History from Point Zero? Archival Reading in Maissa Bey's Surtout ne te retourne pas and Tahir Wattar's The Earthquake

Focusing on the themes of history, trauma, and amnesia, Maissa Bey's 2004 novel Surtout ne te retourne pas uses reading as a metaphor for archival reconstruction even as it insists on the fundamental instability of the archive. Building on Jacques Derrida's theories in Mal d'Archive (1995), this article compares Surtout with Tahir Wattar's 1974 novel The Earthquake (al-Zilzal). Despite the radical differences between these works' narrators, both are products of historical trauma and face the challenges of history from "point zero" (Wattar). The progressive and inclusive historiographies envisioned by Wattar and Bey invite an archival bridging between their respective projects, in which the critique of gendered violence plays a central role.