‘Here is a French writer from Tunisia who is neither French nor Tunisian,’ Albert Camus wrote in his preface. The colonial world that had fostered its antagonisms was coming apart for good. When Memmi requested French citizenship, he was told he’d never get it because Portrait du colonisé was ‘damaging to France’. Neither a lifetime in France nor French citizenship could make him a Frenchman: France was his home, but his real country, he said, was the French language. In his commitment to North African literature in French, Memmi helped free French literature from its own provincialism, its nombriliste focus on the lives of the French white middle classes.

Source: The North Africa Journal August 24, 2020 15:56 UTC