Tahar Djaout Research Articles

Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories? (On Tahar Djaout's L'invention du desert)

Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories? (On Tahar Djaout’s L’invention du désert) Réda Bensmaïa (bio) Translated by Denise Davis (bio) Elsewhere, history crumbled in its course; it arrives to us in scraps. —Tahar Djaout, L’invention du désert (82) At a time when studies termed “postcolonial” were still in their first stages of theoretical elaboration, the article published by Fredric Jameson in Social Text on “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” immediately sparked an outcry perfectly indicative of what the future would hold for the project of postcolonial theory. 1 Jameson’s thesis formulated the relationship of the literary text to political and historical reality in what could not have been more pointed terms: “All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel” (69; emphasis added). A little farther down on the same page, Jameson lays out his thesis even more exactly. He writes: “Third-World texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (69; emphasis in original). As Ahmad Aïjaz pointed out in his own essay in Social Text, the generalization made by Jameson in formulating his thesis could easily lead to confusion and, what is more, imply a process of essentializing and/or “reduction to the one” that could not but provoke a rebuttal on the part of the reader who had a specific cultural and historical register in mind. From this reader’s point of view, for example, which is to say, that of a postcolonial Algerian, the attempt to inscribe “all third-world texts” under the same regime or Genre of signification can only raise doubt and suspicion: doubt as to the meaning of the totality aimed at (“all texts”); but also suspicion as to the texts’ nature and place of origin or transmission: is it principally a matter of works of fiction, and consequently of novels, or should poetic texts, dramatic plays, critical essays, and more generally all texts understood as “literary” be included in this undetermined “totality”? And if this were the case, what would the “limits” of the literary in question be? Knowing the importance both of writing called “poetic” to the Maghreb, as well as of the diversity of literary genres mobilized in the production of literary works in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, such an assertion kindles even greater reservations and confusion. 2 If it is true that an “allegorical” dimension 3 persists in most [End Page 151] so called postcolonial, this is clearly never the primary or singular “ambition” of the writers in question. When such is the case, experience shows that we often find ourselves before texts that could be called “didactic,” the artistic or literary value of which is slight or nil. This is true of literature proper—as in novels and poetry—but also of cinematic production: films. Legion are the novels and films produced by postcolonial writers and filmmakers “read” as “allegories,” though not so much as “allegories of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” as self-righteous and predetermined discourses on good and evil, on the pure and the impure, on true and false identity, on the glorious past scorned by colonialism, and so on. In short, as Roland Barthes would say of the pensum: the message can be made out from the first sentences, postures, and sequences! With this in view, it becomes clear that when speaking of literatures called postcolonial, Jameson’s thesis is rendered problematic less by the idea that the allegorical is in postcolonial texts, 4 than by the absence of any reference to or problematization of the matter of the languages concerned. Indeed, one of the conditions that enables the critic to inscribe...

Building the Colonial Archive: The Case of Camus's Le premier homme

Building the Colonial Archive: The Case of Camus’s Le premier homme 1 Edward J. Hughes (bio) [Les morts] vivent maintenant avec nous qui nous sentons leurs parents, leurs amis. Ainsi se fait une famille, une cité commune entre les vivants et les morts. [The dead] now live with us and we feel that we are their parents [their relatives], their friends. In this way, a city shared by the living and the dead comes into being. —Michelet 2 La “tristesse africaine” du père. The father’s “African sadness.” —Camus, Le premier homme (297/240)3 Camus was working on Le premier homme in 1959, in what was to be the last year of his life (he died in January 1960). In chronological terms, he was writing against the backdrop of the Algerian War. In political and cultural terms, he was writing against decolonization. This unfinished, fictionalized autobiography recounts the life of the Cormery family, seen by Camus as typifying the lot of those descendants of nineteenth-century French settlers of Algeria. Camus’s tactic is to defend the position of the pieds noirs, whom he regularly depicts as innocents, accidents of a colonial history that has not brought them economic and cultural advantage but rather hardship and the virtues of stubbornness and resilience needed to face up to such difficulty. In short, Le premier homme is an unapologetic defense and illustration of the French Algerians. 4 Were this unfinished novel to have been published in 1960, soon after its author’s death, it would have been an embarrassment for many in metropolitan France. Its unfashionable promotion of the “Français d’Algérie” ‘French Algerians’ would have jarred in a nation that was in the throes of a colonial war. Along the painful road towards decolonization, the protests of loyal, would-be innocent colonizers could only stand as an unwelcome reminder of colonial failure. On the other hand, 1994, when the book was first published, proved a more auspicious date if we are to go by the massive sales of Le premier homme in France and beyond. More than thirty years on, then, it was as though postcolonial France was in a better position to remember and perhaps to indulge its sense of colonial nostalgia, or nostalgérie, by revisiting a past that had been revered and mythified. “Settler self-mystification,” to borrow a term from Philip Dine, finds a latter-day correlative in contemporary nostalgia for the would-be glory days of empire. 5 In this paper, I wish to consider three central areas: first, the linkage Camus makes between commemoration and memory-loss. In that respect, we will see “l’oubli” ‘oblivion’ working circuitously—perversely, one might [End Page 176] argue—as a powerful weapon in the legitimization of the French Algerian legacy; in this connection I shall also briefly consider, by way of instructive contrast, Tahar Djaout’s reading of commemoration in a native Algerian context in Les chercheurs d’os [The Bone searchers]. Second, I want to examine the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intertexts that play a crucial role in informing the rhetoric of persuasion around which Le premier homme is constructed. And third, and by way of conclusion, I shall explore briefly the extent to which Camus’s selective memory may be read as an indirect appeal to irrationalism. Le premier homme reflects urgently on spatial sensibilities in the colonial context. It strives to effect significant cultural reversals, in which the metropolitan center may, from the vantage point of the “littoral algérien” ‘Algerian shoreline,’ lose prestige or indeed acquire it, and the so-called outpost may become a place of peril and yet also a locus of heroism and beauty. Significantly, there is a regular turning away from contemporaneity. Repeatedly, Le premier homme summons up the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At one level, this is entirely to be expected since Camus’s aim is to celebrate his tribal ancestors, whose lives were shaped by such events as the 1848 Revolution, the Franco-Prussian War, and the First World War. Yet there is an abiding sense in which, for Camus, the past (heroic and sacrificial) is to be preferred to the...

Between God and the President: Literature and Censorship in North Africa

Between God and the President: Literature and Censorship in North Africa Hafid Gafaiti (bio) Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. —George Bernard Shaw Those who fight with the pen will perish by the sword. —Slogan of the Algerian Muslim fundamentalists If you speak up, you die. If you don’t speak up, you die. So, speak up and die! —Tahar Djaout, the first writer assassinated in the context of the current Algerian political crisis In the West, censorship has been understood for the most part as the state’s control over cultural production. Many critics in the postwar period, however, have argued that other forms of censorship, such as market censorship, are comparable to the actions of the state. The Christian right’s attacks on art in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s together with Congressional moves to disempower and dismantle the NEA have generated a new set of debates about censorship in this country. It was understood that the extreme right sought to repress cultural productions carrying a message of ethnic and sexual difference, targeting the works by rappers, the photographer Mapplethorpe, Madonna’s music videos, and so on. The right provided rhetoric to support the privatization of public space, the control of language and public images, and the promotion of “safe” art. While many critics refer to this as the “new censorship,” structurally it is exactly the same as the “old” censorship, that is, state control intervening in the liberal subject’s absolute right to free expression. It appears that the dichotomy between the left’s claim for the absolute freedom of the artist and the right’s attempt to repress it is most often conceived in moral terms and is paradigmatic of the Western liberal oppositional categories used to describe censorship. This position views the relationship between art and censorship as either a bourgeois romantic opposition to political order or a corrupt collaboration by opportunistic apparatchiks. It leaves no room for what Michael Holquist, for example, calls “negotiation.” Moreover, it does not take into account the fact that—in Third World or socialist contexts, for example—the way certain intellectuals view their role vis-à-vis the state, society, and/or the people determines their degree of cooperation with censorship mechanisms. The problem with this Manichean vision is that it implies a notion of censorship that is ahistorical: it posits that there is an essential distinction between the censor and the [End Page 59] creator or free mind. On the one hand, as Miklos Haraszti accurately outlines, at least until very recently in the Eastern European context: Censorship is no longer a matter of simple state intervention. A new aesthetic culture has emerged in which censors and artists alike are entangled in a mutual embrace. Nor is it as distasteful as traditional critics of censorship imagine. The state is able to domesticate the artist because the artist has already made the state his home. [5] On the other hand, as Richard Burt rightly suggests: What counts as censorship is not always clear. Indeed, it is hard to see how one could call many contemporary cases censorship without either seriously distorting the traditional understanding of the term or redefining it to include so many practices—ranging from institutional regulation of free expression, market censorship, cutbacks in government funding for controversial art, boycotts, lawsuits, and marginalization and exclusion of artists based on their gender or race to “political correctness” in the university and the media—that the term is overwhelmed, even trivialized, its usefulness as a tool of cultural criticism called into question. [xiii] Recent events, not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world such as Algeria, the case on which I will concentrate, show that one cannot seriously conceive the question of censorship along the lines of closed, distinct, conceptual categories expressing absolute oppositions. In other words, it is necessary to take the concept of censorship out of the realm of morality and locate it in the world of history, to displace it from the framework of philosophy and move it to the context of culture. In this essay, I will analyze the exercise of censorship in Algeria in...

The family that's moving ahead and the family that's going backward

Tahar Djaout, 39-year-old journalist, poet and novelist, was struck by three bullets on 26 May 1993. He died on 2 June. He was the founder and editor of the weekly Ruptures, an openly anti-Islamist publication. He is the author of several novels including Les chercheurs d'os (1984), L'invention du désert (1987) and Les vigiles (1991) for which he won the Prix Méditerranée. The following piece is the last he wrote. What can be expected from a dialogue between parties whose social programmes are light years apart? he asks, and attacks the High State Committee for its failure to determine a direction for Algeria