Book 2 Algerian Women
In researching Ellen’s life, her own reality and misplaced identity of being presented as a wife and therefor reflecting my own reality and at times misguided identity to the mysterieus tales of a 1001 nights to Victorian women working in factories to feminist writing by Mouloud Siber and Seddiki Sadia on the travels of the orient. I read about an Algerian artist called Baya Mahieddine born in 1931 in Bordj el Kiffan. Her brilliant paintings of colourful women clothed in beautiful fabrics with their dark hair and eyes outlined in dark kohl intrigued my sense of the identity of Algerian women compared to the identity of the women on the front page of Elle’s book. My researched of “herstory” is yet again based on so many variants of the way in which women so easily are portrayed as a wife of someone. Early research presented Baya as wife number four of an Algerian man, had to give up her passion for painting and education, that marriage barred her from fulfilling her life. Later reading presented her as a woman determined to make her own choices.
‘But the artist refused to define herself using the terminology of the Western canon. She created work that was deeply personal, rooted in her childhood and her home. As Sana Makhoul asks in her research paper on the artist, ‘Why do we have to define and categorize artwork from non-Western cultures by imposing on them Western definitions and terminology?’
Between Ellen perceived as a feminist travel writer in the Victorian era, Baya as an Algerian artist born between two world wars and Erica (myself) born whilst Baya was still alive on the same continent a connection was stitched together.
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