Legends, memories and violence in North African cities: Urban space in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma and Salim Bachi’s Le chien d’Ulysse

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the role of urban space in two novels: Nedjma by Kateb Yacine and Le chien d’Ulysse by Salim Bachi. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s observations about the colonial city in Les damnés de la terre and Michel de Certeau’s ideas on subversive practices of city dwellers in his L’invention du quotidien, this article explores the protagonists’ experiences in the colonial or postcolonial city and the way they remap the cities with their personal narratives. It demonstrates that in the face of urban transformation brought about by colonial or postcolonial violence the mythical dimension of the city – its legends, memories and myths harking back to a supposedly pristine Algerian past – is irretrievable. With particular reference to Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and Max Silverman’s idea of palimpsestic memory, this article argues that violent nature of the cities’ past and present, along with their vanished cultural memory, prohibits the protagonists from creating a coherent historical narrative around the city, and in a wider sense from developing and sustaining the future character of Algerian cultural and national identity.