Abstract
Women played a key role in the struggle led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) between 1954 and 1962 to end French colonial rule in Algeria. In Our Fighting Sisters, Natalya Vince interweaves the story of what happened to female veterans after independence with a sophisticated consideration of the ways in which these women have remembered their wartime activities. Through her detailed exploration of the intersections between ‘lived experiences and competing discourses about Algerian women’ produced during and after the war (p. 8), Vince is able to challenge a number of commonly held perceptions – that such women have been ‘forgotten’, that after the brief ‘liberating’ parenthesis of the war they ‘went back to the kitchen’, that ‘everything went wrong’ after 1962 – to reveal a messier but much richer reality.
In spite of the appearance since the 1990s of a growing body of works dealing with gender and Algeria, including representations of female combatants or mujahidat, scholarship on the post-independence period remains scarce, especially in English. While explicitly not proposing to single-handedly fill this gap with an all-encompassing study of nation-building or memory in Algeria since 1962, Vince's interdisciplinary monograph nonetheless makes a substantial and important contribution. At its core lies a set of oral history interviews with 27 women who sided with the nationalists, all but one of whom still lived in Algeria in 2005 when Vince did her fieldwork. Beyond this central point of commonality, Vince's cohort displays a diverse set of political, socioeconomic, educational and geographical backgrounds which she uses effectively to emphasize the pitfalls of believing that ‘we can identify a “real” or “most representative” Algerian woman’ (p. 19). The inclusion of rural women within the sample is particularly significant given the almost total absence of such voices within existing works and it is fascinating to see the ways in which their experiences both diverge from and converge with those of better known veterans of the FLN's urban networks such as Zohra Drif.
Throughout, Vince focuses on ‘individual trajectories and day-to-day negotiations’ (p. 184), using these to highlight the often difficult choices and compromises women consciously made as they sought to negotiate their relationship with and place within the post-colonial state as it evolved from the 1960s onwards. The coverage offered by Chapters four and five of the decades immediately following independence are particularly valuable in this regard, helping to ‘stretch out’ a chronology that is all too often ‘squashed down’ to the periods of the War of Independence and the civil violence of the 1990s (p. 14). Yet at no point does Vince seek to deny the fundamental role played by the War of Independence. Instead, her concern is to show how a widely shared but malleable set of codes surrounding this foundational event enable it to serve as both a ‘location for political contestation and a form of social glue’ (p. 256). Following Vince's helpful conceptualization of the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘counter’ history as a Venn diagram, ‘sharing at its centre a dominant history which is widely held to be true, although it might be put to different political ends’ (p. 111) enables us to better understand how the testimonies featured can simultaneously undermine and reinforce myths about the war.
Our Fighting Sisters is therefore characterized by a consistent refusal to draw tidy conclusions or to place people in neat boxes. Instead, in the best tradition of memory studies, it demonstrates the ways in which discourses about the past are continually accepted, rejected, contested, appropriated and manipulated from the bottom up. This requires a ‘tricky triangulation of sources’ (p. 95), but Vince shows herself to be more than capable in this regard. She is deeply sensitive to the multi-layered meanings of the language used by her interviewees and, perhaps even more so, to their silences. The breadth and depth of her contextual knowledge of Algerian history, society and culture enables her to unpack the complexities of seemingly simple phrases and ensures that the book will be accessible to a broad array of academic audiences.
Vince is also refreshingly honest about the practical, intellectual and political challenges inherent in this process. She furthermore eloquently conveys what is at stake for her interviewees in recounting their histories. In so doing she offers a timely reminder that memories are not simply abstract discourses, but rather stories that emanate from real people. They are, moreover, stories that relate to pasts that matter deeply to these women, pasts which entailed considerable personal risks and sacrifices, and which continue to shape their present-day lives in tangible ways, not least through ongoing struggles to obtain veterans pensions. The result is precisely the evidence-based and historicized study Vince promises in the introduction. There is, as she admits, a certain unevenness in places, the relative absence of the voices of rural women in Chapter five being one example. But the reasons for this are made clear and in fact underscore her wider point about the many political agendas and processes of exclusions at play behind the purportedly all-inclusive revolutionary slogan ‘One sole hero, the people’. Scholars from multiple disciplines will therefore find much of interest and value in this excellent study of memory and gender in Algeria.