Nabile Farès

Farès, Nabile (b. 1940). Algerian writer from Collo in Petite Kabylie. As a lycée student he participated in strikes against French rule in Algeria. He studied philosophy and wrote a thesis in anthropology, and settled to live and teach in France.

Farès's fictional writings are concerned with the roots of Kabylian culture and the experience of exile. His major work is Un passager de l'Occident (1971). The experimental form of this work calls into question the nature of fictional structures, though the use of an epistolatory style seems rather old-fashioned. Farès's concern is with cultural decolonization and he problematizes the language of literary creativity in what he calls ‘la reconnaisance d'une dialectique interne’. He suggests that the themes of Algeria's colonial past should be abandoned in favour of the crystallization of national consciousness and that the authentic personality of the nation lies in the pagan heritage: ‘Après la décolonisation française de l'Algérie viendra la décolonisation islamique.’ This fairly simple proposition is, however, made highly complex by being articulated in an elaborate discourse borrowed from Derrida, which ranges far beyond the powers of comprehension of Algeria's illiterate majority. Like Yahia, pas de chance (1970), Un passager is basically an autobiography which calls into question the post-1962 political choices facing Algeria with respect to Islam and Arabic culture. Farès's options are aesthetic rather than political, but the novel is far less naïve politically than the many works devised in response to the one-party system's stranglehold on the definition of Algerian identity during the 1970s. Other works include Le Champ des oliviers (1972), Mémoire de l'absent (1974), L'Exil et le désarroi (1976), La Mort de Salah Baye ou la Vie obscure d'un Maghrébin (1980).

[Abdelhamid Zoubir]