Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory, and Gender in Algeria, 1854 2012 by Natalya Vince (review)
Natalya Vince's award winning study of Algerian women war veterans is an important reflection on gender and memory in the history of modern Algeria. Recognizing the centrality of the Algeria War of Independence (1954 62) on modern state building, national identity formation, and historical study, Vince seeks both to situate the experiences of the war years as continuities, not ruptures, and to go beyond violent conflict in the narration of postcolonial Algeria. Toward these ends Vince offers an analysis of "vernacular memory" to explicate the terrain between individual and collective memory (9) Vince juxtaposes nationalist celebrations and commemorations of women freedom fighters, who are neither completely forgotten nor fully remembered, within the "glorified national history" sanctifying the anticolonial struggle withwomen's variegated trajectories to counter the presumption that women's rights have gone precipitously downhill since 1962 (3) At the heart of Vince's study are interviews with twenty seven women active during theWar of Independence. These are supplemented by National Liberation Front (FLN) documents, memoirs, newspaper accounts, and occasional references to cinema and fiction in a careful consideration of their relation to the state and nationalist ideals. Vince balances the experiences of the largely Francophone, urban, professional women with a handful of Tamazight speaking rural women, allowing her to articulate how socioeconomics and education have helped shape these women's experiences and memories. The former includes European women who fought with the FLN and later took Algerian citizenship. Acknowledging the absence of a predominantly Arabophone majority, Vince urges readers to question the notion of one single representative image of an "authentic" Algerian identity. Despite the diversity of these women's postwar trajectories, and what appear on the surface to be conflicting interpretations, they use similar language and reference points
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies