The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb by Claudia Esposito (review)

The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb by Claudia Esposito is an update of the some of the most important literary texts written in French and Italian by various significant contemporary authors from former French North African colonies. It asserts itself as an antidote to “dogmatic and identitarian fundamentalisms,” among which is the much feared “clash of civilizations between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ on European ground.” In this respect, Esposito positions her work as a “positive alternative” to Samuel Huntington’s “(in)famous book” The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Among Maghrebi writers, Amin Maalouf holds a similar view in Le Périple de Baldassare,¹ whereas the fictionalizing of Amara Lakhous’s life story in Scontro de civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio,² translated into English, unequivocally echoes Huntington’s vision.

According to Esposito, “Reading writers who identify with the Maghreb in relation to the Mediterranean rather than in opposition to France allows not only for more wide-reaching, broader, and deeper transversal understandings into the aftereffects of colonization, it also presents new iterations of a millennial space.” Indeed, The Narrative Mediterranean proposes a postcolonial approach of French and Maghrebi literature rooted in various literary topoi. However, although Esposito points to a shift in plurilingual literary production by some contemporary Maghrebi writers in order to escape the bilingual, historical, and colonial French-Arabic heritage, her work still deals mainly with French and Francophone writers.

Esposito’s purpose is to propose a literary construct originating from various writers who supposedly share the Mediterranean as a common geographical space, a common source of history, and a mutual source of related values. The selection of the diverse narratives from Maghrebi writers is meant to shed a literary light on the shifting identity of the modern Mediterranean insofar as “words are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassumingly for a higher reality; they are, instead, an integral formative part of that reality.”³ In Jacques Derrida’s own words, literature acts as an antidote to power: “The undecidable in literature refuses sovereignty its own ipseity, rendering the sovereign divisible and no longer sovereign.”⁴

Albert Camus, for example, drew on an “imaginary Mediterranean that was driven by an attempt to formulate a universal, apolitical humanist discourse.” He “developed a profound affinity with nature and with the physical universe of man” yet conceded that nature cannot fully account for one’s identity. How does one become what one is, and how does one find one’s measure, wonders Camus—pondering a “virtuality” of Being that subtends the Mediterranean ethos of each of the writers in Esposito’s book. Camus’s fundamental philosophies of the absurd and revolt can be traced back to his “Mediterranean feeling”—a desire for rationality in a nonrational world that drives one to rebel in order to affirm life, “an irrepressible demand of human nature, of which the Mediterranean, where intelligence is intimately related to the blinding light of the sun, guards the secret.”⁵ Likewise, Camus’s humanism stems from the Mediterranean “solar thought”—that of Protagoras, Heraclitus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and the Stoics. Finally affirming that the writer’s function is to serve those who are the “subjects” of history, Camus set the stage for rewriting alternate narratives of the Mediterranean.

Resurrecting “historical models of the past as a way of understanding the world in the present” through “chronological others,” the novels of Maalouf and Fawzi Mellah offer alternative histories of the Mediterranean. Maalouf posits that cultural diversity and mixing, Enlightenment ideals, and self-conscious identity define a vital Mediterranean identity and ethos, despite a tension between self and belonging to a nation, an ethnic community, or a religion. Mellah warns, “If our contemporaries are not encouraged to accept their multiple affiliations and allegiances . . . then we shall be bringing into being legions of the lost and hordes of bloodthirsty madmen.”⁶ Maalouf puts the question of translation...