Djebar shared this sort of educational experience with a high proportion of “francophone” writers, yet these individuals were in a tiny minority among the colonized in the Maghreb or other parts of Africa, where basic levels of literacy remained low right up to the end of the colonial period. Of the few “native” children who went into and beyond secondary education, a small proportion came from poor backgrounds: among eminent “francophone” writers, this was true of Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Jew whose own brilliant fictionalized autobiography, La statue de sel (The Pillar of Salt), explores how his education alienated him from his parents—a matter of class, and a particular cultural environment, as well as ethnicity—or Ousmane Sembene, who began writing only after working as a laborer in his native Senegal and then in France, where he became an active trade unionist. Djebar’s case is more typical, in that her family was relatively privileged. By the same token, the readership for all these works within the authors’ “native” cultures has always been limited, and for the most part elite. It was for such reasons that Sembene turned to filmmaking (as did Djebar in the 1970s), which allowed him to work in the Wolof language and to be understood by audiences who could not read French, or could not read at all.
Two different ways of placing “francophone” literature in historical context have been sketched out so far, the historical and the biographical, and, as we have seen, they are closely linked. French colonialism introduced French schooling and the French language into its colonies—albeit to a lesser extent than the rhetoric of the “civilizing mission” might have suggested. Some of the colonized became French speakers, and some became adept at writing French. In certain cases this happened at the expense of other written languages, such as Arabic, in which they might otherwise have expressed themselves. Some people, especially at the height of the anticolonial struggles, found this intolerably compromising. Many “francophone” writers, though not all, became opponents or critics of colonialism, turning their French intellectual and linguistic tools back on their colonial masters, or former masters. Against this historical backdrop, it is easy to see why many of them grew up with a difficult, often uncomfortable relationship to French culture in the broad sense. And the discomfort was not just about the contamination of French with the violent associations of colonialism. Writers who came from the “colonized” population may have identified with it and indeed remained ineluctably associated with it, but they also tended, through their unusually prolonged experiences of French education, to become distanced from their peers and their home cultures.
Consequently, the point at which historical narratives and biographical narratives converge in producing “francophone literature” is also the point at which they start to interfere, and to perturb from within the category of “francophone literature.” In biographical terms, most of the writers are or were highly unrepresentative of the cultures or countries they are usually taken to represent (in Djebar’s case, in the Académie française, “Algeria,” “the Maghreb,” and “the francophone world”); and in their works representing a “foreign” culture, they knowingly reveal themselves as products and producers of a mixed, transnational culture, albeit one with a strong French imprint.
This leads toward the third way of situating “francophone” literature historically: literary history. For other “sorts” of literature, that rubric might have provided the obvious place to start, before working out toward History in wider or grander senses. In the case of “francophone” literature, however, as we have seen, the term itself already implies, however hazily, that the literary works carry with them a nonliterary historical context. It implies that the works have something to do with French colonial expansion and discrimination, and that they should be understood in relation to a biographical “author figure” who—at least from certain viewpoints—appears marginal, and tied historically and geographically to a foreign culture. Some of the works themselves, many of which are published in Paris, may invite this approach, accepting or emphasizing the “foreignness” to their primary or imagined readership, of the culture on which they center—for instance, by explaining terms borrowed from Arabic, Creole, or other languages. Other works, however, thwart such expectations and conventions, or imagine their first readers differently, or more openly, and leave non-French linguistic and cultural material untranslated and unexplained. Either way, the sense of “foreignness” always seems to be there for the reader who has the “francophone” category in mind; and it is hard to dispel, however far an author may have traveled, physically or intellectually, from any foreign origins, and however much a certain “Frenchness” may have become part of his or her identity. In one sense Rémy, when he welcomed Djebar to the Académie française, was correct to say that Djebar had arrived from far away, across the Mediterranean, but this was several decades after she had moved into her first flat in Paris, and a good ten years after she had taken up her first academic post across the Atlantic, in the United States.
There is more to be said about the drawbacks of a conventional literary-historical narrative about the emergence of “francophone literature.” Certainly, it is possible to tell a story along those lines, starting with the first “francophone” works. One might recall that the first francophone African literary work is often reckoned to be Les trois volontés de Malic (Malic’s three wishes), a tale written by a Senegalese schoolteacher named Ahmadou Mapaté Diagne and published in Paris in 1920. Some readers have considered it a rather crude piece of propaganda for France’s “civilizing mission,” though one of the ways it may qualify as “literary” is in allowing readers to interpret things differently. When the colonizers open a school in Malic’s village, and an official tells the villagers they will be able to trust the teacher because he too has black skin, some readers will be less struck by the explicit message of reassurance than by the implicit recognition that the villagers may have reasons not to trust the white-skinned colonizers.
When the story was published, however, not many readers would have thought of it as “literature,” and almost none would have thought of it as “francophone literature.” This matters, because it seems that a fundamental part of the history of “francophone literature” is a history of reading practices. The term “francophone” was first used in print as early as 1880 by one Onésime Reclus, in a book called France, Algérie et colonies, but it became widely used only much later, after the main era of French colonialism was over. Accordingly, the word “francophone” was not in the title of one of the major works that, from today’s perspective, would be considered influential in establishing “francophone literature” as a phenomenon, the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of new Negro and Malagasy poetry in French, 1948). Nor did it appear in the book’s preface, written by Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir” (“Black Orpheus”), which hailed this poetry as “the only great revolutionary poetry” of the age, and courted controversy through its aggressive address to an imagined white reader. Sartre began: “When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground?” The split enforced here between “us” and “them” was a matter of deliberate provocation and needs to be understood in the historical context of anticolonialism, but it also foreshadowed, in radical form, the “othering” built into “francophone literature” as a category.
The collection’s editor, Léopold Sédar Senghor, would become the first president of newly independent Senegal in 1960, and he also became, in 1984, the first African and first “francophone writer” to be elected to the Académie française. There he was welcomed not only as a distinguished poet but also as an international figure who, in the immediate wake of decolonization in the 1960s, was one of the great proponents of “francophone” groupings and institutions. His achievements o
n all these fronts were considerable; nonetheless, it is understandable that critics of Senghor and of the wider promotion of francophonie (that is, the promotion of worldwide use of French, and of links between French-speaking countries) have seen it as neocolonial; and some former colonies, most notably Algeria, have kept their distance from it. Another of the difficulties of telling the story of “francophone literature,” then, is that the term’s connotations, and the approach to reading it implies, may be tainted by association with neocolonialism.
To express skepticism about the idea of a transhistorical, global francophone community or tradition is not to deny that there have long been fertile contacts and conversations internationally among francophone writers and their books. A salient example is the relationship between Senghor and Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet whose long poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, 1939), is usually considered one of the major works of francophone literature. Most often, though, “francophone” authors have, like Djebar, dwelled on the particularities of a specific culture or history outside France—Algerian, in her case—rather than a generalized “francophone world” or a transcultural phenomenon such as négritude (an idea and a movement, with Césaire and Senghor as its most eminent spokespeople, that aimed to revalorize African and Caribbean cultures and the whole notion of “blackness”). As has been emphasized already, these non-French francophone cultures are scattered across the globe; involve many other languages and are internally variegated in many other ways besides; and remain disparate not least in their relations to colonialism, to French culture, and to French. For such reasons, then, questions arise not only about the relationship of francophone writers, and works, to the writer’s putative “home” or original culture, but also about how much francophone works have in common besides, and by virtue of, being written in French. The skewed generality of “francophone literature”—a category encompassing very diverse literary authors who work in French, but not all literary authors who work in French—glosses over all these complexities.
Djebar is among the “francophone” writers to have recognized that to be categorized in that way is to encounter certain forms of condescension and constraint, linked to the historical domination of the francophone world by France. Some writers have responded not only by calling attention to the ethnic and colonial attitudes that have circulated around the term, but by positioning their literary works in a web of references and imagined interlocutors extending far beyond both their home culture and the “francophone” sphere. Djebar herself certainly drew on and cited other francophone writers from the Maghreb, such as Kateb Yacine, author of the experimental novel Nedjma 1956). She also used the term “francophone” occasionally, however alert she may have been to its ethnic and colonial associations; and she embraced Camus as a fellow Algerian and brother in writing, although he is not classified as “francophone” in the ethnicized sense. She appeared happy to accept, then, as must any history of French literature, that to have French in common is already to have something significant in common; and for anyone who went through French schools, the common ground includes, of course, the experience of a literary education that prioritized books written in French.
Yet, breaking out of this circle, Djebar also looked elsewhere for inspiration and placed herself in other contexts. Her writing invokes Algerian writers who used other languages in the distant past, notably Augustine, who wrote in Latin, and Ibn Khaldun, who wrote in Arabic. The fact that these two figures wrote autobiographical works was especially important to her, as it helped her counter the idea that autobiography is an alien form in the Maghreb; and this became part of her wider critique of militant monoculturalism or monolingualism. In this spirit she also drew on writers with no particular link to French culture, or to Algeria, or indeed to her. Like everyone else, she also read translations; in L’amour, la fantasia, Agatha Christie is mentioned as an early influence. In such respects too, she and all “francophone” writers are like other French writers, who also belong to a mixed, transnational culture. Moreover, Djebar suggested that her writing had been shaped by other art forms, ranging from Algerian women’s traditions of oral storytelling; to Beethoven, in whom she found inspiration for the symphonic structure of movements in the novel; to Delacroix, whose sensual painting of women in a harem, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement of 1834, had already provided the title and cover image, and some subject matter, for the book that relaunched her writing career in 1980.
Some readers have found it disconcerting and provocative that Djebar’s writing draws on such a wide range of material, especially work such as Delacroix’s, given that the timing of his visit to Algeria and the nature of his imagery associate it strongly with the French conquest and even with Orientalist stereotype. Among the things she saw in the painting, however, was evidence of a fascination with otherness mixed with the urge to tame otherness. This too is part of the history of francophone literature. What is more, she saw the painting as transcending, at least in significant respects, its origins, which is to say the historical circumstances of its production or the intentions of the painter. However reactionary Delacroix’s personal opinions on Algerian women and Algerian culture, Djebar could see in the painting, or imagine through it, something of the lost presence and even the subjectivity of the women it depicts; and she could see how it entered a tradition of representations that, rather than fixing identities definitively, always allows reinterpretation. Djebar drew as well on a series of paintings by Picasso that reworked Delacroix’s images and themes, and her own literary work extends this tradition—if a singular “tradition” is still what we are talking about.
All of this casts light on the uses made by Djebar of all her sources—literary or nonliterary, from France, Algeria, or anywhere else—and on ways in which we may understand the “literature” part of “francophone” literature, or French literature. When Pélissier wrote his report on the slaughter of the Ouled Riah, he did not intend to create a scandal. According to another officer, as quoted by Djebar, “Pélissier made only one mistake: as he had a talent for writing, and was aware of this, he gave in his report an eloquent and realistic—much too realistic—description of the Arabs’ suffering.” From Djebar’s perspective, however, both the simple fact that he committed the events to writing and his talent as a writer give reason to feel “incongruous gratitude” toward him. Pélissier, in writing well, created “terrible poetry” from his terrible material, and so brought it home and brought it to life for people in Paris who may have felt no prior sympathy for the victims of colonialism. Pélissier’s writing can be and has been separated from Pélissier, Djebar is saying, just as Delacroix’s paintings can be separated from Delacroix; in its emotiveness and its openness to interpretation, his report turned out to do some of the work of literature, and did so irrespective of his background and intentions.
The final problem with the category of “francophone literature,” then, is that it may disguise the fact that for “francophone” writers too, or at least for some “francophone” writers, it may become important at a certain point for writing to shear away from history and biography. We may say that biographically Djebar was born in 1936, and that “historically” she was born in 1842 (this, remember, is what she herself says, late in L’amour, la fantasia). But we may also say, with Rémy, that “Assia Djebar was born in January 1957,” the year in which she published her first novel and coined her pen name. (Her real name was Fatima Zohra Imalayène.) Djebar spoke in 1999 of the risk that the notion of “women’s writing” would enclose women writers in a “pseudo-literary harem” where their work would be read always and only biographically and sociohistorically. For “francophone” women writers, the risk is doubled. Novels get treated as if they were historical documents, or as if they wished to be; fiction is treated as autobiography.
Djebar resisted this, even as she drew deeply on history and on events from her own life. Her francophone literature is a s
pace—an exotic one, for many of her readers—in which she represents the history and culture of Algeria and evokes the perspectives of particular women whose thoughts and memories may otherwise go unrecorded. But it is also a space in which the writer can play imaginatively with any and all traditions of representation that come to hand, and gesture toward that which may not be representable in French, or in any language. It is a space in which Djebar did not have to be herself. At a certain point, for Djebar and other writers, issues of historical and biographical origin may fade into the background and other ways of reading come to the fore, as individual literary works take on an aesthetic life of their own, at a distance from their authors’ lives, their “own” traditions, and even, if they are translated, from the language in which they were first written. To a significant extent, literary tradition in French, as in other languages, is defined crucially by works that succeed in such ways; and “French” or francophone literary history, drawing on and merging with other histories, is a history of exceptions.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land / Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Translated by Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard. Bilingual ed. Hexham, UK: Bloodaxe, 1995.
Diagne, Ahmadou Mapaté. Les trois volontés de Malic. Paris: Larousse, 1920.
Djebar, Assia. L’amour, la fantasia. Paris: Lattès, 1985.
———. Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade. Translated by Dorothy Blair. London: Quartet, 1989.
———. Le Blanc de l’Algérie. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995.
———. Algerian White. Translated by David Kelley and Marjolijn de Jager. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.
———. Ces voix qui m’assiègent … en marge de ma francophonie. Paris: Albin Michel, 1999.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 78