Colonizer or Colonized?
I am interested only in the actions that here and now can spare useless bloodshed and in the solutions that guarantee the future of a land whose suffering I share too much to be able to indulge in speechmaking about it.
—Albert Camus, preface to Algerian Reports (1958)
Albert Camus was born in 1913 in what was then “French Algeria.” Because he was born to parents who were legally French, he enjoyed from birth the full rights and protections of French citizenship, unlike the overwhelming majority of Berber and Arab Algerians, who were denied citizenship and designated as indigenous “French subjects” or “nationals.” His father, Lucien Camus, who had spent part of his youth in an orphanage, was barely literate and worked in different vineyards in Algeria until he was drafted into the French army and died in France at the beginning of World War I. Even though the ancestors on one side of his father’s family were among the earliest French colonialists in Algeria, Camus seems to have believed that his father’s side of the family consisted exclusively of Alsatians who had chosen to emigrate to Algeria in 1871, after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, rather than live in an Alsace occupied by Germany. This gave a patriotic and republican rather than colonialist justification for his father’s family’s presence in North Africa and corresponded to the fiction of Algeria in which Camus fervently believed until his untimely death.2
Camus’ mother, Catherine Hélène Sintès Camus, never learned to read or write, and while Camus was a child she worked as a housekeeper to help support her family after the death of her husband. She came from a Spanish family who had immigrated to Algeria to flee the poverty of their Minorcan homeland only to discover the additional hardships and destitution that were the lot of many Spanish immigrants in Algeria. In a colonized land that was, at the same time, legally an “integral part of France,” Camus was thus born into the lowest socioeconomic level of French-Algerian (or pieds-noirs) citizens. But in terms of the brutal dichotomy imposed by the colonialist system and because of the privileges that were an essential part of what it meant to be French in Algeria, his experience of colonialism was still not that of a colonized Arab or Berber Algerian.3
Camus’ relation to both his French and Algerian identities, however, would turn out to be a more complex issue for this French citizen of Algeria than the stark opposition between colonizer and colonized might suggest. His father’s death less than a year after Camus’ birth left his family destitute, which meant that the actual conditions in which his family lived were closer to those of the powerless than to those of the privileged and thus not substantially different from those of the Arab families next to whom his family lived in Belcourt, a poor, ethnically mixed area of Algiers. In any case, they were far different from those of the rich French Algerian families of the strictly European sections of the city. It is also true that Camus’ family, like other poor French Algerians, were still cut off from their Arab neighbors by culture, language, and religion, and also by the fact that they received the benefits, privileges, and legal protections of French citizens denied to Arab and Berber Algerians.4
French Algeria was divided into three départements, whose status was in principle the same as the other départements of mainland France. Yet the Algeria of Camus’ youth was not French in the same way that areas of mainland France were French, and not even the most reactionary colon really believed that it was. The three départements of Algeria also differed from the majority of other French colonies, since Algeria was what was called a “populated colony”; that is, unlike most other colonies, it was inhabited by a substantial number of French citizens. At the time of Camus’ birth in 1913, the French citizens of Algeria numbered approximately 750,000 and ruled over seven or eight times as many Arab and Berber subjects. The ratio of French to “natives” would steadily decrease during Camus’ lifetime, largely because of the population explosion among Arab and Berber Algerians and a decrease in the rate of new European immigration, but until independence, the French population of Algeria considered Algeria to be not only an integral part of France but also, and more importantly, their homeland—or, as Camus put it, his “true country.”5
The départements of French Algeria, in perhaps a more blatantly contradictory way than any other colony or département, were thus French and not French simultaneously, legally an integral part of the French Republic and, at the same time, an extension of the Republic outside itself, across the Mediterranean and into North Africa and the Muslim “Orient,” a part of France inhabited by an overwhelming majority of non-French Muslim “natives” and ruled by a minority of French citizens empowered by French political, economic, legal, and penal institutions. The situation in Algeria was complicated even more by the fact that a substantial number of the French citizens of Algeria were themselves not descendents of French families from mainland France, but of Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Corsican, or Greek heritage, and after 1870, when Algerian Jews were granted French citizenship, of North African Jewish heritage as well. This meant that the question of national identity, what it meant to be French and how “Frenchness” was imagined and represented in political and literary texts, was more complex in the Algeria in which Camus was born and grew up than perhaps anywhere else in metropolitan France or in any other French colony or possession. It also meant that to be “Algerian” was an even more conflicted issue—not just for Berber and Arab Algerians, who had no officially recognized national identity, but for French Algerians as well.6
No native French Algerian, for example, could ever claim to be French in a narrowly nationalist sense and pretend to possess in Algeria, across the Mediterranean Sea and thus at a distance from the soil, monuments, traditions, and culture of mainland France, the imaginary identity that for militant nationalists every “true” French man or woman “naturally” had as his or her birthright and that made him or her what an “uprooted” foreigner could allegedly never be.7 French Algerians could be French only in the way that an increasing number of French are French today, in a post-colonial world of hybrid identities and multicultural identifications—even if many, if not most, denied their own hybridity and displayed rather an exaggerated patriotism as concerns their “mother country.”8 In spite of the overall reactionary nature of politics in the colonies, however, it should also not be forgotten that from 1870 until the end of the Algerian War, it was republican and even socialist France that supported and believed most fervently in the colonialist project, not the antidemocratic, ultranationalist Right. Until General de Gaulle took power in 1958, when the Fifth Republic was formed, it was a series of Socialist governments that fought the Algerian War and authorized the torture of FLN suspects, summary executions, and the napalming of suspect villages—all in the name of democracy and the integrity of the French Republic and its people. As the then Socialist Minister of the Interior François Mitterand succinctly put it during his visit to Algeria in November 1954, soon after the first terrorist acts had been committed by the FLN at the beginning of their armed struggle for independence, “Algeria is France.”
In reality, the Algeria that was France, a legal and integral part of the French Republic, was a land in which democratic rights were denied to the overwhelming majority of native Arab and Berber inhabitants of Algeria in the name of democracy itself. As compensation, these “French subjects” were given only vague and unfulfilled promises of assimilation into French culture and full citizenship in some distant, ill-defined future. If, under colonialism, all Algerians could be considered to have been exiled both from the land of their birth and from the French nation that claimed possession of Algeria—and exile is a dominant theme in Camus’ writings—it is also true that they were not exiled in the same way or with the same economic, political, and cultural consequences, depending on whether they were French subjects or citizens, colonized or colonizers.
A substantial number of French Algerians, and especially the poor, uneducated pieds-noirs to which Camus’ family belonged, even if the only official national identity they had was French, clearly considered themselves more Algerian than French and referred to France as if it were a foreign country. They did not say “we” but rather “they, the French,” for example, when referring to the French people in general, because the French were for them a foreign people living across the sea in a land where French Algerians did not truly belong or with which they did not immediately identify. In Camus’ own case, it was not until he had to flee Paris in June 1940 due to the arrival of German troops that he is reported to have admitted for the first time that he truly felt French.9 His experiences in the war and in the French Resistance could also be argued to have reinforced his identification with the French of occupied France and his desire to participate in the struggle for freedom against Nazi Germany.
In spite of his strong identification with “the Frenchman” in him during World War II, “the Algerian” in Camus never disappeared, no matter how long he lived in Paris. Immediately after the war, Camus published a series of editorials in Combat arguing that the French could not continue to deny to the majority of the inhabitants of Algeria what the Resistance had fought to achieve in mainland France for all French: both freedom and justice. In 1945, and this would still be true in 1958, Camus did not take the terms “freedom” and “justice” in the context of Algeria, however, to imply immediate Algerian independence and autonomy from France. They rather meant for him that colonial Algeria had to be transformed into a true social democracy—which, in fact, was the political project he supported at that time for all of France. That is, fundamental reforms had to be made immediately to transform Algerian society into one in which Arab, Berber, and French Algerians would have equal rights and the same social and cultural status, one in which all ethnic and religious groups would live in harmony and that all Algerians could consider their “true country,” no matter when or under what conditions they or their ancestors had originally arrived there. Already in 1945, a democratic, multicultural Algeria was “Camus’ Algeria,” the imaginary Algeria the Algerian in him argued should and could become a political reality.
Until his death and even in the midst of a horrible war, Camus stubbornly believed in this idealized vision of a multiethnic, multicultural Algerian people, of an Algeria with equality and justice for all Algerians. When, in the late 1950s, his hope for a peaceful resolution to the war without the participation of the FLN became increasingly difficult to imagine and impossible to sustain, he repeatedly lamented the failure of France to have begun working earlier toward creating a democratic Algeria. This is a vision he insisted could have been achieved by radical reforms and peaceful means before the outbreak of war, or even during its early stages, and without the horrible loss of life on both sides or the use of terrorism, on one side, and the torture and summary execution of FLN suspects, on the other. With the escalation of terrorism and the brutal counterterrorist measures undertaken by the French army, Camus repeatedly warned that the most destructive elements of both sides—the most extreme and violent Algerian nationalists and the most reactionary, racist pieds-noirs—would ultimately determine the fate of the Algerian people. The inevitable result would be an even more repressive colonialist regime or a nominally independent state ruled by a brutal and authoritarian revolutionary council or military dictatorship. In both cases, justice would continue to be denied to the Algerian people—to Arab, Berber, and poor French Algerians alike, that is, to all those who for him were the true Algerians and who were paying the heaviest price throughout the war.
If the kind of democratic reforms Camus proposed for Algeria in 1945 had been undertaken immediately after World War II, it would not be difficult to imagine that the course of history in Algeria would have been radically changed and an independent Algeria born without the horrible bloodshed and suffering that was the result of eight years of devastating war. Instead, the increasingly brutal French oppression of the overwhelming majority of “French subjects” in Algeria and the horrible economic conditions in which they continued to live set the stage for the armed struggle that did in fact occur. What had been radical proposals for change in 1945 were by 1958 considered by most on the Left to be self-deluded musings over what could have been. But if Camus’ idealism could legitimately be questioned in terms of its relevance to the political realities of the last years of the war, reading his political essays reveals that his commitment to justice in Algeria for all Algerians cannot be doubted.
It is also important to understand that Camus’ perspective on Algeria, which was never exclusively or even predominantly political, was developed long before the Algerian War actually began in early November 1954. It was rather the result both of his own observations of oppression and injustice while growing up in Algeria between the two world wars and of his involvement in the French Resistance. What was common to his prewar and wartime experiences was his steadfast refusal to accept the political, cultural, and economic oppression of a people—whether of the French in occupied France or of Arab, Berber, and Jewish Algerians in colonial (or Vichy) Algeria—and his hatred of the racism that supported and legitimated such oppression. Camus was thus a résistant who never forgot “the Algerian” in him and who, even during his active involvement in the struggle against Nazi totalitarian oppression and the racist ideology that divided peoples into superior and inferior races, never accepted that colonialism, also rooted in fictions of cultural and racial superiority, could ever be justified or the injustices it perpetrated accepted.
From One Resistance to Another
In 1942 in occupied Paris, when a limited number of books were being published because of a paper shortage and all manuscripts had to receive the approval of Nazi censors, a young, relatively unknown Algerian journalist and writer named Albert Camus burst onto the French literary scene by publishing within a few months two important works: his first and still best-known novel, The Stranger, followed months later by The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay on “the absurd.” Camus’ national and, soon after the war, international reputation, which would culminate in his winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957 at the age of forty-four, thus began in the midst of one of the darkest hours of twentieth-century French history.
In the fall of 1943, Camus moved to Paris and became a reader for the Editions Gallimard. But it was only when Paris was liberated and the names of the contributors to the clandestine resistance newspaper Combat were finally revealed that the public discovered that one of its chief editors and editorialists was also the author of The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus very quickly became the living symbol of the young, politically committed writer who had risked his life in the struggle against racism and oppression and challenged existing social norms and values in his editorials, novels, and plays.
By the time of Camus’ untimely death in an automobile accident in the midst of another especially dark moment in twentieth-century French history, almost everything had changed, at least as concerned his political reputation. No longer accepted by many on the Left as the noble defender of victims of oppression—a position he in fact mocks in his novel The Fall—Camus was treated by many of his previous admirers, and especially those former allies and friends who enthusiastically supported the armed struggle for Algerian independence, as a political enemy and an obstacle to peace and justice in Algeria. In the eyes of many of his former admirers, the heroic young résistant to Nazi oppression had disappeared at least a decade before and been replaced by a militantly anticommunist Nobel Prize–winning writer and public intellectual.10 Rightly or wrongly, they felt Camus had changed political camps because his position on Algeria differed from that of the overwhelming majority of those on the Left, who belatedly—but, because of that, perhaps all the more fervently—attacked colonialism, supported the FLN in its armed struggle, and demanded immediate and complete Algerian independence. As the French were finally willing to recognize an independent Algeria in order to save both the Algerian people and the French Republic, they increasingly ignored Camus because of his opposition to the creation of an independent Algerian nation and his harsh criticism of the terrorist tactics and revolutionary-nationalist ideology of the FLN.
What his opponents disliked, he would assert in notes for his fictional autobiography, was above all “the Algerian” in him,11 the part of him that even after living in Paris for a decade was still deeply attached to land of his birth and demanded justice for all Algerians, the part that did not believe, however, that independence and justice were necessarily the same thing. It is important to understand that the Algerian in Camus was the enemy of colonialism and the fanatic colonialists who defended “Algérie française” and continued French colonial rule. But the Algerian in him did strenuously defend the right of French Algerians to continue to live in a homeland that he insisted they had as much right as other Algerians to call their “true country.” The “Algerian in Camus,” in the sense I am using the term, does not, however, constitute an “Algerian identity” that would define Camus; it is rather the locus of a problem, of a split or conflict of national, cultural, and political identities that is expressed in his writings in various ways. Rather than the unity of a national identity, it evokes a fundamental relation to difference and otherness that is, at the same time, an integral part of a self that remains in large part a stranger to itself.
The Algerian in Camus should not be understood as an attempt to define who he really was, but rather as an expression of the alterity or hybridity of his conflicted identity, of a division at the very core of the self that constitutes an opening or receptivity to others. The Algerian in Camus is also an important component of his agnosticism, of his determined resistance to political and religious doctrines, systems, and ideas, the side of him that maintains a distance from—and a complicated, oppositional relationship with—national, religious, cultural, ethnic, and political identities, the side that resists oneness, sameness, uniformity, and all expressions of absolute truth. In Camus’ terms, the Algerian in Camus is a Mediterranean: neither strictly French nor Algerian, neither European nor African, but both at the same time. The Algerian in Camus is also a rebel.
The Climate of the Absurd—What’s Algeria Got to Do with It?
Camus, of course, changed in the eighteen years between the publication of The Stranger and his death two years before the end of the Algerian War. But what it meant to be a French Algerian had changed even more. With the French withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954 and the beginning of the Algerian War at the beginning of November of the same year, French colonialism was rapidly and violently coming to an end. The Algerian in Camus and the Algerian themes and topics in his writings, which during and immediately after World War II were considered positive aspects of his work, became during the Algerian War and are still considered by many critics today to be limiting, ideological components of his work. But no matter which side one takes in the decades-old debate over whether Camus’ Algerian texts ultimately constitute a defense of or a critique of colonialism, a justification for or a rejection of colonial injustices, his writings in general and the political implications of his literary texts in particular, perhaps more than those of any other major French writer of the period, testify to the radical changes that occurred in French literature, culture, and politics during the troubled times from the beginning of World War II through the end of the Algerian War. In terms of no problem is this more true than the demise of colonialism in general and the long, agonizing death of French Algeria in particular.
When Camus published The Stranger in occupied Paris in 1942, however, the fact that this young, unknown writer was Algerian and that his first novel takes place in Algeria, with the Algerian landscape and climate playing a central role in the “tragedy” and revolt depicted in the novel, did not go unnoticed by Camus’ first readers. It could even be said to have played an important role in the initial success of the novel. For the French living in occupied Paris, being a French Algerian was nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, Jean-Paul Sartre, the most important of Camus’ earliest readers, published an essay on The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus in the review Les Cahiers du Sud in February 1943 that repeatedly alludes positively to the Algerian dimensions of Camus’ work.
Sartre begins his philosophical “Explanation of The Stranger” by agreeing with the consensus that it is “the best book in France since the end of the war” (the original French text says “since the armistice”), thus situating the novel’s appearance and his own explanation explicitly within the context of the war, the German occupation, and Vichy collaboration (“the armistice”).12 Sartre also suggests that an important aspect of the novel’s interest for readers living in France during the occupation under the conditions imposed by the armistice is precisely its foreignness: “This novel itself is a stranger. It comes to us from the other side of the Equator” (108 [99]; the French text says “from across the sea”). For Sartre, the novel does not merely have a “stranger” as its main character and his “foreignness” to French society as its principal subject. More important, the novel appears to have arrived in France from a foreign land located across the Mediterranean, a land of beautiful beaches and blazing sun where simple pleasures still exist, a land far removed from the war, occupied Paris, collaboration, and the continuing winter of French discontent. Coming from another place, the novel also arrives as if from another historical time, a time of simplicity, honesty, innocence, and moral courage, and in this way too it appears totally foreign to the French living in either occupied or Vichy France.
At the same time, Sartre asserts that the author and the novel, no matter how foreign they might appear to the French of occupied France, are profoundly French; Sartre even considers The Stranger to be the twentieth-century equivalent of Voltaire’s contes (121 [121]). When Sartre discusses how The Stranger is related to The Myth of Sisyphus, he once again speaks of climate and geography, but now in terms of the absurd: “The Myth of Sisyphus might be said to aim at giving us this idea [of the absurd], and The Stranger at giving us the feeling…. The Stranger, the first to appear, plunges us without comment into the ‘climate’ of the absurd; the essay then comes and illuminates the landscape” (114 [110]). The Algeria of the novel and the idea of the absurd presented in the essay are thus doubly exotic to its Parisian readers: a climatic exoticism for readers dreaming of warm beaches and innocent pleasures and a philosophical-political exoticism that raises fundamental questions of existence and freedom in the stifling atmosphere of totalitarian oppression. Their foreignness, what could be called their Algerian dimension, is treated by Sartre as a breath of fresh air in the oppressive political and cultural climate of occupied, collaborationist Paris.
Camus’ later writings will repeatedly confirm Sartre’s early insight that climate and geography are as much philosophical-political issues in his work as they are natural phenomena. Even when Camus leaves the philosophical issue of the absurd behind, it is in terms of Algeria as a geographical, philosophical, and political landscape that he will repeatedly pose the problems of oppression, resistance, freedom, and justice. But in the last years of World War II, the Algeria of The Stranger was for Sartre and other readers not the site of colonial oppression but of the possibility of freedom and revolt. Sartre’s “existentialist” interpretation of The Stranger had an important influence on readers of the novel and the essay for decades. It only began to be abandoned, although rarely if ever directly questioned, long after Algerian independence, with the growth of postcolonial cultural criticism in the last few decades. It is important, however, not to forget that the Algerian in Camus and his work was first seen in a positive critical light by one of Camus’ most important and influential early interpreters, one who later, of course, became one of his most severe political critics.13
Postcolonial Controversies
Given the collapse of systems of thought, the bankruptcy of ideologies, the incapacity of doctrines to enable us to foresee or even understand a world that is allegedly being changed… one has the right to ask in the name of what Camus’s behavior was condemned. All of the old condemnations implied values that have today been abandoned.
—Jean Daniel, Le temps qui reste
It would not be an exaggeration to say that many critics today still do not like the Algerian in Camus. Even though the question of Camus’ relation to Algeria has divided critics for decades, most of the important postcolonial interpreters of his politics have paid at least lip service to the difficulties and contradictions a pied-noir on the political Left faced once a brutal anticolonialist war had broken out in Algeria. For example, Conor Cruise O’Brien, one of the earliest and harshest of Camus’ postcolonial critics, admits that even though he is convinced Camus is militantly colonialist in his political essays, he considers Camus’ literary texts to be more complicated and conflicted.14 From a very different if not opposite perspective, Michael Walzer characterizes Camus as “a good man” who “in a bad time… did better than most of his fellows.”15 Another influential critic of Camus, Edward Said, has used similar terms to characterize Camus, calling him “a moral man in an immoral situation.”16 Tony Judt praises Camus for being, along with Léon Blum and Raymond Aron, one of only “three Frenchmen who lived and wrote against the grain of these three ages of irresponsibility.”17 Whatever their ultimate purpose for doing so, all four commentators admit that Camus was a man of high moral principles, all acknowledge that the political situation he faced as a pied-noir during the armed struggle for independence in Algeria was extremely difficult and painful and that he was highly conflicted over what he could and should do, and all are willing to praise his honesty and courage. But they definitely do not agree, at least not when the issue is colonialism in general and the Algerian War in particular, as to whether or not honesty and moral courage were enough.
The general consensus among these four critics concerning Camus’ moral character and personal courage in an “immoral situation” is thus somewhat deceptive, given that their political assumptions and critical goals are so different, if not opposed. O’Brien, for instance, attacks those critics who had ignored or depoliticized the effects of Camus’ presentation of Algeria and Algerians in his fictions and essays and indicts Camus for what he claims is a defense of repressive French government policy in Algeria.18 He argues that underneath the mask of the progressive, antiracist, European humanist and defender of the oppressed can be found Camus’ true face: that of a partisan colonialist. Walzer’s purpose is the opposite: to “defend [Camus] against his critics,” including or especially, one would imagine, O’Brien, “and at the same time free him from the bonds of myth” so that we can “learn from his experience something about the obligations and limits of the critical enterprise” (137).
Said, whose position is close to but not identical with O’Brien’s, also feels that we can learn important lessons from Camus, but principally, if not exclusively, negative ones. Besides claiming that Camus was “simply wrong historically” (175), Said characterizes Camus’ work as a determined defense of French colonialism in Algeria: “Camus’s novels and short stories narrate the result of a victory won over a pacified, decimated Muslim population whose rights to the land have been severely curtailed. In thus confirming and consolidating French priority, Camus neither disputes nor dissents from the campaign for sovereignty waged against Algerian Muslims for over a hundred years” (181). Judt, on the contrary, exempts Camus, along with a very few other French intellectuals, from his otherwise sweeping and polemical condemnation of what he claims is the general irresponsibility of French intellectuals “from the end of World War I until the middle of the 1970s” (14). For Judt, however, no matter how “irresponsible” he alleges the French in general were, there “was never any doubt about Camus’s sympathies,” given his repeated attacks on “French policy and military practices in North Africa” (117). Judt argues that Camus’ political position, even though it became increasingly outdated and unrealistic over the course of the war, never constituted an apology for colonialism.
On the “Camus-as-colonialist” side, then, O’Brien asserts that Camus supported “the substance, if not the details of the methods, of the French government’s policy of pacification”: “Despite his revulsion from the methods of the repression, his position was necessarily one of support for repression, since he constantly opposed negotiation with the actual leaders of the rebellion, the FLN” (90–91). Said’s criticism is even more severe, since even though Camus was born in Algeria, because he was a French citizen and not an indigenous Muslim, Said denies him not only the right to consider Algeria his homeland but also even the right to identify positively with the Algerian landscape or describe it lyrically in his essays and fictional works. What Said curiously calls Camus’ “realistic” descriptions of Algeria constitute a justification for continued French occupation rather than the expression of a subjective, emotional attachment to the harsh beauty of the land. For Said, Camus is quite simply not an Algerian, and thus the Algerian he would claim was a fundamental part of him is a usurper, which makes his claims on or for Algeria, even if fundamentally aesthetic, totally illegitimate.19
On the “Camus-as-anticolonialist” side, Walzer argues that Camus had valid reasons for opposing both sides in the Algerian War and thus considers him a courageous dissenter, a man of justice who, in the context of a war in which “madness was practical, moral sanity utopian,” insisted on choosing “the least mad, the most just” of what for him were equally unacceptable alternatives (145). In a similar vein, Judt, who refers directly to Camus’ political essays on Algeria more extensively than the other three critics, considers Camus’ ambivalence on the Algerian War to be justified because it resulted from what he calls Camus’ “search for an evenhanded application of justice…. Intellectual responsibility consisted not in taking a position but refusing one where it did not exist” (121). Overall, however, these four critics differ so greatly in their analyses and conclusions that it seems they are not even talking about the same person or the same body of work. It is as if their different readings had to do not with one Albert Camus but at least two and perhaps even four different Camus and thus with four very different and even opposed representations of Algeria and colonialism.20
The differences among these four critics—two who accuse Camus of being a colonialist apologist and two who defend what each considers to be his resistance to political dogmatism—are in fact symptomatic of the divisions among Camus critics in general, even if the influence of those critics who have treated Camus as a colonialist has in the last decades been far greater than those who have taken the opposite position. The goal of the present book, however, is not to rehearse and thus perpetuate what by now has become a somewhat tired debate over Camus and colonialism, but to explore the different and at times contradictory aspects of the Algerian in Camus and of the Algerian dimensions of his work, the way his writings present, comment on, and imagine alternatives to colonial injustice. Even though this book deals with questions similar to those raised by the critics mentioned above, it does so in large part by proposing readings of Camus’ Algerian novels and short stories, namely, The Stranger, The Plague, three short stories from Exile and the Kingdom, and his posthumously published autobiographical novel The First Man. My purpose here is to challenge the reductive terms of the polemics over Camus’ politics, and by doing so come to a better appreciation of both Camus’ Algerian fictions and their political implications, not just in terms of the historical context in which they were written and first read, but in the contemporary political context as well.
The debates surrounding Camus’ work have in my estimation for too long been focused on the question of whether Camus was a colonialist ideologue. To read him this way is also invariably to weigh some of the “evidence” found in his work more heavily than other evidence, especially if the goal is to make the strongest possible case against Camus—which means, in most instances, to argue that his refusal to support the FLN and his opposition to an independent Algeria under FLN control should be given much greater weight than, for example, his repeated denunciations of colonial injustices and demands for radical democratic reforms in Algeria. To have as a primary goal the construction of a case against Camus has meant that his literary texts have been read predominantly or exclusively in terms of their alleged political message, as a source of evidence for the anticipated verdict that Camus was a colonialist. The present work challenges this verdict, reinterprets the evidence, and offers alternative readings of Camus’ literary texts to support its own claims for the critical interest of his writings and the importance of the fundamental ethical issues his texts raise.
I would even say that to judge and indict Camus for his “colonialist ideology” is not to read him; it is not to treat his literary texts in terms of the specific questions they actually raise, the contradictions they confront, and the uncertainties and dilemmas they express. It is not to read them in terms of their narrative strategies and complexity. It is to bring everything back to the same political point and ignore or underplay everything that might complicate or refute such a judgment. With the critic acting as prosecutor, judge, and jury, it is perhaps to make the strongest and most partisan case possible to readers who are themselves put in the place of the jury in a court of law or political tribunal. But what may very well be a strong case for a prosecutor or political militant is not necessarily the most convincing critical reading of either literary texts or complex political issues. I would argue that reading Camus without a prosecutor’s mentality produces very different results from the verdicts of his harshest critics. This book urges readers, whether committed to postcolonial theories or not, to read Camus critically before, and even instead of, judging him.
Camus may not have found realistic solutions to the political conflicts of his own time or provided adequate answers to today’s divisive political issues, but his writings raise fundamental questions concerning justice and the limits of political actions that can and should be taken in its pursuit. I believe that it is time we begin to take such questions seriously. I am thus proposing that Camus be read with an open mind concerning his relation to and perspective on colonialism in general and colonial Algeria in particular, neither mystifying his undeniable nostalgia for his “true country,” his particular form of “nostalgérie,” nor dismissing the importance of his critique of both FLN terrorism and the French army’s systematic use of torture, nor ignoring or undervaluing his insistent and passionate demands for justice for all Algerians. And above all, that before judging and attacking his writings, readers consider seriously his idea, no matter how unrealistic it might be, especially given what actually occurred in Algeria, of a hybrid, multicultural Algerian people and its implications for the postcolonial era or condition in which we now live. By focusing on the place of Algeria in Camus’ work and “the Algerian” in him, and insisting especially on how he conceives of and deals with the issue of justice in the context of severe colonial oppression, I hope that what I would call Camus’ defense of the rights of the oppressed will be better appreciated and his political essays and literary texts no longer treated lightly or dismissed. After rereading his political essays and literary texts, I am convinced now, even more than when reading The First Man for the first time, that Camus’ is a voice to which we urgently need to listen once again. Or perhaps really for the first time.