Lecture empathique et trauma de la guerre d’Algérie chez Assia Djebar, Boualem Sansal et Leila Sebbar

This article analyses the narrative processes and literary strategies that seek to engender the reader’s empathy for the main characters in three Francophone texts that depict the trauma of the Algerian War of independence. Each text starts from a real event by intertwining historical facts and the present with fiction, allowing for a better understanding of the postcolonial situation. These expectations are reinforced by Djebar’s and Sansal’s paratexts. Drawing on the theories of Suzanne Keen and Fritz Breithaupt empathy can especially be favoured by internal focalization, the characters’ empathic interpersonal relationships as well as polyphony. The imaginative construction of the other is emphasized as necessary, while the detailed description of historical facts may rather provoke feelings of pity. A fortiori, empathy can decline or be blocked in the passages, which go against the moral convictions of the reader. This imaginative resistance is due to the fact that these passages concern reality and not fiction

History and Identity according to Leïla Sebbar

Leila Sebbar, since the beginning of her literary work, has been describing her identity experience connected with her mixed family origins: the writer’s father was Algerian and her mother French. This prevailing thread in her texts demonstrates the weight of the (re)construction of identity, frequently incoherent and delicate, in order to confirm her ethnic and cultural affinity.The author of this article is interested in problems, so close to the writer, of identity and history. The point of departure of the reflection on Sebbar’s attitude towards mother tongues of her parents is the analysis of her autobiographical novel “Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père” (2003). “We are not born with one identity, an identity is always gained, built”, maintains Sebbar and through this statement she confirms the role of the cultural baggage in the broad sense of the word, in the life of an individual coming from a culturally diversified environment. The questions of the ignorance of the Arabic language also lead the writer to define not only the picture of the individual family history but also common history, the history of the inhabitants of Algeria during the French colonization. The Seine Was Red: Paris, October 1961 (1999) is a story in which its author continues to exploit, tirelessly, the issue related to the history of its two countries: Algeria and France. For Leïla Sebbar, to return to the traumatic events of the massacre of dozens of Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961 means to enter into incessant dialogue with the painful past. It seems that the writer’s will to confront the past is one of characteristic qualities of her works. In an original, far from stereotypical, way she tries to disclose errors and fights the oblivion and repression of uncomfortable events from history. The aim of the article is to analyze the non-stereotyped strategies that Sebbar uses to build his characters and to reflect on the modes of representations of History and identity.

A Place of Dialogue

Contemporary writers create narratives that delve into the residual effects of Western colonization while integrating them into a larger ethical discussion about the complicity and responsibility of the colonizers as well as the formerly colonized. In so doing, late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century authors such as the French–Algerian Leïla Sebbar and the Algerian-born Jewish–French Hélène Cixous, whose works are situated in the larger framework of memorial writing about colonial Algeria, engage with the melancholic behaviors rooted in the traumas of the past, as both individual and collective phenomena.

The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French

"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence of colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue – in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era’s concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation, and literature’s ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.