Great authors such as Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, and Mohamed Dib established the foundation of using fiction as a form of resistance and truth-telling. This made the concept of the Algerian novel serve a therapeutic function by reconstructing a distorted colonial memory and glorifying a revolutionary past.
However, we must not overlook the danger circling the crime scene. When a nation’s imagination is entirely devoted to reconstructing the past, it forgets how to construct its future. In light of this, there is an important question that we must ask ourselves. It is whether the next great Algerian novel should remain devoted to our past, or break free and become an act of speculative rebellion. The latter would entail looking towards the future we could build, instead of endlessly returning to a history we already survived.
Postcolonial Literature and the Burden of Resistance
Academic critics have noted that postcolonial literature often feels trapped in a resistance paradigm. This leaves us, Algerian writers, subject to an expectation of telling serious Realist novels that document our struggle. We are also expected to correct historical misconceptions and bear witness to a collective experience shaped by history.
While this is important, the burden becomes somewhat of a cage, as if our reality is too heavy to tamper with or escape. By limiting ourselves to such a narrative, we implicitly agree that our identity is defined solely by what was done to us. In doing so, we become prisoners of a period of time in our history.
However, our reality is entirely different, considering that our historical and identity roots have existed long before colonialism. By not committing to this reality, we are preventing the next generation, and the whole world, from the opportunity of discovering a much richer and deeper culture. A culture of ancient human presence, indigenous statehood, and intellectual and cultural exchange that shaped the Mediterranean and Africa alike.
Nevertheless, there is another way of handling that. Instead of only Writing Back to focus on our history, we can start writing forward, from it through speculative fiction.
Writing Forward: Speculative Fiction as a Revolutionary Tool
There is a misconception that genres, including science fiction, fantasy, and such, are considered apolitical distractions. In reality, they are the most powerful revolutionary tool a writer can hold. Speculative fiction is the only genre that breaks the chains of what is to show us what could be. Therefore, it provides a playground for the imagination where we can test social ideas, dissect our present struggles, and build a blueprint for a better world.
Why Algerian Culture Is Suitable for Speculative Fiction
In our case, Algerian Identity is probably the best-equipped to write world-class speculation, and it has nothing to do with France. It is because our revolutionary DNA sits on a cultural timeline that stretches back thousands of years. From the triumph of Numidian kingdoms and the hum of Roman ports, through the glow of Andalusian memory and the silence of desert trade routes, to the urban mythologies that coil from the east to the west. None of that began in 1830, and none of it has to end in 1962.
If speculative fiction is about asking “what if?” and building entire worlds from that question, then Algeria already has a warehouse of those things. Raw material, saints and marabouts, jinn stories, mountain legends, caravan routes, ruined fortresses, mystical orders, and the history of people who have said “no” to every empire that tried to control their destiny.
Reclaiming the Future Through Fiction
African and Afro-futurist writers are already proving that when you insert ancient cosmologies, along with an anti-colonial spirit, into the speculative genre, you do not end up imitating Western sci-fi anymore. Instead, you produce something astonishingly more true to your identity. You create a visionary sovereignty. Even more so, by reclaiming the future through our own lens, we stop being characters in someone else’s story and start becoming the architects of our own destiny.
Imagining the Next Algerian Novel
Algeria could push this even further. Let us imagine a novel that treats Amazigh myth as science, rewrites the War of Liberation as a time-war across centuries, or envisions a future where ancient caravan knowledge evolves into a high-tech navigation system. This would not be a derivative fantasy. It would tell stories from our deepest cultural memory that nobody else on Earth could write.
So, the next Algerian novel should not just retell the Battle of Algiers; it should channel that revolutionary spirit into imagining the battles of tomorrow. Our next novel should not be a monument to the martyrs, but a blueprint for their grandchildren. One that is weird, terrifying, magical, or impossible to categorize. The very things that make Algeria “historical” are precisely what could make the next wave of Algerian fiction feel like something the literary world has never seen before. In that strangeness, we can finally find a freedom that history alone could never give us. Our identity, our culture, and our language should belong on spaceships, not just in museums.