Revisiting the Early Generation of Francophone Maghrebian Writers and Artists. Are They Relevant Today?
Panel 098, 2012 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 19 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
In the sixty years since the publication of the first literary texts of Maghrebian writers and the fifty years that followed Algerian independence, literary and cultural production of the Maghreb has changed considerably as new voices emerged in the postcolonial era. The earlier texts such as Mohammed Dib's La Grande Maison [The Big House] (1952) focused on the themes of poverty, colonial injustice, violence, and exile experienced by the colonized during the colonial period. Writers today - Tahar Ben Jelloun, Assia Djebar, Maissa Bey - express the challenges posed by postcolonial societies. This panel proposes to examine earlier works, texts of the novelists termed the "Generation of 1952, " (writers such as Mouloud Feraoun, Mohammed Dib, Driss ChraDbi) as well as painters of the same generation: Bachir YellBs, Ali Ali-Khodja, Abdallah Benanteur, M'hamed Issiakhem, Mohammed Khadda; Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, Jilali Gharbaoui with new perspectives. In the past five years, the art would has seen a variety of exhibitions and retrospectives of this generation of North African artists who were born in the 1920s and 1930s. In the realm of literature, we find an increasing number of English translations of the earlier writers during the same period. Significantly, March 15, 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Algerian writer, Mouloud Feraoun, assassinated by the OAS shortly before the end of the Algerian War. Tributes to the writer will occur in Algeria to commemorate his life.
The focus of this panel is to return to the earlier works with a heightened critical sense. Our aim is not to express nostalgia for an earlier era, but rather to find the subtlety and irony that escaped readers, critics and viewers at a time when indigenous African literary and visual expression was often appreciated for sociological and ethnographic elements rather than artistic merit. In this same vein, we are joining word to image, literary expression to art to create a conversation between the two forms of expression. And, we will discuss three major figures of the era: Dib, Feraoun, Chraebi, (two Algerian, one Moroccan), who were important voices in the transitional period to independence and who have not been forgotten today.
Disciplines
Participants
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Robert Mortimer
-- Chair
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Dr. Valerie K. Orlando
-- Presenter
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Prof. Mildred Mortimer
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Mary B. Vogl
-- Presenter
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Dr. Lucy L. Melbourne
-- Discussant
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Dr. Fawzia Ahmad
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Prof. Mildred Mortimer
Mouloud Feraoun, Le Fils du Pauvre/ The Poor Man’s Son : A retrospective
March 15, 1962 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Algerian writer, Mouloud Feraoun. A member of Algeria’s “Generation of 1954,” (named for the year that marked the beginning of the Algerian War), Feraoun was killed by French colonial extremists three months before the end of the war. Two of Feraoun’s texts, Le Fils du Pauvre (1954) and La Terre et Le Sang (1953) have recently been translated into English, published by the University of Virginia Press. The Poor Man’s Son appeared in 2005, and Land and Blood in 2012. Hence, they are now accessible to university students who do not read French. Significantly, The Poor Man’s Son, is not the English language translation of Le Fils du Pauvre published by Editions du Seuil in 1954, but the translation of the original text published in 1950 at the author’s expense by Les Cahiers du Nouvel Humanisme. The 1954 text is an abridged and edited version of the earlier text; by concluding with the protagonist’s admission to Teacher’s training school, it praises the French colonial education system in Algeria. The earlier text, in contrast, ends on a far more critical note. My paper will compare and contrast the two texts in the attempt to judge whether the 1954 publication, with its “amputated” ending betrays Feraoun’s initial message and whether the English translation restores proper meaning to the text.
At the same time, I will explore the tension that exists in both versions between the voice of the novelist, one that is deeply rooted within the community, and the voice of the anthropologist, the impersonal and objective voice that describes the customs, rituals, beliefs of the Berber community in a scientific manner. I am questioning whether the latter does not “orientalize” this community dwelling in Algeria’s hills in the period leading up to World War II, thereby making them appear exotic, if not primitive to Western readers. Here I test the hypothesis that the two versions, as they alternate, create a literary work that is more complex than it appears upon the first reading.
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Dr. Mary B. Vogl
In the past five years a number of retrospective exhibitions have featured North African artists born in the 1920s and 30s and active at the time of independence (1). Pioneering artists of that generation helped decolonize Maghrebi art practice and the theoretical discourse surrounding it. My paper considers the legacy of critical texts from the early post-independence period for Maghrebi visual arts today. The editors of a recent issue of an African Art journal discuss the Saharan north/south divide in the study of African art. “Today,” they write, “scholars, artists and other producers of visual culture continue to grapple with the partitioned discursive and institutional structures handed down in part from colonialism—divisions further exacerbated in recent contexts of local, national, and global conflict” (2). Critiques of these “partitioned” structures can be found in four essays from Morocco and Algeria in the late 1960s that the editors chose to re-present in the journal, including a manifesto for a new aesthetics in the Maghreb by the Algerian group Aouchem. My paper investigates these essays and others in a 1967 issue of the journal Souffles, along with Toni Maraini’s Écrits sur l’art [Writings on Art], and Mohammed Khadda’s Eléments pour un art nouveau [Elements for a New Art] (1971). I consider their impact on current debates over issues of the local and the global in an era when the Middle East is emerging as a new pole in the contemporary art world and when a rich diasporic production is creating alternative conceptions of nation and belonging. My paper also analyzes how early critical texts shaped thinking, over the next half century, on artistic subject matter, media, styles and taste in North Africa, up to the present.
(1) These include Algerians Yellès, Ali-Khodja, Benanteur, Issiakhem and Khadda; Moroccans Belkahia, Melehi, Gharbaoui and A. Elbaz; Tunisians H. Turki and Belkhodja.
(2) Katarzyna Pieprzak and Jessica Winegar, “Africa North, South and In Between.” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, No. 5, Fall 2009, page 5.
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Dr. Valerie K. Orlando
In the 1950s, Moroccan authors noted that writing in French allowed them a certain distance from their traditional culture as well a linguistic tool with which to challenge the oppressive French colonial regime. Authors wrote from the margins of their own society in order to define, what would become after independence in 1956, a new Moroccan postcolonial literary consciousness. Driss Chraïbi’s 1954 novel Le Passé Simple is considered a monumental text in the Moroccan, and vaster Maghrebian, francophone canon. Chraibi’s first novel set the tone for the first generation of Moroccan francophone authors after independence. As Morocco transited into the independence era of the late 1950s-early 1960s, authors writing in French became increasingly known for their resistance. They felt it their duty to attack the political hypocrisy that particularly Chraïbi believed was becoming endemic in the country. Le Passé simple set the tone for a literature that would thereafter criticize and revolt against tradition, postcolonial corruption, and the inequalities in Moroccan society. This seminal novel defined a place for the literary dialogue of the engaged writer; a space that continues to be reworked, reviewed and revitalized in the contemporary era. This paper will consider Chraïbi’s legacy within the scope of francophone writing in the Morocco of the new millennium.
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Dr. Fawzia Ahmad
An ‘Ecrivain-frontalier’: Mohammed Dib’s Textual Identity
Mohammed Dib is best known as the expatriate prolific writer who chose to live in France for most of his writing career. His works’ themes span from autobiographical depictions of his Algerian childhood to mythic depictions of his characters’ desires.
His early writings-La Grande Maison, L’Incendie, Le Métier à tisser- in the ‘Algérie’ series can be viewed as ‘realistic’ or ‘natural’ depictions of his Algerian identity. They also contain questions and answers that reflect the retention of a dual consciousness of the mentality of the ‘frontalier’—a pioneer in an era of cultural boundaries and identity politics. Dib’s literary voice as a French-educated Algerian allowed him to explore the thresholds of multiple cultural experiences but, more importantly, he strengthened his position by disregarding a sense of apologetic explanations about his own Algerian environment in his writings.
However, to find one’s voice and depict the helm of a dual cultural exposure is not the only task of this ‘écrivain frontalier.’ Dib also imparts a sense of organization of such experiences in his writing for his reader. The author’s early writings revealed a keen sense of the assertive ‘frontalier’ and reshaped his own literary creation that side-steps the facile image-to-describe formula about his birth culture.
Indeed, the author of the Generation of 1952 goes a step beyond Jean Pélégri’s claim that “It is in [landscapes] that we find our sensibility and our metaphysics of the world around us flourish and grow.” (translation mine, Jean Pélégri in Ma Mère Algérie). Dib brings his identity and locus into an even more prominent position than a simple reconfiguration of multiple locational thresholds… he manages to retain his own turf on the creative terrain that could have remained subjected to one or the other cultural standards.
