Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack: A “Redemptive Narrative”

Résumé

This article studies how Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack brings innovative narrative twists to the terrorist novel genre to challenge contemporary, western-based approaches to the issue of fundamentalism. It claims that the narrative’s humanist stance is the result of his long repressed feelings when he served in the Algerian army, during the period of the interior war of the 1990s. Amidst the tormented environment of that decade, silence was imposed on Khadra’s literary and humanist expression. But when he quitted the army, his repressed experience with political violence and terror found an outlet in fiction in the form of a redemptive narrative, which demarcates from some conventions of the ‘terrorist novel’, and provides new perspectives on the complex issue of fundamentalism.