Abstract/Summary

This study analyses Maghrebi Francophone Postcolonial literature and films by Algerian female authors such as Assia Djebar, Leï la Sebbar, and filmmaker Rayhana Obermeyer who expose the feminine condition in post-independence Algeria, during and after the traumatic Civil War. The focus of the study revolves around the space used to depict this feminine condition, the homosocial women's hammam. Based on the notions of 'lived space' by French geographer and phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, and Luce Irigaray and Deborah Jones's 'parler femme' and 'women's oral culture', I argue that these feminist Algerian women's writings all specifically use the historically exoticized hammam as a lived space to create an emancipated microcosm for their female characters in a patriarchal society – a female-exclusive microcosm where Algerian women gather, socialize and finally feel free to express their taboo and repressed thoughts and desires, and to explore and nurture their bodies like nowhere else. Through Djebar, Sebbar and Obermeyer’s Maghrebi insider lens, and mine, I explore how these representations of the women's hammam disclose realities that go further than Orientalist imagination and hegemonic patriarchal discourses could have ever grasped. These writings provide an account of the Algerian women’s socio-political condition, their physical and spiritual awareness, but also their solidarity in the face of male adversity from an insider's rendition of the presumed exotic setting where it all takes place, the hammam – a place where all the senses are embraced, and where the hammam’s lived experiences nurtures and discloses both the lived female bodies and the women’s minds/voices in an oppressive postcolonial Algeria.