A l'coute des meskounates: la parole des possdes dans La femme sans spulture d'Assia Djebar

Abstract

In La femme sans spulture, Assia Djebar relates the story of a communal obsession shared by Algerian women of her native city: the narration and overdue inscription of Zoulikha's story, a heroine of the Algerian War of Independence who was tortured, killed, and abandoned without a burial place. This article analyzes this obsession in terms of a desire for memory, an archive fever articulated by the voices of possessed women or meskounates. The women who tell the story of this member of the resistance are inhabited by her spectral voice, a narrative voice without a locus of enunciation. A voice coming from a different place, from the Other who speaks through them and emerges into the text in monologue form allows the re-inscription of Zoulikha's story in a new discursive space of feminine knowledge. This knowledge inaugurates a postcolonial discourse within which the desire for memory articulated as archive fever is a spectral intruder, a space beyond the text confined within the text that transgresses the official discourse on the Algerian War of Independence.