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Frantz Fanon uses the image of the unveiling of Algeria in A Dying Colonialism in drawing a connection between the land, the nation, women, and their bodies. Assia Djebar twists that image in her story "Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement" and in the "Postface" to the collection of the same name. Djebar uses the space of the city of Algiers rather than that of the whole nation. Twenty years after Fanon's polemic, Djebar examines the place of women in Algeria under the patriarchal nationalists, finding women's bodies and minds imprisoned by physical walls and mental veils. In a different kind of war, through her discourse, she seeks to contribute to the liberation of Algerian women, their gaze, and the voices which emanate from their material bodies.
Fanon's project included the liberation of women, within the nationalist project of Algerian liberation. However, he also makes use of the ancient metaphor equating land with women and women with land which can be found in texts ranging from the Koran (Surah II, verse 223: "Your women are a tilth for you [to cultivate] so go to your tilth as ye will"), to ancient Western, to modern Arabic literature. That this metaphorical relationship between land and women is shared in both the French and Algerian psyches is argued by Winfred Woodhull in Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures: "The cultural record makes clear that women embody Algeria not only for Algerians in the days since independence, but also for the French colonizers. ... In the colonialist fantasy, to possess Algeria's women is to possess Algeria" (16). This cultural fantasy extends, she maintains, even to French intellectuals, who, "like their military and administrative compatriots, make of Algerian women key symbols of the colony's cultural identity" (19). Algerian women were "at once the emblem of the colony's refusal to receive France's 'emancipatory seed' and the gateway to penetration" (19). Thus, not only was Algeria imagined as a woman to be possessed, but possessing (conquering, penetrating) an Algerian woman was a step toward possessing Algeria. As Fanon's title "Algeria Unveiled" indicates, this equating of land and woman is especially focused on the veiled woman. Woodhull concurs in her analysis of French colonial fantasy: "Whether the imagined contact between races or...