She is not only tormented by her battle scars, but by her relegation to the annals of the unknown and to the caste that includes prostitutes and lepers, not national heroes. She is haunted by the women that the French created: women with bare faces, looking in on the remnants of war in starched white uniforms and Parisian heels. Leila’s insanity is manifested in her confusion: she is a schizophrenic citizen of Algeria. The drugs that she imbibes establish a set of dichotomies that become evident in her madness: veiled/unveiled; traditional/modern; colonial/postcolonial; halaal/haram. In Leila, the schizophrenia of Algerian society is manifested. Leila, in her insanity and her withdrawal from the drugs realizes that she has herself been relegated back to the annals of pre-colonial history and shuffled aside so that the new Algeria can re-classify and re-construct its gendered social strata.
Leila herself is the voice of the re-writing of Algerian history. Her voice is threaded throughout the first segments of the novel as being angry, confused, and accusatory of the women who were her warrior sisters. She embarks on a rant about “the fire carriers” (44), the women who carried grenades through the streets during the war, and how in the postwar period they have retuned to their harems, the barbed wire of their windows now replaced with the lattice that had existed there before
Where are you, you fire carriers, you my sisters, who
should have liberated the city… Barbed wire no longer
obstructs the alleys, now it decorates windows, balconies,
anything at all that opens onto an outside space. (45)
Leila goes on in her lamenting about the current status of women in the post-independence period; she invokes Woman’s Day as a day in which the women of the war can return to their former glory.
Throughout Leila’s own discourse, she makes repeated reference to fire in the form of grenades, bombs, burns, and illuminations. Is this a nod to the jinn: the mischievous fire spirits that haunt Islamic theology and feed on feces? Surely Leila cannot be referring to herself in such a vulgar manner as through the jinn, but she is. The jinn are composed of fire, anonymous and mischievous creatures that may or may not engage in evil-doing. Often they are attributed with the act of possession: the women fighting in Algeria’s war were jinn, they are jinn-possessed in the contemporary state of the historical mind, and that is perhaps why they are written out of the history of liberation.
Leila continues her defiant soliloquy, exchanging Arabic for French, crying out
…then like me behind the delirium of fever (for you know
Sarah, I do have a fever, I shall always have a fever), were
they really still alive? The bombs are still exploding… but
over twenty years: close to our eyes, for we no longer see
the outside, we only see the obscene looks, the bombs explode
against our bellies and I am—she screamed—I am every
woman’s sterile belly in one! (45)
She speaks from the perspective of a woman twenty years past the date of independence, presumable sometime in 1982. The 1980s marked an increased period of social unrest in Algeria’s history with objections to the Front de liberation nationale (FLN) and their monopoly on power and nationalism. There was a growing frustration in the direction that Algeria was taking and a burgeoning opposition stemming from the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Leila is thus referring to the position that she was placed in during decades of war: she is relegated backwards to her traditional gender role in society. Algerians have forgotten the role that women like Leila acted in the liberation of their nation: instead they see them simply as mad women who are to be pitied or prostituted. The grief of a barren woman: she has suffered and endured tremendous emotional and physical pain only to be granted the status of a mad woman. Leila continues in her ramblings, chastising her “brothers” and questioning their understanding or recognition of women’s sacrifice during the war
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