This is the first book-length study to analyse and problematize the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’ with regard to the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), and memories of it, in the work of French authors of Algerian origin. The book considers a primary corpus spanning over forty literary texts published between 1981 and 2012, analysing the extent to which texts are able to collect diverse and apparently competing memories, and in the process present the heterogeneous nature of memories of the Algerian War. By setting up the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’, where the potentially explosive but also consensual encounter between former colonizer and colonized subject takes place, the book contributes to ongoing debates surrounding the contested place of narratives of empire in French collective memory, and the ambiguous place of immigrants from the former colonies and their children in dominant definitions of French identity.
This is the first book-length study to analyse and problematize the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’ with regard to the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), and memories of it, in the work of French authors of Algerian origin. The book considers a primary corpus spanning over forty literary texts published between 1981 and 2012, analysing the extent to which texts are able to collect diverse and apparently competing memories, and in the process present the heterogeneous nature of memories of the Algerian War. By setting up the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’, where the potentially explosive but also consensual encounter between former colonizer and colonized subject takes place, the book contributes to ongoing debates surrounding the contested place of narratives of empire in French collective memory, and the ambiguous place of immigrants from the former colonies and their children in dominant definitions of French identity.
The Algerian War in French/Algerian Writing: Literary Sites of Memory
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The Algerian War in French/Algerian Writing: Literary Sites of Memory
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This is the first book-length study to analyse and problematize the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’ with regard to the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), and memories of it, in the work of French authors of Algerian origin. The book considers a primary corpus spanning over forty literary texts published between 1981 and 2012, analysing the extent to which texts are able to collect diverse and apparently competing memories, and in the process present the heterogeneous nature of memories of the Algerian War. By setting up the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’, where the potentially explosive but also consensual encounter between former colonizer and colonized subject takes place, the book contributes to ongoing debates surrounding the contested place of narratives of empire in French collective memory, and the ambiguous place of immigrants from the former colonies and their children in dominant definitions of French identity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786833068 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 10/05/2018 |
| Series: | French and Francophone Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
History and Fiction: Literary Spaces, Memorial Spaces
The aim of this first chapter is to provide a broad overview of the ways in which the Algerian War and its memory are represented in the primary corpus, setting up and problematizing the notion of the text as a site of memory. As Dine argues, it is in the 'continued absence of both a state-sponsored ritual of mourning and a consensual history of the period' that there is recourse to writing as a 'substitute for the physical lieux de mémoire'. Related to Dine's point, Lia Brozgal, referring to the deadly suppression of the peaceful protest by Algerians on 17 October 1961, also argues for the literary text as an alternative archival site in the absence of access to archives relating to the Algerian War. In the absence of the 'official archive', literary texts may 'constitute a collection of traces that refer to real past events and participate in the production of knowledge about those events'. Brozgal emphasizes that this knowledge 'need not be exclusively historical', but may also 'concern subjective and aesthetic experiences' related to the past, underlining the potentially significant role of cultural representations in contributing to our understanding of events that have been subject to wide-ranging state and public silence. Through an examination of the diverse ways in which the primary texts represent the Algerian War, the chapter will analyse and question the extent to which these textual spaces constitute alternative sites of memory and explore the kind of knowledge and understanding of the past that such representations offer us.
As indicated in the Introduction, the texts that constitute the primary corpus span a period of around three decades, from the early 1980s up to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Therefore, the chapter will analyse the evolution in the representation of the Algerian War by French/Algerian authors over the course of these three decades. Apart from the early 1980s marking 20 The Algerian War in French/Algerian Writing the emergence of a new generation of authors of North African immigrant origin, dubbed the Beur generation, the period from this decade onwards is significant in that an overall shift in the memorial landscape with regard to the Algerian War can be observed. In her recent work, Djemaa Maazouzi reiterates Henry Rousso's outline of the ways in which memories of the Algerian War have emerged in the French collective imaginary, observing that the period from 1981 to 1991 constituted one of 'anamnesis', with the arrival in power of the Left under François Mitterrand's presidency at the beginning of the 1980s facilitating 'une visibilité de la mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie qui concerne l'immigration algérienne' ('a visibility of the memory of the Algerian War that relates to Algerian immigration'). Maazouzi does not go on to elaborate on this link between visibility of the war and Algerian immigration to France, and her book goes on to look only at the work of Mehdi Charef in analysing representations of the war in the literary output of authors of Algerian immigrant origin, though this is not the only group that she considers. By recognizing the link between emergence of memories of the war and immigration from Algeria, however, Maazouzi hints at the possibility of reading texts by French/Algerian authors from the 1980s and early 1990s as sites of memory with regard to the war, even if, as will be demonstrated in this chapter, references to the war are few and far between in these earlier texts.
Maazouzi's and Rousso's observation of a period of anamnesis from 1981 to 1991, followed by a period of obsession, or 'hypermnésie' ('hypermnesia'), regarding the memory of the Algerian War is backed up by the historian Benjamin Stora who, writing in 1994 and having outlined the ways in which French institutions suppressed memories of the war, recognized that 'pour ce qui concerne la société française, il est évident que la mémoire de guerre a réinvesti l'espace public depuis une dizaine d'années maintenant.' ('as far as French society is concerned, it is clear that the memory of the war has permeated the public space over the last ten years now'). In the preface to the second edition of La Gangrène et l'Oubli (1998), Stora went on to note that, since 1992, France had seen an 'accroissement considérable de travaux, publications, films de fictions et documentaires, expositions autour de la guerre d'Algérie' ('a considerable increase in works, publications, fictional and documentary films, exhibitions about the Algerian War'). Thus, Stora observes an emergence of works, fictional and otherwise, that deal with this past over the course of the 1980s and into the 1990s, culminating in a definitive end to the historical silence with regard to the war: 'Cette mémoire est revenue et le temps du silence est fini dans l'espace public, définitivement' ('This memory has returned and the period of silence in the public space has come to a definitive end'). From an 'official' point of view, it would still take a few more years for the silence to come to an end, with the French state only recognizing the Algerian War as a war in 1999.
While Stora claimed that the historical silence with regard to the Algerian War had come to an end in the public sphere in the early 1990s, House and MacMaster delineate a slightly different chronology. The 'watershed' moment for House and MacMaster was the trial of Maurice Papon for crimes against humanity during the Second World War. The trial took place from October 1997 to April 1998 and had the collateral effect of highlighting his role as chief of police in orchestrating the suppression of Algerian demonstrators on 17 October 1961. In turn, the trial led to the opening of archives, accelerating the gradual re-emergence of the memory of the Algerian War that was already under way. Accordingly, House and MacMaster distinguish between the 'virtual public silence' regarding the Algerian War in the period from 1961 to 1979, a 'slow emergence' of memory in the period from 1980 to 1997 and 'higher visibility' of the Algerian War from 1997 onwards. While there exists some discrepancy in the chronologies outlined above regarding the resurfacing of the memory of the war, what can be observed is that, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the return of the Algerian War in the French public sphere began to challenge the silence to which it had been largely condemned since 1962.
That is not to say that the breaking of the silence and the state's recognition of the war as a war in 1999 led to consensus regarding memories of the Algerian past in France. The infamous article, later repealed, in the law passed on 23 February 2005, which required schools to teach the 'positive' role of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa, is but one manifestation of the persisting tensions surrounding how colonialism is remembered in France since the turn of the century. The renaming of a street name in the town of Béziers in the southern, Languedoc region of France, which includes a considerable pied-noir population, gives further evidence of the memory battles that see the war being replayed in contemporary France as different groups vie for the legitimacy of their particular historical narrative. The street, formerly named rue du 19 mars 1962, commemorating the Évian accords that marked the end of the Algerian War, was rechristened rue Commandant Hélie de Saint Marc in 2015, in memory of a French army general who participated in torturing Algerian prisoners during the war and in the putsch of the generals in 1961, which attempted to oust Charles de Gaulle when it became apparent that the president was favouring Algerian independence. The primary corpus thus spans a period during which, on the one hand, the memorial landscape evolved to welcome a proliferation of memories of the war but that, on the other hand, has seen tensions and divisions inherited from the war also come back to the fore.
As we shall see throughout this chapter, the literary output of the sons and daughters of Algerian migrants only partially contributed to the memorial developments described above. With regard to fictional writing, authors of metropolitan French origin were, until the 1980s and 1990s at least, more ready to confront the Algerian War, as Dine charted in Images of the Algerian War (1994). Didier Daeninckx's detective novel Meurtres pour mémoire (1984) is perhaps the most prominent example of bringing occluded events from the Algerian War to public light (again, 17 October 1961 is a crucial reference point in Daeninckx's novel). The success of Daeninckx's novel in 'bring[ing] these events to public attention' signals the potentially important role of literary work in unearthing repressed memories and representing the difficulties inherent in such a task. If writers of Algerian origin were slower than their 'Franco-French' peers to come to deal in a significant manner with the Algerian War, that is because questions of memory and representing the past were eclipsed by more pressing issues regarding identity and their own integration in French society at the time when the memorial landscape was changing. As Silverstein argues, French/Algerian works of the 1980s 'narrated the war in terms of how it directly affected their lives in France', underlining that these texts were primarily concerned with establishing political subjectivity and agency rather than the excavation of repressed memories demonstrated in Meurtres pour mémoire. Silverstein's observations also indicate, however, that this corpus is not only concerned with questions of subjectivity and agency. On the contrary, the texts 'articulate affirmations of sociopolitical belonging that provide a counterpoint to, if they do not explicitly challenge, the official nationalism and dominant narratives of French imperial and post-imperial history'. In other words, the war and colonial past more generally have always been a 'fundamental topos' in French/ Algerian writing, even if the main focus of different narratives is not necessarily the representation of historical events. Through an analysis of the evolution in the representation of the Algerian War and its memory, this chapter will ask whether more recent works place greater emphasis on the recovery of the past, but will also revisit early examples of French/Algerian literature and examine the representation of the past in these works. In this way, building on Silverstein's own analysis of Beur historical consciousness, the chapter seeks to move beyond viewing these earlier texts as solely concerned with questions of identity and the clash of French and Algerian cultures.
The chapter takes a chronological approach, an approach that will be mirrored in the second and third chapters of the book. In the first instance, it will analyse Beur texts from the 1980s, demonstrating that, in these earlier texts, the Algerian War becomes obscured by a preoccupation with expressing a sense of subjectivity and agency, which were of primary importance to the political aims of the Beur movement. This lack of critical engagement with the past problematizes the straightforward conception of the text as a coherent site of memory. As the chapter goes on to chart, texts from the 1990s, in the transition from the period of 'anamnesis' to the period of 'hypermnesia' with regard to memories of the war, reveal a more concerted attempt to engage with the war and the colonial past. However, as we shall see, representations of the war remain partial and incomplete during this period. The final part of the chapter will consider more recent texts by French/Algerian writers, asking whether the proliferation of memories of the Algerian War in the public sphere since the turn of the century has led to an increased engagement with the war and its memory in writing. While the slower emergence of memory in the 1980s and 1990s might have elicited the need for literary responses to the historical silence, the higher visibility of the war since the turn of the century has not signalled a halt in representations of the war and its memory. On the contrary, as Brozgal observes with reference to the opening of archives relating to 17 October 1961, the disclosure of hitherto silenced histories brings 'questions of interpretation ... again to the fore': as access to information is facilitated after a long, state-imposed silence, the question of how to represent this information becomes crucial. Consequently, alternative sites of memory constituted by textual spaces are all the more significant in creating 'an interpretative framework in which both "official" and "unofficial" stories may be considered alongside one another, and without a predetermined hierarchy'. Before a consideration of the extent to which more recent French/Algerian literature contributes to this interplay of narratives, the chapter will turn to an analysis of the representation of the Algerian War in Beur texts from the 1980s.
The Interplay of Memory and the Quest for Belonging in Beur Texts
As Hiddleston has observed, references to the Algerian War in Beur literature from the 1980s and 1990s are 'surprisingly sparse'. According to Hiddleston, this is due to the 'widespread suppression of these memories', as reflected by the official state silence with regard to the war, as well as because of a breakdown in the transmission of memories of the war from the first generation to the younger generations. McCormack confirms that family silence has inhibited in a significant manner the ability of the children of immigrants to engage fully with memories of the war, leading to a lack of awareness of the experiences of their parents on the part of these younger generations. As a result, representations of the war in the literary output of the children of Algerian immigrants are made up of only 'scattered and fleeting images [that] evoke the uncertain position of the subject in relation to his or her history and origin'.
The issue of family transmission of the war is staged in Leïla Sebbar's first novel, Fatima ou les Algériennes au square (1981). The inclusion of Sebbar herself amongst Beur authors is questionable. In his Anthologie de la littérature algérienne, 1950–1987, Charles Bonn begins a final section on what he calls the 'deuxième génération de l'émigration' ('second generation of emigration'), which is often conflated with the Beur generation, with Fatima. However, unlike those who are grouped within the second generation of immigration or Beur generation, Sebbar was not born in France, nor did she move to France from Algeria at an early age with her parents, but moved to France from Algeria to pursue her university education. Her residence in France was thus a personal choice rather than a necessary result of the migratory movements of her parents, setting her apart to a certain extent from the generation of authors whose work is analysed in this study. Nonetheless, as Hiddleston observes, 'much of Sebbar's work concentrates on the "second generation" or on individuals of Algerian origin who were either born in France or who have lived in France for a long time.' These characters are 'immersed in French culture but ... remain unsettlingly conscious of their difference and displaced origins'. While she dissociates herself from the Beur generation, therefore, much of Sebbar's literary work is at the same time concerned with representing the challenge to monolithic, singular definitions of culture and identity exemplified by that generation. More pertinently as far as the overarching concerns of this chapter are concerned, Sebbar's representation of the Beur generation very often depicts children of Algerian immigrants 'who do not know anything about the Algerian war.' In Fatima, the only way in which the young protagonist, Dalila, learns about the war and the colonial past is by inconspicuously overhearing the various stories retold by her mother, Fatima, and her female North African friends when they meet in their regular spot in the public square.
On the one hand, therefore, Sebbar stages the way in which the children of migrants, having 'never experienced the Algerian war as a direct trauma', learn about the war 'through older Algerians' stories'. On the other, she represents the indirect, problematic transmission of memories of the war from older to younger generation, as Fatima and her friends recount freely their experiences and those of other acquaintances of theirs, forgetting Dalila's presence. For example, as one of the women recounts one of the many stories outlining the difficulties faced by North African migrants in France that make up a large part of the narrative, the narrator of the tale is only reminded of Dalila's presence by Dalila's interjection: 'La femme l'entendit, s'arrêta un instant, elle avait tout à fait oublié la petite fille sous la veste, regarda Dalila comme si elle la découvrait' ('The woman heard her, stopped for a moment – she had completely forgotten about the little girl under the jacket – and looked at Dalila as if she was only just discovering her'). Dalila's inconspicuousness is helped by her habit of concealing herself under her mother's jacket and the surprise with which her presence at the square is met underlines that the stories being told are not intended for her. Therefore, transmission of these stories to Dalila occurs by accident, highlighting the indirect transmission between older and younger generation, as well as a broader generational distance that runs through Sebbar's text.
(Continues…)
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