Women Fight, Women Write

On 1 March 2019, social media lit up with images of 83-year-old Djamila Bouhired protesting with thousands of Algerians against the fifth presidential term of Abdelaziz Bouteflika. An iconic “living martyr of the Revolution,” Bouhired has explicitly connected 2019’s ongoing hirak (uprising) to the 1954–62 War of Independence, praising the “resurgence of a fighting Algeria” after almost six decades of “usurped legitimacy.”1 Female former militants (moudjahidate) have taken to the streets before, for example, in protest against the Family Code introduced in 1984 that downgraded women’s legal status. Algerian women’s continuous insistence upon their rightful place in history is the subject of Mildred Mortimer’s retrospective on the independence war as object of individual/collective memory and reminder of “women’s courage, fortitude, and resiliency” (3). Bouhired was one of the militants immortalized in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers (1966), alongside Zohra Drif, also prominent in the current hirak, and the late Samia Lakhdari. Mortimer considers Drif’s memoir Inside the Battle of Algiers (2013/2017) with other belated testimonies by former combatants Louisette Ighilahirz and Eveline Safir Lavalette—this last, surprisingly, of European or pied noir heritage, reminding us of a historical national diversity that Algerian writers often disobediently remember in order to complicate Algeria’s official reconstruction as Arab and Muslim. Two other works by a moudjahida, Danièle Djamila Amrane-Minne’s history of the Algerian war and her collection of interviews with fellow female combatants, define the stakes of revisionary historiography. Mortimer stresses the wider participation of women in the independence war, in militant and civic roles, as well as their contributions to Algerian historiography as memoirists, novelists, filmmakers, and scholars; in short, women’s persistence in speaking truth to power, notably opposing both state and Islamist discourses during the undeclared civil war of the 1990s (la décennie noire)

Ancient history · Art history · Battle · Collective memory · Courage · Historiography · Independence (probability theory · Legitimacy · Memoir · Political science · Politics · Presidential system · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · War of independence · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · North African History and Literature · Gender Studies · History · Law

• Beyond masculinist ideals of resistance

  Open Access•Maša Mrovlje, Jennet Kirkpatrick•Women s Studies International Forum•2024

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