Taming Trauma in the Land of the Million Martyrs: A Reading of Assia Djebar’s Algerian White

Abstract

Algeria is a land of perpetual trauma. Haunted by a bloody colonial past and an Islamic terrorist present, Algeria cried over thousands of dead people. Assia Djebar’s Algerian White is a contemporary narrative of trauma in which the writer engages in an exhausting labor of remembrance of those who died victims of colonialism and its legacies or murdered for the vain causes of Radical Islamism.

Using perspectives from social, political and cultural psychology, I will attempt to explore the process and the politics of articulating trauma in Djebar’s Algerian White.