ALTRALANG Journal
Volume 8, Numéro 1, Pages 343-352
2026-06-05
Saying The Unspeakable Through Silence: Poetics Of The Unsaid And Traumatic Memory In Lilia Hassaine's Bitter Sun
Authors : Belouadi Fatima Zohra . Benabdallah Imene .
Abstract
ABSTRACT: This article offers a critical reading of Lilia Hassaine's novel Bitter Sun (2010) through the prism of silence as a literary and memorial device. Set in the context of Algeria's Black Decade and postcolonial exile, the story follows Samia, a young woman forced to flee Algeria after the assassination of her journalist brother. Rather than providing an explicit narrative of the violence she suffered, Hassaine constructs an oblique style of writing, made up of ellipses, sensory fragments, and charged silences. By mobilizing theories of trauma (Cathy Caruth), transgenerational memory and the poetics of Relation (Édouard Glissant), we analyze how silence functions both as a symptom of speech hindered by history and as an aesthetic and ethical strategy capable of making the unspeakable resonate without betraying it. Far from being a linguistic defect, the tacit becomes in Hassaine a space of resistance, where traumatic memory finds a literary form without giving in to spectacularization or narrative recuperation.
Keywords
Silence ; Trauma ; Dark Decade ; French-Speaking Maghreb Literature ; Postcolonialism ; The Unsaid
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