FROM 1957 UNTIL 1964, when it was re-launched as Le Nouvel Observateur, Marguerite Duras wrote a number of incendiary articles for the France Observateur: ‘Like you, like anyone,’ she recalled in 1980, ‘I felt an overwhelming urge to denounce injustice of all sorts, whether its victim was a single person or an entire nation.’ Her very first piece was entitled ‘The Algerian’s Flowers’, where she described a ‘miserably dressed’ twenty-year-old Algerian flower seller:
He walks towards the corner of Jacob and Bonaparte, which is less closely watched than the market, and stops there – anxious, of course. He has reason to be anxious. Not ten minutes have passed – he hasn’t had the time to sell a single bouquet – when two gentlemen ‘in plain clothes’ move towards him. They come from rue Bonaparte. They’re hunting. Noses in the wind, sniffing the fine Sunday air for irregularities the way a big dog might sniff for quail, they head straight for their quarry.
‘Papers?’
The Algerian has no licence to sell flowers.
So one of the two gentlemen goes over to the pushcart, slides his clenched fist underneath, and – how strong he is! – overturns the cart, flowers and all, with a single blow.
The intersection fills with the flowers of early spring (Algerian spring).
Eisenstein isn’t there to record that image of flowers on the ground, stared at by the young Algerian flanked by France’s representatives of law and order. Nobody is there. The first passing cars avoid the flowers, instinctively drive around them – nobody can stop them from doing that.
No one is there. But wait, yes, there is someone, a woman, just one woman. ‘Bravo!’ she shouts. ‘If the cops always went after them like that, we’d soon be rid of that scum. Bravo!’
When Duras wrote a similar article a year later – this time on the senseless humiliation (and incarceration) inflicted on a North African bartender for the sole reason that he was accompanying a French waitress home – she ended it with the following postscript: ‘The person who telephoned me at midnight the last time I dared to speak of “Algerians” and who threatened to “bust my face if I did it again” is kindly requested to leave his name.’ It seems Duras took the advice with a pinch of salt, since she later went on to hide members of the clandestine FLN – the Front de Libération Nationale, the spearhead of the Algerian liberation movement – in her flat. Such dedication is hardly surprising considering that, as early as 1955, barely a year after the struggle for independence had begun, Duras, alongside André Breton and François Mauriac, had been one of the chief architects behind a petition against the war in North Africa, which incurred the wrath of Jacques Soustelle, the Governor-General of Algeria – who not only rejected the notion that there was even a war in Algeria, but who further opined that it was only a ruse on the part of a handful of ‘agitated’ intellectuals.
Clear-eyed and fearless in the way they linked colonialism abroad with mounting racism at home – once even drawing parallels between the conditions of Algerian immigrants in Paris and that of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto – Duras’s articles during those years were alas but a premonition of the horrors to come. On 17 October 1961, a peaceful pro-FLN demonstration was attacked by the Parisian police, resulting in 11,538 arrests, at least 200 deaths and a further several hundred who ‘disappeared’, their bodies most likely quickly (and quietly) consigned to the Seine. Largely unreported in the national press, the cover-up of this massacre proved so efficient that many of the inhabitants in nearby arrondissements were none the wiser until years after the event.1 Of course, Duras was only one of the many writers and activists who ran considerable risks in reporting the truth. There was, after all, a violent sense of obstinacy in the air, fuelled by the refusal of successive governments to face the inescapable reality on the ground in Algeria – namely, that while the French had actually won the war from a purely military perspective, it was only a matter of time before they would be forced to concede defeat and cut their losses.2 Yet despite the growing calls for Algerian selfdetermination on both sides of the Mediterranean – as well as abroad – politicians of all stripes proudly proclaimed their indifference to the popular will: from François Mitterrand’s claim that ‘Algeria is France’ in 1954, to Charles de Gaulle’s 1958 speech in Oran when he shouted ‘Vive l’Algérie française!’.
Defying this cross-spectrum consensus, Duras, like the overwhelming majority of the French intellectual establishment, continued in her defiance and later became a signatory of the ‘Manifesto of the 121’, the now famous open letter published in 1960, which levelled a number of accusations against the French government – and was one of the few instances that saw the Left and Right united under a single cause; proof yet again of France’s ‘special’ relationship with that country, which it had officially annexed in 1848, 18 years after it was conquered and its population subjected to one of the first modern instances of systematic ethnic genocide. Even the easily distracted Napoleon III had a soft spot for Algeria, fancying himself not only the Emperor of the French, but of the Arabs too. Yet if France singled Algeria out for preferential treatment, it did so in a variety of manners: long before Polynesia, Algeria was France’s first and favoured testing site for its nuclear programme, whose crowning moment came on 13 February 1960, when a Hiroshima- style bomb was detonated just outside the small oasis of Reggane, deep in the Saharan south – subjecting thousands of civilians to critical levels of radiation. The majority of them are still awaiting compensation, despite the fact that 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence – all of which is unsurprising considering that France only recognised the Algerian conflict as a ‘war’ as late as 1999.3
The events of the Algerian war (1954–1962) have inspired countless histories, novels, memoirs and films, and yet there is no single writer that has so singularly devoted himself to the task of tackling the mind-boggling ramifications of that conflict – in both France and Algeria – as Rashid Boudjedra. Born on 5 September 1941 in Aïn Beïda, a small city to the southeast of Constantine, Boudjedra moved to Tunis at the age of ten, when his father, a wealthy merchant, sent him to attend the elite Collège Sadiki4 where he received a solid grounding in both Arabic and French. Aged 17, Boudjedra left Tunis and returned to Algeria, where he joined the FLN, which had been fighting against the French since 1954. Wounded after a few months of active service, Boudjedra spent the following couple of years as the FLN’s representative in Madrid. Back in Algeria in time for Independence in 1962, Boudjedra began an undergraduate degree in philosophy, which he completed at the Sorbonne in 1965, and subsequently wrote a master’s thesis on the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Later that year, Boudjedra published Pour ne plus rêver (To No Longer Dream), a collection of poetry championed by Jean Sénac5, one of Algeria’s leading poets. By the time Boudjedra returned to Algiers, the country’s post-colonial transition was entering a violent, authoritarian phase; the same country that had once welcomed Malcolm X and Che Guevara was now suppressing the trade union movement and routinely ‘disappearing’ or forcing into exile the pieds rouges, who unlike the pieds noirs had been pro-independence, definitively brushing aside the promise of the early years, when Ahmed Ben Bella – who passed away this April – would pose for photographs in his blue Mao jacket and declare that Algeria would serve as ‘a beacon’ to the Third World. Ben Bella was eventually ousted in June 1965 by Houari Boumédienne, his minister of defence,6 and an atmosphere of political intolerance quickly ensued, making life very difficult for outspoken leftists such as Boudjedra, whose criticisms of the government not only lost him his job, but further earnt him a two-year sentence in prison. Released in 1967, Boudjedra was then exiled to Blida, to the south-west of Algiers. During that time, he taught at the Lycée El Feth, a girls’ high school, an experience that allowed him to witness first-hand the challenges, dogmas and taboos faced by young Algerian women, and which later served as the inspiration for his second novel, L’Insolation (Sunstroke).
While in Blida, Boudjedra began his first novel, La Répudiation (The Repudiation), a thinly veiled autobiographical account of how his mother was cast aside by her husband on a spurious charge of adultery after he decided to take on a younger wife, and who was then kept a virtual prisoner in her own home: ‘The cloistering was necessary, inevitable, and would last for the rest of her life.’ A violent and erotic journey into the psyche of the narrator, a young Algerian, as he describes these events to his lover, Céline, a Frenchwoman, The Repudiation also features ‘Si Zoubir’, or ‘Mr Prick’, the domineering father, as well as Zahir, the narrator’s older brother, a tormented homosexual who ultimately takes his own life at the age of 20 after a failed romance with a Jewish professor. Immediately banned in Algeria due to its sexual content – one of the book’s most amusing scenes features a pederastic Qur’anic schoolmaster – and the ferocious way in which it assailed that society’s deep-seated prejudices regarding women, Jews and political dissenters, its publication marked a watershed in North Africa letters. Despite forcing the author into exile after a fatwa – the first of many – was pronounced against him, the book was nevertheless the subject of immense acclaim in France, where it was awarded Jean Cocteau’s Prix des Enfants Terribles.
While in exile in Paris, Boudjedra produced a series of long journalistic essays: La Vie quotidienne en Algérie (Daily Life in Algeria) and Naissance du cinéma algérien (The Birth of Algerian Cinema) in 1971, and Journal Palestinien (Palestinian Diary) in 1972 – by which time he had also published his second novel L’Insolation and relocated to Rabat in Morocco, where he would remain until 1975. That year, Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronique des années de braise (Chronicle of the Years of Fire), on which Boudjedra had worked as a screenwriter and which narrated the events of the War of Independence through the eyes of a peasant, was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. By the mid 1970s, the political situation in Algeria had turned somewhat more favourable: after the failed collectivisation of agriculture, a new constitution was introduced and the FLN decided to relax their grip on the country’s political life, opting for a rapprochement with the Communists, allowing a number of intellectuals some sway over governmental policy – all of which prompted Boudjedra to return. Around this time, he served briefly as an adviser to the Ministry of Culture, contributed to the Révolution Africaine, a journal that supported the Third World, and became a founding member of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were a prolific time for Boudjedra, beginning with 1975’s Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée (Ideal topography for an aggravated assault): the story of an illiterate immigrant lost in the Paris metro who is murdered by xenophobes as he is unable to read the maps and find his way out; then 1977’s L’Escargot entêté (The Stubborn Snail), a Kafkaesque parody of six days in the life of the head of the ‘Department for the Destruction of Rats’, who conscientiously carries out his duties despite his love for the animals until he encounters a gargantuan snail.7 Boudjedra followed this up two years later with 1979’s Les 1001 années de la nostalgie (The 1001 Years of Nostalgia), a sprawling fable that focuses on a Saharan village trying to survive in the face of modernity as it interacts with an American film crew shooting on location; and 1981’s Le Vainqueur de coupe (The Cupwinner): a brilliant recreation of the assassination of Ali Chekkal, a pro-French Algerian politician during a football cup final in 1957.
Le Vainqueur de coupe was the last novel Boudjedra would write in French until the mid-1990s. Beginning with 1982’s Al-Tafakkuk, the story of two women’s struggle to break out of their feudal bonds in the aftermath of independence, Boudjedra abandoned that language in favour of Arabic, while ensuring his books were immediately translated into French. This, as Boudjedra contends, was part of his attempt to modernise the Arabic novel and steer it away from the 19th-century model popularised by writers like Naguib Mahfouz. While Boudjedra initially attempted to translate these books himself, as he did with Al-Tafakkuk, which later appeared as Le Démantèlement (The Unravelling), he found he was not suited to the task, as it proved too great a temptation to revise and rewrite. For his following four novels, Boudjedra therefore collaborated with Father Antoine Moussali (1920–2003) – a Lazarist priest of Lebanese origins who worked for Diocese of Algiers and taught Arabic at the local university. Together, Boudjedra and Moussali co-translated La Macération (The Maceration) in 1984, La Pluie (The Rain) and La Prise de Gibraltar (The Taking of Gibraltar) in 1987, and Le Désordre des choses (The Disorder of Things) in 1991.
Restlessly outspoken, Boudjedra earned himself a second fatwa in 1986 when he contributed to L’Islam en Questions, for which 24 Arab writers were asked whether Islam could prove a workable template for a modern state. Boudjedra’s reply was the following:
No, absolutely not. It’s impossible; that is not just a personal opinion, it’s something objective. We saw that when Nimeiry [Sudanese Head of State] wanted to apply Sharia law: it didn’t work. The experiment ended abruptly after some hands and feet were chopped off... There is a reaction even among the mass of Muslims against this sort of thing – stoning women, for example, is hardly carried out, except in Saudi Arabia, and even then extremely rarely... Islam is absolutely incompatible with a modern state... No, I don’t see how Islam could be a system of government.
Several of the comments Boudjedra made were later expanded upon in 1992’s FIS de la haine (The Sons of Hate)8, an explosive indictment of Algeria’s increasingly popular FIS – Front Islamique du Salut – whom Boudjedra excoriated, comparing them, among other things, to the Nazis:
Between the fire at the Reichstag in 1933 and the fire in the little apartment in Ouargla in 1989 [when the house of a widowed woman suspected of receiving male guests was set on fire, killing her child and causing third degree burns to her face], there is more than an analogy. There is the whole world of barbarity and insanity.
The book’s publication coincided with the beginning of the Algerian Civil War (1992–2002) which was a result of the military’s intervention to prevent the FIS from taking power after it gained a majority in Algeria’s first democratic elections. FIS de la haine marked Boudjedra’s return to French and he subsequently published a novel Timimoun (1994), a play, Mines de rien (As if Nothing Had Happened); the non-fiction Lettres algériennes (Letters from Algeria) in 1995, La Vie à l’endroit (Life Right Side Up) in 1997, Fascination in 2000, Les Funérailles (The Funerals) and a book-length essay about the visual arts, Peindre l’Orient (Painting the Orient) in 2003; Hôtel Saint Georges and Cinq Fragments du désert (Five Fragments of the Desert) in 2007 and Les Figuiers de Barbarie (The Barbary Figs) in 2010.
Described by Boudjedra as ‘the novel of my life’, The Barbary Figs takes place in a single hour, during which two once-inseparable cousins,9 Rashid and Omar, find themselves on a flight from Algiers to Constantine. As the plane takes off, Rashid begins to relive the traumas of Algeria’s past, taking the reader on a macabre ride through a historical hall of horrors, from 1830 to the present day, using his own life and that of his cousin – the novel is in a sense the biography of both – as a prism, sliding from one scene to the next, utterly radical in its pursuit of truth, and, he hopes, closure. The only comparable novel that springs to mind is Wolfgang Koeppen’s masterly Death in Rome, though the historical element in The Barbary Figs is less of a micro-plot than it is a major part of the tapestry. The narrator aides his quest by recalling old newspaper headlines – ‘THERE MUST BE A RUTHLESS CLAMPDOWN, GENTLEMEN! FRANCE REACHES FROM FLANDERS TO THE CONGO!’ – lessons imparted by his teachers – including a story about how Marseille’s famous soap was once manufactured using human remains looted from Muslim cemeteries – as well as chilling extracts from letters the French General Saint-Arnaud (1801–1854) sent home to his family – ‘Frankly speaking, brother, Algeria simply loses its poetry without a good deal of massacres and smoke-outs.’ Rashid thereby ushers us into a painstakingly researched world, and after a few pages, we begin to share in Rashid’s belief that though some questions may remain unanswerable, it is nonetheless vital to raise them. This is Boudjedra’s greatest success in The Barbary Figs: to make these questions relevant whether one likes these characters or not. Omar’s crippling doubts as to whether his father really did collaborate with the French during the resistance, an ambiguity that eventually leads to public dishonour, and later insanity and death, becomes pertinent to us; as does what is perhaps the most important of these questions: was Algerian independence simply the precursor to even greater crimes against the Algerian people? Yet above all, The Barbary Figs is a eulogy to the lives lost not only in Algeria, but in all colonial wars:
War, this carnival to which foolish soldiers traipsed off and always lost, trudging through the muddy Vietnamese marshes, catching all sorts of diseases like foot-and-mouth, yellow fever, dying as they cried out for their mothers, their mouths full of mosquitoes, their flocculent bodies slowly decomposing, rotting, deteriorating in a very short space of time because the tropical climate is quicker than any ambulance, any rescue helicopter, any combat fighter, any chemical or nuclear weapon... Bubbling with heat, its slimy, marshy vapours and that unbelievable sweat trickling from God knows where, as if the body was capable of pumping it up and out again at a frightening pace.
These stupid, perennial losers of the colonial wars, yomping through the icy Algerian winters and the mossy Vietnamese jungle, contracting all types of hepatitis, dying as they cried out for their fathers, their mouth full of ants, their frozen bodies washed away by the mad, raging streams flooding down from the Atlas mountains, bodies later found torn to shreds in oases like Mchounèche, Tolga and Timimoun, where the first heat waves of the Saharan spring stripped them to the bone in the blink of an eye, helped by voracious horned vipers and the countless ants...
Yet the Algeria Rashid and Omar return to after the war is in the full grip of retribution and paranoia. Not long after independence, Rashid is almost torn to shreds by an angry crowd when his blond hair and light skin mark him out as a traitor: a fate he is spared by an old woman’s timely intervention, who argues that ‘despite’ the colour of his skin, or that of his hair, there is ‘something Algerian’ about him.
Rashid and Omar’s anxieties over their identities are exacerbated when their legacy as freedom fighters is fatally compromised by the FLN’s – always referred to as the ‘Organisation’ – brutal repression of the October riots in 1988, when a sharp drop in petroleum prices seriously affected Algeria’s economy, to the point that the government found itself unable to pay the country’s civil servants and the cost of living rose dramatically, sparking off a series of protests. By virtue of honest, rhythmic prose, we are made to feel Rashid’s disappointment and overwhelming sense of impotence as he telephones Omar. We cringe as the cousins commiserate over the country’s tragic state of affairs as they witness former brothers-in-arms – now turned party supremos and wealthy autocrats – dispatch young soldiers to spill the blood of their own countrymen:
I was appalled, stricken with chronic grief and melancholia as I watched Algerian soldiers, of all people, savagely putting down those angry riots during that mild month of October 1988. I ached all over, as if I had been torn apart.
While the events of October 1988 initially led to a new constitution, which was theoretically supposed to dismantle the FLN’s supremacy, the long-awaited democratic elections that followed in 1990, whose results the FLN refused to recognise, ironically led to the civil war and the perpetuation of the one-party state.
Keeping hope alive in such dire circumstances becomes an exceptional feat, yet it is one that Rashid is determined to attempt, despite the best efforts of his twin brother, Zygote, who arguably serves as his alter ego: the evil other, smallminded, green-eyed, indifferent to the tragedies taking place everywhere around him. The material representation of hope comes in the form of the Barbary figs, the central metaphor of the novel, and an omnipresent part of the Algerian landscape – the plant is a recurring motif: appearing in a golden effigy around Omar’s neck and among the ‘the charred remains of Jeeps, disembowelled tanks, the fragments of shrapnel and the mines buried just under the scree that was sullied for miles on end with napalm’ as Rashid winds his way through the bush as a rebel, and finally, as an eternal symbol of resistance.
Those Barbary figs had been a staple part of our summer holidays, their different shades – ranging from green to brown and red – with that trademark stiffness that made them seem so much more violent to us, so much more real. [...] To us, the Barbary figs were symbolic guardians that had always kept watch over our country. Despite all the disasters and the tragedies, despite the genocide!
No single emblem better sums up Boudjedra’s desire to reclaim history in the face of defeat, especially considering that figuiers was also a racial slur used by the French to refer to the Algerians during the war.
Central to Boudjedra’s ambitious project is his willingness to experiment. Just as William Faulkner intended The Sound and the Fury to be published in different coloured inks to differentiate his storylines, Boudjedra builds a labyrinth of digressions within digressions, purposefully scrambling our sense of plot in order to make our thought processes, doubts and revelations keep pace with that of the narrator. That Boudjedra achieves this by appropriating Céline’s notoriously difficult punctuation makes his an even more remarkable accomplishment. Heavily influenced by Claude Simon and the nouveau roman, Boudjedra writes in a style that may be termed ‘verbal excess’, constantly reiterating key themes and obsessions, endowing his prose with a hallucinatory quality, thereby indirectly achieving a grotesque sort of realism, where every detail acquires a visceral vividness. Boudjedra adds to this disorientation by inducing a sense of déjà vu by sometimes transposing entire pages from an old novel into a new one, creating an intertextual continuity throughout his oeuvre.10
To my knowledge, Boudjedra is the only living writer to have successfully switched from French to Arabic and back again. In interviews, Boudjedra has often attributed his decision to switch languages mid-career to his wanting to reconnect with Algeria’s identity and bring himself closer to his mother tongue, recalling the case of his mother, who only spoke the Algerian dialect of that language. Comfortable in two languages – like Isaac Singer, Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Czeslaw Milosz, Julien Green, Milan Kundera and André Brink before him – Boudjedra’s example however corresponds more closely to that of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, since both were primarily driven by a political dissatisfaction with their respective colonial languages.
Regardless of the language in which they were written, or the themes they tackle, once Boudjedra’s novels are pieced together, like the tiles of a mosaic or the pieces of jigsaw puzzle, the vivid, layered complexity of the Algeria they depict falls nowhere short of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart. They are a crescendo of clarity, sifting through the bloody rubble of history and broken lives, affording a rare glimpse into that shameful recess of the collective Franco-Algerian conscience. Anyone interested by Alexis de Tocqueville’s contention that colonisation made Muslim society more barbaric than it was before the French arrived will find Boudjedra’s work essential reading.
From La Pluie (1987) where Boudjedra recounts the bigotry and sexism faced by the female head of a health clinic, to La Vie à l’endroit (1997), the tale of a man pursued by assassins because of his political beliefs, all the way to Les Funérailles (2003), a disturbing look at religious fanaticism during the civil war through the eyes of Sarah, a detective in the antiterrorist brigade, Boudjedra’s novels represent one of the most outstanding testaments to the lives trapped in the Serbonian bog of history. They are bleak, disheartening and yet strangely life-affirming books, simply because Boudjedra appears to have hung on to his firm belief in the potential of literature to contribute to the formation of a responsible and engaged citizenry, whose knowledge of history and its consequences can ultimately be a force for good. In Letters from Algeria (1995), Boudjedra describes his view on the relationship between history and literature:
All great literature has incorporated history as a fundamental element of the interrogation between the real and the human, operating in a more subjective mode than one would think in so far as it is the one fruitful and interesting mode of inquiry, becoming far more than just a reading of the past that is immediate, official, fossilized, academic, mechanistic and opportunistic, always co-opted, distorted and travestied for the sake of the cause.
Boudjedra occupies a position at the very forefront of modern North African literature, yet this recognition has thus far been restricted to academic circles. The reasons for this are manifold: chief among them that the majority of Arabic literature selected for translation – especially in English – conform to the old stereotypes: Allah, the subjugation of women, and sexually frustrated would-be terrorists. The five years since the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) was set up have seen three of those awards bestowed on what I believe are timid historical novels, in what seems to be a concerted effort to favour mediocre works of fantasy over a more serious, and potentially compromising sort of literature. Yet if apathy is to be our fate, and as Sartre once wrote, we are to enter century after century groping blindly along, then how to reconcile our consciences? Boudjedra’s may be an uncomfortable voice, but it is inescapable, and haunting.
As Doris Lessing remarked in her Massey Lectures, ‘To remember history is not for the sake of keeping alive the memories of old tyrannies, but to recognise present tyranny, for these patterns are in us still.’ To read Rashid Boudjedra’s novels is to understand – and feel – how sane men and women can be led down the road of murder and madness in times of public lunacy. There is no single truth to be found in his books, no one-sided aim other than the faithful record of the atrocities committed during those terrible years, atrocities that went well beyond those usually licensed by war. Reading his novels is a rewarding and gut-twistingly human experience. Why? Because we should all be very frightened about what happened, and continues to happen, in Algeria.
André Naffis-Sahely
London, July 2012