Anne Frank Goes East: The Algerian Civil War and the Nausea of Postcoloniality in Waciny Laredj's Balconies of the North Sea

Abstract

Countering the Eurocentric view that the entire Muslim world denies the Holocaust, this paper demonstrates how Maghrebian writers have engaged in the Shoah through the local aesthetics of Sufi Islam and the blood ties of Andalusia rather than the patronizing prism of western humanism. Waciny Larej 's Balconies of the North Sea (2002) is a typical case of the transgressive Arabic literature which continues to be ignored by Western academia for various political and ideological reasons. Through the testimonial accounts of Yassine and Anne Frank, Larej instrumentalizes the Holocaust and uses the textual space of the novel as a proxy setting for the war crime tribunal thwarted by Bouteflika's decree of national amnesia. Whereas Holocaust testimonial literature is based on a crisis of truth (Shoshana Felman), the testimonial literature ensuing from the Algerian Civil War revolves around a crisis of state responsibility.