Home -- General -- Events -- Graduates -- Undergraduates -- High School Teachers -- Faculty

	General   Program   Abstracts   Call for Papers   Registration   Conference Hotel   Transportation  & Maps   Tallahassee   Contact us

ABSTRACTS Susan Ireland (Grinnell College) The Algerian War Revisited Recent years have seen the publication of a series of texts that return to the subject of the Algerian War in order to re-examine its place in French history, a re-examination which seems especially important now, since France has declared 2003 the Year of Algeria. A foundational event for the Algerian nation, the 1954-62 was also constitutes a traumatic period of France’s collective past, the consequences of which are still being felt today. As has been observed, besides creating serious internal divisions in France while it was taking place, the war, “rather than being simply relived through memory, is actually being waged again and again on French territory through racially motivated incidents and racist discourse” (Donadey 219). Maissa Bey’s Entendez-vous dans les montagnes, the main text to be discussed in this paper, serves as a good example of what Anne Donadey calls “amnesis,” the attempt to move from collective amnesia to reconciliation regarding the Algerian War. In this work, Bey uses a train journey across France—reminiscent of the ferry crossing depicted in Akli Tadjer’s Les ANI du Tassili—to bring together three characters who represent some of the main groups involved in the war: the French army, the FLN, and the pieds noirs. As these three figures—the daughter of pieds noirs, the daughter of an Algerian tortured and killed by the French, and the former soldier responsible for his death—engage in conversation, Bey addresses both the need to and the difficulty of revisiting the war and overcoming amnesia. By alternating between narratives from the past and the present, and by juxtaposing the conflicting memories of different groups and generations, the text portrays a shared re-vision of the evens of the war, thus suggesting the shift toward reconciliation and healing characteristic of anamnesis. As such, Entendez-vous dans les montagnes plays a part in reshaping the ways in which a painful period of the past is remembered on the individual and collective levels. The analysis will also include comparisons with other works such as Leila Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge and Tassadit Imache’s Une fille sans histoire.

440 Diffenbaugh | Tallahassee, Fl. 32306-1515 | ICFFS@www.fsu.edu | Tel 850.644.7636 | Fax 850 644 9917 Copyright© 2001 Florida State University. All rights reserved.  Questions/ Comments - contact the sitedeveloper