Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Case of Algerian Women

Algeria exemplifies colonialism’s innate ability to appropriate and determine not only the means of domination but the means of resistance as well. The case of the Algerian women and their veiling demonstrates the consequences of colonialism’s want to ensure as Fanon says that “everything (that is, progress) comes from itself” and their prerogative to render “formerly inert element(s) of native configuration” (i.e the veil) into battlegrounds between the colonized and the colonizer. As a consequence, the two major hierarchies that dominate the existence of the Algerian woman, the infantilization by the Islamic patriarchy and the sexual objectification by the French colonists converge into a singular epistemology that renders the hope for freedom, at least the freedom that is conjured in revolutionary imagination, utterly fantastic. The singular epistemology that results is that the veil represents that which is not European and that which is cemented into the very being of Algerian culture. Whereas de-veiling is (rendered) an essentially European exercise, the clearest manifestation of the role of Algerian women as allies in “cultural destruction”. This condition of being caught between a proverbial rock and a hard place is ultimately what underscores everything the Algerian women do, their bodies a perennial platform for struggle. Fanon would say that the Algerian woman’s “ardent love for the home” is not flight but rather the preparation for battle, that she fights against the “colonial negation” of the structure of Algerian society, and that she is an active combatant. However, the sheer bravery and suffering of the Algerian women cannot be confused with the attainment of freedom.

For the Algerian women, every movement whether towards tradition or modernization is marred irrevocably by demands and prevailing notions from either the colonized or the colonizer. Her veiling is the embrace of the Algerian man’s prerogative to not see her and to render her invisible. Her de-veiling is the consequence of the European male gaze, his want “to see” when he encounters an Algerian woman, his frustration in being unable to have her, a despicable outcome of the violence purported by and inspired from the erotic imaginations of European men against Algerian women that creates “fertile ground” for “criminal acts” by Europeans. Once again, this demonstrates the condition of being caught between a rock and a hard place that severely undermines the liberation movement. In her de-veiled state, she is both the subject of “abject humility” in European imagination and as an ally of cultural destruction. And it is from this state of “abject humility” that the responsibility is thrust upon her to take part in the revolutionary struggle, as de-veiled fighters manipulating the system the French had put in place precisely to disarm them. But as mentioned before, this is a victory for the aforementioned colonizer’s mission to overpower the cultural traditions of the Algerian people by appropriating the means of resistance and evidences the sacrifice of Algerian women much more than means of attaining some sort of freedom, lest one confuse freedom with the absence of French imperialism. Moreover, Fanon himself states that the doctrines of Revolution never facilitated revisionist interpretations of the veil and so even at their bravest with grenades strapped to their chest, the women of Algeria were still devotees to a revolution that was not entirely their own. When in the third phase, the veil is donned again, it is once again a response to the “necessities of combat”.

The historic dynamism of the veil may undercut completely any argument that the colonized are bound by tradition or the Algerian women are invisible, but in the case of Algeria said historical dynamism is a product of the demands of revolution and therefore cannot be used as a means to assert that the Algerian women achieved freedom as is perceived in the imagination of the revolutionary. Even if the colonizer does not grasp the “intellectual reality” of the colonized’s psychological response to reject the norms of the occupier, this still remains a victory for the colonizer in many ways because he damages an otherwise potentially organic process by which progress and freedom (for the Algerian women) can be attained by encoding it what will remain a colonially inherited ethos. De-veiling will thus forever be a colonial product. Therefore, by appropriating the means of both oppression and revolution and by binding the brave women of Algeria to respond to the needs of the revolution (and to find themselves in it), it can be said that the answer to “What Freedom?” may be far from anything the revolutionaries imagined or promised.