A dialogue with painting in Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement by Assia Djebar

The paper presents the phenomenon of hybridity present in Assia Djebar’s writings based on the example of the collection of short stories entitled Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment). The title of the collection makes reference to famous paintings by Delacroix and Picasso but in doing so the author also supplements the Europocentric discourse with her own voice, the voice of a Francophone Algerian writer who, holding a dialogue with the painters, breaks with exoticism and the orientalising European approach. The dialogue with painting is accomplished on two levels; the first, diegetic and second, essayistic; in ‘The Overture’, and especially in ‘The Afterword’, which is not only a commentary to the painting works by Delacroix and Picasso, but also a complementation of the literary plot. The permanent link of Djebar’s writings to the dramatic present and the remembrance of the women deprived of their voice and subjected to reification is voiced powerfully in the work, which cannot be easily evaluated as it is very diverse in its references to other fields of art