Mutual Adversaries, Fellow Dissidents

In mid- to late 20th-century Algeria, the language in which an author wrote reflected more than personal preference: it indicated a political affiliation and a position within the culture wars that merged with the violent conflict of the 1990s. Taking the tension between francophone, arabophone, and pluralist factions in Algerian literature as its point of departure, this article sheds light on the transcendent and multilingual “language” of dissidence exemplified in the novels of al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār and Tahar Djaout. Previous work on Waṭṭār and Djaout has portrayed their mutual antipathy as an unbridgeable political divide. This article challenges this interpretation through an analysis of Waṭṭār’s novel al-Zilzāl (1974) and Djaout’s posthumous novel Le Dernier Été de la raison (1999). The article concludes that Waṭṭār and Djaout were not simply antagonists. Rather, they were fellow dissidents opposed to a cultural monolith on the one hand, and political and economic malpractice on the other.