Algerian Writer Research Articles

A odisséia da reapropriação: a obra de Mouloud Mammeri

Este artigo reproduz uma conferência de Pierre Bourdieu sobre a obra do escritor e antropólogo argelino Mouloud Mammeri. O texto de Bourdieu foi lido in absentia no colóquio realizado em Argel sobre "A dimensão magrebina da obra de Mouloud Mammeri". O Autor compara a relação de Mammeri com o Magreb, região do Norte da África, como uma "odisséia", na qual essa peregrinação comporta dois momentos. O primeiro, de afastamento da cultura nativa, em direção à cultura universal universitária. O segundo, de reapropriação da cultura de origem através da investigação etnológica e de suas pesquisas sobre os antigos poetas cabilas. A descoberta de Homero e o investimento no trabalho etnológico sobre sua terra natal permitem a Mammeri ligar as duas pontas dessa viagem, graças ao resgate da cultura renegada através da cultura que impôs sua negação. O fim desse percurso equivale à confrontação com uma das modalidades da dominação simbólica, que é a vergonha de si.

En lisant, en écrivant – Extrait

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments Julien Gracq, born Louis Poirier in 1910, is considered one of the major French writers of the twentieth century. His training in history and geography permeates his fiction and essays. His first novel, Au chateau d’Argol (José Corti 1938), was hailed by André Breton as a true Surrealist novel. It was followed by Un beau ténébreux (1945), Le Rivage des Syrtes (1951), for which Gracq declined the prix Goncourt, and Un balcon en forêt (1958). All have been translated into English, the latter two by the poet Richard Howard. The Belgian director André Delvaux adapted “Le Roi Cophetua” (one of the three short stories that comprise La Presqu’île) into the film Rendez-vous à Bray, which received the Prix Delluc in 1971. His reflections on literature in Préférences, as well as Lettrines (1967 & 1974) and En lisant en écrivant (1980) are penetrating and frequently quoted. Gracq has also published two books of poems, Liberté grande (1947) and Prose pour l’étrangère (1952) and a play, Le Roi pécheur (1948). His latest books, La Forme d’une ville (1985), Autour des sept collines (1988) and Carnets du grand chemin (1992) are evocations of places, at the crossing between memory and description. All published by Corti, his works, in two volumes, are now also part of Gallimard's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Lucy R. McNair is a freelance translator and doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her translation of The Poor Man's Son, an autobiographical novel by the late Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun, was published this year by the University Press of Virginia. Alyson Waters teaches in the French Department at Yale University and is the Managing Editor of Yale French Studies. She was awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2004 to translate Vassilis Alexakis's novel Les mots etrangers, which will be published in 2006 as Foreign Words by Autumn Hill Books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.

Litterature et temps colonial: metamorphoses du regard sur la Mediterranee et liAfrique (review)

Reviewed by: Littérature et temps colonial: métamorphoses du regard sur la Méditerranée et l’Afrique Benjamin Claude Brower Littérature et temps colonial: métamorphoses du regard sur la Méditerranée et l’Afrique. Ed. Jean-Robert Henry et Lucienne Martini Actes du colloque d’Aix-en-Provence 07– 0804 1997, Centre des Arches d’Outre Mer. Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1999. 344pp. ISBN 2-7449-0066-4. Five years before Edward Said's landmark work Orientalismand a decade after Algerian independence, a group of researchers met in Algiers to study colonial literature and ideology. Integrating theoretical currents then transforming literary studies (Althusser, Goldmann, Barthes, and Kristeva), they produced an innovative and exciting work ( Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques économiques et politiques11.1, mars 1974). However, a robust field devoted to the study of colonial literature failed to develop. French and francophone students, reacting to a general lack of interest in works considered racist, paternalist, or apologetic, shunned colonial writers. Nevertheless, some who were part of this first project, like Jean-Robert Henry, persisted, and in the 1970s and 80s, Henry led French research into important questions of culture and politics in colonial contexts, and edited and authored several key texts. Littérature et temps colonialpresents the work of thirty, multinational scholars who were united by Henry and Lucienne Martini in 1997. As might be expected, there is unevenness in a volume with so many contributions. Some articles are brief sketches of early research, of interest to the specialist, while others contain advanced readings of colonial texts for a wide academic audience. Among the latter, articles by Colette Dubois, Éric Savarèse, and Daniel Denis stand out. Dubois surveys French adventure novels and investigative journalism for sensational accounts of the Red Sea slave trade. Savarèse interrogates constructions of French-African difference in children's books (1930-62) and gives a theoretically sophisticated reading of the ideological currents that inform these texts. In a similar vein, Denis examines Third Republic textbooks to understand how exotic discourses combined with new debates [End Page 131]on national hygiene to produce a belief in the revitalizing qualities of the colonies for French youth. North African subjects account for nearly half of the articles. Some offer new perspectives on familiar figures such as Isabelle Eberhardt, Albert Memmi, and Albert Camus (Danielle Marx-Scouras's rereading of critical possibilities in Camus's fiction is noteworthy), while others treat themes from the colonial "imaginary" such as the desert and violence. Jacques Frémeaux, Rosalia Bivona, and Charlotte de Montigny look at the desert in colonial texts, and Fabienne Le Houérou examines Henry de Monfreid's work and texts from Italian soldier-colonists in Ethiopia, the insabbiatto(stranded in the sand). Alain Mahé begins with the provocative observation that writings on colonial Algeria are "saturated" with violence before he turns to Saïd Guennoun (1887-1940), an Algerian writer and soldier who wrote intimate descriptions of anticolonial and intracommunal conflict. Zineb Ali-Benali examines Abdelkader Fikri and Robert Randau's vision of a different French Algeria or the "(im)possible futures for Algerians" (243). Two articles are outside of Africa. In the first, Arundhati Virmani contests Edward Said's reading of Kipling's Kim. The second, by Alain Guillemin, explores questions of language and nationalism in francophone Vietnamese literature. Overall, a clear project does not emerge in this volume, and it lacks the range of other French collections on postcolonial questions such as Le mal de voir(1976) and D'un orient l'autre(1991). One wonders if the editors' call for pluralism, "All readings are valuable!," (16) did not take away needed focus. Nevertheless, Littérature et temps colonialis an important part of francophone efforts to rethink colonial literature and is part of a field that should be taken seriously by Anglo-American scholars In addition to the valuable introduction and articles, it includes reproductions of fascinating colonial iconography from the exhibition accompanying the conference and a summary of the conference's debates. This book will interest a broad audience in the field of postcolonial studies and historians of European imperialism. Benjamin Claude Brower...

Dialogue on oral poetry

In this dialogue held in the mid-1970s, Pierre Bourdieu and the Algerian ethnologist, writer, and poet Mouloud Mammeri (1917-1989) explore and explicate the social bases, uses, and meaning of oral poetry in Kabyle society and history, thus illuminating the peculiarity of oratory and the social conditions of symbolic efficacy. As the son of the next-to-last amusnaw (sage, bard) of his tribe, Mammeri is uniquely placed to situate this master of words who served the traditional function of mediator and carrier of knowledge, and stood as the living incarnation of tamusni (the practical philosophy of Berber excellence), in relation to the marabout, bearer of the sacred scriptures of the Koran, and to the peasants who composed his main audience. Becoming an amusnaw occurred by election and entailed a two-fold apprenticeship, first by osmosis in a milieu saturated by verbal commerce and contest (in the armourer’s workshop, the village assembly, the markets and pilgrimages) and, later, through explicit training with a master-poet setting out a series of exercises and exams. It required not only commanding a set of verbal techniques and an oratorial canon but also imbibing and embodying wisdom. Playing on the multi-layeredness of language, adapting with flexibility and à propos to the specificities of each occasion and audience, the Kabyle bard was continually tested and his cultural skills endlessly refined, to the point where he would not only master the rules of the craft but also play with them, transgress them within the spirit of tradition in order to invent new rhetorical figures extracting the maximum ‘yield’ from language. Tamusni thus emerges not as a body of inert knowledge cut off from life and transmitted for its own sake but as a ‘practical science’ constantly revivified by and for practice. The poet is the spokesperson of the group who, through his cultural discernment and expert use of language, perfects the specific values of the group, separates things that are confused and, by shedding light on things obscure, mobilizes the people.

The odyssey of reappropriation

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE i A prolific writer, playwright, poet, linguist, and anthropologist of his native Kabylia and of the range of Berber-speaking populations, Mouloud Mammeri was born in 1917, the son of the mayor of his mountain village and a traditional poetic bard (anusnaw). He was schooled in Algiers, Rabat, and Paris, where he graduated in literature from the Sorbonne in 1938. After fighting in World War II, he taught French in the interior of Algeria, published his first essays on Kabyle culture and the colonial question, and earned a growing reputation as a novelist, especially due to his trilogy of 'ethnographic novels', La Colline oubliee (1952), Le Sommeil du juste (1955), and L'Opium et le bâton (1965). He spent the war of national liberation in forced exile in Morocco before coming back to Algiers in 1962, where he became president of the Union of Algerian Writers and a professor of Berber language and North-African ethnology at the University of Algiers. He directed its Center for Anthropological, Prehistorical, and Ethnographic Research from 1969 until 1982, fostering the 'Algerianization' of social research and the development of field studies covering the gamut of regions and ethnicities of Algeria, with a strong focus on Berber oral cultures and interdisciplinary cooperation, despite the growing hostility of the authorities towards anthropological research. In 1985 he founded the Center for the Study of Amazigh Culture (CERAM) and its journal Awal ('the word') in Paris, which Pierre Bourdieu helped baptize with a joint article entitled 'On the Proper Uses of Ethnology' (Bourdieu and Mammeri, 1985). Mammeri is the author of numerous books on Berber language and grammar, poetry, ethnography, and literature, and he was a leading exponent of Kabyle resistance to the forced 'arabization' of his people by

Feminism and the Question of ?Woman? in Assia Djebar'sVaste est la prison

This article analyzes the Algerian writer Assia Djebar's uncertain and ambiguous relationship with feminism. While her work is clearly preoccupied with women's experiences, the notion of a collective feminine identity remains a subject of contention, and female characters are frequently presented as both singular and elusive. In Vaste est la prison, the author sets out to trace a coherent genealogy of Algerian women, but the narrative at once hints at and disrupts any clear linking threads. For this reason, I argue that feminist resistance for Djebar revolves not around the uncomplicated celebration of female solidarity, but around a continual shifting between collective and singular critique. Women's resistance to patriarchal oppression in Algeria consists of a continual process of convergence and divergence. Djebar does not propose a single feminist argument but charts instead the very difficult process of creating a shared concrete cause.

Feminism and the Question of "Woman" in Assia Djebar's Vaste est la prison

This article analyzes the Algerian writer Assia Djebar's uncertain and ambiguous relationship with feminism. While her work is clearly preoccupied with women's experiences, the notion of a collective feminine identity remains a subject of contention, and female characters are frequently presented as both singular and elusive. In Vaste est la prison, the author sets out to trace a coherent genealogy of Algerian women, but the narrative at once hints at and disrupts any clear linking threads. For this reason, I argue that feminist resistance for Djebar revolves not around the uncomplicated celebration of female solidarity, but around a continual shifting between collective and singular critique. Women's resistance to patriarchal oppression in Algeria consists of a continual process of convergence and divergence. Djebar does not propose a single feminist argument but charts instead the very difficult process of creating a shared concrete cause.

Women and boundaries in the fiction of Mouloud Feraoun

The fiction of Algerian writer and novelist Mouloud Feraoun (191362) tends to have been overshadowed by that of his contemporaries, the latter being seen as more engags at a time when Algeria needed strong literary statements. Fifty years on, this essay seeks to reappraise his novels in the light of, specifically, his treatment of women. The initial, and then more recent, critical reception of his works is briefly examined. It is then argued that his portrayal of female characters presents their situation, and the constraints placed upon them, as indicative of what he saw as repressive in Kabyle culture (thus woman functions as symbol of that culture). But it is also suggested that these portraits, and in particular the evocation of female friendships, function in a sense as revolutionary literary symbols at a troubled time, in that Feraoun also uses woman, cast positively, as example of what that culture can aspire to.

An Historical Obsession: Counternarration in Rachid Mimouni'sTomb�za

Rachid Boudjedra begins his brief epistle in Lettres algeriennes (1995) on the relationship between literature and history by confessing that [1]'histoire m'obsede parce qu'elle est la preoccupation constante de l'humain pour echapper au piege du present. Elle m'obsede d'autant plus en ces jours oui la peur me fait regarder les choses autrement. Je n'ai pas, par exemple, vu monter l'integrisme dans mon pays 'I am obsessed by history because it is the constant preoccupation with the human in order to escape the trap of the present. I am all the more obsessed these days, when fear causes me to look at things in a different light. I did not see coming, for example, the rise of fundamentalism in my country' (26). He goes on to assert that this obsession is common to a great many serious writers: Toute la litterature importante a donc integre l'histoire comme element fondamental de questionnement du reel et de l'humain, operant sur un mode plus subjectif qu'on ne le croit dans la mesure ou c'est le seul qui soit fecond et interessant et parce qu'il n'est pas une lecture immediate, officielle, figee, scolaire, mecaniste et opportuniste du passe, toujours a recuperer, a defigurer et a travestir pour les besoins de la cause 'All great literature has thus integrated history as a fundamental element of the interrogation of the real and the human, operating in a more subjective mode than one would think in so far as it is the one fruitful and interesting mode of inquiry and because it is not a reading of the past that is immediate, official, fossilized, academic, mechanistic and opportunistic, always co-opted, distorted and travestied for the sake of the cause' (27). Situated in a discourse on nation and national history, Boudjedra's remarks reflect the importance of literature to the development of a nationalist consciousness and to the formation of a responsible and engaged citizenry. If they do not hold for national literatures in general, they are decidedly pertinent to twentieth-century Algerian literature, and particularly for that written in the postindependence period. In this category, novels depicting the war of independence are legion, especially as such valorizations of the moment of the nation's birth coincide with official mythology and find support in a government led by the Front de Liberation National (FLN), a political party born of that struggle. Whether it be in a critical mode or not, Algerian writers publishing in the last three decades have evinced a fascination with their country's bloody beginnings, illustrating the concern that Algeria's present woes can only be understood in terms of her past. Indeed, the war of independence reappears with such constancy that it has become the obsessive metaphor haunting Algerian writing, even when the ostensible subject is the rise of radical Islamic politics in the 1990s. For instance, Assia Djebar's 1995 haunting requiem for the victims of Islamic extremist-inspired rampages

Veiled Vision: Assia Djebar on Delacroix, Picasso, and the Femmes D'Alger

This paper looks at the issue of representation of the female 'other' in the context of the reading made by contemporary Algerian writer Assia Djebar of Delacroix's 1834 painting, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, and its reworkings both by Delacroix and by Picasso. Djebar's approach to the French Orientalists on the one hand rehabilitates their vision of Arab women, one often condemned as a reductive assimilation to fantasized western notions of the exotic feminine. Her comments on Delacroix and Fromentin (who drew on the Femmes d'Alger for his description of a harem) assert the empowering effect of French artists' gaze on the women they represented, in a culture where the female body was (and often remains) hidden from view. On the other hand, Djebar herself paradoxically practises some of the 'sins of perception' commonly attributed to the Orientalists as she reduces other to same, assimilates autonomous being to submissive function, in her account of the Delacroix and Picasso paintings. Overlooking the black servant, she marginalizes this major compositional foil as an accessory function. Politically concerned to see Picasso's women of the war of independence years as free, Djebar (mis)reads him through a veil of historical association that eliminates the notion of enslavement, and she doubles that veil by reading Delacroix retrospectively via Picasso. Her cultural intimacy with the harem scene produces greater blindness to the 'second-degree' otherness it contains than does Delacroix's cultural distance which lets him embrace a plurality of otherness, in a depiction of African women where power and autonomy are located, against expectation, in the slave.

Veiled Truth: Reading Assia Djebar from the outside

In a recent review of Edward Said's Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, philosopher and development ethicist Martha Nussbaum paraphrased his definition of the role of the as basically Socratic: to unsettle and oppose, to test all orthodoxies, to offer routes by which young minds may travel from one culture to another and learn a valuable type of estrangement from their own. What a beautiful invitation to think across borders, including theological borders, encountering what is out there and questioning what is in here! Reading the work of Algerian writer Assia Djebar is, in this sense, a university experience, particularly when it comes to her treatment of what has become one of the West's favorite cases against the East and Islamic fundamentalism--the veiling of women. Veiling, in Algerian history and in the work of Djebar, who began her academic career as an historian, is like a palimpsest, a rich and complex text on which multiple messages are inscribed, overlaid, and intertwined. It is an issue that invites outsiders to overcome their estrangement from the other by recognizing estrangement from self, particularly as a study of veiling reveals how persons separate themselves from intimate exchange. Djebar's writing provides a provocative location of estrangement, a place where national history, personal history, and aesthetic recreation converge. It is, among many other things, a place where Christians in the West are able to ponder anew the complex layering of revelation and tradition, the two consistent cornerstones of the Church, particularly as they relate to the complexities of gender construction. These connections will be explored by way of allowing Djebar's texts to defamiliarize both cultural and theological precepts that we often accept without questioning them. The Algerian Context is a country that has been covered multiple times by foreign empires, all projecting their shadows over the land and culture. In 146 B.C. Rome destroyed Carthage and soon conquered coastal Algeria. By the end of the fifth century A.D., the Berbers and Vandals had descended into and eroded Roman control. In the early sixth century the Byzantine Empire established a thin veneer of unity and order over North Africa. Then, in the seventh and eighth centuries, Muslim Arabs conquered the Byzantines. In the fifteenth century Spain removed the Muslims, not only from its own land but from the coastal cities of as well. With help from Turkish pirates and the Ottoman Empire, the Spaniards were then sent packing, and became part of yet another empire. The French entered in 1830 and had established almost total control by 1847. During World War II came under the Vichy government but later housed the Free French government of Charles De Gaulle. After a long and bloody struggle Algerians voted for independence in 1962, after which began a complex period of power struggles among Berbers, Francophone Algerians, Islamic fundamentalists, and socialist ideologues. Algeria's political and social woes--the plight of the still disaffected Berber population and complaints by international human rights agencies about the government's ill treatment of Islamic militants--are in the news today, the country's cultural identity still a matter of layer upon layer of ethnic transcript. The veiling of Algerian citizens is thus a complex physical and symbolic act. Women are the obviously veiled subjects, but all citizens are veiled in so many ways. Psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, author of the stark, anticolonial classic The Wretched of the Earth but also of the lesser-known Algeria Unveiled, published in A Dying Colonialism, does much to problematize the issue. As he argues, the function of veiling in Algerian society changed radically as the French sought to unveil Algerian women and as Algerian women began to participate in the struggle against colonialism, thus complicating the very idea of woman. …

Maghreb--Sub-Saharan Connections

The commonly applied division separating the Maghreb from sub-Saharan Africa gives rise to innumerable problems since it denies the many forms of intertwining influence that exist. The Algerian writers Kateb Yacine and Nabile Farès refer to sub-Saharan aspects in their work. Hampaté Bâ, the Malian writer whose texts are infused with Sufism, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane, a Fulani from Senegal, present themes that are quite similar to those of authors from the Maghreb. The Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi uses images drawn from sub-Saharan Africa while the painter Farid Belkahia, also from Morocco, is interested in the music of the Gnawa, descendants of former sub-Saharan slaves, incorporating techniques that come from Black Africa as well. Thus, the juxtapositions and shifting that the continent has known result in a communication of thought, which the arts and literature explore. On this subject let us quote Glissant:

Sites of Lost Memory: Malika Mokeddem and the Necessity of Writing

The Algerian writer Malika Mokeddem embeds her novels in the geography of a desert that belongs ever more to the past of the nomadic immediate ancestors of her main characters. Object of nostalgic yearning, this desert past and the nomads peopling it also necessitate flight, especially for women, trapped there in a patriarchal culture and society whose violence has been perpetuated into that of contemporary Algeria - also often aimed against women. Besides a few strong older women able to take advantage of their age and status to help their juniors, these novels principally set on stage young women or girls whose accidental or perilously self-willed access to education and - above all, writing - frees them from binding traditions even while, for most, such writing is akin to the nomadic traveling of their ancestors (as `writing' on the desert's very body). Even so, because it is a revolt against such traditions, their writing is the site and actuality of fraught struggle and pushes them into the `nomadism' of literal exile, across seas themselves often envisaged as wider deserts.

The Colonial City and the Question of Borders: Albert Camus's Allegory of Oran

The Colonial City and the Question of Borders: Albert Camus's Allegory of Oran David Carroll "Camus is an Algerian Writer."—Mohamed Dib1 FOR NUMEROUS HISTORICAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL REASONS, hybridity and the modern city seem inseparable. It would be difficult to think of what a modem city would be like if it were not cosmopolitan, hybrid, culturally diverse. The idea of a completely homogeneous city, a city where everyone was of the same linguistic, cultural, religious , and ethnic background would have to be considered at best incredibly boring (isn't that what suburbs are for?), and at worst a nightmare, sheer horror, part of a brave new world only imaginable as the horrible result of some form of nationalist, religious, cultural, or ethnic "cleansing." Cities of course are constituted not just by external borders separating them from the suburbs or banlieue where the well-to-do have fled or the poor have been driven, but also by numerous intemal borders which are called either neighborhoods , boroughs, villages or arrondissements, on the one hand, or barrios or ghettos, on the other. In the French colonies of North Africa these borders separated distinct areas that had names such as la cité européenne, la Casbah, le village nègre, or le quartier juif, names that left little ambiguity as to which segments of the population lived in each of them. During colonialism, these intemal borders delineated, and in postcolonial cities today they in fact continue to delineate , areas where peoples from specific ethnic, economic, linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds, by choice or necessity, live in miniature cities within the city, both as a part of the city and apart from the city as a whole. In colonial cities passages across the borders separating the neighborhoods of colonizer and colonized were of course severely limited and closely monitored, at least in terms of the colonized. But we need to ask ourselves exactly how such borders differed from those in the postcolonial cities we now inhabit. It might even be possible to argue that there is something profoundly colonialist about the modem city itself, something that was part of the very formation of the intemal borders within modem cities and that persists after the demise of colonialism. The differences between the intemal borders of the colonial city and the postcolonial city could even be argued to be not of nature but of degree, primarily having to do with how closed the intemal and 88 Fall 2001 Carroll external borders are and how difficult (or at times impossible) it is to move back and forth across them. In other words, in what ways and how severely borders were and still are policed and how the rights of residency and passage across borders are guaranteed or denied to specific populations. But I also would suggest that the circulation, exchanges, and passages across or around borders in the city have always been more unpredictable and uncontrollable than political authorities, police or military forces, economic determinants, or ethnic, religious, and cultural restrictions or prohibitions would have allowed—not only in the postcolonial era but also, although certainly not to the same extent, already under colonialism itself, no matter how segregated colonialist societies necessarily were. Do these passages across ethnic, cultural, religious, and economic borders, I wonder, also reflect something fundamental about colonialism, a post- or anti-colonialist possibility the colonized city itself also possessed? A possibility that our cities still possess but have not yet fully realized, a possibility (or hope) that arises because peoples from different cultures live and work next to each other, no matter how unequal their economic and political status, and interact in various ways, not all of which are or can be determined by economics, the values imposed by the dominant culture(s), or the laws of civil and military powers? It is above all in the city that the hope arises or simply the necessity exists that the different peoples sharing/dividing up its space will not just oppress, exploit, and do violence to each other because of their differences and the borders separating them and privileging certain groups over others. The hope is also that they will learn and borrow...