L’Écriture pénélopéenne de Maïssa Bey

In Maïssa Bey's works, disasters are numerous: natural or human, political and historical, sometimes private. Colonial enfumades, tortures and corvées de bois, assassinations, bloody repressions, earthquakes, napalm, fratricidal struggles are different aspects of what could sound like a dreadful fate if Maïssa Bey's entire work wasn't simultaneously directed against the “silence shroud” that seems to seize everything in official Algeria, against the mektoub, against the resignation and the “acquiescence to misfortune” of “that was written” (Bey, Surtout 59–60). What her work is about is “lifting the veil,” unweaving the stories, “undoing the knots,” and, rather than seeking the extremity of a thread that incessantly shies away, building the frame of a possibility—a senseless and therefore irreducible one. It is this Penelopean poetics that is analyzed, through the example of Surtout ne te retourne pas (2005)

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Humanities · Political science · Politics · Silence · Undoing · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History · Law · Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies · North African History and Literature