Content
Ritualized violence and collective honor
Fouad Larouis novel La vie, l'honneur, la fantasia The narrative begins with a murder witnessed by the narrator as a ten-year-old during the Moroccan equestrian ceremony of the Fantasia. This pivotal scene serves as the framework for a collective crime, not to be understood as an "ordinary" murder, but as a symbolic act of identity-based self-assertion. The murder of Arsalom, who appears as the embodiment of modern greed and corrupt power, pits the tribal spirit against the arrogant mobility of the modern state. Arsalom represents modernity and its lack of anchoring ("sans ancrage, déconnecté"), having made his red Cadillac limousine the mobile center of his world—a symbol of "mobilité arrogante" and voracious speed ("vélocité vorace").
Un bref appel du boss donne le signal. La troupe s'ébranle. Elle marche d'abord au pas, puis l'allure augmente peu à peu puis c'est le gallop. The souffle of the cavalier is made by the horse and is also available in the vape of its flancs.
The boss lances a deep, raucous, guttural. Les cavaliers are dressed on leurs étriers, go to gallop, and brandissent haut leurs fusils. Source émotion – horreur, terreur, incompréhension ? – aurait ressentie Arsalom s'il avait su que this troupe hurlante qui piquait droit sur lui dans le scintillement de la poussière allait l'immoler sur cet autel fait de gradins de bois?
The chef donne the three signals. Hey! cry-t-il. Quinze index impatients pressent autant de détentes, à l'unisson, et de la bouche de chaque fusil jaillit l'éclat de lumière et puis, presque immédiatement, c'est la déflagration, une seule détonation faite de quinze autres, sinistre, effrayante, qui retentit dans le ciel et c'est ensuite l'odeur âcre de la poudre qui envahit le champ immense bordé de milliers de témoins – qui n'ont rien vu.
Arsalom se dresse comme un diable jailli de sa boîte, hagard, les yeux exorbités. The porte la main à son cou, titube, pantin desarticulé à la chemise ensanglantée, fait quelques pas puis s'effondre au pied de la tribune, dans la poussière, les bras en croix.
Mort.
A short shout from the leader gives the signal. The troop sets off. At first, they march in step, then the pace gradually increases until they are finally galloping. The rider's breath echoes like that of the horse and mingles with the steam rising from its flanks.
The leader lets out a second cry, hoarse and guttural. The riders straighten in their stirrups, still galloping, and raise their rifles. What emotions—horror, terror, incomprehension?—would Arsalom have felt if he had known that this screaming troop, charging directly at him in the glittering dust, would sacrifice him on this altar of wooden steps?
The leader gives the third signal. “Hep!” he shouts. Fifteen impatient index fingers simultaneously press the trigger, and from the barrel of each rifle shoots a flash of light, and then, almost immediately, the explosion, a single bang among fifteen others, eerie, terrifying, echoing in the sky, and then the acrid smell of gunpowder filling the vast field, lined with thousands of witnesses—who saw nothing.
Arsalom stood there like a devil who had jumped out of his box, bewildered, with bulging eyes. He clutched his throat, staggered, a broken marionette with a bloodstained shirt, took a few steps, and then collapsed at the foot of the stands, in the dust, his arms outstretched.
Tot.
This scene shows the climax of the t'bourida as a meticulously choreographed act leading to the execution of the corrupt Arsalom. The sequence—three signals from the chief (m'qaddem)—transforms the deed from a simple murder into a solemn, almost sacred ritual. Central to the scene is the description of the simultaneous shots: "une seule détonation faite de quinze autres" (one single detonation made by fifteen others). This synchronicity symbolizes the unity of the "serba" (horse troop) as a "corps collectif" (collective body) that restores the clan's traditional honor by ending the "vie vile et corrompue d'Arsalom" (Arsalom's vile and corrupt life). The scene in which Arsalom collapses like a rag doll ("pantine désarticulée") marks the dramatic end of the modern villain's "mobilité arrogante" (arrogant mobility).
Assia Djebars L'Amour, la fantasia (1985) and Fouad Larouis La vie, l'honneur, la fantasia (Mialet-Barrault, 2025) offer two complementary literary approaches to the same historically rooted Maghreb ritual—the Fantasia (t'bourida)—and use it to explore fundamental questions of history, violence, identity, and social order. While Djebar (born near Algiers, 1936) poetically opens up Algeria's colonial archive by juxtaposing polyphonic voices and suppressed female memories with official historical narratives, Laroui (born 1958 in Morocco) disenchants contemporary society through an analytically ironic reconstruction of the social, economic, and institutional forces that shape a modern, postcolonial Morocco. Both texts employ the same cultural symbol but with entirely different narrative techniques and political implications: Djebar opens a counter-archive of the colonial past, while Laroui exposes the workings of contemporary power mechanisms. It is precisely in this tension between poetic memory and rational diagnosis that the productive basis for comparison of both works lies, which together make it possible to reveal continuities and transformations of violence, ritual and community across colonial and postcolonial eras.
Assia Djebar and Fouad Laroui develop a complementary interpretive spectrum through the interplay of their key terms, which programmatically connects the novels while simultaneously aesthetically separating them. For Djebar, the connection between "love" and "fantasy" represents a paradoxical simultaneity of intimacy and violence: The Fantasy fabric It stands metaphorically for the cavalcade of Algerian history, the war, the public, male domain, and the language of the colonizers (French). Love In contrast, the female, private world represents the body, the intimate narrative, and the Arabic mother tongue. The Fantasia, as a symbol of colonial appropriation and an image of female vulnerability, is intertwined with a subjective, physical-emotional dimension, so that love becomes a cipher for a writing that attempts to heal the damaged relationship between the individual, history, and language. Laroui, on the other hand, links "Life" and "Honor" to the same Fantasia in his title, but thereby shifts the focus to the social mechanisms of the present: honor appears as a collective, often dysfunctional code that structures the characters' lives and makes the Fantasia the stage for a modern game of power, violence, and symbolic capital. The shared reference to Fantasia thus marks a cultural constant, while the flanking terms ("love" versus "life/honor") make the different poetic orientations visible: Djebar's title opens a poetic-introspective space of remembering and reclaiming, Laroui's title a socio-diagnostic space in which rituals and life practices are questioned about their contemporary function.
Assia Djebars L'Amour, la fantasia is a multifaceted, hybrid work of memory and history that interweaves personal, literary, and historical perspectives on the French conquest of Algeria and the lives of Algerian women. The text assembles autobiographical episodes, literary quotations (including from Fromentin), colonial accounts, everyday scenes, and oral traditions, moving between childhood memories, ethnographic observation, and the reconstruction of violent events. Its polyphonic form—short episodes, shifting voices, linguistic ambiguities, and documentary interludes—understands memory as a multi-layered construct and makes tangible how history is sedimented in bodies, landscapes, and narrative modes.
This poetics of polyphony is reflected in the novel's structure, which is divided into thematically varying parts (including "La prise de la ville," "Les cris de la fantasia," and "Les voix ensevelies"). These parts range from early colonial military encounters to private stories of love, violence, injury, and silence. Writing thus becomes a space for struggle and liberation: it brings to light suppressed female voices and translates muteness into articulated memory.
The autobiographical first-person narrator appears simultaneously as a child, a writing intellectual, and a listener who gives other women a voice. In this constant shifting of perspective, she becomes a moderating force, assembling historical sources, oral narratives, and her own memories, thus preventing any single character from possessing or concluding the story. Djebar employs a self-reflexive, polyphonic narrative technique that expands the official archive and opens a counter-archive, re-inscribing marginalized voices into the historical narrative.
Fouad Larouis La vie, l'honneur, la fantasia is a contemporary, prosaically clear novel that understands Fantasia as a social field in which honor, violence, corruption, and collective identity are negotiated. From the perspective of a male first-person narrator, who retrospectively reconstructs his childhood memory of the spectacular assassination of Arsalom, the text explores familial constellations, failing masculinities, the failure of state institutions, and the convoluted workings of honor cults. The tone is simultaneously ironic, detached, and analytical; Laroui combines the local social commentary with a critical look at modern (post)colonial forms of power and administration.
The narrative tension unfolds in two movements: first, in the detailed depiction of the ritual and the social atmosphere of the Fantasia, then in the gradual uncovering of crime, economic fraud, and institutional complicity. The first-person narrator reconstructs Arsalom's economic misdeeds, analyzes administrative and financial practices, and shows how ritualized violence and collective secrecy ( 'asabiyya) subverts modern legal and political logics. His perspective remains stable and not very polyphonic: he acts as an analytical consciousness that exposes mythical narrative patterns and transforms them into a semi-ethnographic, semi-detective chronicle. The ending rejects any melodramatic resolution and reveals a society that remains in a precarious limbo between traditional mythology and rational enlightenment.
Fouad Laroui lives in Amsterdam, where he teaches French literature and philosophy at the university. A trained engineer, Laroui holds a doctorate in economics. He has published nine novels, numerous essays, and short stories, and has received several awards (including the Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle and the Grand Prix Jean-Giono). At its core, Laroui's literary work is an ongoing exploration of Moroccan identity within the tension between tradition and modernity, as is also evident in his novels. La vie, l'honneur, la fantasia, where a living symbol of cultural heritage and collective honor is tragically desecrated through an act of corruption and revenge: the murder of Arsalom. This reflects Laroui's recurring theme of how deeply rooted rites and myths are undermined by the modern evils of moral decay and nepotism. The analytical uncovering of the crime in La vie, l'honneur, la fantasia The attempt to rationally understand the archaic act is a literary parallel to his essayistic work. The theme of language itself, which appears in essays such as... Le Drama linguistique Marocain The way it is treated underlines the complexity of his bicultural narrative voice and his constant endeavor to build a bridge between different cultural worlds through clear language and critical thinking.
Djebar's portrayal of colonial violence is not antiquarian: the continuity between the military occupation (1830 onwards) and later forms of political repression, communal violence, and patriarchal control is ever-present. By offering female readings of history, she raises the question of collective responsibility: How are women represented or rendered invisible in the nation's archive? Which languages (French/Arabic) legitimize narratives? Thus, in Djebar's work, the political present remains a question of representation, memory, and linguistic domination.
Laroui's political present is more pragmatic: corruption, the erosion of the rule of law, market logics that transform local cultures into profit-driven motives—all these are issues that directly connect to current discussions in Maghreb countries. The novel explores how honor is preserved or abused in a capitalist world and how collective codes undermine the agency of modern institutions. Laroui thus raises the question of political responsibility in postcolonial societies caught between tradition and neoliberal modernization.
Regarding the narrative order of both texts
Djebar and Laroui work with fundamentally different narrative logics: Djebar assembles fragments, quotations, documentary inserts, and snippets of voices into an associative, ring-shaped narrative; her text is rhythmic and episodic, time is layered, and flashbacks and interpolations disrupt linear chronology. This montage reflects an intention: history is not a single chain of causality, but an ensemble of narratives that must be played off against each other to uncover hidden truths. Djebar's form thus corresponds to a postcolonial poetics of rupture—the narrative is an archive in which absences, pauses, and "buried voices" (voix ensevelies) themselves carry meaning.
Laroui, on the other hand, prefers a more coherent first-person narrative that picks up threads of memory and reconstructs them in a clear, ironic tone. His structure initially appears more classical: exposition, setup, revelation (Arsalom's murder), resolution/consequences. But it is precisely in this linear form that Laroui employs the tactic of slow revelation—the banal and the bureaucratic detail become forensic: by uncovering bank documents, questions of ownership, administrative acts, and social customs, he deconstructs the narratives (legends, tales of honor) surrounding figures of power; the narrative is thus analytically archaeological.
In comparison, this means that where Djebar makes form itself a political practice (breaking the silence, gathering voices), Laroui opts for reconstruction as a critique tool: his method allows corruption and collective secrecy to be exposed. Both strategies address power, but on different levels – one poetically ethnographic, the other prosaically institutionally critical.
Collective and individual
In Djebar's work, characters often appear as a collective presence: women's voices, oral storytellers, historical eyewitnesses; identity is shared, fragmented, and relational. Individuals (Haoua, Badra, the girls from the hamlet, the narrator herself) are present, but their meaning only emerges in their interaction with others and in the historical ruptures they experience. Crucially, Djebar's characters are vehicles for memory; they are not merely psychological but political—their bodies are sites of colonial violence (rape, exile, the destruction of landscapes) and simultaneously places of resistance (repetition, writing, witnessing).
Laroui focuses more on individual portraits – Arsalom as an ambivalent power figure, who hair T'hami as a traditional authority, the first-person narrator as observer/analyst. The characters are socially stereotyped: the corrupt notable, the bankrupt buyers, the silent woman, the organized crime. Serbian-collective. But Laroui shows how individually complex motives are: honor morphs into profit, tradition into spectacle, revenge into collective action. His characters function as knots in a social network, pulled apart by economics, shame, honor, and law.
In comparison, two ways of thinking about community become apparent: Djebar imagines community as a remembering crowd that collects written voices; Laroui shows community as organized practice (t'bourida, 'asabiyya) whose codes structure political life. Both perspectives complement each other: memory needs the concrete social stage; society needs memory to understand its violence.
Language, writing, silence
Language is both theme and medium in Djebar's work. French and Arabic languages interact; French often appears as an ambivalent tool: a colonial medium, but also a writing instrument for a female narrative voice (the narrator writes in French and uses writing as an act of liberation). Silence and the "unspoken" are made visible—through gaps, insertions, and the "unnamed" suffering (rapes, massacres). Writing becomes politics: it reconstructs the temporal layers of the colonization process and transforms silent bodies into witnesses.
Laroui emphasizes rational communication: protocols, bank records, police interrogations, administrative language. The rhetorical sharpness of his narrator—ironic distance, analytical observations—contrasts modern documents with oral codes. But Laroui also shows how silence becomes formal: the 'asabiyya functions like an omertà; collective unspeakability is communicatively productive—it protects, it conceals. Thus, in Laroui's work, the language of offices and that of tradition are juxtaposed.
Both novels explore the tension between writing and orality in colonial contexts: Djebar uses writing as a subversive practice; Laroui shows how written logics (contracts, mortgages, deeds) shape everyday life in colonial and postcolonial times – and how these logics are undermined by informal codes.
Memory and Chronicle
Djebar writes in a historical-lyrical style: her temporal structure is cyclical, the present interwoven with the turning point of the 19th century in 1830; past battles, personal episodes, and literary allusions run concurrently. Past atrocities are present, enlivening the protagonists' contemporary experiences and manifesting themselves in bodies and landscapes. This understanding of time is postcolonial: it does not deny the continuity between colonial violence and later social structures.
Laroui, on the other hand, works with linear, almost forensic time: events are ordered, documents are consulted, and causal clarification takes center stage (who acted, why, and with what means?). This has an advantage: it subjects institutions—banks, police, administration—to critique and reveals how collective myths are institutionally reproduced. His chronicle is analytical; it seeks responsibility and the materiality of social ruptures.
Taken together, this means that Djebar teaches that historical traumas cannot be explained solely chronologically; Laroui shows how chronology and documentation help to identify responsibilities. Both perspectives are necessary for a holistic understanding of colonial violence: one opens up spaces of remembrance and poetics, the other sharpens the instrumental view of structures and actors.
Fantasia as a symbol
The depiction of the traditional Maghrebi equestrian ritual reflects profound historical shifts: from an orientalist, exotic projection of the 19th century as in Delacroix's Fantasia Arabe from 1833 to a postcolonial allegory of national identity, war, and female liberation. The t'bourida is a traditional Moroccan equestrian ceremony, now recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity due to its cultural significance. The ritual, whose origins date back to the 8th century, is a spectacular demonstration of horsemanship and collective discipline. The t'bourida follows precise rules: An odd number of riders, traditionally dressed, charge along a straight track, the so-called Maharak, at high speed. The central element is synchronicity: The riders must accelerate the movement of the horses and fire their muskets or muzzle-loading rifles at the end of the barrel so simultaneously that only one single shot This can be heard. From a ritual-theoretical perspective, the t'bourida is understood as a mode of holistic, embodied, and existential experience. The perfection of the synchronized firing symbolizes not only military might, but above all the collective unity and power of the community; the public spectacle stages the dominance of masculinity in public space.
L'alignement étant décidé, on lit la sourate qui ouvre le Coran puis on monte le cheval et ce n'est que là, à cet instant, parce qu'on est à portée d'oreille du compagnon fidèle, qu'on récite l'illustre « verset du trône », afin que le cheval The entende also: « Dieu, il n'est d'autre divinité que Lui, Vivant, qui veille éternellement à la marche de toute chose, sans que jamais somnolence ni sommeil ne Le saisissent. À Lui revient ce qui est dans les cieux et sur la terre. Qui pourrait sans Son aval interceder auprès de Lui? Il sait all de leur passé et all de leur avenir mais eux ne partagent de sa science que ce qu'Il veut bien leur accorder. Son trône déborde les cieux et la Terre – et leur garde et leur conservation ne Lui coûtent aucune peine… »
Mon hôte m'assura que this récitation avait l'effet immédiat de rasséréner le cavalier et sa monture. Devant mon air sceptique, il m'affirm l'avoir lui-même observé. Je hochai la tête et me tus. L'homme qui murmure à l'oreille des chevaux, ce n'était donc pas dans le Montana qu'il était le plus efficace, c'était dans les Doukkala ou le Gharb…
Nous passesons ensuite, me dit-il, aux deux "sourates protectrices" qui sont si profondément liées l'une à l'autre qu'on ne les sépare jamais: on les récite l'une après l'autre. Nous commençons par celle dite « de l'aube » : « Dis : I cherche protection auprès du Seigneur de l'aube, against the mal des êtres qu'Il a créés, against the mal de l'obscurité quand elle s'accroît, against the mal des sorcières et against the mal de l'envieux. » Puis nous passons à celle dite « des humains » : « Dis : Je cherche protection auprès du Seigneur des humains contre le mal du tourmenteur furtif qui insuffle l'angoisse dans les poitrines, qu'il soit djinn ou homme. »
Once the orientation has been determined, one reads the surah that opens the Quran, then mounts the horse, and only there, at that moment, because one is within earshot of one's faithful companion, does one recite the famous "Throne Verse" so that the horse can also hear it: "God, there is no deity except Him, the Ever-Living, who eternally watches over the course of all things, and neither drowsiness nor sleep ever overtakes Him. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. Who can intercede with Him except by His permission? He knows all about their past and all about their future, but they share only that knowledge which He wills to grant them. His Throne is above the heavens and the earth, and its guarding and preservation require no effort from Him..."
My host assured me that this recitation had the immediate effect of calming both rider and horse. When I looked at him skeptically, he assured me that he had observed this himself. I nodded and remained silent. So the man who whispers in the horses' ears wasn't most effective in Montana, but rather in Doukkala or Gharb…
We now come, he told me, to the two "protective surahs," which are so closely linked that they are never separated: they are recited one after the other. We begin with the so-called "Dawn Surah": "Say: I seek protection from the Lord of the Dawn from the evil of those He created, from the evil of the increasing darkness, from the evil of witches, and from the evil of the envious." Then we move on to the so-called "Prayer of Mankind": "Say: I seek protection from the Lord of Mankind from the evil of the secret tormentor who whispers fear into hearts, whether he be a jinn or a human."
This scene at Faroui reveals the deeply rooted spirituality and the strictly codified preparations that precede the combat ritual. The recitation of Quranic verses, particularly the Throne Verse and the "Sourates protectrices" (protective surahs), is intended to calm ("rasséréner") the rider and his mounts and grant them divine protection. This confirms that the t'bourida is not merely a military exercise, but an act imbued with "niyya" (good intention) and "imaan" (faith). The inclusion of the horse in the prayers underscores the special, almost mystical relationship between human and animal, in which the horse is considered an "intercesseur" (intercessor) and a witness on the Day of Judgment.
The ritualized cavalry display of the Fantasia is a central image for both authors, but it is interpreted differently. For Djebar, the Fantasia appears as an ambivalent spectacle: it is a place of beauty and death (the galloping blow, the wounded woman Haoua), a metaphor for colonial violence and at the same time for indigenous forms of resistance; the Fantasia is simultaneously cultural expression and a stage for brutality. Djebar's topography connects the coast (the "ville imprenable") and the hamlet; landscapes are perforated by wars and memory.
Laroui transforms the Fantasia into a social matrix: ritual, honor, violence, spectacle, and secrecy coalesce into a public drama that simultaneously makes private decisions (the murder of Arsalom with the Fantasia's assistance is both revenge and the preservation of honor). The arena space becomes a microcosm of social power: stands, the dignitaries' gallery, the riders' platform—everything is organized, everything has a function within the network of visibility and invisibility. Laroui also interprets landscapes as modern economies (construction projects, land fraud), thereby transforming space into capital.
For Djebar, Fantasia is a literary field in which history, body, and language collide; for Laroui, it is a social stage and an indicator of institutional dysfunction. Both interpretations complement each other because they show how ritual functions as an interface between tradition, violence, and modernity.
Intertextual dimension
Djebar's work is explicitly intertextual: Fromentin, reports by colonial officers, Ibn Khaldoun – she quotes, paraphrases, and ironizes historical sources to deconstruct colonial archiving. By quoting the literary and historical texts themselves, she makes visible how the colonial narrative marginalizes women and the colonized; her reinterpretation of these sources is an anti-colonial process.
Laroui refers, less poetically and more implicitly, to modern discourses: economic and bureaucratic texts, legal categories, and classical sociological thinkers (Ibn Khaldoun appears as a point of reference), thereby analyzing postcolonial society with both literary and scientific tools. His intertextuality is functional: it serves to illuminate social mechanisms.
Both texts participate in a broader Maghrebi/Francophone postcolonial discourse (Moi/Autre, memory/archive, destruction of languages and bodies). Djebar produces literary counter-archives; Laroui writes a sociology of everyday life in novel form. The intertextuality of both works points beyond them to debates surrounding the politics of memory, archival critique, and the role of literature in dealing with violence.
Conclusions
Djebar: the end as a ritualized return of the voice
Djebar's concluding movement (including the chapters "Tzarl-rit (final)," "Pauline," "La fantasia," and "Air de nay") is less concerned with a psychological resolution than with a liturgical return: the fantasia, the collective memory, and the women's voices return in varying tones. The ending is not teleological: it offers no final redemption, no judicial triumph; instead, the act of writing itself remains the ongoing process—writing as a practice of remembering, as repetition, as reconstitution. The literary form does not conclude, it circulates; the narrator holds the reader in a poetic void, where the witnesses can still speak. Herein lies a political dimension: the ending claims the possibility of free speech about bodies that are otherwise recorded in the colonial archive only as victims.
Formally, the ending is an accumulation of voices and motifs (the wounded man's hand, the persistent images of Fantasia, the language problem) that do not lead to a narrative closedown, but rather to a moral and aesthetic appeal: memory must not be stifled in official archives (military reports, colonial chronicles); it demands literary mediation. Djebar's conclusion also brings the question of repetition and ritual to the forefront: Fantasia remains ambivalent—beauty and death, community and violence—and it is precisely this ambivalence that persists because memory does not fit into simple moral categories.
Laroui: the end as institutional upheaval and social repercussions
Laroui's epilogue (see the chapter "Épilogue"; the passages on the distribution of Arsalom's estate, the persecution by banks, the flight of his sons) functions differently: it is a disenchantment of the Great Man. Arsalom's death does not liquidate the social mechanisms that enabled him; rather, in its aftermath, Laroui exposes the administrative and economic sloppiness—bank failures, the division of his estate, the flight of his heirs. The ending is demystifying: death does not disenchant structural corruption, it is instead formalized (confiscations, adjudications). Arsalom disappears from the chronicle; his social reality is absorbed by bureaucratic procedures.
Narratively speaking, Laroui's conclusion is not cathartic; it is a sociological postscript and therefore political: it shifts the focus away from the spectacular murder and towards the institutional consequences, the banks, the legal system, so that attention remains focused on the system, not the individual perpetrator. The first-person narrator comments, distances himself, and takes stock – the ending is analytical, not mythical.
Assia Djebars L'Amour, la fantasia and Fouad Larouis La vie, l'honneur, la fantasia These are complementary readings of the same historical field: fantasia as a cultural practice, the colonial history of the Maghreb, and the mechanisms of postcolonial order. Djebar delivers a poetic, linguistically critical literature of remembrance that opens up voices and questions the power of the archive; Laroui offers a sober, documentary-analytical cultural critique that makes institutional responsibility visible.
The central contrast, therefore, lies in the answer to the question "What does death do?": In Djebar's work, death (as image, as memory) is brought into literary consciousness; the ending is proclamatory and poetic: continuing to speak, continuing to write. In Laroui's work, death is transformed into something administrative; the ending is diagnostic: the system remains intact, and the enlightenment lies in the exposure of administrative processes. Both endings critique violence, but on different levels: Djebar on the symbolic-ethical level (language, witnessing), Laroui on the material-institutional level (banks, property, law). Together, they imply that neither poetic memory nor forensic disclosure alone suffices: only their combination can establish historical accountability.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
