Talk:Women in the Algerian War

The portrayal of Algerian women during the war through colonial postcards:
Algerian author and poet Malek Alloula (1937-2015) in the Colonial Harem (2004) recollects colonial postcards of Algerian women during their “Golden Age”, that being the time period between 1900 and 1930. In Principle, postcards are characterized with “having neither depth nor aesthetic pretensions”. They are supposed to be this neutral mean of communication between people from different locations. However, in the Colonial Harem, Alloula deconstructs this common assumption, and shows how colonial postcards became “one of the forms of the aesthetic justification of colonial violence”.

When French armies settled in Algeria, along with them came photographers and artists eager to explore the Orient, this “Other” mystical and exotic place that used to be the dreamland for the West. Alloula notes how this is a revival of an orientalism that was maintained by no longer popular paintings. In a way, colonial postcards reactivate the obsessive eagerness with the Orient and democratize the practice of orientalism: access to the Orient’s perceived exoticism becomes affordable and reachable to all: the tourist, the solider, and the colonizer, who are all enthralled by the idea of taking a glimpse of a North African city.

But Alloula argues very clearly that postcards are a source of a “pseudoknowledge of the colony”. They don’t represent Algeria nor its women truthfully, but they rather project their phantasmal scenarios and stereotypes imported from the West on them. In this sense, Alloula draws the powerful conclusion that colonial postcards distort the Algerian society’s structure, traditions and customs. This is best illustrated by the portrayal of Algerian women through these postcards, which constitutes the theme of Alloula’s book. The idea of the private, veiled Algerian women in her harem obsessively interests and enthralls the West. She is imagined as this erotic, sensual, almost mystical creature, laying leisurely in her Harem. In this stereotypical idea lies the very motivation of the colonial photographer: he goes to Algeria to finally capture what he has long imagined and dreamed of. Yet, the first thing that strikes the photographer is that Algerian women, contrary to his expectations, are unreachable. They are veiled, and their body isn’t inviting to be explored and photographed. Alloula elegantly says that the veil stands as the symbol as a brutal rejection for the photographer, as it completely shatters his hopes for voyeurism: “the exoticism that he thought he could handle without any problems suddenly discloses to him a truth unbearable for the further exercise of his craft”. Alloula even goes further into observing how the photographer is caught at his own game: the Algérienne, through her gaze “concentrated by the tiny orifice for the eye” just like that of a camera, is the one capturing the photographer.

Thus, the photographer feels challenged, but not any less discouraged. In fact, he pursues his endeavor through staging photographs to meet his desired imagined scenarios. If Algerian women won’t engage in entertaining his desires, he will pay models recruited from the margins of society to do so. In his studio, he would meticulously try to enact his phantasms through controlling everything: from the decorations and the attire of the model to her posing and gaze. He first starts by unveiling the model and goes further into demanding that she exposes her breasts, so as to eroticize the Algerian women’s body.

The very act of unveiling argues Alloula, is the starting point of the “distorting enterprise” that is the postcard. It is distorting in the sense that it abruptly changes the Algerian women’s reality, by projecting and imposing on her western imported orientalist dreams and scenarios. The act of unveiling stands as a “symbolic revenge upon a society that continues to deny him access and questions the legitimacy of his desire”. It is a tool of possession, of domination and of violence, as it appropriates and objectifies the body of the Algerian women. Thus, the colonial postcard becomes the embodiment of “the colonial spirit in picture form”, and the instrument of what Alloula calls “a double appropriation”: one of space, referring to how the photographer’s studio is transformed to distort Algerian reality, and one of the body, referring to how the model’s body is objectified to please the photographer and the imperial ideology. Of the most striking collections of postcards that Alloula presents and analyses in his book are the ones portraying Algerian women in prison and the ones showing “traditional” Algerian couples. Women in prison:

The photographer stages scenarios of Algerian women imprisoned in their own homes. The paradoxical nature of this idea is fully intentional. It bears the unsettling message that the Algerian women, because she is veiled, is oppressed in her own society. The religious and cultural value of the veil is distorted by the photographer and transformed into a tool of oppression. This shows how colonial postcards stands as another aspect of French colonial policy as a subversion of Algerian identity and reality. By staging photographs of imprisoned women in their own homes, the photograph sends a clear message to the world: French presence in Algeria is meant to liberate Algerian women from the oppression that their own traditions and men impose upon them. The colonial enterprise is thus abusively justified through exploiting the noble idea of feminism to serve France’s colonial machine.

Couples:

Another striking illustration of how the colonial postcard imposes the Western reality on Algerian society and distorts the reality of Algeria is staging couple photographs. Alloula argues that the idea of the couple is imported because Algerian society’s foundation is the family that extends to the clan or the tribe, and that goes beyond a mere association between two individuals. In other words, the western idea of the couple is unconceivable in Algerian society. Yet, the photographer, as clearly demonstrated by Alloula, doesn’t intend to truthfully portray Algerian society. He instead projects western imported stereotypes and principles upon it, without any consideration to the “social equilibrium” that is intended to be preserved by not mixing the sexes in Algerian society.

Through this book, Alloula shows that colonial postcards weren’t just colonial postcards, their scope goes beyond their so-called informative and communicative purpose. They stand as a tool of colonial dominance over Algerian women, and thus over the Arab World: “Possession of Arab women came to serve as a surrogate for and means to the political and military conquest of the Arab world”. Alloula further argues how the eroticized Algerian women portrayed in these postcards metaphorically stand as “trophies” of war. Women have a symbolic value in a war, their raiding is the ultimate reward of the victor, and they are the “spoils of victory” and the “warrior’s reward”. Unveiled and sexualized, these colonial postcards fallaciously claim to have liberated Algerian women from the prison that is the Harem. Alialelf (talk) 12:31, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: POLC 3200 African Politics
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