zaouia: a community built around a sanctuary where noble families descended from the local saint live.
zen oak: a type of oak typical of the Mediterranean coast.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR
ASSIA DJEBAR won the prestigious Neustadt Prize for Contributions to World Literature in 1996 for perceptively crossing borders of culture, language, and history in her fiction and poetry (previous winners include Max Frisch, Francis Ponge, and Gabriel García Márquez) and the Yourcenar Prize in 1997. She is a novelist, scholar, poet, and filmmaker who won the Venice Biennale Critics Prize in 1979. She writes in French and her books have been translated into many languages; those currently available in English are A Sister to Scheherezade (1993), Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1993), and Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1992).
Algerian with Berber roots, Djebar was educated in France and in her homeland. She is currently Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Louisiana State University. She lives in Paris and in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
BETSY WING is the author of Look Out for Hydrophobia, short stories and a novella and has published in The Southern Review and other journals. Her translations include Helene Cixous’s The Book of Promethea, Didier Eribon’s Michel Foucault and more recently The Governor’s Daughter by Paule Constant as well as poetry and essays by Edouard Glissant (Black Salt and Poetics of Relation). She lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.