Leila Sebbar's novel recounts an event in French history that has been hidden for many years. Toward the end of the Algerian war, the FLN, an Algerian nationalist party, organized a demonstration in Paris to oppose a curfew imposed upon Algerians in France. About 30,000 Algerians gathered peacefully, but the protest was brutally suppressed by the Paris police. Between 50 and 200 Algerians were killed and their bodies were thrown into the Seine. This incident provides the background for a more intimate look into the history of violence between France and Algeria. Following three young protagonists one French, one Algerian, and one French national of Algerian descent Sebbar takes readers on a journey of discovery and comprehension. Mildred Mortimer's impressive translation conveys the power of Sebbar's words in English and allows English-speaking readers an opportunity to understand the complex relationship between past and present, metropole and colony, immigrant and citizen, that lies at the heart of this acclaimed novel."

Today, the ""fight to write""-the struggle to become the legitimate chronicler of one's own story-is being waged and won by women across mediums and borders. But such battles of authorship extend well beyond a single cultural moment. In her gripping study of unsung female narratives of the Algerian War, Mildred Mortimer excavates and explores the role of women's individual and collective memory in recording events of the violent anticolonial conflict. Presenting close readings of published works spanning five decades-from Assia Djebar's 1962 Children of the New World to Zohra Drif's 2014 Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter- Women Fight, Women Write traces stylistic and material transformations in Algerian women's writings as it reveals evolving attitudes toward memory, trauma, historical objectivity, and women's political empowerment. Refuting the stale binary of men in battle, women at home, these testimonial texts let women lay claim to the Algerian War story as participants and also as chroniclers through fiction, historical studies, and memoir. Algeria's patriarchal norms long kept women from speaking publicly about private matters, silencing their experiences of the war. Still, the conflict has ceaselessly sparked creative work. The country's dark decade of violent struggle between the Algerian army and Islamist fundamentalists in the 1990s brought the liberation struggle back into focus, inspiring and emboldening many more women to defiantly write. Women Fight, Women Write advances the broken silence, illuminating its vital historical revisions and literary innovations.

Today, the ""fight to write""-the struggle to become the legitimate chronicler of one's own story-is being waged and won by women across mediums and borders. But such battles of authorship extend well beyond a single cultural moment. In her gripping study of unsung female narratives of the Algerian War, Mildred Mortimer excavates and explores the role of women's individual and collective memory in recording events of the violent anticolonial conflict. Presenting close readings of published works spanning five decades-from Assia Djebar's 1962 Children of the New World to Zohra Drif's 2014 Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter- Women Fight, Women Write traces stylistic and material transformations in Algerian women's writings as it reveals evolving attitudes toward memory, trauma, historical objectivity, and women's political empowerment. Refuting the stale binary of men in battle, women at home, these testimonial texts let women lay claim to the Algerian War story as participants and also as chroniclers through fiction, historical studies, and memoir. Algeria's patriarchal norms long kept women from speaking publicly about private matters, silencing their experiences of the war. Still, the conflict has ceaselessly sparked creative work. The country's dark decade of violent struggle between the Algerian army and Islamist fundamentalists in the 1990s brought the liberation struggle back into focus, inspiring and emboldening many more women to defiantly write. Women Fight, Women Write advances the broken silence, illuminating its vital historical revisions and literary innovations.

Reflecting distinct and important stages in the career of the preeminent Algerian writer Mohammed Dib, ""At the Cafe" and "The Talisman"" brings together two collections that embroider on themes relating to the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962). "At the Cafe, " published in 1955, is mostly realistic in style and illustrates particularly well Dib's uncanny talent for storytelling. "The Talisman, " published eleven years later, reflects Dib's growing penchant for relating his perception of the magical or mystical qualities underlying everyday reality.

When he wrote "At the Cafe, " Dib felt it was his duty to witness or testify on behalf of the downtrodden of Algeria under French colonial rule. Three stories in this collection--"Little Cousin," "A Fine Wedding," and "The Long Wait"--poignantly describe the rampant poverty, hunger, sickness, and despair that prevailed under French rule. In others, such as the titular story and "Forbidden Lands," Dib gives a voice to those who had been silenced but who were slowly learning to make themselves heard. On the eve of the war for independence, Dib felt obligated--as does the protagonist, Djeha, in "The Companion"--to take a stand on affirming one's role within the community and take action.

In "The Talisman, " Dib no longer feels the need to testify. Although colonialism and the brutality of war are still central threads, his treatment of them in this collection is more scathingly critical. Dib's style also shifts from the naturalism dominant in his earlier writing, showing a marked interest in the fantastic or magical. The under-lying themes in this collection take up, among other things, an obsession with the experience of death, a fascination with madness, the decrypting of symbols, the quest for a primordial language, and the possibilities of spiritual transcendence.

If space is important in the realm of imagination and a key theme in feminist theory, cross-cultural studies of social maps reveal that men and women's spatial experiences differ; women rarely control physical or social space directly. Positing the thesis that women's writing of Francophone Africa and the Caribbean offers important perspectives on the relationship of gender to space,Writing from the Hearth proposes close readings of Francophone women writers of Africa (Aoua KZita, Mariama B%, Ken Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, and Aminata Sow Fall) and the Caribbean (Marie Chauvet, Simon Schwarz-Bart, Maryse CondZ, and Edwidge Danticat). As critical readings of postcolonial African and Caribbean literature show that tropes of confinement appear frequently in female-authored texts_where home is often depicted as a place of alienation_this critical study examines ambiguities associated with domestic space as enclosure as it explores the relationship between the female protagonist and the inner and outer spaces of her world: domestic, imaginative, and public space. Writing from the Hearth probes the hypothesis that the female protagonist can move toward empowerment by entering public space from which she has been excluded by indigenous patriarchs and European colonizers and by establishing a new relationship to domestic space or securing a liberating alternative space within it. Flexible and multipurpose, alternative space is a place of possibilities that can function as a refuge for meditation, recollection, or fantasy, an antechamber for action, and a site of resistance and performance. Here, by telling the tale, writing the creative work, a woman can affirm her sense of self.

The celebrated and highly versatile writer Leila Sebbar was born in French colonial Algeria but has lived nearly her entire adult life in France, where she is recognized as a major voice on the penetrating effects of colonialism in contemporary society. The dramatic contrast between her past and present is the subject of the nine autobiographical essays collected in this volume. Written between 1978 and 2006, they trace a journey that began in Aflou, Algeria, where her father ran a schoolhouse, and continued to France, where Sebbar traveled, alone, as a graduate student before eventually realizing her powerful creative vision. The pieces collected in this book capture an array of experiences, sensations, and sentiments surrounding the French colonial presence in Algeria and offer an intimate and prismatic reflection on Sebbar's bicultural upbringing as the child of an Algerian father and French mother. Sebbar offers an unflinching portrait of her original disconnection from her father's Arabic language and culture; she goes on to describe her struggle to revive a cultural heritage that her family had deliberately obscured and translate into French the vibrant yet muted Arabic of her father and of Algeria. Looking back from numerous vantage points throughout her life, she presents the complicated and divisive dynamics of being raised ""between two shores""--the colonized and the colonizer.

Reflecting distinct and important stages in the career of the preeminent Algerian writer Mohammed Dib, ""At the Cafe" and "The Talisman"" brings together two collections that embroider on themes relating to the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962). "At the Cafe, " published in 1955, is mostly realistic in style and illustrates particularly well Dib's uncanny talent for storytelling. "The Talisman, " published eleven years later, reflects Dib's growing penchant for relating his perception of the magical or mystical qualities underlying everyday reality.

When he wrote "At the Cafe, " Dib felt it was his duty to witness or testify on behalf of the downtrodden of Algeria under French colonial rule. Three stories in this collection--"Little Cousin," "A Fine Wedding," and "The Long Wait"--poignantly describe the rampant poverty, hunger, sickness, and despair that prevailed under French rule. In others, such as the titular story and "Forbidden Lands," Dib gives a voice to those who had been silenced but who were slowly learning to make themselves heard. On the eve of the war for independence, Dib felt obligated--as does the protagonist, Djeha, in "The Companion"--to take a stand on affirming one's role within the community and take action.

In "The Talisman, " Dib no longer feels the need to testify. Although colonialism and the brutality of war are still central threads, his treatment of them in this collection is more scathingly critical. Dib's style also shifts from the naturalism dominant in his earlier writing, showing a marked interest in the fantastic or magical. The under-lying themes in this collection take up, among other things, an obsession with the experience of death, a fascination with madness, the decrypting of symbols, the quest for a primordial language, and the possibilities of spiritual transcendence.

If space is important in the realm of imagination and a key theme in feminist theory, cross-cultural studies of social maps reveal that men and women's spatial experiences differ; women rarely control physical or social space directly. Positing the thesis that women's writing of Francophone Africa and the Caribbean offers important perspectives on the relationship of gender to space,Writing from the Hearth proposes close readings of Francophone women writers of Africa (Aoua Keita, Mariama Ba, Ken Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, and Aminata Sow Fall) and the Caribbean (Marie Chauvet, Simon Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Conde, and Edwidge Danticat). As critical readings of postcolonial African and Caribbean literature show that tropes of confinement appear frequently in female-authored texts-where home is often depicted as a place of alienation-this critical study examines ambiguities associated with domestic space as enclosure as it explores the relationship between the female protagonist and the inner and outer spaces of her world: domestic, imaginative, and public space. Writing from the Hearth probes the hypothesis that the female protagonist can move toward empowerment by entering public space from which she has been excluded by indigenous patriarchs and European colonizers and by establishing a new relationship to domestic space or securing a liberating alternative space within it. Flexible and multipurpose, alternative space is a place of possibilities that can function as a refuge for meditation, recollection, or fantasy, an antechamber for action, and a site of resistance and performance. Here, by telling the tale, writing the creative work, a woman can affirm her sense of self.

"Silence on the Shores" depicts the final day in the life of a Maghrebian immigrant in France. Having crossed the Mediterranean to "the other shore" as a young man to find work, he ultimately remained in France, married a French woman, and broke the promise he made to his mother to return home one day. Aware that death is drawing close, he fears experiencing the ultimate form of exile: dying alone, with no fellow Muslim at his side to whisper the customary prayer for the dead in his ear.

Leila Sebbar's minimalist style deftly and powerfully conveys the simplicity of everyday life on both shores of the Mediterranean. Interweaving several monologues, she examines multiple facets of exile and the role of memory in easing its pain.