Francophone North African Literature

The study of francophone North African literature has witnessed something of a surge in popularity over the last twenty years. Although many of the richest and best-known literary works in French by North African writers were published in the lead-up to and aftermath of decolonization, criticism in this area has exploded in recent decades, in particular with the rise of postcolonial studies in the US and the UK. If, moreover, the end of the French presence in the North African colonies of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and in particular the Algerian War of Independence, were subjects that received little critical attention in France in the years after decolonization — as if testifying to a difficulty in coming to terms with the trauma of colonial loss — these have now become a more prominent focus of intellectual enquiry. Despite this resurgence of interest in the colonial past in North Africa and its legacies in the present, however, much work remains to be done and this remains a troubled field, at least in France. Critics cite, for example, article 4 of law 2005-158, proposed on 23 February 2005 though later retracted, according to which university research must accord recognition to the positive contribution of the French who served overseas.¹ Even if the wording was subsequently modified, the subjection of university research on colonialism and postcolonialism to a legal discourse in this instance indicates an ongoing and disturbing political anxiety about the ways in which colonial history might be investigated and interrogated. Literary critics, for their part, have recently paid renewed attention to the memory and representation of colonialism and its demise in North Africa, perceiving in the literary form an alternative critical perspective to that of ‘official’ political discourse. At the same time, given the persistence of widespread anxiety about the colonial past in France alongside the emergence of new tensions in North Africa, the very meaning of ‘postcolonialism’ in North Africa, fifty years or more after independence, is again under scrutiny.

Colonialism and ‘writing back’

Before the recent explosion of interest in francophone North African literature, one of the most significant early studies of the Maghrebian novel was Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Le Roman maghrébin, published in 1968. Khatibi’s readings associate the novel closely with the political context of the War of Independence. Indeed, according to Khatibi, the mission of the novel at that time was to ‘exprimer le drame d’une société en crise’.² In this respect, Khatibi’s discussion anticipates something of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s paradigmatic conception of postcolonial literature as a corpus of works that ‘emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the imperial centre’.³ This does not mean that each work produced at the moment of crisis necessarily takes the form of a straightforward depiction of it, however, and one of Khatibi’s central concerns is precisely the complex form of the novel’s engagement with its epoch. Literary writing does not have to provide an unmediated portrait in order to be able to bear witness, and may gesture rather more allusively towards experiences that are occluded by public discourse. Taking into account the significance of language and aesthetics, Khatibi’s analysis nevertheless emphasizes literature’s ability to intervene in social and political upheaval. The Maghrebian novel in French at this moment, according to Khatibi, set out to record and analyse the drama of decolonization, yet it also used form to understand that drama in challenging new ways.

In the wake of Khatibi’s book, two major studies of francophone North African literature to emerge were those of Jean Déjeux and Jacqueline Arnaud. Jean Déjeux’s Littérature maghrébine de langue française came out in 1973, and offered a broad synthesis laying out the emergence and typologies of a ‘littérature de combat’.⁴ Without offering close readings, Déjeux’s work nevertheless served to provide a systematic analysis of the manifold forms of francophone literary production responding to the colonial...