Assia Djebar, Romancière Algérienne/Cinéaste Arabe by Jean Déjeux (review)

Book R eviews Mohammed Dib, écrivain algérien; Assia Djebar, romancière algérienne, etc. The problem immediately arises of how to place Memmi and his work, and Dugas has taken the position that Memmi’s homeland is that of separatedness, tornness, exile. Guy Dugas’62-page introductory essay actually places Memmi’s writings in the context of the author’s “situation” : that of an indigenous person in a colonized country and of a member of the Jewish minority in Muslim North Africa. This excellent introduction is followed by another 60 pages of extracts from Memmi’s works. Though perhaps an editorial requirement, the usefulness of reprinting such extracts is questionable, since most of Memmi’s major writings are readily available in libraries, even on this side of the Atlantic. This criticism would not of course apply to an extract from an intriguing short story, “La Mère,” published for the first time here. The story reflects the richness of imagination and control of prose for which Memmi is already known as a novelist. The last 40 pages of the book comprise an exhaustive bibliography, which supplants any earlier listings on Memmi and takes the reader up to the end of 1982. It includes Memmi’s writings of all types, from novels (including the many foreign language translations), sociological essays, short stories and poetry, and articles in periodicals and newspapers, to the many interviews with Memmi either published or recorded on film or tape, his lectures and con­ tributions to conferences. The secondary sources include reviews of his books and studies of his literary and non-literary writings, and even dissertations and unpublished papers. Though the bibliography has some recent omissions, and unattainable, unpublished work might well have been edited out, it was reviewed by Memmi himself, and can serve as a reliable guide for scholars. Dugas’ 60-page essay includes a table useful for understanding Memmi’s complicated biography, and examines his philosophy and approach to writing. He discusses Memmi’s elaboration of the idea of “la différence,” based on the author’s personal experience of marginality as a poor Jew growing up in a colonized Muslim country. He shows Memmi’s efforts to exorcize personal anguish by elaborating a theory of relations between colonizer and colonized, Jew and gentile, dominator and dominated, and definitions of the concepts of race, dependency, Jewishness. In Memmi’s writing, biography is a constant thread which gives unity. However, his novels and poetry evince an increasing concern with form, with literature as play. In his early period, he used art as a technique for a necessary catharsis. Later, the passionate rebellions come to provide a pretext for making art rather than its substance. Despite Memmi’s interest in and obvious mastery of literary form, he will probably con­ tinue to be known primarily as the voice of the colonized, the dominated, the oppressed, the unflinching analyst of painful relations between unequals. Dugas discusses Memmi’s development of literary form. The book is probably correct, however, in the relative emphasis it places on Memmi’s philosophy of human relations and examination of rela­ tions between the self and others. Though one would have preferred more of this excellent analysis rather than the extracts, the cogent and succinct summary of the main trends in Memmi’s thought, and comprehensive bibliography, make this an important contribution to a series of essential scholarly studies of Francophone writers. J u d ith R o u m a n i Washington, D.C. Jean Déjeux. A s s ia D je b a r , r o m a n c iè r e a lg é r ie n n e / c i n é a s t e a r a b e . Sherbrooke, Québec: Naaman, 1984. Pp. 120. Jean Déjeux brings to Maghrebian literary criticism more than two decades of dedica­ tion and scholarship. In addition, his extensive bibliographies are indispensable to all Vol.XXVI, No. 1 97 L ’E sprit C réateur students of Francophone Maghrebian fiction and criticism. This study of the Algerian novelist, Assia Djebar, is the fourth publication in the Naaman series, Auteurs de Langue Française (AFL), initiated by...