What the Day Owes the Night

Voted best book of the year in 2008 by the editorial staff of the magazine Lire, and winner of the France Télévisions prize, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (What the Day Owes the Night) can be read, three years after its publication—that is to say, in the light of the current revolutions of the Arab world—as a novelistic illustration of what Benjamin Stora calls “the exhaustion of the ‘old-soldier’ memory”:

“The important thing, however, is that, forty years on, the ‘old-soldier’ memory, the one that always wants to live with it, to play the war over and over again, is exhausting itself. The men and women who are going to have to make, and are already making, the Algeria and the France of tomorrow bear no responsibility in yesterday’s confrontation. The majority of young people regard the independence of Algeria as an inevitable, necessary, normal fact. The Franco-Algerian drama becomes merely one page of their history. They want to read this page methodically, far from the sound and the fury so long sustained by their elders, the actors of this history. They mean to break out of the confinement of the colonial trauma, to break out of the litanies of the former victim and the blind self-justifications of the former aggressor, in order to forge values of equality on the ruins of contempt, of hatred.”

Without excluding the “litanies” of some and the “blind self-justifications” of others, Yasmina Khadra’s novel is the disenchanted evocation of an adventure soon confiscated: on the eve of July 5, the day of independence, the hero does not choose the jubilation of the streets but prefers to go “to the port to watch the banished depart. The quays were flooded with passengers, with luggage, with handkerchiefs of farewell. Liners waited to weigh anchor, swaying under the grief of the expatriates. I remained leaning over the port until daybreak, unable to bring myself to the idea that what had not really begun was well and truly finished.”

Is this a turning point in Yasmina Khadra’s work? This French-language Algerian author is among the best known in France for novels¹ whose favorite theme is the spiral of terrorist violence into which his heroes embark. On this subject one may reproach him for an unclear argument, particularly when he attributes the choice of terrorist action to purely exogenous factors without truly questioning the internal causes of terrorism in Muslim societies.

Yet in Ce que le jour doit à la nuit, the hero is a man who precisely does not pass to action.

Younès, the narrator and main character of the novel, is the son of a farmer ruined by the burning of his harvest at the start of the 1930s; he must therefore leave the rural world, and goes off with his family to settle in the slums of Oran; following his father’s downfall, he leaves Oran alone for the small village of Rio Salado. Entrusted to a more well-to-do uncle, thanks to whom he is able to pursue his studies, he becomes a pharmacist just as the war of independence begins.

Thus one discovers, in the course of this very fine novel, urban and rural Algerian society through a host of extremely well-chosen and well-drawn characters, belonging to various social strata and to the different communities. Jean-Christophe Lamy, Fabrice Scaramoni, Dédé Jimenez Sosa, or Simon Benyamin: the names of the band of pals of the adolescent Younès say well enough the richness of this multi-communal Algeria where there formed friendships that transcended identities: “They called us the prongs of the pitchfork. We were inseparable.”²

But at the outbreak of the war of independence, the choices diverge: Jelloul takes to the maquis, Lamy enlists in the ranks of the OAS; only Younès cannot bring himself to act. Like Doctor Zhivago abducted and taken prisoner by the Reds to become their physician, he becomes, nolens volens, the pharmacist of the maquisards, the one who receives in his letterbox lists of medicines to prepare for the insurgents. He does not join them, and this despite the reproaches of Jelloul, who takes to the maquis: “You’re nothing but a coward. What is happening in our villages bombed with napalm, in the prisons where they guillotine our heroes, in the maquis where they gather up our dead with a teaspoon, in the camps where our militants rot, you do not see it.”

Neither victim nor actor, the hero of Yasmina Khadra is exactly like the Frédéric Moreau of L’Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education)³: elsewhere, on the sidelines, both on the plane of political action and on that of the heart. In both characters, regrets and dreams take the place of a reality they do not know how to grasp. Younès’s passion for Émilie runs through the whole novel, but ends in permanent failure, as the last letter she addresses to him shows. The beloved woman is, in both novels, an idealized and inaccessible chimera; action, like desire, is thwarted in favor of a painful and disenchanted reverie.

History moves fast, and so do its repetitions: will it soon be said of these Arab springs that “what had not really begun was well and truly finished”?⁴

Notes