In January 2021, the French historian Benjamin Stora polarized opinion when he presented his latest report, “The Memory of Colonialism and the Algerian War”, to the Élysée Palace in Paris. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, commissioned the report ahead of the war’s 60th anniversary in 2022.
However, politicians and writers on both sides of the Mediterranean have criticized Stora for the “minimalism” of his report, citing the invisibility of Harkis, conscientious objectors, and Algerian Jews as part of several unacceptable omissions. Furthermore, Macron apologized in February for Ali Boumendjel. An Algerian lawyer and activist, Boumendjel was tortured to death by French soldiers in 1957. Until now, his death was misreported as a suicide.
Notably, Stora’s report and Macron’s apology coincide with two recent English translations of French novels on Algerian history: The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, translated by Frank Wynne, and Tomorrow They Won’t Dare Murder Us by Joseph Andras, translated by Simon Leser. Zeniter, born in 1986, is a French novelist, translator, scriptwriter, and director. In this novel (her fourth), she examines the history of the Harkis: a generic term referring to Algerian paramilitaries who fought alongside the French army during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62). Often seen as traitors, Harkis and their families have been systematically misrepresented and mistreated.
As noted by Zeniter’s narrator, their ‘twofold histories’ conferred upon them ‘a paradoxical status.’ As a result, ‘none of the nations that might have offered them one’ were ‘prepared to take them in.’ Algeria spoke of them as ‘rats’ ‘traitors’ ‘infidels’ and ‘bandits’, whereas France did ‘not speak of them at all.’ Today, Harkis continue to be either publicly condemned or punishingly ignored in France, Algeria, and the wider Algerian diaspora. The Algerian War, defined by guerrilla warfare and the extensive use of torture on both sides, also devolved into a horrific civil war.
France spent decades using such euphemisms as ‘events’ and ‘conflict’ to describe one of the most brutal decolonization wars on record. Indeed, it was often called la guerre sans nom (the war without a name). It was finally called a war on the 5th of October 1999. And, in 2017, Macron recognised France’s actions in Algeria as ‘a crime against humanity.’ Significantly, there is still no friendship treaty between the two countries.
French Colonialism
The Art of Losing is divided into three parts: ‘Papa’s Algeria’, ‘Cold France’, and ‘A Moveable Feast’, respectively focused on three generations of one family: Ali, Hamid, and Naïma. The story unfolds over 70 years, from Ali in Kabylia to his granddaughter Naïma, a young woman living in modern-day Paris. The Art of Losing follows a rapidly developing tradition of 21st-century novels and memoirs about the Harkis. In 2003, the Year of Algeria in France, or Djazaïr 2003, four Harki daughters: Hadjila Kemoum, Zahia Rahmani, Dalila Kerchouche, and Fatima Besnaci-Lancou, published their autobiographies.
Their goals were similar: to articulate their fathers’ untold stories. Harkisseldom discussed their history amongst themselves or their families. Le silence du père (the silence of the father) is a well-documented phenomenon. Kerchouche, who was born in one of many Harkisdetention camps in France, deploys the term quête (quest) harkéoligique — in a play on the words Harkis and archeology — to excise the notion of buried history. In Mon père, ce Harki (2003), Kerchouche wrote:
‘I am a harki’s daughter. I write this word with a lowercase ‘h,’ as in honte [shame]. During the Algerian War, my father, an Algerian, fought with the French army against the FLN, the national liberation front of the country. How could he support colonization against independence, prefer submission to freedom? I don’t understand, to highlight negative prejudices that continue to haunt the Harkis. Kerchouche was also one of many writers to take issue with Stora’s recent report, telling Le Monde newspaper: ‘For me, this report hasn’t forgotten the harkis, it’s buried them.’
Kerchouche has previously explained that Macron’s government cannot ‘turn a new leaf’ on ‘a page of history it hasn’t read.’ She has called for an independent commission modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee (a court-like restorative justice body assembled at the end of apartheid). It is right to remember that France’s use of torture was extensive throughout its 132-year colonization of Algeria. Yet, France’s acts of torture — including Macron’s recent apologies — are still subsumed under the rhetoric of war, implying that extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures. As previously argued by Nicolas Bancel, Pascale Blanchard, and Sandrine Lemaire: ‘Torture in Algeria was engraved in the colonial act; it is a ‘normal’ illustration of an abnormal system.’
In 2003, the then President of Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, stated: ‘The time has not yet come for harkis to visit [Algeria,] it is exactly like asking a Frenchman from the Resistance to shake hands with a collaborator.’ Zeniter, herself the granddaughter of a Harki who came to France in 1962, uses this quote as an epigraph. Comparisons to Vichy collaborators are often used to incite hatred against the Harkis, but the conflation of these separate histories is emphatically misleading. The only reasonable comparison between the Algerian War and France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany is their mutual definition as a parenthesis in history — a vacuum — allowing France to renounce responsibility for its crimes. Indeed, it’s interesting to consider the use of ellipses in Zeniter’s novel in relation to historical events, such as these, that have been parenthesized or footnoted in official histories.
For instance, in response to the question: ‘How is a country born?’, the narrator relates a Kabylian tradition wherein a woman can give birth to a child even though the father has been absent for several years: the baby is asleep in their mother’s womb. Zeniter’s narrator argues that: ‘Algeria is like that sleeping child’ and that it was conceived ‘so long ago that no one can agree on a date, and for years it slept, until the spring of 1962.’ This analogy is also applicable to France’s slow and uncertain reckoning with its colonial past. Other ellipses include Ali’s involvement in the Second World War (only ever referred to as ‘the war’) and the boat crossing from Algiers to Marseille. As such, ellipses are one of several ways Zeniter leans on structural devices to echo the silence of the Harkisor and the inadequacies of memory (and official memorialisation).
One of many problems with the term Harkis is that it suggests intentionality, but as shown in The Art of Losing: ‘Choosing one’s camp is not the result of a single moment, a solitary, specific decision.’ As stated by the historian Sung Choi, ‘the reasons an Algerian would have chosen the path of a harki were often overdetermined and complex.’ While the French army coerced some Algerian Harkis, others were driven by their contempt for FLN (National Liberation Front) fighters who had threatened and harassed their families.
Other Harkis, as Kerchouche has explained, were driven by their loyalty to France. Furthermore, just as Harkis do not form a homogeneous group, neither do members of the FLN. As Zeniter’s narrator shows, not all FLN fighters were ideologically committed revolutionaries. Algerians who began fighting alongside the FLN in March 1962, at the 11th hour (known as Marsiens), are one such example.
As Naïma discovers, Algeria is the tenth-largest country in the world and the largest country in Africa and the Arab world. Eighty percent of Algeria’s surface area is covered by the Sahara. Until 1957, France referred to the Sahara as ‘les Territoires du Sud‘: a phrase the narrator dismisses as both ‘mysterious and banal’, and Algeria itself was not considered a colony so much as a trio of French départements.
François Mitterand’s phrase, given in a speech on the 12th November 1954, ‘there is but one law and that law is the law of France’, emphasizes these imperialist assumptions as does the narrator’s reference to the popular belief — taught to children in French schools — that the Mediterranean separates Algeria and France as Paris is divided by the Seine. During the war, ‘French government ministers had repeatedly insisted [that] Algeria is France.’ Although, to many Algerians, including Ali and his wife Yema, the phrase tended to mean the reverse: ‘France is Algeria, or at least an extension of Algeria.’
Harkis of the Hinge Generation
Zeniter, like Kerchouche, seeks to unearth a too-quickly buried past. When asked why she wanted to write the novel, she responded, ‘I wanted to fill in the silences’ (The Guardian, 2019). She has expressed her wariness about national fictions, and to this end, her crystalline prose and poignant metaphors highlight her impatience with cloudy, careless language. In one powerful section, the narrator reproduces chunks of ‘The Agreements Relating to Algerian Independence’: a document signed by Charles de Gaulle at Évian, France, on the 18th of March, 1962.
The infamously vague, unpossessing language of this official document is glaring against Zeniter’s bright, clean prose. For example, one article states: ‘In order to assure the Algerians of French status, the protection of their person and property, and their normal participation in Algerian life, the following measures are provided for: they will have a just and genuine part in public affairs.’ However, as Naïma reflects, ‘just’ and ‘genuine’ are senseless adjectives in a document that otherwise fails to stipulate concrete legislation to protect them. From a narratological standpoint, these paragraphs serve an important purpose: they slow down the narrative’s pace, allowing a pause for thought in an otherwise rapid, ‘easy’ read.
In one tragic scene, set in 1957, Ali discovers the naked, mutilated corpse of Akli — a veteran of the First World War — with his military medal hanging from his mouth ‘like the tongue of a grotesque puppet.’ The letters FLN are carved on his chest and spelled in blood on the nearby wall. Next to the man’s body, a sign reads: ALL THE DOGS WHO HAVE SOLD OUT TO THE FRENCH WILL SUFFER THE SAME FATE. This references one of the FLN’s preferred means of torture, ‘The Kabyle Smile’: slitting a person’s throat and pulling out their tongue. This scene serves as a chilling reminder of the dangers inherent in interpreting political indeterminacy as agency: ‘to stand aloof from the struggle is a crime’ (First Proclamation by The Front de Libération Nationale, the 1st of November 1954).
Having arrived in France, the family is detained at The Camp of Rivesaltes (also known as The Camp Maréchal Joffre): one of several ‘transit’ camps in southern France. As of 2015, Rivesaltes became a memorial ground and museum. The site was built as a military camp in 1938 and was first used to intern refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Zeniter’s narrator alludes to this history by describing it as ‘a pen filled with ghosts.’
In Rivesaltes, Harkis and their families were made to live in tents in extremely punitive and unsanitary conditions. Zeniter’s narrator refers to ‘the mass distribution of tranquilizers’ as ‘a fast and effective response to the angry outbreaks that flare up in the walkways,’ adding: ‘when drugs prove insufficient, they are reinforced by a stay in a psychiatric hospital.’ Hamid becomes accustomed to seeing medics lead out strange creatures with vacant eyes, drooping faces, and bandaged heads that look (vaguely, only vaguely) like men.’
After Rivesaltes, Ali, Yema, and the children are relocated to the Logis D’Anne, ‘temporary,’ barrack-like accommodation in rural France (although this one stayed open until 1988). Like many Harkis, Ali works for the National Forestry Office in a physically demanding and isolating job: ‘The house and the job come together: Siamese twins. No one asked them to imagine or to dream what their life in France might be like. They will live among the trees; they will work among the trees.’
Harkis and their children who spent part of their lives in camps or forestry villages are known as les harkis de génération charnière (Harkis of the hinge generation), an expression attributed to General Abd-El-Aziz Meliani in 1993. Forestry villages followed the same principle as barbed-wire detention camps: social exclusion. In The Art of Losing, as in life, these exclusionary practices are repeated when Ali and his family are later moved from their forestry village to a housing estate (cité) on the outskirts of Flers, Normandy. The scholar Géraldine Enjelvin records 42 such housing estates, purposely designed to keep Harkis and their families on the edge of town, removed from cultural centers.
When Yema tries to resettle in Flers, the handful of objects she has brought from Algeria seems absurd amidst the Formica furniture, the wallpaper, and the pale-yellow linoleum of her rent-controlled apartment. Torn from their proper setting, these items take on the aspect of museum artifacts. Zeniter’s narrator refers to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, where Indian and African artifacts are accompanied by explanatory notes. These notes, although intended to ‘bring viewers closer to the object, keep them at a distance by marking it out as a curiosity, something that, rightly, needs to be explained.’ This metaphor illustrates Zeniter’s argument that new realities necessitate a new, adequately nuanced vocabulary. However, the term Harkis does just the opposite; it fails to meet the social or emotional needs of the people it claims to represent.
Notably, the narrator’s description of the housing estate in Flers recalls the arbitrariness of colonial boundaries. It is ‘a landscape made up of harsh, geometric lines marked out with a ruler.’ This emphasizes that here, as elsewhere, the built environment is maladapted to human psychosocial needs. For example, when the children play in the recreation area, the climbing frames pull off the ground because they are poorly fitted. And, after heavy rainfall (a near-constant in Normandy), ‘the cité quickly comes to resemble a mud-hut village precariously built on marshy ground.’
It’s also pertinent to compare the housing estate in Flers with the narrator’s earlier description of the camp as ‘a makeshift city hastily erected over the previous one’s ruins.’ The narrator explains that Flers now boasts the largest Leclerc hypermarket in France—a detail that evokes the sadness of urban sprawl.
As Zeniter explained in a 2017 interview for Entrée Libre, she often found herself jotting down ideas for her characters in the margins of history books. Thus, the author was literally writing in the margins about the marginalisation of the Harkis.
The Art of Losing is also a highly self-reflexive novel in constant dialogue with other works of fiction. The French army is compared to Cervantes’ Don Quixote and ‘his dreams of greatness’, whereas multiple references to the Odyssey and the Aeneid posit the idea that, unlike Ulysses and other heroes, Harkis and their families never made it home: ‘I can’t remember how the Aeneid begins [but] at the end of his painful wandering, Aeneas arrives back in Latium, where his descendants will found Rome.’
A Future in a Foreign Language
The final part of the novel, ‘A Moveable Feast’, is a nod to Hemingway’s titular memoir. Published posthumously in 1964, it recounts the experiences of a struggling ‘expat’ in Paris, collecting new places and people like so many souvenirs. The memoir’s narrative echoes Naïma’s discoveries on her journey to Algeria: its artists and writers, Algiers, and her family’s ancestral village. Notably, the French-language edition of A Moveable Feast, titled Paris est une fête, experienced a considerable revival after the terrorist attacks in Paris on the 13th of November, 2015. Selling out in bookshops across France, some copies were found in makeshift memorials.
Zeniter’s choice of epigraphs provides a further commentary on language. Here, quotes from the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, or the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, sit alongside Charles de Gaulle and Jean-Marie Le Pen to show how racist propositions engender historical misinformation. In part one, de Gaulle’s well-known 1959 statement, ‘Papa’s Algeria is dead,’ is used as both an epigraph and a title. However, by bringing Papa’s Algeria to life through the long, demanding process of historical research and fictional reconstitution, Zeniter defies the phrase’s paternalistic implications. She ensures that ‘Papa’s Algeria’ exists in the reader’s imagination, if not in geopolitical reality.
The narrator further observes the tension between history and fiction by looking at the origin story of the French invasion of Algeria, in which the Dey of Algiers was rumored to have struck the French Consul with a fan or fly-whisk in the summer of 1830. Although often cited as the catalyst for the invasion, this legend rests upon a faulty premise: there was no Algeria as it is known today. The invasion was, in fact, ‘a war against several Algerias: […] the Regency of Algiers ruled by the Emir Abd al-Kader, then Kabylia, and, half a century later, the Sahara.’ By casting doubt on the offending object (fan or fly-whisk), Zeniter’s narrator cautions against narrativization of historical events, but not without a degree of irony — after all, The Art of Losing is itself a work of historical fiction.
In turn, manifold references to children’s books and comics such as Mandrake the Magician, Tarzan, or Tintin in the Congo highlight the perpetuity of the colonial experience by emphasizing the idea of lineage. However, they also serve to deconstruct the genealogy of colonialism by stressing intergenerational discontinuities. Notably, Hamid’s comics allow him to learn the French language but also facilitate his disassociation from his parents. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, like orphaned superheroes, present adults, not children, as foolish and uninstructed. This is interesting to consider vis-à-vis the tensions between Hamid and his father.
With his friends, Hamid likes to read comics that foster the notion of group identity. Yet Ali’s silence, like that of many Harkis, disbarred the possibility of a communitarian ethos. Thus, Zeniter’s narrator allows the reader to draw connections between Hamid’s juvenile reading matter and the texts he chooses later. For example, influenced by his reading of Marx’s Das Kapital, Hamid begins to feel contempt for his father for not having been a revolutionary fighter during the Algerian War.
As such, a line can be traced between Hamid’s immersion in subversive children’s literature and his subsequent attraction to social criticism. In both cases, reading, in general, and the French language in particular, allows Hamid to develop a distinct identity while also conferring one on his father. Thus, it can be argued that Hamid has internalized the language of rebellion and revolution—a language that leaves little room for a sympathetic portrait of his father.
Children’s fiction, including pictorial dictionaries and atlases, is also used to identify discrepancies between official histories and lived experiences. For instance, Hamid’s dictionary, published in the 1950s, has no Algerian flag between Albania and Andorra. Algeria’s invisibility is touched upon again when, much later, Hamid tells Naïma that, at school, he had a map of the world pinned onto his bedroom wall. One day, he came home to find that Algeria had been burned off the map with the lighted end of a cigarette. Hamid assumed that his father must have done it.
The disconnect between parents and their children is one of the central themes of the second part of the novel, prefaced by Pierre Bourdieu’s oft-repeated statement: ‘Every family is the site of a clash of civilizations.’ Ostensibly, many families are also a site of gender inequality. For instance, when Hamid and Kader become de facto secretaries, lawyers, accountants, and letter-writers for adults who cannot read, their sister Dalila, while ‘older and more intelligent than Kader’, is sent to a separate room. Thus, ‘despite the consistent excellence of her school reports, she finds herself beating her head against the invisible barriers imposed upon the world of women.’
In a scene at Hamid’s school, the narrator looks again at the disconnect between parents and their children. The teacher tells Ali that Hamid is a brilliant student and asks him, ‘Have you given any thought to his future?’ Ali thinks: ‘What does this teacher think he is? Of course, he thinks about his son’s future. He thinks about it every day at the steel press in the factory, in the employee’s locker room, at lunchtime, on the bus, before he falls asleep, all the time.’ But he also knows that ‘he has no control over the future of his son, of his children, and it upsets him. He knows that, in spite of all his efforts, their future is beyond him.’ He knows that: ‘their future is written in a foreign language.’
As the children grow older, they speak less often to their parents because ‘language is gradually creating a gulf between them.’ Between the Arabic that ‘is fading with time and the French that resists their parents, there is no space in their conversations for the adults they are becoming.’ Interestingly, Hamid’s language-learning process is also described in aggressive, colonial terms: ‘the dots and loops’ of French letters resemble ‘an army on the march, about to invade this brain.’
The language barrier erected between parents and their children is recounted in another moving scene. This time the family is about to move from temporary housing to a new home in Flers, Normandy. A supervisor jots down ‘Flers’ on a piece of paper, but no one had heard of it before. However, one of the men recognizes the letter ‘s’ as the same letter as is at the end of ‘Paris.’ The adults, who cannot read, are reassured by this: they feel as though they are ‘headed for a miniature Paris,’ believing the ‘s’ at the end of the word signifies ‘stylishness and progress’. Hamid is more skeptical. From leafing through his comics, he has come to realize that letters in French have no intrinsic meaning; they recur in ways that seem random, complicated, and absurd.’
The narrator deploys childhood imagery: dolls, puppets, ogres, superheroes, and big-headed, green-bodied aliens to explain the horrors Hamid and his siblings have either witnessed or endured. When Hamid and his cousin witness the murder of an old village woman, Fatima, they see her ‘body crumple like a sagging doll cut down while singing her old refrain.’
Similarly, when French soldiers tie the corpse of an FLN lieutenant, known as The Wolf of Rabbat, to a post, the narrator compares him to ‘a pitiful puppet, [like] an Algerian warrior in a bad Punch and Judy show.’ This imagery captures a child’s experience of normalized violence and nuances the overtly masculine, militaristic image of the Harkis. The narrator adds: ‘They are children, nothing has ever happened to them — even four years of war have gone straight over their heads like airplanes flying so high that the passengers can’t see them.’
When Naïma goes back to see where her father was detained, she is stunned to discover that there’s almost nothing left to see. In the absence of an adequate language of memorialization, she refers to The Lord of the Rings as a means to describe what she sees: ‘the cliffs of Canteperdrix, flanked by two porticos that rise in a series of pale stone vaulted arches, as beautiful and strange as a set abandoned by Peter Jackson when he finished filming.’
Here, it’s important to remember that until September 2001, there was no public recognition or memorialization of the Harkis. Thus, their lieu de mémoire (memory site) was entirely internalized. (Adam Shatz recently discussed the toll of this internalization in his brilliant article for The London Review of Books.)
Furthermore, references to blockbuster movies like The Lord of the Rings caution against the attractiveness of simple narratives by emphasising the homogenizing effect of mass culture. Interestingly, franchises like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings figure prominently in recent discussions on the motif of colonization in popular fantasy and science-fiction. Mass-culture references are also used to explain that, in the absence of the possibility of understanding a personal, familial history, fiction serves to ‘fill the gaps.’
Mining the Post-Colonial Silence
Significantly, Ali and Yema cannot read, whereas Hamid is as good as an autodidact. (His school teachers are frequently patronizing or ineffectual.) Similarly, Naïma has to teach herself about Algeria and Algerian history, stating: ‘When you’re reduced to searching Wikipedia for information on the country you supposedly come from, maybe there is a problem.’ Thus, by appealing to visual and auditory stimuli (relatedly, Naïma later works in a Parisian art gallery), the narrator asserts the importance of unwritten stories.
Although Naïma struggles to piece together what her father must have lived, his remembrance of the past is just as fragmented as her own. For instance, whenever he thinks of Algeria, he pictures Algiers, even though he had only ever lived in the mountainous regions of Kabylia and had only seen Algiers aboard his ship to France.
For work, Naïma compiles a catalog for a Thomas Mailaender exhibition — a French multi-media artist. The gallery wants to exhibit his photographs of so-called ‘cathedral cars’. (The term was coined by Marseille dockers to describe vehicles with luggage strapped to their rooftops in gravity-defying fashions.) Mailaender has stated that ‘these rolling containers are an obvious embodiment of the concept of borders and cultural tensions that result from them.’ But Zeniter’s narrator queries the usefulness, or accuracy, of this pan-ethnic commentary by juxtaposing it with Naïma’s reconstruction of the past.
In 1962, Ali and his family escaped Algeria, traveling from Téfeschoun (modern-day Khemisti) to Algiers. However, Ali’s car contained neither suitcases nor furniture. In fact, it did ‘not even contain a whole family’ (they had to make separate car journeys). They had no luggage; their survival depended on having ‘nothing that would suggest that they [were] trying to leave Algeria.’
Michel Talata, a visual artist and Harki’s son, uses both art and textual narrative to investigate the legacies of colonialism. Like Zeniter, Talata uses children’s literature to explore the notion of passeurs and legatees. He wrote and illustrated Le Choix de L’Ogre: rue des harkis (The Ogre’s Choice: Harkis street), with François Benoit. Talata wrote the book in response to his own struggle as a father who does not know how to explain the family’s history to his son. His storybook is about a father and son watching as the (grand)father inaugurates a new street in the neighborhood in honor of the Harkis.
Yakob, the six-year-old, does not understand what is happening. His father enumerates distant lands, large, unfamiliar birds, kings and princes, and such metaphysical themes as death and anger, to explain it to him. But the underlying question remains: how can we tell stories about people who never wanted to tell their own? This question is also central to The Art of Losing.
Arguably, Mailaender’s approach reproduces le silence du père, whereas Zeniter and Talata deconstruct it. Zeniter has stated that she wanted to creuse (mine) the silence, but Mailaender seems to hold a mirror to it. So, in the end, for all her Google searches and history books, Naïma has to see Algeria for herself, as a 29-year-old, for it to ‘re-emerge from the silence that cloaked it more completely than the thickest fog.’
Thus, abundant literary allusions highlight the thin line between literature and history and emphasize the importance of oral histories — or oral histories made significant by their absence. In a sense, Zeniter seems to argue that the history of the Harkis can only be explained through the inadequate, approximate language of general culture. And yet the narrator also seems to say: why hasn’t this story been told before? And better?
Moreover, The Art of Losing is itself a perfectly rendered novel. Thus, Zeniter’s novel has a defiant quality: by writing in such a relatable fashion and with recourse to so many well-known films, television series, and works of canonical literature, Zeniter reframes the question about the legitimacy of representation. In short, she seems to argue that it’s not about legitimacy so much as a willingness to write and read and listen. Language will always falter, but what better way to unearth buried stories than to write new stories about them?
The novel’s title draws inspiration from an Elizabeth Bishop poem, One Art, which contains the beautiful verse: ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master;/ So many things seemed filled with the intent/ To be lost that their loss is no disaster/ I lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent/ I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.’ This poem, like this novel, is about ambivalent but necessary acceptance. Bishop is also an interesting poet to have chosen, given that, unlike her contemporary Mary McCarthy or near-contemporary Anne Sexton, she was uninterested in confessional literature.
Bishop preferred a more expansive approach, or — to borrow Lorna Sage’s phrase — ‘the stranger shores of consciousness.’ Similarly, Zeniter’s narrator, although highly attuned to each character’s emotional complexities (Ali drinks too much, Hamid is given to bouts of hubris, and Naïma often feels as though ‘everyday life is a high-level discipline from which she has been disqualified’), she always steps back to see the bigger picture. To this end, this is an intensely moving, humanistic novel. It speaks ever so movingly about the idiosyncrasies of one family while still feeling universal.
The Art of Losing is a masterful and beautifully written novel, expertly translated by Frank Wynne (who won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2002 for Atomised, his translation of Michel Houellebecque’sLes Particules Élémentaires). Its success — it won Le Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2017 and has been translated into over half a dozen languages — suggests, yet again, that literature comes closer to honoring the past than state-sanctioned reports. As stated by Zeniter’s narrator: ‘fiction and research are equally necessary: they are all that remains to fill the silences handed on with the vignettes from one generation to the next.’ Arguably, there was too much unfilled silence — or affirmative but misleading ‘noise’ — in Stora’s latest report.
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Harkis | Encyclopedia.com
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