Between East and West, with Leïla Sebbar
Audio 03:39
A French writer with an Algerian father and a Périgord mother, Leïla Sebbar is a novelist, short story writer and essayist.
She is the author of an abundant and deeply personal work.
© Editions Bleu around
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
11 min
Born to an Algerian father and a French mother, novelist Leïla Sebbar grew up in colonial Algeria, before going into exile in France during the war of liberation.
Drawing on this Franco-Algerian collective memory, made up of pain, incomprehension and too rare moments of communion, this French writer like no other has built a memorial work, as abundant as it is strong and moving.
Portrait signed Tirthankar Chanda.
Publicity
Fascinating Leïla Sebbar.
Franco-Algerian writer, this great lady of contemporary French letters has been able to build an abundant and deeply personal work, interweaving the dramas of her life and of history with a capital "
H
".
“
I write to know my father, but it's an illusion.
I would never know him.
It is a silent metaphor of the history of my father, of my father's civilization, of my father's culture, all that means that this part is unknown to me
, ”she confides.
Leïla Sebbar is a novelist, author of autofictional chronicles, of essays, not to mention the ten collective collections of stories that she has assembled or edited.
Shérazade
(Stock 1982)
Le Silence des rives
(Stock, 1993),
My dear son
(Elyzad, 2009),
I don't speak my father's language
(Bleu around, 2016): these are some of the titles of this work considerable.
Writing for more than 40 years, she fascinates readers beyond the French-speaking world, especially in American universities where her books are studied as much for their postcolonial and feminist resonances as for their literalness.
Mockery, insults and jeers
The novelist was born in colonial Algeria, of an Algerian father and a French mother, Périgourdine.
Her two parents were teachers in a "
school for native boys
", in Hennaya, near Tlemcen where the future novelist grew up and where she attended the girls' school in the European district.
Several decades have passed since then, but the writer still remembers, as if it were yesterday, the mockery of the boys on the way to school, the gibes and filthy insults in Arabic, a language she did not understand. not.
To protect herself from this exterior full of threats, the teenager then took refuge in the books that surrounded her in her parents' house who were, she recalls, “
people of the book.
They were both teachers.
There was a large library in my house, a lot of books.
And then, in the high schools and colleges where I went and where I was a boarder during the war, in Algeria, there were libraries, which were very good.
I read The Search for Lost Time in Pensions and I read Russian literature, Anglo-Saxon literature.
I have always read, always read.
And I read so much that sometimes I felt like I came out of my mother's womb with a book.
"
The turbulence of May 68
The desire to write came later, when she moved to France in 1961, fleeing the war of liberation that was raging in her native country.
She was just 20 years old when she arrived in Aix-en-Provence to complete her studies.
By her own admission, she almost became a “university library rat”.
But this time, it's not the books that will save her, but the din of the outside world.
The novelist likes to evoke her participation in the nascent feminist movement, through her collaborations with the historical organs of the movement that were “Witches” and “Histoires d'Elles”, followed by her investment headlong into the turbulence of May 68. These movements of release and collective liberation allowed the future novelist to free herself from her complexes and to embark on the writing career of which she had dreamed.
At the same time reconnecting with the native country, she made the bruised memory of childhood and adolescence in Algeria, the territories of her writing.
Algeria, France, the complex relations between the two shores of the Mediterranean constitute the common thread of this memorial construction that Leïla Sebbar has been patiently raising, for more than forty years now.
Located in a fertile space, between East and West, his work tirelessly questions the silences and cries that punctuate the memory of a personal and historical past, which has never ceased to water him.
Variations on the theme of the room
The last two books she published,
Dans la chambre
(Bleu around, 2019) and
L'Algérie en patrimoine
(Bleu around, 2020), bear witness to the specificity of the novelist's work as a writer, shared between the exploration of the intimate and the desire to be part of a collective memory quest.
Composed of short stories, the first work is a variation on the theme of the bedroom as both a place of confinement and a walk towards elsewhere.
Its protagonists are women: women from the Maghreb, yesterday and today, moving between East and West, between Algiers and Lyon, Constantine and Marseille, Oran and Paris, Ténès, Lille, Clermont-Ferrand and Rochefort.
In the second book, the author continues the work she had started in a previous text-album entitled "
My Algeria in France
".
She gives voice to men and women from the common Franco-Algerian history, whose book resuscitates the shadows and the light of this memory, the moments of grace and the blockages.
Worn from story to story, one of these blockages was the lack of knowledge of Arabic, the father's mother tongue.
“
From my father's native Algeria, I am illiterate,
” recalls Leïla Sebbar in one of these profession of faith texts, which appeared recently.
She was brought up without learning the language of her father who did not transmit it to her, neither her God nor civilization.
This lack experienced as a symbolic wound is the great drama in the life of Leïla Sebbar.
This drama of lost filiation did not prevent her from living, loving and growing, but it made it the very source of her writing.
Having become a stranger to herself, she explores Algeria, her native land.
“
I write my father's body in my mother's language
,” she says, sometimes arousing anger and intolerance.
“
I said it
, remembers the writer,
during a meeting in a library, the national library of Tunis where I presented my book
:
I do not speak the language of my father
.
And a Tunisian was up.
O fury.
He had said to me
: "
You defile the tongue of your father, of your mother, the earth of your ... etc., Etc.", because I had rightly said "
I write the body of my father in the language of my mother
"
.
He meant the language of your French mother defiles the Arabic language of your father.
It was very… warlike.
"
This identity war does not start today.
In the last century, did the English Nobel Prize winner Kipling not already say: "
The East is the East and the West is the West, and they will never meet."
"
It is undoubtedly to deny Kipling that God created… Leïla Sebbar!
________________________
In the bedroom
, by Leïla Sebbar.
Editions Bleu around, 125 pages, 15 euros.
Algeria as a heritage
, unpublished stories brought together by Martine-Mathieu Job and Léïla Sebbar.
Editions Bleu around, 253 pages, 25 euros.
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