One of the most talented Algerian novelists of recent times, Leila Marouane’s fictional universe is populated by demonic, bearded, Islamists and young women who have survived kidnaping, rape, torture, and pregnancy at the hands of the fundamentalist rebels in Algeria’s decade-long civil war. Her novels: Ravisseur (1998), and Le Châtiment des hypocrites (2001), are unique in that they depict an insane society where violence and hypocrisy are common currency, but she narrates events that unfold in this world in a manner evoking lunacy and carnival. The two heroines of these novels are a testament to the potential for humans to endure suffering and cruelty. After their escape, each of the young women, Mlle Kosra in Le Châtiment des hypocrites and Samira Zeitoun in Ravisseur are then plagued by memory loss, insomnia, hallucinations, and other psychological effects. Mlle Kosra’s case is the most perplexing; she has taken on a new identity, a kind of angel of death roaming the streets of Algiers, perhaps killing as many as three men encountered in the streets and bars of the capital, before becoming an abused housewife in Paris where she finally murders her husband. Samira, brutalized by her own father as well as her kidnappers, survives only by retreating into a delusional world.

The burlesque and carnavalesque tone of Marouane’s fiction belies the deadly seriousness of Algeria’s descent into violence and chaos, which has targeted women citizens in specific ways. The trauma-induced madness suffered by Marouane’s heroines, is a reflection of the oppressive manner in which contemporary Algerian society has treated women citizens. The psychological damage inflicted is at once a coping mechanism that enables the heroines to repress certain memories of their experiences. As a narrative strategy, the stories of Marouane’s heroines surface in fragments requiring the reader to act as a quasi-analyst in understanding what has really happened to the women. Furthermore, it can be suggested that Marouane’s heroines are mad because in the violent civil war, victims of rape are themselves considered shameful and are hidden away by their families. There is very little psychological therapy offered to women victims in the civil war.

Marouane’s novels demonstrate that in a society at war with itself, battling demons of sectarian terror, misogyny, and class warfare, the result is that women experience violation in their very being. Women’s bodies are the battlefield for much of the Algerian civil war; Marouane’s heroines appear to suffer more from the psychological ramifications of the violence as much as the physical scars it has left.