Abstract
The fiftieth anniversary of Camus’ death in 2010 was largely ignored in his native Algeria, reflecting the critical response to Camus’ writings that regards him as a colonialist writer and apologist for the French domination of his native Algeria. This critique also claims that Camus’ colonial attitudes are hidden and reinforced by a European attitude that sees him as dealing first and foremost with universal questions about the human predicament and existential isolation. However, Camus’ journalism shows an Algerian closely identified with the destiny of all the peoples of Algeria, and his novel The Outsider contains sufficient indications that, whatever its existential importance, in the concrete situation of Camus’ Algeria the Arab has the precise status of outsider.
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Notes
Reported in ‘Á Alger, “Il n’est pas facile de défendre Albert Camus en 2010”’, Le Monde 20 February 2010. See also Kateb Yacine’s comparison between Camus and Faulkner at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpXExBh7UR0.
O’Brien, C. C. (1960). Camus, Fontana Modern Masters.
‘Les tares de l’Occident sont innombrables, ses crimes et ses fautes réels. Mais, finalement, n’oublions pas que nous sommes les seuls à détenir ce pouvoir de perfectionnement et d’émancipation qui réside dans le libre génie’. Albert Camus, ‘Discours prononcé à la salle Wagram, le vendredi 15 mars 1957’, http://la-presse-anarchiste.net/spip.php?article1021.
Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 208.
Culture and Imperialism, 209.
Culture and Imperialism, 209.
Culture and Imperialism, 209.
Culture and Imperialism, 223.
Culture and Imperialism, 224.
Culture and Imperialism, 224.
Culture and Imperialism, 212.
Culture and Imperialism, 217.
Culture and Imperialism, 217.
Camus, 25-26.
See Horne, A. (2006) A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962. New York: NYRB Classics.
The First Man (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), 217.
The First Man, 217.
The First Man, 217.
The First Man, 217.
The First Man, 219.
The First Man, 218.
Calhoun, C. (2006). Pierre Bourdieu and social transformation: Lessons from Algeria. Development and Change, 37(6), 1403–1415.
Bourdieu, P. (1962). The Algerians Boston. Beacon Press, 131. See also Yacine, T. (2004). Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at War: Notes on the birth of an engaged ethnosociology. Ethnography, 5(4), 487–509; Le Seuer, J. D. (2002). Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, and in particular Bourdieu’s foreword.
Between 5 June and 15 June 1939 the newspaper Alger républicain published a series of 12 graphic articles by Camus on a famine in this remote region of his country, the blame for which Camus very frankly sheeted home to the French colonial government. See his Chroniques algériennes 1939 - 1958, Actuelles III (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).
He also declared – this was in 1966 – that ‘La francophonie est une machine politique néocoloniale, qui ne fait que perpétuer notre aliénation, mais l’usage de la langue française ne signifie pas qu’on soit l’agent d’une puissance étrangère, et j’écris en français pour dire aux français que je ne suis pas français’. ‘The French language is a neo-colonial political machine, which only serves to perpetuate our alienation, but using the French language does not mean that one is the agent of a foreign power, and I write in French so as to tell the French that I am not French’.
Berber, ‘une langue du roc et du sol, disons de l’origine’; Arabic, ‘une deuxième langue, celle du dehors prestigieux de l’héritage méditerranéen’; French, ‘troisième partenaire de ce couple à trois, se présente la plus exposée des langues, la dominante, la publique, la langue du pouvoir’. Djebar, A. (2002). Le blanc de l’Algérie. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 243.
Albert Camus, 26.
P. 27.
As David Carroll, on whom I draw for this analysis, observes, Camus himself encouraged this interpretation when he wrote, in 1955, that ‘a man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death’, adding that L’étranger is ‘the story of a man who, without any heroics, agrees to die for the truth’. (See Camus, A. ‘Preface to The Stranger’, in his Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy, ed. Philip Thody. New York: Vintage Books, 1968, 335–337.)
L’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 145; The Outsider (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 97.
P. 29.
The Outsider, trans. Joseph Laredo (London: Penguin, 1983), 60.
The Outsider, p. 71.
Evans, M., & Phillips, J. (2007). Algeria: Anger of the dispossessed. New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 31.
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Grigg, R. The Trial of Albert Camus. SOPHIA 50, 593–602 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0271-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0271-3