{"id":13750,"date":"2015-10-08T03:14:50","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T07:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=13750"},"modified":"2015-10-08T03:14:50","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T07:14:50","slug":"why-algerian-novelist-boualem-sansals-2084-is-a-sensation-in-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/why-algerian-novelist-boualem-sansals-2084-is-a-sensation-in-france\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Algerian Novelist Boualem Sansal\u2019s \u20182084\u2019 is a Sensation in\u00a0France"},"content":{"rendered":"

via the excellent Arabic Literature (in English):<\/p>\n

BY MLYNXQUALEY<\/a><\/span><\/span> on<\/em> 0<\/a> )<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Boualem Sansal\u2019s<\/em>\u00a02084\u00a0has become a sensation in France, where it made the longlist for every one of country\u2019s most prestitious literary prizes. Nadia Ghanem reads the book, and its reception, against the backdrop of France\u2019s relationship with Algeria and the aims of its literary prizes:<\/em><\/p>\n

By Nadia Ghanem<\/b><\/p>\n

\"2084Couverture\"<\/a>In France, every year between October and November, six of the most prestigious literary prizes open the autumn: the Goncourt, the Grand Prix, the Renaudot, the Medicis, the Femina and the Interallie<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This year, 2084: The End of the World<\/em> (Gallimard ed., 2015<\/a>), Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal\u2019s seventh novel, appears on every of these literary institutions\u2019 longlists. 2084<\/em> was preselected bythe Goncourt<\/a>, the French Academy\u2019s Grand Prix du Roman<\/a> (who celebrates its centenary this year<\/a>), the Femina<\/a>, the Renaudot<\/a>, the M\u00e9dicis<\/a>, and the Interalli\u00e9<\/a> prizes. In addition, 2084<\/em> is onLe prix de Flore<\/a>\u2019s list and was also selected forLe prix de la page 111<\/a> whose winner was Pierre Senges, as announced on the first of this month.<\/p>\n

What is the purpose of a literary prize in France?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Goncourt, the French Academy\u2019s Grand Prix, and Femina are the oldest in the history of French lit prizes. The Goncourt awarded its first prize in 1903, Femina in 1905, and the French Academy its Grand Prix in 1915. Then came the Renaudot in 1926, Interalli\u00e9 in 1930, and the M\u00e9dicis in 1958. The Goncourt was created for a specific purpose: to institutionally recognize prose as a valuable, separate genre apart from verse,and to rebalance how aesthetics, and its hierarchy, were understood \u2014\u00a0definitions that had up till then\u00a0been exclusively set by the French Academy and its immortals<\/em> (an institution that dates back to the seventeenth\u00a0century). The Goncourt brothers wanted to reward literary prose, recognise its separate branches, and step away from the French Academy\u2019s monopoly. Other literary institutions created prizes that followed the brothers\u2019 vision.<\/p>\n

As time passed, these organizations and prizes grew deep roots and shaped the literary canon, but they took on an international dimension only relatively recently. The Goncourt underwent\u00a0this process in the 70s, and the French Academy\u2019s creation of the Prix de la Francophonie<\/em>, initiated in 1986 by Canada, France and Morocco, illustrates this new literary (and geopolitical) objective. It will escape no one that the 70s coincide with a decade that saw the emergence of new nation-states, who in the course of their history had become francophone by force or by choice.<\/p>\n

Today, the Goncourt states that it aims to reward the best work of imagination published in the year. The French Academy\u2019s Grand Prix du Roman seeks to reward a work\u2019s originality, and the Femina\u2019s intention is to recompense free thinking<\/a>. But before and behind these various literary concerns, it is the quality of the French language (they all declare) that is fundamental. The promotion and safeguard of the French language is at stake here.<\/p>\n

With notions of language protection and promotion at the prizes\u2019 core, it becomes natural to find francophone writers who come from geographies physically remote from the mothership, France. These authors\u2019 novels are considered for services rendered to the French language, and for enriching the corpus of an institutional canon. Francophone authors are related by language, their second umbilical cord, not by birth or origin.<\/p>\n

If colonization has taught us anything, it is to beware the politics of language. While safeguarding one\u2019s language is noble, France has showed time and again that its tactics for survival, and expansion, include intellectual co-opting. Behind every cultural embrace lays a claim for ownership. France isn\u2019t unique here: dominant nations as far back as the Assyrian and Babylonian empires founded themselves on the same principles. They erected their supremacy with weapons and established their hold with culture, absorbing the other <\/em>until it belonged, according to each\u2019s\u00a0definition of belonging.<\/p>\n

They rewrote history by writing stories.<\/p>\n

The substance of the story<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why is 2084<\/em>\u00a0creating such a craze? We are told Sansal\u2019s revisiting of Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/em> is key in having captured the imagination of readers. The French literary scene seems quite fond of this book-extension concept, the extension of classics, especially when Algerians are reworking them. It made this\u00a0amply clear last year with the reception of Kamel Daoud\u2019s Meursault, contre-enqu\u00eate,<\/em> which\u00a0extended Camus\u2019 L\u2019\u00e9tranger<\/em>. Algeria was once the land of French expansion. It is now the land of European\u00a0classics\u2019 extension. But is a concept sufficient to win a prize? What about the story?<\/p>\n

In a sanatorium, set up high in the Ou\u00e2 mountains, towering over the S\u00een region, Ati is recovering from tuberculosis. A year has passed during which he has received the appropriate dosages of concoctions and powerful talismans to aid his condition. Ati is somewhere around his early thirties, he doesn\u2019t know. No one knows his or her exact age in Abistan, the land of believers in the all-seeing Y\u00f6lah and his representative on earth Abi, or Bigaye, who rules over 60 regions, that is the whole world. Ati has recovered and can now be sent back to Qodsabad, the capital of Abistan, to resume his work as council clerk. He and all other patients now healed, will leave by caravans pulled by donkeys. It will take a year to reach Qodsabad, during which Ati will meet Nas, a civil servant working for the archives department of the Ministry of Holy books and Memories. Nas has just returned from an excavation where he and a group of archaeologists found a previously unknown site whose remains point to a great flaw in Abi<\/em>\u2019s truths: there was a world before Abistan, one in which Y\u00f6lah\u2019s religion and others co-existed. Could a time have existed before the greatest war, the Holy War Char,<\/em> when Abistanis won against the Chitan and the Enemy, previously known as the United High Regions or the Lig in Abilang, Abistan\u2019s language?<\/p>\n

Unnerved by what the excavations will reveal but excited, Nas makes his way back to the Kiiba, around which the oligarchs of Abigouv have set up their ministries and where they fight among themselves for power. Ati returns home haunted by Nas\u2019s tale. The religious scepticism that had gripped him during his sanatorium stay firms up when he meets Koa, a work colleague who shares Ati\u2019s secret questioning of Gkabul, acceptance, and of man\u2019s purpose beyond the worshipping of Y\u00f6lah nine times a day. Both friends are moved to action by doubt, a feeling for which there is no word in Abilang. They decide to head for the Kiiba, the pyramid that shines like the rising sun and can be seen from all four horizons, to find Nas. They leave searching for what lies within the Holy city, and to discover who or what is Democ and the Return.<\/p>\n

The coating of the substance<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some might be inspired by the story\u2019s content, others \u2014\u00a0like the media, worked\u00a0up by Sansal during his interviews \u2014\u00a0have been mesmerised by its coating. And as you read 2084<\/em>, you can easily see why.<\/p>\n

An Iranian or Afghan-sounding city name (Qodsabad) is surrounded by suburbs reachable on rails via underground tunnels (the metro system, shht<\/em>). In the Kiiba, Ati and Koa\u2019s shady new friend, Toz, has kept a museum intact whose ancient name is the Louvres. He continues to fill it with artefacts to piece together a time before Abistan, even though there is no such thing, Abi says. The languages that survive post-Abilang,<\/em> spoken in hiding, are French (thank God!) and Modern Standard Arabic.<\/p>\n

Piece all this together and now you can start to panic. France, and what\u2019s worse Paris, have been taken over by futuristic brothers bent on Friday floggings, remarrying burniqab<\/em> women, raping young boys, the total sum of which wear burni<\/em>-cloaks so dirty you can tell washing machines exist no longer. The death of home electrical equipment is a sure sign all types of sciences have been proscribed, except for IT to keep electronic newspapers going in Abistan. (Meanwhile, Toz<\/em> represents an onomatopoeic word in various colloquial Arabics, inspired by the anus.)<\/p>\n

What lies beyond<\/strong><\/p>\n

Think you might read 2084<\/em>? You should, but be prepared.<\/p>\n

Sansal describes Ati\u2019s journey in four parts called Books,<\/em> plus a curious epilogue. Book 1 sets the scene and explains Abistan. It is probably the most nebulous. Sansal has no clear idea what Abistan is like because he just can\u2019t see what it could be like. In Book 2, Sansal can no longer sustain his lack of imagination, nor can the reader, and that\u2019s lucky. His talent takes over at this point to breathe a three-dimensional spirit into Ati and his surroundings (basically, it\u2019s Algiers). Book 3 begins Ati and Koa\u2019s detective work. For any detective and crime-novel fan, it\u2019s the best part. Book 4 is the last book. This means you\u2019re nearly done, and it\u2019s worth a read on that basis. Then there\u2019s the Epilogue, composed of seven + 1 articles. Seven articles published by Abistan\u2019s e-news and the +1 is a mountaineer\u2019s tale, written on a sheet of paper circulated by caravaneers.<\/p>\n

Think you might not read it? Wait.<\/p>\n

Whatever you may think of Sansal as an author, he is not unkind. He leaves a shorter way to get through the book. Every Book,<\/em> or part, starts with a short summary of the tale it contains. So in essence, Sansal\u2019s novel is not 288 pages, it\u2019s 4 pages + 1.<\/p>\n

Boualem Sansal is one of Algeria\u2019s best established novelists, as well as\u00a0one of the country\u2019s most talented, whether we\u2019re happy about this or not. In 1999, his first novel, The Barbarians\u2019 Oath<\/a><\/em>, earned him two prizes, Le Prix du Premier Roman and the Prix Tropiques in France, and set the stage for\u00a0his literary career. His novels share the same traits: a fluid, playful and radiant language that carried his vision of a fragile and sinister reality, a world inhabited by individuals whose experiences were moving and actions compassionate. That was the pattern for his first four powerful novels. Something after them changed.<\/p>\n

A world of newsreel<\/strong><\/p>\n

2084<\/em> is not the first book in recent years to have generated media debates because it mixes the fear ofthe other<\/em> with electoral suspense. Michel Houellebecq\u2019s Soumission <\/em>did it in 2015, Sabri Louatah did it in his epic four volume family saga Les Sauvages<\/em> (2012-2014), in 1982, Christopher Mullin did\u00a0it in English with A Very British Coup<\/em> (but the fearsome other<\/em> were UK Left-wingers). However, these stories didn\u2019t put any of their writers up for five\u00a0major literary prizes. Could the hermeneutics of numbers in the title 2-0-8-4 have cast a spell? Haruki Murakami\u2019s 1Q84<\/em> and Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/em> are splendid, but it\u2019s not because of their titles nor hermeneutics.<\/p>\n

In 2084<\/em>, Sansal essentially describes a world we can entirely relate to without stretching our creative powers because Abistan is built on the images of destruction and conflicts we see today, and everyday, on the news. But it is a world so remote from Sansal\u2019s western compass, physically and emotionally, that he just can\u2019t get inspiration for it beyond the first layer, the TV screen layer. 2084<\/em> is a CNN news flash.<\/p>\n

The world of journalism has been fundamental in shaping contemporary Algerian literature. Algerian lit has been marked by major and classic authors who are, and were first, journalists. Sansal was not one, but that\u2019s the belly he comes from and I wonder if things went wrong because of this environmental legacy. This news diet, and its inherent exploitation of immediate attention-getting and readership, has not solely affected the once awesome writer of Le Serment des Barbares<\/em> (a cornerstone work in Algerian literature), it has affected Algerian literary production. A serious examination of recently published novels should be commenced to try and determine what is happening, not to French literature, but to Algerian literature and its vampiric news muse.<\/p>\n

\"nadia\"<\/a>Nadia is a doctoral student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where she\u00a0specializes in the ancient languages of Iraq and Syria. Based between Algeria and the UK, she blogs \u00a0at\u00a0tellemchaho.blogspot.co.uk<\/a>\u00a0about living in Algeria, and Algerian literature.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
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