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Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War (1962)

di Assia Djebar

Altri autori: Vedi la sezione altri autori.

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1377198,151 (3.7)99
Assia Djebar, the most distinguished woman writer to emerge from the Arab world - and a top candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature - wrote Children of the New World following her own involvement in the Algerian resistance to colonial French rule. This long-overdue first English translation coincides with the 50th anniversary of the start of the Algerian war and with the growing insurgency in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.… (altro)
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This was very different from what I expected - more like interlinked stories about a group of women(and some men) in a small Algerian town in the early 1960s. Beautiful and poetic writing. This edition has a great essay about Djebar and the politics behind the novel which was very helpful.

Even though this novel is about Algeria, it is all too applicable to Iraq or any country where the local insurgency is dealing with a foreign occupation. ( )
  laurenbufferd | Nov 14, 2016 |
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud.
Children of the New world by Assia Djebar.
The Algerian war of Independence 1954-62 was fought between France and the independence movement in Algeria. It was a conflict characterised by guerrilla warfare and was notorious for the weapon of torture used by both sides. It was a bitter and complex struggle between a colonial power and its former colony with terror attacks and retribution being key elements. The Meursault Investigation and Children of the New World are novels written by Algerian authors whose central themes radiate from events during the war. One is clever, witty, utterly modern and ultimately vacuous, the other is a profound exploration of Muslim men and women caught in a dirty war and fighting for survival.

The Meursault Investigation is in part a reworking of Albert Camus famous novel L’estranger in which an unnamed Arab is killed on the beach by the Frenchman Meursault. Kamel Daoud gives the Arab a name: Musa, thereby providing a critique of Camus’ colonial perspective in centring his story on the Frenchman: Daoud imagines that Musa’s younger brother and his mother painstakingly investigate the murder; an event that shapes the rest of their lives. It is the mother who is the prime mover cajoling her surviving son into greater efforts to attain some sort of closure that ends with him taking out his own retribution.

Daoud’s novel starts with the single sentence: “Mother’s still alive” today which mirrors the first sentence in Camus’ novel: “Mother died today” and from the moment I read this I was alert to the idea that this was a novel too clever for its own good; nothing I read subsequently changed my view. Daoud’s writing imitates Camus short staccato-like sentence structure and is alive with references to Camus’ novel and other writings. For those readers who are not familiar with Camus novel Daoud must outline the story and he does it like this:

“I’m going to outline the story before I tell it to you. A man who knows how to write kills an Arab who, on the day he dies, doesn’t even have a name, as if he had hung it on a nail somewhere before stepping onto the stage. Then the man begins to explain that his act was the fault of a God that doesn’t exist and that he did it because of what he’d just realised in the sun and because the sea salt obliged him to shut his eyes……..”

This was the moment I threw the book across the room for two reasons. Daoud by a sleight of hand is making the reader believe that Camus’ novel was a real life testimony - “A man who knows how to write kills an Arab” This is a lie. Although Camus’ novel was written in the first person, the point of view was of his hero Meursault not his own. This is important because Camus has been castigated as a colonialist and this book is riding on a wave that furthers that myth. Camus was a Frenchman born and raised in Algiers who could not bring himself to support the independence movement because of the horrors of the war and fears for his family. Unlike other armchair critics on the left (Sartre et al) and at some personal risk to himself, he went to Algeria near the start of hostilities and attempted to broker a peace. He had a history of sympathy and support for the Arabs from his days as a journalist and so does not deserve the acrimony he has since garnered. The other reason for tossing Daoud’s book is the crude attempt to belittle Camus writing, which I think is evident from the extract above.

How refreshing then to turn to Assia Djebar to find a novelist who effortlessly tunes into the lives of both Arab and French Algerians at a time near the start of hostilities. She does not need the crutch of a famous novel of the past on which to base her story, but weaves her themes into a single day in the actions of eight characters whose lives intersect on a day when everything changes for each of them. Her characters get a chapter each starting with Cherifa’s story, She is a muslim women whose respect for tradition and family keep her bound within the confines of her own house. From her courtyard along with other women of surrounding dwellings she watches the fighting taking place over the mountain that dominates the small town.

“The days of intense fighting pass quickly inside the homes that people think of as unseeing, but that now gape at the war, which is masked as a gigantic game etched out in space. The planes are soaring and diving black spots that leave white trails, ephemeral arabesques that seem to be drawn by chance, like a mysterious but lethal script . “Oh God” a woman cries when one of them nose dives into flames and the bullets that they can picture in their mind, but then it shoots up out of the smoke running along the ground (“Death the damned thing has brought death in its wake!”) There it is again, spiralling way up in the sky; then nearby artillery fire ruptures the air, so close that the walls shake”

The women are fascinated by the aerial ballet, but are not just interested bystanders; Cherifa’s mother-in-law has recently been killed in the courtyard by falling shrapnel.

Each chapter fills in a little of the back story to the characters and so we learn that this is Chjerifa’s second marriage; she is married to Youssef and is very much in love with him and fears for his safety being aware that he is a local political leader and so is in danger of his life. Her story also introduces many of the other characters, who will have a chapter to themselves, but Cherifa’s own heroic walk across town (she has rarely ventured out of her house and certainly not alone) to warn her husband of impending arrest is told in another characters chapter and so Djebar skilfully interlinks her chapters to give a mosaic affect to her story.

The first four chapters tell the women’s story; Lila is fresh from university somewhat westernised and married to her college sweetheart who has left her to fight with the rebels in the mountains, then there is Salima a teacher at the local girls school who is arrested and interrogated and finally Touma who has become an informer for the French police. There are four chapters that fill in the male’s stories, but still it is the women’s stories that take priority, many of the characters are related
or know each other from living in the small town, which is changing rapidly due to the internecine conflicts which overtake their lives. The book has a clear female perspective and it is their pain, horror, and fear that we, the readers are made to feel, however Djebar never loses sight of other aspects of their characters and their strength, courage and love predominate for the most part. The female characters generally have a deep understanding of their male counterparts and live their lives accordingly, but are not afraid to stand their ground in a society that is male dominated and they bring a sensuousness to their relationships that they are not afraid to express.

Two novelists then that take a very different approach and while it could be argued that Daoud’s book is not wholly concerned with the war, as its other main theme is Camus’ existentialist viewpoint, however it does increasingly move towards the conflict in Algeria when it runs out of things to say about Camus. I was pleased to have read (yes I did pick it up from the floor) Daoud’s book first, because once I got into Djebar’s book I understood how superficial Daoud was. Reading the Meursault Investigation was like listening to politicians campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union; much cleverness and bluster on the surface, but underneath no substance and what was even worse a lack of honesty. Yes of course Daoud’s book has been nominated and won literary prizes but the gloss did not fool this reader. If you haven’t read Camus’ L’étranger read that and don't bother with The Meursault Investigation unless you are in the mood for a quick and painless beach read. Assia Djebar’s book is the real deal, its beautifully written and well translated from the French and has an authenticity to it that comes from the authors deep empathy with her characters and the situation in her country of birth.
The Meursault Investigation - 2 stars
Children of the New World - 4.5 stars. ( )
4 vota baswood | Jul 13, 2016 |
This review was first published in Belletrista.

This was Djebar's third book and has, by comparison to her later work, almost a hopeful tone, written as it was on the eve of independence and before the calamities of the oncoming decades. This story is told in novel form, tracing a web of encounters and interactions between a double-handful of people on a single day during the final stages of the war.

This is a story whose borders are defined by the myriad of viewpoints presented to the reader. What seem to be diverse story lines gradually tie together into a unified whole encompassing the motivations, the dilemmas, and the costs of insurrection upon the country and its people.

At first glance, the book seems balanced between male and female perspectives: the first chapters are centered on women, the last on men, and those in the middle alternate. However, as the story progresses, it's clear that this book is actually centered on the impact the struggle has upon the women and their responses to it. The life decisions they make in response to the demands upon them form the story's structure, and make the women inhabiting it the actors and the men the reactors. Cherifa's decision to step out of her seclusion, Hassiba's to join the guerillas, Touma's to collaborate with the French, even Salima's to say nothing with a strength that came "from all the silenced women she used to know"-- these are the defining curves of the story that simply draw the men along in their wake.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this story is how Djebar makes it a challenge to build a simple equation between traditional vs. Westernized and oppressed vs. free roles for women. She will seem to reinforce that dichotomy with one set of characters. Then she will turn and show us Lila, largely unconstrained by culture, yet paralyzed by what is occurring around her and sure to be destroyed by the coming events, and Cherifa, nominally sequestered as a proper Muslim wife, yet in a marriage of mutual respect with a man who thinks her truly freed. In the scene that had, for me, the most impact in the entire book, Cherifa leaves her house for a solo, public journey across town to warn her husband, Youssef, of danger. It is an act of courage for her, yet also of necessity—one in which, as a person, she must step beyond traditional female passivity and take action. As she puts it, "For a happy wife, living inside a house she never leaves, as tradition has prescribed, how for the first time to act? [She] must also create a new step, a new approach—a different way of seeing, being seen; of existing."

As the story draws to an appropriately symbolic close, the reader is left with a hope for the country and its people—most particularly, its women. ( )
2 vota TadAD | Oct 5, 2010 |
After struggling at first with the style of Djebar's writing and keeping track of the charaters and their relationships, I really got into this book and by the end was completely absorbed. Set during the Algerian war, Children of the New World follows the lives of various people living in one town during a 24 hour period.

The first thing to say about this book is how modern it feels. The writing and the themes have not dated at all (it was first published in 1962). Young men joining an insurgency against an outside power and the tensions between Western versus Islamic or traditional culture clearly resonate today (in fact there are many echoes of the Algerian struggle for independence in the current Iraq situation, particularly guerilla warfare and torture).

Many of the main charaters are women and we see the impact of the war on their lives. Cherifa, the wife of a resistance leader, has to leave her house for the first time to warn her husband about his imminent arrest. Lila's husband has gone to join the resistance and she has to live by herself. Hassiba, a young girl, goes to the maquis hiding in the mountains.

I think what I liked most about this book is that Djebar highlights the difficulties experienced by these women in a subtle and interesting way, rather than a 'look at these poor oppressed Muslim women' heavy-handed rant.

As I've said, I did have trouble getting into the rhythm of the writing for a while. Sentences are often long and contain several ideas. And I struggled with the character of Lila - i just couldn't get a grip of her. But I know that these are the things that will bring me back to this book again. There is more for me to discover. ( )
2 vota charbutton | Aug 10, 2009 |
This is a story set in war-time Algeria. It follows the thoughts and feelings of a number of different townspeople, many of them women, as they and their relatives struggle with their Islamic faith, French colonial culture, and their war for independence. Topics include youth and coming of age, happiness, marriage, heritage, but all done subtly and without preaching.

The book takes a while to really warm up, perhaps as many as 60 or 80 pages before the individual ingredients and characters become intertwined inextricably and passionately. It is well-written and at least once seems nihilistic and existential and faintly reminiscent of Camus--perhaps a coincidence. This is probably a must read for an African Literature course, very deep and also scales to other cultures as well. ( )
  shawnd | Apr 29, 2009 |
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Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
Assia Djebarautore primariotutte le edizionicalcolato
Jager, Marjolijn DeTraduttoreautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Zimra, ClarissePostfazioneautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato

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Assia Djebar, the most distinguished woman writer to emerge from the Arab world - and a top candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature - wrote Children of the New World following her own involvement in the Algerian resistance to colonial French rule. This long-overdue first English translation coincides with the 50th anniversary of the start of the Algerian war and with the growing insurgency in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.

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