The Colonial Culture and the Difficulties Experienced By Muslim Women in Asiya Cebbar'S Work Titled There Is No Place For Me in My Father'S House

Abstract

The author/narrator animates the memories of childhood, puberty and adulthood returning again to the memory in the novel named Baba Evinde Bana Yer Yok of Asiya Cebbar. During this narration, her father plays an important role especially in her conscious and in her future life. He sometimes becomes a hardhearted censor and sometimes libartarian. But Asiya still admires him secretly. She tries to shape herself in this uncertain attitude of his father. In fact, Asiya Cebbar tries to mention two major problems among her memories of her country trapped under the French colony. One of them is the problem of identity revealed as the result of the colonial culture imposed, and the other one is the fight for freedom of Algerian woman. Whether being colonized or being in the colonizing countries, people might not know what to do and how to act, and they naturally are drowned in a crisis of identity. Asiya tries to display the problems that the women face in the society she lives in from her point of view. While she is exposed to the clothing style, habits, religion and values of dominant culture, she discovers the presence of a completely different another world with the influence of books she read at school and with the life styles of her friends in the dorm which she tastes freedom. The author, portraying her own life, plays a leading role on the freedom of woman in the Algerian society which has been forced to make important changes under the pressure of colonizing countries.