Every now and again and perhaps unfairly, history endows a writer with such a compelling personal story and such amazing literary gifts that the combination places a special burden on him or her to act as posterity’s conduit to a passing era. When canvassing the intellectual history of the 20th century, I think of many such people, but I believe that foremost among them is the Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun.
Born a Muslim Berber in the mountainous region of Kabylia in 1913, during the heyday of French colonialism, he emerged from rural poverty by way of the French school system, graduated from the École Normale (an elite institution) in Algiers, and eventually became an educator and one of Algeria’s most eloquent critics of colonialism. He almost lived to see his country achieve its long-awaited independence from France but was shot dead with five other top educators by a group of French pro-colonial terrorists in an Algiers suburb in 1962 — less than a week before the cease-fire ended one of the most violent wars of 20th-century decolonization and with it a brutal 132-year imperial experience. His French murderers thus simultaneously robbed his children of their father, rural youth of their most committed teacher and advocate, the nation of its leading voice of moderation, and the world of a gifted writer in his prime. Yet now, with the rediscovery of his debut novel, Le fils du pauvre: Menrad, instituteur Kabyle, Feraoun’s remarkable story can continue to illuminate the multiple realities of colonial occupation, the pains of discrimination, and the transformative power of literature itself.
The strange publishing history of this 1950 novel, which has been translated for the first time into English by Lucy R. McNair as The Poor Man’s Son: Menrad, Kabyle Schoolteacher and published by the University of Virginia Press, serves today as a testimony to the resilience of literature. More than 50 years since it was published in France in the aftermath of World War II, The Poor Man’s Son story has become an artifact of the tangled history that persists in linking France and Algeria in intriguing ways. Considered by many writers and scholars to be a foundational text in Francophone postcolonial literature, Feraoun’s monumental first novel provides extraordinary autobiographical glimpses into the reality of colonial occupation, its effects on the Algerians, and its consequences for him as a young boy growing up in a remote village. In this sense, he was able to do for Algerians and Berbers what the French writer Albert Camus (a friend of Feraoun) did for European settlers (pieds noirs) in Algeria in his posthumously published novel, The First Man. In their works, Camus and Feraoun communicate the inner workings of family, culture, and their own unique Algerian experiences to a world with no direct contact with that place or with colonial Africa in general.
Because of its realism, Feraoun’s novel remains one of the best descriptions of life among the Kabyles, the largest group of North African Berbers, and offers insights into the issues Algerians faced as they interacted with the French colonial system, and particularly French schools. Above all, the novel’s simple autobiographical beauty eloquently portrays this young Algerian artist’s metamorphosis from boyhood to manhood. For Feraoun, first as a pupil and then as a member of an elite group of Muslim educators, began to internalize France’s claims to represent universal human values of liberté, égalité, et fraternité. It is his own view of that process, which he saw as both constructive and ultimately destructive, that makes The Poor Man’s Son so compelling.
Despite the novel’s importance and the immense interest in literature from the Muslim world, The Poor Man’s Son had been unavailable to English readers. Five years ago, I approached Carrol F. Coates, editor of a translation series for the Virginia press, about such a project, and we quickly realized that there was a unique opportunity to go beyond the standard translation. After comparing the original 1950 version to the second edition, published in 1954, we understood the vastness of the changes made to Feraoun’s original. Along with McNair, we decided to pursue the translation of the original edition, which almost immediately disappeared after its initial and limited print run, and which has not been available in any form since it was first published.
Our reasoning was simple. The Parisian editors of the second edition had omitted a critical section of the novel, removing Feraoun’s depiction of the surrender of France to the Nazis in 1940, the rise and fall of the Vichy regime in France and Algeria, the liberation of North Africa by the Americans and Allied forces, and the eventual brutal restoration of French colonial authority over the Muslim population after liberation. The original novel shows how Algerians reacted to the American troops and then to Gaullist efforts to restore hegemony as the deep wells of Nazi collaboration began to dry up north of the Sahara. Those events were depicted from an Algerian point of view, by a man educated in and working for the French school system, who had grown tired of the enforced misery of colonial occupation and of the inane supposed superiority of French settlers.
Given the critical stance taken in the novel toward France’s collaborationist leaders, whom Feraoun believed had betrayed France’s core values (which he had been commissioned by the French ministry of national education to teach Algeria’s youth), it is certainly understandable that the average Frenchman might have found these criticisms by an Algerian intellectual a difficult pill to swallow. However, it was most likely the spiraling political chaos in French Indochina and the imminent crises in French North Africa (in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) that convinced the editors of the need to shorten the book as they did. It remains unclear who requested the cuts and why Feraoun went along with them. But the effects of the mystery are not. By eliminating the final third of what is perhaps Algeria’s most famous novel and persuading its author to rewrite the ending to give it a much more uncertain feeling, the French editors blunted some of Feraoun’s more searing criticisms of the French establishment and of the settlers. The restored English edition offers readers access to Feraoun’s original text and, more important, to the full story of the novel, whose uniqueness and beauty still communicate both the depth and nuances of French colonialism in Algeria.
As a specialist in French and North African history, I have come to appreciate Feraoun’s complex position as a hybrid intellectual who integrated both French and Algerian cultures. While writing my first book, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and watching the frightening events of Algeria’s civil war unfold in the 1990s, I began to sense that general readers (including my own students) wanted to learn more about Algeria and the wider Muslim world. But I wondered why Feraoun, arguably the most lucid voice of his generation, had never been translated into English. It was, above all, his unflinching commitment to justice and fair play, coupled with the poetic style of his writings about Algerian politics, that communicated a sense of urgency in me to do something about translating him.
So in 1996 I approached Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade about undertaking the daunting task of translating Feraoun’s journal of his experiences during decolonization. This translation was published as Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War by the University of Nebraska Press in 2000. Of all the texts written during the Algerian war of independence, Feraoun’s Journal remains perhaps the most complete and honest first-person account. Written practically day by day throughout the conflict, it provides unparalleled insights into the horrors and hopes of a country seeking to rid itself of an unwanted colonial master. As an indigenous writer and educator, Feraoun also offers a unique window into the effects of colonial and anticolonial warfare on the youth and the general population. Because of his insider-outsider relationship with France and with colonial authorities, Feraoun’s Journal provides ready access to the French worldview as well. Without exaggeration, it is the literary equivalent of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 classic film The Battle of Algiers.
Like Pontecorvo’s powerful film, Feraoun’s Journal describes for posterity Algeria’s difficulties and triumphs, the reality of French torture and the excesses of liberation’s violence. In doing so, it presents an unqualified statement against the totalizing effect of both colonial and anticolonial violence and suggests that humanity remains conditioned by, but ultimately resilient to, those collective experiences. Published posthumously in Paris in 1962, the Journal has retained the edgy authenticity of its time, for it was neither doctored nor revised after independence. Because it was published without self-censorship, the Journal illustrates what life was like during the final months and days of absolute terror in Algiers. Even today it serves to demythologize nationalist violence by describing how violence can easily become a part of a Manichaean power play in which all political opponents claim that there are no “innocents,” and from which a postcolonial nation would have difficulty emerging. As is the case with The Poor Man’s Son and his two other published novels, La Terre et le sang (1953) and Les Chemins qui montent (1957), Feraoun’s Journal reveals the logic and dislocations of colonialism, with its few positive and many negative attributes. The Journal demands that Algerians overcome colonialism with a sense of honor, and without self-pity.
At the core of all of Feraoun’s writings lie a few central ideas that remind us today why he was such a symbol of courage and humanism: tolerance, a respect for diversity, and a desire to represent himself and his people honestly and with ethnographic detail. He insisted, for example, that during decolonization Algerians had to remain distrustful of authoritarian nationalist movements, even ones whose chief aim was to liberate the colonized. As difficult as these values are to maintain in times of peace, Feraoun forged his ideas in the white-hot coals of world history, where different civilizations and cultures struggled against one another, then overlapped, and were then ripped apart in the acrid bitterness that marked the end of colonial rule. Those ideals were, it is fair to say, neither easy to come by nor easy to stand by, especially when nationalist movements resented their own elite’s willingness to criticize liberation’s violence and when the colonial authorities had lost all sympathy for criticism.
To understand just how deep Feraoun’s criticism of French colonialism ran and how profound his celebration of Algerian culture was before the war of independence began, it is necessary to return to The Poor Man’s Son in its full form. As a rediscovered text, the novel aids us in retracing one empire’s decline through the eyes of a major indigenous writer. This is especially significant as debates about the future of the so-called American empire and issues in the broader Muslim world occupy our thoughts. In reading Feraoun now, we can also finally understand what the French publishing world might have most ardently feared about the impending revolution in Algeria. It is evident from this translation that while Feraoun wished to remain tolerant and act faithfully on his principles as a writer, he also wanted to defend his people who were suffering under the weight of colonial rule.
Herein lies the true power of Feraoun’s work and its danger to his French overseers: Feraoun forced a radical confrontation with the darkest aspects of French history as reflected by the illuminating mind of a brilliant Algerian intellectual. That this mind can continue to bring a lost era to life through a rediscovered text — despite the fact his mortal eyes were closed by 12 bullets fired by a French terrorist’s machine gun — is the best evidence for Feraoun’s lasting place in the pantheon of 20th-century writers.
James D. Le Sueur is an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He wrote the introduction to The Poor Man’s Son, which was published this year by the University of Virginia Press. An expanded edition of his book Uncivil War will be published early next year by the University of Nebraska Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 9, Page B19