Acting Bits/Identity Talk

Abstract

In Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Assia Djebar places herself with great autobiographers: Augustine, the Berber who wrote not only his theology but his Confessions in the language of Rome; and Ibn Khaldfin, son of a family that fled southern Arabia, who wrote not only his history but his Ta'arif[identity] in Arabic. Staging herself as an Algerian Muslim woman, she gives a fragmented version of the graph-ing of her bio in French. Identity as a wound, exposed by the historically hegemonic languages, for those who have learned the double-binding "practice of [their] writing" (F, p. 181). I accept this difficult definition, to present a series of citations of "myself" engaged in identity talk.