Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed by Martin Evans and John PhillipsĪfter a long and bloody war to end colonial rule, Algeria emerges in 1962 to become a darling of the non-aligned movement. She lives in France, and was elected to the prestigious Académie Française in 2005. This unconventional novel’s elaborate construction can be frustrating at times, but it presents a memorable account of lives lived under French repression.Īssia Djebar is the pen name of the Algerian novelist, academic and film-maker Fatima-Zohra Imalayen. She says she is “writing … above all, to resurrect so many vanished sisters”. The raw, emotional prose reflects both passion and compassion as the narrator recounts the stories of women struggling for Algeria’s independence and their own.

In the latter part of the book a tapestry of first-person female voices conveys the experiences of participants – rebel fighters, torture victims, exiles – in the vicious struggle against France.

The novel reclaims the role played by Algerian women in society and emphasises their role in the country’s history – their suffering, but also their tenacity and resilience. She uses a colourful mix of fictional and reconstructed history from archives to counter colonial as well as patriarchal attitudes – sometimes reflecting the parallels between the two. In the first novel of her Algerian quartet, Djebar intertwines the autobiographical story of a young girl’s coming of age with the history of French conquest in 1830 and the war of independence in the 1950s. Fantasia by Assia Djebar, translated by Dorothy S Blair Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former Algerian army officer who adopted his wife’s name to evade military censors. This rich, captivating novel offers Younes/Jonas as a trenchant witness to both colonial and colonised Algeria. His idyllic life shattered, Jonas is forced to choose between two worlds – Algerian and European. But it faces a much greater challenge as Algeria’s grisly war of independence reaches Rio Salado and racial tensions erupt. The group’s friendship is sorely tested when the arrival of the beautiful Emilie brings painful lessons about love. Jonas acquires a tight coterie of friends, but racism – both subtle and overt – is never far away. It’s a life-changing experience for the young boy, who, renamed Jonas, moves with his new family to the town of Rio Salado, where he goes to school among Europeans. The father, ground down by poverty, eventually agrees for Younes to be brought up by his uncle, an educated and affluent pharmacist. The narrator, Younes, is the son of a poor Arab farmer who loses his land and, in search of work, drags the family to a slum in the city of Oran.

Martin evans algeria