Sansal Harraga cover[Bloomsbury; 2014]

Tr. by Frank Wynne

Harraga is an Arabic term for “path burner,” the latter word being the important part for its current meaning — referring to those who burn their identity papers and set out in search of a better (though different would be more accurate) life, often in Europe in the case of Algerian harragas. Harraga is the title of Boualem Sansal’s 2005 novel, recently translated into English, as well as a 2009 French-Algerian film, in which harragas is translated as les brûleurs, literally “burners.” Harragas, the film, begins with a clandestine meeting, a transfer of electronics from an older to a younger man, followed by a prayer, “May God be with you.” It is a scene reminiscent of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, where we may assume the equipment is for detonating a bomb and the prayer is a gesture of solidarity in the anti-colonial struggle. But things are different here, as the electronics are only handed over after a transfer of cash, and instead of Algiers we are in Mostaganem, a city whose most important characteristic, for the viewers, is that it is located 200 kilometers from the coast of Spain.

In many ways Sansal’s novel is about the change that the opening scene of the film marks, the passing of the grand narrative of anti-colonial struggle, of building an independent Algeria, to the grand narrative of migrancy, of a globalized world undermining the national government and economy. The anthropologist David Scott has suggested that this change is generic, from the romantic to the tragic, and it is hope and redemption that undergo the most substantial alterations. Sansal puts these themes in the hands of Lamia, a single, fiercely independent, middle-aged pediatrician who has resigned herself to a solitary life in her family home. Her parents have passed away, along with her older brother Yacine, whose life she unsparingly reduces to an obsession with the very same car that took his life in a wreck. Then there is Sofiane, her younger brother, who, “with his first cigarette . . . got into his head that, come weal or woe, he would leave the country and get as far away as possible. ‘Better to die elsewhere than to live here!’ he would scream whenever I tried to reason with him.” Because he goes the way of the harragas, Lamia has no idea what has become of her brother Sofiane, and in his absence she chastises his rashness to the other absences that populate the house — ghosts of past residents that tell the long, interweaving histories of Mediterranean peoples (Ottomans, Frenchmen who convert to Islam, Jews, pied-noirs, and finally Lamia’s own Kabylian family that took up residence after independence). Absent a family, completely disinterested in politics — “the constant Algerian bilge, the national naval-gazing, the moronic male chauvinism that regulate society” — it is unclear why struggle and hope would be preferable to resignation for a reasonable, independent-minded person like Lamia, or even where she would see her solitude redeemed aside from through the comforts of a good library and a satellite television dish.

This holding pattern is broken by Chérifa, a young, provocatively dressed, and very pregnant girl, who arrives unexpectedly at Lamia’s door. She says Sofiane has sent her, but is short on information about Lamia’s brother. At first Lamia is put off by Chérifa’s carelessness — she tosses her belongings wherever she pleases, disappears into the dangerous parts of Algiers without alerting her host, and rejects Lamia’s attempts at instilling a love of learning and culture (echoing Rousseau’s Emile, Lamia gets the idea to educate the savage youth after rereading Robinson Caruso). But the two woman slowly develop a mother-daughter bond, though putting it in these terms simplifies things. What Sansal is really interested in is not the maternal bond, but the two paths towards independence that these women represent. It is Chérifa’s fearlessness above all that Lamia comes to admire, even though it brings about all shades of despair when Lamia is forced into the darker corners of Algiers to find her missing companion. And in the search for her lost charge, along with her impatience for ossified customs and for deference to the dysfunctions of her country, Lamia demonstrates the virtue of following an authentic project (the implication being that her younger brother may have lacked the formative experiences to validate his choice).

Despite the very simple narrative scaffolding, the twists and turns of the relationship between Chérifa and Lamia, the book is about big ideas — what we do in the wake of the nationalist project, what is a reasonable investment of hope? One of the most impressive set-pieces of the book, rich in asides both polemical and celebratory of the simple act of storytelling, is Lamia’s narration of an ARTE documentary on the harrowing journey harragas make, from the deserts of the Ténéré to the waters off of Gibraltar. The documentary ends with “policemen with their funny helmets fishing bodies out of the sea while, high up on the cliffs, a priest who supported the rights of the harragas, surrounded by tearful militants, prays with all his might to a God who refuses to listen to the poor.” There are some survivors amongst the human wreckage, but we are assured that they will be treated poorly, just as these harragas were along their perilous route, exposed and vulnerable to the worst kinds of callousness and extortion that defines this form of migrancy. “I know all this,” Lamia says, “yet I still feel moved; images reinforce words.” For much of the book we are stuck inside Lamia’s acerbic internal monologue, her perpetual misgivings towards the corrupting influence of Islamism on Algeria, but Sansal has dotted the novel with images and references to myths and fairy tales to make Harraga about more than just the perilous state of his native country. How one connects with historical and literary residues in a dispiriting and shrinking present is the struggle that Lamia faces in her internal exile, and though it lacks the direct political content of migrancy and corruption, it is nonetheless a pervasive feature of places like Algeria.

This is an important point, one which has seemingly been lost on certain European critics who are a little too quick to celebrate Sansal’s condemnation of the political currents in North Africa, especially as concerns the treatment of women. There are some compelling thematic and biographical reasons for this reading (Sansal’s books are banned in Algeria and he was dismissed from his government post for criticizing the government in an open letter to his compatriots in 2006), but I think Harraga should be read in terms of the larger ideas discussed above, especially as his name gets mentioned in Nobel Prize discussions. The canon of world literature should not just reflect a liberal-humanist position, one which has the tendency to fix upon critique, a brave form of truth-telling, to advocate for the power of art to push corrupt regimes towards more humane forms. There is plenty of critique in Harraga, but it’s not incidental that these broad political themes are refracted through the interior monologue of a character really struggling to find meaning in her life. At times Lamia is immobilized by the fact that nearly all of the narratives around her are not and will not be hers, but the steady undercurrent of narrative keeps bubbling up throughout the novel nonetheless. While this doesn’t lead to the most satisfying resolutions (the final passages of the book certainly suffer from cliché), it makes for a far more productive set of conversations than the straight political read.

Michael Schapira is the Interview Editor for Full Stop.


 
 
Become a Patron!

This post may contain affiliate links.