Violence and resistance in Ait Ouahioune’s The eternal snow (2023)
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Date
2025
Authors
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi Ouzou
Abstract
This research explores the issue of colonial violence with reference to Ait Ouahioune’s The
Eternal Snow (2023). Dealing with colonial violence in the post-colonial period has a crucial
importance in digging into the memory of people and building a usable past for the present and
the future generations. Unless this dimension of Ait Ouahioune’s novel is investigated, the
reader risks losing sight of the purpose behind the speaking of the colonial encounter and the
resistance to the encroachment on Kabyle territory. The research has tried to accomplish this
task by taking its bearings from an eclectic approach combining the anthropological paradigm
borrowed from Tillion and Bourdieu, as well as Fanon’s theory on colonial violence. To deal
with the dimension of evil and how it shapes the form of the novel, the approach has also
appealed to theories about the detective novel. In applying these eclectic approaches, the
research has led to the following findings: One, the novel illustrates perfectly Fanon’s ideas
that the violence of the colonized against the colonizer is marked by an internalized syndrome,
where the colonized turn the violence against one another. Two, colonial violence was met at
the historical period cornered by the novel, by resistance of what is called “Les bandits
d’honneur”. Three, resistance in the novel is shown to have taken a literary form in its evocation
of the figure of Si Mohand Ou Mhand. Four and last, The eternal snow has engaged in the
exploitation of the struggle of evil and good, giving a universal dimension to the work and
celebrating the triumph of good over the evil brewed in the cauldron of the colonizer and which
has managed to destroy the habitus of the Kabyle people as part and the prevail of the Algerian
population as a whole.
Description
55p. ; (+CD-Rom)
Keywords
anthropology, colonial violence, evil, habitus, resistance
Citation
Literature and Civilization