Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria is a book about expatriation, and the constant, necessary revisiting that follows. Algeria remains a focus, an object of desire throughout Djebar's corpus, but it is also a point of departure, and excludes the writer more often than it grounds or defines her. Her only locus of identification or belonging, Algeria is at the same time figured as broken, war-torn, unfamiliar and irrevocably lost. A potential symbol of difference in contradistinction to colonial influence, Djebar's Algeria is also diverse, divided and ultimately destroyed. Driven by the urge to recover her country's history, Djebar repeatedly returns to Algeria's past only then to interrupt the narrative of its shaky development. The native land is the object of a quest, inciting the writer to invent an identity and a genealogy, but it also resists and eludes that quest. It offers glimmers of familiarity, hints of a home, but under closer inspection shatters and disseminates the cultural security that Djebar strives to create and represent. As the quotation reproduced above suggests, this sense of alienation may not be a straightforward or completed movement of expatriation, but the writing is constantly jolted by its movement, by a sense of doubt concerning its author's enclosure within a secure set of borders or a defined locus of identification.