Testimony and Relationality in Boualem Sansal’s L’enfant fou de l’arbre creux

Writing before the contentious Algerian Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation of 2005, Assia Djebar remarks that, “une solution en somme ‘à la Nelson Mandela’ de l’Afrique du Sud d’aujourd’hui aurait pu se concrétiser” (Le Blanc de l’Algérie). Benjamin Stora similarly probes the parallels between the “first” and “second” Algerian wars, suggesting that the ostensibly mimetic relationship between the two derives, in part, from the ubiquitous framing of the anticolonial war as a binary opposition that simultaneously represses the multiple truths of the war. Boualem Sansal’s novel L’enfant fou de l’arbre creux engages with the concept of the TRC, but it shifts the focus beyond reparation to a sustained form of “working upon the past.”Sansal’s diegesis resists ideological categories and national boundaries, suggesting that a more multifaceted and transnational historiography of the anticolonial war is necessary.