Djebar’s fiction and films since the 1960’s have been a testimony to the power of literature to further historical reflection. In her most recent novel, La Femme sans sepulture, she does so in several different, yet interrelated ways:

1. Resisting the amnesia of official history
   
   Althought Algeria has set up the war of liberation from the French as the nation’s founding event, that official history has silenced certain aspects of the war, especially with respect to the exact nature of the participation of women in the war. Because of gaps and silences of official Algerian and French history on the war, Djebar has turned to fiction as a privileged way to put flesh on the skeleton of history. La Femme sans sepulture (2002) represents her latest contribution to the working through of that war.


2. Revisiting Sites of Memory
   
   Djebar’s rewriting of the past takes place through revisiting meaningful geographic sites of memory. Yet Djebar is not seeking to replace the silences of history with a univocal commemoration of women’s participation in the war. She avoids such fixed monumentalization in La Femme in two major ways. First, her narrative focuses on the ghostly presence-absence of disappeared freedom fighter Zoulikha, whose disembodied voice paradoxically highlights her own embodiment, Zoulikha’s life is evoked in fragmentary ways through the testimony of several generations of women. Secondly, Djebar’s text foregrounds the narrator’s sense of belatedness and time lag, as different time frames palimpsestically overlap: the memories of the war in the 1950’s and 60’s; the period in which Djebar first attempted to write about Zoulikha in the 1970’s; and the narrator’s/author’s return to that double past and to Zoulikha’s hometown in the 1990’s.