Modern Algerian literature was born in a time of colonial terror and anticolonial resistance. Since the 1990s, Rachid Mokhtari has characterized this literature as a ‘graphie de l’horreur’ and novelist Rachid Boudjedra as a ‘palimpseste du sang’. Contemporary Algerian novelists remain preoccupied by the historiographic dilemmas and testimonial demands first articulated by an early generation charged with forging a national identity through literature, including Kateb Yacine, Mouloud Feraoun, Malek Haddad, Mouloud Mammeri, and Assia Djebar. As the liberation war has become as a touchstone for political authority in postcolonial Algeria, its historiography is an important matter of state; novelists both facilitate and contest nationalist emplotments of the revolutionary past. Writers have played an especially vital role in documenting and denouncing the harrowing violence that killed or disappeared more than 200,000 Algerians during ‘la décennie noire’ of the 1990s. Under the guise of promoting peace, the Algerian government has recently passed amnesty laws that mandate collective forgetting and prohibit legal redress for those unresolved crimes. In the absence of institutional justice, literary texts have not only created a space for mourning but also for insisting on new forms of justice in the face of ongoing state repression. By closely reading fiction by Yamina Mechakra, I explore the dissenting capacity of literature to challenge the state’s narrative and epistemological authority. Algerian literary texts have long been treated as documents of social reality and national allegory, but Mechakra’s La grotte éclatée (1979) and Arris (1999) pose significant barriers to such interpretations. Composed of fragments on which she dwelt for decades, Mechakra’s connected novels meditate on the precarity and loss erased from sanitized narratives of the anticolonial war. Despite renewed interest in her work since her death in June 2013, these texts remain obscure. Mechakra’s only published story can be found in a 1976 back-issue of El-Moudjahid. Arris is out of print and nearly impossible to find, and despite an ardent preface by Kateb Yacine, La grotte éclatée (1979) has yet to be published outside Algiers. I suggest that Mechakra’s relative opacity signals the unassimilability of her work to nationalist ideologies. Drawing theoretical insight from Nasrin Qader (Narratives of Catastrophe) and Emily Apter (Against World Literature), I argue that the formal and aesthetic qualities of Mechakra’s fiction insist on untranslatability and incommensurability in ways that demand close reading and that expose the limits of narratives that serve the interests of the state.