Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony by Jill Jarvis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony by Jill Jarvis Mallory Nischan Jarvis, Jill. Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony. Duke UP, 2021. ISBN 978-1-478-01196-5. Pp. 273. This monograph brings together well-known and lesser-studied Algerian works of literature and considers them alongside legal writing on violence and testimony in Algeria. Through close reading, Jarvis addresses silences left in national documents, laws, and legal testimony, and shows how literature fills in those gaps, expresses seemingly unspeakable pain and suffering, and gives voice to victims not officially recognized. While not ignoring the temporal references of colonization, decolonization, and the 1990s civil war, this study foregrounds texts that unsettle established frameworks which define Algeria by the above phases. Jarvis sets out to and succeeds in centering Algeria rather than France as the site of "aesthetic innovation and theoretical contestation" (2). Highlighting the multiplicity of languages and genres in Algerian literature and resistance, the book further breaks down common theoretical binaries in Francophone Studies that have pitted Arabic against French, and completely ignored Amazigh languages and dialectal Arabic. Addressing head-on the politics of amnesia regarding the connections between Algerian colonization, Nazi violence, and military repression during and after the French-Algerian war, Jarvis shows that if Algeria has been a site of violent state repression (both French and Algerian), it has also been a site of indigenous resistance for hundreds of years. Furthermore, despite "postcolonial amnesia" at the national level, collective and popular literature, art, and activism across multiple Algerian languages and ethnicities have never stopped demanding justice in ways that cannot be articulated by existing legal frameworks. The book makes an important contribution by its attention to the ways literature imagines and expresses mourning, lamentation, and absence, and how these become acts of resistance that oppose state-sanctioned modes of mourning and martyrdom. Chapter one studies testimony through Zahia Rahmani's Moze (2003) and "Musulman" roman (2005) paired with Giorgio Agamben's reflections on Nazi camps in 1945. Chapter two studies censored and clandestine anticolonial testimonies during the latter years of the Algerian war through "quasi-legal" narratives like La gangrène (1961), Nuremberg pour l'Algérie (1961), and Djamila Boupacha (1962). Chapter three considers how Yamina Mechakra's La grotte éclatée (1979) and Arris (1999) challenge state definitions of who or what can be grieved and who qualifies as a martyr in post-independence Algeria. Continuing the idea of grief and mourning, chapter four explores translingual and alternative forms of testimony in Waciny Laredj's Sayyidat al-maqām (1993). The book concludes with a look at how novelist Assia Djebar and poet Samira Negouche work through the military repression of the 1988 protests in Algiers. Here Jarvis ties 1988 to Hirak, a multilingual movement of popular protests in 2019 that revolted against a fifth presidential term for Abdelaziz Bouteflika. This book will interest scholars of [End Page 193] North African literature broadly, but it is crucial for scholars of Algerian literature because of the variety of texts studied, inclusion of works in multiple languages, and active decentering of the European perspective. While its treatment of Berberophone languages and oral tradition only scratches the surface, it takes an important step in the right direction concerning non-standardized language and sociolinguistic practices in relation to literature. [End Page 194] Mallory Nischan University of Tennessee Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French