Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
Readers of the works of Albert Memmi, a half-Berber half-Jewish writer from Tunisia, often remark upon the similarity of his characters to himself, and upon his fixation with his protagonists origins, as well as his own. In Memmi’s books and autobiographies, his attention turns again and again to the time and place of birth, often to revise the details of a story already told.
Although it is tempting to regard this inconsistency as merely reflecting a desire on Memmi’s part to weave his own autobiography into his novels, Lia Nicole Brozgal argued in a lecture on Thursday that Memmi’s unreliable narrators show how, as a bicultural writer in a postcolonial world, Memmi is using the “trope of identity” to at once assert and deny his individuality.
Brozgal, who holds a PhD in French Studies from Harvard, began her lecture by explaining why we should not simply conflate Memmi’s protagonists with the author himself. Although it is “somewhat plausible,” she said, that the similarities between his own life and those of his characters indicates that Memmi was using his novels to explore his own complicated life story, she also argued that this misreading “fossilized” the text by amplifying similarities and “obfuscating the fictional”.
In fact, Memmi’s work is full of tantalizing half-truths and discrepancies that seem to suggest a single underlying story but deviate from it in many subtle ways. Birthplace and genealogy are two motifs in which Memmi is particularly interested.
In his books Memmi often locates the birth of his protagonist in the same place, the Tarfoun Impasse, located between the Jewish ghetto and the Arab quarter of Tunis.
Sometimes, in recounting the story, he provides more details, sometimes fewer; sometimes the details are contradictory. At other times he asserts that it does not matter, as in Ce Que Je Crois, when he asks, “what does it really matter if I were born a Monday, Tuesday or a Friday…?” The collective impression of these different stories is to suggest that there are two readings of Memmi’s tale of origin: one that accepts them as autobiography, however unreliable, and another that reads them as fiction, each providing its own conclusions.
Brozgal argued that this unwillingness on Memmi’s part to pin down his origin, while at the same time constantly referring to it, is a result of the tenuous situation in which Tunisian Jews found themselves in the post-colonial period. During the 1940s, she explained, a Jewish community who had enthusiastically allied themselves with the French after the French Revolution, found themselves subject not to standards of Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite, but to the Vichy laws which were extended even to the African colonies. Under threat, the Jewish community of Tunis became insular and tightly-knit. In these conditions, Brozgal concluded, writers like Memmi who wished to explore their own identity in writing were viewed as a potential threat, or possibly even traitors.
This colonial background, Brozgal said, explains why Memmi is at once obsessed with establishing identity through biography and with obscuring it. His strategy of always keeping the reader unsure of what is fact and what is fiction creates an “interstitial space of doubt” that protects the writer and his family from harm.
Brozgal concluded her lecture by inviting the audience to consider who this kind of writing is “for” — who is Memmi “writing back to”? In one sense, she said, Memmi is writing back to the “periphery”, the Judeotunisian world he grew up in. In another sense his work should also be seen as seeking to be in dialogue with Mother France, the colonizer.