Boualem Sansal Research Articles

Testimony and Relationality in Boualem Sansal’s L’enfant fou de l’arbre creux

Writing before the contentious Algerian Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation of 2005, Assia Djebar remarks that, “une solution en somme ‘à la Nelson Mandela’ de l’Afrique du Sud d’aujourd’hui aurait pu se concrétiser” ( Le Blanc de l’Algérie ). Benjamin Stora similarly probes the parallels between the “first” and “second” Algerian wars, suggesting that the ostensibly mimetic relationship between the two derives, in part, from the ubiquitous framing of the anticolonial war as a binary opposition that simultaneously represses the multiple truths of the war. Boualem Sansal’s novel L’enfant fou de l’arbre creux engages with the concept of the TRC, but it shifts the focus beyond reparation to a sustained form of “working upon the past.”Sansal’s diegesis resists ideological categories and national boundaries, suggesting that a more multifaceted and transnational historiography of the anticolonial war is necessary.

Intertextuality and Translation in Three Recent French Holocaust Novels

This essay highlights the role translation plays in constructing Holocaust memory in fiction. Considering for example references to the work of Primo Levi in French texts, it shows how recent Holocaust novels have recourse to intertexts originally written in another language in order to evoke shared knowledge about the Holocaust. The translation of Holocaust novels therefore poses the problem of translating an intertext that is itself a translation. Analysis of recent novels by Fabrice Humbert, Boualem Sansal, and Sylvie Germain suggests that such translated intertextuality can produce complex and unpredictable reinterpretations. The essay argues that translation and multilingualism are rhetorical strategies used in Holocaust fiction to approach complex questions of identity and unrepresentability.

Invoking Totalitarianism: Liberal Democracy versus the Global Jihad in Boualem Sansal's the German Mujahid

In the years following the attacks of 9/11, the Cold War discourse of totalitarianism has resurfaced in connection with Islamist terrorism. Scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals across the ideological spectrum routinely characterize the global jihad as the “new totalitarian threat” for the twenty-first century, as evidenced by such proclamations as the 2006 Euston Manifesto (“For a Renewal of Progressive Politics”). This discourse employs different names—“Islamofascism,” “Islamic totalitarianism”—but each signifies a tentacular threat to liberal democracy across the globe. It is in this context that this essay reads a recent novel, The German Mujahid, published (originally in French under the title Le village de l'Allemand, ou Le journal des frères Schiller) in 2008 by Algerian author Boualem Sansal. Banned in Algeria but winner of the 2011 German Book Trade Peace Prize, The German Mujahid, I argue, reproduces this new iteration of Islamist totalitarianism in novel form, triangulating memory of the 1994 civil war in Algeria and memory of the Holocaust along with contemporary representations of radical Islam in Europe. Yet for a novel so concerned with history and memory, and with the complex interplay between Europe and North Africa, what is striking in The German Mujahid is the absence of any engagement with the French-Algerian war or even French colonialism in Algeria. Certainly there is no shortage of creative and scholarly works on the Algerian War, but the suppression or erasure in the novel of this formative moment signals, in my view, a retreat from the anticolonial ethos that this conflict mobilized globally.

Melancholia and Victimhood in Boualem Sansal's <em>Le Village de l'Allemand: Ou Le journal des frères Schiller</em>

Algerian author Boualem Sansal’s 2008 novel Le Village de l’Allemand: Ou Le journal des freres Schiller (An Unfinished Business ) focuses on the journal entries of two brothers—Rachel and Malrich Schiller—as they respond to the news that their father was a Nazi war criminal. In doing so, the novel engages with two major conceptual models: melancholia and victimhood. Both concepts have emerged as dominant paradigms in recent years, with melancholia in particular being reconceptualized as an ethico-political mode of resistance and agency. By focusing on the emergence of these concepts in Le Village de l’Allemand, however, the author demonstrates how melancholia can lead the grieving subject to conflate victims and perpetra tors and to appropriate the victim subject-position. Sansal’s novel thus calls into question the suitability of melancholia as an ethico-political paradigm, signaling the need for new modes of working through the past that attend to the singularity of historical events.

Transnational Heritage in Boualem Sansal's The German Mujahid

Boualem Sansal's novel The German Mujahid (2008) recounts the Schiller brothers' respective trajectories through their combined diaries after the murder of their parents, Hans and Aïcha Schiller, in a remote Berber village in Algeria in 1994, and the subsequent discovery of their father's dark Nazi past. The essay examines how the diary as a genre is used to reconstruct the brothers' lapses of memory, and ultimately becomes a tool in the quest for identity. Beschea-Fache demonstrates that the novel questions familial and national responsibility for crimes and the politics of transmission of memory, and explores possible responses through the brothers' journeys. Drawing on the multifocal structure of Sansal's novel, the essay examines the politics of memory transmission in the familial, national, and global spheres and thereby illuminates the limitations of a transnational heritage. Against the commonly held belief that one's sense of belonging is dependent on one's community inclusion in the national history (Renan 1882; Nora 1989), Sansal's protagonists help us rethink how national identity is produced.

“Jeg har jo oplevet det hele” - “Postrealisme” i franske romaner efter Claude Simon

Hans Peter Lund: “‘I have seen it all’. Postrealism in French Novels after Claude Simon”From the 80s onward there has been a tendency in the French novel for letting a true story appear within the novel as autobiography or actual event. This article discusses texts from Claude Simon to Laurent Mauvignier, including François Bon, Boualem Sansal and others, and focuses on the fact that the material appears in novel-like constructions, as experienced, while it is also made the object of criticism.

Lacunae, erasure, and the impossibility of bearing witness in Boualem Sansal's Le Village de l'Allemand (2008)

Le Village de l'Allemand ou Le journal des frères Schiller (2008), the prizewinning Algerian author Boualem Sansal's fifth novel originally published in France, confronts major historical events of the twentieth century: the French occupation of Algeria, the Holocaust, the Algerian War of Independence and Civil War in the 1990s, as well as the banlieues in modern day France. Taking the form of two diaries written by half-German, half-Algerian brothers in the aftermath of discovering their father was a Nazi, the novel sets up testimonies and witnessing by proxy. Putting 'Islamism' and Nazism in contact with one another, Sansal's novel finds a wide audience in translation. Called The German Mujahid and marketed in the United States as 'The first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust', the novel brings together guilt, collaboration, and atonement in a way that ultimately reveals the dangers of history and testimony under erasure, and the impossibility of bearing witness.

Vichy 2010

Vichy 2010 Richard J. Golsan To all appearances, what the distinguished historian Henry Rousso labeled the "Vichy Syndrome" in the late 1980s is still alive and well in France ten years into the new millennium. Indeed, the troubled and troubling memory of les années noires and the traumas associated with them—the disastrous and humiliating defeat of summer 1940, collaboration with the Nazis, and French complicity in the Holocaust—continue to inform public political discourse, inspire compelling novels and films, and, through the power their memory has on the national conscience, inflect and inform other traumatic memories from the nation's recent past as well. These include, most obviously, the troubled memories of decolonization and la guerre sans nom in particular, but they also include those of World War I, of France's dark history of slave trade, and in a broader global context the memory of Communism and its crimes worldwide. Moreover, such has been the interpenetration of these memories, both in chronological and geographic terms, that Henry Rousso has stated that writing a book about a specific traumatic memory and especially a specific national context—a work like Le Syndrome de Vichy—no longer seems entirely valid or appropriate. What happened in France in World War II, and the legacy it left behind, now needs to be viewed in a broader European, and perhaps global, context. Moreover, as events at the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997-98 for crimes against humanity demonstrate, it is not an easy task to dissociate, for example, the crimes committed under Vichy from terrible crimes committed by later democratic regimes in France, like the brutal and murderous suppression of Algerian protestors by French police on the night of 17 October 1961. For this reason it is entirely legitimate, as Michael Rothberg has argued recently, to consider a specific historical traumatic memory not in isolation, but "multidirectionally," in association with other memories with which it has become inextricably linked.1 As if to take up this transhistorical and transnational challenge, writers of what might be called the "new generation" of writers dealing with the traumatic memory of World War II have explored that memory in a much wider temporal and historical context. These writers include Yannick Haenel in his novels Cercle and Jan Karski, Boualem Sansal in his deeply moving Le Village de l'Allemand, Sylvie Germain in Magnus as well as other works, and of course Jonathan Littell in Les Bienveillantes. But the list of these writers and works is, of course, much longer than this. [End Page 1] If Vichy and its memory have increasingly become implicated, or imbricated, in the memories of other traumas from other times and other places, so to speak, this is not to say that they have entirely lost their French specificity, or that particular or particularly traumatic episodes from les années noires have not continued to attract wide public attention and controversy, as well as the attention of historians and scholars. Olivier Wieviorka's revisionist study of the D-Day Landings, the Battle of Normandy and the liberation, for example, has sparked renewed interest and debate on a topic already exhaustively (to say the least) studied and discussed.2 The terrible defeat of May-June 1940 also continues to spark interest, as reflected not only in media and historical exposés and controversies, but also among readers of Irène Nemirovsky's powerful, posthumous novel, Suite française. Even the problems and hardships, as well as the tastes and styles, of daily life under the Occupation have inspired new interest, perhaps most notably in the successful exhibition of powerful and often beautiful color photographs of Paris under the German yoke taken by André Zucca. But if the memory of Vichy lives and thrives both in the specificity of the French historical context as well as in its imbrication in and implications for other traumatic historical contexts, it has also become a metaphor, on occasion, for moral and political corruption in the present. This was the case, for example, in Lydie Salvayre's powerful and disturbing 1997 novel, La Compagnie des spectres. But nowhere was the phenomenon more in evidence, and more controversial, than...

Guerre des mémoires ou ‘parallèles dangereux’ dans Le Village de L'Allemand de Boualem Sansal

‘The Schiller Brothers’ Diary’ (the subtitle of Boualem Sansal's Le Village de l'Allemand) is the encounter between two diaries that bring together the memories of several European and African communities. Two young men who think that they are the children of Kabylian peasants murdered by Algerian fundamentalists discover that their father is a Nazi war criminal whose story they must uncover. In order to explore the border between fundamentalism and Nazism, Sansal weaves a historical narrative straddling three territories and three national histories (France, Germany and Algeria). He also creates an inextricable knot of ‘entangled memories’. In other words, Le Village de l'Allemand positions itself at the heart of a debate that revolves around what the French often refer to as a ‘war of memories’ or around an attempt to deal with what hostile voices describe as ‘repentance’. The most productive aspect of Sansal's literary text is that it stages the cohabitation between two contradictory forms of memorialisation. The author suggests here an analysis of how Rachel and Malrich, the two heroes of the novel, instrumentalise history from radically different perspectives and a study of the ways in which the novel emphasises the contradictions that persist within each narrative. ‘Le Journal des frères Schiller’ (le sous-titre du Village de l'Allemand de Boualem Sansal) est un roman construit comme la somme de deux journaux qui mélangent les mémoires de plusieurs communautés européennes et africaines. Deux jeunes hommes qui se croient les enfants d'un couple de paysans Kabyles égorgés dans leur village découvrent que leur père est un criminel Nazi dont il leur faut retrouver l'histoire. Sansal s'est donné pour mission d'explorer la frontière entre islamisme et nazisme et pour ce faire fabrique le récit de personnages qui sont au croisement de trois territoires et de trois histoires nationales (France, Allemagne et Algérie) mais aussi au centre d'un inextricable enchevêtrement d'histoires croisées’. Le Village de l'Allemand est au cœur du débat sur ce que certains historiens français appellent une ‘guerre des mémoires’ ou ce que des commentateurs hostiles appellent la tentation de la ‘repentance’. Le texte littéraire de Sansal met en scène la cohabitation entre deux formes de mémorialisation presque incompatibles et l'auteur se propose d'analyser la façon dont les deux héros Rachel et Malrich instrumentalisent l'histoire à partir de points de vue radicalement différents et minés de contradictions internes.

Boualem Sansal: novelist, polemicist, eulogist

L'enfant fou de l'arbre creux, by Boualem Sansal, Paris, Gallimard, 2000, 301 pp., ISBN 2-07-075928-8 Poste restante: Alger; Lettre de colère et d'espoir à mes compatriots, by Boualem Sansal, Paris, Gallimard, 2006, 59 pp., ISBN 2-07-077684-0 Petit éloge de la mémoire: Quatre mille et une années de nostalgie, by Boualem Sansal, Paris, Gallimard, 2007, 134 pp., ISBN 978-2-07-034126-9 Sansal represents an important new voice in Algerian literature. He is a politically engaged writer who, after publishing four novels, has turned to such genres as the political pamphlet and the essay to express political criticism. This analysis reviews a representative novel, a pamphlet in the form of an ‘open letter’, and an essay on North African history in order to present Sansal's principal arguments and to illustrate his stylistic methods. The three works constitute a coherent whole that attacks orthodox ideas while calling for expanding the space of public discourse in Algeria.

Introduction

Introduction THE PRESENT ISSUE OF L'ESPRIT CREATEUR attempts to explore some of the conflicts between history and memory that lie at the core of postcolonial and transnational experience on four continents, and across several overlapping cultural boundaries. It deals with modalities of narrative evocation and ellipsis, and concerns itself with the deep, incessant reshaping of personal or collective memory. Reflecting upon phenomena of memorial repression and transformation, the articles that comprise this collection evoke political events and historical confrontations repressed or reborn, individual and collective dramas incessantly reappropriated and displaced . They cover thus a wide range of issues: modalities of remembrance of the Algerian war of independence; the ever changing conceptualization of national culture and interpretation of history; the role of the dissident intellectual within the project of construction of a multicultural post-independence identity; the overarching architecture of simultaneously historical and autobiographical fiction; the repression of desire; the hybrid representation of "national" culture; the displacement of external experience to psychological interiority in Caribbean fiction; as well as the fictional reconstruction of colonial space as childhood and adolescent experiences find their way into fiction. Nearly forty years after independence in Algeria, and drawing heavily from recent political literature of the French far right, Benjamin Stora examines the contemporary fabric of French society as reflected in the ideological processing of Algerian colonization. Concerned with "the displacement of values, habits, and beliefs that were elaborated over the 132 years" of French colonization, Stora's article meticulously unveils the National Front's invention of a history rooted in racial intolerance and anti-Islamic myth. In his metaphorical reference to the antebellum South, Stora identifies Jean-Marie Le Pen's version of colonial history and vision of contemporary racial diversity as the uglier facet of the fundamental contradiction inherent in the ostensibly egalitarian ideology of republican discourse. Indeed, the selectively assimilationist ideology of modern French republicanism, what Stora names a "false model of republic," barely masked "a differential and segregationist strategy." Stora goes on to examine the crisis of French Jacobinism that arises out of conflicted understandings of Algeria, particularly once colonial communities and their political cleavages have settled in various sectors of French society. Of particular interest, thus, is Storas's accurate and nuanced analysis of the historical imaginaires of various French Algerian communities, such as the exilic memories of the pied-noirs and the mémoires citoyennes of the beurs. No less important, finally, are Stora's discussion of the "mémoire de Vol. XLIII, No. 1 3 L'Esprit Créateur revanche inavouée" that has made the successes of far right activism possible, as well as his well-taken admonition for an end to the political discourse of euphemisms and equivocation that has long presided, in the midst of the French republic, over the evocation of the Algerian war of independence. The second article in the collection considers several occurrences of contesting and regenerative memorialization of Algerian history: in the recently published journalistic writings of Kateb Yacine, in Elisabeth Schemla's 19992000 travel journals, and in the detective fiction of a talented newcomer to Algerian fiction, Boualem Sansal. In this article I consider various trajectories of the process of memorial densification of Algerian images. Stressing the transgeographical purview of Kateb 's journalistic preoccupations and their préfiguration of the themes of his post-independence theater, I draw attention to the lay discourse of "désassimilation" they relentlessly construct. The occasionally problematic observations Elisabeth Schemla indulges as she searches for physical memories of her father bear witness to the postcolonial challenge of reconciling subjective and historical remembering. An evocation of existential hallucination and of a moral chaos of epic proportions, finally, Boualem Sansal's novel Le Serment des barbares offers perhaps the most metaphysically absolute translation of sociopolitical anomie, a feat accomplished through the creative manipulation of the genre of the detective novel. Jean Sénac, whose poetic and political itineraries and whose historical significance Danielle Marx-Scouras thoroughly maps out in the following article, remains perhaps the most controversial Algerian figure and therefore the writer the least officially acknowledged by independent Algeria, whose citizenship he had freely chosen. It is on Jean Sénac's contested and ignored "alg...

Translations of Memory from Kateb to Sansal

Translations of Memory from Kateb to Sansal Bernard Aresu THE FOREMOST HISTORIAN OF ALGERIAN POLITICS, Benjamin Stora, has referred to the current civil war as "a tragedy behind closed doors" characterized "by an absence of [widespread] images."' Central to Stora's most recent analysis of the current Algerian civil war are several observations: its partial, truncated representations on both sides of the Mediterranean; its mediatic inaccessibility; in short, a crisis of representation. Stora also mentions other reasons for the informational confusion that surrounds the civil war, historical signs such as the opacity of its beginnings and the confusion of its origins: "La guerre est arrivée en Algérie sans vraiment s'annoncer, par touches successives, provoquant cette confusion des origines" (GI 15). Other symptomatic signs are the post-independence occultation of founding figures who lost their lives in the internecine political struggle among Algerians (GI 106-09), censorship and disinformation, as well as the notion of historical repetition of the revolutionary war against France. He also notes, in contradistinction to the paucity of mediatic exposure, the size of a new body of print materials which include journalistic but above all literary and autobiographical accounts of the war (GI 94-102). The notion of historical repetition of violence is of particular significance since it brings forth, Stora points out (GI 114), two major, perhaps heretofore underestimated, political factors: the role of the religious in the forging of a communitarian nationalism, and the trauma of experienced violence (the war of independence in the 1950s) reenacted within the independent State when its political or religious legitimacy is being contested (the civil war of the 1990s). One observation , toward the end of the book, helps bring into focus some of the points I would like to make in this study. Discussing the sense of historical repetition of violence that emerges out of the ongoing war, Stora states the following: "Ce qui lie les deux périodes, si importantes dans la formation de l'Algérie moderne, ce n'est ni leur ressemblance ni leur dissemblance, mais une intense circulation d'images, d'idées, de représentations, de paroles décelables dans un système d'échange mémoriel" (GI 115). What the representation of current events may be carrying within their own violent unfolding, Stora thus seems to be saying, amounts to much more than a mere sense of inevitable repetition. No less important, also, is the hidden, long-repressed code of their own hermeneutical and elaborative possibilities : the circulation of images, ideas, and representations discernible in 32 Spring 2003 Aresu the dynamic system of both individual and collective memories. For historical recurrence enables anamnetic processes. It facilitates the emergence of truth, albeit progressive and incomplete, elaborative and reticent, still controlled as it is by the apparatus of the state or contested by equally repressive warring factions.2 More recently James McDougall has minutely mapped out processes of "inscription and imagination of Algerian history" which, through such Islamic reformist, salafi writings as Ahmad al-Madanî's The Story of Carthage Through Four Ages,3, played a pivotal role in the elaboration of the anticolonial , but nonetheless unitary, mythologized structures of institutional history that became prevalent shortly after independence with the advent of the Boumediene and Chadli era. Part of the following analysis will not so much try to pick up where Stora and McDougall left off as to examine literary projections of the events for which they have provided such minute historical analyses. More precisely, this essay considers four exemplars of the memorial diversification and retranslation of historical experience. The clear-cut deconstructions of institutional views of Algerian history which they carry out seek to make sense of the current patterns of confrontational violence and of the civil war: premonitorily in the case of Kateb Yacine's posthumously published journalistic writings ; autobiographically—and problematically—in the case of Elisabeth Schemla's 1999-2000 Algerian journal; through highly individualized manipulations of the genre of the detective novel in the cases of Rachid Mimouni and Boualem Sansal.4 Briefly put, what is indeed at work in these four texts is a rhetoric of agonistic transformation, a narrative grammar of transition and translation. Be they...