Description Of Dreams and Assassins is the urgent and rhythmic fourth novel of Malika Mokeddem, her second to appear in English.
In exile, Kenza puts her hope in m tissage, the blending of cultures embodied by the character of Slim, he.
Of Dreams and Assassins is a protest, against the subjugation of women in Algeria and the violence of the last ten years, perpetrated by fundamentalist Muslim guerrillas.
Kenza\'s suffocating childhood in the house of her boisterous, leering father is broken only by summers in the desert, where the dates "become golden brown and gleam like little clusters of suns that mock the children." Eventually, Kenza, like Mokeddem herself, leaves her home to go to school in Montpellier, because she can no longer tolerate life in Algeria.
Kenza\'s subsequent search for herself through the mother she doesn\'t know, told in a frank first-person narrative, mirrors the struggle of Algerian women to make a place in a society that has stripped them of their rights in spite of their crucial participation in the war for independence.
Her mother leaves alone, never to return.
Born during a visit to Montpellier in the year of Algerian independence, she returns with her mother to Oran to find her father has taken another wife.
Kenza is an exile, first in her own society and later in France.
Through its heroine, Kenza, and her simultaneous rebellion and immersion in the literary classics at a boarding school, the novel dramatizes the possibilities for women to express their identities.
Of Dreams and Assassins, though not strictly autobiographical, evokes through the beauty and vastness and oppressive heat of the desert Mokeddem\'s early yearning for freedom.
Though raised in a tolerant version of Islam, Mokeddem nevertheless felt the weight of custom and tradition.
Born in Algeria to a Bedouin family that had only recently become sedentary, Mokeddem was raised on the stories of her grandmother, who encouraged her education at a time when girls did not go to school.
Description Of Dreams and Assassins is the urgent and rhythmic fourth novel of Malika Mokeddem, her second to appear in English
