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- Far away from football, an event at the French Academy, an Algerian woman enters today under the dome.

- Assia Djebar is the first Maghrebi personality to be elected Academician.

- In her work, she defends women’s rights in the Muslim world, in parallel she taught French literature in the United States.

- Assia Djebar becomes a symbol of the relationships that tie France and Algeria. Nathalie Hayter.

- It is one of the inevitable steps of the protocol: the official handing over of the new Academician’s sword. Assia Djebar submitted to it with good grace.

- She demanded to have her initials carved in Arab on her sword and also the word PAX, peace in Latin, as for her both languages and cultures are closely linked.

- In a few hours, the first Maghrebi personality will thus be received under the dome and according to her in auspicious circumstances.

- I am the fifth woman and I have the seat number 5, twice then. So as a fact, in Islam, it is a lucky number. It’s Fatma’s hand.

- Assia Djebar is a gifted child. The daughter of an Algerian school teacher, a student at Normale Sup, she is just 20 when she publishes her first novel.

- The others will come next. Her books are often committed, in particular about Muslim women’s right.

- In 1979 Assia Djebar launches herself into cinema. Her movie, “The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua”, will be banned in the Maghreb but praised at Venice Biennale.

- Aged 69, the new academician published about 20 books, all of them in French, an obligation during the colonization but to which she got used to with time.

- What is it to be a Maghrebi when you speak 2, 3 languages, and to try to make understand that it is a wealth, that my French text is the result of the weaving of several languages.

- An Algerian woman, French speaking, Muslim, famous worldwide and little known in France. I think that it is almost, I would say, the honor of the French Academy to recognize her.

- As for the 38 present Academicians, they only need to read Assia Djebar’s works. As she says with humor, many of them may have never read my books.