Rémy went on to say that when Djebar was elected, it was “a triumph for you and for the francophone world; and also a great moment in the life of the Académie, even if it raised a few eyebrows.”
This chapter will explore how Djebar reached this point of ambiguous triumph and how her story, and her writing, may cast light on the wider story of “francophone literature.” In her inaugural address, Djebar too invoked the idea of francophonie, recalling that when she first heard she had been elected, she was “contente pour la francophonie du Maghreb”—happy, that is to say, for French speakers in the Maghreb and for a wider culture in and around the French language in the Maghreb. The term “francophone” sometimes means simply what it appears to mean, “French-speaking”: and if Djebar’s election was a triumph for the francophone world, perhaps it was a triumph for all French speakers—including the French, and including members of the Parisian literary scene, which Rémy mocked for its tendency to be inward-looking and self-regarding. But the word frequently has a more coded meaning, also present in Rémy’s speech, and signaled throughout this chapter by quotation marks: “francophone literature” most often designates—albeit tendentiously, as this chapter will suggest—literature in French that is not French, or not “fully” French, by an author understood to have arrived on the literary scene from a cultural distance. Such writers seem to be given a special responsibility to speak for others: for Algerian women, say, or for non-French francophones everywhere.
Djebar, who was born in 1936 and died in 2015, began writing very young, and she had published three novels before the end of the Algerian war of independence in 1962. It was beginning in 1980, with the publication of the prose collection Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment), that she really started to establish her high reputation. Her best-known work is probably L’amour, la fantasia, first published in 1985 and translated into English by Dorothy Blair as Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade in 1993. That book, which is central to this chapter, opens with a striking image: “A little Arab girl going to school for the first time, one autumn morning, walking hand in hand with her father. A tall erect figure in a fez and a European suit, carrying a bag of school books. He is a teacher at the French primary school. A little Arab girl in a village in the Algerian Sahel.” From there it develops across a complicated structure of movements, chapters, interludes, and other subdivisions, through which different characters and different historical moments are juxtaposed, and sometimes blended together. One of its principal strands revisits episodes from the early decades of the French conquest of Algeria; another strand involves women’s experiences of the Algerian war of independence; another again concerns Djebar’s own life. It can be hard to tell whether the author is speaking about herself or someone else. Although there are apparently good reasons to treat some episodes as autobiographical and others as carefully historiographical, the book is positioned explicitly and implicitly as a novel, through the label on its cover and through its uses of language. All in all, the looping movement between Djebar’s own story and wider histories is something that the writing itself repeatedly invites then deflects. And in doing so, as we shall see, it raises questions about the very category of “francophone literature” and its role in a “history of modern French literature.”
Initially, then, there seem to be three ways in which Djebar’s work, and “francophone literature” more generally, may be situated historically, and this chapter proceeds along these lines. The first approach concerns French colonial history, the second the biography of the individual writer, and the third, literary history.
This is not the place to offer an account of the French colonization of Algeria, let alone the general history of French colonialism over a long period and across the globe. All the same, it must be said that French colonialism is the unavoidable foundation of any history of “francophone literature,” or at least the unavoidable foundation of any historical grasp of how “francophone literature” works as a category. As already noted, “francophone” often appears to mean “not fully French.” But there is more to it than that. Plenty of eminent “French” writers were not born in France; and while some were born in French colonies—for example, Camus in Algeria or Duras in French Indochina—others were born elsewhere: the playwright and Académicien Eugène Ionesco in Romania, for example, or the non-Académicien Rousseau in Geneva. Some, including Rousseau, never had French nationality. These figures are usually treated as French authors in the sense that they form part of French literature courses, are incorporated into histories of French literature, and are shelved alongside Diderot, Sartre, and so on even in bookshops that separate “French” from “francophone” literature. (No bookshop, incidentally, separates French from “francophone” philosophy, or historiography, as far as I know—which suggests something about the peculiar burden of identity, or of cultural “representativeness,” placed on literature.) None of the non-French writers just listed, nor even a figure such as Samuel Beckett, is usually referred to as a “francophone” writer.
By contrast, the “francophone” label tends to get attached, despite her objections, to a French writer such as Marie NDiaye, who was raised by her mother in France and has a surname that points to her father’s Senegalese background. It is also used for writers from the French “overseas departments” such as Martinique and Guadeloupe. A Québécois author of any skin color gets to be “francophone” (if writing in French). Clearly, some sort of ethnic or pseudoethnic dimension is in play here, but that is not the whole story either. When Rémy gave his Académie française speech about François Cheng—who, as noted earlier, was born and grew up in China—the word “francophone” was never used; and there was no question of his election being a proud moment for the francophone world or, for that matter, for China. At least as strong as any tacit racial factor, then, is a tacit linking of the author figure to the French empire.
In the case of L’amour, la fantasia, the connection of “francophone” writing with empire is confronted head-on. The conquest of Algeria by France, which began in 1830 with battles described vividly by Djebar, is usually considered to mark the start of the second major wave of French colonialism. An earlier wave had retreated, and had left France with territories and spheres of influence that remain an important part of today’s francophone world, notably Quebec, several islands in the Caribbean (among them Haiti as well as the “overseas departments”), and a scattering of other colonies, including Mauritius. In the second wave, France established and extended colonial relationships with other parts of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, Indochina, and Madagascar, as well as Tunisia and Morocco, Algeria’s neighbors in the Maghreb.
Francophone literature has emerged from all these places, and each has its own history in terms of the legacy or afterlife of French colonialism, as well as in many other ways. In the case of Algeria, the bloody war of independence that lasted from 1954 to 1962 left particularly deep scars, in both French and Algerian culture. A sense of lingering disquiet or even trauma in the relationship between the two countries is an unavoidable backdrop to Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia and to much Algerian francophone literature, and this helps to explain why Rémy emphasized the distance Djebar had needed to travel to the Académie, and why he saw particular significance in her election. Debates over the impact of colonialism, especially on Algeria, remain vehement in France, and a matter for formal political debate. Only in 1999 was the war of Algerian independence recognized officially in France as a war (euphemisms had always been used formerly in official documents and speeches); and a law passed by the conservative UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) government in February 2005—that is, just a few months before Djebar was elected to the Académie—stipulated that the history syllabus in schools had to “recognize the positive role of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa.” (The law was repealed, in the face of fierce opposition in France and around the francophone world, early in 2006, the
year of Djebar’s inauguration into the Académie.)
L’amour, la fantasia, published twenty years earlier, emphasized the appalling violence of the whole colonial period in Algeria and showed that all phases of the conquest and its aftermath, right up to the present, involved wars of opinion. The importance of the battle over representations is well known in the case of the Algerian war of independence: the French military’s use of torture became a focus of international opposition to French Algeria, and a sticking point for French people troubled ethically, or in their self-perception, when they heard about the brutal work done in their name. Several chapters of Djebar’s book, titled simply “Voice” or “Voices,” which relate women’s memories of the war, include experiences of torture; and when Djebar tells the story of two Algerian combatants who were tortured until they revealed a weapons cache, then shot, she mentions that a French soldier was “keen to show that he knew his job as a torturer”—a reminder that the use of torture was systematic and perhaps even a source of pride, rather than an aberration attributable to what today might be known as “rogue elements.”
Djebar reminds us too that at the very start of the conquest, the French were already concerned with how their military actions would be depicted and remembered. She describes how the French fleet brought with it a contingent of painters, draftsmen, and engravers, and notes that numerous eyewitnesses published accounts of the first battles. Among the accounts available to Djebar, only three out of thirty-seven looked at events from the perspective of the besieged. In numerous other cases, the archives hold no written record at all from the perspective of the colonized. One moving chapter describes how 1,500 members of the Ouled Riah tribe were slaughtered in 1845: the French army lit fires in the mouth of the caves where the families had taken refuge, and they died there, crushed by their panicking animals, or burned and asphyxiated as heat and smoke billowed in on them. One of Djebar’s sources, the report by the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Aimable Pélissier, sparked controversy in Paris, but his actions earned him a promotion. As Djebar notes, other officers learned from his example: thereafter, the reporting of any similar slaughters was much more discreet.
In dwelling on such episodes L’amour, la fantasia resembles other “francophone” novels dealing with the French empire and its legacy. It challenges Eurocentric understandings of European colonialism that were once greatly predominant and in some quarters still hold sway. (The short-lived law of 2005 reflects this.) It also enters into details and textures of the experience of conquest and colonization that may escape conventional works of history. At such moments any work of literature involves imagination, and some invention; and Djebar, while drawing on interviews and archival research, melds fiction with fact. This approach colors the stories she tells about the colonizer as well as the colonized, and complicates that opposition when, for example, she evokes currents of attraction across the two poles. But she pays particular attention to stories from the side of the colonized that might otherwise never have been heard, or captured, or imagined, especially those of illiterate women who contributed to anticolonial resistance.
Something else that L’amour, la fantasia shares with other “francophone” literature is the basic fact that the language in which it is written came to the author as a bequest, or imposition, of French colonialism. Indeed, as was suggested earlier in this chapter, this is fundamental to the very notion of “francophone literature.” Typically, then, the so-called francophone author will have a self-conscious, perhaps uneasy relationship to French, which will remain “foreign” in some important sense, even when it is the language the author knows best, or is the author’s only language.
Behind this generalization, one can glimpse further problems with the notional boundaries of “francophone literature.” Literary authors who were born in France may also have a “self-conscious” relationship with language, and this may have ideological aspects, not least because the long history of regional and migrant languages unsettles any simple association of France with French. In an evocative essay titled “My Mother Tongue, My Paternal Languages,” Michel Serres, another Académicien, claims that at the time of World War II, no more than half of the population of France were native French speakers. He was born in 1930, and for him too, in the mid-twentieth century, French was a “foreign” language; as a native speaker of Gascon, he encountered prejudices—and elementary problems of comprehension—when he traveled elsewhere in France as a young man. The promotion of French over other languages within France was and is a political matter, linked with the history of European nationalism; and French colonialism spread the idea of a “national language” at the same time that it spread French. If people continue to create a distinction between “French” and “francophone” literature, it is partly because of this troubled nationalist inheritance.
In other “francophone countries” too, of course, the francophone cultural and linguistic element is in truth just one among many, and those countries and cultures are diverse in many other ways. Consequently, the French linguistic legacy itself feels very different to different writers. The French speakers of Quebec are in a minority in Canada and in North America and have reasons to consider themselves threatened by the dominance of English-language culture (which helps explain the appeal there of a linguistically based nationalism), as well as condescended to by the French, who can have trouble understanding Québécois. But within their province, French speakers are in a majority over English speakers, and over speakers of Canada’s aboriginal languages, themselves decimated by European colonialism. Another part of the colonial legacy, in Quebec as in many other former French colonies, has left the French language strongly associated with the Catholic Church—which is not the case in France. The same association plays differently in Martinique, which politically remains part of France, and where Creole is the other language commonly spoken, and sometimes written; and it plays another way again in Algeria. There, Arabic, which like French is transnational and arrived in the country as the language of a colonizer, has been given privileged status as the sacred language of Islam, and it has been promoted as the official national language—partly, ironically enough, on the French model.
Not surprisingly, Djebar was not always comfortable with the rivalry between Arabic and French as national languages, or the linguistic purism associated with Arabic’s status as a religious language. She was also suspicious of the politicization of religion, and as a part-Berber writer of French, she had personal as well as political reasons to object to any idea that in modern Algeria, Arabic should always trump Algeria’s other languages, even if she was always drawn to Arabic literary tradition. She broached these topics in texts including Le blanc de l’Algérie (Algerian White) and La disparition de la langue française (The disappearance of the French language, not yet translated), both of which deal with the conflicts (or “civil war”) of the 1990s that ranged Islamists against government forces and left tens of thousands of people dead. Among them were writers who were Djebar’s friends, targeted for liberal views and for writing in French.
Djebar’s dismay at some of the political investments in Arabic did not mean, however, that she felt wholly at home in French or could ignore the language’s historical connection with the violence of colonialism, which preceded the violence of the Islamic Salvation Front. She once described L’amour, la fantasia as “a double autobiography where the French language becomes the main character”; the book’s examination of Algerian history becomes an explanation of how history brought the French language into her hands, and how it became possible for someone like her to become a French writer, or a writer of French. If, as has already been suggested, all “francophone” literature shares something of this colonial history, L’amour, la fantasia could even be read as an autobiography of “francophone” literature. (Again, this is a matter of the category’s connotations, rather than anything so coherent as a definition; after all, “French” literature more generally may be marked by t
his same history; but it is not automatically associated with it.)
In the case of Algeria, as we have already seen, the language’s associations are bloody indeed, so the sense of guilt in using French can be acute. Late in the novel, Djebar writes: “I am forced to acknowledge a curious fact: I was born in eighteen forty-two, the year when General Saint-Arnaud arrived to burn down the zaouia of the Beni Menacer, the tribe from which I am descended.” (The zaouia was a religious building at the center of the community.) The chapter in which this remark appears is named “The Tunic of Nessus,” after the mythological robe, blood-stained and poisonous, that was given as a gift and then killed its recipient. The chapter ends: “The language of the Others, in which I was enveloped from childhood, the gift my father lovingly bestowed on me, that language has adhered to me [in French, the verb coaguler is used] ever since, like the tunic of Nessus: that gift from my father who, every morning, took me by the hand to accompany me to school. A little Arab girl, in a village of the Algerian Sahel.”
Those last words echo the opening sentences of L’amour, la fantasia, which were quoted earlier: “A little Arab girl going to school for the first time, one autumn morning, walking hand in hand with her father. A tall erect figure in a fez and a European suit, carrying a bag of school books. He is a teacher at the French primary school. A little Arab girl in a village in the Algerian Sahel.” In this “double autobiography where the French language becomes the main character,” the first story is Djebar’s own. In conventional biographical terms, her life started in 1936, a century after her imagined “birth” in the French conquest of Algeria and more specifically in the attack of 1842. That was why her primary school was French, as were the other schools she attended in Algeria—a middle school, then the Lycée Bugeaud. (The latter was named after the governor-general who ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Pélissier’s massacre of the Ouled Riah, who told Pélissier to “smoke them out like foxes,” and who later promoted him.)
A History of Modern French Literature Page 77