“By these measured words… the good man is convinced.” So says the young protagonist of Maïssa Bey’s novel, Surtout ne te retourne pas (English title: Above All Don’t Look Back), after telling a story to maneuver her way unchaperoned onto a bus headed for an Algerian metropolis. Her accomplishment lies in a shrewd understanding of how to manipulate language and different forms of power to her advantage. This paper explores this further by analyzing the narrative strategies of women’s quotidian dialogue, where they—in subtle ways—assert novel forms of agency through clever deployment of their voice. In current, broader literary scholarship, ‘voice’ has become a forceful image of self-expression for women (e.g. ‘finding a voice’); however, using ‘voice’ as a metaphor advances it as a sign often privileged over the speaker herself. I propose instead to analyze voice as a speech act and narrative discourse which will consider the socio-political and ideological conditions where speaking happens, thus privileging the female speaker over the gesture of speaking. Two rising Maghrebian francophone authors, Maïssa Bey, an Algerian novelist, and Nadia Chafik, Moroccan, deploy the voice as a forceful and subtle speech act for asserting agency in novel ways. Both authors also cite real events as inspirations for their texts. I develop a theory which accounts for the constructive power of fictional discourse and testimony as that which asserts what journalistic accounts cannot/do not. Furthermore, with a focus on the performative aspects of narrative dialogue, I deconstruct how speech-acts enter and manipulate daily socio-cultural-linguistic codes; this analysis recasts the ways that women in these novels assert agency. While their dialogues honor particular codes in language (e.g. deference, respect), the ensuing actions require approaching the speech-act differently, discerning the ways that female characters manipulate speech inventively to result in a desired act. Thus, the subtler forms of agential assertion are explored through an analysis of the creative manipulation of speech and storytelling.