Feraoun never fit into a neat category in colonial Algeria. He was a Muslim who counted French intellectuals among his closest friends, including Albert Camus. Although an Algerian nationalist, he was a Berber who neither spoke nor wrote Arabic. As a result, his journal brings a unique perspective to what was perhaps the most brutal of the anticolonial wars. This is not a chronicle of the war itself; rather, it is an intensely personal memoir detailing how the savage conflict affected the daily lives of people on both sides of the divide. Feraoun is clearly sympathetic to the rebel cause, but he is no mere shill for their side. He passionately examines the human condition with all its flaws and nobility, yet he occasionally describes events with an eerie detachment. Since he was assassinated by a French terrorist group just three days before the cease-fire that ended the war, his account is especially poignant. An emotionally draining and important work.
Jay FreemanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"[Feraoun] passionately examines the human condition with all its flaws and nobility, yet he occasionally describes events with an eerie detachment. Since he was assassinated by a French terrorist group just three days before the cease-fire that ended the war, his account is especially poignant. An emotionally draining and important work."—Booklist
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Booklist )
"As a chronicle of what the break meant when it was taking place on the village streets and in the countryside, in the homes of the people most directly affected by its endless cruelty, the journal that Feraoun kept, at the urging of his friend Robles, somewhat irregularly, from 1955 until 1961, is indispensable. It is also entirely without philosophical affectation, a profound and concrete commentary on issues that would arise again in the ''north-south'' crises in the following decades, of which the Algerian revolution was, on might say, the laboratory. After years of anti-colonial and post-colonial theory, Feraoun''s journal is truly refreshing to read. In its pages a genuinely free man reflects on relations of power between the conqueror and the conquered, on the place of intellectuals and teachers in a political war, on the effect of repression and resistance on families and neighbors, friends and communities. The simplicity with which Feraoun approached these terrible events was a literary strategy, a literary accomplishment--and proof that he had a better grasp of the meaning of his country''s history than did most commentators in Paris and elsewhere. Keeping his journal, moreover, was an act of courage: people where arrested and killed for less overt expressions of sympathy for the rebellion. . . . [Feraoun and Camus] both learned French with the simplicity and the clarity that characterize that language''s best prose: they are the kinds of writers who seem, when you first encounter them, easy to read, and turn out to be far more difficult to understand. They always say much more than you thought they said. This is, of course, one definition of classical literature; and both Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and Feraoun, who is probably the most widely-read French-language Algerian writer of the century (after Camus), were part of the French canon by the late 1950s. . . . Tersely and eloquently, Feraoun summed up in the pages of his journal the injustice of the colonial system, but unlike the Paris intellectuals he did not dwell upon it, preferring to keep notes on what actually happened to actual people with whom he was acquainted. . . . Feraoun''s journal became one of the most important books to emerge from the Algerian conflict. It is an essential human document, a real war book. . . . The Algerian war . . . remains an unavoidable reference point in the debate over the kind of world we will live in. And this debate was foreshadowed in Feraoun''s journal, as in the polemical writings of Camus and Amrouche. For this reason, the publication of this English translation of Feraoun''s Journal is very welcome."—New Republic
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New Republic )
“Feraoun’s painfully candid yet engaging journal of the French-Algerian War constitutes an unusually poignant record of one of Africa’s cruelest colonial conflicts and one of twentieth-century France’s darkest moments. Journal, 1955–1962 will surely supplant Frantz Fanon as the definitive text on French Algeria in particular and on colonialism in general.”—Julia Clancy-Smith, author of Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904)
(Julia Clancy-Smith )
