Inspired to write during the turbulent 1990s, the period of Algeria’s undeclared civil war between the government and jihadist groups, Algerian novelist Maïssa Bey has become an increasingly important literary figure defending cultural pluralism and women’s rights in her country. Her first novel, Au commencement était la mer (In the beginning was the sea [1996]), established her as a politically committed writer focused on the myriad problems facing postcolonial Algeria: poverty, corruption, misogyny, Islamic fundamentalism, and the status of women. For Bey, the violent events of the 1990s in Algeria served as a catalyst, bringing back memories of earlier trauma, for she is the daughter of a martyr to the Algerian War. Thus, writing has become for her a practice that allows the traumatized to reconcile with their painful pasts. As Bey uses writing as tool in her search for meaning in a world fraught with violence so does the protagonist of her most recent work, Puisque mon coeur est mort [Since my heart is dead (2010)]. This epistolary novel is composed of a grieving mother’s letters to her dead son, murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist guerilla amnestied under the concorde civile, the government policy implemented in 1999 to bring the civil war to an end. Unable to move past the trauma of her son’s death, the mother sets out to avenge his murder, with predictably tragic results. With its portrayal of a traumatized individual, the novel tests the limits of reconciliation, asking: To what extent can forgiveness, an intimate expression that comes from the heart, succeed as a public policy? My analysis of the text involves both the personal and the collective. Adopting Cathy Caruth’s definition of trauma as “unclaimed experience” that continues to haunt the survivor, I study the psychological portrait of the mother through the letters that express her efforts to remain lucid in a chaotic world and I also reflect upon the broader context, the struggle of the Algerian nation to embrace tolerance. Situating her text within the larger body of contemporary literary works set in “traumascapes,” (Maria Tumarkin), places scarred by war, violence, terror -- Rwanda in 1994, Syria today – Bey, like her fellow dissident writers, urges Algerians to embrace the values of cultural and religious pluralism.