Flashcards
Unfinished Nations
Cards in this deck (14)
- 1As I have showed in my literature review on the narration of the postcolonial nation, the performative level of the nation, this subversive level of the nation where artists engage in contending the narrative authority of the official narration, and unlike the pedagogical, official narration which is narrated as fixed, closed and absolute, gives voice rather to an experimental nation, an unfinished nation that is open, and resisting to closure, as based on Reda Bensamai's work.Bensmaïa, who pinpointed three broad fictional trends in the history of Maghrebi literary narration: a period of ‘acculturation and mimetism’, of ‘self-affirmation and combat’ and of ‘myth interruption’.
- 2The first two phases have a lot in common with Fanon's 3 phases , of unqualified assimilation, remembrance and a combative phase.With the pre-war phase of acculturation and mimetism the literary na(rra)tion was mostly a native’s chronicle on French Algeria and/or Algeria as a French colony constituting what became referred to as le roman indigène (the indigenous novel),
- 3a phase that resembles Fanon's phase of assimilation, In the first phase, still during colonial rule, the native intellectual writer proves to have assimilated the culture of the oppressorEg of Assimilation and Mimetism,
La soif 1957 and les Impatients 1958 - 4At that time Algeria was in the middle of a bloody war for independence. La Soif is the story of the twenty year old girl Nadia. Nadia’s French mother died at childbirth and her Algerian father now lives in France. She received a French education and both acts and looks very European; she even claims to be surprised when hearing Arabic speech in the town where she spends her vacationIt becomes clear that La Soif has no obvious political or historical content. In an afterword to the English translation of Djebar’s third novel, The Children of the New World (1967), Clarisse Zimra even states that at the time Djebar was “praised (and marketed) as an exceptional product of […] French acculturation” (Zimra 2005: 205) and presented as the westernized ‘New Algerian Woman’.
- 5This novel was written in 1957, still during the period of the war for independence, and should therefore belong to Bensmaïa’s second phase of the narration of the nation. However, Djebar’s presentation as a westernized and acculturated woman and the absence of any fight or struggle for independence in her work do not affirm her belonging to this phase. On the contrary, La Soif still belongs to Bensmaïa’s first and Fanon’s second stage of the narration of the nationThe second phase of self-affirmation and combat emerged with the rise of early nationalism and was one of national myth. It resembles Fanon’s second and 3rd phases of the narration.
- 6It resembles Fanon's second phase of remembrance where he rediscovers his own history that was ‘disfigured and distorted’ by the oppressors; which leads him to describe his own people’s culture instead of that of the oppressors.This phase where 'the native is disturbed and decides to remember what he is.
- 7it resesembles also The third phase of writing is defined by Fanon as the fighting phase in which the writer “turns himself into an awakener of the people” (Fanon 1963: 178f). Fanon defines this as “a literature of combat”, which is the first sign of a national literaturein this phase, all compromise, all reconciliation with colonial France was rejected”
- 8In this second phase the intellectual is expected to create a new, unified culture and reject the French language and culture. for this to succeed the writer had to believe in an essence of an Algerian people that didn’t exist at the timeMany writers and intellectuals contributed to this and indeed invented and created new narratives of Algerian history and culture which lead to a nation that was built solely on mythical, or artificial, foundations
- 9Eg of Literature of Combat: les Enfants du Nouveau Monde, 1962 In Children we encounter nine main characters, five women and four men, who all have a chapter that carries their name. These nine characters live in Blida and are followed during one single day: May 24, 1956. In that day they are dealing with the Algerian war of independence and the consequences this war has on their personal lifeNone of the characters can be considered to be the true hero of the novel, as Clarisse Zimra states: “there is no single hero – only the suffering of a people.” (Zimra 2005: 214). By the end of the day the characters have been changed by the decisions the war forced them to make that day.
- 10Needjma wasn’t a people as one but was a quest for a definition of Algeria. was not united by a single party , but divided between various groupings split by misunderstandings and rivalries, and how each party envisioned ist own myth oft he nation. But it was a novel that chronicled the plagues of colonialism and the suffering oft he people which marks a split from the previous phase of assimilationWriters of this phase, positing much belief in the nation’s inevitable independence and manifesting a total rupture with French Algeria, laid claim to a mythical, unified nation along with a people-as-one image
- 11. Being mythical, and although a potent tool in the early national struggle against the French, the na(rra)tion of self-affirmation and combat, failing to account for the emerging Algeria, soon collapsed to usher in the third phase of demythification or myth interruption.Fanon died in 1962 and never lived to see the new society that would be formed in Algeria. However, he did utter expectations about this society to come.
- 12Marked with ‘a radical questioning of the transparency and the validity of the myth’, this phase no longer gives voice to a holistic, mythical nation but, rather, to an ‘an experimental nation’ and/or ‘unfinished community’ which, as denoted by its name, is fragile, open and yet in the making.The phase has constituted as such a caesura in Algeria’s previous na(rra)tions
and With the national myth demythified, what remains of the na(rra)tion ‘would not be a single, unified nation or the communion […] but the division [partage] itself’. - 13He showed how writers gave voice to an experimental nation by drawing attention to the literary strategies that writers "to reappropriate their national cultural heritage, to regain their idioms, and to reconfigure their history, territory, and community."Writers from the Maghreb have long been engaged in experimenting with the nation to demythologize it,
- 14new modes of literary "interruption" that expose the nation as "an unfinished community" (p. 25). Through a variety of narrative strategies and stylistic inventions, these "interruptions" open up the possibility of a creative engagement with "the multiple voices and languages of Maghrebi popular culture"Hence the title of the collection, Experimental Nations
and hence my focus of these modes of interruption in the four respective chapters of my thesis, be it the technique of disruption/transgression, of masquerading and/or remapping.
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- Flashcards on Unfinished Nations, created by meriem bough on 08/01/2021.
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