The Shadow Of The Trickster: The Art Of Deviation In Assia Djebar’s Texts

The present paper attempts to conceptualize Djebar’s progressive struggle and dissatisfaction with the notion of language, identity, and gender. It appropriates the tradition of the “Trickster’s techniques of deviating discourses”. In Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1980), So Vast the Prison (1995), and Woman Without Sepulcher (2002), elements of a deviating stance are displayed, hence offering a subversive and conspirational account at the very heart of the oppressive authorities. It will be suggested that Djebar’s works implicitly juxtapose comparable models of “Intellectual Trickster” resistance to all kinds of tyrannies.