Incomplete Death: Snapshots from a Wounded Collective Memory

Published in 1995, Le blanc de l’Algérie reconstructs moments in the lives of different generations of Algerian writers, therein breathing new life into their silenced deaths. Even though the book was inspired by the brutal assassinations of Mahfoud Boucebci, M’Hamed Boukhobza, and Abdelkader Alloula, the author informs us that during the process of writing:

In the section titled La mort inachevée, the book sheds light on the death of important literary figures, including Jean Amrouche, Jean Sénac, Malek Haddad, and others, while weaving their stories into the larger narrative of memory in Algeria. The sudden murder of these three major intellectuals serves as a pretext and a reminder for Djebar to dissect the ways in which death has deprived Algeria of its intellectuals, on the one hand, and how official practices have silenced crucial aspects of the Algerian past through rituals of commemoration invented to supposedly sustain the memory of the nation, on the other hand.Footnote ¹⁴

The Algerian military’s abortion of the 1992 democratic process, which would have brought the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) to power, plunged Algeria into one of the most murderous episodes in Maghrebi history. FIS’s projected winning of both rounds of legislative elections in 1991 and 1992 was the fruit of a long-term, but slow process of a new brand of Islamization taking hold of Algerian society. The rise of the FIS and the ultimate termination of the democratic process were both direct results of the Front de Libération Nationale’s lengthy rule. Firstly, the nationalist government’s adoption of a radical Arabization process led to the importation of thousands of teachers from the Levant who slowly entrenched the Muslim Brotherhood version of Islam in the Algerian Muslim society. Secondly, the FLN’s three-decade rule of Algeria failed to concretize the promises of independence, thus pushing Algerian voters to identify in the FIS a political alternative to the FLN. When the projections showed that the FIS was going to win the majority of parliamentary seats in the second round of parliamentary elections, President Chadli Bendjdid resigned, creating a constitutional vacuum, which in turn embroiled the country in murderous violence. More than two hundred thousand people were killed, and thousands of others experienced the agonies of the decade of terror in significant ways.Footnote ¹⁵ This bloody decade, which spanned the period between 1992 and the 2000s, was the consequence of the FLN’s refusal to accept that times had changed and that Algerian society had transformed in ways that old FLN rhetoric was unable to resonate with. In fact, the FLN itself embraced Islam as an ideology in its later years, which further complicated the false argument claiming that the struggle pitted Islamists against secularists.

Boucebci, Boukhobza, and Alloula were assassinated in cold blood in the period between February 1993 and March 1994 at the height of the relentless terroristic violence. Although the circumstances of many of these assassinations remain completely obscured, which still feeds continued debate over the role of the Algerian authorities in the intensification of this internecine violence, the incontrovertible fact remains that several important journalistic and literary figures were brutally murdered during this dark era. Because political assassinations were so frequent during this period, some scholars, like Julija Šukys, coined the phrase “Algerian intellocide” to describe the killings that targeted prominent figures.Footnote ¹⁶ As William Quandt writes:

Statements made by FIS leaders, such as Anouar Haddam, and by former intelligence officers, including Colonel Mohamed Samraoui,Footnote ¹⁸ do nothing but further blur the possibility of ever establishing the identities of the perpetrators of the killings, who wiped out much of the Algerian elite.Footnote ¹⁹

“En souvenir de trois amis, disparus”: thus, Le blanc de l’Algerie is dedicated to the three intellectuals whose names followed the dedication. Disparu in French means, among other things, dead, departed, and missing. The word choice in this dedication is neither coincidental nor fortuitous. For the author to clearly signify her refusal to accept the premature death of her intellectual friends and call off their mourning, she reports them as disappeared. Disappearance may very well turn into reappearance one day given disappeared persons’ communities always nurture the hope of their ultimate return. This return, however, may not necessarily be physical given Djebar’s statement that “blood does not dry in language.”Footnote ²⁰ This metaphor about the impossibility of blood drying in language combined with the incompletion of their death (mort inachevée) transforms the text into “un lieu sans lieu (u-topos)” where “we do not die.”Footnote ²¹ Only in language, and through remembering, is this biological law unsettled and the physically dead human beings brought back to life. Djebar herself has underlined that she did not “believe in their death: because of this… it is unfinished.”Footnote ²² Regardless of the impossibility of the physical return of the three intellectuals, their textual resurrection refigures their lives and endows them with public signification. This is a signification that Gayatri Spivak has compellingly redirected toward autobiography’s enabling of history writing in provocatively writing that “autobiography is a wound where the blood of history does not dry.”Footnote ²³ In stressing the impossibility of blood drying in language, death and the mourning ensuing from it are challenged in Le blanc de l’Algerie.Footnote ²⁴ Consequently, because the novel dispenses with death, which is associated with blood coagulation, healing, which should normally ensue from mourning, remains open and in textual, perpetual becoming.

Instead of mourning her friends, Djebar has chosen to immortalize powerful snapshots from their lives.Footnote ²⁵ From California to Oran, Alloula, Boucebci, and Boukhobza reemerge to converse with the author both in her dreams and promenades, and these conversations are caught in stirring moments that freeze time and discard death. While honoring her duty to remember her friends Boucebci, Boukhobza, and Alloula, Djebar gives free rein to her dialogues with her murdered friends to reveal “what each of these three intellectuals represented, in his singularity and his authenticity, for those close to him, for his town of origin, his tribe.”Footnote ²⁶ She opts for a snapshot technique to present highly charged moments of their provocative existence. As Linda Myers has written, the snapshot has the power to “help us remember and imagine and write.”Footnote ²⁷ When we read through these mnemonic images, each one of these three disappeared intellectuals leaves us with a potent visual photograph that continues to reverberate in our minds, urging us to make sense of its circumstances and broader significance. These Algerian snapshots have the iconic power to signify for themselves, destabilize the viewer, and trigger larger questions about the subject in question, which, in this case, is the memory and politics of political murder in Algeria.

One such potent and politically charged snapshot is Boucebci’s recounting of his story with one of his patients. Although the patient spoke impeccable French, dialectal Arabic, and Berber, he chose to address Boucebci, his physician, in classical Arabic, which Boucebci did not master. Fully aware of the identitarian disorders implied in such a linguistic choice, Boucebci urges his patient to “[b]e simply Algerian! Be yourself.”Footnote ²⁸ Read in the context of 1980s Algeria, this seemingly simple injunction is a profound diagnosis of and remedy to the Algerian malady: the failure to perceive and appreciate Algerian pluralism as a source of richness. Instead of being divided into inimical camps along the lines of linguistic choices, Boucebci called his patient, who can also be considered an allegory for the wound-laden Algeria, to merely be himself. Not only did Boucebci provide the diagnosis, but he prescribed the treatment as well. After narrating the story, Djebar explains that Boucebci was “thinking privately that half his therapy would be done!” if the patient were to be himself.Footnote ²⁹ Instead of striving to be French or Levantine, Boucebci still urges Algerians to embrace their diversity. Linguistic and identity disorders, as this patient’s case demonstrates, can be representative of the state of a nation that failed to value its diversity. To further argue her point, Djebar cites the Algerian-born member of College de France and Islamologist Jacque Berque, who stated five days before he passed away that Algeria “has shown a talent for creating a major problem out of something that began as an advantage!”Footnote ³⁰

Le blanc de l’Algérie: No Mourning, No Amnesia

Interweaving today’s assassinations of intellectuals with deaths from the more distant past destabilizes the state’s desire for collective amnesia. Amnesia results when important events, stories, or people fail to have a meaning in social memory. In the historiographical arena, Michel-Rolph Trouillot has identified “the making of sources,” “the making of archives,” “the making of narratives,” and “the making of history” as the crucial moments in which silence—and amnesia by extension—enters the “process of historical production,” and thus social and cultural memory.Footnote ³¹ Muting the text forecloses individuals’, communities’, and events’ ability to signify for the wider society. Here, I find that Le blanc de l’Algérie is Djebar’s endeavor to put an end to the textual aphasia imposed on the stories that deviate from the official narrative.

Le blanc de l’Algérie battles amnesia at the source. Illustrative of this fact is Djebar’s reconstruction of the differential presence of Ahmed Zabana’s and Ferradj’s stories in the Algerian social memory. In the middle of her narrative about her disappeared friends, Djebar takes us all the way to Kateb Yacine’s apartment in Paris, where Ali Zaamoum, Yacine’s friend of thirty years, remembers June 18, 1956.Footnote ³² Ali was only twenty-two years old at the time of the events he is narrating. Zaamoum tells Yacine, in the presence of Djebar, the circumstances in which two Algerians citizens, Ahmed Zabana and Ferradj, were guillotined on the same night. Even though “Zabana and Ferradj have their heads cut off in the name of French law,”Footnote ³³ their uneven presence in Algerian historical narratives and social memory is emblematic of the workings of institutionalized forgetting. Only Zabana is remembered in Algerian history, whereas Ferradj’s story is besieged and doomed to be forgotten. Because Zabana’s “way of death” was in full compliance with the sacrificial, nationalist plot, his story was integrated into the national script. His final statement as he faced death: “I die, my friends, and Algeria will live!” has metamorphosed into a powerful motto and a rallying cry for political legitimacy, which perfectly fits the chivalrous nationalist narrative of the post-independence state.Footnote ³⁴ Ferradj, on the other hand, resigned to die like a human being and failed to “die like an ‘authentic’ Algerian!”:Footnote ³⁵

Ferradj’s unheroic response to his execution excluded him from the heavily guarded pantheon of patriotism. As a result, Ferradj’s supposedly cowardly demeanor in the face of the guillotine blacked out his story from memory and history, whereas Zabana’s memory is honored through the establishment of a national museum that carries his name in the city of Oran. Zabana’s heroism has also inspired a biographical film while Ferradj is simply forgotten. It does not matter that he was guillotined the same night as Zabana, likely by the same guillotine. However, Le blanc de l’Algérie uses Zaamoum’s eyewitness testimony to revive a memory of Ferradj. The novelistic rehabilitation of Ferradj concurrently rehabilitates many other victims of colonialism whose manner of death contests the state-imposed criteria dictating who deserves to be remembered or forgotten.

Le blanc de l’Algérie illustrates how “excessive commemoration” overshadows critical questions about the FLN’s past.Footnote ³⁷ Similarly to exclusion from the sources, as theorized by Trouillot, excessive memorialization overshadows countless others who are left out of commemorative rituals and practices. The glut of memory has equally served the leaders of independent Algeria to either impose amnesia on their opponents or control the public circulation of their memories. Benjamin Stora perceptively contrasts France’s repression of the memory of the Algerian war with Algeria, where a “commemoration frenzy founded the legitimacy of the military state, dissimulating the pluralism and clashes that had existed between the pro-independence movement and within the FLN itself.”Footnote ³⁸ Given the fact that in addition to being a novelist, Djebar is also an academic historian, her understanding of excessive commemoration’s amnesia-inducing function cannot be overstated. Consequently, Djebar’s resuscitation of the little known anecdotal and arcane stories, like Ferradj’s in Le blanc de l’Algérie, attributes the continuity of series of political murder in Algeria to official amnesia and offers mnemonic accountability as a means to engage with these concealed (hi)stories.

Excessive focus on the praise of the dead had in itself become a source of trauma, PTSD, and mental illness. Those who deviated from the “normal” course established by FLN’s nationalist discourse were considered an anomaly, and thus de facto excluded from the nation. One such example comes to us from the cases Fanon analyzes at the end of The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon analyzes the cases of a young, educated Algerian man whose professional dreams did not align with the logic of martyrdom. A discussion with his parents one day, however, indicated to him that his pursuit of professional advancement placed him with the “colonial state”—made him a traitor of his people. Since that conversation with his parents, this twenty-year-old man suffered from what Fanon diagnosed as “[a]ccusatory delirium.”Footnote ³⁹ The social imaginary in which the culture of jihad predominated pressured this man to forsake his professional dream and slip into a state of madness that led him to seek death at the hands of the French to prove that “I am not a coward. I am not a woman. I am not a traitor.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This case specifically brings attention to silenced cases of trauma and PTSD caused by intra-Algerian dynamics and imaginaries about what it means to be or not to be part of the liberation struggle. Djebar’s excavation of these hidden stories is what enables me to make this connection with the case Fanon discusses and dates from 1955.

Writing against amnesia places Djebar in a frontal confrontation with official and institutionalized forgetting. Nowhere else is this clearer than in Djebar’s insertion of the story of Abane Ramdane’s execution in Le blanc de l’Algérie. Ramdane’s story calls into question the supposed unanimity over his martyrdom and heroic status after Algeria’s independence. An important leader of the FLN, Ramdane vehemently disagreed with Houari Boumediene during the Algerian war,Footnote ⁴¹ which ultimately led to his assassination in 1957 on a farm in the northern city of Tetuan, Morocco.Footnote ⁴² In order to save face, Ramdane was sanctified and declared a shahīd (martyr) of the liberation even though his death was most likely at the hands of Boumediene’s wing in FLN. Le blanc de l’Algérie’s retelling, however, thrusts us into the ceremony of Ramdane’s reburial in his Kabyle village of Azouzza. Again, based on the memoirs of Ali Zaamoum, Ramdane’s reburial ceremony is cast as a terrain of contestation where the sanctity of death did not serve as a bulwark against the demands of historical truth. No sooner had Krim Belkacem, a former FLN leader, started his speech about Ramdane’s significance in the liberation struggle, than a member of Ramdane’s family from the attendance:

The speaker accuses Krim Belkacem and Ben Tobbal, another FLN leader also present at the ceremony, of being responsible for Ramdane’s assassination. Faced with staunch opposition, Krim Belkacem finally interrupts his speech to admit, “I understand the pain of Abane’s relative…. The file of this case is in the hands of the government. I request that it be reopened…. I am not the only one in this business.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Only then did Ali Zaamoum gain awareness of the festering rottenness in the Algerian revolution.Footnote ⁴⁵ The act of unearthing Ramdane’s dead body happened in tandem with the witness’s realization that the founding event of contemporary Algerian history conceals putridity. What ensued from this realization is a resignification of the three pompous burials of Ramdane’s corpse before its final rest in the “Carré des Martyrs,” where Ramdane is “buried next to… Krim Belkacem, his murderer, lying not far from the imposing tomb of Boumediene, the latter being in fact the murderer of the murderer.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus Krim Belkacem, who was later murdered by Boumediene’s men in Germany, lies between his victim and his killer in a most sacred and honored section of Algiers’s El-Alia cemetery. In this way, Le blanc de l’Algérie lays bare the politics of commemoration. The novel shows that the commemoration of Ramdane’s death and the multiple exhumations and inhumations of his body, which are showered with official recognition along the way, are mere subterfuges to distract attention from his political murder. Eulogy, heroization, and ceremonialization, undertaken with the goal of healing and mourning (and moving on), are shown to be mere strategies whereby institutional actors further thicken the shroud of silence that envelops a past they do not want to revisit.Footnote ⁴⁷

Contrary to the findings of several influential scholars,Footnote ⁴⁸ Le blanc de l’Algérie is not about mourning. It is rather a site where mourning is rejected. To speak about mourning, the mourner has to acknowledge the loss for which he seeks closure. However, Djebar writes that her friends “never disappeared. They are there; they sometimes come close to me, together or separately…. Whispering shadows.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Because Djebar refuses to concede her friends’ death, I contend that mourning is not the appropriate lens through which to view Le blanc de l’Algérie. Djebar’s critical position vis-à-vis lamentation gives credence to this hypothesis. The author’s conviction that mourning is the antithesis of writing further strengthens this position. Time and again Djebar reiterates that lamentation confines women to orality, which deprives them of the power of writing—the power of holding the pen.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nowhere in Djebar’s writings do we more clearly read this antimourning at work than in her references to al-Khansā’, the pre-Islamic poet, whose dirges about the loss of her brother, Ṣakhr, have become proverbial for their signification of inconsolable loss.Footnote ⁵¹ In opposition to Djebar’s diatribe against mourning, Rebecca Saunders writes that the “lament tradition encompasses a range of utterances from shrieks and cries to improvised oral performance to formal written texts.”Footnote ⁵² Where Saunders sees a performative act that “should evoke grief in participants and observers alike” and “a potent mode of resistance to religions, patriarchies, and states,”Footnote ⁵³ Djebar clearly identifies a tool that merely sustains the conditions that “asphyxiate the [woman’s] body.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Because of the limited space available to them to exert their agency, women bear their life only through “chanting, lamentation and incantation through the liberated voice.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In this sense, mourning is part of the oppressive system that robs women of their feminist aspirations.

Engaging in a literature of mourning would be a total failure to account for the wounds accumulated in Algerian history. Djebar herself wonders: “[h]ow can we mourn our friends, our colleagues, without first having sought to understand the why of yesterday’s funerals, those of the Algerian utopia?”Footnote ⁵⁶ Unless today’s bloody situation is connected to Algeria’s past, mourning is a useless endeavor. Furthermore, reading this passage elucidates the importance of this quest for Djebar’s memorialization project. “[Y]esterday’s funerals” and “Algerian utopia” are two crucial phrases in this context. First of all, referring to funerals from yesterday establishes historical continuity between today’s bloodbaths and the past ones. It is true that the actors are different, but the elimination methods and even the language of demonization is the same: “ ‘terrorists,’ ‘assassins,’ ‘bandits’: the circle of words from before!”Footnote ⁵⁷ The very language that the French deployed to exterminate the Algerian resistance during the war is reproduced against a section of Algerian citizens during the bloody decade. This leads us to “Algerian utopia,” which morphed into an elusive, murderous dream. The hefty dream of a modern, democratic state after independence from France proved to be a mirage, which disillusioned many Algerians from the generation of the resistance. Consequently, mourning would be futile as long as the roots of the violence remain. Mourning would resemble treating the symptoms without curing the malady. Accordingly, if mourning were to be undertaken, it would occur after engaging in the necessary process of understanding how the collective Algerian project derailed from its course.

A counterargument could be made, however, against my assertion that Le blanc de l’Algérie is antimourning. Writing in itself could be considered a way of mourning because writing is another way of disposing of the mourned in the written text. According to this argument, the text could be seen as a cemetery where one comes to terms with loss. Nouri Gana writes that:

Whereas Gana’s assertion states that writing about an object of loss turns the written work into a repository for remaining feelings of guilt or incompletion, Djebar’s approach is the total opposite. In Djebar’s understanding, writing accounts for blood, keeps it fresh, retains it, and thus sustains its life because it never dries when it is in language. The approach Gana suggests would necessarily lead to forgetting and amnesia, which is exactly what Le blanc de l’Algérie is seeking to counteract by reopening multiple other wounds stretching into the Algerian past. Djebar’s text, therefore, is not a site where the author rids herself of the grief associated with loss, but a locus where life is given its fullest meaning in remembering multiple generations of disappeared Algerians. It is also a space in which Djebar’s academic reflections are entwined with her literary skill, which makes writing to move forward an unlikely position.

Both mourning and amnesia have dangerous ramifications for a people. Niederman asserts that amnesia causes vulnerability, and most dangerously the amnesic person has “to accept on faith what they are being told about themselves, and their past and their history.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Again being aware of the politics involved in these choices, Djebar seeks to turn writing into a site in which remembering and celebration actively engage with larger questions about the nation’s past, present, and future, but not simply as a repository where the author disposes of her sorrow. The text is a location where the work of time is suspended or even annulled because the “strangled, the suicides, the murdered, nestled in their somber history in the hollow of tragedy” are resurrected even after three decades of their disappearance.Footnote ⁶⁰

Writing in the context of the Algerian war (1954–1959), Frantz Fanon furnishes an early articulation of the complex possibilities a deeper reflection on mourning and its absence could offer in the context of war. Fanon noticed that because of displacement and lack of social connections, the usual “lamentations, the wails, the grief-stricken faces, and the contortions of the body have today practically disappeared,” and the “classic mourning tears are hardly any longer to be found in Algeria.”Footnote ⁶¹ Fanon convincingly attributes the disappearance of traditional forms of mourning to the deep transformation that spatial and social conditions inflicted on Algerians. As a result of the ubiquitous death, “[o]ne does not weep, one does not do as before when one is faced with multiple murders.”Footnote ⁶² Although dissimilar to Djebar’s antimourning project, which I argue is articulated in her Franco-graphie, Fanon’s articulation of the context-based nature of response to death paves the way for me to further assert Djebar’s antimourning stance.Footnote ⁶³ While the Algeria that Fanon was describing in his work was going through a decolonization war that pitted Algerian nationalism against French colonialism, which gave a sacrificial dimension to death for the nation, the civil war Djebar depicts is inter-Algerian, and its dead are not necessarily dead for a reason that can be rationalized in any higher terms. Also, whereas Assia Djebar opposes mourning to keep the questions of collective memory and history open, societal refraining from mourning observed by Fanon during the war finds its justification in the fact that those who make sacrifices for a higher reason are not mourned, but commemorated.Footnote ⁶⁴ Where Fanon finds validation for his theories on decolonization struggle in this very death and the transformation of mourning that ensues from it, however, Djebar uses terrorist violence and death it causes to revisit martyrdom as a source of legitimacy.

One of the outcomes of Djebar’s rejection of mourning is the contestation of martyrdom as a source of political legitimacy. Because of their otherworldly status, martyrs cannot speak, but the words they bequeathed during their life become unimpeachable. The living, with vested interest in sustaining their legacy, transform their words and acts into instruments whereby the rule of the Algerian state is legitimated. James McDougall insightfully captures the significant outcome of the deployment of shahīd narratives in the production of political legitimacy in post-independence Algeria:

Because of excessive memorialization, the shuhadā’ al-ḥarb (the martyrs of the war) supersede all other Algerians in the authenticity of their patriotism. From their graves they hold the key to political, socio-economic, and cultural legitimacy of the living. McDougall’s analysis of this quasi-sanctification of the shahīds in Algeria demonstrates how it functions as a double-edged sword, which al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār deftly employs in his collection of short stories entitled al-shuhadā’ ya‘ūdūn hādhā al-’usbū‘ [The Martyrs Are Returning This Week] to reveal the maze of socio-economic and political interests built into this sanctification of the dead.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the title story, the potential return of Mustapha, Sidi ‘Ābid’s supposedly martyred son, after thirty years, endangers the interests of many officials who all agree that such a reappearance is detrimental to the foundations of social and political peace established after the independence of the country. Waṭṭār employs the discursive adulation of martyrs to criticize the increasingly dictatorial regime, which had been forming in Algeria since 1962, and condemns the post-independence, dysfunctional political system by “creating a situation whereby those in power are portrayed as answerable if not to the people of Algeria then to its martyrs, whether in this world as projected in the story or in the other world.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Even more subversive, The Martyrs Are Returning This Week depicts how actors across Algerian political, religious, and cultural spectra exploit the status of the martyrs and the material benefits acquired through their martyrdom to silence dissidence.

The bankruptcy of the martyrs as political capital, however, forced the state to look for fresher sources of legitimacy. The state seemed to find an alternative in the appropriation of the funerals of public figures during the bloody decade. Ali Zaamoum, Kateb Yacine’s friend, notes that the “funeral show has not only invaded the site of the dead chahids [sic], martyrs buried and reburied; this time, the cultural field—the body of the purest writers—too, becomes a pretext for graveside eloquence!”Footnote ⁶⁸ This official endeavor is, however, faced with resistance. Against this opportunistic reappropriation of intellectuals who might not even have been on good terms with the state during their lives, Le blanc de l’Algérie dislodges martyrdom narratives by depicting the secular aspects of the funerals. This secularizing endeavor is best embodied in Kateb Yacine’s funeral, which turned into a cultural festival where the Internationale was chanted, and in which:

Furthermore, Djebar employs the word baṭal (plural abṭāl), which is the Arabic equivalent of the word hero in English, to describe the dead instead of the overtly religious shahīd. Baṭal retracts the religious connotations embedded in sacrificial death implied in shahīd. Djebar wonders “[w]hy not the abtals [sic], the war heroes, the volunteers who offered their lives, their ardor, why already that hyperbole, and by suspicious consensus?”Footnote ⁷⁰

Recasting the national struggle in secular terms frees space for criticism and paves the way for the delegitimization of the instrumentalization of the dead to lock the living into authoritarianism. In the meantime, the cemetery—especially in Yacine’s funeral—is the locus where both secular and religious discourses confront each other over liturgical language. The imam’s exclusive use of Qur’anic Arabic in a predominantly Berber region during the funeral and the fierce opposition that his behavior elicited from the Berber and French-speaking attendees herald the painful years that lay ahead for Algeria. They were already harbingers of the systematic attacks against Kateb Yacine’s literary and intellectual legacy after he passed away and in a way constituted a premature announcement of Algeria’s abysmal descent into the black, bloody decade.Footnote ⁷¹

The Significance of Activating Memories of Political Murders in Franco-graphie

Having addressed the politics underlying Assia Djebar’s rejection of mourning in Le blanc de l’Algérie, I now turn my attention to the discussion of the significance of Djebar’s Franco-graphie in accounting for the spilled Algerian blood. Franco-graphie is, to borrow Jane Hiddleston’s description of Djebar’s writing, what contains “the manifold dialects and idioms that contribute to her own singular plural mode of expression.”Footnote ⁷² Franco-graphie is Djebar’s richer and more complicated alternative to Francophonie. Although the latter classifies authors based on the outward language of publication in a very reductive Arabic versus a Francophone fashion in a postcolonial context, Franco-graphie, according to Djebar’s statements about it in different contexts, carries the personal and civilizational imprint of its writer in all its diverse complexities. In a book chapter titled Être une voix francophone published in Ces voix qui m’assiègent, Djebar refutes the attempts to categorize her as a Francophone voice. Arguing that French is a language she did not choose, Djebar reiterates that colonial imposition of French removed her from Arabic, one of her mother tongues.Footnote ⁷³ Due to the specific circumstances of colonization, French was the only language “mise à disposition” (available) to the author.Footnote ⁷⁴ Writing in French then was not a choice, but a sort of unavoidable imposition. In this imposition, the author’s multiple voices emerge:

The mixture of these voices with French language was embodied in Franco-graphie. The latter, despite being the aggregate of voices in the writer’s experience, allows Djebar to restore “the traditional cultures that have been ostracized, abused, despised for a long time, to register them, in a new text, in a written form that becomes ‘my’ French.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, Franco-graphie is the melting pot of the multiple linguistic and vocal heritages passed down to Djebar, which find a home written in the author’s French. This French is uniquely imprinted because it is written in “slightly deviated French, because heard with an Arabic or Berber ear, all written against a multilingual mumble.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The practitioner of Franco-graphie, the Franco-grapher if we may, is necessarily a speaker whose language is imbued with and underpinned by multiple languages, histories, memories, and identities. These tongues, within the folds of which multiple languages and histories are dormant, finally find their written form in a subversive Franco-graphie.

The Franco-graphic practice, then, enables Djebar to undertake the provocative work of memory she carries out in Le blanc de l’Algérie. Without any pretense that French surpasses any other Maghrebi language, Franco-graphie is disposed to give their fullest expression to the political upheavals that beset Algeria in the 1990s and even before. It is not because French has a better sensibility to embody memory or account for the Algerian nation’s blood that Franco-graphie is the vessel through which the past wounds are resurrected, but rather because French is the shared terrain where Franco-Algerian memories interlace and scuffle. Furthermore, speaking the French language is one of the reasons these intellectuals were murdered. Moreover, the civil strife of the 1990s was in one way or another a belated consequence of the French colonial legacy because the French language is one of the colonial residues whose status the FLN duplicitously exploited to achieve shortsighted political gains. Hence, Djebar’s Franco-graphie transforms French into a site where she addresses memories of Franco-Algerian violence despite her mostly Algerian focus in Le blanc de l’Algérie.

Le blanc de l’Algérie’s Franco-graphie also evokes a history that Djebar recovers in Vaste est la prison.Footnote ⁷⁸ Reminding the reader of Polybe, the Greek historian, whose “writing is nourished by all [the] simultaneous destruction” he witnessed,Footnote ⁷⁹ Djebar imagines herself as a modern-day Polybe who infuses her writing with all the murderous acts that she heard of or witnessed throughout Algeria’s independence. Although Polybe wrote in his mother tongue, his language, which was “espoused by the cultivated minds of the West at that time, runs freely over the tablets and is polygamous!”Footnote ⁸⁰ Thus, Franco-graphie’s capacity to engage memories of murder and political violence is only matched by its rootedness in ancestral traditions. The bilingual stele of Dougga, which “fuses together two cultures,” Berber and Latin, underlines this “polygamous” and cross-fertilized texts that constitute Djebar’s Franco-graphie.Footnote ⁸¹