Aḥlām Mustaghānmī's first novel, ذاكرة الجسد (Dhākirat al-Jasad; The Body's Memory, or more loosely, Phantom Limb), was dedicated to her father and to Malek Haddad,Footnote ¹

(“who swore after the independence of Algeria not to write in a language that is not his . . . martyr of the Arabic language and the first writer who decided to die in silence . . . and out of love for it”; Mustaghānmī 5). Already an established poet and novelist in French, Haddad decided to put an end to his literary career in 1962.Footnote ² Haddad's decision was not an artistic statement, a disillusion with art or some of its forms, but rather a patriotic statement, an act of sacrifice, of martyrdom, as Mustaghānmī tells us. Committing to silence, however, is no mere sacrifice; it is what I like to call “literary suicide.”

Kateb Yacine, Haddad's fellow Algerian writer and contemporary, countered with his famous statement, “la langue française est notre butin de guerre” (“the French language is our spoils of war”). Clairvoyant as it was, Yacine's view went against the nationalist grain of the time. Yet Yacine himself was among those Algerian writers described by Haddad as “orphelins de vrais lecteurs” (“orphans without true readers”; “Les zéros” 11), “Car ceux pour qui nous écrivons d'abord ne nous lisent pas et probablement ne nous lirons jamais” (“because, to begin with, those for whom we write do not read us and probably never will”; 12). Even Yacine would eventually search for a way to bring his writing to the working-class Algerian and Arabic-speaking public.

Isn't silence the antithesis of writing, a death of the author (to borrow Roland Barthes's expression although we are talking about different deaths)?Footnote ³ Authors fall silent, or commit literary suicide, for various reasons. Yet Haddad's silence is intriguing, to say the least, and raises a host of questions about the choice, or lack thereof, between bilingualism and monolingualism. On a superficial level, can bilingualism, or even plurilingualism, turn into monolingualism by literally switching off one or more languages? What if that language is the speaker's or writer's only mode of expression? What if it cannot be replaced by anything other than silence? Is a broken, injured, mutilated mother tongue sufficient for expression?Footnote ⁴ On a deeper level, however, one needs to think and rethink language as home and as exile, language as a broken home, a reconstructed home, language inhabiting us as we inhabit it, possessing and possessed, language as a barrier to communication, a marker of difference and similarity, inclusion and exclusion, belonging and alienation, of owning and disowning, language as being, in Jacques Berque's terms, and as not being, I might add. Language as remembrance and forgetfulness at the same time. Mustaghānmī's dedication left me with these and many more questions.

Before tackling these questions, however, two important clarifications are in order. First, although many parallels can be drawn from various parts of the world, and rightly so, the linguistic situation in Algeria was and still is both unique and extreme for reasons that I explain below. Second, and most importantly, the core question I am posing here is not about the reasons some Algerian authors chose or choose to write in French, a topic about which much has been said and written, but quite the opposite: why Haddad and later Yacine, as two prominent examples, opted not to write in French when it was their only means of literary expression.

Haddad was born in Constantine (in northeast Algeria) in 1927, and his schooling was entirely in French. Although Constantine was at the time the epicenter of an Arabo-Islamic reform movement led by Sheikh Ibn Bādīs (1889–1940) and later by Muḥammad Al-Bashīr Al-Ibrāhīmī (1889–1965), both presidents of Jamʿiyyat Al-ʿUlamāʾ Al-Muslimīn (the Muslim Scholars Association), it was a multilingual environment where Arabic, Tamazight (Qbayliyya to the north and Shawiyya to its south), and French were in use. On 8 May 1945, while the world was celebrating the end of the Second World War, the region of Setif and Guelma witnessed the massacre of thousands of Algerians by the French colonial gendarmerie, army, and settler militias. Haddad was barely eighteen when the demonstrations broke out in Constantine, and the events would be engraved in his memory. His journey would lead him to studying law in Aix-en-Provence, which he abandoned on the eve of the Algerian war. Haddad published his first collection of poetry, Le malheur en danger (Misfortune in Danger), in 1956, two years after the start of the Algerian war of independence, and his last, Écoute et je t'appelle (Listen and I Will Call You), in 1961, one year before the end of the war. In between these two collections, he published four acclaimed novels: La dernière impression (1958; The Last Impression), Je t'offrirai une gazelle (1959; I Will Offer You a Gazelle), L’élève et la leçon (1960; The Pupil and the Lesson), and Le quai aux fleurs ne répond plus (1961; The Flower Quay No Longer Answers). His burst of literary production took place during a time of struggle, resistance, and revolution, which provided him at once with his subject matter as well as the drive for his work, as if writing was a revolutionary act that ended with the Algerian independence in 1962. After 1961, he did not publish any other literary work.

Why this silence? To consider this question, one needs to understand the complex linguistic history of Algeria during the colonial and early postcolonial periods (Benrabah; Ḥallūsh; Zarhūnī). Language policies during both periods were full of paradoxes. During the French occupation (1830–1962), Arabic was banned from educational institutions, and at best taught as a foreign language in the French Lycée. Algerians could learn it only in Koranic schools in remote areas, mostly in the south away from the reach of the colonizers. Other efforts to provide instruction in Arabic, such as the initiative led by Ibn Badis and Jamʿiyyat Al-ʿUlamāʾ Al-Muslimīn, were limited to small enclaves, like the Al-Jāmiʿ Al-Akhḍar (the Green Mosque) in Constantine, and persecuted by the French authorities. Those very few Algerians who could, like Rachid Boujedra and President Houari Boumedien, studied Arabic in the Ṣādiqiyya and Zaytūna in neighboring Tunis, the Qarawiyyīn in Fes, or as far away as Al-Azhar in Cairo. The majority of Algerians never went to school and the few who were able to, an elite that would lead the country after its independence, with very few exceptions (such as al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār) did not study Arabic. Haddad poignantly remarks: “notre langue maternelle était en exile dans son propre pays” (“our mother tongue was in exile in its own country”; “Les zéros” 16).

Arabic, to borrow Abdelfattah Kilito's expression, is a forked tongue, like that of a viper (Min shurfat 5). It has two varieties: one is spoken in everyday life at home and in the streets (dārija or ʿāmmiyya), and the other (fuṣḥā) is the idiom of literacy, the key to the Arabic canon, and is learned at school. Sadly, and paradoxically, Haddad had to read some of the major Arabic works, like the books of Al-Jāhiẓ, in French translation (most likely Charles Pellat's).Footnote ⁵ Here, translation, like an unwanted guest, displaces the original text. The mother tongue is discovered (or re-covered) through the foreign tongue. French is transplanted to become one side of the forked tongue, or is the tongue really still forked? Or is it more accurate to say that French was grafted onto the fuṣḥā branch of the tree of Arabic? The cuckoo bird laying its eggs in other birds’ nests? With the displacement of Arabic, a whole canon and a set of values are displaced, and Imriʾ Al-Qays and Al-Mutanabbī are replaced by Victor Hugo and Lamartine, Al-Jāhiẓ by Moliére, and Ibn Khaldūn by Voltaire. The danger lies not in appreciating the rich French literary canon but rather in the displacement of the Arabic one. More dangerous yet are the values that come with that: French is alive and is the language of emancipation, enlightenment, and the idiom of the future, while Arabic is portrayed as the language of a decadent and backward past, stuck in antiquity and unable to cope with modern times.

French school must have been a very strange place for Haddad and other Algerians of his generation, a fortress, an island in a foreign land where France, or an image of it, existed between its walls with its language, discipline, values, and vague literary figures that were hard to relate to the local stories his mother told him and the streets in which he ran with his classmates. Who is foreign in this case, the school or the world outside it? And who is the stranger? Is it the French schoolmaster or Haddad himself living in two contending worlds separated by physical and moral walls as well as by power and privilege? Perhaps he was a stranger in both places, or one space would become foreign once he stepped inside the other.Footnote ⁶ In his own words, there was always a school between him and his past. There was always French between him and Arabic.

The French mission civilisatrice (“civilizing mission”) was a one-way street where, through language and education—as well as other integration institutions such as the army, the church, and the media—colonial subjects would évoluer (“evolve”) to become French, but not completely, as Homi K. Bhabha pointed out in the case of the British colonization of India. The common argument is that, unlike the British, the French actually believed in the transformational power of their civilizing mission, but that is far from the what the facts tell us.Footnote ⁷ Despite a few dissenting voices, French humanism, the product of the Enlightenment and the motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, applied only at home in France, and at best could be extended to western Europe. The colonies, however, were “lawless,” “savage,” and “unruly,” where no “human” laws applied; their “uncivilized” populaces understood only the language of brute force. Extreme violence perpetrated by the “civilized” and “civilizing” was now rationalized and made morally acceptable. “The horror! The horror,” to echo Kurtz's last words in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. An even more dramatic echo is the cry of the Algerian militant Jamīla Būḥīrid (b. 1935) during her trial by the French military court in Algiers in 1957: “en nous tuant, . . . ce sont les traditions de liberté de votre pays que vous assassinez” (“in killing us . . . you are [in fact] assassinating the traditions of freedom in your country”; qtd. in Zeroual). Algerians would hold an ambiguous status, for while the French considered Algeria a territoire that was divided into départements in 1848, Muslim Algerians, the overwhelming majority, would not be granted French citizenship or be admitted into the circle of the privileged few who were protected by the French values of freedom and equality. As Achille Mbembe has stated, French language policies in its colonies were promoting not bilingualism but monolingualism instead. Even the nuanced “colonial bilingualism” that Albert Memmi portrays still does not reflect the complexity of the situation in Algeria or pay due attention to different degrees of a nonstatic and unbalanced “bilingualism.” How bilingual were the colonial subjects, even the elite, if they were illiterate in one of the two languages they used (Memmi 124–28)? The same question applies to Jacques Derrida's Le monolinguisme de l'autre (Monolingualism of the Other). Who is the other, the French or the Algerians? And who is monolingual in this case? The statement he starts with, “je n'ai qu'une langue, ce n'est pas la mienne” (“I have only one language, but it is not mine”; 13), is not as paradoxical as it seems, at least from Haddad's perspective. Yet there is a lack of choice in the first half of the statement, the act of acquiring only one language, and a choice in the second half, the act of disowning that very language. In his La langue de l'autre (The Language of the Other), the Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi, who engaged Derrida in a decade-long debate, critiqued the idea of owning a language, even what we call “the mother tongue,” and put forth the alternative notion of writing in French as a reincarnation for him, a space he can populate freely. Neither view seems to explain Haddad's choice, and later Yacine's, adequately.

True as “colonial monolingualism” is, for the wound of colonialism is still festering and attempts at decolonization are still ongoing, there was always resistance, a very important part of the dialectic that seems to be left out in Edward Said's, Mbembe's, Memmi's, Derrida's, and even Khatibi's accounts.Footnote ⁸ It would be rather simplistic to speak of a coexistence or of a purely hegemonic relationship between French and Arabic; complexity, adaptability, and constant change seem to be more accurate characterizations. Arabic surrounded by French, Arabic surrounding French, Arabic in French, French in Arabic, Arabic on top of French and underneath it, Arabic including French and excluding it, wielding French expressions to fit its grammatical forms, adapting, adopting, and using it to resist and at times to assimilate. The result is not a pidgin or a creole but code-switching. Or is it rather code mixing? Can we truly speak of two codes, or does the colonial past make us insist on the linguistic polarity? Despite envying the colonizers for the material and nonmaterial privileges they enjoyed (Fanon), most Algerians, from their end, did not want to become French either, at least not completely. “Nous écrivons le français, n’écrivons pas en français” (“We write French, not in French”), Haddad asserts (“Débat”).

How can one interpret such a drastic act? Is it an exaggeration to characterize it as “literary suicide”? Didn't Khaled, the protagonist of Le quai aux fleurs ne répond plus, an exiled poet tormented by the futility of his resistance poems compared to fighting on the ground, commit suicide? After finding vicarious salvation in his wife's joining of the resistance fighters, he discovers that she was betraying him with a French officer.Footnote ⁹ The fact is, Haddad did not publish any literary works between 1961 and his premature death in 1978, except for a few newspaper articles that appeared here and there. Other than the colonial history, or the French school, that stood between Haddad and his past (and by “past” he does not mean just the immediate past but rather the whole complex tradition to which Algeria belonged before colonialism), one should consider talking about the purpose, the symbolic message, of his decision to be silent rather than the reasons that led him to do so. Mustaghānmī's dedication portrays the act as one of sacrifice and martyrdom for the love of Arabic. In other words, he sacrificed his ability to write in French out of love for a language in which he could not write, a language, or a variety of it, of which he was deprived. He died silently long before his physical death in 1978. A living silent martyr. This is certainly a patriotic act that carried great symbolic meaning, and it was more of a rejection of French than the embracing of Arabic, a rejection of a colonial past. In an interview, Boujedra, who himself renounced writing in French and wrote in Arabic for a decade (1981–92) then switched back to French, says that Haddad's writing stopped when the revolution ended and that there was no sense for him in writing after that (qtd. in “Malek Haddad Doc” 08:57–09:13).Footnote ¹⁰ In an essay he published together with his last collection of poetry entitled “Les zéros tournent en rond” (“Zeros Go Round in Circles”), Haddad writes, “Je suis moins séparé de ma patrie par la Méditerrannée que par la langue française” (“I am less separated from my homeland by the Mediterranean than by the French language”; 9), and he adds in an article in 1965, “la langue française n'est pas ma patrie, elle est mon exile” (“the French language is not my homeland, it is my exile”; “Débat”). Was he returning home from his exile when he renounced writing in French? To what linguistic home? He could not exist, in a literary sense, in Arabic, let alone be comfortable in it. Part of the home he wanted to return to was no longer there: the fuṣḥā quarters, to continue the analogy, were almost completely torn down by the colonial language policies (Raḥwī). What a double exile that must have been, an exile within exile as Abū Ḥayyān Al-Tawḥīdī wrote centuries ago.Footnote ¹¹ In this essay, Haddad laments the inability of Algerian francophone writers to address the audience that needs to read them most: Algerians. “Zeros going round in circles,” “orphelins de lecteurs authentiques” (“orphans of real readers”; “Les zéros” 11), and “writers without true readers,” he calls them, including himself, Yacine, Mohamed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, and others. They wrote in a language that their main subjects, the majority of Algerians, could not read. Double exile, again. Did Haddad fall into silence for this reason? If you cannot address your fellow Algerians, your main audience, in their language, then what is the point of writing?

It is still hard to reconcile Haddad's decision to fall silent with statements he wrote anticipating the end of the Algerian war of independence: “Les fusils se tairont mais les stylos ne se tairont pas” (“The rifles will fall silent, but the pens will not”; “Les zéros” 10). In the same essay he adds, “la language française . . . , qu'on le veuille ou non, qu'on l'ad-mette ou non, fait desormais partie de notre patrimoine national” (“the French language . . . , whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, is from now on part of our national patrimony”; 21). Admitting the presence of French, however, did not stop him from rejecting it as a medium of writing.

The decision that Haddad made on a personal level is the same that the postindependence Algerian government made nationally. Typical of a posttraumatic reaction, Algerian cultural and linguistic policies aimed at returning to an imagined precolonial Arab and Arabic speaking nation, ignoring the complex multilingual reality of the country and 132 years of French occupation. Arabization was rushed, sudden, and obviously driven by ideology rather than a serious consideration of the complex linguistic situation. Egyptian teachers were hired to fill the ranks of elementary and high school faculties,Footnote ¹² and many attempts to linguistically reform the large bureaucracy failed. Arabic was the official language only on paper. Monolingualism was now the unifying force in nation building. The paradoxes of nationalism—assertion and rejection, affirmation and negation—are interdependent and betraying anxieties and underlying attitudes that are the product of the contact and interaction of French and Arabic in a colonial context. In a speech where he addressed the question of Arabization, Boumedien, an Arabist and graduate of Al-Azhar University, called for a reformed Arabic that can cope with modern sciences, biochemistry, medicine, and so on (“Khiṭāb”). He was neither the first nor the last to call for such a reform: Ṭahtāwī and Al-Bustānī did so before him. What is striking is that less than two centuries before this speech, ʿAbd Al-Rahmān Al-Jabartī, whose training in the same Al-Azhar (or is it really the same?) was mostly in language and jurisprudence, did not run out of Arabic scientific terms when describing in minute details the laboratories, workshops, experiments, and inventions of the French savants who accompanied Napoleon in his campaign in Egypt (Jabartī 232–36). Arabic, the language of the past, was somehow stripped of its past, lost its memory (perhaps even the memory of its memory), and now had to compete with French, but starting at a disadvantage, from scratch, and without its memory. Arabic was no longer sovereign, but rather defined by another competing tongue. The irony of fighting French values with French values, decolonizing with colonial thought.

The alternative to Haddad's path is synthesized in Yacine's famous quote: “la langue française est notre butin de guerre” (“the French language is our spoils of war”). Yacine would be criticized for this view by nationalists as well as by those who questioned his elitism. What war and whose spoils?

Yacine was born in 1929 to a family of Chaoui Amazigh in the same city as Haddad, who was born two years earlier. Both knew each other well and worked together at a certain point while in France, and their paths crossed many times. Yacine was a high school student in Setif when the 8 May 1945 massacre took place. Three days later, he was arrested by the French authorities and put in jail for two months. He stopped going to school and joined the Front de Libération National. His literary career, like Haddad's, started with a collection of poetry in 1946, and in 1956 he published his highly acclaimed novel Nedjma, which established him in the francophone canon. Soon, however, his interest shifted to theater. In an essay entitled مع ” كاتب ياسين : مسرح عربي في منفى لغوي “ (“Maʿa Katib Yacine: Masraḥ ʿarabī fī manfā lughawī”; “With Kateb Yacine: An Arabic Theater in a Linguistic Exile”), the Syrian playwright Saʿdallah Wannūs paints a very intimate portrait of Yacine and describes two of their encounters, the first in 1967 (the year of Naksa, Defeat) in Paris and the second in Damascus in 1971 (157–77). The title clearly engages Haddad's “Zeros Go Round in Circles” and his notion of linguistic exile. Wannūs asks,

”أنت تكتب بالفرنسية ومسرحيتك عن فلسطين ستكون بالفرنسية، أفلا تشعر أنّك منفي داخل اللغة وأنّك مسوّر بحائط لا بد من هدمه كي تصبح أعمالك أكثر فاعلية وأعمق تأثيراً؟ “

(“you write in French, and your play about Palestine will be in French. Don't you feel exiled inside the language, surrounded by a wall that must be torn down so that your works become more effective and deeper in their impact?”; 176). Yacine responds:

Furthermore, what seems to save Yacine from the futility of his work is his belief in an endless revolution that is not restricted to Algeria.

”أعتبر العمل المسرحي جزءاً من الثورة، ووسيلة قويّة للنضال .“

(“I consider theater part of revolution, and a powerful tool for [resistance and] struggling”), Yacine tells Wannūs (172). Yacine was on his way to Vietnam for a second visit to collect material for his next play L'homme aux sandales de caoutchouc (The Man in Rubber Sandals), a tribute to Ho Chi Minh, and would go on to write other plays on Palestine and Nelson Mandela. Neither his refusal nor his writings on struggles happening around the world would help him break out of the cycle of a zero that goes round in circles. His salvation came in the form of plays he wrote in dārija, spoken Algerian Arabic, with which he toured in France and Algeria to perform them in front of workers and farmers in cities and distant rural areas, the audience he could not address in French.

While Haddad rejected writing in French and opted for silence, Yacine finally found his way back to Arabic even if his tongue was partially mutilated and no longer forked. Haddad would “come out of his exile”Footnote ¹³ through translations of some of his works, most posthumously. Was Haddad defeated by monolingualism or was he victorious, as many, like Mustaghānmī, portray him?Footnote ¹⁴ Was Yacine victorious? Perhaps what matters most is that they had no choice in the language they were taught at school, but now could decide whether they would write in it or not. Each in his own way made the same statement to the past colonial powers: “I shall not speak your language.”