Standing at the Crossroads in Colonial Algeria: Identity De/Formation in Yasmina Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night

Abstract

This study aims to highlight and explore the impact of the French colonisation on the Algerian intellectuals in Yasmina Khadra's What the Day Owes the Night (2008). The selected novel provides a socio-historical account of a critical period in the Algerian history. Besides, it sheds light on the identity issues experienced by Algerian intellectuals which were a direct result to the assimilation policy adopted by the French administration in colonial Algeria. This research focuses on the traumatic consequences of being in margins and on borders of two clashing cultures: the native one and that of the coloniser, namely as an inevitable outcome of identity hybridisation. This endeavor, thus, investigates how those Algerian intellectuals developed a sense of alienation and confronted a chaotic psychological state of in-betweenness, particularly after the outbreak of the War for Independence. This study brings to the surface the troubled relationship between Algeria and France and seeks to explore the deep effects left by more than a century of exploitation of both the Algerian soul and soil. To this end, this dissertation is divided into two chapters; the first one provides a socio-historical examination of the era before and during which the events of the selected novel take place: the thirties, forties, and fifties of the twentieth century in colonial Algeria. This offers a better understanding of the issues tackled in the second chapter. This latter, in its turn, analyses the fragmented identity and its dimensions during French colonisation through the character of "Younes/Jonas." The protagonist, who is the representative of colonial Algerian elite, engages in an internal existential war for self-identification. Therefore, this chapter probes the depths of the hybrid identity and its deformations as portrayed by Khadra in his novel.