What’s in a name?  A woman, imprisoned in a camp for being “Muslim”, wonders at her futile attempts to escape the fate contained in a name she never asked for, whose connotations circumscribe her every step.

When she is five, her family flees Algeria, the land of her birth, because the new regime is hunting her Harki father.  She willingly trades Berber for French, the language of her new land.  It is there, in school, that she first hears the world “Muslim”, aware of little about it except the barely concealed hatred behind it.  To understand her parents’ sadness, she later returns to Algeria.  There she meets her uncle Vava el-Hadj, who has dedicated his life to preserving the oral Berber culture.  Searching for her identity, she finds a world that will not leave her be, insisting on her confinement first in a label, and eventually in a cell.

Rahmani’s novel is at once a tale of exile, an examination of the sinister uses of language, and a cry against the politics and ignorance, the fear of the “other”, that would indiscriminately group exceedingly different peoples under a blanket label.