Performing the Future of Memory: Algerian Playwrights in France
- Performing the Future of Memory:Algerian Playwrights in France
Janice B. Gross is Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages and Chair of the French Department at Grinnell College. Her current work examines how francophone theatre expresses the problematic of cultural identity and memory in the context of France and Algeria. Using interviews with Algerian playwrights in Paris, she has recently published on Slimane Benaïssa's drama of terrorism in Theatre Journal and on the representation of women in Fatima Gallaire's plays. Forthcoming work includes a study of approaches to staging religion in works by Mohamed Kacimi and Slimane Benaïssa. Her essays on French women's writing for theatre have appeared in Modern Drama and French Review.
Notes
1. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
2. Voices of protest to the official commemoration program appeared at the opening of the 2003 events. See Metref's editorial "L'autre Algérie," the debate of the question "Faut-il boycotter l'Année de l'Algérie en France?" in Libération, and the dossier "L'Année de l'Algérie en France" in Théâtres.
3. In their introduction to Post-Colonial Cultures in France, Hargreaves and McKinney present an exploration of the "post-colonial problematic" with its competing notions of identity as expressed by minorities within the context of France's historically centralized approach to "national" culture.
4. Kateb Yacine described his goal at the time of Algeria's call to resistance as "une sorte d'accouchement de l'Algérie par un livre" [a way of giving birth to the nation of Algeria through a book] (Poète 27).
5. A closer study of this process of devolution from fils as biological "son" to FIS as amputated political construct is presented in my essay, "The Tragedy of Algeria: Slimane Benaïssa's Drama of Terrorism."
6. My essay on Gallaire in Subversion du réel presents many examples of her female characters' ability to dream beyond the realities of the present and invent solutions, however utopian, for the future.
7. "Quand je me vois nu dans une glace, j'oublie la faim et le froid, je pense à ces millions d'hommes agglutinés, entassé les uns sur les autres, de l'autre côté de la Méditerranée, et qui rêvent de vivre, ne serait-ce qu'une fois dans leur vie, ma nudité de tous les jours."
8. "L'Algérie me fait penser à un être cher que l'on retrouve le visage brûlé. Face à lui, on peut crier d'effroi pour dire la monstruosité de sa métamorphose, ou prendre le temps de le caresser et chercher, sous la blessure, les traits de beauté que le feu a voulu ravager."
Works Cited
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