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  • Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French
  • Seth Graebner
Debra Kelly . Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. (i–vii) + 400 pp.

Working in a field in which standards and infrastructure are still developing, critics of Francophone literature have occasionally reinvented their wheels. Debra Kelly may at first appear to have done so: her book follows the volumes edited by Martine Mathieu, and by Ernstpeter Ruhe and Alfred Hornung, in treating one of the most visible varieties of postcolonial writing in French: autobiographical writing in multiple genres: "autobiographical" novels, memoirs, letters, and (even)self-declared autobiographies.1 Her study, however, differs significantly from earlier presentations of the "classics" of these genres (so broadly defined, the list might include works as different as Camara Laye's L'Enfant noir and Driss Chraïbi's Le Passé simple). Kelly rejects the readings of postcolonial autobiographical discourse that treat it as testimonials, or as the product of subjects representing a collectivity rather than any particular individual. A rereading of these works not based on this assumption was long overdue. [End Page 284]

Kelly begins by outlining the state of debate in criticism of autobiographies in European literatures, and provides some indications about the means of applying the insights gained there to writing from the Maghrib. Here she lays out her argument against systematically reading "I" as "representing" a collective "we," a habit stemming from the received wisdom about the importance of the collectivity in Arabo-Muslim societies, especially during their nationalist struggles, and the corresponding insignificance of the individual, who must always and only represent the group. Kelly also argues against the notion that autobiography constitutes a form and conception wholly foreign to the Muslim world. She necessarily relies on secondary sources for her evidence on the various traditions of Arabic literature; it seems worth pointing out that many critics have not bothered to consult even those. There remains the question, alluded to very briefly in her first chapter, of why we receive these works as autobiographical at all, when arguably we would be considerably less likely to do so, were the authors Français de France. Something about their provenance, or about postcolonial modes of reading, influences their reception, but Kelly never explicitly discusses the issue.

In her subsequent chapters, which treat works by Mouloud Feraoun, Albert Memmi, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Assia Djebar, Kelly traces the developing subjectivities of the author-narrators, in citations which she often lets speak for themselves. Very frequently, her analyses of the considerable passages she cites consist mostly of her account of the significance of the events narrated in it, rather than on the way in which the author recounts them. In the chapters on Feraoun and Memmi especially, she does not often give the "close textual reading" promised in the introduction (4). In this way, she remains free to devote the bulk of her argumentation to the way in which the works in question fit into the authors' respective life-projects. Overall, her arguments about the four authors advance toward very similar conclusions about the virtues of writing for helping to resolve problems of identity in the postcolonial context. Each work, for her, ultimately recounts its author's coming to writing, and testifies to the power of autobiographical discourse to assist in the construction of identity under difficult circumstances, as well as to comment on its own ethics and aesthetics.

Kelly's assistant, responsible for producing the English versions of [End Page 285] most of her quotes, proved unequal to the task: the text contains a startling number of mistranslations, some of which betray significant misunderstanding. These and other lapses mar the presentation of the book.

Seth Graebner
Washington University

Notes

1. Martine Mathieu, ed., Littérature autobiographique de la Francophonie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996); Ernstpeter Ruhe and Alfred Hornung, eds., Postcolonialisme et autobiographie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998).

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