Témoignages fictionnels au féminin: une réécriture des blancs de la guerre civile algérienne by Névine El Nossery (review)

This study concerns women’s writing in Algeria during the décennie noire of the 1990s, a period of civil war marked by the escalation of Islamic fundamentalism and the widespread abuse, torture, rape, and murder of women. Névine El Nossery examines what it means to write about such violence and to do so in a context where a writing woman, deemed ideologically aberrant, writes at the risk of her life. Battling against the occultation of women’s experiences in journalistic and official historical accounts, the authors concerned — Assia Djebar, Latifa Ben Mansour, Leïla Marouane, Malika Mokeddem, and several others whose writings are more briefly explored — invent stories, generated by real-life experiences, that constitute counter-histories that address the period’s violent excesses. El Nossery theorizes these stories as ‘fictionalized testimonial’, a specific subset of women’s writing whose delicate points of slippage between fact and invention establish truths about what is unspeakable. This subset is carefully situated with reference to existing theory on testimony and writing trauma. Following an introductory section that covers in brief the history of the civil war and the origins of fundamentalist violence against women, the book devotes a chapter to each of the four writers, beginning with Djebar’s creative engagement with the period and the elaboration in her work of (plural) partially fictionalized autobiography. The décennie noire is seen as a turning point in terms of Djebar’s writing of violence, and her conception of historiography stands as a foundational statement for the rest of the book. Three cycles of creativity — exploring memory, orality, and nomadism — are detected in Mokeddem, and the writer’s virulent, cathartic ‘écriture du désastre’ (p. 42) is studied as well as her elaboration of a subtly lyrical mode that conjures appeasement through metaphors of the sea and the desert. The evolution of errance in Mokkedem’s vision is also explored. The chapter on Marouane is devoted to the specific problems of writing rape. Through allegory, metaphor, and the fantastic, and always from the point of view of the victim, Marouane’s intensely violent writing is shown to forge powerful accounts of this brutally annihilating experience, an experience that too readily goes unnoticed socially (and is often repressed by the victim) even in times of peace. The work of Mansour, which incorporates within fictional frameworks factual material, political analysis, psychoanalytic introspection, and journalistic reporting, is posited as the paradigm par excellence of fictionalized testimony. El Nossery sees Mansour’s approach to writing as motivated by a remedial instinct and as specifically (scripto)therapeutic. Overall this book constitutes a richly comparative study of women’s novels and short stories which grew out of the Algerian civil war and which, collectively, write women into history, dispersing historical authority while at the same time addressing the broader problem of women’s construction in Islam. El Nossery’s study is clear, persuasive, engaging, and accessible without sacrificing anything of the complexity of the issues approached. It stands as an important contribution to scholarship in the field.