Maisonneuve et Larose Editions present Algériennes surexposées, a book by Zalia Sékaï.
“Open your eyes,” goes a Kabyle expression, because “yes, vast is the Algerian prison,” and more particularly that of women.
“Erasure, confinement, repression, encirclement, so many negativities that have assailed since the beginning, for a dark destiny, this harsh and dense land where femininity itself seems only to exacerbate a diffuse cruelty. ‘Yes, vast is the Algerian prison!'” – Jacques Berque, letter to Assia Djebar, dated June 2, 1995 (five days before his death).
1960: Algerian War, regroupment camps, and population control. The French army forcefully unveiled Algerian women for identity photos. Secretly, Marc Garanger, an anti-militarist conscript, takes portraits in an unofficial setting. Behind these photos are women destroyed by violence and a war that exalts male supremacy. Behind the image, there are stories and History, off-screen: a colonial alienation so strong that it brings out ancestral alienation. Bodies of shame and war fodder, surviving in hypersexualized and hypergendered universes, annihilated women, caught between all the dominants, all the conservatisms. The words of authors such as M. Feraoun, J. Roy, T. Amrouche, G. Mattéi, J. Sénac, …, completely devastated by this conflict, reinforce these photographs, recounting moments of their experiences and contributing to the emancipation of women. The photographs encourage us to enter the interstices of history, of this profoundly destructive colonial tragedy, and of a spirit opposed to ethnic and sexual diversity.
Zalia Sékaï is a playwright. She has published Autopsie d’un exil algérien ou Lux beauté à la rose (éd. du Cygne) and created the play En Attendant l’Algérie.
Zalia Sékaï : Algériennes surexposées
éditions Maisonneuve et Larose
342 pages
40 photos approximately
https://www.hemisphereseditions.com/
