Investigating a Disappearance: Multilingualism and Language Erasure in Assia Djebar’s La Disparition de la langue française

Abstract

The title of Assia Djebar's 2003 novel La Disparition de la langue francaise provocatively announces the of the French language. Its content, which details the unsolved of its protagonist, offers readers a deceptively simple parallel between two disappearances. Berkane, the hero of the story and one of its narrators, disappears from a roadside in Kabylia in the same way that the French language disappeared from Algeria in the 1990s. These parallel disappearances could be said to evoke, in the case of the former, the murders of many Francophone intellectuals during the violence of the decennie noire, and in the case of the latter, strict Algerian Arabization laws that sought to replace French with Arabic in classrooms, in the media, and in official government business. However, this deceptive parallel yields an oversimplified interpretation, both of the novel's complexity and of the historical and linguistic situation in Algeria. Berkane does not necessarily represent the French language, nor is the French language precisely (or exclusively) what is disappearing in Djebar's Algeria. La Disparition begins with Berkane, a budding author, preparing to return to Algeria for the first time after over twenty years as a self-described exile in Paris. His fateful return takes place in 1990, mere months before the electoral victory of the Front Islamique du Salut would set off the decade of violence commonly referred to as the decennie noire. The narrative composition used to recount this return is structurally complex. Berkane's initial bittersweet homecoming is described, in a premiere partie, by two narrators who alternate in numbered subsections: Berkane and an unidentified narrator who uses the third person to refer to the protagonist. In this portion of the narrative, readers learn that Berkane has left behind a French lover, Marise, in Paris, but upon his return to Algiers he develops a relationship with Nadjia, an Algerian woman. A deuxieme partie exclusively uses Berkane's first-person narration and excerpts from his autobiographical writings to recount aspects of his childhood that seemed to have been buried during his time in Paris: his years in a French colonial school, his resistance to colonialism, and his subsequent time in a French prison as an adolescent. Yet the joy of his return is mixed with nostalgia for an Algeria that seems to be disappearing before his eyes, metonymized through the Casbah and its state of increasing physical disrepair. The novel ends with a troisieme partie, in which Berkane vanishes after embarking on a quest to relocate the centers in Kabylia where he was detained by French troops, an experience he planned to include in the autobiography he was writing. This closing section of (exclusively third-person) narration follows the reaction of three of those closest to Berkane: his journalist brother Driss, Marise, and Nadjia. Berkane's disappearance, however, remains unsolved. Not only do readers not know whether he has run away, been killed, or been kidnapped, they are also left in suspense as to the meaning of this disappearance. Who, or what, has really disappeared? Despite the novel's title, the putative of French is not extensively discussed in the text. One possible referent of this could be Algeria's Arabization legislation. After decades of French domination of the education system and suppression of the Arabic language, Algeria constitutionalized Arabic as its national language and declared that it would become the sole official language of education. However, the difficulty of implementing necessary educational reforms meant that after independence many Algerians were still educated in French. While French flourished in practice, in theory politicians described the disappearance of French from the Algerian curriculum as an ultimate goal that had yet to be achieved. Ahmed Taleb-Ibrahimi, education minister from 1965 to 1970, stated that Arabization would aneantir ce melange d'elements de cultures disparates, et souvent contradictoires, heritees des epoques de decadence et de la periode coloniale, de lui substituer une culture nationale unifiee, liee intimement a notre passe et a notre civilisation arabo-islamique (63). …