Décrire la violence ou écrire l’urgence ? Les écrivaines algériennes francophones entre l’ignorance et l’indifférence

Abstract

This article analyzes the place of Francophone Algerian women writers during the "Black Decade" of the 1990s, a period marked by extreme political and ideological violence. It shows how these women of letters found themselves caught between Islamist terror, the constraints of a patriarchal system, and the ambiguous expectations of the Western publishing world. The study highlights the triple marginalization they faced: as women, intellectuals, and Francophone writers. Faced with threats and exile, their fiction often adopted a more introspective and symbolic form, privileging memory, fiction, and aesthetic resistance rather than raw testimony. Far from disengagement, their literary voice constituted a strategy of survival and protest against imposed erasure. Thus, Algerian women's writing of/about the 1990s became a space for reclaiming identity and resisting political and social violence.