The End of the Chimera: Disillusion, Alienation and Ambivalence

This chapter argues that the 8 May 1945 massacre is the direct impetus behind the 1954 Algerian revolution. It is a major game changer in the rapport between the Algerian intelligentsia and the Occident resulting in a political divorce, which engendered an important volume of literature that recorded the painful birth of a nation painfully tearing itself from the domination of another. Caught between the traumas of yesterday’s colonial night, and the uncertainties of tomorrow, the expression of these anxieties produced literary accounts of high value. Their themes varied from a narrative of alienation, to rebellion against colonial injustice, a questioning of decolonisation and imperialism, a revolt against social prejudice, and most importantly an endless search for identity, and an account of the East-West encounter demonstrating all the while that the other of the Maghrebi novel is the Occident. While decolonisation often meant a repudiation of everything brought by the ex-coloniser including its language, this position tended to lose its intensity as the ex-colonised came to realise the eternal dichotomy between two Occidents: the Occident as a colonial power which is now defeated, and the Occident as a culture and a civilisation which continues to captivate and enchant the Maghrebi person.

‘La France, c’est moi’:1 Love and Infatuation with the Occident

This chapter studies three representative novels that voice their authors’ fascination with the Occident and desire to see their people become part of the civilised world. Although these novels are guided by their authors’ unbending belief in France’s civilising mission, the social ills they depict invite the readers’ doubts of this view. Whether they were fully assimilated to the point of converting to Christianity (Chukri Khodja’s Mamoun: L’Ebauche d’un idéal), or partially assimilated by remaining Muslim while indulging in the vice of drinking alcohol and mixing with bad Europeans (Abdelkader Hadj Hamou’s Zohra la femme du mineur), the main characters in these novels have not been saved from their ‘barbarity’; one way or another, they all meet a tragic end. In contrast however, Mohammed Ould Cheikh’s Myriem dans les Palmes heralds a new era where through mixed marriages and the fusion of the French and Maghrebi races peace prevails at last, reflecting of course the author’s utopic dream as promoted by the French civilising mission. Furthermore, this chapter demonstrates that the discussed novels offer significant instances of self-exoticism and a faithful adoption of the Orientalist tropes providing thus much needed clichés to the authors’ targeted Occidental readers.

The Maghreb and the Occident: Towards the Construction of an Occidentalist Discourse

This chapter attempts to construct a non-biased definition of Occidentalism and argues that the term is still an evolving concept being constantly nourished by the ongoing relationship between Orient and Occident. It rejects the view that Occidentalism is the exact reverse of Orientalism and contends that there are many Occidentalisms as expressions by diverse ‘Orientals’ about their equally diverse encounters with the Occident. Occidentalism is therefore, the multi-conceptions produced by multi-nations not only as a reaction against Orientalism, but also as the position of at least four continents out of six, vis-à-vis Western civilisation and as Westernisation. The chapter brings into discussion scholarly views from both Orient and Occident on the issue of Occidentalism and concludes that the differing facets and meanings of Occidentalism in different theoretical perspectives and settings should be interpreted as a sign that testifies to the power of the concept rather than its inadequacy.

Afterword

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The New Maghrebi Woman and the Occident: From Occidentophilia to Ambivalence

As a reaction to European women’s campaign to save native women from their own men, Algerian authors debated the condition of native women and called for their emancipation through education. Questions around whether French education would divert them from their prime role as the guardians of national culture, whether too much Occidental culture would contaminate and alienate them from their own people, and whether exposure to French ways would incite them to rebel against their traditions and customs were debated at length. These questions and many others were echoed in the work of Djamila Débêche as the first Maghrebi feminist novelist whose novels illustrate the emergence of the French educated native woman, who is active in the public sphere and who, like her male counterparts, she engages with the Occident. Her novels and articles denote a total shift from the image of the silent and secluded native woman to that of the active feminist agent. In order to gain a better understanding of Débêche’s novels this chapter situates them in their feminist context and investigates the influence of French feminism and the emergent Algerian feminist movement on their author’s viewpoints.

The Occident and the Oriental Woman: Rescuing the Oriental Man’s Victim?

Starting with European images of native women and a presentation of testimonies on colonial violence against them, this chapter explores the work of French feminists and their mission to save Algerian women. A discussion of Hubertine Auclert’s book Les Femmes arabes en Algérie, is central to this chapter as an Occidental woman’s rare testimony on Oriental women in the nineteenth century. Her views on saving native women became deeply anchored in the Occidentals’ mind-set making it not astounding to find that the image of the Oriental victim of her vile men continues to persist in twenty first century western imagination. The discussion of Auclert’s book is juxtaposed with an analysis of Fadhma Aït Mansour Amrouche’s autobiography, Histoire de ma vie as a counter narrative that disputes the mission of saving native women. It is also a testimony of ‘redemption’ through French education, assimilation of French language and culture, followed by conversion to Catholicism, while continuing to live in the midst of her Muslim compatriots. A close reading of this text reveals a very rare account of an Oriental woman’s encounter with the Occident between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Occident and the Barbary Corsairs: Pre-colonial Maghrebi Encounters with the Occident

This chapter argues that while French occupation of the Maghreb was motivated by economic gain, religion played a pivotal role in the Maghrebi encounter with the Occident. This is demonstrated by Chukri Khodja’s historical novel El-Euldj that addresses the theme of the Barbary corsairs, their control of the Mediterranean Sea, and their tyranny against Christian captives. As if written from the perspective of a European author, El-Euldj discusses the complexity as well as the impossibility of religious conversion and the intricacies of adopting French civilisation and culture. These two facts constitute the main themes addressed by the Francophone Maghrebi novels of the first half of the twentieth century, which mainly focussed on the early encounters with the Occident within the Maghreb itself. Voicing the concerns of the native elite, El-Euldj is almost a plea to the Occident to give up its policy of making conversion to Catholicism a condition for naturalisation demonstrating that it is perfectly possible to become French and remain Muslim, building thus the thesis of the ‘Français Musulman’, as the status of naturalised Maghrebis. Unlike the vernacular and classical Arabic poetry, which is unreservedly ‘Occidentophobic’, this novel presents an ambivalent position vis-à-vis the Occident.

From the Faraway Orient to the Reclaimed Occident: French Civilisation, Religious Conversion and Cultural Assimilation

This chapter analyses the discourse created by colonial France to consolidate its rule in the newly conquered Maghreb. This discourse was supported by imperialist authors who worked towards a discursive reversal of history primarily aimed to strip the natives from their own history reminding them that before its Islamisation the Maghreb was part of the Christian world. This legitimises the mission of France to redeem this stolen land and salvage its people from their status as the uncivilised and fanatical believers of a heretic religion, while at the same time transforming the place from the Muslims’ Occident into the Occident’s Orient. Therefore, the mission to civilise overlapped with the mission to colonise and justified it. To achieve this goal, France deployed two main institutions; the Church and the School. Nevertheless, as demonstrated in this chapter, cultural assimilation proved to be extremely challenging because it implied renouncing one’s statutory rights, which was deemed an act of apostasy. Despite the efforts of the educated native elite to explain the Occident to the Orient and the Orient to the Occident, the latter’s intentions about civilising the former were not always forthright, contributing thus to the failure of the mission to ‘civilise’ the uncivilised.

Introduction

Edward Said defines Orientalism as ‘a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and “the Occident”’.1 The literature thus produced takes the distinction between East and West/Orient and Occident as the dividing line between Orientalism and Occidentalism. While in Said’s view ‘Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France and the Orient,’...