“Nothing Is Truly Hidden”: Visibility, Aesthetics and Yasmina Khadra’s Romans Noir

Dr. Sharae Deckard

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Abstract:

Key words: Yasmina Khadra, Algeria, crime fiction, detective fiction, neoliberalism,
petro-state

On the eve of his sixtieth birthday and the day of his death, Commissaire Brahim
Llob, the protagonist of Autumn of Phantoms, ruefully muses, “I still don’t
understand. I just feel my way, in broad daylight. The laurels I have earned for my
enlightenment are just blinkers. My prophetic gaze can’t find its bearings” (Khadra
“Autumn” 7). The passage’s play between sight and the unseen, between
apprehension and comprehension, visibility and obstruction, embodies a central
impulse of Yasmina Khadra’s romans noirs: to detect that which is obscured, to
prophesy a social future in the midst of crisis. Metaphors of sight, the specular and the
spectacular, abound throughout each of Khadra’s polars, appearing as obsessively as
tropes of haunting and spectrality. Here, Llob’s seeming paralysis, blinkered, lacking
understanding, unable to see a way forward, signifies the crisis not only of the
protagonist, but of the Algerian nation, embroiled in civil war and economic
kleptocracy with no apparent path forward. Fredric Jameson has famously observed
that the role of detective fiction is social detection, offering Raymond Chandler’s
fiction as the quintessential example of the ideological function of form in the noir
genre. For Jameson, in the ‘divided scenic content’ of Chandler’s LA novels, the
detective’s horizontal navigation of the compartmentalized, differently-classed
neighborhoods of Los Angeles makes visible the conflictual, lived contradictions of
space where the reproduction of the social relations takes place (Jameson 66).
Similarly, Yasmina Khadra’s quartet of Inspector Llob mysteries self-consciously uses
the aesthetics of the detective thriller to render visible three aspects of the enduring
invisible within Algerian society: the uneven socio-economic relations of the petro-
state intensified by neoliberalization which are manifested in the fragmented spatial
construction of urban Algiers and its hinterlands; the entanglement of the political
state with the occult economy of the black market; and the “mis-remembered”
massacres and crimes of Algeria’s independence struggle and civil war which
ineluctably return to haunt the present. In this essay, I will examine the implications
of the policier genre for the exposure of occluded social conditions as expressed in
Khadra’s romans noir and explore the aesthetic manifestations of the ideological
contradictions arising from Khadra’s desire to unmask certain aspects of Algerian
society and the institutions of the state, while concealing others, namely the central
political role of the military.

I Khadra and the Emergence of the Algerian Polar

 Yasmina Khadra (“Jasmine Green”) is the female pseudonym of Algerian writer

Mohammed Moulessehoul, who adopted his wife’s name to disguise his identity when
he started writing detective fiction in the 1990s, while still a high-ranking officer in
the Algerian military. His first two detective novels, Le Dingue au bistouri (1990) and
La Foire des enfoirés (1993) were published anonymously in Algeria and purported to
be written by the fictional Commissaire Llob. His subsequent trilogy of Inspector
Llob novels, Morituri (1997; Morituri 2003), Double blanc (1997; Double Blank
2004), L’Automne des chimères (1998; Autumn of the Phantoms 2005), were
published by Gallimard and Editions Julliard in France under the newly chosen
pseudonymn of Khadra. Increasingly more critical of the Algerian regime and thus
unable to be published in Algeria, the novels were welcomed by the prestigious
French publishers of roman noirs, hailed as providing ‘native informant’ perspectives
on the Algerian situation. The trilogy was subsequently translated in multiple
languages, and published in English by Toby Crime. In the first three novels, events
follow a linear chronology throughout the 1990s, culminating with Llob’s
assassination at the conclusion of Autumn. In 2000, enduring an escalation of death
threats, Khadra and his family went into exile in France, supported by the
International Parliament of Writers (IPW). In 2004, he published the fourth novel in
the quartet, La Part du Mort (2009, Dead Man’s Share), a prequel set in the 1980s,
before the action of Morituri. Twice the length of the previous novels, Dead Man is
also distinctive in being more developed in its narrative and content, more fluent in its
style, and more explicitly concerned with representation of historical events.

Ironically, given the strong current of sexism and homophobia accompanying the
hard-boiled clichés of his noir fiction, Khadra was originally feted in France as an
Arab woman writer with special feminist insight into the masculinist, fundamentalist
violence characterizing Algeria’s civil war, celebrated for robustly colonizing a genre
seen previously as the domain of men, and even nominated for the Prix Femina. He
did not admit that he was a man until 1999, nor disclose his true name until 2001,
(both in interviews in Le Monde). With this authorial unmasking, he experienced a
backlash from the French media and literary establishment, which were horrified to
discover that a “soldier-writer”—who had not only had participated in the violence of
the civil war but outspokenly proclaimed his support for the Algerian military and
professed to have seen no evidence of military implication in massacres or
“disappearances” of civilians—was behind the novels which they had previously
consecrated as the liberal expressions of ethnic and gender difference. For these
reasons alone, Khadra’s case is a salutary lesson not only in the perils of modes of
literary criticism which distort texts to “fit” pre-existing theoretical models, but also
in the larger operations of the French literary field, particularly the dynamics of what
Pascale Casanova calls “consecration”: in this case, the consecration of fictions
which simultaneously seemed to enshrine the exotic difference of francophone North
Africa and to assimilate comfortably to a French anti-Islamist perspective. Not long
after the revelation of his true identity and his public declarations in support of the
Algerian military, Khadra was stripped of his funding by the IPW and subjected to a
series of delegitimations, entering into a more ambivalent relationship with the French
media and publishing industry, which he described as “assez compliquée... étant mal

 vu pars contains qui ont réussi a imposer leur vues” (“rather complicated…frowned
on by those who have managed to impose their own views” Polar Roman par.)

However, casting his eye to the world literary field, particularly the post-9/11 market
in literary fiction mapping the geopolitics of “terror,” Khadra successfully
repositioned himself as a “serious”—as opposed to “genre”—writer of “literary”
bestsellers such as Les Hirondelles de Kaboul (2002; The Swallows of Kabul 2004),
L’Attentat (2005; The Attack 2006), and Les Sirenes de Baghdad (2006; The Sirens of
Baghdad 2008), whose investigation of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism in
Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq are couched in two-dimensional stereotypes and
politics uneasily reminiscent of American neo-conservativism. Indeed, their popular
reception in the U.S. coincided with the same political atmosphere in which The
Kiterunner and Reading Lolita in Tehran were eagerly consumed as “authentic”
accounts of the repression of women and ethnic minorities and of the “terrorist
mindset” which U.S.-imported “democracy” promised to reverse. While the dynamics
of Khadra’s subsequent re-consecration, both within France and in the world literary
field, as an allegedly universal writer with privileged insights into the “failure” of
democracy in the Arab world certainly bear further analysis, especially in light of the
subsequent Arab spring uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East, this essay
will focus on the ideological contradictions of his earlier genre fiction, which already
display the hallmarks of anti-Islamism, beginning with a brief discussion of the role
of detective fiction and thrillers in the Algerian literary field.

The crime novel has not been a dominant genre within Algerian literature: Beate
Burtscher-Bechter estimates that only twenty-three were published in Algeria between
1970 and 1998 (183). Khadra’s own quartet was published in France, both because its
content was allegedly too sensitive and critical of the Algerian regime for local
publication, and because of Khadra’s aim for recognition in the French literary scene,
though the local constraints to dissemination were also a pressure. Burtscher-Bechter
heralds Khadra’s roman noirs as the first high point of the genre in the Algerian
tradition, moving from the unquestioned allegiance to nationalist ideology
demonstrated in the six early spy novels of Youcef Khader published in the 1970s and
the defense of the Algerian nation and economy embodied by the 1980s detective
novels of Larbi Abhari and Zehira Houfani Berfa, to a more self-reflexive critique of
the government and social conditions during the civil war of the 1990s fiction (183,
191). Khadra’s novels are not only more ideologically critical and self-conscious than
their predecessors, they are richer in their representation of local subjectivity,
affirming an algerianité more complicated than “the idealized national identity of the
Seventies” (Burtscher-Bechter 184).

If Khader’s earlier spy novels emerged in accordance with familiar conditions

complementary to the rise of the crime novel—the dizzying rapid urbanization of the
post-independence period caused by mass migration of peasant farmers to Algerian
cities, the intoxications of oil wealth in the emergent petro-state— they were also
peculiar in setting their plots outside of towns and even the boundaries of the nation
itself (Burtscher-Betcher 185). Algeria achieved independence in 1962 after a

 protracted, particularly bloody war of liberation against France, and the Front de
Libération Nationale (FLN), under the charismatic leadership of president Ahmed Ben
Bella, swept to victory, inaugurating a Soviet-style socialist government and a
planned economy which drew on the immense proceeds of the hydrocarbon sector to
provide citizens with essential services, jobs, housing and social mobility (Cavatorta
and Durac 34). In this new “democracy of bread,” an unwritten social contract
presumed economic security guaranteed by the ruling elites in exchange for the
acquiescence of the masses (Cavatorta and Durac 34). Given that official state
doctrine proclaimed the impossibility of crime, the first manifestation of the thriller
genre was ideologically prohibited from taking the form of the crime novel set in a
city of vice. Likewise, Agent SM 15, the heroic protagonist of Khader’s thrillers, was
imagined in contradistinction to European models such as James Bond—possessed of
similar intelligence and physical prowess, but immaculately ethical in his personal
life, eschewing alcohol, cigarettes, and sex, defending his country against not only the
political machinations but the moral corruptions of his counterparts, whose pursuit of
sex he saw as animalistic (Burtscher-Betcher 190). This set a pattern for Algerian
genre fiction of the infallible hero, selflessly committed to defense of his country and
indefatigable champion of nationalist ideology, one that Khadra would complicate
only slightly in the figure of Brahim Llob.

Not until the 1980s, in the depths of recession produced by the fall of oil prices and
the world financial crisis in the previous decade, and with the 1985 turn from socialist
to neoliberal economic policies, would the “idealized secret agent” give way to more
earthy police officers and detectives as protagonists, and industrial and white collar
crime emerge as viable thematics. Even in this context, crime was still portrayed as
“exceptional” and the detectives as integral to the protection of the Algerian market
“from external influences and subversive elements within Algerian Society”
(Burtscher-Bechter 190). The detective fiction thus emerged in tandem with the
neoliberal market and the “opening” of the country to multinational capital. With the
1990s, despite steady oil revenues, the effects of the neoliberal privatization of
national institutions and the IMF-led structural adjustments of the economy became
painfully evident in the ever-increasing unemployment of the younger populations;
the severely stratified distribution of wealth; the crumbling of state infrastructure and
welfare provisions and intensification of the dearth of habitable accommodation for
the ever-expanding urban populations; and the explosion of a rampant black market
and financial mafia, the “occult” shadow of the official economy. In Algeria, as in
other postcolonial and postcommunist worlds, economic liberalization and
minimalist, procedural varieties of democratization (the illusion of multi-partyism, the
myth of free elections, actually rigged) coincided with the emergence of a criminal
phantom-state which amassed value by “exploiting the new aporias of jurisdiction that
opened up under neoliberal conditions” (Comaroff and Comaroff 5). At the same
time, civil society was wracked by persistent assassination attempts, terrorist
bombings and attacks, massacres, disappearances and abductions and the constant
retaliatory feuds between fundamentalists and the military that characterized the
“dirty” civil war. This conjunction of political turmoil, violence and a burgeoning
criminal economy provided ample raw material for the emergence of police detective

 fiction such as Khadra’s, which abandoned idealist allegiance to the political

paradigm of the Algerian government for a critical view of socio-economic and
political conditions, in which far from progressing since independence, the nation
seemed to be convulsively disintegrating.

In an interview with Polar Noir, Khadra describes detective fiction as an uncommon

genre in Algeria, not only because of its scarcity in the larger tradition of Arab
literature, but because it is looked down on as a popular genre associated with
dilettantism, which “serious” writers must avoid in order to preserve their reputations:
“Cela ne fait pas partie de la tradition arabe de l’écriture. Et aussi parce que le roman
noir policier provoque toujours des préjuges assez réducteurs qui faisaient, par
exemple, que les gens qui voulaient rester sérieux devaient s’en préserver, l’éviter”
(Polar Noir par. ?). However, as Khadra attests in another interview with Richard
Marcus, his initial interest in the roman policier was precisely because of its frivolous
potential to counterpose the suffocating idealism of nationalist literature with the
parodic humor of genre fiction and thus reignite the Algerian reader’s capacity for
pleasure:
I created Superintendent Llob as a diversion for the Algerian reader. […] In
Algeria, we did not have a large selection in our bookshops there, and the
publications revolved around the political demagogy, nationalist chauvinism
and the romantic mediocrity praising the Algerian Revolution in Stalinist
speeches. I dreamed of writing station books, books funny and without claim
that you could read while waiting for the train or the bus, or while gilding
yourself with the sun at the seaside. I dreamed to reconcile the Algerian reader
with his literature. (Blogcritics par )
The entertainment identified with detective fiction is here crucial to Khadra’s desire to
create an Algerian literature that revolves around popular mass appeal rather than
ideological commitment, while enabling the soldier-cum-dilettante author to break
into a commercially lucrative market.

For Khadra, the generic possibilities of detective fiction enable evasion of not only
moribund national ideology, but of the limitations of the Algerian literary field.
Denying the influence of French detective fiction on his work, Khadra instead cites
the importance of African-American literature by writers such as Chester Himes:
I did not read Simenon, at the time. Our bookshops were disaster victims and
our old books managed to do little more then make us dream. We lived in a
country with a horror for writers and artists. However, I really liked the
American black literature: Chester Himes, Richard Wright, and James
Baldwin. (Blogcritics par )
Pim Higginson argues that Chester Himes is an attractive model to francophone
writers because of the paradoxical aesthetic of his crime fiction, which rejected the
“protest” and “social realism” of his earlier writing (and the engagé literature of
writers such as Wright and Baldwin) for the popular genre of noir, suffused with an
“unseemly frivolity” in its deployment of black vernacular and its heady descriptions
of violence, sex and automobiles (6). Himes’s humor is dark, as befits noir, describing
the human misery of Harlem’s “fetid tenements, city of black people who are

 convulsed in desperate living” by comparing them to “the voracious churning of

millions of hungry cannibal fish” (Himes 33). For Higginson, the sardonic
imagination of this passage, with its violent metaphor of cannibalism and its
concluding punch-line— “Stick in a hand and draw back a nub. That is Harlem”
(Himes 33)—is characteristic of Himes’s transformation of sociological observation
into humor: “It is precisely in this metamorphosis of tragic existence into humor, the
passage from gravitas into frivolity, that Himes most radically made his literary mark”
(Higginson 7).

A similar comic metamorphosis transpires in Khadra’s repeated descriptions of peri-

urban slums and rural hinterlands, where lyrical paeans to immiseration are often
followed by blunt, scatalogical punch-lines, as in Brahim’s summation of a
“moldering douar” emptied of villagers due to “disappearances” in the civil war:
“The place looks like the asshole of the world” (Dead 107). Yet despite their humour
and excess, Khadra’s novels remain relentlessly ideological, almost rabid in their
persistent denunciation of Islamic fundamentalism and profession of democratic
hopes for Algeria’s future, and permeated by explicit critique of market capitalism and
corruption in the petro-state. If the first two novels of the early 1990s lean more
towards a mixture of sarcasm with lyrical poetical descriptions of everyday life in the
capital, in each successive book of the following quartet, the comedy grows
progressively blacker and vitriolic, culminating in the weary cynicism of Autumn and
the absurdist horror of Dead Man. In the next section, I will explore the implications
of Khadra’s aesthetic, in which the surreal metaphors and black humour of crime
fiction become a vehicle for describing a social reality whose absurdity and irrealism
seems to resist conventions of literary realism: what Khadra has described in a World
Bank-sponsored interview as the “surreal cacophony” of North African modernity
(Youthink screen 2).

II Occluded Spaces: Visualizing The Market and the Petro-State

As earlier discussed, Khadra’s post-1990s literary career does not follow Himes’s
trajectory from a social realist literature of “hurt” to a genre fiction of “absurdity,”
(Higginson 21) but rather abandons genre fiction for “literary” fiction mapping the
geopolitics of terror, albeit in the crudest form, thus exchanging the black frivolity of
noir for the earnest ideology of anti-Islamist fiction. Nonetheless, Khadra’s Llob
quartet shares at least a partial sensibility with Himes’s Harlem Detective novels,
seething with outlandish violence, grotesque villains, conspicuous consumption,
moral turpitude and sexual baiting (although the latter are always condemned by the
incorruptible Inspector), permeated throughout with a sense of the monstrosity of
Algerian reality. Khadra’s prose is searing, excessive, couched in a vernacular which
is at once vulgar and soaring in its flights of fancy, teeming with references to obesity,
ghoulishness, excrement, and sodomy. Dialogue is full of the hallmarks of the hard-
boiled genre, a pastiche of argots, slangs and dialects: Arabic, Berber, and American
and French working-class diction as mediated through the translation of Himes’s
fiction.

 The quartet’s protagonist, Brahim Llob, is both a police inspector and an author. As a
former maquisard (anti-colonial resistance fighter) and supporter of the FLN, his
bilious disgust at the neo-colonial corruption of the independent nation drives him to
author pseudonymous crime novels whose plots offer scathing critiques of the ruling
order, ‘le Pouvoir’ and whose titles meta-textually reference Khadra’s own first two
crime novels. Llob’s sociological intent results in his censure and institutional
persecution when he is unmasked in the local press. Writing from within the belly of a
corrupt institution, Llob’s authorial pursuits serve as a flattering mirror to Khadra’s
own authorial persona, casting himself as an ordinary citizen appalled by the betrayal
of nationalism and disillusioned with revolutionary ideology, yet committed to the
protection of the nation. His allegorical function as the Last, Just Man, defender of
whatever remains of the national virtue is grandiosely captured in his supervisor’s
eulogy on the eve of his retirement:
While Algeria was desperately trying to find herself, among all the twists and
turns and all the searchlights, while everyone else was fighting for a place in
the sun, Brahim walked a straight line. Mouth-watering temptations, profit, the
soft option—they never attracted him. (“Autumn” 127)
Llob is a violent, yet incorruptible man, investigating crimes with the tenacity of his
fists, if rather less of his grey cells, and steadfastly refusing bribes, sexual temptation,
and ignoring threats on his life. In the implausible tenacity of his conscience, he is
reminiscent of the improbably idealized super agents of earlier Algerian thrillers, yet
distinguished by the cynicism of his world-view, abundantly expressed in both the
profanity of his speech and the violence of his beatings.

Llob is a virtuosic wielder of expletives which are often tautological or contradictory

in their force, as when he rages at the director of the police force for trying to force
him to strike a deal: ‘Fuck you and your ancestors, Monsieur product of nepotism…
The vertigo of hierarchy has gone to your head…You are nothing, just a windy myth a
preserved fruit of mediocrity, an abundant little shit, and ingrate, and a fat
hypocrite’ (Morituri 38). The vituperative contradictions of his insults address the
inauthenticity that seems to permeate every level of the “façade democracy” of the
state (Cavatorta and Durac 38). This is a society in which corruption and kleptocracy
are intimately familiar, as Llob recounts in Morituri: “Stories of the embezzlement of
public funds are common currency with us. From the famous soudouq al-tadamoun
(‘solidarity fund’) created the day after Independence, to the remarkable hospital
benefit telethon, via the scandalous affair of the twenty-six billion, it has become a
regular news item by dint of its extreme banality” (65). Llob is unremittingly
truculent precisely because he is perpetually confronted with the hypocrisy of on one
hand former comrades of the FLN who continue to preach the good of the Nation
while obeying the laws of the free market, and on the other the false piety of the
fundamentalists. The complete subordination of social relations to the logic of the
market and the hollowing out of previous value systems in the transition from
socialism to neoliberalism is rued throughout the quartet, from Morituri, where the
monstrous Ghoul Malek admonishes Llob that “to progress from a caricature of a
socialist system to the opening up of the market, we must pay the customs duty”

 (Morituri 133) to Autumn, where the fallen revolutionary Da Achour laments, “Men
don’t have consciences any more, just obsessions: cash-dough-loot; cash-dough-loot;
cash-dough-loot…. They’re certain that their fundamental values depend only on the
barometer of the stock market.” (22). Like Chandler’s Marlowe, Llob is a crusader
rather than a technical genius, hard-boiled yet idealistic, stewing in his prejudices and
his bile, the lone man of virtue struggling to preserve an embattled faith in Allah and
Algeria rather than in “investments”, even as he submits prostitutes, gangsters,
mullahs and terrorists to torture and severe beatings in pursuit of the names of the
murderers he is duty-bound to chase.

An involuntary explorer across the economic divide, Llob is drawn reluctantly into
sites of utter deprivation and degradation on one hand, and of excess and decadence
on the other, spitting out to one emir’s mistress, ‘I never just happen to pass through
the wealthier areas. It has to be a real necessity for me to venture there. I hate rich
people’ (Dead Man 279). His persistent honesty serves ‘as an organ of perception, a
membrane which, irritated, serves to indicate in its sensitivity the nature of the world
around it’ (Jameson 72). The geographies he traverses are indelibly marked by
combined and uneven development, as his following description, which juxtaposes
the gated community of Deheb with the peri-urban slums:
The Deheb neighborhood hasn’t got a clear conscience. It lies hidden in a fold
of the mountain, behind the hills, and makes out it isn’t there. It’s a tranquil
bay consisting of some thirty villas bisected by a wise, straight road with
young palm trees and cast-iron lamppost on each side. It is one of those
parcels of land which are passed surreptitiously among the corrupt police in
the administration, directly and without fanfare so as not to arouse any
unwelcome curiosity—fabulous oases sold for a symbolic dinar and which one
keeps under warps like a national security secret. To unearth it, one has to be
an old hand at this type of hide and seek. From the main road one cannot even
see the slip road which the bushes devour, and which nonetheless wends its
unobtrusive way behind them before […] charging onto the smooth sand of
the beach and thence onto this microcosm of the fortunate few.

When I think of the dormitory cities which pervert our landscapes, and the
insipid “tenement blocks,” no sooner launched than already fallen into decay,
and become breeding grounds for hostilities; when I think of the shantytown
that continue to extend into the very mentalities of the people, the basement
windows, gaping onto sulfuric emanations, I don’t harbor many illusions
about the days that lie ahead. (Morituri 99-100)
Llob’s disgusted observation make visible the anonymous spaces of Algerian society
which are usually occult, forging an irrevocable connection between the neoliberal
accumulation of wealth in metropolitan enclaves via privatization and dispossession
with the evacuation of capital and state services from the periphery.

In each of the quartet’s novels, the initial investigation into a single crime becomes an
investigation into a whole social and political order as the conventions of the polar
open up into the broader scope of the thriller, investigating vast conspiracies between

 the state and informal sectors of the economy. Llob’s navigations through the fair city
of Algiers are both horizontal-spatial, connecting the privileged residences of business
and political elites with slums abandoned by formal capital but incorporated into the
black-market, and vertical-temporal, gesturing to the uneven space-time sensorium of
modernity in the neoliberal postcolony, with its incongruous juxtaposition of
temporalities and social mixtures: “In Algiers, all you have to do to go from one
century to another is cross the street. And when it falls to you to leave the city, try not
to be surprised if your car occasionally turns into a time machine” (Dead 107).
Khadra’s crime fictions are mostly parochial or nationalist in their focus; the horizon
of the world-system is mostly distant. Yet they nonetheless encapsulate the
chronotopocity of urban modernity in its North African variety. For Llob, “To baptize
Haï El-Moustaqbal, ‘City of the Future’—an appalling collection of rotting hovels
piled higgledy-piggledy on a wasteland overflowing with pestilential gullies and
poverty—reeks of cynicism” yet it is precisely in these peri-urban zones abandoned
by the state, deprived of streetlights, asphalt streets, and functional housing, where
“the people—neither subjects nor citizens—are born and die amid universal
indifference,” that the logic of neoliberal modernity is most visibly embodied (Double
92). Haï El-Moustaqbal is indeed harbinger of a “global future, of the rising neoliberal
age at its most assertive” (Comaroff and Comaroff 42).

That it is an automobile which enables Llob’s “time-travel” between centres and

peripheries is significant, indicating the extent to which the uneven geographies
across which he speeds are produced by petrolic extraction. Algeria is a petro-state
built on an economic monoculture, with foreign sales of oil and natural gas
constituting 98% of its exports.. Despite being one of the richest countries on the
African continent, oil dividends accumulate unevenly to the advantage of the hyper-
rich, bypassing millions of Algerians who endure poverty and unemployment rates of
30% for adults and more than 43% for youth. During the Arab Spring uprisings, many
political commentators believed that Algerian would be the next after Tunisia to
witness mass political transformation. While protests triggered by the rising price of
basic foodstuffs including cooking oil and sugar occurred all over the country in
2010, the Algerian regime used revenues from sales of hydrocarbons to cut duties on
oil and sugar and subsidize wheat imports, thus distributing a small part of the profits
in order to forestall a larger uprising, while at the same time exercising the state
monopoly on violence and setting up a series of sham elections. All these tactics were
taken in lieu of genuine reforms, and scarcely rectified the pattern of clientelism,
nepotisim and corruption characteritic of the petro-state throughout the 1990s.
Furthermore, during the Arab spring, Algeria escaped pressure to “democratize” from
international actors such as the U.S. and the E.U. due to its status as second largest
exporter of natural and oil to the European Union.

Michael Watts argues that petro-states function as rentier states in the corporate
enclave economy of a larger oil complex, dominated by the violent, socially-
disfiguring politics of surplus distribution and management:
In practice the petro-states are “paradoxes of plenty.” Enormously wealthy on
the one hand (vast orgies of consumption for some) yet marked by poor

 economic performance and growing inequality on the other. More than anything
petro-states are haunted by the absence of anything like revenue transparency.
Oil-dependent economies are, in spite of their vast resource wealth, some of the
most sordid, chaotic, socially unjust, and inequitable of all political economies.
Oil states distinguish themselves each year by being ranked lowest in
Transparency International’s annual World Corruption Index. As the proportion
of GDP accounted for by oil increases, economic underdevelopment, state
corruption. (Watts 19)
All of the above applies to Algeria, where the extractive economy has been
accompanied by corruption, clientelism, and nepotism and a corresponding lack of
development of industry or infrastructure. Another recurring institutional element of
the petro-state, as in Algeria, is the dominance of state security apparatuses, which
often work together with private security forces of oil companies, to ensure that
investments are secured, frequently at the expense of the local subjects in whose
communities oil is extracted. Furthermore, multilateral development agencies such as
the International Monetary Fund, which inflicted adjustment programmes on Algeria
throughout the 1990s, act as brokers between multi-national corporations and states in
the expansion of energy sectors, and as enforcers of so-called “transparency.” Finally,
petro-states are usually characterized by the emergence of a black economy in illicit
wealth from such sources as oil theft and the drugs and arms trades (Watts 17).

Khadra’s mysteries register the corruption and phantasmagoria of petroleum mono-

culture, with its commodity fetishism and illusion of money-for-nothing, in both their
content and form. The very mobility of the plot is dependent on the oil which fuels the
protagonist’s police-issue car. Periodization in the novels is referenced as before or
after “the nationalization of petroleum” (Morituri 7). The exposition is hostilely
attentive to the French brand names and commodites that litter the homes of the oil-
rich, inventorying them through Llob’s scorn. Llob’s belligerent outbursts against the
rich are couched in a catachrestic language that speaks to the difficulty of representing
such unreal wealth and decadence. The oozing corpulence of the financial and
political elites, both licit and illicit, whom Llob encounters in their various dens,
mansions and clubs is described in relentlessly oneiric or scatological terms: ““Faced
with his obesity, I am momentarily lost in a dream” (Double 4); “My hemorrhoids
bloom abruptly, like a bunch of Barbary figs. I don’t need to turn around to know that
Lino is two contractions away from shitting his pants” (Double 93). As in Hime’s
description of Harlem, cannibalism is a recurrent trope, attributed not only to the
“cannibalistic horde” of disenfranchised youth and fundamentalist zealous allegedly
poised to swarm over the whole of the city (Morituri 113), but also to the parasitic
political elites who benefit from privatizing public contracts and resources and
forging alliances with the criminal economy to skim off oil-surpluses. Thus, when
Llob apprehends “all-powerful hydra” Dahman Faïd, head of a complex conspiracy to
“destabilize the national economy so badly that the state would be forced to sell of
some of its industrial wealth,” (Double 116), Faïd contorts his face into a “horrible
mask,” pulling back his lips to form “a cannibalistic leer” (Double 119).

10

 The novels’ obsession with spectrality and unseen, invisible, or occluded spaces itself
speaks not merely to the repressed histories of political and sectarian violence of the
civil war, which I will discuss in the following section, but also signifies the
invisibility of oil, whose subterranean extraction is unseen, yet whose distorting social
effects are everywhere visible, flickering into view in the suffering of the
disenfranchised, dispossessed urban multitudes and in the ghoulish consumption of
the hyper-rich. Khadra somewhat grandly describes his writer’s vision as “like a
seismograph in search of sensitivity” (Marcus screen). This is crime fiction as
seismography, registering the occult tremors of social relations which underline the
structure of appearances, an appropriate metaphor if postcolonies are as the
Comaroffs argue, “hyper-extended versions of the history of the contemporary world
order” in which “so-called margins…experience tectonic shifts in the order of things
first, most visibly, most horrifically” (41).

Yet, the critique of the social effects of hydrocarbon capitalism and neoliberalization
that emerges throughout the quartet is mostly reactionary. Llob’s most disgusted
outbursts are usually provoked by taboo sexual acts, as when he witnesses a woman
administering “dizzying fellatio” to a political intellectual at a mafia party, and
exclaims, “Do I have to get used to the idea […] nothing stands up in the face of cash,
that anything can be bought and anything sold, absolutely anything?” (Autumn 57).
The prostitution of women invariably allegorizes the prostitution of the motherland to
the immorality of the cash nexus. “White Algiers” serves as another incarnation of
virgin-whore dichotomies, the city feminized as the body politic of the motherland,
eulogized again and again by Llob in apocalyptic paeans as a fallen or despoiled
woman, her skies sulfurous and full of blood, pathetic fallacy in the extreme.
Similarly, queasily homophobic descriptions of elite sybarites abusing toy boys
replicate the queer-baiting often endemic to noir fiction and utilize sodomy as a
metaphor for claustrophically incestuous, hom(m)osocial social relations in which all
men are involved in screwing each other over. The fragility of Llob’s masculine
dignity and pride of machismo in a pathologically phallocentric society is betrayed
not only by his fondness for homophobic jokes, but by his dependence on Mina, a
stereotype of the passive, submissive wife, who is only allowed actual dialogue in the
fourth book. The novel’s commitment to making visible the hidden is compromised
by the fact that it cannot offer a truly systemic account of social violence if it fails to
acknowledge the role that ethnic and gender prejudices play.

As a Berber from the Kabylie region, rather than a member of the Arab majority,
Llob’s confrontations with social elites are invested with the division between city
and country and the tensions of ethnic as well as class difference, with his ‘proletarian
jacket’ and facial features marking him as a “D’Erguez,” Tamazight for “a real man”
(Autumn 113). He is twice-removed from the corrupt society he navigates, his Berber
identity cast as nostalgic repository of “authentic” Algerian national identity, deriving
from the “original” Berber population in their rural hillsides, rather than the decaying
post-colonial capital full of fallen socialists and failed utopians. His descent from
“poets and warriors” offers him the illusion of dignity in contrast to the constant
parade of inauthenticity and deceit which he encounters in the city, but only through

11

 the mobilization of chauvinist and originary myths. Resolution of seemingly

indissoluble social contradictions can only be forced via the prejudices of the
detective. The hyper-masculinity of the protagonist and the prose-style points to the
novels’ central ideological blindspot, concerned as they are with protecting the
military from censure and preserving at least one domain of masculine respectability.
It is significant that Llob himself is not a free-wheeling private eye, but rather an
‘honest Cop’ whose first-person narration is presented as reliable, yet who remains an
arm of the state apparatus. In his memoirs, Khadra has praised the army for raising
him as a cadet from the age of eight. This filial view of a paternalistic military
complex is never challenged—instead, its hyper-masculine values bleed over into the
texts, compromising their portrayal of the civil war in particular.

III Spectres of War

The Algerian civil war has been described as “one big murder mystery” by Adam
Shatz, with over 150,000 deaths, 7000 disappearances and abductions occurring in the
1990s alone (3). Conflict first erupted in December 1991, when the Islamic Salvation
Front (FIS) gained a large percentage of the public vote and the FLN, previously the
uninterrupted ruling party, cancelled the second round of elections, with the support
of the international community, particularly the U.S. The military took charge of the
government, ousted the current president, Chadli Bendjedid, and banned the FIS from
Parliament, unleashing a vicious retaliation against its members. In response to
thousands of state arrests and brutalities, Islamist guerilla groups including the
Islamic Armed Movement (MIA) and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) began to
mobilize an armed campaign against the government, increasingly escalating into acts
of terrorism, bombings and large-scale killings. The discourses of terrorism and
“Islamo-fascist fundamentalism” used to excoriate the activities of these groups,
however, fail to acknowledge the state’s own collusion with the military apparatus in
perpetuating the cycle of violence through extrajudicial killings, abduction, torture,
and massacre of suspected Islamic militants—often mere civilians in villages and
regions which had previously been strongholds of anti-colonial resistance and now of
Islamic insurgency.

In the Llob quartet, the initial domestic murders that catalyze the action become
subsidiary to the episodic journeys of the inspector and his sidekick Lino and to the
secondary, institutionalized killings which they uncover. As in Chandler’s fiction, the
appearance of the inspector “breaks the equilibrium of large and small systems of
corruption” and sets “ various mechanisms of suspicion ringing” as he crosses social
boundaries, catalyzing a whole series of murders and beatings, giving the impression
that “they existed already in a latent state, that act that had merited them having
already been committed like chemical substances juxtaposed, waiting…to complete a
reaction which nothing can stop” (Jameson 83). Llob is constantly warned not to poke
his nose into the business of the “political-financial mafia” (Morituri 115), lest he set
off a chain reaction. But it is not merely a questioning of catalyzing latent elements
and unleashing new violence; rather, every recent murder leads to the unearthing of a
whole past catalogue of atrocities, aboriginal traumas whose violence radiates out

12

 through generations and decades. Rarely do Brahim and Lino apprehend a criminal:
rather, their suspects commit suicide or are killed off by criminals higher up the
hierarchy in order to prevent the disclosure of the secrets of the political and business
elites. At the conclusion of Morituri, faced with the impossibility of bringing to
justice Ghoul Malek, a businessman implicated in financing a terrorist organization’s
atrocities, Llob shoots him at point blank range, becoming a vigilante in order to serve
vigilante justice in country where justice and the law seem impossible. Frequently,
Llob unveils a conspiracy, only to discover that his own search for culprits was part of
a larger conspiracy by larger political or crime bosses to eliminate their rivals, using
Llob as their bloodhound. Thus, even when justice is served, it is in the interest of
corruption.

The plot’s twists and turns matter less than Llob’s actual negotiations with the system;
suspense is less a question of apprehension than of the specular, what is made visible
as the detective travels, the complicated palimpsest of violence, past, present, and
future. As Llob remarks at the conclusion of Dead Man’s Share, having uncovered
evidence of a massacre of an entire village during the anti-colonial period and the
subsequent deaths resulting from its ongoing cover-up, “I imagine the shock the
nabobs of Algiers must have felt in front of their televisions last night. It wasn’t the
Haj Thobane scandal itself that had churned their guts from top to bottom, but the
realization that nothing is truly hidden” (269). The thrust of Khadra’s polars is neither
puzzle-solving in the real of abstract thought, since Llob is more rhapsodic than
logical in his thought, nor the resolution of given elements, nor the rendering of
justice, both seemingly impossible. Rather, it is the making visible of social wounds
as Llob is propelled ceaselessly from one kind of social reality to another (Jameson
83). If I argued in the previous section that his movements are spatio-temporal in
their revelation of the uneven geographies of neoliberalization and hydrocarbon
capitalism, they are also temporal-vertical in their excavation of historical memory
and the “amnesias” of official narratives which Llob remarks are “common currency
with us” (Double 4).

The majority of criminal and terrorist murders in the novels take place in either in
rural villages victimized by the civil war or in peri-urban ghettoes such as Bab-El-
Oued that endured a double siege throughout the civil war, subordinated internally to
criminal organizations of local emirs and FIS demagogues who exploited Islam for
profit, and encircled from without by the armed forces of the state. During the civil
war, civilian populations were targeted by both sides with unprecedented violence,
resulting in patterns of systematic massacre in rural areas, usually perpetrated by
groups of men who attacked inhabitants at night, slaughtering whole villages in the
most brutal ways: men, women, children, babies and elderly were decapitated,
mutilated with knives, machetes and saws, shot dead, burned alive in their homes,
pregnant women disemboweled (Amnesty 6). Thousands more disappeared in
“abductions,” either retaliatory, or on suspicion of their collusion. Relatives of the
dead and disappeared protested each week outside the Human Rights Ministry in
Algiers, demanding information about their loved ones, only to be informed by the
government that “the past is dead”: only the nation lives on. As Francesco Cavatorta

13

 observes, a central fact of the civil war is its seeming invisibility and lack of
representation: “Over 150,000 people lost their lives during the Algerian civil war but
we have few images of pictures of it, as if a war not shown on television is not a war
at all” (vi).

The proliferation of hauntological tropes in Khadra’s novels voices these ghosted

histories. The words phantom, shade, shadow, chimera, ghost and mirage appear
scores of times across the four novels, usually as descriptors of abandoned “ghostly
villages” where mass atrocities have taken place and been concealed (Autumn 7, 92),
or the fear-drained intellectuals soon to be assassinated (Morituri 103; Autumn 4); or
the remaining few incorruptible police officers and former FLN members like Llob,
“just one shade among all the other shades of this disaster” (Autumn 108). In Dead
Man, the voice of the sole survivor of a village massacre seems to “speak beyond the
grave” though she is still alive, a psychiatrist colleague of Fanon’s driven near-mad by
persecution is “haunted” and drawn, another survivor of massacre who is labeled a
serial killer and pinned with murder is “the ghost.” The impression is of a necrotic
society “wandering in limbo,” traumatized by memories of horror and brutality that
remain unrepresented and unacknowledged (Autumn 108). To this inventory of
specters, the novel opposes a catalogue of violence so protracted and excessive that
the reader is danger of becoming desensitized: throat-slittings, limb amputations,
face-pulpings, digit-crushings, whore-rapings, infanticides, disembowellings, and
burning alives racked up throughout the quartet. Yet in contrast to the excess of Llob’s
verbal insults, the narration of the violence is oddly flat and unsensational,
referencing the almost daily atrocities committed during the height of the civil war. In
Khadra’s crime fiction, as throughout contemporary Algerian literature, the mutilated
“body under siege” is symptomatic of the numbing reality of daily violence
perpetrated on thousands of victims, but also of the dis-membered state and sectarian
narratives which continue to repress he truth of atrocities, thus adding to the seeming
inexpressibility of the violence (Geesey 495).

However, ideological demystification in the polar quartet is complicated by the

author’s disguise of his status as a member of the military apparatus. This mirrors in
miniature the institutional restructuring of the country post-1995, when the army
undertook a number of measures to hide “the central political role of the military
behind civilian rule,” creating a semblance of autonomy for the political parties which
were in actuality nothing more than props used to “offer a mockery of democracy and
accountability” (Cavatorta and Durac 3607). The state’s survival was secured even
though violence continued and security services continued to rig elections, manage
the distribution of political offices and access to media and money, and intimidate
opposition figures. Outside Algeria, international actors such as the U.S. and France
joined in the demonization of the FIS and the legitimation of allegedly democratic and
secular figures, hailed as allies in the war against “terror,” unable to conceive that the
fairly-elected Islamist party might have been more “democratic” than the FLN and
their supporters in the armed services, who proclaimed their defense of the values of
liberal democracy even as they advocated military intervention and practiced
repression (Cavatorta 138). The political programmes of Algeria’s so-called

14

 democratic parties are little more than “‘a myth, a fable, a ghost…’ because the
ideologies they rely on, the issues they emphasize and the activities they carry out are
largely disconnected with the reality of most Algerians, which the FIS had been, on
the contrary, able to identify and partially deal with” (Cavatorta 138). Abdelaziz
Bouteflika, the current president and leader of the FLN, remains little more than a
“fake civilian,” a “creation of the Military” dependent on the support of the leading
figures in the army and security forces (Cavatorta and Durac 37).

Khadra’s novels are alert to this façade of democratization. Bitterly satirizing le

pouvoir’s insitence on concentrating on the birth of the “new Algeria” rather than its
past, Morituri opens with the image of the horizon giving birth “by cesarean section
to a day which, in the end, will not have worth is pain” (Morituri: 1) This is nation-
birth as violent and forced, hollow rather than hallowed—the nationalist myth is
consistently mocked and punctured throughout the whole of the quartet. They parody
the false euphoria of the 1992 transition—“the country was giving birth to a
democracy of sorts; the people were praising breakers of taboos, cheering conjurers of
truths. In the general frenzy, everyone was jockeying for status.” (Double 3)— and
expose the parties’ lack of autonomy due to corruption: “Any candidate, and it didn’t
matter what field he was in, who didn’t benefit from [Dahman Faïd’s] Baraka had no
more chance of being retained than a course of civics handed out to a vandal” (Double
63). In interviews since the Arab uprisings, Khadra has subsequently critiqued the
Bouteflika’s 2012 election plans as mere shams of democratic participation that fail
tto represent the true interests of “the Harragas [illegal immigants], the hittistes
[unemployed], the offended, the outraged, all the Algerians” (Abusheyma). However,
the Llob quartet persistently glosses over the presence of the military, attributing
“totalitarian control” (Double 63) of the political field not to the generals, but rather to
individual businessman and politicians. They vociferously critique the ‘political-
financial mafia,’ the authoritarianism and corruption of the FLN, and the
fundamentalist violence of Islamic separatists, but are silent on the role of the army
and the Sécurité Militaire, the regime’s secret police, in the instigation and
concealment of violence.

Dead Man’s plot makes this abundantly clear, returning to 1988 ostensibly to uncover
the insidious corruption which damned Algeria’s movement towards democracy and
inaugurated the civil war, but failing to blame the military junta for cancelling
elections and taking control, pinning it instead on more conspiracies of the “mafia.”
The massacre underpinning the central plot is one from the 1960s, the past is ghosted
in over the top of the present atrocities in an ideological legerdemain. Thus, while
attempting to unravel one amnesia on the level of plot, the novels perpetrate another
in their own ideology; their project of narrating the hidden social totality of Algiers’s
corrupt body politic is undermined by their failure to reveal the sinister function of the
security forces, the ‘spinal cord’ of the regime. The only faint signifier of the security
forces is the friendly figure of Captain Berrah, an old acquaintance of Llob’s in the
Security Services Communications Centre, who represents nothing more vicious than
weary disillusionment. Prior to the Arab spring, the popularity of the Inspector Llob
quartet in the Algerian literary market was significant: the books were visibly

15

 displayed in most bookshops, unlike Habib Souaidia’s banned memoir La Sale Guerre
(2001), which exposes the military’s direct implication in the massacres of the “dirty
war” (Shatz 4). In Khadra’s thrillers, it is always the so-called ‘mafia’ under scrutiny,
never the unelected generals behind the scenes of le pouvoir.

In lieu of the military generals, Khadra sets up demonized specters, replacing the
ubiquity of systemic violence with the specificity of metaphysically evil individuals:
Ghoul Malek in Morituri, the “abominable human being, this monster [who] has
turned us into objects for thirty years” (131); Mourad Smaïl, the police director who
discharges Llob, with his “annihilating eyes,” “absolutely monstrous mouth” a
“catalyst face in which the power of evil and the pathological need to exercise it are
combined” (Autumn 125). Khadra reserves his most grotesque language for the
spectre of the Islamist: the fundamentalist bomber in Double is “an extra-large
demon, livid and terrifying” (93); the FIS guerilla at the end of Autumn is
supernaturally bestial: “A nightmarish shape attacks me with a thunderous ‘Allahu
akbar!’ an axe at the end of its arm. […] The horror! […] He is a giant, at least a
hundred and twenty kilos, with unending hair and a beard down to his navel. He looks
like an ogre that has escaped from the jungle, or a werewolf, he’s so utterly hideous”
(Autumn 107). When Llob muses that “the wars of Algeria possess this impenetrable
singularity that the belligerents are grossly in error as to whom their enemies are,”
(Morituri 8) it is an ironic observation, given Khadra’s persistent demonization of
Islamists as the primary source of causality for criminal and political violence alike.

The problem of visibility thus operates on multiple levels in Khadra’s crime fiction:
firstly, at the level of genre, where the investigative impulse of detective fiction is
used to map the uneven geographies of the petro-state and expose social wounds both
economic and political in their origin; secondly, in the persistence of catachresistic
aesthetics which stage the seeming irreality of Algerian modernity and tropes of
spectrality which visualize the unrepresented dead; and finally, in the ideological
contradictions of the plots, where the emphasis on revealing the occluded is
contradicted by the text’s erasure of the role of the security forces. Khadra’s fiction is
haunted by ghosts, but paradoxically does little to expose the ghost in the political
machine. When Llob ruefully condemns his own failure to apprehend the true nature
of society—“All my life, I’ve been missing the point” (Autumn 42)—he might as
well be metatextually commenting on the role of the text itself, which offers the
appearance of seeing but falls short of true verstehen, offering instead a distorted view
of Algerian’s political situation.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the external reviewers for their suggestions; Ranka Primorac for
organizing the initial discussion of thrillers at ASAUK; and Pim Higginson,
Francesco Cavatorta, and Vincent Durac for generously sharing their research

Notes on contributor:

16

 Sharae Deckard is a Lecturer in World Literature at University College Dublin. She

recently co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing on
“Postcolonial Studies and World Literature” and edited a special issue of Green
Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism on “Global and Postcolonial Ecologies.”

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