Hervé Sanson is a specialist in Maghreb literature. It recounts the conditions for the emergence of French-speaking Algerian literature in the 1950s, as the country plunged into a brutal war of liberation. Forging their way between activism and aesthetic imperative, the first generation of Algerian novelists and poets founded a literature that was modern and inventive in its form and close in its themes to the miseries and aspirations of their people. Interview. (Rebroadcast)
RFI: Algerian literature is one of the most dynamic literatures in the French-speaking field. When did the first great Algerian novels date?
Hervé Sanson: At the very beginning of the 1950s, before the outbreak of All Saints’ Day on November 1, 1954, there were already the first major texts of French-speaking Algerian literature which appeared and which dealt with the iniquitous system of colonization, which denounced the injustices due to this colonial system and the growing awareness among Algerians of the feeling of injustice and therefore of the need to remedy it. This growing national feeling is a prelude, indeed, to later, the various novels which will deal directly with the war of liberation.
I think of Mohammed Dib with The Big House and his trilogy Algeria. The Big House appeared in 1952, The fire in 1954, which are a denunciation of the colonial system and all its injustices and segregation, a form of segregation and in any case the inequalities which reigned between the two communities which then lived in Algeria. And these novels are a prelude to more “engaged” novels, which will deal with the next stage, namely the war of national liberation.
As Nedjma, eponymous novel from the pen of a young unknown named Kateb Yacine.
The publication of Nedjma is a fundamental date in 1956. Nedjmawhich does not directly deal with the war of national liberation since it is in fact the subject of Nedjma, these are the demonstrations of May 8, 1945 and the repression that followed. Today, a certain number of historians start the Algerian War on May 8, 1945, since this date represents for Algerians a founding moment of national awareness and the fact that there is no longer anything to expect from the colonial system. Nedjma, that’s that theme. Obviously with this fascinating character, Nedjma, who both like a magnet fascinates, captivates the male protagonists – the four cousins who are the main heroes of this novel – and at the same time who is in a form of escape that we do not never manages to reach, and which perpetually flees. This character has fascinated generations of Algerian and non-Algerian readers, and this partly explains the magnetism of this novel which has really left its mark on French-speaking Algerian literature.
We must also mention Assia Djebar, one of the rare women at the time to take up the pen. In 1957, at the age of 18, she published her first novel. The thirst which earned her to be compared to Françoise Sagan. These young authors demonstrate astonishing literary maturity. Their novels are not vulgar pamphlets. What are its main characteristics?
Obviously, what marks these different authors is what we could call a strong poeticity. Work on language, on rhythm, on sentences. It must be remembered that Kateb, like Dib, presented themselves first and foremost as poets. Dib said it until the end. Although we know him first as a novelist: “ I am essentially a poet » and Kateb Yacine was also a poet and therefore this poeticity of the language is one of the major criteria of this literature.
Aragon said it when he wrote the preface to Dib’s first collection of poems, Guardian Shadows : “ This man writes in my language, it’s strange, I understand all the words and at the same time, it’s not French from France. I sense a strangeness in what is written. I smell a foreign accent. » And indeed, under the French writing, short in hollow either the Arabic mother tongue or the Kabyle mother tongue. And this strangeness of accent is also one of the essential parameters of this French-speaking literature.
This Algerian Francophonie is not self-evident. Isn’t it paradoxical to want to fight colonialism in the settler’s language?
The paradox is only apparent. Why write in the language of the colonizer to denounce the colonial system. Several reasons: first, it must be remembered that these authors were educated in French. They went to French school and ultimately, if they had not written in French, they would not have written. Several of this generation have said it: the language they mastered the most was French. So, the question does not even arise when we tirelessly asked these writers who ended up being a little tired: “ But why do you write in French ? I can only write in French and I remind you that there was a phenomenon called the occupation, the French colonization of Algeria for 132 years. This explains why I write in French. »
But apart from that, we have cited Kateb Yacine’s formula a lot, perhaps too much, but a powerful formula. “ French is our spoils of war. » The Algerians lived and suffered French colonization for 132 years and at the time of independence, this culture for at least a large part of them had ingested it. They had assimilated it and in the name of what should they have gotten rid of it, sacrificed it because they were gaining independence? This French language and culture were also an access to modernity, a language of great culture and still an access to modernity which the Algerians would have been wrong to deprive themselves of. In any case, this is how a large number of Algerian writers felt things and authors like Mouloud Mammeri or Dib never made it a problem, a dilemma to write in French.
If you had to choose only three novels about the Algerian war, what would be your selection, Hervé Sanson?
Obviously Mohammed Dib, once again, who is the first with An African Summer in 1959, when the war was not over, to directly evoke this fight for independence. I obviously think of Mouloud Mammeri with Opium and the Stick (1965). We are in this complexity, precisely of the commitment to the fight for independence. But I still want to add a third author, because we still have to cite a female author, and not stay in an exclusively male circle. I want to quote Assia Djebar with The Unburied Womanwhich is much more recent, dating from 2002, in which she returns to the role of mujahidaof these fighters of the war of liberation who were relegated after 1962 to the private, domestic sphere and who were in some way somewhat dispossessed of their participation in this history.
Hervé Sanson is a doctor of letters, associate researcher at ITEM (CNRS), specialist in French-speaking literature from the Maghreb. To read, his recent article on the subject mentioned in this interview: “A dynamic game with loss (Bleu blanc vert by Maïssa Bey and Barks by Hajar Bali)”, in Memories in play, special n° 15-16, winter 2021 -2022, directed by Catherine Brun, Sébastien Ledoux and Philippe Mesnard, p. 147-151.