Arabic as a Secret Song

by Leïla Sebbar, Mildred Mortimer (Afterword), Skyler Artes (Translator)

The celebrated and highly versatile writer Leila Sebbar was born in French colonial Algeria but has lived nearly her entire adult life in France, where she is recognized as a major voice on the penetrating effects of colonialism in contemporary society. The dramatic contrast between her past and present is the subject of the nine autobiographical essays collected in this volume. Written between 1978 and 2006, they trace a journey that began in Aflou, Algeria, where her father ran a schoolhouse, and continued to France, where Sebbar traveled, alone, as a graduate student before eventually realizing her powerful creative vision.

The pieces collected in this book capture an array of experiences, sensations, and sentiments surrounding the French colonial presence in Algeria and offer an intimate and prismatic reflection on Sebbar's bicultural upbringing as the child of an Algerian father and French mother. Sebbar paints an unflinching portrait of her original disconnection from her father's Arabic language and culture, depicting her struggle to revive a cultural heritage that her family had deliberately obscured and to convey the vibrant yet muted Arabic of her father and of Algeria. Looking back from numerous vantage points throughout her life, she presents the complicated and divisive dynamics of being raised "between two shores"--the colonized and the colonizer.

CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

Genres: France, Algeria

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Leïla Sebbar is an Algerian author, the daughter of a French mother and an Algerian father. She spent her youth in colonial Algeria but now lives in Paris and writes in French. She writes about the relationship between France and Algeria and often juxtaposes the imagery of both countries to show the difference in cultures between the two.

Sebbar deals with a variety of topics, and either adopts a purely fictional approach or uses psychology to make her point. Many of Sebbar's novels express the frustrations of the Beur, the second generation of Maghribi youth who were born and raised in France and who have not yet integrated into French society. Her book Parle mon fils, parle à ta mère (1984; Talk son, talk to your mother), illustrates the absence of dialogue between two generations who do not speak the same language.

Reviews

[Rosie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really really loved this and even connected with it. About language, family, mixed-ness, colonialism, and more

[laila* · Rating 3 out of 5]

pedantic

[Lizzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I take no issue with the translation- rather, it was the literary French, with its flowery sentences and circling of the real issue, that threw obstacles in my path. However, I struggled through the prose, not my cup of tea, for the insights hidden below, and I am glad I did.

Thematically, the short autobiographical essays read as a coherent piece, even though they were collected from across decades of work. The puzzle posed by Sebbar is clear: growing up as she did completely separated from Arab Algerians by her father's choice not to raise his children as arabophone and separated from pied noir society by the artificial bubble of her life in her parents' idealized republican bubble, Sebbar never inherited a stable, comprehensive identity. I thought the afterword illuminated this nicely with the comparison to Said and his writing on exile. The answers Sebbar finds in asking questions about her parents' choices are less clear.

She reframes her father's choice not to pass along Arabic or an Algerian cultural reference. Rather than internalized racism, this choice becomes a demonstration of anti-colonial agency, a self- and society-protective way of denying the colonizer access to the inner self, even if the colonizer is in this case his own wife and daughters. Fascinating- but Sebbar asserts this is her conclusion without ever really explaining how and why she got there. She is less forgiving with her mother, whose decision not to learn Arabic or engage meaningfully with Arab or Berber Algerian culture is almost not touched by Sebbar at all, merely observed at a distance as though painful.

In reframing her novels' heroines as the always-inaccessible Arab mother she never had, Sebbar is making a claim on their identity while acknowledging she will always stand apart. It works, largely thanks to her sensitivity and fatalistic acceptance that her Arab heritage will never be a simple frame of self-reference because it was never a personally-lived experience.

[PS · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sebbar’s father was an Francophone Algerian and her mother was from France, and this book is all about colonialism, French as a colonial and family language, and Arabic as a peripheral language in their family. But it is so incredibly repetitive that I lost interest a couple of essays into the book. Could have easily been just one beautiful essay about linguistic loss.

[Mills College Library]

Biog S4434s 2015

[Anneke Guns · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ik heb dit boek niet uit maar ben er wel klaar mee. Alhoewel de auteur beschikt over een mooie pen vind ik haar toch een zagepinneke. Herregud, als je je dan zo benadeeld voelt omdat je vader een andere taal sprak en uit een andere cultuur kwam....dan ga je die taal toch leren? Zelf toenadering zoeken tot die achtergrond? Komaan, als ik Arabisch kan leren, kan iemand met haar achtergrond dat ongetwijfeld ook? Beter? Sneller? Zoals de uitgever al zei op de boekenbeurs van onafhankelijke uitgevers (in de Marais, Paris, november 2018) : mevrouw, u hebt gelijk, maar de auteur maakt er haar levenswerk van om over dat gemis te schrijven, het is haar enige onderwerp. I rest my case.

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the January/February 2016 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...