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The Life and Legacy of Albert Memmi, a Conversation with Dr. Lia Brozgal

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The Life and Legacy of Albert Memmi, a Conversation with Dr. Lia Brozgal The Life and Legacy of Albert Memmi, A Conversation with Dr. Lia Brozgal This issue of NokokoPod provides a discussion of the life and legacy of the late Albert Memmi. The annotated PDF is available on the Nokoko journal website. This conversation took place on November 6, 2020 with Dr. Christopher Webb in Ottawa and Dr. Lia Brozgal in Los Angeles. This version of the PDF has been reviewed by both parties. In addition to the conversation, a set of annotations has been added as footnotes so as to strengthen the value of these publications and enable them to act as a resource for listeners and readers who want to have additional context and/or find additional resources on the topics discussed. Christopher Webb: Hello to our listeners, welcome to Nokokopod, the podcast of Nokoko Journal, Carleton University’s journal of African Studies. You can follow us on Twitter @Nokokojournal for updates on the podcast, new articles and call for papers. Today we'll be discussing the life and legacy of the late Albert Memmi, who passed away in May of this year.1 Memmi was a French-Tunisian writer and intellectual best known for his works on anti-colonial theory, which explored relations between colonizer and colonized, and the psychology of colonial racism. Memmi was also a novelist, writing a number of books, which explored multiple dimensions of the colonial experience. To discuss Memmi's work and his legacy, we are joined by Dr. Lia Brozgal. Dr. Brozgal is an Associate Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA, her research focuses on Francophone North African literature, culture and history, as well as contemporary France, and she is the author of Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory. Dr. Brozgal, welcome to Nokokopod. Lia Brozgal: Thank you. Christopher Webb: I wanted to start by asking you to help us fill in some of Memmi's biography. During the Second World War, he was briefly interned in a labour camp in colonial Tunisia under the Vichy regime's antisemitic laws. He then escapes the camp, makes his way to France, and he tries to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, but as a Tunisian, he was not permitted to sit for the exam, and he instead studied psychology and sociology. He later returns to Tunisia in 1949, where he begins to write a series of novels, most notably The Pillar of Salt. I wonder if you could tell us, what are some of the themes he 1 Albert Memmi died on May 22, 2020 in France at the age of 99. 1 explores in these early novels, and how did they reflect his early experiences as a Jewish Tunisian living under French Colonial Rule? Lia Brozgal: So, as you rightly pointed out, he wrote his first two novels, The Pillar of Salt, which was published in 1953, and a second novel titled Agar, which was published in 1955, both of those were completed while he was still living in Tunisia. I suppose it would be more precise to say he had returned to Tunisia having done his studies in Paris, as you mentioned, he returned to Tunisia a married man, he brought home with him a French bride, and that 'mixed marriage', as he puts it, would become the topic of that second novel, Agar. But before we get ahead of ourselves too much, both the first and second novels, Pillar of Salt and Agar, could be qualified as novels inspired by Memmi's own life experience. Some people have called them autobiographical novels, I'm not a fan of that term, they're certainly novels that are liberally inspired by his own childhood and upbringing, in Tunisia, in the Jewish ghetto on the edge of Tunis. For Pillar of Salt and for Agar, both are somewhat directly inspired by his experiences returning to his home country, again, with a French Catholic wife, so there are continuities across those first two novels insofar as the protagonists are quite lucid. I should add these are both novels narrated in the first person by a male protagonist who is a Tunisian Jew, who is fluent in French, who has had experiences of antisemitism, who has grown up under French Colonial rule, who has been educated in a prestigious Lycée in Tunis and then had gone to higher education in France. In the case of Agar, his protagonist had gone to medical school and become a medical doctor, before returning to Tunisia; so both of these novels feature this protagonist who's highly self-conscious, who's incredibly aware of the sort of geo-political, historical, and cultural and empirical forces working on him. We might call the first novel The Pillar of Salt a kind of bildungsroman.2 We see in that first novel, obviously, themes of alienation, internal identity conflict, again, a subject who is very aware of being both a subject of and subjected to history. We also see, narrated, various forms of what we might call today microaggressions, or small incidents of prejudice and discrimination of antisemitism. Certainly, in Pillar of Salt, the novel is far more concerned with Jewish and Muslim relations than it is with questions of colonization, though obviously questions of colonization are the backdrop. But we really see the main characters more actively attempting to negotiate religious differences, linguistic differences, and perhaps, to a higher degree than we see here, negotiating what we might call the colonial situation, although again, that is clearly the terrain upon which he treads. In Pillar of Salt, many of these issues play out in a school context, whether it's early school, high school, or the question of sitting for an exam called the aggregation, which would be a kind of doctoral exam. This is an episode that frames Pillar of Salt. It begins and ends with the protagonist sitting down to take a written exam that's supposed to last for days, and instead of writing the exam, he writes the story of his life, which becomes a sort of intervening narrative of the novel. In Agar, the second novel, we have an adult protagonist who's now married, who brings home, again, his French Catholic wife, and the novel always underlines his French Catholic/Alsatian, blue eyed, blonde wife. He brings his wife home to his very traditional Tunisian Jewish family, and we see the couple attempting to negotiate their new lives together in what is still a French colony. And I would say Agar is perhaps more aware of the question of colonization and, of course, the impending end of the colonial regime, insofar as it's set in the mid '50s, just years before Tunisia would have seen its independence. 2 A novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education. 2 Those first two novels, in many ways, though as a literary scholar I hate to admit this, those first two novels could be read for their historical content, for their ruminations about these particular situations of everyday life. It's interesting to note, and I'll come back to how those themes play out in his essays, but for the record, I want to note that after the second novel, Agar, Memmi would go on to produce novels at the rate of about one per decade. So, he wasn't a prolific novelist, but he did pursue actively what I would call a very literary novelistic agenda. In 1969, he published a book called Le Scorpion, which is translated as The Scorpion, a highly experimental novel, almost a kind of proto post-modern novel. Despite the fact that there are elements that are based in Tunisian realities, the novel itself is made up of six different layers of narration, some of which deal with mystical Jewish scripture, some of which are the first-person story of a doctor considering whether or not to leave his homeland, Tunisia, on the eve of independence. There's a recuperation of several different lost archives, in his novel. It's a very, very interesting read, and not a novel of Memmi's that's very well known. So that was 1969. In 1977 he published a novel called Le Désert ou La vie et les aventures de Jubaïr Ouali El-Mammi, translated recently by Judith Roumani as The Desert, or the Adventures of Jubair Wali al- Mammi. This is a historical novel, it's also experimental in certain ways. The novel imagines a protagonist from a bygone time, a kind of errant prince looking for his lost kingdom. This fictional, historical character is both a captive and an interlocutor of Tamerlane3, so he sets this character in dialogue with a historical figure. Both the Scorpion and the Desert are highly experimental novels that owe a lot less to the sort of socio-cultural matrix, in which the author grew up. In 1988, Memmi published a novel that returns to the Tunisian setting, called Le Pharaon. The Pharaoh is the story of an Egyptologist named Armand Gozlan, who is living in Tunisia, teaching at the university on the eve of Tunisian independence, so it's a really interesting portrait of Tunis. And then in 2004, he published his last fictional work, which is called Térésa et autres femmes, or Teresa and Other Women. One could argue, if one wanted to, it would be the least successful of his fictional works. It's sort of modelled on Boccaccio’s Decameron4, and It's a story of a group of men from different backgrounds, all expatriates of a different sort, all living in Paris, who get together once a year to tell stories about their romantic lives.
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