Memory and time in Assia Djebar’s novel Les Alouettes naïves

Abstract

The article analyzes themes of collective memory and time in Assia Djebar’s early  novel Les Alouettes naïves basing its approach firstly on Halbwachs’s sociology of memory, and, in the case of the protagonist Rachid’s memory, on Freudian thought of trauma.
Halbwachs, contrary to Bergson, sees the individual conscience and the individual 
memory not as being limited to a person, and thus closed in itself, but as a meeting point of different collective memories, where the latter concept is defined as a memory of a particular social group.
The article author first analyzes the memory of Omar, Nfissa and Rachid, the three protagonists of the novel, commencing his analysis with the study of the memory of Omar, the autodiegetic narrator.  Omar’s individual memory is seen as the intersection of family memory, of collective memory he shares with Rachid, his closest friend, and of partisans for independence memory, all those collective memories being interior and interiorized. Moreover, the first two memories are closely interwoven, as Rachid is Omar’s relative.
According to Halbwachs, the very existence of a recollection proves that all relationships with a particular social group have not been broken. Thus, although Omar had to break his long-term friendship with Rachid after having expressed his love to Rachid’s wife Nfissa, Omar’s recollections of Rachid, his telling us the story of their childhood and youth memories, recreate the bond between them. Thus, Omar who remembers, is not alone, but in a sense still makes part of the small group of two intimate friends he constituted with Rachid.
The most important collective memory concerning Nfissa’s character is the family one in which her recalling her young mother’s taking her and her sister to a ritual weekly bath in a Turkish hammam in their childhood has a privileged place. The family memory is interwoven with the memory of “women of patio”, as the author article names the group including Nfissa’s close and distant relatives, but also her mother and her two elder sisters, who were confined to their home since the age of eight. As in the above-mentioned case of Omar, Nfissa recollections, her memories, 
such as, for example, the memories of dances at women’s gathering at wedding parties, prove that in spite of her being a university student, and an emancipated young woman to a certain degree, she stills has not broken all her bonds with those “women of interior”. That implies that Nfissa, Djebar’s double, has not broken her bonds with her ethnic, national and religious origin and background that still remain an important part of her identity.
In the case of Rachid, “divided man”, the external focalization denies the reader the access to this character’s thoughts. As a reader can only make hypothesis based on Rachid’s behavior, gestures and what this taciturn character chooses to say, it is only in the last chapters that it is revealed that Rachid memory is a repressed one, as consequence of his family and war traumas, where the first “trigger”, the first traumatic event was his young sister Zhor’s death during his adolescence. The inhibition failure is the source of Rachid’s great suffering and his nightmares. The unconsciousness being atemporal, Rachid’s traumatic past is not past nor dead at all, and it cannot fade away, diminish its force, nor be forgotten, but is always latent and thus tormenting him.
Each collective memory having its own particular time, the last subchapter of the article studies the correlations of those times, which create in some cases the “time cluster” (Namer 1997), as times of different collective memories are separate one from another.