Reviewed by Hanna Alwine
Maïssa Bey’s novel Blue White Green, translated from French by Erin Twohig, is a text populated by reflections and refractions, mirrored images, people and places existing in double, where layers of the present and the future are complicated by the imprint of the past. The history of French colonialism in Algeria can be traced back to 1830 when the country was invaded by the Kingdom of France. After 132 years of colonial presence in the region, the country gained independence in July 1962. Set in Algiers following this declaration, Bey’s characters grapple with a changing country, one bent on pushing out and eradicating the impacts of over a century spent under French rule and embracing Arab unity in the formation of a codified nation state. In the subsequent years, the very geography of Algiers undergoes a shift. Place du Cheval becomes Place el Aoud; Bey’s characters move symbolically from Lyon to Belouizdad Street; and, in a metaphor so heavy-handed it could only have come from real life, Colonial Avenue becomes Liberty Street.
The narrative spans the thirty years between Algerian independence and the country’s establishment of an Islamist government. We follow this evolution through a split narration, oscillating between the two central characters Ali (“Him”) and Lilas (“Her”). The two begin their lives separately, turning slow circles around one another until their orbits overlap and converge. Their stories give the reader a double view of the revolution and that which follows, two subjective vantage points layered to give us a fuller, more nuanced understanding of post-independence Algiers, “so often conquered, so often freed” (174).
Lilas lives with her mother and four brothers, her father martyred in the war of independence. She has led a double life since birth, her name written incorrectly by the French man who filed the record for her birth certificate, and she has an intense interest in layers of truth that make up the spaces and histories around her. Her chapters are characterized by a love for stories, for words, and for objects left behind.
Though Ali grows up in the same building, his life diverges from Lilas’ in critical ways. His father, formerly a revolutionary majdahin, currently a member of the increasingly corrupt administration, moved his family from the countryside following independence. The shift was intended to usher in increased freedoms and equality for Ali and his brother, but young Ali understands the change differently, remembering the egality of his youth and the freedom of his childhood outside of the city. Ali’s involvement with the early student revolutions and his later political devolution as he unwittingly follows in his father’s footsteps give us a different understanding of the influence of personal histories and the way economic power might approximate emancipation through or despite its proximity to the West.
The events of the novel are informed by Bey’s own experiences growing up in 1950s Algeria. Born as Samia Benameur, she grew up in a small town south of Algiers. Like Lilas, her father died when she was young, serving the National Liberation Front, the leading nationalist party which remained in power until 1989. Prompted by the Algerian Civil War which stretched from 1992 to 2002, she published her first novel Au commencement était la mer (1996). Fearing the violence writers and journalists experienced during this period of political upheaval, she chose to write under the name Maïssa Bey, a pseudonym suggested by her mother. “I like to say that [she] gave birth to me a second time,” Bey said (“Maïssa Bey”).
It seems only fitting that this text should now live a double life in its own right. In April 2026, Bey’s novel will be released in English, translated by Erin Twohig, Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. Twohig first came across the novel when writing her dissertation on literary depictions of colonial education systems within the Middle-East and North Africa. Through this scholarly attention, Twohig has nurtured an intimate relationship with the novel for over a decade. To her, the text serves a dual function, at once an engaging character-driven romance and a stage on which to present and tease apart the intricacies and contradictions of this political moment.
Twohig’s introduction to Blue White Green feels like a recommendation from a good friend, a fellow reader handing off a heavily worn and annotated text. She gives us a brief overview of the text, offering a skeletal historical framework “for readers less familiar with this period of Algerian history” (xi). The introduction works as a paratextual tool embedded in the framework of the translated novel; and, as one of those “less-familiar readers,” I found myself reaching back for Twohig’s broad historical overview as a framework in which I could situate Lilas and Ali’s personal histories.
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Twohig and Bey’s intertwined guiding hands serve to introduce the uneducated reader to a pivotal period in Algerian history while, at the same time, critiquing the position and conception of history in Algeria. Split in three, the novel tracks the decades following independence: the initial anti-colonial, socialist revolution headed by politician Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-1972); the student protests and disillusionment that follows as the new administration fails to live up to what it had promised (1972-1982); the rise of the Islamist regime responding to a growing discontentment and effort to further distinguish the nation from the Métropole (1982-1992). With each of these turnovers, with each new group that propositions itself as an antithesis to the establishment, there is a need to bend, dominate, and rewrite the historical currents that have pushed them there.
“Now we have to start some history” (6) is the driving call following independence. There is a sense that, in order to overcome the influence and impact of French occupation, the past must be rewritten, pushed out in order to make room for something new. The new future, this new history that begins at independence, uses language and education as a means to chart a new path. Through this process of Arabization, schools are opened to all, the courses within taught in Arabic.
History as something to be discarded and/or written over returns as student revolutionaries protest against the corruption and elitism of the new administration. Ali finds himself caught up by these revolutionary tides. He derides “age-old conventions,” tells Lilas that “the old days are gone” (85). But Lilas finds something ironic in these passionate tirades. She recognizes the words he uses, “the exact same words used by people who broke up our strike and sent the police onto our campus” (85). Where the incursion of the Islamist regime doesn’t seek to gloss over history in an effort to move forward, their rejection of history comprises a reaching back over what has already come to pass in the hopes of returning to something left behind. Each of these selective histories strays from a holistic recognition of that which came before, each revolution, each transition, seems deemed to repeat the past.
Lilas and Ali’s personal history mirrors this broader pattern. Ali rejects tradition, pushes up against the revolutionaries-turned-oppressors. He is uninterested in the conventions of the past; he hopes to chart a new way forward. Still, as he grows into himself, the pull of his father’s trajectory threatens to lead him off course. While Lilas also recognizes the entrapments of tradition and the importance of change, she maintains a concurrent romantic understanding of what has come before. As a young girl she spent her days exploring the bien vacants in her building, apartments newly abandoned by their former French occupants. As an adult she continues to contemplate the way spaces are created by the people that inhabit them, paying attention to residue left behind. After moving in with Ali, she describes the physical impression that she left on her former home, “A stamp album forgotten at the bottom of the drawer. A scratch on the ledge of the table” (137). Where Ali falls into the trap of his forefathers, rejecting the past for some facsimile of progress, Lilas is repeatedly revealed to take a broader view. When they first get married, she refuses the term “conjugal,” preferring to say instead that they are “‘conjugating’ [their] lives” (128), an effort to align their human experience with the way language moves through time. Unlike Ali who is always working against history, attempting to throw off the constraints of traditions and the shackles of what came before, Lilas flits in and between the past, able to take a critical eye by seeing time in its complex entirety.
Through Lilas, Bey offers us a path forward, one that involves looking back over our shoulders to see where we’ve been in order to have a better idea of where we might be headed. In her introduction, Twohig introduces a question Lilas poses in the last chapter: “And tomorrow who will be there to tell the tale for posterity?” (274). In conjunction with this novel’s publication, the question takes on a certain irony. Though Lilas doesn’t know it, her story is already being told and retold. This tale, jointly recounted by Maïssa Bey and Erin Twohig, offers us this cross-section of history, one that informs the present and the future in its description of the past.
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Beyond the historical importance of language as a tool for nation-building and resistance, Bey doesn’t hesitate to present language also as a site for play, experimentation, and joy. “Something I appreciate about the book is that it’s not just about the suffering and the violence of language, but about loving the languages that the characters speak,” Twohig emphasized in an interview I recently conducted with her. “When I translated it, I wanted to show how playful the characters are, how much they love language.”
This careful attention to language and its intersecting functions is clear in Twohig’s simultaneous incorporation of domesticating and foreignizing elements within her translation. She experiments with creative solutions to best communicate the wordplay embedded in the original text: “the nickname for the minister of finance, ‘Sir Plus,’ and the head of the party apparatus, ‘Sir Valance’” (131) and “blurred vision because of a blockage in their ‘tear ducks,’ joint pain from acute ‘Arthur-itis,’ not to mention the classic hyper- ‘intention’” (101).
But her attention to communicating these nuances to an English reader is not at the cost of the multi-lingual nature intrinsic to the text. The translated novel is interspersed with both Arabic and French vocabulary. Bey’s original text, written primarily in French, also incorporates many Arabic terms, a choice that Twohig has chosen to emulate. “They remain, as in the original, untranslated and defined by their use patterns,” she explains in her introduction, “a testament to Algeria’s long history of linguistic diversity and multilingualism” (xi).
As Twohig maintains a close eye on the larger historical movements that buoy and push forward Bey’s plot, she also works to communicate Lilas and Ali’s own personal relationship with language. As she simultaneously translates the two narrators over a pivotal period of development, Twohig carries Lilas and Ali’s shifting registers from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. As children, their prose trends naive, their descriptions of the events happening around them couched in a confusion that serves to illuminate rather than muddle, denaturalizing the political currents shaping their world. The text begins largely explanatory, accounting for this childhood ignorance in a way that eases the reader into a complex web of history. But, as Lilas and Ali become better acquainted with their political moment, their world takes on a more certain, definitive shape.
As is the case with all translation, bits of context, detritus of meaning, are lost in the journey from one language to another. When Lilas visits Paris with Ali, she is confronted by constructed memories pulled from the French works that have shaped her linguistic and literary memory. She describes a feeling, not of “déjà vu” (“already seen”) but of “déjà lu” (“already read”), a play on words Twohig ultimately decides to omit, rather than push it into an unsatisfactory Anglophone mold. Another loss incurred: the designation of the inhabitants of Algiers, “Algérois” (where the “rois” carries the implication of “king”) in contrast to those who live outside the city, “Algériens” (where “riens” might best be translated to “nothings”).
But where there is loss, in translation, there is also opportunity for the creation of new meaning. Throughout the French text, Ali refers to his father as “mon père” traditionally translated to “my father.” In English, this term can be unwieldy, when used by young children it can often feel stilted, weighty, indexing a formality not necessarily present in the original text. So, rather than refer to Ali’s father by a single term, Twohig, in communication with Bey, takes advantage of the semantic distance between the English “father” and “dad.” Ali begins the novel using “dad,” shifting to “father” as familiarity and intimacy wanes between the two characters. Unlike the French, Twohig’s translation allows this relational shift to be embedded directly into the text.
Through these choices, Twohig’s mark upon the text is clear. It is her hands, her words that allow this text to be read by an Anglophone audience. But Twohig does not explicitly take on this creative authority. “I definitely wanted to make sure that I was stepping back and leaving space for the novel,” she said in our interview. “While also thinking about why I do think it’s important that more people are able to read it.” At the end of her introduction she re-affirms this position as a facilitator of Bey’s text, handing the reins back to the author: “While this introduction has aimed to provide a brief historical sketch to introduce readers to Algerian history, the truth is that few words can do so better than Blue White Green itself” (xvi). Using Twohig as my example, I’ll take this moment to hand the reins back to this competent pair of collaborators as they ask readers to think critically, carefully, and holistically about how we write history and frame the past.
Bey, Maïssa. Blue White Green. Translated by Erin Twohig. Georgetown University Press, 2026.
Hanna Alwine studies Comparative Literature and French with a minor in Middle East and North Africa studies at Oberlin College. She translates from French and is interested in the complex relationships between languages that share a nation.