On fait souvent dépendre la valeur d'un écrit de sa force de témoignage et de son réalisme. Or, la tricherie de l’écriture ne permet pas de circonscrire la véracité du témoignage et le réalisme d'une œuvre n'est pas nécessairement proportionnel à la description d'une société et d'une époque.
[The value of a piece of writing is often seen to depend upon its capacity to bear witness and its realism. However, writing's ruse does not allow for restrictions on how truth is expressed and the realism of a work is not necessarily proportionate to its description of a society or a period.]
Abdelkébir Khatibi, Le Roman maghrébin.*
This issue of Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: SITES returns to Abdelkébir Khatibi's influential text Le Roman maghrébin (1968) nearly 50 years after its publication and asks where the roman magrébin is now. Khatibi's analysis situates the “Maghrebian” novel within its social and political contexts while highlighting the critical importance of aesthetics, what he calls un ensemble d'attitudes, a writing that appropriates, in its own way, its political and social contexts. Chief amongst those contexts, then, was the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) which, along with other struggles of decolonization, gave Maghrebian writers a platform and material. Placing the emphasis mainly on francophone writing in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, Khatibi notes how the novelists of the 1950s and 1960s (such as Driss Chraïbi, Kateb Yacine, and Albert Memmi) are united by the common conviction that what they have to say about these new or prospective nations, and the legacies of colonization, was important. Their work was to be a contribution to the revolutionary process of decolonization by cultural means, an opportunity to give expression to a society in crisis (Khatibi, Le Roman 11). Khatibi advocates the construction of forms of national culture across North Africa that would break colonial ties with France and establish new cultural relations and networks with what was then called the “Third World” (Le Roman 14). This work of form, these new articulations of national culture, these new networks of exchange were to be important if a cultural, as well as political, form of decolonization were to take place.
What, then, of the Maghrebian novel today? If Khatibi asked what meaning the novel might have for North Africans in 1968, then the question is of equal relevance today. If the roman maghrébin were to continue the revolution by other means in the 1960s, can the same be said of the contemporary novel across the Maghreb today? The articles in this special issue can be situated within Khatibi's view of the Maghrebian novel; indeed they display what we might call a “thematic continuation” rather than a break with the past even if some of the issues have changed or evolved: there is a concern to engage with a political dimension (the shadow of the state, the emergence of Islamism, the “Arab Spring,” the harragas—those “boatpeople” whose very presence mirrors the persistence of economic as well as political hardship—a continued exploration of aesthetic possibilities, a concern with neo-colonialism—its pressures and temptations—and the unfinished work of decolonization). The very existence and strength of the contemporary Maghrebian novel in French seems almost to confound Khatibi's expectations about its survival; in Le Roman maghrébin, he cited Albert Memmi's prognosis that writing in French would eventually die out (30). Indeed, Khatibi expected the current generation of writers to advise “new generations [of writers] to use their national language” (40). Nearly 50 years later the francophone Maghrebian novel has not yet faded away but is in good health in the face of successive policies of Arabization and Amazight cultural resurgence.
A number of articles in this collection remind us of the continuing and fraught question of language. Hoda El-Shakry draws our attention to the tensions between authoritative language and vernacular speech within the Maghreb and argues that it is the polysemic and multilingual characteristic of the Maghrebian novel, its position as locus of exchanges between languages of the region that endow it with a capacity to disrupt hegemonic forms of discourse. Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla interrogates the Moroccan cultural scene, connecting Khatibi's work with the Souffles group to the early reception of Arabic novels in Morocco, then insisting on linguistic complexity in the twenty-first century, by including Moroccan novels in Darija, Amazigh, Spanish, Catalan, English, Italian, and German. Where Khatibi risks a generalization in saying that the Maghrebian novel in French is Algerian while the Arab Maghrebian novel is Tunisian and Moroccan (Le Roman 15), what is remarkable, as Mohand Akli Salhi and Nabila Sadi outline in their article, is the recent emergence of the Maghrebian Berber novel written in Amazigh (i.e. in one of its three forms: Tamazight, Tarifit, or Tachelhit). These novels prise open the identity of the Maghrebian novel in giving expression to the identity of diverse Berber groups that stretch across Morocco and Algeria. Publishing in Tamazight is political in and of itself and the themes are often provocative, and deliberately so, questioning the relationship between the individual and the state, sexual taboos, and the constant need to re-negotiate Berber tradition and modernity.
French, however, remains as the pre-eminent language of the Maghrebian novel, and the legacy of French culture and literature continues to exert influence. Lia Brozgal pursues this issue through her perceptive reading of Kamel Daoud's novel Meursault, contre-enquête (2013) arguing that we need not read Daoud's reworking of Albert Camus's novel L’Étranger as symptomatic of an anxiety of influence that inflects Algerian writing in French, but as a vigorous interrogation of literature itself. Alexandra Gueydan-Turek in her analysis of Mustapha Benfodil's novel Archéologie du chaos (amoureux) addresses the same question—that of writing a novel in French—differently. She argues that Benfodil's political activism (in the pro-democracy Bezzzef movement) is given expression through unauthorized public readings—interventions—that unbind his literary production from the Parisian “center” and re-inscribe (Algerian) literature within the public sphere, making of it an agent of change. Jane Hiddleston pursues the relationship between aesthetic objects and politics along another path and makes an equally compelling case for the relevance of the novel to society. She reads recent work by writers born in Algeria (such as Tahar Djaout, Malika Mokeddem, Mustapha Benfodil, Salim Bachi, and Boualem Sansal) and finds a recurrent theme of doubt which, she argues, is inflected within the form of their narratives. Such figurations of doubt and uncertainty are antidotes to doctrinaire and hegemonic thought, and critical to free thinking. Lynda-Nawel Tebbani follows another route, arguing for an aesthetic reading over one that reflects political realities in the work of Algerian writer Mourad Djebel. After rejecting qualifying terms such as “francophone” and “postcolonial,” Tebbani argues that one is left with a writerly compulsion to bear witness to memory itself in the pursuit of an avant-garde where an expression of “national consciousness” is simply an epiphenomenon of the formal exploration of memory.
A significant number of leading Algerian writers (Benfodil, Daoud, Bachi, Djebel, Amari) are published by the independent publishing house Barzakh, which was established in Algiers in 2000. Corbin Treacy assesses l'effet Barzakh by reading the intention of its founders (Selma Hellal and Sofiane Hadjadj) to integrate Algerian writers into the Algerian “body” (metaphysical, literary, intellectual) in tandem with the works of the novelists they publish. Treacy argues that the effect is to continue the work of cultural decolonization and to sponsor the evolution of a national consciousness through innovative writing. Mary Anne Lewis asks to what extent is this national consciousness supported by independent publishing houses (such as Barzakh in Algeria, Elyzad in Tunisia, La Croisée des Chemins in Morocco) at the intersection of globalization, authorial identity, language choice, and a particular country's weight in international publishing circuits.
The works of many of the writers considered in this volume might appear to reinscribe the relationship, however fraught, between literature and the nation-state rather than give figure to an idea of the Maghreb that is, by definition, transnational. In many ways, social crises that threaten a nation can also reinforce it. Debbie Barnard argues that a return to Tunisian history and myth by novelists Sophie El Goulli and Abdelaziz Belkhodja offers a way of underpinning a notion of Tunisia that is independent of both “colonialisms”—seventh-century Arabic expansionism and nineteenth-century French colonialism—and productive of new ways of pluralist thinking, if specifically Tunisian. But the turn to (imagined) traditions is only one way of circumventing the legacies of the past and the challenges of the present. Focusing on the transcolonial as a site within which both colonial traces and neo-colonial forms can be interrogated, Olivia Harrison draws out the ways in which Anouar Benmalek, Yasmina Khadra, and Rachid Boudjedra place ongoing conflicts in Palestine and Iraq into a form of palimpsestic analysis that highlights the unfinished work of decolonization, both politically and culturally, and follows Khatibi's call to create new circuits of exchange in the “Third World,” or Global South.
Khatibi lays stress upon an avant-garde exploration of form that would sustain a revolutionary position, yet content itself can be transgressive, rebellious, where it challenges social norms. Alessandro Badin details scenes within the work of two Moroccan writers, Rachid O. and Abdellah Taïa, where heteronormativity is subverted through a desire that is implicitly homosexual and, for the most part, enunciated through an autobiographical mode that Khatibi had also identified as one of the privileged modes of expression within the roman maghrébin (Le Roman 109–110). Indeed, contemporary Maghrebian writers demonstrate a sustained interrogation of literature as a space within which everyday social problems and encounters can be explored. Afaf Zaid argues that today's novel continues to respond to pressing issues—poverty, social and political marginalization—and to question the relationship between such conditions and the kinds of radicalization that would lead someone to undertake acts of terror. Her focus on Mahi Binebine's Les Étoiles de Sidi Moumen looks at the intersection of real events and the literary through the non-space of bidonvilles in Morocco as sites of non-identity that are re-made in literature. Meg Furniss-Weisberg reads Khatibi's promotion of an engaged writing and pushes it forward to claim that clandestine migration is an all-encompassing topic for many writers in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. These writers ask readers to bear witness to this phenomenon of précarité, just as writers in the fifties and sixties committed to and bore witness to the Algerian war. With new histories come new forms, as Nina Wardleworth illustrates. Her look at literary production in Tunisia after the Arab Spring offers new forms of expression (especially to women writers) and as such blogs, photo diaries, graphic novels, radio pieces, tweets, and art exhibitions combine in various ways to alter the very ways the roman maghrébin appears as writing/written.
In Le Roman maghrébin Khatibi was aware of the difficulty of writing about the “Maghrebian novel”. It was not, he quickly conceded, characterized by a “coherent unity” and the term itself was confused and open to ambiguity (15). Nonetheless, Khatibi continued to think and write about the Maghreb long after the publication of Le Roman maghrébin, notably Maghreb Pluriel (1983) and Penser le Maghreb (1993). The Maghreb, as both figure and project, encompassed a plurality of forms within a single designation, a dynamic interplay of competition and complementarities between the different countries, political decisions, and the actions of civil society. Khatibi views the work of the intellectual as critical in the exercise of vigilance over those irrational forces that seek to guide history (Penser 119–120). The emergence of new publishing houses across the Maghreb means that writers are intimately, materially, locally involved in the construction of public spheres across the region.
Indeed, as the articles in this collection suggest, the Maghrebian novel is central to Khatibi's call for vigilance for it is within such works, the exploration of an aesthetics that is proper to the novel, that thought is given form and released into a public sphere that is both of, and greater than, the nation states of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
This special issue includes a short work of previously unpublished fiction by Salim Bachi titled ‘James Joyce’. It's a dense, exciting, and exacting piece of writing in which Bachi interweaves biography, fiction, elements from Joyce's work, an insistent referencing of the heterodox thinker Giordano Bruno–a link to the leitmotif of being burnt alive for one's ideas and passions–in a pursuit of Joyce's desire for Amalia Popper that doubles as an exploration of the ‘Babil babylonien’ of languages. As do so many of the novels we explore in this issue, Bachi's short story lucidly and yet playfully covers that space between aesthetics, language and history that is common to regions well beyond the Maghreb.
Finally, the opposition between hegemonic power and the multiplicity of identities embodied not only by novelists but by artists and men and women in general, of whatever region, is reflected in this issue's two covers illustrated by two paintings by Abdel Mir, born in France of Algerian parents: on the one hand “The Colonel,” that emblem of overweening authority and repression common to so many traditions, and, on the other, those “teneurs de murs,” (barely) standing on the periphery of centralized power.
The issue is dedicated to the memory of our colleague Michael Sheringham.
Roger Célestin, Patrick Crowley, Eliane DalMolin, Megan C. MacDonald
*Khatibi, Abdelkébir. Le Roman maghrébin. Paris: François Maspero, 1968, 12.
Notes on contributors
Roger Célestin is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).
Patrick Crowley teaches literature and cultural studies in the Department of French, University College Cork. He is the author of Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names (Peter Lang, 2007), and has completed three co-edited volumes: Formless (Peter Lang, 2005); Mediterranean Travels (Legenda, 2011), and Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form (Liverpool UP, 2011). He has published essays on Assia Djebar, Eugène Fromentin, Albert Memmi, Nadir Moknèche, and Kateb Yacine amongst others. He served as General Editor of the Irish Journal of French Studies (2011–2014) and, in 2011, was awarded a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship for the project “Algeria: Nation and Transnationalism 1988–2010”.
Eliane DalMolin is a Professor of French and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).
Megan C. MacDonald is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Koç University, Istanbul. Her forthcoming monograph Cannibal, Harraga, Musselman: Literary Precarity and the Mediterranean Turn looks at transnational and postcolonial francophone literatures and cinema in transit across Mediterranean spaces. She has published on francophone literatures and theory in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Francosphères, and The International Journal of Francophone Studies.