Representing Trauma: Minotaurs, Myths and l’Indicible in Qui se souvient de la mer

Abstract

For over 132 years, the Algerian population endured harsh treatment, directly and indirectly, at the hands of the French colonial regime, resulting in intense suffering and trauma. The memories of colonialism and the events leading to the decolonization of Algeria became part of l’indicible. The troubling and violent war affected Algerian collective memory, imposing psychological suffering just as the long years of colonialism had done. Ways of coping with and sharing these traumatic events varied: repression, realist representations, or the use of symbols and surrealist imagery. Mohammed Dib, a Francophone Algerian author who published his first works during the colonial period leading up to the Algerian war, chose to use symbolism and surrealist images. Qui se souvient de la mer, the fifth novel by Dib, written during the armed conflict in Algeria and completed before the result of the struggle was certain, is a symbolic representation of the Algerian war told through the lens of an unnamed narrator. The novel overflows with surrealist imagery, science fiction neologisms, symbols and classical mythology to portray the indescribable trauma of war, l’indicible, on the memory of the colonized. These shared symbols seek to move beyond individual perception to capture the totality of the experience. Joseph Ford argues that ‘literature is very rarely produced in the immediate moment of conflict, but part of a process of reflection that occurs after the putative end of conflicts’.1 Mohammed Dib’s work, therefore, provides a rare insight into the psyche of an author writing in a time of conflict and the implications of this on the literature produced. His decision to portray this revolution through abstract means reflects his unique view of the world at this moment in time. This article analyses the modalities used by Mohammed Dib in Qui se souvient de la mer and the difficulty of representing trauma in literature during times of conflict.