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"Pieds-Noirs in literature."
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Remembering French Algeria : Pieds-Noirs, identity, and exile
\"Colonized by the French in 1830, Algeria was an important French settler colony that, unlike its neighbors, endured a lengthy and brutal war for independence from 1954 to 1962. The nearly one million Pieds-Noirs (literally \"black-feet\") were former French citizens of Algeria who suffered a traumatic departure from their homes and discrimination upon arrival in France. In response, the once heterogeneous group unified as a community as it struggled to maintain an identity and keep the memory of colonial Algeria alive. Remembering French Algeria examines the written and visual re-creation of Algeria by the former French citizens of Algeria from 1962 to the present. By detailing the preservation and transmission of memory prompted by this traumatic experience, Amy L. Hubbell demonstrates how colonial identity is encountered, reworked, and sustained in Pied-Noir literature and film, with the device of repetition functioning in these literary and visual texts to create a unified and nostalgic version of the past. At the same time, however, the Pieds-Noirs' compulsion to return compromises these efforts. Taking Albert Camus's Le Mythe de Sisyphe and his subsequent essays on ruins as a metaphor for Pied-Noir identity, this book studies autobiographical accounts by Marie Cardinal, Jacques Derrida, Hâelلene Cixous, and Lei;la Sebbar, as well as lesser-known Algerian-born French citizens, to analyze movement as a destabilizing and productive approach to the past. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
(In)edible Algeria: Transmitting pied-noir nostalgia through food
For the nearly one million French citizens who fled Algeria during and after the Algerian War for Independence (19541962), the desire to return home has not easily been attenuated. These exiles, commonly referred to as Pieds-Noirs, settled predominantly in France where they experienced discrimination and exclusion due to their colonial ties. Consequently, the once diverse population bonded together in a close-knit community that became consumed with saving and transmitting memories of the homeland, and in a historical period of public silence about the Algerian War until 1999 when it was officially recognized. As Benjamin Stora points out, upon the Pieds- Noirs' exile in 1962, 'la memoire de l'Algerie fran aise va d'abord se transmettre, essentiellement, par les tenants d'un pays perdu' (1999: 72).1 In their effort to maintain their cultural roots, each year on the anniversary of their exodus Pieds-Noirs gather to share memories and to enjoy 'authentic' Pied-Noir dishes such as couscous, merguez, anisette, 'mouna', and 'mechoui'. In these almost stereotypical feasts among friends, the community reconnects to the past as they re-enact what was once a familiar experience. Much like biting into a Proustian madeleine, the Pieds-Noirs can be transported, if only fleetingly, to a former time of wholeness and comfort as they partake in the culinary delights of their youth.
Journal Article
Experimental nations, or, The invention of the Maghreb
Jean-Paul Sartre's famous question, \"For whom do we write?\" strikes close to home for francophone writers from the Maghreb. Do these writers address their compatriots, many of whom are illiterate or read no French, or a broader audience beyond Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia? In Experimental Nations, Réda Bensmaïa argues powerfully against the tendency to view their works not as literary creations worth considering for their innovative style or language but as \"ethnographic\" texts and to appraise them only against the \"French literary canon.\" He casts fresh light on the original literary strategies many such writers have deployed to reappropriate their cultural heritage and \"reconfigure\" their nations in the decades since colonialism.
eBook
Neither Algerian, nor French: Albert Camus’s Pied-Noir Identity
Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913 to white European settlers of French and Spanish origin. Hence, Camus and his parents belonged to the pied-noir community, a term commonly used to refer to Europeans who settled in Algeria during the French colonial occupation. While Camus chose Algeria as the setting for four of his literary texts, this article focuses on Camus’s first novel, L’Étranger, written during World War II and published in 1942, and his unfinished, posthumous, semiautobiographical novel Le Premier Homme, written during Algeria’s War of Independence and published in 1994, because they both discuss the French Algerian pied-noir community. I argue that this distinction allows them to best convey the evolution of Camus’s pied-noir identity. Through an analysis of these novels, I examine the ambivalence of Camus’s representations of French Algeria. Though his writing has left an ambivalent legacy, I contend that Camus mythologizes the past and present primarily through his pied-noir origins. His poverty and loss are consolidated in his negative prognosis for Algeria’s future, a prognosis that is often mistrustful of Algerian independence. Often his pied-noir upbringing and experiences with poverty and marginality put in question the very possibility of an all-inclusive nation, rendering him incapable of imagining a hybrid community of French and Algerians living together. These works convey the complexity of Camus’s identities, and foreground his attempt and ultimate failure to navigate his past and access memories. In the end, these novels offer us a nuanced exploration of pied-noir marginality.
Journal Article