Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War (review)

This novel is not only engrossing as fiction, it also tells us intimately about Algeria's war of national liberation (1954–62) and helps us understand what it means to be involved in military and civil resistance. Translated for the first time into English from the original French (Enfants du nouveau monde, 1962), it is remarkable how fresh and captivating this text remains half a century after the events it depicts. It is for critics to ponder how literature can preserve such immediacy despite the datedness of the revolutionary struggle. The theme is relevant partly because the struggles of occupied people nowadays—whether in Palestine, Lebanon, or Iraq—raise the same issues and tensions, and partly because—independent of the strife in the Middle East—the struggle of the dispossessed against overpowering forces moves people. But Children of the New World, lyrical and sophisticated as it is, is not a socialist realist work, proclaiming a brave new world with formulaic bluntness. It is a work that explores rather than states, evokes rather than invokes.

Assia Djebar (the pen name of Fatma-Zohra Imalhayene) is an acclaimed Algerian novelist and feminist. This novel incorporates feminist issues as a subtext while delineating a gallery of characters. The genius of Djebar lies in her compelling fictional characterization. No matter how little we know about the Algerian state half a century ago, we feel we know the characters since they possess psychological verisimilitude. The bondings between couples as well as their impasses are foregrounded. Traditional illiterate women (Cherifa, Amna, and Lla Aicha) are not dismissed in favor of modernized educated women (Lila, Salima, Suzanne, and Hassiba). Each of the female characters asserts herself and forges her own gendered identity despite lurking patriarchal restrictions. The struggle then is two-fold: against the foreign enemy that confiscates land and dispossesses Algerians, and against the enemy within, the customs and traditions that oppress women. Hassiba, the young woman who joins the freedom fighters in the mountains, is an example of the emancipated native woman, yet she is not portrayed as an emblem of heroism but rather as fragile, somewhat naïve, and romantic. In the very portrayal of the struggle for independence, Djebar points to the pitfalls in the road taken, as Frantz Fanon did in The Wretched of the Earth.

The novel is by no means a Manichean struggle between good and evil. There is no binary opposition between the French and the Algerians, but there is a binary of change versus status quo. Suzanne is French and has married Omar—an Algerian lawyer who defends Arabs—despite her parents' disapproval. She helps the teacher Salima, who is imprisoned and tortured, by contacting Khaled, an attorney who lives in the nearby capital Algiers. These characters are not larger-than-life figures: Omar gets fed up with the struggle and leaves for France. Touma is a young Algerian woman who sides with the French colonial rulers and works as an informant against her own people. Despite the treason involved and the curses she receives from the town's people, including those of her brother who ends up killing her, we feel sorry for her because we can somehow sense the spontaneous youthful exuberance of her challenge to the prison-house of family and traditions. The same is true of Hakim, the Algerian police inspector who collaborates with the French in locating the underground resistance and interrogating them with inhumane methods. A semblance of humanity persists in his traits as we learn that he had to take the job to support his extended family. He avoids interrogating the detained by occupying himself with paperwork, but he is forced to do the dirty work of extracting a confession from Saidi, the manager of the Moorish café, under the watchful eyes of his superiors. As Saidi dies from torture, Djebar leaves it to the reader's imagination to fathom Hakim's psychological state. To Djebar, what is between the...