by unveiling womens situations and making it public; they feel shame and guilt because they are stigmatized by Arab society. Like Djebars Algerian sisters who unveiled and threw their vulnerable bodies literally into the front lines of battle during the Algerian War, Djebars commitment to and quest for liberation herself, for her sisters both past and present, and for her country render her painfully exposed and vulnerable(Ghaussy10). Living as a Westerner exposes Djebar though, but at the same time it also alienated her from the protective and nurturing traditional realm of her childhood. The matrons of Djebars youth we recognize that although a French education will spare the young girl from a life of seclusion, it will also serve to exclude her from their company. This initial expulsion and exposure are complicated by another, which has its roots in the very culture from which Djebar was progressively alienated. Her upbringing taught her never to use the first person singular pronoun I to talk about herself. In this novel the chapters in the first person are told by Djebar, indirectly. These womens stories may or may not be real, but the cries are. The reason for this ambiguity is so Djebar can tell her stories in with others so no one knows her story directly.Fantasia represents the rewriting of Algerian history from a feminine stance so that these screams will be heard and so that collective oral history transmitted by women may also be inscribed into the fabric of Algerians past. Womens bodies become monuments and privileged sites in this re-inscription process at the heart of Djebars work. These bodies testify to, and can be read as, the story of womens active presence in history....
