The Richness of Diversity:
Extracts from an Interview with James Gaasch

I was born in Algeria--colonial Algeria--in Aflou, a village in the Highlands of southern Tiaret (today an Islamist fiefdom). My father was the director of a school of "native boys," he was an "instituteur du Bled," or country school teacher, trained at the teacher's college in Algiers, at Bouzareah, where his friends had also gone: Mouloud Feraoun, Mr. Imalayen (Assia Djebar's father), Emmanuel Robles, who was older than the people of my father's generation. I met him in Paris, a few years before his death, upon the occasion of the publication of my first novel, Sherazade.
         My mother, who was a teacher at my father's school, came from a small village in the Dordogne. She had been pursuing her studies in Bordeaux where my father met her when he was doing an internship in France.
         I didn't know Aflou, which my parents left when I was one year old. Aflou is still famous today for its fine wool rugs of red and black geometric design.
         The village that provided me with the basis for an Algerian imagination that one finds in an indirect way in my fictional texts and in a direct way in my autobiographical writings is Hennaya, ten kilometers from Tlemcen, where I spent my childhood years living at my Father's school, in the Arab quarter, on the outskirts of the colonial village, a rich one where European "petits Blancs" and "grands Blancs" colonizers lived. My father knew Mohammed Dib who had also been a school teacher and comes from Tlemcen.
         I led a protected and privileged childhood surrounded by the books at the school and those at home, the books belonging to my older brother and the books of the daughters, my two sisters and me. Nevertheless, I think the reality of colonial Algeria reached me in a sly way, first in the streets from the insults hurled by Arab boys because my mother was a Frenchwoman; then in the school yard where the girls from the colony asked me inquisitorial questions concerning my father, an Arab. I have discussed this in Les lettres parisiennes, an exchange of letters with Nancy Huston, a Canadian writer exiled in France. I also mention it in autobiographical accounts published here and there in reviews.

         I write fictional texts because my native land, Algeria, the land of my father and of my childhood, forsook me . . .
        I write because I didn't have the language of my father, Arabic, the language of his land which I never learned.
         I write because I feel that I am in exile, an exile that moves and perturbs both body and soul, even if France is also my country, the country of my mother and my sons, the country of my mother tongue, the language in which I create, French, the only language I have mastered.
         I never tried to learn Arabic, but I wanted to hear it; I wanted the voice of Arabic and not the meaning.
         I write because I was born divided even if my father and mother's marriage was one of love (it still is today when my ill father feels cured if he holds my mother's hand).
         My parents protected me as much as they could from the conflicts in the colony, the hatred, the war. Both of them were for the independence of Algeria, my father belonged to the PCA (Algerian Communist Party), but my mother didn't. They weren't active militants like some of their friends, including the Guerroudj's in Tlemcen, but my father was arrested by the French army and imprisoned for several months because of a gesture of political solidarity. He taught young Arab prisoners who were his cell mates how to read and write.
         My writings are marked by Algeria--Algeria and the Maghreb in exile in France--and by France, through the contact between the Maghreb and Europe, East and West. I would not have recreated a world of interaction, of love and violence, in my novels had I stayed in Algeria--that Algeria of monolithic thought, of the single and controlled body. Algeria without the Other would not have inspired me.

Translated from the French
by Eric Sellin