Children of the New World by Assia Djebar

Although Camus’ novel was written in the first person, the point of view was of his hero Meursault not his own. Daoud by a sleight of hand is making the reader believe that Camus’ novel was a real life testimony - “A man who knows how to write kills an Arab” This is a lie. This was the moment I threw the book across the room for two reasons. Then the man begins to explain that his act was the fault of a God that doesn’t exist and that he did it because of what he’d just realised in the sun and because the sea salt obliged him to shut his eyes…….” A man who knows how to write kills an Arab who, on the day he dies, doesn’t even have a name, as if he had hung it on a nail somewhere before stepping onto the stage. “I’m going to outline the story before I tell it to you.

For those readers who are not familiar with Camus novel Daoud must outline the story and he does it like this: Daoud’s writing imitates Camus short staccato-like sentence structure and is alive with references to Camus’ novel and other writings. It is the mother who is the prime mover cajoling her surviving son into greater efforts to attain some sort of closure that ends with him taking out his own retribution.ĭaoud’s novel starts with the single sentence: “Mother’s still alive” today which mirrors the first sentence in Camus’ novel: “Mother died today” and from the moment I read this I was alert to the idea that this was a novel too clever for its own good nothing I read subsequently changed my view. Kamel Daoud gives the Arab a name: Musa, thereby providing a critique of Camus’ colonial perspective in centring his story on the Frenchman: Daoud imagines that Musa’s younger brother and his mother painstakingly investigate the murder an event that shapes the rest of their lives. The Meursault Investigation is in part a reworking of Albert Camus famous novel L’estranger in which an unnamed Arab is killed on the beach by the Frenchman Meursault. One is clever, witty, utterly modern and ultimately vacuous, the other is a profound exploration of Muslim men and women caught in a dirty war and fighting for survival.

The Meursault Investigation and Children of the New World are novels written by Algerian authors whose central themes radiate from events during the war. It was a bitter and complex struggle between a colonial power and its former colony with terror attacks and retribution being key elements.

It was a conflict characterised by guerrilla warfare and was notorious for the weapon of torture used by both sides. The Algerian war of Independence 1954-62 was fought between France and the independence movement in Algeria. The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud.Ĭhildren of the New world by Assia Djebar.

Children of the New World by Assia Djebar