“La France, c’est moi”: Love and Infatuation with the Occident

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Speaker: Prof Zahia Smail Salhi (Manchester)

Departing from the putative notion that the Orientals were generally uncivilised and often uncivilisable, the early Maghrebi novelists were keen to establish their evolution from their primitive state to that of civilised people. Through their novels they portrayed characters who not only represented them and their often painful evolutionary process, but also voiced their sentiments and views about their encounter with the Occident. Deeply infatuated by western civilisation, they saw in it the Occident the embodiment of perfection. They often blamed their own people for being ‘uncivilised’ and for their feelings of alienation, rather than hold France accountable for their people’s misfortunes. Following rigid sets of binary oppositions, all the wrongs were placed within the world of the ignorant, naive, fanatical and uncivilised ‘Oriental’, whom the knowledgeable, sophisticated, and civilised, ‘Occidental’ was eagerly trying to save from their own dangerous barbarity.

This paper will discuss three novels, which are rarely studied with any form of depth as part of Maghrebi literature.  Written early in the twentieth century, their authors were sons of the privileged ‘Friends of France’, and their works were tokens of gratitude for all the work deployed by the Occident to civilise them, but also as a gesture of appreciation and a sign of loyalty to their civilisers. For this, they were side-lined during the colonial period and then totally rejected in the post-colonial Maghreb as works written by traitors who sang the praises of the colonisers.

These considerations aside, these works remain valuable testimonies of the time when they were written, but also a missing part in the evolution of the relationship between coloniser and colonised from colonial to postcolonial times.

Zahia Smail Salhi is Chair of Modern Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester.

She served as Judge of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013, and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2016. She acted as Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World from 2013 to 2016.

She was a Member of Sub-panel 27 (Area Studies), Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014), and is a Member of Sub-panel 25 (Area Studies), Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021). Her publications include: Politics and Poetics in the Algerian Novel (Edwin Mellen Press: 1999), The Arab Diaspora: voices of an anguished scream (Routledge: 2006 & 2011), Gender and Diversity in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge: 2010 & 2014), Gender and Violence in Islamic Societies: Patriarchy, Islamism and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa (I. B. Tauris, 2013) and, most recently, Occidentalism: Literary Representations of the Maghrebi Experience of the East-West Encounter (EUP: 2019). She has also published a number of articles on literature and gender with focus on the Middle East and North Africa.