Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition 9781350022799, 9781350022829, 9781350022812

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Postcolonialism, World Literature and the Thousand and One Nights
2. Why Write? Literature According to its Authors
3. Writing for Others: The Public Writer and the Ghostwriter
4. Rewriting the Past: Literature and History
5. Creating ‘Reality’: Literature and Life
6. Writing between Languages: Literature as Translation
7. Francophone Letters: Literature as Encounter
8. The Power of Reading: Living with/through Books
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Writing After Postcolonialism

New Horizons in Contemporary Writing In the wake of unprecedented technological and social change, contemporary literature has evolved a dazzling array of new forms that traditional modes and terms of literary criticism have struggled to keep up with. New Horizons in Contemporary Writing presents cutting-edge research scholarship that provides new insights into this unique period of creative and critical transformation. Series Editors: Bryan Cheyette and Martin Paul Eve Volumes in the series: Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature by Maria Lauret Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption by John McLeod South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation by Jeanne-Marie Jackson Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror by Susana Araújo The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism by Isabelle Hesse Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing by Joseph Brooker (forthcoming)

Writing After Postcolonialism Francophone North African Literature in Transition Jane Hiddleston

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 © Jane Hiddleston, 2017 Jane Hiddleston has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi-vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Alice Marwick All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2279-9 PB: 978-1-3501-0492-1 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2281-2 ePub: 978-1-3500-2280-5 Series: New Horizons in Contemporary Writing Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction 1 Postcolonialism, World Literature and the Thousand and One Nights 2 Why Write? Literature According to its Authors 3 Writing for Others: The Public Writer and the Ghostwriter 4 Rewriting the Past: Literature and History 5 Creating ‘Reality’: Literature and Life 6 Writing between Languages: Literature as Translation 7 Francophone Letters: Literature as Encounter 8 The Power of Reading: Living with/through Books Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

31 61 95 119 145 173 205 229 255 264 276

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for granting me a research fellowship for the year 2014–15, during which I did much of the writing of this book. I am grateful to the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College Oxford, as well as the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford, for supporting this period of leave. I am grateful for the permission to reprint material from several published articles: parts of Chapter  1 will appear in ‘Writing World Literature: Approaches from the Maghreb’, in PMLA October  2016; parts of Chapters 4 and 8 appeared in ‘Rewriting Algeria, Past and Present: History and Cultural Politics in Two Novels by Tahar Djaout’, in The Fiction of History, edited by Alexander Lyon Macfie (Routledge, 2015); parts of Chapter  7 appeared in ‘Nancy, Djebar and the Singularity of Literature’, in Singularity and Transnational Poetics, edited by Birgit Mara Kaiser (Routledge, 2015); parts of Chapter 6 appeared in ‘Le Silence de l’écriture: Arabic and Its Absence in the Works of Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar’ in Fixxion: revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine, 2012. I am very grateful to all the friends and colleagues with whom I have had the opportunity to discuss the issues related to this study. The strand on ‘Intercultural Literary Practices’ at the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation programme at TORCH, which I co-organized with MohamedSalah Omri, offered me many opportunities both to sharpen my thinking on North African literature and to consider notions of literarity and interculturality from a broader perspective. During my Leverhulme Research Fellowship, I participated in conferences at the Université Oran II Mohamed Ben Ahmed, Algeria, and the Université Cadi Ayyad, Marrakesh, and I am grateful to the organizers and participants in both events for providing such a stimulating and thought-provoking arena for discussion. I’m grateful also to David Avital and Bryan Cheyette at Bloomsbury for the enthusiasm with which they greeted this project from our initial correspondence. My writing has benefited from the invaluable input from various friends who have been kind enough to read early drafts of sections for me: Colin Davis, Nick Harrison, Sura Qadiri, Patrick Crowley and Anissa Daoudi. Discussions with my highly

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engaging DPhil students, Edward Still, Vanessa Lee, Khalid Lyamlahy and Alexandra Reza, have also helped me to clarify my thinking in this study. Finally, innumerable thanks are due to Colin and Natasha for their love and support and for ‘keeping my feet on the ground’. Jane Hiddleston, October 2016

Introduction

After the explosion in the popularity of postcolonial studies during the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, critics have increasingly been suggesting that postcolonialism is entering its demise. Even at the discipline’s peak, postcolonial critics tended to open introductions and readers with a discussion of the limited usefulness of the term. And although francophone critics have gradually become more open to the insights offered by postcolonial studies, the notion has been met with particular resistance in the French métropole. Now, more dramatically, there are suggestions that postcolonialism is over and has been replaced by more contemporary concerns such as globalization and the new forms of transnationalism. In 2007, for example, PMLA published an Editor’s Column provocatively entitled ‘The End of Postcolonial Theory’ in which critics debated the misconceptions associated with the use of the term, and although the conclusion was not that it should be incontrovertibly jettisoned, there was certainly a sense that the discipline needed to move on with the times.1 More forcefully, and clearly rather optimistically, Hamid Dabashi asserted in 2012 that the events of the Arab Spring heralded the definitive end of the postcolonial and the start of a new era: ‘we are, in my view, finally overcoming the condition we have termed “coloniality” and, a fortiori, “postcoloniality” ’.2 This book sets out to explore what happened to francophone postcolonial literature in North Africa in the generations after those of the struggle for independence. Far from dismissing the significance of all connection with the colonial past, however, this study will analyse how francophone postcolonial writing has evolved since the 1980s and will explore the new concerns of writers and intellectuals both shaped by and at a distance from the struggles of the generation before. The ‘after’ of Writing After Postcolonialism, therefore, is not intended to denote the completion of a finite period that we might associate with postcoloniality, but rather a continuation and a development. How do

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francophone writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries both build on and alter the postcolonial thinking of their forebears? How does the legacy of French colonialism in the Maghreb trigger or become imbricated in new struggles, and how do these impact on literary culture? More broadly, what role do writers conceive for their craft several decades after the revolutionary moment, and has literature been accorded the same contestatory force more recently as it was by intellectuals of the 1950s such as Frantz Fanon or Kateb Yacine? Writing After Postcolonialism does not, then, concur with pronouncements that postcolonialism is no longer a useful paradigm for understanding contemporary global politics. The book does suggest, however, that postcolonialism now means something rather different from what it meant when the term first became popular, and the Maghreb is taken as a compelling example of a region where the national regimes that have evolved in the wake of the ravages committed by the French colonial power continue to face difficulties both created by and superseding the colonial past. Tensions within and towards the state, moreover, have had a specific impact on conceptions of intellectual dissent and, more specifically, of the role of literary writing in society and culture at large, and the writers chosen for discussion here all reflect on recent and contemporary political history through an investigation of literature’s place both in the modern nation and in the wider world. Shaped by and reflective of their time, the texts at the same time step outside contemporary society in order to rethink their engagement in it and to reassess their ability to challenge orthodoxies and contribute to the creation of alternative local cultures. As Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in their different ways have faced ongoing social dissatisfaction and political unrest, writers question how their work can or indeed cannot  contribute to resistance movements and militate for change. And  while national culture remains a source of contestation in North Africa, many writers question what perhaps oblique or limited role their own cultural activity can have in promoting creative, intellectual and political freedom within the postcolonial nation. It is in Algeria that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have brought the most violent forms of unrest, and it is also Algerian literary writers who have been the most prolific and vocal both in speaking out and in questioning the role of their work in responding to the political troubles of their time. As historian James Le Sueur describes, the early 1980s saw an enormous change in Algeria’s fortunes, indeed ‘one of the biggest shifts in postcolonial history’.3 The Front de libération nationale (FLN) government

Introduction

3

had built out of its revolutionary heritage a monolithic single-party state, an authoritarian regime controlled largely by the military, which insisted on a tight unity that could only be disastrously artificial. Algeria was to be Arabicspeaking and Islamic, as plans to Arabize the education system were quickly if inefficiently set afoot after independence.4 This mythology, however, began to fall apart through the 1980s, with results that turned out to be catastrophic. The astute and powerful President Boumedienne was succeeded by Chadli Benjedid in 1979, but as Michael Willis suggests, Chadli’s ‘grip both on the army as an institution and thus, by extension, the Algerian political system as a whole was far less firm and directed’.5 The Arabization policy pursued by Boumedienne in the wake of independence was also starting to reveal its flaws, as the privileging of Arabic in the education system was not matched by a comparable commitment to it in the administration, with the result that there was large-scale unemployment among young people emerging from Arabic schools. Moreover, the economy was struggling, and after the oil markets crashed in 1986, it took a steep downward turn. Algerian society at the same time became increasingly fractured. As dissatisfaction with the authoritarianism and uniform vision of the FLN grew, protests gathered force across various sectors of the population. The Berber question became pressing after 1980, when a decision by the authorities to cancel a course on Berber poetry at Tizi Ouzou University led to demonstrations and protest across the region of Kabylia. The movement has resurfaced in successive waves since this event, in a call for a more pluralized, liberal and secular Algeria that would challenge the oppressive professed unity of the post-independence regime. The unrest that gathered through the 1980s, however, led at the same time to the growth of an opposing force, in the form of radical Islamism, which in turn presented itself as a major challenge to the Algerian nation state. It was the resurgence of radical Islamism in Algeria that led the nation into the spiral of brutality of the 1990s known as the ‘décennie noire’ or black decade. Again, this descent into violence was at least in part the result of the flawed structure of the postcolonial state as it struggled to reconstruct itself after decolonization, though the evolution of an extremist form of Islamism also created a different form of conflict from that waged against the external oppressor. Dissent against the single-party state was growing in force among multiple groups, and Islamists called for a new party representing and uniting not the secular nation but the Islamic umma in accordance with Shari’a. After the riots of October 1988, Chadli Benjedid allowed the formation of ‘associations of a political character’, and the newly formed Front Islamique du Salut achieved

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a dramatic surge in popularity.6 When the FIS gained a land-slide victory in the 1991 elections, however, the government saw no other option than to cancel the vote and ban the party, forcing the Islamists underground. Although the official party was dismantled, armed groups of Islamists were then formed through 1992, the largest and most brutal of which was the Groupe Islamique Armée, which began a horrific and bloodthirsty campaign of violence not only targeting the state and security forces but also attacking and assassinating foreigners and unveiled women, as well as journalists and intellectuals whose secular views opposed their vision of an Islamic state. Importantly for the present analysis, the Islamist resurgence in Algeria can be understood to be linked with colonial history in the sense that it constitutes a rejection of the state that was created out of independence. Marnia Lazreg has perceptively analysed this association between Islamism and colonialism in Algeria, since, she argues, ‘Algerian culture was displaced and re-territorialized in an effort to create a new social order under the pretence of re-establishing an old one purportedly displaced by colonialism’.7 At the same time, however, the Islamist resurgence also crucially indicates the  emergence of a new set of concerns about the orientation of the current regime and about Islamic identity in the postcolonial context. Moreover, the enemy of liberal writers and thinkers became now not so much the foreign imperialist power, even if both  past and present forms of imperialism remain objects of critique. Rather,  intellectuals have been challenging a set  of forces operating within Algeria that comprised ongoing state repression  together with an increasingly aggressive religious extremism. Francophone literary writers were targeted during the 1990s because  they represented a challenge to both state and  extremist religious orthodoxy and a commitment to individual questioning. The resistance they  expressed was directed towards the  oppressive  political, cultural and religious ideologies that  had grown up within the postcolonial  nation, even if these were also inevitably shaped both by the past and by movements elsewhere, such as in the Middle East. The relationship between the Islamists and the Algerian state was complex, however, and writers and intellectuals have been alienated on both sides. Allegations have been made of support for the Islamists from within the security services, as, according to Le Sueur, it has been suggested that the military may have actually encouraged some of the more brutal attacks in the hope of discrediting the Islamist project. In any case, writers such as Tahar Djaout, Assia Djebar and Boualem Sansal use their work to express criticisms both of the Islamists’ attack on personal and intellectual freedom and of the repressive

Introduction

5

authoritarianism of the military-controlled administration. Djaout was assassinated in June 1993 purportedly by the Groupe islamique armé (GIA), but his writing set out to vilify not only the stultifying effect of extremist orthodoxy but also the oppressive political and cultural ideology of the contemporary Algerian state. The horrific violence of the black decade was put to an end after Bouteflika came into office in 1999, and yet the era of ‘national reconciliation’ cannot be said to have quelled all tensions. Algerian society has in many ways succeeded in regenerating itself since the 1990s and, indeed, there has been a vibrant burgeoning of cultural activity since the turn of the century. Yet many writers still struggle to make sense of what happened during the period of bloodshed in their literary work. One of the ways in which Bouteflika managed to achieve relative peace was by promising an amnesty for the absolution of the crimes of the previous decade, so that there is a sense that justice has not been done. Writers such as Boualem Sansal and Malika Mokeddem, for example, denounce the oppressive silence created by Bouteflika’s amnesties and vilify the institution of a culture of forgetting. Islamism remains a threat in Algeria since the start of the new millennium, moreover, first with the development of the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, and, since 2007, with the new North African branch of Al-Qaeda, known as Al-Qaeda au Maghreb Islamique. This Islamism is now increasingly influenced or driven by other extremist groups in the Middle East, though, as James McDougall also notes, the rekindling of Islamism in Algeria as a result, for example, of the US-led invasion of Iraq should not be overemphasized.8 At the same time, if the threat of Islamist resurgence has not disappeared from Algeria, dissatisfaction with the state is also resurfacing now with the uneasiness created by Bouteflika’s amendment to the constitution, allowing him to serve a third term from 2009, followed by a fourth term from 2014. The post-independence generation in Morocco experienced less extreme unrest than that of Algeria, but the period has nevertheless brought further conflicts and renewed oppression, both of which have their origins in the colonial era while taking a distinct form in the decades after independence. As Benjamin Stora demonstrates, Morocco’s experience of the nation state is very different from that of Algeria.9 The colonial period in Morocco was much shorter than in Algeria, lasting from just 1912 to 1956, and the protectorate left many aspects of the local administration intact. Morocco also has a stronger sense of its long-term, precolonial history, and national unity has been constructed around the figure of the monarchy retaining an established link with local tradition. Nevertheless, the powerful role of the monarchy in

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representing and affirming a new national unity also, after independence, led to a rigid authoritarianism and the attempted eradication of political dissent. In the immediate post-independence period, fracturing between rival groups led to further moves to consolidate the power of the king. After Mohammed V died in 1961 and passed on the throne to his son, Hassan II, the powers of the monarch were further entrenched and, as Michael Willis argues, in the 1962 constitution, ‘not only were the government and ministers made responsible primarily to the king (rather than parliament), but both the person and the institution of the monarchy were made constitutionally inviolable and beyond criticism or question in all matters’.10 The authoritarianism of Hassan II’s long reign from 1961 to 1999 led the period to be known as ‘les années de plomb’ or ‘years of lead’, which peaked during the 1970s and during which dissent and protest were rapidly quashed, intellectuals and critics who contested aspects of the regime were imprisoned, and torture and abuse were employed to root out dissidents.11 Increasing numbers of testimonies and reports have surfaced recently bearing witness, for example, to the brutal conditions in which prisoners were kept in the horrific Tazmamart prison during Hassan II’s reign. The poet Abdellatif Laâbi was imprisoned for eight long years between 1972 and 1980, apparently because of his supposed participation in a coup against Hassan II, though the trial was something of a farce. Broadly, Laâbi was condemned because of his criticisms of the regime and his association as a founding member with Souffles, an avant-garde francophone journal that existed between 1966 and 1972, publishing both poetry and literary writing and, particularly latterly, more overtly political essays. Laâbi’s mistreatment at the hands of the regime is carefully recorded in his prison letters, published in Chroniques de la citadelle d’exil, in which writing is presented as the only meagre, if crucial, consolation for the brutality and isolation he suffered.12 Writing after his liberation, moreover, Laâbi continues to observe the lack of belief in literary writing in Morocco during the 1980s, as ‘l’écrivain est perçu comme un être mineur, ou comme un parasite sans consistance qu’il faut écraser’ [‘the writer is perceived as a minor being or as a weak parasite who has to be crushed’].13 A number of the new literary reviews with which he became associated were banned, and Laâbi left Morocco for France in 1985 because he felt unable to pursue his writing freely in his country of origin. Economic riots in Casablanca in 1981 and in Fes in 1990 triggered a brutal response from authorities, who attempted to hide the scale of the casualties by disposing of the bodies at night, only to trigger further anger among dissidents. Laâbi’s political writings during the

Introduction

7

1990s and 2000s note the attenuation of the regime’s authoritarianism after Mohammed VI came into power in 1999, but he still insists repeatedly on the stasis of a regime he conceives as oppressively archaic.14 Morocco has also not experienced the same resurgence in violent Islamist extremism as Algeria, perhaps in part because of the association between the monarchy and religious identity. Nevertheless, Islamism remains a visible force of dissent. During the 1960s, small groups of Islamists appeared, many of which were then united under the banner of the ‘Islamic Youth’. As movements in Algeria and Tunisia gathered force through the 1970s and 80s, however, Morocco never saw quite the same level of protest, as Hassan II’s strategy to deal with these groups was to bring them into the political system and give them a voice. In the context of the rise of Islamism across the Arab world in recent years, however, Morocco too has suffered from attacks from radicalized groups, including a major suicide bomb attack in Casablanca in May  2003. At the same time, the Berber question has also caused tensions in Morocco, as, like Algeria, Morocco too affirmed an Arab identity after independence and pursued an Arabization policy from the 1960s. Again, Berber protest in Morocco never reached the levels of those that swept across Kabylia in Algeria during the 1980s, but if Hassan II did allow the presence of Berber cultural associations, he nevertheless banned the first edition of a new revue entitled Amazigh in 1980. More broadly, from February 2011 and in response to what is known as the ‘Arab Spring’ in other Arab states, there were demonstrations across Morocco in which people demanded a new constitution that would attenuate the powers of the Monarch and put an end to corruption. Tahar Ben Jelloun argues in his study of the Arab Spring, L’Etincelle, that Morocco has successfully made at least a partial transition to democracy. But the legacy of the years of lead, and ongoing protests, indicate a state still struggling to accept national plurality and allow for political dissension.15 Laâbi’s comments in 2013 on the failure of Morocco to bring about significant constitutional change in the wake of the demonstrations in 2011–2012 also suggest that democratization remains incomplete.16 Until 2011, Tunisia was perceived in the West as one of the most stable regimes in the Arab world, and yet the uprising that inaugurated the ‘Arab Spring’ has now revealed the illusory nature of this image of harmonious postcolonial democracy. Once again, like Algeria and Morocco, in the wake of independence the new nation was tightly controlled by a single authoritarian power. Bourguiba made sure that the constitution of 1959 accorded the maximum power to the president, and he pushed his own image as an integral symbol of the new

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Tunisia. Highly intolerant of criticism, his insistence on his own power only grew through his long term in office through the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike those of Algeria and Morocco, Bourguiba’s programme of Arabization was accompanied at the same time by a vision of francophone modernization, and national identity was conceived to be created out of dialogue, rather than according to a homogenous unified culture. Yet Bourguiba’s regime was met with dissent in part for its occlusion of local history and for its commitment to an inegalitarian market economy.17 Zine al-Adbine Ben Ali, a senior military officer, ousted Bourguiba in November 1987, and although Ben Ali claimed to be committed to opening Tunisia up to multiple political parties, after winning elections in 1989 the president once again assumed much of the political power. As Willis discusses, parties that criticized the regime were quickly marginalized.18 Moreover, Tunisia has also seen protest from Islamists, starting in the 1960s, in response to dissatisfaction with the post-independence regime. The MTI (Mouvement de la tendance islamique) organized itself into a unified group during the 1980s, though Bourguiba’s regime was quick to crack down on the movement. After Ben Ali’s coup in 1987, the MTI renamed itself An-Nahda, meaning Renaissance, and applied for recognition of status as a political party. When the request was declined, a series of violent attacks against security forces ensued. Unlike in Algeria, however, in a sweep of arrests the government succeeded in crippling the movement and Tunisia, therefore, did not experience the same descent into brutality witnessed across the border. Nevertheless the authoritarian regime clearly masked growing fragmentation and unrest. The revolution that broke out in January 2011 was not, however, an Islamist movement, but a broad statement of dissidence against the years of corruption and repression instituted by the national regime. If the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on 17  December  2010 was the trigger for the uprising, that was because the humiliation he suffered represented the broader injustice of Ben Ali’s political system and widespread unemployment and poverty among the Tunisian population. Known within Tunisia as the Revolution of Dignity, moreover, the uprising was a protest not only against corruption and social deprivation but also against restrictions on freedom of speech. Ben Ali immediately stepped down, and after much instability, it looked as if Tunisia might finally accomplish a successful transition to democracy. Elections in October 2011 led to the creation of a coalition government and brought in a new constitution, though security has continued to be a problem due to the radicalization of the Salafi movement, and the government failed

Introduction

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to resolve ongoing economic difficulties. There has been further conflict between Islamists and the other parties, indicating ongoing fragmentation, and the economy continues to suffer with high unemployment. The modernist party Nida Tounes won the election in 2014, but terrorist attacks on the Bardo Museum in Tunis in March 2015 and in Sousse in June 2015 demonstrate the continuing problem of radicalization, influenced by conflicts in other parts of the Middle East. As in Algeria and Morocco, the postcolonial period from a broad perspective has seen successive regimes struggle to maintain a stable position between oppressive authoritarianism, on the one hand, and fracturing and dissent, on the other. The forms of dissidence and political critique across the region may seem far from those of the nationalist programmes of the anti-colonial period. In each case, though in different ways, however, the generations succeeding those of the decolonization movements in these nations have struggled to secure peaceful and lasting democracy, and even at the time of writing there remain significant levels of dissatisfaction with state regimes that have not yet managed to balance authority with the people’s emancipation after the removal of the colonial power. Many commentators, such as Hamid Dabashi, cited at the beginning, at least initially perceived the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising in Tunisia as the welcome harbinger of deep-rooted change, and certainly journalists and commentators covering events in the immediate aftermath expressed hope for the emergence of a new regime promoting freedom and equality. Algeria and Morocco have not witnessed the sorts of changes seen by other Arab states since 2011, though both societies are evidently far more open than they were at the end of the twentieth century. ‘Transition’ in this context is not so much a shift from one state to another, then, but an ongoing movement whose end remains difficult to envision. Both countries have witnessed at the same time a form of cultural regeneration and, indeed, the editorial introduction of a recent volume entitled Algérie: la nahda des Lettres, la renaissance des mots’ argues that Algerian literature is now experiencing a renaissance after the ravages of the 1990s.19 The flourishing of local publishing houses such as Barzakh in Algiers, Elyzad in Tunisia or La Croisée des Chemins in Morocco offers a home to creative and avant-garde writing and testifies to a renewed cultural vibrancy.20 Nevertheless, it is clear that during this epoch of change and unrest since the 1980s, periods of restriction on freedom of expression have generated questioning also about the critical role of literary creativity, a questioning that has both given rise to forms of aesthetic and formal experimentation and to a renewed awareness of

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literature’s precarious status in the ongoing transition to democracy. It is this questioning that will be the main focus of this book. **** Many francophone North African writers seek to challenge the restrictive cultural ideologies both of contemporary political regimes and of Islamist extremism. In so doing, however, some of the most thoughtful and sophisticated writers of the period since 1980 at the same time express a renewed concern about the status of their own project and its resonance in the face of oppressive forces that seek to crush dissent. Literary writing is on the one hand celebrated as a space for the expression of modes of thinking that have no place in the official political arena; it is a liberated and unregulated form that works outside ideology and where it is possible to imagine alternative modes of thinking and cultural creation. On the other hand, however, despite an ongoing commitment to the critique of authoritarianism, the ability of literature to exert influence on politics as well as on the wider society is something that recent writers openly throw into question. Some of the writers explored here have been either themselves, or have seen their peers, censored or more brutally silenced, and though this indicates the extent to which their work has been perceived to be powerful, it also reveals how the state regimes as well as the extremist groups that have targeted them harbour a profound suspicion towards creativity and critical thinking. Having lost the more explicitly revolutionary rhetoric of writers of the independence movement, those analysed in the present study appear to be rather more variable and uncertain in their conception of the role of their art, and despite remaining committed to both aesthetic and political contestation, they have produced a series of self-conscious works in which literature itself is figured as a character held up for scrutiny. While reflecting on national culture and its reinvention a generation or more after that of the anti-colonial movements, they also look back critically at their own work, as the status of literature remains uncertain. The writers explored in this study all write in French, which itself places their work in opposition to state-governed, nationalist policies of Arabization. Francophone literature clearly occupied a problematic position during the anticolonial period, as writers and intellectuals expressed their resistance to the French colonial presence in the language of the colonizer. If, however, until independence French was the hegemonic language, the Arabization policies that followed independence set out to overturn that colonial legacy but brought with them in their turn a new set of tensions. The official establishment of

Introduction

11

Arabic as the national language in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia means that French is now for some writers a language of dissent. In a certain irony, the state vision of Arabic monolingualism mimics French Republican and colonial ideology in pursuing linguistic unity in order to shore up political cohesion in societies that have historically been linguistically diverse. The assertiveness of the Arabization programmes, however, has varied across North Africa. In Tunisia, although Arabic was declared to be the national language after independence, the administration has remained openly bilingual. In Morocco, Arabization was pursued more rigorously in the years after decolonization, with the creation, for example, of the Institut d’Etudes et de Recherches pour l’Arabisation in 1960, which set out to promote and implement a programme of Arabization in education and administration.21 In Algeria, however, the push towards Arabization was both more comprehensive and more problematic. As James McDougall notes, the Arabization programme in Algeria was the most ambitious in the Maghreb, and the language policy and the broader concept of ‘Arabism’ promoted by the state have been highly artificial: Not only has it tended to suppress and delegitimize autochtonous and distinctive Amazigh (Berber) language and culture, but official AraboIslamism has also been criticized as cut off from the country’s own distinctive and local vernacular Arabic and popular religious patrimony. It has also, of course, served to delegitimize the undiminished (indeed growing) importance of broader, Mediterranean, cosmopolitan and predominantly, though not exclusively, francophone cultural, intellectual and economic connections among much of the general population – and to mask their continuing predominance among the elite.22

Despite its ongoing association with the colonial past, then, francophone writing in this context at the same time becomes a statement of resistance to the postcolonial state, and francophone writers tend to use French to affirm Algerian cultural plurality. The state-controlled vision of Arabization, and its insistence on classical Arabic, fails to account for the extent to which Algeria, as well as Morocco and Tunisia, is a diverse, multilingual society, as the population speak in their dayto-day lives dialectal Arabic or Darija, French, Berber languages, and also in some cases Spanish and Italian.23 Arab culture as it is affirmed in North Africa by local writers, artists and musicians is also itself far more diverse linguistically than the Arabization policies in Algeria and also Morocco seemed to allow.24 As the Moroccan writer Fouad Laroui acerbically laments, monolingualism in Morocco, for example, is nothing less than ‘fake’ and creates a real dilemma

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Writing After Postcolonialism

for writers for whom classical Arabic is divorced from their everyday idiom.25 Alongside the use of Berber languages and spoken forms of Arabic, then, selfexpression in French has also in many cases come to constitute an affirmation of the diversity that the ruling ideology seeks to deny. Nevertheless, French retains at the same time a considerable hold in the administration in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and there is something of a contradiction between language usage in the political arena and the broader ideological vision of Arabization, as Ahmed Moatassime eloquently suggests: ‘tout se passe comme si le «monstre bureaucratique» fonctionne et ronronne à l’unison en français, mais produit à l’infini un «message» arabe, même incomprehensible, à destination du public’ [‘it is as if the “bureaucratic monster” functions and ticks over in unison in French but endlessly produces an Arabic “message”, albeit incomprehensible, addressed to the public’].26 In reality, much of the administration even in Algeria still uses French, so that it remains a language used by an élite, even as writers deploy it as a symbol of freedom of expression and cultural dialogue. Francophone writers can as a result be seen somehow as both marginalized dissenters and the bearers of a certain symbolic and cultural power. They may be highly controversial but they are not underprivileged; they represent not only a cultural minority but also a certain status. The ambiguous status of francophone writing in the Maghreb, however, is also the result of the eclectic state of francophone publishing in the region. Many of the writers explored in the present study are published in France, for a variety of reasons, including the underdevelopment of francophone publishing houses in North Africa and tighter restrictions on what it is acceptable to print. Hafid Gafaïti’s article ‘Between God and the President: Literature and Censorship in North Africa’ tracks, for example, the complex history of literary censorship in the region in order to demonstrate how state control over publishing has waxed and waned with political changes.27 Writers such as Mimouni and Boudjedra, notes Gafaïti, have had their works banned for periods before they were subsequently welcomed back into local bookshops, as tolerance of political and religious critique has come and gone and as the state has wanted intermittently to celebrate their work as part of the national culture. These variations notwithstanding, it is evident that it has been easier for many writers to publish their work in France, in part not only in order to escape restrictions on freedom of expression, but also because there they reach a larger audience, sell more books and get paid in European currency. As a result, francophone literature is often not given the recognition it is due in the Maghreb. In Algeria, and until recently in Morocco, it has been a bitter source

Introduction

13

of contestation. And, according to Hédi Bouraoui, at least in 1995, francophone writers in Tunisia were still excluded from the Union des Ecrivains, reserved for arabophones and francophone Tunisian literature is rarely taught in schools.28 Over the last fifteen years or so, local publishing houses such as Barzakh and Elyzad have started actively to develop the production of literature in French and to promote cultural diversity, but francophone literature nonetheless remains somewhat marginal.29 On the one hand, for writers still shaped by the memory of decolonization, writing in French remains marked by traces of the colonial conflict. For Assia Djebar, born in 1936, the French language is a ‘Tunique de Nessus’, the poisoned shirt that killed Heracles, a form that destroys what it contains.30 On the other hand, for those who began writing some time after independence, writing in French triggers less of a stark ideological conflict and rather a broader, less definable source of tension or non-belonging, either a rootlessness or a tool for critique from outside what they see as the prevailing political ideology. For the Tunisian poet Tahar Bekri, born in 1951, it remains ‘une conquête’ [‘a conquest’], not so much an open conflict, however, but ‘pacifique et belle, mais cela est loin d’être sans passion’ [‘peaceful and beautiful, though not at all lacking in passion’].31 For Maïssa Bey, an Algerian writer born in 1950, French is not the language of the enemy, but rather ‘cette langue que je séjourne sans visa’ [‘this language in which I dwell without a visa’], a space for self-expression without ownership that does not for her conform to a single cultural ideology.32 French is also for some in part associated with exile or with a lack of a sense of integration with local history and tradition. According to Leïla Sebbar, for example, her own written French is shaped by the absence of Arabic, her father’s language, and her texts trace the silence of her Arabic heritage between their lines.33 For others, however, it was scarcely offered at school as a result of the Arabization policies. Kamel Daoud, who taught himself French, suggests in this context that, ‘le français représentait la digression, la dissidence’ [‘French represented digression, dissidence’].34 Daoud describes the language of his writing not as ‘butin de guerre’ [‘war booty’], the much cited metaphor of Kateb Yacine, but rather as a ‘bien vacant’, a term used to refer to properties vacated by the French after independence, and signifying here a form the writer can appropriate that allows him to express his dissent towards the contemporary regime. These comments on the use of French convey both the potential freedom it might bring and a sense of non-belonging. Yet if Daoud suggests that Kateb’s metaphor of war booty, conceived to describe his revolutionary writing in the lead-up to independence, is no longer appropriate, then despite the militancy

14

Writing After Postcolonialism

of some of Daoud’s own writing, this shift also brings with it a broader reappraisal of literary contestation. Khatibi’s study of the Maghrebian novel after independence, Le Roman maghrébin, emphasizes the link between the revolution and the novel, and although one of Khatibi’s principal arguments here is that Maghrebian writing is formally experimental, he nevertheless associates the use of inventive language during this period with anti-colonial critique.35 As I have explored elsewhere, moreover, Fanon’s vision of national culture during the anti-colonial movement in Les Damnés de la terre placed literature at the very centre of the combat.36 With a certain messianism to his tone, Fanon celebrates the co-implication of militant action with literary writing and urges the people to construct their resistance both through revolutionary struggle on the ground and through the invention of a new culture. Decolonization requires, according to Fanon, not only the seizing of power but also the creation of new men, and this redefinition depends on the imagination and also takes place through culture, including literature. Fanon’s view of Algerian literature is, however, somewhat limited, and he seems to valorise only writing that concisely and directly represents the contemporary conflict. Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma, published in 1956 and also reflecting on the struggle for independence, offers a far more subtle vision of revolutionary writing and manages to combine a sharp condemnation of French injustices with a highly complex and opaque literary form. Despite the circuitous structure of the narrative, however, and despite the ambivalent and allusive character of its heroine, Kateb continues to conceive his art as a form of insurrection. For Kateb, ‘le poète, c’est la révolution à l’état nu, le mouvement même de la vie dans une incessante explosion’ [‘the poet is a revolution in its unadorned form, the very movement of life in an incessant explosion’].37 The ‘revolutionary’ character of the literature of the next generation is, however, in many cases more uncertain. Evidently, some of the writers explored in this book have been perceived by the authorities to be incendiary, and though these authorities sought to quash literary dissidence, the brutality of their treatment of writers also testifies to a belief in the potential power of their work. As I mentioned earlier, in the 1970s the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi was tortured before being imprisoned as a result of his dissident thinking and activism against the repressive Moroccan regime. In addition, a death threat was issued against the Algerian novelist Rachid Boudjedra after the publication of La Répudiation in 1969 due to the explicit condemnation of women’s mistreatment in contemporary Algeria, and although Boudjedra was temporarily rehabilitated in Algeria in 1975, he was again condemned

Introduction

15

by Islamists in the late 1980s and ultimately forced to take refuge in France. Many Algerian writers indeed chose to live abroad to escape persecution during the ‘décennie noire’. And some who have opted to remain there, such as Boualem Sansal, have seen their works banned at home. Most tragically, as I also mentioned earlier, Tahar Djaout was one of the first of a series of thinkers, artists and journalists to be assassinated in 1993, purportedly by the GIA, though there were allegations at the time that the authorities might have been responsible. Whoever was to blame, Djaout’s writing clearly represented a dangerous claim to intellectual freedom and a force for dissent that needed to be extinguished. If the brutality of this crushing of creative thinking on some level testifies to its contestatory power, some more recent commentators have gone so far as to read into the most challenging works by these writers, an anticipation of the uprisings associated with the ‘Arab spring’. According to Faustin Mvogo, many of the great francophone Maghrebian writers since decolonization had already predicted the revolt that burst onto the streets in Tunisia and across the Arab world in 2011, in that they had been criticizing national regimes since the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, commenting on Arab literature more broadly, Michael Binyon suggested in an article in Le Monde in April 2011 that literary writers prepared the terrain for the political tumult, and Peter Clark wrote in the Guardian during the same month that a revolution in Arab fiction ‘prefigured  the Arab spring’.38 More specifically and perhaps less grandiosely, Mohamed-Salah Omri has emphasized the role and power in particular of poetry during the Tunisian revolution. Although Omri too notes an attenuation in the belief in the revolutionary power of literature, he argues compellingly that the uprising came out of a culture of resistance also expressed through poetry, and he analyses both the implications of the use of a line from Abou el-Kasem Chebbi’s 1933 poem ‘The Will of Life’ as a slogan for the revolution, and the contestatory power of the poetry of Mohamed Sgaeir Awlad Ahmed.39 Indeed, Tunisia had recently started to see the emergence of a literature denouncing the regime and exposing the horrors of the prison system under Ben Ali in the lead-up to the uprising. Some of the aforementioned claims may be highly optimistic about the impact of literature on political movements, but it is perhaps significant that they nevertheless indicate a belief in the ability of literary works to voice dissent in ways that might  reflect or help to envision revolt across the Arab world. Despite these assertions of literature’s capacity to fuel insurrection, however, the North African writers explored in the present work perceive the force

16

Writing After Postcolonialism

of their work in more complex ways. It is perhaps tempting to overstate the relationship between literature and activism in this context; yet according to Abdeljalil Lahjomri writing just a little later in 2013, those involved in the uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’ were mostly not writers, and a profound and lasting literary reflection on the events will only come much later, after a considerable period of reflection.40 Many literary writers in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia have over the past thirty years or so also tended to express in their works a sense of uncertainty about what literature can do, and about what place its questioning might have, in their contemporary climate. Restrictions on the freedom of literary expression may, importantly, not have induced writers to abandon any belief at all in the contestatory power of their art, and many remain committed to using the experimentalism of literary form to denounce both authoritarianism and extremism. Nevertheless, some of the most subtle and compelling texts of the period do analyse again the form of that contestatory power. Literature clearly can offer a space for dissent, but its fragile status in a political climate deeply unsettled by the twin forces of nationalist repression and Islamist extremism has provoked many writers to abandon Fanon’s or Kateb’s vocabulary of revolution or insurrection through art. Literary writing perhaps, as we shall see, invites alternative modes of thinking both in its creator and in its readers, but in questioning orthodoxies it also questions itself. This is not, however, to say that the self-conscious works explored in the present study necessarily participate in what might be conceived as postmodern textual play. Charles Bonn was correct to observe in the generation of the 1970s a move away from realism and an attempt to create alternative modes of questioning by manipulating the form of their writing, but it is also true that in the face of the violence in Algeria during the 1990s, a number of writers sought again to offer a more direct and unmediated account of the effects of the brutality on people’s lives.41 As Hafid Gafaïti argues, however, the resurgence of testimonial writing in response to the brutality has nevertheless been accompanied by aesthetic experimentation: ‘il n’en demeure pas moins que l’expérience individuelle et le témoignage sont portés par une formalisation, une réflexion et un travail d’écriture’ [‘it is nonetheless true that individual experience and testimony are conveyed by means of a reflection on form and by work on the writing process’].42 Yet if the texts analysed here share with ‘postmodern’ literature a concern with literary language and a desire to probe the very process of constructing textual meaning, they in no way privilege attention to form to the detriment of any specific engagement with

Introduction

17

the concrete political questions of their time. The self-consciousness of these works lies rather in the ways in which they figure literature, the writing process and narrative, so that these are presented as an agent in the text, as a crucial part of the characters’ lives and of their understanding of history and the social world. When they question the power of literary narrative and the sorts of meaning it is able to produce, these writers do not so much offer a postmodern critique of language, as incorporate literature more concretely into the storyline, so that literature is conceived to be a crucial part of the characters’ experience of and engagement with contemporary society and politics. As I suggested earlier, literature is examined here as if it were a character itself and certainly as a significant aspect of the subject’s mode of interacting with the world. The idea of the literary in postcolonial criticism has already received a good deal of attention and remains a subject of some controversy. Broadly, a number of critics have pointed out the inadequacy of readings of postcolonial literature that focus on history and politics to the detriment of the aesthetic and that reduce literary texts to the status of a straightforward historical testimony. Deepika Bahri’s Native Intelligence, published in 2003, demonstrates the naivety of readings that fail to attend to literary aesthetics, and Bahri offers a series of commentaries on literary works in which form is considered to be a crucial part of the texts’ engagement with the political world.43 Nick Harrison’s special issue of Paragraph entitled ‘The Idea of the Literary’ and published in 2005 draws attention to the need for literature to be treated properly as literature, and Harrison’s own contribution to the volume calls for further reflection on the complex ways in which literary works both refer to the world and call into question that process of reference.44 A number of postcolonial critics have taken these arguments on board, including most provocatively Chris Bongie’s Friends and Enemies on the ‘scribal politics’ of postcolonial literature, as well as Eli Park Sorensen’s Postcolonial Studies and the Literary on the inability of postcolonial theory adequately to theorize the work of literature, and indeed my own Decolonising the Intellectual on politics and culture during the period of decolonization.45 Rather than rehearsing these postcolonial debates again, however, the next section responds to this call for proper reflection on the status of the literary by exploring its broader resonance in relation to democracy, as a means of thinking through the particular status of North African literature in the transitional period in question in this book.

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Writing After Postcolonialism

Literature and democracy The association between literature and democracy is crystallized perhaps most visibly in the notion of ‘littérature engagée’ or committed literature – a form of writing clearly responding to the exigencies of its time. Benoît Denis’s study of literature and ‘engagement’ demonstrates that literature has on some level always engaged with the social and political world, but nevertheless argues that the notion grew in significance after the Great War and reached a sort of apogée during Sartre’s epoch. It was Sartre who most famously and most explicitly established the association between literature and democracy in his highly provocative Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, and it is Sartre’s model of ‘engagement’ that forms the basis for many recent critical conceptions of literature as a dissenting force. As is well known, the context for Sartre’s argument was the Nazi occupation of France, and against this totalitarianism Sartre affirmed the role of literature in representing human freedom and democracy. In describing the world, argued Sartre, the literary text was actively able to change it, to shape it anew and to launch an attack on orthodox ways of seeing.46 At the same time, the writer was conceived to call upon the reader to think and to respond, and in so doing he or she would be promoting the individual questioning that would be integral to a democratic society. More broadly, however, Denis also suggests that ‘engagement’ is a form of active participation, and it is a way for a writer to assume responsibility and to speak in the name of the society in which he or she lives. ‘Engagement’ could be understood, then, as the ‘conscience lucide de l’écrivain d’appartenir au monde et volonté de le changer’ [‘the writer’s lucid awareness of his belonging in the world and desire to change it’].47 Denis perceptively demonstrates how the notion of ‘engagement’ was in fact most explicitly theorized at a moment when there seemed to be a new sense of doubt about the political importance of literary writing, but his analysis still tends to emphasize the central power of the writer in establishing the political role of his or her work. Denis notes that the impact of the committed work may never be assured or known in advance, but his conception of ‘engagement’ nevertheless stresses the writer’s sense of his or her own ethical responsibility to participate in public debate through writing. This call for a ‘littérature engagée’ is, moreover, a way to reaffirm the importance of literature and to reestablish its central role in society, as Denis argues, ‘on ne saurait dire plus clairement que l’engagement représente malgré tout une certaine façon de croire encore à la littérature et en ses pouvoirs’

Introduction

19

[‘one cannot state clearly enough that commitment represents in spite of everything a certain way of believing in literature and its powers’].48 ‘Engagement’ from this perspective is a way of participating in public debate and implies that the writer on some level speaks on behalf of society in order to promote the people’s freedom within the polity. The committed writer is thoroughly implicated in his work and assumes an ethical role in allying his or her writing to the cause of social and political improvement. While the North African writers explored here are evidently politically engaged in the struggle for democracy and certainly write in the name of freedom, it is nevertheless significant they are also quite divorced from the political arena, which they either critique, or towards which they express their dissatisfaction, from the outside. Certainly Abdellatif Laâbi, for example, stresses his own ‘engagement’ and indeed affirms repeatedly in his political writing even after the end of the reign of Hassan II that democracy in Morocco remains his main preoccupation. The writing of Laâbi’s compatriot Abdelhak Serhane, moreover, is among the most viscerally angry of his generation, and is evoked as a sign of the endurance of literary ‘engagement’ by Khalid Zekri in his volume of critical essays.49 Nevertheless, Laâbi argues at the same time that the difficulty for contemporary Moroccan intellectuals is their lack of solidarity and cohesiveness: ‘s’ils prennent position, agissent, ils le font en ordre dispersé et le plus souvent à titre individuel’ [‘if they take a stand or act, they do it in a dispersed manner and most often as individuals’].50 He also notes that many writers and thinkers are suspicious of the notion of ‘engagement’ because for them it connotes ‘embrigadement’ [‘indoctrination’] and the reduction of cultural activity to a political programme (though Laâbi himself does not agree with this judgement). Furthermore, as Julija Šukys records, Tahar Djaout asserted quite adamantly that ‘littérature engagée’ was not the appropriate term for the kind of contestatory writing he himself produced since ‘in Algeria, in the 1970s, to become engaged necessarily meant to be on the side of power, to be against a certain number of realities, or specters like imperialism, neocolonialism … In this sense, many writers who were engaged were at the same time very servile’.51 Although Djaout specifically mentions the 1970s here, this association between national culture and the memory of the War of Independence continues to result in the marginalization of other forms of writing and other literary subjects into the 1980s and 1990s. Writers of this generation may also participate in public debate, but they do not necessarily conceive themselves as speaking for the rest of society, and although they may associate writing with

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Writing After Postcolonialism

freedom, it is not clear that they write on behalf of a specific disenfranchized community that shares their views. As Gafaïti also argues, this generation, represented by the major figures of Assia Djebar and Rachid Mimouni, write in the name of individual freedom rather than in the name of the community, and their critique from the margins means that ‘leur combat dépasse les limites du politique’ [‘their combat exceeds the limits of the political’].52 Moreover, if writers like Assia Djebar, Abdelkébir Khatibi and Salim Bachi remain committed to challenging orthodoxies and to pursuing intellectual freedom, their writing also expresses deep disillusionment with the contemporary political arena and a broader commitment to representing history and culture beyond the confines of national society in the present. Beyond this conception of the committed writer’s position in his or her society, however, it has also been suggested that literature per se intrinsically invokes democracy. Literature would from this perspective be by its very nature an expression of democracy regardless of the writer’s intentions or activism, and literary form itself would be part of the work’s potentially incendiary quality in societies such as those of North Africa as they struggle to establish their own form of democracy after the end of colonial rule. This co-implication of literature with democracy has been understood to operate in several ways. In a wide-ranging article entitled ‘Démocratie de la fiction’, Philippe Roussin argues first that literature (by which he assumes European literature) of the democratic age is now concerned above all not with difference but with sharing and equality.53 Following Tocqueville, he then argues that literature emerging from democratic societies is able to explore humanity itself, and it looks beyond deterministic systems and specific ideologies to take on board the broader potential of human creativity. Literature is bound up with democracy, then, because it precisely asks open questions and posits alternatives to accepted truths: ‘cette interrogation de la fiction littéraire sur un monde qui pourrait ne pas être ce qu’il est est à rapprocher de cette “dissolution des repères de la certitude” (Claude Lefort) dans quoi la démocratie s’institue et se maintient, de l’inconnu et de l’indétermination qui la caractérisent’ [‘literary fiction’s interrogation of a world that might not exist can be associated with that “dissolution of the markers of certainty” (Claude Lefort) in which democracy is created and maintained, and with the indeterminacy and the unfamiliarity by which it is characterised’].54 Literature’s capacity to resist determinisms and to explore the potential of humanity is conceived in a more specific way by Patrick Deneen and Joseph Romance to emerge through the use of character. Democratic literature, they argue, allows us to think beyond the restrictions of

Introduction

21

individualist thinking by inviting us to see the world from different perspectives, and yet at the same time, in presenting its characters precisely as specific, it prevents us from losing a sense of the distinctiveness of particular modes of thought.55 Roussin, Deneen and Romance at times seem to slip between a conception of the democratic significance of all literature and a reflection on literature as it is produced in European or American societies. Nevertheless, their broader theses provocatively suggest that literature may be able to perform aspects of democratic thinking in its envisaging of potential ways of being and seeing without presenting these as new orthodoxies. Derrida famously goes further, however, in affirming that literature and democracy are inextricable. Derrida’s argument rests on the observation that in the work of literature, statements can be made that are not necessarily wholly endorsed by the text, and this capacity to experiment with ideas without adhering to truth or to a particular belief system allows the literary work potentially to say anything (‘tout dire’). Literature is a vast forum for experimentation: ‘la littérature lie ainsi son destin à une certaine non-censure, à l’espace de la liberté démocratique (liberté de presse, liberté d’opinion, etc.). Pas de démocratie sans littérature, pas de littérature sans démocratie’ [‘literature thus ties its destiny to a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc). No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy’].56 Literature is indissociable from democracy, according to Derrida, because it is defined by its evocation of potentialities and by its ability to say things that are not already established as either truthful or acceptable, and democracy must allow that freedom of expression in order to be faithful to its foundational principles of equality and emancipation. At the same time, however, as Peggy Kamuf points out in her reading of Derrida’s Sauf le nom, and as Jacques Rancière argues more broadly in La Haine de la démocratie, democracy must always undermine itself in order to avoid becoming a newly oppressive law.57 In Derrida’s words, democracy must remain ‘to come’, as indeed ‘to exist in a democracy is to agree to challenge and be challenged, to challenge the status quo which is called democratic, in the name of a democracy to come’.58 Literature too, then, must display its own provisional status if it is to retain its association with democratic questioning and freedom. Rancière’s analysis of the relationship between literature and democracy in La Politique de la littérature offers an extended reflection on the ways in which literature represents democratic principles of creativity as opposed to orthodoxy, and multiplicity as opposed to the determinisms of any ruling ideology. Politics begins, according to Rancière, with the ‘partage du sensible’

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Writing After Postcolonialism

[‘the distribution of the perceptible’], which allows new subjects and objects to become perceptible, to be represented.59 Opening his study with a critique of the restrictiveness of Sartre’s insistence on the use of transitive language in ‘littérature engagée’, which he argued had to take the form of prose as opposed to poetry, Rancière perceives a form of democratic thinking in art’s ability to create new ways of establishing relationships between language and the world. Rancière disagrees with Sartre’s reading of Flaubert’s prose, for example, as a sort of pure art that ‘petrifies’ people and objects, and rather draws attention to the critics who saw in Flaubert’s attention to lofty subjects alongside trivial or base ones a sort of democratic egalitarianism. Indeed, Flaubert’s attention to material things could be understood as part of his refusal to adhere his writing to any particular set of principles and as a sign of its democratic nature: L’écrivain pour lui devait se garder de rien vouloir prouver. Mais cette indifférence à l’égard de tout message était pour ces critiques la marque même de la démocratie. Celle-ci signifiait pour eux le régime de l’indifférence généralisée, l’égale possibilité d’être démocrate, antidémocrate, ou indifférent à la démocratie. Quels que pussent être les sentiments de Flaubert à l’égard du peuple et de la République, sa prose, elle, était démocrate. Elle était même l’incarnation de la démocratie.60 [For Flaubert, the writer had to be wary of trying to prove anything. But this indifference to any message was, for Flaubert’s critics, the very mark of democracy which, for them, meant the regime of generalized indifference, the equal possibility of being democratic, antidemocratic or indifferent to democracy. Whatever Flaubert’s feelings about the people and the Republic may have been, his prose was democratic. It was the very embodiment of democracy].

Crucially, then, Flaubert’s writing can be conceived to be democratic when it refuses to treat people and objects hierarchically, when no character or object is presented as more important than another and when no single, unchanging set of principles governs the form and structure of the narrative. Moreover, the affirmation of the autonomy of the literary work, and the withdrawal of the writer as guiding voice, means that it is opened up to anyone to interpret it for themselves. The literary text does not address a particular preconceived audience – anyone can produce it or read it in their own way and outside the established frameworks of social doxa. More broadly, Rancière also defines the democracy of literature as distinct from political democracy. Literature throws into question the relationship between language and meaning and it redeploys words in order to open up

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23

new possibilities of signification. In this way it is clearly distinct from the polemical discourse of politicians, even those operating within democratic regimes. Literature represents a different form of politics itself, as Rancière argues: À cette mise en scène démocratique la littérature oppose une autre politique, dont le principe est de rendre à sa vanité le tapage des orateurs du peuple nourris à l’ancienne rhétorique, de quitter la scène de la parole portée par les voix sonores pour déchiffrer les témoignages que la société elle-même donne à lire, pour déterrer ceux qu’elle dépose sans le vouloir ni le savoir dans les bas-fonds obscurs. À la scène bruyante des orateurs s’oppose le voyage dans les souterrains qui en détiennent la vérité cachée.61 [The principle of this politics is to return to its vanity the great racket made by the orators of the people, brought up on the old rhetoric, and to quit the stage of speech carried by sonorous voices in order to decipher the testimonies that society itself offers for us to read, to disinter those society unwittingly and unintentionally deposits in its dark underground shoals. The noisy stage of the orators is opposed by the journey through the subterranean passages that hold its hidden truth.]

In turning its attention to hidden subjects, and in portraying the complexity and slipperiness of the relation between language and meaning, literature is able to uncover the blindness even of democratic discourses and to encourage reflection on the limitations of any overriding principle, even that of democracy itself. It is political in the sense that it creates an alternative mode of representation, one that belongs precisely not to the established regime of political signification, but one that is perhaps closer to a kind of ‘metapolitics’. This metapolitics is nevertheless a powerful site of critique for Rancière. These reflections on the relationship between literature and democracy provide a thought-provoking background for reading works questioning the power of literature, as Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian societies continue to struggle to establish properly democratic regimes some decades after decolonization. As we shall see, the literatures explored in this book tend to represent not so much distinct communities or precise political agendas as individual perspectives promoting human creativity and freedom in a way that might be conceived to illustrate Roussin’s or Deneen’s and Romance’s arguments. The writers in Ben Jelloun’s L’Ecrivain public or Daoud’s ‘La Préface du nègre’, or Djaout’s historian in L’Invention du desert, for example, represent creative figures operating outside sanctioned discourses, and they offer both distinct perspectives on their contemporary context and a commitment to

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Writing After Postcolonialism

broader human equality in their ability to perceive their own limitations. In addition, Djaout’s Le Dernier été de la raison explicitly demonstrates how literature can challenge the conception of a single (in this case Islamist) truth, and Djaout’s portrayal of the ways in which, through reading, the bookseller is continually confronted with other worlds and other modes of life serves as an example of how literary experimentation, as Derrida similarly conceives it, promotes individual thought and questioning. If Rancière, moreover, emphasizes the ability of literature to expose hidden, ‘subterranean’ worlds in order to reveal the artificiality of the discourses of politicians, then all these texts cited earlier depict unusual figures who do not belong to any specified community but reflect upon society as if from the outside. And if Rancière also understood literature’s capacity to mine processes of signification as a commitment to exposing the hackneyed phrases of political rhetoric, then Djebar’s subtle investigation of literature through the figure of the letter in L’Amour, la fantasia certainly develops an understanding of linguistic complexity that might concur with that of Rancière. Importantly, however, if democratic thinking can only ever remain democratic if it is able to consistently question itself, then many of the works discussed here too display that sense of doubt about their own position. Literature is often figured as a source of questioning, and some of the works by writers examined here have therefore been subjected to censorship, as we have seen, by authoritarian and antidemocratic regimes in Algeria and Morocco. Yet while championing free thinking, these works also manifest their own provisionality precisely by representing literature as fragile, alienated and subject to misreading. When set alongside the contexts of the writers explored here, moreover, the theories of French thinkers such as Derrida and Rancière can seem optimistic; they celebrate literature’s inherent capacity to figure freedom of thought precisely within European and American regimes that at least purportedly, if not unproblematically, promote democracy. Literature may also represent democratic thinking in North Africa, but its capacity either to contribute to the establishment of political democracy or more broadly just to alter expectations is evidently in this context highly limited. As Laâbi noted in the case of Morocco, moreover, the marginalization and isolation of writers and intellectuals have made it very difficult for them to militate effectively for concrete political change. Derrida and Rancière may not have believed that literature could help to bring about the establishment of better democratic regimes, but there is in their writing a celebration of freedom of expression and thought that is evidently shared by the writers explored here. Yet they write in

Introduction

25

a context where the commitment to such principles is by no means widespread and where they feel that the free thinking they at once recommend and perform takes place in some degree of isolation. Finally, Rancière’s conception of the disruptive potential of literature implies that readers will necessarily perceive that disruption as they read, yet as Djaout, or Djebar, or Daoud know literary works cannot programme a response in advance even if they do reach readers beyond a somewhat marginalized circle of intellectuals. Rather, their works stage processes of questioning while at the same time portraying the difficulty of both expressing and maintaining political critique in literary form. The rest of this book builds on this political and philosophical context by offering commentaries on North African texts produced since the transitional period of the 1980s that particularly foreground processes of writing and reading. All these texts are written in French and, therefore, offer a particular perspective on contemporary society in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia and on their evolving Arabic cultures. They are evidently not exemplary of the wider community and their reflections on contemporary society are also infused with elements of European culture and thought as well as aspects of their Arabic heritage. Moreover, this study focuses on prose narratives, for the most part novels, though some of the works contain autobiographical elements, and these are also sometimes conceived in conjunction with essays and theoretical works. Although there is a significant corpus of rich and challenging francophone poetry produced in North Africa during this period, this study focuses more specifically on storytelling and other narrative forms in order to assess how these in particular are able to engage with, contest or expand the boundaries of their social and political context. Stories told in prose such as those analysed here can adopt experimental structures and operate on multiple levels, all of which unsettle mimetic assumptions at the same time as they examine the very mechanics of linking and shaping events through the production of narrative. Focusing overtly on the question of representation, they are also able to portray the naivety of discourses that claim to determine and encapsulate a people, a nation or a history. Prose narrative also offers a space for the conceptual analysis as well as the reinvention of contemporary cultural activity, as storytelling becomes intermingled with theorizing, speculating and reimagining. The writers explored in this present work at once create alternative narratives of past and present events and uncover the very capacity of literary writing to engender different forms of knowledge. Chapter  1 explores the theoretical background against which this writing might be considered, and Chapter 2 goes on to offer a broad survey of writers’

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own comments on their position and practice. After that, works are explored in pairs to provide complementary or contrasting perspectives on various forms of writing as well as on the ways in which literature interacts with characters’ lives. In Chapter 3, Ben Jelloun’s L’Ecrivain public and Kamel Daoud’s ‘La Préface du nègre’ use the figures of the public writer and ghostwriter to explore what it means to write on behalf of others or indeed to write at all, and in both cases the writer expresses resistance and disaffection towards the national culture as he also struggles to make sense of his role. In Chapter 4, Djaout’s L’Invention du desert and Bachi’s La Kahéna offer alternative ways of thinking about the writing of history across different temporalities and geographical sites, as Djaout depicts a historian reflecting on parallels and discrepancies between past and present forms of oppression, and Bachi creates a history of colonial and postcolonial Algeria in complex overlapping layers. Chapter 5 builds on the analysis offered in Chapter 4 by investigating not only the recreation of history but also the more immediate intervention of literature into lived reality and contemporary knowledge through readings of Fawzi Mellah’s Le Conclave des pleureuses and Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête. Chapter  6 explores the dialogue within francophone texts with the other languages with which they come into contact. The chapter juxtaposes contrasting visions of writing as translation, as Khatibi’s Un Eté à Stockholm evokes an ethics of openness encapsulated by the activity of translation and bilingual writing, while in Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, Sebbar conceives her francophone writing as curiously shaped by the traces of the Arabic language she never learned. In Chapter  7, letters are conceived as a way to rethink literature as a mode of communication, as Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia depicts the interrupted, open-ended relationship between addresser and addressee, while Khatibi and Hassoun’s exchange published in Le Même livre explores both the rich shared history of Islam and Judaism and the capacity of literature to develop a concomitantly dialogic mode of thinking, performed in turn through their own living correspondence. Finally, Chapter 8 analyses that process of communication from the other side, namely that of the reader. The chapter examines how reading affects characters’ conceptions of themselves, of contemporary political and religious ideology and of their relationships with others, through analysis of Djaout’s Le Dernier été de la raison and Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père. In many cases, the works explored here promote or perform democratic thinking alongside a critique of political and religious orthodoxies. Writers at the same time challenge nationalist culture and use literature to envision or

Introduction

27

perform dialogues with cultures beyond those of the nation state. Nevertheless, they also hold their own form and presuppositions up for questioning, and the critiques they offer are for the most part expressed with an awareness of their own contingency. None of these works can be seen to elucidate a circumscribed theory of literature and its purposes, and each speaks to the questions raised here in distinct and singular ways. These creative works offer a particularly fertile form of conceptual reflection on the literary, then, precisely because, perhaps unlike ‘theory’, they are never prescriptive or argumentative, and rather sketch tentative portraits of literature’s work or raise questions about its power without providing schematic answers. Ultimately, if literature can use its uniquely experimental form to contest deterministic and exclusivist ideologies, then it is also surely the mode of writing most able to think through its own at once elusive and singular force.

Notes 1

Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu and Jennifer Wenzel, ‘The End of Postcolonial Theory’, PMLA 122.3 (May 2007): 633–651. 2 Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (London and New York: Zed Books, 2012) p. 9. 3 James Le Sueur, Between Terror and Democracy: Algeria since 1989 (London: Zed Books, 2010) p. 1. 4 For a detailed, if polemical, analysis of the Arabization process, see Mohamed Benrabah, Langue et pouvoir en Algérie: histoire d’un traumatisme linguistique (Biarritz: Atlantica, 1999). 5 Michael Willis, Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (London: Hurst and Company, 2012) p. 98. 6 Ibid., p. 129. 7 Marnia Lazreg, ‘Islamism and the Recolonization of Algeria’, in Ali Abdullatif Ahmida (ed.), Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb: History, Culture, and Politics (London: Palgrave, 2000) pp. 147–164 (p. 156). 8 James McDougall, ‘After the War: Algeria’s Transition to Uncertainty’, Middle East Report 245 (2007): 34–41. 9 Benjamin Stora, ‘Algeria/Morocco: The Passions of the Past, Representations of the Nation That Unite and Divide’, in James McDougall (ed.), Nation, Society and Culture in North Africa (London: Frank Cass, 2003) 14–34. 10 Willis, Politics and Power in the Maghreb, p. 55.

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11 See Valerie Orlando, Francophone Voices of the ‘New’ Morocco in Film and Print: Representing a Society in Transition (London: Palgrave, 2009). 12 Abdellatif Laâbi, Chroniques de la citadelle d’exil: lettres de prison (1972–1980) (Paris: Denoël, 1983). 13 Abdellatif Laâbi, La Brûlure des interrogations: entretiens réalisés par Jacques Alessandra (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985) p. 55. 14 Abdellatif Laâbi, Les Rêves sont têtues (Paris: Mediterranée and Casablanca: Eddif, 2001); Un Autre Maroc (Paris: SNELA La Différence, 2013). 15 Tahar Ben Jelloun, L’Etincelle: révoltes dans les pays arabes (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). 16 See Laâbi, Un Autre Maroc. 17 See R.A. Judy, ‘Introduction, for Dignity: Tunisia and the Party of Emergent Democratic Humanism’, in Boundary 2 39.1 (2012), Tunisia Dossier, ‘The Tunisian Revolution of Dignity’, 1–16. 18 Willis, Politics and Power in the Maghreb, pp. 131–135. 19 Mélanie Matarese, Adlène Meddi and Gilles Kraemer, ‘Introduction’, Algérie: la nahda des Lettres, la renaissance des mots, Riveneuve Continents: Revue des littératures de langue française 19.2 (2015): 5–7. 20 Many of the essays in Patrick Crowley’s Special Issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, The Contemporary Roman Maghrébin: Aesthetics, Politics, Production 2000–2015 20.1 (2016) describe this reawakening. 21 Fouzia Benzaour, Driss Gaadi and Ambroise Queffélec, Le Français au Maroc: lexique et contacts de langues (Bruxelles: De Boeck et Larcia, s.a., 2000). 22 James McDougall, ‘Dream of Exile, Promise of Home: Language, Education, and Arabism in Algeria’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 43.2 (2011): 251–270. 23 See Claudia Esposito, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev and Hakim Abderrezak (eds.), Le Maghreb méditerranéen: littératures et plurilinguisme, Expressions Maghrébines 11.2 (2012). 24 See McDougall, ‘Dream of Exile, Promise of Home’. 25 Fouad Laroui, ‘A Case of “Fake Monolingualism”: Morocco, Diglossia and the Writer’, in Liesbeth Minaard and Till Denbeck, Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism, Thamyris: Intersecting Place, Sex and Race 28 (2014): 39–46. Laroui also in this article describes francophone Moroccan literature as a ‘monster’, since it is not written in the language of the nation and borrows from a European genre, though he also affirms that it is a monster that ‘refuses to die’ (p. 45). His own work also testifies to a belief in its potential inventiveness. 26 Ahmed Moatassime, Arabisation et langue française au Maghreb (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992) p. 37. 27 Hafid Gafaïti, ‘Between God and the President: Literature and Censorship in North Africa’, Diacritics 27.2 (1997): 59–84. For a survey of publishing history in Algeria,

Introduction

28 29

30 31 32

33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

29

see Hadj Miliani, Une Littérature en sursis? Le champ littéraire de langue française en Algérie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002). Hédi Bouraoui, La Francophonie à l’estomac (Paris: Editions Nouvelles du Sud, 1995) p. 28, p. 73. For more on the evolution of Editions Barzakh, see for example Corbin Treacy, ‘L’Effet Barzakh’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, The Contemporary Roman Maghrébin: Aesthetics, Politics, Production 2000–2015 20.1 (2016): 76–83. Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) p. 297. Tahar Bekri, De la littérature tunisienne et maghrébine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). Maïssa Bey, ‘Mutuelle complicité’, in Cette langue qu’on appelle le français: l’apport des écrivains francophones à la langue française (Arles: Actes Sud, Babel, 2006) 175–181 (p. 180). Leïla Sebbar, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (Paris: Julliard, 2003). Kamel Daoud, ‘Sur les traces de Camus’, http://afrique.lepoint.fr/culture/kamel -daoud-sur-les-traces-de-camus-28-09-2014-1867354_2256.php (accessed February 2017). Abdelkebir Khatibi, Le Roman Maghrébin (Paris: Maspero, 1968). See Jane Hiddleston, Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). Kateb Yacine in Jean-Marie Serreau, ‘Renaissance de la tragédie’, Le Poète comme un boxeur: Entretiens 1958–1989 (Paris: Seuil, 1994) 37–43 (p. 39). Michael Binyon, ‘Les voix du printemps arabe’, Le Monde, 14 Avril 2011; Peter Clark, ‘The Revolution in Arab Fiction Prefigures the Arab Spring’, The Guardian, 18 April 2011. Mohamed-Salah Omri, ‘A Revolution of Dignity and Poetry’, Boundary 2 39.1 (2012), Tunisia Dossier: The Tunisian Revolution of Dignity, 137–165. http://lobservateurdumaroc.info/2013/11/08/voyage-litteraire-printemps-arabe -fut-pas/ (accessed February 2017). See Charles Bonn, ‘La littérature algérienne francophone serait-elle sortie du face -à-face post-colonial?’, Modern and Contemporary France 10.4 (2002): 483–493. Hafid Gafaïti, La Diasporisation de la littérature postcoloniale: Assia Djebar, Rachid Mimouni (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005) p. 26. Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Nicholas Harrison, ‘Who Needs an Idea of the Literary?’ Paragraph 28.2 (2005): 1–17. Chris Bongie, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/colonial Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008); Eli Park Sorensen, Postcolonial Studies and the Literary: Theory, Interpretation and the Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); Hiddleston, Decolonising the Intellectual.

30 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55

56

57 58 59 60 61

Writing After Postcolonialism Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Benoît Denis, Littérature et engagement de Pascal à Sartre (Paris: Seuil, 2000) p. 36. Ibid., p. 42. Khalid Zekri (ed.), Abdelhak Serhane: une écriture de l’engagement (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006). Laâbi, Un Autre Maroc, p. 61. Tahar Djaout, quoted by Julija Šukys, Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007) p. 42. Gafaïti, La Diasporisation de la littérature postcoloniale, p. 247. Philippe Roussin, ‘Démocratie de la fiction’, Fixxion: revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine 2012, pp. 17–25. http://www.revue-critique-de -fixxion-francaise-contemporaine.org/rcffc/article/view/fx06.03/762 (accessed February 2017). Ibid., p. 24. Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph Romance, ‘Introduction: The Art of Democratic Literature’, in Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph Romance (eds.), Democracy’s Literature: Politics and Fiction in America (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) 1–7. Jacques Derrida, Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993) p. 65; ‘Passions: An Oblique Offering’, On the name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) p. 28. Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Jacques Rancière, La Haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005). Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Chérif, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009) p. 42. Jacques Rancière, Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2007) p. 12; The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2011) p. 4. Ibid., p. 17; p. 8. Ibid., p. 29; p. 20.

1

Postcolonialism, World Literature and the Thousand and One Nights

This book examines what might be conceived as a ‘transitional’ period not only in its focus on the movement towards democracy in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia but also in its reflection on the place and concept of francophone literature. The works explored here intervene not only in contemporary politics but also in critical debates around ‘postcolonialism’ or ‘world literature’ as these too have developed over recent decades. As I suggested in the Introduction, postcolonial studies may have peaked during the 1990s and early 2000s, but the questions at the heart of postcolonial criticism – questions of justice, equality and anti-authoritarianism – remain highly pertinent in the current context and certainly resurface in the works under scrutiny here. The evolution of North African nationhood since the 1980s can still be seen as a ‘postcolonial’ issue: the contemporary nation remains determined by the struggles for independence that defined the preceding generation, and the new forms of nationalist authoritarianism in some ways mimic the hegemonic structures imposed by the French during the colonial period. The very persistence of a literature in French testifies at the same time to the ongoing influence of colonial history on more recent cultural production, and the writers contributing to this corpus continue to reflect on the effects of the colonial past both on the political and cultural present and on their own aesthetic practice. At the same time, however, it would be limiting to read contemporary francophone North African literature as wholly determined by the framework of the postcolonial nation. And indeed, the postcolonial nation should not be reduced to its colonial past in such a way as to obscure its evolution in dialogue with contemporary events and experiences in other parts of the Arab world, in Europe and further afield. The recent regeneration in the concept of ‘world literature’ as a means of describing works that explicitly challenge

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restrictive nationalisms may concomitantly also offer insight into the works under discussion here, even if, as we shall see, many existing theories of ‘world literature’ can be seen to be highly problematic. Indeed, the works under consideration provocatively reflect back on the false universalism implied by certain conceptions of ‘world literature’ by explicitly demonstrating their own wide-ranging engagement with multiple different cultural forms. ‘Postcolonial’ struggles within independent nations are not, then, the only historical framework with which the generation of North African writers who have flourished since the 1980s engage, and cultural innovation occurs at the same time through resistance both to the burden of colonial history and to containment within contemporary nationhood and its tensions. Moreover, intermittent references to and reflections on that great precursor of Arabic literature, the Thousand and One Nights, also indicate the importance of a cultural heritage beyond that of colonial history, at the same time as they offer insights into the ability of ‘worldly’ literature and storytelling to transcend both authoritarian and orthodox modes of thinking. Most importantly, however, the attempt to insert this body of work neatly into the category of either ‘postcolonial literature’ or a supposedly universal form of ‘world literature’ is likely to turn out to be misleading. Defining the works analysed here as unproblematically ‘postcolonial’ risks binding them to the colonial past, while the celebration of a new ‘world literature’ may be far too generalizing. Nevertheless, evolving theories of postcolonialism and world literature continue to offer crucial insights into the stakes and implications of these texts. The reinterrogation of recent developments in these areas may, then, have something to contribute to our understanding of the resonance of contemporary francophone North African writing.

Postcolonialism ‘Postcolonialism’ has always been a contested term, and the definition of ‘postcolonial literature’ has continually evolved as a result of critical questioning. Early introductions to postcolonial literature posit a close relationship between the text and the experience and critique of empire, as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, for example, affirm that these are literatures that ‘emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the imperial centre’.1 Elleke

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33

Boehmer provides a related definition, emphasizing in particular literature’s capacity for resistance, as she in turn argues that ‘rather than simply being the writing which “came after” empire, postcolonial literature is generally defined as that which critically or subversively scrutinizes the colonial relationship’.2 For the francophone critic Jean-Marc Moura, moreover, this contestation is inscribed in particular in the use of literary form, as postcolonial literature is a set of ‘modes d’écriture […] qui sont d’abord polémiques à l’égard de l’ordre colonial avant de se caractériser par le déplacement, la transgression, le jeu, la déconstruction des codes européens tels qu’ils sont affirmés dans la culture concernée’ [‘modes of writing […] which are first and foremost polemical towards the colonial order, but which are also characterised by their playing with, and by the displacement, transgression, and deconstruction of, European codes as they are affirmed in the culture concerned’].3 Indeed, francophone postcolonial literature has been conceived by Dominique Combe not only as a response to colonial history but also as a site for the reinvention of French language aesthetics, or ‘un laboratoire de la théorie littéraire’ [‘a laboratory of literary theory’].4 As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin go on to indicate in the second edition of The Empire Writes Back, however, the time period to which the term ‘postcolonial’ refers has been a subject of intense debate, and critics have argued either that it should only refer to the period after decolonization, or that it signals a completion to the colonial legacy that is misleading, or indeed that it unhelpfully ties the new nation to its previous experience of the colonial power. In response, Ashcroft et  al. argue that postcolonialism is broadly the multiple modes of engagement with imperialism both before and after decolonization, but evidently the ‘post’ implies a chronology that continues to unsettle and provoke critics. A decade and a half after the second edition of The Empire Writes Back was published, ongoing uncertainty surrounding the term’s resonance and timescale indicates that it continues to mutate and call for redefinition. Literatures produced some decades after decolonization may not only still intermittently ‘foreground the tension with the imperial power’ but they also show that that power now operates differently and has become implicated in, if not replaced by, the highly complex forms of domination at work in the contemporary nation state. The political resistance expressed in francophone North African literature is indeed now not so much directed against the former colonial power as against the regimes that have struggled to transition to democracy in its wake, even as these remain structured by colonial history as well as by international forces. These writers may be ‘postcolonial’ in that they remain

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Writing After Postcolonialism

concerned by the legacy of imperialism in contributing to contemporary forms of oppression and conflict, but they are evidently not now bound up in the immediate demands of anti-colonial struggle. The destructive effects of the colonial presence are rather figured alongside other tensions within the nation and resulting from its situation in the wider contemporary world, even if these can on some level still be understood to be the effects of a form of neo-imperialism (manifested for example by authoritarian postcolonial governments, as well as by global capitalist forces and the rise of extremism against ‘the West’). Postcolonialism is clearly relevant to our contemporary understanding of global and national politics, as well as to the literatures at the centre of this study, yet it also needs to be understood in specific ways in the generation in question. Despite the celebratory ring of titles proclaiming ‘The End of Postcolonial Theory’ and ‘The End of Postcolonialism’, it is clear that many of the recent conflicts and struggles in the Middle East and North Africa cannot be understood separately from the antagonisms of the colonial past, and postcolonial questions of freedom, equality and emancipation remain more pressing than ever.5 Among the contributors to Simon Gikandi’s PMLA Editor’s column on ‘The End of Postcolonial Theory’, Fernando Coronil is perhaps the most affirmative in calling for the relinquishment of the discourse of postcolonialism, but even he concedes that there remains much to be learned from the debate: ‘whether from the vantage of postcolonial studies or not, in the end what matters is to keep developing the intellectual project this field helped to advance – its critique of dominative knowledge and its pursuit of worlds that are more plural and more just’.6 Postcolonialism is still a crucial field of enquiry, then, because it demands the critique of inegalitarian hegemonies of the sort that persist, even if these are highly variable in form. Equally, Maia Dauner and Cynthia Foo’s special issue of Invisible Culture entitled ‘After Post-colonialism’ sets out to interrogate the limits of postcolonial theory in the contemporary global arena, but the editors nevertheless still call for a return to many of its questions, to be conceived alongside theories of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization, with which they are clearly tightly intermingled.7 Most forcefully, Robert Young’s response to the debate in a subsequent article, entitled ‘Postcolonial Remains’ and printed in New Literary History, is thorough in its delineation of the various dimensions of postcolonialism’s ongoing relevance. Young argues that postcolonial criticism continues to help articulate the limitations of Western knowledge and it will cease to be necessary only when we can determine whether:

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35

imperialism and colonialism in all their different forms have ceased to exist in the world, whether there is no longer domination by nondemocratic forces (often exercised on others by Western democracies, as in the past), or economic and resource exploitation enforced by military power, or a refusal to acknowledge the sovereignty of non-Western countries, and whether peoples and cultures still suffer from the long-lingering after-effects of imperial, colonial, and neocolonial rule, albeit in contemporary forms such as economic globalization.8

Most pertinently for the present focus on North Africa, Young notes the ongoing relevance of postcolonial criticism in situations where national sovereignty after decolonization has brought further oppression. The resurgence of Islamism is also, he argues, a remnant of the colonial conflicts of the past and the product of an inability properly to understand Islam in the West. Indeed, it is surprising that Islam has not been a central focus for ‘postcolonial’ theory until recently, despite its enormous significance in politics, society and culture both in the aftermath of decolonization and during the contemporary period. If French colonial regimes treated Muslims with particular disdain, it is as if postcolonial studies in France, as well as in Europe more broadly and in the United States, have continued to fail to recognize and enter into proper dialogue with Islamic culture and thought.9 This failure is perhaps the most catastrophic legacy of both European and US imperialism and demonstrates all the more compellingly the ongoing need for ‘postcolonial’ critical thinking. As I suggested earlier, francophone critics have been slower to embrace postcolonial criticism than their Anglophone counterparts, but in the recent spate of publications about postcolonial theory in France it is evident that there are signs of a new commitment to understanding both the colonial past and its implications now and in the future. Charles Bonn may have argued, more specifically, that Algerian literature has since the 1970s started to come out from the ‘face-à-face postcolonial’, but there remains a need to understand the ways in which contemporary North African culture both moves on from and continues to be shaped by the effects of colonial and neo-colonial power structures.10 Bonn notes a shift in focus in Algerian literature during the 1970s towards a form of ‘postmodern’ experimentation and away from colonial critique. In arguing that this constitutes a move away from the postcolonial, however, he appears to confuse postcolonialism with anti-colonialism and risks undermining the ongoing significance of colonial history in the evolving present. More broadly, however, over the past ten years francophone critics

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Writing After Postcolonialism

have started to stress the effects of the colonial legacy on French society and thought, and if these focus more on France than on the former colonies themselves, they nevertheless reveal the persistence of colonial thinking in France’s conception of itself and in the notion of ‘francophonie’. Most famously, for example, Blanchard, Bancel and Lemaire’s provocative volume La Fracture coloniale, published in 2005, assertively denounces neocolonial thinking in France, and many of the work’s contributors stress how France has sought to deny its history of colonial violence.11 The ‘fracture coloniale’ of the title refers to the split between discourses that emphasize the ‘positive’ impact of the French overseas and those that call for better recognition of France’s colonial crimes. The volume also contains many references to the particular colonial history of North Africa which serve to demonstrate further the continuing significance of postcolonial critique in this area. Benjamin Stora, for example, notes the excessive emphasis on the Algerian War of Independence and its unresolved legacy in contemporary France, at the same time as a significant and persistent lack of understanding of the colonial period that preceded it.12 Equally importantly, Anna Bozzo traces the conflict between Republican ideology and Islam, the roots of which she finds in colonial Algeria, where ‘la situation coloniale a créé un rapport de domination sur l’islam: religion de la majorité de la population algérienne, son contrôle a été indispensable au colonisateur français pour s’installer dans la durée’ [‘the colonial situation created a relationship of domination over Islam: as it was the religion of the majority of the Algerian people, its control was indispensable to the long-term establishment of French colonialism in Algeria’].13 In the same year, Alec Hargreaves’s edited volume Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism offers a series of analyses of how French colonialism has been remembered, commemorated or indeed occluded in various historiographical and cultural forms, including in some cases the sorts of texts explored here.14 Hargreaves’s volume also contains articles analysing more specifically the memory of colonial violence, in particular in Algeria, as well as readings of literary works, such as those of Assia Djebar and Réné-Nicolas Ehni, which explore the interpenetration between history and fiction in the context of a kind of postcolonial amnesia. At the same time, there have been recent calls for the development of postcolonial theory in French critical discourse. The editorial preface to a 2006 special issue of Labyrinthes entitled ‘Faut-il être postcolonial?’, for example, responds positively to the question of the volume’s title and pertinently concludes by arguing that postcolonial thinking signifies

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not so much a heritage as a work of memory that is at the same time able to look beyond itself and into the future.15 In addition, a special issue of Mouvements entitled ‘Qui a peur du postcolonial?’, published the following year in 2007, puts Anglophone postcolonial theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Ella Shohat into dialogue with a range of francophone critics while also analysing the slow evolution of postcolonial studies in France.16 Most ambitiously, perhaps, Claire Joubert’s edited volume Le Postcolonial comparé, published in 2014, argues not only for continued reflection on the notion of the postcolonial in francophone studies but also for a wider study of the relationship between colonial history and the contemporary phenomenon of globalization.17 Joubert’s insistence not only on the postcolonial but also on the ‘transcolonial’ indicates a commitment to understanding the evolution of imperialist thinking in a transnational world where increased cultural connectivity is a driving force in historical change. The significance of Joubert’s volume, moreover, is not only that she successfully brings francophone postcolonial criticism into dialogue with anglophone criticism, by including, for example, the translation of an article by Robert Young on ‘Littérature anglaise ou littératures en langue anglaise’ as well as comparative readings of anglophone and francophone literary texts. Even more, Joubert also argues that it is time to analyse in more depth the relationship between the national and international in colonial and postcolonial histories. Describing the work of ‘transcolonial’ criticism, Joubert argues that ‘la comparaison apporte à ces projets des outils pour interroger au ras de leur énonciation les concepts de mondial et de l’international, du national et du rapport international colonial, et les idéologies plurielles et croisées qui en ont décliné les diverses réalisations historiques’ [‘comparison brings to this work tools to help interrogate the concepts of the worldly and the international, of the national and colonial international relations, and the multiple and intersecting ideologies that have shaped their various historical manifestations on a discursive level’].18 From this point of view, postcolonial criticism should engage with global or transnational history and promote awareness of the ways in which different histories impact on one another across national borders. Taking on board this ongoing insistence on the significance of postcolonial thought, this book investigates the representation of ‘postcolonial remains’ in North Africa since the 1980s in order to uncover how the colonial legacy has become implicated in new forms of oppression and conflict, and, most particularly, in order to assess the status of literature itself in this new context. Some of the writers under scrutiny here were born during the colonial period,

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and a very few of them started writing before independence. The works chosen for analysis, however, were all published after 1980 to reflect a shift in the political climate at the same time as an increased questioning of the nature and power of literature as it responds to its historical moment. Tahar Djaout, for example, denounces the occultation as well as the misuse of the colonial past most explicitly in Les Chercheurs d’os, and the difficulty experienced by the historian in L’Invention du désert in writing a history of Algeria is evidently, if obliquely, the result of the destruction of local history by the colonial regime. Djaout also pertinently demonstrates how this obfuscation of history affects the writer’s conception of his own endeavour to produce a narrative that might make sense of the relationship between past and present. Colonial destruction in this way contributes to the historian’s questioning of his project and to the fragmentation of narrative that his uncertainty engenders. For Salim Bachi, moreover, colonial history is interwoven into the depiction of more recent conflicts in a way that both displays its evolving relevance and requires the construction of a multilayered narrative able to reflect both the ostensible and the hidden resonance of multiple pasts and presents. The return, the evolution and the reworking of colonial history in dialogue with other moments in Algerian history demonstrate a need continually to reassess connections between past and present in fresh ways. Most famously, perhaps, Assia Djebar’s reflections on reading and writing in L’Amour, la fantasia and Nulle part dans la maison de mon père repeatedly shift between the colonial and postcolonial periods and situate their introspective reflections on literary activity in a complex and simultaneous engagement with a range of moments in Algerian history. Djebar’s works are at once preoccupied with the memory of the colonial period and its demise and with a vision of aesthetic creativity that would signify both liberation and broader forms of cultural dialogue beyond the nation. Nevertheless, as I have suggested, the ‘postcolonial’ questions with which these writers engage are in many cases associated with, or indeed in some cases surpassed by, a broader cultural framework, and the critique of nationalism is frequently bound up with a resistance to the very idea of a national literature defined by the local experience of the aftermath of colonialism. Even more, it could be argued that the restrictive form of the postcolonial nation has, for North African writers, triggered an even stronger commitment to cultural and intellectual dialogue beyond the borders of the nation state. Perhaps paradoxically, the response of these writers to the postcolonial period is at the same time precisely to resist the idea that their culture is determined by the

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colonial past and to challenge modes of thinking that pit cultures one against the other in the very way that the colonial project and its legacy have demanded. Joubert’s ‘transcolonial’ might be conceived here as a theoretical tool not only for reflecting on overlapping histories of colonialism, then, but also as a way into an alternative model that would emphasize the transnational postcolonial culture embedded in and enacted by many of the works under scrutiny here. These ‘postcolonial’ literary works would from this point of view be conceived not as restricted to the postcolonial nation, but, through their awareness of the  ways in which national history and culture only develop through their contact with  those of other nations, as products of mutual intercultural influence. As  they specifically denounce the constraints and limitations of national culture, these texts connote the hybridized and dialogic form not only of postcolonial culture  but also of ‘world literature’, or of a worldly mode of writing able to look beyond national borders, conceived in ways appropriate to the global politics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

World literature The resonance of the notion of worldliness for Maghrebian literature has already been noted in Charles Bonn and Arnold Rothe’s 1995 volume Littérature maghrébine et littérature mondiale.19 Bonn and Rothe’s study lacks a fully worked-through theoretical framework, yet it nevertheless insists on the importance of resisting the temptation to read Maghrebian literary works as wholly determined by their particular national historical context. Rejecting the deterministic structures of nationalism, Arabic monolingualism and Islamism, written in French rather than in the national language of Arabic, the works explored in this book are often highly transnational or cross-cultural creations, in which literature itself is also figured as a site for dialogue and exchange across borders. Although they remain preoccupied with the state of contemporary national culture, many francophone works of the recent period explicitly challenge the restrictiveness of a notion of ‘national literature’ and also address movements in global history at the same time as they draw on multiple languages, cultures and literatures. Situating themselves in a global landscape of interconnected and overlapping histories as well as within a postcolonial national culture, they demonstrate not only how literature can travel through the circulation of the text after publication but also how its very form can encourage a broader ‘worldliness’ or diasporic thinking that would

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draw attention to wider influences on local history as well as promoting a form of creative thinking that transcends borders. This form of ‘worldliness’ would work to counter both false universalisms and the neo-imperialist force of the global capitalist network and would promise instead an aesthetics and ethics of cultural exchange. The notion of ‘world literature’ is, however, notoriously indeterminate. Since its origins in Goethe’s 1827 references to a universal Weltliteratur, it has passed through many mutations, and, with the resurgence in interest in the term since David Damrosch resuscitated it with his provocative What Is World Literature? in 2003, it has provoked a good deal of controversy. One of the ambiguities of the notion is that although it appears to describe a type of literature or group of texts, it is rather more often used to designate a critical perspective that varies in form. What this critical approach entails, however, is often unclear, and frequently freighted with cultural and sociopolitical assumptions that leave the supposed openness of world literature questionable. The relationship between world literature and postcolonial literature is also often contested, indicating ongoing uncertainty about the implications of both terms. Robert Young has argued that world literature and postcolonial literature are necessarily opposed, since world literature implies universality, together with a focus on aesthetics, while postcolonial literature must be historicized and indeed inexorably ‘riven by its own context’.20 According to Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, however, postcolonial literature is precisely closest to both Goethe’s and Marx’s original Weltliteratur because it is ‘a product of different streams and influences from different points of the globe, a diversity of sources, which it reflects in turn’.21 Postcolonial literature from this point of view is an example of worldliness in literature par excellence. Despite these differences, then, and despite the indeterminacy of the very concept of ‘world literature’, this section will explore how something like Edward Said’s ‘worldliness’ might nevertheless be seen to be actively and self-consciously foregrounded in francophone North African literary works.22 Many of the writers to be analysed here invite a focused and anti-universalist reflection on ‘worldliness’ on the level of both ethics and form, and their intercultural aesthetics can be conceived to give new energy to a concept of ‘world literature’ that might adequately represent the global connectedness of contemporary cultural experience. ‘World literature’ has been problematic since the term’s inception, and, as Damrosch argues, it is often not clear both which (if not all) forms of literature it refers to and what concept of ‘world’ it implies.23 Goethe famously affirmed, according to Eckermann, that ‘poetry is the universal possession of mankind,

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revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men’ and, therefore, ‘national literature is now rather an unmeaning term’.24 As the numerous analyses of Goethe’s concept attest, however, what he then means by Weltliteratur is rather vague. The comments cited above spring from his enthusiasm towards a Chinese novel he read, and his discovery that despite the enormous differences between Chinese and European cultures, there is a level on which the work is able to transcend its context, to communicate more broadly with humanity and address our universally shared concerns. Nevertheless, as Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir suggest in their preface to The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Goethe’s focus is at times global, but at times more narrowly European.25 Moreover, as John Pizer suggests in his more detailed study of Goethe’s concept in the same volume, ‘world literature’ names not a stable canon of works but a process whereby writers of many kinds from diverse origins are able to communicate and learn from one another through the far-reaching network of literary exchange.26 And yet that literary dialogue is by turns understood as the preserve of an intellectual elite and, conversely, as the far larger and more diffuse network created by the commercialization of literary culture. Weltliteratur is from the beginning not only a challenging, visionary idea, an aspiration towards an at-once inventive and inclusive literary humanism, but it is also, as Christopher Prendergast suggests, ‘a thoughtexperiment, a groping reach for a barely glimpsed future’.27 Goethe’s reflection on circulation and exchange was taken up again more recently by critics such as Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch, who set out to explore in more detail the processes by which texts enter into international space. Casanova’s highly ambitious World Republic of Letters, published originally in French in 1999, examines the dual pull of the international and national forces working on literature as it is shaped by processes of exchange and formed by the market by which it is influenced and then diffused.28 Casanova’s ‘world republic’ still places Paris at its centre, however, and her vision of international literary space rests at the same time on a conception of the movement of a literary work between its initial national context and the broader network of exchange. Ultimately, then, the nation still retains a privileged position in the world republic of letters, and Casanova’s theory of competition and rivalry hardly contests borders and categories in the way that Goethe perhaps originally envisioned. David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature? goes further in its vision of transcultural circulation, in that he explores precisely the ways in which works travel, often through translation, away from the contexts in which they were written and, in so doing, generate

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new meaning. Damrosch also insists that world literature is above all a mode of reading, ‘a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time’, and rather than focusing on the national rivalries that shape world literature, as Casanova does, he perhaps more optimistically emphasizes the new creative life produced through literary circulation and translation.29 Yet if Damrosch helpfully recommends this emancipatory form of literary travel, his model relies on translation: texts move in the wider world because they are translated from one language into another. This model pays insufficient attention to the ways in which texts might already contest borders through their own multilingual, intercultural form. The ‘worldliness’ of world literature may already be there in the form of the work; it may need to be ‘released’ by the perspicacious reader, as Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o suggests, but it is not simply created by the circulation that its translation allows.30 Casanova and Damrosch in their different ways leave out the question of what the worldliness of the text itself consists in, and for a better understanding of the text’s own worldly engagement, as opposed to its perception by the critic, we might turn back to Edward Said. This reappraisal of ‘worldliness’ might also function as an alternative to the false universalism of ‘world literature’, since it suggests rather an alertness to the ways in which texts might stage the impact of cultures on one another, but also a ‘worldly’ wisdom about the text’s limits that serve to attenuate the bold utopianism of some existing theories of world literary production. Most famously, Said argues in The World, the Text, the Critic that even texts that appear to be autonomous, those that retain the ‘most rarefied form’, are still ‘always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society – in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly’.31 Said’s point here seems to be a simple one – literary works do not consist in pure textuality but are immersed in both history and lived experience – but his emphasis on the world as opposed to nation or locality is highly significant. Said is consistently resistant in all his writing to ideological and critical orthodoxies and, indeed, he argues that ‘secular criticism’ – a form of worldliness – is ‘constitutively opposed to the production of massive, hermetic systems’ and therefore open to the world.32 Importantly, however, if this ‘secular’ perspective was established during the nineteenth century as a challenge to religious orthodoxy, it immediately becomes implicated in the structures of ‘Orientalism’, so (like democracy) must continually turn against and critique itself. As Jonathan Arac notes, Said’s modern secular criticism (and therefore worldliness) must be defined by an awareness of its limitations and an ability to question itself.33

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One might consider in addition, moreover, that if a text is ‘enmeshed’ in the world, this is not only because it circulates after completion, but because it comes to life through the dialogues it maintains not only with the place of its creation but also with the broader, multiple cultural histories that its language draws on or taps into, at the same time as with itself. The worldly text from this point of view both knows its own contingency and demonstrates its connectivity with the world or worlds from which it is born. Françoise Lionnet’s contribution to The Routledge Companion to World Literature embraces most explicitly the multilingualism and palimpsestic form of world literature and serves as a compelling springboard for the present reflection on intercultural writing in the Maghreb after postcolonialism. Lionnet’s essay opens with a critique of the French littérature-monde movement, inaugurated by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud with their manifesto ‘Pour une littérature-monde en français’ first published in Le Monde in 2007 and developed in the volume of essays with the same title.34 Le Bris and Rouaud may have wanted to liberate literature from ‘son pacte avec la nation’ [‘its pact with the nation’], but Lionnet argues that, on the contrary, the movement actually participates in an old assimilationist agenda that promotes the integration of the larger Francophone world of letters into a very Parisian understanding of writing as a monolingual activity that seeks to embrace ‘les voies du monde’ [the ways of the world] (Le Monde 2007), but in order to make them fit into the world Republic of Letters as defined and understood by a universalizing French perspective.35

The shortcomings of Le Bris and Rouaud’s understanding of littératuremonde are multiple and have been amply dissected in Forsdick, Hargreaves and Murphy’s volume on Transnational French Studies. Perhaps most pertinently here, their model seems to imply a bland universalism that actually obfuscates the diversity the authors set out to affirm.36 Lionnet, conversely, goes on to explore rather the palimpsestic structure, the ‘creolization’ or multilingual strategies, of a range of literatures in French, including not only the famous example of the Martinican Edouard Glissant but also half-forgotten eighteenthcentury poets Evariste Parny, Antoine Bertin and Nicolas Germain Léonard. Lionnet deliberately cites metropolitan alongside postcolonial figures, all of for whom the French language is continually interspersed with words, idioms and traces of other languages so as to construct a more richly intercultural and linguistically dynamic literary form. A creolized world literature is in this way a

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broad signifier for writing whose form and style would not be constrained by a national culture and language, but would in its very fabric display its engagement with global cultural and linguistic diversity. Lionnet’s conception of world literature as a creolized space of production is precisely not limited to the Caribbean context; rather, creolization is a broader figure for hybridization and linguistic plurality in literary form as it occurs in any context. This ‘worldly’ process might once again succeed in evoking not a false universalism dominated by the European or US imperialist culture, but an ongoing encounter between languages from different parts of the world that might unsettle assumptions about the purity and hegemony of European languages. Moreover, this understanding of world literature would represent the contacts as well as the conflicts created by both earlier and more recent forms of imperialism and, as the Warwick Research Collective insists, would contest the idea of ‘world’ as ‘a level playing field’.37 ‘Worldliness’ as I use it here, then, connotes connectedness but not fusion, an awareness of the shaping of national history by global history, but at the same time a commitment to challenging the inequalities produced by these histories. To return to the francophone context, the two North African writers who contributed to Le Bris and Rouaud’s volume can, unlike the editors themselves, perhaps also be conceived to embrace a comparable form of creolized, worldly literary creation in that they demonstrate how texts can actively juxtapose more than one language or culture at the same time as they bear witness to histories of inequality and oppression, and in so doing they demonstrate in their very fabric a resistance to cultural determinism within and beyond the nation state. The first of these is Tahar Ben Jelloun, who, though drawing extensively on local tradition in his novels, throughout his oeuvre focuses (to the dismay of some of his critics) less on postcolonial Morocco than on migration, travel, cultural transfer and exile. In his contribution to Pour une littératuremonde, Ben Jelloun reflects on his own bilingualism, but goes on to use this not to theorize a literature written in two languages but a much more open ‘errance dans l’écriture’ [‘errantry in writing’].38 A literature that dramatizes its immersion in the world will contain traces of contacts with multiple cultures and stretch the boundaries of standardized French, rather than positing languages as enclosed national entities (creating in the case of Morocco a straightforward clash between French and standard Arabic). Literatures that are created through the writer’s dynamic contact with the world and with multiple communities juxtapose rhythms, sounds, idioms and images to create visions that, once again, transcend nation and ethnicity. As we shall see in Chapter 3, in

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L’Ecrivain public, his novel most explicitly concerned with the writing process, Ben Jelloun tracks a writer’s travels around a disaffected postcolonial Morocco, as well as to other parts of the Arab world and Europe, in order to explore the ability of the writer (here figured as a public writer) to embrace the lives of other people. In this instance, however, the travelling writer represents not only a form of enmeshment in the world but also an inexorable sense of exile, and here Ben Jelloun also brings out the doubt and self-questioning that for Said were a crucial aspect of ‘worldliness’. The writing also alters or betrays its referents and leaves its creator with a profound sense of alienation. Writing that embraces the world, then, does not claim to capture and possess it, but accepts its own contingency. Boualem Sansal also contributes an article to Le Bris and Rouaud’s volume, in which he condemns the restrictive effects not only of the literal borders between nations but also of the conceptual thinking that separates, antagonizes and divides. This separatist and isolationist way of thinking fuels, argues Sansal, the creation of Arabic as the national language in Algeria at the expense of dialectal forms, Berber and French. Against this oppressive monolingualism, Sansal like Ben Jelloun celebrates the opening out and diversification of language, the creative remodelling of French, for example, through its dialogue with other cultures, and he rejects the belief that languages are to be owned. Languages, as they are used and spoken in the world, continually stretch and mutate, and we must accept that ‘les langues sont ainsi, on les veut nôtres à part entière, parce qu’on est jaloux, et elles, se veulent ouvertes à tous et finissent par nous imposer leur bruyante progéniture’ [‘languages are like that, we want them to belong to us completely, because we are jealous, and they want to be open to everyone and end up imposing on us their noisy progeny’].39 More critical than Ben Jelloun, Sansal’s point is also a political one. Algerian culture is precisely not a unified national culture, as the regime would have it, but a hybridized mix emerging from a history both of invasions and of movements outwards: ‘nous sommes des Algériens, c’est tout, des êtres multicolores et polyglottes, et nos racines plongent partout dans le monde. Toute la Méditerranée coule dans nos veines et, partout, sur ses rivages ensoleillés, nous avons semé nos graines’ [‘we are Algerians, that is all, multicoloured and polyglot beings, and our roots are buried all across the world. The whole of the Mediterranean flows in our veins, and we have sown our seeds all across its sunny shores’].40 Sansal is not rejecting the significance of the Algerian nation here, but indeed celebrates the specificity of Algerianness in his affirmation ‘nous sommes des Algériens’. Nevertheless, national culture is also shaped by its historical encounters with

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other cultures, and the Mediterranean is figured here as the arena for the clashes and movements between the peoples lining its shores.41 Sansal responds to the littérature-monde manifesto with a condemnation of all forms of monolithic and separatist thinking. The implication is that this critique is the foundation of littérature-monde, a creative culture that would actively resist reductive forms of nationalism and monolingualism, as well as a radicalized Islamist monoculture in Algeria, in its engagement with its plural and dialogic past and future. Sansal’s literary texts, moreover, are known more specifically for their deliberate interweaving of Arab and Jewish histories, and his bold demonstration of how these mutually inform one another may be one example of a worldly literature that refuses to partition stories into self-enclosed cultural compartments. Commenting on his writing, Sansal boldly affirms in an interview in World Literature Today: ‘I make literature, not war … . Literature is not Jewish, Arab, or American. It tells stories to everyone’.42 Le Village de l’Allemand ou le journal des Frères Schiller, for example, tells the story of two Algerian brothers who discover that their father had been a Nazi officer and explores the links between the Holocaust, the Algerian War of Independence, the civil war in Algeria during the 1990s, and contemporary disaffection in the Parisian banlieues.43 More recently, Rue Darwin explores the writer’s own complex family history and stresses the proximity between Arab and Jewish communities in Belcourt during his childhood.44 The character Daoud, moreover, a childhood friend whom the narrator later learns is his brother, reinvents himself as a Jew working in the Hotel Lutétia in Paris (where the Nazis gathered Jews to be deported and also where Jews were initially returned after the war), and with both texts Sansal is at pains to stress the proximity and shared history between Islam and Judaism, despite the brutal conflicts that have dominated their history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Sansal’s writing, then, both broader histories and subjective memories are international and cross-cultural and, as a result, identities, such as that of Daoud or indeed that of the narrator himself, are themselves open to recreation. And if history and memory are ‘multidirectional’ in this way, to use Michael Rothberg’s term, then the creative works that embrace this dialogic structure might be rather closer to world literature than to national literature, even if in the case of Sansal the texts are also deeply rooted in Algeria.45 Sansal’s Rue Darwin, however, is also on a more profound level an excavation of knowledge and truth, and it might be conceived to display something of the ‘worldliness’ of world literature by signalling the ethical and political

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importance of doubt and self-questioning. On one level the text is the narrative of a search for origins and for self-discovery, but on another level it is a larger and more far-reaching reflection on our ability to know what we think we know and on the paradoxical falsity of truths or forms of knowledge that are presumed to be stable. In seeking to find out who he is and where he comes from, the narrator, loosely based on Sansal himself, at the same time discovers that, in a society where myths are propagated and where secrets are covered up, some questions will remain unanswered, even as he is compelled to keep asking. The text at once unravels without resolving the layers of secrecy that cover the protagonist’s family history and denounces the falsity of Algerian nationalist discourse after independence. Both strands of Sansal’s narrative suggest that knowledge lies not in ‘truth’ or certainty but in the understanding that perceptions change, that mythology necessarily lies: ‘la vérité est dans le mouvement et dans la possibilité de l’erreur’ [‘truth lies in movement and in the possibility of error’].46 As for Said and Ben Jelloun, the text’s immersion in the world and its worldly self-awareness at the same time bring into view the limits of what any narrative can ascertain.

The Thousand and One Nights The Thousand and One Nights is arguably one of the greatest works of ‘world literature’. It is in itself a vast compendium of literary reflection, and its diverse characters and stories, as well as its own meta-commentary on narrative processes, provide a crucial intertext for many of the contemporary francophone North African writers analysed in this book. Sandra Naddaff suggests in her contribution to The Routledge Companion to World Literature that the work’s manifold origins and versions, together with the richly dialogic and multilayered structure of the Nights, perform the transcultural movement that might aptly exemplify the ‘worldliness’ of world literature. It is an inherently cross-cultural work drawing on a multitude of sources from Persia, the Arab world, India and Europe, incorporating various cycles from different epochs and locations, and having been repeatedly reworked and retold. According to Naddaff, the Nights therefore speaks directly to the potential of a foundational literary text fearlessly to cross borders and boundaries of all sorts: generic, formal, linguistic, and national. Perhaps no other work of world literature holds up as clear a mirror to the way

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Marina Warner similarly celebrates the Nights as ‘an extraordinarily productive case of cross-fertilisation, retellings, grafts and borrowings, overwriting, imitation, and dissemination’, and this dynamic structure evidently enacts a form of literary dialogue and travel that aptly demonstrates the capacity of a work of literature to challenge and transcend deterministic national and cultural frameworks.48 Moreover, the Thousand and One Nights is also palimpsestic, as stories are told within stories and narrators are grafted upon narrators to create a work at once full of the most diverse happenings and creatures, and provocatively reflective of all the complexity of literary representation. As Warner also argues, the work incorporates storytelling into its very fabric, so that the art of narration is conceived as part of the action and the imagination is blurred with the real.49 The Thousand and One Nights, then, is at once a ‘worldly’ work constructed out of continuing dialogue with multiple cultures, and a reflection on literature itself, as the power of storytelling itself is the driving force of the narrative. While, in the frame tale, the narrator Scheherazade saves herself and the women of the land more broadly by stalling King Schahriar’s killing spree by engaging him with her stories, throughout the text characters call for justice or demand circumspection by spinning tales and inciting listeners to consider their actions anew. At the same time, however, this does not mean that narrative is accorded with excessive power. Rather, it serves to foreground the contingency of knowledge and the potential for events to be endlessly reformulated and reconceived. Storytelling and literature can not only be provocative and influential, but they also display the fragility of human perception and the limitations of the understanding we believe we possess through the fictions we tell ourselves. The iconic work of the Thousand and One Nights is a lively source that contemporary North African writers seek repeatedly to rework, and at the same time a signifier of a diasporic and worldly literary culture upon which they are able to build their own conception of literature. One of the most prominent aspects of the Nights that might be seen to inform contemporary North African literature is its dynamic cross-cultural form. This cultural multiplicity is what Salim Bachi displays most visibly in his 2010 novel Amours et aventures de Sindbad le Marin, a work that reinvents the story of the restless voyager Sindbad and which consists in a densely intertextual dialogue at the same time with a myriad other myths and texts.50 In the Arabian Nights, Sindbad is,

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at first glance, a hero, a sailor who goes through many adventures, and each time returns having made his fortune. He is endlessly restless, he gets lost, shipwrecked and narrowly escapes death many times, but cannot resist setting out anew in an unquenchable thirst for discovery. The text repeatedly stresses that on returning from his voyages, Sindbad has plenty of riches and is ready to settle down, and yet each time the next story begins with the return of this urge to travel. As an insatiable voyager, then, he is an apt hero for a work of world literature that too contests hermeticism and isolationism. Nevertheless, Sindbad’s travels expose him to extraordinary brutality, perhaps most strikingly, for example, in the fourth voyage, when according to a local custom he is buried in a tomb with his dead wife; he survives by killing the husbands and wives who succumb to the same fate in order to eat their rations. And Sindbad himself is also here violent, as this dark tale casts doubt on the form of his adventuring. In several instances, he is treated with brutality because, arriving somewhere new, he misunderstands local inhabitants, disturbs the natural equilibrium, meddles in the environment and arouses wrath in the creatures and people on whom he intrudes. Indeed, as Wen-chin Ouyang explains, the Sindbad of the Nights learns, just like Schahriar in the frame story, about the dangers and limits of power and, far from the swashbuckling games of the Hollywood film version, the original text is rather more cautionary.51 Travelling, perhaps, may be an enriching and compelling process of discovery, but it is dangerous if the traveller becomes egocentric and arrogant. The Sindbad in Bachi’s tale too figures travel and worldliness in a complex and reflective way. On the one hand, Sindbad delights in the refreshing discovery of new places and in particular in his series of lovers, the most prominent of which is Vitalia, whose name connotes the sailor’s embrace of life through his encounters. Sindbad’s story of his adventures also celebrates the creative potential of his heterogeneous intellectual discoveries, and a form of multilingualism shapes the text as he litters his anecdotes with imagery drawn from other texts. In Rome, for example, he reads Sciascia’s Spanish Moments to vindicate his own solitude and looks anew at the back streets such as the Via Veneto by remembering Tennessee Williams exploring there for young boys. Strolling in Cadiz, he imagines he enters the world of Salammbô: ‘Je devins un Carthaginois, un marchand grec, une putain sacrée qui embrassait un serpent et l’aimait comme un homme ou une femme, ou quelque chose de plus étrange encore’ [‘I became a Carthaginian, a Greek merchant, a sacred whore who kissed a serpent and loved it like a man or woman, or something even stranger’].52 Even the traveller’s disgust towards the inanity of Italian television is compared

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to Dante waiting at the gates of his Inferno, and the Milanese industrialist who dominates the media is a Golem, or the Emperor Tiberius. The story is richly interwoven with such images and citations, as if the experience of a place is always enhanced, developed and altered through a simultaneous imagined journey into comparable literary worlds. On the other hand, however, the Sindbad of Bachi’s work is not the seafaring hero of the Nights, who returns each time from his travels having made his fortune, but a much more disillusioned, nomadic soul, continually dissatisfied like his predecessor yet rather less heroic and certainly less wealthy. His journey is triggered after he squanders his fortune, and in his departure he is accompanied by many others desperate to escape the dystopia of Carthago. The sailor’s errantry in the world here is less an epic adventure than a bid to leave the stultified Algerian nation, ‘l’enfer de nos indépendences ratées’ [‘the hell created by our unsuccessful efforts at independence’], and lacking the purpose of the Sindbad of the Nights, Bachi’s reincarnation merely drifts.53 His travelling will not make him his fortune, then, and yet Bachi’s text sketches a worldliness that perhaps more quickly eschews the desire for mastery and that is from the outset more alive to a process of discovery without possession. It is, once again, clearly a response to the dangers and restrictions of nationalism in the postcolonial era, and yet the disillusionment Bachi expresses might also be associated with a non-proprietary attitude that is, once again, worldly in Said’s terms. In addition to reassessing worldly travel, moreover, Bachi’s text also interacts with the Nights in order to reflect on literary representation itself. The Sindbad narratives in the Arabian Nights question the status of fiction in part through the presence of the narrator’s double: Sindbad the Sailor tells his story to another Sindbad, a poor porter, a reflection of what he might have been without his riches. He recounts his adventures, then, before an alter ego who reminds him of his potential failure, and the story is created against the backdrop of that sign of its provisional status. In Bachi’s version, this trope of doubling recurs several times. First, Sindbad tells his story to the enigmatic figure of the Sleeper, and like the poor porter, the Sleeper is in a sense Sindbad’s double or his darker side. Bachi draws here on the myth of the seven sleepers, according to which a group of Christians took refuge in a cave in Ephesus, sometime around 250 AD, to escape persecution, but they fell asleep and only awoke 180 years later (more in some versions) and then died. The myth itself has multiple origins, and is also referred to in the Koran, but Bachi redeploys it here in the form of an anonymous figure (the Sleeper) who returns after a long

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absence to Carthago to find it ravaged and barely recognizable. Later, however, a painter named Ingres tells Sindbad the story of the original Sindbad, and Bachi’s protagonist identifies here with the poor porter; so in this case, he is the fragile one, the shadow that casts doubt on the storyteller’s depiction of the Sailor’s success. Bachi’s Sindbad has more than one double, reflecting multiple different potentialities and the ability to play many contrasting roles, each of which is on some level a fiction. Furthermore, stories are shown to be unable to contain the richness of reality, as Bachi’s protagonist comments that Sindbad the Sailor escapes Ingres’s narrative. This insufficiency, however, is linked at the same time to the observation that Sindbad’s good fortune lies in ‘sa capacité à se réinventer à travers les femmes et les voyages’ [‘being able to reinvent himself through his women and his voyages’].54 Narrative might be flawed because it is finite and partial, but its limitations might also be its strength: provisionality allows for renewal. Through the presence of the various doubles that structure and inform the story, Bachi in this way continues the intensely self-reflexive work of the Thousand and One Nights and conceptualizes literature itself as a contingent space for worldly self-doubt and self-questioning. The Thousand and One Nights also forms an important precursor to recent North African writing because of its explicit reflection on the role of the storyteller herself. In the frame tale, Scheherazade spins tales not only in order to distract or entertain Schahriar but also to provoke him to alter his thinking through her stories of injustice towards women alongside visions of female empowerment. As Suzanne Gauch demonstrates, in recounting tales of violence, injustice and resistance, Scheherazade manages to change the king’s view of femininity and of his own brutal practice.55 Stories, then, have the capacity to alter the way we think and to bring about justice. Gauch goes on to explore the complex ways in which modern writers rethink this conception of the storyteller to provide a subtle and compelling vision of the writer and his or her work in the contemporary period. Assia Djebar can be conceived as a reincarnated Scheherazade, for example, challenging injustice by means of  her storytelling and vilifying, in particular in L’Amour, la fantasia, the crime of sexual violence against women. Djebar’s narrator, like Scheherazade, exposes  a series of horrific episodes of violence against women and reveals women’s cruel mistreatment as  their abuse is referenced with casual disdain by male tyrants, in this case the  French officials of the colonial invasion. The soldiers’ pride and grandiloquence in their letters  home, for example, is punctured by Djebar’s attention to the image of a woman’s foot severed from her body so that her anklet can be stolen, a cursory detail recorded only

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briefly in  General Bosquet’s account of his triumph. If critics have disputed the results  of Scheherazade’s project by noting how she stops  telling stories and marries the sultan at the end of the work, however, in Djebar’s narrative, the  questionable success of the storyteller’s project of resistance  becomes far more prominent. Although she has uncovered a history of brutality against women, the narrator doubts her ability to liberate the women in whose name she writes. Djebar’s narrator is aware that her version also fails to capture the voices and experiences of her abused ancestors. She may, like Scheherazade, set out to alter perceptions of what is just and unjust in the treatment of women, but she doubts whether her narrative too can really overturn old hierarchies. Storytelling is a powerful means of correcting falsities and provoking reflection, but in both the Nights and L’Amour, la fantasia it does not seem to be capable of bringing about a new political order. Djebar draws on the Thousand and One Nights intermittently but repeatedly throughout her corpus, and perhaps most prominently in Ombre sultane, where the relationship between Scheherazade and her watchful sister Dinarzade provides a framework for a reflection on relationships between women in Algeria more recently. The work of the storyteller becomes blurred with that of the observer and protector, however, and Djebar suggests through her two central female characters in the text that there may also be inequality in relationships between women. However, Djebar most clearly and pointedly examines the relationship between the subversive stories of the Nights and contemporary politics in ‘La Femme en morceaux’, one of the stories in Oran, langue morte, and it is here that the narrative experimentalism of the Nights is figured as a provocative and yet highly fragile challenge to restrictive orthodoxies. ‘The Story of the Three Apples’, which revolves around the discovery of a massacred woman’s body, found in a trunk at the bottom of the Tigris, is interwoven here with the narrative of its analysis by a group of modern Algerian students and their teacher Atyka. Yet the brutal assassination of Atyka by extremists at the end of the story serves as a powerful indication of their mistrust of the class’s, and the original text’s, critique of injustice. In particular, both ‘The Story of the Three Apples’ and Atyka herself testify to a history of violence against women, and both the original work and Djebar’s retelling imply that the story is a statement of resistance towards that injustice. The literary analysis of the text by the modern students, together with the teacher who encourages individual questioning, also show how hidden layers can be brought to light in such a way as to retrieve voices that authoritarian patriarchies tried to silence both in the world of the Nights and in the present. The story ends with the repeated

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question, ‘et la voix?’ [‘and the voice?’], as if to lament the silencing of both the woman in ‘The Story of the Three Apples’ and Atyka herself, and the brutal scenes both in the original and in Atyka’s classroom, ravaged by murderous intruders, indicate both the importance of maintaining the voice of questioning through literature and the horrific consequences of those modes of thinking that mistrust literary and critical creativity.56 While writers such as Djebar and Bachi in this way develop their enquiry into worldliness, literature and storytelling initiated in the Thousand and One Nights, the Moroccan writer and thinker Abdelfattah Kilito offers a challenging reflection on the potentially problematic uses of the work in the present. Kilito’s Dites-moi le songe is composed of a playful hybrid between stories and essays, with narrators resembling Kilito himself, but whose voices are nevertheless both unreliable and surprising. In the first two pieces in particular, characters engage with the Nights in complex ways, and the literary work becomes part of their lives and also plays on their thinking. ‘Ida à la fenêtre’, for example, opens with the narrator’s reflection on how reading the Nights when he was unwell as a child fuelled his convalescence, and he seems to want to champion a conception of literature as therapeutic. The narrator in the second story, ‘La seconde folie de Shahriar’, however, confesses that after publishing a study of the Nights, he fell into a serious depression. The implication seems to be the ironic point that one should avoid over-celebrating the beneficial effects of reading literature and that immersion in the enormous compendium of the Nights might be a hindrance as much as a learning experience. Equally, the optimistic assumption that a magisterial work such as the Thousand and One Nights might somehow speak to a universal mankind is challenged when the narrator of ‘Ida à la fenêtre’ is asked to address an audience in the United States who know little of the text. Moreover, the same narrator seems to be guilty of wanting somehow to possess the work, when after spotting an edition of Richard Burton’s translation in a bookshop nearby, he becomes anxious that a member of his ignorant audience might want to purchase it before him. Kilito’s narrative figures the Nights in this way as an example of a work of literature that continually confounds expectations and resists mastery – once again, like many of the works explored here. Dites-moi le songe also reflects on the process of reading the Nights. In ‘Ida à la fenêtre’, after buying the Burton translation the narrator finds tucked inside one of its volumes the manuscript of a story with which he is unfamiliar, ‘Histoire du prince Nourredine et du cheval’. The discovery triggers an anxious desire to determine the text’s origins, a process, however, that turns out to be

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frustrated. Yet, at the end of his reflection, the narrator notes that what the story does remind him of is in fact an episode in Nietzsche, whereby he embraces a horse whom he witnesses being whipped in a street in Turin. Without finding the origins and meaning of the story, he instead concludes his investigation with the image of ‘Nietzsche comme personnage des Mille est une nuits’ [‘Nietzsche as a character from the Thousand and One Nights’], an image that not only in part again demonstrates the ability of the text to establish dialogue between cultures, but that also in part comes across as a whimsical and ironic product of the narrator’s imagination.57 Furthermore, the subject of ‘La seconde folie de Shahriar’ is the consternation caused by the thesis of a certain Ismaël Kamlo on the ending of the Nights. Kamlo explores the controversy surrounding the work’s conclusion and asks, among other things, why Schahriar did not record the stories. Most importantly, however, what the student’s examiners most criticize is his attention to a popular storyteller’s account, according to which Schahriar loses his mind because his scribes are not able to write the stories down. Kamlo is upbraided for trusting an unreliable source and for his intermingling of scholarly erudition with hypothesis and fantasy. There is in this story a degree of satire against the rigidity of academic convention and again a suggestion that our response to the Nights may always be bound up with the fantasies we create about it. Kilito suggests in both ‘Ida à la fenêtre’ and ‘La seconde folie de Schahriar’ that the desire for knowledge about the text’s composition and origins will always be frustrated and that we can only ever assimilate the work through the images and connections we create for ourselves, however fanciful. A work whose interpretation will never be completed, the Nights are also figured here as the trigger for creative readings that will each themselves also remain subjective and provisional. Despite these sophisticated contemporary reflections on the Nights, several writers have denounced the appropriation of the work by the popular imagination. Most recently, Fatema Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West examines the simplifications of various European reworkings and challenges the exoticization of the text in the Western imagination.58 Mernissi’s own work nevertheless responds to these distortions with more nuanced readings of some of the stories found in the written text while also correcting misconceptions about Arab and Islamic culture more broadly. Leïla Sebbar’s Shérazade trilogy answers back to the myth in the figure of its young protagonist, Shérazade, from the Parisian banlieues, who at once re-enacts and subverts Orientalist fantasy by masquerading as an odalisque while also engaging in hold-ups and hitchhiking around France.59 A second-generation Algerian immigrant or ‘beur’, Shérazade

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is compelled by exoticist images of oriental women but also works to reinvent the stereotype as she travels across France and recreates herself through her meetings and dialogues with other people. In addition, Boudjedra’s 1001 années de la nostalgie depicts the crass arrival of a film crew in a small village in the desert and suggests that an engagement with Algeria’s past requires a far more complex mode of reflection than that offered by popular versions of tales from the Nights.60 Again, however, it is not the text of Thousand and One Nights that is the object of Boudjedra’s critique here, and indeed the central character Mohamed, who leads the villagers’ revolt, is steeped in the work and its imagery while also drawing inspiration from classical Arabic scholars. What these critiques tend to have in common, then, is a denunciation of the reductive mythology that can accompany the Nights in the Western imagination, while the work itself remains a powerful trigger for reflection both on contemporary culture in North Africa and on its continued engagement with its past. In its vast juxtaposition of stories of courage and resistance in the face of injustices, it at the same time continues to trigger reflection on literary representation, storytelling and also reading, in ways that remain wholly relevant to the present generation of writers. **** Neither ‘postcolonialism’ nor ‘world literature’ nor the Thousand and One Nights should be construed as defining models for francophone North African literature since the 1980s. The recollection of what these frames and contexts mean during this period nevertheless helps to foreground the concerns of the writers explored here. If the resonance of the dynamic use of these paradigms is something this chapter has set out to demonstrate, then this discussion also serves as a means to situate and offer an intellectual context for the analyses that occupy the rest of this book. This book is evidently one written by a European brought up on a particular sort of liberal critical theory, whose thinking is inevitably shaped by dominant currents in recent European and American literature and thought. Postcolonial theory and world literature are critical paradigms that have held sway in European and American universities in recent history, and if they seem to this author to offer important insights into francophone North African literary works, then these will also necessarily be partial. That said, the works under discussion are not only written in French but are also themselves involved in the critical tradition that gave rise to the development of postcolonial theory and theories of world literature, and their approaches to the questions that

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dominate these fields serve as compelling contributions to the debate. If many of the writers examined here also refer back to the paradigmatic work of Arabic literature, the Thousand and One Nights, they set its strategies and tropes into dialogue with techniques derived from European literature and thought. They should be read as a result as potentially illuminating reflections on the crucial literary debates raised by these influential and provocative models of literary activity. Nevertheless, it is perhaps selfevident, though important to reiterate, that the perspectives they bring are specific, situated and in many ways highly problematic to other parts of the societies to which they bear witness. This book explores the form and the self-questioning of a certain genre of writing produced in North Africa, one that is in no way representative of local culture but one that nevertheless reveals the difficulty of its own status in ways that might also productively contribute to contemporary literary critical thought.

Notes 1

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial literatures (London: Routledge, 1989, 2nd edition 2002) p. 2. 2 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2005) p. 3. 3 Jean-Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999). 4 Dominique Combe, Les littératures francophones: questions, débats, polémiques (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2010) p. 23. 5 Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu and Jennifer Wenzel, ‘The End of Postcolonial Theory’, PMLA (May 2007) 633–651; Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (London and New York: Zed Books, 2012). 6 Fernando Coronil, in Sunil Agnani et al. ‘The End of Postcolonial Theory’, p. 649. 7 Maia Dauner and Cynthia Foo, ‘Introduction’, in Maia Dauner and Cynthia Foo (eds.), ‘After Post-colonialism?’, Invisible Culture 13 (Spring 2009): 1–3. 8 Robert Young, ‘Postcolonial Remains’, New Literary History 43 (2012): 19–42 (p. 20). 9 For more on this lack, and as an attempt to redress the balance, see Geoffrey Nash, Kathleen Kerr-Koch, Sarah E. Hackett (eds.), Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture, Society and Film (London: Routledge, 2014). 10 Charles Bonn, ‘La littérature algérienne francophone serait-elle sortie du face -à-face post-colonial?’, Modern and Contemporary France 10.4 (2002): 483–493.

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11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24 25

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Bonn notes a shift in focus in Algerian literature during the 1970s towards a form of ‘postmodern’ experimentation and away from colonial critique. In arguing that this constitutes a move away from the postcolonial, however, he appears to confuse postcolonialism with anti-colonialism. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire (eds.), La Fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005). Benjamin Stora, ‘Quand une mémoire (de guerre) peut en cache rune autre (coloniale)’, Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Sandrine Lemaire (eds.), La Fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005) 59–67. Anna Bozzo, ‘Islam et République: une longue histoire de méfiance’, Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire (eds.), La Fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005) 77–84 (p. 81). Alec G. Hargreaves (ed.), Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005). ‘Editorial’, ‘Faut-il être postcolonial?’, Labyrinthes 24 (2006), http://labyrinthe .revues.org/1286 (accessed February 2017). Laurent Dubreuil (ed.), ‘Qui a peur du postcolonial?: dénis et controverses’, Mouvements 51 (2007). Claire Joubert (ed.), Le Postcolonial comparé: anglophonie, francophonie (Paris: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2014). Claire Joubert, ‘Le «postcolonial» à la différence des langues: culture, politique et enjeu de monde’, in Claire Joubert (ed.), Le Postcolonial comparé: anglophonie, francophonie (Paris: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2014) 9–42 (p. 21). Charles Bonn and Arnold Rothe (eds.), Littérature maghrebine et littérature mondiale (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, GmbH, 1995). Robert Young, ‘World Literature and Postcolonialism’, in Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) 213–222 (p. 221). Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) p. 49. Edward Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann and Soret (London: Smith, Elder, 1850) p. 350. Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, ‘Preface: Weltliteratur, littérature universelle, vishwa sahitya …’, in Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir

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26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

36

37 38

39 40 41

Writing After Postcolonialism (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) xviii–xxi. John Pizer, ‘Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: Origins and Relevance of Weltliteratur’, in Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) 3–11. Christopher Prendergast, ‘Introduction’, in Christopher Prendergast (ed.), Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004) vii–xiii (p. viii). Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Damrosch, What Is World Literature? p. 281. Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, p. 60. Said, The World, the Text, the Critic, p. 35. Ibid., p. 26. Jonathan Arac, ‘Edward W. Said: The Worldliness of World Literature’, in Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) 117–125. Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud (eds.), Pour une littérature-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). Jean Rouaud, ‘Mort d’une certaine idée’, in Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud (eds.), Pour une littérature-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2007) 7–22 (p. 21). See also Françoise Lionnet, ‘World Literature, Francophonie, and Creole Cosmopolitics’, in Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) 325–335 (p. 325). Charles Forsdick, Alec Hargreaves and David Murphy (eds.), Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-monde (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). My own contribution to the volume is entitled ‘Littérature-monde and Old/New Humanism’, which discusses the lack of nuance in the authors’ use of the notion of the human. See pp. 178–191. The Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015) p. 22. Tahar Ben Jelloun, ‘La Cave de ma mémoire, le toit de ma maison sont des mots français’, in Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud (eds.), Pour une littérature-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2007) 113–124 (p. 113). Boualem Sansal, ‘Où est passée ma frontière?’, in Michel Le Bris and Michel Rouaud (eds.), Pour une littérature-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2007) 161–174 (p. 173). Boualem Sansal, Poste restante: Alger. Lettre de colère et d’espoir à mes compatriotes (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) p. 48. There has been some interesting scholarship on the Mediterranean as a dynamic space of cultural interaction, as well as a nostalgic trope for convivencia, or more recently, border zone for clandestine migration. See for example Edwige Tamalet

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43 44 45

46 47

48 49

50

51

52 53 54 55 56 57

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Talbayev, The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). Boualem Sansal, ‘A Rustle in History: Conversations with Dinah Assouline Stillman’, World Literature Today (September 2012) http://www .worldliteraturetoday.org/2012/september/rustle-history-conversations-boualem -sansal-dinah-assouline-stillman-0# (accessed February 2017). Boualem Sansal, Le Village de l’Allemand, ou le journal des frères Schiller (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). Boualem Sansal, Rue Darwin (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Rothberg suggests that multidirectional memory is ‘subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing: as productive not privative’ (p. 3). His focus is above all on the ways in which Holocaust memory triggers and overlaps with the memory of other moments of trauma, in particular, those of the conflicts around decolonization. His point is that the way we remember an event is through its dialogue and association with other memories, as well as with the memories of other people. Sansal, Rue Darwin, p. 253. Sandra Naddaff, ‘The Thousand and One Nights as World Literature’ in Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) 487–496 (p. 487). Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (London: Chatto and Windus, 2011) p. 25. Marina Warner describes the narrative’s portrayal of ‘dream journeys in which the maker fuses with what is being made, until the artefact exercises in return its own fashioning force’. Stranger Magic, p. 27. Salim Bachi, Amours et aventures de Sindbad le Marin (Paris: Gallimard, 2010); The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor, trans. Sue Rose (London: Pushkin Press, 2012). Wen-chin Ouyang, ‘Whose story Is It? Sindbad the Sailor in Literature and Film’, in Wen-chin Ouyang and Geert Jan Von Gelder (eds.), New Perspectives on the Arabian Nights: Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons (London: Routledge, 2005) 1–15. Bachi, Amours et aventures de Sindbad le Marin, p. 89; The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor, p. 58. Ibid., p. 128; p. 84. Bachi, Amours et aventures de Sindbad le Marin, p. 149. See Suzanne Gauch, Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism and Islam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) p. x. Assia Djebar, Oran, langue morte (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997) p. 214, 215. Abdelfattah Kilito, Dites-moi le songe (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010) p. 39.

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58 Fatema Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems (New York: Washington Square Press, 2002). 59 Leïla Sebbar, Shérazade, 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts (Paris: Stock, 1982); Les Carnets de Shérazade (Paris: Stock, 1985); Le Fou de Shérazade (Paris: Stock, 1991). 60 Rachid Boudjedra, 1001 années de la nostalgie (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).

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Why Write? Literature According to its Authors

‘Ecriture qui aurait pu signifier historiquement mon exterritorialité, et qui devient pourtant peu à peu mon véritable territoire’ [‘Writing, which could historically have signified my extraterritoriality, and which nevertheless gradually becomes my true territory.’] Assia Djebar, Ces Voix qui m’assiègent (44) ‘J’écris pour ne plus avoir de visage. J’écris pour dire la différence’ [‘I write in order to be faceless. I write in order to express difference.’] Tahar Ben Jelloun, Le Discours du chameau (106) Writing, as it is portrayed by contemporary North African authors who write in French, is something of a double-edged sword. Assia Djebar in the aforementioned quotation, and throughout her oeuvre, figures writing both as a source of alienation or even expatriation and as the one space she is able to create as her own. Ben Jelloun’s melancholic evocation of self-effacement also reproduced here may, conversely, suggest that writing is above all a way of transcending or escaping from the self, and yet he too observes that the poet finds a home in his work: ‘sa patrie, c’est le territoire des mots’ [‘his native land is the territory of words’].1 For Djebar and Ben Jelloun, then, writing is at once constructive and destructive, comforting and disorientating. It is a home, but only in the sense that it creates the illusion of belonging in a context where the writer finds herself alienated between the various cultures that shaped who she has become. Literary creation, moreover, is figured repeatedly by francophone writers of the region as both self-discovery and self-loss; it is also by turns a space of respite and a journey. It is a means of self-expression, a tool for dissent or even combat, and at the same time a frail mirage unable to effect change in a context of cultural antagonism and repression. Writing is also potentially a space to bring together multiple languages, to generate intercultural dialogue

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and exchange, but risks all the while failing to convey meaning across borders and falling into opacity. A compulsion for many, it is at the same time the bringer of visionary hope and of frustrated anxiety. This chapter will explore the multiple dimensions of the writing process as it is evoked by a wide range of writers in order to understand better its ambiguous status during the recent period. The chapter will explore a series of tropes used to describe literature’s capacity to reassure, challenge, anchor or transform the writer in a context where national culture remains contested a generation or more after decolonization. If the present title echoes Sartre’s militant and provocative ‘pourquoi écrire?’ [‘why write?’] of Qu’est-ce que la littérature? [What Is Literature?], the multiple responses of recent francophone North African writers suggest that writing remains for them a more eclectic, ambivalent and at times conflicted process than Sartre described.2 As we saw in the Introduction, Sartre’s answer to the question was clearly that the committed writer at least writes in the name of liberty and democracy and, indeed, contemporary North African writing is undoubtedly also deeply concerned with the expression of intellectual freedom and with the critique of authoritarianism. Nevertheless, the public role of literature is something that many writers since the 1980s have at the same time been reassessing, and while some conceive their work as a space of resistance, if not of revolution, others experience their writing as a more introspective and indeed often more fragile locus of exploration.

Writing as autobiography Autobiography has occupied a central place in francophone literature, and many early works emerging during the colonial period in North Africa spring from the writer’s attempt to determine both his or her own position, and that of his or her community, in response to the colonial presence. Debra Kelly’s study Autobiography and Independence provides a thorough analysis of the development of autobiographical discourse in North Africa from Mouloud Feraoun to Assia Djebar and helpfully explores the multiple tensions within the autobiographical project in this tense cross-cultural context. Kelly notes that autobiography has often misleadingly been conceived as a European genre and argues rather that autobiography is in this postcolonial context more importantly about self-assertion, ‘a tool for “decolonising the mind” ’, since writers use the form to define themselves and their cultures on their

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own terms rather than in those imposed upon them by colonial discourse.3 In addition, however, she stresses that francophone North African autobiography manifests a complex and dynamic negotiation between individual and collective identification. Deftly undermining the simplified association of Western culture with individualism, in contrast to the communitarianism of Arab and Islamic cultures, Kelly nevertheless stresses that autobiography is in this context an exploration of colonized subjectivity while at the same time it questions how the writer’s subject position relates to, and may or may not speak for, the colonized community at large. Offering close readings of autobiographical works by Mouloud Feraoun, Albert Memmi, Abdelkébir Khatibi and Assia Djebar, Kelly suggests that ‘in the work of all these writers there is a meditation on an individual experience and on the relationship of that experience to that of others, leading to diverse forms of creative, and political, intervention’.4 The focus of this book is not on autobiography, and yet there is an autobiographical strain that persists in some francophone North African works in the recent period, which testifies to an ongoing association between writing, self-knowledge and the situation of the self within the world. It is evident from the sorts of comments that writers offer on their project that literary writing more broadly remains in some cases, like the works of Kelly’s study, a search for a self. Nevertheless, since the 1980s, the question of identity and community, of the self and his or her context or milieu, is presented in increasingly complex ways and, indeed, the relationship between text and life as it is conceived by the writers themselves also turns out to be more unstable than the notion of autobiography might suggest. Some of the writers to be explored here not only conceive writing as a quest for identity but they also question the possibility of achieving the stability that ‘identity’ assumes, and rather than representing a community, they make the self ‘other’ through writing. Writing may also often have an autobiographical impetus, but the works in question here are not all strictly autobiographies and take rather the form of a creative reconstruction. Writing is bound up with the reinvention of the writer’s ‘self ’, and these authors use their work both to analyse and to fictionalize the writing process in which they are engaged. This section will explore, then, not so much texts which narrate the lives of their authors, but those that explicitly conceptualize the author as a creator of literature and that establish the writing process as central to the construction of a notion of ‘self ’. It has been suggested that all writing is on some level bound up with autobiography, with the expression or creation of an identity, and with a reflection on the relationship between writing and life. The autobiographical

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strain is in this sense not necessarily associated with the narration of a life story, but with the exploration of the writing subject’s perception and self-perception through the writing process. For Paul de Man, most notably, autobiography and fiction can always be seen as indistinguishable, because in texts purporting to be autobiographies, the self is only ever a figure generated by the text, and conversely when a fiction is signed by the author, he or she always already leaves an imprint, an inscribed ‘self ’, upon it. De Man explores an extract from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu to show how an authorial perspective weaves in and out of the narrative, perceptible through the use of metaphor, and concludes the following: Autobiography, then, is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts. The autobiographical moment happens as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual selfreflexive substitution. The structure implies differentiation as well as similarity, since both depend on a substantive exchange that constitutes the subject. This specular structure is interiorized in a text in which the author declares himself the subject of his own understanding, but this merely makes explicit the wider claim to authorship that takes place whenever a text is stated to be by someone and assumed to be understandable to the extent that this is the case. Which amounts to saying that any book with a readable title-page is, to some extent, autobiographical.5

North African writers exploring their art may not theorize the blurring of fiction and autobiography in quite the same terms as De Man, but their evocation of their writing as inseparable from subjectivity perhaps illustrates the former theoretical claim. The Tunisian thinker and writer Albert Memmi indeed notes in Le Nomade immobile that ‘toute œuvre est plus ou moins autobiographique; mettons que la mienne l’est plus ouvertement que d’autres’ [‘all works are more or less autobiographical; let’s say that mine is more explicitly so than others’].6 And commenting on their ambiguous position as francophone intellectuals engaging with European, Arab, local as well as national cultures, many writers of the region and period conceive their art as a place of self-reflection and a means to situate, or perhaps question, the writing self in relation to local community, national society and the world. If Memmi describes his work as autobiographical in Le Nomade immobile, published in 2000 and some time after the production of his best known works in the 1960s, it is because it is here that a certain self-consciousness about the writing process comes to the forefront of his thinking. While

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the self-consciousness of texts such as La Statue de sel and Le Scorpion illustrates Memmi’s interest in the role of literature early on, looking back on his trajectory towards the end of his career, Memmi offers a set of more succinct insights into his conception of the literary and its place in his life in Le Nomade.7 Writing is, he insists, central to his existence, it has always been a part of his daily rhythm, like eating and sleeping, and occupies his entire body: ‘c’est d’abord une activité qui occupe mes mains, mes yeux, mon corps tout entier. Une mobilisation de tous mes muscles, un rapport à l’espace’ [‘it is above all an activity that occupies my hands, my eyes, my whole body. A mobilisation of all my muscles, a relationship with space’].8 It is a ritual that gives structure to his life, it fuels him and it is a means for him to assert his survival. At the same time, Memmi conceives his writing as a search for truth and for knowledge, not in the sense that it must offer a realistic depiction of the world around him but in the sense that is able to capture the multiple dimensions of human experience. While philosophy, according to Memmi, imposes formal argumentative constraints, literature can invent, and triggers a process of discovery that sheds light on the hidden recesses of the self and the world around him. Perhaps most compellingly, writing provides pleasure and comfort in its ability to construct identity and belonging. Memmi is best known for his theorization of the colonizer’s destructive perception of the colonized and for his repeated reflections on the place of Jewishness in the FrancoTunisian culture in which he grew up. The violence and anxiety theorized in texts such as Portrait du colonisé and Portrait du Juif, however, seem to fall away in his soothing evocation of the therapeutic effects of creative activity.9 Literature allows him ‘en tâtonnant, de tenter de me reconstruire, pour arriver à une relative pacification avec moi-même et peut-être avec les autres’ [‘to try to reconstruct myself, feeling my way, to achieve a relative reconciliation with myself and perhaps with others’].10 Like Memmi, the Moroccan writer Driss Chraïbi also turns to a reflection on writing late in his career in the two largely autobiographical works Vu, lu, entendu and Le Monde à coté, published in 1998 and 2003, respectively. Also like Memmi’s, Chraïbi’s best known works, such as Le Passé simple and La Civilisation, ma mère, have an autobiographical element to them, and yet it is these later works that set out to theorize the evolution and role of his writing in his life.11 Vu, lu, entendu explores his upbringing, his Koranic followed by his French education, his discovery of literature through reading great French writers such as Zola and his own hesitant, early attempts at poetry. Le Monde à coté, moreover, articulates clearly the interaction between creative activity

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and selfhood. Chraïbi writes, he insists, ‘pour me situer dans le monde, dans mon monde d’origine et dans celui vers lequel je me dirigeais à l’aveuglette’ [‘in order to situate myself in the world, in the world of my origins, to which I have been blindly making my way’].12 Writing is also a space where French and Arabic come together for him, as he ridicules the implication that there might be a dichotomy between thinking in Arabic and writing in French, but rather suggests that his work is a space where he can explore the relationship between the two cultures as they have influenced his life and identity. Equally, while the depiction of Islamic authoritarianism in Morocco in Le Passé simple reflected the author’s own unhappy experiences at Koranic school, together with his acerbic critique of Moroccan culture and politics in the lead-up to decolonization, La Civilisation was written according to Chraïbi as a way of recreating a bond with his native land.13 Once again, the act of writing seems here to be a process of identifying and situating the writing self. These writers were born in the 1920s, and the self-conscious reflections produced by Memmi and Chraïbi at the end of the twentieth century on writing, selfhood and autobiography are part of a mature thinking rooted in a desire for a sense of place and origin. Although their earlier autobiographical works, La Statue de sel and Le Passé simple respectively, explore both the productive and the alienating effects of colonial education and link this experience to their evolution as writers, it is later in their trajectory that the literary project comes under intense scrutiny to be enlisted in a search for self-knowledge. For the Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Algerian Assia Djebar, born the decade after, the introspective focus on the construction of a writing self is more prominent, and more unsettled, throughout their works. Their conceptions of the writer and of the role of literature are crystallized perhaps most sharply in Djebar’s collection of essays Ces Voix qui m’assiègent (1999) and in Khatibi’s intellectual autobiography Le Scribe et son ombre (2008), and in both cases the autobiographical project of self-identification is accompanied by a multiplicity of doubts and questions concerning the efficacy or even desirability of life-writing. As we saw at the  beginning of this chapter, Djebar describes  writing as ‘mon véritable territoire’ [‘my true territory’] in the face of  the non-belonging she feels as a francophone woman writer whose experiences set her apart from  the community of Algerian women of which she is also a member. If her partly autobiographical L’Amour, la fantasia opens with the image  of a young girl going to school, hand in hand with her father, this, she suggests in Ces Voix,

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will be an image that encapsulates all her writings in  that it signifies her unusual position as an Arab girl attending a French school and, therefore, her origins as a writer: Parler de la matière même de l’écriture, matière bâtarde par cette confrontation intérieure de deux langues se faisant la guerre dans ma conscience, et s’entrelaçant pourtant à l’ombre de la mort des ancêtres, c’était finalement cela pour moi, ce reflux de l’enfance, cette «fillette arabe allant à l’école française dans un village du Sahel algérien».14 [To speak of the substance of my writing, the substance made hybrid by the internal confrontation of two languages warring against one another in my consciousness and nevertheless interweaving themselves in the shadow of the death of my ancestors, was ultimately this, the resurgence of my childhood, that “little Arab girl going to the French school in a village in the Algerian Sahel”.]

Nevertheless, Djebar’s experiments with autobiography in L’Amour, la fantasia in 1985 and Nulle part dans la maison de mon père in 2007 precisely generate not the creation of a positioned self but a series of anxieties concerning the alienating and transformative effects of texts that tackle both national and personal traumas, yet are written in French. There will not be space here to investigate the enormous complexity of Djebar’s self-conscious meditations in these works, which will be the subject of close readings in Chapters 7 and 8 of this book. But the close association between writing, identity and origin evoked in the quotation above is also questioned, unravelled and undermined throughout her corpus, and explicitly in Ces Voix qui m’assiègent. If writing on one level helps to create a self and a home for Djebar, on another level that creation takes on a certain momentum and autonomy that ultimately not only transform but also deform and alienate the self. Always failing to capture experiences that originally took place in dialectal Arabic, the writing alters and recreates. It does not offer a secure foundation, but rather an ongoing journey with unpredictable ends. This creative process, moreover, is at once liberating and disorientating. On the one hand, the language Djebar uses is above all a ‘«moyen de transformation», dans la mesure où je pratique l’écriture comme aventure’ [‘a “means of transformation”, in the sense that I practise my writing as if it were an adventure’].15 The writer also derives a certain pleasure from the freedom this creativity allows, as she recalls how her earliest works released in her, ‘une pure joie d’inventer, d’élargir autour de moi – moi plutôt raidie au-dehors, parmi les autres, du fait de mon éducation musulmane – un espace de légèreté imaginative, un oxygène …’ [‘the pure joy of inventing, to expand

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around myself – myself, rather stiff from the outside, among other people, as a result of my Muslim education – a space of imaginative lightness, of oxygen …’].16 This pleasure and this liberation, however, at other times in Djebar’s work become associated with a more violent process of destruction, as the language of the former colonizer betrays the subject who is also the victim of the system that oppresses her. In her famous commentary on the autobiographical project in L’Amour, la fantasia, Djebar describes this form of self-revelation in French as ‘une autopsie à vif ’ [‘to lend oneself to the vivisector’s scalpel’], a dissection that, in revealing what is beneath the surface, breaks it apart to leave painful wounds that cannot be captured by words.17 In Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, her second, more candid attempt at an autobiography, the apparently confessional text retains at its core both silence and flight. Djebar’s narrator here recounts in detail the traumatic moment during her adolescence when, after a quarrel with her beloved Tarik, she throws herself under a tram. The sudden clarity of the written text, however, reinforces the occlusion created by the years of silence that precede it. The final section is entitled ‘«Silence sur soie» ou l’écriture en fuite’ [‘ “silence on silk” or writing in flight’], and the play on words alludes to the attempt to make something ‘soyeux’ [‘silky’], something reassuring out of the silence surrounding the notion of the self (the ‘soi’). But it also conveys the irresistible movement of the writing away from the trauma that fractures the writing subject. Khatibi’s autobiographical works, like those of Djebar, also at once situate and transcend the biographical self. Khatibi’s earliest life narrative, La Mémoire tatouée (1971), presents itself as a return to origins, a reflection of the role of writing in the writer’s early life and at times a joyful celebration of the pleasure it gave him. The image of the tattoo nevertheless already signals an awareness of the inscription of memory by means of signs that shape, recreate and transform past experience. Le Scribe et son ombre, however, is more explicitly a narrative of the ‘chemin de la pensée’, and the scribe is ostensibly the ‘je’ who writes and who produces (as he argues all autobiography does) a portrait closer to ‘la fiction d’un double’ [‘the fiction of a double’].18 The text opens with a reflection on ‘Signes d’appartenance’ [‘Signs of belonging’], which at first glance appears to signal the predictable desire to define and determine the self in relation to the community or communities that formed him. Khatibi goes on to offer something of a pastiche of the traditional qualities of a Moroccan, followed by a reflection on his role as an intellectual and an evocation of his early upbringing during the Second World War. Next, he outlines his trajectory through his studies, his license in Paris and at the same time the impact on his thinking of the historical

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sociologist Ibn Khaldun. The chapter ‘Le Chemin vers soi’ similarly emphasizes self-creation, this time more explicitly through the works that the writer read and that shaped his own readings of others. The rest of the text works through the specific geographical and disciplinary stages of his intellectual development with the aim of providing the context for his evolving self and thought. Although unlike that of Djebar, Khatibi’s retrospective is not bound up with trauma, the subject constructed by the writing is very much an invention of language rather than a biographical self. Khatibi is quick to comment that the reading material that shaped him precisely allowed him to transform himself ‘d’être un mutant dans sa vie réelle’ [‘to be a mutant in real life’].19 He describes his autobiographical writing in Le Scribe as a process, ‘m’autobiographiant’ [‘autobiographying myself ’], the aim of which is to ‘m’engendrer, de me développer dans la langue de l’autre’ [‘to engender myself, to develop myself in the language of the other’].20 Writing the self in French is also ‘un exercice d’altérité et de cheminement vers l’autre. Une transformation du corps et de la sensibilité’ [‘an exercise in alterity and in movement towards the other. A transformation of the body and of one’s sensibility’].21 The text at the same time experiments with different forms in an effort to stretch the conventions of the autobiographical gesture, as Khatibi uses fragments of diary and two-person dialogue to dramatize the tension between the desire to capture the self and its fragmentation into different voices. This self-conscious textualization of the writer does not, however, exclude materiality, but captures traces of the body: ‘l’empreinte matérielle d’un corps et de son rhythme’ [‘the material imprint of a body and of its rhythm’].22 The writer as embodied being is not occluded by language, rather he is continually at once figured and recast. The scribe’s work, then, is neither self-expression nor pure text, but something that works between these poles: an energized ‘transmutation’ that both disorients and transforms. Writing as the search for a self, as autobiography, is for Khatibi the start of a journey.

Writing as liberation and escape The search for an autobiographical self becomes for Djebar and Khatibi a movement beyond the self, a transformation rather than simply a process of anchoring. The desire for origins, for a sense of situatedness and belonging, is mingled with a resistance to containment and an attempt to escape rather than merely determine the communities by which they were formed. Djebar’s return

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to origins at the start of L’Amour, la fantasia is also a return to her beginnings as a writer and, therefore, the starting point for her escape, and the free circulation of the written word is evoked here through the image of the limitless blue sky, ‘azur soudain trop vaste’ [‘the blue of heaven is suddenly limitless’].23 The young girl is shaped by the combined forces of her colonial education and her Muslim heritage, but once she has learned to write, she exceeds her father’s control. Her ability to create brings the inauguration of her intellectual and cultural freedom. In Ces Voix, moreover, writing may be the subject’s self-created ‘territoire’, but it also records, between the lines, the writer’s ‘expatriation’, her hesitant and openended departure. Writing may be a way to ‘se poser’, but for Djebar it takes place against the background of ongoing exile and flight.24 This conception of writing as escape rather than as self-definition is developed, moreover, in works by two further Algerian writers of the next generation, Yasmina Khadra and Malika Mokeddem, for whom to write is not to anchor oneself, but to experiment with an alternative mode of thinking, to create an elsewhere liberated from the constraints that are imposed, in very different ways, on their everyday lives. Literature retains an autobiographical dimension, but it is also a point of entry into another world. Yasmina Khadra’s L’Ecrivain, published in 2001 but reflecting on the author’s experiences in the Algerian military since enrolling as a cadet in 1964, clearly sets writing in opposition to the strict regulations of army life. Khadra is now well known as a popular writer who tackles directly the violence and brutality that have afflicted Algeria and other parts of the Arab world. He has written in stark detail about terrorism in a number of different contexts, as well as about the civil war in Algeria during the 1990s, about the Taliban in Afghanistan and about the war in Iraq. Before moving to France to become a full-time writer in 2001, however, Khadra was an officer in the Algerian army, and he adopted his wife’s name as a pseudonym to avoid censorship. The use of the pen name already suggests that when he becomes a writer, he adopts another identity, he creates an alternative persona. In L’Ecrivain, then, literature is clearly associated with an alternative life and operates as a direct antidote to the stultifying army routine. Long sections of the text are taken up with descriptions of his bewilderment towards the military discipline to which he is subjected as a child and of the reductive anonymity of the soldier’s existence. Seeking an antidote to the aggression of the other cadets, the trainee takes refuge in books. First, it is reading that offers an escape: ‘chaque titre m’offrait une lézarde où je me faufilais hors d’El Mechouar. Les contes me propulsaient au cœur d’un monde captivant, me gardaient, le temps d’une lecture, des influences néantisantes

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de la forteresse’ [‘each title offered a crack by which I sneaked out of El Mechouar. Stories projected me into the heart of a captivating world, and, for the time it took me to read them, kept me away from the nullifying influences of the fortress’].25 Fascinated by words, the young soldier discovers that placed alongside one another, words ‘devenaient force et esprit’ [‘became strength and spirit’], they signify vitality and mental activity. Inspired by his reading experiences, the young Mohammed (his given name) then resolves to write as a sign of a commitment to difference in a context where individuals are expected to be the same.26 Later, writing bestows the very power to transform that is denied to him by his rigorous training schedule: Je suis le roi des mages; l’exergue est ma couronne, la métaphore mon panache; je fais d’un laideron une beauté, d’une page blanche une houri. Sous ma plume, les crapauds deviennent princes et les gueux sultans. Je suis le seul à pouvoir inventer l’amour à partir d’une virgule. Et vous n’y pouvez rien.27 [I am the king of the sorcerers; the epigraph is my crown, metaphor my panache; I make ugly girls beautiful, the blank page a houri. Under my pen, toads become princes and paupers become sultans. I alone have the power to invent love from a comma. And you can do nothing about it.]

Moreover, in the subsequent volume, L’Imposture des mots, Khadra asserts that he writes out of anger against the restrictions placed upon him both in the army and in his country more broadly, where intellectual contestation is at best discouraged and at worst banned. For Khadra, writing is this enraged assertion of freedom. Malika Mokeddem’s extended reflection on the writing process in La Transe des insoumis, however, associates literary creativity with liberation of a different sort. While Khadra turns away from his army life, and flouts restrictions on freedom of speech by openly tackling contemporary instances of political and religious extremist brutality, Mokeddem figures writing as a deeper expression of anger and as an escape from an introspective, gnawing anxiety that prevents her from sleeping. La Transe des insoumis alternates chapters recalling the writer’s insomnia as a child growing up in a large, poor, Muslim family in Algeria during the War of Independence where only her grandmother offered her any affection, with reflections on her current life as a doctor in Montpellier, recently abandoned by her husband, Jean-Claude. In both strands, the inability to sleep is a figure for insubordination, as ‘la transe des insoumis’ plays on the echo between ‘insomnie’ and ‘insoumis’, and the ‘transe’ signifies a refusal to conform and acquiesce. Sleeplessness is also an indignant and contestatory response to violence and trauma experienced both in the past and in the present.

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Mokeddem’s narrator recalls, for example, a horrific episode when, refusing to wear a veil as a teenager at an event commemorating the start of the War of Independence, she is showered with insults and then indecently assaulted by one of the boys, and she responds in turn with a violence that enrages her conformist mother. At the same time, La Transe records the narrator’s loneliness after losing her husband and her work as a doctor in Montpellier treating sick and damaged immigrants from underprivileged parts of the city. If this anger and resistance are expressed and figured by insomnia, however, that insomnia is also indissociable from her passion for writing. In refusing to sleep and to submit, the writer clings to the other worlds to which she is transported by books. Remembering her wakefulness as a child, she asserts her ‘droit à l’insomnie, rivée aux livres, emportée par leurs ailleurs’ [‘right to insomnia, bound up with books, carried away by their visions of elsewhere’].28 It is through this mutual association between insomnia, insubordination and writing that literature for Mokeddem comes to represent flight and selfassertion. Awake and in revolt, Mokeddem’s narrator describes writing as ‘le plus grand départ, c’est là que j’essaie d’aller au plus loin. Maintenant je dois interpeller les silences du passé pour mieux habiter le bastion de ma solitude’ [‘the greatest departure, it is there that I try to travel the furthest. Now I must recall the silences of the past in order the better to inhabit the bastion of my solitude’].29 It is both a means to travel into the past and to connect with her heritage and an impetus to create something different. During her unhappy childhood, books offer a form of refuge from her crowded and loveless household and a deliberate distancing from her parents’ disinterest and cruelty. Since neither her mother nor her father were able to read, books become ‘mon premier espace inviolable’ [‘my first inviolable space’].30 Gorging herself on literature, the young narrator becomes anorexic by substituting reading for nutrition, and her reading is now an attempt to create an alternative body ‘un corps de substitution, un corps fictif mais conquérant qui s’en allait à travers les aventures des lectures, qui transportait mes rêves hors du naufrage des dunes, abandonnant volontiers le corps blessé, telle une dépouille à la détresse’ [‘a substitute body, a fictitious body, but one that conquers and that travelled away through the adventures provided by reading, which transported my dreams away from shipwreck on the dunes, willingly abandoning the wounded body, like a distressed cadaver’]. 31 Reflecting on her turn to writing after the episode where she is attacked for not wearing the veil, the narrator then realizes that her creative writing is her anger, it voices her rejection of the world that tries to define her: ‘cette ronde rageuse du verbe dans mon esprit la nuit, est-ce l’écriture? Oui’ [‘that enraged dance of

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words in my head at night-time, is that writing?’]. Much later, she comments on the composition of her novel about amnesia, N’zid, in 2001, in which the protagonist Nora awakes to find herself on the deck of a boat floating in the Mediterranean sea, and here the creation of the text is the ultimate gesture of self-effacement: L’écriture de N’zid m’a été salutaire. Elle m’a effacée de la terre, de toute terre, de tout désamour, blessure, pour me livrer aux seules pulsations de la mer, de la Méditerranée. Je m’y suis gorgée de sa respiration, de son entre-deux. Les mots de la mer, ses lumières, son vent ont pacifié mes frontières, mes contradictions. Ils ont remis la pendule de la mémoire à l’heure de la nécessité. J’en suis sortie délivrée des refus, des hantises. Avec la volonté de me réconcilier, de me ruer. D’aller à l’essentiel dans l’écriture aussi.32 [Writing N’zid was salutary for me. It erased me from the land, from all land, from all disaffection, all wounds, to deliver me just to the rhythms of the sea, the Mediterranean. I gorged myself on its breath, its in-betweenness. The words of the sea, its lights, its wind, pacified my barriers, my contradictions. They set my memory back where it should be. I emerged free of refusals, of obsessions. With the desire to reconcile myself with myself, to rush. To get to the heart of things through writing too.]

As we saw in Chapter 1 with Sansal, the Mediterranean is again a site for the contestation of national culture, and its refiguring through writing allows Mokeddem to imagine a form of liberation from past legacies and obsessions. La Transe des insoumis ends with the narrator’s return visit to her family and her final farewell to her enfeebled father, but there is no sense of a renewed belonging. Writing is evidently a means for Mokeddem’s narrator to reject, to flee, to deny. Khadra and Mokeddem place escape and resistance at the centre of the writing project, but reading, writing and travel are repeatedly associated with one another in the works of several North African writers who reflect on a sense of homelessness as members of a minority francophone educated elite. Like Mokeddem, but perhaps less compulsively, Chraïbi too remembers reading at night to fuel his imagination, though this time the gesture of defiance involved is directed against his father’s suspicious gaze.33 As we shall see in Chapter 8, Djaout’s bookseller in Le Dernier été de la raison reads in order to escape the violence and brutality of the Islamist resurgence, and books are described as conduits to other worlds, as sources of adventure. And writing too might be not only an escape or a statement of refusal, as it is for Khadra or Mokeddem, but also a journey, as, in one of his poems, Tahar Ben Jelloun evokes how ‘tout

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poète est un voyageur, un migrant, un passager de l’espèce’ [‘every poet is a traveller, a migrant, a passenger of the species’]. 34 The writer is conceived by Ben Jelloun’s poetic voice, perhaps idealistically, as a visionary able to use his imagination to move through, and recreate, the world beyond his immediate context and experience. Alongside the creation of self-hood associated with the autobiographical impulse, this notion of literature as departure becomes associated in turn with a search for contact with other cultures and with the wider world.

Intercultural dialogue This conception of literature as an escape or a journey helps to temper the solipsism of autobiographical introspection and brings the writer into contact with other people. Writing may be a way for the writer to flee the cultural constraints imposed upon him or her by nationalist or religious ideology, but in fleeing he or she might enter into other forms of community and dialogue. Far from participating unproblematically in the creation of a postcolonial national identity, then, many contemporary North African writers conceive literature as a space of exchange that works beyond national frontiers. The fraught construction of nationhood may remain a concern for Algerian writers such as Djebar and Boudjedra, or Moroccans such as Laâbi, for example, but many literary writers also both respond to and address communities across borders in a bid to contest the oppressiveness of the monolithic and monologic national myth. This uncoupling of literature from the nation might be associated with the movement of ‘world literature’, a notion which, as explored in Chapter 1, has itself come under scrutiny but which, in its invocation of textual ‘worldliness’, might nevertheless emphasize the ability of literary texts to engage with multiple spaces to contest the restrictive cultural politics of nationalism and to conceptualize their own contingency. While still conceiving cultural plurality in North Africa in part as the result of the colonial past, contemporary writers at the same time imagine their works as broader forms of cultural exchange beyond the binary confrontation between France and the postcolonial Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian nation. Khatibi is perhaps the writer who has theorized this mode of intercultural thinking most explicitly through his invention of a ‘Maghreb pluriel’, a concept he uses to demonstrate a new understanding of postcolonial culture in North Africa at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Khatibi’s text describes the

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specific shift he sees two decades or more after the anti-colonial movement, and since the publication of Maghreb pluriel cultural identity in the region has continued to evolve, but the work is significant for my current purposes for its inauguration of a notion of intercultural dialogue and plurality in North Africa. Khatibi redeploys the term ‘Maghreb’ as the signifier of a new diversity and to express a refusal to establish postcolonial identity on the basis of atavistic or enclosed ideology or theology: ‘Maghreb, ici, désigne le nom de cet écart, de ce non-retour au modèle de sa religion et de sa théologie (si déguisées soientelles sous des idéologies révolutionnaires), non-retour qui peut ébranler, en théorie et en pratique, les fondements des sociétés maghrébines dans l’élément de leur constitution encore informulée par la critique qui doit le bouleverser’ [‘Maghreb, here, is the name of that distance, of that departure from its religious and theological model (even if these are disguised as revolutionary ideologies), a departure without return that can shake, in both theory and practice, the foundations of Maghrebian societies in their very constitution not yet formulated by the critique that must disrupt it’].35 Insisting that the notion of a unified Arab culture is no longer workable, Khatibi calls for a conception of identity not based on origins and on a single religion but invokes the notion of a ‘Maghreb pluriel’ as an alternative to the regressive ideologies of local nationalisms. At the same time, Khatibi’s invocation of plurality is a rejection of the binary logic of the colonial encounter that rests on the stark conceptual opposition between Western metaphysics and Islamic theology. Rather, and looking forward into the next century now, he calls for a dialogic understanding of cultural activity, working across languages and open to the world: ‘seul le risque d’une pensée plurielle (à plusieurs pôles de la civilisation, à plusieurs langues, à plusieurs élaborations techniques et scientifiques) peut, me semble-t-il, nous assurer le tournant de ce siècle sur la scène planétaire’ [‘only the risk of a plural mode of thinking (made up of many parts of civilisation, many languages, many technical and scientific creations) can ensure, it seems to me, the movement of this century on a planetary level’].36 Khatibi’s affirmation of dialogic, bilingual creativity and of the opening of North African cultures onto ‘la scène planétaire’ in many ways anticipates the work of more famous Anglophone postcolonial thinkers such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. The identification of Khatibi as a postcolonial theorist of hybridity, however, risks undermining the specific resonance of his work in understanding the complex position of Maghrebian culture since independence and towards the twenty-first century. Certainly, his use of the term ‘Maghreb’ as a signifier of cultural plurality has not held sway since the 1980s, as critics

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and writers have been uneasy with the implication that Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia can be lumped together in a single unit. Indeed, the Tunisian writer and thinker Hédi Bouraoui evidently rewrites Khatibi’s concept in his volume of essays, Tunisie plurielle, in which he juxtaposes articles specifically on the multiple sources of Tunisia’s cultural history.37 It is important, however, that whether or not the idea of ‘the Maghreb’ continues to be one that writers seek to champion, Khatibi’s thought here offers a profound vision of the cultural diversity of the region and of its potential to transform itself through dialogue with the rest of the world going forward. Khatibi’s text is significant for my current purposes, moreover, because his vision of the creativity of bilingualism and intercultural exchange is indeed best demonstrated by literary texts. If he criticizes Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui’s restrictive conception of history as defined by continuity, rationality and truth, for example, Khatibi goes on later in the work to read the Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb’s highly experimental novel Talismano as an intricate performance of thinking between languages. And indeed, Khatibi’s evocation of the simultaneous creativity and loss that characterize the internal processes of translation at work in Meddeb’s text gives way in the analysis to a conception of all North African literature as ‘un récit qui parle en langues’ [‘a narrative which speaks in many languages’].38 Khatibi’s work, despite its publication early in the period in question here, serves as a compelling background for the intercultural form and thinking of recent and contemporary North African writing. Most simply, this notion of literature as a locus for dialogue is demonstrated by writers who openly conceive their works as a means of communication, to create links and promote mutual understanding, to inform. Memmi argues quite plainly that ‘s’exprimer, c’est tenter de dire quelque chose à quelqu’un’ [‘to express oneself is to try to tell someone something’], and he describes his writing as at once confession, plea and seduction.39 In each case, the writer is attempting to reach an addressee, though he stresses that a lot of work goes into finding ways to engage the reader who may not share his worldview. Beneath Memmi’s reassuring humanism, there is a sense of anxiety about the relationship between writer and reader and a desire to build complicity in the face of potential misunderstanding. More forcefully, the Algerian writer Maïssa Bey’s short reflection on writing, L’Une et l’autre, foregrounds exchange even its title. ‘L’une et l’autre’ refers to the two languages and cultures on which she draws, French and Arabic, and she sums up her enterprise by affirming her desire to write, even more, in order to reach out to others beyond her own community. For Bey, writing is an encounter with others: ‘c’est aussi et surtout, je le crois profondément, écouter les battements

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du cœur de nos semblables en humanité, être solidaire’ [‘it is also and above all, I believe, to listen to the heartbeat of other human beings, to live in solidarity with them’].40 Bey’s conclusion also, revealingly, quotes Camus’s celebrated formula bringing together solitude and solidarity, and finishes with a reference to Edouard Glissant’s poetics of Relation, where to write is to ‘vivre une altérité étoilée d’héritages et d’horizons’ [‘to live with an alterity studded with heritages and horizons’].41 For both Memmi and Bey, writing provides a point of contact with humanity, not just with one’s own culture or community but with the diversity of all human beings across the globe. Moreover, as Khatibi also suggests, writing literary works allows the creative thinker to bend the rules of language usage so as to bring together multiple languages, to create new meanings by setting idioms alongside one another in a way that other discourses cannot. At the same time, it is significant that Khatibi’s ‘pensée en langues’ does not necessarily imply the explicit juxtaposition of words from different languages alongside one another, but the resonance of multiple idioms within even the apparently monolingual work. Maïssa Bey, for example, describes her upbringing in a family where French and Arabic were used side by side, and her literary writing allows her to convey that cross-cultural history.42 Without drawing extensively on Arabic words in her written French, Bey nevertheless sets out to convey Islamic culture and experience in her francophone writing, and stresses that, far from representing a contradiction, this process precisely portrays her lived association with both languages and worldviews. Again echoing the thought of Edouard Glissant and his affirmation of the multilingualism of all creativity, Tahar Ben Jelloun also conceives writing as a space for the coming-together of multiple languages: the writer is for him ‘l’hôte imprévisible de toutes les langues’ [‘the unpredictable host/guest of all languages’].43 Indeed, when he writes, he claims that in those moments when he is struggling to find the right word to use, he draws on his knowledge of classical and dialectal Arabic and allows one language in some way to contaminate the other.44 Djebar’s enormously rich and dense creative corpus too is explicitly made up of traces of a plurality of languages, of voices of multiple origins. To  write, she argues, for an autochthonous francophone Maghrebian writer, is to ‘écrire tout contre un marmonnement multilingue’ [‘to write right up against a multilingual murmuring’].45 The intercultural form of literary creation is also at times demonstrated in the writer’s celebration of the wide range of reading material that serves to shape his or her own work. The writer creates as a result of an exchange with the other literary works he or she has read, as if the intercultural literary

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community represents an open world of ideas beyond the tensions of national and international politics. The multilingual text can be conceived from this point of view as one built out of echoes and images drawn from other works created in other languages, such as Salim Bachi’s enormously rich and dialogic Amours et aventures de Sindbad le Marin, discussed in Chapter  1. The writer’s reinvention and redeployment of other works of literature, moreover, is conceived by some precisely as a means of making comparisons and identifying shared modes of thinking. Reading La Fontaine as a child, for example, Chraïbi notices the parallels between the Frenchman’s animal fables and the Kalima wa Dimna (fables of Indian origin, first written in Sanskrit and later translated into Arabic and Persian), and it is through this literary encounter that he realizes the Islamic world is not so divorced from that of Europe: ‘ses écrivains conversaient avec les nôtres depuis des siècles’ [‘their writers conversed with ours for centuries’].46 Equally, Boudjedra celebrates the work of the French Algerian Jean Sénac, a poet who represents a multiracial and multireligious Algeria through his combined engagement with French literature and, for example, Omar Khayyam. Indeed for Boudjedra, Sénac precisely serves as a highly significant source of inspiration for other Algerian writers in his open embrace of both cultures.47 Perhaps most strikingly, as we shall see in Chapter 8, Djebar’s entire oeuvre can be read as an extended dialogue with a vast range of writers, traced clearly in Nulle part dans la maison de mon père but evident also particularly prominently in L’Amour, la fantasia. These key works are triggered and developed out of the writer’s engagement with French military history, Orientalist art (Delacroix and Fromentin), French literature (Baudelaire), as well as pre-Islamic poetry (Imru al-Quais) and Islamic literature (Rûmi) and many more. These forms of intercultural dialogue are signifiers of the broader humanism and ‘worldliness’ of North African writing during this period. This openness to cultural exchange is strikingly crystallized in the speech made by the celebrated Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, who was inaugurated as a member of the Académie française on 14  June  2012. Maalouf ’s acceptance speech concluded with reference to his commitment to intercultural communication and to the crucial importance of this commitment in the contemporary global context. Since he originates from Lebanon rather than from North Africa, Maalouf ’s work exceeds the framework of the present study, but his hard-hitting evocation of the antagonisms between European and Arab or Islamic cultures is highly relevant to the North African context and indicative of the entrenched divisions that continue to provoke violence around the world, as Maalouf observes:

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Un mur s’élève en Méditerranée entre les univers culturels dont je me réclame. Ce mur, je n’ai pas l’intention de l’enjamber pour passer d’une rive à l’autre. Ce mur de la détestation – entre Européens et Africains, entre Occident et Islam, entre Juifs et Arabes –, mon ambition est de le saper, et de contribuer à le démolir. Telle a toujours été ma raison de vivre, ma raison d’écrire, et je la poursuivrai au sein de votre Compagnie.48 [A wall has been erected in the Mediterranean between the cultural universes with which I am aligned. I have no intention of stepping over this wall to cross from one shore to the other. My ambition is to chip away at, to help to demolish this wall of hatred, between Europeans and Africans, between Islam and the West, between Arabs and Jews. This has always been my reason to live, my reason to write, and I will pursue this goal in your Company.]

Maalouf ’s membership of the Académie française, like those of Assia Djebar and, most recently, the Haitian Dany Laferrière, is itself here made into a signifier of the movement towards interculturality of what has historically been seen as an institution aimed at safeguarding the hegemony and purity of French. Maalouf ’s life and work, moreover, have always been aimed at working against the confinement of identities within national, ethnic and religious categories, and his novels are always concerned with transnational history. This commitment to intercultural dialogue that forms the catalyst for his writing is most clearly demonstrated in Les Identités meurtrières, a lucid account of the damaging effects of identitarian thinking, and an analysis of contemporary cultural and religious conflicts based in an understanding of the association between violence and the defensive affirmation of origins and selfhood.49 Most strikingly, perhaps, as I have discussed elsewhere, Maalouf ’s Samarcande tells the story of the creation and travelling of Omar Khayyam’s Robaïyat to form an extraordinary vision of a text that at once itself signifies contingency and flux, and, in its contribution to the establishment of democracy in Persia much later in the nineteenth century, demonstrates the ability of a literary work both to cross borders and to contest orthodoxies.50 These conceptions of literature’s capacity to establish intercultural dialogue indicate, however, a degree of optimism about the power of texts to reach beyond the pernicious conflicts that divide European and Islamic cultures. The writers explored here all tend to conceive their work as intercultural, multilingual and, with that, humanist in an open and inclusive manner. They envisage their work as an engagement not only with local culture and with the nation, but more broadly with the diverse richness of the human imagination in its different forms across the world. Even more, literature is evoked as a privileged arena

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for this form of exchange, as its very language is able to display the traces of its intercultural influences and as the form of each work is sometimes manifestly created out of dialogue with other forms. As I suggested in Chapter 1, however, this notion of transnational ‘worldliness’ must bring with it a necessary awareness of the contingency of the literary text, as the representations it creates are always provisional, experimental and impermanent. An openness to intercultural dialogue requires an understanding of the fragility of any cultural creation, as it invites different interpretations in different contexts and presents itself as one way of seeing the world among many others. Alongside the affirmation of literature’s ability to communicate and to invite new forms of exchange, then, is a recurrent awareness that the communication process is apt to break down. This disruption may not only be a sign of the literary text’s potentially enriching ability to create meaning beyond that of its author’s original intention but also a reminder of its opacity and its powers to deceive.

Writing, deception, effacement Many of the writers already discussed intersperse their more affirmative evocations of writing as a creation of selfhood, as a space for escape or as a tool for intercultural communication, with expressions of doubt towards the success of these projects. Khatibi’s own affirmation of an emancipatory ‘pensée en langues’ is followed by a reading of Meddeb’s Talismano in which the process of translation that is visibly at work in the text is also necessarily associated with loss. Meddeb’s French is able to gesture towards the writer’s Arabic, but this is precisely a gesture that must honour at the same time the untranslatability of the Arabic signs and idioms on which he draws. Khatibi reads this untranslatablity, moreover, as the repression of a mother tongue, the traces of which are scattered across a text that couples memory with amnesia. Anticipating Le Scribe et son ombre, Khatibi suggests here too that the text is shadowed by its double, by the traces of the mother tongue that only silently underpin the language in which it is written. The meeting between French and Arabic, Khatibi reminds us, is also the result of a history of violence, whereby the colonial language is imposed upon, and subjugates, native speakers of Arabic or Berber. Khatibi’s evocations of the silence of the untranslatable language subtending the written French nevertheless still tend to affirm a form of linguistic plurality through the text’s hidden shadow or double. The Algerian writer Rachid

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Boudjedra, conversely, offers an analysis rather of the deceptive powers of writing in a series of provocative reflections entitled Lettres algériennes, and here he emphasizes not so much the difficulty of translation as the inherent trickery of all language. First, words themselves are described as slippery, deceitful and unwieldy. And in putting words together, the writer creates unforeseen meanings which might be either illuminating or, indeed, misleading: ‘les mots nous échappent quelque peu dans la mesure où ils ont plusieurs sens. Ils sont glissants, instables et fuyants. Chaque combinaison leur donne une succession de sens, une accumulation d’interprétations, une superposition de malentendus’ [‘words escape us somewhat because they have many meanings. They are slippery, unstable, elusive. Each combination gives a succession of meanings, an accumulation of interpretations, layers of misunderstandings’].51 Even more, Boudjedra goes on to evoke the treachery of language; words, he suggests, have the potential to contain within them the meaning of the world, but they are sly and porous, and twist the speaker’s or writer’s intentions. They intervene in the relation between an object and an image, bringing unplanned connotations, and prevent the writer from ever conveying what he set out to depict. The multiplicity of words in any given language, moreover, means that the writer endlessly fiddles with possibilities and never arrives at a satisfactory final draft. The desire to communicate, to enter into exchange, is always, according to Boudjedra, doomed at least in part to fail. Boudjedra struggles in particular with the malleability of dialectal Arabic and French, as they come into contact with one another in his own writing. In the oral languages spoken in Algeria, he notes a particular suppleness, as words displace and recreate meaning in the creation of a new, living culture that contests the dominant discourse of the state. The deforming power of language, however, is in this case less a source of alienation, as it is for Djebar’s narrator as she struggles to portray the experiences of Algerian women who did not share her privileged upbringing, than a creative ruse: ‘cette agilitié des langues dialectales est une superbe astuce pour déjouer et forcer la censure sociale et la morale rigide’ [‘this agility that dialectal languages possess is wonderful trick that can foil and force open social censorship and rigid morality’].52 In reshaping their referents, words can be used creatively to contest received truths and entrenched orthodoxies. Nevertheless, Boudjedra at the same time emphasizes not only the creative ability of words to deform their assumed referents but also the loss of meaning that occurs as he works between different languages. Buffeted between French, Arabic and Berber, Boudjedra evokes now less a refreshing, crosscultural multilingual creativity than a profound sense of loss, a marooning in

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the in-between space of translation: ‘chaque fois que je m’exprime oralement ou par écrit, il y a une énorme perdition, une sorte de fuite du sens et des sens’ [‘each time I express myself orally or in written form, there is a great loss, as meaning and meanings seem to escape’].53 It is perhaps revealing in addition that Boudjedra has written in both French and Arabic, as if experimenting with each, and each time struggling with the cultural politics of his linguistic choice. In writing in one language, the other, he insists, is always present, and yet neither provides an adequate tool for expression and their cohabitation in the writer’s consciousness does not necessarily provide the basis for a fruitful creative interaction. More dramatically, as I suggested earlier, Djebar’s francophone autobiographical writing in L’Amour, la fantasia and Nulle part dans la maison de mon père brings not only self-discovery and revelation but also self-destruction and effacement; indeed, Nulle part ends with a farewell to the writer’s self. Even more, references to silence are interspersed throughout Djebar’s works, as if all her efforts to depict either herself or the community of Algerian women to which the texts repeatedly return are insufficient. Writing is only ever an inadequate, incomplete or disingenuous mode of representation, and it effaces or deforms at the same time as it appears to give voice. The opening section of Vaste est la prison, for example, is tellingly titled ‘Le Silence de l’écriture’, and the narrator first associates writing with death, then with flight and then with untranslatability. Perhaps anticipating the thinking of Mokeddem’s narrator in La Transe des insoumis, here Djebar’s narrator confesses ‘longtemps, j’ai cru qu’écrire c’était s’enfuir, ou tout au moins se précipiter sous ce ciel immense, dans la poussière du chemin, au pied de la dune friable’ [‘for a long time I believed that writing meant getting away, or at the very least, leaping out under this immense sky, into the dust of the road along the foot of the crumbling dunes’], as if writing is a means to run away from the restrictions of her upbringing.54 This initial evocation gives way to an anecdote about the Algerian women in the hammam, who refer to their husbands as ‘l’e’dou’, a term that the narrator translates as ‘ennemi’, but the recollection of which confronts her with a glimpse of the sexual inequalities that her own narrative struggles to convey in French. Moreover, alongside the figures of memory, flight and multilingualism discussed earlier, Ces Voix qui m’assiègent foregrounds most prominently once again the silence that underpins the writer’s written French. Djebar’s writing is first of all a direct response to a lack of speech, as ‘j’écris à force de me taire’ [‘I write by keeping silent’].55 She does not conceive her work as the expression of her ‘francophone

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voice’, but rather as at once a confrontation with, and continuation of, both her own silence and that of her maternal genealogy. In many cases, the association between writing and effacement arises from the writer’s difficulty in depicting violence. Djebar’s doubt towards the ability of her writing to convey experience is most acute in her reflections on the inexpressibility of the brutalities inflicted on Algerians during the War of Independence and later during the 1990s. In particular, in Le Blanc de l’Algérie the colour white is used to signify at once annihilation, mourning and the writer’s uncertainty in overcoming that effacement by means of her written account. In her preface, Djebar describes the work as ‘une recherche irrésistible de liturgie’ [‘an irresistible search for a liturgy’], and the narrative takes the form of a series of accounts of the deaths of the narrator’s friends, together with those of a sequence of other Algerian writers and intellectuals, as if in an attempt to perform a proper commemoration.56 Lamenting the horrific assassinations of three of her friends in the first part of the work, the narrator is committed to recording the details of their last days, as if to call their assassins to account and to make sense of the brutality of their murder. In the following sections, she remembers the creativity and spirit of a range of writers and thinkers of the previous generation, and her writing is conceived as a means of honouring and preserving their memory in a manner appropriate to their own creative thinking. In recording the destruction of these writers and intellectuals, however, the narrator dwells on the association between writing and death: writers have been assassinated as a result of their work, while at the same time, writing itself seems fragile and imperfect. If writing might have been seen as a way of making a mark, in Algeria during the ‘décennie noire’ it rather brings about the writer’s effacement. Writing for Djebar is then in turn associated with whiteness, as ‘je ne peux pour ma part exprimer mon malaise d’écrivain et d’Algérienne que par référence à cette couleur, ou plutôt à cette non-couleur. «Le blanc, sur notre âme, agit comme une silence absolu», disait Kandinsky’ [‘I can only express my disquiet as a writer and as an Algerian woman through a reference to that color, or rather that non-color. “White acts on our soul like absolute silence,” Kandinsky said’].57 The narrator’s own project of commemoration is also itself another form of effacement, as she laments the failure of her work to capture the voices of those she has lost, and the act of commemoration risks packaging the remembered subject away in the past. Djebar’s association between the violence against intellectuals in Algeria and the renewed effacement caused by the process of writing about it is comparable to Tahar Ben Jelloun’s narrator’s attempts to evoke the war in Beirut

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in L’ Ecrivain public, to be analysed in Chapter 3. Indeed, as we shall see, this chapter explores the association between writing and the loss of selfhood as the narrator struggles to find a place for himself, but he is also profoundly troubled in particular by the sense that the war in Beirut both figures a sort of destruction of Arab culture and necessitates a refusal of chronological narrative. The quotation from Ben Jelloun’s poem reproduced at the beginning of this chapter, moreover, in which the poet laments, ‘j’écris pour ne plus avoir de visage’ [‘I write in order to be faceless’], also implies that even beyond the lived experience of physical violence and homelessness, the writer loses himself in the words that finish by replacing him. Nevertheless, it is significant that Djebar’s narrator in Le Blanc de l’Algérie, despite her disillusionment towards the commemorative power of writing, continues to conceive her project as a challenge. Amid the trauma of living in ‘une Algérie sang-écriture’ [‘an Algeria of writing-in-blood’], and alongside her disillusionment towards her own project, Djebar’s narrator insists that her writing is an attempt to resist forgetting and to call the agents of brutality and injustice to account.58 And this challenge is perhaps one of the most potent catalysts for many writers struggling to make sense of the tensions and hostilities between the cultures that nevertheless mould their creative activity.

Literature and resistance Some of the most challenging francophone writers of the region have used their works to articulate forms of dissent or resistance that have been taken seriously in the political arena. Most famously, as we shall see in Chapters 4 and 8, Tahar Djaout was unafraid to express his distaste for repressive and ideological versions of Algerian nationalism, as well as for the brutality of the rising Islamism in Algeria in his novels, and yet he paid for his denunciations with his life. Djaout refused to remain silent despite his awareness of the dangers of speaking out, and though these words do not figure in any of his written works, he is famously believed to have insisted: ‘le silence c’est la mort, / Et toi, si tu parles, tu meurs, / Si tu te tais, tu meurs, / Alors, parle et meurs’ [‘silence is death. And if you speak, you die, if you remain silent, you die, so speak and die’].59 Djaout’s life and work, as they are crystallized in these words, are perhaps the most caustic reminder of the crucial place as well as the danger of writing in expressing resistance to injustices in contexts of cultural and political conflicts or oppressions.

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Cases such as that of Djaout provide striking evidence of literature’s capacity to voice a powerful form of dissent. Dominique Fisher’s study of Djebar and Djaout, provocatively entitled Ecrire l’urgence, compellingly demonstrates the form that literary dissent can take and reveals the incendiary quality of novels by Djebar and Djaout in refusing cultural segregation and hostility. What Fisher terms ‘écriture d’urgence’ is writing produced in extreme and violent situations (such as in Algeria during the War of Independence and during the civil war of the 1990s) and that refuses to adhere to the divisive thinking on which these conflicts are built. As Joseph Ford has shown, the term ‘écriture d’urgence’ was used frequently by the media, and in some cases by writers themselves, during the 1990s to describe writing that responded to the official ‘état d’urgence’, though the notion has tended to downplay the aesthetic experimentation of Algerian literature in order to emphasize its political significance.60 To return to Fisher’s slightly more open-ended conception of ‘écriture d’urgence’, however, the Tunisian Abdelwahab Meddeb is referenced as a witness to the writer’s crucial place in this context of cultural and ideological clash, in which ‘il en est du rôle de l’écrivain de pointer la dérive des siens et d’aider à ouvrir les yeux sur ce qui les aveugle’ [‘it is the role of the writer to point out how his people have drifted and to help open people’s eyes to what blinds them’].61 Moreover, as I mentioned in the Introduction, the editor of a recent volume on literature and the Arab Spring perceives a powerful prescience in francophone North African literature since the end of the colonial period and argues that the revolutions known as the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 were anticipated by the critiques and challenges articulated by writers such as Mimouni, Chraïbi, Kateb, Bey, Boudjedra and Ben Jelloun. These writers not only articulated the ills of colonialism and its aftermath, as well as ongoing resulting tensions in the Arab world, but also predicted, according to editor Faustin Mvogo, the rebellion and upheaval that spread across the region since 2011. The Arab writer is no less than ‘un militant engagé, un défenseur acharné de la cause d’un droit-de-l’humanisme fort, inspiré par un monde plus juste’ [‘a committed militant, a determined defender of the cause of the rights of man, inspired by a more just world’].62 As I have analysed elsewhere, during the period of decolonization, militant intellectuals such as Kateb Yacine conceived their writing as nothing less than revolutionary.63 This association between literature and combat may, as we shall see, be rather more attenuated in the recent period, but metaphors of literature’s capacity to wage war persist among writers engaging with ongoing hostilities in successive generations. Djaout’s own defiance in the face of the

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threat of censorship or indeed assassination has already been noted, but in an interview with Mouloud Mammeri, he also describes the text’s capacity for contestation using the imagery of destruction and explosion: ‘briser les moules convenus, pousser la forme jusqu’aux limites de ses possibilités … de ses impossibilités …, la faire en quelque sorte exploser, n’est-ce pas une manière de briser les contraintes et donc d’aider à la création de quelque chose d’autre?’ [‘to break down established moulds, to push form to the limits of possibility, of impossibility, to make it explode, is this not a way to break down constraints and so to help create something different ?’]. 64 Here, experimentation with literary form and language are themselves linked to the undermining of political and cultural doxa, and new modes of expression are conceived to bring alternative, more liberated ways of thinking. Djebar too invokes a provocative association between writing and struggle by drawing on the Arabic term ijtihad, related to jihad, but connoting not so much combat as a commitment to intellectual debate and to questioning.65 And as we have seen, Mokeddem’s linking of literature with insubordination entails at the same time nothing less than a ‘révolte’ through writing.66 The creation of challenging new forms of written language is in this way itself associated with combat and resistance. One of the most outspoken of the writers explored here, Boualem Sansal uses the form of an open letter in his Poste restante: Alger, so that the text becomes a mode of address that implicates the reader more fully in the project of contestation. The complexity of the letter form and its resonance in literature more broadly will be the subject of the analysis in Chapter 7, but in Sansal’s text, the letter is deployed quite directly as a means of reinforcing the links between the work and its addressee. Sansal’s Poste restante: Alger was published in 2006, and as I mentioned in the Introduction, its virulence led to the banning of all Sansal’s works in Algeria. Certainly the subtitle ‘Lettre de colère et d’espoir à mes compatriotes’, together with the dedication to President Mohamed Boudiaf, assassinated in 1992, reinforce the urgency of the critique the author wishes to convey. The text is addressed to Sansal’s fellow Algerians and opens with a condemnation of the silence that has obstructed their ability to respond to contemporary injustices in Algerian society. Part of what is wrong with Algeria, according to Sansal, is that no one talks about the horror, and the aim of the text is to start that conversation, since: Constater l’arrêt est un progrès, cela implique cette chose banale et fantastique que quelque part, quelqu’un, un jour, vous, moi, un autre, a dû s’entendre dire: «Dieu, où en sommes-nous après tant d’années livrées au silence  ?» ou simplement : «Que se passe-t-il en ces lieux ?» Terribles questions. Des hommes

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sont morts sans savoir, et d’innombrables enfants arrachés à la vie avant d’apprendre à marcher, et des villes entières, qui furent belles et enivrantes, ont été atrocement défigurées.67 [To establish an end is a form of progress, it implies that somewhere, someone, you, me, or someone else, said that banal and fantastic thing: ‘Heavens, where are we after so many years in silence?’ or simply: ‘What is happening here?’ These are enormous questions. Men have died without knowing the answers, and innumerable children have been deprived of their lives before learning to walk, whole towns, which were beautiful and intoxicating, have been horrifically disfigured.]

Sansal goes on to remind his readers of the qualities and successes of the Algerian people, but emphasizes that they have become introspective and apathetic, and though conscious of both the potential danger and the potential futility of his writing, the writer is insistent that ‘il nous faut parler’ [‘we need to talk’].68 The substance of Sansal’s critique is the denunciation of social and cultural oppression and an affirmation of Algeria’s multiculturality and multilingualism as well as of the dynamism of its Islamic culture, crushed by the violent extremism that continues to halt the progress of democracy. The closing pages are a highly charged call for action: after reading the text, Algerians may want to burn it, but if they do not, Sansal lists the many forms of justice for which they should militate to allow the country to flourish again. Sansal’s closing call is both extended and precise and finishes by asserting that the reporting of injustice in his letter must lead directly into action: ‘maintenant que nous avons bien parlé et arrêté d’utiles dispositions, nous avons à œuvrer, il n’y a rien de plus urgent pour le moment’ [‘now that we have spoken properly and usefully put an end to certain tendencies, we need to set to work, there is nothing more urgent right now’].69 Sansal’s literary works are evidently more complex than Poste restante, but this open letter demonstrates something of its author’s militancy and of the force he attributes to his own writing, even if the purpose of his literary work is rather more subtle and suggestive. As we saw in Chapter 1, Sansal’s partially autobiographical Rue Darwin, for example, explores both Algeria’s history and its narrator’s complex origins in a multilayered structure that more obliquely conveys the legacy of years of secrecy and oppression. Here, the construction of the narrative out of doubt, questioning and hidden truths works as a subtle critique of the form of political ideologies that present false beliefs as certainties. A rather more transgressive, anarchic form of contestation, however, can be found in the work of another highly provocative contemporary Algerian

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writer, Mustapha Benfodil. Benfodil is a young writer, artist and journalist based in Algeria and was one of the founders of the Barakat movement, which campaigned against Bouteflika’s candidacy in the 2014 elections to serve a fourth term. Benfodil’s work is based on the observation that, in the wake of the horrors of the ‘décennie noire’, Algerians have withdrawn from political life and have become afraid to voice dissent.70 Rather than calling for revolution, however, Benfodil crucially demands reform and, indeed, his comments on his art in the context of the Arab Spring suggest that he sees the invention of new aesthetic practices as a response to, but not necessarily the bringer of, political change. Defending his work after his installation, consisting of mannequins dressed as footballers displaying purportedly blasphemous slogans, was banned at the Sharjah Biennial in 2011 because it was perceived to be offensive to Islam, Benfodil insists: ‘I really hope that, in its impetuous course, this cycle of Arab revolutions, which has shaken our tyrannical and medieval political regimes, will also challenge our imaginations, tastes, aesthetics, canons and thought processes’.71 Although this comment reinforces the significance of art’s ability to change the way we think, Benfodil implies that the change will follow the revolution rather than provoke it. Most strikingly, however, the dissent expressed in Benfodil’s literary writing is incendiary and yet somewhat anarchic. Benfodil invents a highly challenging form of writing, in which he combines erudite literary references with slang and multilayered metaphors with sexually explicit language. Archéologie du chaos amoureux, published in 2007, tells the story of a disaffected and nonconformist student bent both on seducing women and on challenging contemporary culture by reading and writing literature, and the result is a highly creative but disconcertingly idiomatic vision of an alternative culture of intellectual and personal freedom.72 In a fragmentary and self-conscious structure with several narrators, Benfodil’s characters reinvent themselves as dissidents, created from the models they glean from their reading, and slogans based on wordplay, such as ‘rêveurutionnaires’ and ‘anartistes’, form the basis of the mission statement for students expressing resistance through literature and sex. Benfodil’s aesthetic here is creatively irreverent, and political dissatisfaction is expressed in his text above all through the invention of an impudent and iconoclastic literary language. The belief that literature can perform a powerful form of political resistance is, then, maintained in this generation, but that resistance is also expressed in a variety of more or less direct or militant ways. As many of the texts explored in the rest of this book suggest, moreover, the possible effects of a resistance

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expressed through literature are often also thrown into doubt. Benfodil’s irreverent and playful language, and his dissident writer-protagonist, may serve as an expression of dissent, but the work is also anarchic and somewhat nihilistic; the writer’s aim seems also be provocation rather than revolution. With perhaps more circumspection, Salim Bachi conversely upholds his belief in the power of art by celebrating its autonomy. Citing Chekhov, Bachi emphasizes the ability of the writer to offer political critique precisely by standing apart from the political world; the artist should not be constrained by the determinisms of party political, religious or philosophical argument. Just as Rancière perceived in literature an alternative form of sense-making, removed from the grand rhetoric of political orators, so too does Bachi invoke a sort of metapolitical questioning. This rhetoric of emancipatory artistic freedom, however, is unlike the language of the critiques offered by Sansal or Benfodil in that it gives way in Bachi’s thinking to a more melancholic sense of the alienation of the work of art from the social  world and from politics. Maintaining an uneasy, somewhat remote relationship with  the public, the work, according to Bachi ‘se joue seule, comme  une pièce de théâtre pour un public absent’ [‘plays itself out alone, like a theatre play before an absent public’].73 Art and literature require creative  autonomy, but they achieve little impact in wider society. Rather than offering a real and concrete political  challenge, perhaps literature from this point of view is a space for thought, as Bachi suggests in an interview with Patrick Crowley: Je crois qu’on peut apprendre de la littérature à se méfier, à ne pas croire tout ce qu’on nous dit. Le statut même de l’ambiguïté de la littérature, l’incertain qui la constitue, est le rejet le plus fidèle sans doute de notre monde et de la manière dont nous inventons nos vies.’74 [I think we can learn from literature to be suspicious, not to believe what we are told. The very ambiguous status of literature, the uncertainty it comprises, is undoubtedly the most faithful rejection of our world and of the way in which we invent our lives.]

Writing may be a space for contestation, it may represent freedom and resistance and, indeed, Bachi may offer damning portraits of some of the most brutal moments in Algerian history. Yet, according to Bachi, this contestation is not so much a call for practical change but the creation of a space for provisional thought that unsettles the production of restrictive orthodoxies. Its wisdom perhaps derives from this ability to perceive its own fragility. ****

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The writers cited here suggest multiple, at times conflicting, motivations for writing, and in many cases literature does not have a single end with which the writer remains satisfied. Literary creation is a complex, multifaceted process, crucial to its producer, but at the same time bewildering, frustrating, even painful. Writing might be associated with the search for a self, but it also brings about the loss of selfhood; it liberates but also disorientates; and it can voice a challenge while at the same time never succeeding in fully conveying the message its creator intended. A highly charged activity, it is, if we are to believe Memmi, inherent to the writer’s existence, and yet despite the multiple self-conscious reflections worked into the texts cited in this chapter, he or she often struggles to formulate why in terms that remain consistent or coherent. Even more pressingly, for Abdellatif Laâbi, returning to writing after eight years of imprisonment in Morocco during the 1970s, writing is an affirmation of survival, ‘un élixir de résurrection’ [‘an elixir for resurrection’], and a return to life after the horrific abuses of incarceration. But the attempt to make sense of that experience through writing is also ‘une grande épreuve physique, une véritable ordalie’ [‘a great physical test, a real ordeal’]. Writing is not only a compulsion but it is also a struggle; it is at once life-giving and a source of anguish.75 Laâbi’s difficult and introspective writing, as it has developed since his release, offers an apt reflection of the tensions of literary creativity with which to conclude this introductory chapter. Laâbi has been living in Paris since 1985, but remains preoccupied with the interaction between France and his homeland, and between francophone and Arabic cultures. He writes frequently about the failings of the political regimes of Hassan II and Mohammed VI, as well as about the role of the intellectual and his own experience of exile in France. Literature, he asserts, constitutes an alternative discourse to that offered by the political arena, ‘elle est une voie autre de la connaissance, de la sensibilité et de la vision. Elle nous interroge plus qu’elle nous apporte de réponses. Mais elle dénonce également toutes les formes d’aliénation et d’oppression, sans oublier de démasquer les égoïsmes et les lâchetés sans lesquels aucune tyrannie ne peut se maintenir’ [‘it is another form of knowledge, sensibility and vision. It asks questions of us more than it gives us a response. But it also denounces all forms of alienation and oppression, without forgetting to unmask the egotism and cowardice without which tyranny could not survive’].76 The activity of writing and its ability to help the writer make sense of his mistreatment by the authorities, and his experience of exile, moreover, is at times itself the focus of Laâbi’s poems and novels, but it is also figured as a source of anxiety and disturbance.

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In his most intensively self-reflexive novel Les Rides du Lion, for example, published in 1989, the protagonist Aïn writes a journal recounting his move from Rabat to Paris but he is assailed by voices, in particular by his double, Hdiddane, and his writing becomes a site for the encounter between his desires and aspirations, and his doubts. If Aïn writes on the one hand in order to make sense of his alienation, on the other hand he is tormented by the inadequacy of his creations and by the anxiety generated by the blank page. Laâbi has himself in his essays also commented on the sense of paralysis he intermittently experiences when confronted by the empty page, and the vehemence of his political commitment is often perplexingly juxtaposed with self-questioning.77 The writer, then, might harbour a range of aspirations and fantasies for what his craft will achieve, but the creative process is a difficult one and can take the practitioner in unanticipated directions. In Le Livre imprévu, this potentially disturbing unpredictability is also itself deployed as a source of creativity. Blurring novel, essay, poetry and diary, the text reads as a sort of experiment in unplanned writing, as a pursuit of the unexpected.78 What is most striking about Laâbi’s self-conscious reflections, however, is their variability, their uncertainty and eclecticism. Like Laâbi and his protagonist, the writers represented in the works explored here are frequently altered by their activity and for the most part produce different sorts of text from what they might have imagined at the start. Their writing, moreover, is often either based on or interspersed with introspective questioning about the writing process and its uncertain status in contemporary North African society and politics and turns out to be neither transitive nor teleological. The literary work is a site where thoughts, questions, doubts and desires converge and conflict, and it is never a simple means of argumentative expression, even for the most politically motivated writers such as Laâbi or Sansal. The form and significance of that convergence and conflict will be the subject of the remaining chapters of this book.

Notes 1 2 3

Tahar Ben Jelloun, Le Discours du chameau, suivi de Jénine et autres poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 2007) p. 518. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Debra Kelly, Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005) p. 12.

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Writing After Postcolonialism See also Abdallah Bounfour’s illuminating essay, ‘Forme littéraire et représentation de soi: l’autobiographie francophone au Maghreb et l’aubiographie arabe du début du siècle’, in Charles Bonn and Arnold Rothe (eds.), Littérature maghrébine et littérature mondiale (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann GmbH, 1995) 71–79. Ibid., p. 334. Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN 94 (1979): 919–930 (pp. 921–922). Albert Memmi, Le Nomade immobile (Paris: Arlèa, 2000) p. 10. Memmi’s italics. See Albert Memmi, La Statue de sel (Paris: Coréa, 1953); Albert Memmi, Le Scorpion (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). Ibid., p. 147. See Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1982 [1957]); Portrait du juif (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). Memmi, Le Nomade immobile, p. 147. Driss Chraïbi, Le Passé simple (Paris: Gallimard, 1954); Driss Chraïbi, La Civilisation, ma mère (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Driss Chraïbi, Le Monde à coté (Paris: Denoël, 2003) p. 31. ‘Je venais de renouer avec mon pays natal’ [‘I had just bonded again with my native land’]. Ibid., p. 140. Assia Djebar, Ces Voix qui m’assiègent … en marge de ma francophonie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999) p. 52. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 18. Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) p. 224; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Quartet Books, 1993) p. 156. Abdelkebir Khatibi, Le Scribe et son ombre (Paris: SNELA La Différence, 2008) p. 17, p. 14. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid. Ibid., p. 119. Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia, p. 12; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, p. 3. Djebar, Ces Voix qui m’assiègent, p. 203. Yasmina Khadra, L’Ecrivain (Paris: Julliard, 2001) p. 98. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 237. Malika Mokeddem, La Transe des insoumis (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 2003) pp. 16, 17. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 171.

Why Write? Literature According to its Authors 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48

49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

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Ibid., p. 284. Driss Chraïbi, Vu, lu, entendu (Paris: Denoel, 1998) p. 30 Jelloun, Le Discours du chameau, p. 518. Abdelkebir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983) pp. 12–13. Ibid., p. 14. Hédi Bouraoui (ed.), Tunisie plurielle (Tunisie: L’Or du Temps, 1997). Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, p. 186. Memmi, Le Nomade immobile, p. 148. Maïssa Bey, L’Une et l’autre (Paris: Editions de l’Aube, 2009) p. 58. Ibid., p. 59. Bey writes, ‘je suis née dans un milieu où cohabitaient, sans que cela pose problème, deux langues, deux cultures, deux modes de vie. Et j’allais de l’une à l’autre naturellement, sans jamais avoir eu conscience d’une incompatibilité ou d’un antagonisme’ [‘I was born in an environment where two languages, two cultures, two ways of life cohabited without difficulty. And I went from one to another naturally without any awareness of a possible incompatibility or antagonism’]. Ibid., p. 23. Jelloun, Le Discours du chameau, p. 342. See Tahar Ben Jelloun, ‘La Cave de ma mémoire, le toit de ma maison sont des mots français’, in Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud (eds.), Pour une littérature-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2007) 113–124 (p. 113). Djebar, Ces Voix qui m’assiègent, p. 29. Chraïbi, Vu, lu, entendu, p. 30. Rachid Boudjedra, Lettres algériennes (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 1995) pp. 71–74. Amin Maalouf, ‘Discours de réception’ to the Académie francaise, http://www .academie-francaise.fr/discours-de-reception-et-reponse-de-m-jean-christophe -rufin (accessed 14 June 2012). Amin Maalouf, Les Identités meurtrières (Paris: Grasset, 1998). Amin Maalouf, Samarcande (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1988). See also my ‘Travelling Poetry: Text as Migrant in Amin Maalouf ’s Samarcande’, Comparative Critical Studies 11.2-3 (2014): 249–263. Boudjedra, Lettres algériennes, p. 20. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. Assia Djebar, Vaste est la prison (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) pp. 11, 12; So Vast the Prison, trans. Betsy Wing (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999) p. 12. Djebar, Ces Voix qui m’assiègent, p. 25. Assia Djebar, Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) p. 12; Algerian White, trans. David Kelley and Marjolin de Jager (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000) p. 13. Ibid., p. 271; p. 226.

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58 Ibid., p. 275; p. 229. 59 See Julija Šukys, Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 60 See Joseph Ford’s PhD thesis, Recasting ‘Urgence’: Algerian Francophone Literature after the ‘décennie noire’. University of Leeds, 2016. 61 Abdelwahab Meddeb, La Maladie de l’Islam (Paris: Seuil, 2002), quoted in Dominique Fisher, Ecrire l’urgence: Assia Djebar et Tahar Djaout (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) p. 266. 62 Faustin Mvogo, ‘Préface’, in Faustin Mvogo (ed.), Le Printemps arabe: prémisses et autopsie littéraires (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012) 5–10 (p. 6). 63 See my Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). 64 Tahar Djaout, in Mouloud Mammeri, Entretien avec Tahar Djaout (Algiers: Editions Laphomic, 1987) p. 25. 65 Djebar, Ces Voix qui m’assiègent, p. 216. 66 Mokeddem, La Transe des insoumis, p. 40. 67 Boualem Sansal, Poste restante: Alger. Lettre de colère et de désespoir à mes compatriots (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) pp. 12, 13. 68 Ibid., p. 28. 69 Ibid., p. 87. 70 See Benfodil and Karima Bennoune, ‘Algerian Elections and the Barakat Movement: ‘We are saying no to submission’, Open Democracy, https://www .opendemocracy.net/5050/mustapha-benfodil-karima-bennoune/algerian -elections-and-barakat-movement-we-are-saying-no-to-submission (accessed 2 April 2014). 71 Pierre Tristram, ‘Mustapha Benfodil: Because art is free to be impolite’, http:// middleeast.about.com/od/algeria/qt/Mustafa-Benfodil-censorship.htm (accessed February 2017). 72 Mustapha Benfodil, Archéologie du chaos amoureux (Algiers: Barzakh, 2007). 73 Salim Bachi, ‘Rethinking the Political through Intercultural Aesthetics’, unpublished presentation at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, 26 February 2014. 74 Patrick Crowley, ‘Salim Bachi: Myth, Modernism, Violence, Form’, Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies 4.1 (2012): 1–11 (p. 11). 75 Abdellatif Laâbi, La Brûlure des interrogations: entretiens réalisés par Jacques Alessandra (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985) p. 33. 76 Les Rêves sont têtus: écrits politiques (Paris: Méditerranée and Casablanca: Eddif, 2001) p. 134. 77 Ibid., p. 29. 78 Abdellatif Laâbi, Le Livre imprévu (Paris: La Différence, 2010).

3

Writing for Others: The Public Writer and the Ghostwriter

In among their reflections on the potential of literary creation to provide a sense of liberation, Abdelkébir Khatibi and Yasmina Khadra both note that during their youth they fleetingly took on the perhaps more functional role of the ‘écrivain public’ or public writer, writing letters on behalf of others less well equipped to express themselves. Both present this role as at once enabling and playful; it is an amusing activity that extends their potential as writers to project themselves beyond the confines of their own experiences. In La Mémoire tatouée, for example, Khatibi recalls how, as an adolescent: Je devins écrivain public; le dimanche, des internes me chargeaient de leur dicter des lettres d’amour qu’ils devaient envoyer à leurs amies. Pour exciter l’inspiration, on m’apportait des photos. Entouré de mes dictionnaires, j’étais exalté, multiple à travers ces passions épistolaires. Je gérais ainsi, jusqu’à midi, la sensibilité du monde.1 [I became a public writer; on Sundays, other boarders asked me to dictate the love letters they would send to their girlfriends. To inspire me, they would bring photos. Surrounded by my dictionaries, I was elated, living multiple lives through these epistolary passions. In this way, till midday, I would govern the sensitivity of the world.]

Writing love letters on behalf of his schoolmates allows the narrator both to experiment with plural identities, as he lives out through writing the passions of others, and attain a certain power, managing other people’s relationships with the world. Khatibi further develops and foregrounds this notion of the writer as the scribe who works for others in Le Scribe et son ombre. This time, though, the scribe is not so much the literal communicator of other people’s business, but a figure for the writer transforming himself through writing, writing his own life as if he were a public writer writing on behalf of someone else. The autobiographer as scribe, according to Khatibi, transmits traces of past selves, as he asserts ‘ce scribe

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est un syntaxier, transmetteur de quelques atomes de survie à la matière brute’ [‘the scribe is someone who plays with syntax, he transforms a few surviving atoms into raw matter’];2 his writing marks the imprint and survival of his many former doubles. More playfully, and perhaps less philosophically, in L’Ecrivain Yasmina Khadra dubs himself ‘l’écrivain public de Koléa’ after agreeing to use ‘la main heureuse’ [‘the happy hand’] to write a letter repairing relations between one of the other cadets at the school and his girlfriend, and his schoolmates’ passions fire his own fantasies of romantic and sexual union.3 Both Khatibi’s and Khadra’s autobiographical musings, as we saw in Chapter 1, include reflections on writing as both liberating and alienating, but it is striking that their references to the craft of the public writer emphasize the pre-eminently refreshing ability to write themselves into the lives of others. Leïla Sebbar’s short story ‘Ecrivain public’, moreover, similarly stresses the liberating function of writing for public writer Isabelle Eberhardt, who travels in Algeria during the early twentieth century in the guise of a man, paying her way in part through writing.4 Sebbar’s story portrays Eberhardt receiving requests to write letters for dockers at the port of Marseille, and although the woman traveller carries a sort of solitary melancholy as she longs for her brother Augustine who is away fighting with the French Foreign Legion, she nevertheless represents for Sebbar a challenging and transgressive figure in her cross-dressing and, notably, in her use of her writing skills to make a living. It is through working as a scribe, then, that Eberhardt is able to travel alone in a way that was unprecedented for a woman at the time. Sebbar repeatedly associates her writing activity with her transgressive persona and, since she also learns multiple languages, her enthusiasm for writing seems to be bound up with her urge to travel. Sebbar’s portrait of the ‘écrivain public’ is in this way a largely emancipatory one and, despite Eberhardt’s unhappy separation from her brother, both her persona and her craft give her a freedom denied to most other women of the period. If to some extent the public writer enjoys a certain creative ability, however, the practice of writing for others is evidently not necessarily liberating, and further reflection on what this activity entails can shed light on the at times uneasy relationship between an author and the subject for whom he supposedly writes more broadly. The introspective reflection on the role of the public writer also develops some of the musings of the self-conscious commentaries discussed in the preceding chapter, and the public writer can indeed be construed as a figure for the creative writer in contemporary Morocco and Algeria. The central

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character of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel L’Ecrivain public is, then, a public writer as well as a writer tout court, while Kamel Daoud’s short story ‘La Préface du nègre’ has a ghostwriter as its protagonist. Yet unlike in Khatibi’s, Khadra’s and Sebbar’s reflections, in these works writing for others is associated with a persistent sense of ambivalence and serves as a stark indication of the contemporary writer’s doubt towards his craft more broadly. The ‘écrivain public’, defined as a person who writes documents for others ranging from personal letters to formal correspondence, speeches and even biographies, is one of the oldest professions and has seen something of a resurgence in recent years. Yet while the website of the Académie des écrivains publics (founded in 1980) celebrates the public writer’s mission ‘d’aider à communiquer’ [‘to help people to communicate’], Ben Jelloun and Daoud instead use the figure of the public writer or ghostwriter in order to consider the potentially obstructive or obfuscatory effects of literary writing and its attempt to record and reflect experience in contemporary Morocco and Algeria.5 The job of writing for others in Ben Jelloun’s text is the trigger for the narrator’s flight from the world into creative writing after an extended period of childhood illness and subsequent rootlessness in a static and oppressive Morocco that nowhere provides him with a sense of home. For Daoud’s protagonist, a ghostwriter resentfully transcribing the memories of a veteran soldier of the Algerian War of Independence, writing on behalf of the other brings out the rupture between generations in contemporary Algeria and the manipulative association between national literature after independence and the false rhetoric of national heroism. In both cases, the public writer or ghostwriter seeks to use his craft as a source of creativity and self-affirmation in a context of cultural alienation in postcolonial Morocco or Algeria, but writing for others also triggers a reflection on literature’s inability to bring the freedom and inspiration hoped for by Khatibi and Khadra. These two works are in this way perhaps the most doubtful and the most ambivalent in their reflections on writing of all those analysed in the present study. The public writer is like Rushdie’s character Salman, the unwieldy scribe in The Satanic Verses who subtly alters the wording of Mahound’s revelations in order to test their veracity. He may be empowered with the ability endlessly to rewrite, to express alternative meanings and thus endlessly to develop and reinvent the narrative he purports to transcribe.6 But just as Salman regrets his discovery that there is no sanctified original, Ben Jelloun’s and Daoud’s protagonists are disorientated by the absence of any personal or collective

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‘truth’ in their writing. They rather produce texts that reinforce the alienation and groundlessness of the writer as contemporary Moroccan and Algerian national cultures struggle to accommodate literary creativity and freedom of expression.

Tahar Ben Jelloun, L’Ecrivain public While many of Ben Jelloun’s novels contain multiple narrators, with various storytellers recounting both their own and other characters’ adventures from a range of different perspectives, it is L’Ecrivain public that focuses most closely on the writing process. A significant aspect of Ben Jelloun’s writing is its interpenetration with the Moroccan oral tradition, and his best known texts, such as L’Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée, foreground the intervention of multiple storytellers in the construction of the central character Ahmed/ Zohra’s history.7 L’Ecrivain public, however, published in 1983, is most explicitly focused on the practice of writing creatively in contemporary Morocco. Ben Jelloun left Morocco in 1971, when the controversy surrounding Souffles, for which he had regularly written, erupted, yet the work continues to look back at literary culture in his homeland under the oppressive regime of Hassan II. The text, then, is concerned not only with storytelling, which has been a significant preoccupation in many of Ben Jelloun’s works, but also with the defamiliarizing effects of transcribing other people’s and indeed one’s own experiences in written form against the background of a sense of intellectual and cultural nonbelonging in contemporary Morocco. L’Ecrivain public recounts the reflections and wanderings of its rootless protagonist, whose unhappy beginnings as a sickly child confined to his ‘couffin’ lead to a lifetime spent writing, detached from the social world. Lying on his back, the child creates patterns out of the lines on the ceiling, a process that already serves as a metaphor for writing as the potentially endless configuration and reconfiguration of forms: ‘je créais à longueur de journée des signes mouvants et flous, je les assemblais dans un désordre extravagant et les déposais ensuite sur la mosaïque des zelliges incrustés dans les murs’ [‘all through the day I would create moving, blurred signs, I would put them together in an extraordinary order and then place them on the mosaic of zelliges carved into the walls’].8 His long nights are filled with dreams he chases like the thread of a narrative, and his days are spent quietly watching and observing the details of people’s behaviour to fuel his appetite for fabrication. Witnessing his mother’s visits from aunts

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and other female companions, the narrator also fantasizes sexual relations with them and revels in an intimate relationship with Loubaba, whose very sensuality is mingled for the child with the syllables of her name and the warmth of her muffled voice. These fantasies, then, are presented as the starting point for his future creative activity, yet they trigger an association in the writer between the imagination and social withdrawal. Sheltered from the world, he creates patterns, manipulates forms and rewrites stories, but this activity reinforces the separation of the writing mind from the physical encumbrance of the body, from everyday experience and from lived relationships. The narrative of the protagonist’s childhood reveries sets up his future writing work as the product of, and catalyst for, alienation. The protagonist’s work as a public writer is referred to on only two occasions in the text and is only a small part of his life story, but it is nevertheless the crucial trigger for the self-conscious reflection on writing that shapes much of the narrative. The period when he most genuinely occupies the role is during his stay at a disciplinary camp for dissenting students, where he writes family letters, love letters and job applications for fellow inmates, and where he enjoys the proximity that the work brings between himself and other human beings. In this instance, writing for others is conceived as a means of constructing relationships and empathizing with experiences unlike his own. The evocation of this practice, moreover, is followed by a reproduction of one of the letters and a recounting of the stories of some of the characters for whom he writes. These insertions of other voices into the narrative are a part of the writer’s exploration of multiple identities and foreground his use of writing as a potential force for self-transformation. Nevertheless, this fragile proximity at the same time seems to be something of a frail illusion in the context of the camp, where he is unable to understand the other men’s ability to cling to their hopes for romantic and sexual harmonies. The text also explicitly refers to the notion of the public writer in the initial preface, the ‘Confession du scribe’, yet here the narrator confesses that when he worked as a public writer in the Medina in Marrakech, he often invented the letters dictated to him, and ‘j’ai souvent rêvé d’entrer dans la vie intime de quelqu’un et de brouiller les souvenirs jusqu’à en faire une nouvelle mémoire où personne ne reconnaîtrait personne’ [‘I have often dreamed of entering into someone’s inner life and interfering with their memories so as to make a new memory bank where no one would recognise anyone’].9 The public writer here is less a scribe than an inventor, harbouring ‘des tendances à l’affabulation’ [‘a tendency to tell lies’], and yet this creativity inevitably generates distrust and even anger in his clients. If the former sickly child clings to his

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early dream world by writing for others as an adult, this process is necessarily double edged. It brings him closer to other people only to reinforce their noncomplicity and triggers a creativity that amounts to betrayal. This experience of alienation in public writing will come to epitomize the writer protagonist’s lack of self, of home and of intimacy in his narrative as a whole. The ‘Confession du scribe’ recounting the exploits of the public writer, moreover, forms a disorientating opening for a narrative in which the writer’s voice is itself dispersed across different personas. The role of the ‘écrivain public’ is to adopt the identity of others in order to express their needs in writing, but in writing for himself, the public writer, conversely, also figures that self as another on whose behalf he constructs a narrative. If, as Rachida Saigh Bousta suggests, ‘l’écrivain public dispose ainsi du potentiel de la réécriture de l’histoire’ [‘the public writer has the potential to rewrite history’], then the writer’s own story will be subject to rewriting as if from the perspective of another.10 The life story of the public writer is formed of fragments portraying different selves, each in turn recreated through the writing process as if from the outside. The puzzling preface inaugurates this pluralization and unsettles the form of the apparently autobiographical narrative it introduces. The narrator of this confession presents the text as the transcription of another man’s narrative, so that the writer appears not to be the protagonist of the main text but a strange acquaintance: ‘quelqu’un que je connais bien, que j’ai fréquenté depuis longtemps. Ce n’est pas un ami, mais une connaissance’ [‘someone I know well, whom I have frequented for a long time. It is not a friend, but an acquaintance’].11 The wording here presents the protagonist as someone else, but hints at the same time at the possibility that it is the writer’s own persona, a vision of himself as if from afar. Equally, the narrator admits that he has himself invented certain episodes, so that whether or not the protagonist is based on himself, it is clearly not a faithful representation. And he reminds us that a sick child will necessarily have a tendency towards invention, so that the discourse he apparently transcribes is in turn presented as unreliable. In addition, the preface contains a letter apparently written by the protagonist emphasizing that his narrative is not an autobiography but a series of stories, recounted after nights of solitude and uncertainty, not to be taken seriously. In a dizzying game of mirrors, the preface presents layers of selves and layers of text, all of which contribute to the dissemination of the writer’s voice. The autobiography of the public writer, then, is presented as the fabrication, itself rewritten, of a mysterious other, and the writing subject becomes lost in the multiple layers of his textual creation.12

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The rest of the text dramatizes this plurality by intermittently splitting the narrative voice, so that the ‘je’ gives way to ‘il’ and also to ‘tu’, again as if he were writing for another. Some of the episode in the camp, for example, is narrated in the third person, as if to reinforce the way in which the experience brings a loss of self, a psychological detachment that results from the anonymity with which he is treated. After recounting the experiences of the ‘false’ soldier whom he meets on the journey to the camp, the narrator’s voice seems to blur with that of his interlocutor, who also turns out to have been a wandering public writer, as well as an ‘éternel voyageur’ and wearer of masks (‘aujourd’hui déguisé en soldat, demain en maître d’école coranique, ou en aviateur de l’armée américaine’ [‘today disguised as a soldier, tomorrow as a Koranic schoolmaster or as an aviator in the American army’]).13 The dialogue between them is then followed by the detached comment, now referring to the narrator that ‘il se sentait devenir une chose opaque, sourde, et non voyante’ [‘he felt himself become opaque, deaf, unable to see’].14 This opacity is also combined with the sensation of reaching out to the world with his body, as if, no longer present to himself, the ‘écrivain public’ is capable of a heightened awareness of the other. In another passage, however, the ‘je’ is replaced by a ‘tu’, apparently the voice of his fiancée but internalized, as if articulating rather the words of his conscience – again speaking to himself as if he were another person. The voice demands why he has been antagonistic towards his father, and also comments on some photographs of him, one a restrained pose of the protagonist seated next to his mother while also a little distant from her and the other at the entrance to the house, next to his father, dutiful but somehow absent. A third photograph figures the narrator wrapped in the embrace of a young girl on the beach, and the combined effect is once again the dissemination of the narrator’s image into different ‘selves’, further distanced from the text’s ‘je’ by the voice that addresses him as ‘tu’. This multiplication of narrative perspectives is intensified by the frequent insertion of real or imagined speeches, diaries or letters by other characters, recorded in the novel just as the public writer transcribes other people’s words. Excerpts from his fiancée’s diary, for example, allow us to juxtapose her perspective with the narrator’s own, though again her expressions of disillusionment and self-loss on some level parallel and almost blur with those of the narrator. She too confesses to an unremitting sense of solitude and detachment from the self, ‘j’ai dix-sept ans et je ne reconnais pas mon visage dans le miroir dans la nuit de la nuit’ [‘I am seventeen and I do not recognise my face in the mirror in the night of nights’], and she too hides from the world

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in order to write.15 The text also contains a narrative from the perspective of the father, from whom the narrator remains detached, but whose musings contain comparable expressions of rootlessness and self-masking. Yet in this case, the transcription is itself fantasized, as the narrator longs to apply his practice of writing other people’s experiences to his father so as to understand him better. Supposedly transcribing his father’s words, the narrator is both united with and alienated from him, he thinks himself into his father’s past but rewrites it from his own perspective. He also imagines his father charting his wandering through Morocco and concludes the account with a confession of a sense of alienation from Fes, his original home, since after all his travels: ‘je sais que Fès n’est plus dans Fès’ [‘I know that Fes is no longer in Fes’].16 This alienation, however, is clearly also that of the narrator, who, through writing his father’s life, seeks to create a renewed complicity, yet finds that that complicity lies only in the shared experience of non-belonging in contemporary Morocco. If L’Ecrivain public uses the figure of the public writer to explore the relationship between writing and others as it might characterize literary creation more broadly, it is nevertheless crucial that this reflection on the writing process is rooted in the context of Ben Jelloun’s study of deracination and disillusionment in Morocco. Ben Jelloun may be suggesting that all writing brings a form of detachment, as the scribe recreates himself and the world through the creative process, but his narrator’s loss of self is also the result not only of his childhood illness but also of a sense of cultural stasis and anxiety in Morocco as dissatisfaction towards the new nation continues. The novel, then, is about writing itself, but it is also about the loss of a sense of belonging in a Morocco uneasy about its national identity and culture since the departure of the French and about the rootlessness of a character who travels the country only to find at each of his destinations a climate of frustration and stultification. Ben Jelloun has been criticized for failing to tackle overtly the trauma of the ‘années de plomb’ in Morocco, yet L’Ecrivain public portrays suggestively, if not overtly, a sense of uncertainty and dissatisfaction towards the new nation’s ability to move forward. The narrator’s alienation after leaving his secure ‘couffin’ triggers a forever frustrated search for a new place of security, shelter and belonging. The figure of the lemon tree in the courtyard in Fes, which crops up several times through the narrative, represents this idea of a lost origin, though, never rediscovered, it is also associated despite the narrator’s longings with dilapidation and loss. The narrator of the preface first refers to it when he suggests that the novel might be called ‘Murmure printanier du citronnier

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dans la cour’ [‘the springtime murmur of the lemon tree in the yard’], but he immediately deflates the false romanticism of the image by noting that there is in the narrative neither a murmur nor a mention of spring and that the ensuing text refers only cursorily to ‘un citronnier chétif au milieu de la cour de la maison natale à Fès’ [‘a meagre lemon tree in the middle of the yard in the house I was born in in Fes’].17 In another reference to it, the narrator dreams of his own death and watches his own funeral sitting on its branches, as if to suggest that a return to origins would bring only annihilation. More broadly, the city of Fes, the narrator’s birthplace, is figured at once as a lost ‘patrie’ and as a city ravaged by past conflicts, unable to shelter its deracinated inhabitants. The opening of the third chapter consists in an elaborate description of the city, the ‘mère abusive’, whose dusty streets connote the ashes of destruction, and this is a city that has lost the ability to reinvent itself. It is ‘recroquevillée dans ses légendes’ [‘hunched over in its legends’], just as the Moroccan nation is judged by writers such as Ben Jelloun, and more explicitly, Abdellatif Laâbi, to be cramped by archaism.18 Moreover, the city bears the scars of its violation, as ‘le visage de Fès est plein de trous, un cratère argenté, cendré, un visage bouffi, ravagé par la variole du temps’ [‘Fes’s face is full of holes, a silvery ashcoated crater, a face swollen and ravaged by the smallpox of time’].19 And it is also the site of present violence, as a husband pursues his protesting wife with a knife, and, contemplating his non-belonging much later at the end of the text, the narrator associates it with oppression and containment: ‘suis-je à Fès à l’époque où la ville avait des portes dans les murailles et que le veilleur de nuit et des murs – un maître potier – fermait une à une, gardant précieusement sur lui les clés?’ [‘am I in Fes at the time when the city had doors in the walls and the guardian of the night and of the walls – a master potter – would close them one by one while carefully keeping the keys’].20 If Fes is in no way the symbol of a secure origin, the narrator’s subsequent travels only reinforce that sense of lack, as ‘le pays me manque partout où je vais’ [‘I miss the country everywhere I go’].21 While his writing dissolves the sense of selfhood, it is the narrator’s wandering that both triggers and enhances that self-loss as the country itself repeatedly fails to provide the vagrant with any grounding. Tangiers, for example, initially welcomes him when he arrives at night-time to revel in its stunning illumination, and yet ‘je voyais déjà dans ce décor la fascination du jeu, du mensonge et de la fuite’ [‘I already saw in the décor a fascination with gaming, with lies and evasion’].22 The apparent internationalism of the port juxtaposes an old man shouting out his defence of Islamic morality with an American poet smoking ‘un kif ’ and caressing the hair

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of a young boy, but Tangiers also exhibits a culture of pretence, as the cinema shows only MGM films, and a man keeping watch of the cars wearing a djellaba claims to be English. This is a city of crossing cultures, having been occupied by successive invaders, but it is now a space defined by artifice and unable to provide either the roots or the inspiration that the narrator lacks. Even worse, Casablanca is evoked as the site of the riots of March  1965, when protestors against restrictions on education were shot down by the army and the extent of Hassan II’s mistrust of intellectuals became apparent. The narrator suggests here that his writing precisely emerged from this wound, as the rapid burying of the dead and ensuing silence surrounding the violence drive literary creativity underground, so that ‘j’écrivais en silence. J’écrivais en secret’ [‘I wrote in silence. I wrote in secret’].23 Next, Tétouan, gripped tight between two mountains, connotes again the oppression both of the colonial past and of the new authoritarian regime, so that ‘je la voyais comme une maison faite de murailles, de grottes et de caves, une maison où on aurait omis de percer des ouvertures, des portes et des fenêtres’ [‘I saw it as a house made of walls, caves and cellars, a house where they had forgotten to put any openings, doors and windows’].24 Each of the cities carries, in different forms, a sense of stultification, a lack of freedom of thought and a renewed anxiety towards the creative process. Ben Jelloun’s text says nothing explicit about the regime of Hassan II, and yet the sense of constraint and stultification emerges repeatedly through his travels, as Morocco is figured as trapped by the vestiges of an archaic past and forbidden to pursue genuine innovation or self-renewal. The narrator’s travels also take him beyond Morocco, however, as he goes to Paris in order to write, but his stay takes place in 1982 and coincides with a new awareness of the devastating war in Beirut. This war comes to represent a violence in the Arab world that only makes him feel increasingly exiled in France. He comments notably, for example, on France’s lack of attention to the conflict, testimony to an ongoing disregard for Arab cultures. The war in Beirut feeds a broader anger at a history of injustice towards Arabs, and the writer also once again expresses a sense of disillusionment towards the power of writing to counter prejudice: ‘dérisoire l’écriture en ces jours sans lumière où l’Arabe, en France ou ailleurs, est celui qui porte en lui, contenue, la colère, celle d’assister impuissant à l’humiliation de cette identité et au massacre des populations libanaise et palestinienne’ [‘writing seems pathetic in these dark days where the Arab, in France and elsewhere, carries contained anger within him, anger as a result of having to watch, powerless, the humiliation of that identity and the massacre of the Lebanese and Palestinian population’].25 The narrator writes

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that he believes that France should somehow intervene, perhaps by imposing sanctions, but he goes on to note that France’s history of antagonism with the Arab world is only continued in this present non-action. As he becomes increasingly obsessed by the war, the narrator starts to fuse Beirut with the Moroccan cities whose ravaged histories, he imagines, anticipate the destruction of contemporary Lebanon, and the hideous disfigurement of Beirut intensifies the image found elsewhere in the text of the history of violence against Arabs in North Africa. Once again, writing becomes the arena where the protagonist plays out the alienation created by the conflict, as the brutality infuses his writing while at the same time destroying it: ‘ce pays où je n’étais jamais allé m’envahissait; il m’emplissait de ses déchirures et de son mystère et détraquait mes mots’ [‘this country where I had never been overwhelmed me; it filled me with its lacerations and its mysteries, and threw my words out of order’].26 The tension between France and the Arab world brings a destructiveness that serves also to paralyse the writing process. This association between writing and destruction is intensified in a series of reflections on death that weave through the narrative. As friends tell him that death has become banal in Beirut, an everyday occurrence without consequence, the writer expresses an increasing sense that this is a city and a nation whose history cannot be explained and encapsulated in words: ‘le Liban est de ces pays qui ne s’écrivent pas, qui résistent plus à une définition qu’à une blessure’ [‘Lebanon is one of those countries that cannot be written, which resists definition more than wounding’].27 Excessive violence cannot be contained by narrative, it destroys the image of the city that the writer might have tried to evoke and the writer is in turn disfigured both by the war and by his attempts to write it down. Yet death has also accompanied the writer throughout his life, as he remembers for example his uncle helping to wash the dead during the period of his own childhood illness. Moreover, in the internment camp, he witnesses the death of the man in the bed next to him, and in both cases he emphasizes the parallel existence of his dreams and fantasies alongside these scenes of demise. At the end of his narrative, he reflects that the desire to return to his roots is bound up with a search for death, ‘rentrer chez soi et mourir’ [‘to go back home and die’], and yet he does not die but continues to write instead.28 So, while the violence in Beirut seems to obstruct the writing process, his ongoing writing practice takes place alongside scenes of death and seems to echo that physical annihilation. His fiancée tells him more than once that ‘au lieu d’écrire tu devrais vivre’ [‘instead of writing you should live’], as if writing is also itself a refusal of life, a means to distract the

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writer from communication with the world, an act of withdrawal.29 Writing brings a form of effacement, it signals the absence of the body whose voice it records. Ben Jelloun’s evacuation of the subject from the writing at the same time recalls the thinking of Maurice Blanchot, who conceives language per se as the signifier of absence. The very utterance or inscription of the word signals that its referent can be detached from itself: Quand je dis «cette femme», la mort réelle est annoncée et déjà présente dans mon langage; mon langage veut dire que cette personne-ci, qui est là, maintenant, peut être détachée d’elle-même, soustraite à son existence et à sa présence et plongée soudain dans un néant d’existence et de présence; mon langage signifie essentiellement la possibilité de cette destruction; il est, à tout moment, une allusion résolue à un tel événement.30 [When I say, ‘This woman’, real death has been announced and is already present in my language; my language means that this person, who is here right now, can be detached from herself, removed from her existence and her presence, and suddenly plunged into a nothingness in which there is no existence or presence; my language essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction; it is a constant, bold allusion to such an event.]

Literature, for Blanchot, becomes the site where that negation is affirmed in order for the creative potential of language to be liberated. For Ben Jelloun too, writing somehow replaces material presence, but for the public writer of this text this engenders a disorientating sense of self-loss or even annihilation. The  protagonist is detached from himself, from others and from the world through the writing process. The protagonist’s final destination before returning to Fes is Medina, and this pilgrimage seems to constitute an ultimate attempt to conclude the search for meaning and community that the writer lacks. Yet this scene also turns out to be one of the most extreme withdrawal, a form of spiritual introversion clearly influenced by Sufism, as if the writer loses all substance and presence and becomes nothing other than the writing he creates. He comes to Medina in order to touch the tomb of the Prophet, but his spiritual epiphany takes place away from the other pilgrims. The embrace of Islam may seem to provide him with the belonging he desires, but once in Medina he is curiously suspended, alone in his room and detached from the world: ‘je me sens parfaitement accordé à cet état d’intense absence à laquelle j’aspire depuis l’enfance’ [‘I feel perfectly in tuned with that state of enormous absence to which I have aspired since childhood’].31 He seeks a perfect serenity between the white walls of his room, detached from humanity, apart even from his own body and close to death.

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He remembers that prayer, during his childhood, was a duty forced upon him by his parents, but on hearing the call of the muezzin he now experiences praying as another, highly spiritual means to separate himself from himself and from others: ‘je plane. Je vole au-dessus de l’immense foule de fidèles tous prosternés’ [‘I hover. I fly over the great, prostrate crowd of the faithful’].32 Far from being a return to roots, writing here is, as Pierette Renard suggests, ‘quête d’un Ailleurs absolu, espace nu, “blanc”, à l’écart du souvenir, antithèse du relatif ’ [‘a quest for an absolute elsewhere, a bare space, “white”, apart from memory, the antithesis of the relative’].33 The section ends with a dream sequence, representing again the priority of the created world over the real, in which the narrator imagines that he becomes part of a film. The pilgrimage not only offers a sort of spiritual epiphany but it also serves to complete the self-effacement that characterizes the public writer’s life as a whole. The experience is curiously both a sort of purification akin to that prescribed by Sufi mysticism and a moment of the most radical detachment from the world. L’Ecrivain public offers a singular portrait of a writer without roots or identity, detached from others and from the world, lost in the realms of his creative processes. By the end, his body is a shadowy silhouette that pursues him, the double about whom he writes just as he writes other people’s letters, and even more, the voice of the double is not that of a lost but completed self but that of an indistinct, cumbersome presence representing a subject he cannot capture. If the writer here is in a sense a ghostwriter for himself, then his narrative also explores the spectral quality of the hazy selves that both accompany and disorient him. Addressing him as if he were another person, the double, like the fiancée, tells him that his inventions replace living, since ‘à force de remplir la vie et le corps des personnages que tu inventes pour écrire, tu as perdu la chair et la terre de ton corps’ [‘by filling the lives and the bodies of the characters you invent in order to write, you have lost the flesh and the ground of your own body’].34 The protagonist, lost and wandering in the jaded and uncertain countryside of contemporary Morocco, lives through his writing but becomes further removed from other people the more he embraces his craft. Writing documents and letters on other people’s behalf is part of a much broader practice, whereby the writer seeks to find himself through the creative process, but discovers that the subject of his writing is as remote from his psychic experience as any of the characters for whom he writes or with whom he enters into a relationship. Far from being the provider of the sense of belonging he lacks, writing is a form of disembodiment and pluralization, it transforms the self not to create a new identity but to reinforce and intensify the subject’s

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lack of substance and  belonging. If the background to the novel is a static and oppressive  Morocco still struggling to define itself after decolonization and newly troubled by ongoing tensions in the  Arab world, the work of the writer  that occupies the novel’s foreground indicates that creative activity remains traumatized by that cultural and political unease.

Kamel Daoud, ‘La Préface du nègre’ If Ben Jelloun’s L’Ecrivain public foregrounds the rootlessness and alienation of the public writer in contemporary Morocco, the young Algerian writer and journalist Kamel Daoud adopts a rather more caustic approach to the writing process. Born in 1970, Daoud is known in Algeria for the critical and acerbic articles he regularly publishes in Le Quotidien d’Oran, and more recently, he has made his mark in Europe and the United States with his highly controversial Meursault, contre-enquête, to be analysed in Chapter  5. His lesser known collection of short stories, Le Minotaure 504, however, came out in 2011 and demonstrates his commitment to critical thinking as it can be experimentally explored through literature. If Daoud’s journalism unashamedly condemns the hypocrisy and stultification of contemporary Algeria, the stories of Le Minotaure 504 all also express a form of contestation or revolt. Daoud has explicitly criticized Algeria’s current apathy, and he has written against the excessive pursuit of Arabization in Algeria and against the ideology of Islamist extremism.35 The story ‘Le Minotaure 504’ consists in a rant by a taxi driver in Algiers against the city he conceives as utterly monstrous, and, though at times less overtly focused on Algeria, the other stories in the collection similarly depict forms of defiance against authority alongside creativity. A military aviator in ‘Gibrîl au kérosène’ laments that no one is interested in a plane he has constructed himself and acerbically vilifies contemporary Algerian lethargy, and in ‘L’ami d’Athènes’ a marathon runner who runs without stopping denounces, in contrast, his compatriots’ lack of tenacity. ‘La Préface du nègre’ also expresses dissent through its depiction of a ghostwriter employed to transcribe the memoirs of a former soldier in the War of Independence, and who is disgusted with the falsity of the mirage he is being asked to reproduce. Unlike Khatibi’s and Khadra’s more jubilant young public writers discovering the passions of others through their craft, Daoud’s ghostwriter, like Ben Jelloun’s public writer, experiences his role as both

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alienating and frustrating. Yet while for Ben Jelloun that alienation triggered the bewildering fragmentation of the narrative voice as the protagonist struggled to find himself during the course of his wanderings through contemporary Morocco, Daoud’s text rather presents the writer precisely as an enraged figure frustratedly seeking a voice of his own, independent from the pressures of nationalist orthodoxy. The double meaning of the epithet ‘nègre’ labels him at once as a ghostwriter and as a racialized, subjugated other, ironically now subordinated by the older generation rather than by the colonizer. Writing for an old man who wants to celebrate his heroic role in national memory, Daoud’s protagonist nevertheless attempts a form of ghostwriting that would allow him to express his dissent. In the struggle against the conflation of literary culture with national hubris, however, he is left by the end only with the ‘preface’ as an unconventional forum for critique. While Ben Jelloun’s public writer initially prided himself on producing a range of documents for others, and went on creatively, if distressingly, to construct his own autobiography as if on behalf of another, Daoud’s protagonist is saddled with the more restricted and menial task of transcribing the memories of a war veteran, and he undertakes the work purely for financial reasons. The work of the jobbing writer is here less an opportunity for creativity and transformation than an economic necessity from which the creative process is all but evacuated. His transcription is a thankless task which downgrades the writing process and deprives the public writer of an individual voice: ‘une stratégie de copiste incapable d’élever sa voix à l’intérieur d’un siècle défavorable, coincé entre le besoin de manger et celui de mourir le plus tard possible’ [‘the strategy of a copyist incapable of raising his voice in an unfavourable century, caught between the need to eat and the need to stay alive as long as possible’].36 Listening to the old man recount his memories, the writer is expected merely to write them down for him with no input of his own, and his preface is the only, desultory space he is accorded to choose his own words. He refers several times to the fact that he only undertakes the task for money, and he figures the writing process as mundane and humiliating. Replaying his cassettes in the evening in order to continue the transcription, he reflects on the inglorious task of relaying the old man’s words while omitting his coughs, sniffs and hesitations. The creation of the other’s memoir, then, is an unglamorous workaday project. Daoud in this way uses the figure of the ghostwriter to portray the struggle to escape the narrow and reductive form of contemporary literature constrained by the memory of decolonization.

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The old man sets out to record his memoirs because he wants to celebrate his role in the War of Independence and to incorporate his life into national memory. Initially he is called up to serve the French in the Second World War, but on returning to Algeria joins the revolt of his compatriots against the colonizer and participates actively in the struggle for independence. Although the soldier is imprisoned and tortured before being freed by his people, however, the protagonist nevertheless refuses to glorify his activities but rather wonders at the man’s curious nostalgia for the early days of the formation of the resistance. Moreover, the narrator pauses to remember a particularly striking episode in the man’s memories, when he comments on how any voice that did not fit in with the official line was extinguished. He himself was ordered to kill members of the maquis who were suspected of writing a book, as writers were assumed to be colluding with ‘l’Ennemi’ merely by virtue of their craft. When asked to assassinate ‘l’homme le plus pieux, le plus instruit, le plus juste et le plus noble qu’il ait jamais connu’ [‘the most pious, educated, just and noble man he ever knew’], he agrees to accord the victim one night of reprieve in order to pray, and the soldier then listens to him narrating the atrocities he has witnessed through the night.37 Nevertheless, his duty to Algeria is such that he continues to perceive the act of writing as potentially threatening. His own history in the maquis induced him to share the national suspicion towards creativity that Daoud sets out to condemn. More broadly, however, the ghostwriter of ‘La Préface du nègre’ is there to denounce the falsity of the national literature that glorifies the War of Independence and to expose the emptiness and pretence of the writing that clothes the struggle in the utopian rhetoric of heroism. The story is succinct, but significant, because it paints an unprecedented portrait of how literature in this context can become not a forum for liberation and self-expression, but a tool for the further dissemination of a celebratory but ultimately restrictive nationalist ideology. For Daoud, literature itself is revealed here to be potentially deceptive, it has been coopted by the politics of nationalism and dissenting voices are silenced even in what might have been conceived to be the arena of free aesthetic experimentation. Ben Jelloun’s public writer may have been alienated by his craft, yet his writing was nevertheless a space for the openended exploration of other selves, while for Daoud’s scribe literature remains a decoy. He vilifies, for example, the surveillance of literary production since the war, the requirement that texts necessarily reproduce an accepted and official version of events, leaving space neither for individual testimony nor for the reader’s freedom of interpretation:

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La production des livres, les auteurs lorsqu’ils existaient vraiment, étaient étroitement surveillés à partir de cette ligne tracée entre la balle de la fameuse Guerre de libération et l’utopie paysanne qu’elle avait visée dès le début comme pour séduire tout le monde. Plus bêtement encore, l’histoire de ce pays était le livre dont la fin était de dévorer le lecteur après avoir imposé l’anonymat aux auteurs qui essayaient de laisser, tout à la fois, un livre et un nom.38 [The production of books, and authors, when they genuinely existed, were closely monitored on the basis of the link between the bullet of the famous War of Independence and the peasant utopia that it had targeted from the beginning, as if to seduce everyone. Even more stupidly, the history of this country was conceived in a book whose aim was to devour the reader, having imposed anonymity on authors who tried to leave behind both a book and a name.]

This single, unitary version of national history is endlessly repeated, and as he learns to write, the narrator finds himself repelled by the mythology that associates the creation of Algeria with the single mission of the uprising. It is as if, he notes, all literary production is conceived with tomorrow’s historian in mind, seeking to pre-empt future reassessment and shore up the vision of the nation as heroic resistor. The historian of the future, moreover, is figured in turn as a smug, overweight schoolmaster wielding judgement, ironically, just as the colonizer judged and constrained the colonized. In promoting the ideology of Algerian nationalism, the old man’s memoirs are also a self-congratulatory paean to his own achievements, but the ongoing celebration of these leaves him stuck in the past. The narrator describes the old man as a ‘héros d’une guerre qui ne valait plus rien aujourd’hui’ [‘the hero of a war that no longer had any value in the present’], his memories are the stagnant souvenirs of ‘tous les déclassés de ce pays’ [‘all the lower classes in this country’], but the war veteran nevertheless longs to conserve them in his memoir as if in an ultimate statement of revolt against the colonizer.39 He dreams of ‘un livre final, comme d’une dernière victoire sur le Colon qui lui avait refusé l’école ou qui l’avait obligé à la quitter pour prendre des armes’ [‘a final book, like a last victory against the Coloniser who did not allow him to go to school or who forced him to leave it to take up arms’], yet the project remains for the narrator a pitiful attempt to restore the man’s heroism as, decrepit in his old age, he pathetically battles against cancer.40 The written record of his memories is a final bid for recognition or even applause, a last protest against mortality that he hopes will secure his glory in the eyes of future generations. The literary work is from this point of view not only the

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disseminator of nationalist ideology but also a forum for self-aggrandisement, a desperate last defence against insignificance. Daoud’s narrative of the angry, disillusioned scribe can be seen as a commentary on contemporary Algerian culture and on the limited scope and role of literature in that context. This Algeria that still rests on the laurels of its former triumph is now described as directionless, sterile, lacking in innovation as much as in freedom of speech. Having accomplished its mission of securing independence, the country has lost its way, so that ‘j’avais l’intuition, depuis ma jeunesse, que ce pays souffrait non pas d’un manque de nourriture et d’espoir, mais d’un mal encore plus terrible et qui pouvait conduire à la construction de pyramides ou à la perpétuation de massacres: le désœuvrement’ [‘I felt since my youth that this country suffered not from a lack of food or hope, but from an even worse sickness that could lead to the construction of pyramids or the perpetuation of massacres: idleness’].41 The narrator himself is anguished by the sense that he has nothing to say, and he suggests that the old man too knows that his story is hackneyed. The myth of the war has foreclosed the possibility of writing other kinds of stories, and the writer is disabled by its weight: ‘ce désœuvrement était une fatalité, et je ne pouvais y échapper pour aller raconter des histoires d’amour invraisemblables ou imaginer des énigmes superbes capables de résumer une partie du monde et de déboucher sur des doutes qui relancent la création comme au cinéma’ [‘this idleness was a kind of fatality, and I could not escape it in order to tell unrealistic love stories or wonderful enigmas capable of encapsulating a part of the world and ending up in doubts that could revive creativity, like in the cinema’].42 Moreover, the protagonist suggests that the younger generation more broadly is crippled by the debt they are expected to repay the older generation, and the old man’s memoirs become a broader figure for the weight of the past and its stultification of the present. Just as Sindbad, the shipwrecked sailor of the Thousand and One Nights, awakes in his fifth voyage with an old man he is unable to shift lying across his back, the younger generation of Algeria is saddled with the burden of a war that prevents innovation and creativity in the present and future. If the protagonist is expected merely to transcribe the hackneyed memories of the past, however, as he vents his anger in this curtailed preface he explores at the same time the gulf between his voice and that of the man whose words he transcribes. And this gap is at once the source of the scribe’s disaffection and the possible starting point for his use of the project to attempt a more liberated form of self-expression. The opening of the tale sets the scene in the old man’s home, overlooking the courtyard, but his voice is already described as a distant

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rambling that addresses only itself. The protagonist dreams and thinks of other things as the monologue unfolds, imagining an alternative form of writing merely in order to preserve his will to live. As the narrative progresses, the relationship between the old man and the scribe becomes increasingly fraught, as the writer has the power to express the memories in his own words but is also subject to the old man’s exacting (if illiterate) scrutiny. Reading back the pages he has written, the writer is upbraided for his mistakes, and the old man ends up retelling events in ways that are inconsistent with the first version. Castigating and denigrating his scribe, the old man repeatedly embarks on history lessons that only alienate the protagonist further, and as the project develops the writer is increasingly suspected and mistrusted. The relation between scribe and subject is, moreover, bound up with a power dynamic that ironically replicates the oppressive force of the colonizer against the colonized. This denigration is crystallized nowhere more pointedly than in the repeated use of the somewhat ambiguous term ‘nègre’, designating him as ghostwriter while calling up associations of colonial assumptions of the black man’s subordination and assumed inferiority. Far from using his craft to liberate his thinking, then, the dual meaning of ‘nègre’ is here exploited to suggest that this writer is another form of slave, at the whim of the master who dictates what he should transcribe as if directing his thoughts and silencing his voice. Daoud’s imagery now becomes curiously reminiscent of that of Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, where the ‘nègre’ or the black man is effaced by the discourse of the oppressor, though in Daoud’s text the one wielding the power is precisely not the white man but, still more horrifically, his compatriot of the previous generation, his supposed liberator. The financial compulsion to work as a scribe makes the ghostwriter subordinate, a ‘nègre’, which is here another term, as in Fanon, for ‘l’homme invisible’.43 The old man even wants his writer to be ‘nègre dans l’absolu, sans prénom, répondant à la clochette, à peine plus visible qu’une machine d’orthographe magique’ [‘a ghost writer in an absolute sense, with no name, answering the bell, hardly more visible than a magic writing machine’];44 the scribe is reduced to the anonymity of Fanon’s alienated black man in ‘L’expérience vécue du noir’ [‘The Fact of Blackness’]. Quite the antithesis of the writer who uses his craft to imagine other selves and other worlds, this ghostwriter is nothing more than a servant, and it is writing itself (as transcription) that is the medium of his oppression. Nevertheless, Daoud’s protagonist seeks at the same time to turn his position to his own advantage, to articulate a muffled dissent, even if by the end of the text this too is silenced. He starts to conceive the transcription not just as a copy

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but as a space for his own reflections, as the old man’s story is accompanied by the narrator’s own, a clandestine double whose voice he might subtly weave into the memories he records. Just as Salman the scribe in The Satanic Verses started to insert into his transcription inventions of his own, Daoud’s protagonist resolves to add his own words to the text, gingerly at first, but increasingly, so as to create a curious double narrative that would stretch the work beyond its narrow limits: Je commençais, par glissements malhonnêtes, libertés clandestines, sous les yeux d’un homme un peu analphabète, déséquilibré par son fusil imaginaire qu’il n’arrivait pas à déposer alors que le pays était indépendant depuis des décennies, à écrire le livre dont je rêvais depuis des années, comme un Dieu fainéant qui hésiterait à se révéler sous une forme déchiffrable et à choisir un prophète dans sa collection d’hallucinés, ou même à créer un vaste miroir ventriloque comme ce monde.45 [I began to write the book I had dreamt about for years, by dishonest slippages, clandestine liberties, under the gaze of a somewhat illiterate man, disturbed by the imaginary gun he was unable to put down even though his country had been independent for decades. I wrote like a lazy God, hesitating to reveal himself in comprehensible form and to choose a prophet from his collection of madmen, or even to create a vast mirror, ventriloquizing just like this world does.]

Since the old man is illiterate, the scribe has the curious ability to rewrite the text without the latter knowing, so the ghostwriter can inscribe his own spectral presence within the pages of the work. If at first he just notes his own imprint on the work by filtering it through his personal style, later he attempts to use the project to express ‘ma propre façon de voir le monde’ [‘my own way of seeing the world’], until, he imagines, the man’s memoirs are merely the cover for his own creative enterprise.46 The craft of the ghostwriter or scribe, then, seems able to offer the potential for an alternative means of self-expression, the record of a voice deprived of any other outlet, a transgressive protest at once within and against the sanctioned medium. The protagonist’s attempt to make of the transcription a double narrative, to use his craft to disguise his own words as the memoirs of another, ultimately fails. The narrator finally presents the old man with two hundred printed pages, containing fragments of stories he has dreamt up over the years (reminiscent of the tales of Le Minotaure 504 itself), and the work’s recipient then pours over it lovingly without understanding the words. Nevertheless, on his next

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visit, the narrator discovers not only that the old man has died but also that he burned the manuscript the night before his death. It seems, then, that the scribe’s attempt not only to rephrase the old man’s memories but to appropriate the work to his own ends takes the text too far from the spoken narrative and separates too decisively the two voices of the potentially reworked transcription. Although the  old man did not know what he was reading, he perceived the scribe’s duplicity  and silenced them both. Nevertheless, the opposite option of properly  fusing his voice with that of the old man is equally unattractive to the writer, as he continues to scorn the veteran’s retrograde self-image and physical  decrepitude. The narrator is horrified to find himself condemned to write as if he were an ancient and ailing raconteur who failed to die at his peak, and the adoption of the other’s voice is  much more degrading than it can ever be promising: ‘j’en étais réduit à naître  sous la forme d’un vieillard cancéreux dont la moitié des paroles était addressée à des morts et l’autre moitié à son  propre dentier’ [‘I was reduced to being recreated as a cancer-ridden old man, half of whose words were addressed to dead people and the other half to his own dentures’].47 Disgusted by the compulsion to write as another, and unable to sustain his whole-hearted appropriation of the other’s text to his own ends, the scribe never achieves the publication of a completed work. What Daoud’s revolted narrator does manage to produce, however, is precisely this unruly ‘preface’, and though there is no main project for that preface to introduce, it nevertheless stands for a strangely challenging form of critique. As  Derrida also suggests in ‘Hors livre’, in La Dissémination, the preface is a curious genre, both belonging to another work and standing apart from it, and it is both a literary form and a non-literary textual support.48 Here, it allows the narrator to write in his own voice, yet that voice is necessarily subordinate. And in this text, most perplexingly, it is subordinate precisely to a narrative that never sees the light of day. The preface is, on one level, another way for the public writer to use his duty towards the other to explore himself, but it is also only ever an addendum, a secondary narrative, dependent on the main text, though in this case it achieves a strange autonomy because the main text was never published. It is a space for the scribe to attempt a form of selfexpression without adhering to the literary expectations of the contemporary community, yet it only exists because of his role to write for someone else. Daoud seems to be suggesting here that creativity and innovative critique arise in contemporary Algeria precisely out of such impromptu forms, forms which evade the demands of nationalist mythology, but which are necessarily

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at the same time of indeterminate status. While the narrator himself admitted that ‘les meilleurs romans de ce pays sont d’ailleurs le fruit d’une parenthèse, l’exercice d’un faux anonymat ou l’accident préfabriqué d’un homme qui suspend sa rotation autour du soleil pour décrire ses propres chaussures’ [‘the best novels of this country, moreover, are the product of a kind of parenthesis, an exercise in false anonymity or the prefabricated accident of a man who stops moving around the sun in order to describe his own shoes’], his own work derives its force from its unconventional form as a free-standing preface.49 If contemporary Algerian literature is, according to Daoud’s narrator, stunted by the pressures of national ideology, then the only space for creative innovation will be precisely in literature’s margins, as they are filled with the unorthodox notes of one whose voice has no place in the political arena. The public writer or ghostwriter for both Ben Jelloun and Daoud is a singular figure whose shadowy presence in his text offers compelling insight into the art of literary creation in contemporary North Africa more broadly. In L’Ecrivain public, the work of the public writer triggers a disorientating reflection on the creation of other selves through literature, at the same time as on the alienation of the writer looking to find himself in a Morocco in which cultural innovation is quashed. In ‘La Préface du nègre’, the scribe subverts the work he transcribes in order to uncover the dangers of subscribing to literary orthodoxy in an Algeria whose culture is still constrained even after independence, and if both works suggest that writing for others is hardly emancipatory, the idiosyncratic genre of the scribe’s preface represents a possible model for a literature that provocatively challenges its own form. Daoud is perhaps suggesting that contemporary francophone Algerian literature is a kind of marginalized space, a ‘preface’ seen as liminal to the official national culture, but this marginal form is also a place both of invention and of self-awareness and reflection. In both cases, writing for others triggers a reflection on the difficulty of conceiving that process as a liberated means of self-expression, as both protagonists experience their activity as the alienating and disturbing bringer of self-loss. Their work does nevertheless at the same time offer revealing insight into the potential expressiveness of a multi-vocal literary form in challenging restrictions on freedom of cultural expression in contemporary Morocco and Algeria. In this way both the opacity and fragmentation of Ben Jelloun’s narrator, and the liminal critique offered by Daoud’s ‘Préface’, intimate potential alternative forms of literary writing in contexts where creativity has been marginalized or crushed.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Abdelkebir Khatibi, La Mémoire tatouée (Paris: Denoël, 1971) pp. 77, 78. Abdelkebir Khatibi, Le Scribe et son ombre (Paris: SNELA La Différence, 2008) p. 119. Yasmina Khadra, L’Ecrivain (Paris: Julliard, 2001) p. 256. Leïla Sebbar, ‘Ecrivain public’, in Ecrivain public: nouvelles (Saint-Pourçain-surSioule: Bleu autour, 2012) 21–54. See http://www.ecrivains-publics.fr/ (accessed 2 April 2014). The website defines the public writer as ‘un professionnel de l’écrit dont la mission est d’aider à communiquer – par l’écrit – au sens large du terme’. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1998 [1988]). Tahar Ben Jelloun, L’Enfant de sable (Paris: Seuil, 1985); La Nuit sacrée (Paris: Seuil, 1987). Tahar Ben Jelloun, L’Ecrivain public (Paris: Seuil, 1983) pp. 13–14. Ibid., p. 11. Rachida Saigh Bousta, Lecture des récits de Tahar Ben Jelloun (Casablanca: Afrique Orient, 1999) p. 108. Jelloun, L’Ecrivain public, p. 9. Robert Elbaz expands on this paradox of the public writer’s autobiography: ‘la définition même de l’autobiographie occidentale, néo-classique, ne saurait être compatible avec l’être de l’écrivain public, puisque l’écrivain public ne se raconte pas, mais raconte plutôt les autres, ou des parcelles de leurs histoires plurielles’. See Robert Elbaz, Tahar Ben Jelloun, ou l’inassouvissement du désir narratif (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996) p. 94. Jelloun, L’Ecrivain public, pp. 88–89. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 134.

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28 Ibid., p. 186. 29 Ibid., p. 103. 30 Maurice Blanchot, ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, in La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) 303–345 (p. 326); ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) p. 323. 31 Jelloun, L’Ecrivain public, p. 140. 32 Ibid., p. 144. 33 Pierrette Renard, ‘Le pouvoir ambigu des mots’, in Mansour M’Henni (ed.), Tahar Ben Jelloun: Stratégies d’écriture (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993) 11–23 (p. 21). 34 Jelloun, L’Ecrivain public, p. 185. 35 Some easily accessible examples include ‘Cette Algérie vaniteuse et pourtant incapable de dire sa colère’, Slate Afrique, http://www.slateafrique.com/99893 /algerie-incontournable-peuple-tres-contournable (accessed 12 December 2012). Also, ‘Le dangereux mirage du Sahelistan’, Slate Afrique, http://www.slateafrique .com/101633/mali-sahelistan-topographie-pays-jeep (accessed 15 January 2013). And ‘Djazairi: Le manifeste de Ma Langue par Kamel Daoud’, L’Algérie-Focus, http://www.algerie-focus.com/blog/2013/06/djazairi-le-manifeste-de-ma-langue -par-kamel-daoud/ (accessed 4 June 2013). 36 Kamel Daoud, ‘La Préface du nègre’, in Le Minotaure 504 (Paris: Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 2011) 73–109 (p. 76). 37 Ibid., p. 94. 38 Ibid., p. 91. 39 Ibid., p. 80. 40 Ibid., p. 81. 41 Ibid., p. 100. 42 Ibid., p. 101. 43 Ibid., p. 83. 44 Ibid., p. 85. 45 Ibid., p. 80. 46 Ibid., p. 84. 47 Ibid., p. 98. 48 Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1993). 49 Kamel Daoud, ‘La Préface du nègre’, p. 94.

4

Rewriting the Past: Literature and History

The role of literature in challenging colonial history has been much discussed by postcolonial critics and theorists. The founding premise of one of the first critical studies of postcolonial literature, The Empire Writes Back, is that literary texts can portray the colonial past from new and different perspectives, ‘writing back’ to the centre by offering alternative, critical depictions of past and present forms of oppression.1 Moreover, several postcolonial theorists have conceptualized the particular challenge offered by local narratives in producing alternative histories to those created from a European perspective or by a new nationalist ideology. In Le Discours antillais, Edouard Glissant famously distinguishes ‘Histoire’ from ‘histoires’ in order to pinpoint the disjunction between official European narratives of the past and the multiple versions of events and experiences produced by local memory within the Caribbean. Glissant provocatively argues that, ‘l’Histoire est un fantasme fortement opératoire de l’Occident, contemporain précisément du temps où il était seul à “faire” l’histoire du monde’ [‘History is a widespread fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone “made” the history of the World’].2 Against this totalized ‘Histoire’, Glissant emphasizes the significance of multiple ‘histoires’ that reflect the diversity of lived experience, and, exploiting the double meaning of ‘histoire’ as both history and story, champions the multiple and variable voices of resistance emerging from local literatures. Similarly, Dipesh Chakrabarty has offered a sustained and compelling critique of the creation of colonial history, such as that of India, by European narrative, and calls urgently for a better awareness of the limitations of European historical knowledge.3 Chakrabarty demands not so much attention to alternative literary narratives as a thoroughgoing critique of European history, but the present chapter will set out to demonstrate precisely how literature is particularly able to lay bare the structural blindness of hegemonic historical discourse.

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In addition to Glissant and Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha has explored how local literatures can challenge not only European colonial history but also, importantly, hegemonic national discourses constructed out of an assumed linear view of the past. Bhabha notes that ‘the linear equivalence of event and idea that historicism proposes most commonly signifies a people, a nation, or a national culture as an empirical sociological category or a holistic cultural entity’.4 Against that categorization, Bhabha explores, instead, ‘the complex strategies of cultural identification and discursive address that function in the name of “the people” or “the nation” and make them the immanent subjects of a range of social and literary narratives’.5 Most famously, Bhabha is interested in what he conceives as the time lag between the official, unitary history of the nation and the ‘shreds and patches’ of local memory, the fragmented narratives of people’s lived experiences with which nationalist discourse can never quite catch up. He evokes the people’s own creation of their lived present, divorced from the ‘constituted historical origin in the past’, and celebrates the proliferation of diverse forms of narrative invention as opposed to the sanctioned history shored up by the discourse of authority. This split is conceived, moreover, as a distinction between the ‘pedagogical’, that is, the official history created by nationalist authority, and the ‘performative’, the counter-discourse of the people produced in the present. Literature per se is not at the centre of Bhabha’s discussion here, but novels and storytelling are significant examples of the multiple ‘performative’ forms that work to contest dominant, unitary versions of history. This chapter will not, however, analyse examples of counter-narratives representing alternative versions of history before, during and after the colonial period, but will explore more specifically two works by Algerian writers Tahar Djaout and Salim Bachi in which the process of creating a historical narrative is actively both foregrounded and thrown into question through a reflection on the role and form of creative fiction. Based on a critique of postcolonial nationalist ideology akin to that of Daoud’s ‘La Préface du nègre’, these are works that more fully experiment with the potential of literary narrative to use its suppleness to challenge monolithic forms of historical knowledge. The broader project of rewriting the past in order to correct sanctioned versions of history has been the focus of multiple francophone North African works both of the anticolonial period and of the more recent period since the 1980s. Most famously, much of Assia Djebar’s work is concerned with how literature might start to fill the gaps left by official history. L’Amour, la fanatasia, for example, criticizes the obfuscatory grandiloquence of French soldiers’ accounts

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of the invasion of Algiers in 1830 by drawing attention to individual voices of suffering, and La Femme sans sépulture attempts to recover the voice of Zoulikha, a resistance fighter during the War of Independence who disappeared and whose story has so far not been properly recorded in written form.6 In addition, early works by Mohammed Dib and Mouloud Feraoun contest European history by portraying the adverse effects of the French presence in local communities in Algeria in the lead-up to decolonization.7 And, both Kateb Yacine and Mouloud Mammeri also, in different ways, use the novel to portray more particularly the  build-up to and outbreak of the War of Independence from the perspectives of local people  exploited by colonial history.8 Looking further back into the past,  moreover, Djebar’s Loin de Médine reconstructs events from the life of the  Prophet Mohammed in order to contest modern Islamist discourses that rewrite the history of Islam in order to insist on women’s subordination.9  Driss Chraïbi and Salim Bachi similarly in L’Homme du livre and Le Silence de Mahomet offer new perspectives on the psychology and life of the Prophet so as to depict the emergence of Islam from a series of subjective and ‘unofficial’ perspectives.10 Finally, in La Mère du printemps and Naissance à l’aube, Chraïbi also uses the novel form to renarrate the spread of Islam across the Arab world so as to emphasize the unrecorded experiences of the Berber victims of that conquest.11 Djaout’s L’Invention du désert and Salim Bachi’s La Kahéna, however, both go one step further in their highly self-conscious reflections on literature’s ability to rework history. Literature, narrative and the imagination occupy the centre stage in these novels, and the texts’ own stories of narrative creation offer revealing insights both into the political misuses, and our inevitably partial apprehension, of the past. In Djaout’s L’Invention, a writer sets out to rewrite the creation of contemporary Algeria through a history of the defeat of the Almoravids dynasty by the Almohads in the twelfth century, but he discovers in the process that much of the story, and indeed the wider history of Algeria he is trying to access, remains buried or resists the historian’s search for coherence and completion. The work combines multiple narrative strands in order to portray the difficult process of trying to encapsulate Algeria, figured by the image of the unfathomable desert landscape, in textual form. It challenges assumptions about historical reconstruction at the same time as it expresses doubt about the ability of narrative to define either individual or collective identity or to bring a coherent understanding of national history. Despite the assertiveness of Djaout’s challenge to national history and the creative experimentalism of the text’s fragmented form, however, the

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protagonist of L’Invention expresses a comparable kind of alienation to that which afflicted Ben Jelloun’s public writer and Daoud’s ghostwriter. In Salim Bachi’s La Kahéna, the writing process itself is less overtly foregrounded, and yet the narrative too focuses throughout on the role of the imagination in the protagonist’s compelling but highly fragmentary reconstruction of the past. This fragmentary reconstruction shares with that of Djaout’s work a persistent sense of uncertainty about its protagonist’s ability to piece the past together coherently, but Bachi’s work also offers a provocative vision of the ways in which literary narrative presents knowledge of the past as both multilayered and multidirectional. The title, La Kahéna, refers to the mansion of Louis Bergnana, a Maltese adventurer who worked to rebuild the mythical Algerian city of Cyrtha in the early twentieth century, but the name is also that of the Berber princess who resisted the Arab invasion at the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century. The text’s protagonist, Hamid Kaïm, attempts to discover more about these broader histories and about his lineage having lived at the mansion as a child, and the narrative is constructed out of his reminiscences across three hallucinatory nights as he tells his story in a multilayered but incomplete form to his lover. While Djaout’s protagonist, like those of Ben Jelloun and Daoud, expresses a sense of doubt about the ability of his work to produce a recognisable narrative of his native land, Bachi’s work does not depict quite the same form of introspection, but it does dramatize a revealing alternative narrative structure. Both Djaout and Bachi in their different ways demonstrate how rewriting history as literature not only allows for new perspectives on past events, but also invites the construction of new, multilayered forms of knowledge in order to reveal the falsity of discourses that claim ownership of the past.

Tahar Djaout, L’Invention du désert Tahar Djaout is perhaps best known for his controversial novel Les Chercheurs d’os, published in 1984, on the memory of the War of Independence in contemporary Algeria. The text explores the quest of its protagonist to locate and exhume the bones of his brother who was killed during the war, and this quest, which turns out to be one shared by others in the community, represents a subtle reflection on the uses of the past in the present. The narrative ostensibly reveals the disparity between personal, subjective, oral memory and official, state-controlled history. Yet, by the end of the text, all forms of commemoration

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turn out to be problematic, and it transpires that the quest succeeds not so much in honouring the dead as in revealing the selfish motivations of the bone seekers as they also seek to bury the dead again in order to forget. The past is excavated and redeployed to suit the political agenda, or indeed the personal anxieties, of officials and seekers in the present.12 If Les Chercheurs d’os criticizes the misguided use of the memory of the War of Independence a generation on, however, L’Invention du désert, published in 1987, broadens its historical scope still further in its investigation of the very process of constructing history and its relationship with the present. The text looks back to the defeat of the Almoravids in order to reflect on the resurgence of Islamism and the stultification of literary creativity in contemporary Algeria, and the practice of writing is depicted as capable of stimulating the imagination in ways that work against the established frameworks of both nationalist and Islamist extremist cultures. Djaout’s work in this way dramatizes Glissant’s and Bhabha’s conceptions of an alternative history, as his inquiry into the creation of historical narrative challenges sanctioned national, ideological or Islamist discourses that set themselves up as monolithic. It also both indicates the sparsity of historical record and demonstrates how it is the writer’s subjective and  fragmentary memory that drives the narrative in a way that recalls Pierre Nora’s celebrated distinction between history and memory in Les Lieux de mémoire. The narrative blurs the excavation of Almoravid history with the narrator’s own subjective memories, and the multiple threads both trouble and reflect back on one another  in a many-layered, fractured and disjointed form.13 The ‘sites of memory’  visited and portrayed by Djaout’s narrator, however, are far more sparse than those evoked by Nora, and scarcely capture a shared past in the way that Nora’s analysis envisages. The text adds nuance to Glissant, Bhabha and, indeed, Nora, then, by demonstrating the challenges and the anxieties of the writing process itself. Djaout’s L’Invention ultimately shows how the novel can interrogate both history and historiography, but it also casts doubt on its own viability as any kind of stabilizing narrative. Djaout’s L’Invention du désert was published when dissidence in Algeria towards the new nation was increasing in intensity and when Islamism was on the rise. Yet the work is an unconventional historical novel in that it self-consciously explores the rewriting of history and its function in the nation, rather than straightforwardly retelling the past in order to reflect on the present. The central character of L’Invention is a writer, who over the course of the novel seeks in various ways to tell the story of the creation of contemporary Algeria out of its history of violence and by travelling through

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his imagination across its perplexing and disorientating desert landscape. The result is a series of different unsatisfactory approaches to the nation’s history and geography, consisting most notably in the narrator’s attempts to recount the defeat of the Almoravids dynasty by the violent and oppressive Almohads, grafted onto his own errantry and his childhood memories growing up during the period of decolonization. Like Ben Jelloun’s L’Ecrivain public, the text opens with, and remains structured by, the fragmentation and dissemination of the writer’s voice as, reflecting on his project at this point from a position of exile in Paris, he narrates how the writing process creates a multiplication of selves. We are told at the outset that, ‘il se voit multiple, se bagarre’ [‘he sees himself as multiple, he struggles’], as if the writer uses his art to imagine himself beyond the limitations of immediate perception to re-establish links with past ancestors as well as past selves.14 This pluralization of the self in the writerly journey through time and space, however, is not simply the catalyst for the evocation of a new diverse Algeria. It is, rather, a highly disconcerting confrontation with the writer’s inability to assimilate his own and his nation’s history and to orient himself in among the buried layers that structure Algeria’s geographical space. The opening scene in which the writer reflects on the disjunctive experience of writing about Algeria from his apartment in the cold winter streets of Paris figures the writing practice as the result of a distressing disjuncture: J’appréhende par-dessus tout ce rêve sur le temps qui me taraude. Un cataclysme irréversible m’exclut à tout jamais des territoires de l’enfance. Une barque invisible mais véloce m’emporte vers un monde de décrépitude; je regarde les années matérialisées en bêtes menaçantes filer dans le sens inverse de mon parcours.15 [I perceive above all this dream about time, which nags at me. An irreversible cataclysm shuts me off forever from the land of childhood. An invisible but fast-moving boat takes me away to a world of decrepitude; I watch the years, which appear to me in material form as threatening beasts, fly by in the opposite direction to my own trajectory.]

The writer’s reconstruction of the past will be a disparate and incomplete juxtaposition of moments and spaces that indicates the falsity of any monolithic construction of the Algerian cultural present, but that never forms a coherent narrative promising a new harmony. The writer’s fragmented history will therefore not contribute to the invention of an alternative, determinate Algeria, but rather constitutes an investigation of the nation’s complexity in defiance of the new orthodoxies that paralyse the very process of its ‘invention’.

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The narrator’s ostensible project is to recount the history of the Almoravids, though he quickly discovers that the archives only record the dynasty from the perspective of their defeat by the Almohads, headed by the redoubtable Ibn Toumert. Already the narrator’s history, which the editor had wanted in the form of ‘un récit coloré mais tout à fait impersonnel’ [‘a colourful but completely impersonal narrative’], risks becoming a biography.16 Theologian and defender of the strictest religious principles, Ibn Toumert militates violently against the use of alcohol, prostitutes and all that he conceives as religious sin, to the extent that ‘l’orthodoxie était la forteresse d’Ibn Toumert; il la défendait avec acharnement’ [‘orthodoxy was Ibn Toumert’s fortress; he defended it with determination’].17 He gradually forces the towns and communities of the Maghreb to submit to his rigid principles, forbidding any infraction of the rules of the Koran. In 1121, he convinces representatives of all the main tribes of the Atlas that he is the Mahdi whose advent had been predicted by Mohammed, and he gathers together an army and forms the great dynasty of the Almohads. The narrator goes on to recount a series of battles against the Almoravids in the name of a new religious justice, until, just as the struggle for Marrakesh unfolds, Ibn Toumert passes away. His status is nevertheless reaffirmed, as the narrator recounts an episode on the ship, on a journey from Alexandria back to the Maghreb, when, just as the crew are ready to throw him overboard, a storm prevents them, as if to confirm his power. Above all, the narrative clearly reflects also on the rise of a violent and restrictive Islamism in Algeria during the 1980s and explores the ways in which barbaric practices of religious oppression came to take hold. Ibn Toumert’s interpretation of religious doctrine also resonates with the narrator’s critique of the Islamist notion of the rigid law of ‘Le Texte’ [‘the Text’], ‘qui musèle le monde par son intransigeance, sa beauté – qui ne tolère que l’acquiescement. Le Texte jaloux, tyrannique, qui n’admet aucune autre parole, aucune autre figure signifiante’ [‘which silences the world with its intransigence and its beauty – which tolerates only acquiescence. The jealous, tyrannical Text, which recognises no other language, no other signifying figure’].18 The narrator’s retelling of Ibn Toumert’s conquest of the Almoravids is, then, on some level an exploration of his nation’s contemporary plight; it is at least in part an endeavour to understand the present by means of its links with the past. This recreation of the past, however, is in no way a straightforward project, and the writing process again provokes doubt rather than providing coherence. If on one level the narrator’s project could seemingly be read as an allegory of the construction of the Algerian nation, it certainly does not draw a secure

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connection between the nation’s history and its present. Rather, the narrative of Ibn Toumert is presented as just one among many of the narrator’s confused and unsatisfied attempts to ‘invent’ Algeria in writing, and the novel never suggests that these coalesce to create a cogent vision of the people’s trajectory as a whole. Fredric Jameson may have argued that ‘third world’ texts can often be read as national allegories, but as Réda Bensmaïa has gone on to argue, in this case the narrator’s uncertain and fragmentary musings in no way produce the new nation out of the experiences of the old.19 Indeed, what the narrator learns is precisely not that the nation can be created and known through narrative, but that ‘la patrie est sans cesse à inventer dans des alliances et des accouchements dont on voit rarement les fruits – amers, lorsqu’ils viennent, comme ceux de l’oranger sauvage’ [‘the native land is to be continually reinvented through its associations and creations, the fruits of which are rarely seen, and which when they come turn out to be bitter fruits like those produced by wild orange trees’].20 As the narrator’s journey interweaves with that of Ibn Toumert, we come no closer to discovery, and the historical narrative only contributes to the narrator’s sense of loss and ‘dépaysement’ in the present. For Bensmaïa, part of what disables the text as allegory is precisely this disjunction between the desire for a narrative of the past and the fragmentary self-questioning that characterizes the narrator’s writing in the present: Indeed, one line of force that moves through Djaout's text is not so much the transparency of one historical layer in relation to another or the congruence of events in one scene (that of the history of the twelfth century) with those of another scene (that of the narrator's present), but the tension between two radically heterogeneous or even opposite modes of exposition and translation of Algeria’s real present. There is a tension between the pedagogical and the performative, according to the paradigm proposed by Bhabha, but there is also a tension between the syntactic in this text – an account, a narrative, even a straightforward story – and the rhetorical: the invention, that is, the mapping out (balisage), as the narrator repeatedly expresses it, of the desert, or, in other words, the experience of the impossibility of giving form to or narrating the nation (and himself as well). The unnarratable itself!21

In response to Bensmaïa’s reading, however, Raji Vallury gleans a more constructive vision of democratic promise in Djaout’s text, and she argues that the novel remains allegorical in that it hinges on a set of fleeting and suggestive metaphors that create parallels between the different epochs, without providing the coherent meaning that Bensmaïa believes allegory would imply. According to Vallury, the fragmented reconstruction of the desert reflects the difficulty of

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finding a coherent form for the narration of the nation, but the multiple strands to the text do nevertheless evoke a criss-cross form emblematic of an alternative form of national community: ‘in L’Invention du désert, poetic metaphors invest the space of the nation with new possibility by creating transitory bonds between dismembered fragments of memory and history.’22 Despite their different emphases, however, both Bensmaïa and Vallury imply that if the traditional notion of allegory enhances understanding of one story by means of its imbrication in another in a process of mutual conceptual enrichment, L’Invention in no way brings such reassurance. Bensmaïa emphasizes fragmentation and dispersal, while Vallury discerns an alternative comingtogether, but in each case, the juxtaposition of one epoch with another serves to bring into question the process of producing a cohesive and unified national history. Djaout explores how the desire to write the nation, to ‘invent’ the desert of Algeria, finishes by altering the narrator’s very understanding of historical knowledge, as well as of his own quest for origins, as both turn out to be made up of partial traces that resist being shaped into a coherent, completed narrative. From the outset, writing is presented not as a successful process of recreation but as a highly destabilising experience that disrupts and pluralizes the narrator’s very sense of self. As he starts to write, he finds less that he rediscovers the present through the past, than that he becomes disorientated and even loses his sense of self in the present. As he evokes the disjunction between the Parisian cold and the heat of the desert, he writes, ‘l’histoire almoravide clignote dans un lointain assoupissement, elle cliquette à l’intérieur de mon crâne, avec des remontées brutales qui allument un feu sous l’occiput’ [‘the history of the Almoravids flickers in a distant lethargy, it jingles inside my skull with brutal resurgences that seem to light a fire at the back of my head’].23 The recapturing of the past through writing is not a reassuring return to an origin but a painful and unsettling contact with another reality that leaves the narrator ill at ease in the present. Moreover, as he imagines a journey through Algeria, both through the desert and through the ‘non-lieux’ of its cities and villages, the narrator feels his writing too loses its way and gets stuck in the sand.24 The desert’s vast space and complex history interrupt and distort the writing process, as ‘dans un thème et un espace aussi vastes et aussi érosifs (les Almoravides, la région de Biskra), l’écriture ne peut que se déliter ou s’enliser’ [‘in such vast and erosive space and time (that of the Almoravids, the region of Biskra), writing can only break down and get stuck’].25 Contemplating the ruins at Tehouda, the narrator also notes the layering of the past in the desert landscape, as history and legend become mingled, and

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the vestiges of different historical periods jostle together while at the same time masking and submerging one another. Tehouda is associated with the spirit of La Kahina, the Berber princess evoked, as we shall see, by Salim Bachi in La Kahéna, but in Djaout’s text she is figured both as a provocative reminder of past rebellion and as a half-forgotten figure of defeat.26 Here, the narrator obliquely reinforces the place of Berber culture and history in the Algerian nation and again evokes the paucity and crumbling form of the traces of the past in the present site. This may on some level work as a commemorative ‘lieu de mémoire’ in Nora’s sense, then, and yet Djaout stresses the loss as much as the preservation of the layers of the past. Broadly, the narrator may transport himself into the past by obsessively conjuring the phantoms of the Almoravids, but his commentary conveys not discovery but profound disorientation, a whirligig of fantasies and a physical effort that leaves him exhausted and overwhelmed. Ibn Toumert haunts his present exile (he imagines the ancient leader transported to modern Paris), but the ghost reminds him not so much of an Algeria that was lost as of his own confusion as he struggles to achieve a coherent perspective on the past. Writing becomes compulsive to the narrator because each attempt to capture a scene, a place or a memory confronts him with a further sense of loss. The journey across the desert landscape of Algeria continues into the Middle East, where the narrator still struggles to find traces of history visible in the present architecture. In addition to the historical chronicle of Ibn Toumert, the narrator also recounts the travels of the enigmatic, nomadic figure of ‘l’ancêtre pélerin’ seeking to find himself through his travels across the Arab world. But here too, evocative, sensory images of the landscape are conjured without chronology, and different periods become blurred with one another. The narrator dreams of being able to write as if accompanying the old ancestor or Ibn Toumert, not through the scholarly mining of sterile archives, but rather as if he too could follow them on their travels and experience the environment through the other’s senses. He  seems here, as I suggested earlier, to have embarked on a quest not so much for ‘history’ as for ‘memory’ in the sense that Nora gives to it, a subjective, sensual, affective assemblage rather than a linear account with a claim for objectivity. He imagines creating a language full of meaning that would fuse him with the land, as he writes, ‘j’aurai voulu que ma tête se remplisse de symboles pour que tout ce qui coule, sable ou eau, se confonde, pour que tout ce qui meurtrit purifie’ [‘I would have liked my head to be filled with symbols, so that everything that flows, sand and water, would be mingled together, so that everything that is bruised becomes purified’].27

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Nevertheless, once again the writing process provides not this sensory plenitude but a sort of hardening that drains the imagery of life, until, ‘consigner par l’écriture, c’est comme tailler dans la pierre’ [‘to consign something to writing is like sculpting in stone’].28 Writing only hypostatizes the image; it fails to revivify past within present but solidifies it in unrecognisable form. If the narrator hopes at least initially that his writing would reconnect him with his native Algeria, in L’Invention du désert both the story of Ibn Toumert and the narrator’s own memories are never fully conjured. Indeed, this partial and fragmentary evocation of Algerian history is precisely the source of its provocation, its refusal of reductive national stereotypes. As he recounts his travels beyond Algeria and further into the Arab world, the narrator’s text is littered with evocations of the vastness of the desert, its capacity to disorient individual travellers and to bury the ruins of history beneath the layers of sand. It is also a cruel and violent landscape, hostile to the traveller and vengeful of those inattentive to its power. And that power, moreover, is what is excluded from the rigorous boundaries of the religious text or official history with their affirmations of indisputable knowledge, as the narrator evokes, ‘le désert: la marge sans limites qui chasse le Texte hors son étendue’ [‘the desert: the margins without limits that chases the Text outside its area’].29 The cities and towns (Djedda, Sanaa, Aden) that the narrator passes through on his travels are also themselves disconcertingly cut off from history. The tourist’s desire for discovery is thwarted by the intense climate, just as the writer is disabled by its brutal effacement. Dehydrated in the overwhelming heat, the narrator becomes feverish, confuses himself with Ibn Toumert and switches from first to third person, as his writing mimics the physical disorientation of his illness. Next, addressing himself in the second person, the narrator recounts his desire precisely, in journeying, to write the history of that landscape, ‘le désir t’assaille quand même de fixer pour le souvenir le temps qui s’éternise; d’écrire, de parler, de gesticuler’ [‘you are again afflicted by the desire to fix a time made eternal in memory; to write, to speak, to gesticulate’].30 But again, ‘il te glisse toujours d’entre les doigts, d’entre les lignes’ [‘it always slips between your fingers, between the lines’].31 The ‘invention’ of the desert is part of an ongoing project of discovery, triggered and developed through writing, but which writing will never successfully complete. The final section of L’Invention is based on the narrator’s childhood memories, and explores both the child’s fantasized construction of the world beyond his experiences, allusively shaped by the tensions of the independence period, and the inability of the present narrator to recapture his own past. The section in this

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way juxtaposes belief in the possibility of creating connections across time and space by means of the imagination with a sense of disillusionment towards that process. On the one hand, the books he reads as a child are evoked as liberating conduits to an alternative universe, a way of experiencing different landscapes. Like the birds whose migratory patterns he passionately evokes in the third section, he is able to travel across continents, as if national borders are no longer visible and do not matter. At the same time, as he reads and imagines, the child walks into the open countryside, and as with the narrator’s travels in the present, processes of writing and wandering mirror one another. Imagining the sea and all the places it could take him to, the child creates infinite possibilities in his head, as if to suggest multiple directions for the future of Algeria, and his mind is stimulated and enlivened by the creative process. The fantasy of travel becomes at the same time a broader figure for perpetual movement: ‘le mouvement de rotation sortait de ma tête et gagnait tout ce qui bougeait sur la ligne tendue de midi: le chant continu des cigales, les berceuses tristes de la voisine, tout s’emmêlait dans la grande rotation du voyage, dans un fracas de pales et d’étraves’ [‘the rotational movement came out of my mind and affected everything that moved at the moment of midday: the continual song of the crickets, the melancholy lullabies of the neighbour, everything was mingled together in the great rotational movement of the journey, in a clamour made by paddles and bows’].32 On the other hand, however, this access to alterity through the imagination is also experienced as dangerous: ‘puis [ma tête] commençait à faire mal. N’allait-elle pas éclater?’ [‘then my head began to hurt. Was it not going to explode?’].33 And sure enough, in parallel, the present narrator is distraught and alienated by the attempt to narrate his childhood, as creative activity is a painful process, it is naggingly compulsive, resists completion and throws up a multitude of sensations and traces that never cohere to provide either a personal or a collective identity. The dream of a return to the past may be compelling, then, but the reality is at once disappointing and alienating. After time has accomplished its destructive work, the narrator is left with ‘un champ de ruines qu’il faut relever par le rêve et l’utopie de l’écriture’ [‘a field of ruins that has to be revived by dreams and by the utopia of writing’], but that utopian dream is also revealed to be an unrealized ideal.34 Writing might have been thought to be able to bring about a sense of rootedness, belonging and permanence, but ‘the typewriter runs, runs and runs. It’s a cold blend of steel and ink. Elle ne sait pas que ses touches malmenées ne servent qu’à faire naître des écrans fantômes

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derrière lesquels défilent des cadavres’ [‘it does not know that its misused keys serve only to create screens peopled by ghosts, behind which is only a procession of corpses’].35 The machine is an inanimate force, transforming the writing process into an experience of loss, of the failure to recapture the past, even as it calls the writer endlessly to continue to try. L’Invention du désert uncovers the potential of the writing process to challenge monolithic conceptions of national identity, but it remains modest about the ability of the novel to herald an improved sense of roots or community by means of creative activity. In the final chapter, the narrator conjures the heteroclite city of Algiers, as if a symbol of the nation’s multilayered diversity, and stresses the impossibility of capturing the capital in all its eclecticism: ‘on ne saisit généralement qu’un seul reflet à la fois de cette ville-kaléidoscope au corps changeant comme de la moire’ [‘it is generally possible to grasp only one image at a time of this kaleidoscopic city which is as changeable as shot silk’].36 And this lively, multilayered portrait of Algiers, which perhaps anticipates Sansal’s celebration of Algerian diversity cited in Chapter 1, is followed by the equally symbolic return to the narrator’s childhood village, where he does not manage fully or satisfactorily to unite himself with his past self and indeed finds little trace of his former life. Ultimately, Djaout’s text presents a fragmentary, irresolute and multifaceted literary narrative that undermines rigid notions of historical, political or religious truth, while at the same time emphasising the alienating effects of the experimentation it undertakes. Nevertheless, if Djaout’s work does not figure the production of narrative as a source either of rerooting or of cultural coherence, its implications can be conceived as salutary, in that it paints a challenging vision of literature as the producer of a restless questioning, both of dogmatic forms of historiography and of the projection of false national unity in the present. Raji Vallury, as I mentioned earlier, perceived in the text a constructive vision of the new nation as a site of criss-crossing and partial connections, and though this reading may be somewhat prematurely celebratory, the layered structure of Djaout’s highly sophisticated narrative may provocatively suggest that the nation can only be known through this form of endless questioning. L’Invention is in this way highly sceptical about the power of narrative simply to convey knowledge about collective or individual pasts. Yet it compellingly displays the limitations of nationalist orthodoxies, and demonstrates how a more flexible, self-doubting mode of literary writing is perhaps better able to capture our partial, subjective, but imaginative engagement with the past.

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Salim Bachi, La Kahéna If Tahar Djaout’s L’Invention du désert openly stages the historian’s writing activity, Salim Bachi’s La Kahéna instead interrogates the reconstruction of the past through its recounting of the hallucinatory, fragmented and multilayered narrative produced by the text’s protagonist over three nights with his lover. Less overtly concerned with the writing process than Djaout, Bachi’s work nevertheless constitutes a highly sophisticated and challenging reflection on the creation of history in its disorientating interweaving of overlapping but incomplete narrative strands. Published in 2003, La Kahéna like Djaout’s work denounces the rigidity and oppressiveness of nationalist ideology as it developed since independence, and, in depicting the violent suppression of the 1988 riots, the work at the same time explicitly reveals the horrific culmination of the discontent that Djaout recorded in L’Invention back in 1987. Moreover, while Djaout specifically explores the complex relationship between the twelfth-century invasion of the Almohads and contemporary Islamism, Bachi both refers back to the precolonial period in his reference to the Berber princess La Kahéna and weaves colonial history into the lives of characters in the generations after independence. Like Djaout’s novel, Bachi’s intricate and creative engagement with different periods in Algeria’s history serves to portray at once the importance and the difficulty of gathering the manifold links, explicit or buried, between past and present. Bachi’s text examines literature’s singular engagement with history by weaving its story out of multiple threads and by foregrounding the role of the protagonist’s imagination in the creation of a memory that is not linear but rather ‘multidirectional’. Michael Rothberg famously theorized memory not as directly linked to identity, but ‘as subject to ongoing negotiation, crossreferencing, and borrowing; as productive not privative’ in his examination of the relationship between Holocaust memory and narratives of decolonization, and Bachi’s work too weaves together past and present through the juxtaposition of multiple overlapping perspectives rather than through a single chronology.37 The text is constructed out of the narrative of its central character, Hamid Kaïm, familiar already to readers of Bachi’s earlier Le Chien d’Ulysse, as he recounts memories and reflections to his lover over a period of three intense, hallucinatory nights spent at La Kahéna, the villa built by a former colonial adventurer, Louis Bergnana.38 Reminiscent of Nourredine Saadi’s La Maison de lumière, published just three years earlier in 2000, in which a Moorish mansion built by the Vizir of the Dey of Algiers is the backdrop for the story

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of successive generations living through the city’s turbulent history, Bachi’s text is an even more structurally complex composition that moves back and forth between distinct but related historical moments.39 Hamid Kaïm’s story is made up of several threads, set alongside one another in a disorientating structure and mingled with his personal dreamlike reminiscences and the narrator’s own commentary, centred in and reflected back by the enigmatic backdrop of La Kahéna. The first of the text’s multiple threads comes from the notebooks of Louis Bergnana, a Maltese adventurer who arrived in Cyrtha, a mythical Constantine, in 1900 to make his fortune, and who built the mansion as a sign of his conquest. The villa’s name, however, refers to the legendary Berber princess who led the resistance to the Arab conquest between 693 and 702 AD, and, unknown at least initially to Bergnana, it serves to associate the house with rebellion. Hamid Kaïm is also preoccupied, however, with his own origins, with his father’s history before he was killed as a result of his resistance to the coup d’état of 1965, when Ben Bella was ousted by Boumedienne. The three feverish nights of the text therefore intersperse parts of Bergnana’s past with excerpts from Hamid Kaïm’s father’s notebooks, as well as his own memories and that of his friend, Ali Khan, who has maintained the house in his absence, until the strands gradually and finally come together as the text moves towards its end. The work is richly intertextual, reminiscent not only of Djaout’s L’Invention du désert in its reflection on the manifold layers of historical reconstruction, but also of Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma in its preoccupation with obscure origins and its use of multiple perspectives. The text’s depiction of the Algerian landscape, as well as its portrayal of the catastrophic effects of violence on all sides, is also evocative of Camus’s work, and indeed, the work astutely alludes to the changing positions of oppressor and oppressed as conflicts succeed one another. La Kahéna reflects on colonial history, then, but it is not so much an anticolonial work as a portrayal of the multiple, contradictory and often hidden effects of the colonial legacy on the present. Hamid Kaïm’s confused apprehension of the various narrative threads betrays the inability of any single historical discourse to claim to own the past. The first parts of La Kahéna focus on Louis Bergnana and the myth of colonial conquest. Bachi evokes at once the grandeur of Bergnana’s vision, the fantastic opulence of his crowning achievement, the construction of the colonial mansion and, at the same time, the illusory form of that vision. The memory of the colonial adventurer, then, is already depicted as a sort of fiction, the product of his imagination and of the manipulation of form, represented above all by

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the mansion itself. The text initially follows Bergnana’s arduous travels to the Amazon in search of riches, during which he fantasizes about the splendour of the mansion, the emblem of his colonial glory, as he imagines, ‘un lieu hors du monde où le temps s’abolirait en une éternité de délices; où les fêtes se succéderaient et s’épuiseraient en feux de Bengale; où les contraintes de sa vie s’évanouiraient, délivrant des festons et des flammes’ [‘a place outside of this world, where time would be abolished by an eternity of delights  ; where festivities would continually succeed one another and finish with light flares; where the constraints of life fade away, giving way to garlands and flames’].40 With its Doric columns, its multiple levels and grand windows, La Kahéna borrows from classical Greek style, but it is also seemingly alive, surrounded by a lush and varied garden planted with palm and rubber trees and thereby fusing architectural grandeur with ‘l’arborescence tout africaine’ [‘a wholly African arborescence’].41 Moreover, on the other side of this hybrid but exuberant edifice lies a different sort of façade, appearing rather like that of an ordinary bourgeois residence, so as not to provoke future voters (Bergnana later stands as Mayor of Cyrtha). With its two sides, with its dramatic opulence concealed behind its less distinguished façade, La Kahéna is Bergnana’s greatest fantasy: ‘Louis Bergnana avait érigé la demeure de ses rêveries, son palais des Mille et Une Nuits’ [‘Louis Bergnana had built the house of his dreams, his palace of the Thousand and One Nights’].42 Bachi’s text draws on the Thousand and One Nights in several ways, but here the work is evoked to conjure the power of dream and of the imagination, the ability to perceive the world through fiction. Travelling in search of riches, Bergnana is also figured as a sort of Sindbad, as he fashions himself as a conqueror and hero who will return from his quest both wealthy and glorious. As we saw in Chapter 1 of the present study, Bachi also used the Sindbad stories from the Thousand and One Nights in his Amours et aventures de Sindbad le Marin to trigger reflection on the fragility of the personas we create for ourselves, and here once again Bergnana’s self-perception is presented as an at once seemingly powerful but ultimately fragile fictional construction. This thread in the novel already introduces Bachi’s preoccupation in the rest of the text with the capacity of the imagination to recreate reality, as knowledge of the self here is figured as both fantasized and provisional. Indeed, the traumatic reality of Bergnana’s journey, the dystopia of the dying prisoners on the ship, his own illness and the haunting vision of his dying mother, all serve to emphasize the falsity of the imagery of grandeur and success. Carried away by his dreams, Bergnana also loses himself, as, ‘incapable d’envisager le monde dans sa simple

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vacuité, il s’attelait à des chimères’ [‘incapable of perceiving the world in its simple emptiness, he pursued illusions’].43 The narrator, moreover, is careful to point out that all of us too live our lives through such illusions, setting up the rest of the narrative as a comparable struggle for a coherence that will either remain out of reach or threaten to dissolve. Despite Bergnana’s vision of La Kahéna as a symbol of his conquest, the house resists his ownership and control, and its name ties it to a much older history of struggle and refusal. A place of secrets, the mansion bears within it elements of multiple histories, of which no single occupant can achieve satisfactory knowledge: ‘la maison se défiait des intrusions, et tout au long de son histoire, rétive, rebelle, farouche, La Kahéna se déroba à ses occupants. Jamais Louis Bergnana et ses descendants ne se sentirent réellement chez eux’ [‘the house defied its intruders, and all through its recalcitrant, rebellious and savage history, La Kahéna hid itself from its occupiers. Louis Bergnana and his descendents never really felt at home’].44 Bearing the name of the Berber queen who resisted the Arabs centuries before, La Kahéna, the mansion is also always written in italics, as if she too were a character, a Nedjma who remains a source of mystery, or indeed herself a novel bringing together and reinventing various interconnected histories. Bachi chooses the reference to La Kahéna carefully, moreover, as she is not only a symbol of rebellion, but herself a source of contestation, a myth rewritten by successive generations and communities and whose history can only be accessed through various provisional narratives. As we have seen, Djaout’s L’Invention du désert refers to La Kahina as a haunting but half-forgotten figure of rebellion, but it is also perhaps pertinent that Abdelmajid Hannoum’s historical study of the princess uncovers some of the contradictions in the myth and demonstrates her broader significance for North African historiography.45 Hannoum records that Ibn Khaldûn, for example, praises her bravery and reads her as a signifier of the strength of Berber culture. Whether or not she was Jewish, however, is contentious, and if for some she was a heroine representing North African unity in that she purportedly asked her sons to convert to Islam, for others she was the force that destroyed that unity. She has also been figured as an inspirational female leader, the heroic resistor against invasion and, at the same time, a sorceress, a mysterious and other-worldly figure. In her recreation of La Kahina’s story, moreover, Gisèle Halimi compellingly captures how she was seen to combine this formidable leadership with an element of the supernatural, as her troops imagine, ‘une reine, une déesse, l’être surnaturel qui dialogue avec les étoiles, l’eau, les dieux. Avec Yahvé’ [‘a queen, a goddess, a

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supernatural being who speaks with the stars, with water, with the gods. With Yahvé’].46 She is associated in Bachi’s text with the nomadic Beni Djer, the tribe who formerly owned the land on which Cyrtha was built and who obstinately refused the French colonial project, and though dispersed, continue to inhabit Algeria and to resist renewed forces of oppression. Above all, the mansion’s name brings into the more immediate history of French colonialism and its after-effects that larger history of insubordination, coupled with an implied reminder of the interpenetration of history and myth. La Kahéna the queen and therefore also the mansion represent the return of the past into the events of the present, but also our provisional knowledge of that past and its recreation by means of the imagination. La Kahéna is also, however, the site for Hamid Kaïm’s own story and sets the stage for the event of the narration itself. Hamid lived in La Kahéna until his father’s death in 1965, and he has returned after the riots of 1988 in an attempt to make sense of his origins and past. The mansion, however, rather than revealing its secrets peoples Hamid’s consciousness with ghosts, with fantasies and doubts, and represents not so much a place of discovery as a trigger for hallucination. If it was for Bergnana, the dreamed palace of the Thousand and One Nights, it is for Hamid Kaïm a space that allows him to apprehend the past only through a series of trompe l’oeil. His lover evokes this quest for origins using the vocabulary precisely of fictional construction. La Kahéna is described at the beginning as a theatre, where ‘sur les planches, pareil à un mage, Hamid Kaïm convoquait les morts, ces pales incarnations de la parole’ [‘on the floorboards, Hamid Kaïm like a sorcerer conjured up the dead, those pale figures incarnated by his words’].47 The house is also, we learn repeatedly, filled with mirrors, often misty and damaged, reflecting the space back to itself continually but imperfectly, just as the narrative gives back multiple images that are necessarily warped, partial and provisional. Moreover, within Bergnana’s fantastic palace, Hamid becomes a ‘Schéhérazade de pacotille’ [‘a fake Scheherazade’], the intoxicating storyteller whose tales, told also at night time, provoke reflection on justice while reminding us all the time of their own status as fiction.48 Seduced by the mystification of Hamid’s words, his lover is, like King Schahriar of the Nights and like the reader, never quite offered the conclusion she desires but remains captivated by the web of stories whose truth is always uncertain. On some level, Hamid’s double, moreover, the narrator also serves to reflect his story back to him in a further mirage, while at the same time in turn supplementing it and reimagining it in her own words. The quest

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for historical knowledge and for origins, then, becomes within the walls of La Kahéna at the same time a departure into the realms of the imagination, and historical references – to colonial exploitation, to the War of Independence, to the coup d’état of 1965 and to the build-up to the riots in 1988 – are woven into the strange, fragmentary form of Hamid’s and the narrator’s imagining. It is, however, not only the house and the imagery it conjures, but also the manuscripts that Hamid Kaïm reads there, that provide him with the threads with which he must reconstruct the past. Despite the mansion’s secrets, in leaving behind his notebooks Louis Bergnana ‘se dressait contre l’oubli, ultime destination de nos vies, gouffre silencieux prêt à s’ouvrir sous nos pieds’ [‘stood up to oblivion, the ultimate destiny to which our lives lead, the silent abyss about to open up beneath our feet’].49 It is thanks to these notebooks that Ali Khan and then, finally, Hamid learn not only that Hamid’s mother was one of Bergnana’s daughters, but also that his former lover Samira, who suddenly and mysteriously fled from their exuberant lovemaking in the ‘palais de conte de fées’ [‘the palace of fairy stories’], was the daughter of Bergnana’s daughter Ourida (conceived not with his French wife but with his Arabic lover) and therefore his sister.50 Hamid also discovers here the diaries of his father, who is also named Hamid Kaïm and is in a sense another double, and he uses these to piece together some of the traumas of the family’s past. The diaries recount his father’s poor upbringing, as well as the marriage and repudiation of his sister Attika; and Hamid also learns of the rape of his father’s sister Roundjia by the military. These discoveries highlight at the same time the links between this brutal past and Hamid’s father’s later dissidence. In addition to finding out about his genealogy, he learns of his father’s dissatisfaction with the FLN, with the oppressive mythology of the war hero and the brutal actions of the military, and his father’s resistance and torture in 1965 are then echoed in Hamid’s own protest against and mistreatment by the regime in 1979. Hamid’s reconstruction of the past is, nevertheless, like that of the narrator of Djaout’s L’Invention du désert, fragmented, allusive and insecure. Glimpses of Hamid’s own experience of the violence following 1988 and during the ‘décennie noire’ were already offered in Le Chien d’Ulysse, but in La Kahéna Bachi both expands on his story and portrays the character’s own difficult access to his family’s past. The diaries remain incomplete, and when the narrative also intermittently reconstructs his father’s voice evoking his childhood, his sisters’ mistreatment and his own suffering, the sentences are disjointed and broken. As Hamid weaves his reading into his

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own reflections, the narrator and lover at the same time frequently comments on the meandering form his discourse takes, as moments come to light fragmentarily and chronology is lacking. Recreating the past like a storyteller, Hamid keeps his listener, and indeed the reader, in suspense: ‘les histoires, chez lui, ne suivaient jamais des lignes droites; elles serpentaient, suspendues entre vérité et mensonge, empruntaient des chemins de traverse pour ouvrir sur des perspectives inconnues’ [‘his stories never followed straight lines; they meandered, suspended between truth and falsehood, they took backroads in order to open up unknown perspectives’].51 Frequently depriving his interlocutor of explanations and details, he captivates both of them with his half-finished suggestions and partial glimpses of hidden truths. The form of the novel with its secrets, its hints and its fantasies, is the most significant and challenging aspect of Bachi’s engagement with historiography. Hamid Kaïm is a journalist, and yet his narrative in no way documents events, nor does it push an argument. His interlocutor indeed describes him rather as something of a novelistic character when he returns to La Kahéna at the end of the text. He becomes ‘un personnage tragiquement romanesque’ [‘a tragically novelistic character’] who loves literature and who learns by reading, and Hamid’s narrative is indeed far more literary than it is journalistic.52 Similarly, we learn that his father, according to his friend Mahmoud, ‘aimait trop Tolstoï pour admirer Napoléon’ [‘loved Tolstoy too much to admire Napoleon’]: literary reflection on the folly of war is more persuasive to him than the glory of conquest.53 Most importantly, it is precisely this approach to knowledge that the nationalist authorities, with their dogmatism and their myopic historical revisionism, seek to eradicate. Moreover, in his confrontation with Rachid, a rebel who turns to Islamism to define his position in opposition to the regime, Hamid realizes precisely that, ‘il n’y avait plus de place pour un homme de réflexion, ni à Cyrtha ni dans le reste du pays’ [‘there was no room for a thinking man either in Cyrtha nor in the rest of the country’].54 As the authoritarian regime and radical Islam become pitted against one another, neither side allows for reflection and questioning, neither admits to the uncertainty that literature explores and that perhaps always inflects present reworkings of the past. By juxtaposing multiple but interrelated strands, the narrative of La Kahéna is able to perceive telling links between epochs at the same time as it uncovers the shifting of power structures and the movement between apparently opposing forces. In describing the violent suppression of the 1988 riots,

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Rachid tells Hamid that, ‘on se serait crus en pleine guerre d’Algérie’ [‘you could have believed you were in the middle of the Algerian War’], as brutal practices are re-enacted even as the affiliations of those in authority change.55 Later, despairing in the face of Rachid’s tale of murder, when he kills the owner of the Beau Rivage bar in revenge for the latter’s role in the suppression of the rebellion, Hamid notes the pattern of repetition as successive generations are similarly brutalized by the authorities: Il reconnaissait cette histoire, elle ressemblait beaucoup à la sienne, à celle d’Ali Khan aussi. L’indépendance de l’Algérie proclamée, les prétendants, ils étaient légion, remplacèrent, après 1962 et jusqu’en 1965, les anciens maîtres du pays. Contrairement à ce qu’enseignaient les manuels scolaires, il n’y eut pas de révolution, ou alors ce fut celle du retour à la case départ. Les nouveaux arrivants allaient user les mêmes armes: exploitation et confiscation de nos droits. Ils avaient été à bonne école, il faut le dire. […] Les massacres d’octobre 1988 étaient dans la lignée de cette violence obscure, réfléchie depuis des millénaires sur les miroirs de la haine; elle nous concernait tous, comme elle avait concerné son propre père depuis ce mois de mai 1945 où, revenu de la guerre, il avait percé le sens mystérieux de l’Histoire.56 [He recognised this story, it was much like his own, and like Ali Khan’s too. Once Algeria had declared its independence, its claimants, of which there were many, replaced the former leaders of the country, after 1962 and until 1965. Unlike what the schoolbooks tell us, there was no revolution, or rather it was one of a return to the place of departure. The newcomers used the same weapons: exploitation and the confiscation of rights. They had been well schooled, one must admit […] The massacres of October 1988 followed the heritage of that obscure violence, for centuries reflected in the mirror of hatred; it affected all of us, just as it had affected his own father since May 1945, when, on returning from war, he had grasped the mysterious meaning of History.]

The practices and ideologies of the past, then, resurface to terrorize future generations, and yet no position remains stable. Rather, new regimes come and go, reinventing each time their response to history in order to justify their own attempts at oppression. Each party claims a fresh start, but each falls into the same bleak performance of domination and authoritarianism. Bachi suggests that there can be no conclusive narrative of revolution and renewal, no state discourse can impose and maintain a single vision of the colonial past and its overthrow. The past insists in continuing to shape the present in new and unpredictable ways.

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This insistence on the mutating positions of those in power and on changing affiliations contributes to Bachi’s resistance to historical narratives governed by politics and ideology. No party is able to legitimate its actions by reducing history to its own ideology, and indeed, Bachi’s characters are more complex than to represent a single ideological position. Just as Rothberg rejects the idea that ‘a straight line runs from memory to identity’, so does Bachi’s text insists on the alteration of characters’ positions in relation to the past.57 Louis Bergnana may have been the colonial conqueror, but it turns out that his position during the War of Independence was somewhat ambivalent, as he created links with the FLN, possibly in order to preserve his fortune at a moment when it was clear that the colonial presence in Algeria was coming to an end. He is, ironically, assassinated by the OAS, ultimately betrayed by his own side, and in this revelation Bachi emphasizes the ways in which perspective and ideology change through time. Equally, Rachid’s murder curiously echoes that of Camus’s Meursault, carried out on the beach under the baking heat of the sun; only this time it is the Arab who is the murderer. Yet if Rachid’s act is described in terms that recall that of Meursault moreover, his vengeance at the same time contains something of Mourad’s rage in his brawl with M. Ricard in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma, though in the latter case the object of the violence was the colonial oppressor. The assassination of Louis Bergnana and the intertextual echoes of Rachid’s own act of murder in this way reflect that complex history where the positions of oppressor and oppressed become altered and perspectives necessarily change. Furthermore, if colonial history resurfaces in present events only to open up new perspectives on both past and present, La Kahéna also depicts its various narrative strands as bound up in a still broader mesh of interconnecting moments. These in turn reveal the multiple or multidirectional connections between a wide span of historical epochs and the continually new meanings they bring. La Kahéna the house is portrayed as a place with manifold histories, as references to the myth of the Berber princess La Kahéna, and the nomadic tribe of the Beni Djer, repeatedly relativize the passing quests for power of Bergnana and the subsequent authorities. Equally, in his attempt to grasp the history of the house, Ali Khan imagines not only La Kahéna the rebel princess alongside Bergnana the adventurer, but also various other figures of defiance or military prowess, including the Numidian Kings Jugurtha and Massissina, and the Carthaginian commander Hannibal. The mansion, moreover, exceeds the grasp of both Ali Khan and Hamid Kaïm because its proliferating, overlapping histories resist ownership. It is described as follows:

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Une maison perchée sur le faîte d’une colline, énigmatique enclos, lieu chimérique où les époques se tordaient le cou, s’entremêlant comme les fils d’une pelote sous la patte d’un chat, et que Hamid Kaïm tentait de démêler, en vain, puisque lui-même s’intoxiquait au contact de la maison, ne parvenant plus à détailler les ombres, qu’elles fussent surgies d’un passé lointain ou extraites de la gangue de ce présent indéfinissable, rendu opaque par le fourmillement d’intérêts et de désirs entrecroisés.58 [A house perched on the top of a hill, an enigmatic enclosure, a chimerical place where different epochs were twisted together and mingled like the threads of a ball of string under a cat’s feet, and that Hamid Kaïm tried in vain to disentangle, because even he was intoxicated by the house, and could no longer distinguish its shadows, whether they had emerged from a distant past or were extracted from the veined rock of this indefinable present, made opaque by the swarm of interwoven interests and desires.]

History in Bachi’s multilayered text as in the mansion is in this way not a chronological progression but a multidirectional network of interwoven strands, in which the patterns and connections between epochs are so extensive and so complex as to be open to continual reinterpretation. While Djaout’s L’Invention du désert is an intensely self-reflexive investigation of the work of the historian-turned novelist, Bachi’s La Kahéna may not recount a tale of writing, but it is perhaps equally concerned with the process of creating historical narrative as the former work. The novel’s multidirectional structure, its depiction of the multiple strands that contribute to tensions in the present and its implication that there may be many further connections not yet made actively propose a new historiography that literature, in all its provisionality, is best able to practise. At the same time, Bachi’s emphasis on the role of the imagination, and, via the Thousand and One Nights, on the hallucinatory power of storytelling, foregrounds the role of fiction and fantasy in our perception of the past. Bergnana, Ali Khan, Hamid Kaïm and the narrator/interlocutor all reflect on themselves, on their experiences and histories via the hallucinatory influence of dreams and stories, and the novel is full of references to the trope of representation itself, through the imagery of intoxication, of mirrors and doubles. And just as Hamid’s lover and the narrator are seduced and compelled by his complex story, so is the reader drawn to read the novel as an invitation to the imagination. Deeply concerned with Algerian history, La Kahéna is at the same time a subtle investigation of the creativity of the literary imagination as it struggles to make sense of the many complex and dynamic strands that both connect and dissociate past and present.

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Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989 [2002]). Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) p. 227; Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: Caraf Books, 1989) p. 64. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’ Representations 37 (1992): 1–26. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) p. 140. Ibid., p. 140. Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985); La Femme sans sépulture (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002). Mohammed Dib, La Grande maison (Paris: Seuil, 1952); L’Incendie (Paris: Seuil, 1954); Le Métier à tisser (Paris: Seuil, 1957). Also, Mouloud Feraoun, Le Fils du pauvre (Paris: Seuil, 1950); La Terre et la sang (Paris: Seuil, 1953). Kateb Yacine, Nedjma (Paris: Seuil, 1956); Mouloud Mammeri, L’Opium et le bâton (Paris: Plon, 1965). Assia Djebar, Loin de Médine: Filles d’Ismaël (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991). Driss Chraïbi, L’Homme du livre (Eddif Maroc, 1995); Salim Bachi, Le Silence de Mahomet (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). Driss Chraïbi, La Mère au printemps (Paris: Seuil, 1982); Naissance à l’aube (Paris: Seuil, 1986). Tahar Djaout, Les Chercheurs d’os (Paris: Seuil, 1984). For more on the use of history in this work, see Patricia Geesey, ‘Exhumation and History: Tahar Djaout’s Les Chercheurs d’os’, The French Review 70.2 (1996): 271–279. Nora’s key concepts are elucidated in his article ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. He argues, for example, that ‘memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past’ (p. 8). Tahar Djaout, L’Invention du désert (Paris: Seuil, 1987) p. 9. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 19. Djaout’s italics. Ibid., p. 115.

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19 See Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, in Social Text 15 (Autumn, 1986): 65–88. 20 Djaout, L’Invention du désert, p. 121. 21 Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations, or, The Invention of the Maghreb, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) p. 83. 22 Raji Vallury, ‘Walking the Tightrope between Memory and History: Metaphor in Tahar Djaout’s L’Invention du désert’, Novel 41.2–3 (2008): 320–341. 23 Ibid., p. 26. 24 Dominique Fisher suggests that the ‘désert’ of the title refers not only to the open spaces of the Sahara and the Arabian Desert, but to the ‘non-lieux que sont devenus les espaces, les villes globalisées ou villages traverses par le narrateur’ as well as to the broader historical amnesia. See Dominique D. Fisher, Ecrire l’urgence: Assia Djebar et Tahar Djaout (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) p. 185. 25 Djaout, L’Invention du désert, p. 31. 26 Ibid., pp. 32, 33. 27 Ibid., p. 76. 28 Ibid., p. 77. 29 Ibid., pp. 81, 82. 30 Ibid., p. 103. 31 Ibid., p. 104. 32 Ibid., p. 181. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 189. 35 Ibid., p. 190. 36 Ibid., p. 191. 37 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) p. 3. 38 Salim Bachi, Le Chien d’Ulysse (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 39 Nourredine Saadi, La Maison de lumière (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000). 40 Salim Bachi, La Kahéna (Paris: Gallimard, 2003) p. 71. 41 Ibid., p. 64. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., p. 54. 44 Ibid., pp. 109, 110. 45 Abdelmajid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2010). 46 Gisèle Halimi, La Kahina (Paris: Plon, 2006) p. 133. 47 Bachi, La Kahéna, p. 29. 48 Ibid., p. 98. 49 Ibid., p. 142.

144 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Writing After Postcolonialism Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., pp. 155, 156. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 292. Ibid., p. 300. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid., p. 299. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 4. Bachi, La Kahéna, p. 236.

5

Creating ‘Reality’: Literature and Life

Details but the size of two words made me believe that the maddest of all dreams can be realized, and there are no boundaries between literature and life.1 In her intensely poetic meditation on love against the backdrop of 1990s Algeria, Chaos of the Senses, Ahlam Mosteghanemi explores the ways in which a novelist struggles to negotiate the porous relationship between writing and life. One of Algeria’s greatest contemporary women writers, Mosteghanemi writes in Arabic in support of her people’s culture and as a rejection of the colonial legacy, and, as a result, a close reading of her work remains outside the boundaries of this study with its focus on North African literature in French. Mosteghanemi’s writing might give pause here, however, not only because of its bold analyses of male and female sexuality in Algeria and its reflections on violence and authoritarianism in her country from the late 1980s to the 1990s, but also because of its interrogation of the role and place of imaginative writing in everyday affective and social life. Mosteghanemi’s best known two novels place writing at the heart of the narrative, as characters importantly not only use writing to make sense of reality, but also muddy the very distinction between what is fiction and what is lived experience. In her first novel, Memory in the Flesh, first published in Arabic in 1985 and celebrated, though also criticized, across the Arab world, Mosteghanemi depicted the consuming passion of a painter, Khaled, wounded in the War of Independence, for the much younger writer Ahlam (also called Hayat), and it is through writing that Khaled works through his unreciprocated love.2 The novel is punctuated with reflections on the power of literature, its capacity to speak harsh truths but also its deceptiveness; it portrays its use as an outlet for its creator but also its frustrations and indeed its potential violence. Khaled and Ahlam repeatedly misunderstand one another, suggesting once again that the

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representations we create of ourselves and others might fuel our actions but also mislead us. Chaos of the Senses, first published in Arabic in 1998, continues the drama of Memory in the Flesh, this time through the eyes of Hayat, the writer, and the work constitutes an intricate and far-reaching investigation of the mutual permeation of literature and life. The novel opens with a short story by the narrator, who then believes she sees the man from the story (also named Khaled) at the cinema, goes on to meet him in a café and embarks on a relationship with him. Later, her fascination with a book she believes he annotated (though she later realizes it was not his) further fuels her love. The relationship at the centre of Chaos of the Senses repeatedly blurs the imagined and the real in a subtle reflection on the power of the imagination or indeed of illusion in love, and this then mirrors the illusory form of Algerian national identity at the time. The difficulty with this blurring, however, is that although living through the imagination can be transformative, the loss of ‘authenticity’ can be profoundly destabilizing. ‘Literature teaches us to borrow lives, convictions, and appearances’, the narrator observes, but the most difficult part comes ‘when we close our notebooks and take off all that doesn’t belong to us’.3 At this moment, the writer is no longer recognizable, writing has recreated reality, and the idea of a self – and, she suggests, that of a lover or even an Algerian nation – outside the illusion has been lost. If, as we saw in Chapter  4, Tahar Djaout and Salim Bachi portrayed the importance of the imagination in our perception and recreation of history, Mosteghanemi’s provocative novels set the scene for further reflection on the infiltration of the writer’s creations into his or her knowledge of lived experience. For Mosteghanemi, moreover, as for a number of francophone North African writers, this analysis springs from a sense of uncertainty about the status of writing in a context of political tension, where literature can be an escape from a troubled reality but can also, despite its fictionality, constitute a crime, and where political discourse is also itself mingled with fabrication. If Hayat in Chaos of the Senses blurs the borders between her books and her love affairs, then, this at the same time reflects back on the difficulty of distinguishing truth from ideology in contemporary Algeria, where national unity and identity are an illusion. Hayat asks herself, ‘Nation? How could we call it a nation, that which concealed a crime in every grave and a tragedy in every piece of news it brought us?’4 A comparable reflection in francophone literature can be found in the Moroccan writer Touria Oulehri’s Les Conspirateurs sont parmi nous, published in 2006, in which the protagonist writes in order to champion

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freedom of expression in the wake of the restrictions that characterized Morocco’s ‘années de plomb’.5 On the one hand, the protagonist Nedjma (already figured as a literary creation through the reference to Kateb Yacine) attempts in her work as a journalist to defy the ‘conspirateurs’, to uncover information about the victims of the years of lead, and the text opens with her photographing a mass grave filled with the bodies of people massacred during the riots in Casablanca in 1981. On the other hand, she is also writing a novel, and lives out her relationship with her lover (Kateb) through her creative writing. This novel is created out of frustration towards the ways in which real events were hushed over by official discourse, but it then also takes on a power of its own. It becomes a means for Nedjma to escape and to make sense of her troubled, repressive family life and her relationship with Kateb, but also distances her from the world, as she comments, ‘l’art comme reflet de la réalité est un leurre’ [‘art as a reflection of reality is an illusion’].6 As in Mosteghanemi, literature shapes its creator’s life; it is a space of selfinvention and provides alternative realities to characters who vilify political deception and occultation. At the same time, however, it is itself deceptive, and has the capacity both to inspire and to alienate. The texts of both Oulehri and Mosteghanemi are, then, ultimately inconclusive in their visions of how the infiltration of fiction in lived experience can remain an enriching process and avoid leading the writer into solipsism or delusion. This exploration of the intervention of stories into our experience of ‘reality’ has been more broadly theorized by what is known as the recent ‘narrative turn’. It has become widely recognized that, after the formal experimentalism of the nouveau roman, French literature and theory have witnessed a return to storytelling, not in a naïve rehabilitation of ‘realism’ but in an understanding of the complex ways in which experience and events always become known to us through the narratives we produce of them. Hanna Meretoja has analysed this return to narrative in French fiction and philosophy in her study The Narrative Turn, in which she traces this resurgence of interest in stories from the crisis in narrative during the post-war period to Michel Tournier’s selfconscious reflections on the importance of storytelling in human existence as well as cultural understanding.7 As Meretoja recognizes, moreover, one of the most influential theorists of this rehabilitation of narrative was Paul Ricœur, whose monumental Temps et récit posits at its foundation the premise that it is narrative that shapes and structures our understanding and experience of time, and it is through the creation of narrative plot that ‘nous inventons le moyen privilégié par lequel nous re-configurons notre expérience temporelle

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confuse, informe, et à la limite, muette’ [‘we invent the privileged means by which we re-configure our confused, unformed, and at the limit mute temporal experience’].8 Specifically, Ricœur argues that it is through narrative that time becomes human time, and the activity of telling stories is deeply rooted in the temporal character of human experience. Meretoja helpfully elucidates the broader significance of this hypothesis via reflections also on the work of comparable philosophers including Hannah Arendt, Adriana Caverero and Martha Nussbaum, to provide an illuminating conception of the significance of narrative in human sense-making at the same time as its lack of foundation. Just as Mosteghanemi and Oulehri suggest, we shape our understanding of the world through the stories we tell about it, but the constructions we produce will also always be alarmingly fragile, contestable and even violent in their ability to appropriate and potentially deform the experience of others. This chapter will analyse the ways in which two francophone North African writers theorize the relationship between narrative and ‘reality’, as well as the importance and the difficulties of understanding events, and in particular acts of violence related to Tunisian and Algerian politics and history, through writing. As in the above-mentioned texts by Mosteghanemi and Oulehri, moreover, characters do not only narrate stories in order to make sense of the world, but find that narrative plays a pivotal role in their lives and in their relationships with others. The Tunisian writer Fawzi Mellah’s Le Conclave des pleureuses, published in 1987, takes a journalist as its central character, as do Oulehri’s Les Conspirateurs and Bachi’s La Kahéna, and the text explores how the journalistic ‘enquête’ or investigation of a crime gives way to a far more complex, multilayered and ultimately literary reflection in which storytelling, tradition and the imagination also play a decisive part. This juxtaposition of the journalistic with the literary, moreover, at the same time symbolizes the tensions of contemporary Tunisian society as it has evolved since independence and as it struggles to reconcile progress, modernity and science with its rich and diverse cultural heritage. The journalist of Le Conclave may not confuse his own life with his story in quite the same way as Mosteghanemi’s Hayat, though the investigation turns out to be personally motivated. The text nevertheless clearly problematizes ‘reality’ by incorporating multiple versions of events, and in the encounter with various witnesses and through his own investment in the inquiry, the journalist relinquishes the quest for truth and resolves instead by the end, ‘j’en ferai peut-être un roman’ [‘I will perhaps make a novel out of it’].9 Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête, published in Algeria in 2013 and in France in 2014, also, as the title indicates, takes the form of a sort of

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inquiry, yet Daoud offers here an extraordinarily sophisticated reflection on the production of narrative, and indeed the text itself, and the controversy it has provoked in Algeria too raises questions about the status of the literary text in relation to the society to which it might be understood to refer. A sort of ‘writing back’ to Camus’s L’Etranger, Meursault, contre-enquête reflects on the process of telling a story or producing a version of events, but in its engagement with Camus it also makes us think again about how we interpret texts and how we relate them to  the world. While the previous chapter set out to show how literary writing can  problematize the creation of historical knowledge, the following analysis  focuses then on the incursion of narrative into the journalistic inquiry or case study. Mellah and Daoud in their distinct ways interrogate the challenging  place of literary narrative in the search for information as well as for self-knowledge, and demonstrate its vitality as well as the uncertainty that continues to surround its status in contemporary Tunisia and Algeria.

Fawzi Mellah, Le Conclave des pleureuses Le Conclave des pleureuses tells the story of a journalist’s attempt to investigate and report on a series of rapes purportedly committed by the mysterious figure of the ‘saint de la parole’ [‘saint of speech’] in the community of Montagne Rouge in the Tunisian capital. The text opens with the saint’s testimony, in which he describes how as a child he was led to believe he had saintly attributes, including the ability to fly, leading his mother to tie him up with chains. People from the community come to visit him, seeking miracles and salvation, and women touch and caress him in search of healing. These caresses, however, are what lead to the accusations of rape, of which the journalist is then charged with providing a full account. Yet, the accusations seem to be levelled also in other parts of the community, as the inhabitants of the rich quarters and those of the poorer areas are mutually suspicious of one another, and each believes the other is responsible for degrading Tunisian culture and society. The rapes are in this way evidently symbolic of a broader crime of violation, as residents of the different parts of the city imagine that the others are destroying their vision of local or national culture. Although Tunis itself is not named as the locus of events, the text clearly reflects on the conflict between tradition and modernity in the city as the nation reinvents itself for the modern era. The journalist’s ambivalence towards his role, his struggle to reconcile the

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editor’s desire for fact with the multiplicity of stories he is told in the course of his investigations, is emblematic of the tension between scientific progress and the culture of storytelling and myth that Mellah perceives at the heart of contemporary Tunisian society. This drama, moreover, also once again tells us something about the role and status of literature. The journalist is charged with an ‘enquête’, an inquiry or investigation, but even at the outset he is unhappy with the term because of its intimation of scientific ‘truth’ and its eclipse of the imagination. The claim to truth implied by this form of inquiry is one, he remarks, held dear by the Republic: ‘cette république dont je suis la première génération ne cesse d’enquêter, calculer, dépouiller, comptabiliser, mesurer, délimiter, définir, identifier; comme si la nation dont on veut accoucher n’était qu’une obscure alchimie de chiffres, d’informations classées et de coordonnées magiques; comme si l’État n’était rien d’autre qu’un immense et insatiable enquêteur’ [‘this republic, of which I am the first generation, never stops investigating, calculating, dispossessing, accounting, measuring, demarcating, identifying; as if the nation that is coming into being was just an obscure alchemy of figures, of classified information and magic coordinates; as if the State was nothing other than a huge and insatiable investigator’].10 Yet, throughout his investigation, the journalist finds it difficult to distinguish fiction from reality, as the accounts he hears conflict with one another and he is increasingly drawn in to a community shaped by storytelling and myth, and where there is no place for impersonal facts and figures. The text, and the saint’s testimony, open with the injunction ‘Écris’, which in turn echoes the command ‘Lis’ with which the journalist starts the second chapter, and which is also the first word of the Prophet Mohammed’s revelation. In this creative engagement with sacred scripture, the journalist at once reminds readers of the importance of active reading and of an ongoing process of interpretation in Islamic theology, and at the same time asks about his own role as a writer, ‘créant l’indispensable maillon entre le lecteur et le signe le signe et le sens’ [‘creating the indispensable link between the reader and the sign, between the sign and its meaning’].11 As in the Koran, however, reading and writing conceived in this way are difficult processes, and they are perhaps better explored through a form closer to that of the literary, with its capacity for selfquestioning, rather than through the language of calculation that characterizes the journalistic inquiry. The uncertainty and self-questioning of literary language is here, then, presented as a necessary antidote to an oppressive form of modernization, and Mellah seems at once to join Ben Jelloun, Daoud and

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Djaout in condemning the contemporary stultification of literary creativity, and to present its resurrection in yet more affirmative ways. As the narrative evolves, the journalist discovers several versions both of the life of the saint-de-la-parole and of the broader violation suffered in the community that the saint’s story represents. These multiple perspectives already indicate how narrators reinterpret and reinvent events, with the result that an objective and unbiased journalistic account becomes impossible. The editor wants ‘the truth’, but the wildly differing versions recounted by successive witnesses, each infused with its own myths or ideologies, suggest that events can only be accessed through their various creative representations. The saint’s own story of being dipped in the well only to discover his saintly powers, and to be surrounded from then on by the tactile presence of the women who tended to him and sought healing from him, is followed in the second chapter by the testimony of Aïcha-Dinar, his mother. If Aïcha-Dinar’s version is less fantastical, however, hers too encourages the journalist to consider more fully the role of storytelling in his inquiry. Aïcha-Dinar is herself the ‘legend’ of the Montagne Rouge, the poorer quarter of the city, and she represents the folkloric culture that contests the soullessness of modern capitalism as it has invaded urban space. Her stance is symbolized by her disdain for identity cards, the tools of a bureaucracy that can in any case be falsified, and she celebrates instead the use of tattoos and trust. She explains to the journalist that her son ‘n’a jamais accepté le monde des hommes et leurs palabres indigentes’ [‘never accepted the world of men and their endless impoverished debates’]; rather, he is somehow not quite of this world.12 The problem with the journalist’s approach, she tells him, is that, ‘vous tentiez alors de démêler le vrai du faux sans réaliser ce que les récits doivent à l’arbitraire’ [‘you try to distinguish truth from falsehood without realising the arbitrariness of people’s narratives’].13 He will achieve a better understanding, it would seem, by listening with compassion and by accepting the importance of the witness’s imagination, rather than attempting to create an objective journalistic account. The rapes themselves, moreover, are according to Aïcha-Dinar the result of the individualist culture propagated by the new town. It remains unclear in Aïcha-Dinar’s account who is guilty and who is the victim, but her testimony represents an affirmation of a culture of storytelling and communality that conflicts with the prioritization of scientific ‘truth’ that she sees at the heart of modern culture. After visiting Aïcha-Dinar, the journalist meets a series of other characters, each with his or own story and a name, like that of the matriarch, that creatively

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describes something of his or her character, but it is Fatma-la-Lampe whose testimony gives the inquiry into the rapes a broader resonance. Fatma-la-Lampe is the saint’s sister, and she tells the journalist of his childhood, his preference for solitude and love of books – in particular the story of Elissa, the founder of Carthage (the resonance of which will be explored later) – and of the day when the other children tied him up and pushed him into the well, a trauma which only triggered his further withdrawal. His perhaps fantasized interpretation of the events, together with his love of literature, characterize him in turn as a kind of writer, someone who again blurs his life with fiction. Fatma-la-Lampe also, however, tells the journalist the story of the ‘pleureuses’ of the title and the broader violations that they uncover at the heart of Tunisian society. She prefaces her account with the suggestion, ‘si tu n’y apprends rien d’utile, fais-en un roman’ [‘if you don’t learn anything useful, make a novel out of it’], once again to affirm the inevitable blurring of reality with fiction and her own embrace of a culture in which the power of the imagination is duly recognized.14 She goes on, moreover, to evoke the faults of the culture of the new town, where she worked for a family whose own story she goes on to recount. Most importantly, Fatma-la-Lampe tells of how, after the death of the father of the ‘Madame’ for whom she worked, the ‘pleureuses’ come to carry out a process of mourning, but the women finish by taking a stand against the emptiness of the mode of life they discover in the house. They point out that the marriage between ‘Monsieur’ and ‘Madame’ is emotionally sterile, accuse the family of misunderstanding the community of the saint-de-la-parole, and suggest that the rapes were committed in the new town, not in Montagne Rouge. The violation that they deplore, however, is most importantly the occultation of cultural memory: elles déclarèrent que le seul objet de leur colère et de leur procès n’était ni le quartier neuf, ni la surdité des fonctionnaires, ni le miroir et les images, ni les fresques phéniciennes dénaturées, ni les viols des corps, mais les pertes de mémoire, la perdition des paroles, l’éviction des origines et l’absence d’être [they declared that the single object of their anger and of their trial was not the new quarter, nor the deafness of government officers, nor the mirror and its reflections, nor the spoilt Phoenician frescoes, nor the rapes of human bodies, but the loss of memory, the wasting away of words, the eviction of the people’s origins and the lack of a sense of being.15]

If Fatma-la-Lampe wryly suggested that the journalist should make of her testimony his own novel, the story she tells is at the same time once again

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one of the vulnerability of a culture where subjective narrative and personal memory are sidelined. The cultural forms defended by the ‘pleureuses’ are at odds with the mission of the newspaper, and as the narrative unfolds, the journalist increasingly struggles to make sense of the task he is assigned by his editor. The ‘Rédacteur en chef ’ under whom he works is nicknamed ‘l’Œil de Moscou’, and he demands that the writer eschew any tendency that may be associated with the literary, such as storytelling and invention, in favour of objective ‘truth’. In setting the journalist on his mission, he commands, ‘pas de nostalgie ni de lyrisme naïf! De la rigueur et de la volonté; votre enquête devrait aboutir à des décisions!’16 Information, according to ‘l’Œil de Moscou’, should be ‘utile et moderne, prospective et didactique’ [no nostalgia or naïve lyricism! Rigour and willpower; your investigation should lead to decisions!’].17 Nevertheless, while the editor initially appears somewhat baldly to represent the denigration of storytelling and the promotion of science and reason, his own past again serves to demonstrate how subjectivity shapes perception. His professed ideology too turns out to be another fabrication. First, we learn that in the past he had defended cultural history, and it was his resulting vilification that hardened his commitment to the modernizing cause. Secondly, his quarrel with the saint has a history that in turn polarized his view of the relationship between stories and ‘truth’. While he had once frequented the saint and listened to his chants and poems, he became irritated by the saint’s claim to be a historian, and this led to a deeper conflict between them. When the saint sent women to disrupt a march organized by the editor calling for the prohibition of the burial of traitors in the Muslim cemetery, the event turned violent and the editor ended up in prison. The episode serves as an example of how tradition and modernity become polarized by conflict, and Mellah evidently suggests that a fruitful cohabitation between the two cultures would have provided a better way forward for the divided Tunisia to which he bears witness. More dramatically, the journalist too admits his personal investment in the investigation, and it transpires that any account he comes up with will be as subjective and as bound up with invention as the testimonies he hears while conducting his research. As a child, the journalist was part of the saint’s community but he was expelled from it by the saint’s mother when he became a man, and he asks himself if his commitment to the inquiry is not the result of ‘la fascination inquiète que ce lieu et ce saint ont souvent exercée sur ma pauvre imagination depuis l’adolescence?’ [‘the anxious fascination

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that this place and this saint have often provoked in my poor imagination since adolescence?’].18 Aïcha-Dinar suggests, moreover, that the journalist believes the accusations levelled against the saint because they confirm his prejudices, born out of his anger at his exclusion from the community. At the end of the narrative, having realized that his journalistic inquiry comes to nothing, and having resolved instead to make of it a novel, the journalist also admits that he has reconciled himself with Aïcha-Dinar, as he sees that both he and she are the victims of expulsion, of the violent closing off of one community from another. His rejection of scientific inquiry, then, is also a reconciliation with the culture of the saint, of storytelling and marabouts, and the starting-point for his own novel writing. His final words following on from this reconciliation, ‘j’en ferai peut-être un roman’ [‘I will make a novel out of it’], serve to highlight the role of literature in negotiating the conflict that marks the main body of the text.19 The drama enacted in Le Conclave des pleureuses is, then, also about the status of the novel itself. The story and its structure both tell us something about the novelist’s view of his craft. The myths and stories of the Montagne Rouge are evidently in the first place oral narratives, but they are also reminiscent of literary forms in their subjectivity, their use of the imagination and their provisional status. And like the novel, they also contain a form of knowledge that challenges false objectivity and ideological dogmatism. In defending the community of the saint against the ‘chefs extralucides’, moreover, the journalist affirms values and forms that might also be said to characterize those of the literary text: Là où les chefs extralucides et les alphabétisés de ce pays n’ont vu que viols et contraintes, j’ai vu réunions solidaires et étreintes chaleureuses. Là où ils n’ont perçu que paroles maladroites, j’ai entendu oracles et présages. Là où ils n’ont vu que corps voilés, j’ai entrevu des libertés insoupçonnées.20 [Where the extra-lucid leaders and literate people of this country have only been able to see rapes and constraints, I have seen meetings creating solidarity and warm embraces. Where they have perceived only awkward speeches, I have heard oracles and portents. Where they have seen only veiled bodies, I have glimpsed unsuspected freedoms.]

If the journalist is describing here the communality and solidarity of the saint’s community, the multiple perspectives of Mellah’s novel might be said also to affirm that collective ethos. If the community believes in omens and oracles, then that too can be compared to an affirmation of the power of literature, not, perhaps, to predict the future, but to explore the meaning of symbols and signs.

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And if the journalist sees behind the veil alternative forms of freedom, then this ability to look beyond what is immediately visible surely recalls the demand made by the literary text that the reader reflect on what is hidden between the lines. Mellah’s use of the novel here is at the same time reminiscent of that of Tahar Djaout or Salim Bachi, in that it is shown to be able to recount history in such a way as to bring it alive. Le Conclave des pleureuses is evidently not only concerned with the investigation of recent crimes but also with the revival of the past and its living on in the present, and Mellah’s juxtaposition of testimonies, like that of Bachi in La Kahéna, foregrounds the importance both of memory and of its ongoing recreation. The text at the same time dramatizes the urgency of this revival in contemporary Tunisia, and though the setting for the journalist’s investigation may not be named as Tunis, it clearly refers to the modern capital struggling to reconcile past, present and future a generation after independence. The conflict between history and modernity that Mellah sees as the source of a rift in contemporary Tunisia is symbolized, moreover, by the imagery of the two statues that adorn the main thoroughfare of the city. One of these is of the President Habib Bourguiba, representing capitalism and progress, while the other is of the historian Ibn Khaldun, who embodies history and the revival of tradition. The statues seem to look to each other as if in an attempt at reconciliation, and yet the journalist notes the dominance of the former and degradation of the latter: la statue du chef – élevée sur un socle en pierre de taille et juchée sur un cheval – fait mine d’ignorer l’usure du temps et affiche cet air hautain et dominateur des gens chevauchant; alors que celle de l’historien, figé un livre à la main, semble ne plus pouvoir résister à une si morne et inquiétante éternité. [the statue of the leader – mounted on a cut stone pedestal and perched on a horse – gives the impression of being unaware of the wear and tear of time and has a haughty air, as if to dominate the people that encroach below; whilst the statue of the historian, fixed with a book in his hand, seems no longer able to resist the dismal and worrying eternity of time.21]

While Tunisia requires the creative fusion of past and present, cultural history and modernity, the position of the statues and Mellah’s text, more broadly, suggest rather that these remain polarized and that a creative engagement with the past is lacking. Mellah’s own novel exploring the stories of the community of Montagne Rouge and staging the challenge they offer to the culture of modern journalism is itself, then, a creative integration of memory and progress. The very form of the narrative as a series of conflicting

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testimonies allows the work to undermine and transcend the destructive dichotomy between the two cultural and ideological positions. Mellah at the same time looks even further back into the Tunisian past in his imagination of a dialogue between the old and the new. Fatma-la-Lampe recounts, for example, how, in responding to the ‘pleureuses’, Monsieur remembers the emblematic figure of Elissa, the Queen of Carthage, and he denounces the way in which Virgil renames her Dido and focuses on her relationship with Aeneas rather than recognizing her role as founder of the new city. In 1988, moreover, Mellah published a novel specifically narrating Elissa’s journey from Tyre to found the new city, and he emphasizes here how she precisely understood the complex mixture of continuity and change that defines a community and a nation as it evolves.22 Carthage, or Qart Hadasht, meaning the new city, is founded and constructed with this double movement in mind, and Mellah seems to be implying that more recent conquests, those of the Arabs and those of the French, might have learned from this model of dialogue between existing cultures and their reinvention in the present. Mellah’s story of Elissa, moreover, once again emphasizes the dynamism of the writing process. The narrative takes the form of a letter written by Elissa back to her brother Pygmalion in Tyre, yet an introduction written by another narrator indicates that the text we have is his own reconstruction. Drawing on stelae assumed to be lost, the narrator pieces Elissa’s story together and confesses that his creation has had to be a rewriting rather than an unmediated transcription. Evidently this recovery of the history of Elissa and of Carthage, and its significance in provoking reflection on the identity of the modern city in the present, is already itself a literary creation. If Mellah throws into doubt the historical veracity of his story, however, this is above all in order to underline the centrality of the creative process in our imagination of the past. Once again, this overtly and self-consciously literary narrative cherishes history while showing how its resonance comes from the ways it is made to live again through its subjective recreation in the present. Mellah uses literature in Le Conclave, and perhaps less extensively in Elissa, to perform this restless and dynamic exchange between past and present and to demonstrate how modern Tunisia needs to give space for creative retelling. On  the one hand, the journalist’s inquiry gives way to a multilayered and fragmented collage of stories, and if these do not cohere to provide an objective and coherent account of events, they do capture something of the creative practices and the understanding of the vagaries of human perception held dear in a community excluded by the dogmatic form of modern Tunisian capitalist

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culture. On the other hand, Mellah’s own narrative exploits the multiple perspectives allowed by the literary form in order both to contest the monolithic concept of modern Tunisian culture as driven by the desire for progress and to show how knowledge of history and ‘reality’ is inevitably shaped by the stories that we tell about them. According to Mohamed-Salah Omri, Mellah’s works precisely make us think about how ‘the community finds an anchor and voice in its founding myths, living memory and continuous story’, and this integration of myth, history, memory and revival must be something that literature is best placed to achieve.23 Mohamed-Salah Omri’s article on Mellah ends with a cautionary note, as he observes how this affirmation of living-on and reinvention means that knowledge is necessarily slippery and unreliable. The reader of Le Conclave never quite gets to the bottom of the story of the rapes; rather, we learn that the saint-de-la-parole is a misunderstood figure, and both sides – the community of Montagne Rouge and the new town – perceive fault in the other. In his final letter to the editor in which he confesses his inability to provide a proper article on the basis of his inquiry, the journalist evokes the contradictory rumours, hints and suggestions he has discovered and suggests that these are necessarily on some level inconsequential: Cela ne peut faire l’objet d’un article sérieux, j’en conviens volontiers. Tout au plus un roman sans portée ni cohérence. Des histoires pour rien. Une littérature sans véritables personnages ni trame vraisemblable, mais des images et des mouvements en tous sens. Le conteur de bonne foi et son auditeur devraient s’en contenter et ne pas en rechercher l’authenticité ou l’intérêt.24 [This cannot be the subject of a serious article, I willingly admit. At most it might be a novel without scope or coherence. Inconsequential stories. A literature with no proper characters nor a realistic plot, but images and movements going in all directions. The honest story-teller and his listener should be content with this and not look for authenticity nor interest.]

Although on one level here, there is an admission of the triviality of this story, of this ‘littérature’, however, at the same time the journalist observes that it is through these fragmentary images that people inevitably perceive and understand their experience. It may be problematic that he has not managed to discern the truth of the accusations, and this absence of objectivity evidently makes it difficult for justice to be done. What the journalist’s work suggests, however, is rather that the objective account demanded by legal inquiry would necessarily fail to take on board the blurring between experience and the stories people invent to make sense of it. The investigation undertaken at the

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beginning of the text disconcertingly becomes by the end nothing more than a novel, by implication the text of Le Conclave des pleureuses that the reader has just read. This may not offer grounds for the attribution of blame, but the journalist nevertheless beseeches the editor not to destroy it. The questioning it comprises will perhaps serve to reveal the value of storytelling not only as a means of reviving cultural history but also as a vital source of knowledge in the community under scrutiny, in public inquiry, and in Tunisian culture more broadly.

Kamel Daoud, Meursault, contre-enquête Meursault, contre-enquête is a response to Camus’s L’Etranger, and comprises a monologue purportedly narrated by the brother of the Arab who was killed in the earlier novel. The ‘contre-enquête’ takes the form of the brother’s reflections on the murder as he looks back on it and succeeding events more than half a century later, narrating his struggle to a French academic conducting his own inquiry. As  in Mellah’s work, though perhaps even more playfully, the investigation from the beginning blends fiction with lived experience. Indeed, the narrative hinges on a confusion between literature and life in that it assumes that Meursault is both the assassin and the author of the great novel that tells his story, and the work in this way, and through its own problematic reception, demands careful reflection on the ways in which literary texts can refer to the world. The narrator’s account, like that of the journalist in Le Conclave des pleureuses, is above all a search for a story, and again reflects on the difficulty of providing an account of a crime that would serve as a basis for justice to be done. Yet the play on Camus and the broader reflection on the literary are complex and many layered: the narrator, Haroun, at first attacks the original novel for its failure to name the Arab and for its cursory treatment of the innocent victim. But when Haroun too takes revenge by murdering a Frenchman, who was hiding in the property abandoned by his family and co-opted by Haroun and his mother, just hours after the end of the War of Independence, his attitude switches from attack to identification. As in L’Etranger, the assassin’s treatment by the authorities from that moment on emphasizes the absurdity of the legal system and the political ideology from which it stems. At the same time, moreover, the form of Haroun’s monologue echoes that of La Chute, as both take the form of a self-justificatory, manipulative address to a silent interlocutor in a bar (Mexico City in foggy Amsterdam becomes in Daoud’s

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text Le Titanic in Oran). And most provocatively, Daoud’s echoing of Camus’s vilification of religion raises fundamental questions about the relationship between literature and orthodoxy, and about the capacity of literary writing to problematize notions of ‘truth’, including that understood to be sanctified by sacred scripture. At first, Meursault, contre-enquête appears to be a classic example of the empire ‘writing back’, akin to Jean Rhys’s response to Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea or Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of Shakespeare in Une Tempête. The first step in this response is, according to Haroun, to write in French, not in order to associate himself with the culture that murdered his brother but to address the attacker in his language while appropriating it at the same time as his own. Daoud’s decision to write in French is itself one of the things that has provoked criticism in Algeria, and unlike for writers such as Assia Djebar, French was not the language in which Daoud was educated. Rather, as we saw in the present introduction, Daoud taught himself, since under the Arabization policy, French was accorded little time at his school. In Meursault, contre-enquête, Haroun uses French, but in order to find a way to express himself in his own terms; it is the starting point for a rewriting that not only engages the original text but also creates a distinct idiom: Le meurtrier est devenu célèbre et son histoire est trop bien écrite pour que j’aie dans l’idée de l’imiter. C’était sa langue à lui. C’est pourquoi je vais faire ce qu’on a fait dans ce pays après son indépendance: prendre une à une les pierres des anciennes maisons des colons et en faire une maison à moi.25 [The murderer got famous, and his story’s too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote it in his own language. Therefore I’m going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I’m going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language.]

Even more, Haroun goes on to argue that he writes in French in order to carve out a place for his brother in the language that, in Meursault’s narrative, occluded him. Haroun implies that his brother was doubly murdered, since his assassination was succeeded by a written account that failed to name him, to leave a written trace of him. The power of literature is again evident in this reflection, since it is as if it was also the text itself and the language in which it was written that eradicated the voiceless Arab. If, however, Haroun admires the precision of Camus’s French, ‘une langue inconnue, plus puissante dans son étreinte, sans merci pour tailler la pierre des mots, nue comme la géométrie euclidienne’ [‘a language that was unknown and grew more powerful in his

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embrace, the words like pitilessly carved stones, a language as naked as Euclidian geometry’], and seeks to mimic that exactitude, his own language at the same time captures his singular perspective.26 Replete with references not only to L’Etranger, but to works from across Camus’s corpus, in particular La Chute and Le Premier homme, Haroun’s monologue has an energy and effusion absent from that of Meursault, and the French is interspersed with Arabic terms and references to local culture. If Haroun sets out to create a story in his own language, it is the act of naming his brother that serves as the foundation for his endeavour. Haroun repeatedly refers to the anonymity of the ‘Arab’ in Meursault’s narrative (he counts twenty-five instances of the term in the original text) and insists on repeating his brother’s name throughout: ‘Moussa, Moussa, Moussa … j’aime parfois répéter ce prénom pour qu’il ne disparaisse pas dans les alphabets. J’insiste sur ça et je veux que tu l’écrives en gros. Un homme vient d’avoir un prénom un demi-siècle après sa mort et sa naissance’ [‘Musa, Musa, Musa … I like to repeat that name from time to time so it doesn’t disappear. I insist on that, and I want you to write it in big letters. Half a century after his birth and death, a man has just been given a name’].27 Naming is crucial in that it is precisely the written trace of the lost one, the sign that records the brother’s absence. Writing the name is a form of resistance to eradication, and as Haroun insists, in providing the name and speaking in the place of his brother, the monologue tries to open up his tomb. If Haroun notes that the identity of the victim was never confirmed, moreover, then his insistence on his brother’s name is also a way of asserting that Camus’s narrative did have a clear referent, even though the text itself leaves open the possibility that Haroun’s identification of his brother is itself a product of his own narrative. Starting with this insistence on ‘Moussa’, then, Haroun works against his brother’s annihilation, and his story goes on to restore the victim’s humanity and articulate his forgotten perspective: ‘cette histoire devrait donc être réécrite, dans la même langue, mais de droite à gauche’ [‘the story we’re talking about should be rewritten, in the same language, but from right to left’].28 This writing from right to left is in part a reference to Arabic, but it also encapsulates a new chronology that would start with Moussa’s living body rather than relegating him to the status of an anonymous figure, annihilated before he is given substance. Moreover, Haroun also refers to his brother as ‘Zoudj’, the other half of his pairing, but also the two of two o’clock, the time when he was killed, in a playful reference to the emptiness of the official record of the murder, ironically reinscribed in Arabic. At the same time, however, Daoud’s parodic play on the name, in his

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echoing of ‘Meursault’ with ‘Meurt seul’ or ‘Meurt sot’, and in the assonance of ‘Meursault’ and ‘Moussa’ also suggests that, while Haroun’s insistence on naming rests on a desire for textual reference, Daoud’s own work conceives a more playful relationship between word and referent. Daoud’s ‘writing back’, then, is not only a contestatory response to Camus, but also a reflection on the status of narrative and of textual inscription. The story of the murder itself is the focus of Haroun’s ‘enquête’, and as in Mellah’s work, there are several versions. A child when his brother disappeared, Haroun never fully understood what happened at the time, and his inquiry is in part triggered by this confusion. His memories of the day itself evoke only perplexity towards adult behaviour and the smell of couscous, so that, ‘hors des livres qui racontent, point de salut, que des bulles de savon qui éclatent’ [‘outside of storybooks, there’s no hope, nothing but soap bubbles bursting’].29 His mother’s obfuscation, moreover, and, as we shall see, her fantasies about Moussa after his death are also a catalyst for Haroun’s own invented version. In addition, later, looking back at the public discourse surrounding the murder and the effects of the celebrated novel, Haroun notes the deformation of the story through its mediatization and retelling: ‘elle a pourtant quelque chose d’une vieille putain réduite à l’hébétude par l’excès des hommes, cette histoire’ [‘picture an old whore dazed by an excess of men; she and this story of mine share some features’].30 The story, perhaps like that of the saint in Le Conclave des pleureuses, has been reworked both by those close to the victim and by rumour, infused in turn with political ideology, and in Daoud’s work, the existing literary version is also the starting point for the most far-reaching reinvention. As in Mellah, moreover, and as Meretoja suggests from a more general perspective in her study of the ‘narrative turn’, the multiplication of versions serves above all to suggest that events are always only known through this process of reinvention. The belief that either Camus’s text or Haroun’s narrative inscribe a single identifiable reality in textual form is undermined and thrown into question. Haroun’s mother’s versions, and her persistent need for an ever fuller inquiry, weigh heavily on his own compulsive retelling. The central role of the mother in both L’Etranger and Le Premier homme is reconfigured in Daoud’s text, as he opens the work with a rewriting of Camus’s famous opening line, so that ‘aujourd’hui, M’ma est encore vivante’ [‘Mama’s still alive today’].31 Indeed, it turns out that the mother, driven to distraction by the loss of her son and eventually mute (in a reference to Jacques Cormery’s mother in Le Premier homme, based also on Camus’s own mother), is overwhelmingly present in the narrator’s consciousness, as before she falls silent she endlessly tells Haroun

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tales of his brother’s heroism and forces her younger son to live in the shadow of his lost predecessor. For her too, then, the story of the murder can be rewritten, as Haroun recalls, ‘elle me décrivait non pas un meurtre et un mort, mais une fantastique transformation, celle d’un simple jeune homme des quartiers pauvres d’Alger devenu héros invincible attendu comme un sauveur’ [‘she wouldn’t describe a murder and a death, she’d evoke a fantastic transformation, one that turned a simple young man from the poorer quarters of Algiers into an invincible, long-awaited hero, a kind of savior’].32 These tales are fantastical imaginings, ‘mille et un récits’ worthy of the Thousand and One Nights, and which are later in the text echoed in the testimonies offered by mother and son in court, themselves ‘un désordre indescriptible, une sorte de Mille et Une Nuits du mensonge et de l’infamie’ [‘an incredibly disordered jumble, a kind of Thousand and One Nights of lies and infamy’].33 Haroun’s ‘enquête’, then, parallels that of his mother, who also scrambles after clues and endlessly reinvents her memories as a result of her discoveries in such a way as to emphasize further the multiplication of fictional versions. And in a further blurring of life with fantasy, Haroun suggests that his mother attempted to reincarnate Moussa in him. His life is shaped by the dead man’s shadow, built around his image. Daoud’s passing references to the Thousand and One Nights in his depiction of Haroun and his mother’s storytelling are developed and given weight by his choice of name for the protagonist. As we have seen, naming is presented as being of crucial importance in this work, yet Daoud also evidently likes to play ironically with the names he attributes to his characters. First and foremost, the names of Daoud’s protagonists evidently refer to Aaron and Moses, brothers in the Koran, whose story anticipates something of that of Daoud. Moses is said to have accidentally killed a man when intervening in a dispute, in an echo then of Meursault’s murder of the Arab. Moses also beseeches Allah to allow his brother Aaron to be his counsellor, in particular because his own speech is faltering while that of Aaron is eloquent, and this evidently reflects Moussa’s silencing and Haroun’s voluble narrative in Meursault, contre-enquête. In addition, however, Haroun can be seen to evoke the great Caliph of the Thousand and One Nights, Haroun Al-Rashid. Based on the real Caliph who ruled from 786 to 809 at the peak of the Islamic Golden Age, Haroun Al-Rashid figures in many of the tales in the Thousand and One Nights as a great and powerful ruler. If the real Caliph governed during a period of great cultural advancement, Haroun Al-Rashid in the Nights is also a wealthy and formidable figure, and the association of Daoud’s protagonist with this fabulous character suggests a desire to assert himself through his monologue. At the same time,

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Haroun Al-Rashid is in the Nights at once himself a fantastical figure, and someone to whom stories are told, and Daoud’s Haroun too is presented as a character in a proliferation of stories, and as someone who tries to make sense of the stories he hears. The Haroun of the Nights, however, is at the same time a violent ruler, quick to condemn to death those who he feels have done wrong, and Daoud’s protagonist’s revenge by means of the murder of the French settler Joseph Larquais is perhaps an echo of Haroun Al-Rashid’s similarly bloodthirsty settling of accounts. Moreover, while Haroun in Meursault, contre-enquête is a sort of fictional reconstruction of the already-fabulous Haroun Al-Rashid, it is perhaps also relevant that he tells us that his brother Moussa was a porter, since porters crop up several times as significant figures in the Nights. Sindbad the Sailor, for example, as I mentioned in the introduction, tells his story to a poor porter also named Sindbad, in a structure that indicates the proximity between the powerful and the weak. And if the porter, as well as the Caliph and the calenders in the ‘Story of the Five Ladies of Baghdad’ are told by their hostesses not to ask questions, it is the porter who is first accused of failing to comply, and when they are all then commanded to tell their stories to save themselves, the porter merely recounts his invitation to join the ladies before giving way to the calenders. He is, then, like Moussa a victim, and one whose voice is dismissed as insignificant. The name Haroun, moreover, is also taken up by Salman Rushdie in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, first published in 1990, and Rushdie’s thoughts on the status of literature both within this work and beyond also reflect back on Daoud’s work in revealing ways. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the main character Haroun is the son of Rashid Khalifa, a great storyteller otherwise known as the ‘Ocean of Notions’ or the ‘Shah of Blah’, yet one who loses his gift when his wife leaves him. It is the oppressive figure of Khattam-Shud, however, who outlaws the craft of storytelling, since, ‘stories make trouble. An Ocean of Stories is an Ocean of Trouble’.34 Khattam-Shud’s interdiction on storytelling stems from his mistrust of fiction, as he asks, ‘What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?’, but this interdiction brings with it a terrifying sense of ending.35 Without stories, then, there is no life: stories reflect but also generate life, and the absence of stories equates to a kind of annihilation. The parallels between this playful narrative and Rushdie’s own experience of attempted silencing, after the Ayatollah Khomeini called for a fatwa against him as a result of what was perceived as the blasphemous nature of The Satanic Verses, are evident, as Rushdie here sends up the belief in the noxious power of literature. Whether or not Daoud was thinking of Rushdie when choosing the name Haroun,

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moreover, his own conception of the status of literature within Meursault, contre-enquête, and indeed the controversy that the text has provoked in Algeria, invite comparison with Rushdie’s experience and work. Like Rushdie’s, Daoud’s Haroun lives his life through stories and blurs the distinction between narrative and ‘reality’, but in both cases, this blurring is life giving and generates individual thought. Daoud too has received death threats because of what have been seen as the anti-Islamic sentiments expressed in the work, but as in the case of Rushdie, the denunciation of the text, however provocative, stems from a misconception of the relationship between the literary text and ‘truth’. Both Daoud and Rushdie portray the power of storytelling, but their reflections on literature and religion at the same time warn against misunderstanding the status of literary experimentation and attempting to reduce creative writing to orthodoxy. Meursault, contre-enquête most visibly explores the relationship between literature and life through its confusion between author and character, between Camus and Meursault. Haroun’s initial invective against his brother’s murder and subsequent effacement in the literary account is directed against a figure who was both the murderer and the writer, as if the assassination and the silencing of the ‘Arab’ by the text constitute the same crime. In the French version of the text, published by Actes Sud, the addressee of the monologue is Meursault, though Haroun objects not only to the killing but also to the way in which the hero of Meursault’s text tells his story. Meursault, it seems, is also the writer. In the Algerian version of the text, published by Editions Barzakh, the confusion is intensified, as the addressee is named Albert Meursault, in a clear conflation of writer and character. Equally, in the French version, the text Haroun vilifies is entitled L’Autre, while in the Algerian version it is overtly named L’Etranger. In the Actes Sud edition, then, the fictional status of the work is emphasized, whereas in the Barzakh edition it is clear that Haroun is referring to the famous work by Camus. Equally, in the Algerian version, the assassin purportedly lives at 93 Rue de Lyon, Belcourt, though Haroun later admits that no one was quite sure which number it was, in a reference to existing disputes about the address of Camus’s mother. In the French version, the address is not provided, again in a move to loosen the connection between Meursault and his creator. The significance of this confusion, and its slight attenuation in the French version, is far reaching. In the Algerian version, Daoud is clearly announcing his engagement with Camus, and Haroun’s lived experience of the events in the literary text of L’Etranger again demonstrates the interpenetration of literature and ‘reality’. For Haroun, the written text is both alive and powerful, and the

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author’s silencing is the same as his character’s assassination. In the French version, Daoud slightly weakens the connection between literature and lived experience, perhaps to highlight the experimental, fictional quality of his own work. Set alongside one another, the two versions offer a double-edged view of the status of literature and its intervention in lived reality. On the one hand, the author is called upon to take responsibility for his writing, since readers might conceive the literary text as ‘true’, or at least to correspond to a genuine vision of reality – as Daoud’s and Rushdie’s critics have done. Texts, as we have seen, from this perspective have palpable consequences, and though he is on one level mocking Haroun’s inability to distinguish literature and life, Daoud nevertheless stresses that stories do have the power to determine our understanding of our lives. On the other hand, however, the blurring between literature and ‘reality’ is evidently misleading. Stories might both alter and shape our experience, and we might respond to the world through the narratives we create about it. But, Daoud seems to remind us, fiction is a creative experiment and writers do not necessarily endorse their characters’ points of view. With this in mind, it is perhaps telling that, in an interview for ‘Cultures d’Islam’ on France Culture on 29 May 2015, Daoud had to remind his listeners that, ‘Haroun, c’est pas moi’ [‘I am not Haroun’].36 The narrative of Meursault, contre-enquête is an investigation of the impact of Camus’s work, and of literature more broadly, on lived reality, but it is not a statement of its author’s own beliefs. As was the case in Rushdie’s work, the most provocative aspect of this reflection on the power but also the deceptive quality of fiction is its engagement with religion. One of the most problematic issues raised by Daoud’s work is that of the status of religion, which, like Camus, he depicts as at risk of falling into a set of rituals and formulae that are themselves a sort of fiction. If, then, the text initially denounced Camus’s effacement of the Arab, later Daoud dramatizes the parallels between L’Etranger and Meursault, contre-enquête, and this comes across most pointedly in Haroun’s vilification of Islamic orthodoxy – a direct reflection of Meursault’s rejection of Christianity in the original work. In L’Etranger, for example, Meursault laments the senselessness of Sunday rituals, and in Meursault, contre-enquête, Haroun describes the Friday call to prayer and the customs it invokes as a ‘spectacle’. While Meursault finds Sundays monotonous and dull, Haroun is similarly alienated by Fridays, and his evocation of religious practices emphasizes their theatricality. Even more, Haroun goes on to describe the text of the Koran so as to stress both its dreamlike quality and its cumbersome language, again undermining its status as ‘truth’: ‘j’y retrouve d’étranges

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redondances, des répétitions, des jérémiades, des menaces et des rêveries qui me donnent l’impression d’écouter le soliloque d’un vieux gardien de nuit, un assasse’ [‘what I find there are strange redundancies, repetitions, lamentations, threats and daydreams. I get the impression that I’m listening to a soliloquy spoken by some old night watchman, some assas’].37 Finally, at the end of the text Daoud directly transcribes Meursault’s tirade against the priest in L’Etranger and reframes it as a challenge levied by Haroun against the imam, whose apparent certitudes, he insists, mean nothing. The speech itself denounces the assumption that the religious text should express a clear truth, as if, like literature, the sacred text might better be construed as a site for questioning. Indeed, Haroun prefaces his tirade with the insistence that, ‘Dieu est une question, pas une réponse’ [‘God is a question, not an answer’], to suggest both that the conception of sacred scripture as fixed truth is a fiction, and that religious reflection might have something to learn from the open-ended, experimental form of the literary.38 At the same time, that the speech is itself a citation from Camus highlights its fictional character, and the transcription warns us against assuming that the view expressed is the true perception of the author. Daoud’s broader rewriting of Camus serves at the same time to demonstrate the multilayered and ambiguous nature of the literary text, its potential for reinvention and its ability to resonate in different ways in distinct contexts. If, as I have shown, Haroun starts with an attack against Meursault, he soon comes to identify with him and becomes his reincarnation. Haroun’s murder of Joseph Larquais mirrors Meursault’s killing of the Arab, as both take place half way through the text and constitute a turning point, but it is also a continuation: ‘j’ai appuyé sur la détente, j’ai tiré deux fois. Deux balles. L’une dans le ventre et l’autre dans le cou. Au total, cela fait sept, pensai-je sur le champ, absurdement.’ [‘I squeezed the trigger and fired twice. Two bullets. One in the belly, and the other in the neck. That makes seven, all told, I thought at once, absurdly.’]39 Meursault’s crime is committed at two o’clock in the afternoon, moreover, whereas Haroun kills the Frenchman at two o’clock in the morning. If Meursault’s treatment by the authorities is an absurd charade, so is that of Haroun, as in both cases they want to impose an inappropriate explanation for the crime. In L’Etranger, Meursault is purportedly a callous misfit who did not cry at his mother’s funeral, while in Meursault, contre-enquête, Haroun’s murder takes place two hours after Algerian independence, but the authorities seem to want to identify the act as a heroic gesture of anti-colonial resistance. That the shooting was two hours late makes a mockery of this explanation,

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as it transpires that Haroun, like Meursault, killed for the wrong reasons. The echoes between the two works proliferate throughout the second half of Meursault, as both works depict the justice system as at once skewed and farcical, and both finish by casting their protagonists as social outcasts. Mériem, the woman who introduces Haroun to the narrative of Meursault, and the only woman with whom he is able to entertain any kind of relationship, also evidently recalls Meursault’s Marie. Most importantly, however, this shift in the work’s attitude to Camus serves as a compelling indication of the way in which the literary work can signify differently to different people and at different times. Daoud’s text finishes by suggesting artfully that L’Etranger was both a powerful effacement of Arab culture and a challenging call for freedom and for the assumption of individual responsibility. His rewriting is at the same time a means of demonstrating the work’s incompletion and living on, as new readers continue to bring it to life. Daoud’s engagement does not stop at L’Etranger, and Meursault, contreenquête can be seen as a highly knowing reflection on Camus’s complex writing and thought more broadly. The references to Camus’s other works at the same time enhance and add nuance to the reflection on literature on which Daoud’s work rests. Haroun’s monologue in a dimly lit bar resonates with that of Clamence in La Chute, and if Clamence continually addresses his silent interlocutor in order to manipulate his response, so does Haroun seek both to justify himself and to second guess his listener’s reaction. This self-justificatory tone once again underlines the status of the narrative as a subjective fabrication. In figuring the listener as a French university lecturer, Daoud also wittily raises the question of the text’s interpretation by the academy, as if to anticipate readers’ potential prejudgements. In addition, the imagery of Amsterdam constructed in circles like the circles of Hell is replicated in Daoud’s evocation of Oran: on dirait une sorte d’enfer croulant et inefficace. Elle est construite en cercles. Au milieu, le noyau dur: les frontons espagnols, les murs ottomans, les immeubles batîs par les colons, les administrations et les routes construites à l’Indépendance; ensuite, les tours du pétrole et leur architecture de relogements en vrac; enfin, les bidonvilles. [like a sort of tumble-down, inefficient hell. It’s laid out in circles. In the center, the hard core: the Spanish façades, the Ottoman walls, the buildings the colonists put up, the administrative offices and roads that were built right after Independence; then you’ve got the oil wells and their surrounding architecture of wholesale relocation; and finally, the shantytowns.40]

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Here, the association of the city with the image of Hell foregrounds the role of myth in the way space is experienced and perceived. At the same time, Haroun’s absent father and ultimately mute mother echo those of Jacques Cormery in Le Premier homme, himself a fictionalized version of Camus, as if once again characters are conceived as recastings of their creators as well as of one another. And Meursault, contre-enquête is nothing if not an ongoing literary dialogue and a means for Daoud to reflect on the status of Algerian literature by reinventing one of the most complex figures in Algerian literary history. Daoud’s text has evidently been profoundly controversial, and there is no doubt that he has used his literary work to raise highly provocative questions about culture, politics and religion in Algeria. While, on the one hand, Meursault, contre-enquête is a very self-conscious reflection on the status of literature, it is also an acerbic critique of certain contemporary modes of thinking in Algeria, and in the ‘Cultures d’Islam’ interview, Daoud asserted that he chose to voice this critique in literary form because through literature, it is possible to, ‘aller à l’essentiel’ [‘to get to the heart of things’].41 Daoud may have been a leading journalist and editor at the Quotidien d’Oran, but he chose to write a novel in order to explore deeper human questions, as well as the roots of some of the most profound difficulties of our time. These essential questions include, he suggests, those of ethics, responsibility and the use and misuse of religion, but it is perhaps true that despite the text’s self-consciousness, in trying to ‘aller à l’essentiel’, at times Haroun’s language is a little crude. Most problematically, Haroun’s invective to the imam denounces religion tout court, but makes no distinction between Islam and Islamism in its attack against dogmatism. And while he may be right to point out the dangerous effects of passive subservience, he pays little attention in the text to the ongoing reflection and inquiry that lie at the heart of the Koran’s teachings, as writers such as Assia Djebar and Abdelkébir Khatibi have emphasized. Furthermore, when, at the very end of the narrative, Haroun notes that Meursault, pronounced in Arabic, is El-Merssoul, ‘l’envoyé’ [‘the envoy’] or ‘le messager’ [‘the messenger’], the implied association between Meursault and the Prophet Mohammed was always likely to cause offense.42 Daoud has also been criticized for the negative commentary contained in the text on the notion of ‘Arabité’, which, while for Haroun is an unhelpfully generalized category, has for some worked as a powerful signifier of identity against that imposed by colonialism and the West. As James McDougall has persuasively argued, in contrast to state-imposed Arabism, Algerian culture has at the same time seen the affirmation of more far-reaching, transnational

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forms of Arab identity, such as that found in the work of Ahlam Mosteghanemi or Waciny Laredj.43 Haroun’s vitriolic denunciation of ‘Arabité’ fails to account for more open-ended, dialogic forms of Arab culture that do serve to provide a sense of heritage and history to large numbers of Algerians. In framing his criticisms of ‘Arabité’ and religious orthodoxy within a larger interrogation of the interface between literature and reality, however, Kamel Daoud reminds us that these arguments are viewpoints that he himself may or may not endorse. The ideas for which he has been vilified are indeed those of Haroun, not the author himself, and they are embedded in an imagined response to a work of fiction. This does not mean that some of Haroun’s statements are not rather baldly, indeed even crassly provocative, but it does mean that we are encouraged to read them as experimental rather than as affirmations of belief. The implication of Meursault, contre-enquête, then, as of Mellah’s Le Conclave des pleureuses or Mosteghanemi’s Chaos in the Senses, is that literature can enter into our lives, can alter and reshape them, and in turn, our response will be at least a partially fictional narrative of its own. This interaction between literature and life importantly implies not that texts are true to lived experience, but that they are crucial to our thought processes, and can help us to see the world differently, just as we are then able to read them in our own idiosyncratic ways. Just as Rushdie argued that what the novel dissents from is, above all, ‘the view that the world is quite clearly This and not That’, Daoud’s narrative is also an exposition of multiple versions, of the blurring of knowledge and fiction, and of the creative potential of rewriting.44 Haroun signs off by writing, ‘c’est ma parole, à prendre ou à laisser’ [‘it’s my word’]; his monologue is a text we are called actively to engage with, not to be identified as either right or wrong.45 Literature may be profoundly enmeshed in lived experience, but that does not mean that it should be read as a portrait of its creator. Rather, it enters our lives as a fuel and trigger for the imagination at the same time as it serves as a filter for our perception of a constantly shifting world, and of ourselves.

Notes 1 2 3

Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Chaos of the Senses, trans. Baria Ahmar Sreih (Cairo: The American University of Cairo Press, 2004) p. 32. Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory of the Flesh, trans. Baria Ahmar Sreih, translation revised by Peter Clark (London: Arabia Books, 2008). Mosteghanemi, Chaos of the Senses, p. 111.

170 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Writing After Postcolonialism Ibid., p. 219. Touria Oulehri, Les Conspirateurs sont parmi nous (Rabat: Marsam, 2006). Ibid., p. 153. Hanna Meretoja, The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014). Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit: Tome I (Paris: Seuil, 1983) p. 13; Time and Narrative: Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) p. xi. Fawzi Mellah, Le Conclave des pleureuses (Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1993) p. 149. Mellah, Le Conclave des pleureuses, p. 38. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid. Ibid,. p. 92. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., pp. 40, 41. Fawzi Mellah, Elissa, ou la reine vagabonde (Paris: Seuil, 1988). Mohamed-Salah Omri, ‘Memory and Representation in the Novels of Fawzi Mellah’, International Journal of Francophone Studies 3.1 (2000) pp. 33–41 (p. 37). Fawzi Mellah, Le Conclave des pleureuses, p. 148. Kamel Daoud, Meursault, contre-enquête (Paris: Actes Sud, 2014) p. 12; The Meursault Investigation, trans. John Cullen (London: One World, 2015) pp. 1, 2. Ibid., p. 110; p. 100. Ibid., p. 23; p. 14. Ibid., p. 16; p. 7. Ibid., p. 34; p. 24. Ibid., p. 61; p. 51. Ibid., p. 11; p. 1. Ibid., p. 26; p. 16. Ibid., p. 26; p. 131. Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Penguin, 1990) p. 155. Ibid., p. 155. http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-cultures-d-islam-contre-enquete-2015-05-29 (accessed February 2017). Daoud, Meursault, contre-enquête, p. 81; The Meursault Investigation, p. 71. Ibid., p. 149; p. 139.

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39 Ibid., p. 85; p. 75. 40 Ibid., p. 127; pp. 116, 117. 41 http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-cultures-d-islam-contre-enquete-2015-05-29 (accessed February 2017). 42 Meursault, contre-enquête, p. 153; The Meursault Investigation, p. 143. 43 James McDougall, ‘Dream of Exile, Promise of Home: Language, Education, and Arabism in Algeria’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 43.2 (2011) 251–270. 44 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) p. 396. 45 Meursault, contre-enquète, p. 153; The Meursault Investigation, p. 143.

6

Writing between Languages: Literature as Translation

In her editor’s introduction to the volume Algeria in Others’ Languages, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger emphasizes the central role played by language in Algerian politics since decolonization. According to Berger, ‘the language question is one of the most intricate, conflictual, and enduring aspects of Algeria’s postcolonial politics’, and the position and status of Arabic in relation to French, dialectal Arabic and Berber languages remains a source of tension still now more than a decade after the publication of Berger’s essay.1 While the growing Berber movements of the 1980s and since denounced the oppressive effects of the state-controlled Arabization policy, it has also become clear that the very foundation of that policy was built on an illusion and would never be workable in a society where people speak a range of languages and dialects. In the face of the conflicts of the ‘décénnie noire’, moreover, historian and former FLN member Mohammed Harbi described Algeria’s divisive politics of language as nothing less than murderous. According to Harbi, Algeria suffers from a fissure in its identity, defined by ‘la distance qui sépare et oppose berbérophones, francophones et arabophones. Et ce clivage autodestructeur aboutit à la mort de ceux qui rêvent de la suture, à savoir les intellectuels.’ [‘the distance that separates and opposes berberophones, francophones and arabophones. This self-destructive division leads to the death of those who dream of their coming together, that is, intellectuals.’]2 Harbi’s comment may, as Berger points out, itself risk hypostatizing distinct linguistic groups, since most Algerians, in reality, speak more than one of the three languages cited, and dialectal Arabic in any case comes in many forms. Nevertheless, multilingual Algerian society during this period evidently remains a site of intense linguistic conflict. In Morocco, linguistic tensions have not generated quite the same degree of violence as in Algeria, yet, as I suggested in the Introduction, the nationalist

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movement similarly gave rise to an Arabization policy that turned out to be oppressive. In the decades following independence, cultural expression in languages other than Arabic was treated with intense suspicion, as Abdellatif Laâbi describes how la tendance monolithique et “unanimiste” qui caractérisait la structure idéologique dominante au sein du mouvement nationaliste ne pouvait admettre aucune atteinte au consensus, qu’elle s’exprimât par le souci de ne pas séparer la question sociale de la lutte des classes de la tâche de libération nationale, ou qu’elle se manifestât par l’usage d’une langue autre que la langue nationale dans le domaine de l’expression littéraire. [the monolithic way of thinking that pushes for “unanimity” and that structures the dominant ideology of the nationalist movement would not admit to any attack on consensus, whether this came from the desire not to separate the social question of class struggle from the task of achieving independence or from the use of a language other than the national language in literary writing.3]

While, like Algeria, Morocco too has seen the development of movements promoting Berber languages and culture, Laâbi’s analysis focuses in particular on Morocco’s binary division between French and Arabic. As I mentioned in the introduction, Laâbi himself was instrumental in setting up the avantgarde journal Souffles, which set out to provide a forum for inventive literary activity in French, yet the journal was banned in 1972. Francophone Moroccan literature nevertheless started to flourish in the 1980s, and Laâbi indeed perceives during that period an increase in the dialogue between francophone and arabophone cultures in Morocco.4 Writing as recently as in 2013, however, Abdelfattah Kilito affirms that the division between Arabic and French remains disappointingly rigid. Moroccan society is, according to Kilito, not properly bilingual, and its cultural output gives the impression that it is made up of distinct linguistic communities who do not maintain a genuine or significant cultural dialogue: ‘aussi l’impression qui prévaut est-elle moins de vivre une situation de bilinguisme qu’une situation où coexistent deux monolinguismes’ [‘the dominant impression is thus that we live less in a bilingual society than in a society made up of two monolingualisms’].5 This chapter will explore the ways in which literature can challenge this division between languages and use its poetic experimentalism to perform a creative dialogue that might offer an affirmative alternative to discourses promoting linguistic purity and segregation. This poetic experimentalism at the same time serves to uncover the artificial nature of the broader ‘myth of monolingualism’, whereby it is assumed that the national community is

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associated with the notion of a ‘mother tongue’.6 If Salim Bachi sketched in La Kahéna, and indeed in Amours et aventures de Sindbad le marin, the ways in which both history and contemporary experience can be understood by means of their interconnections with other cultures and other pasts, then this intercultural form can be further developed through a text’s own internal multilingualism. Literary texts can use their experimental form to stage the encounter between languages and to theorize their interaction in ways that contest the segregation of linguistic forms into distinct or conflicting cultural categories. Abdelkébir Khatibi and Leïla Sebbar both explore forms of bilingual or multilingual expression in their writing, and both ask what it means to live and write in dialogue with more than one language. Literary works such as Khatibi’s Un Eté à Stockholm and Sebbar’s Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père self-consciously theorize and perform the poetic interaction between languages, and examine at the same time the ways in which translation figures or informs the writing process. In their explicit engagements with multiple languages, moreover, Khatibi and Sebbar dramatize the potential movement and exchange contained within what might be called a work of ‘world literature’. Critics such as Emily Apter may have criticized the tendency in theories of world literature to ignore the question of translation and the obstacles it poses, as thinkers calling for the embrace of literatures from around the world ‘zoom over the speed bumps of untranslatability in the rush to cover ground’.7 Apter’s reservations, however, stem from a conception of monolingual texts being translated into another language in a direct one-to-one relationship, a process that she rightly conceives as highly problematic and in which she argues that levels of meaning are inevitably lost. Yet Khatibi and Sebbar in their different ways add nuance to Apter’s reflections on untranslatability in their dynamic reflections on the activity of other languages within their own written French, so that translation is no longer a straight encounter between two separate linguistic forms. Their literary writing is precisely a forum for the meeting of languages, and, even more, the form of that encounter is also the starting point, in particular for Khatibi, for a challenging theory of writing and translation that would undermine the divisive linguistic politics still at work in Moroccan and Algerian societies. Khatibi’s conception of his writing itself as a form of ‘traduction simultanée’ aptly develops the idea of a world literary text whose resonance and form reach beyond national borders, while also affirming its progressiveness with more confidence than many of the other writers explored here. While Sebbar’s work continues to express a  sense of ambivalence and non-belonging as it

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repeatedly  records the violence of the  division between French and Arabic communities in her memories  of  Algeria, she too nevertheless at times wants to perceive her  experience as the  impetus to use writing continually to work upon and contest, if not overcome, that destructive  segregation. The challenge offered by these works may not be an overtly political statement in favour of the recognition of multilingualism  in Morocco or Algeria, and  Khatibi’s and Sebbar’s  textual  experiments are far more creative, and at times more ambivalent, than they are argumentative. Nevertheless, they work to make of their linguistic encounters a ‘worldly’ poetics of multilingual dialogue at the same time as an affirmative ethical stance.

Abdelkébir Khatibi, Un Été à Stockholm Khatibi is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking study of cultural and linguistic plurality in the postcolonial Maghreb, Maghreb pluriel, discussed in Chapter  2.8 Published in 1983, Maghreb pluriel theorizes the association between decolonization and the invention of a new ‘pensée autre’ that would transcend the violence of the binary opposition instated and entrenched by the colonial project. This ‘pensée autre’ is at the same time a ‘pensée en langues’, a mode of thinking and writing that would embrace multilingualism, dramatized compellingly in Khatibi’s reading of Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano, in which he artfully elucidates the text’s internal references to translation between French and Arabic. Even more, Khatibi’s own playful and poetic narrative on bilingualism, Amour bilingue, also published in 1983, can be read as a highly creative performance of the dialogue between languages that takes place in a bilingual relationship, where words, idioms and rhythms from different systems inform and shape one another, without, however, becoming confused.9 Khatibi’s progressive vision of the dynamic encounter between French and Arabic, in a movement towards a form of writing that would resist that very binary opposition, can be intriguingly juxtaposed with Abdelfattah Kilito’s more cautionary analysis of the persistent human desire for linguistic purity and rootedness in Tu ne parleras pas ma langue, originally published in Arabic in 2002. While Khatibi promotes the enriching effects of linguistic dialogue, Kilito offers a series of reflections on untranslatability and on repeated examples of a ‘désir de protéger la langue des atteintes des étrangers’ [‘desire to protect the language from attack by foreigners’].10 Kilito concludes with a reference to the poor translation by Mattâ ibn Yûnus, translator of Aristotle during the

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tenth century, of the terms tragœdia and comœdia, and suggests that it is this misunderstanding that led Arabs to believe for centuries in the unique and untranslatable character of their own poetry. Nevertheless, Kilito finishes his study of a history of resistance to translation with the observation that ‘Mattâ ne pouvait savoir que, au fil des siècles, quelque chose changerait dans le monde, et que les Arabes auraient un jour besoin de traduire d’autres littératures que la leur, et de parler d’autres langues à côté de la leur’ [‘Mattâ could not know that, over the centuries, things would change in the world, and that one day Arabs would need to translate literatures other than their own, and to speak other languages alongside their own’].11 Behind Kilito’s interest in our desire to protect the boundaries between languages lies a commitment to dialogue exemplified by his own intensely intercultural work, itself written by turns in Arabic and French, on Arabic and European literature and thought. Beyond these reflections on the encounter between French and Arabic languages and cultures, however, Khatibi’s later works include a vision of writing as translation that not only surpasses but indeed omits even to mention, at least openly, the legacy of colonial Manicheism. No longer preoccupied with the encounter between French and Arabic and its evolution since decolonization, Khatibi’s subsequent texts are less ostensibly ‘postcolonial’ than those of the 1980s, and the focus on France and the Maghreb is replaced by a much broader theorization of translation as a figure for a wholly nomadic, deterritorialized form of writing that eschews all remnants of identitarian thinking. Un Été à Stockholm, published in 1990, is situated, as the title indicates, in Stockholm, a city that represents neutrality, and there are scarcely any references to North Africa. Rather, the narrative evokes its protagonist’s brief stay in Stockholm as a simultaneous translator, and the city as well as the figure of the translator generate a broader theory of writing and living which affirms an ongoing commitment to travel and a resistance to all forms of rootedness. As I suggested above, in its affirmation of crosscultural dialogue Khatibi’s work might be seen as a good example of world literature, or of ‘worldliness’ as it is conveyed by the form of the text, and Un Été in particular adds substance to this idea of worldliness in its conception of translation as a mode of thinking about openness and exchange, as well as about contingency and flux. This curious work is evidently unrepresentative of contemporary North African literature, however, in its disengagement from local context, though other writers such as Mohammed Dib have similarly sought to write works that look beyond North Africa to other regions such as Scandinavia. Yet Khatibi’s text affirmatively drives forward conceptions of

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cultural activity that work against linguistic divisiveness in its highly original and challenging vision of writing, translating and living without adopting a fixed position in relation to language, to culture or, even more broadly, to family and other acquaintances. The protagonist of Un Été à Stockholm is an example of what Khatibi terms ‘un étranger professionnel’, a concept to which he refers several times in his theoretical writing and which he also uses to describe himself. The term first crops up in Khatibi’s final, celebratory section on ‘Nationalisme et internationalisme littéraires’ in Figures de l’étranger dans la littérature française, published in 1987, where he asserts, ‘je suis moi-même, presque, un étranger professionnel, dans la mesure où l’écriture ne me préoccupe maintenant que comme un exercice d’altérité cosmopolite, capable de parcourir des différences’ [‘I am myself, almost, professional stranger, in the sense that I am preoccupied by writing now only as an exercise in cosmopolitan alterity, able to travel across differences’].12 Here, then, the ‘étranger professionnel’ is the writer and reader who conceives literature as a space for an encounter with different people and cultures. The  professionalism suggests that Khatibi also makes a specific and deliberate decision to seek out and preserve otherness in his academic and literary activity. This work of the ‘étranger professionnel’ is, once again, not necessarily a form of writing born out of the colonial situation. Indeed, Jean  Genet is held up as an apt example of a writer continually in search of other cultures, other countries and other  languages, as his life is described by Khatibi as one of ‘apprentissage, exercice d’altérité et d’altération dans une réalité tout à fait traitable et intraitable’ [‘learning, of an exercise in alterity and in the alteration of a reality that both can and cannot be written about’].13 Expanding on the  notion in a later essay, ‘L’Étranger professionnel’ published in Études françaises in 1997, however, Khatibi suggests that it is also a way to describe the form of his writing as a practice of translation in itself.14 His writing in French has already in its conception gone through a process of translation, not only from Arabic but from multiple languages such as Berber and also Swedish, and including imagery derived from Arabic, European and other civilizations, and this is what gives it a uniqueness, an impenetrability that must on some level be preserved in order for it to continue to resist all forms of cultural hegemony and appropriation. The writing of the ‘étranger professionnel’ is precisely not necessarily composed of the juxtaposition of two linguistic systems, and it is not particularly based on the insertion of words from one language into a text in another language, in an example of literary code switching. Rather, it is in his syntax, Khatibi

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argues, that he incorporates the rhythms of other languages and texts, rhythms conceived by Alison Rice to enter into the writing according to the musical processes of ‘transcription’ and ‘transposition’.15 These often-imperceptible rhythms, moreover, are at the same time what prevent the reader from reducing and encapsulating fully the work’s complex, polyphonic singularity. In this way, the text retains an ongoing mobility, an ability to suggest multiple readings and a refusal to give itself away entirely once and for all. This, in turn, becomes, in Réda Bensmaïa’s reading, an affirmation of an ethics of openness: To leave, go out, to let oneself be seduced. To become several people, to become someone else (with others), to become, to become, to face the outside, fork off elsewhere, make a rhizome with others, discover oneself to be a foreigner, to create a new identity for oneself. These are some of the odd, foreign elements, some of the varieties of alterity and exposure, that the professional traveller encounters.16

The ‘étranger professionnel’, then, is not just the postcolonial subject of the Maghreb, created out of the dialogue between French and Arabic cultures. Rather, he is a continual traveller, ethically committed to an ongoing resistance to cultural determinism both within and beyond the postcolonial context. The  writing of this ‘étranger professionnel’ in turn dramatises this resistance to appropriation in its preservation, through its multilingual echoes, of ‘son unicité solitaire’ [‘its solitary uniqueness’].17 The central character of Un Été à Stockholm is, then, an ‘étranger professionnel’ or a ‘voyageur professionnel’, who, in his job as a translator, is always on the move. His full name is Gérard Namir, which, in combining a French first name with an Arabic-sounding surname, is itself suggestive of cultural hybridity. As  Khatibi explains in La Langue de l’autre, ‘Namir’ also recalls the Berber story of Hammou ou Namir, who fell in love with an angel, as well as connoting ‘unintelligible’ in its Guinean version.18 The layers implicit in the narrator’s name already both enrich our understanding of the central character and offer an example of the multiple, often hidden, cultural references, on which much of the text’s poetics draws. We are first introduced to Namir on an aeroplane travelling from New York to Stockholm in order to interpret for a conference on neutrality, and the opening scene recording his reverie during the flight aptly sketches his ethics as a subject without borders whose mind is open to the world. The ‘voyageur professionnel’ is here someone ‘qui veut traverser les frontières avec une souplesse d’esprit’ [‘who wants to cross borders with an open mind’], and sitting in his cabin, the protagonist tells himself, ‘que voyager ainsi, à l’ombre de mon corps, éveille l’esprit à des pensées imprévues, le souvenir

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de chaque voyage en avion répétant dans la mémoire une série indéterminée de départs et d’arrivées, comme devant un échiquier où le voyageur immobile serait rêvé par le jeu’ [‘that travelling in this way, in the shadow of my body, opens the mind to unforeseen thoughts, the memory of each plane journey repeating in my memory an indeterminate series of departures and arrivals, as if before a chessboard where the immobile traveller is created by the game’].19 This chess game, however, is comprised of a set of movements for which there is no key, no ‘message indéchiffré’ [‘message that has not been decoded]’. And concomitantly, the narrator warns that there will be no contract, no set of rules for the relationship between himself and the reader, rather the text too will be made up of fleeting scenes, faces and encounters, in which no angel or demon will provide a resolution or demarcate right from wrong. The ‘étranger professionnel’, then, is not so much a postcolonial subject caught between cultures as a rootless thinker committed to all kinds of discovery, with a flexible mind created out of his multiple journeys and embracing both transience and uncertainty. The work too demands that the reader accepts its fragmentary and allusive form, its performance of contingent ‘vibrations assourdies’ [‘muffled vibrations’] and its avoidance of either grounding or conclusion.20 Gérard Namir’s practice as a translator serves to conceptualize further the ‘étranger professionnel’ and his writing. At the start of the conference on political neutrality where he is to work as a simultaneous translator, Namir articulates a subtle, reflective theory of translation which is also suggestive of the multilingual quality of Khatibi’s writing as a whole. First, simultaneous translation is itself associated with neutrality: the translator is a ‘capteur’ who is obliged to efface himself, to suppress the desire to alter and betray the original. At a conference on neutrality, then, his translation reflects that very principle on two levels: ‘neutre, je devais l’être à double titre: pour une politique de la neutralité et pour moi-même’ [‘I was to be neutral on two levels: that of political neutrality, and neutrality for myself ’].21 Nevertheless, the skill of the translator also lies in his ability to correct the original just as he maintains its tone and rhythm. Neutral, he at the same time improvises in order that his translation might subtly refine and improve on the clarity of the original speaker’s language. He may intervene, then, but imperceptibly, so that he effectively remains faithful both to the original and to the demands of the target language. Most pertinently for Khatibi’s broader ethics, the translator must create a subtle fusion between himself and the speaker, as his version both preserves the tone of the original and discreetly leaves the trace of his own refinements: ‘je suis successivement moi-même, l’autre, et de nouveau moi-même, entre la vitesse et la parole, la

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vitesse et le silence’ [‘I am successively myself, another person, myself again, between speed and speech, speed and silence’].’22 He must capture all the layers of meaning in the speaker’s delivery, those which are intentional and also those which may not be, and he understands while artfully assimilating all these layers in his new version. In this way, the translator works in the space of an ‘interlangue’: ‘entendre en anglais ou en allemand et traduire en français, ma première langue’ [‘to listen in English or in German and to translate into French, my first language’].23 He concludes, ‘une immense oreille m’habite’ [‘a great ear lives inside me’]; he is in a state of heightened alertness to linguistic nuance and tone, and his own version will record that intense receptiveness.24 Like the work of the translator, moreover, Khatibi is suggesting that his writing also attempts to capture the rhythms and traces of the languages that shape his imagination as he writes. Writing too, for the ‘étranger professionnel’, demonstrates that extraordinary receptiveness, not this time to a single original, but to all the images and timbres that fuel the creative process as it unfolds. Khatibi’s theory of writing and simultaneous translation comprises not only an approach to language, but also, as I suggested, a broader ethics, and this is articulated most clearly in the excerpts from the conference speeches reproduced by the narrator. According to one of the professors at the conference, ‘la neutralité est la fin idéelle de toute guerre. Elle s’attache à la nécessité du désarmement, qu’il s’agisse d’armes classiques ou conventionnelles, ou encore inconnues’ [‘neutrality is the ideal goal of every war. It is bound up with the necessity of disarmament, whether of classic, conventional, or still unknown weapons’].25 The implication is that both political neutrality and the neutrality upheld by Gérard Namir in his work as a translator work against conquest and domination, against violence between peoples and cultures. Neutrality may be very difficult to adhere to in practice, moreover, but it requires ‘discernement’, a term to which the text will return in its depiction of love relationships, and which emphasizes calm reflection, attentiveness, a refusal of egotism and rapid judgement. The professor goes on to associate neutrality with the rejection of colonialism and with sympathy towards countries demanding decolonization, and the principle here is clearly linked with notions of linguistic dialogue through the implicit cross-referencing to Khatibi’s earlier theorization of decolonization as a call for a ‘pensée en langues’. This association between the ‘interlangue’ and political neutrality is then further reinforced by the argument that in the face of a possible invasion, the politically neutral state favours persuasion and  dissuasion – a strategy based in ‘des théories de communication’.26 This

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neutral position,  however, must itself also be provisional, it is a strategy that  requires continual reflection and negotiation if it is not (as we saw for democracy in the  Introduction) to become newly oppressive itself. The professor’s speech as a result leaves some questions open, such as how Sweden’s economic dependence  on other countries can be compatible with  neutrality, and how Sweden might participate in the European Community, with its commitment  to democracy, without becoming associated with a form of  communitarianism that could then turn against other communities. Yet if neutrality is an ethical  principle whose political manifestation will need constant  rethinking and reworking, it can nevertheless be encapsulated by a consistent belief in a certain way of life: ‘la passion d’effacer les traces’ [‘a passion for erasing all traces’].27 Here again  Khatibi’s vocabulary brings together the ethical refusal of colonialism and  war with linguistic imagery reflecting the translator’s ability to bring languages into dialogue with one another without appropriating and betraying the translated work. The city of Stockholm is also itself a signifier of neutrality, and is figured as a curious space of potentiality that at the same time gives nothing away. Sweden is, more broadly, as Gérard Namir describes, ‘un pays neutre, à la fois européen et plus ou moins autre chose’ [‘a neutral country, at once European and more or less something else’], and in this sense it represents both cultural hybridity and a unique singularity.28 Stockholm, moreover, in particular provides the scene for dreams and new encounters, and although the narrative takes place in the summer, the imagery of the city shrouded in snow through the winter recurs through the text to represent the blank canvas that allows the imagination to preside. This neutrality means that nothing is imposed on the visitor; rather, its secrets remain hidden in an environment that in turn allows the traveller to open himself up to discovery. Compelled to return repeatedly to the old quarter, Gamla Stan, the narrator experiences his walks as a search for some kind of secret, a truth hidden behind the walls: ‘en me promenant à Gamla Stan, je fus intrigué par mon insistance à revenir dans cette vieille ville, ses placettes, ses rues tournantes, ses vieux magasins et ses églises. Cette insistance fut-elle la quête d’un secret et de son dévoilement?’ [‘walking around Gamla Stan, I was intrigued by my own insistent desire to come back to this old town, with its little squares, its winding streets, its old shops and churches. Was this insistence the quest for a secret and for its revelation?’].29 References to the secrets of Stockholm crop up several times throughout the narrative, and represent not so much the quest for truth as the restlessness and liveliness of the narrator’s mind as he explores the city whose identity and

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culture never impose themselves on the traveller. Secrecy and restraint, then, are traits that, far from shutting out the city’s inhabitants and its visitors, encourage heightened receptiveness and reverie: ‘le silence que je mets ici en valeur est une ambiance translucide où, en demeurant actif et conscientieux, le Suédois rêve éveillé dans la ville’ [‘the silence that I appreciate here creates a translucent atmosphere in which, remaining active and careful, Swedish people can live in the city as if in a waking dream’].30 If, then, Khatibi already drew links between the practice of translation and political neutrality, the associated ethical principles of non-imposition and non-appropriation are also mapped onto his apprehension of the city space and its architecture. The attentiveness and receptivity of the translator, in accordance with the ethics of neutrality, are aroused at the same time by his ‘flânerie’ through Stockholm’s ancient streets, with its elusive façades and secret passages. Even more, the ethics and way of life of the translator are enacted in his renewed understanding of love relationships. Without rejecting the intimacy of marriage, Gérard Namir nevertheless perceives during his sojourn the potential destructiveness of relationships based on possession and control. While the translator is receptive to linguistic nuance without imposing his own vision or meaning on his text, the lover too, he suggests, can remain open to the world and must resist the temptation to impose himself on and restrict the freedom of the loved one. Gérard’s marriage with Denise, who writes to him emotively from back home in France, becomes, then, restrictive in its requirement that each partner adheres to a set of predetermined expectations. Khatibi is not straightforwardly criticizing the institution of marriage here, but he is interested in the tension between the individual’s pursuit of freedom and the demands of a marriage contract, the assumption that marriage means possession. Gérard’s unease with Denise is triggered, we learn, when he sees her kissing another man, and the couple’s intimacy is inevitably broken by the individual’s desire for discovery. Yet Denise is also troubled because her husband is frequently absent. Gérard and Denise continue to love one another, but they struggle nevertheless to accept the real fragility of their closeness as it evolves through time. The narrator suggests that happiness can only be achieved if both members of the couple manage to accept their own contingency as well as that of their interaction. This acceptance is bound up with the realization of each individual’s mortality, and what the narrator describes as women’s excessive love is, it seems, associated with a fear of transience and loss. In the face of this, he once again ultimately embraces the principle of non-imposition and non-appropriation, the calm acceptance of the other’s difference and agency. Marriage, then, needs to reach this stage of

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maturity: ‘l’émotion est toujours là, la beauté est toujours visible, nous atteignons une force, celle de l’esprit de discernement. Celui-ci accroît notre présence aux êtres, notre attention aux choses. Ce temps de proximité est si précieux’ [‘emotion remains present, beauty remains visible, and we acquire a strength, that of the power of discernment. This increases the force of our presence to other people, our attention to things. This time of proximity is so precious’].31 Just as political neutrality requires this ‘discernement’, so too does the relationship with the lover need this reflection, this attentiveness and this refusal to fall into determinism and stasis. The narrator’s relationship with his wife is contrasted with his encounter with Lena, an air hostess, whose very profession as well as her past represent mobility and contingency. He first encounters her during the flight, and it is with Lena that he discovers the secretive allure of Stockholm. She is, then, already associated both with travel and with the sense of neutrality perceived in the Stockholm cityscape. The narrator discovers, moreover, that she was an orphan, brought up by her grandmothers who also in turn later disappear. Her story becomes for the narrator a sort of ancient myth, a Nordic tale where, he writes, beings and creatures can continually be transformed, as ‘Lena était ellemême le souvenir d’une figure mythique, sous les attraits d’une femme volante’ [‘Lena herself incarnated the memory of a mythical figure with the attractions of a woman who flies’].32 She becomes a signifier of the mobility that the narrator pursues, beautiful and yet not excessively crafted, alluring but spontaneous, and created out of a life of continual departures. Comparing her to an oriental carpet, Gérard Namir sees in her both order and negligence: ‘Lena n’y projetait aucun excès; c’était un à-peu-près ornemental qui convenait à ce lieu de séjour et de passage, adaptable, plus que je ne le pensais, à un décalage horaire vécu régulièrement par elle’ [‘Lena did not project any sense of excess; this place of dwelling and passing through had an appropriate decorative, adaptable approximate quality about it, the time lag with which she often lived’].33 Her compelling appearance exudes a kind of liveliness and a resistance to artistry, a restlessness that again fits appropriately with the text’s broader ethics. Her ability to adapt constantly to changes in rhythm as she travels between time zones contributes to this creation of her character as an eternal ‘volante’. The narrator’s exploration of neutrality, mobility and the ‘interlangue’ in Stockholm takes place not only in his relationship with Lena, however, but also with two further figures. One of these is Alberto, a film-maker working in Stockholm on a film about the last days of Réné Descartes, who died there when visiting Queen Christine. Also preoccupied with the neutrality of Sweden

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as a background for the film, Alberto offers Gérard a friendship which, like his relationship with Lena, allows for spontaneity and ongoing mutual discovery. It is also Alberto who helps Gérard to understand that marriage can only survive without possessiveness. The other figure is Ulrika, the typist, who also becomes a magical figure in her reimagining of Gérard’s own history, and who rescues him from his intoxication with Lena. In his interactions with these three figures, the narrator imagines that together they form a ‘carré magique’, a figure that once more reflects something of the text’s ethics. A magic square is a mathematical structure, a set of numbers arranged to form a square, where each row adds up to the same total. It is suggestive, then, of equality, of connections made in different directions, but where no set of connections turns out to be dominant. This magic square, moreover, is for Gérard Namir the structure that shapes his experience in Stockholm, as each of the figures in the square represents a departure and a discovery, so that ‘tout fut réinventé à partir de figures mythiques: Lena la Volante, Ulrika la Digitale et Alberto le Médium désenvoûté. Narrateur et traducteur, je m’incarne dans ces transfigurations: je parle et j’écris, je parle et je traduis, je raconte et je suis le scribe de mon histoire’ [‘everything was reinvented on the basis of mythical figures: Lena the flying woman, Ulrika the one who types, and Alberto the Medium no longer bewitched. As narrator and translator, I am embodied in these transfigurations: I speak and write, I speak and translate, I narrate and I am the scribe of my story’].34 The mobility created by these relationships at the same time reinforces the sense of recreation engendered by translation, writing and telling stories. The interactions evoked by Khatibi in Un Été à Stockholm illustrate what he calls ‘aimance’, a form of love that demonstrates the openness and resistance to appropriation that informs the philosophy and language of the work as a whole. The term was invented, according to Marc Gontard, by Edouard Pichon, a psychoanalyst as well as a grammarian, who used it to describe a form of love without sexual desire.35 In Un Été à Stockholm, the term is used explicitly several times, such as when the narrator describes his friendship with Alberto as a combination of ‘délicatesse et sollicitude’ [‘gentleness and solicitude’], as well as, ‘une sorte de prière addressée à un partage, un partage en devenir dans la vie, la mort et leurs traces’ [‘a sort of prayer addressed to sharing, a sharing to come in life, death and their traces’].36 The sharing and intimacy of ‘aimance’ imply a provisional quality, the ability of the relationship to move on and change as life too develops and alters. This notion crops up in many of Khatibi’s works and is the subject of Khatibi’s volume of poetry, Aimance, a moving collection evocative of a form of intimacy that is at once profound and

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cautious. Reminiscent of courtly love, with its respect for the other together with attention to the ‘lois de l’hospitalité’ [‘laws of hospitality’] (the requirement that the host remains open to and does not judge the visitor), the term is explained most lucidly in an essay addressed to Jacques Derrida: L’aimance: aimer en pensant. C’est un acte, une affinité active, entre les hommes, les hommes et les femmes, les animaux et leurs semblables, les plantes et toute chose initiatique de l’existence. Une relation de tolérance réalisée, un savoirvivre ensemble, entre genres, sensibilités, pensées, religions, cultures diverses. C’est l’art des correspondances vivantes, qui donne à l’amitié cette légèreté et cette apparente insouciance, libérant un espace de bien-être, et une poussée inhibée de jouissance.37 [‘Aimance’: to love while thinking. It is an act, an active affinity, between men, men and women, animals and things like them, plants and everything coming into existence. A relation characterised by real tolerance, an ability to live together, between genders, modes of feeling and thought, religions and different cultures. It is the art of living correspondences, which gives friendship a lightness and apparent carefreeness, opening up a space of well-being and a restrained burst of enjoyment.’]

Derrida too uses the term in his exegesis of friendship, Politiques de l’amitié, where it is, ‘l’amour dans l’amitié, l’aimance au-delà de l’amour et de l’amitié selon leurs figures déterminées, par-delà tous les trajets tous les trajets de lecture de ce livre, par-delà toutes les époques, cultures ou traditions de l’aimer’ [‘ “lovence”: love in friendship, lovence beyond love and friendship following their determined figures, beyond all this book’s trajectories of reading, beyond all ages, cultures and traditions of loving’].38 A friendship without judgement, working across borders and open to change, ‘aimance’ performs the ethics of the translator and of the writer who shapes his craft through this mode of interaction. The ethics of ‘aimance’ serves to crystallize the linguistic and the ethical philosophy that subtends the narrative of Un Été à Stockholm and indeed much of Khatibi’s writing in the second part of his career. The various figures and tropes that contribute to Khatibi’s thinking on the ‘étranger professionnel’ come together to form not only a theory of travel and translation but also a broader vision of subjectivity without determinism and always on the move. Neutrality, the ‘interlangue’ and ‘aimance’ are all notions that require an acceptance of the subject’s limitations and contingency, that require an openness to difference and change, and that foreclose temptations of mastery and appropriation. These in turn prevent the subject from becoming overdetermined or essentialized, and indeed, although Gérard Namir is

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named as the narrator at the end of the first chapter, it is significant that this is only when he recounts his passage through border control rather than at the outset. He may have a name, then, that connotes both French and Maghrebian cultures, but the narrating subject of the text remains on some level anonymous and  difficult to pin  down. He offers a series of thoughts and encounters but  there is little  information about his past, and his voice comes  across as both rootless  and faceless. At the beginning, for example, in among his reflections  on his experience as a  ‘voyageur professionnel’, he fleetingly wonders, ‘comment  revenir  auprès de moi? me recentrer sans perdre mes points d’équilibre?’ [‘how can I return to myself? How can I centre myself again without losing what gives me stability?’], and yet in the rest of the text there is little  sense  of an anchored self to which he would return.39 Later, Lena introduces him to her aunt as ‘Gérard Namir, un voyageur anonyme’ [‘Gérard Namir, an anonymous traveller’], and several times he describes himself as a ghost or as his own double, somehow detached from himself.40 The work of the ‘étranger professionel’, then, is not easy, and the extreme deterritorialization explored in Khatibi’s text is difficult to live out. Indeed, it might be objected that the abstract vision of the rootlessness of the translator as liberatory is somewhat utopian: the nomad works as a figure for free-thinking if he is privileged enough to have the means to circulate freely. Khatibi’s poetics and ethics of exchange are certainly reliant on the traveller’s achievement of a certain status whereby movement is unhindered by border control or by lack of resources. The professional traveller, however, should be read not as a model for modern migration but as a philosophical figure representing a mode of writing, thinking and living that might work as an ethical challenge to national determinisms. Namir’s condition is not an easy and happy embrace of nomadism, moreover, but an intellectual and psychological struggle, a mode of thought with which he repeatedly grapples. The chapter towards the end of the text entitled ‘Prière’, for example, constitutes an attempt to come to terms with this contingency, as the narrator laments a permanent sense of detachment and disorientation, a feeling of self-loss as he moves through time: ‘on file dans le Temps, séparé de ses certitudes, dans chaque instant éternel, chaque illusion, chaque idée superflue’ [‘we speed through Time, cut off from its certainties, in each eternal moment, each illusion, each superfluous idea’].41 His journey, moreover, is often associated in the narrative with the search for a secret, only there is no revelation, only an ongoing pursuit. Finally, it is perhaps pertinent that if, as we have seen, Khatibi addressed an entire work to Jacques Derrida in 2007, much of his thought is indebted to

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Derridean philosophy in its embrace of movement and deferral. In Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi already allied ‘decolonisation’ with ‘deconstruction’. Derrida’s Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, moreover, opens with a reference to Khatibi’s Amour bilingue before exploring Derrida’s own experience of rootlessness when, living in Algeria during the Second World War, his French citizenship was taken away from him because he was Jewish. There will not be space to explore the intricacy of Derrida’s text here, as I have done elsewhere, but the work is worth noting in the current context because Khatibi clearly shares with Derrida, in particular in works such as Un Été à Stockholm, this conception of the dissociation between language, identity and ownership.42 Derrida may have suggested in Le Monolinguisme that he was more of a ‘franco-maghrébin’ than Khatibi because Khatibi also had a Moroccan identity, while he himself experienced in heightened form the ‘trouble de l’identité’ of living in the colonial system because he lost his citizenship even though French was his only language.43 Yet in Un Été à Stockholm, Khatibi perhaps comes closer than Derrida realizes to that sense of dispossession in language, not this time because his identity was taken away by the state, but nevertheless as a result of his relinquishment of any form of cultural affiliation and belonging during that summer in Sweden. Equally, the text at the same time suggests that it is in literary writing that this vision of movement and non-mastery can be aptly explored, since the secrets of the text, like the secrets that the narrator seeks out, keep it endlessly alive to the imagination of each new reader. And if Derrida associated literature per se with secrecy, with the refusal entirely to give itself away in ‘La littérature au secret’ [‘Literature in Secret’] in Donner la mort [The Gift of Death], then Khatibi’s novel can be conceived both to recount and to enact that textual resistance.44 Khatibi’s Un Été à Stockholm may seem a perplexing choice for an analysis of francophone literature after postcolonialism in North Africa. It certainly does not comment explicitly on the politics of postcolonial Morocco a generation after independence, and unlike most of the texts explored here, it does not directly assess the role of literature in the wider society as the nation struggles to define itself still decades after the end of the French colonial presence. Yet the novel does nonetheless attempt to create a compelling ethics out of the practice of translation and to associate this with writing and living beyond borders in a way that still poses a direct challenge to reductive and myopic versions of national culture in contemporary North Africa. As an example of the deterritoralized writing of the ‘étranger professionnel’, Un Été à Stockholm is also ultimately much more than a portrait of cultural hybridity, of a subject torn between languages and communities. It is rather a far-reaching reflection on

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literature and translation or literature as translation, conceived in conjunction with an ethical openness that informs the writing process and, even more, politics, personal relationships and the formation of subjectivity itself. This ethics, born out of a theory of translation and of writing in the ‘interlangue’, nevertheless succeeds in revealing the pitfalls of the divisive linguistic and cultural politics of contemporary Morocco even as it surpasses the constraints of that context.

Leïla Sebbar, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père While Khatibi’s Un Été à Stockholm figures writing as translation in order to imagine a salutary ethics of openness and non-mastery, Leïla Sebbar’s reflections on the relationship between French and Arabic in Algeria and in her own writing are rather less optimistic. Sebbar’s portrait of the confrontation between languages is rooted in her memories of growing up in colonial Algeria, but the scars of that linguistic conflict continue to mark her writing in the contemporary period. Rather than seeking to transcend the experience of linguistic division that shaped her upbringing, and that continues to afflict linguistic communities in Algeria since 1980, Sebbar repeatedly and almost obsessively represents the violence of that conflict, and her literature, rather than leaving the oppressive binary structure behind, instead forms an attempt to work upon it and perhaps to transform it into a source of creativity even as it continues to alienate her. As the daughter of an Algerian father and a French mother, Sebbar is nevertheless only able to speak and write in French, and she alludes repeatedly to her sense of separation from her father’s memory and culture as a result of this ignorance, even though the recapturing of her Algerian heritage is a recurring focus of all her writing. Literature, then, is in this case less a site for the creation of an alternative ethics based in the ‘interlangue’ than a means to record the divisiveness and destructiveness of Algerian language politics and to think through, if not resolve, its ambivalent impact on the writing process. If Khatibi emphasizes the presence of multiple languages in the rhythms of his literary French, Sebbar repeatedly figures Arabic as the silence that underpins her writing. Her writing in no way affirms the sort of celebratory multilingualism found in that of Khatibi; at the centre of her work lies rather the recognition of her lack of knowledge of Arabic. Having published her essays on her relationship with Arabic in discreet journals rather than as a gathered

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collection while her father was alive, however, after his death she is compelled to reflect openly and repeatedly on what she calls, in 2007, that ‘chant secret’.45 Yet these multiple evocations of the Arabic language in her writing present it by turns as the signifier of the lost, but longed for, community of her father’s ancestors and as the conveyor of violence in the form of insults hurled at the young Leïla and her sisters by Arab boys as they walk to school. Sebbar’s partially autobiographical narrative Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, published in 2003, is her most extensive piece of writing on the Arabic language and exhibits a tension between the (now always unfulfilled) impulse to recapture what she might conceive as the language of her origins and the discovery that that language connotes for the narrator cultural (and sexual) division. What is also perhaps surprising about Sebbar’s representation of Arabic and its absence, however, is that her writing turns out to require this absence; it is the very trigger for her creativity. Far from achieving a multilingual poetics of the sort imagined by Khatibi, Sebbar actively refuses to learn Arabic and to meld it with her French writing. Her work is structured by the experience of the separation between French and Arabic, and any putative overcoming of that separation would deny the context of her upbringing. Arabic is somehow there as she writes her text, but only in the memory of the sounds and music that she heard throughout her upbringing which can nevertheless be neither written down nor translated. This analysis of the lack of Arabic in Sebbar’s writing is by no means meant as a direct contestation of salutary theories of a more forward-looking form of cultural and linguistic border crossing. Rather, Sebbar’s work offers an insightful counterpoint to Khatibi precisely because it reveals the difficulty of achieving cultural communion and exhibits the tensions behind the construction of any alternative ethics of border crossing. Critics of Sebbar’s novels, focusing in particular on the Shérazade trilogy, have often tended to champion the refreshing forms of hybrid identity that her characters, namely Shérazade, can be seen to enact. Anne Donadey, for example, reads Shérazade’s engagement with, and subversion of, Orientalist imagery as a sign of a triumphant cultural métissage, and Winifred Woodhull and Valerie Orlando both explore the potentially liberating ‘nomadism’ of Sebbar’s characters.46 Indeed, my own chapter on ‘Leïla Sebbar between Exile and Polyphony’ stresses how Shérazade’s engagement with multiple cultural references, and her discovery of selfhood through travel, might, despite the ongoing sense of exile, be seen to propose a refreshing vision of transculturation.47 Equally, Françoise

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Lionnet has proposed the notion of a ‘logique métisse’, taken from Jean-Loup Amselle, to describe a ‘dynamic model of relationality’, and reads Sebbar’s Les Carnets de Shérazade as an example of new forms of dialogue between cultures that resist entrenched stereotypes and patterns.48 Certainly, Lionnet’s thinking here on one level helps to imagine a more pluralized, interactive and intercultural mode of identity construction, and, like Khatibi’s ‘pensée en langues’, usefully works against the destructive binaries of colonial thinking. Close reading of Sebbar’s partially fictionalized autobiographical narratives, however, does not necessarily disable this form of hybridized thinking, but it does reveal the persistence of the tensions that deterritoralized modes of thinking seek to transcend. Languages exist alongside one another in Sebbar’s work, and her entire imaginary is the product of the encounter between French and Arabic. Yet this meeting is necessarily here defined by rupture, and this is a form of conflict that, as we have seen, persists in North Africa despite the invention, by writers such as Khatibi, of more ethical visions of multilingualism and linguistic mobility. Sebbar’s evocations of her upbringing in Algeria in her multiple autobiographical essays and short stories, and in the narrative of Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, repeatedly allude to a sense of enclosure within the closely guarded, francophone, republican space of her family home. Multiple images of barriers and sequestration underline the separation between this environment and the outside space of the local Arabic-speaking community. In the essay ‘Le Silence de la langue de mon père, l’arabe’, for example, Sebbar describes the house they occupied in her father’s school as ‘une petite France, edifiée au nom de la République française, à l’intérieur des mûrs et de la clôture qui cernent l’école et la séparent des pauvres maisons arabes’ [‘a little France, constructed in the name of the French Republic, within the walls and the enclosure that surround the school and separate it off from the poor Arab houses’];49 it is a secular space fenced off from the rest of the village. In the short story ‘La Moustiquaire’, the image of the mosquito net is symbolic of the barrier between the young girl and the world she observes, as she huddles behind it protected from the gaze of onlookers but staring, alone, at the local children as they play. As the narrator mulls over her detachment from the girls playing hopscotch and from the boys who call out insults, she punctuates her musings with multiple references to the mosquito net that marks her separation.50 By the time of Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, the physical barriers of the walls, the garden fence and the mosquito net are imposed on the French language

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itself, as the enclosed space of the domestic home is inextricably tied up with linguistic sequestration: Nous portions, mes sœurs et moi, en carapace, la citadelle de la langue de ma mère, la langue unique, la belle langue de la France, avec ses hauts murs, opaques qu’aucune meurtrière ne fendait, l’école était entourée d’un muret bas sur lequel était planté un grillage vert, était-il vert? […] Citadelle close, enfermée dans sa langue et ses rites, étrangère, distante, au cœur même de la terre dont nous savions rien et qui avait donné naissance à mon père, aux garçons de sa langue, à nous, les petites Françaises, à mon frère séparé de nous, les filles, hors de la maison. Citadelle invincible, qui la protégeait? La République? La Colonie? La France?51 [My sisters and I wore the citadel of our mother’s language like a shell, that unique language, the beautiful language of France, with its high opaque walls that no murderer could crack, the school was surrounded by a low wall on top of which there was a green fence, was it green? […] A closed citadel, shut in by its language and its rituals, foreign, distant, right at the centre of the area of which we knew nothing and where my father and the other boys who spoke his language had been born, and where we were born, the little French girls, and my brother, separated from us, the girls, outside the house. An invincible citadel, who could protect it? The Republic? The Colony? France?]

French and Arabic languages are closed off from one another by the imposing walls that literally surround the family residence and the secular republican school. And although Sebbar is writing about this segregation half a century later, a long time after the end of the colonial presence, her implication in this repeated return to that imagery is that this divisive structure continues to shape the present narrator. This physical demarcation is reinforced by repeated references to Sebbar’s narrator’s ignorance of her father’s language in numerous essays and narratives. Starting with ‘Si je parle la langue de ma mère’, published in Les Temps modernes in 1978, Sebbar almost obsessively returns to the silence of Arabic through a sequence of texts with titles that refer to that silence in various ways, including, ‘Si je ne parle pas la langue de mon père’ [‘If I do not speak my father’s language’], ‘La Moustiquaire’ [‘The Mosquito Net’], ‘Les Jeunes filles de la colonie’ [‘The Young Girls of the Colony’], ‘Le Silence de la langue de mon père, l’Arabe’ [‘The Silence of my father’s language, Arabic’] and, of course, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père.52 Many of these essays are now gathered in the volume L’Arabe comme un chant secret, published in 2007 with

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a new edition in 2010, and this new publication indicates again the ongoing resonance of the conflict that shapes its author.53 The content of these texts is largely overlapping, as she returns compulsively to her ignorance of her father’s heritage and sense of exile within French culture, as if in an attempt to make sense of it while remaining unsatisfied with each such endeavour. Moreover, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père also repeats in various forms the statement that she does not speak Arabic, as she opens each section with curt allusions that echo the title, such as ‘mon père ne m’a pas appris la langue de sa mère’ [‘my father did not teach me his mother’s language’], or, ‘mon père ne m’a pas appris la langue des femmes de son peuple’ [‘my father did not teach me the language of his people’s women’].54 One of the distinguishing features of this latest and most prolonged reflection on her father’s language, however, is the now-close association between her ignorance of Arabic and her father’s unwillingness to talk about the War of Independence. Her father’s refusal to teach his daughters Arabic is now bound up with an inability to recount the details of his experiences during the war (he was imprisoned by the French military for a few months in 1957). The opening sections of the narrative record telephone conversations with her father, in which he entreats her to forget, and these are juxtaposed with the narrator’s recollections of conversations between her father and his Arab friends during that time, that she was unable to understand. This silence in turn marks the division between French and Algerians during that conflict, the alienated position of the young Sebbar, and her ongoing estrangement from her Arabic heritage in the present. In Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, the most distressing silence is that which surrounds the memory of how local Arab boys shouted insults at her and her sisters as they walked to school in their short dresses. In these passages, Arabic is not only presented as other, as the bearer of a culture and tradition that is necessarily sealed off from the narrator, but even more, it is a signifier of violence. As for Assia Djebar, who also evokes the suspicion surrounding girls’ education in colonial Algeria at the beginning of L’Amour, la fantasia, the walk to school is associated with a sense of alienation from the local community. Indeed, Djebar refers to the ‘regard matois’ [‘knowing look’] of the villagers who foresee danger in the education of a young girl.55 Yet for Sebbar, the daily exposure to verbal abuse in her father’s language becomes an inaugural trauma that consistently reinforces her exclusion from the local Arabic-speaking community, and to which many of her texts compulsively return in the form of a repeated flashback. The Arabic words themselves are described as weapons,

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which, though her father is unaware of this daily scene of violence, the narrator perceives as ‘meurtriers, lancés comme à la fronde’ [‘murderous, thrown as if by a catapult’].56 The boys hurl the words at the girls as they throw pebbles to the birds: Ils taillaient la fourche en bois d’olivier, ajustaient le caoutchouc noir prélevé à un vieux pneu de la décharge, fouillaient leurs poches pleines des cailloux de la route en terre, et ils tiraient, le plus haut, le plus loin. Les mots des garçons nous visaient et ils visaient juste, ils nous touchaient. Le bonnet de laine tricoté, les jours d’hiver, n’arrêtaient pas les rebonds injurieux.57 [They cut the pitchfork in wood from the olive trees, fixed it with the black rubber taken from an old tyre from the rubbish tip, searched in their pockets full of stones from the earth road, and they fired, as high and as far as they could. The  boys’ words were aimed at us and they were well aimed, they hit us. The  knitted woollen hats that we wore on winter days did not stop them rebounding on us and injuring us.]

Defenceless, disoriented by the onslaught of words they do not understand, the girls merely lower their heads and say nothing of the attacks either at the time or in the years that follow. That Sebbar produces multiple versions of the incident is in itself significant, since it suggests that, as a trauma, the moment, in accordance with trauma theorist Caruth’s definition, ‘is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time’ and therefore insistently returns.58 This resistance to assimilation is inevitably exacerbated because the language of the insults is beyond the narrator’s comprehension. If she grasps fragments of the Arabic words, and certainly feels the aggression in their tenor, the injury they inflict is perhaps experienced as more traumatic precisely because it is not fully understood. As a result, Sebbar’s narrator repeatedly evokes the event across multiple narratives and in different forms, as if to perform what Caruth conceives as a ‘delay and incompletion in knowing’.59 Moreover, the differences between Sebbar’s narratives of the moment are themselves revealing. In ‘Si je parle la langue de ma mère’, published in 1978, Sebbar underlines that she did understand at least some of the words, and even more, shouted them back: J’ai appris les injures pour les crier par-dessus le portail et sur le chemin de l’école, quand les garçons couraient derrière nous avec des gestes obscènes dont je percevais confusément le sens. J’entendais – NIQUER – c’était le mot qui revenait, toujours accompagné d’un basculement du bassin vers l’avant. Je les haïssais.60

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[I learned insults in order to shout them out from the door and on the way to school, when the boys ran behind us with obscene gesture of which I vaguely understood the meaning. I heard – FUCK – that was the word that kept coming back, always accompanied by a backward movement of the pelvis. I hated them.]

The sexual violence of the scene is at its clearest in this version, though the narrator is on some level empowered by her ability to shout back. In ‘La Moustiquaire’, the narrator quotes the accusation that she and her sisters are ‘les filles de la «Roumia»’ [‘the daughters of the “Roumia” (Frenchwoman) ’], and again, she repeats, ‘ils crient – Nique … Nique … Nique … – combien de temps, l’un après l’autre ou tous à la fois’ [‘they shout – Fuck … Fuck … Fuck … – how many times, one after the other or all at the same time’], though the ellipses indicate only a fragmented understanding.61 In ‘Le Silence de la langue de mon père, l’arabe’, moreover, she cites the words that she understands, ‘Roumia et Roumiettes, Française, la Chrétienne, l’Etrangère’ [‘Roumia and Roumiettes, Frenchwoman, the Christian woman, the foreign woman’], as well as the ‘mot répété cent fois, agressif, sexuel […] c’est l’arme qui frappe et qui tue, le couteau qui égorge et le sang coule, le mot persécuteur, assassin’[‘the aggressive, sexual word repeated a hundred times […] it was a weapon that hit us and that kills, like a knife that cut our throat and drew blood, a word of persecution, murderous’].62 By the time of Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, however, there is no reference to the content of the insults, little sense of comprehension and no possibility of riposte. The emphasis in this latest version is on the family’s silence around the incident, suggesting that the repeated narrative has brought not further understanding but only renewed alienation in the present – both from the language of violence, and, once again, from the father and the rest of the family community. The redoubling of the trauma through this further sense of incomprehension, and through further silencing, is particularly pernicious precisely because of its disempowering effect. In her analysis of hate speech in Excitable Speech, Judith Butler shows how injurious speech acts precisely disorient the addressee by dislocating him or her from the community, by placing him or her out of context and displacing the reference points by which he or she recognizes the self. According to Butler, ‘What is unanticipated about the speech act is what constitutes its injury, the sense of putting its addressee out of control.’63 Butler goes on to note how Shoshana Felman explores the inevitability, with any speech act, that there remains a

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certain excess; the speaker is on some level always partly unknowing about the implications of what he or she is saying. So there may always be effects that the speaker did not intend. As a result, however, Butler argues that any utterance of hate speech always has the potential to be uncoupled from the intended meaning; it might ‘become disjoined from the power to injure and recontextualised in more affirmative modes’, so this potential uncoupling is what leaves open the possibility of contestation.64 She suggests that ‘the terms by which we are hailed are rarely the ones we choose […]; but these terms we never really choose are the occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an originary subordination for another purpose, one whose future is partially open’.65 Yet in the case of Sebbar’s most recent narrative of the local Arab boys’ insults, the narrator’s incomprehension of the Arabic words, and the subsequent silence that shrouds the event, precisely disable this possibility of redeployment. Butler asserts that the injurious effects of speech might be subverted if the addressee is able to reinterpret and redeploy the terms used in his or her attack, and yet, for Sebbar, those terms remain alien and, even more, forgotten or denied by the rest of the family. The repetition of the scene of the Arab boys’ insults, far from bringing any improved understanding, leads only to a stronger sense of alienation, of separation and violence between languages and communities. If in earlier versions the narrator is able to offer some response, by the time of Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, the insults wound without allowing any possibility of retort because their language is presented as yet more impenetrable. Nevertheless, it is also possible to suggest that by this time it is the text itself which, alongside its repeated assertions of linguistic rupture and alienation, perhaps signifies for Sebbar an imagined response or at least a desired lifting of the silence. The narrative of the insults is, in this work, much more bound up with the problem of her family’s subsequent silence about the event than with the original moment, explored in more detail in particular in ‘La Moustiquaire’. Yet the narrator emphasizes the importance of her account even years later, since, though her father continues to say nothing about it, ‘parce que j’ai écrit, le récit est imprimé, lisible par qui veut le lire, je sais que mon père l’a lu, je me tais’ [‘because I wrote it, the narrative is printed, readable by whoever wants to read it, I know that my father has read it, I remain silent’].66 If, for Sebbar’s narrator, silence ‘simule l’oubli avec quelle constance’ [‘simulates forgetting with such constancy’], her bold, repeated report of the scene of trauma is a first attempt to combat her father’s silence and, concomitantly, the division between his language and her language that is intensified in such violent form by the

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words of the Arab boys.67 Moreover, it is the recounting of the scene that opens the moment up for interpretation and that sets the insults into a new context in order perhaps to afford a glimpse of the alternative future to which Butler refers. The rest of the narrative of Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père can also be read as an imagined attempt to bridge the linguistic divide and to access the memory of her father’s heritage. As I noted earlier, her father’s reticence in speaking not only in Arabic, but also about the War of Independence, is one of the text’s preoccupations, and Sebbar’s narrator deliberately provides a fictionalized version of his experience that for her achieves some form of revelation. One of the further concerns of Sebbar’s narrative here is a sense of separation from the maids Aïsha and Fatima, and the fiction she weaves into the memoir establishes further the connection between her father and the family of Fatima. She recounts how Fatima’s son had intended to kill her father, since, working for the maquis, the son perceived the school teacher as too closely affiliated with France. A fantasized reconciliation takes place when her father meets Fatima’s son in prison, however, and teaches him French. She goes on to narrate more of the son’s story, his travels in France, his life at La Courneuve and, ultimately, his return, much later, to find the schoolteacher in his village. The final scene is one of reconciliation, and the entire narrative serves both to fill the gaps of her father’s missing tale and to create a renewed connection with Fatima’s family, and indeed, with Algerians who fought for independence from the French. The fantasy ends with an image of continued dialogue: ‘ils ont parlé longtemps, le maître et le fils de Fatima, dans la langue de la petite cour et l’odeur du jasmin’ [‘they talked for a long time, the master and Fatima’s son, in the language of the little courtyard and the scent of jasmin’].68 Despite the emphasis on the silence of Arabic and on linguistic rupture, then, Sebbar’s narrative does retain a vision of a desired reunion with an Arabic-speaking heritage. The fantasized reunion is abruptly curtailed when at the end of the text the narrator explicitly states that none of what she recounted actually happened. Yet her interest in Fatima’s son is part of her dream of an (impossible) fusion with the originary local Algerian community, and this is then theorized through the notion that the murmurs of the voices of her father and his family are somehow present as the narrator writes in French. These would be highly reminiscent of the voices of the ‘aïeules’ frequently referred to in the works of Assia Djebar, in particular in L’Amour, la fantasia, though rather than including fragments of the original idiom, as Djebar does, Sebbar rather evokes a musicality, a rustle that is reflective of her non-comprehension of the language they use. Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père caps the repeated

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statements of the narrator’s ignorance with the steadfast ‘je n’apprendrai pas la langue de mon père’ [‘I will not learn my father’s language’], yet in answer to this, the narrator nevertheless confesses: ‘je veux l’entendre, au hasard de mes pérégrinations. Entendre la voix de l’étranger bien-aimé, la voix de la terre et du corps de mon père que j’écris dans la langue de ma mère’ [‘I want to hear it, by chance during my wanderings. To hear the voice of a beloved stranger, the voice of the land and body of my father which I write in my mother’s language’].69 Her father’s language, then, is absent and yet somehow present nevertheless, its sounds ring in the writer’s ears as she writes and its musicality drives the creative process. Furthermore, as Carine Bourget affirms, Sebbar across her works seems particularly troubled by her alienation from the women of Algeria, and she dreams of accessing their voices as much as she does her father’s.70 The volume Mes Algéries en France performs something of this imagined reunion, as Sebbar collects memories and stories from Algeria and combines them with passages of her own fiction, in an effort to combat in particular, ‘La séparation irrémédiable d’avec la mère, les sœurs, les femmes du peuple de mon père, les Algériennes que j’appelle “mes sœurs étrangères”, je les voudrais sœurs de sang, de terre et de langue mais je reste étrangère’ [‘My irremediable separation from my mother, her sisters, the women of my father’s people, the Algerian women I call my “foreign sisters”, I would like to be their sister by blood, by land and by language but I remain a foreigner’].71 By inserting fictionalized excerpts of women’s memories and experiences into her novels, Sebbar returns to Algerian women’s stories not only in Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père or Mes Algéries en France, but across the corpus of her fiction, in an effort, perhaps, at what Helen Vassallo has called ‘re-territorialization’.72 Despite her inability to understand Arabic, then, Sebbar’s texts nevertheless strive to capture the sonority of women’s voices and to bear witness to their idiom without, however, transcribing it or giving away its meaning. Rather, these voices are the imagined, incomprehensible echoes that accompany her production of written French. Sebbar returns to memories of the period leading up to independence, and to the conflict between French and Arabic at that difficult time, but the simultaneous intimation and occlusion of Arabic in her writing evokes also a more current context in which languages continue to mark cultural divisions – overlaid in turn by divisions between the sexes. This silence, moreover, and this confrontation with the division between languages is both an inevitable testimony to the tense linguistic politics that continue to provide the

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backdrop for Sebbar’s writing and the cause of an alienation that her writing seems actively to require. Sebbar’s Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, as the narrative of what her father did not tell her, is the result of a silence and would not have existed without that silence. And in Lettres parisiennes, she affirms quite clearly that she needs that silence in order to create, and that if she tried to learn Arabic, that would be a sign that she was unable to write: ‘il me semble que le jour où je deciderai d’apprendre à lire, à écrire et parler l’arabe, j’irai mal … Je veux dire que ce sera le signe que je suis sèche, que je n’ai plus d’inspiration’ [‘it seems to me that the day I decide to learn to read, write and speak in Arabic, something will be wrong … I mean that it will be the sign that I have dried out, that I have run out of inspiration’].73 Even more, literature takes the place of therapy for Sebbar, and this suggests that, in not learning her father’s language, she uses her francophone writing as a form of continual working upon, if not a completed working through, of the conflict that defines her past. This is not a catharsis that is ever in any way finished, and as we have seen, the repeated narrative of the trauma of the boys’ insults takes the form of an obsessional return that precisely resists acceptance and transcendence. Yet Sebbar’s francophone writing continually acts out the silencing of Arabic that so structures her consciousness, and in that continual enactment it inscribes the absence almost as a presence: ‘la langue de mon père, absente, entendue, perdue, retrouvée, jamais parlée, sa langue est là malgré le silence volontaire, elle est là, sédimentée, personne ne me l’enlevera’ [‘my father’s language, absent, heard, lost and found again, never spoken, this language is there in spite of my voluntary silence, it is there, sedimented in me, and no one can take it away from me’].74 Sebbar’s repeated theorization of the lack of Arabic is, then, the trigger for a form of writing that is compellingly able to record the sound and resonance of a language that it is nevertheless unable explicitly to include. Khatibi’s and Sebbar’s poetic explorations of linguistic interaction offer a novel vision of the capacity of literary writing to create alternative modes of thinking to those prescribed by nationalist ideology. Their writing represents a performance of multilingualism and recommends an ethics of intercultural dialogue. In this sense, their works like those explored elsewhere in this study contain a self-conscious reflection on literarity, and are perhaps less preoccupied than writers such as Djaout or Sansal with political critique and more explicitly concerned with ethics and poetics. Khatibi’s writing in particular reflects less on literature’s intervention in the political than on its creative and ethical potential and its capacity to disrupt the ideological preconceptions underpinning language usage. Literature from this perspective is less a tool for

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dissent than an act of linguistic experimentation that implies at the same time a fundamental shift in notions of the relationship between language, identity and nation. Sebbar’s texts are rather more cautionary and doubtful, and express an ongoing concern about their position in relation to a fractured nation long after independence, but they too reconfigure the relationship between French and Arabic in order to invent their own singular and creative idiolect out of a history of violence. They serve as compellingly creative experiments, and perform a salutary dialogic, anti-hierarchical thinking even if they at the same time portray the persistence of linguistic divisiveness in the contexts from which they emerge.

Notes 1

Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, ‘Introduction’, in Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (ed.), Algeria in Others’ Languages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002) 1–16 (p. 1). 2 Mohammed Harbi, ‘Violence, nationalisme, Islamisme’, Les Temps modernes 580 (1995). Special Issue ‘Algérie: La guerre des frères’: 24–33 (p. 33). Quoted in AnneEmmanuelle Berger, ‘Introduction’, in Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (ed.), Algeria in Others’ Languages, 1–16 (p. 8). See also Sami Naïr, ‘Le peuple exclu’, also in Les Temps Modernes 580 (1995): 34–45. 3 Abdellatif Laâbi, ‘A propos de la littérature marocaine de langue française’, in Jacques Alessandra (ed.), La Brûlure des interrogations: entretiens réalisés par Jacques Alessandra (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985) 130–143 (p. 132). 4 Laâbi, La Brûlure des interrogations, pp. 58, 59. 5 Abdelfattah Kilito, Je parle toutes les langues du monde, mais en arabe (Arles: Actes Sud, 2013) p. 22. 6 For more on this, see Liesbeth Minaard and Till Dembeck’s volume Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism, Thamyris: Intersecting Place, Sex and Race 28 (2014). 7 Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013) p. 3. 8 Abdelkébir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983). 9 Abdelkébir Khatibi, Amour bilingue (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1983). 10 Abdelfattah Kilito, Tu ne parleras pas ma langue, trans. Francis Gouin (Arles: Actes Sud, 2008) p. 99. 11 Ibid., p. 106. 12 Abdelkébir Khatibi, Figures de l’étranger dans la littérature française (Paris: Denoël, 1987) p. 211.

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13 Ibid., p. 136. 14 Abdelkébir Khatibi, ‘L’Étranger professionnel’, Etudes françaises 33.1 (1997): 123–126. 15 Alison Rice, Time Signatures: Conceptualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007). Rice conceives ‘transcription’ both as the ‘copying, or taking down of spoken words’ and as the ‘rendering of the sounds and scents of their surroundings in North Africa’. ‘Transposition’ refers to the change of score between instruments and ‘a similar change of key, a modification in tonality’. See pp. 280, 281. 16 Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations, or, The Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) p. 133. 17 Khatibi, ‘L’Étranger professionnel’, p. 126. 18 Abdelkébir Khatibi, La Langue de l’autre (New York: Les Mains secrètes, 1999). For more on the tale of Hammou ou Namir, see Abdallah Bounfour, ‘La parole coupée: essai sur l’éthique du conte’, in Christine Buci-Glucksmann et al. (eds.), Imaginaires de l’autre: Khatibi et la mémoire littéraire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987) pp. 99–110. 19 Abdelkébir Khatibi, Un Été à Stockholm (Paris: Flammarion, 1990) pp. 9, 10. 20 Ibid., p. 11. 21 Ibid., p. 48. 22 Ibid., p. 49. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 48. 26 Ibid., p. 51. 27 Ibid., p. 58. 28 Ibid., p. 72. 29 Ibid., p. 63. 30 Ibid., p. 89. 31 Ibid., p. 120. 32 Ibid., p. 37. 33 Ibid., p. 86. 34 Ibid., pp. 152, 153. 35 Marc Gontard, Le Moi étrange: littérature marocaine de langue française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993) p. 53. 36 Khatibi, Un Été à Stockholm, p. 74. 37 Abdelkébir Khatibi, Jacques Derrida, en effet (Paris: Al Manar, 2007) pp. 69–70. 38 Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994) p. 88; The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997) p. 69. 39 Khatibi, Un Été à Stockholm, p. 10. 40 Ibid., p. 102.

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41 Ibid., p. 141. 42 See my Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). 43 Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1996) pp. 29–32. 44 Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999). 45 Leïla Sebbar, L’Arabe comme un chant secret (Saint Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Bleu autour, 2007) p. 109. 46 See Anne Donadey, ‘Cultural Métissage and the Play of Identity in Leïla Sebbar’s Shérazade Trilogy’, in Elazar Barzan and Marie-Denise Shelton (eds.), Borders, Exiles, Diasporas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 257–273; Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonisation and Literatures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Valerie Orlando, Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999). 47 Jane Hiddleston, Reinventing Community: Identity and Difference in Late TwentiethCentury Philosophy and Literature in French (Oxford: MHRA and Maney, 2005). 48 Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995) p. 4. Lionnet draws on Jean-Loup Amselle, Logiques métisses: anthropologie de l’identité en Afrique et ailleurs (Paris: Payot, 1990). 49 Leïla Sebbar, ‘Le Silence de la langue de mon père, l’arabe’, Etudes littéraires 33.3 (2001): 119–123 (p. 121). 50 Leïla Sebbar, ‘La Moustiquaire’, in Leïla Sebbar and Nancy Huston (eds.), 17 Ecrivains racontent une enfance d’ailleurs (Paris: Belfond, 1993) 197–207. 51 Leïla Sebbar, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (Paris: Julliard, 2003) p. 39. 52 Leïla Sebbar, ‘Si je parle la langue de ma mère’, Les Temps modernes 379 (1978): 1179–1188; ‘Si je ne parle pas la langue de mon père’, in Adine Sagalyn (ed.), Voix de pères, voix de filles (Paris: Maren Sell, 1988) 153, 154; ‘La Moustiquaire’, in Leïla Sebbar and Nancy Huston (eds.), 17 Ecrivains racontent une enfance d’ailleurs (Paris: Belfond, 1993) 197–207; ‘Les jeunes filles de la colonie’, in Leïla Sebbar (ed.), Une Enfance outremer (Paris: Seuil, 2001); Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (Paris: Julliard, 2003). 53 Sebbar, L’Arabe comme un chant secret. 54 Sebbar, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, pp. 33, 59. 55 Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) p. 11; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1993) p. 3. 56 Sebbar, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, p. 37. 57 Ibid., p. 38. 58 Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction: Trauma and Experience’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) 3–12 (p. 4).

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Ibid., p. 5. Sebbar, ‘Si je parle la langue de ma mère’, p. 1182. Sebbar, ‘La Moustiquaire’, p. 200, pp. 204, 205. Sebbar, ‘Le Silence de la langue de mon père, l’arabe’, p. 122. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 4. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 38. Sebbar, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père, p. 39. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 125. Carine Bourget, ‘Language, Filiation, and Affiliation in Leïla Sebbar’s Autobiographical Narratives’, Research in African Literatures 37.4 (2006): 121–135. Leïla Sebbar, Mes Algéries en France (Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Bleu autour, 2004) p. 102. See Helen Vassallo, The Body Beseiged: The Embodiment of Historical Memory in Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012). Leïla Sebbar and Nancy Huston, Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l’exil (Paris: Bernard Barrault, 1986) pp. 159, 160. Leïla Sebbar, ‘Entendre l’arabe comme un chant sacré’, L’Arabe comme un chant secret, p. 91.

7

Francophone Letters: Literature as Encounter

In an essay entitled ‘Violence de l’autobiographie’, Assia Djebar evokes the profound disorientation caused by the realization, after publication, that her works will be read in multiple ways and that she has no control over the process of circulation: Désormais, oui, je sais que l’œuvre vit entre deux pôles, deux rives; m’ayant échappé à sa publication, elle circule ailleurs et quelquefois si près, elle cherche son point mouvant, elle n’est ni à moi ni au lecteur, mais entre nous, dans l’échange, dans l’allée et venue des réminiscences. Parfois, elle risquerait de se disloquer, ou de se dissoudre en poussière.1 [From now on, yes, I know that the work lives between two poles, two shores; having escaped my grasp at the moment of publication, it circulates elsewhere and sometimes nearby, it seeks the point from which its movement starts, it belongs neither to me nor to the reader, but between us, in a process of exchange, in the coming and going of memories. Sometimes, it risks becoming dislocated or dissolving into dust.]

As the literary work circulates, it is possessed by no one and is continually recreated through an ongoing process of exchange. And this is an exchange that provokes in the writer a disconcerting sense of ambivalence. On the one hand, the author’s relinquishing of the work to its unknowable readership could be threatening; the text could be ‘dislocated’ or even dissolved by readers who make of it what they will. On the other hand, however, Djebar comments that the reader can also serve to protect the text by preventing its meaning from being misconstrued and then ossified. It is her readers who reinterpret and reinvigorate the text in multiple forms and who help her to ‘sortir de la mise sous silence’ [‘to come out of my silencing’].2 The text’s encounter with the reader is at once a dangerous one, then, in that it instigates a rupture from the author, but it is also what allows the work to live on. Independent from the author, the work is able to take a form of its own that perhaps threatens

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to alienate its creator, but that also works to preserve its vitality through the constant dialogue it maintains with the world. Djebar’s reflection on literature and its living-on can be understood to anticipate Derek Attridge’s conception of the ‘singularity of literature’ in his volume of that name. Attridge evokes the unique quality of the literary form, not so much, however, in the sense of the specific properties that distinguish it from other sorts of text, but in the sense of its disruptive, inventive force, its experimentalism and its resistance to entrenched or dogmatic modes of thinking. Literature, for Attridge, creates an encounter with alterity, with the unfamiliar, its singular form forcing its readers to think in new ways. Literary writing is a locus for the questioning of cultural norms, yet it also continually reinvents itself at the moment of reception; it is always different from itself because it is always able to generate new readings. It is not ‘pure’, but is open to ‘contamination, grafting, accidents, reinterpretation, and recontextualization’.3 In this sense, for Attridge literature is never anything other than an event: the singularity of literature is an event of reading, an infinitely variable moment of encounter between writer and reader, who might also remain disconcertingly distanced from one another. This is a meeting between two singularities, ‘the singularity of the work thus speaks to my own singularity.’4 The encounter is each time unpredictable and each time potentially as alienating as it is enriching. This chapter will develop this understanding of literature as a disrupted and constantly renewed encounter between writer and reader through an analysis of the figure of the letter in two francophone North African works published in the 1980s. This reflection on the literary encounter through letter writing will at the same time develop the conception, already sketched in Chapters 2 and 6, of the capacity of literature to promote undetermined forms of intercultural  dialogue at a time when, as we have seen, Algeria, Morocco and indeed many parts of  the Middle East have witnessed an intensification in cultural and religious  antagonism. Moreover, if, as we saw in Chapter  3, writing  for others according to Ben Jelloun and Daoud triggered an at times highly critical and self-doubting conception of literary creation, here the letter form offers an alternative model of literature as more productively capable of opening  up a potentially liberating, if uneasy, form of interaction. Djebar’s L’Amour, la  fantasia, published in 1985, is a novel in which many characters write and  receive letters, and in which the process of exchange inaugurated by the letter can be seen to reflect the literary text’s  simultaneous attraction and distancing of its readers.  The letter is here the instigator of a fragile but

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transformative  relationship between author and reader, and the various correspondences occurring in the text perform an alarmingly open but, in some cases, potentially liberating interaction between addresser and addressee. This  encounter in part works to renegotiate the relationship between French and Algerian cultures in the wake of colonialism and offers a vision of cultural evolution and reinvention across temporal and geographical borders. At the same time, however, it potentially loosens the relationship between the text and the context in which it is produced, and creates an open-ended, indeterminate relationality akin to that of the literary event, whose ends can never be known in advance. If for Attridge, moreover, ‘singularity’ replaces any notion of intentional self-expression, Djebar’s exploration of letter writing and literature demonstrates a perhaps more complex tension between the persistent desire for communication and the repeated realization of the work’s unpredictable, singular mode of address. The letters of L’Amour, la fantasia, and the conception of literature that the work generates, dramatize rather the way in which the desire for communication is challenged and opened out by this looser, more unpredictable literary encounter. In the second part of this chapter, Abdelkébir Khatibi and Jacques Hassoun’s correspondence, published in Le Même livre in the same year as Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia, will be read as an active performance of the enriching and, at the same time, contingent and even disorientating dialogue produced by letter writing. Through the theological reflections its writers put forward, as well as through the particular form of their correspondence, it too works to enact the unpredictable, productive and yet alienating address of literature itself. Le Même livre offers at once a highly significant and far-reaching meditation on the interaction between Judaism and Islam, as the letters between the Jewish Egyptian psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun and the Islamic Moroccan philosopher and writer Abdelkébir Khatibi stage a series of observations on shared history and on the destructive force of the separatist thinking that continues to fuel Jewish-Muslim conflict. At the same time, the writers’ affective interaction, the spontaneity of their letters and the evolution of their thought as each provokes the other’s thinking and allows himself to ruminate in unplanned ways, all reveal in heightened form the creative but aleatory form of the literary encounter per se. This creative encounter may not be conceived as a way of intervening directly in the political conflicts afflicting parts of the Arab world that Hassoun and Khatibi nevertheless discuss. Yet it is an experimental exercise that is provocative rather because, in both content and form, it refuses the dogmatism that is the cause of those violent clashes.

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Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia Djebar’s essays in the collection Ces voix qui m’assiègent repeatedly express resistance towards the notion of literature as the communication of a message and present the literary voice as necessarily interrupted, suspended and partially opaque. The narrator may at times be keen to establish a dialogue with her readers, to convey messages both about Algerian history and about her own evolution as a writer, but she insists that she precisely cannot be a ‘francophone voice’ and that she cannot inhabit the subject position that this terminology implies. As we saw in Chapter  2, her writing cannot straightforwardly be associated with a process of self-expression, and any process of communication is also interrupted by silence: ‘j’écris à force de me taire!’ [‘I write in order to keep silent’].5 This silence is, according to Djebar, on one level the silence of her maternal genealogy, of generations of oppressed Algerian women whose experiences she wants to recognize but who nevertheless have no place from which to speak. At the same time, however, this silence is central to Djebar’s conception of literary expression, as the form of the work obfuscates any original intention and the text comes to life through its recreation by the reader. On the one hand, moreover, Djebar’s insistence on the silence of her writing reflects the alienation caused by her use of the colonial language, as well as restrictions on women’s self-expression required by Islamic custom in the society in which she grew up. On the other hand, the silence of writing also represents something of the singular form of literature itself, as it resists the identification of an originary meaning to be received in the same way by readers living in different contexts. Literature is for Djebar at once an attempt at communication, a reaching out and a relinquishment of clear, subjective selfexpression, and this tension persists both because she writes about her native land in the colonial language and because she recognizes the text’s ability to evolve through dialogue with new readers. As the editors of the collection Assia Djebar: littérature et transmission suggest, literary creation according to Djebar is always this double-edged process of transmission as well as dispossession; it is able to bring at the same time both complicity and separation between writer, character and reader.6 The exchange of letters and the relationship between addresser and addressee are a significant aspect of the narrative of L’Amour, la fantasia, and the rest of this section will think through the ways in which the letter form can at the same time represent something of the unpredictable encounter enacted by literature itself. Patrick Crowley has written about how, in L’Amour,

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la fantasia, the letter, like literature, turns out to be ‘a model of circulation, of intimacy, of a split subjectivity, of uncertain destinations’, and Crowley’s work might be developed here to think more specifically about the complex form of relationality implied by the letter and its significance for an understanding of literary reading relations.7 Letters crop up repeatedly through the work, both in Djebar’s analyses of French soldiers’ narratives of the conquest of Algeria and in her reminiscences on familial and love relationships, and in each case they both create and disrupt intimacy. The letter is on one level dangerous in its resistance to control, its potential for misleading, for misrepresenting or for reaching the wrong addressee, but it is also potentially a bringer of new forms of relationality. It issues a threat and offers a promise, and, like literature, it brings about an open-ended exchange made at once of proximity and of rupture. Letters in L’Amour, la fantasia unsettle and disorient both writer and recipient. If, unlike in the literary text, their sender may intend to convey a specific message, in Djebar’s work they never turn out to communicate that message unproblematically to a single addressee. The opening scene of the novel evokes the young Algerian girl walking to school hand in hand with her father, yet this image seems to be a harbinger of danger: What if the girl learns to write, or more specifically, to write letters? Any correspondence could both cross the boundaries of her sequestration and initiate relationships that the girl herself might not fully understand, as the narrator warns: Si la jouvencelle écrit? Sa voix, en dépit du silence, circule. Un papier. Un chiffon froissé. Une main de servante, dans le noir. Un enfant au secret. Le gardien devra veiller jour et nuit. L’écrit s’envolera par le patio, sera lancé d’une terrasse. Azur soudain trop vaste. Tout est à recommencer.8 [And if the maiden does write? Her voice, albeit silenced, will circulate. A scrap of paper. A crumpled cloth. A servant-girl’s hand in the dark. A child, let into the secret. The jailer must keep watch day and night. The written word will take flight from the patio, will be tossed from the terrace. The blue of heaven is suddenly limitless. The precautions have all been in vain.]

The letter, then, could escape the clutches of its writer and fall into the hands of any passer-by. As soon as words are written down, they have a life of their own and exceed the grasp of their creator. Next, the narrator tells of how her first experience of love occurred through the receipt of a letter, which becomes a figure for a transgression that the authoritarian father cannot control. He tears up the missive and throws it in the wastepaper basket, but the narrator continues, much later, to write to her suitors and lovers, so that the French language that her father taught her becomes itself an ‘entremetteuse’ [‘go-between’].9 Again,

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the daughter’s letters transgress the physical barrier of the house in a way that cannot be controlled by the father, and, moreover, surprise the daughter herself in the intimacy they bring: ‘choc des premiers mots révélés: la vérité a surgi d’une fracture de ma parole balbutiante’ [‘the shock of the first words blurted out: the truth emerging from a break in my stammering voice’].10 Resisting the enclosure of the young girl within a safe, controlled environment, letters provide her with a means of contacting the wider world and open her up to new forms of intimacy and dialogue. The intimacy of the love letter, however, is also a source of anguish, as the words once written can be read by others and turn out to signify differently from any original intention. The narrator repeatedly laments her inability to express feelings of love in French, and her evocation of the intimacy of the letter is coloured by both dissatisfaction and a fear of excessive disclosure. She believes at first that her letters are love-letters, in that they are addressed to a secret lover, yet subsequently realizes, ‘ce n’était que des lettres du danger’ [‘they spelled out danger’].11 This is in part because, despite their intimacy and despite the sense of revelation, ‘l’émoi ne perce dans aucune de mes phrases’ [‘my words betray no inner turmoil’], the shadow of her father stilting her selfexpression.12 Writing in the language of the colonizer itself distances the letter from its creator’s adolescent experience, as if the colonial language is unable to access her affective experience. The intended candour of her missives is at the same time clouded by her ingrained modesty, by the sense that excessive selfrevelation is also destructive, and is certainly not recommended by the Islamic culture that shaped her early years. Moreover, if she wants to believe that ‘écrire, n’est-ce pas “me” dire’ [‘is not writing a way of telling what “I” am?’], she struggles to find herself in her writing, and, what is more, remains unmoved by her lover’s apparently impassioned responses: ‘la passion, une fois écrite, s’éloignait de moi définitivement’ [‘once passion has been expressed in writing, it cannot touch me].13 The letter is not, then, the unmediated self-expression of its author but attains a sort of autonomy of its own. Most disturbingly, the destination of the letter cannot be guaranteed. The  narrator goes on to recount how, a few years later, she receives an astonishingly candid letter from her husband, in which ‘ses mots détaillent mon corps-souvenir’ [‘he recalls, one by one, each aspect of my body’], yet rather than sharing her husband’s feelings of intimacy, she is above all alienated by the letter’s explicit terms.14 Even worse, the letter is then read by a rival for her affections, whose shock in turn both makes her feel as if she has been robbed and induces her to question whether she ever properly read it and received it herself.

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A month later, the narrator’s purse containing the letter is stolen by a beggar woman, and she imagines that it gets crumpled up and dropped in the gutter: its long and winding circulation ending in a ‘naufrage’ [‘shipwreck’].15 As a result of this episode, she realizes that writing never has a single destination; it must inevitably circulate freely, and it exceeds the grasp of both sender and addressee. She also learns to conceive writing not as unmediated self-expression but as a play between silence and subtle disclosure. The letter is never a straightforward confession, the communication it permits is tempered by the anguish of not being able to say what one wants, or to control who reads the writing and how. If the narrator maintains a certain ambivalence towards the expressive power of love letters, the war letters, written by soldiers after the conquest of Algiers in 1830, seem much more dangerous. For a start, the violence they recount is couched in a celebratory rhetoric, aimed to aggrandize the officer’s achievements, that not only distorts but actually dissimulates the horror to which it alludes: ‘toute une pyramide d’écrits amoncelés en apophyse superfétatoire occultera la violence initiale’ [‘the supererogatory protuberances of their publications will form a pyramid to hide the initial violence from view’].16 These letters are to be mistrusted and require the reader to read between the lines, to attend to the horrors to which they allude but which remains hidden by their eloquent language. At the same time, however, they also reveal what the sender might not have intended them to reveal, they confess personal obsessions and neuroses to  close relatives, only to be read against the grain subsequently by historians  such as Djebar. In this case, they do not so much obfuscate self-expression as betray a ‘self ’ that their creator may have wished to mask. The narrator notes, then, that the letters unwittingly testify not to the actuality of the violence, but to  traces of the soldiers’ unsettling motives, as ‘la destinatrice devient soudain prétexte pour se dévisager dans l’obscurité de l’émoi’ [‘the recipient suddenly  becomes the excuse for taking a clear look at oneself in the muted light of one’s own emotions’].17 Yet more disturbingly, she notes that references in Bosquet’s letters to the Algerian women who refused to accept defeat, who would not look at their conquerors in acquiescence, betray in spite of the writer  ‘une Algérie-femme impossible à apprivoiser’ [‘Algeria as a woman  whom it is impossible to tame’].18 Horrified by the images of seduction, by the desire of the soldiers to penetrate and possess the Algerian territory ‘quasiment sur le mode sexuel’ [‘as they would a woman’],  Djebar’s narrator  discovers that the letters betray the fantasies that underpin the gesture of conquest and also indicate a native resistance that they cannot quite overcome. The letters are again at once opaque and revelatory; they obscure the

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reality of  the violence but unwittingly uncover ‘l’emoi même des tueurs, […] leur trouble obsessionnel’ [‘the agitation of the killers, […] their  obsessional unease’].19 Read out of context by readers other than those for whom they were intended, they present an alternative narrative of events, they convey something their creators did not  intend, and their silences hint at a different history, not one of conquest, but one of quasi sexual obsession and neurosis. In this way, they demonstrate how literature too can be read against the grain, by a variety of readers, and show how reading is each time a new encounter where meaning is both gained and lost. Letters, and perhaps literature too, are from this point of view potentially dangerous: they obfuscate, mislead, betray what should have remained hidden and circulate beyond their intended readership. Despite her suspicion towards the threat they might present, however, Djebar’s narrator also at times evokes the potentially liberating power of the letter, its creation of alternative forms of address. The relationality created by letter writing can, in transgressing distance in space and time, bring people into contact with one another despite their differences and can establish intimacy across borders. This celebration of a liberatory open-endedness also brings the letter form closer to the notion of literature itself, since unlike the letter, the literary work explicitly plays on its fictionality, and the process of communication it initiates was likely to have been conceived as open-ended from the start. Some of the letters of L’Amour, la fantasia do not provoke the sorts of anxiety discussed above, then, but issue a call: they herald the beginning of a dialogue across differences and bring about the mutual exposure of singular voices in the absence of a pre-established connection. Early on in the narrative, for example, the narrator describes the ‘trois jeunes filles cloîtrées’ in a hamlet in the Sahel who write letters to men all over the Arab world. Responding to advertisements in magazines, the girls adopt pseudonyms and gradually build up a series of fractured long-distance relationships with their correspondents. The youngest girl explains that she writes the letters because she does not want to be married off to a stranger; her project is to create a secret intimacy, beyond the gaze of her father, that will in the end protect her from the intrusiveness of a future suitor chosen by her parents. Though once again dangerous, then, these letters figure a potential complicity that transgresses borders. They provide a contact without contact, an open dialogue, which, though risky, is conceived by the writer as transgressive and ultimately liberating. In this case, since the destination of the letters is unknown, they can constitute an act of freedom for their producers.

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They form a call for dialogue, the nature and outcome of which will be refreshingly unpredictable. Furthermore, letters can establish a proximity that social interaction does not necessarily allow. They form a point of contact between singular beings who are separated from one another by distance or time, but at the same time create a closeness despite that necessary rupture. In another early chapter, for example, the narrator recounts how her father wrote postcards to her mother while away from home using her name and signing only with his first name. She explains that Arab women were not supposed to refer to their husbands by their first name, so that the father’s act constitutes a clear statement of informal intimacy that transgresses social rules. Even more, the postcard will have passed through the hands of numerous postmen, the names will have been freely visible to all those who participated in its circulation, and this makes the relationship between husband and wife into a perceptible statement of intimacy. Here, then, the correspondence acts contrary to accepted models of communal interaction in order to announce an alternative complicity despite the geographical distance. A parallel example of such an intimacy occurs later when the narrator writes about her marriage in Paris, which is not a traditional wedding and takes place in the absence of the family. Instead of inviting the family and obeying convention, however, the narrator chooses to send a telegram to her father, stating simply, ‘je pense d’abord à toi en cette date importante. Et je t’aime’ [‘thinking of you on this auspicious day, I love you’].20 While defiantly refusing to comply with the expectations of the community, the narrator nevertheless uses the telegram to reinforce another sort of complicity with the father, as she expresses a powerful intimacy despite their separation. These instances of proximity across distance and against convention again demonstrate how letters provide a suspended contact, a closeness that is no longer associated with traditional forms of community, but that at the same time allow a respectful complicity across distance. This complicity is reminiscent, moreover, of the ethical openness of Khatibi’s ‘aimance’. The final section of the novel, exploring the experiences of activist Pauline Rolland, who was transported from the Saint-Lazare prison to Algeria in 1852, contains a further example of how letters institute alternative forms of contact. Rolland was a school teacher, ‘qui combat pour sa foi et ses idées’ [‘who fights for her faith and her principles’], and who travelled in Algeria for four months before falling ill and returning to France to die.21 Known as a ‘dangereuse agitatrice’ [‘dangerous agitator’], she comes to symbolize for Djebar the women

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who generations later fought against the French presence during the War of Independence.22 During her time in Algeria, however, she wrote numerous letters to her friends and family, and reading the letters now, the narrator dwells on her curious sense of intimacy with their creator. Rolland’s narration of her experiences clearly anticipates the continued resistance of Algerian women generations after, and her letters resonate with the narrator’s own project of contestation despite the separation created by time. Having fallen into the hands of a writer and scholar years after her death, the letters initiate a new relationship that serves to link past and present, as well as to testify to the fragility of women’s resistant voices. Djebar’s narrator affirms, ‘dans la glaise du glossaire français, elle et nous, nous voici aujourd’hui enlacées’ [‘she and I are now clasped in each other’s arms, our roots entwined in the rich soil of the French vocabulary’], and Rolland’s words, ‘irradient là sous mes yeux et enfin me libèrent’ [‘give off light before my eyes and finally set me free’].23 The letters are read, then, not only by their original addressees but also by a woman of a completely different historical moment, yet their words create a subtle, hesitant contact and generate new significance in that process. Through her letters, Rolland’s suspended voice circulates, travels and finds a new destination, in order to speak to the narrator’s singular perception a century after her demise. Letters in this way may not always arrive at their intended destinations; they may fall into the hands of the wrong readers, but their potential to always reach unforeseen recipients is indicative also of literature’s continually openended form of address. Moreover, literature might be seen to accept and exploit the open-endedness which, for the letter writer, may at times be conceived as productive while at other times it is rather more unwelcome. In the fragmentary postcards printed in the ‘Envois’ section of La Carte postale, Derrida explicitly theorizes the uncontrolled dissemination of the postcard or letter and associates the heterogeneity of the letter form with that of literature itself: ‘le mélange, c’est la lettre, l’épître, qui n’est pas un genre mais tous les genres, la littérature même’ [‘mixture is the letter, the epistle, which is not a genre but all genres, literature itself ’].24 Derrida’s own correspondence here, scrawled on the back of the numerous copies he purchases of postcards depicting Plato and Socrates, is a fragmentary set of musings whose addressee remains a ghostly female phantasm, and which he announces more than once is fit only for burning – it is ‘les restes d’une correspondance récemment détruite’ [‘the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence’].25 Printed in the same volume as ‘Le facteur de la vérité’, Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s reading of Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’, the extracts respond to Lacan by repeatedly suggesting that letters do not arrive at

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their destinations, that they precisely perform how writing is subject to theft, loss, negligence and destruction. Lacan, perhaps enigmatically, concluded his reading of Poe with the affirmation that ‘une lettre arrive toujours à destination’ [‘a letter always arrives at its destination’],26 whether or not that destination is in fact the intended one. Yet Derrida suggests that, despite Lacan’s exploration of the letter’s complex trajectory, his analysis retains a sort of determinism. The  letter may, for Lacan, attain its significance only after arrival, it is the signifier that the recipient wants it to be, and yet, for Derrida, this still implies that it belongs in a circumscribed structure. Conversely, however, his own postcards display their contingency, the sender’s lack of control over the future of his missive (‘ça peut t’arriver, à toi aussi, de n’y rien comprendre, et donc à moi, et donc ne pas arriver, je veux dire à destination’ [‘it might also arrive for you, for you too, to understand nothing, and therefore for me, and therefore not to arrive, I mean at its destination’]27). The postcards in this case both address ‘her’ and the multiple readers of the published book, and if any ‘message’ exists only as it is created and interpreted by the reader, then that message becomes infinitely plural and impossible to determine. They become, as David Wills shows, a figure for literary dissemination: According to the structure of the text, any attempt to reduce the notion of a destination to the communication of a truth, or to see the mechanism of the postcard as assuring the inviolability of an unspoken truth, is undone by the process of reading, whereby there immediately exist two addressees – her and the reader – and no guarantees about which messages are addressed to each.28

The implication is that, just as the postcard’s trajectory and receipt is openended, so does the literary work communicate only contingently to its multiple singular readers. Derrida’s postcards can serve to theorize the disseminated trajectory of Djebar’s various letters and to reinforce the link between the letters and a broader conception of literature and its unpredictable and creative forms of communication. Letters for both Djebar and Derrida do not necessarily convey the controlled ‘voice’ of a pregiven subject, bringing a message to a specific addressee. Rather, they are contingent articulations, open to interpretation, out of context, by a series of singular recipients. Djebar and Derrida use letters to explore how writing travels beyond the exchange between one specified ‘subject’ and another and in the process opens up new channels and forms of communication. Derrida’s postcards, like Djebar’s letters, are singular articulations whose circulation cannot be wholly circumscribed, but which

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allow meaning to adapt and change as the words travel across borders in space and time. Ultimately, the various journeys of the letters in Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia, the multiple and dynamic forms of correspondence between readers and across geographical and historical moments, serve to enact the literary text’s contingent articulation as it speaks, each time unique, to its infinite singular readers. The work in this way might also be conceived to attain something of the ‘worldliness’ evoked in the present Chapter 1 in this vision of its ongoing reinvention in different contexts. Letters and texts can travel away from their points of departure and resist being constrained to determinate forms of meaning. This worldly circulation also takes the work beyond any originary community and allows it to operate outside any circumscribed ideology. This encounter between text and addressee becomes, for Djebar by the time of her most recent work, an uneasy, and indeed perhaps inconsistent, relinquishment of ‘self-expression’, as despite the apparent frankness of the narrator’s confessions here, she ends the work with an explicit adieu to authorial ‘selfhood’. As a coda, it is worth pausing briefly on one of the final passages of Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, Djebar’s last work, to be discussed in the next chapter, and in which she comments explicitly again on the destabilizing effects of the reading encounter. She notes that certain types of narrative, perhaps those that are the most pressingly confessional, give the reader the disconcerting impression of the presence of their author, so that we read, ‘avec l’obscure sensation que l’auteur(e), couché(e) à jamais depuis lors, tourne pourtant avec nous les pages’ [‘with the obscure sense that the author,  sleeping forever from now on, nevertheless turns the pages with us’].29  The effect on the reader, however, is a heightened sense of the ‘champ vain de ruines qu’aura  laissé cet auteur(e) encombrant(e)’ [‘the vain field of ruins that this cumbersome author will have left for us’], a stronger impression of the ashes she leaves behind and of their very inaccessibility.30 The more the author tries to address the reader directly and the more she seeks to guide our reading, the more futile this controlling gesture appears and the more remote the traces of her past. In  writing a confessional narrative such as Nulle part, Djebar’s narrator owns by the end that she nevertheless surrenders her ‘voice’ to the contingency of literary circulation. Just as the letters of L’Amour, la fantasia exceed the control of their senders in the discovery of new contexts and new readers, so do the memoirs of Nulle part belong not to the writing ‘subject’ but to the multiple singular readers who will receive their articulation in unforeseen ways. Writing about one’s experiences in letters, in memoirs, in literature is a

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way to ‘se dire à soi-même adieu’ [‘bid oneself adieu’], in favour of a singular address to multiple readers.31 Despite her efforts at autobiographical disclosure, then, Djebar’s work seems to come alive, she implies, at the event of its reading. Her final ‘confession’ is in no way a statement of cultural origins and belonging, but the trigger for a risky but continually evolving exchange that eschews both cultural determinism and secure self-expression.

Jacques Hassoun and Abdelkébir Khatibi, Le Même livre Hassoun and Khatibi’s exuberant correspondence, Le Même livre, constitutes a compelling example of how the exchange of letters, as well as literary writing itself, can represent a dynamic and evolving intercultural dialogue. The  ostensible subject of the volume is the relationship between Jewish and Arab cultures and the history of interaction between Judaism and Islam in particular in North Africa and the Middle East. In this sense, it is, according to Olivia Harrison, an example of ‘transcolonial’ thinking of the sort theorized by Claire Joubert, discussed in the present Chapter 1, and can be seen to represent an assertion of a kind of ‘anticolonial solidarity’.32 Yet the form of the work itself – a correspondence that evolves spontaneously and haphazardly – is at the same time crucial to its underlying reflection on literature as a forum for and producer of both exchange and living thought. In the preface, the authors assert that the text promotes ‘une éthique de la rencontre’ [‘an ethics of meeting’], and its dialogic form mimics at the same time ‘nos différences et nos convergences autour d’une vieille, si vieille histoire’ [‘our differences and our convergences around an old, old history’].33 Moreover, Khatibi and Hassoun also describe the unpredictable form of the thinking that the letters generated. This is a meeting of minds across cultures, but it is also a work created out of and structured by a dialogue whose ends were in no way anticipated at the start. And, while addressing one another, the authors at the same time stress that they set out to open a dialogue with the reader, so that the text, like the work of literature as Djebar conceives it, is once again an experiment in addressing the other, with unpredictable results. Le Même livre, then, at once explores relations between different cultures, promotes an ongoing and open-ended mode of reflection in its form as a series of responses, and, finally, calls to the reader to keep that spontaneity and dialogue alive. According to the authors, ‘c’est vers l’Etranger – quel qu’il soit et d’où qu’il vienne – que se tourne ce livre’ [‘it is towards the Stranger that this book turns – whoever he is and wherever he is from’]; each

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reader is called upon to respond anew, just as Djebar and Attridge suggest the literary encounter also demands.34 The title Le Même livre encapsulates the impetus for the volume. The authors stress that their at once distinct and overlapping cultures are here brought together in a single book, and this text is the signifier of that unity and sharing. Their own Même livre, however, refers at the same time to the original communication between Judaism and Islam, both religions of the book, both monotheisms, the complicity of which is crystallized in Khatibi’s observation that ‘les Musulmans et les Juifs écrivent dans le même livre, sans le savoir’ [‘Muslims and Jews write in the same book, without knowing it’].35 Le Même livre, then, denotes most specifically the overlap between the Torah and the Koran, as well as the wider history of dialogue between the two religions that has come to be so disastrously forgotten in the sequence of conflicts since the Second World War, the formation of the state of Israel, and the demise of colonialism. It is perhaps worth noting that the dynamism and adaptability particularly of Egyptian Jews was already the subject of Hassoun’s previous volume, Les Juifs du Nil, where the author argues that through multiple political changes and successive take-overs, ‘les Juifs d’Egypte ont intégré, absorbé, les cultures et les invasions’ [‘Egyptian Jews have integrated and absorbed cultures and invasions’].36 Far from claiming an intrinsic Jewish identity, he suggests, Egyptian Jews have historically been able to interact with and adapt to the other cultures with which they have come into contact. Moreover, the historians contributing to Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora’s mammoth History of Jewish-Muslim Relations stress varying degrees of openness and dialogue between Jews and Muslims across the Middle East and North Africa until the mid-twentieth century. In the early days of Islam, for example, Stora notes that Mohammed initially wanted to bring about a convergence with Judaism, and even when this turned out not to be acceptable to Jews, the Jewish community was nevertheless accorded the special status of dhimma or protection, enabling them to trade and practise their religion freely in Muslim countries. In addition, historian Mark Cohen analyses the Koran’s mixed messages concerning Judaism, since the text at first seems to offer convergence, only next to convey conflict when that convergence appeared to be problematic. Yet it is important, Cohen stresses, that the Koran’s larger spiritual principles continue to emphasize conciliation and dialogue.37 Hassoun and Khatibi’s Le Même livre takes the figure of the book as the signifier for this conciliation, and the relationship between the two holy books is conceived as the starting point for their own intercultural dialogue

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through letter writing. As Geneviève Gobillot discusses, the Koran itself can be read as ‘a commentary on scriptures and previous revelations’, and its various forms of reflection and explanation refer to ways of reading the existing holy books of monotheism.38 The text, then, contains on the one hand explicit rewritings of passages from the Torah, and Gobillot takes the narrative of Abraham’s  encounter with the angel as a particularly striking example. On the other hand, she argues, many verses  contain implicit references to previous religious texts, so that dialogue  turns out to be integral to the very creation  and development of Islamic scripture. Many other texts in Meddeb and Stora’s volume elucidate not only the  history of interaction between the two religions but similarities also in other  areas, including law, philosophy and everyday  practices such as prayer, holy day rituals, ritual fasting and culinary tradition. Examples of these, moreover, are recalled with affection by Khatibi and Hassoun in some of the later letters in Le Même livre evoking their respective childhoods filled with the sights and sounds of the other’s culture. The parallels between Hebrew  and Arabic languages are also laid out, for example, in the section on ‘Mirrored Languages’ in Meddeb and Stora’s volume, though dialogue between languages will be, as we shall see, a focus for Hassoun and Khatibi’s volume in even more complex ways. Hassoun and Khatibi’s text is replete with references to these points of dialogue and convergence. Khatibi notes in both religions the interdiction of the image and commitment to the word, and he responds to Hassoun’s reference to the proximity of the blind to the divine word with several examples of the ‘voyant’ who is able to see beyond the visual image in Muslim tradition. Hassoun responds in turn with the reflection that both religions understand writing to be an attempt to access an ineffable that nevertheless always remains beyond signification: ‘le Musulman comme le Juif serait en proie à l’écriture dès qu’il s’agit d’aborder l’Ineffable. Celui-là joue de la distortion des lettres, celui-ci s’attache à l’écriture d’un signifiant dont le signifié serait comme déplacé, éloigné hors de la vue’ [‘the Muslim and the Jew are prey to writing as soon as they try to approach the Ineffable. The one plays on the distortion of letters, the other binds himself to the inscription of a signifier whose signified is displaced, distanced and out of sight’].39 This reflection on writing as a form of displacement returns intermittently in the authors’ self-conscious theorization of their own project and its relationship with the literary more broadly, though here it is above all significant in that they underline a philosophical affinity between Jewish and Muslim conceptions of the written word. This history of proximity between the two religions is compellingly encapsulated later in the

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text by Hassoun’s image of the arrangement of the tombs in the Turkish cemetery in Marsa, where the Jewish tombs face the East and the Muslim tombs face the South-East.40 The angle between them is a space of forty-five degrees which, according to Hassoun, might have formed the title for their correspondence, and is associated for him with that promise of complicity, containing traces of arabesque and cuneiform, a writing and reading interwoven with one another created out of a shared space. The complicity that Hassoun and Khatibi both trace and recreate is explicitly set against many references to division and conflict between Judaism and Arab culture. Khatibi laments, for example, the loss of that historical dialogue between the religions and the end of tolerance towards Jews in the Arab world: ‘les Indépendances, l’Etat d’Israël ont sonné le glas en déracinant encore plus les sépharades. Et ceux qui, parmi eux, appellent maintenant à une nostalgie de leur identité arabe “perdue” doivent sentir en eux-mêmes, je l’éprouve à mon tour, l’état de revenants et fantômes à leur pays natal’ [‘independence from colonialism and the foundation of the state of Israel sounded the death knell by uprooting Sephardi Jews even further. And those among them who express nostalgia for their “lost” Arab identity must as I do feel they are ghosts or phantoms in their native land’].41 On the one hand, Khatibi goes on to trace this conflict back to its conceptual underpinnings in theocracy. Judaism and Islam are now pitted against one another because ‘nous sommes empoisonnés par notre archaïsme exclusif ’ [‘we are poisoned by our exclusive archaism’].42 The monotheistic structure now claims a kind of absolutism, so that each religious system excludes the other. On the other hand, the volume contains several references to real moments of conflict unfolding as the authors write. In June  1982, for example, Khatibi writes about the invasion of Lebanon by Israel, the result, he contends, of the creation of a state by means of force and by the exclusion of the other. If he vilifies the exorbitance of the demand for recognition by the state of Israel, however, Khatibi also criticizes the inability of Arab states to accord both Palestinians and Jews with equal recognition. Again, however, he suggests that the problem is this underlying exclusivism, ‘le dieu Terreur, le dieu Stratégie, le dieu Technologie, et tous ses grands et petits génies qui font et défont la cartographie du Moyen-Orient’ [‘the god of Terror, the god of Strategy, the god of Technology, and all those greater and lesser geniuses who create and recreate the cartography of the Middle East’].43 Khatibi’s letter ends on a note of hope, though he concedes that the idea of a reunified, Abrahamic Jerusalem can now only be a naïve dream.

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While recalling the early convergence between Judaism and Islam, Le Même livre at the same time envisions a new, alternative dialogue, performed in the writers’ own letter writing, and which indicates something of the power of literary creativity in keeping a dynamic form of relationality alive. One aspect of this kind of encounter comes from the authors’ use of French and their attendant theorization of multilingualism, explored at the same time, as we have seen, in several of Khatibi’s other works including Maghreb pluriel and, later, in Un Été à Stockholm. French, Khatibi suggests, functions for the writers as a kind of ‘intermédiaire’, though he also notes that he knows a little Hebrew, and wonders whether this sketchy apprehension of Hebrew was indeed the trigger for this  correspondence carried out nevertheless in French. Both writers refer also to their meeting at Khatibi’s conference on bilingualism in Rabat, where, despite participants’ many references to the painful schism created by bilingualism, the notion served as a call to look beyond monolingualism and ethnocentrism, ‘au-delà des frontières,  des cartes dessinées sur notre mémoire  par des millénaires de méconnaissance et d’intolérance’ [‘beyond borders, and beyond the maps etched on our memory by millennia of ignorance and intolerance’].44 The use of another language for one’s writing,  Khatibi goes on, may be associated with the pain of exile, yet it is at the same time a chance, a risk, bringing the destruction of any entrenched ‘self ’  but also a liberating recreation as fiction. Later in the volume, moreover, in August 1984, Khatibi notes that the letters have become more personal, as if it were perhaps easier for the writers to express themselves freely in a foreign  language. This in turn generates a further evocation of both Jewish and  Arabic multilingualism,  two towers of Babel, two diasporas, two extraordinarily diverse and evolving peoples. It is the myth of autochthony, responds Hassoun, that has recently undermined the history of diaspora and multilingualism in both cultures, and the writers’ own theorizations of writing between languages and without roots are presented then as philosophical counters to destructive claims for territorial and cultural as well as linguistic possession. Writing, then, and in particular the creative space offered by a literary writing between languages, can promote an alternative philosophy to that which underpins cultural and religious exclusivism. Khatibi is struck, he writes, by the affirmation by François Cheng at the bilingualism conference, that in choosing to write in French and to abandon Chinese it is as if he is admitting ‘je suis mort’ [‘I am dead’].45 Yet, while this apparent suicide might seem highly troubling, for Khatibi it also offers the chance of a resurrection, a recreation, as if ‘je suis

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un personnage en forme d’idéogramme’ [‘I am a character in the form of an ideogram’]. Later, after reading an article by Daniel Lagache on ‘polyglottisme dans l’analyse’, Khatibi reflects on the creative layering of bilingual writing, which, he contends, might be the product of the repression Lagache finds in the analysand’s use of a second language, but which might also help to dissociate language from the constraints of law: ‘la langue n’est ni maternelle, ni paternelle, comme la loi’ [‘language is neither maternal nor paternal, like the law’].46 Writing in another language would then symbolically help to contest the idea of an original truth accessed through words that would somehow be able to bear that single message. This reflection on bilingualism or the use of a second language is also evidently part of what fuels the evolution of Khatibi’s pensée autre, not only a mode of thinking open to multiple languages, but a restless philosophy that celebrates its own contingency because of the philosopher’s ability to perceive the fictionality of his writing: ‘une pensée ni sage ni affolée, une sorte de philosophie du libertinage, la frivolité grave des choses ou personnages ou personnes qui me font signe’ [‘a mode of thinking that is neither wise nor mad, a sort of philosophy of libertinage, the serious frivolity of things or characters or people who signal to me’].47 As in Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi is again exploring here a form of writing, perhaps a poetic philosophy, constructed out of more than one language and therefore fundamentally at odds with all forms of linguistic, cultural and religious determinism. What is most original about Le Même livre, however, is the way in which the writers’ use of the letter form is incorporated into, and serves further to develop, literature’s creative movement, its embrace of and address to the other. Like Djebar and Derrida, Hassoun and Khatibi conceive the letter as necessarily diasporic, its circulation and effects always on some level unplanned and unpredictable. The open-ended trajectory of the letter once again represents and performs the ability of the literary work, and even more the literary work by a bilingual writer, to resist being circumscribed by a single monolithic culture and language. Responding to a reference by Khatibi to the potential loss of the letter, the possibility that it might not reach its addressee, Hassoun, for example, rather imagines the letter’s continual movement: ‘je rêve d’une lettre qui ainsi, voguerait dans l’éther, se jouant des bords. Seuls ceux qui marchent sans  regarder leurs pieds, la capteraient’ [‘I dream of a letter which would in this way sail through the ether, play itself out on the margins. Only those who walk without looking at their feet would be able to capture it’].48 Just as Djebar evokes the image of the scrap of  paper escaping the walls of the young girl’s domestic enclosure at the beginning of L’Amour, la fantasia, so here does Hassoun

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intimate something  of the letter’s unlimited potential to reach new readers and to signify differently in different contexts. One of the main preoccupations of the letters, moreover, might be the intermittent, promising but curtailed form of the  communication they offer between Hassoun and Khatibi. Yet at the same time, the address to the reader  of the published volume both at the beginning  and at the end testifies to the work’s acknowledgement that it too, like each individual missive, institutes a new encounter each time a new reader picks it up. If, as we have seen, at the end of the preface the authors insist that their principal call is to the ‘Étranger’, in  the volume’s closing letter Khatibi again refers to the reader in order to stress  that the destination of the work will be open-ended and unknown: ‘Quel est donc le destinataire imaginaire de ces lettres? Quel lecteur est interpellé ici?’ [‘So who is the imaginary recipient of these letters? Which reader is interpellated here?’].49  The questions remain unanswered, and these letters, like literature  itself, cannot determine their own reception in advance. Hassoun and Khatibi’s correspondence is, they insist, something of an experiment, a series of contingent reflections covering common concerns, the status of which must remain provisional. It is, according to Khatibi, a ‘correspondance ni fausse ni vraie, au-delà de cette opposition, une correspondance à finalité graphique et imprimable’ [‘a correspondence that is neither true nor false, beyond that opposition, a correspondence that results in a graphic and printable form’].50 The practicalities of letter writing and sending, as well as the contingent circumstances of the missives’ creation and reception, will turn out to be an important part of the text’s philosophy and its conception of the ways in which writing reflects back on the conflicts to which  the authors bear witness. Many questions never receive a response, and there are sometimes long gaps between letters before a new train of thought  is set in motion. This pattern itself aptly demonstrates the movement of human thought and its evolution through  exchange and writing. The writers seize on words and images in one  another’s writing before allowing their own  musings to unfold unplanned, so that, as Hassoun affirms, ‘les lignes de force pourraient n’apparaître qu’en cours  de route ou au terme de cet échange’ [‘the key elements  could only appear along the way or at the end of this exchange’].51 In his letter dated 8 July 1984, moreover, Khatibi notes that the last letters had crossed over, yet rather than simply assuming that this was a one-off error, he goes on to describe how the postman’s distribution and dispersal of  letters is always contingent and necessarily subject to error. This is an inevitable part of the letter writing process,  and again serves to emphasize the potential

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unreliability of the communication attempted through written correspondence while also capturing something of the unpredictable circulation of a published  literary work. In addition, Hassoun comments that letter writing is subject to ‘accidents’, as if  the writers sometimes say things they do not mean, or finish by contradicting  themselves and revising their ideas, and in so doing they record  the necessarily fitful but dynamic evolution of thought through the writing process. Indeed, Hassoun admits towards the end that he is no longer sure why he is writing, yet again, spontaneity and the absence of a predetermined goal are part of the project’s integral reflection on letters and literary writing as producers of open-ended exchange. As we saw in Chapter  6, in Un Été à Stockholm translation and writing between languages come to figure a broader ethics, a vision of human relationality according to which each subject would recognize and respect the other’s difference and resist the temptation to control or appropriate the other. Similarly, in Le Même livre the spontaneity of the correspondence and the form of literary writing that it at the same time serves to represent are also associated with an open and ethical mode of friendship. Hassoun notes, for example, that he loves writing rather in the way that he might love a woman, ‘dans une reconnaissance toujours renouvelée. Et dans l’impossible à combler’ [‘in a continually renewed process of recognition. In the impossibility of full satisfaction’].52 The imagery here of renewal and incompletion, both in writing and in loving relationships, represents again a necessary resistance to ownership and possession and a recognition that both friendship and literature require an acceptance of development and change. Khatibi, moreover, comments on the relationship between men and women in a way that recalls the reflection on ‘aimance’ in Un Été à Stockholm and elsewhere, but he goes on also to suggest that the interaction between Muslims and Jews needs to follow the same model. The ethics of openness, the resistance to appropriation performed most aptly by the letters themselves and by a writing open to different cultures and languages, might, according to Khatibi, also offer a way forward from the present conflict between Judaism and Islam: Et bien, j’aimerais dire quelques mots, non pas de l’amitié en général (il n’y a que des amitiés), mais sur ce qui, du judaïque à l’islamique, transforme le mépris et la haine en contrat blanc, où rien n’est effacé, mais où le mépris se suspend dans sa trace archaïque, dans son fond abîmé. Rien n’est effacé, mais la connaissance de l’autre, du Juif, de mes pères et frères, permet de me dégager d’une certaine représentation mythique, de la haine ancestrale. Il n’y a pas d’amour entre les gens du Livre partagé. Il n’y a que ce rapport au Livre et au sacré.53

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[So I would like to say a few words, not about friendship in general (there are only individual friendships), but about what, between Judaism and Islam, transforms contempt and hatred into a blank contract, where nothing is effaced, but where contempt is suspended in its archaic state, its ruined foundation. Nothing is effaced, but knowledge of the other, of the Jew, of my fathers and brothers, allows me to separate myself from a certain mythical representation, from ancestral hatred. There is no love between the people who share the Book. There is just that relationship with the Book and with the sacred.’]

The relinquishment of that mythical hatred and the acceptance of difference and evolution in people and in thought would, for Khatibi, perhaps trigger the start of a dialogue built out of the ethics of intercultural writing. At the heart of Le Même livre is, once again, a theory of literature and of its capacity to represent an alternative mode of thinking to that which founds cultural and religious antagonism. Khatibi notes early on, for example, that his own immersion in the Koran and its rhythms is a preoccupation with the text precisely as text as opposed to doctrine: ‘le Coran selon sa lettre, ou plutôt ses ayate, sans commentaire interposé, sans doctrine aucune’ [‘the Koran to the letter, or rather to its verses, without any interposed commentary, without doctrine’].54 Perhaps, he implies, the conception of Koranic scripture as dogmatic is a matter of interpretation, as religious teaching is at the same time mingled with a call for reflection. By the end of the volume, it turns out that this commitment to writing as literary creativity, as cultural resource but also as potentiality, is at the root of his philosophy of dialogue, and structures his exchange with Hassoun. Moreover, Khatibi suggests both provocatively and controversially that ‘on peut donc relire le Coran autrement que la théologie ou la mystique. Et ce qui est mis en jeu, de part et d’autre, dans ces trois formes du monothéisme, c’est comment le message sacré nous interpelle aujourd’hui, qu’on soit croyant ou pas ou au-delà de toute opposition entre croyance et athéisme’ [‘it is possible, then, to read the Koran other than as theology or mysticism. And what is at stake on all sides in these three forms of monotheism is the way in which the sacred message interpellates us today, whether we are believers or not, or beyond any opposition between belief and atheism’].55 Rather than conceiving the holy book as an immutable truth, then, for Khatibi it is a living text. Like literature, it addresses its readers differently across space and time and constitutes an immensely rich repository of reflection that can invite different forms of exchange in different contexts and with different readers. Some understanding of this dynamism and of the multiple reading encounters that a text might provoke would serve in this way to work against

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the temptation to cling to cultural and religious exclusivism. The very vitality and energy of Hassoun and Khatibi’s exchange is, moreover, a highly creative and suggestive performance of this kind of dynamic encounter. It might be objected that Khatibi and Hassoun’s correspondence, and the model of literature it represents, has a kind of frivolity about it. And indeed, this championing of the literary will be at odds with the conception that many Jews and Muslims retain of the mode of reading demanded by the holy book. As I quoted earlier, Khatibi describes his thinking as ‘une philosophie de libertinage’ [‘a philosophy of libertinage’], and certainly the playful form of the correspondence, together with the celebration of the possibilities offered by fiction, might make it difficult to perceive the force of the work’s intervention in the real conflicts on which it nevertheless reflects. While Le Même livre at times seems utopian in its call for dialogue between cultures, however, the conception of literature on which it rests must also admit its own frailty, it must accept that its effects cannot be pinned down and determined in concrete terms if it is to remain faithful to its own structuring principles. As for Djebar, literature for Khatibi and Hassoun creates a singular dialogue each time it is read, and its trajectory and impact will always be unpredictable. The text continues to circulate long after its creators have relinquished control, and it is not possible to establish how the particular arguments that Khatibi and Hassoun put forward could alter the unfolding of Jewish-Muslim interaction in the world. Khatibi and Hassoun perhaps imply in this way that their focus on literature and language leaves their work in the ludic domain of the textual. Yet if it is suggested that literature has a certain non-seriousness, then this is also, for Khatibi and Hassoun, the root of its critical force. It may be that literature’s capacity for reinvention means that it cannot be reduced to an identifiable argument or intervention, and that its effects cannot be conceived to be the product of a specified and determined aim. As many of the texts explored in this study suggest, however, it perhaps does mean that it calls its readers to keep their thinking dynamic and alive. This living dialogue by definition cannot found a politics built out of a concrete set of goals. But it promises at least an ethics of openness and mutual recognition.

Notes 1 2 3

Assia Djebar, Ces voix qui m’assiègent (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999) pp. 104, 105. Ibid., p. 106. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2005) p. 63.

Francophone Letters: Literature as Encounter 4 5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

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Ibid., p. 78. Djebar, Ces voix qui m’assiègent, p. 25. ‘Transmission et dépossession sont par suite inscrites, avec les récits d’Assia Djebar, dans les figures du partage, de l’empathie, la sororité, la reprise, le relais et par des formes de prosodie venues de la musique, des danses voire des transes des femmes – sans alphabet. Transmission et dépossession cependant appellent aussi les figures de la solitude, de la souffance et de la mise en souffrance, de la patience, la résistance, le creusement au vif de soi des signes d’écriture qui font de chaque livre une stèle – un tombeau mais aussi des repères qui ouvrent un espace à parcourir sans fin, en tous sens.’ Wolfgang Asholt, Mireille Calle-Gruber, Dominique Combe, ‘Liminaire’, Assia Djebar: littérature et transmission (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010) 9–14 (p. 11). Patrick Crowley, ‘Algerian Letters: Mixture, Genres, Literature Itself ’, in Patrick Crowley and Jane Hiddleston (eds.), Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011) 129–146 (p. 142). Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985) pp. 11, 12; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (London: Quartet Books, 1993) p. 3. Ibid., p. 12; p. 4. Ibid., p. 13; p. 4. Ibid., p. 86; p. 58. Ibid. Ibid., p. 87; p. 58. Ibid., p. 88; p. 59. Ibid., p. 91; p. 61. Ibid., p. 67; p. 45. Ibid., p. 84; pp. 56, 57. Ibid., p. 84; p. 57. Ibid. Ibid., p. 151; p. 105. Ibid., p. 308; p. 222. Ibid., p. 308; p. 223. Ibid., p. 309; p. 223. Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980) p. 54; The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) p. 48. I would like to thank Patrick Crowley for drawing my attention to this quotation in his own article, ‘Algerian Letters: Mixture, Genres, Literature itself ’, cited above. Ibid., p. 7; p. 3. Jacques Lacan, ‘Le Séminaire sur «La Lettre volée»’, Ecrits I (Paris: Seuil, 1966) 19–75 (p. 53); ‘Seminar on the Purloined Letter’, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 (1973): 39–72 (p. 72).

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27 Derrida, La Carte postale, p. 28; p. 23. 28 David Wills, ‘Post/Card/Match/Book/Envois/Derrida’, SubStance 13.2 (1984): 19–38 (p. 23). 29 Assia Djebar, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (Paris: Fayard, 2007) p. 403. 30 Ibid., p. 404. 31 Ibid. 32 Olivia C. Harrison, ‘For a Transcolonial Reading of the Contemporary Algerian Novel’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Special Issue on The Contemporary Roman Maghrébin: Aesthetics, Politics, Production 2000–2015 20.1 (2016): 102–110. 33 Jacques Hassoun and Abdelkébir Khatibi, Le Même livre (Paris: Editions de l’éclat, 1985) pp. 8, 9. 34 Ibid., p. 10. 35 Ibid., p. 17. 36 Jacques Hassoun (ed.), Juifs du Nil (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1981) p. 12. 37 Mark R. Cohen, ‘The “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Myth and Reality’, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (eds.), A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, trans. Jane-Marie Todd and Michael B. Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) 28–38. 38 Geneviève Gobillot, ‘The Koran and the Torah: The Foundations of Intertextuality’, in Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (eds.), A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations, 611–622 (p. 611). Gobillot sets out the three forms of exegesis: tafsīr (commentary), ta’wil (unveiling of original intent), and tafsīl (detailed explanation). See pp. 611–612. 39 Hassoun and Khatibi, Le Même livre, p. 21. 40 Ibid., p. 72. 41 Ibid., p. 25. 42 Ibid., p. 87. 43 Ibid., p. 65. 44 Ibid., p. 41. 45 Ibid., p. 42. 46 Ibid., p. 54. 47 Ibid., p. 55. 48 Ibid., p. 61. 49 Ibid., p. 161. 50 Ibid., pp. 12, 13. 51 Ibid., p. 14. 52 Ibid., p. 61. 53 Ibid., p. 139. 54 Ibid., p. 40. 55 Ibid., p. 163.

8

The Power of Reading: Living with/through Books

If literature is the instigator of a kind of fragile and tentative dialogue, then this can be conceived not only as the result of the text’s open and continued circulation but also as the result of the active work of the reader. Derek Attridge’s conception of the literary encounter offered a productive model for the reflection on literature and letters explored in Chapter  7, and his vision of the reader’s dynamic and active role in bringing literary works to life can serve as an insightful backdrop for the investigations of reading undertaken in the North African texts to be explored here. Attridge notably stresses the importance for the reader of ‘reading creatively’, of allowing the text to surprise us and alter our patterns of thinking. According to Attridge, to read creatively in an attempt to respond fully and responsibly to the alterity and singularity of the text is to work against the mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same, attending to that which can barely be heard, registering what is unique about the shaping of language, thought, and feeling in this particular work.1

Reading from this perspective is a process whereby ideological preconceptions and prejudices are put to one side, and whereby the reader is called upon to take on board modes of thinking with which he or she might be highly unfamiliar. The reader must also be prepared to be transformed by the work, just as the words that make up the text are reinterpreted and transformed by the reader. This chapter will both build on and nuance this celebration of readerly creativity in order to think through the potentially transformative effects of reading as these are presented on both a political and on a personal level in two more francophone Algerian literary works. Tahar Djaout’s Le Dernier été de la raison engages explicitly with the resurgence of Islamist extremism and its stultification of literary creativity, and here literary reading brings an openness to diversity and unfamiliarity in a gesture of resistance to reductive

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and oppressive religious and cultural orthodoxies. Djaout’s main character is a bookseller, passionate about literature because it challenges a doctrine that disallows questioning and creativity, and his reading practice stimulates the imagination in ways that work against the established frameworks of both nationalist and extremist cultures. This does not mean that literature becomes a utopian space for the successful creation of a liberated and harmonious new community, however, and, as in L’Invention du desert, living through books also frustrates the protagonist’s hopes for the creation of a new shared mindset of openness and mutual recognition. Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, moreover, offers a yet more complex vision not only of the intellectual stimulation but also of the affective power of the reading process, as here the protagonist’s emotional development takes place against a background of a series of literary encounters that feed into, shape and alter her relationships with family and friends as well as society and history. These encounters both transform and disturb the young reader, however, and reading is depicted at once as a force for the re-evaluation of the self and as a potentially distressing source of questioning that unsettles both the subject’s self-knowledge and her relationships with other characters around her. If, as we saw in Chapter  3, writers such as Ben Jelloun and Daoud expressed a certain scepticism towards the power of literature in the contemporary context, for both Djaout and Djebar reading too is on one level provocative, enriching, and life giving, but on another it is also the bringer of renewed uncertainty. Before embarking on readings of Djaout and Djebar, a brief reflection on a short story by Abdelfattah Kilito, ‘La Nièce de Don Quichotte’ in La Querelle des images, provides an arresting insight into the perceived power of reading. In Cervantes’s original, Don Quixote’s niece burns his books, having seen the dangers of her uncle’s misguided attempts to mimic literature in real life. In Kilito’s arch response it is the father of the child protagonist Abdallah who fears the effects of the latter’s reading material on his son’s impressionable mind: ‘les livres peuvent tuer, ils peuvent aussi rendre fou, c’est ce que la littérature, bien avant Cervantes, ne cesse de proclamer’ [‘since well before Cervantes, literature has ceaselessly declared that books can kill and drive you mad’].2 At the end of the text, however, the narrator recounts how, having seized his son’s book from his hands just as he was reading a fight scene in Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer (Tueur de Daims), the father finishes not by confiscating it but by studying it intently himself. So if initially, the father fears the ability of literature to threaten a man or send him mad, and endeavours to banish his son’s reading material in order to protect his security, when he sees the images illustrating the Cooper

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novel, he too is seduced enough to want to find out more. The  story wittily portrays at once the narrow-mindedness that seeks to avoid the stimulation and challenge of literature, and literature’s ability to distract and draw its readers in despite their desire to cling to old habits. Abdallah’s father may not be able to read the story and responds merely to the charm of the picture, yet the book’s seductive capacity means that by the end of the text, ‘il était complètement désarmé et ne pouvait plus faire œuvre d’iconoclaste ou de censeur’ [‘he was completed disarmed, and could no longer play the role of an iconoclast or a censor’].3 The book is accorded here with a formidable power, in that, although initially it generates suspicion, its lure incites its recipient to suspend his former judgement. Reading in Kilito’s story is portrayed as powerfully seductive, and it is also an object of suspicion for authorities who want to limit people’s ability to question how they live. One can read in order to discover new modes of thinking, or one can fear and banish literature precisely because it requires a confrontation with the unfamiliar. To return to Attridge, this means that reading also has an ethical dimension: the literary work issues a call to respond properly to alterity, to relate to it but not to appropriate and reduce it. If we concede not to banish books but to allow ourselves to be seduced, we must be prepared to take on board the challenges they raise. In Attridge’s terms: To respond to the demand of the literary work as the demand of the other is to attend to it as a unique event whose happening is a call, a challenge, an obligation: understand how little you understand me, translate my untranslatability, learn me by heart and thus learn the otherness that inhabits the heart.4

So literature calls upon us to respond ethically, and this can also, for Attridge, have political consequences, not in the sense that the work can be seen as a tool for social change, but in the sense that its exposure of unfamiliar modes of thinking can serve to unsettle fixed political ideologies. The difficulty with Attridge’s suggestion here, however, is that only certain types of readers will encounter these most challenging works, and these are the readers most likely to be persuaded by the questioning that they raise. Readers who respond to the challenge of literature will be those who are most willing to open themselves up to it, and the subversive force of literature will evidently be limited if it only reaches those who are already receptive to it. Abdallah’s father may have been seduced by the images accompanying his son’s reading material, then, but as in Attridge’s study, the powerful effects of the book in Kilito’s story are perhaps

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presented in a utopian light. The remainder of this chapter will explore this notion of reading and its effects in Djaout’s and Djebar’s novels in order to analyse what it might mean for literature to destabilize political orthodoxies or personal emotions, but also in order to explore the limitations and the difficulties of this potentially subversive practice.

Tahar Djaout, Le Dernier été de la raison Tahar Djaout’s Le Dernier été de la raison was published in 1999, some years after his death in 1993, on the basis of an unfinished manuscript found among his papers. The work had no title when it was discovered; the phrase ‘le dernier été de la raison’ [‘the last summer of reason’] is taken from the text itself to refer to the dramatic deterioration of the oppressive society that the novel starkly portrays. Like L’Invention du désert, it figures the conflict between extremist Islamists and intellectuals as a tension between opposing responses to the written word, or more precisely here, between distinct conceptions of the reading process. The narrative tells the story of Boualem Yekker, a bookseller who tenaciously clings to his business, and to his belief in literature, under the oppressive regime of the ‘Frères Vigilants’ – a radical religious party, reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan, whose tight grip on Algerian society disallows all cultural activity other than engagement with ‘le Livre’ itself. Importantly, Islam itself is not mentioned in the text overtly, and though the reference to the FIS is evident, Djaout is evidently not trying to undermine Islam’s spiritual teachings but to offer a specific critique of the destructive concept of reading at the heart of extremist thinking and which has disastrously divorced from more moderate Islamic notions of the ongoing work of scriptural interpretation. Bearing traces of the totalitarian regime of Orwell’s 1984, Le Dernier été also, then, portrays political and religious oppression through a reflection on the status of literature, as the bookseller finds himself increasingly victimized, isolated and ultimately broken (his shop is closed down and his books are burned). If, as Attridge suggested, literature demands an engagement with otherness, Djaout’s novel shows that it is precisely this sort of engagement that extremist thinking disallows in its deferential privileging of the sacred text, to the exclusion of all other cultural and creative works. This is not a celebration of a ‘Western’ form of liberal humanism opposed to Islam per se, but a broader exploration of the importance of non-prescriptive modes of reading against forms of dogmatism that disallow individual thought.

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Le Dernier été de la raison constitutes an overt challenge to a certain reductive understanding of the reading process. For the Frères Vigilants, the only book worth reading is le Livre, bearer of the Truth. This Truth descends upon humanity ready-made, to be received and absorbed with worship: ‘on vous arrache aux questionnements incongrus, aux doutes qui harcelaient vos nuits, aux angoisses qui nouaient vos tripes. On vous replace, d’une poigne bienveillante mais ferme, dans le giron chaud et protecteur de l’évidence’ [‘you are torn away from incongruous forms of questioning, from the doubts that disturbed your nights, from the anxieties that knotted your guts. You are put back, with a kind but firm hand, into the warm and protective lap of proof ’].5 When interrogated on his own reading on the eve of the elections, Boualem Yekker recalls pretending that he too only believes in the sacred text, since all other works are nothing but ‘fatuités’ that obscure and distract from the Truth. Moreover, the Frères Vigilants promulgate a new form of knowledge in which everything must be tested against the book itself. Scientific discovery must be justified by its relation to the Sacred Book, so that ‘notre religion est la source de tout savoir: toute loi scientifique, morale ou législative édictée au temps d’avant cette religion, où l’humanité baignait dans les ténèbres, le mensonge et la barbarie, est nulle et non avenue’ [‘our religion is the source of all knowledge: every scientific, moral, or legislative law decreed before the time of this religion, when humanity was bathed in darkness, lies and barbarity, is null and void’].6 Boualem Yekker’s bookshop is forced in this context to participate in a semiclandestine circuit of exchange, where ‘profane’ works have become prohibitively expensive because they are increasingly rare. Literature is outlawed because it constitutes an attack on Truth. Boualem’s distaste for the regime is intensified when he realizes that children too are brainwashed by religious teaching, and it is they who carry out some of the first petty attacks on his shop. Their education is reduced to passive assimilation and rote learning. Children are taught to be subjugated to a higher order passed down to them from above, ‘ils doivent servir la Vérité, transgresser les barrières de la loi humaine arbitraire et fallacieuse pour atteindre et servir la vraie morale, celle qui échappe au temps et aux conjectures parce qu’elle est l’émanation du Bien dont le Très Haut a fixé une fois pour toutes les contours et la substance’ [‘they must serve the Truth, transgress the frontiers of arbitrary and fallacious human knowledge to reach and serve true morality, the morality that is beyond time and beyond speculation because it is the emanation of the Good, the contours and substance of which have been fixed forever from on high’].7 The schoolmaster insists on the child’s assimilation of the Text ‘à

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coups de bâton’ [‘by strokes of a cane’], and the words of the text are ingested, painfully, like a destructive potion.8 This subservience to the text is also, for the bookseller, not only violent and painful, but destructive of life itself. When his daughter is converted, he laments nothing less than the death of the spirited young girl, replaced by a ‘statue dressée de justicière. Virago implacable que toute féminité a désertée’ [‘the upright statue of an upholder of law, an implacable Virago without feminity’].9 She voices reprimands to her father as if in a trance, inhabited by an external force that has killed her childish mischievousness and joie de vivre. And for Boualem, accessing the order of Truth means paralysing any capacity for receptivity: ‘se boucher les oreilles, domestiquer ses yeux, brider les élans de son cœur, déchirer ses livres trop hardis, casser tout ce qui vibre et qui chante’ [to block one’s ears, to domesticate one’s eyes, to restrain the impulses of the heart, to destroy books that are too adventurous, to break up everything that moves and sings’].10 Reading from this point of view is a process of closing down, a refusal of the new in deference to what is known to be sacred, a turning away from the dynamism of human life. Against reading as passive assimilation, as subservience to Truth, Boualem like Kilito’s little Abdallah conceives his immersion in literature as nothing less than an adventure, with the twists and turns of a journey, whose progress is hazardous and whose end is unpredictable. He enjoys Arabic texts whose punctuation is careless, where voices are merged and juxtaposed, and where the attentive or ‘vigilant’ reader is actively called upon to recreate the meaning of winding sentences and coiled paragraphs, so that: ‘la lecture est chaque fois une aventure, des avancées incertaines, des allées et venues tortueuses pour débusquer le visage des mots, leur redonner une fonction, les établir dans leur rôle de locomotive ou de wagon’ [‘reading is always an adventure, it is made of uncertain advances, tortuous comings and goings which bring out the face of words, give them a function again, establish them in their role as locomotive or carriage’].11 Reading here, rather than a one-way transmission, is an active encounter much closer to that envisaged by Attridge, as the text makes demands of the reader, exposes him or her to the unexpected, and calls upon him or her to engage actively with what is unfamiliar and challenging. It initiates something akin to what Mary Jacobus calls ‘a dynamic process of connection, linguistic possession, and vehicular movement’, and triggers an alteration in the reader as he/she is transported somewhere new.12 Moreover, what Boualem Yekker laments for future generations under the Frères Vigilants is their lack of exposure to ‘l’inquiétude et l’impertinence des livres’ [‘the worrying and the impertinence of books’], as if books should probe, worry and

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unsettle their readers.13 The encounter between a text and its reader is from this point of view, again, the instigation of a challenge, a call for reappraisal, an impertinent address triggering unease rather than the affirmation of ‘la certitude résignée’ [‘resigned certainty’].14 Boualem’s books in this way bring something of Attridge’s otherness to a transformative encounter that challenges settled truths. Reading is also for Boualem a form of travel, providing access to other places and other worlds. As a child, Boualem dreams of roaming round the world, and it is through reading that his imagination brings him into contact with different landscapes, climates, architectures and peoples. Again, as Mary Jacobus suggests via A.S. Byatt, reading creates ‘a whole world in your head’, as the reader turns away from his or her immediate surroundings to alternative landscapes that stimulate the rambling mind.15 Boualem’s adventurous reading practices provide him with ‘un univers-kaléidoscope [où] foisonnent des arbres qui nourrissent, rafraîchissent et ombragent, des plantes ornementales, des oiseaux en cage et des oiseaux en liberté liés par leur amour du chant, des cafés où l’on discute et rit, des lieux où l’on s’amuse et danse’ [‘a kaleidoscopic universe that abounds with trees which nourish, refresh, and shelter, ornamental plants, caged and free birds brought together by their love of singing, cafés where people chat and laugh, places where people have fun and dance’].16 This access to another world is also, importantly, not so much a pathway to a better reality as an encounter with multiplicity. This is not simply a vision of utopia, but an introduction to the diversity of the world’s landscapes, plant life, seasons and human activity. It is ‘ensorcelant et dangereux à la fois’ [‘at once enchanting and dangerous’], an inspiring trigger for the imagination but also a potentially threatening exposure to unfamiliar phenomena, even a risk to the self.17 Literature is what opens Boualem’s mind to the multiple places and ways of life that unsettle him as well as offering him pleasure. Furthermore, the memory of the images he has amassed through reading are what provide him with an escape from the pressures of his contemporary life. At times of stress he draws on this bank of dreams, a stock of ‘mirages rafraîchissants’ [‘refreshing mirages’] made at once of blurred shadows and more acutely delineated profiles that transport him away from the grey of the present before propelling him back as he is jolted awake. Not only a comfort, his reading encounters are at once a source of escape and an experience of shock. Despite this evident celebration of the power of the literary encounter, however, Djaout is careful to suggest neither that reading literature is necessarily emancipatory nor that it might actually have the power to provide the basis for

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the construction of a new, more liberated society. A belief in the tranformatory potential of the literary encounter does not lead to an overinflated vision of its power to change the social order, and Djaout’s depiction of reading in Le Dernier été de la raison is modest rather than utopian in its claim for literature’s power. As Julija Sukys notes, Boualem’s surname Yekker means ‘he gets up’ or ‘he holds himself up’, and yet it is perhaps ironic that the bookseller hides himself behind his books rather than articulating his resistance out loud.18 He also at times questions his belief in the potential of literature, as, stoned by children as he opens the door to his shop, his real body of flesh and blood seems entirely divorced from the vibrant life of the mind he pursues through reading. He starts to lose faith in his trade and imagines that the books that line his shelves while clinging to the walls are also hiding from the world, ‘ils se sont voilés le visage’ [‘they veiled their faces’].19 He then wonders in despair if he is not imprisoned by his books, burying himself in their pages so as to avoid engaging with the rest of the world, and indeed, Sukys describes him in her posthumous interview with the author as ‘a prisoner of his bookstore, of his city, of his country’.20 This is no doubt a response to the oppressive life forced on society by the Frères Vigilants, yet there is a sense that the books offer only one form of encounter and replace face-to-face dialogue with others in ways that serve to alienate and anguish Boualem. Reading literature too, it is suggested, might start to feel oppressive if it takes the place of other forms of human encounter. Outcast by the society in which he lives, Boualem is through most of the text painfully alone, (‘ce dont Boualem Yekker souffre le plus, c’est la solitude’ [‘what Boualem Yekker suffers from the most is solitude’]), and the narrative weaves through his thoughts for the most part as they unfold in isolation from others.21 He watches passers-by through the window of the shop when his concentration on his reading wanes, but is only further unsettled by the quasi anonymous shadows of the veiled women walking several paces behind their husbands. His only friend is Ali Elbouliga, who visits the bookshop also in search of some sort of refuge, yet as the story progresses, their conversations are carried out in increasingly hushed tones, and Boualem becomes afraid to put the lights on after dusk so they talk hidden by the gloom. Towards the end of the narrative, we also learn that Boualem is a failed poet, that he would have liked to create the sorts of works he devours, but reads and sells books as a compromise and as an admission of defeat. In this acceptance, we are sardonically told that ‘Boualem a accepté de mourir’ [‘Boualem accepted death’], as he gives up on his own creative dreams and settles for reading rather as a disappointing compromise.22

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Having lost his family to the cause of the Frères Vigilants, Boualem finds his books hardly fill the gap left by his wife and children, and in a cruel passage at the end of the text reflecting on the painful separation of child from parent, books in no way make up for the father’s loss. The intellectual who believes in the discovery of the world through literature is also an irremediably pathetic and lonely figure. The society in which he lives is one that stultifies and crushes creativity, but literature alone is not for Boualem a sufficient antidote to this oppression. Djaout’s Le Dernier été de la raison is in many ways an affirmation of the ways in which literature works to challenge orthodoxies in its creation of an encounter with otherness. The ethics implied by Attridge’s singular encounter is to some extent realized here as Boualem mounts a direct refusal of extremist ideologies that stifle individual thought. This is not, however, a straightforward affirmation of literature’s ability to transform the social and political world, and clearly literary experimentation, as challenging and stimulating as it might be, will not likely become an actual creator of social change. Boualem’s rebellion is compelling and laudable, but it is also ultimately weak and ineffectual, perhaps because he took refuge in books at the expense of engaging with living human beings. If Ben Jelloun’s ‘écrivain public’ was accused of writing in order not to live, one might point out to Boualem Yekker that reading literature has come to replace any dialogue he might have strived to continue with living people – both those that were close to him and those who were swayed by the authoritarian regime. Boualem may feel that his society has turned against him in its vilification of creativity and embrace of religious orthodoxy, but his retreat perhaps only fuels the division between himself and those around him, and his books might have gained more life if he had endeavoured to communicate their hidden treasures with other living beings. Reading, then, might be refreshing, challenging and transforming, but it is less likely to accomplish these sorts of processes if it is carried out alone. Boualem may have felt that he had little choice when he embraced freedom of thought by separating himself from the world and taking refuge in literature, but Djaout is perhaps also suggesting that literature must remain in dialogue with everyday interactive life in the present. What literature can do, in Le Dernier été, is call its reader to ask questions, to doubt, to refuse to submit to a single unchanging Truth, and to perceive the world in ever-changing ways. This alone will not bring the downfall of an oppressive regime, but it will introduce new ways of thinking to any readers prepared to take up the challenge. In a society such as that of Le Dernier été, the

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problem is that fewer and fewer people are either able or willing to engage with literature, and to this problem, Djaout does not offer an easy answer. Indeed, Boualem Yekker’s notion of literature as a stimulus for escape is presented in such direct opposition to the doctrine of the ‘Frères Vigilants’ that it finishes by supporting the sorts of polarizing logic he rejects. And Djaout’s blunt depiction of extremism in the text can perhaps in turn be seen to simplify the highly complex political and religious thinking in different forms of contemporary Islamism, so that his own dichotomy between extremism and liberalism can seem rather stark. Djaout nevertheless compellingly suggests that the banning of literature is an assault on intellectual innovation, and writing and reading can be processes through which a contemplation of a different mode of living might be initiated. The Frères Vigilants of Djaout’s text finish by destroying Boualem’s books precisely because ‘ils ont compris le danger des mots, de tous les mots qu’ils n’arrivent pas à domestiquer et à anesthésier. Car les mots, mis bout à bout, portent le doute, le changement’ [‘they understood the danger of words, of all the words they do not manage to domesticate and anesthetise. For words, put end to end, bring doubt and change’].23 Words offer access to other worlds, other communities and other forms of human organization and sow the seeds, not necessarily of revolution, but perhaps more modestly, of doubt. This doubt is what Djaout perceives as the trigger for the hesitant, unfulfilled imagination of another Algeria, one that might be created out of a dynamic dialogue with the world and open to its own continual reinvention, as opposed to the reductive stultification created by the twin forces of religious extremism and political authoritarianism. His own silencing testifies to the fragility of that more hopeful vision.

Assia Djebar, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père While Djaout’s Le Dernier été de la raison emphasizes the significance of reading for individual free-thinking in a context of religious and political oppression, Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père contains a more intimate tracking of the young narrator’s personal and affective development through reading. Both texts emphasize the reader’s journey of discovery and the freedom of interpretation, but in Nulle part dans la maison de mon père the intellectual and emotional experience of reading is tracked in more detail, and the process is portrayed as both transformative and alienating because it is so deeply integrated into the lived reality of the reader. Djebar’s autobiographical narrative

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returns to her childhood and adolescence, in an effort both to understand the narrator’s upbringing and to uncover the young Algerian girl’s loss of heritage, as it is referred to in the text’s title. If the text recounts a series of formative scenes from the narrator’s past, however, it is striking how many of these turn on an experience of reading. Significant moments in her development take place against the backdrop of her ongoing literary engagement, and reading encounters become woven into her affective evolution. The death of her grandmother, for example, and the pivotal moment of her dispute with Tarik occur alongside intense and transformative reading experiences, which heighten, extend and alter the events themselves. Moreover, the scene of reading is not only a background for the unfolding of real-life experiences, but a focal point in which a nexus of desires become concentrated. An avid and passionate reader, the narrator reads in order to fulfil desire, and the desire for the text is associated with multiple other desires – for family, friendship, intimacy and, importantly, a link with a precolonial past. Tarik’s recitation and transcription of the pre-Islamic poems known as the Mo’allaquats both fuel their closeness and create for the narrator a compelling access to a cultural past before the successive Arab and French conquests of Algeria. Once again, however, as for Djaout, reading is not a straightforward process of communication but a dynamic activity that both arouses the reader’s thoughts and potentially alienates or disappoints. Reading is also both transformative, triggering the creation of alternative worlds and alternative selves, and distressing, in that it introduces conflict into existing relationships just as it disallows full access to the other worlds it nevertheless promises. By turns seductive and disorientating, reading serves to display and crystallize rather than resolve the narrator’s highly complex position in relation to both the communities in which she lives and the European, Arab and local cultures which form her development. Critics have argued that Djebar’s works have always intermittently drawn on her abundant reading material. Beida Chikhi’s article ‘Une visite dans l’atelier itinérant d’Assia Djebar’, for example, offers a broad survey of the interweaving of Djebar’s poetics with her extensive library of European and Arab writing.24 Ernspeter Ruhe’s ‘Enjambements et envols, Assia Djebar échographe’ demonstrates how Djebar precisely explores her life and identity both through her readings of other literary works and through her reworkings of scenes from her own texts in subsequent versions.25 Furthermore, Mireille Calle-Gruber’s Assia Djebar, ou la résistance de l’écriture theorizes our own work as readers of Djebar, as she shows how the critic or reader is required not to elucidate but to

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follow the thread of the narrative while respecting its secrets. Calle-Gruber’s book opens with the observation that ‘il faut lire Djebar depuis le silence’ [‘you have to read Djebar taking into account the work’s silence’], since the texts ‘enseignent l’écoute, voix, marquant qu’il y a présence du silence’ [‘teach us to listen, the voice marks the presence of silence’].26 At the centre of Djebar’s texts there always remains a secret, according to Calle-Gruber, an absence that the generous reader must respect, must leave alone in order not to deform it. Reading the traumatic narrative at the heart of Nulle part, for example, when the narrator throws herself under a tram after a dispute with Tarik, Calle-Gruber suggests that the scene requires us to ‘suivre la veine du texte, se faire la servante de la phrase pas à pas mot à mot, ululer ânonner tâtonner’ [‘to follow the vein of the text, make oneself the servant of the sentence, step by step, word by word, ululating, stumbling, feeling one’s way’].27 The allusive quality of Djebar’s work engenders this awareness of the difficulties of reading, created by the texts’ partial disclosures and our own input as readers reinventing the work as we read. This concept of reading as both promising and alienating, moreover, crystallizes a mode of response that Djebar’s work has always demanded, but which is perhaps portrayed most fully and most self-reflexively within the text in this apparently confessional volume. Hector Malot’s Sans famille is the first book that the child reads, and the scene of her absorption in it already creates desires and tensions that will turn out to be formative. First, the child throws herself into the book with a kind of compulsion, she reads, ‘comme on boit ou comme on se noie!’ [‘as if drinking or drowning!’].28 The world of the book absorbs her completely, until she (at least seemingly) forgets where she is and perceives the self she glimpses in the mirror as ‘une autre fillette’ [‘another girl’], so transformed is she by her reading.29 The story of a foundling sold to a street musician also moves the child reader until she is shaking with sobs. At first glance the moment clearly portrays reading at once as proximity, since the narrator empathizes so vividly with ‘la vie si proche, si palpable d’un autre être’ [‘another person’s life, so close, so palpable’], and as distance, since she encounters this story of life without a family while lying reading in the comfort of her parents’ bed.30 Yet the significance of the scene does not lie merely in the emotive effect of the reading. The child’s empathy with the protagonist clearly becomes bound up with her own desire for security, played out in a series of complex ways in the ensuing pages. She recognizes immediately afterwards that her tears in part spring from a recognition of the warmth and reassurance of the parental bed. She notes at the same time her memories of placing herself squarely in between her parents as a small

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child, and the sense of well-being she felt from hearing them whisper above her, even though she does not remember the specifics of their interaction. In addition, her emotive reaction occurs soon after starting the reading, and it is perhaps significant that in the early pages of Sans famille there are indeed several references to the child’s thoughts as he lies in bed. On the first page, the protagonist Rémi emphasizes with a heightened tenderness the attentive and comforting presence of the woman who cares for him as if she were his mother, and several pages later, when he overhears a conversation that enables him to understand that his parents are not really his, he eavesdrops when he should be sleeping in his bed.31 Djebar’s narrator’s emotional outburst on return to the parental bed, some time after the memory of that early intimacy, is in this way perhaps bound up with an ambivalence towards her increased separation from them that is clearly intensified by her exposure to the experiences of bedtime solace and subsequent alienation recounted in Malot’s text. She herself looks back on the scene using the third person as testimony to her further distancing from her lost childhood innocence: Tant d’années après, elle se demandait si ces larmes évoquées ne tenaient pas leur douceur du lit de ses parents où elle s’est jetée, alors que le garçonnet du livre, lui, ne connaissait nul repos, nul havre dans ses malheurs tout au long des pages tournées.32 [Many years later, she wondered if those tears did not derive their sweetness from her parents’ bed onto which she had thrown herself, whilst the little boy in the book did not experience any such rest, no haven from his misfortune throughout the book.]

So as she avidly desires to uncover the orphan’s story, she also lives out her desire for comfort in the intimate embrace of her parents of a sort that she has already at a young age started to lose. The other’s story comes to reflect the intensity of her own emotional needs. Yet this emotiveness is in turn not an unequivocal example of filial love, heightened by the fear of loss aroused by the story. It is significant that, despite the comforting space of the parental bed, the sobbing induced by the reading experience perplexes her mother and seems to reinforce the distance between them. Failing to understand her daughter’s emotion, the mother calls her to tea, and then moves away, disconcerted by the power of her reading. If the narrator recalls that her mother is similarly touched when she sings Andalusian verses, she nevertheless emphasizes to some extent the separation between mother and daughter. And though the question of language and culture is

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only fleetingly addressed here, the way in which the daughter is moved by a book written in French, while the mother loses herself in Andalusian verses transcribed in Arabic, is evidently representative of their conflicting cultural references and experiences. The narrator goes on to imagine that her mother ‘concevait sans doute comme un pont fragile entre la sensiblerie qu’excitaient en moi ces histoires occidentales et la beauté secrète, sans égale, pour elle, des vers andalous qu’elle fredonnait, tout émue’ [‘doubtless imagined a sort of fragile bridge between my sensitivity to these Western stories, and the secret, peerless beauty of the Andalusian verses she would emotively hum to herself ’].33 Yet the parallel she draws between their cultural activities here is tentative and fragile, and reveals once again both proximity and distance. Mother and daughter are comparably moved, but they fail to understand the source of the other’s stirring. The formative moment of reading Sans famille at once reinforces and attenuates the narrator’s own desiring relationship with her mother. And indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, in many ensuing scenes the narrator repeatedly contrasts imagery of her complicity with her mother with confessions of alienation, in particular as a result of her French education.34 This scene occurs narratologically before the scene of the narrator’s grief at the death of her grandmother, but we are told that this loss preceded the reading encounter, and the tears shed on reading are also those she shed earlier: ‘larmes de désarroi causées par un chagrin à vif, déchirure étirée à l’infini et me taraudant tout au long d’une course qui, dans ma mémoire, paraît encore ne jamais finir’ [‘tears of distress caused by a raw experience of grief, an infinite wrench nagging at me as I ran as if, my memory suggests, never to stop’].35 She describes how, on hearing the news, she ran out into the street choked with sobs, forced out of her throat with her movement, her tears flowing into the wind. The  force and vigour of her crying, however, lead her to vow she will never cry like that again, ‘plus jamais je ne verserai un tel torrent de larmes, non!’ [‘never again would I shed such a torrent of tears, never!’], and yet the fresh tears she sheds on reading Sans famille seem on some level to be the continuation of those of this inaugural moment of grief. Once again this suggests that the distress of the reading encounter is associated with her own sense of the loss of family security, and the solitude of Malot’s protagonist fuels her own desire for a lost complicity. Moreover, several chapters later the narrator tells us of the death of her baby brother at the age of six months, and though the chronology of events here is unclear, she suggests that she must have been around five years old or a little younger. If she reads Sans famille at the age of five or six, the loss of the little brother probably predates the scene of reading, and is likely to form part of the

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distress unleashed by the reading encounter. On this occasion, however, unlike on the death of her grandmother, she notes the family silence, as if the trauma were too awful to be spoken of: ‘on le taira donc. On l’enterrera à nous trois, très vite, les années suivantes’ [‘so we remained quiet about it. We quickly buried it, the three of us, over the following years’].36 Malot’s story provides renewed access to repressed pain, and, though she never admits it openly, through reading the narrator re-enacts a melancholic loss that was not fully worked through at the time. While projecting the reader into an alternative life, it causes her to experience again, by proxy, the unacknowledged alienation at the centre of her own childhood. I have already mentioned that the scene of reading Sans famille takes place on the narrator’s parents’ bed, and though she claims at the time that in her absorption she forgets her surroundings, the repressed significance of the place of reading itself seems to merit further analysis. Sprawled carelessly, ‘à plat ventre, les genoux pliés, ses pieds ayant rejeté les sandales’ [‘on my stomach, my knees bent, my feet having kicked off my sandals’], she implies initially that the circumstances of her reading are a relaxed environment that enables her to lose herself in the book.37 Yet, as she describes her response to the work, she constantly juxtaposes references to the content of her reading and the time and space of her encounter in a way that indicates the manifold levels of sensation and affect that create the intensity of the moment. This layering recalls Proust’s engaging exploration of his childhood reading experiences in Du côté de chez Swann, of which Adam Watt has provided a detailed account including an exploration of two ‘primal scenes’ of reading early on in ‘Combray’.38 The first is that of Marcel’s mother reading François le Champi, in which reading and desire become tightly interwoven in ways which, as I shall go on to demonstrate, anticipate the confusion and desire of Djebar’s narrator. The second is the evocation of Marcel reading in his bedroom in Combray, and it is here that the mingling of the imaginary world of reading, and the physical setting of the reader, trigger a fascinating exploration of the layering of different selves. The scene is a rich feast of sensory details, as the freshness of the room contrasts with the brightness of the afternoon sun outside, of which he is reminded by the sounds of the banging of dusty crates and the musical humming of flies, all of which create ‘le spectacle total de l’été’ [‘the complete spectacle of summer’].39 Subsequently sent outside by his grandmother, Marcel continues his reading under the chestnut tree, and his thoughts are again awakened at once by the setting and by the intellectual stimulation of the book itself. Reading in this context of heightened sensory receptiveness leads him to identify the multiple

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dimensions of consciousness at any one time, creating ‘l’espèce d’écran diapré d’états différents’ [‘a kind of screen adorned with different frames of mind’].40 Aware at once of his most intimate imaginings and of the perceptual horizon of the garden, he conceives a broader relation between his inner self and the world he contemplates on all its distinct levels. Djebar’s scene of childhood reading does not contain the explicit philosophical reflection of that of Proust, but she too weaves the sensory environment of the bed and the voice of her mother into her reading, and these coalesce in the confused emotional outburst in which the scene results. The environment where reading takes place in both Proust’s and Djebar’s scenes is a crucial part of the reader’s intellectual, emotional and sensual response. If setting and reading become intermingled in this dynamic layering, this is also because, as Djebar’s narrator suggests several chapters later, the parental bed retains a significance from an even earlier childhood experience. In a chapter entitled ‘La Chambre parentale’, the narrator recalls sleeping as an infant in a little bed next to that of her parents. First, this is significant because this is where she sleeps until the little brother, who subsequently dies, is born, so that, although she does not allude to this openly, the place is evidently associated on some level with that tragedy. Secondly, she remembers as a child hearing the whispering of her parents in bed, coupled with indistinct sounds she is unable to interpret, ‘une sorte de musique, une plainte informe, mais de jouissance (je ne connais pas le mot, je le sens ainsi)’ [‘a sort of music, a formless moan, but of jouissance (I did not know that word but I sensed it in this way’].41 Half-asleep and uncomprehending, the infant nevertheless has some awareness of her parents’ lovemaking. In Freud’s case study of the ‘Wolf Man’, the witnessing of parental sex is called a ‘primal scene’, and the object of the analysis experiences the scene here as profoundly disturbing (it unleashes a fear of the father, of castration and an association between desire and violence).42 Concomitantly, for Adam Watt, the first scene of reading in ‘Combray’, where the young Marcel listens, desiringly, to the voice of his mother reading François le Champi, itself a story of incest, is also a form of ‘primal scene’, not this time the actual witnessing of coitus, but ‘the ambiguous, suggestive, transgressive performance of a literary text by the narrator’s mother’.43 This primal scene is not now bound up with violence but, according to Watt, it marks nevertheless the inauguration of Marcel’s intellectual development as well as of his ill health, and brings together reading with the emergence of a confused sensuality, a transgressive eroticism. In Djebar’s text, conversely, the narrator’s introduction to sexuality through a sort of primal scene seems on the outside to be less one

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of trauma than one of a positive recognition of feminine sexual enjoyment: ‘ma mère m’avait délégué, à son insu, la plénitude sereine du plaisir amoureux’ [‘my mother unknowingly passed onto me the peaceful sense of plenitude created by the pleasure of love’].44 Whether or not the adult narrator’s response really captures the effect of the scene is open to question, but this association between the parental bed and pleasure is likely also to be present, if unconsciously, in the emotive scene of reading. Once again, however, the association between reading and desire in this ‘primal scene’ must surely be not only associated with secure family complicity and with a future sexual pleasure, but with alienation. The adult narrator goes on to affirm (without overtly stating why) that babies should not sleep so close to their parents, and the half-awake child clamps her eyes shut and pretends to be unaware as if in recognition of her non-belonging in the scene. Other parts of the work also stress the friction in the narrator’s relationship with her father, and his own anguished response to her nascent sexuality. In a subsequent scene, he upbraids her vehemently for revealing her legs while riding a bicycle, and though for the narrator his intervention represents a brutal restriction on her freedom of movement, for the father forced to occupy the role of guardian in a society that requires women and even young girls to hide their bodies, the bicycle represents a dangerous impropriety. His enforcement of her modesty here then pre-empts her horror towards Tarik’s surprising authoritarianism much later, when he rebukes her for sending away their friend Mounira when she wanted to be alone with him. It is her father, moreover, who is responsible for liberating her by sending her to school and teaching her to write, but who, as we discovered in L’Amour, la fantasia, destroys her first love letter in a fit of rage. The narrative of the outburst provoked by Sans famille, then, on some level anticipates what will remain a muddled experience of desire, transgression and alienation, and the reading encounter, with all its accompanying scenes of affect or trauma, is bound up in the narrator’s ongoing working out of her relationship with her parents, with the family and with her still dormant sexuality. Given the nexus of affects present in this first scene of reading, it is hardly surprising that the text’s central trauma of the failed suicide is also associated with an experience of reading. Before turning to Tarik and the Mo’allaquats, however, it is also worth recalling how in the interim the narrator’s friendship with the French girl Mag during her adolescence similarly brings together literature, intimacy and separation. During this period of intense literary discovery, Mag and the narrator’s shared love of reading forms the basis of a strong and intimate bond. At the beginning of the second part of the text, the

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narrator has already indicated the liberatory effects of her literary adventures, as reading here is, as for Boualem Yekker in Le Dernier été, a conduit to multiple alternative worlds despite the staid atmosphere of the boarding school: Le monde intérieur s’élargit soudain grâce aux livres, à l’imagination devenue souple, fluide, un ciel immense, découverte, découverte, lectures sans fin, chaque livre à la fois un être (l’auteur), un monde (toujours ailleurs), l’effervescence intérieure traversée de longues coulées calmes ou lire c’est s’engloutir, s’aventurer à l’infini, s’enivrer, l’horizon qui se déchire, recule, même à l’intérieur de la salle d’études d’un internat de jeunes filles.45 [My inner world suddenly expanded through books, through my imagination becoming more supple, more fluid, uncovered, like an immense sky, endless reading, each book representing both a human being (the author) and another world (always elsewhere), an inner ferment traversed by long periods of calm, in which reading is a way of becoming engulfed, of venturing out infinitely, of becoming intoxicated, as the horizon is torn apart, pushed back, even in the classroom of a boarding school for young girls.]

This desire to explore other worlds and other ways of being turns out to be something she shares, uniquely, with Mag, and both the reading and the friendship with a European girl are expressions of a desire for escape. Following the correspondence between Jacques Rivière and Alain-Fournier, the girls copy the writers’ reading habits and in this way, together, manage to transcend the ‘étroitesse intellectuelle’ [‘intellectual narrowness’] of their companions. The girls’ shared imaginary worlds lead the narrator to perceive her friend as ‘un double de moi-même, une alter ego’ [‘a double of myself, an alter ego’], as they create a strange complicity beyond their ethnic differences, which allows both of them to conceive themselves in new ways. If the sharing of reading experiences is presented in this way as a source of intense intimacy, however, once again the narrator suggests that the fantasy world of reading uncovers other tensions. As she attests in the preceding evocation of her discovery of Baudelaire (BEAU DE L’AIR) through the readings of Mme Blasi, her interest in French literature is both the result of and the catalyst for her desire to transgress the restrictive division of French versus Arab culture. Indeed, as Françoise Lionnet has noted, the teacher sensually reads the verses of ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ in a way that the narrator has only heard when listening to recitations of the Koran, and Mme Blasi’s voice comes to blur with that of her missed paternal grandmother, so that ‘voix de “l’autre” et corps de l’ancêtre se trouvent ainsi associés, dans l’imaginaire précoce de l’auteur, grâce au poète de la flanerie moderne’ [‘the voice of “the other” and the ancestor’s body in this way

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become associated with one another in the precious imagination of the author, thanks to the poet of modern flanerie].46 Nevertheless, this transgression is a temporary, illusory reprieve from a profound sense of solitude that stays with her throughout the text, as it did with Djaout’s Boualem Yekker, though for different reasons. And if reading the same works of literature as Mag establishes a liberating complicity, that complicity emerges as fragile and ephemeral when, even as she upholds the fantasy of a ‘sœur en littérature’ [‘sister in literature’], the narrator evokes their subsequent distancing.47 After meeting again in Paris in 1968, she initially emphasizes the reigniting of their former passions, but after their separation wonders whether the War of Independence did not leave ‘une ombre d’ambiguïté’ [‘a shadow of ambiguity’] between them.48 Shared reading is in this way capable of bringing about new relationships, establishing alternative selves in an imaginary world beyond existing political and cultural tensions, but the illusion also turns out to be frail, and gives way to differences, misunderstandings and, ultimately, alienation. It is the narrator’s relationship with Tarik that reveals the activity of reading to be charged with affect in the most troubling ways. Their intimacy develops as Tarik first recites then transcribes verses of pre-Islamic poets such as Imru al-Qays, and the flourishing and interruption of their relationship is tightly interwoven with the narrator’s halting discovery of her lost cultural heritage. Sexual desire and the desire for knowledge fuel one another, as the narrator’s fascination with the poetry heightens and is heightened by her proximity with Tarik. Reading, as in the first primal scene of ‘Combray’, is highly eroticized, as Tarik’s voice and gestures are integral to her absorption in the poetry itself. The rhythm of his recitation, for example, is bound up with the rhythm of their steps as they walk (uncomfortably for the narrator) arm in arm. Moreover, if she compares Tarik’s explanations to the way in which ‘on défait le voile d’une jeune nomade dont la beauté ne sera admirée que par un seul!’ [‘the veil of a young nomad, whose beauty will be admired by just one person, is unravelled’], then the revelation of this forgotten literature seems comparable to her own nascent sexual liberation.49 Once again, the recitation, like the scene of reading, gives rise to the evolution of simultaneous, juxtaposed states of consciousness, as the narrator is both swept away by the story of the Yemenites and highly aware of Tarik’s physical proximity and their surroundings as they walk. The verses he quotes are those of Imru al-Qays, the Prince errant [‘wandering prince’], and this image of wandering maps onto both her physical movement with Tarik, and the transgression she undertakes in allowing herself to be so close to him. Remembering the words of the traveller-poet, she savours also

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the voice of Tarik scanning the verses, as if the poetry itself is a source of both intellectual and sensual arousal. This scene of Tarik’s recitation as they walk arm in arm is followed by the recollection of the letters he subsequently sent to the narrator, in which he transcribes some of the Mo’allaquats. Here again the significance of the poems themselves is mingled with the evolution of a curious, guarded intimacy between the narrator and Tarik. On one level, the poems themselves represent for the narrator a liberated sensuality and romanticism, and connote at the same time a series of cross-cultural connections: Les Mo’allaquats, ces odes célèbres, se déployaient, elles, avec un lyrisme que j’imaginais pur ou sensuel et, me disais-je, avec un romantisme qui jaillissait en moi, presque malgré moi, qui parlait d’amour, d’un amour absolu: cette inspiration qui avait fleuri ensuite en Andalousie avait influencé la poésie des troubadours et l’«amour courtois» du Moyen Age occidental.50 [The Mo’allaquats, those famous odes, unfolded with a lyricism that I imagined was pure or sensual, and, I believed, with romanticism that sprung up within me, almost in spite of myself, a lyricism that spoke of love, of an absolute love: this inspiration, which then flourished in Andalucia, influenced the poetry of the troubadours and ‘courtly love’ of the Western Middle Ages.]

This romanticism and cross-cultural transfer are evidently, though not explicitly, synonymous with a dynamic, diasporic heritage that transcends the restrictions of colonialism and the hardened version of Islamic culture resurgent in Algeria as a defence against French influence. Tarik’s alternating use of both the original Arabic and a French translation also comes to represent for the narrator a utopian sense of cultural symbiosis, when, reading the verses secretly with a torch under the sheets, she imagines the two versions, ‘comme les deux visages d’une même poésie enveloppant mon corps de dormeuse’ [‘like the two faces of one poetry enveloping my sleeping body’].51 Once again, the sensual environment of the bed itself contributes to the harmony she wants her reading both to represent and to engender. At the same time, moreover, the poet and Tarik himself become blurred: Tarik’s transcriptions transport her into the world of her lost pre-Islamic heritage, while the poems are at the same time a form of communication between the nervous young lovers. The transcription is part of an intricate process of courtship between Tarik and the narrator, and is experienced as liberating for the narrator both because it provides access to a lost culture and because it in itself forms a sort of illicit exchange: ‘mon amorce de correspondance avec Tarik me fit l’effet d’une transgression presque

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irréelle’ [‘the opening of my correspondence with Tarik seemed to me to be an almost unreal transgression’].52 She pours over the verses not only in order to understand a centuries-old culture, but also in order to decipher the motives behind Tarik’s choice of poem. Her reading is at once an intellectual exercise, bound up with a search for cultural knowledge and an erotically charged interpersonal exchange. This exchange, however, is again in no way a harmonious sharing, but works to upset as well as to establish intimacy. The narrator is disconsolate when Tarik initially sends her the verses of the poetess el Khansa who lost her brother, and here it seems as if she is deliberately turning away from a source that might remind her of her own earlier childhood loss. When Tarik then sends her some lines of Nabigha al-Dhubyani evoking the Euphrates, she rapidly scans them for some sign of his intentions but remains perplexed. Nevertheless, when he subsequently sends her a real love poem, taken from Kitab el Aghani, Le Livre des chansons, the beauty of the verses so unsettles her that she resolves to terminate the correspondence. And after Tarik goes on to upset her by demonstrating a friendship also with Mounira, the narrator reflects that, though he may have transcribed the love poems, Tarik never himself made any promises. From this point on, then, the word Mo’allaquat becomes no longer a symbol of intimacy, but ‘évocateur de tortures’ [‘a word that evokes torture’], and she realizes that she fell in love with ‘la langue perdue, réanimée dans ce visage de jeune homme qui la maîtrisait’ [‘the lost language that was revived in the face of this young man who had mastered it’], not with the man himself.53 Reading, then, fosters illusions, and though it engenders discovery, it can also bring misunderstandings and divisions between readers; the intimacy of shared reading is fragile. The term Mo’allaquats means ‘hanging poems’, since the verses were traditionally conceived to be so valuable that they were hung up or suspended on curtains, yet for the narrator, the intensity of their richness leads to a distress that makes her too feel somehow suspended: ‘à bout de bras, sinon au pilori, au moins par mes épaules soulevées, par mon cou enchaîné, ma langue trouée, mon cadavre exposé à tous vents, non pas justement sous le ciel d’Arabie, mais sous tous les ciels du vaste monde’ [‘at arm’s length or pilloried, at least with my shoulders raised, with my neck tied, my tongue pierced, my body exposed to all winds, not only under the sky of Arabia but under every sky across the wide world’].54 The intimacy of reading is also here destructive – the puncturing of the myth of complicity through reading is what leads her to throw herself under the tram – and the

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misreading of the poetry as a symbol of love in the present has disastrous consequences. The potentially transformative power of reading also has the capacity to uncover the vulnerability of human relationships and the fragility of our most cherished illusions. Reading in this way becomes implicated in human interaction and can be both seductive and alienating. And this is also because it is itself always faulty, never complete. The narrator’s grasp of the verses was fleeting, fragmentary, shaped by her contemporary desires, and the poems themselves remain both compelling and elusive. The first time Tarik sends her the transcribed verses, she admits, ‘Je relus à voix basse cet extrait qui me laissa quelque peu sur ma faim ’ [‘I read aloud again in a low voice that extract that left me wanting more’], and in her reading she avidly seeks interpretations she is not sure she can substantiate.55 The poems invite decipherment but also themselves suspend meaning; each time, the narrator has to work hard to reconstruct meaning behind the fragmented traces. Reading triggers desire, then, it is erotically charged and offers the seeds of a shared discovery, but the text also refuses to give itself away entirely. As Julian Wolfreys notes in his evocative discussion of reading in the volume Readings: Acts of Close Reading in Literary Theory, ‘something remains, something is left behind, something is missed altogether, something other is still to be read’.56 The language the narrator sought to recover by reading the Mo’allaquats remains a ‘langue perdue’, lost in the haziness of the desert sand: the verses are ‘ “poèmes suspendus” dans le désert d’Arabie, parmi la foule et la poussière’ [‘ “suspended poems” in the crowds and dust of the Arabian desert’].57 They fuel a desire for knowledge, a quest for cultural liberation and a search for sexual intimacy, but never speak directly to the reader. They are seductive traces upon which the reader grafts her fantasy and her affect, and their reading, just as Wolfreys suggests more generally, ‘is always this, the experience of fragmentariness’.58 The multiple reading experiences that punctuate Nulle part dans la maison de mon père indicate that this autobiographical memoir is also the narrative of the formation of a reader. In addition to the crucial scenes evoked here, the work makes frequent references to the narrator’s reading material, as the Mille et une nuits, the Koran, Lucretius, Euripedes, Cervantes, Claudel, Gide, Giraudoux, Char and others accompany her through her affective development and trigger new interpretations of her own life through the resonances they bring. Ernspeter Ruhe has demonstrated, for example, how the scene where the narrator recounts an episode from Jalal Al-Din Rûmi’s Mathmawi or Odes mystiques comes to represent her entire reflection during the text’s second part.59 She recalls the story

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of how Ali, the husband of Fatima the Prophet’s daughter, pours out into a well the latter’s secrets, and in so doing triggers the growth of a rose that releases in those who touch it a music stimulating the dance of the dervishes. Her ensuing reflection, ‘à quelle transmission ou à quelle métamorphose ai-je été destinée dans cet invisible à déchirer, tel que j’ai désiré l’esquisser?’[‘to what transmission or metamorphosis was I destined, in this invisible world to be torn apart, in the way that I wanted to imagine it?’], is then answered in the following chapter with a reference to her memory of her female ancestors.60 This brief recollection explains the title of the second part, ‘Déchirer l’invisible’ [‘Tearing apart the invisible’] and serves to figure both the continuing movement around buried secrets, and the address to her ancestors, that the text itself explores as a whole. If Djebar is so preoccupied with the role of reading in her psychological evolution, however, she must also be addressing us as readers too, and asking us to consider how we read her own charged, traumatic story. Having explored the multiple layers of her own formative reading encounters, she calls her reader to question her response to a narrative which deliberately foregrounds its fragmentary, allusive and incomplete form. The pages that succeed the suicide attempt form a sustained reflection on how that inaugural trauma triggered a perpetual desire for escape – an escape, too, from the clutches of the overzealous European reader hoping to ‘know’ the Algerian culture in which the narrator grew up, just as she wanted so much to grasp the world of the Mo’allaquats. If we read with a desire for information or for psychological insight, we too will be frustrated, since the failed suicide is precisely a figure for the narrator’s ongoing flight: ‘Comment s’en sortir? Comment s’élancer? Comment retrouver essor et légèreté, et ivresse de vivre – même en sanglotant?’ [‘How could I escape? How could I move forward? How could I find again a sense of lightness, the ability to fly freely, an intoxication with living even if I would sob at the same time?’]61 Djebar’s apparently highly candid confessional narrative creates a powerful sense of intimacy with the reader but, as I suggested at the end of the discussion of Djebar in Chapter 7, the textual persona also withdraws. Speaking of herself using the ‘tu’ form in the later sections of the work, the narrator reminds us that the protagonist is not a straightforward autobiographical ‘je’, and that the story she recounts is one that flags up the difficulty of straightforward reading from which we might have something to learn. If we are to read Nulle part dans la maison de mon père in a way faithful to the narrator’s project, then we must recognize our distance from it, since, ‘oui, la vie du Texte résiste, se rebiffe, se rebelle’ [‘yes, the life of the Text resists, recoils, rebels’].62 We are drawn in to the narrator’s most compelling formative

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moments, but we are also kept at arm’s length by a work which repeatedly foregrounds the challenges as well as the pleasures of reading. Both Djaout and Djebar suggest that reading can be transformative, that it can play an active role in our lives, provide new experiences and bring new forms of knowledge. As the intellectual discoveries we make through reading weave themselves into our everyday experiences, they keep our minds active and satisfy as well as fuel many of our affective desires. Reading is also portrayed in these works as at once stimulating and misleading, it is a crucial source of questioning and means by which we learn to escape ideological orthodoxies and entrenched patterns of thinking. As such it brings a crucial awareness of the limiting force of cultural and political dogmatisms as they seek to shape Algerian society, past and present. At the same time, however, reading is not presented as a utopian experience of liberation, and it is certainly not a straightforward means of expressing political resistance. It can be isolating, as in the case of Boualem Yekker, and can bring about misunderstanding as much as complicity, as it does for Djebar’s narrator in Nulle part dans la maison de mon père. These writers imply that it is a vital trigger for questioning, then, but one that must be set into dialogue with lived experience and one whose impact will remain both unpredictable and uncontrollable. Reading will also be difficult, even deceptive, and may engender dispute or incomprehension. It is central to the lives of the texts’ protagonists here, but remains a necessarily perplexing and irresolute experience. Its unpredictable, complex and multilayered effects are the result of the challenges to which proper reading must remain open.

Notes 1 2

Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2005) p. 80. Abdelfattah Kilito, ‘La Nièce de Don Quichotte’, La Querelle des images (Casablanca: Eddif, 2000) 67–80 (p. 72). 3 Ibid., p. 80. 4 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, p. 131. 5 Tahar Djaout, Le Dernier été de la raison (Paris: Seuil, 1999) p. 9. 6 Ibid., p. 84. 7 Ibid., p. 45. 8 Ibid., p. 61. 9 Ibid., p. 72. 10 Ibid., p. 91. 11 Ibid., p. 59.

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12 Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 7. 13 Djaout, Le Dernier été de la raison, p. 87. 14 Ibid., p. 87. 15 Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, p. 52. 16 Djaout, Le Dernier été de la raison, p. 62. 17 Ibid., p. 62. 18 Julija Šukys, Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007) p. 78. 19 Djaout, Le Dernier été de la raison, p. 46. 20 Julija Šukys, Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout, p. 139. 21 Ibid., p. 19. 22 Djaout, Le Dernier été de la raison, p. 115. 23 Ibid., p. 124. 24 Beida Chikhi, ‘Une visite dans l’atelier itinérant d’Assia Djebar’, L’Esprit Créateur 48.4 (2008): 117–128. 25 Ernspeter Ruhe, ‘Enjambements et envols, Assia Djebar échographe’, in Wolfgang Asholt, Mireille Calle-Gruber and Dominique Combe (eds.), Assia Djebar, littérature et transmission (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010) 37–53. 26 Mireille Calle-Gruber, Assia Djebar: la résistance de l’écriture (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001) p. 7. 27 Mireille Calle-Gruber, « La Servante du texte », in Wolfgang Asholt, Mireille CalleGruber and Dominique Combe (eds.), Assia Djebar: littérature et transmission (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2010) pp. 197–210 (p. 207). 28 Ibid., p. 19. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 20. 31 Hector Malot, Sans famille (Paris: Nelson Editeurs, 1932 [first edition 1878]) p. 9, p. 30. 32 Assia Djebar, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (Paris: Fayard, 2007) pp. 20, 21. 33 Ibid., p. 21. 34 For an analysis of the figure of the mother in Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, see my ‘The Mother as Other: Intimacy and Separation in the Maternal Memories of Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père’, Journal of Romance Studies 11.2 (2011): 22–33. 35 Ibid., p. 22. 36 Ibid., p. 76. 37 Ibid., p. 19. 38 Adam Watt, Reading in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu: ‘le délire de la lecture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 39 Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) p. 82.

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40 Ibid., p. 83. 41 Djebar, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, p. 96. 42 Sigmund Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, Case Histories II, ‘Rat Man’, Schreber, ‘Wolf Man’, Female Homosexuality, The Pelican Freud Library Volume 9 (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1981) pp. 225–366. 43 Watt, Reading in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, p. 17. 44 Djebar, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, p. 98. 45 Ibid., p. 101. 46 Françoise Lionnet, ‘Ces voix au fil de soi(e): le detour du poétique’, Esprit Créateur 48.4 (2008): 104–116 (p. 110). 47 Djebar, Nulle part sans la maison de mon père, p. 137. 48 Ibid., p. 137. 49 Ibid., p. 283. 50 Ibid., p. 286. 51 Ibid., p. 291. 52 Ibid., p. 289. 53 Ibid., p. 347; p. 369. 54 Ibid., p. 346. 55 Ibid., p. 288. 56 Julian Wolfreys, Readings: Acts of Close Reading in Literary Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000) p. vii. 57 Djebar, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, p. 369. 58 Wolfreys, Readings, p. 64. 59 Ruhe, ‘Enjambements et envols, Assia Djebar échographe’, pp. 41–43. 60 Djebar, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, p. 238. 61 Ibid., p. 365. 62 Ibid., p. 406.

Conclusion

The stakes involved in the creation and reception of literature during this period of transition in North Africa are high. As Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia have struggled to establish peaceful and long-term democracy in the generations after the end of the colonial period, literature has been a powerful source of controversy, and those who create or promote dissent within its pages have, at times, been perceived as dangerous enough to merit censorship, imprisonment or even death. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that literary works during the period frequently focus explicitly on the status of literature itself, not so much with the inward-looking self-reflexiveness associated with postmodernism or the nouveau roman, as with an insistent interest in the place of writing and reading in characters’ lives, psychology and interaction with the world. All the works analysed here place literature at the centre of the narrative, and in each case the force as well as the idiosyncrasies of literary writing are held up for scrutiny in contexts of political disillusionment, oppression and intermittent violence. Moreover, while the risk of censorship or worse has made many writers sceptical about the ability of literary writing to contribute to political change, many nevertheless remain committed to the flexibility and experimentalism that literature allows, even as they question what such work means in contemporary society. These texts all exploit the capacity of literature to challenge orthodoxies, though many nevertheless either reluctantly admit or more fully analyse its limitations, its frustrations and its deceptions. Many writers demonstrate literature’s ability to liberate the mind of both writer and reader through the creative power of the imagination. As Abdelfattah Kilito engagingly suggests in La Querelle des images, the historic interdiction of the image in Islamic culture has generated an intensified search for creative imagery through other means, in particular through literature.1 Narrative prose is celebrated in Arab culture, according to Kilito, for its capacity to conjure up images not through iconic portraits but through words, and indeed,

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the language of Kilito’s own stories in this volume is richly evocative, even as his narratives repeatedly demonstrate the power of the visual image. Equally, Ben Jelloun’s public writer conjures images that people his solitude and entertain him when confined to his bed as a sick child, Djaout’s historian in L’Invention du désert seeks to ‘invent’ the nation out of the ruins and reconstructions of the desert, and in Bachi’s La Kahéna historical narrative is shaped by the incursion of fantasy and mirage. In Mellah’s evocation of the place of storytelling in modern Tunisia, and in Daoud’s retelling of Camus’s L’Etranger, moreover, events are revealed to be understood only through their reimagination by various subjective narrators, who impose their own imagery on crimes whose ‘truth’ remains uncertain. And for Djebar’s narrator in Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, as for Hayat in Mosteghanemi’s Chaos of the Senses, the very borders between literature and life become blurred, as experiences are filtered through imagery gleaned from the subject’s reading material or conjured by the act of writing. In each case, fictional writing has the ability to produce unforeseen images, to bring new associations and to forge new meanings. In this sense, the imagination can be conceived to have something of the power that Paul Ricœur attributed to it across his work and perhaps most explicitly in La Métaphore vive.2 If, as we saw in Chapter  5, Ricœur theorized in Temps et récit how our apprehension of the world is filtered through narrative, since it is through narrative that we impose shape and meaning on the world, then his underlying philosophy of the imagination also implies a productivity and creativity perhaps relevant here. Although the imagination is not at any point the ostensible focus of Ricœur’s work, it is, as critics such as Richard Kearney and Sophie Vaclos argue, crucial to much of his thought and clearly plays an important role in the creation of new meaning.3 In particular, metaphor is a way for Ricœur to conceptualize the ability of language to create new resonances, since in metaphor the imagination is called upon to mediate and to make sense of the relationship between the two contexts upon which the metaphorical figure draws. More broadly, metaphor is an instance of the way in which language, not just images or portraits, can engage the imagination, since it is the imagination that brings about the ‘innovation sémantique’ [‘semantic innovation’] that occurs when things are described in unfamiliar ways. For Ricœur, then, ‘imaginer, c’est d’abord restructurer des champs sémantiques’ [‘imagining is above all restructuring semantic fields’];4 the imagination is defined by the reconfiguration of semantic meaning, as new combinations of images bring unfamiliar associations. Summarizing Ricœur’s theory of the

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semantic imagination, Kearney suggests that it represents ‘an act of responding to a demand for new meaning, the demand of emerging realities to be by being said in new ways’.5 Similarly, many of the writers analysed here emphasize, and also valorize, the productive and creative thinking that is required when the imagination interferes in narrative to suggest alternative ways of representing events or experiences. Ricœur’s philosophy of the imagination departs from that of Sartre, whose L’Imaginaire remains focused on visual images, and for whom the imagination is rather a negation of perceived reality. Ricœur, unlike Sartre, conceives the imagination to be at work within the verbal rather than the visual; it is above all a linguistic phenomenon and not therefore dependent on what the subject sees in the world around him. Moreover, Ricœur also explores the workings of fictional images rather than merely those derived from, but secondary to, reality, and conceives the imagination as a productive and active force: it creates something new.6 And even more, this capacity for innovation means that the imagination as closely bound up with action. In L’Imaginaire, Sartre associated the image with negation, though he also noted that the exercise of the imagination is an aspect of human freedom.7 For Ricœur, however, the imagination is a more positive productive force, since, ‘la première manière dont l’homme tente de comprendre et de maîtriser le “divers” du champ pratique est de s’en donner une représentation fictive’ [‘the first way human beings attempt to understand and to master the “manifold” of the practical field is to give themselves a fictive representation of it’].8 The imagination is a prerequisite for action since it is the function that generates the three components that allow us to act, namely the formation of a project, motivation and belief in our own power. In many of the texts examined here too, the championing of the powers of the imagination is part of a call for change. These works may not be the basis for a practical revolution, but their use of the imagination to express realities differently has a dynamic critical impetus and suggests that they too perceive the importance of a form of ‘innovation sémantique’ as a prelude to acting differently. When Daoud, Djebar, Mellah or Mosteghanemi confuse the boundaries between literature and life, they suggest that the work of the imagination as it is engaged by creative writing and reading is an integral force in shaping how we live. The revelation of the power of the imagination in many of the works explored here also serves as a warning against dogmatisms that discourage creative thinking and that falsely claim to own and contain ‘truth’, whether these are the restrictive nationalisms that have been propagated in

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North Africa after colonialism, or indeed other forms of orthodoxy operating elsewhere and in different contexts. By contrast, in setting the imagination of both writer and reader in motion, literature engages us in an active process; it stimulates independent reflection and, these writers hope, has the ability to jolt us out of acquiescence. At the same time, as Sartre also reminds us, the embrace of the imagination requires in these works too an awareness of its deceptiveness, as well as of the provisional form of the images and eventually the stories it engenders, so as to keep the thinking of both writer and reader alive. The active imagination as it is theorized by some of the francophone North African writers discussed here is also often evoked through metaphors of travel. If travel involves the discovery of new places, then it is as if literature too takes writer and reader away from familiar forms of representation to encounter other ways of thinking and seeing. If, as we saw in Chapter  1, Yasmina Khadra and Malika Mokkedem both described literary writing as a form of escape, many other writers build on this trope both by narrating the writer’s undertaking of a physical journey and by using the imagery of departure and adventure. Ben Jelloun’s public writer wanders across Morocco in an unfulfilled search for a sense of homeland that mirrors the dislocation caused by the reinvention of multiple selves through writing. Djaout’s historian tracks an arduous journey through the desert as he struggles to recreate the history of the Almoravides, and at the same time, alienation in contemporary Algeria is expressed through a sense of frustration and disillusionment towards the writing process. The  bookseller in Djaout’s Le Dernier été de la raison apparently more optimistically, at least initially, compares reading with travel, with the discovery of other places and experiences, and with a relinquishment both of the familiar environment and of entrenched modes of thinking. Even more explicitly, Djebar theorizes all her writing as a form of flight in Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, and many of her works narrate female characters’ stories of escape in ways that parallel the writer’s own claim for intellectual and personal freedom through the imaginative power of her work. Khatibi’s notion of the ‘étranger professionnel’ also dramatizes the ways in which writing allows its creator to cross borders between cultures, to continually take himself somewhere new through the creative process. This embarkation on a journey by means of the literary imagination makes this literature transnational, even if the journey originates in reflection on the identity and shortcomings of the nation state a generation or more after independence. Charles Bonn argued in his volume Littérature maghrébine et littérature mondiale, published in 1995, that it was time to stop reading North

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African literature as an ethnographic document testifying to a specific and circumscribed moment, and Gafaïti has increasingly stressed its ‘diasporisation’, since it represents ‘une culture transnationale et une conscience planétaire échappant concrètement au moule du nationalisme étroit et transcendant le mensonge d’une soi-disant opposition structurelle à l’occident’ [‘a transnational culture and planetary consciousness that concretely escapes from the mould of narrow nationalisms and transcends the illusion of a so-called opposition to the West’].9 As I suggested in the Introduction, moreover, these works’ ability to reach out to other places and cultures through the imagination, their ‘conscience planétaire’, suggests that they are works of ‘world literature’ as much as they are reflections of postcoloniality. This can be understood to connote not a bland universalism, as the notion of ‘world literature’ may misleadingly imply, but an awareness of the porosity of intellectual frontiers if not of geographical borders, and a commitment to dialogue and discovery. This journeying, however, as the analysis of letter writing as a figure for literary exchange demonstrated, is by no means associated with the assimilation of different cultures but with an openness to the challenges of unplanned forms of communication and to the transformation and surprise that genuine dialogue might bring. And, as we also saw in the Introduction, the affirmation of the imagination, of discovery through travel, as well as the awareness of literature’s capacity for misleading, were also all prominent features of the Thousand and One Nights, a work that might be conceived not only as the ultimate laboratory for literary theory but also as the source of many of the forms and questions with which contemporary North African writers experiment. As the Thousand and One Nights also suggests, however, it would be idealistic to attribute to literature an excessive power, and alongside the affirmation of the imagination and of its ability to take both writer and reader on a journey, recent francophone North African literature also displays its own weaknesses. Concomitantly, the arguments put forward by Ricœur emphasizing the productivity and active force of the imagination should not be conceived as a utopian affirmation of the ability of fictive images to effect change. The present study has endeavoured to demonstrate that there is in the works under scrutiny, as in the Nights, a curious and, at times, even paradoxical combination of a belief in literature’s ability to move and challenge with an awareness of its fragility. Narrative might have the power to alter our expectations, as Derek Attridge also reminded us, but the words of which it is constructed are also fragile mirages, which might be misconstrued, ignored or erased.10 At a time when literature has been the object of intense suspicion, francophone North

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African writers uphold its emancipatory potential but at the same time reveal the lack of substance as well as the instability of its tentative imagery. In a way that recalls the playfulness of the Nights too, Khatibi’s vocabulary of ‘frivolity’, or Djaout’s and Bachi’s insistence on doubt, demonstrates a renewed awareness of the utopianism of the desire to associate literature too directly with political contestation and liberation. The suggestion that francophone North African writing during this transitional period is not only ‘postcolonial’ but an example of what we might now conceive as a certain form of ‘world literature’ – or perhaps a worldly literature that would eschew the claim to universalism connoted in the former term – must at the same time be coupled with a reminder of its particularity. The works explored here look beyond their national context, but they also offer a specific take on it, and the writers chosen for discussion belong to a particular intellectual type that should not be construed to be representative. This book has detected a certain strand of liberal questioning within recent francophone North African literature, but this is one with which a certain group of thinkers experiment, who share a particular cross-cultural, European as well as Arabic intellectual heritage. The self-conscious reflections that characterize their work are part of an introspective literary critical mode, and although those works that have been the object of close reading here at the same time contain political critique, they are not for the most part by the most militant among contemporary writers. Abdellatif Laâbi or Boualem Sansal might be considered as figures who successfully combine overt political discussion with poetry, in the former case, and novels in the latter (though Laâbi has also written a few narrative works), but many of those whose works are the focus of the chapters of this book are much more aesthetic thinkers than they are political activists. At the same time, the formal self-consciousness of the writers under scrutiny distinguishes their work from the more direct style of some of the most popular and widely read francophone novelists of the recent period, such as the Algerians Yasmina Khadra or Abdelkader Djemaï, or the Tunisian Ali Bécheur. These works written in French also evidently offer a different perspective from that of contemporary Arabic writing. Although not all were educated in French schools, the writers evoked here all engage with European literature as well as with local culture and, indeed, tend not to refer in detail to contemporary Arabic literature even if elements of Arab history and tradition do enter into the narrative. This study has endeavoured to examine the concept of literature as (largely) fictional and creative works have set out to theorize it, but this mode of writing exists alongside other forms, and it is also perhaps becoming increasingly

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artificial to distinguish francophone from arabophone culture in the Maghreb. A few contemporary writers have written in both French and Arabic, including Rachid Boudjedra or Abdelfattah Kilito, for example, and Kilito in particular draws on an erudite mix of Arabic literary history and European thought and culture in his critical essays. Nevertheless, many writers and critics still conceive francophone and arabophone writing as distinct entities, and the dialogue between them so far seems underdeveloped. As Carine Bourget has argued, with postcolonial critic Richard Serrano, an excessive emphasis on francophone culture in North Africa offers a somewhat skewed image of the region. And, Bourget insists, we need to pay heed to the arguments of Islamic historian François Burgat, who notes that ‘a French-speaking Maghreb … has masked the emergence of an impertinent new Maghreb, which today wants to use a new language’.11 Burgat is describing here the development of Islamism in the Maghreb before the Algerian ‘décennie noire’, and his study constitutes a real attempt at dialogue with Islamists of whom he argues only a very few resort to violence. The broader Islamic culture he defends is one, he asserts, that is insufficiently understood by its interlocutors in other parts of the world. Certainly, although the writers explored here are for the most part culturally Muslim and many (in particular Khatibi) draw on Islamic history in their work, their representation of it is often not highly developed and their perspective on it is often secular. In addition, the vibrancy of contemporary Arabic culture is evidently not represented by the francophone literature at the centre of the present study. Yet, if the division between francophone and arabophone culture in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia remains to be properly bridged, the dialogic thinking that this process would require is in evidence in the works explored here. While Khatibi’s work is perhaps the most richly cross-cultural in its evocation of multilingualism as a starting point for an ethics of dialogue, Sebbar and Djebar in their different ways analyse the relationship between their written French and the Arabic or indeed other linguistic idioms with which their own language comes into contact. As we saw in the introduction, moreover, many francophone writers, including Tahar Ben Jelloun, Albert Memmi, Boualem Sansal and Maïssa Bey conceive their writing as multilingual even if they ostensibly write in a literary French and only sporadically draw on Arabic terms. The future of francophone writing in North Africa may lie, then, in the creation of an increasingly explicit and developed dialogue with contemporary Arab culture, since, while (against the odds) literature in French continues to flourish more than half a century after independence, its position will remain marginal and

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its readership restricted without that outward-looking impetus. As the editors of a Special Issue of Horizons maghrébins devoted to ‘La Francophonie arabe’ suggest, a more sustained dialogue between French-speaking and Arabicspeaking critics might also help to create a better understanding of the multiple cultural influences on local literatures, as, le discours critique francophone profite certainement beaucoup des acquis méthodologiques de la littérature française et de la littérature comparée, certes, mais une plus grande implication d’arabisants, au fait de la culture avec laquelle la littérature arabe francophone dialogue nécessairement, consciemment ou non, risque d’ouvrir de réelles perspectives, et de participer à un décloisonnement d’ores et déjà nécessaire. [francophone critical discourse certainly benefits from methodologies learned from French and comparative literature, but the greater inclusion of Arabic scholars, who know about the culture with which francophone Arab literature necessarily, and consciously or not, enters into dialogue, might open up real perspectives and help to contribute to breaking down barriers in ways that are now clearly necessary.]12

Such work resides beyond the scope of the present study, but the effort found in the texts explored here to imagine not so much a new political order but perhaps, more modestly, an increasingly dialogic and self-questioning mode of creative reflection, can serve as a starting point for a new form of intercultural literary activity in the Maghreb.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6

7

Abdelfattah Kilito, La Querelle des images (Casablanca: Eddif, 2000). Paul Ricœur, La Métaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975). Richard Kearney, On Paul Ricœur: The Owl of Minerva (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Sophie Vaclos, Ricœur, Literature and Imagination (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Paul Ricœur, Du texte à l’action: essais d’herméneutique, II (Paris: Seuil, 1986) p. 219; From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Athlone, 1991) p. 173. Kearney, On Paul Ricœur, p. 40. See also ‘The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality’, in Mario J. Valdès (ed.), A Ricœur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 117–136. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (Paris: Gallimard, 1940, 1986). Sartre concedes in his conclusion that ‘l’imagination

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n’est pas un pouvoir empirique et surajouté de la conscience, c’est la conscience tout entière en tant qu’elle réalise sa liberté’ [‘the imagination is not an empirical power superimposed on consciousness, it is consciousness itself in so far as it realises its freedom’], p. 358. 8 Ricœur, Du texte à l’action, p. 222; From Text to Action, p. 176. 9 Charles Bonn and Arnold Rothe, Littérature maghrébine et littérature mondiale (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 1995); Hafid Gafaïti, La Diasporisation de la littérature postcoloniale: Assia Djebar et Rachid Mimouni (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005) p. 261. 10 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2005). 11 Cited in Carine Bourget, The Star, the Cross, and the Crescent: Religions and Conflicts in Francophone Literature from the Arab World (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010) p. 5. The original is François Burgat, L’Islamisme au Maghreb: la voix du Sud (Paris: Karthala, 1988). See also Richard Serrano, Against the Postcolonial: ‘Francophone’ Writers at the Ends of French Empire (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005). 12 Abdallah Ouali Alami and Colette Valat, ‘Décloisonner le discours sur la littérature arabe francophone’, Horizons maghrébins: le droit à la mémoire 52 (2005): 5–8 (p. 5).

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Index absolutism 220 Académie des écrivains publics 97 Académie française 78–9 adventure 49–50, 67, 72–4, 98, 122, 132–3, 140, 234, 246, 258 aesthetics and creativity 38 and experimentation 9–10, 16, 85, 110 intercultural 40 literary 17, 33 and politics 10, 17, 88, 260 Afghanistan 70, 232 agency 183, 196 ‘aimance’ 185–6, 213, 224 Aimance (Khatibi) 185–6 A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust) 64 alcohol 125 Alexandria 125 Algeria and Algerian civil war Arabization policy 3, 11, 108, 159, 168–9, 173 attacks and assassinations 4, 14–15 coup d’état of 1965 137 and economy 3 education and religious teaching 233 historical background 3–5 identity crisis 4, 7–8, 63–6, 146, 173 linguistic politics 173, 175, 189–93 military and army life 70 multiculturality/diversity 87, 131 multilingualism 87 ongoing conflicts 2, 4 peace and national reconciliation 5 riots of 1988 136, 137, 138–9 rise of extremist Islamism 7, 34, 123, 125 violence and brutality 3–6, 14–16, 73, 83–5, 89, 137–40, 145 women’s mistreatment 14, 52, 72 writers’ criticisms and response to 2, 4–5 Algeria in Others’ Languages (Berger) 173

Algerian War of Independence 19, 36, 46, 71–2, 83, 85, 97, 108, 110–11, 121, 122–3, 137, 140, 145, 158, 193, 197, 198, 214, 247 Algérie: la nahda des Lettres, la renaissance des mots (Matarese et al.) 9 alienation 45, 61, 81, 89–100, 102, 105, 108–9, 116, 122, 193, 195, 196, 198–9, 208, 241–3, 245, 247, 258 allegory 125–7 Almohads 121, 124, 125, 132 Almoravids 121, 123–5, 127–8, 258 alter ego 50, 246 alternative history 119, 123 Amazigh 7 Amazigh (Berber) language 11 American literature 55 amnesia 36, 73, 80, 143 n.24 Amour bilingue (Khatibi) 176, 188 Amours et aventures de Sindbad le Marin (Bachi) 48–51, 78, 134, 175 Amselle, Jean-Loup 191 anarchism 87–9 anger 6, 71–2, 99, 104, 112, 152, 154 An-Nahda/MTI (Mouvement de la tendance islamique) 8 annihilation 83, 103, 105, 106, 160, 163 anorexia 72 antagonism 34, 45, 61, 78, 93 n.42, 101, 105, 206, 225 anti-colonialism 9–10, 14, 34, 35, 57 n.10, 75, 166 antithesis 107, 113 anxiety 62, 65, 71, 76, 90–1, 102, 104, 212 appropriation 54, 115, 142 n.13, 178, 179, 183, 185, 186, 224 Apter, Emily 175 Arab culture 11, 75, 84, 104, 167–9, 217, 220, 246, 255, 261 Arabian Desert 143 n.24, 250 Arabic, as national language 11, 39, 45, 174 Arabism 11, 168

Index Arabization programmes 3, 7–8, 10–13, 108, 159, 173–4 Arab literature 15, 262 Arab Spring 1, 7, 9, 15–16, 85, 88 Arac, Jonathan 42 Archéologie du chaos amoureux (Benfodil) 88 archives 125, 128 Arendt, Hannah 148 Aristotle 176–7 art and autonomy 89 as form of insurrection 14, 16 and literature 89, 116 of narration 48 Ashcroft, Bill 32, 33 Assia Djebar: littérature et transmission (Asholt et al.) 208 Assia Djebar, ou la résistance de l’écriture (Calle-Gruber) 239–40 assimilation 43, 54, 124, 181, 194, 229, 233–4, 259 Attridge, Derek 206–7, 218, 229, 231–2, 234–5, 237, 259 author-character relationship 164, 208 authoritarianism 3, 5–10, 16, 24, 31–2, 34, 52, 62, 66, 104, 138–9, 145, 209, 237–8, 245 author-reader relationship 76, 178, 206–8, 258, 259 author-subject relationship 96, 107, 113 autobiography 25, 62–9, 70, 82, 96, 100, 109 Chraïbi’s narratives 65–6 De Man’s narratives 64 Djebar’s narratives 66–8, 238–9, 250 and fiction 64 Kelly’s study 62–3 Khadra’s narratives 96 Khatibi’s narratives 66, 68–9 Memmi’s narratives 64–5 misconceptions about 62–3 Sebbar’s narratives 190–1 and self-hood 74 Autobiography and Independence (Kelly) 62 autochthony 77, 221 autonomy 22, 42, 67, 89, 115, 210 avant-garde writing 6, 9 Awlad Ahmed, Mohamed Sgaeir 15

277

Bachi, Salim 20, 26, 38, 48–51, 53, 78, 89, 120–2, 128, 132–41, 146, 148, 155, 175, 256, 260 Bahri, Deepika 17 Bancel, Nicolas 36 Barakat movement 88 Bardo Museum attacks, 2015 9 Barzakh Editions 9, 13, 164 Baudelaire, Charles 78, 246 Bécheur, Ali 260 Beirut 83–4, 104, 105 Bekri, Tahar 13 belonging, sense of 18, 61, 65, 68, 69, 73, 102, 106–8, 115, 130, 188, 217 Ben Ali, Zine al-Adbine 8, 15 Ben Bella, Ahmed 133 Benfodil, Mustapha 88–9 Benjedid, Chadli 3 Ben Jelloun, Tahar 7, 23, 26, 44–5, 47, 61, 73–4, 77, 83–5, 97–109, 110, 116, 122, 124, 150–1, 206, 230, 237, 256, 258, 261 Bensmaïa, Réda 126–7, 179 Berber languages 11–12, 45, 80, 81, 173–4, 178 Berber question 3, 7 Bertin, Antoine 43 betrayal 45, 68, 100, 133, 140, 180, 182, 210–12 Bey, Maïssa 13, 76–7, 85, 93 n.42, 261 Bhabha, Homi 75, 120, 123, 126 bilingualism 11, 26, 44, 75–6, 174, 175, 176, 221–2 Binyon, Michael 15 Blanchard, Pascal 36 Blanchot, Maurice 106 Boehmer, Elleke 32–3 Bongie, Chris 17 Bonn, Charles 16, 35, 39, 57 n.10, 258–9 Bouazizi, Mohamed 8 Boudiaf, Mohamed 86 Boudjedra, Rachid 12, 14–15, 55, 74, 78, 81–2, 85, 261 Boumedienne, Houari 3, 133 Bouraoui, Hédi 13, 76 Bourget, Carine 198, 261 Bourguiba, Habib 7–8, 155 Bousta, Rachida Saigh 100 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz 5, 88 Bozzo, Anna 36

278 Burgat, François 261 Burton, Richard 53 Butler, Judith 195–7 Byatt, A.S. 235 Calle-Gruber, Mireille 239–40 Camus, Albert 77, 133, 140, 149, 158–61, 164–8, 256 canons 41, 88 capitalism 34, 40, 151, 155, 156–7 Caribbean 44, 119 Casablanca economic riots, 1981 6, 147 riots of March 1965 104 suicide bombings, 2003 7 Casanova, Pascale 41–2 case study 149, 244 Caverero, Adriana 148 censorship 12, 24, 70, 81, 86, 255 Cervantes, Miguel de 230, 250 Césaire, Aimé 159 Ces Voix qui m’assiègent (Djebar) 61, 66–7, 70, 82–3, 208 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 119 Chaos of the Senses (Mosteghanemi) 145–6, 256 Char, René 250 character construction of 98 creation of 184 use of 20–1 Chebbi, Abou el-Kasem 15 Chekhov, Anton 89 Cheng, François 221 Chikhi, Beida 239 Chraïbi, Driss 65–6, 73, 78, 85, 121 Christianity 50, 165–6 Chroniques de la citadelle d’exil (Laâbi) 6 circulation 39–42, 70, 205, 209, 211, 213, 215–16, 222, 224, 229 citizenship 188 Clark, Peter 15 classical Arabic 11, 12, 55, 77 classical Greek style 134 Claudel, Paul 250 coda 216 code-switching 178 Cohen, Mark 218 collective identity 63, 121, 130

Index colonialism 2, 4–5, 35, 36, 38–9, 85, 136, 168, 181, 182, 207, 218, 220, 248, 258 Combe, Dominique 33 commemoration 36, 72, 83–4, 122–3, 128 commercialization 41 committed literature, notion of 18–20, 62 communality 151, 154 communitarianism 63, 182 competition, Casanova’s concept 41 confessional narratives 68, 76, 100, 102, 211, 216–17, 240, 242, 251 containment 32, 69, 103 contingency 27, 43, 45, 48, 74, 79, 80, 177, 183, 184, 186, 187, 215, 216, 222 convivencia, notion of 58 n.41 Cooper, Fenimore 230–1 Coronil, Fernando 34 cosmopolitanism 11, 34, 178 counter-narratives 120 creative fiction 120, 165, 169, 260 creative thinking 15, 40, 77, 83, 257 creative writing 9, 27, 46, 67, 72, 83, 96–8, 147, 164, 257 creolization 43–4 critical theory 55 critical thinking 10, 35, 108 cross-dressing 96 Crowley, Patrick 89, 208–9 cultural activity 2, 5, 19, 25, 75, 178, 232, 242 cultural determinism 44, 179, 217 cultural identity 75, 120 cultural ideology 5, 10, 13 cultural multiplicity 48 culture Arab 11, 75, 84, 104, 167–9, 217, 220, 246, 255, 261 European 25, 41, 44, 64, 78–9, 108, 239, 260–1 history and 20, 39, 43, 76–7, 128, 153, 155, 158, 169, 218 Islamic 35, 54, 63, 77–9, 87, 210, 248, 255, 261 language and 11, 44, 174, 222, 224, 241–2 local 2, 56, 64, 79, 149, 160, 239, 260 and memory 19, 152, 189 national 2, 10, 12, 14, 19, 26, 39, 44–5, 62, 64, 73, 98, 116, 120, 149, 188, 259 and politics 26–7, 66

Index Dabashi, Hamid 1, 9 Damrosch, David 40–2 Daoud, Kamel 13–14, 23, 25, 26, 97–8, 108–16, 120, 122, 148–51, 158–69, 206, 230, 256, 257 Darija/dialectal Arabic 11 Dauner, Maia 34 death, writing and 82, 83, 105–6, 115, 242–3 death threats 164 décennie noire (black decade), Algeria 3, 5, 15, 83, 88, 114, 137, 173, 261 deception/deceptiveness 80–4, 110, 145, 147, 165, 252, 255, 258 Decolonising the Intellectual (Hiddleston) 17 decolonization 3, 9, 11, 13–15, 17, 23, 33, 35, 62, 66, 85, 108, 109, 121, 124, 132, 173, 176–7, 181, 188 deconstruction 33, 188 Deerslayer, The/Tueur de Daims (Cooper) 230–1 Delacroix, Eugène 78 De Man, Paul 64 democracy liberty and 62 literature and 18–27, 182 progress of 87 and religious orthodoxy 42 transition to 7, 8, 9–10, 31, 33, 255 Deneen, Patrick 20–1, 23 Denis, Benoît 18 departure 50, 70, 72, 75, 137, 180, 184, 185, 216, 258 deracination 102, 103, 220 Derrida, Jacques 21, 24–5, 115, 186, 187–8, 214–16, 222 desert landscape 23, 26, 38, 55, 121, 122–9, 131, 132–3, 135, 137, 141, 143 n.24, 230, 232, 234, 250, 256, 258 desire 69, 76, 81, 91, 126, 127, 129, 141, 150, 157, 161, 162, 174, 176–7, 180, 183, 185, 197, 207, 211, 231, 239–47, 250–2, 260 detachment 42, 98, 101–2, 106–7, 187, 191 determinism 20–1, 27, 39, 44, 48, 89, 179, 184, 186–7, 215, 217, 222 D’Haen, Theo 41 dhimma (protection) 218

279

dialogue cross-cultural 177, 179 cultural 12, 27, 38, 45, 48, 54, 174, 191, 217, 226, 262 ethics of 261 intellectual 38 intercultural 61–2, 74–80, 199, 206, 217–20, 225, 261 intertextual 48 letter writing and 207, 208, 210, 212–13, 217 linguistic 176–7, 181–2 literature and 39, 56, 76, 236, 237, 259 multilingual 176, 219 openness and 218 and travel 48 diary(ies) 69, 91, 101, 137 diaspora/‘diasporisation’ 39–40, 48, 222, 248, 259 Dib, Mohammed 121, 177 Dinarzade (character) 52 Al-Din Rûmi, Jalal 250–1 discernment 184 disillusionment 20, 50, 84, 101–2, 104, 112, 130, 255, 258 displacement 33, 219 dispossession 150, 188, 208 dissemination 48, 100, 101, 110, 112, 124, 214– 215 Dites-moi le songe (Kilito) 53–4 Djaout, Tahar 4–5, 15, 19, 23–6, 38, 73, 84–6, 120–33, 135, 137, 141, 146, 151, 155, 199, 229–30, 232–9, 247, 252, 256, 258, 260 Djebar, Assia 4, 13, 20, 24–6, 36, 38, 51–3, 61–3, 66–70, 74, 77–86, 120–1, 159, 168, 193, 197–8, 205–18, 222–3, 226, 230, 232, 238–52, 256–8, 261 dogmatism 131, 138, 154, 156, 168, 206, 207, 225, 232, 252, 257 Donadey, Anne 190 doubles/doubling 50–1, 61, 68, 80, 91, 96, 107, 109, 114, 136, 137, 141, 187, 246 dreams 59 n.49, 72, 98, 100, 103, 105, 107, 111, 113, 114, 124, 128, 130, 133, 134, 136, 141, 145, 165–6, 173, 182–3, 197–8, 220, 222, 235, 236 Du côté de chez Swann (Proust) 243 dystopia 50, 134

280 Eberhardt, Isabelle 96 eclecticism 12, 62, 91, 131 Ecrire l’urgence (Fisher) 85 écrivain public. See public writer egalitarianism 22 Ehni, Réné-Nicolas 36 Elbaz, Robert 117 n.12 Elissa (Mellah) 152, 156 Elyzad 9, 13 Empire Writes Back, The (Ashcroft et al.) 33, 119 engagement, notion of 17, 18–20, 22, 32, 33, 38, 42, 44, 46, 55, 78, 79, 131, 132, 138, 149, 150, 155, 164, 165, 167, 175, 177, 190, 232, 239 ‘Enjambements et envols, Assia Djebar échographe’ (Ruhe) 239 escape reading as a source of 235, 238, 246, 251–2 writing as a form of 61, 69–74, 80–2, 146, 258 essays 6, 19, 25, 43, 53, 66, 76, 91, 173, 178, 186, 189–92, 205, 208, 261 ethics 26, 40, 168, 179–90, 199, 217, 224–5, 226, 237, 261 ethnocentrism 221 ‘étranger professionnel,’ notion of 178–81, 186–8, 258 Études françaises 178 Euripedes 250 Europe/European culture 25, 41, 44, 64, 78–9, 108, 239, 260–1 currency 12 history 119–21 languages 44, 178 literature 20–1, 24, 28 n.25, 55–6, 62, 119, 177, 239, 260 perspectives 119, 261 postcolonial studies 35 and world literature 31, 33, 47, 54 European Community 182 everyday life 145 exchange 26, 39, 40–1, 62, 64, 74, 76–8, 80–1, 156, 175, 177, 187, 205–6, 208–9, 215, 217, 223–6, 233, 248–9, 259 Excitable Speech (Butler) 195 exclusion 154, 193, 220, 232

Index exclusivism 27, 220, 221, 226 exile 13, 44, 45, 70, 90, 104, 124, 128, 190, 193, 221 expatriation 61, 70 experimentalism 14, 16, 24–5, 27, 52, 76, 80, 108, 121–2, 147, 165, 166, 169, 174–5, 206, 207, 255 exploitation 35, 100, 113, 119, 121, 137, 139, 157, 214, 255 false universalism 32, 40, 42, 44 Fanon, Frantz 2, 14, 16, 113 fantasy 53–4, 91, 96, 99, 105, 119, 128, 130, 134, 136, 138, 141, 161–2, 197, 211, 246–7, 250, 256 Felman, Shoshana 195–6 female empowerment. See under women femininity 51 Feraoun, Mouloud 62, 63, 121 Fes riots, 1990 6 fiction and autobiography 64, 191 creative 120 and deception 165 and fantasy 141 history and 36 and images 256, 257 and imagination 133–4 knowledge and 169 and literature 165, 168–9, 260 and lived experience 145, 147, 158 and philosophy 147, 222, 226 and reality 145, 146, 150, 152, 164, 165 and religion 165–6 and storytelling 163 and vocabulary 136 first language 181 FIS (Front Islamique du Salut) 3–4, 232 Fisher, Dominique 85 Flaubert, Gustave 22 flight 68, 70, 72, 82, 97, 179, 184, 209, 251, 258 FLN (Front de libération nationale) 2–3, 137, 140, 173 folklore 151 Foo, Cynthia 34 Ford, Joseph 85 frame tale 48, 49, 51

Index France and Arab world tensions 74, 90, 105, 192 benefits of publishing in 12 invasion of Algiers in 1830 120–1 Nazi occupation of 18 postcolonial studies 35–7 refugees/migrants in 6, 15, 70, 213 writers exiled in 90, 104–5 France Culture 165 François le Champi (Sand) 243, 244 ‘francophonie,’ notion of 36, 262 freedom of expression 9, 12, 16, 21, 24, 98, 147 freedom of speech 8, 21, 71, 112 freedom of the press 21 French literature 78, 147, 246 French military history 78 Freud, Sigmund 244 Friends and Enemies (Bongie) 17 Fromentin, Eugène 78 Gafaïti, Hafid 12, 16, 20, 259 Gauch, Suzanne 51 Genet, Jean 178 genre 28 n.25, 56, 62, 64, 115, 116, 186, 214 ghostwriter 26, 97, 107, 108–16, 122 GIA (Groupe islamique armé) 4, 5, 15 Gide, André 250 Gikandi, Simon 34 Gilroy, Paul 37 Giraudoux, Jean 250 Glissant, Edouard 43, 77, 119–20, 123 globalization 1, 34–5, 37 Gobillot, Geneviève 219 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 40–1 Gontard, Marc 185 Great War 18 Griffiths, Gareth 32, 33 Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC) 5 Guardian 15 Halimi, Gisèle 135 Hannoum, Abdelmajid 135 Harbi, Mohammed 173 Hargreaves, Alec 36, 43 Haroun Al-Rashid (character) 158–69 Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie) 163 Harrison, Nick 17

281

Harrison, Olivia 217 Hassan II 6, 7, 19, 90, 98, 104 Hassoun, Jacques 26, 207, 217–26 hate speech 195–6 Hebrew 219, 221 hermeticism 42, 49 heroism 97, 110, 111, 162 historiography 36, 123, 131, 135, 138, 141 history Bhabha’s concept 120, 123 colonial 32, 37 conception of 76 and culture 20, 39, 128, 153, 169, 218 discourse 119–20, 133 family 46–7, 87 and fiction 36 Glissant and Chakrabarty’s conceptions 119, 123 and globalization 37 global/transnational 37 and interculturality 79 and knowledge 119–20, 127, 137, 149 and legend/myth 127–8, 136 literature and 40, 119–44 local 8, 13 and memory 46, 123, 127, 128, 142 n.13 and modernity 155 national 39, 45–6, 121, 123–4, 126–7, 208, 261 and politics 17, 140, 148 and present trends 123 and ‘reality’ 32, 42, 157, 175 rewriting of 123 shared 207 and story, double meaning of ‘histoire’ 119 and testimony 17 and tradition 13, 155, 260 and truth 76, 131 History of Jewish-Muslim Relations (Meddeb and Stora) 218 Holocaust memory 46, 59 n.45, 132 homelessness 73, 84 Horizons maghrébins 262 hostility 84, 85, 129 humanism 41, 76, 78, 79, 232 hybridity/hybridization 39, 44–5, 53, 67, 75, 134, 179, 182, 188, 190–1 hypothesis 54, 148

282

Index

identity(ies) alternative 70, 100 Arab 7, 169, 220 collective 121, 130 conception of 75 creation 63–5, 107–8, 179, 191 cultural 75, 182–3 hybrid 190 individual 121 Islamic/religious 4, 7, 79 Jewish 218 language and nation 200 language and ownership 188 memory and 132, 140 multiple 46, 95, 99 national 8, 74, 79, 102, 131, 146, 169 postcolonial 75 quest for 63 ideologies 4, 10, 20, 27, 37, 74–5, 87, 139, 151, 231, 237 idioms 12, 43–4, 77, 80, 88, 159, 176, 197, 198, 261 ignorance 189, 192–3, 198, 221 ijtihad 86 imagery 49, 55, 86, 113, 129, 134, 137, 141, 155, 167, 178, 182, 190, 192, 224, 242, 255–6, 258, 260 images 7–8, 44, 50–2, 54–5, 66–70, 81, 101, 103, 105, 121, 128–9, 131, 136, 152, 157, 162, 168, 181, 191, 197, 209, 211, 219–20, 222–3, 230–1, 235, 247, 255–9, 261 imagination creativity of 141 importance of 146 language and 181, 182 memory and 132 and narration 48, 54 power of 146, 152, 255, 256, 257–9 reading and 230, 235, 238, 247 role of 121–2, 141 scientific ‘truth’ and 150, 151 semantic 256–7 as transformative 146 Western 54–5 writing and 73–4, 123–4, 255, 256, 258–9 incarceration, of writers 6, 14, 90, 110, 193, 236, 255 incest 244

India 47, 78, 119–20 individualism 21, 63, 151 injustice 8, 14, 51–2, 55, 84, 86–7, 104 insomnia 71–2 Institut d’Etudes et de Recherches pour l’Arabisation, Morocco 11 intercultural dialogue 61–2, 74–80, 199, 206, 217, 218–19, 225 ‘interlangue’ 181, 184, 186, 189 intertextuality 48, 133, 140 intoxication 141, 185, 246, 251 Invisible Culture 34 Iraq, US invasion of 5 Iraq war 70 Islamic literature 78 Islamic Youth 7 Islam/Islamism and colonialism, association between 4 distinction between 168 everyday practices 219 extremist ideologies 237 history of 121 and Judaism, interaction between 26, 46, 207, 217–21, 224–5 monolingualism and 39, 45 Islamist groups, extremist in Algeria 3–5, 10, 71, 84, 87, 108, 123, 137–40, 229–30, 232, 238 in Middle East 5 in Morocco 7 in Tunisia 8–9 isolationism 6, 24–5, 45, 49, 232, 236, 252 Israel invasion of Lebanon 220 state formation 218, 220 Italian language 11, 49–50 Jacobus, Mary 234, 235 Jameson, Fredric 126 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 159 Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (Sebbar) 26, 175, 189–200 Jewish-Muslim relations 46, 207, 217–21, 224–6 Jews 46, 79, 218, 220, 224, 226 jihad 86 Joubert, Claire 37, 39, 217 journalism/journalistic inquiry 4, 9, 15, 88, 108, 138, 147–58, 168 Judaism 46

Index Judaism and Islam, interaction between 26, 46, 207, 217–21, 224–5 Kabylia 3, 7 Kadir, Djelal 41 Kalima wa Dimna 78 Kamuf, Peggy 21 Kearney, Richard 256–7 Kelly, Debra 62–3 Khadra, Yasmina 70–1, 73, 95, 96, 97, 108, 258, 260 Khaldun, Ibn 69, 135, 155 Khatibi, Abdelkébir 14, 20, 26, 63, 66, 68–9, 74–7, 80–1, 95–7, 108, 168, 175–91, 199, 207, 213, 217–26, 258, 260, 261 Khayyam, Omar 78, 79 Kilito, Abdelfattah 53–4, 174, 176–7, 230–2, 234, 255–6, 261 Kitab el Aghani, Le Livre des chansons 249 knowledge cultural 249 desire for 54, 247, 250 and fiction 169 forms of 25, 47, 90, 154, 233, 252 historical 119–20, 127, 129, 137, 149, 157 multilayered and multidirectional 122 reality and 26, 157 self- 63, 66, 149, 230 slippery and unreliable 157 and truth 46–7, 65 Koran 50, 65–6, 101, 125, 150, 162, 165, 168, 218–19, 225, 246, 250 Laâbi, Abdellatif 6–7, 14, 19, 24, 74, 90–1, 103, 174, 260 Labyrinthes 36–7 Lacan, Jacques 214–15 La Carte postale (Derrida) 214 La Chute (Camus) 158–60, 167 La Civilisation, ma mère (Chraïbi) 65, 66 La Croisée des Chemins 9 La Dissémination (Derrida) 115 La Femme sans sépulture (Djebar) 121 Laferrière, Dany 79 La Fracture coloniale (Blanchard et al.) 36 Lagache, Daniel 222 La Haine de la démocratie (Rancière) 21 Lahjomri, Abdeljalil 16

283

La Kahéna (Bachi) 26, 121, 122, 128, 132–41, 148, 155, 175, 256 La Langue de l’autre (Khatibi) 179 La Maison de lumière (Saadi) 132–3 La Mémoire tatouée (Khatibi) 68, 95 La Mère du printemps (Chraïbi) 121 La Métaphore vive (Ricoeur) 256 L’Amour, la fantasia (Djebar) 24, 26, 38, 51, 52, 66–8, 70, 78, 82, 120–1, 193, 197, 206–17, 222–3, 245 ‘La Moustiquaire’ (Sebbar) 191–2, 195–6 language colonial 208, 210 creative potential of 81, 106 and culture 11, 44, 174, 222, 224, 241–2 deforming power of 81–2 dialogue and convergence 219 and dispossession 188 diversification of 45, 77 identity and nation 200 identity and ownership 188 linguistics 196–7, 208, 222 literary form and 86 literature and 226 and meaning 22–3, 81, 128 national 11, 28 n.25, 39, 44–5, 174 oral 81 philosophy and 185 and politics 173 and text 13, 16, 125, 159 as transformative 67, 69 and translation 173–203 untranslatable 80–1 usage 12, 22, 77, 174 written 13, 44, 86 ‘La Nièce de Don Quichotte’ (Kilito) 230 La Nuit sacrée (Ben Jelloun) 98 La Politique de la littérature (Rancière) 21–2 ‘La Préface du nègre’ (Daoud) 23, 26, 97, 108–16, 120 La Querelle des images (Kilito) 230, 255 L’Arabe comme un chant secret (Sebbar) 192–3 Laredj, Waciny 169 La Répudiation (Boudjedra) 14 Laroui, Abdallah 76 Laroui, Fouad 11 La Statue de sel (Memmi) 65, 66

284

Index

La Transe des insoumis (Mokeddem) 71–2, 73, 82 Lazreg, Marnia 4 Lebanon 78, 105, 220 Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Djebar) 83, 84 Le Bris, Michel 43, 44, 45 Le Chien d’Ulysse (Kaïm) 132, 137 Le Conclave des pleureuses (Mellah) 26, 148, 149–58, 161, 169 L’Ecrivain (Khadra) 70–1, 96 L’Ecrivain public (Ben Jelloun) 23, 26, 44–5, 84, 97, 98–108, 116, 124 Le Dernier été de la raison (Djaout) 24, 26, 73, 229, 232–8, 246, 258 Le Discours antillais (Glissant) 119 Le Discours du chameau (Ben Jelloun) 61 Lefort, Claude 20 Le Livre imprévu (Laâbi) 91 Lemaire, Sandrine 36 Le Même livre (Hassoun and Khatibi) 26, 207, 217–26 Le Minotaure 504 (Daoud) 108, 114 Le Monde 15, 43 Le Monde à coté (Chraïbi) 65–6 Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (Derrida) 188 L’Enfant de sable (Ben Jelloun) 98 Le Nomade immobile (Memmi) 64–5 Léonard, Nicolas Germain 43 Le Passé simple (Chraïbi) 65, 66 Le Postcolonial comparé (Joubert) 37 Le Premier homme (Camus) 160, 161–2, 168 Le Quotidien d’Oran 108 Le Roman Maghrébin (Khatibi) 14 Les Carnets de Shérazade (Sebbar) 191 Les Chercheurs d’os (Djaout) 38, 122–3 Les Conspirateurs sont parmi nous (Oulehri) 146–7, 148 Le Scorpion (Memmi) 65 Le Scribe et son ombre (Khatibi) 66, 68–9, 80, 95 Les Damnés de la terre (Fanon) 14 Les Identités meurtrières (Maalouf) 79 ‘Le Silence de la langue de mon père, l’arabe’(Sebbar) 191, 192, 195 Le Silence de Mahomet (Bachi) 121 ‘Les Jeunes filles de la colonie’ (Sebbar) 192 Les Juifs du Nil (Hassoun) 218 Les Lieux de mémoire (Nora) 123

Les Rides du Lion (Laâbi) 91 Les Temps modernes (Sebbar) 192 Le Sueur, James 2, 4 L’Etincelle (Ben Jelloun) 7 L’Etranger (Camus) 149, 158, 160–1, 164–7, 256 ‘L’Étranger professionnel’ (Khatibi) 178–9 letters and literary writing 101, 205–28 challenges/subject to ‘accidents’ 224, 259 in Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia 208–17, 222–3 Hassoun and Khatibi’s Le Même livre 217–26 Lettres algériennes (Boudjedra) 81 Lettres parisiennes (Sebbar and Huston) 199 Le Village de l’Allemand ou le journal des Frères Schiller (Sansal) 46 L’Homme du livre (Chraïbi) 121 liberalism 3, 4, 55, 232, 238, 260 liberation cultural 250 political contestation and 252, 260 and self-expression 110 sexual 247 writing process as 6, 38, 61, 68, 69–74, 95 life-writing 66 L’Imaginaire (Sartre) 257, 262–3 n.7 L’Imposture des mots (Khadra) 71 L’Invention du désert (Djaout) 23–4, 26, 38, 121, 122–31, 132, 133, 135, 137, 141, 230, 232, 256 Lionnet, Françoise 43–4, 191, 246 listening skills 109, 151, 166, 246 literary creation 61, 77 literary creativity 9, 10, 44, 53, 61, 71, 77, 90, 95, 98, 102, 104, 116, 123, 147, 151, 156, 206, 208, 221, 225, 229–30 literary expression 16, 208 literary narratives 17, 119–20, 122, 131, 149, 156 literary representation 48, 50, 55 literary theory 33, 259 literary writing 2, 4, 6, 10, 14–16, 18, 25, 63, 74, 77, 88, 97, 116, 131, 149, 159, 174, 175, 188, 199, 206, 217, 221, 224, 255, 258

Index literature and activism 16 author as creator of 61–94 and censorship 12 and democracy 18–27 as departure 73–4 dialogue and 76 as disruptive 25, 206 as encounter 208–28 and ‘engagement’ 18–19 as fictional and creative 260–1 and history 119–44 and language 226 and letters 205–28, 229 and life 145–71, 256, 257 and orthodoxy 159, 164, 168–9, 237 public role of 62 and resistance 84–91, 206 and secrecy 188 as space of exchange 74 and storytelling 47–55 theory of 147, 225 as therapeutic 53, 65 and (as) translation 173–203 and truth 145, 164 Littérature maghrébine et littérature mondiale (Bonn and Rothe) 39, 258–9 littérature-monde movement 43, 46 local culture 2, 56, 64, 79, 149, 160, 239, 260 local history 13, 38, 40 local literatures 11, 38, 119–20, 177, 262 local nationalism 75 local tradition 5, 13, 44, 49 ‘logique métisse,’ notion of 191 Loin de Médine (Djebar) 121 loss 61, 76, 80, 81–2, 84, 90, 101–3, 106, 116, 126, 128, 131, 146, 152, 161, 183, 187, 214–15, 220, 222, 237, 239, 241–3, 249 love letters 95, 99, 210–11, 245 Lucretius 250 L’Une et l’autre (Bey) 76–7 Maalouf, Amin 78–9 ‘Maghreb,’ idea of 75–6 ‘Maghreb pluriel,’ concept of 74–5 Maghreb pluriel (Khatibi) 176, 188, 221, 222

285

Malot, Hector 240–3 Manicheism 177 Marrakech 99 marriage 137, 152, 183–5, 213 Marx, Karl 40 Mathmawi/Odes mystiques (Al-Din Rûmi) 250–1 McDougall, James 5, 11, 168 Meddeb, Abdelwahab 76, 80, 85, 176, 218, 219 Medina 99, 106 Mediterranean 11, 45–6, 58 n.41, 73, 79 melancholy 61, 89, 96, 130, 243 Mellah, Fawzi 26, 148, 149–58, 161, 169, 256, 257 Memmi, Albert 63–6, 76–7, 90, 261 memoirs 108–12, 114, 197, 216–17, 250 memory and amnesia 80 and culture 19, 152, 189 of decolonization 109 and history 46, 123, 127, 128, 142 n.13 Holocaust 59 n.45 living 157 local 119–20, 193 loss of 152 national 109–10 oral 122 and progress 155–6 recreation of 155 subjective 46, 122–3, 153 war 122–3 Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism (Hargreaves) 36 Memory in the Flesh (Mosteghanemi) 145, 146 Meretoja, Hanna 147–8, 161 Mernissi, Fatema 54 Mes Algéries en France (Sebbar) 198 messianism 14 metaphor 13, 64, 71, 85, 88, 98, 126–7, 256, 258 metaphysics 75 metapolitics 23, 89 Meursault, contre-enquête (Daoud) 26, 108, 148–9, 158–69 French and Algerian versions 164–5 Middle East 4, 5, 9, 34, 128, 206, 217, 218, 220 migration 44–7, 58 n.41, 130, 187–8

286 Mimouni, Rachid 12, 20, 85 mirage 61, 108, 136, 235, 256, 259 mirrors 47–8, 100–1, 114, 130, 136, 139, 141, 146, 152, 166, 219, 240, 258 Mo’allaquats (hanging poems) 239, 245, 248, 249, 250, 251 Moatassime, Ahmed 12 modernity 148, 149, 153, 155 modernization 8, 150 Mohammed, Prophet 121, 125, 150, 168, 218 Mohammed V 6 Mohammed VI 7, 90 Mokeddem, Malika 5, 70–4, 82, 86 monarchy 5–6, 7 monolingualism 11, 39, 43, 45, 46, 77, 174–5, 221 monologue 113, 158, 160, 162, 164, 167, 169 monotheism 218–20, 225 morality 81, 103, 233 Morocco Arabization policy 7, 11 and Arab Spring 7 colonial past 5 deracination and disillusionment 102 Islamist extremism 7 linguistic tensions 12–13, 173–6 mistreatment of writers 6, 24, 90 monolingualism 11–12 non-belonging in 98 oppressive regimes 19, 23, 24, 66, 97 oral tradition 98 postcolonial politics 188–9 precolonial history 5–6 socio-political unrest 2, 5, 102 transition to democracy 7, 31, 255 ‘years of lead’ legacy 6–7 Mosteghanemi, Ahlam 145–8, 169, 256, 257 mother figure 253 n.34 mother tongue 80, 175 Moura, Jean-Marc 33, 140 mourning 83, 152 Mouvements 37 multidirectional memory 46, 59 n.45, 122, 132 multilingualism 11, 42–3, 49, 77–9, 81–2, 87, 173, 175–6, 179–80, 189–91, 199, 221, 261

Index Mvogo, Faustin 15, 85 mysticism 107, 225 myth/mythology 3, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 111–12, 115, 122, 133, 135–7, 140, 150–1, 154, 157, 168, 174, 184–5, 221, 224–5, 249 Naddaff, Sandra 47–8 Naissance à l’aube (Chraïbi) 121 naming 160–3 narrative and reality, relationship between 147–8 ‘narrative turn’ 147, 161 Narrative Turn, The (Meretoja) 147 national culture 2, 10, 12, 14, 19, 26, 39, 44–5, 62, 64, 73, 98, 116, 120, 149, 188, 259 national history 39, 45–6, 111, 121, 123–4, 126–7, 208, 261 nationalism 32, 34, 38, 39, 46, 50, 74, 75, 84, 110, 111, 178, 257, 259 Native Intelligence (Bahri) 17 Nedjma (Yacine) 14, 133, 135, 140, 147 ‘nègre,’ notion of 109, 113 neocolonialism 19, 35–6 neo-imperialism 34, 40 neurosis 212 neutrality 177, 179–86 New Literary History 34 New York 179 Nietzsche, Friedrich 53 nihilism 89 1984, Le Dernier été (Orwell) 232 nomadism 187, 190 non-appropriation 183 non-belonging, sense of 13, 66, 102, 103, 175–6, 245 non-imposition 183 Nora, Pierre 123, 128, 142 n.13 North Africa Al-Qaeda in 5 and Arab culture 11, 261 and democracy 20, 24 evolution of nationhood 31 extremist groups 10, 16, 34 francophone publishing houses 12 national culture, contestation of 2, 188, 191 postcolonialism 188, 258 struggles for independence 1, 31

Index transitional period 255, 260 unity 135 nostalgia 55, 58 n.41, 110, 153, 220 nouveau roman 147, 255 novels 14, 25, 41, 44–5, 48, 73, 76, 79, 84–5, 90–1, 97–8, 101, 108, 116, 120–3, 126, 131–2, 134, 135, 138, 141, 145–7, 148, 152–8, 161, 168–9, 188, 190, 198–9, 206, 209, 213, 231–2, 260 Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (Djebar) 26, 38, 67, 68, 78, 82, 216, 230, 233, 238–52, 256, 258 Nussbaum, Martha 148 N’zid (Mokeddem) 73 OAS (Organisation armée secrète) 140 objectivity 128, 154, 157 occultation 38, 147, 152 oeuvre 44, 61, 64, 78, 87, 231 Ombre sultane (Djebar) 52 omens 154 Omri, Mohamed-Salah 15, 157 oracles 154 oral memory 122 oral tradition 98 Oran, langue morte (Djebar) 52–3 orientalism 42, 54, 190 Orientalist art 78 Orlando, Valerie 190 Orwell, George 232 Oulehri, Touria 146–8 Ouyang, Wen-chin 49 Paragraph 17 Paris 43, 46, 68–9, 90, 91, 104, 124, 127, 128, 213, 247 Parny, Evariste 43 parody 160–1 Peau noire, masques blancs (Fanon) 113 pensée autre, Khatibi’s 176, 222 ‘pensée en langues,’ notion of 77, 80, 176, 181, 191 persecution 15, 50, 195 Persia 47, 78, 79 personal memory 122, 153 philosophy 65, 147, 185, 186, 188, 219, 221–3, 225, 226, 256, 257 Pichon, Edouard 185 Pizer, John 41

287

PMLA 1, 34 Poetics of Relation (Glissant) 77 poetry 3, 6, 15, 22, 25, 40–1, 65, 73–4, 78, 84, 90–1, 153, 177, 185, 239, 247–50, 260 political ideology 13, 87, 158, 161, 231 political neutrality 180–4 Portrait du colonisé (Memmi) 65 Portrait du Juif (Memmi) 65 postcards 213–15 postcolonialism/postcolonial as contested term 1, 32, 33 criticism 1, 17, 31, 34–7, 119, 261 limitations 34 popularity of 1, 31 writers’ response to 37–9 postcolonial literature, defined 32–3 postcolonial studies 1, 17, 31, 34, 35, 37 Postcolonial Studies and the Literary (Sorensen) 17 postcolonial theory 17, 32–9, 55–6, 75, 119 Poste restante: Alger (Sansal) 86–7 postmodernism 255 postmodern literature 16, 17 Pour une littératuremonde (Le Bris and Rouaud) 43, 44 pre-Islamic poetry 78, 239, 247, 248 prejudice 104, 154, 229 Prendergast, Christopher 41 primal scene 243–5, 247 professionalism 178 prose/prose narrative 22, 25, 255 prostitution 125 Proust, Marcel 64, 243, 244 pseudonyms 70, 212 public writer in Ben Jelloun’s text 23–4, 26, 45, 84, 98–108, 116, 124, 237 in Daoud’s articles 23–4, 26, 108–16 defined 97 notion of 95–7 role of 95, 100 in Sebbar’s text 96 publishing houses 6, 9, 12–13 ‘Purloined Letter’ (Poe) 214–15 Al-Qaeda au Maghreb Islamique 5 al-Quais, Imru 78 Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Sartre) 18, 62 Quotidien d’Oran 108, 168

288 Rabat 91, 221 radicalism. See Islamist groups Rancière, Jacques 21–5, 89 rape 137, 149, 151–2, 154, 157 rationality 76 readership 205, 212, 262 reading creatively 54, 229 and desire 244–5, 247 difficulties of 240, 252 Djaout’s notions in Le Dernier été de la raison 229–30, 232–8 Djebar’s notions in Nulle part dans la maison de mon père 238–52 ethical dimension of 231 as form of travel 234–5, 258 and interpretation of Koran 150 and intimacy 238–9, 241, 244–51 as passive assimilation 233–4 setting and 243–4 shared 246–7 as transformative and alienating 238–40, 250, 252 Readings: Acts of Close Reading in Literary Theory (Wolfreys) 250 realism 16, 147 receptiveness 181, 183, 231, 243–4 Renard, Pierette 107 resistance 1, 2, 4, 10–11, 14–15, 26, 32–3, 38, 44, 51–2, 55, 62, 69, 72–3, 84–91, 110, 119, 121, 133, 137, 140, 160, 166, 177, 179, 184, 185, 188, 194, 206, 208, 209, 211, 214, 224, 229–30, 236, 239, 252 re-territorialization 4, 198 revolutionary writing 2, 10, 13–16, 85 Rhys, Jean 159 rhythms 44, 65, 69, 73, 176, 179, 180–1, 184, 189, 225, 247 Rice, Alison 179, 201 n.15 Ricoeur, Paul 147–8, 256–7, 259 rivalry, Casanova’s concept 41 Robaïyat (Khayyam) 79 Rolland, Pauline 213–14 Romance, Joseph 20–1, 23 romanticism 103, 248 rootlessness 13, 97, 102, 108, 187–8 Rothberg, Michael 46, 59 n.45, 132, 140 Rothe, Arnold 39

Index Rouaud, Jean 43–5 Roussin, Philippe 20, 21, 23 Routledge Companion to World Literature, The (D’Haen et al.) 41, 43, 47 Rue Darwin (Sansal) 46–7, 87 Ruhe, Ernspeter 239, 250 Rûmi 78 Rushdie, Salman 97, 163–5, 169 Saadi, Nourredine 132 Sahara 143 n.24 Said, Edward 40, 42, 45, 47, 50 Saint-Lazare prison, France 213 Samarcande (Maalouf) 79 Sansal, Boualem 4, 5, 15, 45–7, 73, 86–7, 89, 91, 131, 199, 260–1 Sans famille (Malot) 240–3, 245 Sanskrit 78 Sartre, Jean-Paul 18, 22, 62, 257–8 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie) 97, 114, 163 Sauf le nom (Derrida) 21 Scandinavia 177 Schahriar (character) 48, 49, 51, 54, 136 Scheherazade (character) 48, 51–5, 136 Scheherazade Goes West (Mernissi) 53 Sciascia, Leonardo 49–50 science, and reason 153 scientific ‘truth’ 150, 151 Sebbar, Leïla 13, 26, 54, 96–7, 175–6, 189–200, 261 second language 222 Second World War 68, 110, 188, 218 secrecy 47, 87, 183, 188 secular criticism 42 segregation 85, 174–6, 192 self, notion of the 68 self-discovery 47, 61, 82 self-doubt 51, 131, 206 self-knowledge 63, 66, 149, 230 self-loss 61, 101, 103, 106, 116, 187 self-questioning 45, 47, 51, 56, 91, 126, 150, 262 self-revelation 68 semantic imagination 256–7 semantics 257–8 Sénac, Jean 78 separatist thinking 45–6, 207 Serhane, Abdelhak 19 Serrano, Richard 261

Index sexuality 82, 96, 99, 145, 185, 190, 244–5, 247, 250 sexual violence 51, 195 Shakespeare, William 159 shared history 26, 46, 207 Shari’a law 3 Sharjah Biennial 88 Shérazade trilogy (Sebbar) 53–4, 190 Shohat, Ella 37 short stories 96–7, 108, 146, 191, 230 signs and symbols 80, 154 silence/silencing 5, 10, 13, 52–3, 68, 72, 80, 82–4, 87, 104, 110, 113, 115, 121, 125, 137, 162–5, 181, 183, 189, 191–3, 195–9, 205, 208–9, 211–12, 238, 240, 243 Sindbad the Sailor (character) 48–51, 112, 134, 163 ‘singularity of literature’ 27, 132, 160, 179, 182, 206–8, 213–17, 226, 229, 237 sleeplessness. See insomnia solidarity 19, 77, 154, 217 solitude 49, 72, 77, 100, 101, 152, 242, 247, 256 Sorensen, Eli Park 17 Souffles 6, 98, 174 Sousse attacks, 2015 9 Spanish language 11 Spanish Moments (Sciascia) 49–50 speech act 195–6 speeches 97, 101, 154, 166, 181, 195–6 Spivak, Gayatri 75 stereotypes 55, 129, 191 Stockholm 177, 179, 182–6 Stora, Benjamin 5, 36, 218–19 stories 156–7 storyline 17 storytelling 25, 32, 47–55, 98, 120, 141, 147, 148–51, 153–4, 158, 162–4, 256 structure, narrative 14, 22, 25, 43, 46, 47, 48, 51, 64, 65, 87, 88, 122, 124, 131, 133, 141, 147, 154, 192, 215, 217, 225 subjective memory 46, 122, 123 subjectivity 63, 64, 153, 154, 186, 189, 209 Sufism 106 Šukys, Julija 19, 236

289

supernatural 135–6 Sweden 182, 184–5, 188 symbols 7–8, 12, 103, 128, 131, 135, 148, 149, 151, 154–5, 191, 213, 222, 249–50 Taliban 70, 232 Talismano (Meddeb) 76, 80, 176 tattoo 68, 151 Tazmamart prison, Morocco 6 Tehouda 127–8 Temps et récit (Ricoeur) 147–8, 256 testimonial writing 16 testimony 6, 16, 17, 23, 104, 110, 149–53, 155–6, 162, 198, 241 theocracy 220 theology 75, 125, 150, 207, 225 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ Wa 40, 42 third-person narrative 101 1001 années de la nostalgie (Boudjedra) 55 Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) 32, 47–56, 112, 134, 136, 141, 162–3, 250, 259–60 Hollywood film version 49 Tiffin, Helen 32–3 time and space 42, 124, 127, 130, 147–8, 212, 213, 216, 225, 243 Tizi Ouzou University 3 Tocqueville, Alexis de 20 Torah 218, 219 totalitarianism 18, 232 Toumert, Ibn 125–6, 128–9 Tournier, Michel 147 tradition, role of 148 transcendence 199 transcolonialism 37, 39, 217 transcription 97–8, 100–2, 108–9, 112–16, 156, 166, 179, 198, 201 n.15, 239, 242, 247–50 transculturation 41, 47, 190 transgression 33, 209, 244, 245, 247–9 translation 26, 37, 41–2, 53, 76, 78, 80–2, 126, 173–203, 224, 231, 248 Transnational French Studies (Forsdick et al.) 43 transnationalism 1, 34, 37, 39, 43, 79–80, 168, 258–9 transposition 179, 201 n.15

290 trauma 59 n.45, 67–9, 71, 84, 102, 108, 134, 137, 152, 193–6, 199, 240, 243, 245, 251 travel 39, 41–2, 44–5, 48–50, 55, 72–4, 79, 96, 102–4, 123, 128–30, 134, 177–80, 182–4, 186–7, 190, 197, 213–16, 235, 247, 258–9 trope 50, 56, 58 n.41, 62, 141, 186, 258 truth history and 76, 131 knowledge and 46–7, 65 literature and 145, 164 notions of 76, 131, 159 objective 153 original 222 scientific 150, 151 Tu ne parleras pas ma langue (Khatibi) 176 Tunisia Arabization policy 8, 11 and Arab Spring 7, 9 contemporary tensions 148, 149–50 cultural history 76, 149–50, 155–8 Islamist extremism 2, 7–8, 9 local publishing houses 9 modern culture 156–7 postcolonial 74 transition period 31, 255 Tunisian Revolution 8, 15 Tunisie plurielle (Bouraoui) 76 umma, Islamic 3 uncertainty 10, 14, 16, 33, 38, 40, 83, 89, 91, 100, 102, 107, 122, 126, 136, 138, 146, 149–50, 180, 209, 230, 234, 256 unemployment 3, 8, 9 Un Eté à Stockholm (Khatibi) 26, 175, 176–89, 221, 224 Une Tempête (Césaire) 159 ‘Une visite dans l’atelier itinérant d’Assia Djebar’ (Chikhi) 239 Union des Ecrivains 13 United States 35, 53, 108 invasion of Iraq 5 untranslatability 80–2, 175, 176–7, 231 utopia/utopianism 42, 110–11, 130, 187, 226, 230, 232, 235–6, 248, 252, 259–60

Index Vaclos, Sophie 256 Vallury, Raji 126–7, 131 Vassallo, Helen 198 Vaste est la prison (Djebar) 82 violence 3–5, 16, 36, 51–2, 65, 70–3, 78–80, 83–4, 103–5, 123, 133, 137, 139–40, 145, 148, 173, 176, 181, 189–90, 194–6, 200, 205, 211–12, 244, 255, 261 ‘Violence de l’autobiographie’ (Djebar) 205 voices 23, 52–3, 69, 72, 77, 83, 91, 99, 110, 115, 119, 121, 197–8, 212, 214, 234 Vu, lu, entendu (Chraïbi) 65 war letters 211 Warner, Marina 48, 59 n.49 Warwick Research Collective 44 Watt, Adam 243, 244 Weltliteratur, concept of 40, 41 Western culture 63 What Is World Literature? (Damrosch) 40, 41–2 white, symbolism of 83 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys) 159 Williams, Tennessee 49 Willis, Michael 3, 6, 8 ‘Will of Life, The’ (Chebbi) 15 Wills, David 215 ‘Wolf Man’ (Freud) 244 Wolfreys, Julian 250 women alienation 198 attacks on unveiled 4 as conquerors 211 empowerment 51 mistreatment and abuse 14–15, 51 resistance 214 role in independence struggles 214 self-expression 208 subordination 121 violence against 51–2, 72 Woodhull, Winifred 190 world, concept of 40, 44 World, the Text, the Critic, The (Said) 42 ‘worldliness’ 39–47, 49–50, 53, 74, 78, 80, 177, 216 world literature 31–2, 39–47 multilingualism and creolization 43–4 and national literature 46

Index origins, Goethe’s concept 40–1 and postcolonial literature 40, 55–6 and secular criticism’ 42–3 theories of 55–6 and universalism 259–60 and ‘worldliness’ 39–47, 177 World Literature Today 46 World Republic of Letters (Casanova) 41 worldviews 76, 77 ‘writing back’ 119, 149, 159, 160–1 writing (process). See also literature and alienation 96 in another language 221–2 as autobiography, as search for a ‘self ’ 62–9 on behalf of others 95–118 challenges and anxieties of 123 commemorative power of 83–4 and deception 80–2, 145

291 and destruction 105 and effacement 82–4, 106 as escape (and liberation) 61, 69–74, 96, 258 intercultural dialogue and 74–80 introspective 62, 90 pleasure of 68 theory of 177, 221 transcending with 61 writers’ views of 61–2, 66

Yacine, Kateb 2, 13–14, 16, 85, 121, 133, 140, 147 ‘years of lead’ (Morocco) 6–7, 147 Young, Robert 34–5, 40 Yûnus, Mattâ ibn 176–7 Zekri, Khalid 19 Zola, Émile 65