Covert Conundrums: Chaos Unvoiced in Assia Djebar’s “Les Enfants du nouveau monde”

Its latent poetic bedrock and implicit celebration of triumph notwithstanding, Assia Djebar’s Les Enfants du nouveau monde appears to be in ludic embattlement with its very being. Signifiers are often separated from what they ostensibly signify, a subversive de-coupling of rhetoric and meaning that creates an ambivalent text, one decidedly at odds with the gauzy myths of triumph and re-birth suggested by the title. Shifting constantly between the horror of what was lost and the uncertainty of what lies ahead, the narrator struggles visibly in her attempt to communicate that which is not yet, and might never be. The structural disarray is too blatant to be accidental or unintentional, and leads the reader to infer that the cataclysmic event depicted (the French-Algerian war) is one that language can but jaggedly bestride