The Poor Man's Son: Menrad, Kabyle Schoolteacher (review)

One year into the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), on December 18, 1955, the intellectual and schoolteacher, Mouloud Feraoun, wrote in his journal: “We [educators] are the descendants, biological and spiritual, of the sans-culottes and the brothers of the outlaws of Kabylia. Ah, if only we could talk to them [the Algerian rebels] here, face-to-face! We would surely come to an understanding, and draw up a modus vivendi. (38).¹ Five years separated this entry from the publication of The Poor Man’s Son, Feraoun’s semi-autobiographical first novel. In the interim his sense of the role of educator as mediator had not changed; but the context of mediation had. His vision of the fictional schoolteacher, humbly living “among the blind” (1), and acting as mediator between different cultures had, in reality, been overtaken by that of the educator as political mediator. The struggle to come to terms with the cultural and social conflict engendered by colonial society had become a struggle to come to terms with the internecine struggles of the Algerian people.² Both the novel’s contents and its trajectory, from its inception in 1939 through its prize-winning launching (1950) and subsequent re-edition (1954), reflect the tumultuous years in France and Algeria that led up to independence. As such it makes an excellent classroom text.

In his introduction, James Le Sueur compares The Poor Man’s Son to Albert Camus’ The First Man suggesting that the former is not a novel about the colonial experience as is the latter (xxii), but rather an “anthropological” novel about Kabyle society. To be sure, the settings of the two novels are very different: Feraoun’s takes place in ethnically homogeneous rural Kabylia, Camus’ in multi-ethnic urban Algiers. It is, however, a deceptive disparity, for the two novels are complementary. Both are about overcoming poverty through education; both are autobiographical; both deal with a particular social group within colonial society; both speak to the way colonization compartmentalized society, marginalizing some groups and advantaging others. Camus’ novel focuses on the impoverished settler to the exclusion of the Algeria, Feraoun’s novel has little room for the settler, concentrating as he does on life in Kabylia. But it is as much about the colonial experience as Camus’, for it is this very absence that makes it such a powerful critique of the inadequacies of colonial society.

At the novel’s outset Feraoun remarks on the romanticizing gaze of the “tourists” that blinds so many of them to the harsh realities of Kabyle existence. A metaphor for the colonial reality of the blindness of the settlers for the Algerians, it sets the tone for the novel and frames the life-story of its main protagonist, Menrad Fouroulou. Throughout the novel Fouroulou tries to reconcile his French education with his cultural heritage as a Kabyle. As the plot unfolds the reader is introduced both to the complexity of Kabyle society and to the way it has been distorted by colonial rule. The novel covers the period 1912 to 1948, a time of great economic hardship for Kabylia. Land sequestration had started in the area during the 1870s, dislocating the lives and livelihood of the Kabyles, but it was during the inter-war period that famine and extreme poverty peaked. Camus drew attention to this in a series of articles written at the time; Feraoun’s novel drives the fact home.³ Where was the settler in Kabylia’s hour of need?

Education for the Algerians was only contemplated on a meaningful scale in the inter-war period but even then enrolment and opportunity were very limited. Kabyles immigrated to urban centers, both in Algeria and France, in search of increased educational and economic possibilities. Those able to benefit from such openings as existed sent a large part of their earnings back to their villages to help their families. The dislocation engendered by the loss of the land, so vital to Kabyle identity, was...