Ferial Ghazoul
Al-ahram Weekly
The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, awarded annually by the American University in Cairo Press for the best recent novel in Arabic went in 1998 to the Algerian writer Ahlam Mosteghanemi for her novel Dhakirat Al-Jasad (Memory in the Flesh). Ferial J Ghazoul examines the literary virtuosity of this Algerian writer
Dhakirat Al-Jasad (Memory in the Flesh), published simultaneously in
Algeria and Lebanon in 1993, and presently in its tenth printing, is the
first novel written by an Algerian woman in Arabic. Its author, Ahlam
Mosteghanemi, received her BA in Arabic literature from the University
of Algiers in 1973, and was awarded a doctorate in sociology from the
Sorbonne in 1982. Her doctorate dissertation was published in Paris in
1985, under the title Algérie: Femmes et écriture (Algeria: Women and
Writing), and introduced by Jacques Berque. Ahlam Mosteghanemi has also
published other literary works, including two volumes of poetry entitled
'Ala Marfa' Al-Ayyam (On the Haven of Days) and Al-Kitaba fi Lahzat
'Uriyy (Unveiled Instant of Writing); and more recently a novel entitled
Fawdat Al-Hawas (Anarchy of Senses).
Dhakirat Al-Jasad (Memory in the Flesh), is dedicated to the author's
militant father and to the Francophone Algerian poet and novelist, Malek
Haddad (1927-78), a literary father of sorts to Mosteghanemi, who
decided after the independence of Algeria in 1962 not to write in a
foreign language any more, and ended up not writing at all. As Ahlam
Mosteghanemi points out in her dedication, Haddad passed away -- a
loving martyr of the Arabic language -- as the white page reduced him to
silence. But his verbal traces in Dhakirat Al-Jasad, whether in the name
of the protagonist which is borrowed from the last novel of Haddad or in
allusions and intertextual references, marked in bold font, attest to
the literary kinship between the two writers. The author points out to
her readers from the very first page her filiation and affiliation.
In her own way, Ahlam Mosteghanemi articulates the drama of contemporary
Algeria in the language in which Malek Haddad wanted so much to create.
She settles her accounts beautifully with the white page and does
justice to Haddad and all the Algerian intellectuals who were denied the
use of the maternal tongue in a creative way. As Ali El-Ra'i put it:
"Ahlam Mosteghanemi is a writer who has banished the linguistic exile to
which French colonialism pushed Algerian intellectuals.
" Her novel decolonises on two levels: it reappropriates Algerian
history and presents the ravages of colonialism from the point of view
of its victims; and also she writes in the language of the victims with
passion and mastery. But the novel is not only about the Algerian
struggle against foreign domination, it is also about the complex
post-independence problems facing the emerging nation. Ahlam
Mosteghanemi exposes, with a postcolonial awareness, the
disappointments, deviations and displacements of revolutionary ideals.
However, she does not dwell on these social and political predicaments
directly; she uses them as a narrative framework for the passionate
affair between Khaled, the militant middle-aged Algerian, who turns to
painting after losing his left arm in the struggle, and Hayat, the
fiction writer and the young daughter of his friend, the mujahid
(freedom fighter) Si Al-Taher.
Hayat ends up marrying a character who embodies Algeria's new bourgeois
class, set on accumulating wealth and status symbols. Hassan, Khaled's
brother, on the other hand, presents an individualised case of
demoralised Algerians who turn to religion for relief. Nasser, the
heroine's brother rejects the marriage of convenience between his sister
and the successful businessman. The Palestinian poet Ziyad, who taught
in Algeria and comes to visit his old friend Khaled in Paris also meets
Hayat and a Platonic mutual fascination between the younger writers
takes place, disturbing the older Khaled, before he learns of the tragic
death of Ziyad in Lebanon after the invasion of Israel in 1982. Each
character in this novel is realistically portrayed and at the same time
seems to stand for a type encountered in our contemporary world.
Building a nation proves to be not an easy task after 130 years of
settler colonialism which undermined the native social structure.
Disappointed intellectuals, like Khaled, look beyond national borders to
make a niche for themselves abroad and thus gradually the dream of
Algeria becomes a nightmare. Against this background personal passions
cannot be dissociated from national dramas: Hayat personifies an Algeria
that is driven away from revolutionary glory to mundane concerns, and
yet Ahlam Mosteghanemi brilliantly shows that beneath the formal
breakdown the revolutionary spark is alive, symbolised in the
unfulfilled love between Khaled and Hayat. The writer herself explains
her reluctance to represent a consummation in her work as an expression
of her fascination with raghba, desire, not mut'a, pleasure. The
subterranean erotic longings echo the underground political aspirations
of revolutionary Algerians. Mosteghanemi's "legitimacy of madness" finds
its best expression in the secret terrain of banned liberation movements
and the dialectics of an impossible affair where the beloved evokes both
a daughter figure and an actual mother.
The novel is narrated in the first person pronoun by the male
protagonist Khaled, in a lyrical stream-of-consciousness style, with
frequent flashbacks. The dialogue moves from fusha, literary Arabic, to
colloquial Algerian Arabic with occasional phrases in French, none of
which constitute an impediment to comprehension as the interior
monologues help contextualise and elaborate the verbal exchanges. The
protagonist knew Hayat, the heroine, when she was a child living in
Tunis away from the war zone in Algeria.
Entrusted once by her father, who was both his comrade-in-arms and
political leader, to complete the formalities for her civil registration
and to give her a name, he meets her again two decades later when she is
a young woman, adorned in traditional Algerian jewelry, at the opening
of an exhibit of his paintings in Paris. The massive bracelet reminds
him of his dead mother while the very identity of Hayat reminds him of
her militant father who became a martyr -- all of which bring back to
Khaled's mind the past of Algeria and the present disappointments.
Hayat, on the other hand, meets someone who knew her father, whom she
rarely met as he was involved in the clandestine struggle intimately,
and who could tell her about him and what he was like, going beyond the
national icon that he has become in the eyes of his family and his
country.
It is precisely this cross-referencing of father-daughter and son-mother
relations which give the work a psychoanalytic dimension and
overdetermines the symbolic connotations of the novel. The return of
Khaled to Constantine to participate in the fabulous wedding of Hayat to
a nouveau riche points to the frustrations of a father/lover
possessiveness and to the militant/artist disappointments in the course
of Algerian development. Khaled's cycle of paintings of Constantine's
bridges in different lights seems less a representation of natural
landscapes than an effort to bridge psychological and political chasms.
In contrast to his sensuous but not physical relationship with Hayat,
the Algerian woman, Khaled's relationship with Catherine, the French
woman, demonstrates the encounter in flesh but not in spirit. She
fulfills a physical need and offers Khaled sexual satisfaction, but
there is no abandonment, no madness in this pleasure.
Ahlam Mosteghanemi is able to represent more than four decades of
Algerian history as they interweave with the characters' trajectories
and memories, from the revolt of 1945 in East Algeria, which led to the
imprisonment of the protagonist with the well-known Algerian writer
Kateb Yassin, to 1988 when the protagonist-narrator is writing a memoir
in the form of the novel we read. This tormenting beloved -- this Hayat
who is a correlative of the East Algerian city Constantine, and by
extension of the homeland Algeria -- captivates, in the words of Hoda
Wasfi, "by writing the self through the nation, by the double voice of
body and language, and by combining the techniques of fictionalised
autobiography with documentation, thus blurring the frontiers of genres
and creating intertwining meanings". The poetic flair of the work is
unmistakable, as well as the confessional tone. The work also refers to
actual figures in the FLN as well as invoking literary heroes, such as
Zorba the Greek and the legendary Lorca, which constitute the
sentimental education of the heroine.
Mosteghanemi is remarkable in her ability to embody convincingly a male
voice who constructs this extraordinary tale of passion, and as
Abdel-Moneim Tallima commented, "Ahlam Mosteghanemi goes beyond the
common notions of the masculine and the feminine to present a humane
horizon." As she said in an interview, she opted for a male narrator,
partly because she did not want to be classified under the label of
"womanist writing", and partly because she wanted to cover episodes in
the political history of Algeria in which men were instigators. Her new
novel, Fawdat Al-Hawas has a woman narrator, and is clearly a literary
and historical sequel to the first, magnificent part of a trilogy.
Although the novel Dhakirat Al-Jasad is specifically Algerian in its
setting with the action moving between Paris and Constantine and
occasionally Tunis, its significance could be felt anywhere in the Arab
World or in the Third World. The tragic sense of its unfolding, the
unrealised dreams and the looming death at every corner -- that of the
militant Si Al-Taher assassinated by the French, of the Palestinian poet
Ziyad by the Israelis, of the protagonist's brother by the Algerians in
an uprising -- constitute the fabric of life here and there in these
bleak times. The difficult situation of Algerian writers today is
exemplified in the physical threats endangering their very survival,
just as a sense of doom threatens the rest of Arab intellectuals with
impotence. What Ahlam Mosteghanemi achieves is turning our pain into a
noble art and transforming our grief into majestic literature. Her light
-- to borrow the imagery of Ali El-Ra'i -- shines all the more bright in
the density of this darkness.
Back to Top
© Arab World Books