Violent Days:
Algerian Women Writers and the Civil Crisis

Patricia Geesey, University of North Florida

This essay examines several recent works of fiction by Algerian women who have reacted to a state of violence in their nation by taking up the pen in order to bear witness to the suffering of the Algerian people. Their objective is to describe the civil crisis to a French-language reading public both at home and abroad, as well as to ensure that women’s experiences of the conflict will not be undocumented for future generations. In his collection of essays entitled Comme il a dit lui (Like he said), the Algerian journalist who uses the initials Y. B. in order to protect his identity notes that “Being Algerian is itself a risky profession.”^[2] His claim is bolstered by the numbing statistics of the dead, wounded, and missing in the ongoing civil crisis. Since the start of the state of emergency, which began after the cancellation of elections in January 1992, the number of casualties has risen exponentially. Organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch estimate the number of dead to have reached nearly 75,000, most of them civilians. The civil crisis—or civil war, as the events in Algeria are most often referred to in the French media—is une guerre sans nom, “a nameless war.” This euphemism strangely echoes the manner in which the 1954–1962 Algerian war of independence against the French colonizers was initially labeled by the French.^[3] Further complicating the naming of the conflict is that even after years of bombings, assassinations, massacres, and guerilla skirmishes, many news reports still relate that “no one knows who kills.”

The most widely reported narrative of the crisis situates the origins of the turmoil in the military-backed coup d’état of January 1992, which suspended the electoral process. Some observers now note that it is difficult to account for the precise origins of the violent conflict, since the killings and the state of terror have effectively gone beyond the initial political questions. Other accounts of the Algerian crisis stipulate that its beginnings may be traced back to October 1988, when popular demonstrations against difficult living conditions and the political and economic monopoly of the ruling party, the Front de Libération National (FLN), were violently repressed by the army and security forces. In order to begin a process of national reconciliation, the government allowed for the creation and legalization of other political parties and began a hesitant plan to liberalize Algerian society. The status of women in Algeria did not benefit from this attempt at liberalization. The Family Code Laws which stipulate that women are legal minors under the authority of fathers and husbands were not changed from their conservative promulgation of 1984. According to Fériel Lalami-Fatès, a professor of political science at the Algiers Institute for Political Studies, there is a direct relationship between the Family Code and the targeting of women for acts of violence during the civil crisis. She notes: “In the eyes of the population, the State designates us [women] as submissive beings, someone to be oppressed, which makes us very vulnerable. The general perception of women produced by this law can only serve to weaken them.”^[4]

In December 1991, the first round of voting indicated that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) would win a majority in the national legislative elections. After the state of emergency was declared, the FIS was proclaimed an illegal party and its leaders were arrested. Shortly thereafter, attacks began against military officials, police officers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, journalists, doctors, and foreign nationals living in Algeria. Responsibility for the killings has often been claimed by, or attributed to, the main Islamic rebel groups, which are the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) and the Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS). In addition to attacks against individuals, there were also terrorist bombings of outdoor markets, the Algiers airport, bus stations, police headquarters, schools, and army installations. Many assassinations have taken place in urban areas; yet most recently, Western media have reported on the tragic massacres of villagers in the dead of night, with as many as one hundred inhabitants killed at a single time. The massacres and kidnappings have effectively terrorized the Algerian population, not only by the apparent randomness of the violence, but especially by the atrocious nature of the killings, with brutal attacks on civilians occurring even more frequently during the holy month of Ramadan. Not content to simply kill, these criminal assassins often mutilate and dismember their victims, with throat slashing being a frequent means of execution. In her article “What the Cadavers in Algeria Are Saying,” Fatima Oussedik notes that the choice of throat slashing as a means of execution is not random.^[5] It is a gesture that recalls God’s testing of Abraham’s faith and thus one of the most important elements of the Muslim religion. In Arab-Muslim cultural and religious practices, only animals who have had their throats slit are deemed “halal,” or fit for human consumption. Hence, murdering human beings in this fashion is seen as both an attempt to ritualize the slaughter and to annihilate the human dignity of the victims.

The present violence in Algeria has been particularly fierce against women and can be traced back even before January 1992. In their study Algériennes: entre Islam et islamisme (Algerian women between Islam and fundamentalism), Djediga Imache and Inès Nour relate that “women have been the first victims of terrorist rule.”^[6] In their study of how Islamic militant rhetoric portrays women, they note that for Muslim activists, the “explanation, definition, and articulation of a world view is essentially structured around the idea of the feminine,”^[7] while the notion of “the masculine”—ever present in the Islamist’s rhetoric—is never concretely defined. The violence that has specifically targeted women includes physical and verbal harassment in public, acid attacks against unveiled and veiled women, arson attacks against the homes of women living alone, and numerous kidnappings of young women, whose bodies are later found after the women have been raped and then decapitated. These are the types of incidents that have pushed women writers in Algeria to denounce the targeting of women, as well as to condemn the violence enacted upon all Algerian citizens.

To many observers of the Algerian crisis, it is apparent that women and their rights to self-determination have been at the heart of political and cultural debates. According to the late Monique Gadant, women in Algeria are both the “alibis” and “hostages” of all of the political camps battling for the soul of the nation.^[8] Women have become targets of sectarian violence since 1992 because they are seen as “guardians of traditional Muslim values” by some and as “agents of modernity”^[9] by others. The reports of young women attacked and/or killed because they either were or were not wearing head-coverings and modest dress, or because they worked outside the home, reveal the extent to which women are violently exploited as symbols for various political agendas operating in Algeria.

In the Algerian drama, gender issues also tend to fuse with the situation of the French language. Political scientist Yves Lacoste notes that the continued use of the French language by a significant percentage of the population even more than thirty years after independence from France is an important element in the tragic Algerian equation.^[10] In their anti-Islamist treatises, the novelists Rachid Boudjedra and Rachid Mimouni suggest that numerous francophone writers and journalists have been targeted for death precisely because their use of the French language has made it possible for fundamentalist demagogues to mark them as being “other,” as being somehow disloyal to Algerian identity.^[11] In spite of, or perhaps because of, the polarization of the language issue in the Algerian crisis, even more publications in French by Algerian writers are seeing the light of day. Sometimes written using pseudonyms, and always published outside of Algeria, Algerian literature in French has become what critics refer to as “a writing of urgency.”^[12] The term “urgency” suggests a need to bear witness, to speak out before it is too late on the tragic events in Algeria. In Algerian writing today, the prophetic pronouncement of the novelist and poet Tahar Djaout, assassinated in May 1993, has become an important intertext: “If you are silent, you die. If you speak, you die. So, speak and die!” For the women writers discussed in this essay, the theme of urgency is inextricably linked to their literary projects. They take up the pen, in the language of their choice—even under the threat of retaliation—and bear witness to the struggles of the Algerian people and their will to survive.

An examination of the works published in French since 1992 would seem to suggest that Algerian authors face a choice to either use fictional writing to describe the civil crisis, or to write a first-person account that is direct and makes no attempt to tell anyone else’s story but the author’s own. At times, for both men and women writers, their own political slant on the Algerian crisis is openly presented, and a work subtitled “novel” is more often a journal of events and a meditation on the causes and on the nature of the conflict. As with any writing that seeks to bear witness to terrible events unfolding in the present, some of the works documenting the civil war are very uneven in quality. For Denise Brahimi, the danger facing Algerian novelists at the present time is to avoid being “held hostage” by the immediacy of the need to bear witness.^[13] She notes that a writing of urgency runs the risk of being too reductive, thereby imprisoning writers in the very drama they wish to speak out against (34–35). Sadly enough, Algerian writers also risk being accused of profiting from the tragic events. In a recent review of Algerian novels published in Le Nouvel Observateur by Y. B., just such an accusation is made against the novelist Malika Mokeddem and her novel La Nuit de la lézarde (Night of the lizard).^[14] In Y. B.’s view, Mokeddem’s text is not only badly written, but it is also a virtual exploitation of the Algerian tragedy. He remarks: “But most disturbing is that behind this languid mediocrity something more serious seems to hide: a dishonesty that surfs the bloody Algerian wave. It seemed necessary to me to denounce it once and for all.”^[15] These comments, as painful as they must be for any writer to contemplate, underscore the difficult task facing Algerian writers and intellectuals today. How can the tragedy and suffering as witnessed and experienced by the writer be translated to an audience—an audience who for the present, because of the vicissitudes of the publishing industry in Algeria, is most likely to be living anywhere but Algeria? What narrative strategy will prove to be most effective in the quest for authenticity, if authenticity is indeed the goal of the Algerian novelist? How can a writer balance the need to bear witness to tragedy and the desire to protect the dignity of the victims of violence?

Assia Djebar is the most prolific and internationally acclaimed Algerian woman novelist. Oran, langue morte (Oran, dead language)^[16] is already her second work that examines some of the tragic events that have been unfolding in Algeria since 1992. In 1995 she published Le blanc de l’Algérie (The whiteness of Algeria),^[17] an intensely personal meditation on the loss of friends, fellow writers, and colleagues killed in the violence. Oran, langue morte presents a collage of short stories and a novella in which themes of violence against women in Algeria—from the time of the Algerian war of independence to the present day—are interwoven with images of the female body and feminine desire. In the afterword to this work, Djebar notes that her purpose in writing the collection has been a “desire to reach this ‘ideal reader,’ i.e., the one who, by his or her silent and supportive reading, enables writing of pursuit or murder to free its own shadow, which will palpitate as far as the horizon…” (OL 378). The image of palpitating or fluttering shadows of the women—dead from the sectarian violence or natural causes—portrayed in these narratives is evocative of so much of Djebar’s recent literary project in which she hopes to create a literary space for the memories and oral histories of Algerian women who may not otherwise find expression.

In the story horrifically entitled “La femme en morceaux” (The woman in pieces), Djebar—a historian by training—evokes a link across time between present-day Algeria and a tale from The Arabian Nights. The story tells of a beautiful and innocent wife who is murdered by her jealous husband. The woman’s decapitated and dismembered body has been carefully wrapped up in costly fabric, then wound in a carpet and thrown into the Tigris River. The caliph Harun al-Rashid, whose fabulous court is evoked countless times in the tales Scheherazade must spin to save her life before each dawn, is presented with the dead woman’s dismembered body. He declares that the guilty party must be found and assigns the task of seeking justice to his wise vizier, Djaffar. Then, cut to Algiers 1994, the French class of Atyka, a high school teacher who has assigned this particular tale to her students in order to illustrate her theory that for her bilingual Algerian students, the French language opens a unique window onto the world. In Assia Djebar’s works, the introduction of Scheherazade and The Arabian Nights serves as a powerful illustration of the wealth of Arab women’s oral literary traditions. In her novel Ombre Sultane,^[18] Djebar evokes the image of Scheherazade together with her younger sister Dinarzade to symbolize women’s solidarity in the face of male aggression. Scheherazade may also be seen as an archetype of a female narrator/author in the Arab-Muslim cultural and historic context. Aside from these images, what links Scheherazade to the situation of present-day Algerian women is the fact that she lives and speaks under the threat of losing her life—execution by decapitation at the whim of her husband the sultan. This understanding then returns the reader to the story of Atyka, the French teacher. Atyka’s story oscillates between the narrative time of Scheherazade’s tale and her presence in front of her class in Algiers, encouraging her students to analyze the gender politics and power relationships depicted in the story from The Arabian Nights. On the second to last day of when the class was to have finished discussing the story, five men—four of whom are bearded, dressed in paramilitary uniforms, and carrying guns—burst in, interrupting Atyka’s lecture. The fifth man carries a knife. They accuse Atyka of the crime of telling “obscene stories” to young, impressionable students. This scene is significant in that an Algerian teacher of French is accused of polluting young minds not by discussing a story from the French canon, but by teaching a tale from the most classical (yet still controversial) collection of the Arabic (Persian) literary tradition. She is shot in the heart in front of her class while all but one of the students hide under their desks as ordered.

The teacher’s murder underscores the abusive and irrational nature of language politics in contemporary Algeria. During the past several decades, the Algerian government enacted poorly planned language reforms ostensibly aimed at eliminating French as the language of social and economic promotion in Algeria. It has been widely observed that these reforms have contributed to the marginalization of many young people who subsequently graduated from the public schools with only mediocre competency in either Arabic or French. More recently, Islamic radicals have waged war against intellectuals who use French, claiming that francophone intellectuals belong to “The Party of France” and hence are a danger to Islam because they support a secular and democratic Algeria. By showing a group of murderous and ignorant radicals who pervert the Islamic faith as a cover for their hatred against all things seen as “foreign” or “decadent,” Djebar makes a very effective comment on the misuse of cultural and linguistic policies in Algeria today. Atyka’s attackers represent those self-appointed defenders of religious values and cultural purity in Algeria who are oblivious to the fact that The Arabian Nights has influenced and enriched the literary traditions of other nations in countless ways. Djebar’s portrayal of the scene ultimately depicts the dangers of an absurd belief in the possibility of cultural “cleansing” and “purity.” Atyka’s assassination echoes actual events from Algeria’s civil crisis. In the course of the civil war, several schoolteachers in urban and rural areas have been murdered in front of their students. In the story “La femme en morceaux,” Djebar uses fiction, or more accurately fantasy, to relay the horror that these senseless killings inspire.

Omar is the young student who does not hide under the desk as the teacher is murdered. He watches as the fifth man approaches the dying woman, pulls her head up off the desk by her hair, and slits her throat with such force that her head is severed. But Omar, still enthralled by Atyka’s voice as she relates the tale from The Arabian Nights, hears the teacher finish her lecture—imagining a talking head placed upon the teacher’s desk. In a show of solidarity with women who have been victims of unjust violence since time immemorial, Atyka is transformed into a modern-day “femme en morceaux.” Like her literary ancestor Scheherazade, Atyka faces the possibility of death with only her voice as protection. Whereas Scheherazade survives her ordeal and lives happily ever after, Atyka’s gruesome and vindictive murder suggests that the violence facing Algerian women who resist efforts to silence and control them is altogether more insidious. Atyka’s voice expires with the words: “The night is each one of our days, a thousand and one days, here at home…” (OL 213). The teacher’s final words—issued forth from her severed head—haunt Omar, and he searches for this disembodied female voice in the streets of Algiers, “Alger le blanc,” a city whose color will henceforth recall the white shroud in which Atyka’s mutilated body is taken away.

Women’s voices are also the dominant metaphor in Hafsa Zinaï-Koudil’s novel Sans voix (Without voice).^[19] In this novel, women tell their stories through oral transmission within a feminine collective or write journals in which they hope to preserve their experiences and thoughts for posterity. Zinaï-Koudil is a novelist and screenwriter whose film Le démon au féminin enraged Islamic militants because of its negative portrayal of their actions and rhetoric. Like Baya, the narrator of Sans voix, Zinaï-Koudil left Algeria for exile in France after receiving anonymous death threats. Baya’s journal makes up the bulk of this novel in which women’s accounts of their experiences in the Algerian war of independence are interwoven with narratives of what women are suffering under the current state of siege. In Sans voix, Baya’s situation in France is not an enviable one. She has only temporary permission to reside there; she does not have a permit to work, and working “under the table,” as is the case for her friend Abla, can result in deportation if discovered. Baya relies on the generosity of friends to survive. Her daily routine consists of waiting to hear about her refugee status and fearing news of more deaths and massacres from Algeria. In France, Baya is a member of a growing group of Algerian expatriots—journalists, professors, artists, and playwrights—who have fled Algeria for their safety. Life in France only offers a different sort of despair; members of her circle are tormented by guilt for having left family and friends behind. One woman has a nervous breakdown and becomes catatonic as a result of living with the fear that even in exile she is not safe from those who would assassinate her.

Sans voix does not just present Baya’s story; Baya’s narrative also evokes her spiritual communication with Aicha, a middle-aged woman who still lives in Algeria amidst a group of other women who have nowhere else to go. Aicha is a benefactor for women who are divorced, widowed, repudiated, or sent away from their families because of perceived slights to family honor. The most chilling scenes in this novel involve young women now living under Aicha’s protection, recounting what they have suffered while they were kidnapped by Islamic militant guerillas. These same women were rejected by their families because they brought dishonor to the family by having been raped during captivity. Aicha is the witness, or rather the “historian,” for the group. She writes down the stories of all the women who come to seek shelter with her group, stories of bravery and then betrayal during the Algerian war, as well as the accounts of persecution, rape, kidnapping, and murder that have beset the women since 1992. Aicha transcribes these stories so that the women’s voices will not fall silent with their death. Aicha’s important task reveals that by asserting their right to tell and transcribe their own war stories, with particular emphasis on the physical suffering, the women depicted in Zinaï-Koudil’s novel are determined that future accounts of what took place in Algeria in the 1990s will not neglect the role played by women in resisting the attempts to silence them, or to turn them into political and cultural scapegoats.

The physical suffering and the humiliations endured by women bring the narrative back time and again to the centrality of the woman’s body as a literal and also symbolic “battlefield” in Algeria’s bloody history of the 1950s and of the present day. Indeed, as the women tell their stories, it becomes clear that the violence women suffered during the colonial era and the war of independence is linked to the sectarian violence plaguing Algeria today. For Karima Bennoune, today’s violence against women is especially heartbreaking precisely because of the important role women played in the struggle to liberate Algeria from its colonial domination.^[20] Algerian women writers establish a link between women’s experiences during the earlier period and the hardships they endure today in order to underscore the tragic irony that, even after thirty years of Algerian sovereign rule, so little progress has been reached in guaranteeing women’s rights and in securing their safety. It may also be noted that by linking the violence against women by sectarian forces with their suffering at the hands of the French during the Algerian war, women novelists are suggesting that Algerian society’s enemies of the 1950s have more in common with the enemies of today than one would imagine. On a symbolic level, the images of past and present violence against women further underscore the desire of many writers to lay bare the physical, cultural, and psychological scars of women’s experiences and memories.

One of the accounts transmitted by Aicha in Sans voix symbolizes the desire to uncover physical scars while uncovering dormant memories. A woman comes to live in Aicha’s sanctuary; because of her injuries from the Algerian war of independence, she has been given the nickname “la Muette,” the mute woman. However, she is able to speak. One day Aicha questions her as to the origins of her nickname. The woman’s account is unimaginably horrific; she relates that as a young girl she witnessed her mother and siblings being killed in their own home by a French patrol seeking her father, a known member of the Algerian resistance. As was often the case during the Algerian war of independence, French patrols traveled the countryside with harki guides. The harkis were indigenous Algerians who fought with the French army. It was, in fact, the harki who ruthlessly killed “la Muette’s” mother. She escaped this scene of brutal murder only to be captured later by the very same French soldiers and harkis who had killed her family. Subsequently raped and tortured to reveal her father’s hiding place, she turned “mute” when the soldiers set their attack dog on her and mutilated her genitals. After the woman finishes this account, she lifts her robes to show Aicha the gaping crevasse of scar tissue where her genitals should be—“a veritable ‘grotto’ in her lower abdomen” (SV 185).

Aicha’s narration of this scene of “laying bare” and “bearing witness to” barbarous violence leaves the reader numb with horror. The numerous incidents of violence against Algerian women that are depicted in Sans voix run the risk of overwhelming the reader with the sheer horror of these women’s experiences, perhaps even tempting the reader to see Algerian women simply as helpless victims. But Zinaï-Koudil takes great pains to infuse her characters with dignity and the determination to overcome adversity. The women characters in this work display compassion and solidarity with other women, who in turn gain a sense of strength and community from this shared sisterhood. In this fashion, Zinaï-Koudil’s narrative emphasizes women’s empowerment by enabling her characters to bear witness to their experiences and to lay bare their scars.

In the end, exile proves too painful for Baya. She returns to Algeria in order to confront the forces of intimidation and violence that would silence her and others. While waiting for her return flight to Algiers, Baya sums up her dilemma—one that today faces so many Algerian writers: “Back there, a wall of silence will surround me; I will be mute. If I speak, I die. Silence is another form of death” (SV 201). Sans voix, then, is Zinaï-Koudil’s answer to this dilemma: even at great personal risk in denouncing the forces of oppression, her novel affirms her right to speak out.

Leïla Marouane is the pen name of Leyla Mechentel, a journalist living in exile in France. Ravisseur,^[21] her second novel, is brilliant for its use of the macabre, the burlesque, the tragic, and the fantastic. Samira, the narrator, is a young woman who has been returned, pregnant, to her family after having been kidnapped on her way home from school and held as a “temporary wife” by Islamic commandos. But the violent episodes in the streets of Algiers—called “earthquakes” by the narrator and her sisters—pale in comparison with the state of terror that reigns within the narrator’s dysfunctional, yet strangely comic, family. Beaten by her father for having “shamed the family honor” in this fashion, the reader is to presume that he would have preferred her dead rather than pregnant. Samira becomes amnesic, and her memories of her violation return only in fragments. Marouane’s novel examines the psychological effects of Algeria’s civil war through this portrait of a family in crisis. The father, portrayed as a brutal yet pathetic patriarch, spirals into madness after his wife escapes her imposed routine of daily humiliations by running away to safety in England with a male neighbor and Omar, her only son out of seven children. As the narrator’s memories of her ordeal and her return to her family resurface, she recalls a conversation with her father in which she tries to explain her absence from home which lasted several weeks. The father demands to know what happened to his daughter and the girls taken away along with her. “They raped some of us and they slit the throats of others,” she answers. “‘But to you what have they done…?’ ‘They slit my throat,’ the young girl answers. Without batting an eyelid” (R 79–80). Samira implictly knows what kind of fate her father would have preferred for her. The narrator’s own delusional state indicates the alienation she feels toward her own body. Eventually she realizes that Zanouba, the infant daughter she first thought was born to her mother, is her very own. At the harrowing conclusion, as the narrator has nearly lost her battle against madness, ill-treatment by her father, and poor health, her mother returns to take Samira and her sisters away from their living nightmare to safety in exile. Ravisseur offers a unique approach to examining the atmosphere created by the violence that has shaken Algerian society. By focusing on the drama of one particular family, Marouane demonstrates that the systemic mistreatment of women within a family is at the root of the violence facing women in the public spaces of Algerian society.

Several publications on the civil war have relied on a “chronicle” or “journal” format to trace the mind-numbing horror of daily life in Algeria since 1992. Naïla Imaksen’s La Troisième fête d’Ismaël (The third feast of Ishmael^[22] and Fériel Assima’s Une femme à Alger: chronique du désastre (A woman in Algiers: Chronicle of a disaster)^[23] are two very powerful narratives of how individuals attempt to make sense of the climate of violence in which they live. Assima’s account employs a terse, and virtually impassive, stream-of-consciousness narration as the unnamed female narrator spends her days and nights amidst an extended family in a large dwelling in an affluent section of Algiers. At the heart of this novel (potentially the author’s own journal) is the narrator’s growing awareness that she too is implicated in the civil crisis because of her gender and her social class. The narrator is most concerned with describing the psychological effects of the violence and the political turmoil on the city of Algiers as a whole. She witnesses mob rule and the wanton destruction of property by disenfranchised young men, and she feels the anger and despair rising from all sides of the city, eating away at the very heart of Algerian society—a society in which compassion for others appears to have disappeared altogether.

The narrator evokes the threat of violence that is felt everywhere in the city; however, this atmosphere is most menacing toward women. While accompanying a friend who is dressed in a bare-backed dress to check on the well-being of an elderly neighbor, the two women are targeted by bearded men riding by in a truck. They whip the narrator’s companion with a steel wire, opening a gash in her bare back. The men yell as they drive away: “Dirty whores, it’s not your panties we’re going to rip off, it’s your head!” (FA 14). Such a violent outburst stands as a verbal offering of the open hatred and murderous intentions toward women unleashed by the political and social conflicts raging in Algeria. In Une femme à Alger, the city of Algiers takes on human form: it is a body in agony, being eaten away by the gangrene of unresolved gender, political, religious, and class conflicts. The nation of Algeria is portrayed as a body at war with itself—at war with its own biological and spiritual essence. The narrator cannot escape the dismal conclusion that, ultimately, the fundamental humanity of the nation is in question: “We have sown hatred, we harvest the absurd hatred that makes monsters of us” (FA 157).

In much of the recent French-language Algerian fiction, one senses that despair has indeed begun to outweigh any sense of hope for the future. Yet Algerian writers persist in their literary endeavors even under the threat of violence. Readers abroad can pay homage to the courage and perseverance of Algerian writers by not allowing their efforts to go unnoticed. Assia Djebar’s “ideal reader” makes his or her solidarity with Algeria felt through the act of reading. The words of the novelist and radio personality Hawa Djabali, now living in Brussels, also speak to the importance of literature as testimonial in violent times of civil and sectarian strife. In a 1996 interview with the Paris publication Algérie, Littérature/Action, she was asked what, if anything, novelists or artists can do to affect the situation in Algeria. She responded: “Algeria is culturally wounded, whatever we write, we are from her and we participate in her survival.”^[24] To survive in another sense, Algerian writers need to be read. As readers, we can all ensure that the words of Algerian writers, who reach out to us from exile or from inside Algeria where many are living in hiding and on the run, do not fall on deaf ears.

NOTES

^[1] Mohammed Dib, Qui se souvient de la mer (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962) 189. All translations from the French are my own.
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^[2] Y. B., Comme il a dit lui (Paris: Lattès, 1998) 9.
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^[3] See, for example, Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).
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^[4] Fériel Lalami-Fatès, “Les femmes au coeur des violences,” Confluences Méditerranée 25 (Spring 1998): special issue, La Parole aux Algériens 206.
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^[5] Fatima Oussedik, “Ce que disent les cadavres en Algérie,” Esprit (November 1997): 6.
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^[6] Djediga Imache and Inès Nour, Algériennes: entre Islam et islamisme (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1994) 9.
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^[7] Imache and Nour 13.
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^[8] Monique Gadant, “Femmes Alibis,” Les Temps Modernes 550 (January-February 1995): 230.
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^[9] Imache and Nour 42–49.
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^[10] Yves Lacoste, “Les causes spécifiques du drame algérien ou le slogan de la guerre d’indépendence incomplète,” Hérodote 77 (April-June 1995): 3.
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^[11] Rachid Boudjedra, FIS de la haine (Paris: Denoël, 1992), and Rachid Mimouni, De la barbarie en général et de l’intégrisme en particulier (Paris: Le Pré aux Clercs, 1992).
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^[12] See, for example, S. Benaïssa, L. Sebbar, J. E. Bencheikh, W. Larej, and N. Saadi, round table discussion: “Débat: l’Algérie aujourd’hui,” Algérie Littérature/Action 10–11 (April-May 1997): 221–25.
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^[13] Denise Brahimi, “L’Algérie des écrivains,” introduction to a special issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française 521 (June 1996): 34–35.
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^[14] Malika Mokeddem, La nuit de la lézarde (Paris: Grasset, 1998).
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^[15] Y. B. “Algérie: le Nouveau Roman,” Le Nouvel Observateur 1764 (27 August-2 September 1998): 53.
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^[16] Assia Djebar, Oran, langue morte (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997). All references are to this edition and appear in the text following the abbreviation OL.
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^[17] Assia Djebar, Le blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).
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^[18] Assia Djebar, Ombre Sultane (Paris: Lattès, 1987).
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^[19] Hafsa Zinaï-Koudil, Sans voix (Paris: Plon, 1997). All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text following the abbreviation SV.
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^[20] Karima Bennoune, “S.O.S. Algeria: Women’s Human Rights Under Siege,” Faith and Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World, ed. Mahnaz Afkhami (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995) 184–208.
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^[21] Leïla Marouane, Ravisseur (Paris: Julliard, 1998). All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text following the abbreviation R.
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^[22] Naïla Imaksen, La troisième fête d’Ismaël (Casablanca: Editions Le Fennec, 1994).
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^[23] Fériel Assima, Une femme à Alger: chronique du désastre (Paris: Arléa, 1995) All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text in parentheses following the abbreviation FA.
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^[24] Hawa Djabali, “Entre urgence et création,” Algérie Littérature/Action 15–16 (November-December 1997): 229.
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