4 ideas
As a small girl in the colonial village where her father taught French, Djebar climbs onto a bicycle with the French neighbours' children. Her father, a modern, French-educated Algerian man, stops her in front of them: he does not want his daughter showing her legs. The public ban teaches the child that her body is something to hide under a man's watching eye, and she carries that lesson for life.
At seventeen, after a quarrel with her young fiancé in Algiers, Djebar runs and throws herself toward an oncoming tram. The driver brakes in time. Writing fifty years later, she reads the act not as lovesick despair but as her body's blind revolt against the ban it had absorbed from her father. The act becomes the knot her whole memoir is written to untie.
The same father who sends his daughter to French school, lets her study, and refuses to veil her also polices her body, her letters, and how she is seen. His liberation and his confinement come from a single protective love, so the daughter cannot rebel against one without betraying the other. The result is freedom of the mind held together with a captivity of the body.
The colonized girl schooled in French belongs fully neither to the women's world of her mother's Cherchell nor to the French world of the classroom and the boarding school. Each space takes her in on conditions and watches her as an outsider. Even her father's house is no place where her whole self can live. This placelessness is the condition that later turns her into a writer.