The Earth of the Wretched: Restoring the Vegetal Voice in Yamina Mechakra’s La Grotte éclatée

Abstract

Yasmina Mechakra’s first novel, La Grotte éclatée, is a deeply moving and at times surreal testimony to the horrors of war and its aftermath. Through her use of a female, orphaned narrator, Mechakra effectively recovers voices most often lost to official History, be it colonial or national Algerian. In this article, I expand this act of recuperation beyond the human, to the vegetal realm. I show that an olive tree figures as a central protagonist in the text, allowing the author to present an Indigenous cosmology that subverts ethnocentric notions of anthropocentric hierarchy. I then read Mechakra alongside and against Frantz Fanon—specifically, The Wretched of the Earth—to show what this decentering of the human allows the reader to access anticolonial thought. While Fanon pays special attention to the land in his thought on Algeria, I show that his theory of land use reifies colonial notions of the environment. Mechakra provides a productive intertext that we may consider alongside Fanon as a means of grounding postcolonial thought in Inidigenous ontology, and recuperating the vegetal voices lost to the postcolonial field.

Keywords:

• Yamina Mechakra
• Frantz Fanon
• postcolonial theory
• ecocriticism
• indigeneity
• personhood

Notes

1 I am very grateful to Jill Jarvis and Eden Almasude for engaging in countless, very fruitful exchanges about Yamina Mechakra, La Grotte éclatée, and my argument as it is presented in this article. Their care for the text is without bounds and the space they created and maintain to explore its meanings and limits made this work possible.

2 Scholarship on Mechakra is quite scant, a reality perhaps related to and reflected in her publication history. Indeed, both La Grotte éclatée and Mechakra’s second novel, Arris, are both currently out of print in the original French, with only a single translation (to Arabic) of La Grotte éclatée and none of Arris. Mechakra has also remained on the margins of the North African literary canon, with few scholars dedicating substantial time and space to readings of her work. Notable exceptions include Orlando, Valérie. The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950–1972. UVA Press, 2017; Jarvis, Jill. Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony. Duke University Press, forthcoming 2021. See also Alexandra Gueydan’s unpublished dissertation, ImagiNation (post)nationale de l'Algerie : Politique et pratique identitaires de la literature francophone algerienne, Yale University, 2008. https://www-proquest-com.yale.idm.oclc.org/docview/304390278. Rachid Mokhtari recently published interviews with Mechakra accompanied by a brief analysis of her work (Mokhtari, Rachid. Yamina Mechakra. Entretiens et lectures. Algiers, Chihab Editions, 2015).

3 For further analysis of gendered voice, agency and embodied experience in Mechakra, see Marie-Blanche Tahon and Ruthmarie H. Mitsch, “Women Novelists and Women in the Struggle for Algeria’s National Liberation (1957–1980),” Research in African Literatures 23, no. 2 (1992), pp. 39–50. Rachid Mokhtari writes beautifully of the (unprecedented) impact of Mechakra’s feminine, militant “je” (13). This interest has shown to take bear out problematically, however, as Mechakra’s female voice, her “écriture feminine” (a loaded term for those familiar with French feminist theory) have been essentialized by some scholars, as is the case in Jones, Christa. “La Caverne algérienne chez Yamina Méchakra et Georges Buis: Lieu de résistance, de maternité ou de combat.” Nouvelles Études Francophones, vol. 36, no.1, 2011, 142.

4 Oyeronke Oyewumi uses “world-sense” as “a more inclusive way of describing the conception of the world by different cultural groups” that do not privilege the visual over other senses (3).

5 The apparition of this chemical pesticide in both texts is not coincidence, but reflective of historical phenomena, as the war waged against disease-ridden insects mapped onto geopolitical tensions in the second half of the twentieth century (Wenzel, “Reading Fanon” 194). Rachel Carson also dedicates significant attention to DDT in her groundbreaking study, Silent Spring (1962).

6 The pastoral does not map perfectly onto Mechakra’s environmental imagination, though there is some resonance. Situating Mechakra in the field of environmental literature is beyond the scope of the current study, but suggests an avenue for future work.

7 Rob Nixon undertakes a brief reading of DDT as it appears in The Wretched of the Earth, although, as Opperman points out, he seems to misunderstand Fanon’s argument, seeing DDT as decolonial weapon rather than a tool of the colonizer, as Fanon conceives of it (71).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abigail Fields

Abigail Fields is a doctoral candidate in the Department of French at Yale University. Her dissertation interrogates the representation of land and agriculture in the literary canon of the nineteenth-century French canon. She is also interested in translation theory and literary translation. In addition to this work, Abigail is engaged in several creative-critical projects related to Yamina Mechakra’s literary oeuvre, including an English translation of La Grotte éclatée.