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Le Blanc de l’Algérie, Albin Michel, 1999
Algerian White, Seven Stories Press, 2002
English: Views from Great Britain and North America
“A Pen so pitiless, it spares nothing.” William Gass, World Literature Today
Richard K. Priebe, "Dying in Algeria", Book review Worldview, Vol. 15, March 2002:
Driving to Washington in the wake of the collapse of what was to have been the 40th anniversary celebration of the Peace Corps, I saw for the first time the wreckage of the Pentagon. I was caught short by how unprepared I was to see the gaping dark hole, despite the endless words and images of more than two weeks of media coverage. By a chance meeting, I wound up with a copy of the most recent novel by the Algerian writer, Assia Djebar. Despite having spent most of my last 35 years teaching African literature, I was caught short by how unprepared I was for this work from a great writer giving voice to the many who have left us as a result of violence. September 11 prepared me, and now I cannot imagine how I would have read it prior to having seen the dark hole in the side of a Washington landmark. In Algerian White, [...] public and private experience merge to yield what Wordsworth once noted as 'Thoughts that lie... too deep for tears. […]
Standing six years outside this story which 'ends' in 1995, we too can see that white death headed toward her and toward us in the airplanes of September 11th. And all of the dead that we see and hear in this book are in the process of negotiating among their many selves, their many personalities, up to the moment they die: poet, journalist, father, son; Christian, Muslim; French, Berber, Arab. Not all in one, but many in one; and all are Algerian. These are individuals, but they are also collectively a dying nation. […]
Most were 'the purest of Muslims' killed by those who 'claimed to kill in the name of Islam' and could define their personalities only by that single deranged dimension. […]
One can read the books of the Algerian Quartet in any order; each holds up by itself... […]
One can say that Djebar orchestrates all her linguistic talents to
yield music and voice from silence. Despite the horrific record of torture and death that her quartet unearths, no hatred, no desire for revenge is ever shown.
This is a book about a relatively small country which, in the lifetime of the author, has lost more than 500,000 inhabitants to a violence that left the country with the pale look of death about it. This is a book about ghosts, dead writers and intellectuals who have made the writer what she is and gave her the ability to speak for them from the grave. I know of no writer who writes with a surer hand, a sharper eye, a keener mind or a purer heart. She shows us that what endures in the human condition can't be destroyed by assassins in Algiers or New York. (p 59-60)
Agnès Peysson-Zeiss, « Le Blanc de l’Algérie : une liturgie aux disparus », International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 1999 :
… Le blanc de l’Algérie, cet ouvrage en quête de liturgie visant à assurer la création du cercle des poètes disparus, représente la clé de voûte ; c’est une recherche de stabilité dans un pays où la violence est règle quotidienne, comme en témoigne le meurtre, en juillet 1998, du chanteur kabyle Lounès Matoub, qui avait réécrit l’hymne national algérien, ce pour quoi il a été assassiné. C’est aussi un ouvrage qui pose la problématique du devenir du pays et du statut ou plutôt de ce manque de statut des artistes aujourd’hui, alors qu’a été instauré la politique d’arabisation de l’Algérie en juillet ’98, comme promotion ultime de la langue nationale. […]
C’est de l’avant et de l’après des langues dont il s’agit, car, alors que la langue, du vivant de ses amis, se trouvait être le français par pudeur ; la langue des morts en territoire étranger, puisqu’elle écrit en France et en Amérique, est le français sans pudeur. Ainsi délivré : ‘du linceul du passé, le français d’autrefois, désormais se régénère en nous, entre nous, transmué en langue des morts’ (Djebar, p. 18). C’est à l’aide de cette langue qu’elle ressuscite ces chers disparus, et leur redonne vie. […] C’est dans la mort que les barrières tombent et que les herses sont levées ; à ce moment là, la langue, étrangère, par le passé, devient langue à part entière, loin des contraintes sociales et historiques établies dans la vie. C’est après la mort d’un ou d’une proche que l’aspect trivial des conventions disparaît et c’est alors que l’on se rend compte que tout ce qui embarrassait n’a plus aucune importance. Car, dans la mort, il n’y a plus de bavardage, les morts et la narratrice en viennent à parler ‘pleinement en français (…) Cette langue coule (…) ni masquée ni figurante voilée prenant la place d’une autre, la sœur de nuit (…) Tardivement, notre parler devient si simple !’ (p. 16-17) Parce que le rôle de l’exilée de la vie, exilée de son pays, est celui d’une personne qui titube entre deux ou plusieurs cultures, entre divers modes de fonctionnement. Même exilés, nous renouons avec nos traditions et nos amitiés, et les liens n’en deviennent que plus forts. C’est de l’étranger que le regard peut devenir plus objectif, et c’est de là que naît le désir d’ouverture vers une plus grande littérature.
Utiliser le français, cet acte devient-il acte de résistance dans un pays où le triangle linguistique est dorénavant réduit à un seul côté ? L’auteur, de tradition littéraire française, qui aurait aimé pouvoir écrire en arabe, avait toujours ressenti une gêne à s’exprimer dans cette langue avec ses amis ; le français était alors devenu la langue de communication entre eux : ‘mes amis me parlaient en langue française (…) chacun des trois, en effet, s’entretenait avec moi en langue étrangère : par pudeur ou par austérité’ (p. 15) Cependant, alors qu’avant elle répondait en français ‘faute de mieux’ (p. 15), dorénavant la gêne s’est dissipée. C’est peut-être parce qu’elle le parle en territoire étranger, car : ‘Là en terre américaine, notre français d’avant l’aube se déroule aussi simple, après tout, qu’aurait dû être la langue maternelle que nous partageons’ (p. 21)
John Erickson, “Translating the Untranslated: Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie”, Research in African Literatures 30.3 (1999) 95-107
Je ne peux pour ma part exprimer mon malaise d’écrivain et d’Algérienne que par référence à cette couleur [blanc], ou plutôt à cette non-couleur, « Le blanc, sur notre âme, agit comme le silence absolu », disait Kandinsky. Me voici, par ce rappel de la peinture abstraite, en train d’amorcer un discours en quelque sorte déporté.
For my part I am able to express my malaise as a writer and an Algerian woman only with the color [white], or rather to that noncolor. Kandinsky said, “White, on our soul, acts as absolute silence.” Here I am, opening a discourse in some way deviant and exilic.
- Djebar, Le blanc de l’Algérie (p. 271)
Two nouns often meet in tandem in Assia Djebar’s recent writings, particularly those writings profoundly concerned with the bloodletting that has plagued recent-day Algeria and that finds its roots in the Algerian War of Liberation. Those nouns are le blanc (“white”, “blank”, etc.) and la voix (“voice”) – the former signifying among other things death, unfulfillment, absence, and unwrittenness, the latter the often silenced voice of the innumerable victims of the repression and recrimination occurring in the years since the revolution.
The work central to this essay is Djebar’s Le blanc de l’Algérie, a perplexing memoir published in 1995. The problematic I address is that of Djebar’s impelling motive to lend voice to the sufferings of her fellow Algerians and to those who have struggled to bring about a just and integrated society. Her deep solicitude in regard to the individual tragedies of those of whom she writes projects ultimately onto the question of nationhood.
[…]
The noun blanc carries multiple connotations in Djebar’s memoir. The Grand Robert dictionary offers a profusion of meanings: that which reflects light, symbolizes purity and innocence, is “exsangue” (emptied of blood), an interval, an empty space as on a written page, the center of a target (a bull’s eye) or the target itself, to name but a few. Djebar rings a refrain on these multiple meanings: le blanc for her suggests the paleness of a nation that has seen the blood of so many of its people shed, but above all perhaps it suggests the unwrittenness of the blank page yet to be marked, the story of the absent dead to be told [end p. 95], the silence to be broken – in short, the interval between past and present to be filled.
That Djebar links the noun le blanc to her title to the name Algeria suggests to us the stillborn, unrealized state of Algerian nationhood promised by the War of Liberation that claimed more than a million lives during eight years of bloody conflict against the French (1954- 1962). In the time following, the Algerian nation, as we know, has undergone dictatorial rule and internecine conflict, culminating in the annulment by the military government of the elections of 1991 that would have put power into the hands of the Islamists. From that event has ensued civil war and mass murder.
[…]
Djebar thus calls for a new language to give voice to the nation and to its dead, to translate the unrealized dream of Algeria:
Dans la brilliance de ce désert-là, dans le retrait de l’écriture en quête d’une langue hors des langues, en s’appliquant à effacer ardemment en soi toutes les fureurs de l’autodévoration collective, retrouver un « dedans de la parole » qui, seul, demeure notre patrie féconde.
In the brilliance of that desert, in the retreat of writing in quest for a language outside of language, in applying oneself ardently to erase within one all the furors of the collective self-devouring, to find again an « innerness of the word » which, alone, remains our fertile country. (275-76)
Despite her concluding remarks that imply an as yet unrealized quest for a language to describe the conflict and suffering of her fellow countrymen, the question arises whether or not [end 96] Djebar’s memoir provides a key for understanding why Algerians are undergoing a self-devouring conflict? What causes lie behind the failure to translate years of conflict and turmoil of the Algerian Revolution into an equitable and harmonious society? These are questions for which we seek answers adumbrated in Djebar’s writings.
Le blanc de l’Algérie is an elegiac narrative that attempts to fill in the unwritten blanks in the recent history of Algeria through the creation of a discourse of and with the dead and disappeared. Djebar dedicates her book to the memory of three close friends, the psychiatrist Mahfoud Boucebci, the sociologist M’Hamed Boukhobza, and the dramatist Abdelkader Alloula – all assassinated in 1993 in the campaign against intellectuals in Algeria lead by the intégristes, or Muslim Brotherhood, or radical activists, as John Esposito has called them.
Djebar speaks to the solitude and anguish of her three friends, the “chers disparus”, “cherished missing,” during their life, to their last moments and assassinations, to the shock and grief of those left behind, and to what the three represented to their kin, to their native birthplace, and to their tribe. Her elegy goes beyond these three, however, and in her preface she speaks of setting out in search of a liturgy, of spiritual communion with numerous dead poets, novelists, and journalists, and an unnamed “directrice de college” – all of whom died in a grievous accident or illness or at the hands of unnamed assassins between 1960 and 1994. Their names comprise a litany of well-known and loved writers, poets, journalists: Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, Mouloud Feraoun, Jean Amrouche, Jean Sénac, Malek Haddad, Mouloud Mammeri, Kateb Yacine, Anna Gréki, Taos Amrouche, Josie Fanon, Bachir Hadj Ali, Tahar Djaout, Youssef Sebti, and Saïd Mekbel. They all, like her three friends, were integrally involved with the cultural life and recent history of Algeria, and their writings and tireless efforts towards reform and the realization of nationhood – from those of a Nobel prize-winner (Camus) to those of an unnamed “directrice de college” – tell the story of postliberation Algeria.
[…]
Before what Djebar sees as senseless death, the writer becomes an object of national atonement, or national expiation. On behalf of what? Of whom? Why have they become the propitiary victims? Those are questions her narrative raises. But her narrative also provides the reason for the victimization of the writers, artists, and intellectuals. They were targeted precisely because they threatened the aims of the radical revivalists, the intégristes, because their idea of national “integration” included all Algerians, believers and dissenters, and to build bridges with other cultures – as opposed to engaging in a holy war against all those who resisted making Islam an exclusive way of life. They were targeted as special threats because they created a multicultural discourse. Because their writings and actions were an overt and powerful expression of a search for a more liberal and progressive Algeria free from the restraints of the past.
Djebar’s narrative weaves together inextricably several threads: those of elegiacal mourning for the death of their fellow writers, of the re-enactment through the recounting of their lives and deaths of episodes of the War of Independence and the political and religious turmoil since embroiling Algeria in a fratricidal crisis, and of an autobiographical metanarrative redolent of many of the concerns (particularly the absence or loss of voice) she has emphasized in her earlier works, from L’amour, la fantasia (1985) to Vaste est la prison (1995), as well as in her later works such as Oran, langue morte (1997).
Death and loss are intricate in the recent history of the nation. Le Blanc de l’Algérie is divided into four parts: “The language of the Dead.” “Three Days” “Unfulfilled Death” and “Writing the Blank [le blanc] of Algeria.” Djebar’s work alludes continually to events underlying the history of the war and its aftermath, such as the mass executions at the Barberousse prison in an attempt by the French authorities to put down the intégristes that resulted, not in their suppression, but in a multitude of individuals going over to the “islamiste” camp (37). And, during and after the war, the recriminations by the Algerians against their own: « Sans doute, dis-je, Le sang appelle le sang, nous retrouverons cette logique, mais que dire quand ceux qui s’instituent gardiens de la loi appliquent, eux, la loi du talion? » « Undoubtedly I say bloodletting calls forth bloodletting, [and] we’ll see that logic repeated, but what can we say when those who became guardians of the law apply the law of retaliation? » (37) That retribution and vengeance arise after heated conflict and suffering is understandable, but that the very government of the Algerian nation should trample the notion of justice by retaliatory actions against its own people for Djebar defies understanding.
Djebar speaks of her return to Algeria at the time of independence, and how someone in the Casbah cried out, “Sept ans, cela suffit!” “Seven years, that’s enough!” During that same July month, however, near Algiers [End page 98] the “so-called national and popular army” fired on Algerian maquisards (underground fighters) (121). No, she says, seven years are not enough: “[L]e sang reprend, coule à nouveau et noir, puisque entre combattants supposés fraternels!” « Bloodletting begins again, blood runs again, black, because it’s between fighters supposedly brothers. »
…
She thus calls upon those who have disappeared to help her answer the question why so many of the people have turned against each other, why the nation remains untranslated and the destiny of Algeria remains unfulfilled. Her narrative is fraught with allusions to things missing, disappeared, hidden: the cover of conversation with friends that hid another cover of anxiety and distress (nappe, p. 16), their dialogue whose invisible knot (le noeud invisible) caused their intersecting words to deviate (21), objects like the winding cloth (21), diaphanous white light that veils/half veils the days (22), etc. In her very narrative the absence of dates results in events and times fusing together into a general tragedy that encompasses all of the people and the country itself over four decades. In succeeding parts of her narrative she links the theme of absence to the need to question the dead, to call upon them to help her solve the enigma that shakes Algeria. With [end 99] her absent writer friends, she would recover the lost stories of the Algerian dead, bring them back to help the living understand.
…
While she asks the question of how the tortured can become the torturing, she answers it in speaking of the French prisons and concentration camps that taught Algerians torture techniques. Moreover, Djebar speaks of how the French played on the bad blood and hatred existing between different groups of Algerians, manipulation that was to help tear the nation asunder and lead to homegrown torture and murder, first by the FLN, the by the military regime that took over the government with the fall from power of Ben Bella in 1965 (on especially troubling event occurred in August 1988, when the army crushed peaceful demonstrations, resulting in the death of 600 youths – Le blanc de l’Algérie, 107) – a chain reaction leading to the mayhem committed by the radical islamist activists. An example of the French tactic of sowing divisiveness among Algerian opponents lies in the success of the French during the War of Liberation, when, unable to “turn” youths from the maquis, they framed as informers. Such tactics led to the purge by Colonel Amirouche, head of the Kabyle maquis, of walaya III in 1958-1959, in which 2,000, perhaps as many as 3,000 youths were executed (see Le blanc de l’Algérie, 233-39). Most of the victims were urban youths whose French speech, education, and intellectual background made them suspect to the Kabyle maquisards who were mostly mountaineers and peasants. Unhappily, the wheel comes full circle with the bloody campaign of the radical islamist activists who have also chosen as victims intellectuals – journalists, writers, doctors, and teachers – but have more recently taken to slaughtering peasants and ordinary townspeople.
While Djebar asks the question of how to find a language of unification rather than destruction, she answers it by her spiritual communion with the dead, by the blank pages upon which she writes their stories and gives sense to their deaths, by her repeated use of the phenomenon of whiteness (le blanc) that signifies the paleness of the nation coming from the spilled blood of so many of its people as well as the lost, pristine innocence of a nation fighting for justice and longing for a more perfect nationhood. Le blanc de l’Algérie helps to translate the untranslatedness of the country and its people.
Keling Wei « Le Premier Homme. Autobiographie Algérienne d’Albert Camus », Algérie à plus d’une langue, 2000:
Ainsi, toujours portant l’Algérie en lui-même, Camus s’éloigne, se retire de la scène de la polémique : il entre « dans le retrait de l’écriture en quête d’une langue hors les langues », comme dit Assia Djebar, il essaie de phraser par le biais d’une écriture autobiographique – une autobiographie algérienne, en effet, qui reste inachevée – et par définition inachevable. L’écrivain a laissé un manuscrit sur la scène de sa mort : Le premier homme que l’on trouve dans sa sacoche lorsqu’il meurt dans l’accident de voiture, le 4 janvier 1960, sur la route de Villeblevin ; œuvre publiée posthume, […]
« La mort inachevée » fait irruption : mort accidentelle, imprévue, imprévisible, impensable, qui suspend la respiration, syncope le texte et le tient à jamais à l’état de manuscrit – avec les traces de correction, la précipitation de la plume, la mort n’en finit pas d’arriver, d’advenir, de survenir, et d’achever en inachevant ce manuscrit [Le Premier Homme]. Elle hante l’écriture, l’habite ; le livre en deuil devient alors livre de ressassement et de passage, reliant le monde des vivants au séjour des morts.
Telle trente ans plus tard, les « processions » liturgiques dans Le Blanc de l’Algérie de Assia Djebar, Camus fait réapparaître les cortèges migratoires vers le pays inconnu, toujours en présence de la mort : « ces péniches halées cent ans auparavant », ces « aventuriers verdâtres, venus de si loin, ayant quitté la capitale de l’Europe avec femmes, enfants et meubles pour atterrir en chancelant, après cinq semaines d’errance, sur cette terre aux lointains bleuâtres » (p. 173).
Dans ces « masses sombres » dépatriées, il retrouve le fantôme égaré de son père, de ses aieux, mais aussi de ses contemporains qui continuent la pérégrination, toujours vers l’étranger. L’exode sans fin, la mort recommencée. « Posthume » - « né après la mort du père » - , le livre-orphelin prend forme après la mort de son signataire, ou plutôt de son auteur qui n’a pas eu le temps de contresigner l’ouvrage en cours. Le livre est en retard sur le temps, sur la fatalité – mais n’est-ce pas le fait même de tout livre ? Le livre arrive, et c’est pour faire tombeau, un lieu non de répit mais de reprise – à jamais ouvert comme une blessure. » (p. 127, 133-4)
C’est à travers le français en tant que langue de la littérature que cette rencontre peut avoir lieu dans l’écriture. En fait, Assia Djebar évoque, dans Le Blanc de l’Algérie, qu’entre eux, elle et les trois disparus algériens – Mahfoud Boucebci, M’Hamed Boukhobza, Abdelkader Alloula – , ils parlaient en français : « Mes amis me parlaient en langue étrangère : par pudeur, ou par austerité. » Ici s’établit un rapport semblable à la langue française qui n’est pas seulement celle d’une « communauté », effaçant les accents de classe en arabe, mais une « langue première », telle une matière première à laquelle travaille l’écriture. » (p. 131)