1
A challenging aspect of Albert Memmi’s work is the sometimes-elusive boundary between his life and his work. A number of Memmi’s texts can tempt the reader to treat them as autobiographical—most famously The Pillar of Salt. However, doing so is dangerous, as neither Memmi’s fiction nor his theorizing simply graft aspects of his lived experience onto characters or situations. Rather, Memmi begins to theorize based on his own life, even as his general points capture wider patterns. A significant array of his writing therefore reflects upon his life, either through direct accounts or in the process of discussing a broader issue. Such material includes short interviews, isolated contributions, and introductions to various editions of his major works, examples of each we include here.
In the selections below, most of which were previously untranslated, Memmi reflects on the natural beauty of Tunisia, even as he implicitly critiques the often Orientalist optic on the Arab Mediterranean (the first selection). He considers his experience of growing up as a minority (the second selection). We also include two lengthy previously untranslated pieces from Memmi that take a directly autobiographical direction. Le Nomade immobile (The Stationary Nomad, 2000) combines autobiography and Memmi’s broader statements on a number of subjects. Especially poignant are the sections on Memmi’s early life and his relationship with his family, as well as significant discussion of his development as an intellectual. Here Memmi cites his formative influences, specifically Jean Amrouche and Aimé Patri; gives brief commentary on the state of French intellectual life in the immediate post–World War II years; and addresses his connection to key figures such as Albert Camus (the third selection). Memmi’s interview with Victor Malka, titled La terre intérieure (The Land Within, 1976), concerns his early publications in France (selection number four). Selections from his recently published journal Tunisie, An I (Tunisia, Year I) develop his thoughts on the land of his birth on the eve of independence in 1955–1956, including his previously untranslated essay “Tunisia, A Minor-League Country: The State of Affairs” (selection number five) and short clips from his diaries (the sixth selection). Memmi’s preface to the 1971 Compass edition of Portrait of a Jew address his concerns raised by Israel’s Six-Day War in June 1967 and how it marked a turn in the history of Judeophobia (selection number seven). The interview with Dov Maimon discusses the overarching themes of his work—domination and dependence—along with brief takes on Zionism and Jewishness (selection number eight). The final selections contain his reflections on exile (selection number nine) and Memmi’s lessons for an examined life well lived (the tenth and last selection).
Readers should note that when we occasionally left out beginning parts of Memmi’s sentences throughout the book we nevertheless began those sentences with capital letters for the sake of readability.
Sea and Sun (1967)
For such a prestigious arts publication, I should be getting the word out about my native country by describing the minarets piercing the blue heavens, the aloes bowing in virginal pride, the prodigious hot springs of Hammamet, where your naked body dips into such perfect water that you relive that emotion, that inexpressible happiness experienced by so many others who, not so long ago, believed themselves to be gods.
The language of picturesqueness is deceitful, tainted by omission and flattery. But what if I spoke another language, one that painted a fuller picture, one that revealed the other face of this land of wonders, the shadows of its incomparable light that has rightfully sparked the imagination of our neighbors to the north? If I did that, perhaps I might be doing someone a favor.
They say THE SEA, and they believe they’ve said it all: the sea!
Yes, the sea, Mother Mediterranean—in French, sea (mer) sounds like mother (mère)—inexhaustible and nurturing, purveyor of the world’s finest fish and endless sensual delights.
Who among us, even the least loquacious, has not admitted, if only with a knowing smile, that our shared pleasures are unique?
Who among us, we the inhabitants of this shore, has not sung the praises of the infinitely refracted silver of the sea in full sunshine? Its shy, coquettish blush in the morning, its confident fullness awaiting high noon, and in the evening, its motionless, absent-minded languor?
Yes, BUT how to more thoroughly explain my sea to someone else? When you experience a country, do you describe it like a painting, like an object outside yourself? Maybe experiencing a country makes words superfluous.
The truth is that few people of earlier generations knew how to swim nor would they entrust themselves to the sea without a serious reason. They feared it. The mother sea, yes, but a cruel mother, too. The sea is the dark dream of the drowned.
They say SUN, and they believe they’ve said it all, which is almost true.
The sun is life: the mimosa’s blossoms, like little yellow chicks; the eggplant’s mysterious purple; the arbutus’s violently dense red; sweet lemon and grapefruit, tangerines and oranges, sunbursts all. But enough is enough, our life is the sun, and the sun is our death.
Is Paradise bathed in sunshine, then? Or deliciously enfolded into a magic garden perpetually watered by the immortal gardener who dispenses flowing water and dew?
My Tunisia is my father the saddler, my mother the Bedouin, my uncle the silk spinner, the artisans’ stories, tales of Saif al-‘Ajal the invisible invincible and Joha the simpleton, the fathomless treasure of my childhood and my first loves. For me, Tunisia is also the austere elegance of the indigent Bedouin; olive trees clinging to the clayey soil, toughened and split in their fierce search for water; the black scorpion and the mandrake; the moon, killer of newborns. Tunisia, from which I am forever exiled, Tunisia, all my wretchedness in a nutshell.
Growing Up as a Minority Child
I don’t believe that there is anything specific about the childhood of a Jewish child in Muslim countries of the Mediterranean. When I came to Europe, I discovered many similarities between the situation of such a child and that of Jewish children in Germanic and Russian countries.
With local variations, of course. We spoke a Judeo-Arabic, stuffed with French and Italian plus Hebrew, which remained a living and secret treasure, whereas they spoke Yiddish. But in our case, our relation to the dominant language, French (it could have been Italian if Italy had replaced France in North Africa), was, in their case, their relation to Russian or German.
But in either case we had two languages, the dominant language, that of the majority, and a dialect. From primary school onwards, I had to master French fairly quickly. Perhaps that is why I became a writer: it was a way to master and become intimate with European culture and power.
Our relations with the Muslims were of another kind entirely. We shared most cultural characteristics with them: food, music, close family ties, etc. But at the same time we were wary and even fearful of them. Besides, occasionally some explosion would remind us of our status, which is to say at the same time a permanent feeling of threat and the resulting withdrawal into ourselves.
What I have just suggested is basically a definition of minority status. Indeed, if I had to characterize the situation we lived in at the time, I would say that we were essentially minority people. Moreover, I think that this is one of the characteristics of being Jewish, anywhere in the world.
The probable result of which is a certain number of types of behavior to deal with it or to rise above it. Certain professions, for example: medicine, which allows one to carry one’s knowledge about and to use it anywhere. Or (and people do reproach us for it often enough) our efforts at achieving economic success.
I have never left this childhood sensation of being caught in between two cultures, both of them dominant, each in its own way. My native land and my impressions of childhood can be found in half my books, even today, and I remain deeply attached to the fate of formerly colonized peoples. Many of my friendships and affections lie there. And, moreover, the battle to master the French language and European culture requires a constant effort on my part.
The Stationary Nomad (2000)
I will have spent most of my life writing. [ . . . ]
All writing is more or less autobiographical; let’s just say that mine is more openly so than others. Autobiography, like any other human endeavor, is an attempt to say something to someone. I must have a stronger need to account for myself, to argue my case, perhaps. [ . . . ] [In this book] I shall be attempting to pinpoint what my life has really meant. [ . . . ]
But because I have been fortunate enough, or unfortunate, to have taken part in a few of this century’s defining events, and since the trajectory of my work coincides with that of my life story, readers might find that, by combing through my personal experience, I have managed to gain some insights, which I hope will prove useful to others. [ . . . ]
I was born on a rainy 15 December at eight o’clock in the morning, at 4 Impasse Tronja, Rue Vieille-Tronja, in Tunis, Tunisia, to Fradji Memmi and Maira Sarfati. Memmi is believed to be an ancient family name from Kabyle that means “little man.”1 Another possibility is the vocative of Memmius, member of the Roman gens Memmia. The first case would have my father descending from old local stock, and the second makes him the distant product of Roman occupation. On my mother’s side, Sarfati, which literally means “French,” is a common name in Hebrew literature. My fate seems sealed by the conjunction of the two, more than any astrological sign could possibly do.
No one has ever been able to say why my birthplace bears the name Tronja, an exotic fruit. But I do know why my father decided to move the family into the no-man’s-land between the Jewish quarter and the Arab neighborhood. He was a saddler whose customer base consisted of mainly the cart drivers who all came from the town of Gabès, in the south, which explains why they all lived in a fondouk, a kind of hostel for tradesmen and travelers, located right on Rue Tronja, a stone’s throw from where the Maltese coachmen lived. It’s clear how otherness was woven into the fabric of my life and would remain there forever.
I won’t go into the description of our family or the neighborhood, which I have endeavored to detail elsewhere. Still, it’s worth remembering a few dominant features that are necessary for understanding what is to follow.
Poverty is one of those features. It’s not so much the hardship of poverty that I recall, since we were all poor: my father’s Gabès clients, the Jewish and Arab populations of the neighborhood, and even the Europeans—Sicilians and Maltese, with whom we rubbed shoulders on a daily basis. We’d heard people talk about the well-to-do, the French landowners, a few wealthy Tunisian families, but we never actually knew them. They lived somewhere at the fringe of our world, a place where we would almost never venture. They were like something out of The Arabian Nights. [ . . . ]
We were horribly dressed, in cheaply made bargains or hand-me-downs from adults that our already-overworked mothers would cut to fit us. This was especially true of my own mother, whose work was sloppy and who didn’t like to sew. Still, I was fortunate enough to have uncles who were tailors and would give her scraps of new fabric. I often felt ashamed of my shapeless trousers, especially once I started getting interested in girls.
Along with another family, the Barouches, we shared a kind-of two-room apartment at the end of a cul-de-sac, Impasse Tronja, which I have portrayed in a novel [The Pillar of Salt] under the name Tarfoune. The street and cul-de-sac still exist today. I went there to check just recently. That said, the wall that encloses the cul-de-sac does not look onto a cemetery, as I claim in the description. So why did I put a necropolis there? I don’t know; maybe because death was always looming, and we had to escape it.
In the evening, each family withdrew to their separate room, but during the day, there was constant intermingling. We shared one kitchen, one water spigot for both cooking and personal hygiene. No hot water, that goes without saying. [ . . . ] We shared a single toilet, which we would often line up to use, since there were so many of us in the two families. This meant that we lived with the persistent combined smell of cooking and outhouse. (All of that is gone now. The old Jewish quarters were razed by the first government after independence.)
The whole time we lived in the cul-de-sac, my best friend was Giovanni, a Sicilian, or maybe Corsican—I often confused the two. [ . . . ] At Giovanni’s house, his enormous mother, easily twice the size of mine, would always serve us up some pasta, with a variety of toppings, whether tomatoes, beans, onions, olive oil, and, more rarely, cheese, which I hated—I’ve always found it repulsive, calcium be damned—and of course bread, the staple food eaten with everything. Basically, we would eat bread with something, rather than something with bread. [ . . . ]
I am obsessed by the poor, exasperated. They’re too numerous, too victimized. I feel constantly called upon to express my outrage—haven’t I already shown that revolt is the opposite of indifference? I have never ceased to be moved by the painful emotions that tie me to the underprivileged.
My social philosophy, if I can call it that, amounts to this: I don’t know if it’s possible, but we must at least attempt to eradicate poverty everywhere in the world. One of my first texts is ironically entitled “The Kingdom of the Poor.” In it, I make fun of those European visitors, well-intentioned but exasperatingly romantic. They were wide-eyed in amazement at our picturesque customs, at the continued existence of our quaint traditions, which is fine. But what about our rates of syphilis, tuberculosis, and infant mortality; our inadequate sewage system; our walls that seep in winter; the stench of summer; the intense overcrowding where the animal in us, the animal that is us, inflicts its odors and crudeness? If poverty was so appealing, why didn’t they take their vacations in the slums? Poor people are neither saints nor beloved of God; they are history’s unloved, its ill-treated. [ . . . ] Oh yes, I do hate poverty. [ . . . ]
There were other proud moments, incessantly told and retold: my first day at elementary school, where they tell me I wailed in despair, clinging to my mother’s skirts, or at the kouttab, the religious school, where the rabbi had to intervene with a cane before I settled down and resigned myself to seeing my mother leave. [ . . . ]
School is what saved me, no doubt, but I still hated it. I hated elementary school, where I practically had anxiety attacks because I didn’t understand French. I hated secondary school, because I felt like a stranger among my bourgeois peers, and it was true, I really was. I hated university, because of how disappointing the professors I had admired from afar turned out to be, by philosophy, so abstract and elitist, by the Sorbonne, which did not speak to my needs. [ . . . ]
“The best day of my life,” as they say, was the day the director of my elementary school on Rue Malta-Srira, Monsieur Ouziel [ . . . ] announced that I had been awarded a scholarship to the lycée Carnot [an elite secondary school in Tunis attended mostly by the children of the relatively well-to-do]. [ . . . ]
My first year at lycée coincided with my bar mitzvah, which meant I was making a double entrance into the world: into the adult Jewish community and into the West. [ . . . ] The lycée lifted me out of the ghetto and scrubbed my mind of all its unenlightened beliefs.
At the lycée, I started associating with a youth movement that was recruiting future pioneers for Israeli kibbutzim. [ . . . ]
I had the great good fortune to meet two men who helped me to overcome my sense of humiliation and even to channel it positively. My philosophy teacher at lycée Carnot in Tunis, Aimé Patri, was my first mentor. [ . . . ] His genius notwithstanding, Patri, whom I often depict under the name Poinsot, was a lower-middle-class Frenchman, with his woolen scarf, his sandals that he wore in all seasons (because of an infirmity), and his often-wrinkled clothing. He was a caustic rationalist but open to everything, as are all great minds: he was as interested in Mallarmé—about whom he wrote a dissertation that he never defended, because life kept getting in the way—as he was in the kabbalah or Muslim mystics. Formerly a Trotskyist, he remained a critical thinker nevertheless.2 [ . . . ] He would share the treasures of his library with me, as well as his personal reading notes, after we walked home following class. He helped me keep intact a reasoned sense of outrage.
My second model (chronologically the first, since he was my literature teacher, before philosophy came and stole the stage) was Jean Amrouche. I often depict him under the name Marrou, a kind of lordly Kabyle, with his studied elegance; his grand cape, in the manner of André Gide; and his mild cigarettes, a moody character whose parents’ conversion to Christianity caused him much suffering and cut him off from his people. [ . . . ] He died of cancer toward the end of the Franco-Algerian War, exhausted by his vain attempts at reconciling France and Algeria, shuttling between General de Gaulle and the FLN. Both parties distrusted him and found him annoying. He was my mentor for giving form to feeling and was demanding to the point of bluntness: “That’s worthless!” he would declare, or “That needs to be completely rewritten.” [ . . . ] He initiated me into poetry. [ . . . ] We don’t identify with just anyone who comes along; if I became a philosophy teacher in turn, abandoning medicine, the field to which I had been destined, it was to emulate Patri. If I believed that my salvation lay in writing, it’s because Amrouche had endeavored to find his own salvation there. The philosopher and the writer, however wary they have been of one another, still cohabit within me. [ . . . ]
My marriage was one of the most enlightening events of my life and would give rise to the most serious consequences. My wife and I married at the end of the war, in Paris, on December 24th. [ . . . ] My marriage was the culmination of everything I was searching for: freedom, outside the little community of my birth. [ . . . ] Marrying this young woman of Christian origin—another civilization, in other words, even though she had rebelled against her family and her religious education—meant that I had burned all my bridges to keep from ever turning back, and it affirmed my determination to get as far away as possible. [ . . . ]
After the publication of one of my novels in particular [i.e., Strangers], I was asked lots of questions about mixed marriage. [ . . . ] It’s difficult to make any marriage work, but a mixed marriage, especially one involving different religions, is even harder. [ . . . ] We have been together for fifty years. I sometimes sense that every so often, she too wished our married life weren’t so complicated. Here’s what I would say to young people today who are embarking on a similar adventure: “If you want to take on diversity in your marriage, ask yourself first if you’re really strong enough.” [ . . . ]
I was able to draw an abundance of material from our situation to put into a novel and some short texts and from other people’s experiences as well, not just ours. [ . . . ]
Another significant event marked this period: my decision not to join an Israeli kibbutz, as I was originally preparing to do in the youth movement, though without much conviction, to be honest.3 With this decision, I broke with a political and philosophical project that should have absorbed my entire existence. This turning point came right after my return from the German labor camps, when all my friends [ . . . ] were heading for Israel. During that time in the camps I resolved not to go along with them. [ . . . ] I had gone to the camps more or less voluntarily. I know my European readers will have trouble understanding how I could have consented. They have no idea how alone we felt in Tunis among the French who were nearly all pro-Vichy, apart from a few courageous souls [ . . . ] among the Muslims [too] who, with the exception of a few enlightened minds, Bourguiba among them, sympathized with the Germans—because the enemies of our enemies are our friends. [ . . . ] It was always the children of the poor who filled the trucks that supplied the camps with forced labor. [ . . . ] By going to Israel, I would be continuing to obey—for a better cause, I’ll grant you, but not in the way I had chosen for my life: the path of freedom. I went to the camps out of guilt, and I would have gone to Israel for the same reason, out of guilt. So, I decided, to the extent possible, that I would never again act out of guilt, but, rather, I would base my actions on reason. I would go to college and strive to become a philosopher and a writer. [ . . . ]
A few months after the end of the war, I decided to enroll at the University of Algiers. [ . . . ]
It was the first time since my disastrous experience at summer camp and my time in the labor camps that I was truly separated from my parents. This time, I thought, the separation would be forever—physically, at least. [ . . . ] I spent one academic year in conditions that I would consider unlivable today. We were housed on the premises of some youth movement, no water or electricity, or even toilets. [ . . . ]
The following year, I reached Paris after crossing the Mediterranean for the first time. [ . . . ]
France, which I was seeing for the first time ever, wasn’t ugly—just strange. Double-faced Janus, each face so different from the other that even fifty years later, I still cannot reconcile them. Despite the efforts of Jean Amrouche, who had done his utmost, without entirely convincing me, to defend the consistency of Pascal’s wager or the lyrical grandeur of Bossuet, whom he also admired, the France I had come so avidly searching for was that of Montaigne, Voltaire, and Rousseau, of human rights. But I soon realized there would be another France to take into account, at least as real as the other—clerical and reactionary, narrow-minded and ungenerous. [ . . . ]
The hardest thing was the loneliness that comes with living in a big city. [ . . . ]
In Tunis, I fought back, and any resistance I met only served to nourish my own. But in Paris, I was in a vacuum, where I felt myself dissolving. I experienced true anxiety, in a way I had never known before.
Luckily for me, every season has its sunny days, and this was also the time I met the woman who would become my partner for life and the mother of my children. I don’t know what would have become of me without this dazzling apparition. We married within a few months, so that we could stop having to meet in the university cafeteria and tea salons. We moved in together, in a manner of speaking, at the Hotel Moliere, which has since disappeared, where I had rented a room in my early days in Paris. As a result of a protest over high rent, a tenant committee obtained a reduction, but the landlord countered by shutting off the heat. We spent the winter with ice on the inside of the windowpanes.
This was also the time when I discovered writing as a major resource. I’ll come back to this further on. From that point forward, in every difficult circumstance of my life, and eventually every single day, I would write. I escaped my too-harsh reality for a world that I fashioned to meet my desires. The notes I took during this period provided material for my first book. I even tried to launch a student magazine, Hillel, for which I obtained texts from eminent contributors. I wrote reviews for the magazine Paru, which was edited by Aimé Patri. I succeeded in acquiring the rights, on behalf of Charlot Editions, originally based in Algiers, for the works of philosopher Martin Buber, some of whose unpublished letters I have come to own. Jean Amrouche, who was an insider at the radio channel France Culture back then, asked me to do a few commentaries. But you couldn’t live on freelance work, and since Charlot went out of business, after a valiant struggle, I had to face reality. I decided to go back home to Tunis, where I had been offered a second-rate job, until something better came along. The return to one’s birthplace is rarely triumphant. [ . . . ]
Still, I was pretty fortunate: I never had much trouble getting my manuscripts accepted for publication. (All told, I did have a series of lucky breaks: the lycée, university, my first book and all those that followed. . . .) [ . . . ] The Pillar of Salt was repurchased by Gaston Gallimard,4 who reprinted it with a preface by Albert Camus. It was immediately embraced by the public and has stood the test of time, because of my fresh approach to the issue: I describe head-on the difficulties a third-world adolescent experiences while living under a colonial regime. This was a revelation for most people living in France, who were slowly waking up to the tragic events in their colonial empire. [ . . . ]
On my second trip to Paris, I brought along the nearly finished manuscript of The Colonizer and the Colonized. [ . . . ] I gave a few chapters to Les Temps modernes; to La Nef, edited by Lucie Faure; and to Esprit.5 When the book finally appeared with a preface by Sartre, it met with great public approval, as have subsequent editions. Since its first release, it is still my most widely published book. Almost in spite of myself, I have become what is called engagé, a politically committed writer, a debatable term, since it implies a certain disdain for pure literature. [ . . . ]
Is there any aspect of my life with more far-reaching implications, for me at any rate, than my Jewishness? Many of my colleagues of Jewish origin choose not to talk about theirs, and far be it for me to cast the first stone. “I’m not a Jewish painter, I’m a painter!” exclaimed Chagall, whom I interviewed once for a newspaper. And he was absolutely right. Overemphasizing some singular feature, whether in art or philosophy, only restricts the scope of your work. [ . . . ] History always comes back to haunt us. [ . . . ] Constant recalling of the Nazi death camps ends up annoying people, like some incongruity, as if that aberration of humankind were only the Jews’ problem, not theirs.
Whether it was among the tight-knit artisan community where I grew up or the youth movement where we would continually ponder “the Jewish problem,” after my lycée years, the pressures of the Vichy regime, and getting expelled from university, then the Germans and the labor camps, history has always dealt us challenges, as Jews. How could I have remained unaffected by all that? Even after having written about it so often, today, I still have trouble talking about it. When my book about the Jewish condition [Portrait of a Jew] hit the bookshops, some readers confessed to me how embarrassed they felt when asking for the book out loud, as if the title were somehow obscene, exposing them in public. But this embarrassment reveals something about the Jewish condition, and I had to account for it.
It is also understandable that, while my four homelands are dearer to me than any other, there is a ranking at work (and again, I am speaking for myself here): the fact that I am Jewish weighs more than the others, both negatively and positively. [ . . . ]
It is above all a condition—that is, a nexus of relationships with others and the self. Being Jewish (like being French or Arab or female, for that matter) is not a choice, but a more or less accepted constraint, something imposed upon you, just as institutions and the rigors of climate are imposed. [ . . . ]
Sartre had an expression that is often quoted: [ . . . ] Anyone who considers himself a Jew is a Jew. I posit that to be a Jew is not only to consider yourself as such but also to be treated a certain way, to be subjected to a certain fate. [ . . . ]
Being Jewish is not a mere objective fact; it is also a way of experiencing the world. [ . . . ] I tend to think that the Jewish condition is generally experienced as a wound that never completely heals. [ . . . ]
Still, compared to the Jews of Europe, we North African Jews fared much better: only a few months in labor camps, providentially interrupted by the collapse of the Third Reich, a hundred deaths or so, the usual rapes and heavy fines. [ . . . ]
This objective and subjective condition I proposed to call judéité, or Jewishness, a term I contrived for the circumstance. Similarly, in conversation once with Léopold Sédar Senghor I proposed that he add to his venerable notion of Négritude the term Négrité [blackness], more operative for being more restricted, to designate the objective and subjective condition of Black people.6 [ . . . ] I don’t know to what extent I was involved in the concomitant elaboration of arabité (Arabness), a notion frequently in use now.
The Land Within: Interview by Victor Malka (1976)
ALBERT MEMMI: I had to leave [Tunisia]. I rid myself of everything: friendships, infatuations, family affections of course, personal effects and my position—I had resumed my duties at lycée Carnot—leaving it behind, with no regrets or fallout this time. You’ll recall that I had quit my job previously, losing my seniority; this time I was smarter and just asked for some time off, even though I was convinced this time around that I would be leaving with no thought of ever returning. . . . But Camus made the remark later on, with regard to one of my characters: “This is the kind of protagonist that never leaves, or if he does, he brings all his problems along with him.” As often happened, that well-meaning and insightful observer could see right through me, better than I ever could. He was right: I brought my problems with me, and I’ve been carrying them around ever since.
VICTOR MALKA: Right, but why did you choose France over Israel, or Italy or Argentina, as you did in The Pillar of Salt?
AM: Here’s my point, in the end: whatever else I say about the Arabs and the French, these are conflicts that I locate both inside and outside myself. They are both part of who I am. . . . I told you what a joy it was to hold one of the two teaching positions in philosophy at the lycée in Tunis; the significance is clear: I was recognized by both the French and the Arabs. A French University degree! And to return as a professor to my childhood lycée, where I had once enrolled as a poor, awkward kid, ashamed of himself. Sweet revenge, a crowning achievement! [ . . . ] And in addition to that, I was lucky enough to have a class full of former pupils from the Collège Sadiki [i.e., an elite middle school for Muslim boys in Tunis], by definition, all Muslim Tunisians. That’s how I came to have some of the country’s future high-profile political leaders as my pupils.
VM: Did that become an issue?
AM: No, since they were always kind enough to bring it up first and to remain close friends throughout, which touched me greatly.
It was around this time that I started devouring all the books I could find that could tell me something about the country’s past, about North Africa generally. I felt I had to understand what I was experiencing, what was dying inside me, and what could still be saved. I had to really understand that death in order to prepare the resurrection. I wanted to be a prince, and it had to be a prince of the East. That’s how I eventually discovered that, although I was probably Berber, my ancestors may well have been great Arab nomads.
VM: Were there Arabs that converted to Judaism?
AM: They were already Jewish! Before the advent of Islam! And Arabs at the same time! They were great Arab-Jewish nomads who’d come on their camels from a more distant East. This is not widely known, but it’s almost certain: there existed grand Arab nomads of the Jewish persuasion, fierce warriors who, spear in hand, brought entire kingdoms to their knees, and who ended up founding one of their own that would endure until the 16th century.
VM: That’s the theme of The Desert, right?
AM: One of the main ones, yes.
VM: In effect, it’s a mythical reconciliation.
AM: Not just mythical. At a very basic level, as it turns out, there has never been a complete break. This is what I’ve been getting at here: beyond our conflicts and issues, and even some real nastiness—albeit in only one direction—we were both far from and close to the Arabs. My father was in tears at the death of his Gabès cart drivers, “dog-eaters,” as he called them accusingly. I can’t explain to you how meaningful that is: a Jew weeping over the death of an Arab. What’s curious is that History has confirmed that ambivalence: with the Israeli issue, not only have Arabs never left my life, but [also] they have entered definitively into the life of Jews who don’t even know them. They are the chief concern of anyone who is currently thinking about the fate of Jews overall. It’s clear that our future is now linked to theirs. Ah, if only they would understand that, too!
VM: At least you got some satisfaction from your studies. . . .
AM: Not even. The Sorbonne was one of my greatest disappointments, so much so that I wonder whether my break with philosophy didn’t stem from my break with the Sorbonne.
Back then, I thought my career path was all preordained. I’ve already told you about my great philosophy teacher, Patri, who is still alive and residing in Paris now, and how much I admired him. He seemed to me like the very model of the consummate intellectual.
But above all, I believed passionately in philosophy. For me, it was the king of disciplines, the one that enabled me to understand myself, first of all, and to understand the world.
VM: And yet, you gave it up.
AM: When I got to the Sorbonne, I discovered an abstract, wordy philosophy, quite remote from the issues I considered important, or I did at the time, anyway. One of my teachers at the Sorbonne, Canguilhem, told me: “Philosophy is a game of concepts.” I was crushed by that. [ . . . ] Even today, philosophy oscillates between wordplay and intellectual entertainment. [ . . . ] The same goes for much of contemporary French literature. Lacanian psychoanalysis suffers from the same affliction. Even the sciences of man—look at the rise of structuralism and linguistics—despite some very interesting contributions, point to the same thing: it’s always the excessive emphasis placed on language. . . . I came in search of keys, of models, of a way to come to grips with myself and the world, to understand man, especially. What I found instead were either partisans more interested in politicking, the opposite of free thinkers, or exegetes and historians, whom I respect as scholars like any other, who work on the language of philosophy or on thought systems, but who left me unsatisfied when it came to grand spiritual adventures. [ . . . ] On the other hand, there was indeed a new, passionate philosophy, very much of its day, which was starting to engross my fellow students: existentialism. But there was something irrational and romantic about this doctrine that made me wary, along with its whiff of scandal, the Café Flore, Tabou, etc. that made me terribly suspicious. Philosophies shouldn’t go in and out of fashion; at least, that’s how I saw things back then. [ . . . ]
It wasn’t philosophy that helped me to survive, but, really and truly, it was literature. [ . . . ]
It isn’t even quite accurate to say that I abandoned philosophy; I still do some, from time to time.
VM: You once wrote that “philosophy is more deceitful than art.” [ . . . ]
AM: Art is a fiction that is aware of itself as such, while philosophy prides itself in believing that it touches on truth. [ . . . ]
France has become a lesser nation. That struck me as soon as I arrived in Paris. You could still feel defeat in the air. France had lost the war. [ . . . ] And the sense of tragedy has also been lost somehow. There are no more epics in this country, no more grandeur. The last embodiment, or at least a striving for grandeur, was the duo Malraux–de Gaulle.7 [ . . . ]
VM: You were somewhat close to the Marxists, though, weren’t you?
AM: I was more or less in agreement with them when it came to economic injustice, but I could not abide the collective discipline imposed on people’s thinking, the excessive consistency between thought and action, which inevitably gave rise to dogmatism and intolerance. [ . . . ]
When France was liberated at the end of the war, the Sorbonne was run by two main forces: Communists and Catholics. I don’t think things changed in any fundamental way until 1968.8 [ . . . ]
VM: You haven’t answered my question regarding the publication of The Pillar of Salt.
AM: That’s true. [ . . . ] I arrived in Paris with a bulky manuscript, handwritten into school notebooks, with all the fear and trembling that you can well imagine. I didn’t know a soul, obviously, and had no idea what to do with it, how to go about things. I asked Jean Amrouche for advice, but either he was busy with other matters or he just didn’t take me seriously, and [he] gave a noncommittal reply: “Drop off your manuscript at one or two publishers, then wait and see.” Which is what I did, and I was overjoyed to get back two answers, in Tunis, both positive. The first, from Julliard, made the astute suggestion that I split the work and make two books out of it. Maurice Nadeau, who was working at Corrêa Éditions, which later became Buchet/Chastel, accepted to publish it as is. Since Julliard’s offer seemed sacrilegious at the time, I signed with Nadeau. All he asked me to do was to prune a little, to tighten the text a bit. I read through the whole thing, pencil in hand: there was simply no way I could change anything, apart from spelling mistakes and a few stylistic flaws. Then I packed it up and sent it back to Nadeau, who was kind enough not to belabor it.
As for what happened next, other people told me how it all unfolded. Nadeau had the excellent intuition to take the manuscript over to Sartre, for an eventual publication of a short excerpt in his review, Les Temps modernes. Sartre read it and passed it on to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, who at that time was a member of the editorial board. Things were starting to heat up in Tunisia around that time, and the French public was keen to know what was happening in North Africa: The Pillar of Salt basically told the life story of a young North African. Merleau-Ponty later told me that the further he got into the book, the more he discovered chapters that were particularly enlightening. In the end, and in consultation with Sartre, they divided the book up and included excerpts in their journal, four or five in a row. This was a huge opportunity for a first-time writer . . . but with one downside: many people thought that the book had been published in its entirety in Les Temps modernes and didn’t bother buying it. But I didn’t care back then about whether the book was earning money, and later on, I had no qualms repeating the same operation for The Colonizer and the Colonized, to the great displeasure, this time, of my editor, who thought I had enough of a reputation not to need prepublication in a review. My appearance in such a resolutely leftist periodical, and perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s particular perspective when selecting the sections to be excerpted, set me squarely within the ranks of those who gravitated around Sartre. One critic, also a member of the jury of one of the literary prizes for which I had obtained some votes, furiously declared that so long as he sat on that jury “Memmi will never get the prize.” He kept his word, I’ve been told. What I least expected was how violent the reactions would be in Tunis itself, among my own people. In Tunis, it was something of an event, to have a book acknowledged by Paris, written by a native son and depicting the locals. I was invited to panel discussions where I was summoned to clarify certain things, or worse, to be told to my face that I was an ingrate, that I “understood nothing” about our customs and ways. I even received anonymous letters. [ . . . ]
VM: What do you think now about all that commotion?
AM: My fellow citizens have pretty much forgotten whatever it was that disturbed them and have retained the chronicle of what is, after all, their lives. The Pillar of Salt, more than anything else I have written, is their book. . . . In the heat of the moment, of course I was upset by their reactions, and I sometimes responded harshly; I ended up alienating lots of people, some of whom were friends. . . . Now, when I look back, I see how unpleasant it all was but also flattering, reassuring. It meant I was starting to matter in these people’s eyes. . . . That’s very important for a young man.
VM: For anyone.
AM: Yes, but even more for the person I was. At present, I don’t think anything could change my outward appearance or my destiny. . . . And I wouldn’t even care if something could. . . . But back then, I went through a real and definitive change, a genuine sea change in my life . . . [ . . . ]
It was then that I discovered, and have ever since maintained the conviction, that literature is the way to fight against imbalance and [is] even a sort of insurance against death. [ . . . ] Our entire civilization could disappear, everyone and everything, but that marker will remain. That Pillar was raised, no one can undo that fact, a pillar of words, not of stone. [ . . . ] The Pillar of Salt had another unexpected effect: as I said before, it turned me into a Tunisian writer. I was hailed and celebrated as such by Tunisians. [ . . . ]
I was considered a partisan of independence. [ . . . ] [Béchir Ben Yahmed, editor-in-chief of the magazine Jeune Afrique,] proposed that I become part of the initial founders of the journal and offered me the job as culture and literature editor. I readily accepted, and our collaboration lasted until I left Tunisia . . . [ . . . ] I was politically active but as a writer and journalist. [ . . . ] I had a certain profile, for Tunisians and for the French.
Tunisia, a Minor-League Country: The State of Affairs (1955–56)
Quaint little courts for petty kinglets, armies where officers outnumber soldiers, ministers without ministries, an admiral with no fleet. We often escape into such make-believe worlds through movies, part fantasy, part real, delighting in an atmosphere where life is nothing but a frolic.
Before the war, Tunisia was a charming backwater. On summer evenings, you could see the bey’s musicians seated in a circle in the palace courtyard, serenading the sovereign as he sat at his window, taking the evening air. Bystanders were allowed in to gaze in admiration, through a lattice screen, at their fine uniforms, their unsmiling faces, and their considerable moustaches, as well as the two antique canons that guarded the entrance, like a couple of toothless old dogs. Ah, life was good in that delightful backwater of a country!
The Flip Side
Life is still good there, better than in France. But it’s harder than before, and people there aren’t as happy. The war, the creation of the Arab League thanks to England, the propagandized promises issuing from Germany, then from America, have led to increased poverty and an enhanced awareness of that poverty. For it is this endemic poverty that is truly the root of the country’s problem.
I have toured in southern Tunisia and have seen the ravages of trachoma in towns with neither plumbing nor sewage systems nor medical facilities. In my mind, I still see with horror those crowds of people in rags, their diseased eyes weeping, surrounding the Tunisienne Automobile bus. Periods of famine have reduced the Bedouin to eating nothing but beans and carrot tails, and have pushed them off the land and into shantytowns ringing the cities. But even they have been driven out, and their ramshackle shelters of mud and straw destroyed. The quaintness of Tunisia’s street urchins cannot disguise their tattered clothes and empty stomachs.
Not surprisingly then, the constituency for political parties and trade unions has been more broad-based and stronger than elsewhere in the country. And though the fear among French North Africans may have been an overreaction, the reasons for it were obvious. I myself witnessed, at one of the V-Day celebrations, a crowd that had been convened and organized by the local chapter of the nationalist Destour Party.9 I was impressed by their sheer numbers and discipline. These men, who marched for hours, six by six, flanked by younger leaders, are perhaps unaware of their true interests. But as Madagascar and Indochina have taught us, they swear blind allegiance to their leaders.
But the leaders do know what they want. There exists at present an enlightened bourgeois class, graduates of French secondary schools and universities, who are in part the conscience of their people. Their legitimate demands to participate in the governance of their country make up one element of the problem.
The Grievances
Beyond the verbal circumspection and tactical skill, the Destour Party’s sole genuine claim emerges: Tunisian independence. Prior to the war, another party, the Old Destour, was not quite so entrenched. Lacking support and defeated by the representatives of France in Tunisia, this earlier party died of natural causes. One wonders when the short-sighted half-wits in colonial politics will finally understand their tragic, inexcusable mistake: repressing the moderates and cultivating the fanatics who they think are somehow easier to mislead.
France’s refusal of an earnest partnership with the moderates, alongside all the other unkept promises, has produced a hard core of distrust among the ever-more-desperate and hopeless colonized. Statements released periodically by the Résidence générale about the “heartwarming devotion” of the locals, the “unwavering commitment of the indigenous population to France,” were pure political theater (or some serious blindness). The truth is that Tunisians long ago ceased believing in the French. They have been looking at other options for quite a while and have found all the declarations about l’Union Française, about France and its overseas territories, either annoying or laughable.
As I write this, the pen feels heavy in my hand. No one ever speaks out this clearly when in that land of such intense color and light, and by the time they cross back over the Mediterranean, it’s all forgotten. Still, these things are real and must be stated aloud by anyone who loves Tunisia and France as I do. These things must be clearly made known to those who are able and willing to do something for Tunisia, and for France in Tunisia. During the German occupation, radio propaganda worked on hearts and minds such that the Germans ended up being warmly welcomed. A Destour leader, yet to be disavowed by his peers, made the trip to Berlin. Some, it is true, never yielded to the German offers (precisely the direction an intelligent colonial policy should have steered!). But overall, the Nazis found the general population and its leaders sympathetic to their cause. I am convinced that the soldiers of Rommel’s army found refuge with Muslim families.
But before addressing the issue of collaboration, we have to recognize that the meaning of words is historically contingent. In France, collaborators were those who acted against the will of their people, against the interests of the nation. In Tunisia, through an interplay of historical circumstances for which France was partly responsible, the German cause dovetailed with that of Tunisian independence, or so the Tunisians believed. Germany promised them what France, whether vanquished or victorious, was never going to give them. “But what about the social question?” you might ask. Accepting anything from the Germans amounted to accepting a fascist regime. But you could not seriously demand that the colonized be more democratic in their thinking than their colonizers. And the majority of French in the colonies are anything but democratic. Just as French Resistance fighters got weapons from the British, Muslims are still in possession of German weaponry left behind by Rommel’s army, which the French gendarmerie uncovers every so often. Yes, for them, France was the enemy. Today, they’ve entered a cold-war phase.
One day in the middle of the war, Algerian radio asked a Tunisian student to get a few friends together for a weekly program. They refused, describing their attitude in these words: “Collaborating with the French would be like the French collaborating with the Germans.”
Then came the German defeat. They gambled on the Americans, then, whose consuls promised the moon and the stars. But the Americans quickly lost interest politically in the French colonies (see Indochina). By now, Tunisian Muslims have lost all hope in the West and look to their Arab neighbors to the east.
French Policy
Faced with this united front, the French implemented an inconsistent policy typical of all piecemeal approaches to larger crises. A democratic government sent a resident general, a civilian with democratic values, to deliver a humanitarian speech, to issue promises, and to unfetter the press. Political demands immediately came to light in a burst of violence, and colonists pressured both the resident general and the French Foreign Ministry. Panicked by such a united revolt, following a demonstration whose cause has yet to be elucidated, the government gave free rein to the military, which fired into the crowd and arrested the leaders, whether Destourian or Communist. The civilian resident was then called back to Paris, and in the midst of a governmental shuffle an army general was dispatched, who proceeded to renege on promises and retract freedom of the press. And the cycle resumed, except that the next resident general, once again a civilian and a democrat, was immediately met with suspicion when he delivered his humanitarian speech, full of promises. On occasion, resisting proposals by the army and suggestions from the more hawkish elements among the French, the resident did satisfy a few grievances. But because he failed to initiate reforms unprompted, he merely confirmed the prevailing notion among Muslims that force alone brings results, and among the French, force was all that mattered. His reforms were thus drained of the humanity and justice that they should have conveyed to the beneficiaries. This resulted in Tunisian youth groups moving away from scout-oriented activities and into more immediately useful kinds of training, such as hand-grenade throwing.
On the French side, the two representatives in Parliament belonged to the RPF.10 The Socialists were considered utopians, more or less sympathetic to the Tunisian cause, who did not have much of a stake in the outcome, since they were, for the most part, civil servants and teachers who would eventually be transferred back to France. (In fact, this is the only category of Frenchmen that redeems the image of that France we all love.) The Communist Party, by then in decline, saw itself as a Tunisian party. Most of the French who had any assets at all favored the use of force, either out of self-interest, fear, or conviction. Their position is best summed up by this flight captain with whom I happened to share a part of my trip: “I don’t know what the resident will do if ever there should be an alert. But the Senior Troop Command is ready. We have a few Spitfire squadrons always prepared to take to the air.” And I can vouch for the Spitfires, because I have seen them myself. Every day, several formations, steely aircraft glistening in the sun, would fuel up and fly over the outskirts of the capital of the beys.
How to Address the Issue
But the status quo is not a lasting solution to problems that grow more pressing with each passing day. Mystification can work only for so long, for it discredits and eventually undermines the best intentions. Despite the more or less sincere objections to the contrary from people on the Left, France without her colonies would not amount to much. Perhaps justice demands the acceptance of this loss if, in order that our lives be better, someone else must be sacrificed. If we intend to be socially moral, we had better figure out the cost of our conviction. But the diehard supporters of colonial domination also have to know that they are acting outside moral bounds. Either way, complete clarity is a must. This means that if a solution can be found that would respect justice and honor while preserving the ties between France and her overseas possessions, it is this solution that must be adopted.
A further element of the problem, to which the Left tends to turn a blind eye, involves the situation of the European population of North Africa, which risks facing the same desperate plight as other French nationals in the overseas territories. There are today French men and women who, victims of historical circumstances, were born in Tunisia, know Tunisia better than they know France, and would be heartbroken if they were obliged to leave their homes, jobs, and friends. And because they feel as if they are being dismissed by the democrats, who consider their very existence as an injustice, they have pinned their last hopes on the reactionaries and the use of force as a last resort. What is more, they often share their privileges with the co-opted, well-to-do colonized locals. There is also a population of Italians in Tunisia who would be impossible to uproot from this land where multiple generations of their forebears have lived, and who know next to nothing about Italy. It would be just as unfair and absurd to call for these Italians to leave, or the Jews or Maltese, for that matter, as it would be to expel from Marseille the Corsican families whose great-great-grandparents settled there so long ago.
These are genuine human problems, not some nominally debatable issue, and we should not be allowed to look the other way. The nascent Muslim states are not yet able to protect their foreign nationals against what could easily turn into mob violence. Recent news items have unfortunately shown this to be the case. I know that what I am writing here will not sit well with my Muslim readers, but when we have the right to speak the truth, we must speak the whole truth. And if I failed to speak of the rights of the other inhabitants of Tunisia, how could I come out and affirm that Tunisians have the right to their liberation? For a decent Frenchman, then, the issue is to reconcile, with justice, the interests of France and the safety of Tunisia’s non-Muslim population.
For Tunisians, the situation is even clearer: their interests and their rights coincide in a single demand: the political and economic liberation of their country.
A Possible Solution
Preoccupied as they are by their political independence, as are all nations still in the process of becoming, Tunisians are less concerned about the economic enfranchisement of their people, who are still ruled by feudal overlords. Enslavement of Blacks, for instance, has not yet disappeared, despite its being outlawed. The condition of Tunisia’s peasantry, the fellahin, is no better than that of medieval serfs. Tunisia’s current leadership has taken so little notice—or they pretend not to notice—that political freedom means nothing unless accompanied by economic independence, that the trade unions receive both workers and management, forgetting their economic role and overemphasizing the national struggle. For an instant, the Tunisians believed they had caught the attention of the Americans, whose compassion immediately translated into their takeover of most of the El Aouina Airport. We have learned in recent days that they are once again interested in North Africa. May God protect us from our friends! It is clear that political aid from a European nation would require a renewed economic servitude.
Either that, or Tunisia would disengage from all European trade and enter the Arab League fold. Apart from the fact that ties between the Arab League and the British Foreign Office, its financer, advisor, and beneficiary, are now obvious to all, it would mean the triumph of the reactionary, feudal classes.
It seems to me that the best tool for a two-pronged liberation of the Tunisian people, the only one that would preclude any mystification, would be a progressive party that could unite the social struggle and the political struggle, one that would educate the masses, pave the way for their coming-of-age, and demand the most urgently needed reforms. For the time being, however, such a party can exist only within the framework of a democratic French union. There is nothing paradoxical about this. The situation of trade unions and progressive political groups in politically autonomous Arab countries provides the sociological proof. The leadership of such a party exists but is systematically countered by France. The cadres of such a party are compelled to play the all-out nationalist card to have any chance at all of being heard by their fellow citizens.
But French skeptics will say, “France has never favored a Tunisia political party, and in any case, its self-interests forbid it from doing so.” This is precisely the point I’ve been trying to make: the only solution for France, and more precisely, for all decent Frenchmen, is to support just such a party. Only men and women who believe in democratic values and who strive for the economic freedom of their people prefer a struggle within a democratic French union to the oppression that would follow any compromise with the feudal Arab League and the triumph of the reactionary wing that this implies. To refuse to help such a progressive party would result in all of Tunisia’s aspirations crystalizing around a reactionary nationalist party, with use of force as an inevitable consequence. But a policy based on coercion is always costly and sometimes proves suicidal.
Tunisian intellectuals must step back from their current brinkmanship, which can lead only to either a colonial war or an oppressive feudal government. They must put together a progressive party brave enough to stand before the Tunisian people and tell them where their true interests lie. France must come to the aid of this party, not merely through an act of benign indifference, but it must help prove Tunisia right. It is indeed the case that, despite impediments caused by colonialism, Tunisia made more progress in the areas of medicine, education, and the economy under the French than it did during the rule of the beys. It must now open up the schools to a broader population, intensify the country’s infrastructure, democratize its institutions, and give democrats the strength to defend themselves and to get their fellow citizens to accept the newly minted nation.
Tunisian Diaries, 1955–56
Friday 6 July. I recall (it’s Sebag, actually, who reminded me of it) what Fleg once said to me:11
You are Jewish, Tunisian, French, and you accept all three dimensions. You’re right to do so. It’s a good thing.
Remember that. I will take a stand politically when the urgency of justice requires it. But don’t come asking me to choose among my various identities, my deeper self. I am this, that, and the other thing all at the same time.
What if there is a conflict, you say? What sort of conflict, I ask? If it’s a political conflict, I’ll agree with whoever is right. If it’s about my deeper self, no, I refuse, and I’ll leave the room.
How racism is born: Daniel (5 years old), talking about the neighbors, says to me: They’re worse than Arabs!
13 July: Art alone, I discovered, would allow me to coincide with myself. In politics, all too often, the game was rigged (I don’t dare say that it was fundamentally rigged, by definition). To the extent that tactics can often conceal the real objectives. Which is frequent. Thus, you might believe that some watchword is important in and of itself, but it has actually been designed by the leaders as a diversion tactic, for instance. (In other words, you march to this watchword, but ultimately, they were wanting it to fail all along.) Positive, but the unpleasant experience of having been played, of never being sure. In art: you really do everything you can to coincide.
14 July: Increasing anxiety over this return to Paris. Especially having to face leaving Tunis. All the order in my life that I took such pains to establish must now yield to another.
15 July: I experienced waves of anxiety almost every day, especially at night before going to sleep, and would often wake up in a state of panic. I would share none of this with her [i.e., Germaine, his wife], unless she asked about it.
20 July: It’s not because I was born in Tunisia—or that I’m yearning to secure Tunisian citizenship—that I am helping Tunisians. It’s because I am against all forms of oppression.
26 July: What is so striking first of all is how few Jews are willing to speak out about the Jewish condition, especially when you see what a sizable proportion of them are intellectuals. But you need only get to know Jews to realize that all of them are concerned about it. Here’s the point: they prefer to deny it in public, as if afraid they might somehow contribute to awakening the monster.
The commitment of all Jews to Israel is an act of mistrust toward all other countries (despite the extraordinary good will that Jews show toward their countries of adoption), because they are never sure what the future holds, even in France, even in England, even in the USSR. That’s right, they are never sure to be considered as full citizens like everyone else. See Khrushchev’s speech, for example.
Freedom: Jews are not free to choose whether they are Jewish or not, they simply are Jewish, so all that’s left is for them to be freely Jewish. Come on, let’s get serious!
Naturalization: a legal phenomenon, it doesn’t save them. Would it take conversion? Not even. It doesn’t save them as individuals. They continue to be eyed with suspicion. . . . At best, it might save their descendants (with that, the Nazis still pursued them).
Separate sheet: The Jewish Factor. The problems faced by North African writers are my problems. But they are not exactly mine; or to be precise, mine are affected by the Jewish factor. For language, to give one example. There is nothing unconditional about it, as far as I’m concerned.
Starting out: I took a lot of criticism for ending The Pillar of Salt with a departure. People read it as the protagonist running away after a failure. But if he was running away, he was also seeking to build a new life on different foundations. My critics, for their part, have always faced life head-on, never dodging. But they weren’t entirely correct. He wasn’t exactly running away. In actual fact, AMB did not leave Tunis quite in that way—he went to Paris to try to continue his studies.12
A chapter on war—Israel’s war.
Seeking wisdom and the self.
4 August: the Suez Crisis:13 equivocal feelings of unease, quickly put to rest, I am happy to say (Nasser’s attitude toward Israel).
Preface to Portrait of a Jew (1971)
While this book followed its path, the wheels of history too continued to turn. There was the warning of the Six Day War and the comfort that followed it. Apart from supplying certain reasons to be confident about the future of Israel, this war confirmed the fact that the Arabs had never given up the idea of erasing the young state from the map. In France, once the Algerian war had ended, friendship with the Arab countries became more important than that with Israel. De Gaulle decided on the embargo and made a shocking speech, the most serious aspect of it being that he gave permission to the French once again to be anti-Semites.14 In the Arab countries, some Jews were hung and civil rights were suspended for the others. With the excuse of anti-Zionism, the Soviet Union gave a free hand to traditional anti-Semitism. This time, without any possible argument, reality came to resemble the portrait of a Jew that I had attempted to trace. The result was new editions of this book in France, England, Holland, Argentina, Italy, and Germany.
I don’t want to conclude this short preface solely by stating an unpleasant fact. When the oppressed begins to understand his oppression, he has taken the first step toward his liberation. From this time on, there will be something new, and important, in the spirit of the Jew; it is enough to speak to a young Jew today to be convinced of this. If Portrait of a Jew has been but a symptom of this awakening, I will be very happy.
Interview with Albert Memmi by Dov Maimon (2007)
DOV MAIMON: To begin, could you give a summary of the basic trends in your intellectual biography? Today, with novels such as Agar [Strangers] (1955) or La Statue de sel [The Pillar of Salt] (1953) [both available in translations from French into English, Hebrew, and many other languages] attaining the highly enviable status of classics, I’d like to know what place creating novels holds in your life.
ALBERT MEMMI: My work extends in two directions: creating novels and writing essays that take stock of reality. Taking stock of the real, of individuals or groups, has led me to consider two principal realms that are shared in our lives, and perhaps in those of animals: dominance and dependence.
a. Dominance is the attempt to master others so as to take some advantage of them, real or fictional. That is why racism or heterophobia (a concept I created) would be a good illustration of this (see in particular my book on racism).
b. Colonization, a subject to which I have devoted numerous texts, is also a good illustration of this collective phenomenon. The situation of being a Jew is another (see my Portrait d’un juif [Portrait of a Jew] (1962), where I created the notion of judéité [Jewishness]). But also the situation of being a woman, or of being Black. And so I discovered resemblances between all these states of being and specific characteristics for each.
c. After thirty years or so of research on dominance, I have discovered the importance of the need we have of others, whether it be the love relationship (the notion of the duo), the relationship between parent and child, the dependence on work, etc., but also the dependence on the imagination, mainly art or religion. Here, too, the mechanisms that regulate our dependence on drugs, alcohol, and tobacco and those that regulate our relations with art or religion are perceptibly the same: we are their captives, and they bring us pleasure.
d. But no conceptual analysis can exhaust the real, whether individual or collective; it almost always possesses an imaginary dimension (one loves a woman for what she is and also for the way we imagine her). The same is true for one’s community or country. I therefore need to devote myself sometimes to conceptual analysis and sometimes to fictional construction. For me, writing novels remains unavoidable.
DM: As you have shown often enough, Zionism is not a colonialist phenomenon but purely and simply a movement of national liberation. And yet, how do you explain that the criticism of Israel so conspicuous in Europe seems increasingly to find nourishment in a source of anti-imperialist ideology such as is today incarnated notably in a movement that some, such as P. H. Taguief [sic: Pierre-André Taguieff] and A. Finkielkraut, consider proper to call neo-Leftism?
AM: Because the European Left remains impregnated with Stalin-like and Soviet Manichaeanism. The Arabs, because they were dominated by the West and are still not out of the grasp of the West, seem to remain victims. The same thing happens in Israel. We come up against Arab feudal systems (by some miracle thought to be progressive) and oil money, which will weigh more and more heavily on the politics of Europe.
DM: As an early militant for decolonization, how do you see the evolution of societies in the Maghreb, especially in view of the fundamentalist threat?
AM: I am not reassured, either for the Maghreb or for the whole Arab world. Indeed, the Arab world is passing through a stage that I have called the return of the pendulum. As long as the memory of colonization and its aftereffects, and the sociohistorical decline of the Arab-Muslim world, have not faded, the pendulum risks swinging as far as possible to one side; hence the attractions of past glories, of nationalism, the efforts to recover power in the process of which violence and terrorism appear as the most efficacious tools—instead of latching on bravely to democratization and the adoption of contemporary knowledge.
DM: In the spectrum of French Judaism, you incarnate the nonreligious, cultural, progressive, and identity position. Do you think that a Judaism that is purely secular—not only stripped of its ritual practices but [also] oblivious of the great ethical and metaphysical questioning conveyed by the old Hebrew wisdom—is possible or even simply desirable?
AM: I don’t find fault with rituals, whether individual or group. They are comforting by marking the rhythms of time; they contribute to the unity of the group. On the other hand, I do find fault with making them sacred, the pretension of rabbis and priests in general to be the spokespersons of some divinity rather than dabblers in history. Neither do I find fault with ethical or even metaphysical questioning, if there is such a thing as metaphysics. I do find fault with clerical and mythological answers to these questions. No god can allay our fears, at least not for me. The Bible, like all writing said to be holy, is literature, excellent literature in fact. Somewhere or other I proposed this turn of phrase: “Religion is literature gone mad.”
DM: Does the solution that the Israeli intellectual Left has favored for a long time—I mean the partition of the land into “two states for two peoples” with Jerusalem as capital both for the Palestinian state to the east and for the Hebrew state to the west—still seem operable to you, after the clear failure of the Oslo Accords, which were conceived on this basis?
AM: As long as people have not become more reasonable, I am in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states and two peoples. But I am not sure that the Zionist dream has really disappeared, nor whether the Arabs are resigned to the existence in their midst of a [Jewish or Israeli] national identity.
DM: What is your view of the relationship that Diaspora communities maintain towards the State of Israel?
AM: Decisive, in both directions.
The Fecundity of Exile (2003)
I need to make a confession to you, which is costly: the suffering of exile has often been deplored, and I have had a share in this. It is time to add that exile is also fecund.
As for myself, I have drawn great benefit from having four or five countries and not just a single one.
For forty years, longer than in my home country, I have lived in Paris, and I am in love with this city to the point that it seems to me the most beautiful city in the world. I speak and write in French; I even believe that I have ended up dreaming in French. French is my language as the free, reasonable, and rational man that I strive to be. It is the language of the disciplined but fastidious citizen of a democratic country. It is the indispensable tool for my everyday work as a writer and teacher. French is my way of thinking the universal.
I could not possibly say all that Arabic has been for me, despite my immersion without return in French, especially after the death of my parents. For me, it remains the essential, the intimate familiarity with common roots in the Arab world, such that I rediscover myself in countries from Morocco to Syria.
Hebrew, the language of my childhood imagination, the language of the lived and narrated Bible, quoted with ease and naturalness in our circle of artisans [ . . . ]. Today it is the language of a project of rejoining in an unexpected manner an almost mythical past with a political future.
Italian is a language that is music to my ears. I find great enjoyment in speaking Italian and in hearing my Italian friends say, with me learning from them, “Tesoro mio,” “Carissimo [amico].”
I will say nothing about a few bits of Maltese, which I picked up from being around my father. He was so well-versed in this surprising Arab-Christian dialect that he was often taken to be Maltese. Not to mention the fossilized Spanish, spoken with the distinction of Cervantes, to the point that linguists, it seems, came to study among the Jewish families that had taken refuge here since the inquisition. Nor to mention Greek, the idiom of the philosophers, which I was professionally until literature prevailed over it.
The other side of exile, finally, is to enjoy multiple affiliations and especially to acquire from them a sense of indulgence toward everyone. Groups require us to be this or that, because groups are large beasts without brains. They are jealous because they are afraid. The truth, increasingly, is that we are both this and that, and even more. I would like to have five passports.
Passport for a Hoped Immortality (2007)
I am at the age of settling accounts, where one looks back over the whole of one’s life and asks oneself if one has lived it well: what were the mistakes, the successes, and the occasional regrets.
For the writer I have become, what have I contributed to the basket of the common culture? Why should I be concerned about posterity, when I am someone who does not believe that there is another world? Why so much stubborn effort to build a sort of passport for a hoped immortality?
And so, what little I have discovered I am giving to you in this groping response. One must live, act, and think now, in this life, as if one were worthy of a hoped immortality. To be brief, find and communicate the truth, if possible. Beware of prejudice and utopias, of all dogmas, including those that are one’s own. Live without submission and without compromise. For me, this is the ethics of the thinker and the foundation of what I mean by philosophy.
Then try to develop the proper form for communicating it: that is the role of the writer, which I have also tried to be.