her, only when the inner elements of women's lives are included
within the literary corpus will it become more hospitable to their presence.
To a certain extent, the accusations against Mustaghanami are merited,
as she herself admits to the assumption of a male literary voice. However,
the accusation that a man wrote the text is hardly an "exposure," since those
are the very issues Mustaghanami repeatedly grapples with in both her
fiction and criticism. DhAkirat al-Jasad is hardly a blueprint for women's
writing; there are only glimmers of Mustaghanami's vision through the rub-
ble of Khalid's ruin. Instead, it is a criticism of the masculine perspective,
an exposure of its weaknesses, inefficacy, and impotence. Only with the
tearing down of the walls of the master's house does Mustaghanami tenta-
tively begin revealing the material concealed within. A woman cannot find
refuge in the structures of social legitimacy forever, in the roles of mother,
daughter, and unattainable lover. To truly express herself, she must open up,
give of herself, exposing herself to the public.
Columbia University ELLEN MCLARNEY
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Unlocking the Female in Aḥlām Mustaghānamī

Author(s): Ellen McLarney

I. The Male Literary Voice

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002 Journal of Arabic Literature, XXXIII,I

heard through the narrator Khalid's recapitulations of their dialogues, as

these gaps in the narrative, flashes of Mustaghanami's voice, and literally,

Ahlam remains unresponsive to Khalid, mainly because his art fails to

II. Romanticizing the Past

Khalid's perception of the present is governed almost exclusively through

Algeria, Constantine, his childhood home. His preoccupation with the

art, through its reality-conferring and fiction-generating function, is a me

III. The Veil of Metaphor

reality presented by Ahlam/Hayat. Through this injection of the voice of

IV. The Exposure of Realism

1s See Sells' (1994) discussion of semantic overflow and dissembling simile.

Gaze, Severed Sound" to demonstrate how both exposure and romanti-

she discusses Djebar's complex treatments of her women characters' com-

lights up my depths, despite myself... In that moment, I hate that inquisi-

V. The Key to Emancipation

Despite Mustaghanami's blueprint for a liberated women's literature out-

metonymic repetition of qiyds, Mustaghanami moves from his measurem

At the festival, she is both cheered and condemned "for my femininity,"

femme et ecritures. "After forty years, here I am the legitimate heir of

Columbia University ELLEN MCLARNEY

Charrad, Mounira. "Formation de l'etat et statut personnel au Maghreb: Esquisse

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