Karima Lazali’s critically acclaimed 2018 book, “Le Trauma colonial/Colonial Trauma,” rekindled Franco-Algerian debates on the legacy of colonialism, the question of reparation, and on the very possibility of Algerianness or Algerian subjectivity. For Lazali, thirteen decades of traumatic French colonialism resulted in a complete “mélancolisation/melancholization” of Algerian society (263). It is at the level of the “unconscious” that colonialism in Algeria is still alive and well. Yet, while she devotes much of her discussion toward the end of the book to Fanon, Lazali overlooks the decolonial re-readings that Fanon brings to psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, melancholia, and the unconscious. My paper will therefore confront Lazali’s important thesis with Fanon’s decolonial writings, particularly his most recently published (posthumously) collection of essays “Alienation and Freedom” (2018). My reading of Lazali and Fanon will be punctuated by an examination of the psychoaffective politics of Arab visual and literary culture, especially in films by Nouri Bouzid and Merzak Allouache and novels by Chokri Mabkhout and Mohammed Achaari. The representations of traumatic memory, defeat and failure in postcolonial Arab literary and cultural representation, I argue, is invested in the complexity and ambiguity of trauma and subjectivity. Allouache’s film “Harragas” (about clandestine migration to Europe) opens with a scene in Algeria of the hanging body of Omar (one of the characters), with a note that reads: “If stay I die, if I leave I die; I leave without leaving and I die.” This poignant scene dramatizes the tension between failure and defeat, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fantasy of agentive omnipotence; it makes legible acts of suicide and self-immolation which permeate Arab contemporaneity. What Lazali’s thesis fails to account for, in my view, is the immanent capacities of trauma and melancholia to swerve into acts of defiance and revolt against colonial injustice. In this respect, Fanon’s reworking of Freud’s concept of melancholia is exemplary. In “The Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon states that the French psychiatrists in Algeria “were accustomed when dealing with a patient subject to melancholia to fear that he would commit suicide.” Fanon boldly states, however, that “the melancholic Algerian does not commit suicide. He kills” (299). This paper seeks to probe the concept of melancholia in psychoanalytic and postcolonial thought in order to illuminate its far-reaching relevance to an Arab critique of colonialism and its traumatic legacies in Algeria and elsewhere in the Maghreb.