Our friend Rolland Doukhan

Rolland Doukhan was born in 1928 in Constantine. And he always remained faithful to the imprint of his childhood and then of his engagement during the Algerian War. Having joined the Algerian Communist Party at the age of seventeen, and then, on his arrival in France, the French Communist Party (with his friend Jean Beckouche he joined the Groupe de langues of the so-called colonial students), he would remain bound by friendship to several Algerian intellectuals and writers — Kateb Yacine, Mohamed Dib, and above all Malek Haddad, his almost-brother, whose character Simon Guedj in Le quai aux fleurs ne répond plus (The Flower Quay No Longer Answers; 1961) he no doubt inspired.¹

Although he published a few poems in Les Lettres Françaises as early as 1948, it was nevertheless from the 1990s onward that he devoted himself entirely to writing — a vocation that was essential to him — publishing novels and short stories, among them:

Berechit (Denoël, 1991), Juste un instant d’automne (Just a Moment of Autumn; Denoël, 1994), L’Arrêt du cœur (The Stopping of the Heart; Denoël, 1998).

Rolland Doukhan’s prose is marked by a dimension at once poetic, political, and memorial; it is irrigated by the imprint of his native city, Constantine, so present in his work and in his memory.

It is also marked by the place he grants within it to the Other. Giving voice to an Algerian doctor, an adolescent, or to a Muslim woman struggling against the status imposed upon her, he was able to render the point of view of characters he grasped in their contradictions, their commitments, their inscription within a historical situation that was often tragic — particularly during the “dark decade” of the Algerian civil war. And he drew these characters belonging to the Arab-Muslim world while bearing witness to a closeness and an empathy that make of him a singular voice in French-language Jewish literature.

He knew himself to be marginalised by his choice of dialogue in times of confrontation and exacerbation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a conflict that grew, for him, ever more painful. But he remained faithful to the ideals of coexistence and justice he had always defended.

He claimed, as a source of richness, his cultural métissage and the multiplicity of his belongings, calling himself Arab, Jewish, and French. Which did not prevent him from being steeped in Jewish culture and memory. The title of his first novel, Berechit, Au commencement (In the Beginning), taking up the first word of the Pentateuch, announced from its very title the claim to an inheritance, just as the Arabic words scattered through his texts bore witness to the presence of the Algerian past.

Finally, and perhaps above all, he wished to be a witness to a coexistence between Jews and Muslims in Algeria which, without being idyllic, was real and possible.

In his novels he sought to make heard, within the French language, the language of childhood — a mingled, métissée tongue, resonant with echoes, summoning the very particular Arabic his mother Baia spoke, mixing the love for Algeria with the love for the mother: “the intact voice of my persistent mother,” he writes.

We publish here a short story he had entrusted to us several years ago, which interweaves these two themes.