All Americans Welcome

During a recent visit to Algeria for research on Jean Sénac, a poet, essayist, playwright, poetic radio show host, and literary journal editor during one the most transformative and tragic times in Algeria’s history, I found that I was often reminded of America. Algeria’s fight and victory against French colonialism (from 1954 to 1962) had become a model for anti-colonial wars and revolutions throughout Africa and the world. In America it had gained the support of much of the liberal left, that of president John F. Kennedy, and had a transformative influence on the political aims of the African American community during and after the Civil Rights movement. Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), written in Algeria, had become a political manifesto for the Black Panthers. Eldridge Cleaver later sought refuge in Algiers in 1969, joined by Stokely Carmichael and his wife, Miriam Mabeka All were present during the 1969 Pan African Festival with the likes of Nina Simone, Archie Shepp, Nathan Hare, Julia Hevre, Don L. Lee, and Ted Joans.

Jean Sénac, author of many poems celebrating the Algerian revolution often referenced African American poets and artists in his writings and radio programs, but as a pied noir (European born in Algeria), an outsider to an Algerian nation being defined as exclusively Arab and Muslim despite its multiculturalism, and a homosexual, he became a disturbance and a liability to conservative fringes and was assassinated in 1973. The connection between Algeria and America, suggested by a poets like Sénac who had more in common with Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg than most other Algerian poets of his generation, implies that poets were part of alternate national imaginations. The current situation in Algeria, where Sénac and the revolutionary era of Algerian history are seldom explored in academic, political, and cultural settings has much in common with America’s similar unwillingness to revisit its own poets and alternative cultural narratives of the ’60s. Perhaps this is a move, in both cases, to solidify a national image against real and threatening popular imaginations that found their expression in the most marginalized arenas. Both countries are particularly resistant to readings that are contrary to the more recent, post 9/11, patriotic rhetoric.

Benjamin Hollander’s latest book, In the House Un-American, is such a reading, through a collection of poetry, essays and historical narratives that take us through heterogeneous layers of American culture such as the stories of early twentieth-century Jewish immigrants in New York; the American vernacular in baseball culture; the Kafkaesque trials of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which culminated in the anti-communist witch-hunt in the 1950s; and ruminations on how William Carlos William’s poetry came to symbolize the pragmatism of American language: “no ideas but in things.” In all cases language is a central component to the fashioning and refashioning of a certain American identity.

While on one hand Hollander lays the ground for an American narrative that combines immigrant success stories, anti-communist rhetoric, and current day religious evangelism, there are untold counter-narratives to be found in Herman Melville, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt, Charles Olson, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Leopold Weiss aka Mohammed Asad, and the main narrator of Hollander’s picaresque tale, one Carlos ben Carlos Rossman, who is none other than the heir to Kafka’s main character and sidekick, Karl Rossman, in the novel The Missing Person (1927) (retitled as Amerika by his close friend and post-mortem editor Max Brodt).

While pondering on William Carlos William’s middle name, Hollander’s version of Cervantes’s wandering knight remarks that “no one knew or even asked about this Carlos [the poet], who or why his middle name was Carlos, his name later discovered to have come into being after the brother of his Puerto Rican mother.” Why, we might wonder again, was this American poet not writing in the language of immigrant families who had fled from all over Europe to come to America, and...