Algerian White
By Assia Djebar, Translated from French by David Kelley And Marjolijn de Jager
Seven Stories Press, 233 pages, $24.95
The Last Summer of Reason
By Tahar Djaout, Translated from French by Marjolijn de Jager,
Foreword by Wole Soyinka
Ruminator Books, 145 pages, $19
Algeria is an enigmatic abattoir. Death is everywhere in that country, which came to birth after the eight-year revolt that ended more than a century of French rule in 1962. Sadly, the new nation immediately sank into a lethal torpor from which it has yet to extricate itself.
In the late 1980s, the ruling military authorities announced free elections, but they canceled them when it became apparent that a fundamentalist Islamist party was likely to win. Stuck between the Meccan Black Rock and a hard place, the nation caved in. In the last decade, more journalists have been killed in Algeria than anyplace on Earth (at least 58). Likewise, scholars and artists have been singled out, and Shining Path-like massacres have occurred throughout the countryside.
Most likely the Armed Islamic Group is responsible for this slaughter, which may be calculated to sow fear and undermine institutions, but it has been speculated that the military has also engineered atrocities to blame the Islamists.
In fact, no one knows who is responsible. All people do know is that life amid this “collective self-devouring” that is chronicled in Assia Djebar’s horribly gripping “Algerian White” consists of funeral after funeral.
Djebar, author of “So Vast the Prison,” a soulfully mournful meditation on love and loss, calls her new book a narrative rather than a memoir or a novel because traditional genres cannot contain its grief. The book uses fictional techniques to convey the real lives and, more particularly, the real deaths of a generation of Algerian novelists, poets, dramatists and intellectuals.
She jumps from “the nine historical leaders” of the nationalist liberation movement who swiftly turned on each other, to the rebellion’s first martyrs, guillotined by the French, and then–the deluge. Or perhaps the image ought to be a sandstorm. Writing with the lustrous precision of Camus, whom she also evokes, Djebar holds conversations with dead friends, pleading, “let us at least bring back the strangled, the suicides, the murdered, nestled in their somber history, in the hollow of tragedy.” To do so, she re-creates their last days and minutes with tooth-grinding fortitude. Every time a chapter straightforwardly begins, “A spring day in 1978,” or, “Soon the poet will reach the end of his fiftieth year,” you know that bad news is coming. Immediately to follow will be stabbing, shooting, bludgeoning.
The book is a martyrology, and eventually the names and episodes blur. Poets on the outside of power are killed, and ministers on the inside of power are killed. “[T]he tortured of yesterday are the torturers today,” Djebar says as murderers are murdered and buried next to their victims. Numbness, horror and outrage ensue, and language is their ultimate victim when Djebar perceives “the uselessness of words.” To be fair to hope, she adds, “but their necessity as well,” yet words have a different quality than they did in her previous work. They reveal cynicism when she scoffs, ” ‘name one person who, after being entrusted with public office, didn’t immediately use that power to cause harm to some adversary or other, in the name of God knows what rivalry!’ “; and fury when she refers to her homeland as ” ‘this vile and sullied country’ “; and forlornness when she practically chants, ” ‘Blood brings blood.’ ” And in her words, the dead are “bled white.” The color of her title is the white of “the sun–so bright, so vertiginous–that assailed me with a kind of violence,” and of the desert, and, especially, of the shroud.
That whiteness is also evident in the posthumously published “The Last Summer of Reason,” by Tahar Djaout, whose murder, described by Djebar, ushered in a new wave of killing in May 1993. To give Djaout’s killers the evil credit they surely desire, they understood him well. Djaout’s novel is a parable that chillingly anticipates the terror of a theocratic society. Its hero, Boualem Yekker, owns a bookstore, which by definition makes him dangerous and consequently endangered. He lives in a world controlled by the Vigilant Brothers of Community in the Faith who believe that “inexhaustible serenity” would follow if “not for the seditious philosophies and the devious interrogations that led the spirit of humanity astray by hauling it away from the paths of humility and salutary submission.”
Not that Yekker is a Disney-mongering tool of secular capital. He “rarely watches TV,” preferring the company of books, “his most enduring companions, those thick bound volumes of ancient times.” Nonetheless, he’s suspect. A hitchhiker he picks up detects his natural skepticism and castigates him. He receives ominous letters and threatening phone calls. Eventually his children shun him because it’s easier to succumb to authority than contend with it. And then comes the event that he naively thinks is the ultimate upheaval; his bookshop is closed, the lock changed.
Undoubtedly worse events follow the book’s conclusion, but the shutting of his beloved store is the last loss the humble merchant must endure in these pages, and, like Djebar, he responds by “tak[ing] great care to resuscitate as many distant and incomplete faces and landscapes as possible before it is too late and there is no way out of the chaos.” Like Djebar’s, Djaout’s “world is a desert, insanity has transformed it into an ossuary,” the color of which is, obviously, white.
Ironically, Yekker ends with a questioning, rather than a depressing, note: “Will there be another spring?” Surely there wasn’t for Djaout, and Djebar will never know seasons like those of her childhood. As for Algeria, the prognosis is not good, but as long as it continues to produce writers like these, be they exiled or assassinated, perhaps there’s hope.
