Born: Tunis, Tunisia, 15 December 1920; naturalized French citizen, 1960. Education: Attended French Lycee Carnot, Tunis; University of Algiers, degree in philosophy, 1943; University of Paris, Sorbonne, Doctor es lettres, 1970. Military Service: Interned in a Nazi labor camp in Tunisia toward the end of World War II. Family: Married Germaine Dubach; three children. Career: Taught high school philosophy, Tunis, 1953-56; director, Center for Educational Research, Tunis, 1953-57; researcher, National Center of Scientific Research, Paris, 1958-60; assistant professor, Ecole practique des hautes etudes, 1959-66, and social psychology, 1966-70, University of Paris, Sorbonne; professor of sociology, then professor emeritus University of Paris, Nanterre, 1970-; Walker Ames Professor of Sociology, University of Washington, 1972; faculty member, International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism. Lives in Paris, France. Awards: Commander of Ordre de Nichan Iftikhar (Tunisia); Legion of Honor; Officer of Tunisian Republic; Officier des Arts et des Lettres; Officier des Palmes Academiques; Prix Carthage (Tunisia), 1953; Prix Feneon (Paris), 1954; Prix Simba (Rome). Honorary doctorate, Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel. Member: Chair of Association pour Judaisme Laique et Humaniste; Society of Gens de Lettres; PEN Club; Academie des Sciences d’Outremer; honorary member, advising board for the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University, United States.
Publications
Fiction
La Statue de sel. 1953; as The Pillar of Salt, translated by Edouard Roditi, 1955.
Agar, roman. 1955; as Strangers, translated by Brian Rhys, 1960.
Le Scorpion; ou, la Confession imaginaire. 1969; as The Scorpion; or, The Imaginary Confession, translated by Eleanor Levieux, 1971.
Le Desert; ou, La vie et les aventures de Jubair Oulai El-Mammi. 1977.
Pharaon: roman. 1988. Le Nomade immobile: recit. 2000.
Verse
Le Mirliton du ciel. 1990.
Other
Portrait du colonise, precede du Portrait du Colonisateur. 1957; as The Colonizer and the Colonized, translated by Howard Greenfeld, 1965.
Portrait d’un Juif. 1962; as Portrait of a Jew, translated by Elisabeth Abbott, 1962.
La liberation du Juif. 1966; as The Liberation of the Jew, translated by Judy Hyun, 1966.
L’Homme domine. 1968; as Dominated Man: Notes toward a Portrait (translator unknown), 1968.
Juifs et Arabes. 1974; as Jews and Arabs, translated by Eleanor Levieux, 1975.
Personnage de Jeha dans la litterature orale des Arabes et des Juifs. 1974.
Albert Memmi: un entretien avec Robert Davies suivi de Itineraire de l’experience vecue a la theorie de la domination. 1975.
Le terre interieure: entretiens avec Victor Malka. 1976.
La dependance: esquisse pour un portrait du dependant. 1979; as Dependence: A Sketch for a Portrait of the Dependent, translated by Philip A. Facey, 1984.
Le Racisme: description, definition, traitement. 1982; as Racism, translated by Steve Martinot, 2000.
Albert Memmi: ecrivain de la dechirure, edited by Guy Dugas. 1984.
Ce que je crois. 1985.
Ecriture coloree, ou, Je vous aime en rouge: essai sur une dimension nouvelle de l’ecriture, la couleur. 1986.
Bonheurs: 52 semaines. 1992.
A contre-courants. 1993.
Ah, quel bonheur!; precede de L’exercice du bonheur. 1995.
Le juif et l’autre, with Maurice Chavardes and Frangois Kasbi. 1995.
Le Buveur et l’amoureux: leprix de la dependance. 1998.
Editor, Poesie algerienne de 1830 a nos jours; approaches socio-historiques by Jean Dejeux, 1963.
Editor, Anthologie des ecrivains maghrebins d’expression francaise. 1965.
Editor, Biliographie de la litterature nord-africaine d’expression francaise, 1945-1962. 1965.
Editor, Ecrivains francophones du Maghreb: Anthologie. 1985.
Critical Studies:
”Albert Memmi et ‘l’homme domine”’ by Madeleine Akselrad, in L’Afrique Litteraire, 4, 1969; ”Interview with Albert Memmi: Propos recueillis par Jacqueline Leiner” by Jacqueline Leiner, in Presence Francophone: Revue Litteraire, 6, 1973; ”Albert Memmi: The Syndrome of Self-exile” by Isaac Yetiv, in International Fiction Review, 1, 1974; ”Le probleme du langage chez Frantz Fanon, Malek Haddad et Albert Memmi” by Jacqueline Leiner, in Presence Francophone: Revue Litteraire, 8, 1974; ”Albert Memmi, defenseur et illustrateur de l’homme francophone” by Alex Maugey, in Culture Francaise, 29 (3), 1980; ”Albert Memmi ou le cul-de-sac et l’ecriture” by Esther Benaim-Ouaknine and Robert Elbaz, in Presence Francophone: Revue Litteraire, 23, 1981; ”Albert Memmi” by Giuliana Toso Rodinis, in Le rose del deserto, II, 1982; ”Memmi’s Introduction to History: Le Desert as Folktale, Chronicle and Biography” by Judith Roumani, in Philological Quarterly, 61 (2), 1982; ”L’Oeuvre romanesque d’Albert Memmi, ou le plaisir des yeux” by Guy Dugas, in Revue Celfan, 4(2) 1985; ”Ethics and Esthetics in Memmi’s Le Scorpion" by Isaac Yetiv, in Interdisciplinary Dimensions of African Literature, edited by K. Anyidoho, A.M. Porter, D. Racine, and J. Spleth, 1985; ”Albert Memmi: Conversation” by Najwa Tlili, in Europe-Revue Litteraire Mensuelle, 702, 1987; ”Acculturation, alienation et emancipation dans les oeuvres d’Albert Memmi et de Cheikh Hamidou Kane” by Isaac Yetiv, in Presence Francophone: Revue Litteraire, 34, 1989; ”Albert Memmi and Alain Finkielkraut: Two Discourses on French Jewish Identity” by Judith Morganroth Schneider, in Romanic Review, 81 (1), 1990; ”La Lecon hermeneutique du Scorpion d’Albert Memmi” by Odette Mercure, in Revue Francophone de Louisiane, 7 (1), 1992; ”Albert Memmi: Du roman a l’essai, d’Agar au Portrait du colonise" by Joelle Strike, in French Studies in Southern Africa, 24, 1995; ”Albert Memmi: L’Exil, le desert, l’ecriture” by Amy Dayan-Rosenman, in Pardes, 21, 1995; ”Deracinement et gommages de l’identite: Le ‘passe entre parentheses’ dans Europa, Europa et La Statue de sel d’Albert Memmi” by Peter Schulman, in Romance Notes, 39 (1), 1998; ”Colonialism, Psychoanalysis, and Cultural Criticism: The Problem of Interiorization in the Work of Albert Memmi” by Suzanne Gearhart, in ‘Culture’ and the Problem of the Disciplines, edited by J.C. Rowe, 1998; Postcolonialisme et Autobiographie: Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Daniel Maximin, edited by A. Hornung and E. Ruhe, 1998; ”Eclats de sourire: De la fragmentation dans l’oeuvre d’Albert Memmi” by Joelle Strike, in French Studies in Southern Africa, 30, 2001.
As one of Africa’s greatest intellectuals, Albert Memmi has continued to write and lecture on the problems of difference and racism for nearly half a century. Although sympathetic to the Arab cause in the country where he was born and raised, Tunisia, Memmi was, however, disconcerted by the religious character of the new state. He left Tunisia a year after its 1956 independence to settle in France. The question of homeland, never fully resolved in Memmi’s personal life, appears repeatedly throughout his writings. As a Jew, Memmi supports the state of Israel, although he promotes non-religious, cultural Judaism. While he is an unapologetic secular Zionist, Memmi has never seriously considered living in Israel. He raises the problem of Arab-Jewish relations in his works Le Statue de sel (The Pillar of Salt) and Juifs et Arabes (Jews and Arabs). Pacifists and socialist groups have nonetheless criticized Memmi for his support of Israel, especially after Israel’s victorious Six-Day War of 1967. What Memmi does want to avoid is Israel’s current focus on the Old Testament and the Holocaust, which, in Memmi’s view, limits Jewish cultural development. Memmi’s first novel, The Pillar of Salt, appeared in 1953. Its balanced portrayal of the young hero’s growing sense of alienation from his native Jewish-Tunisian milieu and from the French quickly won Memmi a place in the liberal French intellectual community.
Like fellow Francophone intellectuals Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire, Memmi has a deeply personal relationship to the questions of inter-ethnic violence. During World War II, Tunis suffered pogroms against the Jewish population; later, under Vichy rule, Jews, including Jewish teachers, were dismissed from their positions. After the war, France’s equivocal relationship toward Jews inspired mistrust and resentment, not only in France, but in the colonies as well. Memmi, despite not having overcome his mixed feelings toward the French authorities, moved to France permanently in 1957.
Agar (Strangers), Memmi’s second novel, treats mixed marriages from the point of view of a Tunisian Jew who marries a Frenchwoman from the Alsace, a story similar in some particulars to Memmi’s own. The English-language title, Strangers, also recalls Albert Camus’ famous 1942 novel L’Etranger. For the unnamed protagonist, a sort of ”everyman,” the tensions between the new conservative state of Tunisia, Sephardic Jewish tradition, and his French secular-scientific education play a dramatic psychological role. Memmi shows that the kernel of the problem is the hero’s position half-way between his native Tunisian culture and that of the European colonials. His own ambivalence toward his people and country is thus reflected, magnified, and exacerbated by his French wife, leading to conflict and mutual blame in their household. The novel ends with the disintegration of the hero’s marriage and the wife’s abortion of their second child. The abortion, as the narrator of a later novel explains, symbolizes the impossibility of a fusion between the husband’s Tunisian and the wife’s French worlds.
Yet it was not until the 1957 publication of Portrait du colonise, precede du Portrait du Colonisateur that Memmi truly caught the world’s attention. Translated as The Colonizer and the Colonized, the book became a handbook for national liberation, and was subsequently confiscated from North African prisons for that reason. Memmi argues that colonization is a ”historical misfortune”; it separates both the colonizer and the colonized from their true selves. Although Memmi calls for a rejection of the colonial system, he at first had no plans to reject Europe in its entirety. After all, even this work denouncing France’s position in Africa and in the Caribbean was written in French; Memmi’s wife, Germaine Dubach, is French. Optimistic about the possibilities for the cultural renewal of colonized peoples, The Colonizer and the Colonized is an idealistic work that continues to be influential in post-colonial thought. Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction and the recent foreword by post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha attest to the book’s continuing relevance within an international academic community.
The Colonizer and the Colonized attempts to analyze the destructive effect of colonization of the colonized people’s psyche. Colonization is harmful because it undermines the colony’s native institutions and replaces them with those of the colonizer; it relegates native languages and customs to a secondary status; it requires that those who hope to succeed in the colonial system master the colonizer’s language in order to progress in education and employment. All of these impositions inspire in the colonized people a feeling of inferiority. Memmi then outlines a plan for the reclamation of the colonized people’s autonomy and dignity after the overthrow of a colonial government. Yet even in this highly political work, Memmi shows his sympathy and understanding of human complexity.
Due to the highly personal nature of his writing, it can be difficult to assign a genre to Memmi’s works. His works are self-conscious and self-referential; action and devices developed in one book may be discussed elsewhere. Characters are carried from one work to another. Le Scorpion (The Scorpion) even lays bare this technique by having the narrator questioning the fictionalized novelist’s memory and judgment in his particular portrayals of characters. This multi-layered semi-autobiographical novel combines religion, folklore, historical analysis, and theory in a joyous, postmodern amalgam. In the novel, a physician is asked by his sister-in-law to sort his brother’s papers. Le Scorpion is thus a novel within a novel: it presents not only the brother’s unfinished manuscript, but also his journal, quotations from other sources, and the physician’s notes and commentary on the entire text. Printed with four different typefaces, Le Scorpion deconstructs the illusion of a single dimension within memory; likewise identity is multifaceted, a complex of roles and points of view, some of which are mutually exclusive. Yet from this confusion evolves the uniqueness of an individual’s experience.
Le Racisme (Racism), originally published in 1982, has only recently been translated into English. This topic, addressed especially to the Western liberal establishment, is an examination in three parts (description, definition, and treatment) of the dynamics of racism and how it can be overcome. The root of racism is the social attribution of difference. Difference is a fact; but difference does not have an inherent value, good or bad. Naturally humans respond to difference, but it is when they begin to generalize conclusions based on their observations of difference that ”heterophobia” begins. To counteract this human tendency, Memmi promotes socially responsive education as treatment for racism. Memmi also betrays his own universalist tendencies in his expressed hopes for universalism to mitigate the effects of xenophobia, superstition, and simple fear. Best known in the West for his condemnation of colonization, Albert Memmi continues to be active in struggles against racial discrimination and religious bigotry.
