Feraoun, Mouloud (1913-62). Algerian novelist, one of the first of Muslim descent to publish significant works in French. Born in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking region to the east of Algiers, he was educated and in turn taught in French colonial schools. A friend of Roblès and later of Camus, he was influenced by these and other authors of piednoir (settler) origin, but was one of the earliest voices to articulate in French the experiences of Algeria's indigenous population. During the Algerian War he was torn between respect for French humanist values and the desire to see an end to colonial oppression. He was assassinated by the OAS, a terrorist organization run by colonial diehards, a few days before the conclusion of the Évian peace agreements which brought independence to Algeria.
Feraoun's first novel, Le Fils du pauvre (1950), is highly autobiographical. Its opening pages, in which the narrator-protagonist, Menrad Fouroulou, contrasts his insider's view of Kabyle society with that of casual tourists, typifies the way in which early Algerian novelists continued to address an essentially French audience even while distancing themselves from the colonial standpoint. The remainder of the novel focuses on Menrad's experiences as a schoolboy of peasant origin in French Algeria.
In his second novel, La Terre et le sang (1953), as in the series of tableaux collected in Jours de Kabylie (1954), Feraoun's picture of life in Kabylia is again tailored to a French audience. The pretext for these descriptions in La Terre et le sang is the return to his native village of the protagonist, Amer, after having spent 15 years as an immigrant worker in France. Algeria's indigenous traditions are explained to Amer's French wife, Marie, as she attempts to integrate into village life. The sequel, Les Chemins qui montent (1957), features their son, also called Amer, who is better educated and more critical of the colonial system than was the older man. At the same time, the unsympathetic portrayal of Mokrane, a fanatical Muslim, suggests that little would be gained from a return to Algeria's pre-colonial culture. The younger Amer's suicide appears emblematic of the impasse into which many of Algeria's French-educated élite felt themselves to have been led by the political and cultural contradictions endemic in the colonial system.
In Les Poémes de Si-Mohand (1960) Feraoun presented and translated an important collection of Kabyle poetry. The posthumously-published Journal (1962) kept by him during the war of independence is one of his most powerful pieces of writing. It is a candid and stoical account of his attempt to maintain a sense of personal integrity while being pressurized from all sides to commit himself unequivocally to one or other of the warring camps. Miscellaneous essays and unpublished writings were collected in Lettres à ses amis (1969) and L'Anniversaire (1972).
[Alec Hargreaves]
Bibliography
- C. Achour, Mouloud Feraoun: une voix en contrepoint (1986)
