(Re)constructing ambivalent identities in Zahia Rahmani’s <i>France: récit d’une enfance</i> (2006) and Alice Zeniter’s <i>L’Art de perdre</i> (2017)

This article examines multivocal, intersubjective explorations of ambivalent identity in two literary works centring female descendants of harkis (Algerian auxiliary soldiers enlisted in the French army during the Algerian War). Zahia Rahmani’s France: récit d’une enfance (2006) and Alice Zeniter’s L’Art de perdre (2017) document their protagonists’ struggles to reconstruct, and simultaneously reconfigure or subvert, complex memories and identities fragmented by colonial history and its afterlives. Plural, often transgressive, forms of speech, dialogue, and storytelling are shown to facilitate explorations of ambivalent intergenerational and intercultural affect, also emerging as forces of critique, resistance, and interpellation. In their navigation of conflictual, ambiguous histories that place diverse memories and identities in productive tension, both texts complicate notions of belonging and inheritance. Their layered, dialogic narrative quests treat subjectivity, memory, and temporality as plural, fluid, and contingent, resisting straightforward identification with a singular identity marker, whether harki , Algerian, Amazigh (Berber), French, or otherwise. Crucially, through the real and imagined landscapes they traverse, they also turn outwards in their questioning of broader oppressive, traumatogenic structures and reductive narratives. ‘Pre-written’ narratives, whether involving colonial or contemporary Algeria, the experiences of the harkis or those of rural French communities, are thus deconstructed and rewritten. Drawing on theorizations and interrogations of postcolonial hybridity and witnessing, this article argues that these narrative (re)constructions privilege neither unified subjectivity nor potentially essentialized forms of fragmentary identity. Citing yet interrogating institutionalized narratives of memorialization, reconciliation, and reparation, Rahmani and Zeniter present ambivalent, fractured intergenerational transmission as a shifting locus of encounter, exchange, and contestation.