Testimonial texts of torture during the Algerian War: Paratexts and the obscene

Abstract

The Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) was marked in metropolitan France by divisive debates over France’s presence in Algeria and over the issue of state-sponsored torture. Two testimonial texts written during the war, Henri Alleg’s La Question (1958) and Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi’s Djamila Boupacha (1962), stand out as examples of writing about torture, due to the texts’ connections to the Parisian intellectual community, and their social, political and literary repercussions. Both texts underscore the obscenity of the act of torture and how that obscenity is recreated in torture testimonials that exist in and describe a liminal space that disturbs notions of what can be seen and heard. This article argues that the paratextual legitimisation that Alleg’s and Boupacha’s texts undergo brings the act of torture into public discourse, enabling them to become audible or readable despite the strong preference for denial and inattention.