Bedira, Sherifa, Safia… are guilty of just one thing: having been born female in Algeria. Second-class citizens, minors for life, guilty by nature is their permanent condition. Leïla Aslaoui gives twelve of them a chance to speak out, through stories whose characters most certainly resemble real people who do or once did walk the earth. These women’s specific stories are different, but they share the same destiny as hostages – first of the law, their main enemy, then of tradition, mentalities and taboos.
Through these tales, the author lets us hear her compatriots’ cries of pain and rage. By restoring their confiscated words, she allows these women to say I when they usually disappear behind the authoritarian we of family and society.
While the destinies are extremely dramatic, the book is still impregnated with the certitude that one day, Algerian women’s struggle will achieve its goals, because they are, without a doubt, determined fighters who will never give up.
Leïla Aslaoui, whose husband was assassinated by the Islamists in 1994, lets us hear the cries of Algerian women, still held hostage to law, tradition and mentalities. She weaves a tale from the tragic destinies of twelve of their number. A dramatic shock of a book.