Silence as Resistance in Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World

This essay reads the hidden histories of the First World War and the Algerian War of Independence in Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World, focusing on their representation of a feminized resistance to war that takes silence as its most powerful weapon. In contrast to the privileging of bearing witness in post-Holocaust theories of language and suffering, this essay argues that Barker and Djebar ultimately suggest that, in the face of war’s atrocities, not speaking is an equally valuable act.