SOCIO-HISTORICAL REALITIES AND THE DE/CONSTRUCTION OF THE ALGERIAN IDENTITY IN SELECTED NOVELS OF LEILA SEBBAR

Abstract

Socio-historical realities such as wars, colonisation and migration are significant events in North African literature. Leïla Sebbar's creative writings are suffused with the socio-historical realities of Algeria. Previous studies on Sebbar's novels have dwelt largely on the thematic analysis of these socio-historical realities, with less attention paid to how they have (de)constructed the Algerian identity. This study was, therefore, designed to examine the socio-historical realities in the selected novels, with a view to establishing the manner in which these realities shaped the Algerian identity.

Edward Saïd's Postcolonial Theory and Homi Bhabha's notion of hybridity were adopted as framework. The interpretive design was used. Four of Leïla Sebbar's novels, La Seine était rouge (Seine), La Jeune fille au balcon (Jeune), Mon Cher fils (Fils) and Fatima ou les Algériennes au square (Fatima), were purposively selected for their representations of the Algerian social history. Texts were subjected to critical textual analysis.

Socio-historical realities represented in the texts are the Algerian war, migration, exile and colonisation. French colonial experience in Algeria engendered anticolonial and nationalistic consciousness in the psyche of Algerians. Seine depicts a riot that took place on 17 October, 1961, during the Algerian war, which foregrounds the subalternity of the Algerians both in Algeria and in France. The stereotyped Algerians, who came for a peaceful demonstration against a curfew imposed only on them were injured and killed. Migration of Algerians to France puts them in dire socio-economic conditions. In Fatima, the case of Mina illustrates the marginalisation of Algerians living in France; she lives in the ghetto and does menial jobs in spite of her qualification as a lawyer. The exile of the first generation Algerians resulted in the hyphenated Franco-Algerian identity of the second generation Algerians, born and bred in France, and referred to as Beurs. Girls such as Dalila, Dina and Dora, in Fatima and Jeune, use displacement as subversive practices against patriarchal rules, thereby affirming their feminine Algerianness. Jeune and Fils depict the intergenerational conflict between the old generation Algerians and the new generation born after colonisation. The texts demonstrate the openness of the new generation Algerians (Amel in Seine and Yacine in Jeune) to the Algerian past, unlike the old generation (Amel’s mother and grand-mother or Yacine’s father). The recuperation of these old histories as Algeria’s collective memory enables the young Algerians to deconstruct their historical experiences and to construct new postcolonial identity. Colonisation produces an exilic and migratory consciousness in young Algerians, who feel alienated both in Algeria and in France. Amel in Seine,Dalila in Fatima, Mélissa, Dina, Dora and Yacine in Jeune, and Kamila and Alma in Fils represent the new generation Algerians whose identity has lost its homogeneity and acquired transcultural and transnational hybridity through the agency of colonisation and migration.

Leïla Sebbar's novels narrated the socio-historical realities of Algeria in ways that enable the (de)construction of the Algerian identity between the colonial and post-colonial period.