Historical Presence in Algerian Children's Literature: Saadouni Bachir's Works as a Case Study

Abstract

If literature represents the aesthetic and artistic image of any country or nation, then in Algeria, it portrays a state of distortion and uprooting under despotic rule, leading Algeria to stumble in the abyss of intellectual and linguistic loss, following a strategy of crushing and annihilation of Algerian identity, with its core aim being the distortion of language and the implementation of linguistic colonization. Evidence of this lies in the fact that revolutionary literature and what preceded it are mostly written in the language of the colonizer, crossing over to a phase of revival and reclaiming of Arab linguistic essence requires a genuine invocation of consciousness free from flaws, skepticism, or annulment. As literature encompasses art, culture, and thought, Algerians' interest in it has been conscious, opening its doors and genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, and children's stories, directed towards the future generation, who crafts the hope of the nation and realizes its aspirations, through the efforts of those involved, by preparing literature specialized for children, woven and polished to achieve significant goals of language, religion, and identity, built on a solid foundation documented by the history of the Algerian nation. This intervention aims to demonstrate the role of history in establishing an educational foundation for this literature and reading it through a literary lens, revealing the relationship between history and literature in crafting this genre, historical children's stories in Algeria. The question here is, what is the relationship between history and literature? Is it a relationship of integration or containment? If history is a science based on historical facts and events, and literature is an art based on the dimensions of imagination and fantasy, how did historical fiction manage to achieve this synthesis? To address this issue, we first elucidated the meanings of the terms literature and history, then tackled the nature of the relationship between them by applying the results to selected writings of the creator Saadouni Bachir.