(1920- ) novelist
Albert Memmi was born in the Jewish quarter of Tunis, Tunisia. His father was a Jewish-Italian skilled saddler, and his mother was a Berber (a member of the non-Arab minority of North Africa). When Memmi was four years old, he went to rabbinical school and studied there for three years. In 1927, he attended the school of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in the rue Malta Srira in Tunis. Memmi would often help his father in his workshop where he listened to stories told by an old family friend. While attending school, Memmi was actively involved with local Jewish youth groups; this strongly influenced his perceptions, which would later surface in his writings, especially those relating to colonial issues. Memmi graduated from the Lycee Carnot in 1939 and was awarded the honor prize in philosophy. From 1941 to 1942, he studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. After the invasion of France by Nazi Germany when anti-Semitic laws were implemented by the collaborationist Vichy government of France, Memmi was expelled from the university and sent to a forced labor camp until 1945. After World War II, he moved to Paris and continued his studies at the Sorbonne. After Tunisia gained full independence, Memmi settled in Paris, where he took on various professorial positions. He retired from teaching in 1987.
Memmi’s works were heavily influenced by the political and social situations that shaped his life, and his dual position as a member of the French educated elite as an impoverished and marginalized Jew also influenced his writings. In his first novel, La Statue de sel (The Pillar of Salt, 1953), Memmi’s main protagonist, Mordecai, pours out his despair and sorrow. He is plagued by poverty and solitude, living as an estranged “outsider” who tries to make sense of his existence in a foreign land. Memmi’s political views, his sociological training, and his own experiences, especially during World War II, allow him to discuss and explore the complexity of colonialism, particularly in his 1957 work, The Colonizer and the Colonized, in which he examines the social and psychological foundations of the views held by the colonizer and the colonized. To Memmi, the two groups constitute a framework in which neither group can exist without the other: The colonizer and the colonized are interdependent, but each group is a complex organization.
Memmi’s works clearly show his genius as one of the leading intellectuals in postcolonial theory and thinking. He wrote all of his works in French, but many have been translated and published in English.
Other Works by Albert Memmi
Dependence: A Sketch for a Portrait of the Dependent. Translated by Philip A. Facey. Boston: Beacon, 1984.
Desert. Pueblo, Colo.: Passeggiata Press, 1992.
Jews and Arabs. Translated by Eleanor Levieux. Chicago: J. P. O’Hara, 1975.
The Liberation of the Jew. Translated by Judy Hyun. New York: Viking Press, 1966.
Racism. Translated by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
The Scorpion. Translated by Eleanor Levieux. New York: Orion, 1971.
A Work about Albert Memmi
Roumani, Judith. Albert Memmi. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.
