Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954–2012 by Natalya Vince

Abstract

Reviewed by: Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954–2012 by Natalya Vince Emily Bridger Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954–2012 By Natalya Vince. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. In Our Fighting Sisters, Natalya Vince examines the history of female war veterans in Algeria, from the outset of the War of Independence in 1954, through the postcolonial years of nation building and civil violence, to the near present. Through oral history interviews with female veterans, Vince explores the intersections between women’s own lived experiences and the dominant, public discourses produced about them both during and after the war. Throughout the book, she explores women’s political, social and economic motivations for engaging with, appropriating, rejecting or ignoring these discourses, and argues that by participating in disputes about history, these women assert their belonging to the past while simultaneously using specific narratives about the past as a means of critiquing Algeria’s current political system. The book begins by exploring women’s involvement in the war, examining their motivations for joining, experiences of conflict, and response to both French and FLN (National Liberation Front) discourses produced about them. Vince then goes on to analyse how female veterans engaged with the postcolonial state. She explores how interviewees employ popular narratives of the “winners” and “losers” of independence; women’s role in the post-colonial public sphere; and how female veterans created a new identity as gender-neutral citizens in order to stake an equal claim in nation building. In Chapter Five she argues that, in the context of increased political dissent and violence in the 1980s and 1990s, these women abandoned their gender-neutral identities and used their status as female veterans to critique the state, creating a new feminist-nationalist narrative of the nation in doing so. Vince’s strongest argument lies in her final chapter, in which she demonstrates that women are not merely passive symbols in Algerian nationalist discourse, but rather strategically engage with these narratives and themselves contribute to the production of popular memory. Vince situates her work well within Algerian historiography, and critiques previous literature arguing that women were depoliticised and drawn back into the private sphere after the war. Our Fighting Sisters makes an important contribution to the under-studied field of postcolonial Algerian history, as well as to academic explorations of memory and public history. Vince engages with oral history theory from Europe and other North African contexts in her exploration of how women construct, mobilise or forget their pasts for various social or political means. Her gendered account of these pivotal years in Algerian history is incredibly detailed. However, in focusing on the specifics of the Algerian case, Vince makes few connections to literature and theory produced on female combatants or veterans in other African, Middle Eastern or Third World contexts. This is surprising given scholarly acknowledgement that women’s involvement in Algeria set a precedent for the rest of the continent, and the frequent comparisons made to Algeria by academics working on women in other areas. Vince’s research primarily comes from her interviews with twenty-seven female veterans, twenty-two of whom were from urban, middle class backgrounds while the remaining five were less well educated, rural women. She found a significant difference between the ways in which these two groups engaged with historical discourses; given problems of literacy and language, rural women were less aware of, and thus borrowed less from, national frames of memory. Her work thus privileges the voices of urban women, and where discussions of rural women do feature, they tend to distract from Vince’s aim of exploring the intersections between private and public memories. However, Vince’s refusal to simplify her interviews into a single, cohesive narrative can also be seen as one of the greatest strengths of the book. She admits that her research involves a “tricky triangulation of sources,” as she draws on media reports and archival records to supplement her interviews (95). Nevertheless, the account she presents is remarkably detailed and nuanced. Resisting the temptation to silence the disparities between her interviews, Vince embraces the contradictions and disagreements between her informants that result from...