By Imane Ait-Kaci
Blood stains mark the theatre where Abdelkader Alloula fell from three bullets to his back. In his flat lies Jean Sénac’s body, while M’Hamed Boukhobza’s daughter bears witness to her father’s torture. Through these assassinations, Assia Djebar builds more than a memorial in “Algerian White” – she dissects how nationalism engulfs its own people.
Writing during Algeria’s “Black Decade,” as competing visions of national identity claimed over 200,000 lives, Djebar chose French – the coloniser’s tongue – for her work of mourning. This linguistic choice embodies the complexity her murdered friends represented. Through intimate portraits, she reveals how each death served nationalism’s need for simplification. Sénac, whose poetry merged Rimbaud with Arabic verse forms, embodied the cultural hybridity nationalists sought to eliminate. Boukhobza, writing in French while speaking Kabyle at home, proved how everyday linguistic fluidity threatened myths of cultural purity.
At Frantz Fanon’s grave, Djebar confronts the bitter irony – the great theorist of decolonisation now lies in soil that mocks his vision. His death in 1961, just before independence, seems prophetic; the nationalism he warned should transform into social consciousness instead calcified into new forms of violence. This moment crystallises her argument that postcolonial nationalism reproduces colonial violence. Her friends died not randomly but systematically with each murder narrowing the field of possible Algerian futures. Sénac’s corpse laid twisted into a question mark – a final, bitter symbol of how the nation treats its questioners. This image echoes through Benedict Anderson’s theory – where he sees nations built on shared imagination; Djebar reveals the violence needed to maintain such unity. Her dead friends embody what textbooks only theorise – nationalism’s need to silence its critics. She walks Algiers’ streets, mapping absences as “the cafés where poets gathered now echo with emptiness.” An imagined community takes on urgency in Djebar’s hands, requiring not just shared myths and memory, but also shared silences and forgetting.
In her French prose, Djebar preserves linguistic plurality by including untranslated Arabic and Berber phrases – honouring the complexity her friends died defending. Each death she documents reveals nationalism’s material consequences – how abstract ideas of belonging translate into broken bodies. This violence persists in today’s Algeria as Hirak protesters carried trilingual signs through those same streets, challenging the nationalist monolingualism. Their chants – “not Islamic, not secular, not military!” – echo Djebar’s insistence on complexity; as she describes Alloula’s final play as “a conversation between languages.” His killers understood that such conversations threaten nationalist myths of cultural purity.
Djebar’s book anticipates the pattern of intellectual persecution that defines contemporary nationalism, revealing nationalism’s universal grammar of elimination. Her pages spark with life as beyond documenting deaths, capturing her friends in motion – speaking multiple languages and refusing categories. The portraits become acts of defiance, proving that historical memory itself can resist nationalism’s drive toward simplicity.
The pattern she exposes stretches beyond Algeria’s borders – from silenced Catalan poets to professors arrested in Hong Kong, her portrayal of intellectuals trapped between languages and loyalties reads like tomorrow’s headlines. Each context reveals what she terms “the fatal logic of purity” – how nationalism requires the elimination of hybrid identities. Yet her work also suggests resistance strategies. By preserving multilingual voices in her French text, she creates what Edward Said calls “counterpoint” – a weaving of diverse voices – which finds vivid expression in Djebar’s multilingual text. By juxtaposing French, Arabic and Berber, she resists the nationalist drive toward uniformity, instead orchestrating a symphony of languages that honours Algeria’s convolution. Said’s
counterpoint concept helps explain why Djebar’s linguistic choices constitute political resistance. By refusing to translate Arabic/Berber phrases, she forces French readers to confront the limits of their linguistic dominance, creating what Said calls “contrapuntal awareness” of colonial power structures. Today’s Hirak protestors march through Algiers’ streets, their banners mixing Arabic, French and Tamazight scripts. They march past the cafés where Sénac once read poetry, past the theatre where Alloula dreamed of a different Algeria. In their chants for a plural future, Djebar’s voice echoes – proof that her white tomb of memory planted seeds of hope. Her message is still relevant as nationalism gains traction around the world, as we must avoid the temptation to adopt false unity.
Through the intimate portraits of murdered intellectuals, Djebar reveals nationalism’s systematic erasure of complexity. Her writing preserves what nationalist violence sought to destroy – the mixed identities that challenge myths of cultural purity. As global movements challenge the resurgence of nationalist violence, Djebar’s work reminds us that the fight for complexity is the fight for humanity itself.
Bibliography
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.
Assia Djebar. (2011). Algerian White. Seven Stories Press.
Fanon, F. (2007). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove/Atlantic, Inc. (Original work published 1961)
Mcdougall, J. (2006). History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria. Cambridge University Press.
Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. Vintage Books.
Stora, B. (2001). La guerre invisible. Les Presses de Sciences Po.
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