SOURCE: Donadey, Anne. “The ‘Algeria Syndrome’.” In Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds, pp. 19-42. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001.

In the following essay, Donadey theorizes that the Algerian War is a central theme in most of Sebbar's works, and that although many of the characters in her Sherazade trilogy are unfamiliar with the war, it affects their lives and existence in numerous ways.

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.

—Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones 179

Leïla Sebbar, born and raised in Algeria by an Algerian father and a French mother, remarked that the Algerian war “est chaque fois, malgré moi, dans les livres que j'écris [is in each book I write, in spite of myself]” (quoted in Salien 4). In her 1984 novel, Le Chinois vert d'Afrique, almost all the characters have been involved with the war to some...