Towards an Ethics of Traumatic Memory: Mouloud Feraoun's La Cité Des Roses and Zahia Rahmani's France, Récit D'une Enfance

This article proposes a contiguous reading of two works by writers of Algerian-Amazigh heritage that examine the construction of the self in times of political and cultural fracture and confront what the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano has called 'frozen discourses' (2008) on identity and national belonging. Written 45 years apart, Mouloud Feraoun's posthumously published war-time love story, La cité des roses (2007) and Zahia Rahmani's contemporary experimental memoir, France, récit d'une enfance (2006) approach the collective trauma of the Algerian war of independence and its transgenerational repercussions from an adult male and a teenage girl's perspective who both experience the discourse of inter-ethnic hatred as a suicidal imperative. Completed before his assassination by French paramilitaries at the end of the war, Feraoun's fiction lucidly portrays sexual and political infatuation in 1958 Algeria, seeking to situate an ethics of the self in a context of war. Forty-five years later, Rahmani is compelled by the dual events of racial unrest in France and her Amazigh mother's terminal illness to undertake the autobiographical memory work of her upbringing in rural France as the daughter of an accused Harki. Marked by difference in historical, rhetorical, and gender positions, both writers nevertheless draw upon a common Amazigh heritage; as cosmopolitan insiders they confront the demands of a shattered public with the self's need for love and implication. This cosmopolitan Amazigh perspective should be viewed as an essential element of a Franco-Maghrebi ethics of traumatic memory.