CLAREMONT, California – April, 2016 Anouar Benmalek, an esteemed novelist, journalist, mathematician, and poet, presented at Scripps on the topic “From the Shoah to the Herero Genocide: A Singular Journey from an Arab Writer” for the O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor Lecture. Benmalek holds dual Algerian and French citizenship and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Paris-Sud. He has won several of France’s prestigious literary prizes, and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His historical novels examine the lives of ordinary people living in violent times, that is, under conditions of genocide, political repression, racism, and religious fundamentalism.
… Through the “para-literary” life of an Arab writer, I will try to talk about the sequence of events which lead me to “Son of Sheol”. Some words will be used on several occasions: Arab, writer, censure, terrorism, Shoah, genocide, Herero…
Let us start with the word “Arab”, so charged politically now that it is equivalent to almost an insult in the mouth of some people. Let us describe, through personal examples, what it means to be qualified as an “Arab writer” or, more exactly, a writer belonging to a world actually protean, but that a certain ignorance caricatures violently by reducing it to only one “ethnic group”, with only one “language” et one “religion”. In fact, there is nothing that could be more deeply various than this part of our planet, which extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean and diverse other hot gulfs and seas (hot in all the meanings of the term: climatic and political)?
Take religions, for instance, which are sometimes so “exclusive” that they are used as a false definition for the supposed “ethnicity” of some groups. There is first Islam certainly, faith of the major part of the inhabitants of this Arabic world, but itself divided into Shiite versions (containing two main subcategories: seven-imams and twelve-imams Shi’ism) and Sunnites ones (with their four great schools of interpretations). The word “divided” is an euphemism here, so much the cultural and worship differences are important between these two visions of the islamic heaven and can be transformed, in periods of political tension, by fatal military confrontations (see Iraq-Iran war…)
But, in this world supposedly unified by Islam, faiths are not limited, far from there, to Islam. Everyone has in mind, of course, the Copts of Egypt or the Jews of Tunisia, Morocco and other countries of the area. With a little effort of memory, one can remember the Druze who believe in reincarnation and whose complex religious system includes even Pythagorean elements. But who knows that in Iraq, particularly along the lower courses of Tiger and Euphrate rivers and close to Chatt-el-Arab, live believers of one of the oldest and mysterious religions of the world, that of Mandaeans, who believe in a Heaven called Light-World, profess the existence of an evil female spirit, called Ruha, and ensure that babies died before being baptized in water will be carried for eternity by trees holding fruits resembling the breasts of their mothers? Who had heard of Yezidis of the Sinjar mount before the genocidal massacres committed against them by the killers of ISIS: for Yezidis, a supreme unique God created the world, but delegated the “maintenance” of His universe to seven angels, the most important being Malek Taous, the angel-Peacock, who is at the same time an emanation and a servant of the Almighty.
A last example is that, hardly believable, of the Samaritans - yes, those of the Bible! - belonging to one of the smallest populations of the world (approximately 700 individuals, divided equally between the Palestinian West Bank and Israel) but possessing one of the oldest attested written histories: although their religion is founded on the Pentateuch, they do not give themselves the name of Jews, but that of Hebrews, venerate the Gerizim Mount in the place of the Sinai Mount and regard the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem as an impious innovation of king David!
Notice that my talk is restricted to the Arab world only. I will not address religions of Iran, for example, since Iran is not an Arab country (contrary to what is often believed). It would be, in this case, necessary to quote, for instance, the Zoroastrians’ religion, with its unique cosmogonic dualism and eschatological monotheism …
Same diversity, perhaps more important, exists for languages: tell a Kurd of Syria, a Berber of Algeria, an Armenian of Iraq, a Turkoman of Syria, that their mother language is Arabic! Worse, even with regard to Arabic langage, it is necessary to distinguish Arabic known as traditional or classical Arabic (that, let us say, the language of newspapers) and its dialectal versions which could be so different that two speakers located each at the ends of this Arab world will have much difficulty to understand each other if both of them uses only local specific vernacular versions of Arabic.
The publicly claimed unicity of beliefs and languages of this “Arab” world is thus only a myth or, more exactly, a useful tool for the different dictatorial authorities of this area to impose the same political and religious mould of thought on hundreds of millions people! To understand how much this official unicity for such a vast area can be only a phantasm, it is enough to apply the same concept for Europe: is-it realistic to imagine a single language for all people of Europe, from Portugal to Poland for instance …?
But there is a field where, despite everything, this unicity exists: it is the way the Arab regimes treat their respective populations. All types of models of government exist in this part of the world: monarchies, republics, emirates, incestuous mixtures of the preceding systems, such as monarchical republics, etc. This apparent diversity does not prevent all these countries (all!) to act similarly with their people: contempt, police repression, censure of the medias, extreme intolerance towards freedom of political and religious expressions others than that permitted by the States, militarization of societies, predation of national wealth, corruption at all levels, fraudulent elections (when there are elections), etc.
Let us recognize, however, that a number of Arab countries know better than others how to make what is named pompously the international community shut their eyes when they commit their crimes: Saudi Arabia (a sort of successful ISIS) and Qatar (a corrupting State provider of financial support to some radical Islamic groups) have more dedicated Western allies (included USA and France) than the less rich Syria of dictator Bashar El Assad…
How thus an ordinary Arab citizen manages to be a writer under such conditions? First, he has to make acquaintance with this consubstantial institution of all Arab societies: censure, whether of political nature, social or religious! The freedom of the writer and the artist in general is symbolized by an axiom which the governing powers summarize as follows: “I agree to grant you freedom of speech and beliefs if and only if you pledge, under penalty of the most frightening consequences, to always agree with me! ”
My first example is almost amusing when I recall it. I returned from Kiev (Ukraine) where I had defended a PhD thesis in mathematics and I had quickly succeeded in publishing in Algeria a first novel “Ludmila” in a state publishing house, novel about the tribulations of a foreign student with a critical eye on the Soviet society. The USSR still existed and was directed by a guy named Gorbatchev. A few days after its publication in Algeria, the book was withdrawn from all the bookstores of the country, following strong pressures from the Soviet embassy. More, the director of the publishing house was compelled to write in the Algerian press a paper of repentance (in pure Maoist style) accusing me to have written a book which, according to his own words, was damaging to the “supreme diplomatic interests of Algeria”! You imagine: me, a simple student damaging such great diplomatic interests! A diplomat who was in post in Moscow at the time of the publication of the novel explained to me, years after, that the Soviet government, on the basis of the “reasonable” idea that freedom of edition did not exist in Algeria, had deduced that the publication of my novel was in fact a warning sign of great changes in the geostrategic alliances of Algeria…
My second great surprise as regards censure was the “social-islamist” censure. This adjective is not really appropriate, but I will keep it for lack of a better term. I had published in France a novel on the Moriscos of Spain, these Moslems obliged to convert by force to the Catholic religion after the fall of Grenade in 1492. Like Jewish Marranos, the majority of Moriscos will continue to be secretly faithful to their original religion, in spite of the risk to be burned alive in case Inquisition discovered it. At the beginning of the 17th century, the crown of Spain expelled all the descendants of Moriscos in the first State deportation in modern history. The goal of my book was, among other things, to pay homage to the tragedy of these Moriscos forgotten by History, considered as too Islamic by the Christians of Spain, and too Christian by the Moslems of North Africa who, too often, badly unwelcomed them after their deportation. The trouble with this book in Algeria started when all the employees of the local publishing house with which the contract was signed threatened to resign if their management decided to maintain the publication of “Ô Maria”. Then some over-zealous employees sent the file of the novel to the newspaper about which I spoke earlier …
This period of my life, following the publication of O Maria, was very difficult because it affected also my family. After a heinous campaign of denunciation Algeria, which spread as a powder trail in Arab newspapers by journalists from Irak, Lebanon, etc., not having read a single line of my book (Ô Maria was available only in French at this time), a terrorist group called for my killing. On the advice of the French security services, we left home (By the way, it was necessary to explain to my young son that we had to leave our house because of plumbing problems. My son was very glad, of course, since it meant for him some unexpected days of holiday …).
Ah, you feel intensely alone in such circumstances… as it is the case unfortunately for too many intellectuals and artists throughout the Arab world. All of this is at the same time terrifying and savagely banal in this area dominated by political and religious fanaticism, whether imposed by states or militant Islamic groups: you can be condemned to a thousand whiplashes because of a moderate tweet on the equality of religions; you can be beheaded on public places by a state, in spite of its UN membership and blabla-human rights obligations, because you are a political opponent, or by a terrorist group because you are in charge of a Roman antiquities department; you can be shot because you did not answer correctly to an odd question of theology at a check-point; you can have your throat cut by astonishingly young terrorists because you belong to another religion; you can be sold as a slave child to combatants who will take first the precaution to pray devoutly to God before raping you, etc.
All that without causing massive indignations all around Arab World, without making scandalized crowds fulling the streets of all Arab cities to protest and to claim: not on our behalf, not on our names!
Then, for writers and free thinkers of this area, there remains only one honorable but hard exit: to keep writing even if the price for freedom of art and speech can be high in this world of darkness. But I decided to remain optimistic, because the contrary would be an insult directed to these numerous isolated individuals who persist, at the price of their lives, to resist courageously to the oppression of their states as well as to the atrocious terror of ISIS groups and Co, despite despair, solitude, lack of solidarity and international hypocrisy.
We must read these free journalists, poets and novelists of this Arab world who literally risk their lives or long years of prison for a word. We do not support enough these courageous men or women. In The West and in the Arab countries, we generally adopt too often a cowardly behavior when faced to the power of oil and money of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
Let me be clear and don’t be mistaken by the bitterness of my statements : I speak about the Arab world with anger because I like this world passionately, it is the world of my father and my mother and the world of the most important years of my life. An infinite sadness takes hold of me when I see the present condition of destruction, chaos and hatred of my beloved world.
Iraq, with all its richness of beliefs and cultures, heir of the brilliant Abbasids’ civilization, has perhaps finished to exist as an unified country. Caught in a stranglehold between contemptible terrorism and cruel dictatorship, the great Syria with its hundreds of thousands of deaths is in the final steps of irreversible balkanization. What, then, to say about Bahrein or Yemen, the last crushed without mercy by the confrontation between a brutal coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Houthi militias at the service of Iran? The absolute intolerance introduced by terrorist movements with messianic vision tries to create a new savage society in place of the old societies whose principal (and generally dissimulated) characteristic was initially, as I tried to show, cultural, linguistic, ethnic and religious plurality.
Let us come now to what is part of the title of this talk: Son of Sheol. The Western and Arab press has said that this novel is the first “Arab” novel on Shoah, while systematically omitting (that is significant also of a unconscious racism) to point out that “Son of Sheol” is also the first work of fiction (and not only in the Arab world) to deal with an another completely ignored mass crime, the first genocide of the 20th century, that is the genocide of Herero people.
As a reader and as a writer, I developed a passion for this type of literature describing crucial confrontations, sometimes even mortal, always revealing, between “ordinary” characters and History (with a big H). In my novels, applying this principle, I begin with what I knew best, Algeria and its fight for independence, the theft of democracy by army at the end of its war of liberation, followed, in the eighties, by Islamic terror and its two hundred thousand victims; then, one thing leading to another, Middle East with its interminable and despairing conflicts, Andalusia and deportation of Moriscos. I even wrote on Tasmania to evoke the “successful” genocide of Aboriginals of this Australian island at the end of the 19th century. In my novels, I realize that I tried essentially, more or less consciously, to answer the same old interrogation: “What would I have done if…? What would I do if…?”
What would I have done, for example, if I had been tortured by French Army during the Algerian war of independence in the Fifties… or by the Algerian army in the Eighties? What would have done if I had fallen between the hands of an Algerian terrorist group? What would I have done if I had been the last of the Aborigines of Tasmania, after the massacres committed by English colonists, etc?
To each of these interrogations, I tried to answer by a novel.
For Son of Sheol, the question was as simple as horrifying: “What would I have done if I had been a Jewish German on his way, with all his family, to the gas chambers, or, worst, condemned to become a slave member of these unimaginable Sonderkommandos, expected to throw his own co-religionists in the flames of ovens, before being thrown there in his turn?”
After a great deal of hesitations, readings and several tries, I decided to stick with a simple policy: to tell the story from the sole point of view of an “ordinary” family of Berliner Jews, neither more nor less heroic than others and not having more information on the near future than any banal citizen of Third Reich.
I had my share of worries and doubts during the more than three years of work on this book, of course, but it was not because I was probably the first “Arab” or rather “Arab-Berber” to write a text of fiction dedicated to Shoah. My constant fear had been to be unable to match the challenge of a theme which is burdened by the supposed curse to be “indescribable”. I refuse absolutely this qualification of “indescribability”, this “sacralization” of Shoah, in a way that it would be almost blasphemous to try to understand it by the tools of fiction: the genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies was a crime committed by human beings on human beings, and, from this simple fact, it can and must be told with the words of human beings, as hard as that may seem.
The only thing which prevents me during a long time to write a novel on Shoah was a problem of “legitimacy”. Not the intrinsic legitimacy of the writer: I affirm that a writer has the right to treat any subject, we all belong to the same community of Homo Sapiens and any calamity affecting part of this community affects all of us or should affect all of us. I speak here rather about legitimacy with respect to myself: what would I bring new, as an African, about this European tragedy which took place far from Africa, which did not seem to have any relation with the history of my continent?
The turning point came with the reading of a biography of one of the most important leaders of the Nazi system, Hermann Göring. In the course of a sentence, I learned that his father, Heinrich Göring, had been governor of what was then called the German South West Africa, in other words: current Namibia. Intrigued, I started to read more on German colonialism in general and on this Namibian colony in particular, about which I did not even suspect the existence before. I discovered little by little the extent of the massacres made by the soldiers of the Second Reich during the German occupation of the GSWA, which culminated in 1904 with the genocide of Hereros and Namas: 80% of Hereros were killed, followed, only months after, by 50% of Namas. My amazement came from the fact that I had never heard about what appears to be the first genocide of the 20th century. I checked around me, I discussed the question with many writers, African and Europeans: all shared my ignorance, the same extraordinary ignorance about what should have never been ignored.
How is it possible that an entire genocide was never - and is not so far - part of our common memory?
More attentive research allowed me to understand that the genocide perpetrated in the GSWA had been, to some extent, an artisanal “draft” of the system Nazi Germany, less than forty years later, in a monstrously industrial way, would implement against Jews and Gypsies: similar racial obsessions, first pseudo-scientific experiments with genetic goals, individuals having served their apprenticeship as massive criminals in the colony and who will become important cogs of the Hitlerian machinery, etc.
I knew then that I found my personal legitimacy as an “Arab” writer and, more generally as an “African” writer: Shoah also concerns us as Africans, and in an almost direct way, because it has, in a certain sense, “started” in Namibia.
It is worth to notice that it is only in July 2015 that Germany recognized officially the Herero and Nama genocide as genocide…
I would like to finish my speech by some reflections on the job of novelist. I believe that the novel corresponds, by many aspects, to a scientific endeavor: one takes a certain number of characters on whom are imposed constraints of various kinds, one plunges them under external conditions not depending on them (country, historical events, social conditions and policies, religious and social beliefs) and one finally observes how each of these virtual creatures, armed with a complex mixture of determinism and free will, will manage to keep one’s ship going in the right direction. My description is obviously a caricature, but the important thing is that the novelist has, at the beginning of his work, a freedom of choice not very different from the scientist’s one who hesitates between several assumptions, looks for the right experiments to test each one, and report impartially, at each stage of his research, the result of his findings.
In my opinion, a good novelist (or, more exactly, the kind of novelist I like) has the obligation to observe a certain neutrality towards his characters. Even if he can feel affection towards his paper characters, he should not forget to keep an almost cruel lucidity in the description of their behaviors and motivations.
A human being is not a pure victim of History. A man or a woman can also decide to live one’s small life, pretending to be unaware of History or, more exactly, wishing with all one's heart that History is unaware of him or her. He or she can decide to love, to hate, to be jealous, to show all kinds of petty and ordinary ambitions even when History begins to project its gigantic and, too often, mortals shades on them.
What I try to show in my novels is this battle between the terrifying determinism of certain historical moments and this small piece of freedom, dearly paid sometimes, that every one of us possesses and can decide to use. My characters are never heroes, but “ordinary” persons, revealed to themselves and to the others by “extraordinary” conditions.
Life is an extreme experience: we are born to die and we know about it. This reality transforms any human being in a tragic philosopher: you look at a person whom you love, a woman, a man, children and you know with absolute certainty that they will die, that you will die! That is unbearable and transforms any human existence into an unsurpassable novel: no literary work will ever reach the cruel tragedy of any man or woman’s life. No sooner have we started to understand the life given to us than we lose it. In a certain manner, a life is only one long death agony: the first cry of a newborn baby is the one which starts the countdown leading him to the tomb.
Any writing is, in this sense, a philosophical work: any laughter, any happiness, any exaltation created by a novel or a poem are victories against death, but of a completely temporary type, totally ridiculous against the only winner always present, and alone, on the final podium: death. But the greatness of this weird animal, Homo Sapiens, is precisely to accumulate these temporary victories in every field possible, art and science in particular, and to transmit them to his fellow human beings, thus transforming his tiny transitory present into a kind of iterative immortality going up to the appearance of our species.
It seems that this curious activity, literature, has a justification only because we die. Remove death, and literature becomes useless, if not ridiculous. In my opinion, it is the presence of Nothingness around our short presence on earth that explains this “humanity's strange, ardent love affair” with literature.
Thank you for your attention.
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