Intimate writings in Maïssa Bey

Abstract

This work aims at examining the collection Nouvelles d’Algérie (1998), by Maïssa Bey, pseudonym adopted by the Argelian writer to escape the adverse conditions in the 1990’s, a time of intense political instability in her country. By means of literature, she voices the characters that the official History wiped out, as echoes of her own shattered subjectivity. In those novellas, the history as personal experience and the great History, the individual memory and the collective memory, the autobiography, the Romanesque and the autoficction coexist. Thus, it is meant to restore the splintered “self” through the process of storytelling, unveiling the shadowed zones of the official memory reduced to oblivion.