The Year of Algeria of 2003 (Djazaïr) opens with the promise of "retrouvailles." During President's Chirac's recent state visit to Algeria, a French President's first since Independence in 1962, the "Déclaration d'Alger" promised greater economic and cultural exchange in a relationship "résolument tournée vers l'avenir." However, with the opening of the official cultural program (Mohamed Kacimi's Présences de Kateb Yacine at the Comédie Française, for example), the past was everpresent as Berber protestors, speaking on behalf of "l'autre Algérie," staged protests of the government's role as sanctioned purveyor of Algerian culture. While the legitimate Berberist claim to Algerian identity is rooted in solid historical ground, a far less viable population of political and historical casualties remains fated to suffer its "mémoire impossible" in silence: the pieds-noirs or French Algerians who remain stripped of memory rights both in France and Algeria. This paper will illustrate how theatre as a discourse and a public genre is capable of presenting what Freddie Rokem (Performing History) calls "an organized repetition of the past" capable of reconstructing a "community where the events from the past will matter again" (xii). As such, an impossible and volatile memory might be harnessed and reorganized into a restorative one in order to "counteract the destructive forces of history" (3).

This paper will identify the ways in which Algerian and French authors use the dramatic text to quarry a repressed shared memory of that pluralistic "other Algeria" brutally shattered in the post-independence era. Viewed retrospectively from the lens of the 1980's and 1990's, each text inscribes new emotional layers onto the surface of "nostalgérie" both for pieds-noirs and Algerians. For example, Aziz Chouaki (in Baya, Les Oranges), Slimane Benaïssa (in Les Fils de l'amertume), and Fatima Gallaire (in Au loin les caroubiers ) recall friendships that crossed dividing lines of religion and ethnicity in a mutually shared French-Algerian memory. From another angle, Richard Demarcy in Les Mimosas d'Algérie depicts a poignant conversation between an adult daughter who returns to the land of her youth after a long absence in order to visit her grandmother who chose to "stay behind" in Algeria. Staged in Algeria in 2002, Demarcy's play is part of the 2003 program and draws upon the 1957 "affaire Fernand Yveton," the story of a pied-noir militant guillotined by the French army.

While some of these examples focus largely on the pied-noir's dislocated memory born of the first Algerian war, this paper will also consider the relevant backdrop of another identity war waged "entre deux rives:" the "second Algerian war" of the 1990's which produced its own exiled population ironically named "des pieds-noirs musulmans" by Algerian Chouaki. Moreover, shared French-Algerian memory can also harbor an even deeper repression, that of mutual guilt, born of torture practiced by both sides as strikingly revealed in Benaïssa's play Mémoires à la derive. In a public genre such as theatre, the long fuse of memory might always be re-ignited in unexpected ways.