... provocatively announces the disappearance of the French language. Its content, which details the unsolved disappearance of its protagonist, offers readers a deceptively simple parallel between two disappearances. Berkane, the hero of the story and one of its narrators, disappears from a roadside in Kabylia...

... (2003), she ponders the story of Berkane, an emigre who returns to Algeria in the midst of the violence of the 1990s. After rediscovering the Casbah of his childhood, Berkane goes missing-a fate suffered by many Algerians during this dark period. This narrative seems, at face value, to respond...

... to school by the hand. The disappearing of the French language is not the "return" of the veil that, thanks in part to her father, she never wore, but the apparition of a veil-a veil that Djebar wears in this novel that she haunts, both as Berkane and the anonymous narrator. In this sense, La Disparition...

... of Berkane, an Algerian Francophone writer who returns to his homeland; his French lover, Marise; and his Moroccan lover, Nadja. Whereas Odysseus takes away the Sirens' song, Djebar's narrative parcels down the image of a unified French language, or a Francophone tradition mediated by men. Berkane disappears...

... By white death, the author means slow death that allows for farewells. By contrast, death "without end" violates "our sense of time" (84), as in the case of Berkane in The Disappearance of the French Language. In the first short story of The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry, the heroine creates a parallel...