Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Hi again, everyone! I haven't posted in here since, um, November, and since then I've switched journals (long story) from into_desire back to my old one, anatomiste. I didn't stop reading books by people of color, though, so I've got a backlog of posts to make here!

Before I start, here's a question, born from my position as a white American woman who's trying to learn about race and racism but who's still (of course) struggling with assumptions, prejudices, and misconceptions, many of which I'm doubtlessly still unaware:

I'm taking a course where we analyze the 'dialogue between history and literature' in terms of the Algerian War of Independence. Right now we're reading Fanon and Memmi (I'm looking forward to posting about Fanon!), but we've just finished the first half of the course, in which we read four books by the incomparable Assia Djebar.

For those of you who are, tragically, not familiar with this brilliant writer, filmmaker, and historian, Djebar has been writing novels since the war in the 1960s in which Algeria won its freedom from France which had colonized it starting in 1830. Her perspective therefore spans from colonial to postcolonial; in her novels, short stories, and films she responds critically to both the brutal French occupation and to the repressive policies of the postcolonial government which has legislated Arabic as the official language and enforced the separation and seclusion of women despite the important roles they too played in the revolution.

Djebar's writing is often autobiographical, interspersed with passages of distant history, the voices of Algerian women whom Djebar has interviewed in her role as historian, and prose poetry that's powerful even in translation. She writes in French (leading to some interesting reflections on her choice to use this language rather than Arabic) and constantly meditates on the roles of languages, writing, song, and silence.

I would love to share her books with this community, but here's what confuses me: She almost never engages with race (to the extent that it never came up in our class discussions until we got to Fanon) and I think it would be possible to argue that she doesn't in fact identify herself as a POC.

Now, I've been aware (for an embarrassingly short number of years) that Africa is not a racially homogeneous continent. The black population in Algeria is very small; most people there are Arabs or Berbers, although this is primarily a linguistic distinction as most Algerians are actually descended from Berbers. Djebar comes from a Berber family.

Algeria is also sometimes considered part of the Middle East (I know! Even though it extends farther west than France!) and always part of the 'Arab world.' Now, I know several women of Middle Eastern Arab descent who definitely consider themselves POC. But none of them are from North Africa, so I don't know how relevant that is.

Here are the only two instances of racial typing (for lack of a better phrase) I can remember from Djebar's books: (1) In Children of the New World, Lila, a character whom in class discussions we decided was to some degree an avatar for Djebar, fools a landlord into thinking she is European rather than a "fatma" because of her light coloring. (2) In So Vast the Prison, Djebar mentions the long-ago journey of a Berber princess, Tin Hinan, who traveled with an entourage of women, both black and white.

There might be some other references to race, but they are totally drowned out in Djebar's work by her intense focus on gender and colonialism. In other words, she's very deeply concerned with male/female and colonizer/colonized relations, but not so much with white/POC (or with class, in fact).

However, I can't think about this for too long without feeling like I am trying to stuff Djebar into an imaginary box. After all, race is a social construct. (This has really come home for me in my recent research into the legal and social history of Mexican Americans in the United States!)

So what does this mean in terms of 50books_poc? I don't want to say that because Djebar writes about her subjugation in colonial and gendered but not racial terms, she's not racially discriminated against and therefore she counts as white--that's problematic in at least two ways: (1) it assumes that POC have to past some litmus test of racism, and (2) it comes pretty close to saying that POC have to write about race, which a quick look at this community will show to be a very silly statement.

It's pretty clear, from reading elsewhere, that the French colonizers regarded the Algerians as a different race (and a lot of racism against Algerians continues today in France). It's also true, more generally, that the privileged oppressors have usually been the ones to construct and apply racial categories in the first place. Some of them haven't stuck (it's really odd now for me to think that Eastern Europeans used to be regarded as POC), and lots of them, obviously, have been turned into a source of positive identity and solidarity by the oppressed groups.

So French colonizers, in the 1960s, would probably have identified Djebar as a POC, even if she could "pass" as European. But in her writing, either she chooses not to engage significantly with race, or it doesn't occur to her to do so, and so she neither turns this identity-imposed-by-the-other into a source of strength (apart from her mainly linguistic, thus ethnic, pride in her Berber heritage) nor rejects it.

What are your thoughts? (And, if I'm being really stupid about anything, which I probably am, please point it out so I don't go around spreading it...)

Can I still write about her in this community?