Buffeted between “inside” and “outside,” between the desire to return to the origin and the acute consciousness of foreignness, diasporic imagination is often cast as a yearning for one's “native land” based on a “[m]utual imbrication rather than clear opposition between a desire for roots and an embrace of diasporic existence” (Hirsch and Miller 2). However, Hirsch and Miller dispute the mythifying inscription of the diasporic self, committing instead to “contingent, ambiguous definitions of self” (Hirsch and Miller 4). To emphasize the specificity of their new paradigm of memorialization and self-writing, Hirsch puts forward the concept of “post-memory,” while Miller develops the idea of “transpersonal” experience, which circumscribes “a zone of relation that is social, affective, material, and inevitably public” (Hirsch and Miller 5). The motivation behind this memorial model is to “shift the focus from diaspora to return,” where the term “return” is redefined as a state between “routes” and “roots” (Hirsch and Miller 6), between errantry and rootedness (what Glissant calls “enracinement”), loss and recovery. Insofar as it describes the current memorialization of French Algeria, the model proffered by Hirsch and Miller invites a closer examination of the dynamics of knowledge and ignorance, certainty and doubt, as they are shaped by the desire to know and the fear of the unknown with regard to the individual and collective past.

I Do Not Speak – the Limits of Knowledge and the Possibility of Dialogue

The ambiguous relationship between knowledge and ignorance is central to the works of Leïla Sebbar, an established French writer born in the Oran region of French and Algerian parents. Her mixed lineage, reflected in her own fiction and autobiographical writing, indicates a level of personal investment in the memorialization of French Algeria akin to that of Rey or Besnaci-Lancou. Sebbar's style claims its dual French and Algerian kinship, displaying both the Orientalist opulence of the sentence and the crude lyricism of the “beur” slang, confronting clashing cultures and discordant memories. Moreover, in her personal testimonies she underscores the latent but ever-present and potentially deadly struggle that characterized her own upbringing as a child of French and Algerian parents growing up in the colony: “Je recherche, je crois, ce que j'ai aperçu dans l'enfance algérienne, coloniale et qui m'a troublée, jusqu’à toujours l’écrire, le croisement fécond ou meurtrier de l’étranger avec l’étranger.”