Paradis perdus? (Af)filiative returns in Alice Zeniter’s L’art de perdre (2017) and Zahia Rahmani’s France: Récit d’une enfance (2006)

Abstract

In recent decades, female descendants of harkis - indigenous Algerian men employed as auxiliary soldiers in the French army during the Algerian War - have privileged the literary text as a site of reconstruction of silenced familial and collective (hi)stories, and of reconnection with their effaced ancestral heritage. This article examines representations of physical, affective, and imaginative “returns” in two literary works by members of different harki (post)generations: France: Récit d’une enfance (2006) by Zahia Rahmani, a daughter of a harki, and L’Art de perdre (2017) by Alice Zeniter, a harki’s granddaughter. It is argued that these multivocal narratives problematize straightforward understandings of belonging and inheritance to interrogate the reparative potential of return - whether real or imagined, spatial or temporal - and to confront the ongoing effects of (neo)colonial narratives and power structures. Both texts present the notion of return as simultaneously intimate and broad in scope, resulting at once from external pressures and personal necessity, and capable of healing certain wounds while resisting definitive closure. Invoking the frequently gendered role of storytelling in Arabo-Berber societies, the novels also establish dialogues and connections with disparate histories, memories, and literary texts, allowing their protagonists to transcend and deconstruct static, assigned identities. The texts’ filiative and affiliative returns across time and space are shown to reflect Marianne Hirsch’s conception of the existence of vertical and horizontal forms of “postmemory” (2012) and Michael Rothberg’s notion of “rhizomatic networks” (2009). It is argued that it is precisely the notion of return which emerges as a creative organizing principle, allowing Rahmani and Zeniter to negotiate aspects of transgenerational trauma, absence, and loss, while also turning their intimate, self-reflexive quests outwards to critique and rewrite pre-established narratives and to inscribe their texts within current interrogations of commemoration and reparation in postcolonial contexts.