COVE

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The image above is of female FLN members during the Algerian revoltuon. The embedded video above is a scene from the 1966 critically acclaimed film ‘The Battle of Algiers’. Heavily influenced by the real events of the 11 month long guerrilla war for Algiers during the Algerian War of Independence, the image shows the women of the resistance and video depict the famous real-life bombings of the Milk Bar (an ice cream parlor), a college cafeteria, and the French airport. These attacks led to over 70 French casualties, and were planned in response to the French sanctioning the destruction of an inhabited apartment building in the Casbah (an old, Algerian-Muslim neighborhood and hotbed of revolutionary sentiment), killing over 80 Algerian men, women, and children. Though parts of the movie are fictionalized, this scene is relatively accurate; the three women portrayed in the movie are Djamila Bouhired, Zohra Drif, and Samia Lakhdari. Although ‘The Battle of Algiers’ ignores at best and denigrates at worst the role of women in the revolution, this scene is but a glimpse at the multitude of roles women played in the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Front) and in aiding their country’s liberation. 

The hijab, headscarf, or veil is one of the most reviled aspects of Islam in the Western eye. French soldiers often humiliated Algerian women by forcing them to remove their headscarfs publicly and espousing them as whores, believing in no small sense that their removal meant the infiltration of the colonizer’s mindset into Algerian minds and hearts. Fanon in Wretched of the Earth and more primarily Algeria’s Unveiling notes the power the hijab has as a tool of insurrection, of resistance against oppressive colonial powers. This scene, taken directly from true events, shows the other side of that power. Women in the FLN would oftentimes be able to slip undetected by checkpoints with their headscarves removed, dressed like pied-noirs (French Algerians). 

It is estimated that over 11,000 women were involved in the FLN during the revolution and played hugely important roles in the revolution’s success. Djamila Boupacha stole medical supplies from the hospital where she worked, Louisette Ighilahriz smuggled messages and weapons in the baked bread of her family’s store, and Zohra Drif - a well-educated woman - wrote a majority of the FLN’s rhetoric and oral speeches, and both her and Djamila Bouhired were integral to FLN commander Yacef Saadi. 

Women were spies, provided shelter to FLN members on the run, smuggled weapons, planted bombs, organized strikes, passed information to and from imprisoned members and those still free. They were, in a word, crucial. ’The Battle of Algiers’, though it romanticizes to a certain extent the urban female insurgent, pays no homage to the rural women of the revolution, who made up approximately 70% of the female FLN population. These women, although rarely forced into the FLN, were not given as much choice, were rarely if ever literate, and were often used as tools by both the French and Algerians themselves. 

Mirroring in more ways than one the curve of the revolution, ‘‘The Battle of Algiers’, (while) recognizing the achievements of female resistance fighters…it stages a problematic disconnect between women as active agents in conflict and passive, silent figures, while foreshadowing the exclusion of women from the national narrative’ post revolutionary victory (Flood). 

In direct response to Fanon’s warning in Wretched of the Earth of the exclusion of woman in post-colonial governmental structures, the newly independent Algeria strayed further and further from its Marxist roots. Following independence in 1962, more and more restrictive legislation limiting women’s freedom passed and the women stayed silent; voicing discontent, vocalizing their rights in this new world order was considered unpatriotic and Western.

Upon Djamila Amrane-Minne’s (a FLN member and bomb carrier in her youth) release from prison, she graduated university and became a historian, writing her hugely important book Des Femmes from interviews with hundreds of newly freed female FLN members, now left behind and reeling with PTSD. She aimed to document the under-represented women of the revolution: to show the world that they too (she, too) had fought and suffered for their country’s independence. Below is a partial transcript from her book: Amrane-Minne does not shy away from showing the atrocities they had experienced, but provides an undercurrent of understanding of the true camaraderie, of support in suffering, of the sisters of the revolution:

‘They arrived directly from being interrogated and tortured. Their clothing was ripped; some had shaved heads. Upon their arrival, we asked for large basins of warm water from the kitchen and we helped them wash up; we prepared clean linen for them. Then we washed and repaired their clothes. If you only knew what they had been through… for each woman you could write a book’ (Mortimer). 

Amrane-Minne, imprisoned at 17 and released at 20, also wrote poetry from her cell. Her poems, translated from their original French, allow the heart-wrenching reality of an imprisoned teenager sentenced to death to come to light: ‘The true walls of the prison/ Don’t let us forget them/ They re everywhere/ In everything/ The smile we must wear/ The laughter we must stifle/ The word to speak/ The word not to say/… / And all my words/ Would like to scream/ The words/ I had to stifle’ (Mortimer). 

 Assia Djebar, famous FLN member and now acclaimed writer and poet, writes this of the treatment of the post-independence Algerian woman in her novel Les Alouettes Naives (The Naive Larks); ‘What happened to those who fought and sacrificed? Our women are our men. They are not quite ostracized, yet they are not quite part of things… neither virtuous nor dishonorable while being both… neither vestal nor virgin…marginalized’ (Haddour). This passage is in direct conversation (disagreement) with Fanon. Brilliant theorist he may be, but his Marxist leanings cloud his vision in all other aspects; he could not imagine the woman being at odds with the newly constructed nationalism of a liberated country. 

These women, however, have subverted all odds and expectations, giving voice to the voiceless and truly embodying the revolution they lived and would have died for. History has documented them and their contributions; they cannot be forgotten any longer. 

Works Cited:

Fanon, F. (2021). The wretched of the Earth. Grove Press. 

Flood, M. (2016). Women resisting terror: Imaginaries of violence in Algeria (1966–2002). The Journal of North African Studies, 22(1), 109–131. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2016.1229184 

Haddour, A. (2010). Torture unveiled. Theory, Culture &amp; Society, 27(7-8), 66–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276410383710 

Mortimer, M. (2012). Tortured bodies, resilient souls: Algeria's women combatants depicted by Danièèle Djamila Amrane-Minne, Louisette Ighilahriz, and Assia Djebar. Research in African Literatures, 43(1), 101. https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.43.1.101