From Orality to Reading in Maïssa Bey’s Bleu Blanc Vert: Transgression, Imagination and Self-Assertion

Maïssa Bey’s novel Bleu Blanc Vert (2006) depicts the evolution of newly independent Algeria from the Evian Accords in 1962 to the outset of civil war in the early 1990s. Its historical framework spans three decades in the daily lives of ordinary citizens residing in Belcourt, a working-class neighborhood of Algiers.¹ The text’s portrayal of national transformation through the lens of the personal highlights the residents’ function as a microcosm of Algerian society with diverse beliefs, perspectives, and ethnic origins.² This cross-section of the Algerian population serves as a backdrop for the progressively intimate relationship of Ali and Lilas, the novel’s two adolescent narrators, as they mature into adulthood, marriage, and parenthood. Intertwining chapters, alternately entitled “lui” and “elle,” reinforce the duality of narrative voice, legitimize multiple perspectives on Algeria’s changing landscape, and offer insight into interpersonal relationships in Muslim society. Bey’s approach restores her compatriots’ agency and fundamental subjectivity that was silenced under colonial imperialism and has been disregarded by the FLN’s (Front de Libération Nationale) single party government. As Bey declares in Nouvelles d’Algérie: “Je me suis attachée à présenter des hommes et des femmes, des femmes surtout, pris dans les rets d’une Histoire qui ne retiendra pas leurs noms” (12). Through the telling of personal stories, (“histoires”), Bey circumvents the pitfalls of officially documented history (“Histoire”) which often overlooks the contributions of ordinary citizens to historical events. Her personal and political resistance to hegemonic forces, (such as the control exerted by the FLN), as well as to traditional historiography underscores the diegesis of Bleu Blanc Vert, foregrounding individual stories during a time of political transformation in postcolonial Algeria.

The thirty-year time span underlying the chronological structure of Bleu Blanc Vert constituted a period of rapid political and social change in Algeria, as the country disengaged from more than a century of colonial rule and attempted to establish a national identity. This evolution can be most clearly discerned through the shifting roles of women in Algerian society: “Indeed, women are at the core of the cultural continuities, mutations, contradictions and inconsistencies,” asserts Marnia Lazreg, “The entry of [Algerian] women into the worlds of school and work has made them singularly conspicuous, considering their past invisibility. Since 1962, the presence of women in the public sphere, no matter how limited it is in absolute terms, is the most significant aspect of postwar Algeria” (Lazreg 172, emphasis hers). Following independence and prior to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, Algerian women largely profited from a greater and increased ease of transition between private and public spaces. During former President Ben Bella’s socialist government (1962 – 1965) and continuing through the presidency of Houari Boumédiène (1965 – 1978), Algeria became more urbanized and young women were granted unprecedented access to formal education as well as legal equality with men under the 1976 National Charter. Referring to the twenty years immediately following Algeria’s independence, the historian Benjamin Stora has observed:

L’évolution du taux de scolarisation des filles est […] significati(ve) des mutations produites par la ‘révolution scolaire’, notamment dans les rapports entre les sexes. […] Les jeunes Algériennes qui ont massivement abandonné le haïk (voile traditionnel) et portent le pantalon, vont être nombreuses sur le marché du travail qualifié.

(Stora 48)

Young women’s greater social visibility through education and active participation in the workforce contributed directly to a generational gap with women who remained largely illiterate and veiled in public. According to Fatima-Zohra Oufreha, a majority of Algerian mothers, particularly in urban areas, embraced their daughters’ aspirations as an indication of a cultural revolution promoting a positive image of women in society: “La véritable révolution silencieuse est là, inscrite dans les désirs et les stratégies de femmes qui ne veulent plus que leurs filles aient le même destin qu’elles! Elles vont donc, par leurs stratégies de contournement et de persuasion, accompagner et permettre la concrétisation de leurs...