Teaching in a Time of Crisis
Grève des écoles. Il fallait s’y attendre avec la politique de pacification conduite comme elle le fut en Kabylie.
Est-ce la haine? … C’en est le commencement.
Ali Hammoutene, 19561 La continuité des petits devoirs toujours bien remplis, ne demande pas moins de force que les actions héroïques … et il vaut mieux avoir toujours l’estime des hommes que quelquefois leur admiration.
Epigraph from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in first edition of Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre (1950)2
The work of ‘instituteurs du bled’ during the colonial era – that is, primary school teachers working in remote rural locations, often on their own – has gathered a mythic aura in certain strands of French culture. That aura swirls around Albert Camus’s story ‘L’Hôte’ of 1957: its central figure is 1 ‘Schools are on strike. That was to be expected, given the policy of ‘pacifi-cation’ in Kabylie. | Is it hatred? … That’s the way we’re heading.’
Ali Hammoutene, Réflexions sur la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Publisud/SNED, 1982), 98.
2 ‘The continued faithful fulfilment of small duties requires no less strength of mind than do acts of heroism […] and it is infinitely better to enjoy the esteem of one’s fellow men all of the time than their admiration some of the time.’
This epigraph comes at the start of ‘Le Fils aîné’ (‘The Elder Son’) in the 1950 edition of Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre, 111, E79. Rousseau’s remark (with very slightly different wording) can be found in Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond and Robert Osmond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 91;
Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 89.
a teacher, Daru, ‘qui vivait presque en moine’ in an ‘école perdue, content d’ailleurs du peu qu’il avait’ (83, ‘living almost like a monk in his remote schoolhouse […] content with the little he had’, 44). He is dedicated to his work and apparently respected by his pupils.3 The story of Jean Simonet, the teacher I quoted in the last chapter when discussing ‘adaptation’, also corresponds to the most positive, even heroic version of the myth, at least to start with: he recalled that the mountain village of Ait Aicha where he was given his first post after finishing at Bouzaréah did not appear on any of the maps he consulted, so he simply set off for roughly the right region, then asked around until someone could give him directions. On the last leg of his journey he was met by a mule train organized by the villagers, who somehow knew he was coming, and were pleased to see him arrive.
This was in 1954; they had been petitioning for a school since 1938, and it had eventually been built in 1952. For Simonet the village was a very unfamiliar environment, far from anyone he knew, so from time to time he would travel to the town of Azazga to seek European company. Once he was invited by a French administrator to stay overnight on a Sunday to play bridge, but he declined, saying he should get back to the village to be ready for his pupils in the morning. The administrator responded with surprise: ‘Vous y allez tout le temps là-haut ? Vous êtes communiste ?’
(‘You go up there all the time, do you? Are you a communist?’). Simonet remarks: ‘Ce qui veut dire qu’il suffisait d’en faire un peu, parce que leur pensée c’était « le jour où ils apprendront, ils nous mettront dehors ! »’
(33, ‘Which was to say that if you made any effort they were suspicious, their mindset being: “the day they start learning about things, they’ll kick us out!”’). Simonet’s description of this mindset implies that there was a strong anti-educational consensus in the French/settler community, and that half-hearted work from colonial teachers and administrators was not unusual, but it also shows that there were those, like Simonet, who worked in difficult circumstances with real commitment, whatever their political perspective.4 Simonet’s efforts seem to have been appreciated
3 Page numbers refer to the widely available 1957 Gallimard Folio edition of L’Exil et le royaume, and Exile and the Kingdom, trans. Carol Cosman (London:
Penguin Modern Classics, 2006). The notes in the Pléïade edition cite Roger Quilliot’s assertion that Camus had the idea for ‘L’Hôte’ before the start of the war in November 1954 (Œuvres complètes, vol. 4, (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 1348–49).
4 Simonet interview in Ghouati, École et imaginaire, 28–39. Another former teacher interviewed by Ghouati, Norbert Boj, who spent seven years from 1949 in Oran teaching a classe d’initiation (CI), was told when he started that there
Teaching in a Time of Crisis 87 by the villagers, who organized an armed guard for him when the war started, soon after he had arrived. But he was not able to stay outside the conflict, any more than could Daru; by the end of 1955, Simonet’s school had been burned to the ground.5
This chapter will explore further the ability of colonial education to divide and redivide opinion, and to take on diverse forms and different political valencies. Whereas the previous chapter ranged across the colonial period and paid particular attention to colonial educational policy, with all its variations and inconsistencies, this chapter will be centrally concerned with the writings and experiences of a single figure, Mouloud Feraoun (though other writers he knew, including Albert Camus and Jean Amrouche, appear in the cast). As I have already emphasized, it was very uncommon for a child from a rural colonial background such as Feraoun’s to proceed beyond primary education, so his life story was atypical in relation to those among whom he grew up; yet, in the small, relatively elite group of colonized subjects who enjoyed the greatest educational success, it was common to take the path Feraoun took in training to teach in a colonial primary school.
Feraoun’s decision to become a teacher may be explained partly by constraints on other possible careers, including that of writer, but I will suggest that it should also be understood in terms of his conception was insufficient space in the school, and that some classes would be half-time; so the plan was to accommodate all the Europeans, then fill up empty spaces with Algerians, without increasing class size. The headteacher explained: ‘car de toutes les façons nous les instruisons et cela se retourne contre nous’ (116, ‘because in any case we teach them and that ends up working against us’); not one of his colleagues reacted to this, according to Boj. Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière discusses
‘a series of maps depicting the distribution of communist teachers across Northern Algeria’, distributed within the army in December 1954: ‘Stuck in the Middle with You: The Political Position of Teachers during the Algerian War of Independence’, Landscapes of Violence 3:3 (2015), Article 2, 3–5.
5 The village where Jean Simonet worked had little contact with colonialism until the school was installed, and he implies that the school played a role indirectly in provoking a massacre early in the war (Simonet interview in Ghouati, École et imaginaire, 34–35). Troops in the village were attacked by the Algerian maquisards; then paratroopers came in and shot all the male villagers aged 30 to 70. Simonet had left by the time the school burned and he had not been replaced, which made him think the fire was the work of the ALN. He recounts too that a man named Dahmani, whom he describes as ‘le chef du village’ (36, ‘the head of the village’), and who supported Simonet when the war started, had his house burned twice, once by the French, once by those fighting the French.
of education. As we shall see, Feraoun remained committed to that work, and even to what we might call, after Said, a certain notion of the ‘sacrosanct’ classroom, throughout the war of independence. He did so in the face of formidable pressures to do otherwise, and while enjoying significant success as a novelist. The question at the heart of this chapter is how far or in what sense his commitment to education may be exemplary or instructive. Among other things I will explore the ways that Feraoun justified to himself his work as a teacher, but what may matter more for the purposes of this book are the justifications that we may wish to project into his situation, or to rule out: the justifications for someone such as Feraoun not joining the FLN, not fighting, and continuing to teach.
The Algerian war was an acute and terrible crisis by any standards, far from comparable with anything I discussed earlier in relation to a
‘crisis in the humanities’. The repetition of the word ‘crisis’ across such disparate contexts could appear tasteless. My hope, nonetheless, is that the extremity of the situation faced directly by Feraoun sharpens questions that concern, or might concern, all of us, if less directly (and not only because, if one takes a global view of politics, poverty and war, all eras could be described as eras of crisis). Or perhaps, to avoid assuming too much about ‘us’, I should say it sharpens questions that concern someone like me, even if my own immediate professional and personal circumstances are basically safe and comfortable. In Feraoun’s situation, unlike mine, staying in education took great courage, even heroism, which is part of what makes his story compelling. But, as this chapter will show, the anti-heroic aspect of Feraoun’s stance may be a fundamental part of its importance, both in relation, quite specifically, to the Algerian war, on which his Journal 1955–1962 casts a clear, grim light, and in relation to wider conceptions of the relationship between education and politics.6 The journal, as we will see, could be described as ‘speaking truth to power’, to echo another phrase from Said, and one
6 Feraoun, Journal 1955–1962 (Paris: Seuil, 1962); Journal 1955–1962:
Reflections on the French-Algerian War, ed. and intro. James D. Le Sueur, trans.
Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Le Sueur’s introduction (ix–xlviii) gives a good summary of Feraoun’s career, and also of the Algerian war of independence. Useful biographical sketches of Feraoun and several of the other writers I discuss are provided in Christiane Chaulet Achour and Corinne Blanchaud (eds), Dictionnaire des écrivains francophones classiques (Paris: Champion, 2010).
Teaching in a Time of Crisis 89 that, as I suggested earlier, seems to have had a significant influence on the notion of the teacher–intellectual in postcolonial studies and other politicized fields of the humanities. Indeed, the journal itself could be seen as a heroic project: it was written secretly and if it had been discovered during a raid on his school it could have placed Feraoun’s life at risk. What is more, it is evident from Feraoun’s actions, as well as from the journal itself and from Feraoun’s correspondence, that he always intended to publish it, although publication incurred the same risk. But the journal also reveals his struggles to persist with his daily tasks as a teacher in a village primary school, a sort of work that does not usually or by its nature involve ‘speaking truth to power’. In this way, Feraoun’s story provides an opportunity to think again about the role of the teacher – in colonialism, and also today – as distinct from the role of the intellectual or activist.7
From cradle to grave
Mouloud Feraoun was born in 1913 in Tizi Hibel, a village in Kabylie.
Aged six he started to learn French at school; later, a bursary along with accommodation offered by missionaries allowed him to become one of those very rare colonized children to proceed beyond primary education and, in due course, aged 19, to go to the teacher training college in Bouzaréah. In 1936 he returned to his home region to take up his first post as an instituteur.
When Feraoun began writing a few years later, one of his sources of inspiration was Camus. The inspiration was both direct and indirect, as Feraoun made clear. On one level, Camus provoked negative reactions from Feraoun, and some sort of desire to set the record straight: in a letter to Camus in May 1951 he criticized La Peste for its lack of
‘native’ characters; then, in a subsequent journal article of 1957 on Algerian literature, he argued that it was significant that the man killed
7 I see an affiliation of sorts between my approach to Feraoun and Gary Wilder’s approach to Aimé Césaire. Wilder, inspired partly by David Scott’s criticism of narratives of heroic resistance in Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), says his aim is ‘to challenge the tendency to treat projects for nonnational colonial emancipation as inherently reactionary’. Wilder, ‘Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia’, Public Culture 21:1 (2009), 101–40.
by Meursault in L’Étranger was an ‘Arab’, and that it was implausible for Meursault, a European in Algeria, to be condemned to death for killing an Arab.8 Nevertheless, Feraoun was grateful for certain forms of attention and respect accorded to Algeria by Camus and other writers of his generation, such as Emmanuel Roblès, Marcel Moussy, Jules Roy and Gabriel Audisio (and, before them, writers including Robert Randau).9 In that same article on Algerian literature he wrote: ‘La voie a été tracée par ceux qui ont rompu avec un orient de pacotille pour décrire une humanité moins belle et plus vraie, une terre moins chatoyante mais plus riche de sève nourricière, des hommes qui luttent et souffrent, et sont les répliques exactes de ceux que nous voyons autour de nous’ (54, ‘The way ahead has been shown by those who rejected a cheap, vulgar Orient in order to depict people who are less picturesque but more authentic, a land that sparkles less but that is richer in nourishing lifeblood; men who fight and suffer, and who are the exact replicas of those we see around us’). (The positive connotation of ‘luttent’, fight, is striking in this historical context.) This explains the gratitude to Camus that he also expressed in the letter of 1951: ‘Si je parvenais un jour à m’exprimer sereinement, je le devrais à votre livre – à vos livres qui m’ont appris à me connaître puis à découvrir les autres et à constater qu’ils me ressemblent’
(‘If ever I were able to express myself serenely, I would have your book to thank for it. Your books have taught me to know myself and have allowed me to discover other people, whose resemblance to myself I now see’). Much later another Algerian writer, Mammeri, would remind readers – insisting on how easy it was to forget – that when Feraoun began writing, despite the work of the early ‘Algerianist’ authors, it 8 See Feraoun, Lettres à ses amis ([1969] Algiers: Bouchène, 1991, 2nd edition), 204; and ‘La Littérature algérienne’, Revue française [Paris] 3rd trimester 1957, reprinted in L’Anniversaire (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 53–58: 55. In his letter of 25 July 1956 to Camus, Jean Grenier said that he liked ‘L’Hôte’ but that one – unspecified – thing bothered him, adding: ‘mais il se peut qu’il soit personnel et extra-littéraire’ (Camus and Grenier, Correspondance 1932–1960, ed. Marguerite Dobrenn (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 206, ‘but it may be personal and extraliterary’, Correspondence, 1932–1960, trans. Jan F. Rigaud (Lincoln, NE and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 173). Grenier had been an inspirational teacher for Camus at the Grand Lycée (later known as the Lycée Bugeaud); Rigaud explains that Grenier thought that Arabs in Camus’s work were often ‘passive and silent characters’ (248).
9 For a detailed discussion of this generation of writers see Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).
Teaching in a Time of Crisis 91 still took courage for a ‘native’ Algerian to treat the stories of ordinary Algerians as worth telling.10
Feraoun wrote the bulk of his first novel, Le Fils du pauvre, between 1939 and 1944, completing it in 1948. It remains his best-known work.
The protagonist and part-time narrator is a teacher called Fouroulou Menrad (a scrambling of Mouloud Feraoun). Feraoun’s initial approaches to publishers were unsuccessful; among those to reject him was Jean Amrouche, another Kabyle francophone writer, who at that time was literary director at Éditions Charlot. That rejection left its mark, as I will explain later. Feraoun decided to publish 1000 copies of the book at his own expense, and it appeared in 1950, with a subtitle imposed by the publisher: ‘Menrad, instituteur kabyle’. The novel went on to win the grand prix littéraire de la Ville d’Alger later that year. In his acceptance speech Feraoun said that his success was a tribute to ‘l’École française d’Algérie’ (‘the French schools of Algeria’).11 He was the first ‘native’
to win the prize, and Le Fils du pauvre started to attract significant attention. That led to a second, revised edition of the novel in 1954 with the prestigious Parisian house Seuil.12 The blurb on the new edition said:
10 Mammeri, ‘Mouloud Feraoun: La Voix de Fouroulou’, preface for ENAG 1988 re-issue of La Terre et le sang; reproduced in Berrichi, Mouloud Feraoun, 8–10. Mammeri, another teacher–writer who trained at Bouzaréah, published his own first novel, La Colline oubliée, in 1952 (Paris: Plon).
11 The speech is included as an annex in Achour, Mouloud Feraoun, 99–100.
See also Marie-Hélène Chèze, Mouloud Feraoun, la voix et le silence (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 40.
12 The first French edition is a rarity; the second version is the one that has circulated widely, and is the edition to which I refer in general; however, I have given page references to the 2005 English translation (which is a translation of the 1950 version) if the quoted phrase appears in both versions. Minor differences between the two editions – which are discussed at length by Martine Mathieu-Job in Le Fils du pauvre de Mouloud Feraoun, ou la fabrique d’un classique (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2007), 17–49 – include the omission of the first edition’s subtitle and the replacement of the epigraph drawn from Rousseau, which Feraoun used at the start of the section called ‘Le Fils aîné’ and which I used at the head of this chapter, with a quotation from Michelet saying he was now proud of the poverty that once made him feel ashamed. The major difference is that the revised version is shorter and stops earlier in Fouroulou’s life. In his introduction to the English translation, Le Sueur observes (partly on the basis of some unpublished correspondence) that there is ‘no evidence to prove that the novel was censored for political content’
(xxvii). As he acknowledges, however, at least some of the cuts may have been made in light of political sensitivities: the omitted material includes material on French
‘Mouloud Feraoun était destiné à devenir berger. Il a eu plus de chance que la plupart de ses camarades, nous dit-il. Il a pu étudier, conquérir un diplôme, arracher les siens à la gêne. C’est comme pour s’excuser de cette chance qu’il a écrit ce livre’ (‘Mouloud Feraoun was destined to become a shepherd. He has been luckier than most of his friends, he tells us, being able to study, to win qualifications and to lift his family out of poverty.
In writing this book it is as if he were seeking forgiveness for this good luck’) – which was patronizing, but perhaps not entirely wrong. By this time his second novel, La Terre et le sang, had also appeared, and in 1957 he published a third novel, Les Chemins qui montent.
In the meantime he had begun writing his journal. As I mentioned just now, Feraoun always intended to publish it, preferably before the
In the meantime he had begun writing his journal. As I mentioned just now, Feraoun always intended to publish it, preferably before the