This paper focuses on three influential Algerian authors whose feminist contestations of patriarchal exclusions and historical seclusions have created important discursive spaces for Algerian women. Bey, Djebar and Sebbar focus on the historical traumas that have marked women in Algeria ranging from the War of Independence (1956-62) to the Civil War of the 1990s. Djebar's La femme sans sepulchre reveals the dissonance of being buried without a tombstone as a metaphor of the traditional eclipsing of Algerian women in history. Writing becomes Djebar's medium to excavate these buried stories that subvert partial representations of Algerian history found in the colonial and national archives. In other words, Djebar's novels invite us to consider history differently by reading against the grain i.e. giving absence and loss a textual presence through the archaeology of memory. This engagement with memory is negotiated through the "spectral" presence of the female resistor whose ethereal presence is a marker of women's postcolonial identity. Similarly, in La Seine itait rouge, Leila Sebbar focuses on the massacre of Algerian women, men, and children in Paris on October 17, 1961, one year before Algerian independence. This "forgotten" moment in French and Algerian history has been further obscured by the "colonial fractures" that mark France's brutal relationship with Algeria, thereby invalidating French claims to a civilizing mission in its colonies. The indiscriminate and unwarranted killing of Algerian civilians who have organized a peaceful protest march against discriminatory curfew laws imposed by the French police against them highlights the brutality of coloniality in diaspora and establishes a "traumatic spatiality" between France and Algeria. Sebbar's narrative unveils this tragedy through a process of archival re-membering, wherein the Parisian landscape provides the necessary archaeological site to recover and reclaim the "ghosts of memory" drowned in the bloodied waters of the river Seine. In turn, Masssa Bey provides a panorama of colonial history in Algeria through the figure of the protagonist "Lafrance" in her recent novel Pierre, sang, papier ou cendre. Through the trope of trauma and historical violence, Bey unravels the very ideology of colonization that has also created an ambiguous "nervous condition" in postcolonial Algeria. These tensions are played out in the recent civil war in which the "colonial residue" had compromised the future of a traumatized nation still reeling from the wounds of colonization and the after effects of religious revivalism.