History's Place: Nostalgia and the City in French Algerian Literature (review)

One of the objectives that Seth Graebner has set himself in writing this book is to broaden the field of francophone studies by erasing the artificial separation between its canon of works produced by African and Caribbean writers, on one hand, and on the other, those produced by "native" French authors. No area of francophone studies is more appropriate for the pursuit of this effort than Algeria, whose history, starting from the French conquest in 1830 up to independence in 1962, was marked by an intense and troubled relationship between the indigenous ethnicities, Arab and Berber, and the settler populations, notably of French origin, a demographic and cultural situation further complicated by the presence of a substantial Jewish minority wedged between the two opposed communities. Dr. Graebner's study is devoted to an exploration of the Algerian experience during this period, as this experience is registered in imaginative literature and other forms of discourse expressed in French. It is also concerned with the intersection of history and space, the latter category manifested in the urbanism that developed as part of French colonial policy, as a reflection both of an imperial will and, more profoundly, as an impossible longing for an alternative homeland in the conquered territory, as one that had to be remade in one's image, with little or no concession to native traditions and interests. It is to this latter aspect of the work that the subtitle alludes.

Graebner approaches the lived context of experience that the French colonial order in Algeria determined for both the indigenous and settler populations from different perspectives; it is their convergence within a single unfolding master narrative that is the subject of his book. The theme that seems to me to dominate this narrative is the effort to reduce the contradictions of the colonial order in Algeria to a single meaning, which enables each writer or group of writers to seek to formulate for itself what they regard as the necessary shape and direction, the logic, of colonial history. Each phase of the literary and intellectual history that Graebner recounts and analyzes, beginning with Bertrand's "Latin Africa" and culminating in the summative fiction of Kateb Yacine, represents a continuing effort to impose some form of conceptual order upon a refractory history, marked by profound cleavages that it was impossible to bridge, breeding animosities and leading inevitably to the violent conflicts by which this history has been riven.

Perhaps the most significant pointer in Graebner's account to the dilemmas entailed in this effort is furnished by the moral perplexities that Albert Camus had to grapple with during his life time and which, as Graebner suggests, are reflected in the narrative pitfalls into which he was to fall in his posthumous novel, Le premier homme. The sections that he devotes to Camus (206–35) chronicle what we must now consider a failure of understanding on the part of the great novelist, a failure that is evident in the illogicalities of his political rhetoric and the inconsistencies of his choices. These can only be explained by the unbearable pressures of the moment that even his moral energies were unable to overcome.

It is of interest in this regard to step back in time, and to note the equally conflicted nature of the early novels produced in the thirties by the first generation of indigenous writers. The chapter Graebner devotes to their work is not only significant for its documentary value—the revelation it provides of this group of writers and their anticipation by more than twenty years of what is now regarded as the efflorescence of Algerian literature—but also his insistence on the ambiguous key on which these novels are rung, despite the basic note of dissidence they are intended to convey. This leads him to make a perceptive observation regarding the compulsions that may be said to operate in this kind of fiction: "Reading anticolonialist commitment in the colonial novel requires us...