Paroles gelées

Algerian born French writers Albert Camus and Assia Djebar both employ their memories and experiences, and those of their family and friends, within French-Algerian landscapes, to construct travel narratives that blend myth with reality. Albert Camus’ Le Premier Homme, published posthumously in 1994, is a blend of fiction and non-fiction that can be described as a semi-autobiographical novel. Le Blanc de l’Algérie, published in 1995 by Assia Djebar, is a memoire on loss. Although written four decades apart and published one year apart, together their descriptions of physical and mental voyages demonstrate their unique representations of Algeria pre and post independence.

For Camus, writing during the colonial period, his Algerian journey is both literal and imaginary. For Djebar, having published before and after independence, this particular journey of the nineties describes Islamist conflict and civic turmoil and is predominantly political. In Le Premier Homme Camus, a pied-noir of French and Spanish ancestry talks about his impoverished childhood but he specifically contrasts his early travels in Algeria with his later travels from France to his former Algerian homeland in a deliberate attempt to trace his roots and visit his father’s grave. In Le Blanc de l’Algérie Djebar, of Arab and berber origin, discusses the final journeys of her fellow Algerian friends and writers who lost their lives during the Algerian Civil War.

Travel within Algeria and between Algeria and France enables Camus and Djebar to discuss the effects of colonization and decolonization on their lives and the lives of their friends and families. I will demonstrate how travel facilitates their narratives to and from the Algerian nation as they expose the hybrid identities that exist in French-Algeria. Indeed, their travelling through Algerian space and time allows them to re-appropriate Algeria and overcome identity crises and displacement associated with their homeland.