Études romanes de Brno (Jul 2013)
Mémoire individuelle et mémoire collective dans la fiction de Maïssa Bey
Abstract
The aim of this article is to examine the collection of short stories Sous le jasmin la nuit (2004) and the narrative Entendez-vous dans les montagnes... (2002), by Maissa Bey, a pseudonym taken by the Algerian writer and which allowed her to escape from the adverse conditions of a period of great political instability in Algeria, in the nineties. Through literature she gives voice to charac-ters that wander in the conflicting periods that made the recent history of the country, such as the French colonization, the fights for independence, as well as the political crisis arisen in the nineties. In her work, we find the coexistence of the story as personal experience and the great History, the individual memory and the collective memory of the painful episodes of the colonial time, the wounds inflicted by the decolonization and the complex relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus, her work joins autobiography, fiction and History. When Maissa Bey sets about revisiting her past through the narrative of a personal experience, it is, at the same time, an attempt to better understand the present of the Algerian immigrant and to unveil the fragments of the historical past of her country that many tried to keep in silence.
