Monstrosity, Masturbation, and Motherhood: Assia Djebar’s Fantasia and the Fight Over Algeria’s Body

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade as a counter-theory to what Marnia Lazreg calls “French revolutionary war theory,” which transformed civilian life during the Algerian War (1954–1962) into a battle front. Djebar pushes back by “de-fronting” the entire Algerian landscape; rather than protecting the pre-revolutionary binary of combat/civilian or acquiescing to the all-front of guerrilla revolutionary war, she engages in a “sexual translation” that casts Algeria as a stage for love, sex, and reproduction. Djebar offers an alternate history of somatic, maternal plenitude, rejecting the colonizer’s theory of Algeria without ejecting the colonizer from it, instead absorbing his body and the bodies of his victims as a form of enrichment of the feminized land. Djebar’s generative sexual translation thus highlights the mutual obligation of the French and Algerians towards the products of the colonial encounter: the hybrid, “monstrous” offspring (in both Homi Bhabha’s and Tarek El-Ariss’s senses of the term) that manifests new desires as a result of their combined lineage. Though these hybrid monsters speak new, colonial languages, Djebar insists on their indigeneity through the primordial language of the body, in both its masturbatory and maternal modes.