cousins; I had spent my dreaming adolescence on its fringes, neither totally outside, nor in its heart; so I spoke and studied French, and my body, during this formative period, became Westernized in its way (Djebar127). The French dominates this experience of moving freely in the male sphere. The Arab girl is then uprooted from her own culture, whose customs remain by the standards by which she assesses her own situation. I suffered from misunderstanding I discovered that I too was veiled, not so much disguised as anonymous. Although I had a body just like that of a Western girl, I had thought to be invisible, in spite of evidence to the contrary (Djebar126). Aphasia should not be read only as an involuntary loss of the ability to speak, but instead as a deliberate method of protest against the inherent fault of the European education; verbosity, an indiscreet compulsive longiloquence in these preambles to seduction(Djebar126). The resistance to a complete assimilation of self-definition, cultural identity, and desire becomes especially clear in the encounter of the Arab women with the doubly opposite sex, the Frenchman. This relationship is marked by a power struggle in which the only possible eloquence, the only weapon that could ever reach me was silence. Refusal of speech was both the starting point and the end point of our relationship(Djebar127). In this rebellion the Arab girl refuses to use specific discourse of the colonizer by turning to silence. This goes back to the traditions of her own cultural background, in which love is not verbalized. In Fantasia silence is not, however, simply proclaimed as protest all together. Silence is imposed onto women and enforced and justified by custom and tradition, which can be damaging and smothering, as Djebar illustrates when she re-creates the voices of her Arabic sisters, who narrate their experiences of rape and violence during the French-Algerian war. Djebar shows that...
