Algerian Dissident Writers of French Expression: Opening Books, Opening Minds
Panel 047, 2014 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 23 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
The 18th International Book Fair in Algiers in fall 2013 welcomed representatives from publishers in 44 countries and drew a record-breaking 1,300,000 visitors. Its theme, "Open Me Up to the World," struck a chord with Algerians, who have been isolated from their neighbor Morocco, their former colonizer, France, and from much of the outside world since their violent civil war in the 1990s. But while book fans are seeking connections [ouvertures], the government is reluctant to let every book be opened. This is evident in the banning of 150 books from the Fair, officially on the grounds that they "excuse terrorism, racism or colonialism." There is fear that giving expression free reign might feed flames of tensions along fault lines that have shaken Algeria from its struggle for independence to its 'black decade' (1988-2003) to the present. These fault lines are rifts along the lines of religious/secular; imperialist/sovereign; Arab/Amazigh; Arabophone /Francophone; feminist/
traditionalist, and nationalist/universalist.
This panel examines the work of four dissident Algerian writers of French expression who have had the courage to dwell and write in the country they critique. All born around 1950, Boualem Sansal, Mamssa Bey, Hamid Grine and Tahar Djaout challenge official definitions of the Algerian Nation and affirm the concept of cultural plurality. They do this in part by choosing to publish in French, the language of the former colonizer, rather than in Arabic, the country's only official language. Although their focus is clearly on the present, they examine Algerian history, specifically, the Algerian War, for its great moments and less illustrious events, in search of clarity, truth, and in the case of Bey, to chart Algerian women's emerging memory and voice. They probe the post-war period and critique their country's current shortcomings as well as its lack of political will to invest resources in the people's well-being. Despite very real threats - Djaout, for example, was assassinated in 1993 by Islamists - these dissident intellectuals employ their writing to urge Algerians to free themselves from the "prison of intolerance" (Sansal). Their controversial novels, poems, plays and essays attest to a commitment on their part to probe, criticize, use the memory of the liberation struggle to shape the present and envision a future. Their works -read by many in and outside Algeria-- clearly evoke a response on the part of readers who also seek insight as the country attempts to juggle its past while negotiating its fast-paced modernity.
Disciplines
Participants
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Robert Mortimer
-- Presenter
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Dr. Valerie K. Orlando
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
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Prof. Mildred Mortimer
-- Presenter
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Dr. Mary B. Vogl
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Valerie K. Orlando
Following the Noble Prize awarded to Albert Camus in 1957, Algerian author Kateb Yacine, adamantly proclaimed that “il faut que les Français comprennent que la littérature algérienne, ce n’est pas Camus, et l’Algérie n’est pas française” (The French need to understand that Algerian literature isn’t Camus and Algeria isn’t French). Camus’s conflicted place, buried in the psyche of the Algerian nation, has haunted Algerian authors and intellectuals of French expression for decades since independence. What to do with Camus? Was he a traitor? A political fighter seeking in his eyes a more equitable, “federalized” Algeria? Should he be discounted and effaced from the remembrance of things past in Algeria because he represents the very fragmented identity the FLN rebels and, later, nascent government tried to solidify in 1962? These questions and others are explored in Hamid Grine’s Camus dans le Narguilé (2011). Remembering Camus and discussing his disputed place in the annuals of Algerian history are at the core of this novel written in Algeria’s post “années noires” of the new millennium. Grine’s novel proposes that we think about whether Camus should be remember within a reflective or restorative nostaligic framework. Should the Algerian-French writer be buried in the ruins of the colonial past, left to be reflected upon as part of that past? Or, should he be restored in the way that he really was: conflicted and deeply grieved by what he viewed as the failure of Algeria to engage with its exceptionnalisme, rooted in its multiculturalism and multilingual make-up. This exceptionalism was for Camus the driving force behind a particular pensée du midi (Mediteranean way of thinking) he believed was held dear by authors and intellectuals living primarily in Algiers in the late 1950s. Grine, a contemporary resistance writer, writes from Algeria. His mission is to scrutinize Camus’s conflicted place in Algerian memory in order to exploit and expose topical and often delicate issues that have plagued the sociopolitical realms of contemporary Algeria since the French left in 1962. Camus’s disputed place in Algeria becomes a metaphor for the murky choices made by Algerian authorities, the FLN, and the way history has been documented by Algerian keepers of postcolonial history since 1962.
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Prof. Mildred Mortimer
Inspired to write during the turbulent 1990s, the period of Algeria’s undeclared civil war between the government and jihadist groups, Algerian novelist Maïssa Bey has become an increasingly important literary figure defending cultural pluralism and women’s rights in her country. Her first novel, Au commencement était la mer (In the beginning was the sea [1996]), established her as a politically committed writer focused on the myriad problems facing postcolonial Algeria: poverty, corruption, misogyny, Islamic fundamentalism, and the status of women. For Bey, the violent events of the 1990s in Algeria served as a catalyst, bringing back memories of earlier trauma, for she is the daughter of a martyr to the Algerian War. Thus, writing has become for her a practice that allows the traumatized to reconcile with their painful pasts.
As Bey uses writing as tool in her search for meaning in a world fraught with violence so does the protagonist of her most recent work, Puisque mon coeur est mort [Since my heart is dead (2010)]. This epistolary novel is composed of a grieving mother’s letters to her dead son, murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist guerilla amnestied under the concorde civile, the government policy implemented in 1999 to bring the civil war to an end. Unable to move past the trauma of her son’s death, the mother sets out to avenge his murder, with predictably tragic results. With its portrayal of a traumatized individual, the novel tests the limits of reconciliation, asking: To what extent can forgiveness, an intimate expression that comes from the heart, succeed as a public policy?
My analysis of the text involves both the personal and the collective. Adopting Cathy Caruth’s definition of trauma as “unclaimed experience” that continues to haunt the survivor, I study the psychological portrait of the mother through the letters that express her efforts to remain lucid in a chaotic world and I also reflect upon the broader context, the struggle of the Algerian nation to embrace tolerance. Situating her text within the larger body of contemporary literary works set in “traumascapes,” (Maria Tumarkin), places scarred by war, violence, terror -- Rwanda in 1994, Syria today – Bey, like her fellow dissident writers, urges Algerians to embrace the values of cultural and religious pluralism.
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Robert Mortimer
Boualem Sansal has emerged as one of the foremost and most controversial authors in contemporary Algeria. He is a politically engaged writer who has published six novels, a political pamphlet, and a stimulating essay entitled Petit éloge de la mémoire. His most recent novel Rue Darwin (Editions Gallimard, 2011) also deals with the theme of memory, delving into Algerian history since the 1950s, via the protagonist’s search for his own complex identity as someone who had two families in two worlds, both in Algeria.
In his earlier work, Sansal criticizes the imposition of orthodoxy whether it takes the form of a single political party or an Islamist state. In Petit éloge de la mémoire he emphasizes that Algeria has known many diverse civilizations over its history and has incorporated them all: “It only remains for its people to rediscover its full memory” and thereby “construct its freedom.” In this paper, I argue that Rue Darwin can be read as a fictional approach to the discovery of memory and personal freedom.
The novel was awarded the Prix du Roman Arabe in 2012 only to be challenged by a political orthodoxy when Sansal had the effrontery to attend a literary festival in Israel. One of the many sub-themes in the novel concerns the protagonist’s Jewish neighbor on rue Darwin and the memory of the holocaust. It is clear that Sansal’s imagination continues to challenge orthodoxy wherever it may appear and to celebrate cultural diversity and religious tolerance.
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Dr. Mary B. Vogl
The Algerian writer Tahar Djaout has been celebrated as a martyr for the values of plurality and freedom of expression. He was born in 1954, the year Algeria’s war of independence began, and he was assassinated in 1993, when Islamists began targeting intellectuals in a civil war that would last more than a decade. A French-language writer of Kabyle origin, Djaout is best known outside his native Algeria for his novels and poems. But he was also a prominent journalist for El Moudjahid and Algérie-Actualité before co-founding, a few months before the end of his short life, a journal with the evocative title Ruptures. Much of his writing is a plea for breaking with a past that has been fabricated in the name of the nation’s unity but which excludes rather than unites its citizens. At the time he was struck down, he had just published an essay in Ruptures about Algeria’s need to move forward. He characterized the country as being comprised of two opposing groups, “the family who progresses and the family who regresses.”
In this paper I will focus on Djaout’s articles that celebrate the works of Algerian visual artists from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Djaout wrote about and collaborated with many artists who left behind patriotic art sanctioned by the State in favor of broader and subtler investigations of identity and creativity. These include Ali Silem, Hamid Tibouchi, Denis Martinez, Mohammed Khadda and M’hamed Issiakhem among others. In the post-independence period many Maghrebi artists explored the use of Arabic calligraphy and other markers of Arabo-Islamic identity in a spirit of reviving precolonial traditions. Other artists began experimenting with Tifinagh signs and various Amazigh (Berber) symbols. Yet Djaout recognized that even these practices could become stale if they were simply used as a shorthand to connotate a monolithic representation of Algerianness. Djaout’s preferred artists were those who freed the signs from their fixed significations and let them stand on their visual qualities. As Michel-George Bernard points out, Djaout praises the artist Mokhtar Djaafer for not being obsessed with identity politics. Djaout writes, “[Djaafer]’s not preoccupied with affirming an identity – no doubt because he doesn’t have an identity problem and he doesn’t see any point in proclaiming the obvious.” Like the other writers discussed in this panel, Djaout pushes art to go beyond the memorialization of a static--and exclusionary--past.
