La grotte eclatée

by Yamina Mechakra

Dans les charniers où se décompose démesurément l´homme, elle réimprime d nos sens oblitérés cet esprit vif qui corrige les erreurs, car elle croit d la vie, n´étant pas tout d fait pessimiste.MOHAMED KERREDINE,«Al-Maghreb-Culture», 4-S février 1981, n° 1075La parole de Yamina MECHAKRA ne véhicule aucune des revendications féministes convenues : elle est cette revendication. Son héroïne est une femme d part entière parmi les hommes qu´elle force au respect, parce qu´elle lutte et souffre comme eux, sauvagement. Comme jadis, peut-être, la Kahéna, femme et chef de tribu en guerre. Comme la femme sauvage chez Kateb Yacine, mais une pureté d´adolescence préservée.JACQUELINE ARNAUD,Docteurès lettres, université Paris - Nord

Paperback

Published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Helynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

The multi-talented Yamina Mechakra (b. 1949), psychiatrist, novelist, and polemic writer, reveals in this short francophone novel the passion of the Algerian people through emotional accounts of families separated through the twin tragedies of war and poverty. Her fierce patriotism and the theme of love of one’s origins and the healing energy of maternal love is consistent in the novel. La Grotte éclatée (published first 1979, and again in 1986) emphasizes the duality of nurturing mothers as described literally in the devotion of a young woman, who, ironically is non-Muslim and non stereotypical in every way, to her small son, and figuratively in the culture of Mother Algeria to its native people, particularly in times of colonization and war.
La Grotte éclatée is a stream-of-consciousness narrative that chronicles the ongoing violence in a small portion of war-torn Algeria, 1955-62, by a young woman who attempts to establish a semblance of personal life—love, motherhood, faith in a better future in a liberated country—even while tending endlessly to the wounded and dying in a bleak desert cave near Aurès, a district of Algeria that existed in 1962-72 during and after the country’s war of independence. “Des blessés, une grotte, un feu, mort là-bas sur une frontière, à la limite des Aurès, sous les yeux d’un arbre nu qui crachait sa colère à la face du ciel et des étoiles” (101). While keeping the war in the foreground, Mechakra pays tribute to Algeria’s various traditions, honors motherly devotion, calls attention to the plight of its women over the decades. Without discussing contemporary Algeria as it has evolved since the 1961 independence or since her narrator’s backward look from 1973, Mechakra has suggested some ambiguous responses about whether the role of women has changed or will change, and how important this change is to the new sense of nationalism that her narrator was seeking since the beginning of the war. This is a not a pretty story. Every bad thing one can imagine in wartime seems to happen to the heroine. But Méchakra’s passion and patriotism are unmistakable.

[Sarena · Rating 5 out of 5]

La grotte éclatée is a beautifully written, tragic, moving book that will emotionally destroy you. We don't talk about how many times this book made me cry. Narrated by an Algerian nurse who sees and experiences pain, horror, loss, and bloodshed during her time helping the Algerian resistance against the French colonial forces, this is an important story that brings to light women's roles in the Algerian War and fills in the silences of a largely male and colonial history of that time period.