Photographic Memories in Leila Sebbaris Le Chinois vert diAfrique

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn't attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don't see.

—Emmet Gowin

Leïla Sebbar's novel Le Chinois vert d'Afrique, published in 1984, inscribes itself directly in the debates about culture and the politics of representation in the postmodern, postcolonial world.¹ A novel about memory and identity, Le Chinois vert d'Afrique addresses the questions of how we remember and what is rendered as history through the figure of Mohamed, a twelve-year-old urban nomad of French, Algerian, and Vietnamese heritage whose native country is the banlieue. In choosing to represent the urban landscape of France through the eyes and experiences of a deterritorialized if not dislocated Beur youth, Sebbar seeks to chronicle the condition of exile, nomadism, and pluricultural identity that is constitutive of contemporary experience in global capitalism. As Françoise Lionnet comments, Sebbar's characters "are from nowhere and everywhere, they are emblematic of the shock of societies resulting from the major upheavals of (de)colonization. It is the very concept of the French 'Hexagon' and the notion of 'francité' that is questioned in her novels and essays" (336).

If Sebbar's aesthetic anchors itself firmly in a poetics of exile,² this is due not only to her representation of the (im)migrant experience within postcolonial societies but also, and perhaps just as importantly, to her focus on the relationship of images to the past, a relationship that has become highly problematic in postmodernism. Associated on one level with the globalizing forces of the "culture of the simulacrum," images today are radically altering the very structure of memory, the ways we perceive and live our temporality. As Andreas Huyssen explains:

Both personal and social memory today are affected by an emerging new structure of temporality generated by the quickening pace of material life on the one hand and by the acceleration of media images and information on the other. Speed destroys space, and it erases temporal distance. In both cases, the mechanism of physiological perception is altered. [. . .] A sense of historical continuity or, for that matter, discontinuity, both of which depend on a before and an after, gives way to the simultaneity of all times and spaces readily accessible in the present. (253)

The immediacy of experience brought about via the consumption of images has, to a large degree, contributed to varying degrees of amnesia in our culture as the boundaries between reality and the image disappear and the ephemeral and the impermanent are privileged. However, alongside these developments, or, as Huyssen argues, in direct correlation with them, our society has also witnessed "a memory boom of unprecedented proportions":

There are widespread debates about memory in the cultural, social, and natural sciences. In an age of emerging supranational structures, the problem of national identity is increasingly discussed in terms of cultural or collective memory rather than in terms of the assumed identity of nation and state. [. . .] Struggles for minority rights are increasingly organized around questions of cultural memory, its exclusions and taboo zones. [. . .] Migrations and demographic shifts are putting a great deal of pressure on social and cultural memory in all Western societies, and such public debates are intensely political. (5)

How are we to make sense of the prevalence of cultural and historical amnesia, on the one hand, and the "obsession" with memory, on the other? In posing this question, Huyssen perceptively recognizes that rather than functioning in opposition to one another, memory and amnesia are indeed configurations of the same epistemological shift. For Huyssen,

our obsessions with memory function as a reaction formation against the accelerating technical processes that are transforming our Lebenswelt (lifeworld) in quite distinct ways. Memory [. . .] represents the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity...