MEMMI, Albert

Nationality: Tunisian. Born: Tunis, 15 December 1920. Education: University of Algiers, license in philosophy 1943; Sorbonne, University of Paris, D.Litt. 1970. Family: Married Germaine Dubach; two sons and one daughter. Career: High school teacher of philosophy, Tunis, 1953-56; director, Center of Educational Research, Tunis, 1953-57; researcher, National Center of Scientific Research, Paris, 1958-60; assistant professor, 1959-66, and professor of social psychology, 1966-70, Sorbonne, University of Paris. Since 1970 professor of sociology, University of Paris, Nanterre. Conference director, 1958, and director of department of social sciences, 1975-78, School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences; Walker Ames Professor, University of Seattle, 1972. Contributor, L'Action newspaper, Tunis, 1950s. Awards: Prix Carthage (Tunis), 1953; Prix Feneon (Paris), 1954; Prix Simba (Rome). Commander of Ordre de Nichan Iftikhar (Tunisia); Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur; Officier of Tunisian Republic; Officier des Arts et des Lettres; Officier des Palmes Academiques. Member: Société des Gens de Lettres; Academie des Sciences d'Outremer. Address: Office: University of Paris, 92 Nanterre, France.

Publication

Novels

Le Statue du sel. 1953; as Pillar of Salt, 1955.

Agar. 1955; as Strangers, 1958.

Le Scorpion ou la confession imaginaire. 1969; as The Scorpion or the Imaginary Confession, 1971.

Le Desert: Ou, la vie et les aventures de Jubair Ouali El-Mammi. 1977.

Le Pharaoh. 1988.

Poetry

Le Mirliton du ciel. 1989.

Other

Portrait du colonisé [Portrait of the Colonizer]. 1956.

Portrait du colonisateur [Portrait of the Colonized]. 1957.

Portrait d'un Juif. 1962; as Portrait of a Jew, 1962.

La Libération d'un Juif. 1962; as The Liberation of a Jew, 1966.

La Poésie algérienne de 1830 a nos jours: approches sociohistoriques. 1963.

Les Francais et la racisme, with Paul Hassan Maucorps. 1965.

Ecole pratique des hautes études. 1965.

L'Homme dominé (essays). 1968; as Dominated Man: Notes towards a Portrait, 1968.

Juifs et Arabes. 1974; as Jews and Arabs, 1975.

Albert Memmi: Un entretien avec Robert Davies suivi d'itineraire de l'expérience vecue a la théorie de la domination. 1975.

La Terre interieure entretiens avec Victor Malka. 1976.

La Dependance: Esquisse pour un portrait du dépendant. 1979; as Dependence, 1983.

La Racisme. 1982.

L'Ecriture colorée. 1986.

Editor, Anthologie des ecrivains maghrebins d'expression francaise (2 vols.). 1964; revised edition, 1965.

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Critical Studies:

"Works in Progress/Albert Memmi" by Harold Flender, in Intellectual Digest, 3(4), December 1972, pp. 6-14; "Du scorpion au Désert: Albert Memmi Revisited" by Isaac Yetiv, in Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 7(1), 1982, pp. 77-87; Albert Memmi by Judith Roumani, 1987; Albert Cohen, Albert Memmi, and Elie Wiesel and the Dilemma of Jewish Identity in French Literature and Culture (dissertation) by Héléne Golencer Schroeter, University of Utah, 1989; "Albert Memmi and Alain Finkielkraut: Two Discourses on French Jewish Identity" by Judith Morganroth-Schneider, in Romanic Review, 81(1), January 1990; "Irreconcilable Differences" by Gary Wilder, in Transition, 71, 1996; "Oppression, Liberation, and Narcissism: A Jungian Psychopolitical Analysis of the Ideas of Albert Memmi" by Lawrence R. Alschuler, in Alternatives, 21(4), 1996.

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Albert Memmi was born in 1920 in the Jewish ghetto of Tunis, the son of a poor saddler-cum-leather worker. A gifted student, he received grants and awards that allowed him, first, to go to the Lycée Carnot and, later, to study philosophy at the University of Algiers. In 1943 he was deported to a labor camp, but he escaped and after the war completed his studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. In the early 1950s he returned to Tunisia, where he wrote the literary page for L'Action, the first Tunisian daily, and became the director of the Center for Child Psychology. In 1956 Tunisia became a Muslim state, and 95 percent of the Jewish population left, including Memmi. Back in Paris, he published two major texts, written in 1956 and 1957, that brought him to the attention of the world: Portrait du colonisé (Portrait of the Colonized ) and Portrait du colonisateur (Portrait of the Colonizer ). Together they are a methodical survey of the always corrupting relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. These were followed in 1962 by Portrait d'un Juif and in 1973 by L'Homme dominé (Dominated Man ), which bears the clarifying subtitle The Black, the Colonized, the Jew, the Proletariat, the Woman, the Servant, and Racism. These texts became the starting and reference point for a reflection on colonization so deeply needed during the many political movements of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s. In Paris, Memmi became professor of social psychiatry at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and director of the collection Domaine Maghrébin for the publisher Maspero.

Memmi published extensively as a novelist (Pillar of Salt, Agar, The Scorpio, The Desert, The Pharaoh ), as a social and political analyst, and as a thinker. Taking the example of his own experience, so delicately described in Pillar of Salt, he describes how colonization is not simply a political state but also an internalized means of seeing and living the social experience. He was the first to recognize and denounce racial and ethnic policies in the terms of the political and sociological views of the second half of the twentieth century. He did this by analyzing the life experiences of those imposing and those suffering racism. His psychosociological views made the experience of racism vivid to a Western world often at a loss to understand the painful reality of its "civilizing mission" in the Third World.

Memmi experienced all of the forms of rejection and racism, individual and social, about which he wrote. A Jew raised in an Arab environment, he embraced classical French and Western culture only to be betrayed by the French political system. Poor, he was seen as an outcast by bourgeois Jews and Christians. Living the experience of the colonized, he came to understand the plight of oppressed nations. His education built an unbreakable wall between himself and his family, and his humanism built a wall between himself and other Jews. All of these experiences of rejection give his literary and scientific texts a unique depth.

Memmi's books were an attempt to understand his own life. As he said, "In the novel, I describe my life; in the essays, I try to understand it." Thus, his works are to be taken as a totality, each text mirroring another. His existence and his books were marked by a search for identity and self-justification. His constant return to his origins rooted him deeply in the context of the Maghreb and in Judaism, while never explaining his experience totally. Indeed, he transcended his own experience and projected a universal perspective on the cruel exploitation of the minority and the weak. He succeeded at transforming his own specific and local experience into a blueprint for universal understanding.

Deeply humanist, Memmi affirmed his position as a Jew without religious belief or practice. He found in his respect for the other, including believers, the ultimate sign of tolerance, although it is seldom returned by believers.

—Alain Goldschlager

See the essay on Pillar of Salt.