Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 302-307

Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, ed., Algeria in Others' Languages. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002; 246 pp.; ISBN: 080148801X (pbk.); LC call no.: PJ6074 .A44; $19.95

Algeria has been bleeding for over a decade. Since 1992 an estimated 100,000-150,000 people have been killed there. These deaths, for the most part, have gone unpunished, and the identities of the perpetrators remain unclear. A war is going on in Algeria; a war that, for the most part, is being fought between the regime and the various armed groups that continue to mutate, splinter and multiply: first we saw the MIA (The Armed Islamic Movement), then the GIA (The Armed Islamic Group), and now we have the GSPC (The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat). The casualties of this civil war (or, as some have called it, this "guerre contre les civils") have been children, women, the young, the old and the middle-aged, Islamists, anti-Islamists, the president of the country, foreigners, journalists, writers, doctors, clerics, nuns, teachers, taxi drivers, and the list goes on. This inventory, of course, does not cover the non-human casualties of the war, which include far more ambiguous victims such as civil rights, personal security, hope for the future, and peaceful sleep. The year 2003 began in Algeria with the news of yet another massacre of two families near Blida, and of an attack on a military convoy that left forty-three dead in the Aurès. This same report informed us that, in 2002, one thousand people died: a number which may indeed seem small in comparison to the figures of past years, but this is an impression that results from fatigue, a desensitization brought about by too much pain and too much bloodshed. A thousand lives lost. Algeria continues to bleed.

It is difficult to situate the exact moment of the ignition of this conflict: the demonstrations of 1988 are a good candidate, as is the cancellation of the first democratic national election in 1992, or the on-air assassination of President Mohammed Boudiaf in 1993. The conflict has been particularly [end page 302] distressing for writers, readers, and scholars of Algerian literature, for, in 1993, people just like us began to die: Tahar Djaout, novelist, poet and journalist, was shot in May 1993, he died a week later in early June; Youcef Sebti, poet, professor and journalist, was killed in his bed in December 1994; Abdelkader Alloula, playwright and dramaturge, shot in March 1994. The list goes on. Djaout, Sebti, and Alloula were all targeted because of their writing, because of their thinking, and because of their relationships to language and its politics in Algeria. Interestingly — and this illustrates how muddy and unclear the language politics of Algeria are — each came to the linguistic debate from a different perspective: Djaout was a Kabyle who wrote in French; Sebti wrote in both French and literary Arabic, and was a vocal supporter of the regime's policy of Arabization; and Alloula broke new ground with his writing and staging of plays in dialectical Algerian Arabic. Put simply, language is an extremely complex issue in Algeria: it is not simply a question of which language, but of what kind of Arabic (dialectical vs. literary vs. Classical Arabic), what kind of French, and which Berber languages are being spoken and written.

Algeria in Others' Languages, a collection of essays edited by Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, takes as its starting point the question of language politics in postcolonial Algeria, and, specifically, the issues surrounding the consequences of the Arabization undertaken upon independence in 1962. The book brings together texts by some of the godfathers, and godmothers, of Algerian and Maghrebian scholarship in general, including Réda Bensmaïa, Hafid Gafaïti, and Omar Carlier. This already-strong show of research and analysis is rendered even more compelling by its juxtaposition against two literary pieces. The first is a micro-text (just over three pages in length) called "Diglossia" by Moroccan author Abdelkader Khatibi best-known for his novel Amour bilingue. The tiny piece puts forth three propositions that cut to the heart of the paradox of Francophone writing of the Maghreb: first, "a foreign tongue is not added to the native tongue as a simple palimpsest, but transforms it"; second, "Maghrebian literature is a translation from French into French, and not, as one tends to think, a transcription of the native language into French"; and third, "Maghrebian literature is a radical experience and experiment of autobiography" (158). Khatibi's piece flings the doors wide open to what promises to be a raucous and intense discussion of Francophone writing in the Maghreb, but he does not walk through these doors himself. On its own, this piece would be frustrating, since it promises more than it delivers, but thankfully Kahtibi is joined in this collection by others who try to engage with the important discussion to which he points.

The second literary piece, the jewel of the collection, is Hélène Cixous's extraordinary text entitled "The Names of Oran." Cixous's text is [end page 303] the last presented in the collection, and it is worth waiting for. In it she presents her own childhood experience of the polyglot city of Oran, a city of pure sound, of words without meaning, but infused with scents and colors and textures:

I say Oran, and the words come running down the boulevards and the alleyways, up the hills, along the cliffs the color of raw meat overhanging the coast, here they are clacking high in my new child's ears, dazzled with sonorous sparkles: le Villaginègre, Ya Ouled, Mémé Eckmühl, Ptivichy, Saha, La Calentica, El Khobz… and on Sunday the family took the word les Planteurs and we went up the slopes of the Moorish cemetery, climbing up to the Belvedere, then across the rocky scrub, in the direction of the word Santacruz, and when my father took us we made a stop at the word Marabout. (184)

Cixous's (and her reader's) guides in this linguistic journey through her native city are her grandmother (Omi), who speaks German, and her father, who speaks "French, Spanish, English, Arabic, and since Omi entered the home, he also speaks German Charabia, that is Algharbiya, that is, Berber crossed with Westphalian. It is a language that makes use of everything it encounters" (190). The text is a portrait of a lost world: an Oran loved by so many for the mixing of languages and people for which it was famous, and where Jewish families lived without fear. While the collection is worth picking up for this text alone, happily Berger's collection has a great deal more to offer.

Algeria in Others' Languages is a welcome book in an English-speaking context, where the plight of Algeria is little-known, if not ignored entirely. Berger, who by her own admission, is not a specialist of Maghrebian or Algerian literature (although her personal and familial connections to Algeria are strong), does a good job in her introduction to the book of providing the reader with a history of Arabization and linguistic conflict in Algeria and then establishing the collection's theoretical concerns: namely, questions of gendering inside and outside of language, the mother-tongue vs. the stepmother-tongue, various understandings of bilingualism and diglossia, neocolonialism, and regionalism.

The compendium as a whole will be useful and interesting to both specialists and non-specialists as it contains a good balance of detail and background. It opens with Hafid Gafaïti's "The Monotheism of the Other: Language and de/construction of national identity in postcolonial Algeria," a piece which examines the linguistic practices in Algeria and the place of language in the cultural debates and violent clashes in Algeria. In July 1998 Arabic was declared the only national language of the country — a decision [end page 304] which, Gafaïti explains, was postponed many times due to Kabyle opposition (the unilingual policy has since been revisited and revised). The author is careful and explicit in his taking account of other forces at play. Specifically, Gafaïti resists the tendency to see language politics and conflict in Algeria as occurring only between two homogenous groups of Arabophones and Francophones, and in doing so, he provides a knowledgeable and nuanced account of Berberist politics, of the repression of vernacular languages (including Algerian Arabic); of the strong Pan-Arabist ideology behind the regime's policy of Arabization; and of the crisis in education that followed its implementation. In short, Gafaïti's account of the linguistic crisis in Algeria is excellent and useful to both specialists (since it is very thorough and will inevitably fill in gaps in just about anyone's knowledge) and non-specialists (as it is broad in scope).

In her piece entitled "The Algerian Linguicide," Djamila Saadi-Mokrane traces the targeting of language (the Arabic "linguicide" in this case) back to the French colonial era, and follows what she sees as a systematic repression of language through to the present targeting of Algerian dialectical Arabic, as well as of the country's numerous Berber languages (Chenoui, Chouaia, Kabyle, Mozabite, Zenete, and Tamachek among others), whose speakers make up an estimated twenty per cent of the country's population (48). Her article includes a discussion of the distinctions between Classical Arabic, Modern or literary Arabic, and dialectical Arabic: an exposition most welcome to non-Arabophone readers. Saadi-Mokrane's piece works well as a follow-up to Gafaïti's since she too ends her article with a discussion of the education crisis, which she characterizes as an "identity crisis in schools" (56), and with a quick overview of literary activity in Arabic, French and Berber languages since independence.

Editor Anne-Emmanuelle Berger artfully designed the book so as pieces may be combined into subtle thematic pairings (as seen with Gafaïti and Saadi-Mokrane above) or triads. The pairing of Omar Carlier's essay "Civil War, Private Violence, and Cultural Socialization: Political violence in Algeria (1954-1988)" with Ranjanna Khanna's "The Experience of Evidence: Language, the law, and the mockery of justice" is especially informative, for both take a comparatively long view of a crisis that culminated in such shocking bloodshed in the past decade and a half. Carlier starts his informative look back with a presentation of two seemingly unrelated moments of betrayal and of random violence: the first occurred in 1974, when a woman denounced a neighbor for being "Moroccan"; and the second took place in 1994 when a pregnant woman was disembowled by a teenager because she did not allow him to steal her purse. The author uses these two moments to trace the relationships and distinctions between public and private violence during the three decades he examines, starting [end page 305] with small- and large-scale denunciation that began in the 1970s during the "sand wars" with Morocco, and following through to the extreme violence that exploded twenty years later. Carlier's construction of the links between the not-so-distant past and present is convincing, and require reading for anyone watching Algeria and struggling with the question of how it could have come to this. Ranjana Khanna, for her part, sets up a fascinating juxtaposition of a mock trial held on International Women's Day (1995) by masked women — who were, for the most part, members of the Algerian Union of Democratic Women — with the case of Djamila Boupacha, a victim of torture at the hands of the French during the Algerian War. Boupacha's story was made famous by Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir's book published in 1962. Khanna argues that the two cases are linked in their call for "a fair trial on behalf of a victim of torture, [and to the extent that] the relationship of legal language to referentiality is foregrounded, in a manner that reflects a changing attitude both toward the legal system and toward the French and Arabic languages predominating in Algeria" (112). The piece examines the use of rape as a weapon and as method of torture, and the extent to which legal language has failed and continues to fail women in their search for justice. It is a rare move to draw a direct line between violence against Algerian women and the shortcomings of the legal system then and now, and the result is a thought-provoking and unexpected story.

Of all the scholarly approaches to the linguistic conflict represented in the collection, the literary critical pieces are the ones that get the least and shed the least light on a conflict that has spilled outside of language and whose victims have been all too real. An exception to this is Anne-Emmanuelle Berger's "The Impossible Wedding: Nationalism, languages, and the mother-tongue in postcolonial Algeria." Hers is a theoretically sophisticated piece in which the author brings her expertise in contemporary literary criticism to bear on questions of mother-tongue, national identity, gender, and the veil in Algerian literature. On the other hand, Lucette Valensi's article, "The Scheherazade Syndrome: Literature and politics in postcolonial Algeria," constitutes a quick overview of Algerian literature since independence, touching on the works of authors such as Assia Djebar, Tahar Djaout, Rachid Mimouni, Rachid Boudjedra, Tahar Ouettar, Abdelkader Djemaï, and Kateb Yacine. The article broaches the interesting and important question of censorship in Algeria, but her text is very broad in its scope, and, as a result, it reads like a survey. This is probably the least interesting piece in the book, but it may be useful for a reader who is looking for a potted history of Algerian literature.

Finally, Réda Bensmaïa's "Multilingualism and National 'Character': On Abdelkader Khatibi's 'Bilanguage'" is vintage Bensmaïa. The construction of this text takes a triangulation of thinkers as its starting [end page 306] point: Kafka, Khatibi and Derrida. Bensmaïa's writing is always sophisticated, dense, and deeply engaged on the level of language; this article certainly lives up to the reader's expectations. Here he explores the concept of bilingualism as it is defined by Kafka and Brecht: "the intersection of at least two cultures and three civilizations" (165), and its contrasts with Khatibi's notion of the "bi-langue" in his text Amour bilingue (a bilingualism contained within every language, yet heightened and exaggerated in the Maghrebian context). Also discussed is Bensmaïa's concept of "whitening" ("blanchir") language, an idea which he has explored at length in "Traduire ou 'blanchir' la langue: Amour bilingue de Khatibi" (Hors Cadre 3 [1985]: 187-206). Since the piece remains highly theoretical, it finds few echoes in Carlier's or even Berger's pieces. It does, however, flesh out ideas to which Khatibi points in "Diglossia," but which remain shadowy and mysterious; as such, Bensmaïa's article is indispensable to the collection.

Bensmaïa's piece brings us full circle back to Cixous, the final piece in the collection, which, again, I cannot recommend highly enough. All in all, Berger's work in this volume is admirable, and a good example of interdisciplinarity at work. The translations are good (for many of these pieces were originally written in French), the writing is tight, and the fresh eyes of a non-specialist have provided the clarity and energy needed to pull together a coherent series of readings on a very muddy topic.

Julija Šukys

Northwestern University