Polygraphies: Francophone Women Writing Algeria by Alison Rice (review)

Polygraphies presents new research in contemporary francophone women’s writing on Algeria as the country attempts to move beyond the violent civil conflict of the 1990s. The Introduction sets out the context and offers a rigorous theoretical framework in which questions of testimonial, autobiographical, and fictional narrative are placed under a deconstructive microscope; Derrida, Cixous, Sarah Kofman, and Rousseau offer the space for a theoretical discussion surrounding the possibilities of testimony, fiction, and literature more generally. The book’s title, which refers to the ability of autobiographical or testimonial writing to speak on behalf of others, presenting multiple historical subjectivities and ‘truths’ through a singular autobiographical body, doubles as an image for the lie detector machine, the ‘polygraph’, which such literature simultaneously ‘trumps’. Structuring her study around a series of founding women writers, Alison Rice is able to bring together authors whom we might not otherwise find in a single volume. With each of the four parts taking as its root the work of one or more key founding figures in women’s writing — Marie Cardinal, Cixous, and Assia Djebar — further chapters, on contemporary writers, are framed in new and original contexts, which allow the reader to make links between twentieth- and twenty-first century literary production emerging from Algeria that might otherwise be overlooked. The author locates the younger generation, as represented by Maïssa Bey, Malika Mokeddem, Zahia Rahmani, and Leïla Sebbar, in the thematic and theoretical lineage of the older one. Although the increasing popularity of Camus in Algeria makes his appearance less surprising, the contextualization of Rice’s argument in Cardinal, Cixous, and Djebar, which presents the ‘mother’ as both physical and symbolic site of a third narrative identity — what Rice, after Bey, calls the Algerian ‘terre-mère’ — offers something of a new linkage, one not previously made between Camus studies and Algerian literature. The remaining chapters draw on the experience of geographical and intellectual exile, which applies in varying degrees to each of the writers studied here, and the more particular experience and representation of the ‘fille de harki’ in Rahmani’s work, closing with a chapter on the place of Algerian women’s writing on the world stage today. The result could itself be described as a kind of ‘polygraphy’ that unites the selected authors across previously distinct disciplinary boundaries and succeeds in opening up the possibility for a multidirectional historical criticism of their respective works. While contributing to existing criticism on Djebar and Sebbar, this book makes new and important contributions on writers who have hitherto received less critical attention. Rice’s work is one of the first extended examinations of Bey’s œuvre in anglophone scholarship, and offers readings of Cardinal, Cixous, and Camus that signal new directions in the contemporary use of their writing, particularly within Algerian literature. Polygraphies will appeal to both students and researchers working in francophone Algerian literary studies, gender studies, and, perhaps more broadly, to those interested in the writing of conflict and history through literary fiction in the contemporary postcolonial world.