Algeria In Others' Languages
By Anca Szilagyi
 
Seemingly impenetrable on first glance, Algeria in Others' Languages compelled me, albeit a tad masochistically, to burrow through it. A collection of essays on post-colonial Algeria from a variety of scholars and novelists, it spans issues of political science, history, gender, and--most notably language. Factual, theoretical, and/or poetic, each essay approaches the politics of language from a slightly different angle, ranging from dry academic discourse to rich poetic prose that upon completion elicits a simple "wow."

The book is comprised of three sections: "Algeria in Others' Languages," "Symbolic Violence," and "Writing in Others' Languages." The articles with the most historical information are placed in the second section, which someone who knows little to nothing about Algeria (such as myself) may find annoying. To the editor's credit, however, the introduction does provide sufficient background information to prevent complete disorientation in the reader, and the organization of the essays may well have been a strategy to keep the reader involved; the essays of the second section tend toward the dry side. Perhaps the most interesting from this section is Ranjana Khanna's essay "The Experience of Evidence: Language, the Law, and the Mockery of Justice" which among other things highlights the connection between pain and silence. It concludes with the notion of a haunted language, where repressed historical events (unassimilated into the "national ego") imprint themselves into language as "a bequest from one generation to the next."

While the second section has a more historical and legal slant, the first focuses more on linguistics, introducing the three major players on the scene, Berber (Tamazight) and the Algerian Arabic dialects, Modern Standard Arabic, and French. Djamila Saadi-Mokrane paints the absurd picture of a nation unable to understand TV and radio broadcasts, with business leaders and politicians stammering in literary Arabic (the required public language), "thus consenting to linguistic mutilation."

The final section of the book is the most potent. It begins with a short piece by Abdelkebir Khatibi, author of the novel Amour bilingue (Love in Two Languages). The piece is compact and jam-packed with interesting ideas on writing, "the internal bilingualism of every language." This is followed by a reading of his novel by Reda Bensamaia; though he says "I do not think I am giving in to interpretative delirium," his nitpicky analysis of the layout of the novel indicates otherwise; either way it makes me want to take a look at Khatibi's novel and see for myself. Despite the rigor, by the end of his essay he connects bilingualism (or "bilanguage") with androgyny, the "between," and the fantastic, and I was left muttering "wow."

The second, more emphatic "wow" goes to the last piece, and obviously Berger saved the best for last. Helene Cixous's essay, "The Names of Oran," is the most rich and poetic, combining words of different languages with various senses and places into a tapestry of experience that is truly beautiful. She says:  "the untranslatable is what I love;" the love she pours into that one essay makes the entire book worth it.

(Originally printed in Scrivener #27, 2003)

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