Traumatic Loss, Grief And Mourning In Assia Djebar’s Selected Novels: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985) And Algerian White (1995)

Résumé: The present dissertation undertakes a study of the notions of loss, grief and mourning in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade (1985) and Algerian White (1995). The study’s major goal consists into exploring how Djebar deals with her mourning work as a reaction to traumatic losses inducing her personal life as well as Algerian modern history. To reach this end, I had recourse to Freud’s concepts of Mourning and Melancholia, Alan Wolfelt’s "the Journey through Grief", and Bonanno’s the Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells us about Life. The analysis of the novels under study revealed Djebar’s incapacity to mourn in Algerian White, because of the circumstances in which it was written. Fantasia, on the other hand, shows Djebar’s ability to cope with previous trauma, be it Algerian colonial past or personal agonies. The reason which explains Djebar’s different attitudes towards traumatic losses is to be found in the distance that separated her from the sites of trauma. Indeed, if she succeeded to take aesthetic and emotional distance from the trauma of colonization in Fantasia, she lacked that very distance in Algerian White, written as an urgent response to the civil strife in the country

Publié dans la revue: