Quote by Assia Djebar: “To write is to try to know what we would do if we had a chance to live again.”

Writing is a way of asking yourself: if I could go back, what would I change? It turns literature into a space for reckoning with choices, regrets, and unlived possibilities — a rehearsal for a second life we'll never have.

Djebar published Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade in 1985, interweaving French colonial military records with the voices of Algerian women. Algeria had been independent for over two decades but was still reckoning with the violence of the war of independence and the silencing of women from official history.

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.