Une enfance Outremer (review)

Une enfance Outremer, ed. Leïla Sebbar. Paris: Seuil, 2001. 222 pp. ISBN 2-02-042625-0.

Une enfance Outremer is an anthology of previously unpublished memories of childhood by sixteen authors from what was once the French Empire, particularly North and Subsaharan Africa and the Caribbean. A few of the authors are well known; many have published very little.

Most of the memories concern families, early schooling, often a first awareness of words. The earliest memory is Kossi Efoui feeling dizzy when his mother bends over to pick vegetables while he is tied to her back. For Gisèle Pineau, childhood is the time when images and words rub together. Fouad Laroui's father tells him not to try to pick up a bird, as "the best way to catch things is to use words" (154). The French language is seldom a source of any conflict. Aziz Chouaki's mother reads him French fairy tales and his grandmother tells him Kabyle folk tales.

While the authors were born between 1937 and 1967, and grew up during a period of social change, only a few memoirs concern the politics of their countries. Jean-Luc Raharimanana, whose work is often about politics, describes the oppression in Madagascar in 1975 when he was only seven. Maïssa Bey tells of her father's martyrdom during the Algerian war of independence. Véronique Tadjo writes of her father's deception at the coup d'état and growing intolerance in Côte d'Ivoire, although these events occurred long after her own childhood.

Several writers are of mixed heritage, with a European parent. This caused problems for Leïla Sebbar as a young girl: Arab boys called her "bigarrée" 'mottled.' While writers come from different social classes, only a few come from poor families. Marie-Thérèse Humbert, from Mauritius, describes her early encounters with the family servant, who takes the children on her outings to meet her suitors. Emmanuel Dongala, from Congo-Brazzaville, learns when he steals some fruit from the "commandant's" garden that it is useful to be the son of the local school teacher. Hélé Béji describes life in a middle-class Tunisian family and poetically recounts her first moral dilemma: why did God make her cat and allow him to have an evil instinct to kill birds? Such a concern is universal.

For Aziz Chouaki, an Algerian from Kabylia, the mixed culture of his youth makes him, with no regrets, a "pied-noir musulman" (72). In the other memoirs, the presence of French culture is seldom important to the child's consciousness of the world. Leïla Sebbar, who previously published Une enfance d'ailleurs (with Nancy Huston) and another anthology, Une enfance algérienne, has edited Une enfance Outremer, with no unifying theme beyond the place of birth of the writers. While this anthology usefully adds autobiographical texts, rather than theoretical speculation, to colonial and postcolonial studies, the material is rather slight. Some longer stories would have been more interesting. The quality is also uneven. These selections are not up to the best work of the authors. The childhoods of Emmanuel Dongala and Gisèle Pineau are better evoked in their novels, as is Abdourahman Waberi's in his short stories.