Backstory: Assia Djebar, the unlikeliest French 'immortal'

Académie members serve for life, and the French, without the slightest hint of embarrassment, call them the "Immortals." Among those admitted over the centuries were Louis Pasteur, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean Cocteau, and Voltaire. The now-iconic French writer Victor Hugo tried three times to join before he was finally admitted.

Djebar acknowledges the weight of all that history. But, she says, "it's for others to say what the symbolism is, not me."

Many describe it as a breakthrough. Here, after all, was a fierce proponent of Algerian independence who once wrote that the French language had advanced in the world "on roads of blood, carnage and rape."

Addressing the Immortals, she spoke of France's colonial record in terms of "crushed human lives [and] uncountable private and public sacrifices." As her fellow Académie member, Pierre-Jean Rémy, noted in his welcome speech, Djebar's election makes some French people uncomfortable. "Even here, within these walls," he said, "I know that it can be difficult to evoke the destiny of an Algerian woman whose brothers died from French bullets or worse, while we too have our brothers ... who died from Algerian bullets or worse."

Since 2001, Djebar has taught French literature at New York University, returning to Paris for the summer to visit family and to write.

Her Paris dining-room table is piled with books and papers for her upcoming classes, lectures scheduled in European cities, and research for a book about her father that has her excavating French military records from Indochina.

Like her conversation, her interests range far and wide.

"I have books to write," she says. "I'm always running after time."

She is a wanderer at heart. She says she falls in love easily with cities where she can walk and be stimulated by the architecture. She accepted a teaching position years ago in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, because the sunlight reminded her of the luminous light of Algiers.

Barcelona tops her current list of places she could retire to someday, if she considers retiring at all. But she smiles when her mind turns to Italy. "I don't speak the language," she says, "but I adore listening to it." And then there's New York, where she walks Greenwich Village and the Brooklyn Bridge, writing in her head. Perhaps, she wonders, San Francisco is the place to finally settle down. She remembers the two books she has in progress and puts those thoughts aside.

In her writing, she insists that language is memory and everyone should be free to choose their own. She paid the price for that freedom. She had hoped to study classical Arabic in colonial Algeria, but it was banned by French authorities. Then in 1963, after independence, she rejected a professorship in Algiers because she was forbidden to teach in French.

Now she has a seat in the temple of French language – and she admits she feels at home.

Each Thursday afternoon, members of the Académie meet to take up the task that has occupied them for three centuries. They write and edit the definitive dictionary of French words. They're working on the ninth edition and were on the letter "R" when Djebar attended her first session.

The word under discussion was repère. "It's a sign, for example in a field, that allows one to see the limit of things, to mark out a space or a border," she says.

She considered making a little joke during the discussion. "While we were talking about it, I should have said, 'see, now that I'm elected into the Académie – me, a French-speaking Algerian woman – maybe that's a repère for you but not for me.' "

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