Abstract
With L’Amour, la fantasia, the Algerian author Assia Djebar
made her first attempt at writing her autobiography, only to realize that the very language she uses – that of the former colonizer – imposes not just personal but also collective memories on her that ask for recollection: in order to write the self,
she has to retrieve a collective that seems lost to her. Using Halbwach’s theory about social frameworks, this essay seeks to explore the links between personal and collective memory, and how for this author they are intimately linked to each other by language.