Colonial Trauma

Karima Lazali is a practising psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist

• Foreword – Mariana WikinskiIntroduction: The Trouble of Acknowledging Colonial TraumaThe History of French Colonization in Algeria: A Blank Space in Memory and PoliticsA Much-Needed Interdisciplinary Approach1. Psychoanalysis and Algerian ParadoxesDisarray of the Private and Public SpheresGod’s Reinforcement of Failing Institutions The Power of Religion and the Religion of Power The Literary Text and the Invisible Staging of PowerThe Power of the “Language, Religion and Politics”(LRP) Bloc as Revealed by Clinical PsychoanalysisThe Duplicity of Subjects Confronting Censorship from the LRPAbandoned Citizenship and Speech Acts2. Colonial RuptureThe Colony: The Rogue Child of the Enlightenment Colonialism’s Destruction of Social Cohesion A Colonial Republic Divided, or the “Duty to Civilize [the] Barbarians”1945: A Literature of Refusal is BornNedjma: An Esthetic of Colonial Destruction?Disrupting Genealogical Ties: The Effect of “Renaming” Algerians in the 1880sSubjective Catastrophes and the Disappearance of the Father as Symbolic ReferenceWriting against Anonymous FiliationJean El Mouhoub Amrouche: A Broken Voice3. Colonialism Consumed by War1945-1954: The Necessity of WarThe Impossibility of Forgetting and Madness, a “Remedy” for DisappearanceSilencing the Unforgettable Mutilation of Bodies Toulouse, 2012: The Return of MurderConstructing the “Nation”The Writer’s Pressing Need: Transform Disappearance into Absence4. Colonialism’s Devastating Effects on Post-Independence AlgeriaThe Mutilated Body of the Colonized and the Hunger for ReparationColonial Hogra and a Frantic Quest for LegitimacyThe “Orphaning” Effect of Colonialism and its Impact Further Distortion of Patronyms Divested of a Name: A Form of Colonial MurderManufacturing Erasure and Denial under ColonialismFrom Colonial Trauma to Social Trauma5. Fratricide: The Dark Side of the Political OrderThe Emergence of Algerian Nationalist Movements in the 1930sThe War of Liberation and an Impossible FraternityFrom Parricide to FratricideWhen the Murders between Brothers is Dismissed…Calling on the FatherA Gap in Memory Sets Off an Endless Deadly Battle6. The Internal War of the 90sReconsidering the LRP Bloc (language, religion and politics)The Tyranny and Pleasure of PowerThe Shift of 1988 and the Experience of Political PluralityAn Internal War of Unprecedented Violence The Curse of FratricideThe War Comes Home A Strange Reversal in NamingDo Freedom and Terror Go Hand in Hand?7. State of Terror and State TerrorA Clinical Understanding of TerrorThe Terrified Subject’s Self-EliminationPsychological Terror is always Political Reconciliation: State Terror?When the State Tries to Make its Practice of Disappearance Disappear8. Legitimacy, Fratricide and PowerJugurtha: A Fratricidal HeroUnpunished Crimes within the RepublicThe Legitimacy the French Conquest Claimed for ItselfThe Passion-filled Scene of ColonialityThe Specter of Discord: el Fitna9. Getting Out of the Colonial PactAfter Liberation, the Indefatigable Reenactment of Coloniality within Subjectivities and the Political OrderTrauma as Shelter and AlibiThe Brutalization of the Living: the Disappearance of ChildrenThe “Bone Seekers”: from the Child to the FathersConclusion: Ending the Colonial Curse: Lessons from FanonThe “Colonial Pact”: Erasure of Memory, Disappearance of Bodies, Dispossession of ExistenceThe Mystical Quality of the Colonized For a Future LiberationNotesIndex

"This book adds an important layer to the psychoanalytic understanding of colonial trauma and its afterlife. Beginning with her bilingual clinical practice in France and Algeria, Lazali addresses how patients differ in their response to the technologies of a 'whiting out' of an erased past. She takes up the mantle of Fanon to study intergenerational trauma and how it manifests itself in her patients, in Francophone literary texts, in the bellicose and violent struggles around religion, language, and politics, in concepts of the social, and in the relationship between individuated subjects and the group."—Ranjana Khanna, Professor of Literature at Duke University"With Colonial Trauma, there is no going back to how we thought about colonialism before, just as it is now unclear how we go forward from here—theoretically, clinically, or politically."—European Journal of Psychoanalysis