Postwar Culture

Albert Memmi (1920-2020) was a prominent Tunisian Jewish Francophone author, poet, critic, and philosopher whose fiction and scholarly works center around issues of decolonization in the wake of World War II. He is best known for his sociological study Portrait du colonisé, précédé du Portrait du colonisateur (The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1957), Le Racisme (Racism, 1982), and his novels La statue de sel (The Pillar of Salt, 1953), Agar (Strangers, 1955), and Le scorpion, ou la confession imaginaire (The Scorpion, or The Imaginary Confession, 1969). 

He was born to a poor Jewish family in the city of Tunis when it was still a French Protectorate, and learned French at the Alliance Israélite Universelle school. He later earned a scholarship to study philosophy at the prestigious Lycée Carnot in Tunis, where he struggled to fit in with the wealthier and non-Jewish student body. During the Nazi occupation of Tunisia from November 1942 to May 1943, Memmi was one of around 5,000 male Tunisian Jews sent to a forced labor camp to dig trenches in extremely squalid and unsafe conditions. His semi-autobiographical debut novel, La statue de sel, tells the story of his escape from the camp with a group of prisoners and their efforts to join the ranks of the Free French army, which Memmi eventually managed to do despite the army’s reluctance to accept Jews. 

Memmi graduated from the Sorbonne in Paris with a specialization in philosophy, after which he returned to Tunis to teach at the local technical college. He was a staunch advocate for Tunisian independence, helping found the weekly magazine L’action (later renamed Jeune Afrique) alongside Béchir Ben Yahmed and other intellectuals. Memmi left Tunis for Paris once again in 1956, where he began working at the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques. He became a sociology professor at Université de Paris Nanterre in 1970, and was also involved with the Centre Universitaire d’Études Juives and the Pen Club of France. In 1984 he was awarded the Prix de Carthage––the most prestigious award of Tunisia––by President Habib Bourguiba. 

Often situated among the likes of Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Memmi was among the first scholars to denounce the role of racism as a fundamental ideological component of the colonial system, and to champion the concept we now know as identity politics as a means for fully liberating oppressed peoples and creating a truly egalitarian postcolonial world. Despite Memmi’s controversial support of Zionism (he proclaimed himself a “Zionist of the Left”), he remains a leading voice in postcolonial theory, making valuable academic and literary contributions to the field thanks to his identity and life experiences at the crossroads of multiple cultural and religious traditions. In La statue de sel, Memmi famously writes:

“I am Tunisian, but Jewish, which means that I am politically and socially an outcast. I speak the language of the country with a particular accent and emotionally I have nothing in common with Muslims. I am a Jew who has broken with the Jewish religion and the ghetto, is ignorant of Jewish culture and detests the middle class. I am poor, but desperately anxious not to be poor, and at the same time, I refuse to take the necessary steps to avoid poverty, a native in a colonial country, a Jew in an anti‐Semitic universe, an African in a world dominated by Europe.”