Abstract
This paper argues that Ahlām Mustaghānamī’s novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh) enacts a break with Algeria’s Francophone literary past, multiply staging its affiliation with the Arabic language. e novel positions itself as part of an Algerian linguistic drama that, once translated into French as Mémoires de la chair , is problematically obscured. e press reviews of the novel’s French translation serve to reveal, furthermore, that a French readership’s familiarity with the significant corpus of Francophone Algerian literature mutes the legibility of the Alge-rian linguistic drama that Mustaghānamī’s novel articulates in the Arabic original.