Albert Memmi (Tunis, 1920 - 2020) was a French-Tunisian writer and essayist of Jewish origin whose work examined colonialism, identity and racism from the viewpoint of someone who belonged to several worlds at once. Raised in a household where Arabic was spoken, he was educated in French and wrote in that language, yet he never lost the Judeo-Arabic of his childhood.
Born into a large family of artisans, one of thirteen children, he attended the prestigious Lycée Carnot in Tunis and began studying philosophy at the University of Algiers. When the anti-Semitic laws of Vichy France got him expelled from the university, he was sent to a forced labour camp, from which he later escaped. After the war he resumed his studies at the Sorbonne, where he eventually earned his doctorate, and he worked as a teacher in Tunisia and France.
After Tunisia gained independence in 1956 he settled in France, teaching at several institutions, including the University of Nanterre. His first novel, The Pillar of Salt (1953), with a preface by Albert Camus, is a semi-autobiographical account of life in a Tunisian ghetto. His best-known essay, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, argues that the colonizer and the colonized are bound together in a relationship that shapes both.
His later essays, such as Portrait of a Jew (1962), dealt with the precarious position of Jews in Muslim North Africa after independence. His style is measured and analytical, mixing personal experience with sociological argument. His work on racism, which treats it as a social construction that attaches value to biological differences, placed him among the writers who challenged the pseudoscientific foundations of racist thought.
His legacy lies in presenting decolonization as a process that affects dominator and dominated alike, and in his lifelong effort to reconcile East and West, both in his life and in his writing. His Anthology of Maghrebian Literature (1965 and 1969) helped bring the region's writing to wider attention. He died in 2020, aged 99.
Key works
- The Pillar of Salt (1953), a semi-autobiographical novel about life in a Tunisian ghetto and a divided identity.
- The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), an essay on the mutual dependence between colonizer and colonized.
- Portrait of a Jew (1962), an essay on the situation of Jews in North Africa after independence.
- The Desert (1977), a novel built around a long and winding life story.
Curiosities
A labour camp during the occupation
During the Nazi occupation of Tunisia he was held in a forced labour camp, from which he later escaped. His expulsion from university under Vichy's anti-Semitic laws preceded that experience.
Prefaces by Camus and Sartre
Albert Camus wrote the preface to his first novel, *The Pillar of Salt*, and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface to his best-known essay, *The Colonizer and the Colonized*.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.