Jacques explains the difference between Arabs, French bosses, and “bandits” (terrorists) to his illiterate uncle Etienne/Ernest, the barrel maker, who tells him that the bosses are too tough, but the terrorists are impossible. In a chapter called “Mondoví,” Camus describes a timeless bond between Arab and European farmers, destined to live together. And in his notes for the novel, he writes, in a much-debated fragment: “Return the land. Give all the land to the poor … the immense herd of the wretched, mostly Arab and a few French, and who live and survive here through stubbornness and endurance.”7
Dismissed or disdained in 1958, Algerian Chronicles has a new life in 2013, a half-century after the independence Camus so feared. The book’s critique of the dead end of terrorism—the word appears repeatedly, with respect to both sides of the conflict—its insistence on a multiplicity of cultures; its resistance to fundamentalisms, are as meaningful in contemporary Algeria as in London or New York. Camus’s refusal of violence speaks to Algerians still recovering from the civil war of the 1990s—“the dirty wars,” or “black decade” that resulted in an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths.
The tragedy began in 1991, after an Islamic party emerged victorious in legislative elections and the government scuttled the electoral process to prevent a fundamentalist takeover. The army entered into conflict with the fighting arm of the Front Islamique du Salut. Massacres broke out throughout the country, and the chaos was so great that no one knew who was responsible. Murders were committed by the army and by the Islamic Front, and the army disguised its own violence to make the Islamists look worse. Hundreds of intellectuals, artists, and teachers were murdered; many others were forced into exile.
On a recent trip to Algiers, I discussed Camus’s Algerian Chronicles with several Algerian professors of literature. They responded by connecting Camus’s distant positions first to the dirty wars of the 1990s, and second to the revolutionary struggle of the 1950s. In the 1990s, explained N___,
A lot of Algerians realized that there might be a parallel, that they had become a little like those French Algerians from before, from the 1950s and ’60s—Algerians whose stature as Algerians wasn’t being recognized. Those Algerians in the 1990s recognized themselves in Camus—whose Algerian dimension was denied, whether it was in his novels, in his refusal to take a position, or in the positions he did take—the constant vacillation, the hesitation, the not being able to figure out what is going on or take a clear position. I remember how we felt threatened in our Algerian identity: what, we were supposed to leave Algeria now? We’re as much Algerians as they are! It was a scandal! Also there was the question of exile: people were leaving the country and they were criticized. Had they done the right thing? Did they have a choice? And so they started to reread Camus from that perspective.
A colleague objected. As she saw it, Camus was being rehabilitated as part of a revisionist history that considered the FLN guilty of acts of violence equal to French colonial violence. That revisionism was erasing the just cause for which they had fought.
Both agreed that Camus had been unwelcome in the Algerian classroom for a long time, and the decision in the 1980s to make Arabic the obligatory language in the universities had put yet another nail in his coffin. With French reduced to a second language, Camus had no official place in the national canon. He was, as N___ said, denied his Algerian-ness, now in literary terms. N___ pointed out that the founding fathers of Algerian national literature—Mohammed Dib, Maloud Feraoun, Kateb Yacine—were in literary dialogue with Camus, so that it was difficult to teach them without also teaching him. Yacine’s national epic, Nedjma (1956), starts with a knife that recalls the knife carried by the Arab in The Stranger, only now it’s not a European killing an Arab, but an Algerian worker attacking his European foreman. The Kabyle writer Maloud Feraoun, assassinated in 1962, uses an epigraph from The Plague in his first published novel, The Poor Man’s Son (1950): “In man, there is far more to admire than to despise.”8 These writers were angry with Camus, or disappointed in him. But they remained in conversation with him. “A quarrel,” as Sartre said about his own break with Camus, “is just another way of living together.”
And so the conversation continues. Nabil, the narrator of Hamid Grine’s 2011 novel Camus dans le narguilé (Camus in the hookah), buries his father and learns from an uncle at the funeral that his real, biological father is Albert Camus. He begins a quest that is also an allegory, with Camus as a stand-in for a lost literary heritage. As Algeria changes, the imaginary conversation with the figure of Camus changes, too.9
Perhaps no Algerian writer has given more retrospective power to Camus than Assia Djebar, who has lived in exile in France and the United States since 1980. In her Algerian White: A Narrative, she compares Camus to Nelson Mandela.10 She argues that the meeting for a civilian truce was the key moment when everything might have happened differently, and without violence, for Algeria. It’s as if she were remembering that memorable moment in The Stranger, just as Meursault is about to fire on the Arab: “and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started.… And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.”11 Djebar makes a similar gesture, a writer’s gesture. Of course there was no single moment, but she wants us to imagine that there was, in fact, one decisive moment—when leaders, French and Algerian, could either end the violence, or enable it. “People expect too much of writers in these matters,” Camus might have said.12
Some Algerians thought, by 2010, that Camus had returned to favor. There was a plan for a Camus caravan to travel through the country giving readings. But it was canceled, for reasons no one could explain.
Camus’s investigative pieces on Kabylia from Algerian Chronicles were not included in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, perhaps because they don’t match that book’s philosophical themes, or perhaps because they are full of details of French governance in a far-flung, mountainous region of Algeria that was completely unfamiliar to 1960s readers in the United States and Britain. In 1939, accompanied by a photographer, Camus traveled to Kabylia to write a series of reports for the anticolonialist Alger républicain, a newspaper that ran on a shoestring but gave the young writer the chance to report on everything from murder trials to books and plays. Two decades later, when he sat down to write a short story about a schoolteacher in mountainous Algeria, he used famine-stricken Kabylia as his backdrop. “The Guest”—“L’Hôte” in French, which can mean either “guest” or “host”—was published in Exile and the Kingdom in 1957.
You find in it the French-run local government, the imported sacks of grain, the drought: “But it would be hard to forget that poverty, that army of ragged ghosts wandering in the sunlight,” says the narrator, and actually, it’s Camus’s memory of his 1939 trip that is unforgettable.13 “The Misery of Kabylia” is better documented than any other essay in Algerian Chronicles: Camus reviews the statistics on food supplies, nutrition, famine, and education.
At least one of his suggestions—that impoverished Kabyles could improve their lot by leaving to work in mainland France—is shocking to Algerian readers today. But he is deeply informed and angry at a time when other journalists in France took any complaint about Algerian poverty as an attack on French values. “The Misery of Kabylia” is also in some ways the most literary piece in the Chronicles. There are moments of tragic contemplation, such as this scene with a Kabylian friend, looking over Tizi-Ouzou from the heights of the city at nightfall:
And at that hour, when the shadows descending from the mountains across this splendid land can soften even the hardest of hearts, I knew that there was no peace for those who, on the other side of the valley, were gathering around a spoiled barleycake. I also knew that while it would have been comforting to surrender to the startling grandeur of that night, the misery gathered around the glowing fires across the way placed the beauty of this world under a kind of ban.
“Let’s go down now, shall we?” my friend said.
In Kabylia, beauty and poverty exist together, but to sense them both is intolerable.
“The Misery of Kabylia” may seem gently humanitarian today, but in 1939 it contributed to the shutting down of Camus’s newspaper and to his blacklisting by the French government in Algeria. He was unable to find a job with any newspaper and was forced to leave the country. This was his first exile. For the rest of his life, he believed he had risked everything for his anticolonial activism. After the war, in 1945, his articles in Combat represented a unique understanding of the riots at Sétif—that rally of Algerian veterans that led to a hundred European deaths and then to many thousands of Muslim deaths in the government repression that followed.14
While Camus understood the political implications of Sétif, the communist press referred to the rioters as “fascist agents provocateurs.”15 Camus was convinced that if the French government continued to
