Djebar's trajectory and development as a writer can be conceived as a gradual movement away from any specific form of identification with Algeria towards a new configuration of her native land as severed, diverse and haunted by its past. The lingering traces of a search for the specific in the earlier works give way, by the time of La Femme sans sépulture and La Disparition, to a depiction of Algeria's culture, language and history as intractable or spectral – present but impossible to grasp. It is in this sense that her writing constitutes a hesitant ‘expatriation’, a movement outside the confines of any single, specified notion of Algeria, and a statement of dissociation from the visions of postcolonial Algeria propagated both by the 1990s government and by the Islamists. This expatriation, however, does not in any sense imply rejection. Djebar is emphatically not giving up on Algeria, nor does she in any way become less preoccupied with the complex weave of its history nor the meaning of its present contradictions. Her expatriation is not a refusal of identification but a reappraisal of her country's potential to provide any such secure identification. It is an engagement with Algeria's limits, with its hidden underside, rather than a statement of dissociation or non-belonging. Djebar's ‘expatriation’ is a partial one, it does not connote a straightforward distancing but a movement outside all that is associated with the ‘patrie’, the fatherland and its attendant resonances of patriotism or pride in national frontiers.