While melancholia has been associated in both European and Arab cultural traditions with the elevated and creative intellect of men, its equivalent in women has been associated with hysteria or morbid bodily desires. In The Gendering of Melancholia, Juliana Schiesari argues that while male melancholy is a "privileged state of inspired genius," women's melancholy is always "expressed by less flattering allusions to widow's weeds, inarticulate weeping, and other signs of ritualistic (but intellectually and artistically unaccredited) mourning" (14). Melancholy is divided along gender lines into a positive experience for men and a negative one for women, and so while women do submit to the same melancholy as men, they do not seem to be worthy of its potential philosophical wherewithal. The purpose of this paper is to show the ways in which Maghrebian women writers and artists deconstruct the exclusively male tradition of melancholy and reclaim for creative and productive purposes the discredited tradition of female melancholy. This is not however a mere corrective but a rather radical project of asserting what might be called "deliberative female agency" and of associating it with the agentive potencies of melancholia. I locate this "female melancholia" in the works of several women filmmakers (e.g., Moufida Taltli, Nadia Fares, Selma Baccar, Raja Amari, etc.) and novelists (e.g., Le la Abouze d, Leila Sebbar, Malika Mokeddem, etc.), but this paper will focus only on Assia Djebar's novel "So Vast the Prison" (Vaste est la prison) and Ahlam Mosteghanemi's debut novel "Memory in the Flesh" (Dhakirat al-Jasad). While Djebar and Mostaghanemi differ enormously (not least because the former writes in French while the latter in Arabic), they have both been engaged in re-narrating the nation and in re-claiming the female voices that the male narrative of Algerian nationhood has assimilated beyond recognition.

In La Psychanalyse ? l'lpreuve de l'Islam (2002), the Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama undermines the universality of the Oedipus complex theory by pointing out that the centrality of the father-son dyad while central to the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be applied to the Islamic context where the Oedipal situation is marked by the absence not the castrating presence of the father. In the Muslim psyche, the human pater is actually absent: Ishmael is abandoned by Abraham and Muhammad was symbolically abandoned by 3 father figures through death. Instead of the father son-conflict, he holds the abandonment of the father as the primary trauma in the Muslim psyche, from the story of Abraham's abandonment of Agar and Ishmael in the desert, to Muhammad's status as an orphan and symbolic abandonment (through death) by his biological and two adoptive fathers. In contrast with the nationalist Arab/Muslim leaders of the 1950s and 1960s--Bourguiba, Nasser, or FLN--who adopted state policies which opposed secularism to Islam, Benslama, to face the increasing threat of Islamism, finds it "urgent" that that the disciples of secularism organize and place themselves within an "Islamic reference" to signal their "break-up with the logic of mythical religious identity" claimed by Islamists. One way of combating Islamic extremism is to question and challenge through historicization and free speech, the four constituent parts of "le soi Islamique" claimed by Islamists: one religion (Islam); one language (Arabic), one text (the Quran), and one nation (the Umma). In contrast with the Tunisian expatriate scholar in France, Olfa Youssef, an Arabist feminist scholar residing in Tunisia, does not shy away from using Lacan's concept of the qadhab (phallus) to reinterpret on the symbolic level the Quranic verses often used to ban homosexuality or deny women equal rights in inheritance and political leadership. Reinterpreting the word din (religion in Arabic) as political power, she argues that it is on the symbolic level (i.e., political power not faith) that women are feeble; a position which made her alienated from both the secular and religious movements in the Arab and Francophone world. This paper focuses not only on the conditions of production and reception of this emergent school of Islamic psychoanalysis in its local and diasporic variations, but also on the spiral of silence which conceals its existence in the Anglophone world.

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.