Contemporary Algerian francophone fiction, trauma, and the ‘war of memories’

Abstract

This article studies representations of the colonial past in three contemporary Algerian novels, and shows that these representations are informed by a common sense of absence, that of community in the colony, and touch upon most often on traumatic memories and images of violence. When considered in the context of the debate in France over the imperial past, called by some historians ‘the war of memories’, the different trauma discourses in these novels reveal that the three authors orchestrate an open dialogue over the allegedly positive legacy of colonization, and contest, each in her or his own way, the French attempt to come to terms with the imperial past by acknowledging colonization as a work of civilization. At the same time, they also work through their own sense of trauma, by reporting different forms of colonial violence and commemorating native resistance to colonial domination.