ABSTRACT. Being registered in full of colonialism, postcolonialism, or the American Expeditionary Force, the representation of the place (and city) in the North African Francophone literature and Middle Eastern becomes the issue of tension between political reality, nationalism and pluralism. We will analyze in this essay fictional representations of cities at war characterized by the experience of irrational excess. To do this, we will study the writings of two writers: Ezza Agha Malak (from Lebanon) for the Mashreq and Maissa Bey (from Algeria) for the Maghreb. First, we will explore the representations of the city of Beirut in The Last Crusader (2002) and Baghdad in Baghdad. The Dead Sounding Louder than Others (2006) of Ezza Agha Malak, on the other will analyze the representations of the city of Algiers in White Blue Green (2006) and Under the Jasmine the Night (2004) of Maissa Bey. Beyond national cultural identity, changing the look worn by the writers of the Mashreq and Maghreb on cities at war takes on ethics and politics. The negative image becomes a paradoxical figure of literature, it becomes necessary to rewrite modern emergence of female speech. pp. 85–102

Keywords: imaging cultural capitals and cities, cities at war, trauma, memory, speech of women