She The Mischief By Elra Djebar Analysis

In the majority of her works, Djebar deals with the obstacles faced by women, and she is noted for her feminist stance. She is more interested in her novels and writings in revealing the lives of Algerian women within patriarchal oppression and their historically invisible experiences. Djebar is known largely for her feminist and postcolonial views on dealing with women’s issues in the Algerian society. These views are seen as the foundation for all of her novels.
As she writes using the French language, Djebar was hugely criticized for that. In this regard, Nada Elia in her essay “the Fourth language”. She argues that “Djebar herself refers to French variously as the enemy’s language, the oppressor’s language, and the stepmother tongue. She
In this novel, she focuses mainly on the life two young Algerian women. The protagonist Nadia is an educated and independent girl, while Jedla is imprisoned in an early marriage to a betrayal husband. Djebar puts emphases on the relationship of the two protagonist as she examines the psychological aspect of the characters of the novel, which reveals strong influences of the European culture as she emphasizes on the notion of friendship as well as the sensual aspects in the lives of these women, which hugely lies in the tragic departure of Jedla and the transformation of Nadia from an euphonized modern woman to a reflective one who is stuck in a traditional marriage. Djebar in Les impatients (1958), which is considered to her second novel deals again with a girl who rebels against her isolated life and seeks her freedom and liberation through a secret affair with a someone whom she meets former lover of her stepmother. The young girl uses this to finally obtain her freedom when her stepmother and her lover are horrifically killed in an honor killing
As in previous works, Djebar focuses on the culturally proscribed roles and personal experiences of Algerian women.” The first scene in the novel pictures a little girl who is being taken by her father to school, the scene clearly inspired from Djebar's childhood, while other parts of the novel includes Djebar's historical investigation of conquest of Algeria in 1830 and the Algerian revolution of the 1954/62. Djebar offers hints in French documents and letters of how women were actively involved in the process of these events and documents their encounter with patriarchal textual signs. Therefore, she gives space for presenting various examples of Arab women’s oral history as she was told by these women. While reconstructing and revising the history of those women, Djebar documents the shifting and polyphonic narrative, which represents an innovative meditation on how language is uses as a tool of conquest and subjugation of Algerian