Deserts of the Real: Paris and the Algerian Sahara as Postmodern Simulacra in Malek Haddad’s Je t’offrirai une gazelle

Abstract

This article revisits an overlooked foundational text of early Algerian Francophone literature: Je t’offrirai une gazelle by Malek Haddad (1959). Reading Haddad’s novel through postcolonial and postmodern lenses, I rely on Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation theory to explain the psychological exiles suffered by Haddad’s characters. The novel tells the story of an unnamed Algerian writer during the war of independence attempting to publish an exotic fable he wrote taking place in the Sahara, also titled “Je t’offrirai une gazelle.” Analyzing this metatextual interplay and the search for an Algerian collective consciousness, I argue that Haddad’s novel is postcolonial and postmodern in two ways: in the Parisian frame of the story by criticizing the moral wasteland of the city as a Baudrillardian desert of the real, and in the Saharan frame by responding to colonial and Orientalist literature through the construction of “Arabs” and Tuaregs as a single, noble people. Although Haddad tells stories of failures and shortcomings, his Sahara as a site of culture, fertility, and industry foreshadows his political commitment to a pan-African Arabic-speaking Algeria a decade later under the Boumédiène administration.