The king of martyrs

Abstract

How can people talk about the past in a deeply fractured society, wounded by two centuries of colonial and postcolonial violence? In Oran—Algeria's second-largest city—people find creative ways to speak without speaking about unspeakable pasts. They do this by creating poetic parallelism between urban forms—from skeletons of buildings to martyr images—in everyday speech and image-events. In poetics, parallelism deploys similar linguistic forms to suggest equivalence of meaning for certain effects. In everyday life, parallelism is emergent social action that brings new publics to life through its performance. This parallelism enables ordinary people to talk to each other across entrenched sociopolitical divides, especially in contexts of authoritarian censorship. Through poetic parallelism, Oranis revivify the martyrs of independence as agentive witnesses to their decaying city's housing crisis. In doing so, they reconfigure the relationship between the colonial past and postcolonial present.