Decolonization and the Decolonized. By Albert Memmi. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Pp. 160. $17.95 paper.


 
In The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) Albert Memmi remarked that “the benevolent colonizer can never attain the good, for his only choice is not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness.” Evil and uneasiness are a fair description of the choices faced by Leah Shakdiel, an Israeli peace activist featured in the documentary Can You Hear Me?: Israeli and Palestinian Women Fight for Peace. Born in a house that once belonged to Arabs, she rejected the crusading Zionism of her parents, choosing instead to live in a small town in the Negev desert and to work for social justice. But in order to visit her daughter, who lives in a West Bank settlement, she must travel on what she calls an “apartheid road”—a highway open only to Israelis; her daughter’s decision, Shakdiel confesses to the filmmaker, makes her feel like a failure as a mother. All the same, she loves her daughter. What can she do?

The fatal ambiguities of Shakdiel’s situation are brought home in a wrenching scene where she meets with a Palestinian peace activist, Maha Abu Dayyah-Shamas, and finds that her years of dedication to the cause of coexistence count for nothing in the other woman’s eyes. Abu Dayyah-Shamas runs a legal aid and counseling center for women in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian village northwest of Jerusalem cut in half by the separation wall. To get from her house to her office across the street, she must travel eight miles and pass through a checkpoint. Life for the three thousand inhabitants of Beit Hanina is plagued by such ordeals, and Abu Dayyah-Shamas does not distinguish between the Zionism of the Israeli settlers whose protection requires the wall and the well-intentioned Shakdiel who, as she calmly points out, is in a position of power whether she chooses to exercise it or not. “No matter how he may reassure himself,” Memmi wrote, “[the well-intentioned colonizer] suspects, even if he is in no way guilty as an individual, that he shares a collective responsibility by the fact of membership in a national oppressor group.”

Critics of Zionism have been applying the lessons of The Colonizer and the Colonized to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the early 1970s, although Memmi has always resisted this analogy. “Israel . . . is not a colonial settlement,” he asserts again in his new book, Decolonization and the Decolonized. “Aside from its domination of the Palestinians, which is unacceptable, it has none of the characteristics of such a state.” Zionism, in Memmi’s view, has more in common with the nationalist movements for self-determination that he championed as a young man alongside Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, the independence of his native Tunisia chief among them. Like other oppressed peoples, Jews were entitled to liberation, to sovereignty; Israel was as legitimate as any of the new states that emerged in the postwar era and had the same right to defend its existence. “I approve and continue to approve of the liberation and the national development of the Arabs. Why should I not wish for the same things for my own people?” he demanded in an essay he published after the Yom Kippur war, the defensive tone a clear indication of the widening rift between Memmi and his erstwhile leftist and third-worldist comrades.

The rift has now become a chasm. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi distances himself not only from his radical fellow travelers, but also from his earlier self. Described as a continuation of The Colonizer and the Colonized, his new book in fact reassesses his views on national and ethnic liberation movements and judges them harshly. Fifty years on, Memmi finds little to celebrate in the independent states that emerged after World War II. “Widespread corruption, tyranny and the resulting tendency to use force, the restriction of intellectual growth through the adherence to long-standing tradition, violence toward women, xenophobia, and the persecution of minorities—there seems to be no end to the pustulant sores weakening these young nations. Why such failures?” he asks. The former colonies lack dynamism: the social, economic, and intellectual ferment that characterizes the West. Freedom is a necessary precondition for development; without the civil liberties guaranteed in the constitutions of democratic states, decolonized peoples will remain impoverished and oppressed, trapped in a never-ending cycle of violence, much of it perpetrated by their own corrupt leaders.

Violence permeated every aspect of life in the colonized country. With no legitimate justification for his usurpation of another people’s territory, the colonizer required force to maintain his domination, and the only way of dislodging him was thus to employ force against him. The analysis of The Colonizer and the Colonized led inexorably to revolt. In his Introduction to the first edition, Sartre applauded Memmi for laying bare the logic whereby native populations would take control of their own destinies and overthrow the oppressive colonialist system. “[W]e are witnessing the infamous death-struggle of colonialism,” he concluded. Four years later, Sartre endorsed Fanon’s call for violence in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) in even stronger terms, arguing that France needed the colonized people’s rebellion to purge itself of its sins. “Will we recover? Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.”

Memmi no longer advocates the logic of revolt. “One of the greatest disappointments of the decolonized individual,” he laments, “was his belief in an end to violence.” Far from ushering in an era of peace and prosperity, the death of colonialism has only exacerbated the conflict between the Third World and the West. In Paris, where Memmi has spent the majority of his life, the children of North African immigrants express their disaffection through provocative and aggressive behavior. Muslim girls demonstrate for the right to wear a head scarf—“the head scarf is a portable ghetto,” he contends—while the French Arab male adolescent indulges in an escalating catalogue of delinquent behavior: scribbling on street signs, urinating in elevators, slashing bus seats, and setting fire to automobiles. “Judging that the laws were not made for him, but against him, he feels he doesn’t have to respect them.” At the same time, Islamic terrorists from the formerly colonized Arab world blame the West for all their misfortune and vainly seek to turn back the clock to some mythical golden age. “Beneath its belligerent public face, fundamentalism, and the fanaticism that accompanies it, is the product of despair,” Memmi claims, “the despair of those who are no match for the inevitable struggle.” Admittedly, Europe has not been eager to absorb immigrants from its former colonies, nor has the Christian West shown much tolerance for the Muslim East; Memmi recognizes that the resistance cuts both ways. But the logic of Decolonization and the Decolonized tends in the direction of assimilation and accommodation with the dominant culture, which is to say, the Western values that emerged out of the Enlightenment.

Memmi’s willingness to turn himself inside out, if need be, in order to illuminate some larger social dilemma, be it colonialism, racism, sexism, or anti-Semitism, is not in evidence in this book. Had he been able to engage in the same unflinchingly honest self-analysis as he exhibited in his earlier works, Decolonization and the Decolonized might have provided its readers with insights no less stunning. For his diatribe against intransigent Arab Muslims at home and abroad enacts the conflicts inherent in humanism, the central feature of French liberalism since the Revolution of 1789, although here too Memmi has reversed himself. In Portrait of a Jew (1962), he made the case for accepting “the special qualities” of minorities, for respecting others as they truly are as opposed to denying that differences exist. Humanism affirms the essential sameness of men and women of different races, religions, nationalities, and ethnicities; on an abstract level, it is a noble idea, he conceded, but in practice, it rings hollow. French politicians justified the continued occupation of Algeria on the basis of humanism, after all, insisting that the benefits of democracy, the Rights of Man, and parliamentary government should not be withheld from the Algerian people—that France should not “abandon to their own destiny people who count on us to liberate them from their own ancestral and religious dependency,” as one colonial administrator put it—a justification that turned humanism into “the philosophy of an alibi,” Memmi observed in a 1968 essay.

Portrait of a Jew was dedicated to Sartre and amplifies in many aspects the philosopher’s groundbreaking Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), an exploration of anti-Semitism and its detrimental effects on Jewish self-understanding. But Memmi took Sartre to task for defining Judaism entirely from the outside and in exclusively negative terms; the Jew is not merely, as Sartre would have it, “a man whom other men consider a Jew,” Memmi argued. The exaggerated traits attributed to Jews by anti-Semites are certainly false, but “cleansed of the accusing mud,” Jews are not like everyone else and most do not wish to lose their distinctive identities. “The inhabitants of the ghetto and even our [Tunisian Jewish] bourgeoisie, settled for generations in the European community,” he asserted, “had no desire to become Moslems or Catholics.” Extending his criticism of Sartre to include defenders of the colonized who similarly denied the uniqueness of the native subject, Memmi noted how these so-called allies grew distressed when the colonized demanded the right to live according to their own customs and traditions. Today, however, he maintains that “true universalism” is the Arab world’s only hope, and sees secularism as a necessary condition of the inevitable Westernization of the decolonized.

It is easy to agree with Memmi that the best aspects of the West should become part of a shared heritage, that human rights, universal education, technical, scientific, and medical progress, for example, are owed to all peoples and that the West cannot continue to hoard its privileges, given the interdependence of the global economy. Who would challenge his assertion that “those once dominated must recognize that they too can no longer live outside the world,” especially when he goes on to propose, as a start, “eradicating extreme poverty through a more equitable distribution and better management of wealth—wealth that should belong to everyone, and not to a select few, including natural energy”? Surely the non-fundamentalists in the Muslim community—“the silent majority,” as Memmi regards them—should disavow the violence of the extremists; his point, that the war so ardently desired by the fundamentalists would be disastrous for the Arab world, is well taken. But too much of Decolonization and the Decolonized is devoted to enumerating the failings of “the decolonized Arab-Muslim.” (The French title, Portrait du décolonisé: arabo-muselman et de quelques autres, makes the emphasis explicit.) Is there no delinquency among white French male adolescents? No corruption in the developed world? No religious extremism except among Muslims? Do minorities fare as well as the dominant populations in Western countries? Was xenophobia unheard of before September 11, 2001, as Memmi suggests at one point, implying that the West is justified in regarding all Muslims as enemies today?

Jews throughout Europe have legitimate grounds to fear for their safety. Anti-Semitism is on the rise; in France, attacks against Jews in 2006 alone numbered in the hundreds, and the perpetrators were almost always North African immigrants or their descendants. A French Ministry of Education report leaked on the internet in 2004 documented the intimidation of Jewish children by their Muslim classmates in public schools across the country and cited numerous cases of Jewish students being forced to transfer due to incidents of violence directed against them. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada, both Jewish and Muslim communities have become polarized, making support for Israel or the rejection of Zionism a litmus test for group allegiance. Memmi mentions anti-Semitism only in passing and limits his comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to six pages. He seems intent on demonstrating that his loyalties lie wholly with France, placing himself in a long tradition of French Jewish liberals including, in his generation, the former Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France, the political writer Raymond Aron, and the late historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet—most of whom he disparaged in his younger days. Like them, he is not a believer, but where the families of French-born Jews had assimilated generations ago, Memmi broke with his own family’s religious observance and severed his ties with the Sephardic world all in one blow by marrying a non-Jewish Frenchwoman.

Still, as Memmi acknowledged in a 1971 review of two Fanon biographies in The New York Times Book Review, “one doesn’t leave one’s own self behind as easily as all that.” On the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Memmi cannot help dehumanizing the Palestinians. “The last Palestinian revolt, the second Intifada, which drew significant media attention, cost two thousand lives. That’s two thousand too many,” he states, but then goes on to list the much higher death tolls of other massacres in Rwanda, Burundi, Cambodia, the slaughter of Armenians by the Turks, of Kurds and Shiites by Saddam Hussein, the lives lost in the battles over decolonization, the decades-long strife in Colombia, the Russian pogroms. “During a riot in Bombay over the placement of a Mosque,” he concludes this sorry inventory, “the Indians, citizens of what is supposedly the largest democracy in the world and the most tolerant, massacred two thousand Muslims; the equivalent in two days of two years of the Intifada.” Memmi’s tone is dispassionate: he has done the arithmetic and the suffering of the Palestinians is, statistically speaking, insignificant. Why such outrage over a minor tragedy? It is possible to forget that he is talking about actual human beings.

During the height of the colonial era, children throughout metropolitan France and the empire—Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Arabs, Africans, Asians, and Antilleans—studied the history of “our ancestors the Gauls” in school. Native populations could not help but acknowledge the superiority of French culture to their own, it was assumed. Indeed, in his autobiographical first novel, The Pillar of Salt (1953), Memmi describes his rejection of “the East”—his Arab and Jewish self—under the impetus of his lycée education and his bitter disillusionment when he realized that, for all his striving to become a cultured European, “the West” had rejected him. As a Jew who had grown up in a Muslim country under French colonial rule, Memmi felt doubly displaced. For a time he put his faith in socialism, voluntarily submerging his Jewish identity in “the honey of that universalist embrace,” but his difficulties as a Jew did not end with his self-effacement. Socialism rejected him too. And so he came to embrace his outsider status, to make a virtue of not belonging. A Sephardic Jew among Ashkenazim, a colonized subject in the eyes of his French academic colleagues, a French intellectual in the eyes of his fellow Tunisians, an Arab nationalist who was not welcome in the Arab nations he helped to free: Memmi’s ability to understand the mechanisms of oppression derived from his efforts to negotiate the contradictions of his diasporic existence. And yet, the arguments he advances in his latest work suggest that he has found a home at last in the France of his youthful imaginings, the liberal and secular republic that promised so much to oppressed peoples and delivered so little.

LISA LIEBERMAN is the author of Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide (Ivan R. Dee, 2005) as well as essays in Gettysburg Review, Raritan, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book about Jewish voices in the postwar French debate surrounding decolonization. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and divides her time between writing and nonprofit work.

WORKS CITED

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Richard Philcox, tr. (New York: Grove Press, 2005).

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Howard Greenfeld, tr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).

___, Decolonization and the Decolonized, Robert Bononno, tr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

___, Portrait of a Jew, Elisabeth Abbott, tr. (New York: Orion Press, 1962).

___, The Pillar of Salt, Edouard Roditi, tr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).

Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, George J. Becker, tr. (New York: Schocken Books, 1995).