The Algerian War in French/Algerian Writing: Literary Sites of Memory

FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

The Algerian War in French/Algerian Writing

Series Editors

Hanna Diamond (Cardiff University)

Claire Gorrara (Cardiff University)

Editorial Board

Kate Averis (University of London Institute in Paris)

Colin Davis (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Didier Francfort (Université Nancy 2)

Sharif Gemie (University of South Wales)

Kate Griffiths (Cardiff University)

Rod Kedward (University of Sussex)

Simon Kemp (University of Oxford)

Ronan Le Coadic (Université Rennes 2)

Margaret Majumdar (University of Portsmouth)

Nicholas Parsons (Cardiff University)

Debarati Sanyal (University of California, Berkeley)

Maxim Silverman (University of Leeds)

Other titles in the series

Helena Chadderton and Angela Kimyongür (eds), Engagement in Twenty-first-Century French and Francophone Culture: Countering Crises (2017)

Kate Averis and Isabel Hollis-Touré (eds), Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing (2016)

David A. Pettersen, Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France (2016)

Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye (eds), Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature (2013)

Fiona Barclay (ed.), France’s Colonial Legacies: Memory, Identity and Narrative (2013)

Jonathan Ervine, Cinema and the Republic: Filming on the margins in contemporary France (2013)

Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts, Adapting Nineteenth-Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio and Print (2013)

Ceri Morgan, Mindscapes of Montréal: Québec’s urban novel, 1950–2005 (2012)

FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

The Algerian War in

French/Algerian Writing

Literary Sites of Memory

JONATHAN LEWIS

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2018

© Jonathan Lewis, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN    978-1-78683-304-4

eISBN  978-1-78683-306-8

The right of Jonathan Lewis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Cover design by Clifford Hayes (Alamy and Shutterstock images by permission).

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1:  History and Fiction: Literary Spaces, Memorial Spaces

Chapter 2:  Marginalization, Violence and (Dis)Integration: Sites of Republican Memory and Legacies of the Algerian War

Chapter 3:  The Entanglement of Dominant and Other Histories: Representations of 17 October 1961

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Series Editors’ Preface

This series showcases the work of new and established scholars working within the fields of French and francophone studies. It publishes introductory texts aimed at a student readership, as well as research-orientated monographs at the cutting edge of their discipline area. The series aims to highlight shifting patterns of research in French and francophone studies, to re-evaluate traditional representations of French and francophone identities and to encourage the exchange of ideas and perspectives across a wide range of discipline areas. The emphasis throughout the series will be on the ways in which French and francophone communities across the world are evolving into the twenty-first century.

Hanna Diamond and Claire Gorrara

Στή γιαγιά μου

Acknowledgements

My thanks, first and foremost, to Kate Marsh, for her invaluable advice and support throughout the writing of this book. I would also like to thank Charles Forsdick for his guidance and for commenting on chapters along the way. Friends and colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Liverpool, past and present, have provided much-valued encouragement and advice that have, in more important ways than perhaps they have thought, helped me to complete this book. In particular, I would like to thank Kay Chadwick, Chris Harris, S¸ izen Yiacoup, Godfried Croenen, Hugh Hiscock and Kate Hodgson. I am especially grateful to Sarah Lewis at University of Wales Press for responding to queries and for her guidance and help throughout the preparation of the manuscript.

This book developed from doctoral research undertaken at the University of Exeter, and I would like to thank Helen Vassallo for her supervision, Chloe Paver, Paul Cooke, David Houston Jones and Richard Mansell for their input and advice, and other friends and colleagues who, in different ways, helped in getting this project off the ground. In particular, thanks to Damien Gaucher, Lucie Riou, Helen Simmonds, Rebecca Knight, Marjorie White and Laurie Dekhissi for their friendship and support. I am also grateful to the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Exeter for awarding me a doctoral bursary to help fund the research for this project. I reserve a special thank you to Martin Sorrell for inspiring me to pursue an academic career.

A one-year lectureship at the University of Portsmouth allowed me to exchange ideas that equally helped in shaping this project. In particular, I would like to thank Natalya Vince, Walid Benkhaled, Emmanuel Godin, Ann Matear, Manus McGrogan, Martin Evans, Tony Chafer and Joanna Warson. A special thank you to Ben Garner for his friendship and wisdom.

Over the last few years, I have been lucky to have had the opportunity to discuss my work with a number of fellow academics whose insights and advice I have greatly appreciated. I am especially grateful to Fiona Barclay for providing guidance during the early stages of writing this book, to Ruth Scales for her friendship and support, to Philip Dine for his comments on early versions of my work, and also to Patrick Crowley and Jim House. Events organized by the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France, the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies and the Society for French Studies have provided a supportive environment for the exchange of ideas and for meeting others working in the same field, senior academics and postgraduate students alike. I am also indebted to the reviewers of an article submitted to Modern & Contemporary France for their comments and suggestions, which helped to shape Chapter 3 of this book. Part of Chapter 3 is a reproduction of an article that was originally published in Modern & Contemporary France entitled ‘Filling in the Blanks: Memories of 17 October 1961 in Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge’, which appeared in volume 20/03 (2012). This has been reproduced with kind permission from Taylor & Francis.

Finally, I am grateful to my wife Vicki for her patience and good humour throughout the writing of this book, to my parents and brother for their support, both financial and emotional, and to my daughter Ada (11 months old as I write this) for encouraging me to write outside my normal working hours.

Introduction

Memories of the Algerian War are everywhere in France. For so long characterized as ‘une guerre sans nom’ (‘a war without a name’),¹ due in large part to the official state amnesia to which it was subjected for over three decades since its end in 1962, the war has been firmly established in mainstream French political and public debate since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In an article in Le Monde marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the conflict, the leading francophone historian of the Algerian War Benjamin Stora points to the very public debate at the beginning of the 2000s over the use of torture by the French army during the war, the scheduling of the ‘Year of Algeria’ in 2003 and the publication in 2004 of La Guerre d’Algérie, 1954–2004: La Fin de l’amnésie, edited by himself and Mohammed Harbi, as evidence of the prevalence of the war in the French consciousness since the turn of the century.² As Stora goes on to outline however, the conciliatory potential of a more open and public recognition of this traumatic event in French history does not necessarily lead to consensus when it comes to interpreting and remembering the past. The torture debate itself, launched after the publication in Le Monde of Louisette Ighilahriz’s account of being subjected to torture at the hands of the French army and subsequent denials and confessions on the part of high-ranking French generals, demonstrated what Stora has called ‘la guerre des mémoires’ (‘memory wars’),³ as several opposing accounts were allowed to circulate and, in effect, replay divisions and conflicts inherited from the war. Similarly, the passing of a law in 2005, which included an article stipulating that schools were required to teach the ‘positive’ role of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa, was met with fierce criticism by historians and other public figures, further demonstrating the disparity between different accounts of the past that were released in the ‘explosion of memory’⁴ since the turn of the century. Despite the repealing of the article in question, Stora notes that, in the wake of the controversy, it proved impossible to settle on a date to mark the official end of the war: the date of the signing of the Évian Accords, 19 March 1962, which signalled a ceasefire, was deemed unacceptable by the Assemblée Nationale, which cited the continuation of hostilities including the massacre of French settlers after the signing of the accords.⁵ Over a decade later in 2016, the socialist former president François Hollande officially chose the 19 March as the date on which to commemorate the end of the war, leading to criticisms on the part of the Right, and in particular from another former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. In his statement, Sarkozy argued that ‘pour qu’une commémoration soit commune, il faut que la date célebrée soit acceptée par tous’ (‘in order for a commemoration to be common, the date celebrated should be accepted by everyone’),⁶ drawing further attention to the difficulty of establishing a shared memory of the war.

The brief examples cited above demonstrate that, while the Algerian War may have emerged from the periphery to occupy a central position in twenty-first-century French society and culture, no longer characterized as a ‘war without a name’, it is still very much what Martin Evans has called ‘an unfinished war’.⁷ Furthermore, the circulation of a number of diverse, conflicting narratives pertaining to the Algerian War not only underlines the pervasiveness of the war in France, but draws attention to the crucial role of representation in debates over how to remember the war in the twenty-first century. These questions of representing the Algerian War and its memory are at the heart of this book.

More specifically, this is the first book-length study to analyse and problematize the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’ with regard to the representation of the Algerian War and its memory in works by French authors of Algerian origin, drawing on Pierre Nora’s notion of sites ‘where memory crystallizes and secretes itself’.⁸ As Stora has also observed, the recent ‘explosion of memory’ with regard to the war has not only been initiated by journalists and historians, but by the memory work of the children of Algerian immigrants to France,⁹ who were either born in France or moved to France with their parents at a young age. It is with the literary output of this generation of authors that this book is concerned. Evans reiterates the importance of the immigration issue as another ‘ongoing debate which regularly returned France to the Algerian War.’¹⁰ Indeed, according to Evans, the presence of a considerable population of Algerian origin residing in France, the largest immigrant group in the country,¹¹ has since the early 1980s provided a constant reminder of the war and France’s traumatic break from empire.¹² It was also largely at the beginning of this decade that the children of Algerian immigrants began to publish literary texts,¹³ and the primary corpus analysed in this study spans the three to four decades since the early 1980s, when this generation of authors signalled their emergence on the French literary stage.

The interrelation between questions of immigration and the memory of the Algerian War, as well as their representation, has persisted and even intensified since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Continuities between the war and colonialism in general and the marginalization and discrimination faced by immigrants groups in contemporary France were signalled by the Mouvement des Indigènes de la République, an organization founded in 2005 that put forward a passionate critique of French republicanism, which it claimed was influenced by legacies of colonialism – itself justified by republicanism in the first place.¹⁴ For Evans, the publication of the movement’s manifesto constituted further evidence of the ‘unfinished nature of the Algerian War’,¹⁵ as did the outbreak in the same year of urban riots in several French cities following the accidental deaths of two immigrant youths fleeing police officers in a Parisian suburb. The escalation of violence across France prompted the government to call the first state of emergency since the Algerian War, leading to comparisons between contemporary polarization of majority and minority ethnic immigrant populations in France and the war of independence. As Evans argues, ‘the riots of 2005 were just one example of how the legacy of the Algerian War is still being played out: an Algerian syndrome that is permanently present.’¹⁶ The terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 have led to the war once again being evoked in media discourse and to further connections being made between immigration from North Africa to Europe and the legacies of colonialism. In the wake of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, Le Monde reported that the act of terrorism, carried out by brothers of Algerian immigrant origin, was the deadliest in France since the bombing of a train in 1961 by the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), the pro-French Algeria terrorist organization that perpetrated a number of murders during the Algerian War.¹⁷ In an interview with FranceTv Info, former counterterrorism chief Louis Caprioli similarly compared the situation following the coordinated attacks of the 13 November 2015, perpetrated by, amongst others, EU nationals of North African origin, to events of the Algerian War.¹⁸ Furthermore, the prolongation of the state of emergency enacted by former president Hollande required the modification of the law of 3 April 1955, created during the Algerian War, which allowed for a state of emergency to be put in place for a period of twelve days.¹⁹ The terrible events that have taken place on French soil since 2015 have thus underlined the pervasiveness of the memory of Algeria in contemporary France, a memory that has always been simmering under the surface since the end of the war, and one with which France has still to, and may never, come to terms. Moreover, recent events have highlighted the centrality of questions of immigration to the memory and legacies of the colonial past and the Algerian War, in turn pointing towards the significance of the Algerian War in understanding the sociocultural and socio-political make-up of postcolonial, twenty-firstcentury France.

Not only did the Algerian War lead to the birth of the Algerian nation, ending over one hundred years of French colonial rule in North Africa, it also constituted a foundational moment for contemporary France. The war polarized French society and brought about the collapse of the Fourth Republic: the present French Fifth Republic, established in 1958 midway through the war, was born out of the Algerian crisis. In other words, the latest manifestation of the French Republic was formed as a direct result of the Algerian War, signalling the centrality of the war to contemporary definitions of French republicanism. Thus, rather than denote a clean break with empire, the Algerian War, despite only being officially recognized as a war by the French state in 1999, has left an indelible mark on contemporary France, not least due to the large numbers of Algerian immigrants, who already constituted a considerable presence in France before and during the war, continuing to settle in France after the war’s end. As Kristin Ross and, more recently, Gary Wilder and Todd Shepard have outlined, the French Republic and the French Empire have often been seen as separate entities, ignoring their ‘reciprocal influence upon one another’,²⁰ as evidenced for example by the extensive use of immigrants from the former colonies as labourers to construct a fully modernized and industrialized France.²¹ The interlinking of the narratives of decolonization, modernization and immigration highlights the connection between two of the most persistent sociohistorical/socio-political debates currently shaping French society: the ambiguous place of immigrants from the former colonies and their children within dominant definitions of French identity, and the contested place of narratives of empire in French collective memory. By examining the literary output of French writers of Algerian origin, and the ways in which they have represented the Algerian War and its memory, this book sheds light on and contributes to the ongoing debates associated with these issues. In particular, by conceiving of the text as a site of memory, the book analyses the extent to which texts are able to collect diverse, apparently competing memories and, in doing so, present the heterogeneous nature of memories of the Algerian War. In the wake of the recent political and social turmoil faced by Europe, including the terrorist attacks in France and other European nations, the Brexit vote and the success of the French Front National and other far right political parties across the continent, the ways in which memories of the colonial past are situated within national narratives prove all the more significant in envisaging the future of immigrant communities in contemporary France and Europe. Through the ensuing analysis of literary texts, this book examines the role of literature in the contestation and reconstruction of such narratives, developing our understanding of the impact of colonization, immigration and the Algerian War on modern-day France.

French/Algerian Literature

This book examines the memory of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) as represented in texts by French authors of Algerian origin. More specifically, the book will analyse works by a generation of authors who were born, in France or Algeria, largely during the war years. Thus, they reached adulthood often well after the official end of the war and their memory of and relationship to the war remains distinct from that of their parents, who experienced colonial Algeria as French subjects and lived through the war as adults. Furthermore, the authors are largely representative of what is often termed the second generation of North African immigrants, born or brought up in France and, significantly, holding French, rather than Algerian, nationality. However, the place of these authors within the broad category of French national literature, tied to traditional notions of the nation-state, is problematic. As Michel Laronde has argued, such ‘imagined’ categories of national literature, whether French or Algerian, are ‘inadequate to absorb the literatures of immigration’,²² which instead challenge traditional notions of an unmoving, monolithic national literature and indeed national identity. It is with this view towards ‘de-centring’ the conception of French national literature that Laronde uses the term ‘Francophone literature’, which he employs in order to re-evaluate France and French culture in relation to a wider French-speaking geopolitical space. Such an understanding of the ‘francophone’ had been elucidated earlier with the publication of Charles Forsdick and David Murphy’s landmark edited collection Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (2003), in the introduction to which the editors highlighted the problems associated with previous understandings of the term ‘francophone’:

Use of the epithet ‘Francophone’ itself – in phrases such as ‘littérature francophone’ [francophone literature], referring to all literature written in French except that produced in France itself – suggests a neo-colonial segregation and a hierarchization of cultures that perpetuates the binary divides on which, despite the rhetoric of a ‘civilizing mission’, colonialism depended for its expansion and consolidation.²³

Through the launch of the field of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, therefore, Forsdick and Murphy call for a more inclusive definition of the ‘francophone’, which denotes ‘a complex network of French-speaking (or, in certain cases, partially French-speaking) regions, countries and communities which together form a Francophone space.’²⁴ This space includes France itself as well as French-speaking cultures across the world.²⁵ Laronde applies this understanding of the ‘Francophone’ to literature, affirming that ‘Francophone literature’ should not refer to a (lesser) subcategory of French literature, but to all literature written in the French language, including that written by authors who conform to traditional conceptions of French nationality. The texts that make up the primary corpus of this book – including works by, amongst others, Azouz Begag, Mehdi Charef, Mounsi, Leïla Sebbar, Akli Tadjer, Tassadit Imache, Nacer Kettane, Mehdi Lallaoui, Brahim Benaïcha, Jean-Luc Yacine, Ahmed Djouder, Rachid Djaïdani and Ahmed Kalouaz – through their representations of the Algerian War and its memory, participate in this destabilizing and de-centring of a monolithic, unchanging and exclusive conception of French literature, culture and the French nation.

While there has been considerable study, on the one hand, of the literary output of the children of North African immigrants and, on the other hand, of the Algerian War and its memory, there has not been a book-length study of the ways in which the memory of the war manifests itself in the work of this generation of authors. This is the first book-length study to bring these two strands together, looking specifically at the representation of the war and its memory in texts by writers who have inherited a certain experience of the war from their parents. This experience is that of the generation that fought for Algerian independence and is distinct from what are often assumed to be the competing experiences and memories of other groups that participated in the war, the most prominent being the pieds-noirs (French settlers who were, for the most part, fiercely in favour of keeping Algeria French and had to be repatriated at the end of the war), the harkis (Algerian soldiers who fought on the side of the French) and the appelés (French conscripts who fought in Algeria to keep Algeria French).²⁶ Analysis of the work of writers belonging to, or descending from, these groups is beyond the scope of this study, but the book’s focus on texts by the children of Algerians who fought for Algerian independence does not seek to perpetuate what Stora has called ‘le cloisonnement des mémoires’ (‘the cloistering of memory’) regarding the war,²⁷ according to which each group having participated in the war preserves its own narrative of the past. Rather, building on Richard L. Derderian’s argument that, in fact, the memory work of second-generation Algerians ‘helps challenge and overcome the splintered and fractured remembering of the Algerian past’,²⁸ this book seeks to bring to light and examine the plural, diverse, ‘multidirectional’ memories of the Algerian War as represented in the primary corpus, without going so far as to suggest that such plurality necessarily leads to a straightforward consensus of memory. As such, the book conforms to the notion, put forward by Michael Rothberg, that ‘coming to terms with the past always happens in comparative contexts and via the circulation of memories linked to what are only apparently separate histories and national or ethnic constituencies.’²⁹ It is with such a conception of memory in mind – fluid, plural, interconnecting – that this study examines representations of the Algerian War and the ways in which memories of the war manifest themselves in the primary corpus, opening up the possibility for further analysis of the complex, contrapuntal intersections and potential spaces of consensus, between only apparently separate and competing memories of the war.

The focus on texts as sites of memory distinguishes this study from the scholarship that has been undertaken over the last two decades analysing the literary output of French authors of Algerian origin and the memory of the Algerian War. In the 1990s, Alec G. Hargreaves’s groundbreaking study on this generation of authors, Voices from the North African Immigrant Community in France: Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction (1991), launched critical work in this area of research, and academics working in the field of Francophone Postcolonial Studies have continued to build on Hargreaves’s work. Also in the early 1990s, Laronde published the first French study on Beur (a term often used to designate second-generation North African immigrants) fiction: Autour du roman beur: immigration et identité (1993). Both these works focus on questions of immigration and identity, but do not engage with the representation of the Algerian War and its memory. Representations of the war do become an object of study in Philip Dine’s important work, Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film, 1954–1992 (1994), which contributed significantly to the ‘continuing elucidation of a historic occultation.’³⁰ However, Dine’s book engages with texts and films by writers and directors of French, rather than Algerian,