SOURCE: Donadey, Anne. “The ‘Algeria Syndrome’.” In Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds, pp. 19-42. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001.

[In the following essay, Donadey theorizes that the Algerian War is a central theme in most of Sebbar's works, and that although many of the characters in her Sherazade trilogy are unfamiliar with the war, it affects their lives and existence in numerous ways.]

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.

—Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones 179

Leïla Sebbar, born and raised in Algeria by an Algerian father and a French mother, remarked that the Algerian war “est chaque fois, malgré moi, dans les livres que j'écris [is in each book I write, in spite of myself]” (quoted in Salien 4). In her 1984 novel, Le Chinois vert d'Afrique, almost all the characters have been involved with the war to some degree. Early on in the Shérazade trilogy, the reader discovers that Shérazade's grandmother died during that war (Shérazade 147/158-59). The protagonists of Sebbar's novels are most often children of Maghrebian immigrants in France, or Beurs. They never experienced the Algerian war as a direct trauma. Rather, the teenagers learn about the war through older Algerians' stories (the oral tradition), books, and photographs.

Sebbar depicts their lives at the periphery of large French cities, where the HLM, the low-income housing projects in the suburbs, become a metaphor for a motley immigrant population ghettoized on the margins of French society. Living in France makes it doubly difficult for the protagonists to gain more than a fragmented knowledge of the Algerian war, especially because, until a 1983 decree including decolonization in the Terminale (last year of high school) curriculum, the history taught in French schools stopped with the end of World War II (Rousso 285).¹ In her novels, Sebbar repeatedly presents young Beurs who do not know anything about the Algerian war (Shérazade 56, 147, 164/56-57, 158-59, 176). In what follows, I chart how Leïla Sebbar's novels confirm, as well as go beyond, the existence of the Algeria syndrome that I traced historically in the previous chapter.

LITERATURE AS A LIEU DE MéMOIRE

In Le Chinois vert d'Afrique, Sebbar points repeatedly to the link between current French racism and the Algerian (and Vietnam) war(s) by putting the most offensive racist discourse in the mouths of the Frenchmen who fought in these wars.² At the same time, she is careful to show that not all war veterans react in the same way: Inspector Laruel and Myra's grandfather, Emile Cordier, are much more open to the young Beur protagonist, Mohamed and what he represents than are the other veterans; for Laruel, it is because of a certain Orientalist fascination, and for Emile, it is due to his leftist politics of solidarity.

Mohamed falls in love with Myra, a young métisse (part Moroccan, part Italian, part French) who lives with her grandfather Emile in a lower-middle-class neighborhood (pavillons de banlieue) not too distant from Mohamed's housing project. One of their neighbors, Tuilier, exemplifies the most violently racist and classist ideology in the novel.³ As a young man he fought in Indochina, and he wishes he had been sent to Algeria as well. Tuilier vicariously lives his failed military career through dreams of a neighborhood militia. He sets up a room in his house for target practice and owns a trained police dog named Mao.⁴ The young people of Arab descent living in the projects provide him with a live target for war games. Together with a handful of other older, working-class, conservative men, he attempts to set up a militia in an act they call “autodéfense” [self-defense] (233). Taking “justice” into his own hands allows him to give himself more importance and power than he actually has, as he bestows upon himself the mission of “faire des rondes matin et soir avec mon chien Mao. Ça rend service à tout le monde” [patrolling the area morning and evening with my dog Mao as a service to everyone] (137).

The proximity of the housing projects and Mohamed's wanderings around Myra's garden are all that is needed to generate racist hysteria: “Tuilier parle de ses armes, de la guerre, du club de tir, de l'insécurité des banlieues, des voyous, des Arabes qui colonisent la France, de la légitime défense” [Tuilier speaks of his weapons, war, the shooting club, insecurity in the suburbs, hoodlums, Arabs who are colonizing France, justified self-defense] (136). Tuilier's racist discourse is rooted in violence, as he projects his own (real) violence and dreams of a glorious military career onto the (fanta-sized) violence in the projects, which he associates with Maghrebian immigrants and their offspring; for him, the jump from “hoodlums” to “Arabs who are colonizing France” is automatic. The equation of people of Arab background with violent and lawless groups brings about the “logical” conclusion, the need for self-protection—in an ironic reversal of reality, for, as we have seen, the 1980s were marked by a rise in racist crime (see Giudice, Ben Jelloun 41). Sebbar's use of reported speech and of the enumerative device creates an ironic distance between speaker and reader, helping expose the flimsiness of Tuilier's argument.

In these few lines, Sebbar has perfectly encapsulated racist and demagogic rhetoric à la Jean-Marie Le Pen. That same racist ideology, which is precisely what historian Fernand Braudel sidestepped so easily in his analysis, has been steadily gaining ground in France, where the Front National, Le Pen's extreme right party, nationally received an estimated 14 percent of votes in the first round of the regional elections in May 1992.⁵ The percentages were almost double in some regions, such as the south, where a very depressed economic situation coupled with the presence of large pied-noir and immigrant populations fuels a stronger anti-Maghrebian sentiment. In the first round of the presidential elections of April 1995, candidate Le Pen gathered 15.7 percent of all votes (4,673,000). The two extreme-right candidates together (Le Pen and Philippe de Villiers) swept one-fifth of all votes (20.44 percent), almost as much as Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin (23.3 percent) and much more than the Communist and Trotskyist candidates, who together scored less than 14 percent.⁶ In the municipal elections of June 1995, Front National mayoral candidates were elected in three southern cities (Toulon, Orange, and Marignane). A former Front National member was elected as the mayor of Nice, one of France's largest cities. It was only in the European elections of June 1999 that Le Pen lost a lot of his electorate, due to internal dissension within the Front National and the scission of the party into two competing ones, Le Pen's Front National and Bruno Mégret's Mouvement National (Mégret is Le Pen's former second in command). Although the French political class is currently unanimous in distancing itself from the Front National, Le Pen's rhetoric on immigration has spread to most right-wing politicians and is not being countered very strongly by the Left, either.

Gérard Noiriel, in his book, Le Crueset français, defined the racist rhetoric that Sebbar illustrates in her novel: “[L]a force de cette stratégie politique tient à ce qu'elle ne s'adresse pas à la raison, mais à l'‘inconscient’ qui sommeille en chacun de nous … le discours xénophobe joue volontiers sur les fantasmes: la peur, l'exotisme. … En martelant constamment les mêmes thèmes, le xénophobe tente de susciter des associations d'idées et surtout d'images qui peuvent conduire aux automatismes de pensée qui illustrent fréquemment les propos racistes” [the force of this political strategy is precisely that it does not appeal to reason but, instead, addresses the “subconscious” dwelling within each of us … xenophobic discourse readily plays on fantasies such as fear and exoticism. … By constantly hammering on the same subjects, xenophobic discourse seeks to create associations of ideas and, especially, of images that can lead to the stereotypical thinking that usually underlies racist statements] (Creuset 275-76/211).

It is no wonder that the rhetoric of Tuilier and his friends in Le Chinois should be so similar to Le Pen's. In Francoscopie 1993, Gérard Mermet noted that—like Tuilier and his cohorts—the Front National's typical constituents are men (71 percent) from the lower and lower-middle classes who live in large cities (226). In Le Chinois, Tuilier's men, who claim to be “pas des violents, pas agressifs ni rien” [not violent, not aggressive, really], long for a context of violence legitimated by the colonial wars (233): “Si on pouvait employer les grands moyens, ils retourneraient tous chez eux, vite fait. Dommage, c'est loin la guerre d'Algérie, parce que alors là, on rigolerait pas, balayés, ratissés. On a déjà un ancien d'Algérie dans notre comité, c'est un dur. … Il en a dans le pantalon” [If we could resort to drastic measures, they'd all go back home quick. It's too bad the Algerian war was so long ago, because then, there'd be no messing around, they'd all be swept out, cleaned out. We already have an Algeria vet in our group, he's a tough guy. … He's got balls] (234).

The desire for a revenge over the French failure in Algeria, or rather, the desire to take up the Algerian war again, this time on French territory and to the point of French victory, is shown to be one of the driving forces behind anti-Arab racism. In a psychological fantasy that ignores the factor of economic power imbalance, the situation of the Algerian war is reversed, the Arabs being now perceived as the colonizer: “[I]ls nous colonisent. … On est colonisé” [They're colonizing us. … We're colonized] (236). This perverse inversion of the historical situation legitimates “les grands moyens” [drastic measures] (such as the militia) and the racism of the police force (234). For Benjamin Stora, such a discourse, based on revenge, which perceives the former colonized turned immigrant as a colonizer invading “civilized” territory, reactivates colonial racism and facilitates an unproblematic nationalist identification (Gangrène 288-90): “La guerre d'Algérie continue à travers la lutte contre l'islam. … La liturgie d'une France enracinée dans la pureté d'une identité mythique, sans cesse menacée, voilà ce qui légitime d'avance toutes les mesures de possibles violences, de ‘guerre’ pour se défendre des ‘envahisseurs’” [The Algerian war continues through the struggle against Islam. The liturgy of a France that would be rooted in the purity of a mythical, constantly threatened identity, legitimates in advance any possible violent measure (or “war”) taken to defend oneself from “invaders”] (291).⁷ Once again, the Manichean structures of Orientalist discourse exposed by Edward Said are summoned to perpetuate the perception of an alien, external enemy against whom an endangered national unity can be recreated. Ben Jelloun astutely remarked that the problem lies in the fact that “on a omis de décoloniser l'imaginaire d'une grande partie des Français” [there has been a failure to decolonize the imaginary of a large number of French people] (61).

Sebbar shows another driving force behind racism to be machismo and masculinist warrior values. Tuilier himself is the only son of a war widow, and “pour échapper à la tyrannie maternelle, sans le dire à sa mère, il avait choisi de partir pour l'Indochine” [to escape maternal tyranny, without telling his mother, he had chosen to enlist and go to Indochina] (Chinois 135). As for Marcel, the Algeria veteran of the militia, his toughness and fearlessness are metaphorically measured through his virility: “Il en a dans le pantalon” [He's got balls] (234). This is literally “proved” to the reader on the next page, a flashback to the Algerian war in which, after seeing dead, castrated young French soldiers, Marcel's company raped the village women and then gathered villagers together and blew them up with grenades: “Un massacre, ce jour-là. Les femmes, les enfants, les jeunes, tout avait explosé, un feu d'artifice” [A slaughter, that day. Women, children, youths, they had all exploded like fireworks] (235).

In this novel, Sebbar foregrounds the links connecting war, hypermasculinity, and sexism, from Tuilier's flight from the maternal to Marcel's company's military exploits as inscribed on the bodies of women and children. I am not arguing that Sebbar condemns men as a whole in an essentialist gesture, especially as she depicts men like Emile Cordier in very positive roles, but she does criticize masculinist, racist values that place the white man at the top of a hierarchy of values predicated on violence. The acts of raping, setting fire to places and people, and killing express a desire for ultimate power waged through violence. Other people are controlled through the use of a violence that has gone out of control.

ANAMNESIS AND NATIONAL RECONCILIATION

Whereas in the mid-1980s Sebbar critically interrogated the continuing second phase of France's Algeria syndrome, in 1999 she participated in its third phase, that of historical rewriting, in a short text published in a collection targeting young adults, La Seine était rouge. The novel focuses on the search for historical clues to the October 1961 massacre thirty-five years later. Toward the end of the Algerian war, on October 17, 1961, hundreds of the 30,000 Algerians who were peacefully demonstrating in Paris against the curfew imposed on them by police chief Maurice Papon were brutally massacred.⁸ Censorship was forcibly imposed on newspapers, photographers, and publishing houses trying to cover such an unthinkable act of violence. During the attack, the demonstrators were beaten and shot by police, and dozens were thrown into the Seine and left to drown. Over 11,000 men were rounded up in buses and held in stadiums in a move uncannily reminiscent of the rafle du Vel d'Hiv, the July 1942 roundup of over 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children arrested by the French police for deportation. Hundreds of Algerians were deported to prison camps in Algeria until the end of the war (Einaudi 80). Because of the general amnesty applied to all Algerian war crimes in France, Papon, like hundreds of others, will never have to answer for his participation in the October 17 massacre.

Sebbar's lengthy dedication inscribes her text in a tradition of rewriting of this repressed page of Franco-Algerian history. The book is dedicated to the Algerian victims of the massacre, as well as to those whose works served as sources for Sebbar's own rewriting. In particular, she mentions four fiction writers, Didier Daeninckx, Nacer Kettane, Mehdi Lallaoui, and Georges Mattei. Before analyzing Sebbar's own contribution to the topic, I will briefly sketch out the seven earlier literary treatments of the massacre, all published between 1982 and 1998. It is important to note that there was a twenty-year silence between the massacre and its earliest literary incarnation, Georges Mattei's La guerre des gusses.⁹

Three of the texts refer to the massacre in their opening pages and present it as a landmark event for Algerians living in France. Kettane's 1985 Le Sourire de Brahim opens with a chapter titled “Octobre à Paris.” The massacre, which was erased from French memory, is presented by Kettane as one of the first examples of racially motivated violence, or “ratonnades,” against Algerians living in France (16). The protagonist's young brother is killed during the massacre, and recounting this event at the beginning of the book both provides the basis of the plot and explains the title (Brahim, the protagonist, loses his ability to smile forever after the loss of his beloved brother). A leitmotif in the novel is that anti-Maghrebian violence in the 1980s is directly related to a French desire to continue the Algerian war (58, 74-75, 126, 142). Both Kettane's and Tassadit Imache's texts focus on the childhood and young adulthood of children of Algerian immigrants in France, and both highlight the connections between residual traces of the war and the difficulties these youngsters experience in French society decades later.

Imache, too, opens her 1989 novel, Une fille sans histoire, with the protagonist's first memory, that of the October 17 massacre, which occurred when she was three years old. Her Algerian father was arrested during the demonstration and disappeared for three days, and her French mother was interrogated by the police. The title, with its multiple meanings, resonates with this event: part of the young protagonist's malaise is connected to the violent erasure of her history, as a daughter of mixed parents living in France during the Algerian war.

The October 17 massacre is also given foundational status in the autobiographical narrative Vivre me tue by Paul Smaïl, a French writer of Moroccan descent (1997). Although he does not begin his narrative with the massacre (unlike Kettane, Imache, and Daeninckx) nor provide a full treatment of it, he mentions it on several occasions and devotes a chapter to it (178-80). The originality of his treatment of the event lies in the fact that the chapter describing the massacre most fully comes right after a description of current racist violence in the 1990s. The transition between the two periods is at first made without any indication of a change in the time frame. Further, this is the only chapter in the entire book that takes place before the narrator's lifetime, thus highlighting its continuing significance. The reader is led to assume that Smaïl's narrator is still describing the recent violence until the date “1961” appears at the end of the first paragraph. Like Kettane, Smaïl argues that there is a link between the events of 1961 and more recent “ratonnades”; both authors explicitly name Maurice Papon as the one who ordered the massacre. In Vivre me tue, as in Le Sourire de Brahim, the narrator loses a family member in the massacre: his uncle was killed by the French police when he inadvertently ran into the demonstration on his way to work. Farida Abu-Haidar suggests that Smaïl saw the October 17 massacre as a foundational event, not just for Algerians, but for the entire North African immigrant community. The arrests made in 1961 took on a racist nature as the police relied on physical appearance when making arrests and proved unable to distinguish between Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians (as citizens of independent nations since 1956, Moroccans and Tunisians were not under curfew regulations). As a result, the Moroccan embassy in Paris had to lodge several formal complaints regarding the mistreatment of its citizens (Einaudi 79).

The interpretation of the October massacre as a foundational event for Maghrebians in France is consistent with Mehdi Lallaoui's presentation in his 1986 novel, Les Beurs de Seine. Toward the end of the novel, Kaci, the protagonist, discusses two landmark historical events for Algerians living in France: the first is the May 8, 1945, massacres in Sétif and Guelma (when Algerians demonstrating for their own liberation on the day of France's liberation from German oppression were attacked by the French army), which were a prelude to the war of liberation; the second is the October 17, 1961, massacre, which neither Kaci's southern French girlfriend Katia nor her Beur friend Farida had ever heard of before (158-59). Lallaoui's name figures on the list of people to whom Sebbar dedicated her own literary rewriting of the massacre, La Seine était rouge.¹⁰ That the October massacre was a foundational event for the immigrant community is also attested to by the fact that in Algeria, October 17 has, since 1968, been National Emigration Day (Einaudi 293).

The first literary treatment of the October 1961 massacre to have been read widely in France is Franco-Belgian writer Didier Daeninckx's 1984 detective novel, Meurtres pour mémoire. Inspired by the thenrecent revelations that Maurice Papon had been responsible for the deportation of over 1,500 Jews in World War II Bordeaux, Daeninckx wrote in barely veiled fashion about a killer responsible for both events in his Meurtres pour mémoire.¹¹ The novel opens with the epigraph, “En oubliant le passé, on se condamne à le revivre” [If we forget the past, we are condemned to relive it] (n.p.). Although the novel begins with the perspectives of a few Algerian participants in the peaceful demonstration, the rest of the narrative, which takes place twenty years later, centers only on Franco-French characters. The 1961 massacre is soon obscured by memories of World War II atrocities, and the Algerian characters of the first two chapters disappear.

The plot centers on re-membering Vichy, as the son of a French historian is assassinated in Toulouse twenty years after his father was mysteriously killed during the October 1961 massacre. During his investigation, Inspector Cadin discovers that the Paris prefect of police in 1961, André Veillut, was responsible for the deportation of hundreds of Jewish people in Toulouse (like Bordeaux, a southern French city) during World War II. Both father and son had uncovered Veillut's participation in the Jewish Holocaust and died for this knowledge. Although Daeninckx attempts to make links between the two massacres, in his novel, the Algeria syndrome is covered over by the Vichy syndrome. While participating in the third phase of the Vichy syndrome, that of obsession, the book also enacts the second phase of the Algeria syndrome, even as it attempts to bring it back to memory. While Daeninckx's novel deals with the erasure of French memory, it has little to say about immigrant memory, and thus unwittingly participates in the continued silencing of the October 1961 massacre.¹²

Like Meurtres pour mémoire, Georges Mattei's Guerre des Gusses (1982) is a fictionalized roman à clef. At the end of this historical novel, Mattei provides a detailed account of the massacre and its place in the Algerian war—most of the narrative deals with a French soldier who becomes a deserter and joins the FLN. The book is framed by the two foundational events mentioned by Lallaoui: the 1945 Sétif and Guelma massacres in Algeria and the October 1961 atrocities. The rest of the book takes place in Algeria in the 1950s. Two major events of the war are foregrounded: the well-known 1957 Battle of Algiers, immortalized by Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film by the same name, and the hidden 1961 Paris massacre. Mattei himself was a porteur de valises (literally, “suitcase carrier,” one of the French who supported the FLN during the war), and he provided historian Jean-Luc Einaudi with FLN archival records of the war when Einaudi was writing his history of the October massacre (Einaudi 14). Significantly, Einaudi, too, took up the parallel Mattei made in his historical novel between the two battles, entitling his 1991 history, La Bataille de Paris [The battle of Paris].¹³ Mattei's descriptions of the October massacre rely on testimonies culled from FLN records as well as from the few accounts extant in newspapers of the time. Like Daeninckx, his narrator expresses the duty of memory that he experiences: “Je me souviendrai de cette nuit. … Je serai mémoire” [I shall remember this night. I shall be memory] (220).

In La Guerre des gusses, the identity of the prefect of police is barely disguised: “Marcel Pantobe” bears the same initials and a name sounding quite similar to Maurice Papon's—furthermore, his political trajectory closely resembles Papon's, and Mattei makes direct reference to 1943 Bordeaux. Since the Canard Enchaîné's revelations about Papon's past had occurred only a year before the publication of Mattei's book, readers would have easily been able to identify the character of Pantobe. Moreover, one chapter begins with a quotation from Papon himself, in which he told the Paris police in 1961 that they would be protected no matter what they did (201). These same words are later repeated in the text by Marcel Pantobe (213). Considering Papon's vindictiveness and his predilection for libel suits, this was a courageous act on Mattei's part.¹⁴

Even before Papon's sordid past was revealed, most accounts drew parallels between the bloody repression of the peaceful Algerian demonstration and Nazi persecutions. Less than twenty years after Vichy, French politicians, Jewish personalities, and porteurs de valises alike denounced French use of the same methods against the Algerians. For example, the Action Catholique ouvrière (Catholic Worker's Action) was censored for making the comparison with Oradour that Daeninckx would take up much later (Einaudi 237). Soon after the massacre, politician Eugène Claudius-Petit asked for an investigation of the police repression, spoke of racism and drew parallels with Nazism (Tristan 116). Claude Lanzmann, who later became famous as the director of the documentary film Shoah, wrote a statement, signed by many intellectuals, in which he equated the imprisonment of over 11,000 Algerian men in the Palais des Sports with the internment of Jews at Drancy, the center from which they were deported to concentration camps abroad (Einaudi 225). Mattei draws many parallels between World War II and October 1961 (205, 207-8, 212-14). Daeninckx's Inspector Cadin makes a pithy observation: “Un Oradour en plein Paris” [The Oradour massacre in the heart of Paris] (81), comparing the 1961 pogrom to the infamous killing of 642 Oradour-sur-Glane villagers (men, women, and children) by German SS soldiers in June 1944.

Finally, in Nancy Huston's novel, L'Empreinte de l'ange (1998), most events take place in Paris between 1957 and 1962. Besides the numerous references to the Algerian war, the novel also alludes to World War II and the two wars are compared on several occasions. One of the protagonists, a Jewish-Hungarian refugee named András, participates with FLN members in organizing the October 17 demonstration. The day after the demonstration, while searching for him, his German lover, Saffie, witnesses bodies being dredged out of the Seine (287-90). András makes explicit the connections between the curfew imposed on the Algerians by the French and Vichy policies against the Jews: “Un couvre-feu rien que pour les musulmans. Vingt ans seulement après le couvre-feu pour les juifs. Pareil! Pareil!” [A curfew just for Muslims! Only twenty years after the curfew for Jews. It's all the same! The same!] (274). Huston, of Anglophone Canadian origin, and Sebbar have been friends since their involvement in the Paris feminist movement in the 1970s, and they published their correspondence on exile, Lettres parisiennes, in 1986. The convergence of their interests and concerns is as evident in the late 1990s as it was a decade earlier.

Sebbar's own treatment of the massacre in La Seine était rouge, which relies on historical and archival documents as well as earlier literary rewritings, is the most detailed in French literature to date. Although all the fiction writers already discussed endowed the massacre with symbolic significance for specific constituencies, none of them used it as the main part of their narratives. Sebbar's novel is the only one so far to focus entirely on the memory of October 1961 or to attempt to include the perspectives of all those involved. In Sebbar's rewriting, anamnesis is shown to be a collective endeavor, which occurs across generations, genders, political persuasions, and ethnic origins.¹⁵ For this reason, her novel presents the points of view of French police officers, harkis, Algerian demonstrators, French porteurs de valises, and other eyewitnesses from various walks of life. Several of her characters insist on the partiality of truth and the unreliability of memory, thus highlighting the need for assembling as many forms of testimony as possible if anamnesis is to take place.¹⁶

Sebbar pays homage to those who came before her and whose activism and testimony afforded her the historical information that she needed to write La Seine. As we will see in detail with respect to Djebar in Chapter 4, Sebbar thus provides the reader with her Isnad (the chain of transmission of knowledge), albeit a secular one in this case. Besides naming novelists, she also dedicated her novel to a wide range of other figures interested in the massacre: journalist Paulette Péju, historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, writer Anne Tristan, filmmaker Jacques Panijel, photographer Elie Kagan, and publisher François Maspéro (who helped some of the wounded during the demonstration and whose bookstore appears in Sebbar's novel), as well as the Comité [Committee] Maurice Audin.¹⁷ Without forcing the issue, Sebbar provides her audience with most of the names necessary for further research on the topic. She thus inserts her novel in a four-decades-old tradition of recovery and of bearing witness in the face of censorship and silencing. Indeed, of the texts by authors she mentions in the dédicace (dedication) or elsewhere, several were censored and seized by the French government—books by Péju and by the Comité Maurice Audin, books published by Maspéro (including two by Frantz Fanon), Maurienne's Le Déserteur, and Jacques Panijel's film Octobre à Paris (Stora, Ils venaient 297-98; Einaudi 273-74).

The concerns for a young, multicultural audience that Sebbar evinced in the 1980s were still at the forefront for her at the turn of the millennium. The novel takes place thirty-five years after the October 17, 1961, massacre, and its main characters were all born after 1961. Amel, one of the main characters, is a sixteen-year-old girl of Algerian descent whose grandparents and mother (then a seven-year-old) participated in the demonstration. Omer is a twenty-seven-year-old Algerian journalist who had to leave Algeria and came to France illegally because he feared for his life in the current political climate. Finally, Louis, the twenty-five-year-old son of Flora (a former porteuse de valises), is making a documentary film on the massacre. These three central characters are connected through previous generations of women who all fought for the independence of Algeria: Amel's mother, Noria, and grandmother, Lalla; Omer's mother, Mina; and Louis's mother, Flora; all know each other.

In a way, Amel, Omer, and Louis represent the diverse constituencies (immigrant, Algerian, and French) who have a need for anamnesis regarding both the Algerian war in general and the October 17 massacre in particular. That the process of anamnesis is fraught with difficulties is highlighted by the fact that the three characters often clash in their interpretations and over how the event should be memorialized. Tensions arise between Omer and Louis when Omer uses the word “vous” [you] to refer to the French in general. Louis, whose parents were considered traitors during the war for aligning themselves with the Algerian nationalists, is incensed at Omer's historical oversimplifications (29-30). Later, Omer also includes Amel in this “vous,” eliciting a similarly strong response from her (83). Indeed, Amel and Omer often argue about issues of politics, identity, and history (39-40, 54-55, 116-17). In these moments, Omer learns that simplistic dichotomies (French versus Algerian) cannot fully account for the events of the Algerian war or for the multiple identities and politics of people of French nationality.

At the same time, each character brings something different, yet crucial, to the process of anamnesis. Due to their lack of knowledge about the October massacre, Amel and Louis set out to unearth information about the past, which Amel's family will not discuss with her: the book begins with the cryptic sentence, “Sa mère ne lui a rien dit, ni la mère de sa mère” [Her mother told her nothing, and neither did her mother's mother] (13). Similarly, Louis's mother is at first reticent to testify about her political commitment as a former porteuse de valises (26). This personal silence echoes the general lack of public discourse about the Algerian war in France and highlights the necessity of creating a space for its anamnesis. It is precisely this intergenerational silence about the war that incites Amel and Louis to begin their search for information. Louis's contribution takes the form of a film, which is reminiscent of Jacques Panijel's 1962 documentary on the massacre, Octobre à Paris. Although Amel's mother will not tell her daughter about the massacre, she agrees to bear witness in front of Louis's camera. As for Omer and Amel's contribution, it is expressed through graffiti, often a subversive and fragmentary form of self-inscription favored by the powerless. They write graffiti on well-known monuments to other historical conflicts, thus creating a palimpsest that provides a transgressive response to the lack of official commemoration of the Algerian war in France.

As part of her search, Amel takes Omer on a journey through Paris. Geography features prominently in the process of reconstructing history, as the characters retrace the itinerary of the 1961 demonstration from the Nanterre shantytown where Amel's family used to live to the various places where the demonstration was repressed: subway stations, city intersections, major monuments.¹⁸ The names of these locations, together with the names of people who testify, are used as chapter headings. Already, in her 1982 Shérazade, Sebbar had used the Table of Contents to provide a cartography of the title character's identity and inner world. From the Table of Contents on, La Seine était rouge presents itself as a multivalent lieu de mémoire [site of memory]—the Table of Contents brings together the various memories necessary for national reconciliation through anamnesis. In doing so, Sebbar is also modeling her novel's structure on Einaudi's Bataille de Paris, in which, in his methodical description of October 17, he begins each section with the name of the place where specific events happened.

Like other writers, Sebbar draws parallels between the October massacre and events of World War II. One of the people who had been present at the demonstration speaks to Amel and Omer about it for the first time thirty-five years later, saying: “C'est l'affaire Papon qui a remué tout ça” [The Papon affair stirred it all up again] (Seine 103). Like other writers before her, Sebbar explicitly names Papon as the party responsible for ordering the repression of the demonstration.¹⁹ In addition, as Amel and Omer criss-cross Paris, they find themselves in front of several historical plaques referring to France's resistance to the Germans during World War II (29, 111). Interestingly, the text of the plaques is never reproduced in its entirety, as there is always something masking part of it (56, 111). That the text is “incomplet” [incomplete] suggests that such memorials only tell a partial truth and can be used to mask other, occluded events of French history (111). As Norindr argues in a different context, official commemoration hides as much as it reveals.

The first plaque that Omer and Amel overwrite is on the wall of the La Santé prison; it read: “En cette prison le 11 novembre 1940 furent incarcérés des lycéens et des étudiants qui à l'appel du Général de Gaulle se dressèrent les premiers contre l'occupant” [In this prison, on November 11, 1940, high school and university students were incarcerated because they were the first to rise up against the occupier at General de Gaulle's call] (29). Next to the plaque, they write in red spray paint, “1954-1962: Dans cette prison furent guillotinés des résistants algériens qui se dressèrent contre l'occupant français” [1954-1962: In this prison, Algerian resistors were guillotined because they rose up against the French occupier] (30). The symmetry of the language used in the two sentences (the dates, the similar syntaxes, the usage of the words, “rose up against,” “occupier,” and “resistors”—the last, a word usually reserved for the French who fought against the Nazi occupation—to refer to the Algerians) underscores the parallels between the actions of the French against the Algerians during the Algerian war and those of the Nazis against the French during World War II. Omer and Amel's rewriting is all the more subversive since the French are represented as occupiers, even though the October massacre took place in the heart of Paris. The juxtaposition of the graffiti with official commemorations of World War II highlights the metonymic chain between the Vichy and the Algeria syndromes.

In another example, when Omer and Amel find themselves in front of the famous Crillon hotel, they leave behind graffiti that reads, “Ici des Algériens ont été matraqués sauvagement par la police du préfet Papon le 17 octobre 1961” [Here, Algerians were savagely clubbed by Prefect Papon's police force on October 17, 1961] (88). This graffiti is reminiscent of actual graffiti that was painted on one of the Paris bridges a few years after the massacre—“Ici on noie les Algériens” [Here Algerians are being drowned].²⁰

The three main characters' contributions to anamnesis are revealed to be interrelated, as well as being dependent on the testimonies of the earlier generation, who witnessed, and participated in, the demonstration. Interdependence is a prominent theme in the novel and constitutes one of its organizational principles. It is Amel's personal search for the past that inspires Omer, while Louis includes Amel's mother's testimony in his film and Amel is comforted in her search by Louis's film. Similarly, as Louis is looking for Amel all over Paris, he comes across the graffiti and includes them in his film. The theme of interdependence is further reflected en abyme in Louis's film, which replicates the organizational structure of Sebbar's text, relying as it does on archival documents as well as recent interviews. The structure that divides the story of Amel's mother Noria into six parts, which are juxtaposed with other chapters relating to 1961 and 1996, highlights the dialectical movement between past and present that lies at the heart of anamnesis. Every chapter before a section of Noria's testimony ends with the sentence, “Amel entend sa mère” [Amel hears her mother] or “Amel entend la voix de sa mère” [Amel hears her mother's voice] (32, 40, 57, 83, 111), but before the last installment, the structure of the sentence changes to “On entend la voix de la mère” [We hear the mother's voice] (126, italics added). The new formulation of the sentence, with its use of the generic “on,” highlights the way in which the process of anamnesis has widened to include the community at large. Anamnesis occurs when the generation that lived through an event and the next generation come together to find ways to uncover and memorialize it. Through the shift from “sa mère” [her mother] to “la mère” [the mother], Noria comes to emblematize the mother of all those participating in the process. Sebbar thus suggests that national reconciliation can only occur when the conflicting memories of all those involved in a traumatic event are woven together into a collective narrative of the past deed of violence. By providing a fictional account of the memories of October 17, 1961, Sebbar engages with French historical amnesia once again and helps French memory move into the third phase of the Algeria syndrome.

La Seine était rouge ends in a very open-ended manner with the three young protagonists meeting again in Egypt. Already, in the Shérazade trilogy, Sebbar had moved the action from Paris in the first volume, Shérazade; to the rest of France in the second, Les Carnets de Shérazade; and to the Middle East (specifically Lebanon) in Le Fou de Shérazade. One of the ways in which Sebbar deals with the history of colonial violence in her works is to open her texts to other contexts of violence and war. For example, several of her short stories treat the Bosnian war. Her 1999 collection of short stories, Soldats [Soldiers], juxtaposes wars in Algeria, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chechnya, France, Israel/Palestine, and Somalia. The remainder of this chapter will elucidate the role the Middle East plays in Sebbar's literary reconstructions of history, with a specific focus on her 1991 Le Fou de Shérazade.

BEYOND THE ALGERIA SYNDROME

In her novels, Sebbar creates new definitions of French identity based on métissage. Le Chinois vert d'Afrique goes beyond a situation blocked by the Algerian/French dualism by pointing to a third focus, Vietnam. Sebbar also makes parallels between the Palestinian situation and the Algerian war as similar colonization struggles (156-57). Since questions of identity and nationalism are often wrestled with through wars, and since these questions are at the heart of Sebbar's concerns, it is not surprising that her texts become a palimpsest of wars overlapping each other. In Le Fou de Shérazade (1991), the third installment in her Shérazade trilogy, the Algerian/French conflict is linked to contemporary wars affecting the Arab world, especially in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. In this way, the Maghreb (the western part of the Arab world) and the Mashrik (the eastern part of the Arab world) are brought together in the text. Beur identity is shown to be part of a larger group identity: it is part of the Arab world as well as French and Algerian, Tunisian, or Moroccan. The mise en relation (putting into relation) of different wars, including the one in Vietnam, is generated by what is perceived as a common violence done to different people and expressed in the texts through the repetition of similar violent occurrences.

In Le Fou de Shérazade, the link is made between the different wars by insisting on the similarities between fighting men. This creates the feeling that all the wars are pointless, since the enemies look alike and act identically. For instance, in Beirut, Shérazade is taken hostage by an unidentified group of Arab men, who are in turn arrested by a group of Arab enemy militiamen. She changes hands for the first time in what is to be a long series of exchanges, in which she is treated in exactly the same way. Both groups think that she is a spy; they question and threaten her. As in Le Chinois vert d'Afrique, the link between war and sexuality is foregrounded in both cases. Two men from the first group want to rape her and leave her in a ditch, saying: “[E]lle est seule, personne la réclamera, les femmes restent à la maison sinon …” [She's alone, no one will come asking for her, women stay home, otherwise …] (Fou 20). This comment points to the symbolic transgression created by the young woman, who is outside, alone, in a country torn by civil war. The man's remark is also used by Sebbar as a direct criticism of the world order for which the guerrillas are fighting, since it indicates how conservative these male revolutionaries are when it comes to sexual politics. Their attitude toward Shérazade casts a doubt over their entire political venture.

As Lebanese writer and critic Evelyne Accad argued in her book Sexuality and War, “[S]exuality is centrally involved in motivations to war, and if women's issues were dealt with from the beginning, wars might be avoided, and revolutionary struggles and movements for liberation would take a very different path” (27). With the second militia, the man searching Shérazade takes advantage of the situation to touch her sexually against her will. Sexual violence, from verbal to physical, is structurally shown to be a weapon of war, since it takes place at the same time as the leader is interrogating Shérazade: the episode of sexual violence is framed by two slaps in the face inflicted on her by the leader. Later on, a subsequent jailer will attempt to rape her. After she changes captors for the fourth time, her new jailer alternates between forcefully kissing her and slapping her, then repeats the process. This series of changes that always end up returning to the same state emphasizes the irrationality of a war in which enemy factions behave in similar ways. This, in turn, is reinforced by the parallel established between the different Lebanese militias and the gangs of little boys in the Parisian housing project: the boys are all dressed more or less alike and all look very similar. The narrator asks: “Qui sont les ennemis? … Eux savent distinguer l'ennemi” [Who is the enemy? Only they know how to tell friend from foe] (Fou 47). Sebbar criticizes the leaders of pointless and brutal wars for acting like young gang leaders (48).

When she is finally freed, Shérazade ends up meeting Jaffar, a young Beur like her.²¹ Stopped by more militiamen in Beirut, they are once again treated with disrespect and humiliated. Jaffar makes a parallel between the Lebanese militiamen and French police officers (171). He dislikes the police because, in France, they tend to treat children of immigrants like him violently and in racially motivated ways. The Arab fighters are thus compared to the French police, a force antagonistic to Maghrebians both in contemporary France and in Algeria during the war, when the police participated in the torture of suspected guerrillas. Not only, then, are all Lebanese enemy factions thus collapsed into one, but in a scathing move, they are compared to the French military colonizer in Algeria. From Shérazade's first encounter with the Lebanese soldiers on, Sebbar consistently makes parallels between yesterday's colonizing warriors and today's freedom fighters: Shérazade “ne voit pas tout de suite le soldat debout devant elle, raide, jambes écartées, mitraillette à l'épaule. Elle sursaute à la voix. C'est presque le même soldat, celui qu'elle a regardé souvent dans la vitrine d'un libraire à Paris. Une photographie de la guerre d'Algérie. Le militaire français surveille un enterrement arabe” [doesn't see right away the soldier standing upright in front of her, his legs planted firmly on the ground, with a machine-gun hanging from his shoulder. The sound of his voice startles her. He's almost the exact same soldier as the one she used to contemplate in a bookstore's display window in Paris. A photograph of the Algerian war. The French soldier is keeping watch on an Arab funeral] (17). The scene photographed reinforces the trenchant nature of the parallel between French and Lebanese soldiers: the Lebanese civil war is implicitly condemned as “an Arab funeral.” Later on, Shérazade will compare her fourth captor to French paratroopers in Algeria (101).

The photograph of the Algerian war provides the link, not only between contemporary Arab (civil) wars and the Algerian war, but also between the Shérazade trilogy and Le Chinois vert d'Afrique. Sebbar likes to weave allusions to previous books into more recent ones to create a feeling of community and belonging in the midst of the fragmentation of exile. In Le Chinois, the photograph of the Algerian war is a central element in the formation of the young métis's fragmented identity. He has seen the picture in the very same bookstore as Shérazade and he also owns a copy of it, which he religiously keeps in his cabin. Shérazade and Mohamed are brought together across two different novels through their fascination for the same object.

In Le Fou de Shérazade, the link between sexuality and war is foregrounded again in the character of Michel Salomon, a Jewish freelance photographer and reporter covering the Lebanese civil war. Photographing violent war scenes is sexually exciting for him (129-30). The repetition of the link between sexuality and war in the words and actions of Arab, Jewish, and French men places the bulk of the responsibility for wars on the side of masculinist warrior values.²² Violence and war, no matter where they originate or for what purpose, are shown as harmful, and militias, whether in war-torn Lebanon or suburban France, are exposed as being grounded in a terrorist use of power.

Just as Djebar foregrounds the formerly erased presence of Algerian women in the wars (as discussed in the next chapter), Sebbar also insists on the presence of women on the site of wars, but mostly as agents of peace rather than as direct participants in the war. The absurdity of the Lebanese civil war is exemplified by the endless repetitions of the same blocked situation. Sebbar hints at a possible cause for the problem: the apparent absence of women around the militias. On several occasions, Shérazade hopes to be transferred to a place where women would be present (Fou 44), but she never hears a female voice (46). Like Accad, Sebbar seems to imply that if the sexual politics changed in countries such as Lebanon, if women's voices were allowed to be expressed and listened to, the entire political situation might change. And indeed, the women's voices heard in the text are saying very different things from those of the male guerrillas.

Apart from Shérazade's presence, the only sign pointing to the hope of peace in Beirut is the half-destroyed home of an old Lebanese lady who gives Shérazade shelter. She and her Egyptian maid have chosen not to flee like so many others but to remain within the confines of her house, refusing the civil war (162). Here, Sebbar follows a pattern that Miriam Cooke, in War's Other Voices, described in the following way: “[I]t was the women who stayed, and the men who left” in Lebanon during the civil war; according to Cooke, this pattern then reemerged in Lebanese fiction about the war (132). The old Lebanese lady's voice and presence mix with those of another old woman who, for a similar love of peace, engages in an opposite venture, setting out on a long journey away from her village. For the film in which Shérazade is to star, an old olive tree from the woman's village was uprooted and transported into the housing project's courtyard by a group of male workers whom the old woman had opposed in vain. Accompanied by a young girl and a dove, the old woman sets out on foot to find the stolen symbol of peace and to force the men to bring it back. Her trek parallels Shérazade's own journey.

The novel opens on a single sentence on a separate page, before the first chapter: “Shérazade attend, assise au pied de l'olivier” [Sherazade is waiting, sitting under the olive tree] (Fou 7). From the very beginning, Shérazade is presented as ready for peace, waiting for it. On her way to Jerusalem, the city on whose name the word “salem”—peace in both Hebrew and Arabic—is inscribed, she is forced to stop in a place symbolic of war, Beirut. Just as it is difficult for Shérazade to reach Jerusalem, it is very difficult for Jerusalem to find peace, since wars (religious or not) have been fought there for centuries. However, Shérazade's search for peace, like the old woman's search for the olive tree, generates other peace seekers, including some men. For instance, Shérazade's search triggers her pied-noir boyfriend, Julien's, own trip to Jerusalem to find her; in the old woman's village, a little boy is watching over the olive tree's hole for her; and in the housing project, boys, girls, and women participate in protecting the tree when the filmmaker wants to uproot it again. This time, it is the film crew that is unsuccessful, perhaps because now it is opposed, not just by a single old woman, but by a community (105-7). Similarly, toward the end of the novel, in the Palestinian occupied territories, Israeli soldiers come with bulldozers intending to uproot an entire field of olive trees. Palestinian women, together with Shérazade, oppose them through nonviolent resistance, sitting under the trees and waiting, putting their lives on the line (196).²³

The book progresses from the description of a lone peace seeker (Shérazade under the olive tree in the epigraph, the old woman against the film crew uprooting the tree) to that of community resistance against destruction and violence. It points to the necessity of coalition building in order to successfully oppose war and violence. The women are victorious, since the soldiers never come back (196). The community metaphorically preserves a possibility of peace, neither through surrendering nor through violence, but through a (perhaps utopian) third way—also advocated by Evelyne Accad—that of “nonviolent active struggles” (Sexuality 41). For Accad, as for Sebbar, “The alternative to violence is neither reconciliation, love, nor peace, but only a nonviolent struggle aiming at fighting against injustice and oppression” (41).

Sebbar also treats the Palestinian-Israeli war through the character of Yaël, a young Moroccan Jew now living in Israel. Yaël is doing her compulsory military service, but, unlike her brother, says she would desert the army rather than go to the occupied territories and murder Palestinian children (Fou 65). Yaël, who looks a little like Shérazade, is seen by Julien as Shérazade's “soeur ennemie” [enemy sister] (64), thus reinforcing the links between the two women and beyond them, between populations that have been opposed in recent history.

In the last two pages of the novel, Julien's film is finally being shot. The scene, taking place in the house of the old woman in Beirut, stages “la rencontre entre une Palestinienne et une Israélienne, Yaël et Shérazade, l'Arabe joue la Juive et la Juive l'Arabe, ainsi en a décidé le réalisateur” [the encounter between a Palestinian woman and an Israeli woman, Yaël and Sherazade, the Arab woman playing the Jewish woman and the Jewish one the Arab one, as the director has decided] (202). In the film, which is a mise en abyme of the novel, the Maghreb and the Mashrik, Algeria and Palestine, are once again brought together through Shérazade.

Reminiscent of the structuring of Djebar's novels, Le Fou de Shérazade had its origin in the weaving together of three different, but related, stories: the film set in the housing project, Shérazade's journey, and the old woman's trek. They slowly begin to merge as Julien leaves the film set for Jerusalem in search of Shérazade; the stories converge in the last chapters of the book, as all the characters make it (back) to the film set. The constant deferral of the film, due to Shérazade's absence, is what allows the book to be written. This movement of deferral was already present in the first part of the trilogy, when Julien began writing the script of that same film (Shérazade 145/156). The scenario evolves with each of Shérazade's departures and returns. Writing is thereby shown to be a dynamic process in which both characters participate.

The film's role reversal between Yaël and Shérazade opens up an imaginary space for the beginning of a new conceptualization of peace. In the script, however, the house is bombed and the three women die. This could be interpreted as a critique of the role of Western powers in the war and peace process in the Middle East, since it exposes the peace invented and imposed by the West as being an illusion based on a simplistic understanding of the situation in the Middle East. The last words of the novel are those of Meriem, Shérazade's sister. She is comforting her mother, who did not realize that a film was being shot and thought that Shérazade had really died: “Shérazade n'est pas morte. C'est le film. … Shérazade est vivante, vivante … vivante” [Sherazade isn't dead. It's a film. … Sherazade is alive, alive … alive] (203).

If, indeed, Shérazade, like the olive tree, represents the hope for peace in the novel, then the possibility of peace remains, but perhaps not on Western men's terms, since it is heralded by a young Beur woman. It is also a peace that will be long in the making, since Meriem and her mother have been waiting to hear from Shérazade since the beginning of the first book of the trilogy (Shérazade 35/34). What has been destroyed in the film is, not the real Shérazade, the real possibility of peace, but the staging of both by Western men, perhaps because these men cannot conceive of a peace originating through grassroots, Middle Eastern community movements. In spite of the very negative context of violence, war, and death, the novel ends on a positive note, the reunion of Shérazade and her relatives as a symbol for possible peace in the Middle East and beyond.

Both Sebbar and Djebar foreground a history of violence in their fiction. Sebbar also insists on its corollary: the possibility of a peace brought about by the efforts of a community in which women and children would play a central role. As Djebar tries to (re)construct a dislocated identity by doing violence to her French intertexts, Sebbar attempts to build an imaginary space for a reality that does not yet exist, a utopia. Both writers, through fiction, create “imagined communities” (see Anderson) by foregrounding the experiences of war and suffering.

Notes

1. Sebbar's novel was published the year following the decree. Historian Benjamin Stora noted that 1986 was the first year in which students taking the Baccalauréat [French high school exit exam] in a few regions were asked questions on the Algerian war (Gangrène 353).

2. In Le Sourire de Brahim, Nacer Kettane also associates racist violence with police and soldiers who had been sent to Algeria during the war (132, 162).

3. The choice of Tuilier's name is extremely interesting, as it reflects a case of fiction prophetically dovetailing with reality. In summer 1986, two years after the publication of Le Chinois, a twenty-five-year-old woman of Maghrebian descent was first strangled, and then raped and robbed by two enlisted French soldiers, named Leterrier and Thuillier, who left behind the message, “La France est en guerre contre les Arabes” [France is at war with the Arabs] (Giudice 208). The two were arrested and condemned to life sentences. Fausto Giudice, reporting the incident, concluded that the two young men “se sont trompés d'époque et de territoire. Auraient-ils fait la même chose trente ans plus tôt dans la première mechta venue, ils seraient aujourd'hui de tranquilles pères de famille attendant leur retraite” [got the era and the territory wrong. Had they done the same thing thirty years earlier in any mechta (village), they would now be peaceful family men waiting for retirement] (209). This comment uncannily parallels the novel's episode in which the wartime rape and killing exploits of Marcel (now a member of Tuilier's militia) and his company in Algeria are enthusiastically recounted by Tuilier himself (235, discussed later in this chapter).

4. The name is ironic in that it is a tribute to a Communist leader from a conservative man for whom communism is a code word for the loss of law and order. On the other hand, it is significant in that it foregrounds Tuilier's admiration for the kind of strong, totalitarian form of leadership he would like to exercise over his community and against young people like Mohamed.

5. Le Pen, as Rousso mentions, was predictably a supporter of French Algeria (210). In the first years of the war, Le Pen served as a parachutiste (paratrooper) in Algeria, an intoxicating experience for him (Rioux 135), which may have included his participation in torture during the (in)famous Battle of Algiers (Stora, Gangrène 290). In Le Chinois, Tuilier, commenting on the wars in Indochina and Algeria, says that “La France a tout perdu” [France has lost everything], indicating once again a lingering sense of loss about the wars that significantly informs his thoughts and actions twenty years later (135).

6. France 2 evening news, April 24 and 26, 1995.

7. The French comic group Les Inconnus—three young French men, one black, one of Maghrebian origin, and one white—created a powerful satire of this French paranoid tendency in one of their early 1990s skits, “Les Envahisseurs.” Ostensibly a parody of the U.S. science-fiction television series The Invaders, the skit shows a white Frenchman trying to warn other French people and authorities that “the invaders are among us,” only to discover that it is too late: everybody he encounters has already turned into an Arab.

8. Papon's collaboration with the Nazis in sending more than 1,500 Jewish people to concentration camps during World War II was uncovered in 1981; he was found guilty of complicity in a crime against humanity in a 1997-1998 trial. He appealed this judgment to the highest French court, the Cour de Cassation. In October 1999, days before his appeal was to be considered, Papon fled the country (Dumay 1). He was caught in Switzerland and extradited to France. The Cour de Cassation rejected his appeal, and he was incarcerated in the Fresnes prison to begin serving his ten-year sentence.

9. As early as 1967, Claire Etcherelli had mentioned several ratonnades (beatings of Arabs) (in her famous novel of the working class, Elise ou la vraie vie). However, she did not specifically treat the Algerian demonstration and its brutal repression. Einaudi mentions that for the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, articles about it appeared (in 1980 and 1981) in newspapers such as Libération, Les Nouvelles littéraires, Le Monde, and Sans frontière (Einaudi 278-80, 294).

10. Lallaoui also coedited a three-volume book with David Assouline, Un siècle d'immigration en France, whose third volume includes a short section on the events of October 1961. He contributed to Anne Tristan's investigative report and picture book on the massacre, Le Silence du fleuve (1991). Tristan's name is also mentioned in Sebbar's dédicace (dedication). There is an intertextual reference to Le Silence du fleuve in the title of one of Sebbar's novels, Le Silence des rives, which was published two years after Tristan's book.

11. See Daeninckx, Ecrire en contre 120-21. More than 100,000 copies of his Meurtres pour mémoire were sold in the 1980s (Einaudi 282). The book was made into a TV movie of the same title by Laurent Heynemann in 1989 (and was reissued in paperback in 1998).

12. For an excellent (and less critical) analysis of Daeninckx's novel, see Josiane Peltier.

13. The phrase was first used by Pierre Vidal-Naquet (see Hamon and Rotman 363). For details on Mattei's involvement in Henri Curiel's network, see Hamon and Rotman 240.

14. As recently as February 1999, Papon took historian Jean-Luc Einaudi to court for libel after Einaudi used the word massacre in a May 8, 1998, Le Monde article devoted to the events of October 17. For years, the official number of deaths on October 17 had been three. Papon's libel suit prompted a reopening of the dossier by the government (Papon seems to have been unaware at the time of Einaudi's status as a historian of October 17). Just a few days after photographer Elie Kagan's death, Papon argued at the trial that Kagan's pictures of the 1961 massacre (almost the only pictures of the event to have survived French censorship) were retouched (Benayoun 67). As a response, Jacques Panijel's film, Octobre à Paris, was shown at the trial (Sebbar, personal written communication, September 21, 1999). Not only does Kagan's name figure in Sebbar's dedication page, she also mentions him in the novel and describes his pictures, which are featured in the film made by her protagonist, Louis (85-87, 105). Papon lost the suit, and the French government's official number of deaths as of May 1999 is now at least forty-eight (the new report acknowledges the deficiency of some archival documents). FLN estimations run between 200 and 300 deaths (Herzberg, Le Monde electronic edition, July 13, 1999).

15. For detailed discussions of anamnesis in the postcolonial context, see Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices, and my “Between Amnesia and Anamnesis.”

16. See especially pages 17, 26, 29-30, 68-69, 106, 113, 125.

17. See pages 107, 115, 119-20. The story of Maspéro helping a teenage Algerian boy escape the police force is included in Sebbar's book (see Tristan 67; Sebbar, Seine 62).

18. In Les Carnets de Shérazade (1985), the reader follows a similar itinerary as the protagonist retraces the 1983 march against racism known as the Marche des Beurs.

19. Papon is named several times in the novel (37, 42, 88, 101, 103).

20. A picture of this graffiti is reproduced in several books dealing with the events of October 17, 1961 (Assouline and Lallaoui 19; Tristan 99).

21. Jaffar also happens to be the protagonist of another of Sebbar's novels (outside the Shérazade trilogy), J. H. cherche âme soeur (1987).

22. Sebbar once again is not indicting all men, only masculinist values. In the novel, several men participate in peacemaking and community building. Sebbar thus avoids gender dichotomies while still criticizing male war leaders.

23. This episode recalls real-life grass-roots activism such as the highly successful Chipko Andolan (Hugging Movement) in India, in which “poor women who came out of the Gandhian movement have waged a nonviolent land reform and forest preservation campaign” by hugging trees to prevent them from being bulldozed by loggers. “Men have joined this campaign, although it was originated and continues to be led by women” (Ynestra King 132-33).