Colonial Trauma: A Study of the Psychic and Political Consequences of Colonial Oppression in Algeria. By Karima Lazali

Abstract

Karima Lazali’s extraordinary book is undoubtedly a milestone in postcolonial and decolonial studies since the publication of Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (1961) and his posthumous Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté (2015). Lazali offers a comprehensive reading of coloniality in Algeria and of the long-lasting effects which France’s colonial violence and domination (1830–62) had on the subjectivities of the colonized, but also on the post-Independence political order, leading to the Internal War (1992–2000). Lazali’s perspective is based on her psychoanalytic practice located in both Algeria and France. Her methodology appeals to transdisciplinarity (history, literature, anthropology, psychology, sociology) in order to elucidate the blank spaces and ideological blind spots created on both sides of the Mediterranean by coloniality. Lazali exposes the legacy of colonialism and the traumas to which it subjected the population: ‘an unusual psychic phenomenon […]. The clinical psychologist is forced to deal with a history deprived of archives, literally and metaphorically. It is now no longer a question of deconstruction, but one of reconstructing traces that exist outside of memory’ (Colonial Trauma, p. 5). Lazali unseals the Algerian colonial world in its totality and dismantles its binary logic (reflected in France’s and Algeria’s frozen, antithetical attitudes regarding colonialism). She enlists key but often lesser-studied Algerian authors (for example, Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche, Kamel Daoud, Tahar Djaout, Nabile Farès, Mouloud Feraoun, Wahiba Khiari, Mouloud Mammeri, Yamina Mechakra, Arezki Mellal, Rachid Mimouni, Samir Toumi, Kateb Yacine, Amin Zaoui) to give expression to the blank spaces of historical records, alerting readers ‘to how a text is continuously shaped by its invisible margins’ (p. 7), taking them closer to what has been and continues to be erased by the political order.