Assia Djebar, the Algerian writer, filmmaker, and scholar, has gained wide international fame and recognition and has most recently, in June 2005, been admitted to the Académie Française. Her work addresses, in many forms, the quest for identity and for freedom for herself, for Algerians and for all women, and whose work tirelessly challenges oppressive elements of her tradition. This she does by inscribing women's voices into the history of Algeria and the history of Islam. While much of the criticism written on Djebar's work has justifiably treated her centering on women, little attention has been given to related aspects of her work, including the representation of masculine identity. Even if paternity figures prominently in such works as L'amour, la fantasia, and throughout her works in its concern for heritage, it is the role of the husband that is directly addressed in Ombre sultane. Likewise, it is interesting to note that the figures of the brother and the son are fleeting in her work. This is perhaps because the writing of Djebar is almost always foregrounded as a writing of a woman who has to contend with a dominant paternal heritage that has manifested its most social limitations for the narrator in the marriage of the couple. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ombre sultane, a story entirely dedicated to the failure of a marriage.

In this work, it is not only the husband's role that will be examined in relation to troubled masculinity but also that of Isma, the narrator. Isma partakes of the husband’s role in her relation to Hajila. Furthermore, she embodies both male and female identities, as she is both subject of the narrative gaze and object of its desire. The shadow to the solidarity story of sisters is precisely the reality of the rivalry, the complicity in a patriarchal system, and the internalization by Isma of its masculine structures of desire and of identity in her quest for self and for freedom. The shadow of masculine identity is revealed as its violence and moral impotence, but that identity is also revealed as a shadow, anonym, dead, empty, displaced.