L'autobiographie de Louisette Ighilahriz ou la biographie d'une nation torturée

Algérienne, Louisette Ighilahriz's autobiography, came out in 2001 and was taken as the definitive testimony on tortures perpetrated by the French paratroopers during the Algerian War of Independence. It is argued here that such a reading is accurate, but reductive, as it ignores the subtlety of an autobiographical text with two "authors", inscribing a precise type of readers, and built on a synecdoche closely linking the female body to the national body. Naming the book Algérienne expresses the ex-fellagha's realization that the individual's trauma reproduces the collective trauma, one that is even more difficult to say and hear. By its "ethical architecture" the narrative hopes to evoke an empathic reception from its readership, essentially French people, without glossing over the violence that Ighilahriz and her country suffered, and their consequences, such as the so called second war of Algeria.