Terror and Tremors: Earthquakes and Terrorism in Maïssa Bey’s Surtout ne te retourne pas¹

Abstract

After the 2015 terror attacks in France, historian Pascal Ory explained that although “terrorism” and “earthquakes” share a common etymology and seem to shock societies in similar ways, they are essentially opposite—the former is absolutely intentional, while the latter is purely accidental. Yet, an Algerian novel from 2005 invites us to rethink this dialectic: in Maïssa Bey’s Surtout ne te retourne pas, earthquakes in Algiers can be read as aftershocks and metaphors of the Black Decade. Bey paints an Algeria that has become fragmented and superstitious, with horrors of the past re-emerging through the cracks of the dismantled city space. Through her poetic prose, we see terror and tremors comparably disrupting social relations. After the initial trauma, ideologies and identities shift like tectonic plates, clashing and sliding on top of one another. From this subduction zone of ongoing tensions, the novel itself becomes a meta-textual earthquake: after exposing how crimes and disasters have flipped Algeria upside down, Maïssa Bey flips her own world inside out by transgressing Michel Foucault’s “sacred” space. Through the agency of her female protagonists, she fights back against radical Islamism by breaking taboos and shaking institutions.

Keywords:

• Algeria
• Maïssa Bey
• earthquake
• Black Decade
• spaces
• terrorism

Notes

1 This conference paper was awarded the 2019 Prix Recherche au Présent at the annual twentieth- and twenty-first-century FFSC, “Catastrophes & Cataclysms.”

2 See Christine Détrez, “Maïssa Bey, Lettres d’Algérie.” La Découverte: Travail, genre et sociétés, vol. 2, no. 32, 2014, p. 14.

3 See Anissa Daoudi, “Algerian Women and the Traumatic Decade: Literary Interventions.” Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 2016, p. 44.

4 See Mariève Maréchal, (Re-)faire l’histoire: Agentivité et démocratisation du passé dans Cette fille-là et Surtout ne te retourne pas de Maïssa Bey. 2011. Montréal, Université du Québec à Montréal, MA Thesis.

5 See Mary E. McCullough, “On Earthquakes, Orgasms, and Feminine Identity in Maïssa Bey’s Surtout ne te retourne pas.” Women in French Studies, vol. 24, 2016, pp. 72–84.

6 In his theoretical framework on space, de Certeau explained that “spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life” (96) and that, put more concisely, “space is practiced place” (117). Doreen Massey and Henri Lefebvre’s conceptions of space as a nexus of social relations which is both space-forming and space-contingent follow the same logic. See Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender. U of Minnesota P, 1994, and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 1974. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991.

7 The English translation “the Fault” (38) is particularly fitting in the context of earthquakes. See Maïssa Bey, Above All, Don’t Look Back. Translated by Senja L. Djelouah. 2005. U of Virginia P, 2009.

8 I use the term “radical” following Marwan M. Kraidy’s analysis of Arab Spring protest art; specifically, of the “heroic body of the revolutionary self” (223). “Radical,” in his study, is a mode and a tempo of what he calls “creative insurgency” (223).

9 Already in pre-Islam Arabia, the harām was a designated holy place of worship where blood could not be shed (see Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam. Harvard UP, 2010, p. 30).

10 Expanding the corpus to Malika Mokaddem’s novels which are more overtly anti-Islamism during the Black Decade would be another way to develop this research project. Comparing with Algerian literature published after the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation would also provide insight as to the cultural significance of this shift.

11 Albeit very differently and in different contexts, they both rely on French coding and a European expression of feminism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Valentin Duquet

Valentin Duquet is a French Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin. He works on Postcolonial Nineteenth Century. He completed an M.A. in Francophone Studies at Syracuse University specializing in Caribbean Literature and the Algerian Revolution, and one of his articles on Maryse Condé is to be published in French Forum. His current research focuses on Orientalism and the Méditerranée.