Double Exposure: The Family Album and Alternate Memories in Leïla Sebbar's The Seine was Red

Abstract

Amine's essay explores memory-making and highlights a paradox in Leïla Sebbar's The Seine was Red, a novel that describes the conflicting memories of the police massacre of Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961. Structured as a family album with captioned identities, place, and time, Sebbar's novel employs a mode of remembrance that conventionally illuminates the unity of families. Instead, the text emphasises conflict among diverse protagonists (French and Algerian participants and witnesses on both side of the Algerian war and their descendants) and absences with blank pages that evoke missing testimonies. In reversing the general tenor of the family genre to narrate an imperial tragedy, Amine argues that The Seine exposes the often linear, consensus-driven narrative of community that obliterates inglorious events, which states as well as families adopt as they suppress internal conflict in the representation of their past. In opposition to these exclusionary and homogeneous narratives constructed by select actors, The Seine offers a commemorative model that is inclusionary, dissonant, and participatory.

Notes

¹ Lalla means grandmother in darija (Maghrebi-spoken Arabic) and is also a term of deference for older women. The actual name of the protagonist remains unknown.

² Michel Foucault (1977) calls counter-memory that which resists the consistency, stability, and uniformity inherent in official narratives of historical continuity.

³ Thierry Gasnier notes that France is a society that easily fabricates national consensus ‘with more than 1,571 national celebrations between 1986 and 1993’ (1994: 98).

⁴ Hue-Tam Ho Tai notes that in Realms of Memory, the authors never address who defines the nation and national identity and how well that definition is accepted and by whom (Tai 2001: 918).

⁵ The harkis were Algerian native armed units under French military command. Some were hired by Papon as a supplementary police force to infiltrate Arab neighborhoods in Paris (House 2006: 4).

⁶ Sebbar brings to light ‘memory competition’ [rivalité des mémoires] in The Seine, as she sees the attempt by different groups, such as the harkis, the pieds noirs (French who lived in Algeria), Algerians of various persuasions, to have their history dominate (Mortimer 2010: 1254).