PARIS LETTER
THE CLAIMS OF EVIDENCE
u .
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I should like to point out that by virtue
of generous exchamges and genuine solidarity
we have created a community of French and
Arab Algerian writers."
-Albert Camus
All the literature produced by the French-speaking Arabs,
Kabyles, or Jews of North Africa has one primary purpose: to offer
evidence and assert a claim. But if the evidence is noticeably similar,
the claim is not always the same. Most Arab and Kabyle writers ask to
be considered as men first, Algeriang,..-or Moroccans, or Tunisiang,..–
afterwards. Albert Memmi, perhaps the only Jewish writer of French
North Africa who has written specifically of his status as a Jew, also
claims Tunisian nationality, but in a country, as it happens, where not
only the French but the Arabs as well repudiate his claim.
Hence the community Camus refers to exists essentially on the
cultural level. There was never a question of either a community of
interest or one of sentiment-though since he first began writing Camus
has always declared that his sympathies were with the Moslems of Al–
geria and though the latter have always reciprocated his feelings, with
the recent exception of a few militant FLN's. What creates such a
community, apparent as soon as one is familiar with this literature, is
that the Maghrib writers have not translated into French a native litera–
ture expressing in another language the characteristics of a civilization
different from the words they use; on the contrary, it is not merely a
language they have adopted for the expression of their dilemmas and
their ideas, but a whole tradition. Dib, Ferraoun, Chrai:bi, or Kateb
Yacine owe more to Voltaire and to Proust, to Faulkner and to Poe,
than to any writers of their own language which most of them do not
even know. To deny the existence of a community of French-speaking
writers of both European and Maghrib stock on the pretext that they
express different orders of feeling or even that on occasion they violently
oppose each other, would be as inaccurate as to say that Aragon and
Mauriac do not belong to the same literature because they hold dif–
ferent views as to their country's future and obligations.
