Camus's Algeria: Birthrights, Colonial Injustice, and the Fiction of a French-Algerian People

A literature of failure is not a failure of literature.

Albert Memmi, Anthologie des écrivains français du Maghreb

I. Cultural Criticism and Imaginary Communities

I have had a long affair with Algeria which will undoubtedly never end and which keeps me from being completely lucid about it. . . . [Algeria] is my true country.

Albert Camus, “Petit guide pour des villes sans passé” (1947), L’été

In Algeria, French and Arabs are condemned to live together or to die together.

Albert Camus, “L’Algérie déchirée” (1955)

Camus’s Algeria, the Algeria of his literary texts and essays, is an imaginary place that is related in various and complex ways to the “real Algeria” where Camus was born and grew up and to which he remained deeply attached throughout his life. It is a place whose physical characteristics and social dynamics owe as much, if not more, to Camus’s desires, fears, and his imaginative faculty or his literary-aesthetic sensibilities as to his sense of history or politics or his critical, analytical faculties. Camus’s Algeria is rooted as much in his dreams (and nightmares) as in lived experiences; it takes form more in his novels and short stories than in his journalism and political pronouncements. Its location, history, and relations to other imaginary (and real) places thus cannot be determined either by consulting maps of Africa, no matter how detailed, or history books, no matter how complete, for it owes as much to Camus’s art and imagination as it does to geography, ideology, or a systematic understanding of history and politics.

Camus’s Algeria is thus a construct or fiction which does not so much ignore or negate historical reality as recast or redirect it. More important, his Algeria is the homeland of a particular imaginary community where a people with a distinct cultural identity is alleged to have formed itself or to have been formed, a site where narratives of the birth, development, and even death of this people, its triumphs and defeats, its possibilities and limitations, are inscribed. As a fictional site for an imaginary community, Camus’s Algeria may not in fact be different in nature from the “homelands” of those other imaginary communities we call nations. ¹ The latter do differ, however, in terms of their real function and effects, for they can claim an historical-political existence and legitimacy that Camus’s Algeria and the Algerians who inhabit it lack. Camus’s Algeria thus represents an idea or fiction of community that was never actualized in history—which does not mean that it is without historical or political interest.

One question that needs to be asked at the outset, therefore, is whether it is legitimate to judge Camus’s literary writings and particularly his imaginary portraits of Algeria and Algerians on historical-political grounds alone, whether the irreality or even “illegitimacy” of his Algeria negates both the literary and political interest and importance his novels and short stories might otherwise have. If history has shown that Camus was “wrong” about Algeria, then perhaps he was also wrong about everything else, and we would thus be wrong to find any interest in his writings beyond the fact that they provide us with still another example of a perhaps well-intentioned but still deeply-rooted Eurocentrism.

If this is so, cultural critics intent on highlighting the injustices and devastation caused by colonialism and the way its effects are still being felt in the postcolonial world thus would have very good reasons for attacking on political grounds both Camus’s Algeria and the “moderate solutions” to the Algerian question he proposed both before and during the Algerian War. But if a critic today were intent on indicting Camus for being the spokesperson for an alleged colonialist mentality, he or she would find that much of the task had already been accomplished and that a model for a severe postcolonial cultural critique of Camus and his work has existed for quite some time. It would in fact be difficult to imagine that...