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Representing the Algerian Civil War: Literature, History, and the State

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Representing the Algerian Civil War: Literature, History, and the State Representing the Algerian Civil War: Literature, History, and the State By Neil Grant Landers A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Committee in charge: Professor Debarati Sanyal, Co-Chair Professor Soraya Tlatli, Co-Chair Professor Karl Britto Professor Stefania Pandolfo Fall 2013 1 Abstract of the Dissertation Representing the Algerian Civil War: Literature, History, and the State by Neil Grant Landers Doctor of Philosophy in French Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Debarati Sanyal, Co-Chair Professor Soraya Tlatli, Co-Chair Representing the Algerian Civil War: Literature, History, and the State addresses the way the Algerian civil war has been portrayed in 1990s novelistic literature. In the words of one literary critic, "The Algerian war has been, in a sense, one big murder mystery."1 This may be true, but literary accounts portray the "mystery" of the civil war—and propose to solve it—in sharply divergent ways. The primary aim of this study is to examine how three of the most celebrated 1990s novels depict—organize, analyze, interpret, and "solve"—the civil war. I analyze and interpret these novels—by Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal—through a deep contextualization, both in terms of Algerian history and in the novels' contemporary setting. This is particularly important in this case, since the civil war is so contested, and is poorly understood. Using the novels' thematic content as a cue for deeper understanding, I engage through them and with them a number of elements crucial to understanding the civil war: Algeria's troubled nationalist legacy; its stagnant one-party regime; a fear, distrust, and poor understanding of the Islamist movement and the insurgency that erupted in 1992; and the unending, horrifically bloody violence that piled on throughout the 1990s. Alternating close readings with deep contextualization, I examine how the novels conceptualize the civil war within Algerian history, then propose a reading of the novels themselves by drawing out their positions in relation to each other and to the civil war. After a general presentation in the first chapter, Chapter 2 offers a reading of Boualem Sansal's Le serment des barbares, a novel that presents the larger themes of the dissertation: the distortion of public memory; the difficulty in narrating the civil war; the mythification of history; and the role of the state in contributing to violence in Algerian society. Chapter 3 follows the paths proposed in Sansal's novel by considering the novel's claim that the popular understanding of the war of independence is largely a myth, and that insidious but important episodes of that struggle were deleted from history. Chapter 4 examines the treatment of the civil war in Yasmina Khadra's Les agneaux du Seigneur, an enormous commercial success that frames the civil war as 1 Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, 2004. 2 a noir genre fiction of terror and crime in a village outside Algiers. Chapter 5 examines the discourse used to discuss the civil war, and focuses specifically on the rhetoric of state discourse. Chapter 6 reviews the basic political context of the civil war and what is known about the violence itself. Chapter 7 examines the role of political Islam in Algeria, since this is a crucial element of the civil war and its treatment in the novels. Chapter 8 considers the civil war in the depiction of Assia Djebar's Le blanc de l'Algérie and synthesizes the dissertation's major themes. i Contents Note on Translations ...................................................................................................................... iii Chapter 1 ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 ....................................................................................................................................... 14 Denationalizing history: Le serment des barbares ........................................................................ 14 2.1 Inexplicable violence .......................................................................................................... 15 2.2 Narrative Tapestries ............................................................................................................ 20 2.3 Mourning A Missing Past ................................................................................................... 26 2.4 False memories, Entangled History .................................................................................... 30 Chapter 3 ....................................................................................................................................... 34 The First Civil War and Its Children ............................................................................................ 34 3.1 Mythologies of War and State History ............................................................................... 34 3.2 The Untold History of the FLN's War ................................................................................ 37 Chapter 4 ....................................................................................................................................... 44 Framing history in Les agneaux du Seigneur ............................................................................... 44 4.1 Interpreting Violence .......................................................................................................... 45 4.2 Civil War Causes in Les agneaux ....................................................................................... 46 4.3 History in Fiction ................................................................................................................ 51 Chapter 5 ....................................................................................................................................... 55 State Propaganda and the Rhetoric of Terrorism .......................................................................... 55 5.1 Representation and the Civil War ....................................................................................... 56 5.2 Eradicationist Discourse: The Tropes Of Terrorism ........................................................... 57 5.3 Propaganda: Power over Symbol and Thought .................................................................. 61 Chapter 6 ....................................................................................................................................... 64 Democracy, State Violence and Popular Uprising in 1992 Algeria ............................................. 64 6.1 Riots, Repression, and Islamist Activism ........................................................................... 66 6.2 Democracy, Islamism, and the FIS ..................................................................................... 68 6.3 Democracy Thrown in Reverse .......................................................................................... 71 6.4 State Terror and Civil War: “Terrorize the Terrorist” ........................................................ 73 6.5 Eradicationist Violence, the GIA, and "Electoral Cleansing" ............................................ 81 Chapter 7 ....................................................................................................................................... 87 Islamism in the Algerian context .................................................................................................. 87 7.1 Political Islam and Algerian Nationalism ........................................................................... 88 ii 7.2 Political Islam in Post-Independence Algeria ..................................................................... 92 7.3 Islamism and the State ........................................................................................................ 95 Chapter 8 ..................................................................................................................................... 100 Renationalizing history: Le blanc de l'Algérie ........................................................................... 100 8.1 Introduction to Assia Djebar’s work ................................................................................. 101 8.2 Learning to write about loss: Barbarousse and Tahar Djaout ........................................... 104 8.3 Rewriting the nation .......................................................................................................... 115 8.4 Writing the Civil War: Islamists and the State in Le blanc de l'Algérie ........................... 122 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 128 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 136 iii Note on Translations Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are mine. I attempt to provide English translations for all important textual citations, especially if they are directly relevant to my argument. Occasionally, citations, mostly in the footnotes, are left in the French. 1 Chapter 1 This study confronts the representation of the Algerian civil war in works of literature published between 1995 and 1999, while
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