Review: Autobiography and Independence
Clarisse Zimra of Southern Illinois University recently reviewed Debra Kelly's Autobiography and Independence: Self and Identity in North African Writing in French in the online H-France Review:
With this book, professor Debra Kelly, who teaches at the University of Westminster, proffers a richly researched study on four authors raised as subjects of Empire in North Africa during the first half of the twentieth century: Algeria's Mouloud Feraoun, a Kabyle born in 1913 and Assia Djebar, an Andalusian-Berber born in 1936; Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Sephardim born in 1923 and Abdelkébir Khatibi, a Moroccan Arab born in 1938. None had French as a native tongue. All wrote in the language of the colonizers. Trained in the schools of their colonial masters, witnesses to their countries' access to full independence, their writings have been stamped by a personal experience profoundly marked by the cultural and political trauma of colonial history. Such history has defined them and shaped their craft. Therefore, Kelly posits, these four must be read along two simultaneous axes of interpretation: (a) the biographical connection that sees their works as the painful coming of age of the colonized self seeking agency; and (b) the socio-political context against which they define and eventually achieve their own private and public decolonization.