Assia Djebar’s “Algerian quartet,” a series of four novels which chart her exilic relation of belonging to Algerian history and culture, is usually analyzed through a postcolonial tropology of fragmentation and liminality, in which critics identify a dialectic of subverted self-location—autofictional attempts at the remediation of her split identity between French, Arabic, and Amazigh languages. This paper proposes to read anew two novels in the tetralogy, Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade and So Vast the Prison, by analyzing the implications of their reliance on a distinct narrative strategy to tell their stories: the unmotivated and unexplained, abrupt collision of distant historical planes. In both novels, Djebar subjects historical time to great compression and places side by side episodes of the same history set more than one hundred years apart, linking the situation of Algeria after the independence to the scene of colonial conquest by the French. Her aim is to make emerge repressed points of friction about the history of language politics in Algeria: how, to put it in Djebar’s own words, “the tongue of the murderers of her great uncles” would be the instrument of her own intellectual and gendered liberation. Yet, beyond the ideological contradiction—oppression turned emancipation—and the historical tautology—French colonialism explains the appropriation of the French language by Algerians—at no point does Djebar attempt to show how the conquest might have durably structured the linguistic situation of Algeria. This paper argues, first, that the unexplained gaps in both narratives constitute a distinct formal strategy on the part of Djebar. Their recurrence produces a silence at the core of her texts, which I term a poetics of historical discontiguity, and analyze as a mode of representation for the layers of mediation which tie the scene of conquest to the scene of writing. Second, the paper probes the historical unconscious of Djebar’s novels, by showing how one important intertext, Hamdan Khodja’s The Mirror—the first Algerian anticolonial pamphlet published in Paris in 1833—constitutes the filigree linking these textual silences together. In his counter-history of the Algerian nation, Khodja shows how colonial rule asserted itself from the outset through a project of linguistic engineering, and thus brings into view the historical processes only operative in the blanks of Djebar’s novels—how the imposition of her own language of writing, French, was predicated on the destruction of Ottoman Algiers and the erasure of its language, Arabic.