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ABSTRACTS Mary Jean Green (Dartmouth College) Assia Djebar’s Women Warriors: Rewriting Postcolonial Histories As the US Defense Department searches Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers for images of contemporary relevance, and as young Palestinian women suicide bombers seem to evoke memories of colonial wars, Assia Djebar's return to the history of the Algerian woman warrior in her recent La Femme sans sépulture takes on a special significance, one perhaps suggested by the notations of time and place appearing at the end of the text: "septembre 2001, New York." In reconstructing the story of Zoulikha, who is for Djebar a true heroine of Algerian independence, the writer/historian finally shapes into narrative a history before told only in fragmented form. In her 1977 film, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, where Zoulikha's name first appears in Djebar's work, the voices of rural women evoke the past, seeming by the very form of their telling to refuse the coherent historical narrative then being written by the FLN and inscribed in such widely-known representations as The Battle of Algiers. Not surprisingly, Ponecorvo's film inscribed the image of the woman warrior consciously constructed and disseminated by the FLN during the war, that of the beautiful young woman porteuse de feu, perhaps summed up in Picasso's drawing of Djamila Boupacha, whose torture aroused French antiwar sentiment. In fact, as historian Djamila Amrane has painstakingly documented, the vast majority of women combattants were older, married women in the countryside, and their lives, like Zoulikha's, have left no visible trace. Djebar's work of historical deconstruction of the mythic moujihada, begun in a project of oral history and film, can be traced through her fictional texts, particularly L'Amour, la fantasia, where she embeds the stories of women warriors in Algerian history and in the narrative frame of her own life. Using many of the same techniques of historical reconstruction in La Femme sans sepulture, Djebar places Zoulkha in the center of her own story, creating a powerful gendered model of Algerian resistance.

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