Jonathan Judaken
Albert Memmi defies categorization. Jew and Arab, Tunisian and French, African and European, born poor and yet privileged, Jewish and staunchly secular, Zionist and critical of Israel, a leftist who highlighted the blindness of progressives, a prophet of national liberation whose viewpoint was internationalist, a socialist and anticolonialist who underlined the shortcomings of third-world postcolonial regimes, Albert Memmi has always challenged “fixed identities and easy binaries.”1 In The Colonizer and the Colonized, he called himself “a sort of half-breed of colonization, understanding everyone because” he “belonged completely to no one.”2 The Albert Memmi Reader appears on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth when now more than ever we need his voice to guide us on the complex issues of our time.
On his centenary, we are ripe for a new Memmi moment: a rediscovery of his work and a renaissance in Memmi scholarship. Memmi was always more than a prophet of decolonization.3 This compendium spotlights the continuities in his substantial oeuvre. From his earliest writing, he was in dialogue with existentialists like Martin Buber, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, repurposing the struggle for human recognition highlighted in their work to fit the colonial encounter. He was a forerunner in conceptualizing privilege. He broke new ground in exploring the parallels in forms of domination that led to the understanding of oppression as intersectional or interlocked.
As a Jew from North Africa writing in Paris about the modern Jewish condition, he is an important and oft-cited representative of the imperial turn in Jewish studies.4 He rethought anti-Semitism in light of other forms of racism, coining new language for what he termed heterophobia.5 He helped to establish a new generation of North African novelists and to canonize francophone literature from the Maghreb. As a leftist and a secularist, Memmi warned about the rise of religious tribalism, understanding that terrorist movements emerge out of legitimate social grievances but can take on regressive forms tied to a reactionary agenda. Weaving together these threads among others to offer for the first time in any language the arc of Memmi’s whole opus in a single volume, The Albert Memmi Reader gives an overview of one of the great modern thinkers.6
Born in 1920 on the edge of the hara, the Jewish quarter in Tunis, Memmi, the second child but eldest son in a large family, was raised speaking Judeo-Arabic at home while studying Hebrew in his kouttab (a traditional religious school).7 His illiterate mother was of Bedouin Berber heritage, and his father an Italian Tunisian artisan. He was destined to assume his father’s place in his saddle shop. Yet he eventually became a leading novelist and social theorist writing in French, a key intellectual in the anticolonial struggle, and thus a central figure in colonial and postcolonial scholarship, francophone literature, Jewish studies, and antiracist theory.
Memmi achieved this thanks to attending one of the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) schools before being selected for a scholarship to lycée Carnot, the most prestigious high school in Tunisia.8 By then, the French language had become a passport, “a way to master and become intimate with European culture and power.”9 Two professors at lycée Carnot would profoundly influence him: Jean Amrouche, a renowned francophone poet, and the philosopher Aimé Patri. While continuing his education in philosophy at the University of Algiers, he began to publish articles in the Jewish press.
The dark years of the Nazi occupation stalled his ambitions. After the defeat in June 1940, the French government moved to Vichy, passing draconian anti-Jewish legislation that systematically excluded Jews from citizenship and rights, seeking to eliminate Jews from public life in France and the colonies alike.10 As a result, Memmi was expelled from school in Algeria and forced to return to Tunisia. The German and Vichy governments bombarded the airwaves with anti-Jewish propaganda, hoping to stir the Muslim population against the Jews. But according to the historian Paul Sebag, “manifestations of hostility were, in sum, rather rare. The vast majority of the Christian and Muslim population displayed the greatest restraint.”11
Following the Allied landings in North Africa, for six months beginning in November 1942, the Axis powers directly occupied Tunisia, drastically altering everyday life. Tunisian Jews now faced “roundups, deportations, pillaging, forced labor, and bombings.”12 The Nazis imposed heavy fines on the Jewish community, confiscated Jewish property, and interned some five thousand Jews in labor camps, Memmi among them.13 Then in May 1943, Tunisia was the first country with a sizable Jewish community to be liberated from Nazi occupation as the Allies moved from North Africa into Europe to end Nazi rule.
After the war, following in the footsteps of Amrouche and Patri, Memmi moved to Paris, enrolling to study philosophy at the Sorbonne with Gaston Bachelard, the theorist of the “epistemological break,” and Jean Wahl, whose pioneering studies forged the building blocks of existentialism. Nonetheless, he found Paris depressing and his studies pointless. Too much time was spent focused on the historical explication of texts rather than on solutions to pressing existential problems. He began working with Georges Gurvitch, who was helping to revitalize French sociology. He also became active in Jewish student circles, helping to create and then edit Hillel, a Jewish journal, and immersing himself in the writings of Martin Buber, which he wanted to translate into French and edit for a collection published by Edmond Charlot, before his press went bankrupt.
While living in the student dorms at Cité universitaire, Memmi met his wife, Germaine Dubach. She came from a Catholic family from Lorraine and was studying to pass her agrégation, a competitive national exam that would enable her to become a professor of German. They were married in December 1946. “My marriage was the culmination of everything I was searching for,” Memmi wrote, since it meant “freedom, outside the little community of my birth.”14 But the challenges of a mixed marriage later provided material for a number of short stories and Memmi’s second novel, Agar (Strangers), which would win the Fénéon Prize.15 In 1947, Germaine received a post in the bombed-out city of Amiens, where they moved. There Memmi began to work on his first novel, La Statue de sel (The Pillar of Salt). In 1949, they returned to Tunisia, where he took up a position at his old school, lycée Carnot, then directed a center for psycho-pedagogy, and began to establish himself at the heart of francophone intellectual life.
In 1953, Memmi returned to France with the completed manuscript of The Pillar of Salt. Thanks especially to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, four long excerpts were published in the journal Les Temps modernes, cofounded by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, among others. Arguably his magnum opus, Memmi’s first novel would win the prestigious Prix Fénéon and the Prix de Carthage and be prefaced by Albert Camus upon its reedition. It would establish his reputation. Among the first major North African crossover novels written in French, it helped to usher in a new generation of Maghrebi literature that went beyond the exotic, Orientalist clichés of earlier works by nonnative writers.
Following the first section on “Biographical Reflections,” the second section of this reader contains key chapters from The Pillar of Salt. Set in French colonial and occupied Tunis, it is a bildungsroman of Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, whose story echoes Memmi’s. As Camus indicates in his preface, Memmi chronicles a young man whose identity is “riddled with contradictions . . . that cannot be overcome through flight, but only by living them through to their end.”16 Memmi’s protagonist is defined by his rejection of his family and upbringing and his rejection by others, especially his bourgeois classmates, even if ultimately there is no exit from who he is. As he puts it, “I would always be forced to return to Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, a native in a colonial country, a Jew in an anti-Semitic universe, an African in a world dominated by Europe.” Each chapter stages a moment of conflict with the pre-scripted roles set out for him. As the novel unfolds, Alexandre comes to discover what Frantz Fanon explored in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952), published the year before Memmi’s novel, which is that the quest to master French civilization alienates and separates colonial subjects from their indigenous cultures.17 But writing in French, “a terrible and marvelous secret,” as Alexandre calls it, becomes a leitmotif in his drive to self-realization, since it enables the character to define himself rather than be defined by others, even as he does so in a language not his own.18
A year after the publication of The Pillar of Salt, the Franco-Algerian War exploded. Immersed in the Tunisian nationalist movement across the border, Memmi served as the literary editor for the magazine L’Action, which would continue publication as the ongoing weekly Jeune Afrique. He began more rigorously analyzing the colonial condition in North Africa by scrutinizing the interdependent relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, arguing that decolonization was ultimately inevitable. By the time Morocco and Tunisia gained independence in 1956, he had come to believe that the emerging Arab states had no place for Jews. He and Germaine settled permanently in Paris, where they worked at French universities until their retirement. Thanks to Gurvitch, he initially obtained a position working on the sociology of literature at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), then at the École des hautes études commerciales, followed by a post at the École pratique des hautes études (1960), and finally at the university Paris X-Nanterre (1970).
In 1957, Memmi published Portrait du colonisé, précédé d’un Portrait du colonisateur (The Colonizer and the Colonized) to great international acclaim. It remains his most well-known and widely translated work. It appeared in the midst of the publication of other francophone anticolonial classics, such as those by Sartre, Aimé Césaire, and Fanon, and should be read as part of this larger conversation.
Sartre’s calls for decolonization began shortly after World War II,19 most strenuously in “Orphée noir” (“Black Orpheus,” 1948), his famous celebration of Négritude poetry, written originally as a preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of African and West Indian Poets Writing in French).20 Akin to their American counterparts affiliated with the Harlem Renaissance, the Négritude movement sought to celebrate Black history and culture. Sartre’s preface highlights how the Négritude poets were transforming the meaning of Blackness, using the oppressor’s language for their resistance, and utilizing the master’s tools to dismantle his house.21 Lauding the Négritude writer’s affirmation of Black racial pride, Sartre’s insisted that “anti-racist racism” was necessary to ultimately get to the abolition of racial differences.22
In Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, he called Sartre, and more obliquely Senghor, to task for their “anti-racist racism.” It resulted, Fanon maintained, in reiterating hackneyed stereotypes about Blacks, even as they are deployed to undermine European colonial hegemony and White supremacy. But like his Négritude forebears, as well as Sartre, Fanon’s first book also targeted anti-Black discourse as the key element legitimating colonialism. Fanon was following the trail marked out by his teacher, Aimé Césaire, whose Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism, 1950) also underscored the rhetoric and ideas of colonialism rather than its institutional forms. By the time Fanon penned Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961), a manifesto of his violent struggle against colonialism in Algeria, he would call for the thoroughgoing dismantling of the colonial system’s policies, practices, and structures.
Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized appeared between these works. Sartre’s critical review of the book in Les Temps modernes reflected his own shifts in understanding colonialism. “The whole difference between us,” he insisted, “arises perhaps because he sees a situation where I see a system.”23 Sartre’s exhortation to Memmi that understanding colonialism demanded appreciating the colonial “apparatus,” its institutions and “methods of production and exchange,” and not only its impact on individuals was both a self-critique of his earlier stance and indicative of his deepening Marxism.24 Despite this criticism, Sartre’s nonetheless appreciative review would appear as the preface or introduction to all future copies of The Colonizer and the Colonized, giving cachet to Memmi’s analysis.
Memmi’s essay is one of the great treatises on privilege, a key term for his analysis of colonialism. The essay reveals that Sartre’s interpretation missed this feature of Memmi’s argument, as selections from The Colonizer and the Colonized included in this reader show.25 Memmi clarifies that privilege has economic, legal, normative, social, symbolic, and psychological ramifications. It determines who is hired and fired and into what positions, who governs the system of labor, and who benefits from that labor. It shapes the law and administrative structures so that they advantage some to the detriment of others. It defines the rules and norms of colonial life and the status of the inhabitants of the colony.
Privilege is never absolute, however. It is always relative to “the pyramid of petty tyrants,” as Memmi calls it, whereby “each one, being socially oppressed by one more powerful than he, always finds a less powerful one on whom to lean, and becomes a tyrant in his turn.”26 Some of the colonized are always accorded certain privileges relative to others; this is what makes the machinery of subjugation run. Memmi’s diagnosis of privilege thus clearly indicates that he situates the individual and social analysis of colonization within a structured system of relative privilege that underpins the racial order in the colony.
If the system of privileges is the core of his portrait of the colonizer, then central to the portrait of the colonized is how they navigate both the discourse and the structures of colonization. Colonialism establishes cultural dominance through what Memmi terms “the mythical portrait of the colonized”—the stereotypes that legitimate colonization. Memmi indicates how these are often internally contradictory, since they are excuses for exploitation. Nonetheless, since they are wound into the educational system and the institutions of everyday life, they come to shape the self-image of the colonized, who internalize the ideas of the dominant culture. Efforts at assimilation are consequently bound to failure, since the norms and values of the domineering culture are stacked against the colonized. Revolt, concludes Memmi, remains the only option of the oppressed.
His book thus draws the portraits of a dialectically linked duo whose fates are intertwined, both of whom are disfigured by an inherently poisoned relationship built on myths and lies but also on the force of law and economic exploitation. Only a complete break with the colonial arrangement can rescue both the colonizer and the colonized. Landing on bookshelves as decolonization struggles raged around the globe and just as the Franco-Algerian conflict reached its climax, this message was radical, even if delivered in Memmi’s cool, analytic language. It ultimately became a landmark text in the anticolonial canon.
Having penned his two masterpieces in the 1950s, Memmi is often only associated with this early period of anticolonial struggle. However, this was just the beginning of a long and enduring career. He would go on to publish more than twenty other books and hundreds of articles. Memmi deepened his early analysis of colonialism with his parallel reflections on the situation of Jews, ultimately developing this into a broader consideration of interlinked forms of racism and oppression. In doing so, unlike postcolonial theorists who have tended to treat Zionism as allied with colonialism, Memmi made a compelling case for aligning Zionism with anticolonial nationalism, rather than empire. He articulated this viewpoint in a period when Israel was broadly understood by the Left as a decolonizing, socialist, humanist undertaking, a position that would shift after 1967.
In the 1960s, Memmi turned intensively toward analyzing the Jewish condition. Nurtured on the Jewish traditions of Tunis, he came of age as a socialist Zionist in the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. Just as he argues about other colonized peoples, Zionism articulates the national liberation struggle of the Jewish people. He maintains that the State of Israel is necessary to liberate Jews from millennia of degradation and humiliation. Memmi’s Zionism was steadfastly secularist, however, making him skeptical about many aspects of Judaism.27 He has long called for a desacralization of the Jewish tradition, alongside all religious faith. The Bible, Talmud, and kabbalah are “monuments of world literature” that contain “an inexhaustible reservoir of themes, designs and symbols.”28 But they become desiccated when they are treated as sacred texts, he insists.
These views would emerge with clarity in his two key works on Jews in the 1960s, Portrait d’un juif (Portrait of a Jew, 1962) and La Libération du Juif (The Liberation of the Jew, 1966). A key interlocutor for Memmi’s Portrait of the Jew is Sartre, to whom the book is dedicated, along with his Zionist friends in Hashomer Hatzair. As “Revolution and Zionism: Some Observations on Sartre Regarding his Opinions on the Situation of Jews,” a long and previously untranslated early response to Sartre included here indicates, Memmi amplified several of Sartre’s conclusions and disputed others key to Sartre’s classic treatise, Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew, 1946).
Sartre famously argued, “The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew: that is the simple truth from which we must start.”29 Memmi concurred that central to the Jewish condition was to be seen as a Jew by others, often in abject terms. For Sartre, authenticity thus entailed the resolute acceptance that one belonged to a group of pariahs, subject to harassment. He called upon Jews to rise up and fight against this oppression in solidarity with other stigmatized groups. Writing post-Holocaust, both he and Memmi endorsed Zionism as a solution to Jewish persecution.
As an active member of a young Zionist cadre, however, Memmi took this argument in new directions. Whereas they agreed that Zionism is the liberation struggle of a persecuted minority and a colonized people, Memmi’s lived experience makes his case richer than Sartre’s more abstract declarations.30 Additionally, Memmi’s Zionism is not only political but also cultural, pairing national solidarity with cultural revival, each facilitated by building a homeland in the State of Israel.31
Memmi gave a Zionist spin to many aspects of Judaism. A lot of the religious components of Judaism contain national elements, he points out. Hanukkah, for example, involves the struggle for Jewish independence in the face of Greek domination, and Passover is about the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. Where he goes beyond Sartre is in recognizing that Zionism totally rejects the image of the Jew foisted upon Jews by anti-Semites. Instead, Zionists seek to rid Jews of all aspects of their inferiority complex, refusing to accept how they are depicted in the anti-Semitic imagination.
Memmi’s baseline for his description of the Jewish condition is that Jews live in “a structurally hostile universe,” just as women live in a situation of entrenched inferiority. He remarks on the irritation expressed by many non-Jews when they are reminded of the massacres, deportations, and plundering that Jews have suffered at the hands of non-Jews, as if these should just be considered bygones. Anti-Semites, submits Memmi, are not the perverse purveyors of evil in an otherwise just society. Rather, they are the extreme versions of a culture institutionally organized around Jewish marginalization and anti-Jewish racism. As W. E. B. du Bois suggested about Blacks in a White world, Jewish difference is always a problem in a world defined by non-Jews.32 Just as racism is a White problem, as Richard Wright insisted, anti-Semitism is a gentile problem. It thus shapes how Jews are seen by others and in turn how they come to see themselves. So begins the existential self-interrogation that Memmi undertakes in Portrait of a Jew.33
One strategy to avoid this necessary self-examination, Memmi underscores, is assimilation, or what Homi Bhahba terms cultural “mimicry.”34 Although he understands its impetus, Memmi explains how it is doomed to failure.35 Just as he rejected it as hopeless for the colonized, so the denial of Jewish difference will fail for Jews. Instead, Memmi applauds the Jewish leader Nahum Goldmann, who said, “In the nineteenth century we had to fight for the right to be equal; in the twentieth century we have to fight for the right to be different.”
Jewish difference is wound into the fate of Jews. It constitutes their judeité, a term Memmi coined to describe both the objective and subjective conditions of Jewishness. This is distinct from the cultural values of Jews that stem from Judaism (judaïsme), or Jews’ collective belonging to the Jewish people that he calls by another neologism, judaïcité, translatable into English as Jewry. Memmi elaborates on these distinctions in his article included in this reader, “The Negro and the Jew,” comparing the Jewish condition to that of Blacks and acknowledging that his idiosyncratic vocabulary was likely inspired by the Négritude movement.
Jewish difference led to the mythical portrait of the Jew, akin to the mythical stereotypes of the colonized that undergird the colonial racism opposed by the Négritude writers and by Memmi. The anti-Jewish mythical portrait is theological (e.g., Jews as murderers of God with its afterlives in the charges of blood libel and host desecration), cultural (Jews as a maleficent influence), or political (Jews as strangers, outsiders, or enemies of the people). Each portrays Jews as evil or the source of social malfeasance. As Memmi explains, “Oppression creates the myth and the myth keeps oppression alive.” These negative myths are a powerful way to define the self and assert superiority. As such, Memmi addressed the ways in which postcolonial Arab states used anti-Judaism or anti-Zionism to consolidate Arab or Islamic identity, leading to new calumnies against Jews.
Where Memmi most clearly parts company with Sartre in his Jewish writings is in his desire to add to his portrait of the Jewish condition the role of history and Jewish traditions—the observances and institutions that color every aspect of collective Jewish existence. This is most apparent in The Liberation of the Jew. At the same time, however, as a secularist he often speaks negatively of Judaism as a religion, describing it as “a skein of outdated customs.”36 He offers sociological explanations for why Jewish rites, beliefs, and values developed. In doing so, he chastises a “ghetto mentality” that erects symbolic barriers between Jews and non-Jews. These barriers, he contends, served the purpose of cocooning Jews from the slings and arrows of the dominant culture—Memmi terms this encystment—even as he rejects all forms of self-insulation that he maintains mummify Jews.
Consequently, Memmi explains Jewish customs like eating kosher food as a mechanism for communal cohesion in a hostile world. This is most evident in his discussion of the “sanctuary values,” as he calls them, at the core of Jewish religious tradition: the notions of monotheism, election, and messianism. He brushed each aside as compensatory. There is nothing unique about ethical monotheism, he quickly concludes, since both Christianity and Islam have taken it up. He accounts for both election and messianism by the history of Jewish dereliction. Each is the symbolic compensation for the abandonment and suffering of Jews, a survival mechanism in the face of oppression.
As was sometimes the case with Hannah Arendt in her stance as a conscious pariah, Memmi goes too far in The Liberation of the Jew when he suggests that Jews of his time only feed on nostalgia, producing nothing new of cultural significance in art, literature, or philosophy.37 What is universal in their work is no longer Jewish, he maintains, and what is Jewish is stale, recycling earlier epochs of true creativity. Given the artistic contributions of the painters of the École de Paris, the robust tradition of modern French Jewish thought that Levinas called L’école de pensée juive de Paris, or even Memmi’s own work tout court, to mention just French examples, this was an indefensible position that he retracted in a note in the English translation of the book.38 His larger point was that the necessary renaissance of Jewish culture would only be possible in a context where Jews were no longer a marginalized minority. For Memmi, a full cultural flowering would thus only be made possible by the State of Israel. This full-throated defense of Zionism and Israel was controversial in the lead up to the Six-Day War that erupted in June 1967.39
By 1968, in the context of student uprisings around the world, the Prague Spring, and, perhaps most important, the rise of a new politics of rebellion aimed at challenging subjugated identities—including the Black Power movement, feminism, and gay rights—Memmi published L’Homme dominé (Dominated Man, 1968), his effort to link systems of oppression. From the launchpad of his work on the colonized and Jews, Memmi sought to understand the general mechanisms of oppression by expanding his comparative framework to include African Americans, the proletariat, domestic workers, immigrants, and women. As he had already done for the colonizer and colonized, the Jew and non-Jew, Memmi now wanted to describe the general relationship between dominator and dominated. He considered the myths that legitimated them, the objective conditions that defined them, and the counternarratives that subtended the subordinated, enabling them to cope with their lives. At the same time, he did not want to lose sight of the specificity of each situation facing the oppressed.
Two of Memmi’s essays excerpted here focus on some of the leaders of the American civil rights struggle, putting their portraits into a global frame. In “The Paths of the Revolt,” Martin Luther King, “the moderate,” James Baldwin, “the intellectual,” and Malcolm X, “the revolutionary,” are depicted as not only singular personalities but also as social types. They are not so different from those akin to them engaged in similar struggles outside the United States. Memmi treats them as three paths taken along the road from oppression to freedom. King followed the path of moral ascendency with the goal of racial integration; Malcolm X stood for total revolt with the goal of Black independence; Baldwin, Memmi’s kindred spirit, is depicted as an intermediary figure.
In his introduction to the French translation of Baldwin’s great opus The Fire Next Time, Memmi emphasizes how Baldwin helps readers to understand that the oppression of Blacks in the United States is not a flaw within a system predicated on liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. Rather, anti-Black racism is systemic. It has defined America from colonial slavery through Jim Crow segregation. Anti-Black racism as constitutive of American culture has meant that “power, wealth, pleasure, ideas, art are white; even God is white.”40 The result is that Blacks are taught that they are inferior beings from birth to death. Memmi notes that just as pogroms were no accident of the European treatment of Jews, so lynching in the United States reveals the place of Blacks within the American racial order. Memmi agrees with Baldwin that only a radical social transformation can change the violence inherent in systems of subordination like those faced by colonized people, including amongst the colonized Blacks in the United States.
Frantz Fanon, Memmi suggests, represents yet another path in response to oppression, different from those of King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Memmi’s take emerged most clearly in his influential article “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” excerpted here. The article is key to shaping how scholars have interpreted the Fanonian legacy.41 As Henry Louis Gates has suggested, Fanon is both a “totem and text” who has been interpreted to serve many different critical positions.42 Memmi’s article anticipates this suggestion but also explains how the fundamental drama of Fanon’s existence made this possible.
Memmi argues that Fanon was a kind of tragic mulatto or aporetic Creole, who repeatedly adopted and then rejected various identity positions, each of which was impossible. In his youth, Fanon saw himself as a French Antillean and therefore White. His experience of French racism was shocking and traumatic, forcing him to realize that he would always be treated as a Black West Indian by the colonizer. But unlike his teacher, Césaire, when Fanon pulled off his White mask, he refused the solution of the Négritude writers, which Memmi acutely terms “the Black mirage.” Caught in an impossible vice, Fanon’s solution was the wholesale adoption of the Algerian struggle. At some point, argues Memmi, he must have realized that as a non-Arab-speaking Black of Christian descent this too was an impossible identity. Transcending these tensions, in the course of the Algerian struggle, Fanon subsequently adopted pan-Africanism. Then in his last breaths, articulated in the closing lines of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon espoused a universalist “new humanism” no longer bound by any identitarian filiations. Europe must be overcome, suggested Fanon, in the name of “the sweat and cadavers of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and Orientals.” Memmi’s article suggests that the ambiguity between these various iterations of Fanon’s existence have facilitated the differing interpretations of Fanon’s life and legacy.
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Fanon are each treated by Memmi not only as prototypes of the Black prophetic tradition but also as quintessential examples of what Memmi means when he discusses the “countermyths” that will invariably emerge in the struggles of the oppressed. Malcolm X and the Black Muslims reverse the meaning of anti-Black racism by insisting that God is Black, not White, and that Black culture is the way and the light, representing truth and beauty. Seemingly the opposite of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King’s ideal of the beloved community is equally a countermyth, according to Memmi, because it too represents an impossible ideal: too demanding for those who are human, all too human. These countermyths, each religious, are directly compared by Memmi to the Mosaic myth that underpins the Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible, along with its secular version in Zionism, where God underwrites the possession of a promised land. Fanon’s advocacy of radical and final change might make him the “patron saint of the Black Panthers,” “a prophet of the Third World, a romantic hero of decolonization, a fate which Guevara was to share under different circumstances,” but it, too, is a countermyth that has to be mediated by the complexity of reality, according to Memmi.43 Countermyths, Memmi suggests, are thus necessary to animate the process of revolt against systems of oppression, but ultimately they also require demythologization.
Memmi’s portrait gallery in Dominated Man does not end with key thinkers who opposed anti-Black and colonial racism but also extends to include his reflections on Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of sexual subordination and the path to emancipation that she maps out. Like Memmi, Beauvoir’s project in The Second Sex extrapolated from her own experience to offer a general theory of female subjection. As was the case with Memmi’s focus on Jews and the colonized, Beauvoir illuminates the objective conditions that structure women’s lives as “the second sex,” placing them in a position of inferiority to men. Beauvoir’s memoirs also suggested that her own life could serve as a model for women’s liberation: the refusal to marry or to have children, her partnerships with men other than Sartre, along with her relationships with other women. Perhaps most salient was her life as a writer, since she defined her own identity, while illuminating the place of woman within a misogynistic and patriarchal system.
While laudatory of Beauvoir’s insights, Memmi’s critique of her analysis reveals his own myopia more than her failures. He suggests that both Beauvoir and Sartre led lives that were more escapist than liberatory, since they refused the burdens one most take on as a couple and as parents. But there is a heteronormative assumption in Memmi’s evaluation of Beauvoir: “If, as I believe, not to have children is, for a woman especially, a kind of self-mutilation, the candidate for freedom will find emancipation on these conditions set at too high a price,” he writes. It is a form of “self-rejection,” he claims, akin to Jewish or Black self-hatred, “to reject one’s essential femininity.”44 Since Beauvoir’s thesis is that “woman” is not born but made through the social construction of “femininity,” the primary postulate of her book is to reject any notion of the essential womanhood that Memmi continues to appeal to. But his reflections on Beauvoir are included here because they point to Memmi reaching toward a general theory of oppression that he understood required understanding the parallels of gender, race, class, and other positions of social subordination.
Memmi also pans back from individual portraits in Dominated Man to focus on wider social formations, most importantly the role of immigrants in the postindustrial social order. Foreign workers are the slaves of modern times, Memmi declares in “The New Slaves.” But slavery has changed today. Yesteryear it was paternalistic; today it is anonymous, even as both systems lead to social death.45 Immigrant labor is now an endemic feature of modern societies, “the last form of the exploitation of man, of the permanent voracity of the capitalist system, of the permanent inequity of Western society.”46 Immigrants live in squalor, without legal or political rights, in situations of great suffering. Their exploitation is utterly pervasive so that the entire dominant population benefits. But it is simultaneously rendered invisible. A product of global forces, the only solutions are global, requiring a “truly universal set of laws.” Memmi the socialist is here wedded to Memmi the postcolonial theorist avant la lettre. On the cusp of the new world ushered in post-1968, Memmi was a pioneer both as an analyst of how forms of oppression are entangled and as a perspicacious observer of its operations in the postcolonial world.
In the wake of decolonization in the Middle East, Memmi continued to assess the Arab-Israeli conflict as part of his wider reflections on the postcolonial world, along with his more abstract discussions of domination, dependence, and racism central to understanding these struggles. This was evident in his collection of essays, Juifs et Arabs (Jews and Arabs, 1974). Published in the hostile year between the bitterly fought Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the UN Declaration that Zionism is a form of racism in 1975, the book was dedicated to both his Jewish and Arab “brothers/so that we can all/be free men at last.” Memmi clearly hoped the light he cast on relations between Jews and Arabs would bring them closer, despite the growing antagonism and polarization that was created by the Arab-Israeli conflict. He wrote the book as a self-described “Arab Jew” and a left-wing Zionist, distilling his position on the conflict.47
In his essay, “What Is an Arab Jew,” Memmi explains that most Jews in Arab lands were culturally Arabs: in their language, clothing, cooking, music, and daily habits. But a peaceful and unproblematic coexistence between Jews and Muslims is a myth, he insists. It is a favored narrative fostered by certain groups, especially Arab propagandists and European leftists. When he penned the essay, Memmi suggested it also appealed to Israelis hopeful of a utopian coexistence in Israel, along with the nostalgic viewpoint of Jews from North Africa looking back in hindsight. Those days are now gone. But even Western Jewish historians who compare the experience of Jews in Russia less favorably to the experience of Jews in the Maghreb reinforce the legend, according to Memmi. The relationship between Jews and Arabs was fragile and occasionally erupted into overt hostility or violence.
The myth of peace before the rise of Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel has its double in the role played by “Israel” within pan-Arabism. In “The Arab Nation and the Israeli Thorn,” Memmi explains how Arab states constituted “Israel” as the evil Other in order to create Arab unity. In the face of their divergent social structures and internal challenges, “Israel” enables Arab regimes to symbolically coalesce around an enemy. It provides coherence, but at an exorbitant cost, “for this policy of waging war exhausts their economies’ possibilities in advance, [and] impedes all efforts at democratization.”48
While clearly critical of Judeophobia in the Arab world, as a left-leaning Zionist he is also critical of Israeli policies. He distilled his views taken over many years in “Justice and Nation.”49 The article is framed by citing a line from the Jerusalem Program, the ideological platform of the Zionist movement as adopted by the World Zionist Congress in 1968, arguing that Israel should be founded upon the “justice and peace exalted by the prophets.” Memmi doubles down on these values. To hold true to them, he avers, Israel must adhere to a socialist Zionism he hopes will form the core of the country. “If Zionism is not socialist,” he writes, “then it loses some of its meaning, for Zionism is not concerned only with the building of a nation; Zionism has aimed for the social, economic, and cultural normalization of the Jewish people.” In accord with this socialist ethos, Memmi argues for the need to address the growing inequality within the country.
He also calls out Golda Meir’s racist language with respect to the Mizrahim (as Jews from the Middle East or North Africa are called), slurring them by suggesting that they came from barbaric places where they previously “lived in caves” before coming to Israel and demeaning them for their “congenital laziness.” He censures Ashkenormativity: the domination by Israelis who originally came from central and eastern Europe. Mizrahim in Israel, he inveighs, are slotted into menial jobs and denied leadership positions as a result of this hegemony. Although this situation has ameliorated for Mizrahim, it continues today for Ethiopian Jews.
As a secularist, Memmi also decries the fact that religious Jews hold too much power in Israel. “By continuing to refrain from separating religious from secular matters, by giving the believers too important a role, compared with their numbers, in the conduct of political affairs, the Zionists are behaving exactly like the Moslem states,” he cautions. He is clear that a strict separation of state and religion should be upheld. This enables religious Jews to practice their religion freely, but it also means those practices do not impinge on the rest of the population.
Lastly, Memmi addresses the Palestinian question. He understands its complexity, speaking without any illusions that many in the Arab world want to destroy Israel. But he is clear that Palestinian nationalism cannot be swept under the rug. He waves aside “post-Zionism” or the notion that Israelis and Palestinians can live harmoniously in a single democratic state.50 A two-state solution is the only long-term option. If Israelis do not find a way forward to achieve this solution, he predicts that a wave of despair and hatred will overflow in the relations between Israelis and Palestinians.
From his earliest publications, Memmi constantly tacked back and forth between nonfiction and literature. Following The Pillar of Salt, he wrote five subsequent novels, published works of poetry, and edited and commented upon three collections of North African fiction, and as a result, he has remained a pivotal figure within Tunisian, North African, Jewish, French, and world literature. For readers who have encountered him only as an essayist and social theorist, this serves as a reminder that Memmi’s first acclaim was as a novelist and he remains the most important Tunisian author to date.51
This reader includes excerpts from four of Memmi’s novels.52 These are the most difficult selections to excerpt since they are part and parcel of a longer story. We have attempted to select pieces that exemplify the larger work. They are included to spotlight the key place fiction plays within Memmi’s oeuvre, to show how he developed as a writer, and to showcase what he explores in these novels and how it overlaps with his essays. The chapter “Literary Reflections” also underlines his role as both a literary theorist and canonizer.
Memmi’s The Pillar of Salt (1953) and Strangers (1955) were separated from Le Scorpion ou la Confession imaginaire (The Scorpion, or The Imaginary Confession, 1969) by more than ten years. It would be nearly another decade before Le Désert, ou la Vie et les aventures de Jubaïr Ouali El-Mammi (The Desert: Or, the Life and Adventures of Jubair Wali Al-Mammi, 1977) was published. All of Memmi’s fiction seeks at once to “write back” against the conventions of French literature and its exoticizing optic on the Maghreb and to help create a new idiom and space for North African literature.53 All of Memmi’s fiction weaves together biography and fiction, history and legend, confession and concealment.54 Across the works, he explores maturation, the nature of language, identity formation, and the meaning and purpose of life.
Like Sartre’s and Camus’s early fiction, Memmi’s first novels also explored themes of existential anguish, revolt, and commitment. As opposed to his later works that deal explicitly with the wisdom that comes with aging, Memmi’s first works of fiction focused on young protagonists coming of age. There is also a clear stylistic break between Memmi’s first novels and his later works. The key difference is that his later texts, perhaps inspired by the nouveau roman, are centrally preoccupied with a metareflection on the technical aspects of literature—its structure, composition, and style—as well as by the use of irony. Memmi’s consideration of these stylistic shifts is discussed in his previously untranslated article, “For a Novel of Meaning,” composed in 1959, at a moment between the two phases of his fictional works.
Memmi’s two early novels are realistic chronological narratives with clear autobiographical elements, while the later books intentionally call this organization into question.55 This is evident in the subtitle, The Imaginary Confession, that Memmi gives to The Scorpion. It clearly underlines how the work problematizes the role of autobiography, even as it contains recurring characters and places from Memmi’s earlier fiction.
The formal experimentation of The Scorpion also clearly disrupts any straightforward relationship to a single perspective.56 The book unfolds when the protagonist, Marcel, sorts through papers left in a drawer by his brother, Emile, which he comments upon as he reads them. It also includes the text “The Cellar,” along with Emile’s diary, much of which is a commentary on writing fiction, along with a series of stories about a fictional character, Bina, and a set of sketches about their kabbalistically inclined Uncle Makhlouf. The different threads of the work are highlighted by differing fonts, a compromise from Memmi’s desire to have them printed in different colors, each of which would have conveyed a differing tone to the reader, as do the threads of Uncle Makhlouf’s weaving in the novel.57 As the critic Isaac Yetiv indicates, the polygraphic typefaces reinforce the polyphony of voices in the book, all woven together into a symphony that conveys the unity of the work.58
A section of anecdotes composed together under the title “Chronicle of the Kingdom Within” serves as a coda to The Scorpion and connects it to The Desert, which is a set of stories about The Life and Adventures of Jubair Wali al-Mammi, a Judeo-Berber prince exiled from his homeland, the Kingdom of Within.59 The novel is framed by a section included in this reader, “What Historians Have to Say,” where the author, Albert Memmi, composes a note by a fictional narrator called Albert Memmi. He reports on the supposedly factual grounds of the stories that follow by a second fictional narrator, al-Mammi, the mythical ancestor of the first fictional narrator. The heart of the book is a series of tales recounted by al-Mammi, who is captured by Tamerlane, who recognizes his wisdom and asks for his advice about how he might be saved from suffering defeat and exile like al-Mammi.
In weaving his tales, al-Mammi is like Shehrazade in The Arabian Nights. But Memmi also draws upon the oral traditions of the Tunisian khurafa, the biography of Ibn Khaldun, and works from the European Enlightenment, like Voltaire’s Candide and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, as well as the genre of the advice to kings like Machiavelli’s The Prince.60 Unlike Machiavelli, the tales al-Mammi recounts are not skeptical nuggets about political realism, however, but focus on the pursuit of reclaiming the Kingdom Within, which is a quest for wisdom. After recounting his adventures of war and love, plots and insurrections, each episode is punctuated by al-Mammi’s sage advice. The core of his sagacity is that in the face of the human capacity for predatory barbarity, he counsels “the futility of racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts,” decries fanaticism and bloody wars over identity, and calls on readers instead to band together “to combat human suffering, poverty, and disease.”61
Memmi not only was among the first Tunisian francophone writers to gain widespread fame but also helped to bring other authors recognition and played a significant role in canonizing Maghrebi literature. Working as the head of a research group that started at the École pratique des hautes études, he brought out a series of three major anthologies between 1964 and 1985. He describes these anthologies as works of “literary history” that manifest a system of classification discussed in more detail in his previously untranslated article, “Emergence of a Maghrebi Literature in French: The Generation of 1954.” Prior to the 1950s, Memmi maintains, francophone writing from the Maghreb was Orientalist in its first generation and produced by the work of “writer-tourists” in its second generation. Only in the 1950s were the voices of the indigenous expressed by the generation that included Memmi, Driss Chraïbi, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, Mouloud Feraoun, and Kateb Yacine. He distinguishes these voices of the colonized North Africans writing in French from the works penned by French settlers in North Africa.
In his previously untranslated Introductions to the volumes, Memmi spells out this taxonomy. In the first volume, Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française (Anthology of Maghrebi Writers in French) published in 1964, Memmi distinguishes between the “indigenous” generation of writers working in the French language but born in North Africa who gave voice to the colonized and the “writers-cum-tourists” who found their way to the Maghreb for short stints but whose fiction never featured the characters of the region from the inside. Memmi explicitly calls out Gustave Flaubert, André Gide, and Henry de Montherlant as itinerant visitors whose “exotic” works set in the “convenient Orient” of North Africa were “clichéd.” The first volume collects only the stories that represent the indigenous: “their hardships, aspirations and revolts.”
In a move that proved controversial, Memmi explicitly set aside writers who were French settlers in North Africa, who he insists were marked by their separation from the majority living in the Maghreb. Their stories became the focus of the second anthology. The two volumes are thus a reflection of the colonial relationship that was chiseled into every facet of their interactions, determined by the dyad Memmi described in The Colonizer and the Colonized: “A chapter of frustration, deprivation and refusal for some, a chapter of glory and privileges for others, for which they felt confusedly proud and guilt-ridden.”
The politics of separation, Memmi insists in his Introduction to the second volume, Anthologie des écrivains française du Maghreb (Anthology of French Writers of the Maghreb, 1969), meant that the European writers could not depict the indigenous—neither Jews nor Muslim Arabs—as fully rounded characters. They remained shadows or stereotypes. Camus is called out by Memmi, as he is in Kamel Daoud’s recent work, The Meursault Investigation, which recounts the story of Camus’s The Stranger from the perspective of its mute Arab victim. All of Camus’s work, suggests Memmi, could be understood not only as reflections of the metaphysical experience of human alienation or the absurdity of existence but also as representations of the estrangement of being an outsider as a European in the Maghreb. This includes his play The Misunderstanding, as well as Exile and the Kingdom, whose titles reflect this theme. Summing up the difference between the contents of the two volumes, Memmi writes that the key theme of the indigenous writers was revolt, while for the European writers it was a deliberation on separation. This sense of estrangement was built upon the cultural and institutional differences that divided Europeans from the indigenous. The “collective customs, values and codes” of these groups differed, as did their politics and history.
As he did in The Colonizer and the Colonized, however, Memmi makes clear that a complete account of the colonial experience demands the stories of both sides. By 1985, with some distance from the immediate postcolonial period, Memmi was ready to comingle the authors in the third volume. He did so by embracing the term francophone in the collection’s title, Ecrivains francophones du Maghreb (Francophone Writers of the Maghreb: An Anthology), which Lia Brozgal explains anticipated the concept of “francophone postcolonial studies”62
If Memmi’s third volume on francophone writers of the Maghreb indicated a rounding out of his ideas on literature, then the shift in his work from the category of domination to dependence equally marked a deepening of his understanding of power relations from the perspective of further hindsight. If Memmi’s earlier work focused on the mechanisms of dominance and the subjection of the dominated—the Black, the Jew, the woman, the domestic, and the immigrant—in La Dépendance: Esquisse pour un portrait du dépendant (Dependence, 1979), he now sought to understand the complicated strictures linking dependence and independence.63 Domination and dependence form a duo or diptych, Memmi argues. Conceptually, he distinguished between dominance (i.e., the totality of constraints imposed on the other) and subjection (i.e., how the dominated respond) from dependence (i.e., willing subjection) and providing for the other. In short, “the dependent person more or less consents to her alienation; the dominated person does not,” wrote Memmi.
Dependence is a response to real or imaginary challenges that emerge from the existential challenges of life: conflicts, separations, unhappiness, alienation, death, suffering. It is a concrete response to these difficulties.64 “Dependence is an expression of the individual’s desire to fill a void in his life,” notes Memmi.65 Culled, as is all of his sociological and philosophical work, from the experiences of everyday life, Memmi explores our quotidian modes of dependence from our banal reliance on cigarettes or alcohol to our enmeshment with lovers or entanglement within ideological systems like religion or nationalism. He sought to show that churches, armies, and many other forms of social organization do not function based on coercion and control but rather on a willing subservience to the institution. Both domination and dependence, Memmi maintains, are founded on the primordial experience of human anxiety but respond to it differently. In the case of dependence, it is about solidarity and support, whereas in the case of domination it is about control in order to expel fear.
Memmi’s summa, simply titled Le racisme: Description, définition, traitement (Racism, 1982), depicted the root of racial domination as engendered by the unease, fear, and fascination with the racial Other, a product of fashioning subjects as what Fanon termed “phobogenic objects.” It was published at a moment when the extreme-right National Front emerged as a force in electoral politics, winning its first mayoral elections in 1983 on an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and law-and-order platform. This led to the rise of new forms of antiracist politics fronted by migrant youth: the Beur movement and SOS Racisme.
Racism magnified Memmi’s understanding of racial domination, previously only a subtheme in prior works.66 It offered a “raciology” that went beyond describing situations fictionally in The Pillar of Salt or Strangers or analytically in The Colonizer and the Colonized and Dominated Man. Memmi now sought to treat the problem that he also diagnosed.
In Racism, Memmi works from a definition to elaborate his theory: “Racism is the generalized and final assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accuser’s benefit and at his victim’s expense, in order to justify the former’s own privileges or aggression.”67 In explicating this definition and explaining how it came about, Memmi begins with a historical overview of race thinking from Aristotle through Hitler that provided the rational justification for everything from slavery to genocide. The result of this history was not only a body of concepts but also an “underlying system of emotions and convictions that structure its discourse and govern its conduct.”68 In Racism, Memmi clearly understands racial discourse as systemically produced.
These systems of thought were integrated organically into the national cultural traditions of groups from France to South Africa. These notions legitimated oppression or persecution through the assertion of the superiority of one group over another on religious, biological, economic, psychological, metaphysical, or cultural grounds as a result of a claim about unalterable differences. Racists focus on differing factors in different situations, from the color of one’s skin to the nature of one’s cultural tradition.
Racism is consequently a subset of ethnophobia, Memmi claims: the ascription of blame onto specific groups we are taught to fear. More generally it is a product of heterophobia, which legitimates attacking those designated foreign or strange or otherwise Other who provoke or stoke our anxiety. The function of racism is consequently “anxiety alleviation and ideological distraction.”69 Alongside individual and psychic fears, Memmi also discusses financial exploitation and economic unease. He knits these factors together, writing that ultimately the “machinery of racism . . . produces a vast lexicon of official words, gestures, administrative texts, and political conduct” with “one undeniable goal: the legitimization and consolidation of power and privilege for the colonizers.”70
Memmi does not rest content with his description of racism, however. He proposes a three-pronged antiracist agenda. First, we must become conscious of racism, not only in others but also in ourselves. Antiracism begins with self-consciousness, which entails the “exercise of empathy . . . to understand the suffering of the other, his humiliation, his pain at being insulted or struck.”71 But it also demands self-examination about the relative privilege of different social groups. Second, antiracism requires continual and ongoing learning, sensitive to how racism morphs and changes. This begins with teaching children to enjoy differences, rather than feel anxious about them, but antiracism also demands ongoing education in schools and universities. And third, antiracism is political. It cannot be limited to individuals and intersubjective dyads; it cannot rest content to fight against prejudice. The politics of antiracism must “struggle against all oppression” and “combat all forms of domination.”72 If Memmi’s analysis is triple (individual, social, and political), so is his remedy for racism: autocritique, education, and collective mobilization aimed at overcoming all forms of oppression and heterophobia.
Memmi’s last major work, the 2004 essay Portrait du décolonisé: arabo-musulman et de quelques autres (Decolonization and the Decolonized) once more drew wide readership. But the sharp criticism it received half a century after Memmi’s first major publication indicates how things had shifted fifty years later.73 As Daniel Gordon astutely notes, “He has combined, perhaps more than any other writer since World War II, the compassion needed to articulate the suffering of oppressed groups with the forthrightness needed to censure them for their own acts of oppression.”74 But in Decolonization and the Decolonized Memmi upset many with his direct and unbridled criticism of postcolonial states, especially those in the Arab world, as well as his criticisms of those immigrants of Muslim heritage living in France. To some of his readers post-9/11, in his last major essay he echoed the Islamophobic and xenophobic sentiments of the dominant culture more than he expressed compassion for the perspective of the dominated.
The final section of the reader comprises Memmi’s writings on decolonization as a process and the condition of postcolonial states in the new millennium, including his assessment of the formerly colonized within contemporary France. This section excerpts from Decolonization and the Decolonized to highlight Memmi’s controversial observations on the West’s treatment of Islam and immigration to France from former European colonies. Additional pieces reflect Memmi’s previously untranslated thoughts on the unevenness and incompleteness of decolonization, his continued engagement with the legacies of colonialism, and the future of not only the Maghreb and France but the whole of the postcolonial global world, alongside his commitment to secularism.
With each generation, Memmi’s work has received new attention. Today’s is often informed by the terror attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the Arab Spring uprisings a decade later, the visibility of Muslim immigrants in contemporary European public discourse, and the populist nationalism that organizes around anti-immigrant rhetoric today. Whether Memmi’s commentary on immigration, assimilation, and Islam contrasts with the anticolonial writings of his early career is a matter of debate. In this volume, both his early reflections and his more recent remarks on culture, integration, religion, politics, and power are juxtaposed to help explore these pressing questions more deeply. This reader shows that there are more continuities than discontinuities in Memmi’s last major essay, even as the context has dramatically shifted.
It is important to appreciate that for Memmi decolonization is a process. Formal political independence is not the moment of its completion, given the dialectical framework Memmi established in The Colonizer and the Colonized. Political independence does not mark the end of economic exploitation, and economics does not delimit the ongoing forms of cultural dependence that often characterize postcolonial nations. At the same time, Memmi rejects the notion of neocolonialism for the same reason that he refused Marxist and economic reductions of colonialism, since they only consider one facet of the relationship between dominator and dominated.
In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi maintains that tyranny and corruption more than neocolonialism are responsible for the stagnation of postcolonial states. His critique is global, but it is also angled, as his French title indicates, to the decolonized of the Arab-Muslim world. In general, postcolonial states are not democratic. They are rife with violence. Due process and the rule of law are often only a fantasy. Exploitation by the elite is rife, torture is used as a system of discipline, the subordination of women is widespread, and intellectuals with a critical spirit are often repressed. The result is that fundamentalism is on the rise and Islamist terrorism too often condoned or sanctioned.
While colonialism clearly established many of the preconditions for postcolonial tyranny, it alone cannot explain the present. In short, as Françoise Vergès points out in her review, “Memmi looks at the Muslim world after 9/11 and sees few encouraging things but poverty, corruption, violence, chaos, greedier ruling classes than the colonial class. Arab intellectuals have failed their mission. They too often ‘justify the unjustifiable’ [and] do not fight against the rampant anti-Semitism of the Arab public.”75
Memmi has long held these views. But as Brozgal points out, in advancing them in Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi no longer speaks from his subject position as a Tunisian, African, or Arab but rather as a French writer who echoes the universalism of contemporary Republican values. He paints with a broad brush, too cavalierly indicting vast swaths of the Arab Muslim world. Like other contemporary neo-Orientalists, he suggests that there is a failure of Arab Muslims to comport with the modern world. Rather than take responsibility themselves, they blame the Americans, the Jews, the infidels, and the multinationals. They do not often enough look for the causes of their poverty, corruption, despotism, and fanaticism within.76
The careful reader will notice, however, that Memmi is as sensitive to the enduring forces of colonialism, and the ongoing racism faced by immigrants, as ever. “Immigration is the punishment for colonial sin,” he writes. It has placed the ex-colonizers in a bind, since migration was initially sanctioned for labor. This work is still needed, given the demographic decline in Europe. But the large numbers of migrants in the last generation and their differences of culture and religion have created new problems for Europeans who often exploit and marginalize these immigrants from the Arab Muslim world. The result is that they turn inward, reinforcing their cultural difference, since their integration is denied as a result of racism. They are thus simultaneously sidelined and cocoon themselves in ghettos: “This ghetto is both a rejection and a reaction to rejection, real or imagined, by the others. The ghetto, like the former Jewish ghettos, supports and feeds the separation, but it is also its expression.”77
Since 1989, these tensions and conflicts have often centered in France and elsewhere on a series of scandals about the wearing of a headscarf.78 When it comes to his arguments about the headscarf, as is the case with his critique of Jewish rites, Memmi’s optic is that of a sociologist and a secularist. He is keener to knock down each of the claims made by those who wear it than to empathize with their positions. According to Memmi, the headscarf is nothing but a form of female subjection, a submission to a backward-looking fundamentalism, an abdication of freedom, an identitarian flag. Still, he does understand it, as he does Jewish customs, as a response to daily humiliation, which he sees everywhere, since the Muslim minority is also the subordinate class. As he argued in the 1960s, immigrants are the “new slaves.” He also recognizes that the ostensibly secular order is, in fact, a reflection of a Christian culture, since holidays are all based on the Christian calendar and public monuments reflect a Christian collective memory. Christian values are everywhere dominant.
Memmi has long trumpeted the importance of secularism. In his previously untranslated article “Fundamentalism and Secularism [laïcité],” he makes plain his firm and unwavering defense of laïcité and his clear and unchanging condemnation of fundamentalism (intégrisme). He denounces Jewish fundamentalism as vigorously as he does Christian and Muslim fanaticism. All fundamentalisms have the perverse effect of condemning the majority of adherents of their own religion, he notes. They feed on identifying the infidels without and the heretics within. They operate with an absolutist conception of truth. This is in contradistinction to secularists whose worldview rests upon doubt and who insist that truth is situated, open to critique, and changes over time. Secularists subscribe to the liberal tenet of the separation of powers, especially between the state and religion. They affirm that no authority can violate individual or group rights. These principles are part of a broader defense of secular humanism.
In his views on postcoloniality, Memmi’s socialism and internationalism are also evident. Global inequality and poverty are the sluice that allow postcolonial pathologies to flow. The wealth of the world should be shared, and corruption must be fought. “My philosophy is based on three axes: humanism, rationalism and secularism,” he affirms. In the final notes in this reader, Memmi applauds the outpouring of sentiments expressed in the Arab Spring. But he awaits the summer, the full flowering of the ideas expressed in the streets of the Maghreb and Egypt. Ever the critic of utopia, he is skeptical that they will come to fruition any time soon. In these statements, we hear Memmi’s voice on some of the latest global developments.
There are different ways of synthesizing the evolving stages of Memmi’s oeuvre captured in The Albert Memmi Reader. Guy Dugas suggests four overlapping periods to Memmi’s oeuvre:79 (1) the age of revolt that included The Pillar of Salt, Strangers, The Colonizer and the Colonized, and Portrait of a Jew; (2) the age of doubt and self-interrogation that comprised The Liberation of the Jew, The Scorpion, and Jews and Arabs; (3) the effort at reconciliation expressed in his literary works The Desert and Le Pharaon; and (4) the age of overcoming and detachment that Debra Kelly instead calls simply the era of “taking stock” in works like Trois bonheurs, Le Nomade immobile, and Decolonization and the Decolonized.80 The arc of key concepts that organize the chapters in Hervé Sanson’s recently published collection of Memmi’s articles suggests another way of grappling with Memmi’s vast corpus: (1) colonization and decolonization; (2) Judaism and judéité; (3) cultural identity and francophonie; (4) dependence; (5) racism to heterophobia; and (6) secularism [laïcité].
In this introduction, I have largely tracked these stages and concepts as Memmi’s work bears witness or anticipates the cataclysms of his time: his coming of age in colonial Tunisia in the 1930s and during the Second World War; the decolonization struggles of the 1950s; his consideration of Maghrebi literature and the Jewish condition in the early 1960s; the run-up to the Six Day War in 1967; his effort to link forms of domination and oppression in the tumultuous period around 1968; the polarization of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1970s; reflections on racism in the 1980s; and his latest interventions in the 1990s and into the new millennium, focused on the unfinished business of decolonization: the condition of postcolonial states, migrants, and global inequalities.
For the first time in any language, this reader enables scholars and students to appreciate the full sweep of Memmi’s thought over time. It shows why he is one of the great thinkers of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Having just recently passed away at 99, Memmi had focused in his later years on drawing life lessons. Perhaps it is wise then to let him have the last word summing up what he has explored in his writing: “One must live, act and think now, in this life, as if one were worthy of a hoped immortality. To be brief, find and communicate the truth, if possible. Beware of prejudice and utopias, of all dogmas, including those that are one’s own. Live without submission and without compromise. For me, this is the ethics of the thinker and the foundation of what I mean by philosophy.”81