Troubling Memories of Colonialism

This chapter considers a transformational moment in Algerian history: the first days of the independent school, when students could look forward to studying their own national history and literature. One of the primary preoccupations of novels in French and Arabic that depict this moment was how the school would contend with the memory of the most controversial and taboo aspects of colonialism. Official governmental discourse depicted the Arabized school as a “clean slate” that would fully reject French influence, yet many novels argue for the classroom as a space to renegotiate, rather than erase, the history of French education in Algeria. Maïssa Bey’s Bleu blanc vert (Blue white green) describes the deleterious effects of memory erasure on a generation of young French-educated students, while Abdelhamid Benhedouga’s Nihayat al-ams (The End of Yesterday) features the debate over harkis (Algerians who collaborated with the French) and their place in the classroom. The discussion of memory in these novels forms part of a larger debate about the role of literature in preserving the memories suppressed by the school.