Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Decolonizing Memory is a welcome contribution to the emerging field of postcolonial memory studies. A theoretically sophisticated intervention in debates about the representation of violence and collective trauma in colonial and postcolonial settings, Jill Jarvis’s book zooms in on both canonical and less well-known writings about French Algeria (1830–1962), the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), and Algeria’s “dark decade” (1988–99) to argue for the seminal importance of the literary imagination in shaping representations of the past and contesting official historical narratives. Paying granular attention to the politics of literary representation and the literary qualities of testimonial texts, Jarvis makes the forceful claim that aesthetic works are best positioned to formulate calls for justice in the absence of adequate juridical frameworks for redress on both sides of the Mediterranean—in France, where state discourse continues to disavow the “hallucinatory violence” of colonization (in Frantz Fanon’s apt phrase), and in Algeria, where the National Liberation Front continues to exploit the collective memory of revolution and martyrdom to maintain power in the face of new prodemocracy movements (2019 to the present). Arguing that the field of postcolonial memory studies has inadvertently recentered Europe in its exploration of decolonization and antiracism in, for example, the emergence of Holocaust memory, Jarvis redirects our attention to how Algerians have contested French and Algerian state accounts of the past in a range of languages (French, Arabic, Darija, and Tamazight) and literary and testimonial forms (novels, essays, manifestos, poetry, and visual art) that together make up an alternative archive of decolonization. Borrowing Lia Brozgal’s productive notion of the “anarchive” (a corpus of texts produced by artists and activists to counter the official silence on the police killings of some two hundred Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961), Jarvis proposes to “explore anarchival forms of literary expression that unsettle and elude official discourses of both the French and Algerian states in ways that not only rewrite the colonial past, but also make it possible to envision decolonial futures” (2).In a series of close readings of texts written by Fanon, Fadhma Aïth Mansour Amrouche, Djamila Boupacha, Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Waciny Laredj, Zahia Rahmani, Samira Negrouche, and others, Jarvis argues that “the magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria is such that only aesthetic works, in particular literature, have been able to register its enduring effects”—effects that, as Jarvis and others have shown, include the violence of the postcolonial state (2). This is a bold claim, at first glance difficult to defend. Where does the monumental work of historians and social scientists of Algeria figure in this account? But Jarvis’s expansive understanding of the literary, which includes anticolonial manifestos and testimonial writings by survivors of torture, and her insistence on the archival dimension of these aesthetico-political interventions give this argument a broader reach than one might assume. To include Fanon, Boupacha, and other anticolonial militants in a literary corpus is, after all, a recognition that the literary far exceeds the policed bounds of the discipline of les belles lettres. Jarvis’s argument relies on a distinctly interdisciplinary conception of the literary that is in productive dialogue with the historians and social scientists of colonial and postcolonial Algeria, not in opposition to them.Jarvis’s methodology is to mobilize literary and visual texts, activist archives and philosophical discourses, and historical and legal interpretations of French and Algerian state violence. Her call to “chart a literary constellation whose center is Algeria” is well taken and is to some extent nuanced by the fact that the book begins with consideration of Giorgio Agamben’s much-discussed use of the figure of the “Muselmann,” as Nazi camp detainees were dubbed when they were deemed at the brink of death, to theorize “bare life” (27–47). But Jarvis’s turn to the silence surrounding the “juridical category of exception long experimented with by the French in Algeria”—the same that surrounded the figure of the musulman (and, one should add, the indigène israélite: indigènes were split into Muslim and Jewish natives)—is meant to demonstrate the occlusion of the colonial state of exception in critical theory and, more ambitiously still, to contest “the law’s authority to decide what is human at all” (32). To explore alternative models of testimony that eschew the legal bounds of what counts as human, Jarvis turns to Rahmani, who in her novels Moze (2003) and “Musulman” roman (2005) “semantically and conceptually repatriates the ‘musulman’ back to Algeria where it was born as a category of colonizing law” (50). The stakes of Jarvis’s critique of Agamben come into full force in her artful reading of Rahmani’s novels, which are themselves explicitly engaged in a double critique of French and Algerian state violence through the figure of the harki, the Algerian soldier of the French army expelled from both national narratives. Subsequent chapters investigate the literary quality of testimonials that might supplement the absence of restorative justice in France and Algeria (chapter 2, on anticolonial testimonials published in France during the war) and counterpublic forms of mourning that contest the official narratives and monuments of postrevolutionary Algeria (chapters 3 and 4, on novels by Mechakra and Laredj, respectively).The heterogeneous and idiosyncratic corpus Jarvis puts together tells a fascinating story of the myriad efforts to make up for “those many trials that surely should have taken place, but did not” in both France and Algeria (94). Adopting Gayatri Spivak’s well-known aphorism “Literature is not evidence, but an instrument for imaginative training” as her epigraph, Jarvis proposes to read “texts . . . not [as] documents of past events, but traces of a dynamic, collective, open-ended process oriented toward the future” (14). Her conclusion, written at the height of the prodemocracy movement known in Algeria as le hirak, makes the claim that “literature helped to call the movement into being” (173). That this claim cannot be proved in a court of law is part of Jarvis’s argument. Literature is an arena for “decolonizing memory” in the absence of justice.