The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry

Internationally acclaimed novelist, scholar, poet, and filmmaker Assia Djebar presents a brutal yet delicate exposition of how warring worlds enact their battles upon women's lives and bodies.   Foreigners both in their home and homeland, the people in these stories search for authenticity in hospitals, in homes, in family, in graves. Caught most symbolically in the crossfire are the bodies, minds, and lives of women. A French woman is renamed in order to be buried beside her Algerian husband. Another loses her daughter to that continental divide. With the will to justly carry divergent loyalties, we discover the human heart to exist in all places, within, over, and beneath any geographic borders.   With renowned and unparalleled skill, Assia Djebar does more than bring to life the unspeakable realities of war and independence. In The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry she draws lines and paints color onto the human faces that speak directly to us with resonating intimacy.   Algerian novelist, translator, and filmmaker Assia Djebar is one of North Africa's best-known and most widely acclaimed writers. Author of the acclaimed Algerian White and So Vast the Prison , Djebar explores the struggle for social emancipation and the Muslim woman's world in its complexities. She was elected to the Academie francaise in 2005 and won Germany's Le Prix de la Paix in 2000 and the Neustadt Prize for Contributions to World Literature in 1996. She is a Silver professor of Francophone literature and civilization at New York University.

A beloved author, translator, and filmmaker, Assia Djebar (1936–2015) was born Fatima-Zohra Imalayen in the Algerian town of Cherchell. Her novels and poems boldly faced the challenges and struggles she knew as a feminist living under patriarchy, and as an intellectual living under colonialism and its aftermath. Djebar’s writing, marked by a regal unwillingness to compromise in the face of ethical, linguistic, and narrative complexities, attracted devoted followers around the world, and received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Venice International Critics’ Prize, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Yourcenar Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and a knighthood in France’s Legion of Honor. She was the first Algerian woman to be admitted to France’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure, and the first writer from the Maghreb to be admitted to the Académie Française.