Interview: Albert Memmi, author of the landmark 'The Colonizer and the Colonized', talks to Lara Marlowe on the eve of his visit to Ireland.
Albert Memmi's eyrie looks at first like a haphazard souk, a writer's casbah of scattered books, files, chairs, lamps, an over-stuffed sofa, carpets and a myriad of trinkets. It has taken 30 years to complete their accretion under the sloping eaves of a Paris roof, at the top of a creaking staircase.
But the orderliness of Memmi's mind filters through, in groupings of deep blue bottles, German crystal glasses, tiny Egyptian perfume vials. An etiolated vine creeps around the wall of the main room. There's an exquisite carved wooden screen behind the sofa: "real Andalusian; not a copy", he boasts.
Memmi and his wife, Germaine, live in the flat below, but the garret is where he has written most of his 60 books, where the 84 year-old writer and professor of political sociology receives students and fields telephone calls.
I have come to talk about The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi's landmark analysis of the destructive symbiosis between European colonialists and the peoples they exploited. Revolt, Memmi wrote, was the only solution. It was a dangerous position to take back in 1957, three years into the Algerian war. Memmi was several times questioned by French police, and his book became a Bible to militant nationalists throughout the Third World.
Jean-Paul Sartre provided the original introduction, announcing somewhat pompously that "we are witnessing the infamous death-struggle of colonialism". In the new edition published by Earthscan in Britain, Sartre's preface is the only part of the book that seems dated.
But Memmi considers himself extremely fortunate that Sartre and Albert Camus - both Nobel Prize winners, though Sartre refused the honour - prefaced his early works. Camus, like Memmi a North African, prefaced Memmi's first book, an autobiographical novel called Pillar of Salt, in 1953. It is the story of a Tunisian Jew who is turned over to the Germans by Vichy France.
Memmi never forgot Camus's response when he said he wasn't satisfied with the novel's ending. "Camus told me: 'Every book corresponds to a specific moment in a writer's life. You musn't change it. A writer must respect his own work'."
In Colonizer, Memmi coined the term "Nero complex" to describe the coloniser's need to vaunt his own "superiority" and demonstrate the supposed laziness and stupidity of the colonised. He defined colonisers and colonised thus: "One is disfigured into an oppressor, a partial, unpatriotic and treacherous being, worrying only about his privileges and their defence; the other, into an oppressed creature, whose development is broken and who compromises by his defeat".
The Earthscan edition includes a new introduction by a third Nobel Prize laureate, Nadine Gordimer, who read Memmi's classic through the prism of her South African experience. She takes Memmi to task for asserting that leftist colonialists - of whom Gordimer was one - secretly detested the food, music and customs of the people they defended and did not want to live in a post-colonial state. "Memmi's predictions about the role of the Left have been proved a fallacy," Gordimer writes, citing a half dozen whites who risked their lives, even serving prison sentences, to fight colonialism in central and southern Africa. "There was a minority of colonisers, mainly of the Left spectrum, who identified themselves with the position that colonialism was unjust, racist and anti-human . . ."
"She's defending herself," Memmi smiles. "But I was right; all the whites left North Africa. A lot of them left South Africa too." Memmi also criticised the left for blinding itself to the importance of nationalism and religion, particularly Islam, in independence struggles. Because both were anathema to left-wing ideology, European leftists ignored them.
Though Colonizer made him famous, Memmi is far more eager to talk about his new book, The Decolonized, to be published by Gallimard next month in Paris.
Just as he once categorised colonialists as left-wing humanitarian romantics ("the coloniser who refuses") and right-wing usurpers ("the coloniser who accepts"), Memmi has now divided formerly colonized peoples into three groups: "new citizens" of independent countries; emigrants who left home to live among their former colonisers, and their children, who were born in Europe and are European citizens.
Colonizer ended with an optimistic vision of a post-colonial world in which ". . . the former colonised will have become a man like any other. There will be the ups and downs of all men to be sure, but at least he will be a whole and free man".
Forty-seven years after he wrote these words, Memmi sadly admits he was wrong. "There were more downs than ups," he writes in the introduction to The Decolonized.
Memmi blames what he calls "the triptych of poverty, corruption and political tyranny" for the failure of decolonisation. Poverty is the fault of Third World elites who refuse to invest in their own Arab or African countries. "An estimated 40 to 80 per cent of revenue in Third World countries is sent abroad," he notes. "Imagine if France or Britain sent 40 per cent of their money outside! They'd fall apart too."
Political tyranny is a necessary adjunct to corruption, Memmi says. "If you know you're corrupt, you have to tyrannise people to stop them from revolting against you."
North African Arabs and black Africans who migrate to Europe are better off economically, Memmi notes, but they suffer alienation unknown to those who stay at home. For the majority, religion poses a major obstacle to integration.
As an ostensibly secular republic, France expects Muslim immigrants to adopt French habits. The immigrant Muslim is caught between his desire to assimilate and accusations of betrayal if he abandons Muslim rites and traditions, Memmi says. "Today, Muslim Imams are telling children that they'll burn in hell if they don't do such-and-such - the way priests used to threaten children in catechism. So the emigrant has to cope with metaphysical fear, as well as feelings of guilt and betrayal.
"Among the children of immigrants, these conflicts reach a paroxysm," Memmi continues. "They no longer have the same relationship with the home country, but they're not completely French or British or German. They live in housing projects and they can't find jobs. They don't like school, but they feel contemptuous of their fathers who were street-sweepers or rubbish collectors." The result is a second generation that often turns to crime and/or radical Islam.
In 1957, Memmi's analysis of the attraction of Islam for the colonized was prescient. That attraction - as a source of identity and a way of binding the community together - has continued in the increasingly fundamentalist French banlieues.
As I read Colonizer, I thought repeatedly of the Israeli-occupied territories. Memmi's analysis seemed to fit hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the millions of Palestinians whose lives are destroyed by the settlers' presence. But he brushes aside my observation: "That's a secondary problem which has been inflated because the Arab world has not found its balance," he asserts.
Memmi's curriculum vitae notes that he holds an honorary doctorate from the University of the Negev, and quotes the Jerusalem Post calling him "one of the great Jewish thinkers". Is it possible, I ask him, that his Jewish origins have shaped his views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
"You know, one never completely gets rid of one's origins," he says, glancing at the black-and-white photographs of his parents on the wall. "You never completely escape your parents . . ."
In the nearest photograph, Memmi's Jewish Tunisian Berber mother, Maïra, sits, dark-haired and doe-eyed, in full Berber regalia. She never learned to read or write, and spoke Arabic with her husband Fradji, a saddler by trade. Memmi did not learn French until he was eight years old.
Fradji looks European in his suit and tie. In Colonizer, Memmi explained what it was like to be caught in the middle. "The Jewish population identified as much with the colonisers as with the colonized," he wrote. "The Jew turned his back happily on the East. He chose the French language, dressed in the Italian style and joyfully adopted every idiosyncrasy of the Europeans."
As a result, Memmi continued, "the Jew found himself one small notch above the Muslim on the pyramid which is the basis of all colonial societies". Algerian Jews fought with the French against the Algerians. "My own relations with my fellow Jews were not made any easier when I decided to join the colonised, but it was necessary for me to denounce colonialism, even though it was not as hard on the Jews . . ."
Sartre put it slightly differently, noting that Memmi "understood the system so well because he felt it first as his own contradiction". Whatever his motivations and shortcomings, Albert Memmi has made a lasting contribution to our understanding of colonialism and its aftershocks.
Albert Memmi will participate in a panel discussion entitled Memory and Identity: A Long Story at the Franco-Irish Literary Festival, 2004 Memory Now, in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, at 10.30 a.m. next Friday, April 2nd. On Saturday, April 3rd at 4.30 p.m. he and writer Joseph O'Connor will be interviewed at the festival by Jean-Michel Picard, the head of the French department at UCD. All events at the festival, which runs from April 2nd to 4th, are open to the public; admission free. Telephone: 01-6761732; 01-7088305
The Colonizer and the Colonized, with a new introduction by Nadine Gordimer, has been reissued by Earthscan. Albert Memmi's new book, The Decolonized, will be published in France next month by Gallimard