Why, postcolonialism, do distant French colonial events (slavery in the West Indies in the 15th to 19th centuries) and more recent French colonial histories (French Algeria from 1830 to 1962; the French colonization of Africa from 1895 to 1958) continue to haunt the novels of Francophone authors? How are the novels of West Indies writer Maryse Condé (Célanire cou-coupé, La Belle Créole) and Algerian writer Assia Djebar (Les nuits de Strasbourg, La disparition de la langue française) shaped by unresolved historical tensions? By creating characters that struggle with issues of cultural memory, identity and territory, these writers revisit historical sorrows through the prism of memory. Death, assassination, torture, and enduring violence through generations underline the irresolution of colonial and imperial memory. By taking a critical look at marginalization and at those who have been marginalized, this study analyses frictions related to identity: ethnic and social solidarity; vicious circles that link victims and perpetrators; stigmatization of mixed couples; transgression of social codes, which underline their inanity; the LGBTI community and the propensity of its members to internalize prejudices despite their obvious bias; fears of racial indeterminacy. With these migrant characters, the edge and the center, the border and the cross borders, become places of exploration for multiculturalism. It is, therefore, a decolonization of imagination that is at play.
