Guest-Editor Note

Abstract

The present collection of essays on Algeria was conceived in 1998, after watching a program on W (alias WTN) in which Rachida spoke movingly about her family, most of whom were killed by the Islamicists and/or State police. Apart from extending a critical view of the unrest that is ripping post-independent Algeria apart to an English-reading public, Algeriad's principal objective was to reflect on what Wole Soyinka aptly called the other open sore of Africa. By no means all the issues are confronted and/or dealt with here, though the questions of colonialism, Islamism, terrorism are covered. Equally, the range of critical method, while not exhaustive, seeks to encompass politics, social criticism, critical method, deconstructive analysis, autobiography, and language. It is envisaged that the collection, given its multi-dimensional objective in poem, painting, and narrative, will extend our knowledge of the Algerian and introduce to both the general reader and student of culture a plurality of views of the current situation in that country and the world. This special issue Algeriad is about the rise of Islamism, that complex and dangerous process by means of which many people lost their innocent lives. Both narrative and poem explore and ultimately, I hope, deconstruct the binary notion of Islamism/terrorism, as they operate in a society still searching for a way out of the impasse. The collection examines the process by which, through shifts in positions, any given person can be de-authorized, eliminated, rendered invisible, and perceived as inconsequential, while others are valorized. The contributors, a team of writers, philosophers, feminists, poets, and painters, from different cultural, social, and ethnic backgrounds and positions, have had a difficult task in defining what constitutes the process of crisis from the varied individual and collective points of view, and then writing in a manner which might suggest issues that stand beyond the specific ones addressed here. That they have done so is a tribute above all to their ability to care for and about Algeria. The approaches taken by these essays range from the social to the seductive, from the theoretical to the personal. In reading and re-reading them, I find myself witnessing a process of discovery. It is as though the civil war in Algeria was being converted into new concepts of the Self, of pain, of meaning, of validity, of life and death. The essays are densely interrelated. No introduction, short or long, can deal with the issues they raise. I wish, therefore, to let the reader discover for himself or herself the wide canvas these writers and artists paint. One thing is certain: the reader is made to rub his or her face in the dirt. And if writing cannot create for the writer a paradise or hell, it certainly makes survival possible. Writing is for these contributors a personal and public commitment and testimony to ethical and literary values. I am first and foremost grateful to Kostas Myrsiades for giving me the opportunity to undertake this complex and important task, and who kindly accepted my idea about editing a special issue of College Literature. Izmer Ahmad who, after reading the manuscript, fathered a painting which he aptly called Garden for the cover. (Ironically, under French occupation, there was in Algiers, which was known at the time as le petit Paris, a public park called Le jardin d'essai: une espece d'evasion avant d' arriver a la plage). …