9 - Albert Memmi: The Conflict of Legacies

Summary

The necessity of self-renewal is as obvious as the ambiguity involved. While the colonized's revolt is a clear attitude in itself, its contents may be muddled; for it is the result of an unclear situation – the colonial situation.

(Memmi, 2003 [1957]: 180)

Since the publication of his first novel, The Pillar of Salt (1953), Albert Memmi has offered textual portraits that bring the discomforting perspective of his vécu [lived experience] to bear upon discourses, practices and legacies of domination. In particular, and not surprisingly, Memmi's name often appears alongside those of critics of colonization such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre (for discussion of these writers, see Chapters 1, 5 and 11 of this volume). Jean-Marc Moura provides a typical example of this when he writes that the work of Memmi, Césaire and Fanon constitute ‘les essais de combat’ [the essays of struggle] (2007 [1999]: 69) of Francophone anti-colonial writing. In terms of intellectual legacy, Robert Young argues that since ‘Sartre, Fanon and Memmi, postcolonial criticism has constructed two antithetical groups, the colonizer and colonized […], a false Manichean division that threatens to reproduce the static, essentialist categories it seeks to undo’ (1995a: 5). Yet even as Memmi's work is acknowledged, it is more often than not largely unread or summarily read. For though Memmi's work offers a trenchant critique of colonialism, far from constructing a simple binary opposition between colonizer and colonized it has consistently brought attention to the cultural imbrications that result from the colonial situation.