Fatima Gallaire likes to say that, for her,  writing plays happened by accident.  Although she began to compose poetry and prose at an early age, she never thought of writing for the theatre.  But in 1984, the great-grandmother who raised her, her "nounou," died at the age of one hundred and three.  This death represented "an irreparable loss,"writes Gallaire, "since she played such a large role in my memories.  I put my loss into words by writing a short story in dialogue."

It was not a long road from narration with dialogue to drama, as her first play, Ah! vous êtes venus...là où il y a quelques tombes, later renamed Princesses, was written in 1986.  Today she is considered the leading Algerian playwright and has been ranked among the top twenty-five French playwrights in the twentieth century alongside Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Koltès.

 In her many plays, now close to twenty, Gallaire challenges the boundaries between narration and theatricalization by weaving the two genres together, but this distinctive dramaturgy is not the only way she links oppositions.  Isabelle Starkier, who directed Gallaire's Molly des Sables, a play inspired by Molly Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses, said in a 1994 interview that Gallaire "reconciles...the irreconcilables: the North and the South, blacks and whites, the weak and the strong, men and women, the spoken and the unspoken."

None of these oppositions are more apparent, however, than her braiding of French and Arabic cultures.  Born Fatima Bourega in El Harrouch, a small village near Constantine in the northeastern area of Algeria, she left her homeland without warning in her early twenties to escape the misogynist attitudes which she found intolerable at the University of Algiers.  Except for a couple of years in the early 1970's, she has lived in France ever since.  The act of writing, she admits, grows out of the tension from the one thing missing from her life: Algeria.

Rimm, a character in Gallaire's play by the same name explains:  "I brought gandouras [traditional Algerian dress] with me to France because I thought I would miss them," she confides, "but it is the entire country that I miss."  The longing for her homeland echoes in all of her work, and each of her texts, written in French, relies on Arabic words and phrases repeated like a leitmotif, to nourish the language and strengthen its musicality. "I let myself be carried by my memories, by my earlier experiences, and by the Arabic language that I carry within me, all of which give a coloration, a particular radiance to the French that I write," she explains.  "When I write, I sometimes think in another language, in Arabic, a language which is powerful, redundant, and perhaps more ‘poetic' than French.  Maybe it is this translation from one tongue to another that gives my language the distortions that twist it in interesting and rhythmic ways, creating passages of shadow and passages of doubt."

As Jan Berkowitz Gross, who writes extensively on the work of Gallaire, notes: "Although she lives permanently in France with her family, her writing draws freely upon her identity as an Algerian, often revealing what cultural theorists term ‘a self split up the middle.'  Writing from her own hybridity as an Algerian woman living in Paris, she reveals the complex nature of cultural identity in a postcolonial era."

 Writing for the theatre has become very important to Gallaire since it is the most public of literary genres, and it represents, for her and all women, the metaphoric removal of the final veil:  "The theatre is the agora, the public sphere par excellence, the place that is the most difficult for a woman to make her mark.  Never before [writing Princesses] had I thought about treading there.  It was only my immense loss that encouraged me to tear off the final veil, the one glued to the skin that we wear without even knowing it."

Drama gives women a voice, and Gallaire uses that voice to force the difficult discussions about violence against women, religious fanaticism, polygamy, circumcision, repudiation, and female sexual desire into the open.  For her, theatre has always been "a liberator" since it represents a form of rebellion against repression, a refusal to remain silent and invisible.  Oliver Schmitt wrote in Le Monde in 1991 that "In the Arab world, the Algerian woman started speaking out early on, but today Islam strives to silence her.  Fatima Gallaire's work is a testimony to one fact: more than a loss, her silence would be a tragedy."

 This concern with issues that impact women, especially in Arabic countries, began with the two strongest influences on her life: her mother whom she calls a "woman with a noble heart" and her "nounou," the great-grandmother of the extended family who raised her.  Gallaire turned eighteen in 1962, the year that Algeria won its independence from France–a war that had had a major impact on her family since her father had been tortured and several uncles had lost their lives.  She arrived in Paris in 1967 and soon became immersed in the women's movement and the 1968 student revolt. But she also began her work in cinema, a passion which remains with her to today and which impacts her dramaturgy.

In 1980, she married a Frenchman, thus becoming Fatima Gallaire-Bourega, and by the following year, she became the mother of twins–events which impacted her return to Algeria for many years.  She was quite prolific during the 1980's writing plays and prose.  In 1990, she won the coveted Arletty Prize for drama in French, and in 1994, the AMIC prize from the French Academy. Gallaire continues to write plays and prose.

During her years in France, the situation in Algeria deteriorated so drastically, especially for women, that the shocking ending of Princesses no longer seems so extreme.

The French had been particularly aggressive in their repression of Algerian culture and tradition, so the War of Independence was accompanied by a need to re-establish Algerian identity, which, in turn, came to be associated with the resurgence of Islamic social and religious beliefs.  The family had always been the core of Arab life functioning as the basic unit of social organization and as the main source of personal identity.  As in other Arab countries, the honor of the Algerian family depended, to a large extent, on the behavior of the women, so all transgressions deserved punishment.

In 1984, the government passed the Family Code which restricted the public life of women, forbade marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man, and permitted polygamy.  By 1988, the newly approved constitution dropped all references to women's rights.  In the early 1990's, the Islamic fundamentalists, represented by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), won an overwhelming victory in municipal elections and represented a real threat to the government.  This led to a military coup, so radical FIS members began a guerilla war using suicide bombs, assassinations, death threats, and executions of women not wearing the veil in order to make Algeria ungovernable.  One Algerian woman sighs, "Fear is in the heart, but life goes on.  Fanatics or no fanatics, this is the only country I have."  Yet, the situation is improving as Gallaire has been able to visit her beloved homeland since 1998.