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ABSTRACT
Farid Boudjellal’s Petit Polio series (Soleil/Futuropolis, 1998–2012) is a bildungsroman that contests the narrative and aesthetic deployment of disability as prosthetic metaphor in the post-colonial context. In this series, the male, disabled, Franco-Algerian body takes on an allegorical yet violently embodied position. The intersection of disability and racial markedness here produces representations of bodies that might be considered ‘ravaged’, but in fact those bodies operate as carriers of cultural memory and sites from which a political discourse critical of French universalism can be launched.
Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to Toulon native Caroline Noble for helping me identify precise locations and southern expressions in dialogue, to Lia Brozgal, and to JGNC’s anonymous readers for their careful reading and feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Also see Flaugh (Citation2010).
2. Also see Snyder and Mitchell (Citation2006, Citation2010); James and Wu (Citation2006); Ingstad and Whyte (Citation2007) Cheyne (Citation2010), and Ervelles and Minear (Citation2010) for cogent reflections on the intersections of disability and postcoloniality and/or race. José Alaniz (Citation2014) examines such intersections in Silver Age American comics.
3. Initially invaded by the French in 1830, the northern part of Algeria was officially annexed to the French Empire in 1848 and remained a part of France until Independence was won in a war officially waged from 1954–1962. Algeria had the distinction of being the Empire’s only settler colony, and the territory was divided into three overseas ‘departments’, which were subject to the same administrative logic as the departments of the metropole just across the Mediterranean. Native Algerians had the status of French subjects, if not citizens, with the exception of Jews who became French citizens under the Crémieux Decree in 1870 (Jewish citizenship was revoked under Vichy and reinstated again in 1944 with the abolition of the Vichy laws). The particularly bloody war for independence involved atrocities on both sides and resulted, among other things, in the (re)migration to France of thousands of Pieds-Noirs (residents of Algeria who were of European descent, many of whose ancestors were not originally from France and/or who had lived in Algeria for generations) and Harkis (Algerians who fought on the side of the French during the war for Independence). Members of these groups, added to the massive numbers of Algerians who emigrated to France during the post-War economic boom years, in addition to Maghrebis from Morocco and Tunisia, make for an extremely heterogeneous population of contemporary French citizens who have personal and historical connections to North Africa. Excluding those of European origin, these individuals and their descendants are often referred to as beurs, from a French back-slang term for Arab (although many are not in fact of Arab descent).
4. Here I am of course evoking the numerous critiques of Jameson’s account that have reproached him for ‘flattening’ the postcolonial context, depriving authors of local specificities. See Jameson (Citation1986), Ahmad (Citation1987), Bensmaïa (Citation1999).
5. Chouchou (Allouache, Merzak, dir Citation2003), a film about a cross-dressing, gay beur, can be interpreted as an attempt to satirise and re-appropriate such homophobic feminisations.
6. The patrician Franklin Delano Roosevelt being to this day possibly the most famous polio sufferer in Western history.
7. Mémé d’Arménie also garnered a special mention for the Prix Œcuménique at Angoulême in Citation2003.
8. Boudjellal does not disavow the autobiographical echoes between himself and Mahmoud, whom he calls a sort of ‘narcissistic stand-in’ (‘un substitut narcissique’) with a different name. He does insist that the work is not an autobiography, because its function is not to tell his life story, but rather to recount a common, shared history of the Algerian War. See Boudjellal et al. (Citation2007, 116–117).
9. Boudjellal first introduced the characters of the Mahmoud’s family, the Slimani’s, then living in Paris, in the Oud Trilogy (Boudjellal Citation2000b).
10. Some of this aesthetic evolution could be attributed an evolution in Boudjellal’s artistic skills, and indeed he is quite modest in his judgements about his abilities at the beginning of the Petit Polio series, as evoked in the citation below. But whether the evolution comes from a change in style or an improvement in skills, the effect on meaning within the text is readable in the same way.
11. All translations in this article are my own, with the exception of Mark McKinney’s (Citation2011) interview with Boudjellal that was published in translation by McKinney. French is included in brackets/endnotes where consultation with the original might provide additional insight.
12. ‘Dans Petit Polio, tous mes personnages boitent. […] Mon dessin boite, je le vois au déhanchement des personnages, qu’ils soient en position debout ou en mouvement’.
13. Mahmoud’s mother is also in the panel. She is wearing a skirt that makes it much less clear whether her legs take any slant (at mid-calf they appear vertical), but her arm sets up a diagonal line that extends that of Mahmoud’s stronger, but in this image very bent-kneed, leg.
14. While a single bande dessinée series is not an adequate basis for generalisation, this gendered difference between the representations of bodies in Franco-North African film and comics, as demonstrated in Boudjellal’s texts, may provide the basis for further inquiry should one care to pursue the question of how and why gender functions differently between film and comics within this cultural sphere. Such inquiry is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is worth mentioning that – so far as my reading yet extends – other French-language comic book representations of the Algerian war are consistent with the gendering seen in the Petit Polio series.
15. The phrasing is McKinney’s, but he in turn references Douglas and Malti-Douglas, as well as Miller. Pieds-Noirs are Europeans settled in French Algeria, often for many generations, who were ‘repatriated’ to France with much bitterness during and after the war of independence.
16. In an interview with Mark McKinney (Citation2011, 14–15), Boudjellal explains the parallels between himself and Robert Ranoukian, concluding that ‘Arabic is a language that I have in me, which I can feel and hear, but with a kind of wound that comes from a separation that has caused me to forget the language’ (15).
17. For a reading of Le Cousin Harki also in relation to trauma studies, see Santos-Knight (Citation2014).
18. As he was finishing Le Cousin Harki, Boudjellal was pretty clear that the series would stop there: ‘I think that with this book I will have truly reached the end of something, since all the books that I’m thinking of doing are not at all along those lines. I’m really already into something else’ (McKinney Citation2011, 22).
19. It is certainly the case that less affluent immigrant communities will suffer higher instances of and greater consequences as a result of childhood maladies, but asthma and polio (in the early and mid-twentieth century) were certainly widespread across social and ethnic/racial classes, and do not automatically code as ‘poor’ or ‘minority’ health problems in the way that infant HIV or ‘crack baby’ do. Moreover, Boudjellal is outspoken about the great benefits he himself derived as a child from France’s socialised medical system – a system that at least attempts to attenuate social inequalities when facing the consequences of dealing with disability and chronic illness.
20. The FLN or Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front) was the main revolutionary body during the war, and its armed wing was the ALN, or the Armée de liberation nationale (National Liberation Army).
21. For a particularly compelling highlight, see Naomi Schor (Citation1995).
22. Created by the Allar brothers, the fountain was designed in 1889 to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Fête de la Fédération of 1790.
23. For a concise analysis of French universalism, see Schor (Citation2006).
24. Abdelkader, rather like Joan of Arc, has over the years been instrumentalised for various political ends due to the complicated nature of his history in relationship to Arabness, Berber tribes, French colonialism and Islam.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Margaret C. Flinn
Margaret C. Flinn is an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian and the Program in Film Studies at The Ohio State University, USA. She is the author of The Social Architecture of French Cinema, 1929–39 (Liverpool University Press, 2014, http://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/60958), as well as articles on various topics in French and Francophone cinemas, new media art, and bande dessinée, in journals such as SubStance, Esprit Créateur, Yale French Studies and European Comic Art.