Albert Memmi


Albert Memmi was a French-Tunisian writer and essayist of Tunisian-Jewish origins.

Biography

Memmi was born in Tunis, French Tunisia in December 1920, to a Tunisian Jewish Berber mother, Maïra Sarfati, and a Tunisian-Italian Jewish father, Fradji Memmi, and grew up speaking French and Tunisian-Judeo-Arabic. During the Nazi occupation of Tunisia, Memmi was imprisoned in a forced labor camp from which he later escaped.
Memmi was educated in French primary schools, and continued on to the Carnot high school in Tunis, the University of Algiers where he studied philosophy, and finally the Sorbonne in Paris. Albert Memmi found himself at the crossroads of three cultures, and based his work on the difficulty of finding a balance between the East and the West.
Parallel with his literary work, he pursued a career as a teacher, first as a teacher at the Carnot high school in Tunis and later in France at the École pratique des hautes études, at the École des hautes études commerciales in Paris and at the University of Nanterre.
Although he supported the independence movement in Tunisia, he was not able to find a place in the new Muslim state both because of his French education and his Jewish faith, and following independence he "was asked to leave" the new state.
He died in May 2020, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, at the age of 99.

Writings

Memmi's well-regarded first novel, La statue de sel, was published in 1953 with a preface by Albert Camus and was awarded the Fénéon Prize in 1954. His other novels include Agar, Le Scorpion, and Le Desert.
His best-known non-fiction work is The Colonizer and the Colonized, about the interdependent relationship of the two groups. It was published in 1957, a time when many national liberation movements were active. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface. The work is often read in conjunction with Frantz Fanon's Les damnés de la Terre and Peau noire, masques blancs and Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism. In October 2006, Memmi's follow-up to this work, entitled Decolonization and the Decolonized, was published. In this book, Memmi suggests that in the wake of global decolonization, the suffering of former colonies cannot be attributed to the former colonizers, but to the corrupt leaders and governments that control these states.
Memmi's related sociological works include Dominated Man, Dependence, and Racism.
Sean P. Hier, in a review of Memmi's Racism, calls it "well-written and autobiographically informed." He writes that Memmi's main claim is that racism is a "'lived experience' arising within human situations which only secondarily become 'social experiences.' According to Hier, Memmi writes that racism is "endemic to collective human existence."
Memmi wrote extensively on Jewish identity, including Portrait of a Jew, Liberation of the Jew and Jews and Arabs.
He was also known for the Anthology of Maghrebian literature published in 1965 and 1969.
Reviewing Memmi's fiction, scholar Judith Roumani asserts that the Tunisian writer's work "reveals the same philosophical evolution over time from his original viewpoints to less radical but perhaps more realistic positions." She concludes that "his latest fiction is certainly more innovative and different than his earlier work."
In 1995, Memmi said of his own work: "All of my work has been in sum an inventory of my attachments; all of my work has been, it should be understood, a constant revolt against my attachments; all of my work, for certain, has been an attempt at...reconciliation between the different parts of myself."

French