Recent transdisciplinary attempts to theorize an ethics of memory have centred on concepts such as melancholia, haunting and trauma. Despite being pathological states, they have paradoxically been posited as markers of ‘remembrance’ that signal the subject's ethical refusal to ‘move on’. If Algerian author Assia Djebar's literary output has, since 1995, been concerned with such tropes, I argue that her most recent narrative, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007), marks a shift away from such thinking. Rather than focusing on the spectralized others of Algerian history, Djebar's autofictional narrative enacts a return to the self. In doing so, it postulates a new model of relationality between self and other that moves beyond the limitations of melancholic possession, haunting and the traumatic acting out of the past. Drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler, this article demonstrates how Djebar's narrative seeks an ethical mode of remembrance that refuses to fetishize the traumatic condition.
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.
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