Memory and the Unconscious in Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib and Nabile Fares. What is remembered and who remembers in a nation? These two questions establish a relationship between a political entity -the nation- and the existence of a collectivity animated by a common mode of being -remembering-. They will frame my presentation. In, Le Trauma colonial, Karima Lazari asserts that, while the colonial question is the historical matrix of the Algerian history, it remains largely unconscious for the Algerian citizens who are still not able to work through the devastating psychic effects of the war of Liberation. After a critical examination of this thesis, I propose to analyze a body of literary works in which the theme of the war is prevalent. By doing so, I will articulate literary texts to historiography and psychoanalysis. I will demonstrate that, contrary to Lazari’s assertion, these creative works are not only a subjective way of shedding light on a confiscated history, but that they point towards a new temporal dimension : an opening up towards the future when it emanates from the past. This temporal dimension, I will argue, stands opposed to the ideology of nationalism. I will examine the relationship between the war and the configuration of the unconscious in three different novels by Kateb Yacine, (Nedjma), Mohamed Dib (Qui se souvient de la mer) and Nabile Farès (Mémoires de l’absent). Farès describes his novel as “an attempt to restitute through language the mental… breaking down of a world going through a radical destruction.” He maintains however, an opening towards the future, since his novel is part of a trilogy entitled “La découverte du nouveau Monde”—Discovery of a new world. Similarly, Nedjma and Qui se souvient de la mer can be both characterized as attempts to render the destruction of an old world, but through the prefiguration of its renewal. It is this seemingly antagonistic movement of destruction and recreation of the world that I will conceptualize by using the Freudian concept of the death drive and by showing its intimate connection to Eros. I will argue that a common relationship to memory is articulated in these three works. By anchoring it in the unconscious, they produce a singular conception of memory which is at the same time an opening towards the past, but more importantly an opening up towards a future to come.

Karima Lazali’s critically acclaimed 2018 book, “Le Trauma colonial/Colonial Trauma,” rekindled Franco-Algerian debates on the legacy of colonialism, the question of reparation, and on the very possibility of Algerianness or Algerian subjectivity. For Lazali, thirteen decades of traumatic French colonialism resulted in a complete “mélancolisation/melancholization” of Algerian society (263). It is at the level of the “unconscious” that colonialism in Algeria is still alive and well. Yet, while she devotes much of her discussion toward the end of the book to Fanon, Lazali overlooks the decolonial re-readings that Fanon brings to psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, melancholia, and the unconscious. My paper will therefore confront Lazali’s important thesis with Fanon’s decolonial writings, particularly his most recently published (posthumously) collection of essays “Alienation and Freedom” (2018). My reading of Lazali and Fanon will be punctuated by an examination of the psychoaffective politics of Arab visual and literary culture, especially in films by Nouri Bouzid and Merzak Allouache and novels by Chokri Mabkhout and Mohammed Achaari. The representations of traumatic memory, defeat and failure in postcolonial Arab literary and cultural representation, I argue, is invested in the complexity and ambiguity of trauma and subjectivity. Allouache’s film “Harragas” (about clandestine migration to Europe) opens with a scene in Algeria of the hanging body of Omar (one of the characters), with a note that reads: “If stay I die, if I leave I die; I leave without leaving and I die.” This poignant scene dramatizes the tension between failure and defeat, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fantasy of agentive omnipotence; it makes legible acts of suicide and self-immolation which permeate Arab contemporaneity. What Lazali’s thesis fails to account for, in my view, is the immanent capacities of trauma and melancholia to swerve into acts of defiance and revolt against colonial injustice. In this respect, Fanon’s reworking of Freud’s concept of melancholia is exemplary. In “The Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon states that the French psychiatrists in Algeria “were accustomed when dealing with a patient subject to melancholia to fear that he would commit suicide.” Fanon boldly states, however, that “the melancholic Algerian does not commit suicide. He kills” (299). This paper seeks to probe the concept of melancholia in psychoanalytic and postcolonial thought in order to illuminate its far-reaching relevance to an Arab critique of colonialism and its traumatic legacies in Algeria and elsewhere in the Maghreb.

A remarkable range of aesthetic and historical intertextuality is at play in the work of a new generation of Maghrebi artists. Referencing key works by the likes of Kateb Yacine or Ahmed Bouanani, they bear witness to a continuum of colonial and post-colonial violence as well as a continuum of popular and artistic forms of resistance. I will focus on the work of Nidhal Chamekh, who took part in the Tunisian revolution as a 25-year-old. Citizen and artist at once, he would occasionally step out of protests in order to sketch a character or a situation. Later, these sketches would become a part of composite drawings in which present experience is put in relation with art-historical motifs, scientific or anatomical etchings, and poem or song excerpts. The result is a series of 12 drawings, titled What Do Martyrs Dream of? (2012). In each of these, the represented elements seem to float in the space of the page. Beside the elements as such, what the drawings seek is the right space between them, one that allows derelict, wordless fragments to become visible to each other, to testify to each other’s existence. In this and other works, by experimenting with formal strategies that introduce discontinuity and latency within the space of representation, what Chamekh evinces is a complex temporality, akin to the “present in ruins” of Kateb’s Nedjma. The temporal palimpsest is laid out spatially on the page. The present of the drawing is thick with ghostly temporalities occurring on the same plane. Chamekh gave the title mn?m? to his most recent solo exhibition, playing on the phonic slippage between “memory” in Greek and “dream” in Arabic (?????). In Chamekh’s art, Memory is History shaped by the labor of dreaming. His drawings are rebuses that represent the visual unconscious of Tunisian modernity, with its dreamt revolutions and repressed revenants. Representation here must be understood in the theatrical sense. The page is a theater of the collective unconscious, a stage on which dream-work is performed.

My presentation addresses the question of traumatic transmission, and what Algerian psychoanalyst Karima Lazali formulated as “the colonial unconscious:” a psychic state, both individual and collective, characterized by a disabling intrusion of violence and a related psychotic foreclosure of the past, which she also described as a being-suspended in the mode of (spirit) “possession.” The paper is grounded in my own ethnographic work on madness and spiritual cures in contemporary Morocco, in particular the liturgy of the ruqya, centered on the recitation of the Qur?an, and the visible materialization of its effects, and affects, on the soul and the body of the person, and in the case of demonic possession on the elusive ontological being that is the jinn. The stage of the liturgy becomes a space of manifestation of the Invisible, a stage of the soul, of its torments and battles, attacks and counterattacks, in the shadow of the Qur?an’s. Through a parallel engagement between the time-space of the Quranic liturgy, the temporality of the unconscious in psychoanalysis, and the unconscious of history in the thought of Ibn Khaldun, I propose a different reading of both “transmission”, and “possession.” In the theological context of the spiritual cures of the “vertigo” of history the point is to make possible a passage, a leap to another time, learning to read illness and the time of calamity as at once a historical condition of our time, and a “sign” and a “passage” (the double sense of the Arabic concept of ?ibra, pl. ?ibar) in the tapestry of a larger cosmic history, a sign one is called to ponder and learn from. Healing is introducing a pedagogy that implies the ability to read signs in a cosmological sense, to reinstitute the open-endedness of the world. This is what Ibn Khaldun considered the ethical task of the historian, at once bearing witness to the forms of social and political life that succeeded one another on the revolving scene of the human world, as seized from the historical time of catastrophe, and reading the events and their unfolding as signs and lessons (?ibar), disclosures of nonhuman time; disclosures of the temporality of the hereafter, which opene visibility and insight into the human world.