A Gift of Poisoned Love: The Paradox of Postcolonial Autobiography in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia

The Algerian writer Assia Djebar's resistance & anxiety over using French, the language of her country's colonizers, in autobiographical discourse are reflected in the themes of her novel L'Amour, la fantasia (Love, Fantasy). The myth of Dejanira & Nessus, in which Hercules's wife uses the centaur's blood to poison her husband, when offering him her tunic, is examined as a theme in one of the novel's chapters that sheds light on Djebar's ambivalence toward the French language, which for her is a gift of poisoned love: it is both a blessing for expressing herself & a curse for having to do so in a language that was imposed on her & Algerian culture. This theme is also identified in Jacques Derrida's "La Pharmacie de Platon" (Plato's Pharmacy) in which the French philosopher interprets the Greek term pharmakon 'drug', appearing in Plato's dialog Phaedrus, as both a remedy & a poison with regard to the invention of writing. Thus, according to both Djebar & Derrida, writing is a poisoned gift: it offers the possibility of self-expression but poisons the act at the same time. Z. Dubiel