So Vast The Prison Analysis

In this section, I shall examine the aspects of subverting power/relations in the two novels by the two authors. Therefore, examining images of resistance and representations, which are used from the periphery to voice women’ stories and to make them shift from being part of the subalterns to the center, and from being the subject of producing knowledge about by others to the ones who produce knowledge about the self and the other. That is to say, postcolonial writers including Abouzeid and Djebar have reconsidered the subordinated position of the so-called “other” women. They have moved them from their marginal location to the center, as they have subverted the power relations that were in favor of men for a long time. Therefore, …show more content…
Djebar is clearly declaring her intention to subvert power/ relations in favor of women. She says that, "All of us from the world of the shadow women, reversing the process: We are the ones finally who are looking, who are beginning." Thus, Djebar throughout retelling the unrecognized stories of Algerian women is reconstructing history from a female perspective, in which women are the center of this history and no more in the …show more content…
The first of these fragments relates to Zoraidé from Don Quixote, who frees a slave and flees her own captivity, and whose writing used in the escape plot, is described as ephemeral and largely obscured. This feminine evasion, and the accompanying loss of Zoraidé's language, prefigures, according to Djebar, the plight of contemporary Algerian women. Furthermore, the narrator's mother remembers and passes on traces of feminine dialects that weave unsettlingly in and out of the centuries. Zoraidé the brave woman “sets herself free from the father who has given her everything except her freedom, leaving him behind on the short of Africa.” The story of the rebellious, free Algerian Zoraidé is the example of the traveler, warrior woman who rejected to be abided by any of the social restriction opposed on her. Yet, she is unmentioned in the official history of the country and almost no one knows her or knows her great achievements. “Her writing is erased. No one can read it, so now it is useless. She is indeed the first Algerian woman to write- Zoraidé who meets, if not with Don Miguel, then at least with Don Quixote’s’ captive. The writing of a fugitive: a writing whose very essence is ephemeral.” In this sense, Djebar is fully equipped with shifting women’ stories from being in the margin in the male dominant texts to the center in