An Historical Obsession

Rachid Boudjedra begins his brief epistle in Lettres algériennes (1995) on the relationship between literature and history by confessing that "[l]'histoire m'obsède parce qu'elle est la préoccupation constante de l'humain pour échapper au piège du présent. Elle m'obsède d'autant plus en ces jours où la peur me fait regarder les choses autrement. Je n'ai pas, par exemple, vu monter l'intégrisme dans mon pays" 'I am obsessed by history because it is the constant preoccupation with the human in order to escape the trap of the present. I am all the more obsessed these days, when fear causes me to look at things in a different light. I did not see coming, for example, the rise of fundamentalism in my country' (26). He goes on to assert that this obsession is common to a great many serious writers: "Toute la littérature importante a donc intégré l'histoire comme élément fondamental de questionnement du réel et de l'humain, opérant sur un mode plus subjectif qu'on ne le croit dans la mesure où c'est le seul qui soit fécond et intéressant et parce qu'il n'est pas une lecture immédiate, officielle, figée, scolaire, mécaniste et opportuniste du passé, toujours à récupérer, à défigurer et à travestir pour les besoins de la cause" 'All great literature has thus integrated history as a fundamental element of the interrogation of the real and the human, operating in a more subjective mode than one would think in so far as it is the one fruitful and interesting mode of inquiry and because it is not a reading of the past that is immediate, official, fossilized, academic, mechanistic and opportunistic, always co-opted, distorted and travestied for the sake of the cause' (27). Situated in a discourse on nation and national history, Boudjedra's remarks reflect the importance of literature to the development of a nationalist consciousness and to the formation of a responsible and engaged citizenry. If they do not hold for national literatures in general, they are decidedly pertinent to twentieth-century Algerian literature, and particularly for that written in the postindependence period. In this category, novels depicting the war of independence are legion, especially as such valorizations of the moment of the nation's birth coincide with official mythology and find support in a government led by the Front de Libération National (FLN), a political party born of that struggle. Whether it be in a critical mode or not, Algerian writers publishing in the last three decades have evinced a fascination with their country's bloody beginnings, illustrating the concern that Algeria's present woes can only be understood in terms of her past. Indeed, the war of independence reappears with such constancy that it has become the obsessive metaphor haunting Algerian writing, even when the ostensible subject is the rise of radical Islamic politics in the 1990s. For instance, Assia Djebar's 1995 haunting requiem for the victims of Islamic extremist-inspired rampages [End Page 75] of 1993, Le blanc de l'Algérie, links the assassination of present-day intellectuals to those felled by factionalism within Algerian ranks during the war of independence. Rachid Boudjedra's FIS de la haine (1992) and Rachid Mimouni's even more polemical De la barbarie en général et de l'intégrisme en particulier (1992) underscore the historical continuity in politics: they reveal that leaders of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) were once schooled by the FLN, the current ruling elite they ironically seek to unseat. And still more recently, Mohamed Moulessehoul (Les agneaux du Seigneur, 1998), writing under cover of the feminine pseudonym Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal (Le serment des barbares, 1999) have used the genre of detective fiction to show that supposed crimes of

Art · African history and culture studies · History · Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies · Literature, Culture, and Criticism

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