La Femme sans sépulture

The most recent phase of Djebar's work, including La Femme sans sépulture and La Disparition de la langue française, announces a further step towards expatriation, a break from any intended quest for identity and a reconfiguration of Algeria as necessarily lost. While Le Blanc de l'Algérie and Oran, langue morte begin a process of mourning and resuscitate the ghosts of some of Algeria's writers, intellectuals and resistance fighters, the next two novels present that process of mourning as always, inevitably incomplete. Algeria in this final phase is not merely a victim of loss but constituted by loss, peopled by spectres, and known only in so far as it cannot be, and was never, fully known. In La Femme sans sépulture, Djebar returns to the memory of the war of independence, to the nature of women's intervention and their activities in the maquis, and she seeks once again to uncover singular experiences that remain uncharted by mainstream historical accounts. Yet here, the attempt to recover Algeria's traumatic history at the time of the war demands an alternative language, a complete abandonment of ‘the specific’ in favour of a wholly alternative poetics of haunting, loss and partial presence. Now Derridean notions of singularity and différance in language are expanded and radicalised to engender a more disturbing investigation of hauntology, of deathly half-presences that throw into question the borders of life and death.