Impossible reconciliation? The representation of traumatic memories in La meilleure façon de s’aimer (2012) by Akli Tadjer

This article analyzes the representation of traumatic memories of Algeria in the novel La meilleure façon de s’aimer (2012) by Akli Tadjer, a French writer of Algerian origin. While recent decades have seen a more regular engagement in the French political and public spheres with the past shared by France and Algeria, this confrontation with the past is not a straightforward process. As demonstrated by the reactions to the state-commissioned report on France’s colonial past in Algeria, written and submitted by the renowned historian Benjamin Stora in 2021, constructing a singular shared narrative of the past is fraught and laced with difficulty. Drawing on theories of trauma and the representation of traumatic experiences, this article examines the extent to which reconciliation of the past is possible, through a close textual analysis of the representation of memories of Algeria in Tadjer’s text. It will be shown how memories of Algeria are depicted in the novel as incomplete, fractured, and characterized by a difficult transmission from generation to generation. Thus, rather than the simplicity denoted by the notion of reconciliation, La meilleure façon de s’aimer highlights the complexity of communicating traumatic pasts and reiterates that the “unspeakable and the unknown” constitute intrinsic elements of any representation or narrative of such pasts. This does not mean that remembering the past is a futile task, but that recognizing conflict, silence, and forgetting as defining characteristics of the Franco-Algerian past provides a more productive exploration of the past than the potentially facile notion of reconciliation. Furthermore, the article will show how Tadjer’s text reflects the need for multiple, overlaying narratives in order to provide a more inclusive, wide-ranging, though perhaps never complete, account of the past.