Autobiography and Independence: Self and Identity in North African Writing in French (Liverpool University Press - Contemporary French & Francophone Cultures)

409 Pages·2005·2.89 MB·English

by  Debra Kelly

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Autobiography and Independence
Selfhood and Creativity in North African
Postcolonial Writing in French
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures 2
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DEBRA KELLY
Autobiography and
Independence
Selfhood and Creativity in North African
Postcolonical Writing in French
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
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First published 2005 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2005 Debra Kelly
The right of Debra Kelly to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 0-85323-659-3 hardback
Typeset by XL Publishing Services, Tiverton
Printed and bound in the European Union by
Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Copyright Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: A Place in the Word 1
1 Life/Writing in the Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts 9
Autobiography, Autobiographical Expression, Fictions of
Identity 9
Postcolonial Studies, the Postcolonial Subject and Motivated
Reading Studies 32
2 Mouloud Feraoun: Life Story, Life-Writing, History 53
Naming the Poor Man’s Son: Identity and the Colonised
Subject in Le Fils du pauvre 59
Poverty, Knowledge and Self-Knowledge 62
A Dialogue with Self and Others: Lettres à ses amis 87
Witnessing History, the Self as Witness: Journal 1955–1962 104
3 Albert Memmi: Fictions of Identity and the Quest for Truth 131
Negotiating a Jewish Identity: the Stationary Nomad 135
Poverty, Self-Knowledge and Political Knowledge in
La Statue de sel 149
The Self as Writer in Le Scorpion ou la confession imaginaire 176
4 Abdelkébir Khatibi: The Deciphering of Memory
and the Potential of Postcolonial Identity 205
Writing and the Multiple Discourses of Selfhood 209
Memory, Myth and the Postcolonial Subject in La Mémoire
tatouée 221
Writing Strategies and the Deciphering of a ‘Tattooed
Memory’ 237
5 Assia Djebar: History, Selfhood and the Possession
of Knowledge 248
The (Re-)Possession of Knowledge and the Relationship to
History in L’Amour, la fantasia 258
Myth, Metaphor and the Power of Language 287
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vi Autobiography and Independence
Exile, the History of Writing and the Quest for Liberation in
Vaste est la prison 291
Love and Self-Knowledge 293
The History of Writing 302
Knowledge and Selfhood 310
Conclusion: A Place in the World 334
Notes 341
Bibliography 380
Index 391
vi
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Acknowledgements
I began research for this book with the encouragement of colleagues at
the University of Westminster in what was then called the Maghreb
Research Group, and I would especially like to thank Ethel Tolansky and
Margaret Majumdar (both, sadly, no longer at Westminster) for stimu-
lating my interest in North African writing in French. I have also been
fortunate to work with several scholars in the field who have participated
in the work of the former Association for the Study of African and
Caribbean Literature in French (ASCALF), regrouped and renamed in
2002 as the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies; especially
Andy Stafford, who read the manuscript with care and insight and made
this a better book. I have had the opportunity to try out various sections
of this book at research seminars and conferences in Britain and abroad,
and I would like to thank colleagues and students who took the time to
listen and comment. Of these events, three were especially useful: the
‘Life/Writing’ seminar that extended over three years (organised by
Michael Sheringham and Johnnie Gratton at Royal Holloway, University
of London); and conferences held in Tunisia (the Conseil International
d’Etudes Francophones) and Morocco (organised by the British Council
and the University of Nottingham). I have also had the pleasure of
discussing the work of Assia Djebar particularly over the last three years
with the students on the MA in Cultural Memory at the Institute of
Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and
many elements of those discussions are embedded here. On a practical
level, enormous thanks go to Helena Scott, Research Coordinator at the
University of Westminster, for help with the preparation of the manu-
script at various stages and for her expertise in translation. On a personal
level, my husband sustained me throughout a period of research and
writing that unexpectedly coincided with a difficult period of our lives.
Finally, thank you to Ed Smyth, my series editor, for originally suggesting
that I develop work that had begun with the autobiographical discourses
of Memmi and Camus, and for his patience.
This book is dedicated to my father, the son of an Irish immigrant, a poor
man’s son.
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Copyright Acknowledgements
The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission
to reproduce copyright material: the Photography and Imaging
Department at the British Museum, London, for the Dugga stele on page
303; Albin Michel (Publishers), Paris, for quotations from L’Amour, La
Fantasia by Assia Djebar; Éditions Arléa (Publishers), Paris, for quota-
tions from Le Nomade immobile by Albert Memmi; Gallimard
(Publishers), Paris, for quotations from La Statue de seland Le Scorpion
by Albert Memmi; Éditions Denoël (Publishers), Paris, for quotations
from La Mémoire Tatouée by Abdelkébir Khatibi; Éditions du Seuil,
Paris, for quotations from Le Fils du pauvre© Éditions du Seuil, 1954,
coll. Points, 1995; L’Anniversaire© Éditions du Seuil, 1972, coll. Points,
1989; Journal (1955–1962)© Éditions du Seuil, 1958, 1962; and Lettres
à ses amis© Éditions du Seuil, 1969, all by Mouloud Feraoun.
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Introduction:
A Place in the Word
Une vie d’écriture m’a appris à me méfier des mots. Ceux qui paraissent les
plus limpides sont souvent les plus traîtres. L’un de ces faux amis est juste-
ment ‘identité’. Nous croyons tous savoir ce que ce mot veut dire, et nous
continuons à lui faire confiance même quand, insidieusement, il se met à dire
le contraire.
Amin Maalouf, Les Identités meutrières1
(A life of writing has taught me to mistrust words. Those which seem the
most transparent are often the most treacherous. One of those false friends
is precisely ‘identity’. We all think we know what that word means, and we
continue to trust it even when, insidiously, it starts saying the opposite.)
This book explores the question of the relationship between the writer’s
self and literary expression. The work of each of the four writers studied
here provides a space for a meditation on the act of literary creation and
on the ways in which that act intervenes in the world. Mouloud Feraoun,
Assia Djebar, Albert Memmi and Abdelkébir Khatibi were born in three
different countries in North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco)
during the first half of the twentieth century, and have varied origins:
Kabyle, Berber, Sephardi Jew, Arab.2They share a complex relationship
to language, since all of them write in French, a legacy of colonial inter-
vention in those countries, but this relationship varies according to
differences in ethnic identity, class and gender. The texts studied here
were published over a fifty-year period (the second half of the twentieth
century) and they are therefore intimately bound up with the histories of
European colonialism, war, decolonisation, and independence. The indi-
viduals who wrote them therefore engage not only with their own
personal histories, but also with the collective histories of North Africa
and of Europe. The notion of ‘identity’ is necessarily a focus of the read-
ings here, even though, as Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese writer who lives
in France, warns us above, this is a term that has been much used and
abused. Not only are the origins and identities of these writers different
from each other and complex in their own right, but so are those of the
geographical region into which they were born.3 Khatibi has written
1