Albert Memmi: French-language writer who explored the moral and psychological effects of colonialism

He described himself as a ‘left-wing Zionist’ and his experiences in an oppressive colonial state led him to call for a separate Palestinian homeland

Receiving an honorary doctorate at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in 1999 (Rex)

Albert Memmi was a Tunisian-born writer whose novels and sociological studies explored his tangled heritage as a Jewish outsider in a largely Muslim country that was part of France’s colonial empire.

His death on 22 May in Paris was announced on social media by Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, the French ambassador to Tunisia. The writer was 99 and the cause was not disclosed.

Memmi grew up in a Jewish ghetto in the capital city of Tunis, when Tunisia was a French protectorate. French businesspeople and government workers were at the top of the country’s social pyramid, as other groups – Muslims, Jews, Berbers and immigrants – struggled to find a foothold. This deep-rooted sense of alienation became a central theme in Memmi’s autobiographical novels and other works.

“I am a Tunisian, but of French culture,” he wrote in perhaps his best-known novel, The Pillar of Salt (1953). “I am Tunisian, but Jewish, which means that I am politically and socially an outcast ... I am a Jew who has broken with the Jewish religion and the ghetto, is ignorant of Jewish culture ... a Jew in an antisemitic universe, an African in a world dominated by Europe.”

He was a friend and near-contemporary of Albert Camus, an Algerian-born French writer and Nobel laureate whose novels painted a bleak view of life.

“Memmi can be seen as Camus’s Jewish counterpart,” Etan Nechin, a literary scholar and editor of Bare Life Review: A Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Literature, said in an interview.

Camus wrote a foreword for The Pillar of Salt, in which Memmi’s autobiographical protagonist is a scholarly Tunisian Jew like himself. The novel vividly describes the sounds, smells and teeming hubbub of Tunis’s alleyways and waterfront, but the principal character cannot resolve his ambivalent feelings towards his homeland and its people.

The Pillar of Salt and a 1955 novel about a strained marriage, Strangers, won several literary prizes, but Memmi soon became known for his searching nonfiction works that examined the moral and psychological effects of colonialism and racism. His 1957 book, The Coloniser and the Colonised, examined the idea of colonialism as a form of fascism, built on a foundation of racism and inequality.

In any colonial culture, Memmi argued, colonised people provide the labour that produces wealth and comfort for the colonisers. The colonised peoples – usually speaking different languages and of different races – are excluded from the social and governing systems put in place by the colonial powers. The festering resentment of the colonised peoples turns to anger and, over time, outright revolt.

“The basic theory is that the dependence is reciprocal, but the coloniser and the colonised have vastly unequal power,” Nechin said. “Both are trapped.”

The Coloniser and the Colonised, which included an introduction by another Nobel prize winner, Jean-Paul Sartre, appeared four years before Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The two books were often paired as key texts exploring the social consequences of colonialism.

Camus interpreted one chapter in the book, “The Well-meaning Colonialist”, as an insult directed at him and broke off his friendship with Memmi. They never reconciled before Camus’s death in 1960.

The Coloniser and the Colonised was published one year after Tunisia declared its independence during a wave that drove France and other European powers from the African continent. Memmi supported the independence movement, even though he realised it would probably send him into self-imposed exile.

He noted in his book that colonised people often find solace in religion – one of the few aspects of their lives they can control – and ethnic nationalism. As a member of Tunisia’s Jewish minority, Memmi felt like an outcast in his newly free country.

In his view, one group of oppressors (French colonialists) was exchanged for another (the country’s Muslim majority). Despite his misgivings, Memmi fled to France, where he became a respected writer and intellectual. His later books included Portrait of a Jew, The Liberation of a Jew and Jews and Arabs, in which he sought to claim a Jewish cultural and humanist identity, separate from religious faith.

“I wanted to understand who I am – as a Jew – and what the fact of being a Jew has meant in my life,” he wrote in Portrait of a Jew (1962). “The Jew is not explained by his religious, economic or political situation alone, nor by his psychology alone, nor by the pathology of the antisemite.”

He became what he called a “left-wing Zionist” who believed that Israel could offer a homeland for displaced Jewish people. His experiences in an oppressive colonial state led him to call for a separate Palestinian homeland.

After writing for a decade about Jewish identity, Memmi returned to fiction in 1969 with one of his most ambitious novels, The Scorpion, or, The Imaginary Confession.

In the book, a Tunisian-born doctor, whose last name is Memmi, goes through the artefacts of his late brother, finding a fictional autobiography in which the brother writes about killing his father. Memmi’s technique in The Scorpion pointed towards the fiction of WG Sebald and later writers by incorporating commentary, invented memoirs and diaries. “A complex puzzle of voices and documents, with five different typefaces used to differentiate them, and haunting photographs interspersed throughout,” New York Times critic Richard Locke wrote in 1971.

With this dizzying technique, Memmi “dramatises the characters’ experience in a way that reading a traditional narrative never could”, Lock wrote. “But ultimately it is Memmi’s heart, not his skill, that moves you.”

Albert Memmi was born on 15 December 1920 in Tunis. His father, a saddlemaker, was of Italian Jewish ancestry. His mother, who was illiterate, was a Tunisian native who raised 13 children.

Memmi attended Jewish and French-language schools before entering the University of Algiers. During the Second World War, when France’s Vichy government collaborated with the German Third Reich, Memmi was seized and placed in a Tunisian labour camp, from which he escaped.

After graduating from the University of Algiers, he moved to Paris in 1946 to continue his studies. That year, he married Marie-Germaine Dubach, and they eventually had three children. A complete list of survivors could not be confirmed.

Returning to Tunisia in the early 1950s, Memmi was a high school teacher and directed an educational research centre. In 1957, he returned to Paris, where he became an educational researcher and later a professor at the University of Paris (often called the Sorbonne). He received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1970 and, in 1975, became one of the directors of France’s graduate-level School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences. He spent a year at the University of Washington in the 1970s.

His later books included Dominated Man, Dependence and Racism. In 2006, he published Decolonisation and the Decolonised, a follow-up to The Coloniser and the Colonised. In the new book, Memmi examined why so many once-colonised countries are marked by poverty, rapacious leaders, religious intolerance, poor education and a lack of democratic freedoms.

“There seems to be no end to the pustulant sores weakening these young nations,” he asked. “Why such failures?”

Although he lived in France for more than 50 years, Memmi said his true homeland was not the country itself, but the French language.

“It is a curious fate,” he wrote in 1957, the year he left Tunisia for good, “to write for a people other than one’s own.”

Albert Memmi, writer, born 15 December 1920, died 22 May 2020

© The Washington Post