Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War (review)

Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War, by Mouloud Feraoun. Ed. and trans. by Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000. li + 340 pp.

Mouloud Feraoun was a distinguished, French-educated, Algerian writer who chronicled the Algerian War in this Journal and died at the hands of the European colonists' terrorist organization, the OAS (Organisation de l'Armée Secrète), little more than a month after giving the manuscript to his publisher (Editions du Seuil) and only days after the war's official end in March 1962. The Journal has long been known to students of the Algerian War: its appearance in English will make it available to a broader audience, and will be especially welcome to students of postcolonial theory whose themes it admirably exemplifies. In this respect Feraoun was an outstanding example of "hybridity": he identified fully with French culture, which he unashamedly taught and loved, while the war and ensuing ferocity of the French repression made him increasingly aware that the dream of assimilation was as untenable as it was undesirable. On the other hand, Feraoun could not identify with the nationalist cause either: if French colonialism revealed itself to be little better than a version of fascism as experienced by the Algerians, the rebels appeared to be colonialism's mirror image. Feraoun regarded them as brutish barbarians whose hegemony over the indigenous population was achieved by a campaign of terror, racism, and fanaticism. From the war's outset Feraoun was equally aware of the futility of the French effort to maintain their hegemony in Algeria and the dismal future that the country faced under the long-term rule of the National Liberation Front (FLN) that quickly revealed itself as the only alternative. Reading this book with consciousness of the tortured, failed, postcolonial history of Algeria through the 1990s, which witnessed the FLN in its turn inflicting the methods the French once used against itself on an equally brutal and fanatical Muslim fundamentalist rebellion, makes Feraoun appear an extraordinary prophet indeed, one whose message, however, was almost totally of despair.

It was as witness, however, that Feraoun's insights are most valuable. Had the French understood early enough what became clear to him from the outset, they might have saved themselves much turmoil and bloodshed, for from the very early years of the war the French colonial hegemony over the "hearts and minds" of the population was displaced by the rebels who enforced a regressive Islamist regime on an unwilling population by terror and assassination, early demonstrating their willingness to kill Muslims as well as French with impunity. Feraoun was unable to regard the new rebel regime as in the least progressive: he abhorred the strictures against alcohol and tobacco, he failed to see anything progressive, as Fanon did, about enforcement of the veil on Algerian women, and he was revolted by the rebels' indiscriminate destruction of the few positive aspects of colonialism, in particular the infrastructure of education of which he was a part and which contained many selfless French teachers who labored to improve the lot of the students in their charge. Feraoun is equally caustic with regard to the French, who flailed about indiscriminately murdering the innocent in their pathetic attempts to find those actually opposing them and alienated the population once and for all in the process. It is curious that Feraoun placed great hope in the coming of de Gaulle, for it was under the latter's intensified war effort that over two million Algerians were removed to fortified enclaves so as to enable the French to carry out their "cleansing" operations in the countryside; Feraoun's own village was "freed" in this manner by being surrounded by watch towers and barbed wire, while his cousins, brother, and father were tortured or murdered as "suspects." If there is any glimmer of hope in reading this...