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  • Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French
  • Mildred Mortimer
Debra Kelly . Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Distributed by the University of Chicago Press. v + 400 pp. Bibliography. Index. $85.00. Cloth.

Examining autobiographical writings of North African Francophone writers, Debra Kelly studies the ways in which these texts represent the individual and collective experience of French colonialism and its postcolonial legacy. Probing the "life-writing" projects of Mouloud Feraoun and Assia Djebar of Algeria, Abdelkébir Khatibi of Morocco, and Albert Memmi of Tunisia, she finds each writer adopting specific strategies to explore the complex issue of Maghrebian identity.

Beginning with Mouloud Feraoun, whose novel Le Fils du pauvre charts the intellectual journey from Kabyle villager to French colonial schoolteacher, the critic draws attention to the ironic distance he establishes between the narrator and the protagonist. In close readings of Feraoun's journal and letters, she discovers that his personal writings refute the portrait of the "assimilated" Feraoun that emerges in the novel. Kelly continues to read one text with—or against—another in the following chapter, an analysis of Memmi's autobiographical texts. Juxtaposing La Statue de Sel, a linear autobiographical narrative, with Le Scorpion, a highly complex polyphonic narrative, she finds both texts engaged in the process of uncovering a personal and collective past and preserving it from erasure. Her analysis also reveals Memmi's preoccupation with the role of imagination in autobiographical narrative, a concern he shares with Khatibi.

Turning to Khatibi's La Mémoire Tatouée, she finds the Moroccan novelist bringing childhood memories and accounts of real events, dreams, and impressions together in a text which, like Memmi's Le Scorpion, is structurally and stylistically complex and emphasizes the genesis of a writer. Kelly notes that Khatibi's text presents a series of binary oppositions: two towns (El Jadida and Essaouira); two mothers (his own mother and his aunt); two environments (his Moroccan family and the French school); two cultures (Arabo-Muslim and French); two languages (French and Arabic). Searching for the significance of the tattoo that figures in the title, she concludes that it hides multiple meanings, seconding Lucy Stone McNeece's observation that the title establishes the primacy of the sign and expresses Khatibi's belief that memory is corporeal, sensuous, indelible.

The final chapter, a study of Djebar's L'amour, la fantasia and Vaste est la prison, brings women's voices and preoccupations into the analysis. As Kelly observes, Djebar's most obvious writing strategy is to alternate personal memories with the recuperation of Algerian women's lost history. In her view, Djebar does more than retrieve Algeria's lost history; she engages in the larger issues of gender, colonization, and war. In this vein, she discovers that although Djebar's childhood memories needed to be accompanied by an exploration of Algerian history in the first text, the autobiographical [End Page 132] journey in the second is purely personal and, most important, leads "to the knowledge of potential salvation in the written word" (302).

Kelly's thoughtful, well-researched, informative study will encourage readers to reflect further upon two sets of relationships that are crucial to the understanding of Maghrebian literature today: subjectivity and literary expression on the one hand; aesthetics and political engagement on the other.

Mildred Mortimer
University of Colorado, Boulder
Boulder, Colorado
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