A Gnostic Noir: Y.B.'s Explication of the Algerian Crisis

Abstract:

The Algerian writer Y.B. (Yassir Benmiloud) originally established himself as a satirical journalist and critic of the Algerian regime before publishing his first novel, L'Explication, from exile in Paris in 1999. Although it was met with a relative lack of critical attention, reserved more for his third novel Allah Superstar (2003), which examines the place of Muslims in post 9/11 France, L'Explication is a dynamic reimagining of noir that "others" the classically Western genre. While respecting many of the tropes of detective and noir fiction, including the gradual unveiling of the criminals and their motives for murder, an investigator-focused narrative, temporal doubling, and sassy one-liners, L'Explication deviates from reader expectations with its autobiographical elements, hybridity, and its refusal to provide a rational resolution to the investigation. The novel is imbued with a Sufi mystical structure and ideology that exist uncomfortably alongside, and call into question, French rationalism, the underpinning of a classical detective story. Y.B.'s criminal investigation proceeds along unexpected lines to become an esoteric interpretation of the history of Islam in North Africa and the rise of Algeria's cabinet noir during the 1990s civil war. This article will show that L'Explication is at once a detective novel and a parody of both that genre and of Islamic exegesis. The parodic elements allow Y.B. to circumvent censure, while offering an indirect means of giving voice to national trauma as he endeavors to explain the seemingly inexplicable Algerian civil war.