By Réda Bensmaïa
Jean-Paul Sartre's recognized query, "For whom will we write?" moves on the subject of domestic for francophone writers from the Maghreb. Do those writers deal with their compatriots, a lot of whom are illiterate or learn no French, or a broader viewers past Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia? In Experimental international locations, R?da Bensma?a argues powerfully opposed to the tendency to view their works now not as literary creations worthy contemplating for his or her cutting edge type or language yet as "ethnographic" texts and to appraise them in basic terms opposed to the "French literary canon." He casts clean gentle at the unique literary suggestions many such writers have deployed to reappropriate their cultural historical past and "reconfigure" their countries within the a long time seeing that colonialism.Tracing the circulate from the anticolonial, nationalist, and arabist literature of the early years to the relative cosmopolitanism and variety of Maghrebi francophone literature at the present time, Bensma?a attracts on modern literary and postcolonial thought to "deterritorialize" its research. even if in Assia Djebar's novels and flicks, Abdelkebir Khatabi's prose poems or serious essays, or the novels of Nabile Far?s, Abdelwahab Meddeb, or Mouloud Feraoun, he increases the veil that hides the intrinsic richness of those artists' works from the eyes of even an attentive viewers. Bensma?a exhibits us how such Maghrebi writers have opened their countries as territories to rediscover and stake out, to invent, whereas making a new language. In featuring this masterful account of "virtual" yet veritable international locations, he units forth a brand new and fertile topography for francophone literature.
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Additional info for Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb (Translation Transnation)
Example text
What I find most interesting in Allouache’s film, however, is the fact that he carries out this work of anamnesis and recollection indirectly, in an almost roundabout way. ) of Alilo—the young Algerian trabendiste who finds himself caught between his business partner in Algiers and his cousin and Fatoumata in Paris—Allouache shows us some of what is at stake politically, socially, and culturally in contemporary “real” France, without resorting to militant didacticism or bitter recriminations. The mere presence of these young Algerians adrift in the city functions as a veritable return of the cultural and political repressed of France and Algeria’s twinned histories.
While some writers did devote much of their time and energy to writing and producing plays— like Kateb Yacine and Abdelkader Alloula—most of them have become known first and foremost as novelists. Paradoxically, it is precisely as novelists that Abdelkebir Khatibi, Nabile Fare`s, Assia Djebar, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Mammeri, He´le´ Be´ji, and other postindependence Maghrebi writers have made themselves a name. Despite the cultural wrenching that recourse to the French language represented, despite the contradictions with which they were forced to deal in this deterritorialized context, each of these writers first commanded attention as the author of poems, novels, or essays.
For these writers, this kind of objectivity is nothing other than the reverse mirror image of the extrinsic and overdetermined vision of a space they are attempting to free from norms and principles they deem totally inadequate for understanding the true nature of the Medina. As I will attempt to show, for these writers the Medina cannot be judged according to the abstract and extrinsic criteria of health and sickness, but rather, it must be interpreted through the perceptions and affects that emanate directly from their meandering through the Medina.