Wahiba Khiari’s Our Silences: Writing Trauma au féminin

Abstract
I elucidate violence and trauma in Wahiba Khiari’s debut novel Our Silences (2009). Khiari’s autofiction is based on her own traumatic life experience and alternates two women’s stories: the account of a woman who moved to Tunisia to escape from the Algerian civil war and the account of a girl who was kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists and forced into temporary “marriages of pleasure.”  The textualization of violence is a necessary exercise of empowerment as rape victims struggle to articulate acts of unspeakable violence.
Presenter Biography
Christa Catherine Jones is Professor of French at Utah State University and specialises in colonial and postcolonial North African Francophone literature, film, and folklore. She is coeditor of Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache (special issue of CELFAAN Review, 2017), New Approaches of Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales (University Press of Colorado, 2016), Femmes du Maghreb (special issue of Dalhousie French Studies, 2014), and author of Cave Culture in Maghrebi Literature (Lexington Books, 2012). Her current book project, (under contract with the University Press of Mississippi), focuses on the North African Trickster.