International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2003

The opening formula to stories in Arabic, ‘It was and it was not so ... it happened and it never did,’ reflects the ambivalence of contemporary Moroccan writers towards the recording of history through writing. In his autobiographical novels, particularly Parcours immobile and Ailen ou la nuit du récit, the Moroccan Jewish writer Edmond Amran El Maleh questions the legitimacy of the ‘official’ and ‘objective’ accounts of the past and offers an alternative to historical narratives. Through metafiction and dialogic voices that unsettle fixed notions, he suggests that only fictional and oral accounts can capture the complexities of historical and cultural representations. He also examines the role of photographs in the reconstruction process of memory. El Maleh exemplifies his own ideal of a writer who preserves and revives the past in order to open the way to a better future.

Djebar distinguishes herself from other writers of her generation by the primacy she assigns to the feminine in the elaboration of knowledge and the rehabilitation of collective memory. She has shown herself to be a committed writer, determined to rethink the place of women in Muslim society. Her critical approach is inscribed within an interdisciplinary framework and is impacted by both new historicism and postmodern theories. Her use of metafiction allows her to transgress the theoretical barriers raised by traditional criticism. This transgression is visible in almost all her works, which show with elegance the impossibility of separating the fictional and the historical. To separate herself from the dominant discourse, Djebar locates herself and her writing entre-rivages. She dialogues with both Western and Oriental cultural traditions. In this study, special attention will be given to the strategies Djebar uses to re-establish the ancient memory and to rethink the place of women rawiyates (storytellers) in the elaboration of historical discourse.

Algerian Salim Bachi’s Le Chien d’Ulysse (2001) reveals a world that is caught in the overlapping of truth and myth, hampering the construction of what Pierre Nora describes as the lieux de mémoire necessary for the health of a society’s collective memory. Principal protagonists, Hocine and his friends, are victims of a chaotic parable alluding to the sociocultural disarray which has reigned in Algeria in recent years. Their attempts to construct lieux de mémoire in order to discover the truth about their history and the memories on which it is founded, fail. Hocine, like Salim Bachi, cannot explain how religious fundamentalism came to ravenous, overwhelming power in Algeria during the 1990s. Bachi’s tale is one of a society turned upside down, forced to live a reality that offers little possibility of historical, accurate memory. Such a reality is and was during the 1990s, for the Algerian author, intellectual, journalist, and philosopher, one that had to be rejected.

According to Gérard Noiriel, immigrants have almost no place in the national memory of France, which seems to deny that its colonial past is inextricably linked to its current situation regarding North African immigrants and their descendants. In Parle mon fils parle à ta mere (1985) and Fatima ou les Algériennes au square (1981), Leïla Sebbar places North African immigrant women at the forefront of her narratives. These women construct memory as bricolage, using bits and pieces from their past, and confer it as a legacy to their children, who in turn absorb it or reject it along with the influence of French culture. The women thus reweave unofficial history; this places them in the shadow of the official ‘grave-keepers’ of memory. In so doing, their places in the margins of society can be viewed as ‘radical spaces of openness’ rather than closed spaces of victimization.

Born at the beginning of the twentieth century, raï has imposed itself as one of the most important forms of expression in North Africa, especially Algeria. Fashioned from a series of chaotic moments, shocks and counter-shocks, raï became, over time, the kind of popular music we now know. This essay attempts to trace back the socio-historical and cultural paths taken by this music and its artists.

Lucie Hotte (dir.), La Littérature franco-ontarienne: voies nouvelles, nouvelles voix Ottawa: Le Nordir, 2002

Yasmina Khadra, L’imposture des mots Paris, Julliard, 2002, 177 pp.

Louise Dupré, Jaap Lintvelt et Janet M. Paterson, Sexuation, espace, écriture: La littérature québécoise en transformation Québec: Éditions Nota bene, 2002.