Contested cartographies: Maïssa Bey's Bleu, blanc, vert

This article analyses Algerian-language politics in Bey's Bleu, blanc, vert [2006. Paris: L'Aube], a novel that tracks the 30-year period following independence (1962–1992) through the lives of two Algerians. Drawing on Rafael's theorisation of the interplay of ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ in the language of Filipino nationalism, I show how French – at once embraced by the post-independence education system and reviled by revolutionary political rhetoric – placed a generation of Algerians like Bey's characters in the paradoxical position of both incarnating and betraying a nationalist future. I suggest that the ‘return’ to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) – championed to different ends by the Front de Libération Nationale-dominated state and those with ‘Islamist’ sympathies – refused to recognise the foreignness of the so-called native (MSA) for many post-independence Algerians, eliding the impact of over 130 years of colonial history. By exposing the disjunction between ‘language’ as theorised in post-independence Algerian politics (whether by the state or Islamists) and ‘language’ as lived by average Algerians, I argue that Bey's novel refuses collective amnesias that ignore the rich and dissonant complexity of Algeria's past, confounding and productively complicating any reimagination of Algeria's future through a poetics of inclusion.