Rachid Boudjedra (1941– ) began writing in the 1960s, a period during which the Algerian novel in French shifted from a critique of colonialism to a questioning of social, political, and religious structures. Like most of the Algerian Francophone writers, he sought to transform society and establish a liberal, egalitarian, and secular state. Boudjedra in The Repudiation (1969) unveils sexual and religious taboos and denounces religious hypocrisy, social injustice, political corruption and despotism, and women’s oppression. These themes recur in his later French and Arabic fiction. Central in the author’s narrative strategy, thematic and structural repetition is a fundamental mode of subversion, whereby the repeated themes and motifs serve mostly to parody and transgress the established order.
A modernist novel, The Repudiation is a fragmented, nonchronological, and elusive narrative, recounted by a young Algerian, Rachid, to his French lover, Céline. The lovers are at once close and distant, wavering between attraction and repulsion, emblematic of the passionate love-hate relationship between France and its former colony, Algeria. The narrator, who settles accounts with his father and the archaic society he represents, finds in Céline an enthusiastic, inquisitive audience listening attentively to his lurid story. The bulk of his tale revolves around the repudiation of his mother by his father, Si Zoubir, an oppressive figure blending religious zeal with unrestrained sexual appetite.
Portrait of Rachid Boudjedra 02/25/2014 ©Jean-Francois PAGA/Opale via Leemage
Through this partially autobiographical story, reminiscent of Boudjedra’s mother’s repudiation, the narrator assaults the social fabric in a tone allying parody and caricature, derision and subversion. While attacking his father, the symbol of archaic authoritarianism, Rachid questions the patriarchal society and the religious dogma backing masculine order. He depicts gender inequities and presents marriage as a mere transaction in which women are sold and bought like mere objects or cattle. He talks about his 50-year-old father as having purchased his 15-year-old spouse and paid dearly for her. He similarly points out how married women remain eternal children and helpless victims, under constant threat of repudiation. They are caught between two masculine evils, a “whimsical husband” with the power to repudiate his wives at will, and a “hostile father” for whom a repudiated daughter is a “cumbersome object.”
Rachid’s illiterate mother crystallizes Algerian women’s precarious condition and puerile status. The irony of her situation is that although repudiated, she remains under her husband’s tutelage, “financially” and “morally” dependent on him. She lives in utter seclusion, and her rare visits to baths or friends are strictly regulated by her husband.
In the same vein the narrator denounces women’s subjection and condemns Islam for legitimizing and empowering man’s grip on woman. Time and again he derides religious rituals, dismissing them as either hypocritical or barbaric. A sacred period of fasting, restraint, and abstinence, Ramadan is described as a time of absolute consumption, whereby Si Zoubir’s family is busy gathering “rare and expensive goods,” absorbed in eating and excessive feasting. The holy month offers no respite for women. Chained to their domestic chores, they labor from sunrise to sunset to “satisfy men’s culinary fancies.” L’Aid is similarly depicted in bleak terms. The sacrifice of lambs in Abraham’s honor amounts to a genocide, a sadistic practice that strips childhood of its humanity and innocence. For Rachid the ritual is a traumatic, “terrifying” experience, during which he was “forced to attend the ceremony” as a rite of passage to virile adulthood. Circumcision is another sacred practice that Rachid painfully conjures up and dismisses as “one more barbaric adult invention.”
Rachid pursues the subversion of his “castrating society” by uncovering two sexual taboos, homosexuality and incest. He relates the taleb (Koran teacher) and his brother’s homosexuality, and recounts his own incestuous relation with Zoubida (his father’s second wife) and with his half-sister, Leila. Rachid through incest symbolically kills the father to take his place. Without bloodshed, he dethrones the hated patriarch whom his brother, Zahir, had formerly contemplated murdering. Although he does not kill Si Zoubir because of Zoubida’s presence in bed with him, Zahir, via his homosexual relationship with his Jewish physics teacher, deals the death blow to the father as an emblem of virility, patriarchal order and theocracy, and political establishment.
Rachid ultimately recapitulates his family’s vices and self-destructiveness in a narrative twist that confl ates the familial and the national: “I spent my days telling her about the clan’s life: Zahir’s death, my incestuous relationship with Zoubida and Leila, my mother’s repudiation by Si Zoubir—the clan’s uncontested chief, the cause of the dissemination and dissolution of the family, ensnared and overwhelmed by its own violence, ultimately decimated . . . in that internecine war which devastated the country like an inescapable calamity.”
The narrator’s family becomes here a metaphor for Algeria, and its saga is metonymic of the country’s history. The intermingling of the familial and the national, facilitated by a narrative fl owing easily from the particular to the general, involves a process of condensation where family and nation become interchangeable. The move within the same statement from the family’s violence to that of the nation is achieved through the blurring of spatio-temporal outlines and erasure of the lines of demarcation between private (family) and public (nation) spheres.
In The Repudiation familial violence is an allegory of the internecine strife, plotting, killing, and unscrupulous accumulation of wealth characterizing the postindependence era. Just as he holds his father fully responsible for his family’s dissolution, the narrator blames the post-independence government for social and economic ills as well as for giving up the revolutionary ideals of fraternity and solidarity. He protests against their tyranny and arbitrariness, embodied by the Secret Agents who jailed and tortured him for being disloyal to the regime. Both the Secret Agents and the new government elites are assimilated to French colonial power. The first replicate the former colonizer’s savage methods of oppression, the second become a neocolonial force, a disguised form of local imperialism, buying “all the bars and brothels from the Spaniards and Corsicans” and building sophisticated “villas” to confine and torture political opponents.
To conclude, we may point out the narrator’s ambivalence toward his narration. Throughout, he is caught in a welter of conflicting urges, split between the need to denounce his society’s archaic structures and a simultaneous uneasiness to unveil its taboos to a foreigner. At times the narrator seems uncomfortably aware that he is engaging in a self-Orientalizing narrative disclosing to Europeans his society’s backwardness. In such moments he views Céline as a cannibalistic audience, interested merely in “stealing [his] memories, emptying [him] of [his] substantive folly.” To distance himself from his tale he often insists on its fictionality and reiterates his unreliability as a narrative voice. Time and again he reminds us of his “irrational soliloquy,” his “delirious” flights and propensity to lying, eager to situate his story on a purely imaginative, fictitious register.
Despite the embarrassment it involves, the narrative’s articulation around an Algerian narrator and a French listener serves well the novel’s purpose. Both teller and listener participate actively in shaping a painful story, the former by saying the unsayable, and the latter by listening and stimulating the narrator. A privileged listener to an Algerian tale of social and sexual discontents, Céline fulfils a crucial function in the overall structural design. It is precisely her presence that gives the narrative its raison d’être. All the more so as no Algerian audience, even the most liberal-minded, would have listened so patiently to the unsettling account related by the narrator. On a metatextual level, the choice of a French receptive listener corresponds to Boudjedra’s decision to target a French audience and prevent censorship. In response to his detractors’ blaming him for not writing originally in Arabic, he argued that he wrote The Repudiation in French to avoid censorship.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bensmain, Abdallah. Crise du sujet, crise de l’identité: une lecture psychanalytique de Rachid Boudjedra. Casablanca: Afrique Orient, 1984.
Boudjedra, Rachid. Lettres algériennes. Paris: B. Grasset, 1995.
Gafaïti, Hafi d. Boudjedra ou la Passion de la modernité: entretiens avec Rachid Boudjedra. Paris: Denoël, 1987.
———. Rachid Boudjedra: Autobiographie et Histoire, une poétique de la subversion. Paris: L’harmattan, 1999.
Ibnlfassi, Laïla, and Nicki Hitchcott, eds. African Francophone Writing: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Berg, 1996.
Ibrahim-Ouali, Lila. Rachid Boudjedra: Écriture poétique et structures romanesques. Clermont-Ferrand: Association des publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines de Clermont-Ferrand, 1998.
Lyons, Tom. “Ambiguous narratives.” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2001): 832–856.
———. “The ethnographic novel and ethnography in colonial Algeria.” Modern Philology 100, no. 4 (2003): 576–596.
Zeliche, Mohamed-Salah. Poét(h)ique des deux rives. Paris: Karthala, 2005.
Categories: Arabic Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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