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. It is the novel that I think is most divorced from Memmi's personal experiences as a Jew growing up in Colonial Tunisia. I'm not sure if that's why it's the least successful, but it's certainly the one that's gotten the least attention. I should add that those last two novels, the Pharaoh and Teresa, have not been translated into English.

So, going back to this question of how the themes of the novels play out, Memmi sort of famously has said ‘first I describe things, and then I theorize them’; he talks often about moving from lived experience first, and sort of inventorying or observing lived experienced first and theorizing it second. And so certainly, these themes of alienation, of internal identity conflict, of subjects under historical, geo- political pressure, of micro-aggressions, and the discrimination of colonialism would come to be the stuff of his essayistic work—obviously with Colonizer and the Colonized in 1957, but also with his work on the situation of Jews, Portrait of the Jew and Liberation of the Jew. His later work on situations of domination and racism, all these works of theory clearly have a root in his personal experiences, of the types of situations that he would later attempt to theorize and define.

3 Tamerlane or Timur was a Turco-Mongol military ruler who founded the Timurid Empire in and around present day Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. 4 The Decameron is a collection of novellas published by the 14th Century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio.

3 Christopher Webb: I'm struck by the fact that he continued to write and set most of his novels in Tunisia, despite the fact that he had not lived there, I believe he left in 1956 or 1957, and lived most of his life in France. In a recent piece on his life in the London Review of Books, Adam Shatz writes, and I quote, 'neither a lifetime in France, nor French citizenship, could make him a Frenchman', so I was wondering if you could expand a bit on Memmi's relationship to France, given that he lived there for most of his life. Perhaps I can tack onto that as a way of making it into one question, his relationship to the broader milieu of the French intellectual left of the time. He certainly travelled within similar intellectual circles to Camus to Sartre but was also quite dismissive of the French left.

Lia Brozgal: You're absolutely right, he was born in Tunisia, but did spend most of his life in France. One could say even more specifically, he spent from 1956 on living in the same apartment. He and his wife, I think, spent a couple of months with her family, when they first returned from Tunisia in 1956, but very quickly settled into an apartment in the Marais district of Paris, in the centre of Paris, where he lived until he died. It's an apartment where I had the opportunity to visit him twice. The apartment was on sort of the penultimate floor of the building and he had also a kind of attic apartment, that he used as an office; it was his writing space, and every interviewer who's interviewed him there remarks on the degree to which he sort of recreated his homeland in that attic space. The decor was completely Tunisian, replete with carpets and pillows and photographs and all kinds of memorabilia and objects that he had brought with him from Tunisia. So, he really recreated Tunisia for himself in the centre of Paris, which I think says a lot about the degree to which he remained sort of torn between two places, perhaps neither fully ensconced in either one.

Memmi was very much a kind of in-between figure. It is true that he took French citizenship, always keeping his Tunisian citizenship as far as I knew, there's some ambiguity around the date of when he took French citizenship, which I also think is kind of instructive about the instability of that narrative. He also, when I spoke to him about it, was somewhat slippery about why he took French citizenship when he took it, what took him so long to decide to become French. He became officially French either in 1967 or 1973, depending on who you believe. Interestingly, he saw himself as a French writer. He said to me that between his immigration and the time when I interviewed him, which was 2009, something interesting happened: ‘Je suis devenu un écrivain français,’ or ‘I became a French writer.’ I think becoming a French writer for Memmi, was not the same as becoming French; I think he saw the category of French writer as something different, something beyond questions of nationality, and so I think indeed, as you quote from Adam Shatz, neither a lifetime in France nor the question of nationality could truly make him a Frenchman.

I think there's something about Memmi that cultivates this sort of eternal outsider status. We can't ask him these questions specifically now, of course, but, if we look back at his writing and we look back at things he said, I think there's almost a sense that he preferred it that way. It's not clear to me whether he would have liked things to go differently and they didn't, and so he adopted this eternal outsider status, and this does get into your question about the left. I'll get there in one second, but he does mention that he wouldn't have left Tunisia if history hadn't chased him out, which suggests a certain longing for his homeland. He has also written and spoken about how he felt that Tunisia deserved a chance to evolve as an Arab or Muslim country, with Arabic as its language, which would eventually create a situation in which he, as a member of a Jewish minority, would have no place. No place culturally, but no place linguistically either.

4 You might recall that in The Colonizer and the Colonized, he writes that the situation of colonized writers is an impossible one, and he made this famous prediction that colonized literature in European languages was destined to die young. Famously, he was wrong about that. Literature in French continues to thrive across North Africa, and across what we could call generally speaking the post- colony. So, it's very strange, I mean in many ways he was very integrated in France: he had French children, he taught in French institutions, it was a long-time before he went back to Tunisia, even though eventually he would be invited back, but he occupies this kind of liminal status. Maybe this outsider status is a position that he was interested in cultivating, perhaps not only in terms of his national or cultural identity, but politically—and this gets to your question about the left.

He travelled for a time in similar circles to Camus and Sartre, but not for long. He's spoken about breaking with Sartre, fairly early on. Indeed, he's also spoken about his deep admiration for Sartre and Camus, for prefacing The Colonizer and the Colonized in the case of Sartre, and for prefacing Pillar of Salt in the case of Camus. He talks about his debt to them for this, for the kind of imprimatur they stamped on his work, the sort of passport they gave him into the world of French letters. He broke with Camus over descriptions in The Colonizer in the Colonizer—Camus felt that he saw himself depicted in an unflattering light. Memmi's reason for breaking with Sartre have to do with—and we can decide whether we believe him or not—that he felt that Sartre exercised a kind of God-like authority over a small cult. Memmi was very skeptical of this sort of cult-like personality, and frankly, more or less said, he didn't want to pray at the alter of Sartre. So he broke with Sartre before he, how shall I put this? Before he fully took advantage of what Sartre was offering him. In other words, it’s true that both Pillar of Salt and Colonizer and the Colonized were serialized in excerpt form in Les Temps modernes5, but Sartre actually invited Memmi to collaborate with him, and to direct special issues of Les Temps modernes. These never came to fruition because Memmi decided to break with Sartre and this group.

I think in modern-day terms, we might call that probably a marketing error on Memmi's part, but I think it says a lot about Memmi's individualism, about his desire to pray at no particular pulpits. I think he always has tried to position himself outside of established groups, and he's always had this sort of skepticism about the left. We see it in already his journal that was recently published, under the auspices of Guy Dugas's editorial project, this was published in French, it's called Tunisie, an I : Journal tunisien 1955-1956 or Tunisia Year One. We can already see in these journal entries from 1955 and 1956, a clear skepticism about the left in Tunisia, about the left in France, about Marxism, about Communism. This seems to affirm his liminal status, outsider status with respect to France, with respect to Tunisia, and with respect to political parties. He said at one point, 'I admired Sartre, that doesn't mean I have to accept all of his ideological positions.' He called Sartre a slave to Marxism. I think Memmi's conviction was, again, not to belong to any party if he couldn't disagree or articulate his dissent with that party when the time came. So, we find this kind of contempt of the French left and the French Communist Party, which I think is part of this kind of outside status, and this rejection of all forms of what he perceived of as dogma.

5 Les Temps modernes was a well-known French journal of literature, philosophy and political commentary founded in 1945 by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

5 Christopher Webb: I wanted to turn to perhaps his best-known work, at least in the Anglophone world, The Colonizer and Colonized. In the preface to the 1965 English edition, he writes that he didn't foresee the full significance of the book when he wrote it in 1957. He writes that he feels almost like a father, observing his children with this mixture of pride but also apprehension. He's of course referring to the fact that the book becomes, particularly in the '60s, wildly popular among anti-colonial militants, from the Black Panther Party in the US, to movements in South America and North America, and globally. I'm interested in the universal appeal of this work. I think I mentioned to you that there was a time where in Quebec amongst Quebecois nationalists, that he was one of the leading theorists—this is for a white population within North America who saw themselves as colonized. In many ways, the book to me feels like a description of specific experiences of French colonialism, of alienation, of colonial racism, within a specific time and place, but obviously it had this universal appeal. So I wonder if you could describe what you think it was about this book that made it so popular at this time, within this sort of political period that it gained so much popularity?

Lia Brozgal: It's interesting to think of its popularity in the 1960s given how Memmi's certainly not a 1968 figure, given how skeptical in certain ways and how condescending he was about that sort of culminating movement in the global '60s. What you said in particular about Quebec is true, and this is a story that is circulated that The Colonizer and Colonized was sort of mimeographed, proto-xeroxed, and that it circulated as a kind of samizdat—photocopied by different clandestine organizations and circulated from hand to hand.6 Memmi has told me this story as well, and I think he really was very sort of tickled by that idea, but also it wasn't clear to me that he himself was totally lucid about how exactly the book spoke to so many different contexts so forcefully. We mention Quebec, South America obviously; there's interesting ways to come at this. What I've been interested in is the additions of other prefaces. Memmi wrote a new preface when it was used in a translation into English, I think '65 is the version you were citing. But in many translations of The Colonizer and the Colonized, Sartre's preface was included with the book, as a kind of introduction. So, I've always been very interested in the way in which Sartre's preface became sutured to the book, as if it couldn't stand on its own without Sartre's explanation, which is another topic that addresses another question. Nonetheless, it's instructive to look at which contexts local prefaces were deemed necessary or useful, or just worthy of being. For example, in the Irish context, the author Liam O'Dowd provided a preface to the version that circulated in Ireland, explaining to that local readership the precise value of The Colonizer and the Colonized to that particular context. There's also famously Nadine Gordimer's essay, which I don't believe functioned as preface, but which was widely published, and which spoke to the ways in which Colonizer and the Colonized both did and didn't apply to this situation in South Africa.

Memmi's preface that you mentioned is interesting, he writes, 'it would be untrue to say that my ambition was to describe oppressed people's in general, it was not even my intention to write about all colonized people, I was Tunisian and therefore colonized, I discovered a few aspects of my life and my personality were untouched by this fact.' This strikes me as maybe a note of false modesty. I do think that we see in the book intentions that appear to reach well beyond the specific context that he knew, so I think that this sort of modified, this edited intention in a later version, is perhaps a gesture of

6 For a more thorough account of the popularity of the Colonizer and Colonized, among other anti-colonial texts, among Quebecois nationalist movements, see: Mills, S. (2010). The empire within: Postcolonial thought and political activism in sixties Montreal. Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press.

6 modesty—although I think that there's no doubt that he hoped for some sort of universal import to the work already in 1957 when it was first published in French. I have no doubt also that there are very specific local, historical, political reasons why, for example, the book was so successful in the Quebecois context, or why it was so successful, for example, in Puerto Rico, where Memmi was apparently for a short time, something of a household name.

But I would say this: I think the questions of rhetoric and style are often highly overlooked when it comes to talking about this text, The Colonizer and the Colonized, and I would say that they're not neutral in the way in which the book was received, even if I have some issues with the English translation, which I think could use a serious updating. There are stylistic and discursive aspects to the book that I think are part of what made it resonate so universally. One thing that I'll say is that the degree to which this book is not prescriptive is undoubtedly in part what made it appealing. It's also not exhortative; it's not a call to action in the way his contemporaries and their texts would have exhorted and called to action. The book is far more of an observation, perhaps an invitation to observe. It's also highly anecdotal, and so I think many of these anecdotes actually play well beyond the Tunisian context, even if some of them are culturally specific. It's a book that looks, on the surface of it, rational and methodical, and in some ways it is, but it's also a deeply felt book, and I think that that feeling is what made individuals and other groups bond with the book at the time.

It's also, in interesting ways, a kind of catalogue of types, and I think many of these types are transposable to analogous situations of oppression. It may not be dialectic, we'll get to that other question in a minute, but it is certainly a book that is dialogic. There's a constant reminder, I would say the writer is constantly reminding the reader of his presence, and there are many moments, some of this falls out in the English but not all of it, there's moments where Memmi ventriloquizes the colonizer, or ventriloquizes the racists. These are powerful oppositional gestures, and powerful recuperative gestures. You find this third-world writer taking a voice of colonial authority and making the ridiculousness of that authority visible—I think these are powerful things that people in other contexts attach themselves to whatever local context. The Colonizer and the Colonized also has a certain universal quality to it. Memmi points out mechanisms of oppression that resonate beyond his own context. He talks about how the situation of colonialism works on children, how the memory of colonized people is eroded, how the colonized culture is devalued, how its language is threatened, how the colonized individual is forced into a state of cultural amnesia or forced into a state of lack. And he talks a lot about this definition, this sort of negative definition of the colonized.

There's also this gesture he makes—I don't know if we can call it famous, for me, it's an important gesture—what he calls ‘the mark of the plural,’ where he talks about how the colonizer or the dominator comes in and basically erases the individuality of any colonized subject. Instead referring to them as a kind of plural mass. He talks about this using the third person plural in French, ‘ils’ pluriel, and I think that these elements are very easily understood and felt in other contexts. I think this says something about the sort of global '60s, the cultural matrix from which Memmi was writing. This foretells, perhaps, the rest of our conversation. One thing that's very interesting about this sort of twin book to this one, the later Decolonization and the Decolonized, is that we don't have any of these flourishes, these sort of personal elements, this entering into dialogue with the reader, ventriloquizing with the colonial authority or the dominating authority. All of that is evacuated from the later book, which makes it a very different text. I'm sure we'll talk about that in a minute, but I think part of that has contributed to the very flat reception of that essay from 2004.

7 Christopher Webb: He writes in Colonizer and Colonized that even though he was colonized, he knew the mind of the colonizer well, so I think this turns to the role of Judaism and being a Jew living in Tunisia at the time and the impact this had on this particular work. As you've mentioned, this sort of liminal space that he occupied in the colonial system, both colonized but not exploited in the same ways as others, so I wonder whether you could talk about how this particular positionality influenced the writing of Colonizer and Colonized, and Memmi's relationship to Judaism, which I don't know for sure, but seems to have evolved throughout the course of his life in various ways.

Lia Brozgal: That's an interesting question, as to whether his relationship to Judaism evolved throughout the course of his life. I'm not sure about that. So, as a Jew living in Tunisia, Memmi was sort of one rung up from the very bottom of the totem pole. I think Memmi himself has described the position as one notch above the Muslim on the pyramid that is the basis of all colonial societies. So, very much in between. As an indigenous Jew in a colonial society, Memmi clearly felt the weight of colonialism. He felt the weight of colonial oppression; he felt very deeply his situation of indigeneity, at the same time, Jews in North African colonial societies--this differs according to country--but by and large, reap some benefit of colonialism’s civilizing mission, if I can put it in very bold terms. In other words, there was a group known as the Alliance israélite universelle, it was a French based philanthropy, who's mission it was to educate Jews in areas of the Muslim world, where there was also a French colonial presence, and so Memmi and other Tunisian Jews like him, benefitted from, at the very least, a kind of basic education through the Alliance school system, which gave them access to the French language, access to French culture.

Now Memmi emerges differently from the rest of his sort his co-religionists, insofar as he was identified early on as a sort of exceptional talent and promise. He was able to attend the prestigious Lycée Carnot, which was a French high school in Tunis. And so, he was sort of lifted up initially by the Alliance israélite universelle, but then found himself taken up by the ranks of French schools in Tunisia, not exclusively French-Jewish schools, but the French colonial schools in Tunisia, where he had access obviously to a French education. He famously talks about reading Racine7, and he has this character in Pillar of Salt rising to the top of the class by being able to identify the most Racinian verse of all Racine's tragedies. So, when he talks about knowing the colonizer from the inside, it's because he went to school with the colonizer’s children, he shared desks with them in class, he had access to their homes. He had access to teachers, who were French intellectuals. So, I'd say above and beyond the lumpenproletariat8 of the Jewish community, he had his foot in each domain. He was, after all, a poor Jew in a society where there were also very wealthy Jews. So, he was a poor Jew, a kind of ‘ghetto Jew,’ so on the bottom of the Jewish society, but always again, one notch above the Muslims. So it’s certainly true that Jews weren't exploited in the same way as Muslims were in Tunisia, but the Jewish community also lived in fear of antisemitic attacks emanating from the Muslim community, so this puts it in this really sort of tense position vis-à-vis all the other layers of society, both beneath him and above him. So, his statement that he knows both from the inside is certainly for this particular context in time, true; at the very least, he felt he had access to the kind of, the thought processes on both sides of that equation

7 Jean Racine was a 17th Century French dramatist known for his tragic works. 8 Marx’s concept of the lumpenproletariat is commonly used to describe an ‘underclass’ who have not achieved a sufficient form of class consciousness to constitute themselves as a revolutionary class.

8 Christopher Webb: Returning to something that came up previously, which is the way in which Colonizer and Colonized is written as this description of colonial types and the structural position that people occupy within colonial hierarchies. I was struck by, in re-reading it, the way that these categories seem to be so fixed. That's why I brought up the issue of a kind of anti-dialectical thought within his work which is that even as he occupied this liminal space, he very much sees these as very fixed categories. There’s the anti-colonial colonizer, who can sympathize with the colonized, but, ultimately, they can never overcome their structural position. And that's why I think it's interesting in the introduction that Nadine Gordimer writes in the 1965 edition, that she provides these examples of, well you know, in many other cases this isn't particularly accurate that many of those who had some privileges within colonial hierarchies rejected those in the service of anti-colonial struggle. So, I read this in some ways as a bit of political cynicism in Memmi's work, and I'm wondering where this comes from? Is this coming from the tension that he experienced between colonized groups in Tunisia, between Jews and Arabs, is this why he's perhaps suspicious of the prospects for a more radical politics?

Lia Brozgal: The answer to your question is a really tough one, but I certainly see your point. I was initially surprised in your question about, you know, you sort of built up to the question where you mentioned what you see is a lack of dialectical thought in Memmi's work. I had to think about that for a bit, because my initial reaction was that, in many ways, the essay feels like an exercise in dialectical thought! In him sort of moving around different positions, and trying them out, but I guess I have to admit that you're ultimately, I think you may be right, in that ultimately he does seem to fix these positions, and that especially going back to the Portrait of the Decolonized9, that seems more clear to me. I would even say in the Portrait of the Decolonized, he doesn't seem to move as nimbly around the different positions as he seemed to, at least from my take, in The Colonizer and Colonized. At the end there does seem to be a kind of paralyzing of the positions, and that does seem to be a limitation, and I found myself sort of wondering how we could try to understand that? It seems like perhaps he accepts the ambivalence of the situation but can't allow himself to recognize and live in the ambiguity of the situation.

I think he may legitimately question whether one can ever fully divest oneself of one’s privilege, and certainly Nadine Gordimer's critique doesn't seem unfair to me, but I think ultimately you put your finger on something that is, I don't know—I hate to call it a weakness of the work—because I tend to think of these things as just interesting. But this sort of political cynicism that I think may participate in the mitigated legacy of Memmi, as we try and look around and understand in the aftermath of his passing, what's the ultimate sort of balance sheet, what's the inventory of his imports, of his contributions? He's not an easy figure to deal with.

I was struck by this in a various memorializations I've read of him. Some people, it strikes me, they get him dead wrong. Some people it, strikes me, they’ve kind of frozen him into a certain set of thoughts and attitudes and gestures. That seems a little bit unfair. At the same time, there is this cynicism that I think really, sort of sticks in the craw of scholars and thinkers who would love to be able to use his work, just to articulate a future. And what I come back to over and over again is this figure that's articulated in his first novel, The Pillar of Salt, which is the impasse. So that novel's divided into three sections, and the

9 Albert Memmi’s Portrait du Décolonisé (2004) was published in English as Decolonization and the Decolonized (2006).

9 first section is called the impasse, and there's a really a sort of interesting spatial logic to the novel. The impasse is, narratively in that text, it is the place where he lives, literally. So he talks about not just living in an impasse, but at the very bottom of that impasse, or the very back of that impasse. I'm not exactly sure what the right spatial term would be, but basically at the end of the impasse the place from which you, in theory, you would have to turn around to get out. So, he talks about, he describes himself as growing up at the bottom of this or the back of this impasse, and eventually, throughout the novel, we trace this protagonist's journey out of the impasse and into the world. Famously, Pillar of Salt ends with the main character getting on a boat and leaving his homeland for Argentina, which is an ending that has been variously criticized by different readers of the novel. Again, I don't want to conflate the novel and Memmi's life. I don't want to conflate his character and himself, but I am struck by the degree to which Memmi and his more sort of limpidly autobiographical writings returns to the impasse as the site of his birth, as a kind of origin myth story for himself. The more we think about the impasse and trying to kind of play out it's valences, the more I think it becomes the figure for his political thought.

In a way, that's depressing, but it's also true. I think it behooves us as readers of Memmi to think with that figure, as opposed to just trying to resolve it and create a passage through, right? So there's a way in which, when we look at the way he talks about the figures in Colonizer and Colonized, and then the way even more in which he describes the various figures he treats in Portrait of the Decolonized, we see this impasse in his thinking coming back again and again. This may even go back to your thoughts about his attitude toward the left. Memmi articulates himself into an impasse with respect to political parties, and their possibilities. I would argue as a literary scholar, that it's just really worthwhile to continue thinking about this [the impasse] as opposed to kind of throwing up our hands, which is the figurative impasse. I think it's worth continuing to figure out how that could function as a figure in his political thought. Again, it's unsatisfying answer to questions like ‘can one divest themselves of their own privilege?’ Is it really impossible to imagine, you know, a good-will colonizer, as he describes this figure? I think it behooves the reader to decide. But I think if we transform that cynicism into a kind of literary figure of an impasse, maybe that helps a little bit.

Christopher Webb: I wanted to ask about the contemporary relevance and reception of Memmi's work. I was struck by, when he died earlier this year, at least in English publications or scholarship, his death went rather unnoticed. There weren't too many obituaries that I noticed of him. I wonder what is the cause of this lack of popularity among post-colonial scholars, regarding Memmi? Is this a limit of Anglophone scholarship, and I wonder what Memmi's position is in Francophone scholarship and literary studies? Perhaps building on that, is he still seen as relevant in France, given ongoing debates around the nature of French secularism and the relationship between France and its former colonies?

Lia Brozgal: It's an interesting question. I think his death certainly prompted this kind of searching question amongst those who knew about it. Why wasn't this more noticed? It seems to me that the generally accepted reason for kind of turning away from Memmi, both in the Francophone and Anglophone world, has to do with his position on Israel. As one French scholar put it to me, basically because of Memmi's stance on Israel, his inability to apply the same kind of thinking that made him so famous in Colonizer and Colonized to the situation in the Middle East, was cause for Memmi to be—and I'm quoting this French scholar—'definitively removed from the post-colonial library’, which is a sort of interesting metaphor. I would say also he disappointed in the Portrait of the Decolonized. I think that book, published with Gallimard, very quickly translated into English, and published with Minnesota Press, was poised, just from a marketing and dissemination point of view, to make a bigger impact—

10 perhaps even to be a kind of Memmi revival. It disappointed so many, and I think that is sort of the nail in his coffin. Though I think the situation with regards to his statements about Palestine and Israel were already reason enough for many scholars to abandon him.

There's a committed core of scholars in France who continued to work with him, literally side-by-side up until the moment he died, and who continue to work on him. I'm thinking of Guy Dugas, who has been involved in this project of editing and publishing his journals, also producing a critical edition of the Portrait of the Colonizer, complete with all of the revisions Memmi made to the manuscript as he was writing, which is a very interesting document, available only in French for obvious reasons—very difficult to bear witness to all the traces of changes that were made in translation. There are also a couple of Tunisian scholars, a married couple, Samir and Afifa Marzouki, who have been very devoted to publishing on him.10 Another French scholar, Hervé Sanson, who's brought out an edited collection11 of previously unpublished works by Memmi that deal with questions of laïcité or secularism. So, there's this faithful fellow traveller group, but above and beyond that it's really interesting to note that he hasn't been taken up really by new waves of Francophone post-colonial scholars in France.

It's so interesting to me that the liminality of his position with respect to his own origin, and with respect to his own various possible constituencies, seems to be replicated in the way in which he's received. He occupies this very kind of liminal, even maybe marginal status, within both Francophone and Anglophone post-colonial literary scholars. When it comes to Anglophone scholars, I think it's worth noting that some of his interesting and lesser known work hasn't been translated—I'm thinking of works like L'Homme dominé, either haven't been translated or haven't been translated with publishing outfits that were able to give it the robust sort of boost that it would need. But what's interesting also is that his book, titled in French simply as Le Racisme, titled in English Racism (prefaced by Kwame Anthony Appiah), also doesn't seem to get a lot of traction. So, he seems to occupy this kind of marginal position where he's somewhat ignored.

I would also add that I think, and I'm not sure what your point of view on this is, but I think the existing translation of The Colonizer and the Colonized is not great. It doesn't really do justice to the original, and so sometimes I wonder if, after its first ferment in the 1960s, if later generations of scholars have been, if they find the translation dated, or they feel less moved by it—in part from reasons of language. Then it's also really interesting for me to note that in literary circles, his novels aren't read very widely, neither in French nor in English. I will say that his novels are difficult to get through; they're long and brooding. In the case of the secondary wave of novels, the Desert and Scorpion—from the late 60s and late 70s, their experimental nature makes them very difficult for, I would say, for example, college-age students to wrestle with. So, it remains to me a sort of open question. I think we can only blame the Middle East question to a certain extent, although maybe I'm wrong about that, maybe it weighs much more heavily than I'm even willing to admit. I actually just recently read a piece by David Lloyd12 that I thought was

10 Marzouki, Samir & Afifa Marzouki. (2010). Individu et communautés dans l'oeuvre littéraire d'Albert Memmi. Paris: Harmattan.

11 Memmi, Albert. (2017). Penser à vif : de la colonisation à la laïcité. Textes réunis et présentés par Hervé Sanson. Paris: Non-Lieu.

12 Lloyd, David. (2020). Albert Memmi: Contradictions of the Colonial World. Retrieved from: http://www.tacbi.org/node/170.

11 one of the few fair assessments of Memmi's stance, that agreed to look at his problematic statements about Israel as interesting problems, as opposed to using them as sort of smoking gun evidence to convict him of abandoning his ideological principles. The basic answer to your question is, he occupies this marginal status in both sides of the Atlantic—to just sort of speak in shorthand. It isn't fully clear to me the problematic stance on the Palestinian question is solely to blame for that, although certainly is does seem to be a problem.

Christopher Webb: Just for our listeners that might not be aware, I was wondering if you could just briefly explain his relationship to Israel, and that's why I raised the question previously of his evolving relationship to Judaism throughout his life, was this support for Israel a later development in his political perspectives or was that something that he felt strongly throughout his life?

Lia Brozgal: So, I would be cautious about confounding his thoughts about Judaism and Jewishness and Jewish identity with his thoughts on Israel. I think Memmi was, for most of his life a secular Jew, who culturally identified but was largely unburdened by the demands of the confession, so, to my knowledge, he did not attend Synagogue. I'm not certain that he would have said that he believed in a God, but he certainly felt very deeply his condition of being a Jew, insofar as it was a condition that was also defined in air quotes, negatively, as subjects of persecution. I would say that his relationship to a kind of cultural identity through religion is one thing, and again, he really comes out and says things like, I think of myself as a secular Jew.

The position on Israel is... he's been sort of identified as a Zionist. I don't think he would have disagreed with that necessarily, except insofar as Memmi always disagreed with being categorized or being attributed to a particular group or mindset or party. But he has said contradictory things on the creation of the State of Israel. By and large, he believed that the Jews deserved a homeland and believed that Israel had a right to exist, and has made a variety of different contradictory comments about the colonial nature of the State of Israel, about the oppression of the Palestinian people—which he does decry. He does say that the Palestinians have been discriminated against and subjected to all manner of ill treatment by the state of Israel. But I think it's a mistake to sort of see him as a total Zionist who was blind to the suffering of Palestinians. But again, depending on which one of the statements you use, it can be tempting to castigate him. One scholar working in the United States has called him an uncritical supporter of Zionism, blind to it's Euro-centric disposition and explicit colonial implications. Others have said that it is easy to accuse him of moral ambiguity and that his position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict did not adhere him to either side. This particular critic goes on to say ‘in this domain, he was unloved all,’ which seems to sum up, in fact, Memmi's status in certain ways.

So just to circle back to your question, more specifically, he was very interested in the quality of being a Jew, of being defined as Jew, of being discriminated against as a Jew. He was interested in exploring different facets of anti-Semitism, and he was also very interested in distinguishing between different ways of being Jewish. He talks about, I can't remember exactly how they map into English, but it's really Judaity, Judaism and Jewishness, which have different degrees of religiosity and belief associated with them. I think he certainly believed in his own Jewishness, as a sort of cultural identity. And again, he did believe in a Zionist project, but again I think he has been more ambiguous on this question than people are willing to believe. Ultimately, it's worth considering as an interesting problem in his rhetoric, in his discourse and in his philosophy.

12 Christopher Webb: I wonder also whether we could attribute his lack of popularity today to his resistance to be categorized, in a sense that he did not see himself as a part of any particular stream of French critical theory. As you mentioned he refused to worship on the altar of Sartre. He wasn't a member of that sort of existentialist movement and I’m not too aware of his relationship to structuralism/post-structuralism, but he seemed to maintain a relentless independence from theoretical currents.

Lia Brozgal: I think that's true, and I think one can wonder, particularly when you go back to the moment in the late 1950s early '60s, where he would have made the decision to break with the sort of left-wing intellectual circle that would have welcomed him in Paris. You do sort of wonder again, did he feel a kind of impossibility of being “one of them,” and so he rejected them before they could figure out that he wasn't ever going to fit in perfectly. It's difficult to understand to what degree it's a considered rejection of everything, which actually doesn't seem consonant with his personality. My feeling about him when I met him, was of a kindly avuncular curmudgeon—determined to be disagreeable in the most agreeable possible way.

You mentioned not going into any kind of critical current, in terms of critical theory, this was also true when it came to literature. He was very critical of the nouveau roman13, he was very critical of what he perceived of as trends in literature. There was almost a kind of demand for authenticity and purity that's absolutely impossible to fulfill, and again you just have to wonder to what degree he was his own worst enemy, and to what degree this sort of refusal of everything eventually perhaps cost him a reputation that he might have merited. I'm not sure.

Christopher Webb: Finally, I wanted to ask you about the enduring relevance of his work today. It seems that in many ways we're in this moment where questions of race and identity, privilege, whiteness are very much in vogue. You can find these concepts throughout Memmi's work, so I wonder what can we take from his work, his descriptions of alienation and lived experience, that we could use today to look at the endurance of colonial relations, whether it be white supremacy or neo-colonialism? Even as he's not particularly popular, what is it in Memmi's work that you think it particularly helpful and relevant in the moment that we're living in?

Lia Brozgal: Well, I have to say, I think that his book called Racism is actually a very useful text, and doesn't contain within it some of these, if we could call them, structural weaknesses of the other works. It's a far less personal work on one hand, and maybe more the work of a sociologist than either of the portraits could be considered—even if, of course, he was a card-carrying sociologist. I use excerpts from Racism in classes I teach on French cinema and critical race theory and intersectionality and his excavation of racism I think is very useful to students. The concept of heterophobia, which he articulates to, I think, a great degree, is actually a helpful tool when talking about, as you said, the endurance of white supremacy and the endurance of race-based thinking.

Like the critical race theorists, he acknowledges racism as a construct, and he acknowledges race as a construct and racism as a product of that. But unlike the French attitude today—which is basically if we can delete the word race from the constitution, we could probably just get rid of this problem all

13 Le Nouveau Roman is a term used to denote a type of French novel popular in in the 1950s that diverged from classical literary genres.

13 together—he's not trying to put his head in the sand about it. And this is already in an essay that dated from 1980s. So what if race is a social construct? We still have racism that needs to be understood and inventoried, explored and dealt with. And I think that one of his most enduring legacies is found in that essay. I don't know what we would need to do to convince people to read it, more than the preface by Kwame Anthony Appiah, which seemed to be a great calling card into Anglophone post-colonial studies.

I would also say that Memmi wrote a lot of other small explorations on dominance and about the endurance of colonial relations. One problem is many of these haven't been translated. I think it would be very interesting for readers to look beyond The Colonizer and the Colonized and look beyond Portrait of the Decolonized at his 1968 essay Dominated Man, and an essay from the late 1970s called Dependence. He has these small books that look sort of like vanity projects from the outside but that are actually interesting philosophical ruminations about relationships of dominance, both at the kind of geo- political level and at the micro level. These are books called, in French, Bonheurs, and another set of essays called L'exercice du bonheur. There’s another one from the late 1990s called Le buveur et l'amoureux. So, you can see that in the early and late 1990s, he took a turn towards happiness, you see this word come up in his titles. And he was interested in proposing ways to think together about things, again on the most micro unit of, say, the couple, which was an object of fascination for him. So, the domestic couple, and also the geo-political couple, the “intimate enemies” of Jews and Arabs, as he put it, using air quotes around that expression again. But we see this sort of interest in the 1990s about thinking about happiness and thinking, in a way that I think would be an interesting counter to the discourse of cynicism that you identified.

In the early 2000s he published a kind of philosophical dictionary, called in French Dictionnaire critique à l'usage des incrédules, so a critical dictionary for the use of those who don't believe. Which is really set up like a dictionary, so alphabetically by topic, in which he produces essays about a variety of different issues, including things like racism, but also including things like small forms of dependence on substances and on other people. And then there's also his autobiographical essays which haven't been translated into English from the mid 1970s, mid 1980s and from 2000—La Terre intérieure (The interior world) from 1976; Ce que je crois (What I believe) from 1985; and Le nomade immobile (The stationary nomad) from 2000.

These are all fascinating reflections that actually, I would say, have a more positive outlook towards relationships between people and at all levels. And I think it's something of a shame that these works aren't translated into English and thus aren't available to round out a more complete image or a complete assessment of Memmi's thoughts. And so that would be, in terms of the endurance of his work today, I would say there's still more to be discovered about Memmi, even if he has stopped producing, and really, I think it took death for him to stop producing! He wrote every day as far as I understand, up until just about the bitter end. And I would say there's a more thorough Memmi to be discovered than the current state of assessment. And so again, if I could point to one usable thing, one that's sort of immediately accessible and usable, I think it would really be that book called Racism, that I think in certain ways is more consonant with today's theorists of the global styles of neo-colonialism and of questions of racism and the persistence of colonial relationships.