This paper considers Algerian author Assia Djebar’s “Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement” as a depiction of a gendered, communal experience of melancholia relative to women’s relationship to the nation and the nation-building project. The story also proposes a solution to that melancholia: to “unblock everything: talk, talk without stopping, about yesterday and today, talk among ourselves, in all the women’s quarters” [“…tout débloquer: parler, parler sans cesse d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, parler entre nous, dans tous les gynécées”]. Departing from Sigmund Freud’s foundational essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” this paper will consider the theorization of a collective, national melancholia by scholars like Anne Anlin Cheng, and David Eng and Shinhee Han, as well as Julia Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic chora as a receptacle or space of the drives which orients the child to the body of the (lost) mother. This paper will provide a reading of the core of the nouvelle—the scene set in the hammam, and the sections entitled “Pour un divan de la porteuse d’eau” and “Pour un diwan des porteuses de feu”—as a space for (re)orientation to the lost object, the national community. The poetics present in these sections, particularly in “Pour un divan de la porteuse d’eau,” showcase the transformative power of the chora as a space of the subject’s becoming, enabling new relationships to community and affirming the power of language.