À contre-silence

The following article examines the role of sound and silence in the work of the Franco-Algerian author Maïssa Bey, Puisque mon coeur est mort (2010). The text takes the form of an epistolary novel written by a mother, Aïda, to her murdered son, Nadir. Despite the acutely personal histoire which acts as a catalyst for the act of writing, Bey’s protagonist endeavours to speak out for the maternally dispossessed in Algeria—and elsewhere—in order to give voice to a more public Histoire: the textual emphasis on the importance of audibly speaking to her son through her written letters encompasses a political objective of speaking out for all those who have lost a child in Algeria’s bloody décennie noire, leaving a compte rendu of a mother’s profound grief. That account is most vividly conveyed through the many sounds and noises which made up Aïda’s daily life with Nadir and to which she returns repeatedly throughout the work as a source of comfort and strength. She refuses to succumb to both sonic and writerly silence, but seeks to disturb the enforced silence imposed by the Algerian authorities following the execution of Nadir by ‘loudly’ bearing witness to private and political truths. This article argues that the much-quoted adage ‘Speech is silver, but silence is golden’ is both meaningless and politically noxious for those women for whom freedom of expression is denied.