Education and Violence in the Black Decade

This chapter asks how literature portrays classroom scenes during times of trauma and political crisis, and whether literary depictions of historical moments of trauma can, themselves, be pedagogical. It focuses in particular of literary portraits of the Black Decade of the 1990s. a time when students and teachers inside classrooms were targets of violence. The literary classroom depicting this time became a vacant or fractured space, replaced by direct encounters outside the school between teachers and students, writers and readers. Novels depicting the 1990s feature teachers and students meeting in bars and cafés, young girls who read and teach each other at home, and former teachers writing to their students from exile. Along with two central novels, Wahiba Khiari’s Nos silences (Our silences) and Bashir Mefti’s Ghurfat al thikrayat (The room of memories), this chapter discusses Nacira Belloula’s Visa pour la haine (Visa for hatred), Boualem Sansal’s Le serment des barbares (The barbarians’ oath), and Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Al aswad yaliq bik (Black becomes you). The portraits of education in these works are applicable beyond the context of the Black Decade, as they show how novels bear witness to and reach readers in a hostile political and educational environment.