Comment s'inventer un père écrivain: Albert camus chez Maïssa Bey

This article focuses on the role played by Camus in Maïssa Bey’s work. Focusing on the ambivalent and paradoxical place he occupies in Au commencement était la mer and l’Ombre d’un homme qui marche au soleil, I analyse the construction of the father or rather Bey’s definition of fathers. The biological father (who died as a hero during the war of independence) coexists with Camus, the Francophone Algerian writer who is both a model and a counter-model. The two textual father figures enable Bey to question the principles of filiation implied in the metaphor of paternity, and to invent a (literary) legacy instead of letting it determine who she is as a woman, Algerian and francophone writer.