‘They left their soul on the other side of the Mediterranean’ Rehabilitating Franco-Algerian histories in Mehdi Charef’s Le Harki de Meriem

This article proposes a reading of Mehdi Charef’s Le Harki de Meriem [‘Meriem’s Harki’] (1989) and its 2016 edition that focuses on the text’s discursive and paratextual practices employed to represent Franco-Algerian historical and cultural heritage. This non-linear narrative presents a family saga over the course of the twentieth century, revealing in the process key episodes of the mutual and turbulent history of colonial Algeria and postcolonial France. Through a discussion of passages and editorial work that relate the novel with historical events, I will trace patterns of critique that emphasize their concern with history as a source of knowledge. Such a dialectical analysis will in turn provide a reading paradigm that paves the way into a hybrid France that fragments both the French national grand narrative and Franco-Algerian memory.