On May 26, 1993, the Algerian novelist and poet Tahar Djaout was gunned down in an attack attributed to Islamist extremists. An outspoken critic of the extremism roiling his nation, Djaout, in his death, became a powerful symbol for the “murder of Algerian culture,” as scores of journalists, writers, and scholars were targeted in a swelling wave of violence.
The author of twelve books of fiction and poetry, Djaout was murdered at a critical point in his career, just as his literary voice was maturing. His death was a great loss not only for Algeria and for Francophone literature but also for world literature. Rage at the news of his slaying was explosive but did nothing to quell the increasing bloodshed.
'Silence is Death' considers the life and work of Djaout in light of his murder and his role in the conflict that raged between Islamist terrorist cells and Algeria’s military regime in the 1990s. The result is an innovative meditation on death, authorship, and the political role of intellectuals. By collapsing the genres of history, biography, personal memoir, fiction, and cultural analysis, Julija Šukys investigates notions of authorial neutrality as well as the relationship between reader and writer in life and in death. Her work offers a view of reading as an encounter across time and place and opens the possibility of a relationship between different cultures under peaceful terms.
In suggesting Algerian writer Djaout is still alive, it's not very up-to-date: Djaout was murdered in 1993. But in a way this is also appropriate, as this text is a way of attempting to keep - in some sense - the author alive.
Šukys' text isn't straightforward literary biography, and much of the book concerns itself with the question of how to present the man, memory, and writings. She worries, for example:
Quote:
To forget the mere man is to kill him again. In writing the death of Tahar Djaout we must do so in a way that does not reduce the man to a symbol. But how can we give voice to the dead without doing violence to their memory ?
Among her attempts is one in which she addresses part of the text to Djaout himself (in a letter to the dead author). And in the final section of the book she literally gives him voice, imagining 'A Posthumous Interview with Tahar Djaout'.
Elsewhere Šukys also imagines a trip to Algeria, and in this creative hybrid approach - mixing fact with invention - to handling the material plays an interesting game of how we see an author, his writing, and - in Djaout's case, especially - his circumstances. Each reader likely pieces together what they know and hear about an author and his work and creates a sort of mental picture; here Šukys takes that much further (and goes more in depth).
Along the way, Šukys does provide a good deal of information about Djaout and his writings. Only two of his novels are readily accessible in English translation, and so the larger body of his work likely isn't familiar to those who don't read French, but Šukys gives a good overview of his poetry and fiction, and at least some sense of his influential journalistic work.
Šukys also explains the situation in Algeria well - especially the targeting of intellectuals in the 1990s, as Djaout was one of the first prominent ones to be assassinated, but far from the last. In beginning the book with a visit to the Iowa town with an unlikely Algerian connexion, Elkader, she also sets an American context for the larger issues of Algeria over the past two decades, and the shifting attitudes towards the Islamic world in the US since the events of the fall of 2001.
The book works best as an example of how we create our own stories in any book we read, how facts don't necessarily provide more than the fictions we spin around them. Šukys writes:
Quote:
Every time we read, we enter into a kind of dialogue with the dead, by entering the book, or by internalizing the book. A dialogue with the dead is a thinking journey. And a thinking journey takes us through interior territories.
Among the amusing observations she makes is a (mis)quote in the Lonely Planet Guide to Algeria, garbling Djaout's words - and identifying him as a woman. What is meant to be a factual guide proves no more reliable about even the most basic things .....
A relatively short book, Silence is Death is an almost impressionistic account. There's considerable information about Djaout, and a sense of his significance is conveyed, making for a solid introduction to the author - but it's in the way she has framed and presented the material that Šukys has created something that's of greater interest and appeal than the usual author-monograph.
Jeudi 24 mai 2007 -- L’association culturelle Tussna de Tizi Ouzou a décidé de rendre hommage au poète-écrivain et journaliste Tahar Djaout assassiné en 1993, Alger. Du 23 au 26 mai, les animateurs de cette association et leurs invités évoqueront le défunt, premier journaliste à être assassiné durant les années de violence et de terrorisme. Une soixantaine de confrères le seront après lui. Des récitals poétiques et des conférences sont programmés pour ces journées d’hommage à ce fils du village d’Oulkhou, à Ighil Ivahriyen, près d’Azeffoun. C’est là qu’il est né un certain 11 janvier 1954, à quelques mois du déclenchement de la guerre d’indépendance, et c’est là qu’il sera enterré 39 ans plus tard, un certain 3 juin 1993.
Une semaine plus tôt, c’est-à-dire le 26 mai 1993, il recevra deux balles dans la tête alors qu’il était dans sa voiture, près de chez lui, prêt à rejoindre son lieu de travail, l’hebdomadaire Ruptures qu’il avait lui-même créé en janvier 1993, en compagnie de ses anciens collègues d’Algérie Actualité, en l’occurrence Abdelkrim Djaad et Arezki Metref.
Directeur de l’hebdomadaire, il ne verra pas plus de vingt numéros du journal qu’il a enfanté. Il lègue sa célèbre phrase que beaucoup de journalistes reprendront dans leurs écrits : «Le silence c’est la mort. Et toi, si tu parles, tu meurs. Si tu te tais, tu meurs. Alors parle et meurs.»
"A bookseller battles the bizarre restrictions of a totalitarian regime in this final novel by Djaout, an Algerian novelist, poet and journalist who wrote the book just before being assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists in 1993. Bousalem Yekker is the haunted, introverted protagonist, a 50-ish woodworker who also runs a bookstore in a culture being stripped of artistic expression by a conservative group known as the Vigilant Brothers, who believe that such expression should be subjugated to the worship of God. Djaout provides precious little elaboration on how the group took over, and even less on why the youthful supporters of the movement would buy into the drab, colorless world the party's vision endorses. Most of the book consists of chapters in which Yekker finds himself increasingly boxed in by government repression. Once he realizes he is basically powerless to fight their efforts, he begins to look back on the more romantic aspects of his own past with an odd mixture of bitterness and nostalgia. Djaout's writing displays an excellent flair for poetic description, but the threadbare plot doesn't provide much to differentiate this novel from other titles in which heroic protagonists battle repressive regimes. The concept of a culture in which art, beauty and expression are totally repressed is an interesting notion that allows this book to work to some extent as a cultural parable, but the underdevelopment of the plot prevents Djaout from getting beneath the surface of the compelling issues he tries to examine."
***
Boualem Yekker is a bookseller who refuses to abandon his liberal political beliefs despite pressure from the totalitarian government. His wife and children abandon him and accept the political and religious rhetoric of the nation's new leaders. Yekker is left to his memories of the way of life he has lost and of the last summer of reason, the last season in which people tried to fight the oppression of the emerging government. Yekker is a truly literary hero, openly disagreeing with the treatment of women and intellectuals in his country and never abandoning his belief in the power of books to restore sanity to a nation driven mad with self-righteousness. His creator Djaout's own defiance was silenced when Islamic extremists in his country, Algeria, assassinated him in 1993. "His opinion of life was too high for him to make do with its shadow," Djaout writes of his protagonist. That is a fitting epitaph for a brave author who believed in the power of words to conquer the hate that grows out of fear.
So often it's cast as "us against them," a battle of cultures, West versus East, or even a "crusade," with all that word's loaded implications. For several reasons, Tahar Djaout's novel The Last Summer of Reason demonstrates the error of using such thinking when it comes to radical Islamists. In fact, it shows that the impact of and battle against fundamentalism is far from us versus them.
The Last Summer of Reason examines life from the viewpoint of Boualem Yekker, a bookseller in a republic modeled after Djaut's Algeria. Taliban-like fundamentalists called the "Vigilant Brotherhood" now control the government and the state. "Some men, citing divine will and legitimacy, decided to shape the world in the image of their dream and their madness," Boualem says. "Many citizens discovered that God could reveal a grisly face." The V.B.s have renamed the republic "the Community in the Faith." Its members "act as if they are in a new kind of western at which they play at collecting as many scalps of heathens and offenders of the laws of God as possible." Weather reports disappear because "how can one argue and quibble over patterns known only to God?"
Despite the resemblance to the Taliban, Djaout was writing amidst a civil war in the early 1990s between Algeria's military government and radical Islamists. He was murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist group in 1993. The unedited manuscript of The Last Summer of Reason was found among his papers after his death. It was published without editorial change, leaving modern readers to wonder if he would have elaborated on the tale rather than leave it as a slim, almost vignette-like phillipic.
First published posthumously in French, the language in which it was written, in 1999, the book made its first U.S. appearance in January 2001. While it, of course, drew more attention with the advent of September 11, 2001, the book demonstrates the serious concern that existed among secular or mainstream Muslims about radical Islamists more than a decade ago. Yet it also shows seeming prescience on Djaout's part. Although the Taliban did not take control of the Afghan government until three years after Djaout's death, the book resounds more now because of them. He even describes V.B. members manning roadblocks as being "rigged out like Afghan warriors" and that some of the clothing worn by V.B. members being called "Afghans," reflecting that the mujahideen forces battling the Soviets in Afghanistan were grabbing the attention of the Muslim world.
The Last Summer of Reason unquestionably tends toward polemics at times. Still, Djaout's skills as a poet, novelist and journalist give us a pitiable yet endearing character who sees and experiences firsthand a variety of the ramifications of fundamentalist government - restrictions on women, conversion of the education system into a vehicle to inculcate the young, the societal peer pressure to agree or at least conform, and a description of a demonstration that seems to take you in with the crowds.
While books are the foundation of Boualem's life, flora and memory are key concepts in his story. Flora helps exemplify the variety of ideas and robust debate that hopefully germinate and take root in a healthy and growing society needs. Here, though, state effort is focused on cutting away branches that do not meet V.B. standards and, if possible, destroying it at its roots:
The new order would like to prune humanity, but also every individual human being. Expurgate, amputate, purify. Of memory leave only what celebrates the Revelation, of knowledge leave only what asks no questions, of man leave only the part that is submissive to God - a God whose outlines have been carefully drawn by the new masters: He knows no love, no forgiveness, no compassion and no tolerance. He is the God of vengeance and punishment.
Thus, as Alek Baylee Toumi points out in the introduction to this newly released University of Nebraska Press edition, it is no coincidence that Yekker means "he stood up" in Djaout's native tongue. Even though Boualem's wife and children leave him because they conform to the fundamentalist approach and consider him a pariah, he remains steadfast in his belief in words, ideas and philosophy on paper. Yet in feeling like he stands alone, memory is perhaps the only refuge because his society now breeds individual isolation and mistrust. This refuge contrasts sharply with the stark reality of his current life. And even though thousands of mainstream Muslims may agree with Boualem, "[e]veryone is barricaded behind a bulwark of hypocrisy and artificial piety."
Through Boualem, Djaout makes it painfully clear that we cannot paint all Muslims with the same extremist brush, something that too often tends to happen in the wake of September 11th and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is, rather, a story of what fundamentalist Islamic extremists will do to their own. Nor is Djaout examining perils to which only Arab or Muslim countries are exposed. Comparisons can also be made to the cultural wars in the United States, where some seek to make science subservient to dogma. In Boualem's world, the dictates of government-approved knowledge mean science can "pay attention only to those questions not settled in the Book."
As much as Bjaout intended and we wish that this be a cautionary tale, it also reflects recent realities. That sad fact may lend even greater power to his work.
Lundi 7 Avril 2008 -- La Fondation Mahfoud-Boucebci organise, le jeudi 10 avril, à 16 h, à Riadh El-Feth (espace Frantz-Fanon), une conférence qui portera sur les œuvres de l’écrivain et journaliste Tahar Djaout. Cette rencontre sera animée par Djoher Amhis, professeur de lettres françaises et auteur d’ouvrages consacrés aux écrivains algériens. Mme Amhis, qui œuvre à faire connaître le patrimoine littéraire national, présentera ce jeudi les travaux de Tahar Djaout, dont la démarche s'inscrit contre l'ignorance et l'intolérance.
Mardi 13 Mai 2008 -- L’association culturelle Tussna de Aïn El Hammam a élaboré un riche programme d’activités pour rendre un hommage méritoire au journaliste et homme de lettres Tahar Djaout, assassiné par les terroristes islamistes un certain mardi noir 26 mai 1993, devant son domicile, à Baïnem (Alger). Pour commémorer ce douloureux souvenir du 15e anniversaire de l’assassinat du poète, l’association Tussna a prévu, du 17 au 23 du mois en cours, une exposition de caricatures réalisées par Damel Lounis, un montage poétique, par l’écrivain Brahim Tazaghart, une lecture de textes par Mme Djoher Amhis et la présentation du livre les Vigiles du poète disparu par M. Gasmi. Dans ce programme, le Dr Amine Zaoui, directeur général de la Bibliothèque nationale, animera une rencontre-débat, le 19 mai, à l’université Mouloud-Mammeri de Tizi Ouzou. Le lendemain 20 mai, c’est l’écrivain Rachid Boudjedra qui animera une autre conférence à la Maison de la culture de la ville des Genêts, avant celle de Omar Belhouchet, le directeur du quotidien El Watan, le 21 mai, toujours à la Maison de la culture. Au dernier jour des festivités commémoratives, Tussna prévoit le dépôt d’une gerbe de fleurs à Oulkhou (Azeffoun), le village natal du journaliste écrivain disparu et le recueillement devant sa tombe. En parallèle, Tussna prévoit à la Maison de jeunes de Aïn El Hammam, d’autres activités, notamment des témoignages, des projections sur le poète, ainsi que la réalisation de fresques, exposition de livres et de tableaux de peinture… En cette occasion, l’association Tussna compte “fortifier les bivouacs” pour ne pas tomber dans l’oubli et ne pas perdre “la trace du torrent de vie”, comme disait le regretté Tahar Djaout.
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