Sewing Together Shared Icons: Leïla Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France

Abstract

In Mes Algéries en France, Leïla Sebbar uses the form of the iconotext for its hybridity, a mirror of her own «variegated» genealogy. Like a glove turned inside out, she uses this ‘bastard’ genre to underline the dual need to stitch up the wounds opened by history between the families on both sides of the Mediterranean, and to reconceptualise the telling of a particular life as linked or «sewn» into the fabric of all other lives. History and literary autobiography converge in this unique book to invent a new form of autobiography, which I call «alteregotistical », and perhaps peculiar to the figure of the female writer, but also I believe linked to a particular use of photography, whose potential for preserving the past concerns not only the person or the family. Here we see Leïla Sebbar using photography in order to contain a veritable «lieu de mémoire», in the sense that the historian Pierre Nora uses the term.