SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Narratives of War and Women in Contemporary Algeria

This paper is not about women during the AlgerianWar of Independence (1954-1962), but rather about how discourses about these female combatants and participants and what happened to them after 1962 have shaped the political landscape of post-independence Algeria. In the state-sponsored version – reproduced in official texts, museums and presidential discourses on international women’s day – independence equalled a new world for Algerian women and the confirmation of her equal position within Algerian society. In oppositional versions, Algerian women, having courageously fought alongside their brothers-in-arms were unceremoniously ‘sent back into the kitchen’ after 1962 by a patriarchal and authoritarian regime. Algeria thus exemplifies what Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone’s argument in Contested Pasts: the Politics of Memory (2003, p. 1): ‘contests over the meaning of the past are also contests over the meaning of the present and over ways of taking the past forward.’ At the same time, this paper argues that differences between ‘opposing’ views of the past are not so clear-cut. Using the testimony of women war veterans and focusing on the social importance of the war in collective memory and the social role of commemorative ceremonies and activities, this paper seeks to provide alternative perspectives on a highly politicised debate,questioning straightforward dichotomies between ‘official’ and ‘oppositional’ versions of the past and ‘regime supporters’ and ‘regime opponents’.