Quote by Assia Djebar: “French is the stepmother tongue; Arabic is the mother I never knew.”

Djebar grew up writing in the colonizer's language while Arabic — her ancestral mother tongue — remained distant, half-heard, never fully possessed. This is the postcolonial writer's wound: fluency in the language that displaced you, and estrangement from the language that should have been home.

Djebar delivered her acceptance speech to the Académie Royale de Langue et Littérature Françaises de Belgique in 1995, explicitly reflecting on her position as an Algerian writing in French. Algeria was in the middle of its devastating civil war, and the question of cultural identity and linguistic heritage had never been more politically charged.

Algerian novelist, filmmaker, and historian who wrote primarily in French about the lives of Algerian women under colonial rule and in the postcolonial period. She was elected to the Académie française in 2005, the first Maghrebi woman to receive that honour. Her novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade is considered her masterwork.