Weaving Narratives, Threading Care: A "Mise-en-Récit" of France's Colonial Past in Algeria in Clinical Encounters

More than sixty years following Algeria’s independence, legacies of violence from France’s 132 year colonial rule and the war of decolonization (1954-1962) continue to shape modern-day Algerian and French societies. This dissertation responds to a pivotal moment in the historiography of memory of the Algerian War of Independence: the rising number of French and Algerian mental health practitioners who write about witnessing colonial legacies in their clinical encounters. Whereas memory of the war has been primarily examined through facts and representations, these recent clinical interventions invite new interdisciplinary perspectives for tracing the war’s legacies across generations. Taking the practitioners' stories as my project’s point de départ, I explore a diverse corpus of contemporary narrative sources that represent clinical encounters with individuals of Algerian descent whose parents lived through the war. I argue that the vignette, novels, and interviews I examine depict both characteristics of the memory transmissions descendants receive, as well as the support mental health practitioners offer them to weave stories integrating their parents’ memories with their present experiences. Using narratological tools and methods of close reading, I demonstrate that these sources offer us windows into the “mise-en-récit” (Boutaghou 2019)—the narrative construction process—for descendants who grew up with fragments and silences in their families. These fragments and silences were frequently connected to their parents’ traumatic experiences of the war and France’s colonial past in Algeria. Beginning with Alice Cherki’s clinical vignette in La frontière invisible : Violences de l’immigration (2006), turning next to Samir Toumi and Faïza Guène’s novels L’effacement (2016) and La discrétion (2020), and ending with a set of interviews I conducted with Algerian and French psychotherapists during fieldwork (2022-2023), my three chapters provide case studies to see how descendants’ “mise-en-récit” processes are supported by clinicians in therapeutic encounters. In contrast to studies in postcolonial memory that use a pathologized lens to trace legacies of the war in the present, my interdisciplinary perspective between memory studies, literary studies, and mental health shifts the focus from fractures and wounds to expressions of weaving and repair. This shift offers us a new way to observe legacies from the colonial past inherited by descendants—one that pinpoints the role of clinical story caretakers who play an intermediary role in descendants’ processing the pasts they have inherited. By centering the psychotherapeutic space as a key site where their “mises-en-récit” unfold, my sources illuminate powerful dynamics of descendants’ stories being listened to and cared for. This is accomplished through their textual features such as creative syntax, woven narrative structures, and lexical fields of weaving. As our world grapples with ongoing legacies of violence in and beyond the Franco-Algerian context, it is urgent to examine representations of the spaces that “thread care” in the midst of suffering across generations. Stories written by and about Algerian and French clinicians provide a crucial lens to view emerging narratives of repair.