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

In this comparative study, Nevine El Nossery addresses the works of four Algerian female author–Assia Djebar, Latifa Ben Mansour, Leïla Marouane and Malika Mokeddem–by exploring the hybrid literary genres and narrative strategies used to capture the horrors of the Algerian civil war during the 1990s. Determined to understand how literature can translate violence, El Nossery rigorously tackles thorny questions surrounding the relationship between history, literature, ethics and testimony; the borders between fictional and factual literary production; and the differences between testimonial literature and fictionalized testimonials. El Nossery argues that these four authors resort to fictionalized testimonials as a way to fill both the blanks of the official Algerian history and the gaps between experienced and represented trauma. Fictionalized testimonials, El Nossery explains, should not be confused with testimonial literature. Even if both share the ethical need to acknowledge marginalized voices and to correct the mainstream history, fictionalized testimonials favor an aesthetic approach and the writer’s personal and intimate awareness. The attention to aesthetics, El Nossery precises, by no means interferes with the authenticity of these authors’ texts. On the contrary, working around truth by way of symbolic fictionalized narratives seems to be the only option for these four Algerian writers. According to El Nossery, they confront the atrocities of one of the most ferocious civil wars of our times and explain how women have been targeted and accused of being the origin of societal decadence, while demonstrating that fiction can sometimes be closer to the truth than historical reports. In addition to these authors’ writings, the study takes into consideration journalistic and autobiographical accounts by other female Algerian writers in the 1990s, which allows El Nossery to show the juxtapositions, intersections and porosities between the genres of fictionalized and factual testimonials.

The study is organized into five chapters. The first chapter is an introductory excursus on the Islamic historical, political and theological tenets that incubated the fratricidal slaughters in Algeria. In the following four chapters, El Nossery analyzes the ways in which each author chose specific perspectives to respond to Islamist fundamentalism and at the same time address the hypocrisy of Algeria’s official history fabricated in the forty years following independence. In chapter two, El Nossery contends that Assia Djebar recurs to a historiographical metalanguage, masterfully weaving together history and fiction as well as ethics and literature in order to write as close as possible to the Algerian civil war’s victims. Rather than commemorating fatalities, Djebar aims to recreate the victims’ stories while alive, by emphasizing women’s courage and defiance towards old and new oppressors. According to El Nossery, Algerian women’s stories ultimately allow Djebar to insert fragments of her own personal life, too. Chapter three is devoted to Malika Mokeddem’s writings. El Nossery claims that during the 1990s, Mokeddem’s narrative style was provocative, direct, trenchant and raw, flawlessly combining fiction and historical events. Mokeddem’s leitmotif of women’s nomadism became a symbolic reference attesting to women’s rebellion, emancipation and dissidence but also calling for the reader’s political awareness and engagement. In so doing, Mokeddem rewrote the Algerian civil war by showing how testimony and literature are two complementary ways of writing. Chapter four deals with the theme of rape in time of war and its historical denial. Leïla Marouane’s writings and other journalistic and autobiographical accounts are analyzed. El Nossery posits that Marouane’s baroque style combining tragic real events and burlesque is the perfect example of fictional testimonial. Thematic and textual violence rendered by macabre and comic situations allows Marouane to contextualize and focus on the devastating effects of rape and sexual repression, among which are women’s dissociation, madness and delirium. In chapter five, El Nossery defines Ben Mansour’s narrative as a scriptothérapie, which is a writing that...