The Postcolonial Algerian Novel

Reading through studies of Francophone Algerian literature published in the last 30 years, one might be forgiven for thinking that the colonization of Algeria by France remains the defining feature of the Algerian imagination, decades after Albert Memmi and Malek Haddad first theorized the predicament of the Francophone Maghrebi writer, inextricably caught in the ‘colonial relation’ by virtue of his or her language of expression (Memmi, 1985: 157). More than any other genre the Algerian novel has been read as a response to Algeria's colonial past and as a proving ground for the articulation of a postcolonial national identity. As early as 1966, the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi wrote in the pages of the decolonial journal Souffles that ‘a large part of this literature has remained […] a literature of colonized subjects, in spite of its revolutionary character’ (2016: 71). More generous with his elders, Laâbi's contemporary Abdelkebir Khatibi read the Algerian novel in particular as a vehicle for ‘national construction’ (1968: 17). Contemporary critics have therefore focused on the ways in which the Algerian novel has represented, engaged with or subverted Algeria's colonial past and negotiated the legacies of colonial rule, most notably the central role that the French language and French publication and distribution networks continue to play in the Algerian field of letters, pace Memmi's claim that ‘la littérature colonisée de langue européenne semble condamnée a mourir jeune’ (1985: 130).

The rich archive of Algerian novels written in French in the twentieth and early twenty-first century apparently confirms the centrality of the colonizer/ colonized dyad analysed by Memmi in the 1950s. From Kateb Yacine's anticolonial allegory Nedjma (1956) to Kamel Daoud's acclaimed riposte to Albert Camus's L’Étranger (1957), Meursault, contre-enquete (2013), the Algerian novel seems to be caught in a dialectical relationship with the former colonizer, France. In this sense, it is symptomatic of what we might call the postcolonial relation, updating Memmi's terms to include the postcolonial present. Most evident in the case of novels that directly grapple with Algeria's colonial history – Tahar Djaout's Les Chercheurs d'os (1984) or Yasmina Khadra's Ce que le jour doit a la nuit (2008) – the colonial past also weighs heavily on the literature of la décennie noire, the ‘black decade’ that followed the popular revolts of the late 1980s.