what is Algerian literature?
The origins of Algerian literature merge with a larger Mediterranean, Saharan, and Arabic legacies. Closer to our times, much of Algerian literature is influenced by the country’s history of French colonization (1830-1962), and particularly the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Unsurprizingly, the Francophone Algerian literature is the best known worldwide, but in reality also writing in Arabic and Berber has strong traditions. Among those resounding names, there are Kateb Yacine, the author of Nedjma, Assia Djebar, a feminist voice addressing issues of gender and identity in works like Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Mohamed Dib, whose works often depict life in Algeria before, during, and after colonization, and Khaled El Rahman, known for his poetry and explorations of the Algerian identity in a global context.
I have readBoualem Sansal, 2084. La fin du monde (2015)
Kamel Daoud, Zabor ou les Psaumes (2017) Kamel Daoud, Le Minotaure 504. Nouvelles (2011) Nedjma, L'Amende (2004) Rachid Boudjedra, Fascination (2000) Assia Djebar, Oran, langue morte (1979) |
Vertical Divider
|
I have written... nothing ...
|
dystopia of the borderless
The novel published by George Orwell in 1949 has an abundant descendance. Various years derived from 1984, indicated as the date of an apocalypse, reappear across world literature. There is, for instance, a Portuguese novel O Último Europeu: 2284, published in 2015 by Miguel Real. The book, shallow and rather badly written, presents the end of the world as we know it in terms of an advent of Asia, in which Portugal, the last fringe of Europe, instead of a jardim à beira mal plantado, becomes a sort of reservation of the old civilization. The 2084 of Sansal, by a strange coincidence published in the same apocalyptic year of 2015 (that also brought Houellebecq's Soumission in France), leads the reader into the opposite direction, somewhere deep into the central Asia, to the uncharted territories of Abistan (at least, it is my personal guess that Abistan could be somewhere between Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, although the novel also contains other hints, such as the information that its ancient inhabitants used to worship holy falcon, which would be Egypt, or an allusion to Quds, which would point at Israel and Jerusalem; obviously, the fiction is to be a synthesis of many locations, including the author's own Algeria).
Sansal's novel brings about the same kind of linguistic inventiveness that made the lasting presence of the Orwellian 1984. There is a whole new, simplified language, abilang, containing a novel (yet strangely transparent) religious vocabulary, with the supreme divinity, Yöllah, in the centre, just as the great holly war, the Char, is pivotal for all human history. There is not only a Big Brother in the singular, but a whole Justice Brotherhood (la Juste Fraternité), a congregation of forty apostles who maintain a constant vigilance against the makoufs, the sceptics and unbelievers, as well as other balisians, the adepts of Balis, the Chitan, shortly speaking the Devil. Acceptation, Gkabul, seems to be the equivalent of submission, Islam, as the name of the religion of Abistan and, at the same time, the title of its holy book. Abistan is conceived as a unique country in the world, without any conceivable alternative to its reality, any neighbouring territories, any border. The discovery of a frontier is only possible in the end, as a final result of the hero's quest. Otherwise, it is a world without any exterior, where doubting is as useless as it is forbidden: Il n'y a pas de révolte possible dans un monde clos, où n'existe aucune issue (p. 96).
The book makes a slow reading, with complex, endless sentences, giving to the whole an epic tonality comparable, as it is my private association, with such books as Shikasta and the remaining volumes of Canopus in Argos by Doris Lessing. It is easy to guess that the great war of Char was fought with the benefit of nuclear arsenals, something that the Abistanis do not actually understand: they try to build clumsy fences to isolate the places where il sembre s'être produit des événements depassant l'entendement, des morceaux de soleil tombés sur la planète, des magies noires qui auraient déclenché des feux infernaux (p. 20). It is also the time scale of radioactive decay that introduces those large time perspectives, so characteristic for the Canopean intervention in the evolution of the Colonized Planet 5. The date of atomic explosion is what the year 2084 written on the commemorative stones seems to indicate, but there are many numerological interpretations. It might also be the year of the illumination of Abi, the prophet and the saviour. In any case, the old History has been closed and sealed, and rewritten by Abi, le Délégué. The New Era is a millenarian time without time, without calendars, memory or historiography, le présent éternel (p. 25). Life becomes a pilgrimage, or a certificate of inscription for a pilgrimage, inherited by the oldest son; the rituals celebrate the Expectation. The religious, through the exigences of sacrifices, shapes the only existing economy, just as the pilgrimage and the sacred places shape the only existing geography.
There is also the date 1984, written on the entrance to the sanatorium (p. 48) where Ati is to cure his tuberculosis, just as if it was a new Zauberberg in yet another intertextual allusion, this time to the novel of Thomas Mann. It is on his Abistani Magic Mountain, cet hôpital hors du temps (p. 44), that Ati learns how to doubt and discovers the revolutionary concept of border: La maladie abat de son côté bien de certitudes, la mort ne s'accomode d'aucune vérité qui se veut plus grande qu'elle, elle les ramène toutes à zéro. L'existence d'une frontière était bouleversante. Le monde serait doncdivisé, divisible, l'humanité multiple?, and finally: qu'y a-t-il de l'autre côté? (p. 45). The long way home is Ati's first initiation to the quests that will actually lead him, in the end, toward la Frontière, and out of the closed world of Abistan. There is indeed a deep wisdom connected to the border, and the text contains profound maxims resuming it. Just to give an example: Pour les gens qui ne sont jamais sortis de leur peur, l'ailleurs est un abîme (p. 93). They make me think about my own childhood in a communist country, almost such a closed world of Abistan, where all the external territories only had some vague kind of existence, as if emptied of meaning, true reality, solidity. It also makes me think about that curious, paradoxical depletion of the exterior, of all things abroad, that the anti-democratic propaganda in my country launches right now, in the borderless world of globalisation and the European Union. I am really afraid that this quotation from Sansal might stay with me, as an actual description of my own country of origin. L'ailleurs starts to be an abîme for my people just as I write these words.
The great Heilsgeschichte of Abistan suffers nonetheless a fragmentation, and the ends up in a petty war of clans. As if it were some sort of Pashtun history transcribed in universal, Orwellian terms to show the revers of the political that worried the original author, the religious.
Boualem Sansal, 2084. La fin du monde, Paris, Gallimard, 2015.
Neuville-sur-Oise, Ramadan 22nd, 1442.
Sansal's novel brings about the same kind of linguistic inventiveness that made the lasting presence of the Orwellian 1984. There is a whole new, simplified language, abilang, containing a novel (yet strangely transparent) religious vocabulary, with the supreme divinity, Yöllah, in the centre, just as the great holly war, the Char, is pivotal for all human history. There is not only a Big Brother in the singular, but a whole Justice Brotherhood (la Juste Fraternité), a congregation of forty apostles who maintain a constant vigilance against the makoufs, the sceptics and unbelievers, as well as other balisians, the adepts of Balis, the Chitan, shortly speaking the Devil. Acceptation, Gkabul, seems to be the equivalent of submission, Islam, as the name of the religion of Abistan and, at the same time, the title of its holy book. Abistan is conceived as a unique country in the world, without any conceivable alternative to its reality, any neighbouring territories, any border. The discovery of a frontier is only possible in the end, as a final result of the hero's quest. Otherwise, it is a world without any exterior, where doubting is as useless as it is forbidden: Il n'y a pas de révolte possible dans un monde clos, où n'existe aucune issue (p. 96).
The book makes a slow reading, with complex, endless sentences, giving to the whole an epic tonality comparable, as it is my private association, with such books as Shikasta and the remaining volumes of Canopus in Argos by Doris Lessing. It is easy to guess that the great war of Char was fought with the benefit of nuclear arsenals, something that the Abistanis do not actually understand: they try to build clumsy fences to isolate the places where il sembre s'être produit des événements depassant l'entendement, des morceaux de soleil tombés sur la planète, des magies noires qui auraient déclenché des feux infernaux (p. 20). It is also the time scale of radioactive decay that introduces those large time perspectives, so characteristic for the Canopean intervention in the evolution of the Colonized Planet 5. The date of atomic explosion is what the year 2084 written on the commemorative stones seems to indicate, but there are many numerological interpretations. It might also be the year of the illumination of Abi, the prophet and the saviour. In any case, the old History has been closed and sealed, and rewritten by Abi, le Délégué. The New Era is a millenarian time without time, without calendars, memory or historiography, le présent éternel (p. 25). Life becomes a pilgrimage, or a certificate of inscription for a pilgrimage, inherited by the oldest son; the rituals celebrate the Expectation. The religious, through the exigences of sacrifices, shapes the only existing economy, just as the pilgrimage and the sacred places shape the only existing geography.
There is also the date 1984, written on the entrance to the sanatorium (p. 48) where Ati is to cure his tuberculosis, just as if it was a new Zauberberg in yet another intertextual allusion, this time to the novel of Thomas Mann. It is on his Abistani Magic Mountain, cet hôpital hors du temps (p. 44), that Ati learns how to doubt and discovers the revolutionary concept of border: La maladie abat de son côté bien de certitudes, la mort ne s'accomode d'aucune vérité qui se veut plus grande qu'elle, elle les ramène toutes à zéro. L'existence d'une frontière était bouleversante. Le monde serait doncdivisé, divisible, l'humanité multiple?, and finally: qu'y a-t-il de l'autre côté? (p. 45). The long way home is Ati's first initiation to the quests that will actually lead him, in the end, toward la Frontière, and out of the closed world of Abistan. There is indeed a deep wisdom connected to the border, and the text contains profound maxims resuming it. Just to give an example: Pour les gens qui ne sont jamais sortis de leur peur, l'ailleurs est un abîme (p. 93). They make me think about my own childhood in a communist country, almost such a closed world of Abistan, where all the external territories only had some vague kind of existence, as if emptied of meaning, true reality, solidity. It also makes me think about that curious, paradoxical depletion of the exterior, of all things abroad, that the anti-democratic propaganda in my country launches right now, in the borderless world of globalisation and the European Union. I am really afraid that this quotation from Sansal might stay with me, as an actual description of my own country of origin. L'ailleurs starts to be an abîme for my people just as I write these words.
The great Heilsgeschichte of Abistan suffers nonetheless a fragmentation, and the ends up in a petty war of clans. As if it were some sort of Pashtun history transcribed in universal, Orwellian terms to show the revers of the political that worried the original author, the religious.
Boualem Sansal, 2084. La fin du monde, Paris, Gallimard, 2015.
Neuville-sur-Oise, Ramadan 22nd, 1442.
meet barzakh, a francophone editing house
As one of the very few intellectual bonuses of my stay at Cergy-Paris University, I got an opportunity on seeing, on a webcam, the leading Algerian Francophone editor, Selma Hellal, accompanied by her author, Samir Toumi. Both of them strikingly elegant, civilized, classy, stylish, artist-looking. More French, more Parisian than anyone here. Desperately lacking any touch of Africa, of Orient, of coarse authenticity, of being something else, something newer, tastier, more exciting than just France.
I asked them, much to the displeasure of the organiser, how they saw themselves in the geopolitics of Arab world and Arab language. They answered at length, it was clear that the question was touching at something they asked themselves, very late at night.
Not just the question of their own Arabness, the burden of Arab history, eternally upon them. There was also a business aspect of the question. Algerian Francophone literature is something that had already happened. Something belonging to the past, that they might eventually try to reinvent. They actually went on reinventing it these last two decades, this is why Barzakh actually is a name in the Maghreb. Certainly, the French-speaking literature in this part of the world won't disappear. But just as many postcolonial phenomena, it will never be what it once used to be. The best thing they might do is to reinvent themselves coarse and authentic again, just as they were at the beginning. Algerian literature lived of the fight against fundamentalism, on Yasmina Khadra and alike. But what it might be at the time of peace? I dare say they might start to write in Arabic such things that might be translated into English directly, gain projection and prestige addressing the global public directly, marginalising Paris. But how? This sophisticated woman, as deadly European as I wouldn't even dream to become, won't put her dress and veil and heavy jewellery again (as I could easily and gladly do in her place).
What is the importance of Algeria today? What might be its importance in a globalized Arab culture? I wouldn't advise them to reinvent themselves in those terms that I can easily see in the case of Damascus, when the war is over. As a fashionable place of good food, expensive lifestyle and elitist intellectual ambience that might appeal to my Oxonian or Leidse colleagues. Algeria, I would say even more than Libya, is almost an exception in the Arab world, a land without any past greatness to speak of, a blank space that the French once took as their own. Honestly speaking, it is the margin of a margin, and not easy to sell at all, neither in Frankfurt nor in Riyadh. But it is still a Mediterranean margin, part of that oikumene that might one day be again. Daoud's Zabor goes in the direction of exploring this void. Coarse, rough, not dressed in Parisian clothes, not literary, not aestheticizing, not civilised, uncompromising, hot, sweaty. But please, not down to that confused sexuality of Boudjedra again, not knowing any longer how and why and for what. I could not actually finish any of those books, I had no patience for them.
Neuville-sur-Oise, 18.03.2021.
I asked them, much to the displeasure of the organiser, how they saw themselves in the geopolitics of Arab world and Arab language. They answered at length, it was clear that the question was touching at something they asked themselves, very late at night.
Not just the question of their own Arabness, the burden of Arab history, eternally upon them. There was also a business aspect of the question. Algerian Francophone literature is something that had already happened. Something belonging to the past, that they might eventually try to reinvent. They actually went on reinventing it these last two decades, this is why Barzakh actually is a name in the Maghreb. Certainly, the French-speaking literature in this part of the world won't disappear. But just as many postcolonial phenomena, it will never be what it once used to be. The best thing they might do is to reinvent themselves coarse and authentic again, just as they were at the beginning. Algerian literature lived of the fight against fundamentalism, on Yasmina Khadra and alike. But what it might be at the time of peace? I dare say they might start to write in Arabic such things that might be translated into English directly, gain projection and prestige addressing the global public directly, marginalising Paris. But how? This sophisticated woman, as deadly European as I wouldn't even dream to become, won't put her dress and veil and heavy jewellery again (as I could easily and gladly do in her place).
What is the importance of Algeria today? What might be its importance in a globalized Arab culture? I wouldn't advise them to reinvent themselves in those terms that I can easily see in the case of Damascus, when the war is over. As a fashionable place of good food, expensive lifestyle and elitist intellectual ambience that might appeal to my Oxonian or Leidse colleagues. Algeria, I would say even more than Libya, is almost an exception in the Arab world, a land without any past greatness to speak of, a blank space that the French once took as their own. Honestly speaking, it is the margin of a margin, and not easy to sell at all, neither in Frankfurt nor in Riyadh. But it is still a Mediterranean margin, part of that oikumene that might one day be again. Daoud's Zabor goes in the direction of exploring this void. Coarse, rough, not dressed in Parisian clothes, not literary, not aestheticizing, not civilised, uncompromising, hot, sweaty. But please, not down to that confused sexuality of Boudjedra again, not knowing any longer how and why and for what. I could not actually finish any of those books, I had no patience for them.
Neuville-sur-Oise, 18.03.2021.
