Political Violence and Singular Testimony

Abstract

This article examines the conflicts of 1990s Algeria and Assia Djebar’s critique of these events using the flexibility and experimentation of the novel form. The entrenched government of the Front de Libération Nationale has been engaged in an ongoing conflict with a group of radical, underground Islamist terrorists, and the result has been that both parties attempt to quash any political or cultural dissent. The government clings to its policy of strict Arabition, while the Islamists fight for the invention of a thoroughly new spiritual, Islamic community, necessarily in harmony with itself. Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Algerian White) challenges both the Islamists and the government by exposing the limits of their stultifying rhetoric, and by describing the author’s own experiences of bereavement using an alternative language resistant to generic norms. Djebar upholds unique, creative forms of commemoration that refuse to conform to the demands of Islamist ideology or sanctioned political rhetoric, and that can mimic her deceased friends’ own singular art forms. At the same time, Djebar’s commemorative text seeks a language free from convention-bound formulae and able to transcend the linear progress of a narrative necessarily evolving through time. In this sense, Le Blanc de l’Algérie uses both content and form to deconstruct the layers and masks of commemorative discourse, and the political misuse of those masks. The novel engages with the difficulties of creating an appropriate discourse of mourning while stretching and opening out existing rhetorical forms.