"A Semite: A Memoir of Algeria," by Denis Guenoun

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fo r e w o r d Judith Butler

This book is clearly a memoir, but settling on the genre does very little to orient us toward what is to come. The title, A Semite, seems to identify one among several Semites. And yet, several questions emerge as the story begins: What is a “Semite”?

And who is included within its terms? Who talks this way? And under what conditions is anyone called a “Semite” or describes oneself through this term? The word, of course, haunts from the start, since we know it most clearly through the history of anti-Semitism. “Anti-Semitism” is a confusing word for many reasons. It is not an opposition to “Semitism,” since it would be unclear what an ideology of the Semite might be. But it is an opposition to the “Semite” that has itself assumed ideological form. But what or who does the anti-Semite oppose? And if anti-Semitism is a set of beliefs, a mode of being, an ideological

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formation, what holds it together apart from its animus? Does the animus, in fact, obliterate the “Semite” who is its object?

Does anyone in the midst of anti-Semitism actually ask after the history and meaning of the Semite?

Denis Guénoun’s memoir is about his Algerian and Jewish father, trying to reconstruct his father’s history, one that is at once personal and historical. In one conversation, the father seeks to explain to his son what meaning “the Semite” has for him, and the son begins to parse the political lexicon in which he lives.

The title takes on new meanings in this context. This is the word that the father offers the son in the late 1950s, when the boy is a teenager; it is the substance of paternal counsel and demand; it is a way of being named and naming oneself in a very particular set of historical contexts. It is the name that binds them together, but also the name that binds Arab and Jew. The son asks the father who they are, the two of them, their family and people, and the father answers in a series of statements, each building upon and qualifying the one that comes before. The father gives him this one word, but in the context of an analysis of a politically fraught network of words: “French,” “Jew,” “Arab,” “Algerian,” “European.”

The child asks whether he and his father are French, which means that the child is already unclear, and that the category holds sway over their lives only with some unease. The answer the father gives is yes, and he explains that “we” were here before the French. If “we” were in Algeria before the French, “we” are presumably something other than French. And yet, they are French, or have become French, or are becoming French in ways that cannot be fully anticipated even when the father gives this answer to the young boy. “Are we Arabs?” the son inquires. And at least here there is no sense that one is either French or Arab, though perhaps it is the workings of that mutually exclusive framework that the son seeks to interrogate with the language he has. The father’s answer is less clear: x

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“not exactly,” which means, of course, that in some sense “yes,” or that they can only be understood rightly by understanding that the name, the appearance, the food, the language are clearly Arabic, and though the paternal line all speaks Arabic, the inquiring son is not given that language, so it would seem that “French” is taking the place of “Arab” in the course of the son’s life. “Jews?” the child queries, probing to see how that word feels in the mouth, and here the father gives several answers. Judaism is a religion, and we are not at all religious.

Hitler and the collaborationists, however, did not ask any Jew whether he or she was religious before they were destroyed.

One cannot deny being a Jew without insulting the dead. So yes, to that question, the father instructs the child, you must answer “yes”—but this is an ethical demand, and not precisely a description of what is. In the end, the father offers “Semites,” which, he explains, means both Arab and Jew or, rather, names their commonality, proximity, intertwining. We are like Arabs, we lived close together on the western shore of Algeria. “That is what the word Semite says, either Jew or Arab without distinction, what Jews and Arabs share, what they are together.”

Of course, the father might have said “Arab Jew,” sometimes referred to now as the Mizrachim, indicating those Jews who descend from Arab cultures and regions (Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Persia, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Afghanistan, Syria, to name a few).1 Or he might have said “Jewish Arabs,” but the one term does not qualify the other: “Semite” is what holds them together in proximity and difference. It remains unclear how to understand the origin of his family, whether they wandered from Europe or Spain, or whether the history they have dates back to Northern Africa. So the name “Semite” comes to establish a commonality, a difference, and a proximity that cannot be denied, and that have to be thought together. The word works in both directions at once, naming less an identity than what connects two identities, the “between” by which they are xi

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separated and bound. “Semite” is what Jews and Arabs are together, and so a thought of cohabitation.2 When they live together in alliance, they are “Semites,” but when they fail to do so, the word flounders and loses its referential force. It does not name an identity, but rather a set of abiding relations, both historical and promissory.

Moreover, the term names an interpellation: who is called a “Semite” and who is included when name-calling becomes anti-Semitic? A mode of solidarity is unwittingly acknowledged as the Semite is either Jewish or Arab or both.

The son’s relation to the father pivots on the parsing of these categories. The son asks why “Semite” has to include the Jews at all, and the father explains that it is because of the French that both sides of the term, Arab and Jewish, must be held together. In 1870, the French government declared the indigenous Jews of Algeria to be citizens of France, but not the Arabs. A division and inequality were introduced that had to be politically opposed. One way to do that is to insist that “Semite” refers to an unbreakable bond, a name for resistance itself. It matters what language was used between father and son, but also between Jew and Arab. Bonds were wrought and broken by virtue of speech acts and forms of nomination.

Ambivalence emerges in the heart of this story, since it was this same father who instructs his son first that he is French even as he faults the French for historically producing the inequalities he opposes. But by the time this conversation takes place, they are living in the aftermath of European fascism as well as opposing those French settlers who wish to keep colonial control over Algeria (including the infamous OAS [Organisation armée secrète] that fought Algerian independence from 1954–62 through armed struggle). So the France the father affirms is antifascist and in favor of Algerian independence (voted by referendum in April 1961 and implemented formally in March 1962). xii

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So the son is a Semite and he is French, which suggests that after 1962, when he is sixteen years old, he will become a French Jew. But what then happens to the “Semite”? The “Semite” remains in this story so that a history and an alliance cannot be denied, the name for a form of resistance, alliance, and political hope, but also, to be sure, the name of the relation between father and son. l Like most memoirs, this one asks, “where did I come from?”

Who were my parents? Although the father was recruited to the Vichy French army, imprisoned for insubordination, and then rehabilitated to fight, first in the defense of Vichy-ruled Syria, then in the Free French Army prior to the author’s birth, the echoes of that isolation, punishment, and subjugation reverberate in the words that the author discovers in his archives and recounts and recites in his story. The father becomes a problem of the archive, and the son a researcher of documents and forms of linguistic exchange: traces of what the father’s mother and father wrote, evidence of those to whom they wrote, and what was said of them and to them, and what response was possible. The father was sentenced to prison and drafted into the army, and his life was interrupted and assailed by juridical declaration. What was the response to an unfair conviction, a prolonged imprisonment, an exploited life of the soldier? Can all these events be recovered in words? And the father’s voice, the sounding forth of that history—can it be registered and known?

The son looks to fragments of writings to know his father, to bring his own memories forth within a tissue of words. The letters and the documents all presuppose forced separation, war, imprisonment, and distance, and yet the reunions are all undocumented. All one knows is that the letters stop at a certain xiii

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point where undocumented human intimacy and its difficulties presumably take over. “Something of the missing text ran into my veins,” Guénoun tell us.

The father is called a name once again, shortly after his return from military service in 1936. A woman accuses him of throwing stones, and his life changes definitively. He is accused of a crime, and the accusation sticks—despite the contravening testimony. The father then begins an unsuccessful effort to establish his defense until history intervenes and he is recruited for service in 1939 into the “army of the Levant.”

He is accused of insubordination, is imprisoned, sentenced to five years in a military prison, and remains in custody for a year until he is freed to participate in the last-ditch defense of Vichy French Syria against a British invasion force. Under collaborationist French rule, Jews in Algeria were banned from the national education system. At that time, his father affirms that he is a Jew, and lets his family know this is the language they must use. Even then, this assertion does not break solidarity with any other subjugated people or with the struggle for freedom—it does not deny “the Semite.” For the point was not to find out which identity category fit him best, but to animate those categories in the service of a world that will be structured by equality and freedom. As Denis Guénoun puts it, his father was “seized by the universal.”3 After the Allied victory, the father comes home and Denis is born a little more than nine months later, the product of a history he seeks to fathom in these pages. After the Communist Party was banned in Algeria in 1956, his father maintained a clandestine network of comrades, and as Denis enters his teenage years, there is a sequence of events, attacks, riots, all of which catapult him out of childhood quite suddenly. This memoir also takes a sudden turn, moving from the patient and eager work of reconstructing the course of a life he only partially knew to a detailed account of the author’s own emergence. In this xiv

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sense, the memoir becomes a story and an event, one that tells how the father’s cry becomes the son’s, how “becoming French” happened abruptly, traumatically, in the wake of a political explosion at once general and literal. Guénoun’s family left Algeria for France in 1961, realizing his father’s goal to bring his family there to live. When independence was achieved in 1962, French Jews were asked to leave Algeria, deprived of citizenship at the same time that French settlers were leaving under duress.

The year 1962 marked the devastation of the alliance that the idealism of the “Semite,” Arab and Jew, was supposed to name, foster, and secure!

Whose story is being told in these pages in which the most careful parsing of nomenclature fails to secure the future it was meant to bring forth? The father’s? The son’s? Is it the relation between them that is given a halting narrative form in which sentences break off, stories discontinue, and modes of self-naming are taken over by those who seek to secure a rival semantics? So many traumatic expulsions and imprisonments predate the birth of the author, and yet, as he undergoes his own, all those histories converge for him at that moment of violence and expulsion. What seemed like an archival recovery of another life suddenly becomes alive in the life of the narrator; he enters the string of traumas whose abridged history he has been trying to tell. This becomes a story about how memoirs become drawn into the sights and sounds of traumatic events, how archives suddenly become alive again, repeating still, in the time of the now. But it is also surely about how historical events traverse the life of our narrator in those June days of 1961 when the Algerian war flooded the streets and exploded homes.

They traverse it at that time, but all time comes to repeat the force of the event in the language that seeks to retell it. If the boy had not understood the suffering his father underwent in the years before the son was born, he learns something of its sound and force through the cry that breaks out on that evening xv

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when the home is blasted open. Something of the writer is also established in the midst of that wreckage—someone who seeks to cobble together a story out of shattered remains: “we had to nail planks together, assemble a sort of fence from the scattered fragments.” In the midst of bombs, the family leaves Algeria for France, seeking a place where a child might live to the side of fear, finding it less in the geopolitical reality of “France” than in the French language and its sonorous undertones. It is, after all, his father’s cry that evening that gives him the history he searches for, a cry that carries a history, binds them both, one that makes its way into words without ever losing that sound it seeks to fathom. Does the author find his beginnings, come to know himself, or is he launched into those vocalizations that give us the primary stuff of words, the still animated fragments of unfathomable love and loss?

notes 1. Albert Memmi writes that the “Arab Jew” is a term that he uses “to remind my readers that because we were born in these socalled Arab countries and had been living in those regions long before the arrival of the Arabs, we share their languages, their customs, and their cultures to an extent that is not negligible.”

Memmi, “What Is an Arab Jew?,” in Jews and Arabs, trans.

Eleanor Levieux (Chicago: Ohara Publishing, 1975). The most important scholarly work on this topic is Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). See also Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Ella Shohat, “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab Jews,” Social Text 21, no. 2 (2003).

2. Shenhav goes so far as to say that that, given the differences among Arab Jews, the term can only name a multiplicity. At the same time, he suggests that within the contemporary political xvi

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foreword landscape in Israel/Palestine, “the concept does not necessarily depict a real identity, but rather functions as a counter-factual category that seeks to challenge what I label ‘methodological Zionism’ . . . where all social processes are reduced to national Zionist categories.” The juxtaposition of Jew and Arab, for Shenhav, “posits a critical option,” a mode of intermixing Jew and Arab or effective binationalism that, he claims, has become unthinkable within the terms of contemporary Zionism. Shenhav, The Arab Jews, 9.

3. For the father, to claim to be a Jew at the moment when Jew’s are deprived of their rights is to identify with a more generalized condition of subjugation, one that objects to the same deprivation of rights imposed on any minority. See the resemblance to Franz Fanon’s important statement: “Anti-Semitism hits me head-on: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being a man. I cannot dissociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother.”

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 89.

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