DOI:doi.org/10.65613/741016
Dr. Naima Silet
Modern and Contemporary Criticism, Zian Achour University, Djelfa, Algeria.
Email: n.silet@univ-djelfa.dz
Received : 14/02/2026 ; Accepted : 24/07/2026 ; Published : 10/08/2026
Abstract:
The paper explores how contemporary Algerian women writers utilize narrative and language to redefine identity, challenge patriarchal constraints, and reconfigure gender representation. Historically silenced by colonial legacies and patriarchal structures, Algerian women novelists have transitioned from reserved nationalistic narratives to bold, body-centered literary expressions. Language is framed not merely as a communicative tool, but as a dynamic space of power and existential definition—a means to confront male hegemony and dismantle stereotypical female representations. Focusing on Ahlam Mosteghanemi as a pivotal figure, the study analyzes how poetic prose, semantic paradoxes, and metaphorical density allow female authors to subvert traditional male authority. Through the concept of “writing through the body,” female narrators reclaim corporeal and intellectual agency, elevating the female body from a passive object of male desire to an active cultural value. The act of writing becomes an act of erasure, liberation, and self-reconstruction, allowing women to rewrite their position within society and literature. Ultimately, Algerian women’s narrative discourse feminizes language itself, creating an authentic space where female consciousness, memory, and agency flourish.
Keywords: Algerian Women’s Literature, Feminine Language, Patriarchal Discourse, Writing through the Body.
Introduction
A close examination of literary activity and the development of women’s narrative writing in Algeria reveals that it does not differ substantially from the situation of Arab women writers in general. The creative process is fundamentally conditioned by two essential factors: artistic creativity on the one hand, and the freedom to speak and write on the other. While Algerian women writers have undoubtedly possessed the former, they were deprived of the latter for a long period. This deprivation can be attributed partly to the prolonged colonial era and partly to the complex and deeply rooted social conditions that reinforced the dominance of patriarchal authority.
Linguistic Bias and Gender-Based Discrimination:
The distorted self-image and the uncertain gender identity of the heroines in the contemporary Algerian novel can be traced to women’s concealment beneath accumulated cultural and linguistic constructs. The image of woman has long been represented as that of a captive being imprisoned under the cloak of language and the patriarchal cultural and intellectual imagination. As “Belsey” expresses the significance of language in shaping identity:
“I am not the fully formed, independent woman who occasionally decides to use language as a means of expressing my view of the world… It contributes more to my formation than I contribute to its formation.” [1]
Woman is a lexical entry in the semantic dictionary, a rhetorical metaphor, and a literary symbol. Language has thus practiced a hierarchical form of discrimination between the sexes by viewing them through the lens of gender. Everything masculine comes to represent language, history, and civilization, whereas the feminine remains a mental construct suspended within the realms of language and history.[2]
Women Between the Authority of Language and Reconstruction:
Woman remains imprisoned within the walls and labyrinths of language, which throughout history has sought to reinforce patterns of usage, perception, and acceptance. This has contributed to shaping a particular linguistic consciousness among its users. Within the patriarchal imagination, woman has been reduced to nothing more than a symbolic expression and an aesthetic ornament. Consequently, the masculine has maintained control over the values that grant it superiority and public visibility, while the feminine has remained merely a symbol, usually defined in relation to the masculine.[3]
All of this has constituted a barrier preventing women from liberating themselves from these constraints. In response, women have adopted a forceful stance aimed at unveiling and breaking the silence, thereby announcing their entrance into the realm of the femininity of language. Femininity thus presents itself as a linguistic value within literary discourse, for the woman writer “aims, through writing and speech, to explode every fissure and ripple of her body; it is also an eruption of everything repressed and concealed.”[4]
Language is not merely a means of expression or a tool of communication and emotional exchange. Rather, it is the “house of Being,” as Hölderlin described it, and “the dwelling and refuge of human existence.”[5] This is also reflected in Al-Ghadhami’s discussion of the language of Ahlam Mosteghanemi, where he argues that both her language and her authorship constitute two cultural forms through which woman emerges as a human gender and her text as a linguistic gender: “It is language narrating its femininity, thereby bringing into the world of man a kind of beautiful devastation.”[6]
This transformation can be observed in the evolution of women’s writing in Algeria, from the restrained style found in the works of Zohra Ounissi, where revolutionary struggle, heroism, and resistance dominated the narrative, to a mode of storytelling that ventured into the forbidden, shattered the barriers of euphemism and modesty, and brought about a profound transformation in the forms of feminine writing.
This development opened the way for explicit expression and for revealing a language written through the body. The female narrator “seeks pleasure and deliberately chooses the one who possesses sufficient masculinity to extinguish the intensity of her desire.”[7] Yet such writing is by no means vulgar or provocative. Ahlam Mosteghanemi herself explains her use of the language of the body by stating:
“I do not write about sex for the sake of arousal; I write as I speak… I am a writer of desire, not a writer of pleasure. All my writings are founded upon desire. Pleasure is something entirely different and does not concern me, because pleasure kills literature.”[8]
This explains why the woman writer begins from the body, employing it as a subject of desire and seduction. The body becomes the focal point of both observation and discourse, for her presence is inseparable from the geography of her body.[9]
For her, the body is a source of inspiration and an attempt to release its concealed emotions while discovering a language distinct from that of the projections and fantasies through which man has shrouded woman’s vitality and spontaneity.[10]
When the text itself becomes a body, reading the architecture of the body resembles reading any creative text, encompassing both its visible structure and its inner essence, together with all the symbolic spaces concealed within it and the multiple forms manifested through its unfolding meanings.[11]
The female narrator seeks to capture the reader’s attention and provoke a sense of astonishment not in an instinctive or sensual sense, but rather by compelling the reader to engage with her intellectually, recognizing her as a self endowed with intellectual and cultural substance rather than merely a body. Thus:
“How can the female novelistic text, in its entirety, become a series of magical mirrors through which we perceive the blades of violence directed toward the female self body, thought, and aspirations alike? How does it succeed in conveying to us the tones of feminine confession as it resists a culture of symbolic burial and the rituals of cultural and intellectual slaughter?”[12]
“Women do not wish to pass through life superficially… Rather, they strive with all their strength to gain the attention of humanity as a whole.”[13]
For this reason, the female narrator has devoted exceptional attention to her language, as it constitutes her means of liberation, revelation, and exploration of perceptions, needs, and aspirations that remained imprisoned in silence and concealment for generations. Consequently, women’s writing possesses distinctive characteristics, and feminine language displays qualities that set it apart from all other forms of expression.[14]
Women’s Linguistic Identity: From Stereotypical Representation to the Speech Act:
The contemporary Algerian woman narrator has devoted as much attention to her language as she has to the body of the text itself. This concern manifests itself across multiple levels, where the narrative intersects with the poetic and the emotional, endowing her language with singularity and distinction while carefully avoiding directness and the monotony of superficial expression.
This is precisely what elevated Ahlam Mosteghanemi, who came to be regarded as the pioneer of linguistic innovation in Algerian and Arab women’s narrative writing. As one critic observes:
“What is truly striking and worthy of admiration and astonishment and what constitutes a complete renewal of the spirit of the women’s novel is the poetic linguistic style, unprecedented among Algerian women writers.”[15]
Indeed,
“For life to become the subject of a novel is something frequently encountered in fiction; but for writing itself to become the subject of the novel is a rare occurrence. In some works, the boundary separating life from writing disappears, and reality becomes intertwined with imagination, creating an ambiguous space at both the narrative and discursive levels. This is precisely what we encounter in Chaos of the Senses by the Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi, the second installment of a novelistic project whose first part is Memory in the Flesh. The two novels intersect and continue one another through their protagonist, setting, the historical period extending throughout the second half of the twentieth century, as well as through their narrative language.”[16]
She likewise distinguished herself through her precise employment of language to convey critical meanings and create novelistic images that attracted the attention of both scholars and readers alike.[17]
Through her novel Memory in the Flesh, Ahlam Mosteghanemi restored femininity to language. In this work, she embodied her textual consciousness by creating a woman who invents both language and the protagonist, thereby laying the foundations for what has come to be known as the poetic novel. As one critic notes, “Memory in the Flesh is a feminine soul whose features lie hidden between the folds of its lines and the depths of its words a feminine spirit that caresses masculine love and feminine confession within the recesses of the soul, releasing the body with all its desires while playing upon the strings of words and intimacies…”[18]
As an example of this spirit revealing itself through the hidden layers of language, the novelist writes:
“We write novels for no reason other than to kill the heroes, to rid ourselves of people whose existence has become a burden on our lives. The more we write about them, the more we empty ourselves of them… and fill ourselves with clean air…
Then, after a moment of silence, I added:
In truth, every successful novel is a crime we commit against some memory, perhaps even against a particular person. We kill them before everyone’s eyes with a silencer. Only that person knows that the bullet disguised as a word was aimed directly at them…”[19]
This narrative utterance clearly demonstrates that the feminine writing self, through the bullets of words, erases the existence of the Other. Moreover, the repeated use of verbs such as we write, we kill, we rid ourselves, has become, and we commit conveys movement and continuity, emphasizing the sustained act of “erasure” through which she attempts to liberate her spirit from the dominance of the Other.
This act of erasure also appears in another form as a means of salvation. Through words, the feminine memory exhales the sighs of countless disappointments. Yet these disappointments lose their significance because the woman writer remains a dreamer and a lover, governed by no law other than her own:
“It is enough proof that there are times when I decide that you will be nothing more than the hero of the pages of my novel, and that my attachment to you will end with the final letter written by my pen.
At other moments… I decide that you are the hero of my own life…
I no longer know whether to blame my memory for storing your number on one of its pages, or to blame my fingers, which so skillfully chose the words of my brief message, blessed by my heart, intoxicated with you, before it ever reached you…
Never have I committed any crime.
For just as I wrote to you… truly, a woman’s will in love knows no limits.
Everyone is subject to the law of life and its circumstances, except the dreaming woman in love. She submits only to her own law: an idea she believes in, a man she loves, and children she embraces.
Even if I achieve all this upon the ruins of my femininity… it does not matter. What matters is that I obtain what I desire.
More importantly, the novel dedicated to me succeeded in seducing me. Its events captivated me. Before my astonished eyes it raised the curtain on a stage crowded with actors and actresses deserving of applause…
It made me cry out in the face of my oppressor the boredom and destroyer of my dreams: ‘the law of masculinity.'”[20]
The preceding narrative discourse leaves no room for doubt that feminine memory constitutes the governing law of the woman’s life. It is impossible to escape it, regardless of the passage of time. It directs the act of writing, furnishes the stage upon which her scenes unfold, and through constant return to it, she constructs her dreams and continually reshapes her emotions.
This is further confirmed by the novelist’s explicit acknowledgment that writing, for her, is an act of revelation and confession a magical moment in which she reconciles herself with her feminine identity and discloses it. She declares:
“Women’s writing possesses a unique flavor. It instills in women of the same sex a spirit charged with challenge and enthusiasm, driven by their determination to create moments surrounded by love… moments in which they discover their femininity.”[21]
The novelist also succeeds in employing both her own language and that of the masculine Other in a remarkable interplay, enabling her to dominate him and assert complete authority over him, thereby achieving the absolute liberation of her own self. Through the voice of the male narrator, she writes:
“…I never expected that one day you would turn your bullets toward me. That is why I laughed at what you said. Perhaps it was then that my other fascination with you began. In such situations, we cannot resist the madness of admiring our own killer!
I used to believe that the novel was the writer’s way of reliving a story he once loved… and his way of granting immortality to the one he loved.
As if my words had surprised you, you replied as though discovering something you had never anticipated:
Perhaps that is true as well. After all, we kill only those we have loved, and in return we grant them literary immortality. It is a fair bargain… is it not?”[22]
Through the narrative expression “I never expected,” the male Other attempts to justify his defeat before the feminine self. Here, the female narrator appropriates his position in order to establish her dominance over him. Yet she soon returns to her own position, speaking in her own voice and employing writing as the medium through which the feminine soul expresses itself: “I used to believe that the novel was the writer’s way of reliving…” In doing so, the self seeks to establish a form of existential equilibrium between the self and the Other a kind of immortality, not in life itself, but within literary existence. In this realm, she exercises complete authority over him, making him the possession of her pen, capable of killing him or bringing him back to life whenever she chooses.
Discourse: The Struggle over Meaning and Power:
The woman writer transforms the text into the burial ground and prison of the Other through the arrows of language. Words become arrows piercing the body of the Other the man:
“Can words strike someone like a thunderbolt in this way? Can the body become the aftermath of a single word, incapable of even holding a telephone receiver?”[23]
Here, words fall upon the hero’s body like a torrent of defeat and disappointment, allowing the narrator to reaffirm her celebrated proposition: “We write in order to kill the heroes.” Thus, the woman writer seeks to manipulate the man’s destiny through writing, reversing the established order and proposing an alternative ending. In doing so, she openly acknowledges what she calls “linguistic rape,”[24] for she says whatever she wishes and compels the hero to say and confess whatever she desires.
Indeed,
“She exerted herself to transform Shahryar into an educated king, a lover, a supporter of women, and a philosopher after he had been a savage barbarian. She taught him how to govern instead of how to dominate and oppress. Through her novel, she was recording the epic of civilization while being herself a woman living in a society that denied women the right to knowledge, contemplation, and creativity.”[25]
Consequently,
“Memory in the Flesh remains, above all, an epic that rises above the paradoxes and nightmares of reality, above the ruins of both soul and body an epic that confronts the world through writing.”[26]
The novelist attempts to restore to woman the status that life had deprived her of and to tame man through writing, placing literature in direct confrontation with life itself.[27]
Language thus becomes a double-edged weapon: it can bring death to the body whenever the writer wills it, or it can become an expression of passion whenever she wishes it to survive within the realms of love and memory.
Her novel Memory in the Flesh
“affirmed its presence through its artistic construction and the authenticity with which it expressed lived reality, in addition to its ability to combine characteristics found only in poetry with the prose nature of the novel. This is what distinguishes Ahlam Mosteghanemi from many literary writers, considering that she was originally a poet before turning to the novel.”[28]
Accordingly, the one who is written about in her narrative becomes the writer, while the writer herself becomes an enigmatic text bewildering in her silence, her speech, her complex yet simple logic, and her concise answers, all exposed before herself and before life, which she mocks. Thus, the pursuer becomes the pursued, and the hero begins to play with the writer herself.[29]
The novelist grants bodily memory an unlimited linguistic flexibility expressed through feminine qualities in which it becomes impossible to distinguish what is masculine from what is not.[30] She accomplishes this through the abundant flow of characteristics, temperaments, emotions, and sensations that she imprints upon her characters according to an elevated intellectual and linguistic vision.
As her language moves from its ordinary level to an artistic mode charged with imagery, the concept of poeticity is realized. For her, language is not merely a vehicle for conveying events or descriptions; rather, it serves to shape the contours of character. She writes in order to paint, to personify places within the spirit of memory through questioning and interrogation, thereby giving form to things and to the remnants of things through the fragments of love and immersion within it.[31] As the philosopher Lavelle observed:
“Language is the memory of humanity; it preserves all its acquisitions and is infinitely richer than the thought of any individual.”[32]
This is particularly true when dealing with feminine memory and all the fragmentation and emotional excess it carries. It is a memory that seeks liberation from the bondage of the pen, thought, and language even before seeking the freedom of the body and the soul.
This is what leads the reader to believe that language itself is the true subject of the text, owing to the eloquence of the narration and the richness of its style.
In every narrative passage, the novelist celebrates language through the dense use of metaphors, figurative expressions, and paradoxes. Language thus becomes a textual mosaic in which unconscious desires and symbolic forms contend with one another, creating an intimate fusion between emotional intensity and expressive linguistic structures.[33]
In doing so, her writing achieves a remarkably high degree of poeticity, confronting the reader with the shock of contradiction and disrupting the horizon of expectation, thereby inviting reflection upon the intended meaning:
“Sadness is a banquet.”[34]
“How beautiful what happens between us; how beautiful what never happened; how beautiful what will never happen.”[35]
“Death, exactly like birth.”[36]
The selection of words is therefore never arbitrary but deliberate, intended to create a level of contradiction within the sentence itself. The reader is confronted with the tension between two apparently incompatible images that are expected to coexist, producing a semantic paradox, as in:
“Apologizing without an apology.”
“Memory in the Flesh.”
All of this represents an attempt to reconstruct both memory and meaning,[37] and consequently to reconstruct the self’s past while disrupting the reader’s expectations. Linguistic play thus functions not merely as an aesthetic device but simultaneously as a parallel structure for reproducing and generating meaning.
One also notices a distinct rhythmic quality created through the repetition of words, short sentences, and concise expressions, all of which contribute to the poetic architecture of the language:
“Without longing, without resentment.”
Metaphorical structures are powerfully present throughout the novel, their density serving the purpose of personification and the creation of vivid imagery:
“Memory suddenly begins to rain.”[38]
“The smoke of words.”[39]
“What if novels were a silenced pistol?”[40]
“I pursue the smoke of my words that burned me years ago.”[41]
The novelist demonstrates remarkable mastery in controlling the architecture of narrative through the condensation of language, producing a continuous narrative flow that embodies scenes saturated with memory:
“…I remember something Ziad once said long ago… very long ago. He said: I have immense respect for Adam because when he decided to taste the apple, he did not merely take a bite he ate it whole. Perhaps he knew that there are neither half-sins nor half-pleasures. That is why there is no third place between Paradise and Hell, and to avoid mistaken calculations, we must deserve entry into one of them.”[42]
Her language therefore operates on multiple levels, where the narrative, the poetic, and the emotional intersect. An intimate relationship emerges between the female narrator and language a relationship in which she remains the active force controlling the entire text, while the Other becomes the object,[43] awaiting her pen to reshape him anew. This phenomenon is illustrated in the following passage:
“A man half ink and half sea, who strips me of my questions. Between ebb and flow, he draws me toward my destiny.
A man half modesty and half temptation, who overwhelms me with a fever of kisses. With one arm he embraces me, erases my hand, and writes me. He contemplates me amid my confusion and says:
‘This is the first time I have looked through the window of the page to gaze upon your body.’
‘Let me finally see you.’
‘Do not hide behind anything. I am looking at you in the darkness of ink. Only the lantern of desire illuminates your body now. Our love has always lived in the darkness of the senses…'”[44]
Through these stylistic displacements, the novelist appropriates the body of the Other, redrawing and imprisoning it according to her own will and desire “a man half ink and half sea.” Through imagination, she transforms the Other into a textual being confined within the darkness of ink.
These different levels ultimately merge into a harmonious whole that grants her language its distinctive individuality, preventing it from falling either into excessive directness or into obscure ambiguity. It is, in essence, a language that successfully reconciles the narrative and the poetic dimensions.[45]
Woman as an Agent Rather than a Symbolic Feminine Figure: The End of the Discourse of Guardianship
The first mission of the creative woman is to revolt against the way the Other perceives her body, and the weapon of this revolt is language the instrument capable of correcting society’s image of woman and uncovering the meaning of her existence.[46] This is based on the premise that every social revolution necessarily requires a revolution in discourse, as Julia Kristeva has argued.
The relationship between writing and the body is an intimate one, for the act of writing is an extension of the body through which it reproduces itself in textual form. Through language, the woman writer expresses both her selfhood and her body. Indeed,
“Through the bodily and symbolic forms of her writing, woman summons the repressed accumulations of history and proclaims them in her dialogue or rather her struggle with man.”[47]
She thus transforms language into a mask through which the body writes the self and the self writes the body. This linguistic play is vividly illustrated in the following passage:
“How many letters I wrote to you! Can a woman writer resist words? I wanted to surround you with letters, to enslave you through them, to draw you into the closed circle of words that had been shut in my face merely because I was a painter. So I began inventing for you letters that no woman had ever written before letters that suddenly exploded in my mind after fifty years of silence.”[48]
Here, the novelist gives expression to the language of memory, which carries within it a reservoir of bodily experience. She portrays what happens when the body fails to express itself sensually: writing then becomes the refuge through which the memory of the body is restored and reconstructed. It is through writing that femininity takes shape, while both union and separation become passages toward fulfilling the desire to write. She performs a kind of bodily displacement through the medium of language, whereby the body moves from its material existence into the body of the text. Each nourishes the other, contributing to the formation of a new understanding of both language and the body. This also reflects the efforts of many women writers to liberate woman from being reduced to her body and its purely sexual connotations. Instead, they seek to elevate the female body to the status of a cultural value.[49]
Whenever a woman writes, she exercises authority over both the text and the body, attempting to reconstruct her corporeal and textual existence through the act of writing. Through imagination, she scatters, gathers, destroys, and rebuilds the fragmented self. As the novelist herself declares:
“Whenever I write, I shape myself anew, and I reshape the world around me… I build and destroy; I deny and affirm. I wander between the farthest and the nearest places. I scatter what has been gathered and gather what has fallen apart within me. Inside myself I carry others with all their brilliance and ugliness… I love them and hate them just as I love myself and, at the very same moment, hate myself… Such is the troubled nature of this human clay.”[50]
The Algerian woman writer was also profoundly aware of the significance of the written letter itself. Through letters, meanings come into being, and through them she creates the meanings she desires. Possessing a rich cultural consciousness, the Algerian novelist reconstructs meaning by paying close attention to the individual letters of language. In this process, she does not merely produce meanings; she simultaneously constructs her own identity and the meaning of her existence through the letter itself:
“…She understands the essence of the letter, filled as it is with secrets, and she always says: ‘Pay attention to letters, my daughter, for only through letters do we create meaning.’
Linaz…
The letter Lām… My mother chose the Lām first. Yes, the Lām the Lām of glimpse, dream, and bees. It is neither the Lām of causation, as grammarians maintain, nor the Lām marking the end of purpose, nor that of emphasis, exclamation, transformation, circumstance, communication, or negation. I do not know… perhaps it is the Lām of supplication.
Then comes the Yāʾ… the final letter of the Arabic alphabet in alphabetical order. And the Nūn… that letter resembling two lovers in a state of passion, or a mother embracing her child with the utmost tenderness and care, protecting him from the tyranny of death and the tyranny of life. Then she chose the Alif, which stands at the head of most alphabets derived from the Semitic languages. And finally the Zāy, chosen for a reason I still do not understand. She preferred it over the similar letters Sīn and Ṣād, making the name Linaz instead of Linas or Linaṣ.
*In any case, none of us chooses our own name. Just as no one chooses their mother, birthplace, or beliefs… We all arrive in this world and suddenly find ourselves opening our eyes and senses to swift light. Then begins the process of defining ourselves discovering ourselves piece by piece, cell by cell. And thus begins our journey in search of our own meaning.'”[51]
Through the act of writing, the woman frees herself from marginalization, suffering, and pain, while liberating herself from the distortions of memory in an ongoing effort to reconstruct both the self and the body. This narrative representation, with all its details, digressions, and explicit declarations, is inseparably connected to woman’s freedom to confront the cultural violations imposed upon her in a world saturated with patriarchal values.[52] At the same time, she never abandons the hope of reconnecting with the Other in order to reshape the very meaning of love itself.
Conclusion
The contemporary Algerian woman novelist has succeeded, through her mastery of the expressive medium, in recovering and embodying the hidden reservoir of the self. For her, writing constitutes an incursion into a long-silenced world whose boundaries she alone has the authority to define, for it is an inseparable part of her own existence. This explains women’s sustained engagement with language and their distinctive ways of employing it through the transgression of social taboos embodied in patriarchal society. Since social conventions do not extend to women the same tolerance they grant to men, the woman writer frequently resorts to the technique of the mask in her creative work, concealing herself behind masculine narrative voices.
One of the most distinctive features of Algerian women’s fiction is its reliance on short, repetitive sentences, which simultaneously generate an abundant narrative flow and establish a characteristic musical rhythm.
The language of Algerian women novelists is likewise marked by its avoidance of excessive directness and didacticism. Through metaphors and figurative expressions, they construct their narrative worlds and imbue them with a refined aesthetic quality. The woman writer transforms death into a man a metaphor encompassing all his actions and attributes to him hateful and destructive deeds as an expression of the degraded Other who torments her relentlessly and without compassion.
The Algerian woman narrator seeks to affirm her feminine identity through the act of writing, and this identity remains inseparably connected to her body. Consequently, the relationship between writing and the body occupies a central place in Algerian women’s narrative discourse.
The woman writer therefore adopts writing through the body because the body functions as a sign intimately connected with the world of femininity and with the emotions and desires that animate it. These desires reflect the body’s longing for fulfillment and its aspiration to free itself from every form of oppression imposed upon it oppression that intensifies repression and, consequently, suffering through the denial of pleasure, that essential experience through which woman achieves existential balance and the fullness of her being.
Although men may also express such emotions and desires, women’s writing invests them with distinctive qualities that bear the unmistakable imprint of femininity its emotional intensity, warmth, and the diverse manifestations of its inner sensibility and bodily experience.
Thus, the female body is no longer merely a textual object represented according to the vision of the masculine Other and governed by his desires and impulses. Instead, it becomes the protagonist of the woman’s own text, fashioned through her language in the very process of feminizing the text itself.
[1] Mary Eagleton, Feminist Literary Theory, trans. Adnan Hassan and Rana Bashour, Dar Al-Hiwar for Publishing and Distribution, Syria, 1st ed., 2016, p. 511.
[2] Abdullah Al-Ghadhami, The Culture of Illusion: Approaches to Women, the Body, and Language, Arab Cultural Centre, 2nd ed., 2006, p. 38.
[3] Abd al-Ghaffar Al-Atawi, The Culture of the Body: A Reading of Arab Women’s Narrative, Al-Sayyab Foundation, London, 1st ed., 2013, p. 9.
[4] Mohamed Noureddine Afaya, Identity and Difference: Woman, the Margin, and Writing, Afrique Orient, Morocco, n.d., p. 35.
[5] Safaa Abdel Salam Jaafar, The Ontology of Language in Heidegger: A Philosophical Study of Stefan George’s Poem “The Word”, Dar Al-Wafaa for Printing and Publishing, Egypt, 2001, p. 35.
[6] Mohammed Abdullah Al-Ghadhami, Similarity and Difference, Arab Cultural Centre, 1st ed., 1994, p. 183.
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843): One of the most celebrated poets in the history of German literature. He was a poet, novelist, translator, writer, and philosopher. He was born on 20 March 1770 and died in 1843.
[7] Mohammed Qutb, “Falling into the Captivity of the Body,” Al-Qissa Magazine, Cairo, no. 98, October–November–December 1999, p. 5.
[8] Assia Moussaoui and Bachir Mufti, “Ahlam Mosteghanemi,” Al-Ikhtilaf Journal, no. 3, Algeria, 2003, p. 30.
[9] Hicham Al-Alawi, The Body and Meaning: Readings in the Moroccan Autobiographical Novel, Al-Madaris Publishing and Distribution Company, Casablanca, 1st ed., 2006, p. 20.
[10] Mohammed Berrada, Writing Chaos, Action, and Transformation, Arab Research Foundation, Beirut, n.d., 1986, p. 17.
[11] Al-Hafiz Munir, Bodily Consciousness: Aesthetic Signs in the Rituals of Bodily Salvation, Al-Nay and Muhakat for Studies, Publishing and Distribution, Syria, 1st ed., 2012, p. 175.
[12] Dijla Ahmed Samawi and Abd al-Ilah Al-Sayegh, On the Sentiment of Al-Sayegh: Feminine Literary Criticism, Academic Book Center, 1st ed., 2015, p. 28.
[13] Simone de Beauvoir, How Women Think, translated by the Arab Center for Publishing and Distribution, Maarouf Ikhwan Bookshop, Alexandria–Cairo, n.d., p. 19.
[14] Souad Al-Manea, “Feminist Criticism in the West and Its Reflections on Contemporary Arab Criticism,” The Arab Journal of Culture, Tunisia, no. 32, 1997, p. 73.
[15] Hafnaoui Baali, The Algerian Women’s Novel: Feminizing Writing and the Feminization of the Imaginary, Dar Al-Yazouri Scientific Publishing and Distribution, Amman, n.d., 2015, p. 82.
[16] Salman Zain Al-Din, Scheherazade and Free Speech: Readings in Women’s Fiction, Arab Scientific Publishers, 1st ed., 2010, p. 13.
[17] Abdelhamid Aqqar, “The Maghrebi Novel: Reality and Experimentation,” Muqaddimat Journal, nos. 13–14, Summer–Autumn 1998, p. 19.
[18] Aisha Bent Al-Maamoura, Psychological Readings in Arabic Novels and Short Stories, Dar Al-Hadara Publications, Algeria, 2004, p. 72.
[19] Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh, Dar Al-Adab, Beirut, 15th ed., p. 18.
[20] Fatima Al-Zahra Batoush, The Passion of an Eastern Femininity, Dar Al-Muthaqqaf for Publishing and Distribution, Algeria, 1st ed., 2017, pp. 10–11.
[21] Ibid., p. 11.
[22] Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh, p. 20.
[23] Ibid., p. 241.
[24] Salman Zain Al-Din, op. cit., p. 14.
[25] Amal Alaouchiche, “Woman in the Mirror of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Feminism, collective volume, Difaf Publications, Beirut, 1st ed., 2013, p. 45.
[26] Noura Al-Jarmouni, Character in the Imaginary of the Arab Women’s Novel, Anfo Print Press, Fez, n.d., p. 38.
[27] Salman Zain Al-Din, op. cit., p. 13.
[28] Al-Omari Amohamed, The Poetics of Language in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Trilogy: A Stylistic Study, PhD Dissertation, University of Algiers, 2011, p. 81.
[29] Salman Zain Al-Din, op. cit., p. 15.
[30] Aisha Bent Al-Maamoura, Psychological Readings in Arabic Novels and Short Stories, Dar Al-Hadara Publications, Algeria, 2004, p. 76.
[31] Ibid., p. 73.
[32] Ibid., p. 73.
[33] Mohammed Bekkai, Archipelagos of Postmodernity: The Stakes of the Human Self from the Dominance of Closure to the Affirmation of Liberation, Dar Al-Rafidain for Publishing and Distribution & Opus Publications, Beirut, Lebanon, 2017, p. 204.
[34] Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh, p. 11.
[35] Ibid., p. 12.
[36] Ibid., p. 17.
[37] Mohammed Bekkai, Archipelagos of Postmodernity: The Stakes of the Human Self from the Dominance of Closure to the Affirmation of Liberation, Dar Al-Rafidain for Publishing and Distribution & Opus Publications, Beirut, Lebanon, 2017, p. 368.
[38] Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh, p. 15.
[39] Ibid., p. 13.
[40] Ibid., p. 55.
[41] Ibid., p. 31.
[42] Ibid., p. 160.
[43] Noura Al-Jarmouni, op. cit., p. 30.
[44] Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Chaos of the Senses, p. 187.
[45] Salman Zain Al-Din, op. cit., p. 18.
[46] Abdelrahim Wahabi, Arab Feminine Narrative: From the Plot of Events to the Plot of Character, Dar Kunooz Al-Ma’rifa for Publishing and Distribution, Amman, 1st ed., 2016, p. 158.
[47] Mohamed Noureddine Afaya, op. cit., p. 35.
[48] Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh, p. 276.
[49] Abdelrahim Wahabi, op. cit., p. 158.
[50] Arousia Al-Nalouti, Proceedings of the First Arab Novelists’ Forum, Dar Al-Hiwar, Syria, 1st ed., 1997, p. 147.
[51] Rabia Jelti, The Bottles of Djamila Bouhired Street, Difaf Publications (Lebanon) / Ikhtilaf Publications (Algeria), 1st ed., 2019, pp. 34–35.
[52] Abdullah Ibrahim, Women’s Narrative: Patriarchal Culture, Feminine Identity, and the Body, Arab Institution for Studies and Publishing, Jordan, 1st ed., 2011, p. 223.