Mothers ’ and Daughters ’ Memories : The Palimpsest and Women ’ s Writing during the Algerian Civil War

Max Silverman’s Palimpsestic Memory describes a “transgenerational voice of memory” which may emerge from diverse histories of victimisation. This article will seek to expand upon how this “transgenerational voice” is significant within manifold cultural contexts through examining how the mother-daughter relationship is becoming increasingly prominent within recent Francophone women’s literature from Algeria. Within the fiction which reflects upon the destruction wrought by the Algeria’s civil crisis (c. 1992-1998), the mother-daughter bond connects women’s suffering during this “black decade” with the preceding War of Independence (1956-1962). Female protagonists in literary works by authors including Malika Mokeddem and Leila Marouane are inspired to challenge and resist civil upheaval and violence through recollecting and celebrating their mothers’ earlier resistance during the War of Independence. Presenting Mokeddem’s Of Dreams and Assassins and Marouane’s The Abductor as key texts, this article considers how the mother-daughter bond emerges as a literary theme which, through exemplifying the transnational emphasis on the associations between distinct atrocities, draws attention to female suffering within both Algerian wars, developing a productive and intercultural consciousness of female-specific suffering within multiple historical traumas.

In Algeria, the decade-long civil war (c.1992-98) saw Francophone Algerian women writers "take up the pen" to document the growth of Islamic fundamentalism and the escalation of torture, rape and violence against Algerian women (Geesey,34).During Algeria's "décennie noire" (or "black decade"), Algerian women began to "dare to speak and to write" (to paraphrase Hélène Cixous) about how women's lives were being marked by the vicissitudes of war, violence and persecution (162).Algerian women's memoirs, fictions and other texts are recurrently seen as being caught between the contentious histories of both their home and adopted countries, with Habiba Deming arguing that Algerian women writers are influenced by their contradictory status as "Third World women" writing for a French-speaking "First World readership" (376).This essay, however, aims to demonstrate that such ingenuous oppositions (between secularism and religion, along with the developed and developing world) conceal more dynamic and pluralised explorations of Algerian women's life stories.
With John Joseph understanding these texts to abound with "high levels of intertextuality [and] metafictional appurtenances", I argue that these writings also draw upon memories of women's past experiences of conflict, war and persecution -most notably during Algeria's War of Independence  -to illuminate the brutality of Algerian women's lives in both Algeria and France during the "black decade" (22).Like a palimpsest, one layer of historical time (from the War of Independence) can be viewed through another layer (the civil war), drawing together disparate episodes of violence from women's lives since Algerian Independence in 1962.Through these connections of different historical times, Algerian women's writings also reveal the emotional traumas and strains ensuing from wartime migrations and relocations between Algeria and France.Whilst the immediate months after Independence saw an exodus of "pieds-noirs", or French settlers, from Algeria, the following years also saw other Algerian civilians flee their home country and its ruling party, the Front de Libération National (FLN).In response to these migrations, writers such as Djebar, Mokeddem and Marouane re-imagine the family memories and testimonies which were thought to be lost amid successive conflicts, persecutions and national expulsions from Algeria.This essay brings together two semi-autobiographical writings from the Algerian writers Malika Mokeddem Of Dreams and Assassins (Des rêves et des assassins, 1995) and Leila Marouane's The Abductor (Ravisseur, 1998) to examine how the superimposition of one testimony upon another testimony is facilitated by the relationships between female protagonists, who narrate from the setting of the civil crisis, and their mothers who lived through the final days of France's colonial administration and the War of Independence.Both Mokeddem and Marouane present the mother-daughter relationship as the bond which links women persecuted during the "black decade" to atrocities in Algeria which precede their own lifetimes.Images, figures and metaphors from the War of Independence are integrated into depictions of civil upheaval to leave an almost-indefinite, haunting residue upon the daughters' narrations of war-time violence.It is my argument that Mokeddem's and Marouane's condensing of various historical moments does not merely reproduce and re-dramatise wartime violence but critiques and recreates this history through the overlapping and interacting of women's testimonies from both Algeria's present-day and its prolonged War of Independence.

Algeria's "Black Decade" and the Palimpsest
During Algeria's "black decade", approximately 100,000 citizens were killed in the civil conflict which ensued after the Algerian army's cancelation of the second round of the country's first democratic elections in 1992 (Travis,41).This coup d'état was incited by the Front de Libération National (FLN) government, the ruling party since the country's War of Independence (1954-62), being challenged by the rising popularity of Islamist rebel groups including the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA).Yet amidst this national civil upheaval, female civilians were victimised as especially vulnerable "targets and pawns in the power struggles" between the FLN government and these extremist factions (Turshen,890).Despite Frantz Fanon declaring that War of Independence saw female rebels -who braved torture and imprisonment by the French military -"participate in the destruction of colonialism and in the birth of a new woman", the post-war decades saw the rise of Islamist ideologies which sought to suppress women's growing presence in Algeria's public society (Fanon,170).
Prominent religious factions including the FIS aimed to reconstruct a pre-colonial "golden age" (or "age d'or") in which women were to be 'guarantors of religion, family and tradition' and were prevented from "moving into the public sphere and assume significant positions of power" (Marcus, xv).In the twenty years succeeding the War of Independence, the FLN government, headed by President Chadli Bendjedid, came under pressure to institute Algeria's prohibitive Family Code (1984), which declared women as minors under their male guardians, and also attempted to implement a centralised system of Shari' a law in Algerian courts which restricted the awarding of alimony and child custody to women in divorce cases (1990).As Ranjana Khanna recognises, the FLN's compromises with these radical groups resulted in women being denied the political and legal representations which would have defended them when they were later "singled out for persecution by both religious fundamentalist groups and the state" (xiii).Whilst the FIS and other fundamentalist groups issued fatwas which demanded the "kidnapping" of women without male guardians and even the "killing of girls and women not wearing the hijab" (Turshen,898), international human rights organisations also accused Algerian security forces of "being responsible for thousands of 'disappearances'" of women and children (Perrière,34).
Thus, women allied to supporters of both the FLN government and opposing rebel groups were victims of government-backed military violence and the extremism of Islamist groups.These women's ordeals, however, have not been left without record or documentation since certain Francophone women writers from Algeria have published autobiographical or semi-autobiographical narratives of their country-women's civil war experiences of wartime rape, violence and persecution.Novels throughout the decade -including Assia Djebar's So Vast the Prison (Vaste est la prison, 1995), Feriel Assima's Une femme à Alger: chronique du désastre (1995) and Latifa Ben Mansour's L'Année de l'éclipse (2001) -have sought to reimagine the tensions between women citizens and the political powers or authorities which attempted to dictate their lives in Algeria's rural communities, metropolitan cities and even abroad during the "black decade".
From a distance of nearly three decades, Djebar and Assima illuminate an Algerian society which was destabilised by the War of Independence (and ruined by subsequent declines in national employment and living standards) whilst also reflecting on the traumas which accompanied political violence in Algeria -both colonial and postcolonial.Depictions of the trajectory between the War of Independence and the civil crisis also emerge in the publication of critiques of FLN activities both during and subsequent to Algeria's decolonisation.Andrée Dore-Audibert, for instance, with her Françaises dans la guerre d'indépendance (1995) detailed biographies of female militants who were committed to Independence during the 1960s.Simultaneously, beyond Algeria's national borders, the Egyptian activist Didar Fawzy-Rossano also tells in her Mémoires d'une militante communiste (1942-1990) (1997) of underground FLN groups in France in the wake of the Suez expedition of 1956.Their writings retell of the grief which ensued from national divisions during the War of Independence, the doubts of Algeria's future amidst escalating terrorism and the horrors of brutalities against women during the national crisis.Thus, as Stora argues, women's literature published during the "black decade" saw "the present contaminate the past", initiating an "encounter between memories of yesterday's Frenchwomen and memories of today's Algerian women writing in the French tongue" (83).
These literary analogies and cross-references allude to moments from both Algeria's colonial and postcolonial eras and produce an ultimately palimpsestic arrangement of memory.As illustrated in Max Silverman's eponymous monograph Palimpsestic Memory (2013), the "palimpsestic" conception of cultural memory is concerned with how representations of specific atrocities may act as catalysts for depictions of other seemingly separate episodes of violence.Silverman's palimpsestic memory identifies links between diverse legacies of twentieth-century racialised violence and, consequently, develops new open-ended models and paradigms for the trans-cultural commemoration of these atrocities.Palimpsestic memory contributes to an emergent field of memory studies which argues that, despite increasing critical engagement with trauma theory since the 1990s, there is an enduring propensity to conceive of certain traumatic events, most notably the Holocaust, as unparalleled, unprecedented and unrepresentable.Michael Rothberg, in his study entitled Multidirectional Memory (2009), maintains that the Holocaust is perceived as "'unique' amongst human-perpetrated horrors", despite the atrocity contributing to "the articulation of other histories -some of them predating the Nazi genocide, such as the United States slave trade, and others taking place later, including the Algerian War of Independence  or the genocide in Bosnia during the 1990s" (6).
Thus, without contesting the singularity of the Holocaust, Silverman and his fellow critics acknowledge the points of contact between memories of genocide and colonialism and reveal the layered, multidimensional structures of memory which emerged in the decades after the Nazi genocide.The conception of the palimpsest ultimately facilitates a productive relationship between memory of the Holocaust and of other racialized legacies of violence.Silverman's Palimpsestic Memory illuminates the ongoing negotiation, mediation and collaboration between memories of the Holocaust and the Algerian War of Independence in French and Francophone film (including Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988) and literature (such as Assia Djebar's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, 1980).The spectre of the "black decade" also haunts these representations of the War of Independence.As Geesey recognises, Algeria's civil war is "most often referred to in the French media as une guerre sans nom, 'a nameless war'", recalling the naming of the War of Independence which was titled in the French press with the same euphemism (64).The ambiguous role of the FLN government in the civil crisis also causes Geesey poignantly to observe that "no one knows who kills" or who was killed in the attacks, bombings, military assassinations and civilian massacres which defined Algeria's "black decade".Consequently, Algerians are continually confronting both France and Algeria's denial of fatalities during the "black decade" which echoes the political and media censorship in France following the War of Independence (involving the seizing of left-wing French publishing houses such as Maspero and Editions de Minuit).
Yet the silence surrounding the civil war has also incited Algerian authors to return to the censorship which shrouded in secrecy the fatalities (and testimonies of survivors of French military brutality) from the War of Independence.Specific works of women's literature (of which Mokeddem's Of Dreams and Assassins and Marouane's The Abductor are culturally significant instances) have begun to connect and alleviate the censorship through interweaving the suppressed voices of victims from French colonial persecutions and massacres with their own reflections upon Algerian women's victimization during the "black decade".Alison Rice significantly observes that writers such as Mokeddem and Marouane attempt to critique the "distance that separates [them] from both the preceding generation and the following generation" through reimagining the "colonial" ordeals experienced by "their mothers' generations" (173).Rather than maternal ordeals overshadowing their descendants' life stories, the daughters of these narratives discover that their own wartime experiences resonate with their mothers' trials under France's colonial occupation.
Mokeddem and Marouane further emphasise these specific links through integrating both mothers' memories and daughters' experiences into a sequence of overlapping visions and images which undermines the linear separation between Algeria's past as a French colony and its present-day status as an independent nation.This assimilation of maternal memories is realised through a process of crossreferencing and superimposition which maps distinct characteristics of the mothers' recollections onto the daughters' own encounters.In Mokeddem's and Marouane's writings, this dynamic play is realised when disparate fragments of parents' memories from the colonial past -including distinct shapes, sounds and actions from various violent scenes -erupt into and transform their child's perceptions of the civil conflict.
Through such unprecedented interruptions, different traces of distinct maternal memories are projected onto specific episodes from their daughters' lives in civil war-torn Algeria.In turn, these daughters, rather than being alarmed or distressed by these disruptions, are encouraged to develop their own responses to modern-day civil upheaval.In both Mokeddem's and Marouane's writings, rather than presenting the tensions between the two generations, the mother emerges as a unifying symbol of the suffering and persecution which multiple generations of Algerian women have endured since French colonisation.

Malika Mokeddem's Of Dreams and Assassins (1995)
Malika Mokkeddem (born in Kenadsa, a rural mining town in Western Algeria, in October 1949) emigrated from Algeria, where she was studying medicine at the University of Oran in 1979, ten years before the outbreak of the country's civil war.Yet she only decided to publish her writings on her experiences as an Algerian émigré in the first year of the "black decade" beginning with The Men Who Walk (Les hommes qui marchent, 1990) and following this publication with four other novels spanning the length of the civil crisis, comprising The Century of Locusts (Le siècle des sauterelles, 1992), The Forbidden Woman (L'interdite, 1994), Of Dreams and Assassins (Des rêves et des assassins, 1995) and Night of the Lizard (La nuit de la lézarde, 1998).In her illuminating analysis of these critically-neglected works, Jane E. Evans observes that the novels The Men Who Walk and The Century of Locusts dramatise Mokeddem's own life experiences, with her female protagonists being born in Algerian rural villages before moving to Oran to pursue academic studies and eventually emigrating from Algeria's political turbulence for new lives in France.Evans argues that these dramatizations of Mokeddem's life-story reveal "interconnections" between personal and public memory, especially regarding the "integration" of "family relationships and histories" into depictions of Algeria's wartime political upheaval.
Of Dreams and Assassins -a semiautobiographical account of an Algerian woman, named Kenza Meslem, who migrates to France during Algeria's civil crisis -is seen as a work which speaks for the "new generation" of women who continue to fight for "democracy, equal rights and a place for women in Algeria" (Ireland,173).Opening her story in the Algerian city of Oran, where Meslem works as a French university professor, Mokeddem depicts the various brutalities which women, in both Algeria's rural and urban regions, were subjected to during the "black decade".Yet whilst depicting Islamist extremism and political corruption, Of Dreams and Assassins also reflects upon the lives of the female refugees who choose to flee from, rather than endure, the consequences of civil upheaval.The narration is expanded to include the French city of Montpellier within its plotline.Whilst Meslem initially believes that the "religious mildew" of extremism will be unable to "pollute [her] life in France", she begins to see reminders of her past life, as revealed through eerie and unsettling sights and sounds, in her new urban surroundings (54).The day after her arrival in Montpellier, Meslem catches her own reflection in a "shop window" being momentarily distorted into an image of a "veiled woman" whilst, in another moment, she mistakes the "bark of a stray dog" for the "snarl" of a man who, as in Algeria, is "calling her a vermin … whore" (pp.64-

65).
The city transforms into a menacing landscape, evoking and recalling the civil violence which Meslem thought she had successfully escaped.In her imagination, the women, who stride through Montpellier's streets without the covering of veils, now take on "the strange appearance of being veiled women without veils" (p.64).Projecting these visions of oppression onto her urban surroundings, Meslem watches in despair as her hopes for a promising future in France, as revealed in Montpellier's cosmopolitan scenes, are mutilated into a distorted, yet still recognisable, version of her own recent harrowing past.Yet Meslem's memories (of both the veiled women and the "snarls" directed towards herself in Oran) are also revealed to be visions which, as well as illuminating Algerian civil violence, draw attention to and animate Algerian women's suffering from the War of Independence.Meslem imagines herself surrounded by French military policemen (whose "victims … [were] always Maghrebian!"), "resentful" civilians who catcall racialist taunts and also fellow "solitary [and] rejected Maghrebians" (62).
These spectres, which reveal the threats which Algerian women would have confronted during the War of Independence, emerge alongside Meslem's visions of "veiled" women from Algeria's civil upheaval.
Crucially, however, Meslem does not perceive these figures from the colonial administration through her own eyes, but only through adopting the perspective of another woman.Meslem reveals this woman to be her mother, named Keltoum Meslem, who fled an arranged marriage and abandoned her daughter in the immediate months after the War of Independence.
Since Meslem knows nothing of her mother's life in France, her imagination continually conjures up visions of the brutality which she may have suffered in the country.Therefore, each frightening evocation of colonial oppression during the war is accompanied by an "inexplicable" reminder of her mother, with Meslem stating: Where does this sensation [of returning to the colonial past] come from?… From this word "mother", which, for lack of memories, lacks substance?… From my projection of the word onto [the] unknown … I can't clarify this puzzle.(64) Meslem recognises that the original terrifying visions of civil war violence are associated with her "absent … [and] unknown" mother, who also suffered untold ordeals and violence in her own lifetime (p.5).Yet Meslem does not parallel her own life story with her mother's, but instead interweaves their experiences together in her hallucinatory visions of both independence and civil war suffering.Nightmare reminders of her past life in Oran (with visions of veiled women and threatening "masculine stares", 65) are fused with visions of the hardships which she imagines to have blighted her mother's life.
Meslem's mother emerges as a touchstone of memory which converts the static urban scene into an open-ended collage of diverse moments which, as well as presenting distressing moments from Algeria's horrific present, reveals dark episodes from both countries' menacing pasts.In doing so, Meslem's mother is the vehicle which transforms Montpellier's condensed scene into a pluralised landscape which accounts for women's suffering, during both the War of Independence and civil crisis, on both sides of the Mediterranean.Ultimately, the veiled women who exemplify women's civil wartime persecution are aligned with military figures which recall France's brutal colonial administration.
Simultaneously superimposed onto Montpellier's city scene, these figures reveal the transgenerational