The work of littérature-monde and the fictional laboratories of Alice Zeniter and Bessora

The idea of ‘littérature-monde en français’ has been a catalyst for controversies and debates around several important issues that have come to define late twentieth- and early twentieth-century literature in French such as the development of new aesthetic relations and poetic models (transcultural, transcontinental and transfrontier), the recognition of ‘minor’ literatures, and the importance of rethinking the conceptual framework and value system along with the relationship between ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’ literature(s). One of the points raised in the manifesto ‘Pour une “littérature-monde” en français’ (Le Monde, 2007) is that, even as the last decades of the twentieth century had witnessed the end of the divide between ‘committed’ and ‘artistic’ writing thanks to the ‘narrative turn’, a new line of demarcation emerged, separating metropolitan, or French proper, from ‘Francophone’ writers. Whereas the former were implicitly associated with the unfettered freedom to explore a wide variety of autobiographical, philosophical or historical narratives and to engage with any subject-matter, the latter were often confined to themes pertaining to non-European history and associated with a limited set of genres such as ethnographic, testimonial and documentary writing.

The 2007 text somewhat grandiosely proclaims that a ‘Copernican revolution’ is underway, citing as evidence the growing visibility and success of writers ‘from elsewhere’ that have come to shape the very centre of the ‘World Republic of Letters’:

révolution copernicienne. Copernicienne, parce qu’elle révèle ce que le milieu littéraire savait déjà, sans l’admettre : le centre, ce point depuis lequel était supposée rayonner une littérature franco-française n’est plus le centre . . . le centre, nous disent les prix d’automne, est désormais partout, aux quatre coins du monde. Fin de la francophonie. Et naissance d’une littérature-monde en français. (Le Monde, 2007)

As such, the authors appear to draw their legitimacy from the literary market system, a stance which can be viewed as self-serving and compromising both from the modern perspective concerned with the autonomy of the artwork and the writer’s disinterest in the contingent forces that surround her and from the postmodern perspective which assigns the artist the task of being a critic of late capitalism and globalisation. In her 2013 volume, Against World Literature, Emily Apter surveys the vast bibliography surrounding the debate about ‘littérature-monde’ and summarises the arguments for and against it. On the one hand, the concept offers a better alternative to ‘littérature mondiale’ or ‘World Literature’, it overcomes the outmoded and neo-colonial Francophonie, it recognises internationally marginalised writers, and it abolishes the ‘us’ v. ‘them’, ‘national’ v. ‘foreign’ dichotomy that has held sway over literary institutions, including academia. On the other hand, however, it mimics the Anglo-American global view of literature and its institutions, it obscures the real differences and divergences that characterise the French-speaking world (with its postcolonial, extra-Hexagonal, and continental groups, cultures and agendas), and it may even unwittingly salvage French cultural imperialism under cover of ignoring market forces and transcending national borders (Apter, 2013: 177). Apter’s own contribution to the debate consists of bringing forth two concerns unaddressed by either side: first, that ‘litt-monde [sic] partisans and detractors assume translatability as both a given and heuristic good, thereby devaluing the importance of non-translation and untranslatability for the politics of cultural relationality’ and, second, that ‘the terms “world” in littérature-monde remains curiously under-theorised [with some exceptions that she acknowledges] as a reserve of philosophical untranslatability and conceptual density’ (2013: 178).

And yet, as concise, fragmentary and under-conceptualised as it may be, the text published in Le Monde clearly places the world at the centre of its agenda:

Le monde revient. Et c’est la meilleure des nouvelles. N’aura-t-il pas été longtemps le grand absent de la littérature française ? Le monde, le sujet, le sens, l’histoire, le ‘référent’ : pendant des décennies ils auront été mis ‘entre parenthèses’ par les maîtres penseurs, inventeurs d’une littérature sans autre objet qu’elle-même, faisant, comme il se disait alors ‘sa propre critique dans le mouvement même de son énonciation’. (Le Monde, 2007)

Here its 44 signatories rely on a well-established critical vocabulary that has first been used to signal and then to describe and analyse the changes undergone by contemporary French literature – especially the novel – since the mid 1980s. The liberating return of the world in the pages of books by Ananda Devi, J. M. G. Le Clézio or Boualem Sansal also signals the writers’ turning their attention to the internal plurality of the literary field: ‘Littérature-monde parce qu’à l’évidence multiples, diverses, sont aujourd’hui les littératures de langue française de par le monde, formant un vaste ensemble dont les ramifications enlacent plusieurs continents’ (Le Monde, 2007).

With this argument, the manifesto seeks to remind readers that storytelling, history, the subject and the world had been at the heart of ‘Francophone’ and, more generally, postcolonial novels throughout the long decades of structuralist domination and formalist exhaustion. It is precisely because literature in French is plural that it allows for a pluralised understanding of its subject-matter, the world:

Mais littérature-monde, aussi, parce que partout celles-ci nous disent le monde qui devant nous émerge, et ce faisant retrouvent après des décennies ‘d’interdit de la fiction’ ce qui depuis toujours a été le fait des artistes, des romanciers, des créateurs : la tâche de donner voix et visage à l’inconnu du monde – et à l’inconnu en nous. (Le Monde, 2007)

Pheng Cheah’s recent reassessment of the concept of ‘world literature’ underscores literature's potential to act as a counter-force to the process of globalisation and the existence of the global market. World literature opens up the possibility for other worlds to come into being and constitutes an alternative to the threat of globalisation by ‘craft[ing] new stories of world-belonging for postcolonial peoples’ (Cheah, 2016: 214). More importantly, Cheah clarifies a common misunderstanding surrounding the term ‘world’: he insists that it is impossible to talk about world literature if by ‘the world’ we mean ‘the globe’ and he argues against the widespread conflation of the two terms, insisting that the world is not a geographical space, but a means to conceive of a way in which human beings exist together. The globe is ‘the thing produced by processes of globalisation’ (2016: 42), whereas the world is ‘an ongoing dynamic process of becoming, something that possesses a historical-temporal dimension and hence is continually made and remade’ (2016: 42). Therefore, literature constantly negotiates with the materiality of the world, reconfigures its symbolic shape, and reveals other ways of seeing reality: it is ‘an inexhaustible resource for reworlding and remaking the degraded world given to us by commercial intercourse, monetary transactions, and the space-time compression of the global culture industry’ (2016: 186–7).

Taken together, Cheah’s and Apter’s arguments seem to provide two contrasting, perhaps even opposed, definitions of the relationship between literature and the world and of the attempts to bring them together as ‘World-Literature’ or ‘littérature-monde’, both definitions being nonetheless centred around the question of (un)translatability. I contend that literature itself does not operate as translation understood as a system of equivalences between universal values or global situations. Instead, it functions as a laboratory (laboratorium, from Lat. laborare), etymologically a place where work is being accomplished through which something new is being elaborated or brought forth.

Books associated with a ‘littérature-monde’ stance occupy a place in the French-language literary field often without needing to justify their status and right to belong. They claim a multiple biological, cultural and literary heritage, and seek to unveil a hidden or under-recognised aspect of the world construed as the shared product of geographical, historical, political and cultural transactions. At the same time, they can reveal complex and often contradictory paracolonial forms of nostalgia and resistance (Panaïté, 2017) that bring together conflicting memorial and narrative strands, contested events, memories repressed, buried or forgotten and not easily arranged into clear-cut moral categories or ideological labels: colonial/anticolonial/postcolonial; national/immigrant; identity/alienation.

Novels such as Alice Zeniter’s L’Art de perdre and Bessora’s Zoonomia (as well as Mathias Énard’s Boussole, winner of the Prix Goncourt 2015, or Patrick Deville’s Taba-Taba published two years later, to mention only two recent novels in which Hexagonal – that is, not conventionally ‘Postcolonial Francophone’ writers – also revisit the connections between France and its colonies) combine an ambitious narrative structure which takes the form of family sagas with plots that span decades and casts of characters that include entire generations with a worldwide scope as events and characters move not only across time periods but also across space between countries and continents.

Alice Zeniter’s 2010 novel Jusque dans nos bras, inspired by the debate around national identity, received a great deal of media attention and earned her the first Prix de la Porte Dorée. The synergy between the novel’s plot revolving around a racially mixed marriage and the literary award granted under the auspices of the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration focused the public’s attention on Zeniter’s own identity as a second-generation immigrant. However, the writer has pushed back against this label in her statements where she has sought to position herself as an author trying to construct her ‘posture littéraire’ free from identitarian expectations and constraints: ‘je n’ai pas envie d’être estampillée écrivain bougnoule de service. Je n’ai pas envie d’écrire des livres sur le grand écart culturel toute ma vie, cela ne m’intéresse pas’ (Zeniter, 2010). Her other novels such as Sombre Dimanche (2013) and Juste avant l’oubli (2015) further unsettle and complicate ideological assumptions and cultural expectations. The publication in 2017 of L’Art de perdre, which returns to the issue that contributed to her popular success, can be interpreted as an attempt to reclaim on her own terms a topic to which she had previously rejected a compulsory association. The evocative energy of the family saga is tempered by the critical incisiveness of a metafictional first-person narrative lest it might fall prey to the illusions of a nostalgic, and thus oversimplified, retelling of the past. Zeniter’s book does nonetheless signal the possibility of recreating a world of lives lived and lost with its dense conjunctive tissue of words, events, feelings, and actions forgotten, repressed or silenced. The opening pages spell out the task of recovery captured in the image of the scattered or hidden ‘vignettes’ or ‘bribes’ that a knowing reader of words and of the world would collect and join together to recreate what was broken or pulled apart:

cette partie de l’histoire . . . ressemble à une série d’images un peu vieillottes . . . entrecoupées de proverbes, comme des vignettes cadeaux de l’Algérie qu’un vieil homme aurait cachées çà et là dans ses rares discours . . . pour qu’elles parviennent à former un pays et l’histoire d’une famille . . . C’est pour cela aussi que la fiction tout comme les recherches sont nécessaires, parce qu’elles sont tout ce qui reste pour combler les silences transmis entre les vignettes d’une génération à l’autre. (Zeniter, 2017: 22–3)

The dual meaning of recovery as retrieval and healing is amplified by the symbolism of paste and plaster that refers both to the artistry of painting a full picture or recreating a shattered sculpture and the therapeutic act of bandaging the wounds and setting the fractures of a broken body:

C’est à partir de là qu’il n’y a plus de vignettes, plus d’images aux couleurs vives . . . Elles sont remplacées par des morceaux tordus . . . éclats d’information . . . bribes de récits que l’on dirait tirés des films de guerre sans que personne n’ait été là pour les vivre. Et entre ces poussières, comme une pâte, comme du plâtre qui se glisserait entre les fentes . . . il y a les recherches menées par Naïma plus de soixante ans après le départ d’Algérie qui tentent de donner une forme, un ordre à ce qui n’en a pas, n’en a peut-être jamais eu. (2017: 120)

Bessora’s decidedly transfrontier profile (born in Belgium of Swiss and Gabonese parents, she lives and publishes in France) provides the inspiration for her highly satirical first book 53 centimètres published in 1999. If her preference for subject-matter such as racism and misogyny appears to fit a certain profile of the third-generation postcolonial Francophone writer, her irreverent, ironic and often puzzling style reflected in the titles of her books: Deux bébés et l’addition, Cueillez-moi, jolis Messieurs or Et si Dieu me demande, dites-Lui que je dors situates her work outside the typical categories of the feminine or immigrant writer. Published in 2018 and presented as the first instalment of a trilogy entitled La Dynastie des boiteux, the novel Zoonomia displays a new dimension of Bessora’s poetics. A second-person discourse brings the fictional hero into being by addressing him while at the same time it interpellates the reader:

L’Afrique, avais-tu pensé, ces naturels qu’on éduque et qu’on étudie. Le tout, c’était de ne pas en être, de n’être pas de ceux qu’on catalogue et qu’on décortique . . . Dans les zoos humains, tu te voulais du bon côté de la cage. (Bessora, 2018: 17)

This projective force mirrors that of a character who tries to remake himself into a colonial traveller and adventurer to escape his dominated condition and to erase the memory of an impure heritage. Zoonomia offers a twenty-first-century take on modernity’s scientific and encyclopaedic views on race and the heroic self-fashioning of the Western subject for whom the ‘savage’ world, Africa in particular, served as a (symbolic and literal) hunting ground and provides a blank, virgin and pliant space ready for experimentation, discovery and self-discovery.

In what follows, I will examine a set of aesthetic features that, by combining formal choices and ethical stances, push back against the contention that the ‘comfort zone’ of World Literature is ‘its ready promotion of identifying over differing and its curiously impassive treatment of ‘world’ and anaemic planetary politics’ (Apter, 2013: 335). In their novels, Bessora and Zeniter engage precisely with the tensions and misunderstandings that arise from the need to ‘identify’ through their characters’ struggles to fit into a racially and socially acceptable mould or recreate an elusive spatial–temporal experience while constantly foregrounding both difference as a state of being in the world and differing as a way of world-making. By calling upon a complex intertextual and intermedial web, these novels situate themselves in a promiscuous, that is, etymologically speaking, an indiscriminate worldwide continuum of references, both textual and visual, literary and non-literary, drawn from highbrow sources and popular culture, illustrating diverse and divergent ideological and political views. Their very titles are borrowed from other texts: L’Art de perdre is the translation of ‘The Art of Losing’ by American poet Elizabeth Bishop while Zoonomia refers to Erasmus Darwin’s 1794 medical treatise, but also, through its inscription in the trilogy La Dynastie des boiteux, to the classical French translation of the Bible carried out by the Port-Royal group. The creative potential as well as the ethical ambiguity of this intertexual or ‘referencial’ (Samoyault, 2001: 62) promiscuity is further heightened by the interweaving of documentary research, first- or second-person narrative, and realistic fictional representation that cause constant shifts of tone and tenor within the texts which can be as confusing as they are illuminating. From the synergy of these two features, a third one emerges: the rejection of identity narratives which haunt these novels without ever being allowed to coalesce into a coherent or final model that would provide the answer to the characters’ dilemmas around filiation, belonging and generational place in the world. Finally, the pluralisation of perspectives causes the novels to alternate between subjective and objective narratives, direct and free indirect speech, or internal and external focalisations that offer contrasting and irreconcilable worldviews.

Naïma’s story in Alice Zeniter’s L’Art de perdre is predicated on a technique of narrative fracturing that the novel exposes without attempting to reconcile, as the closing sentence of the novel underscores: ‘elle n’est arrivée nulle part’ (Zeniter, 2017: 506). It is important to note that the italicised word is the verb ‘arrived’, not the negative spatial adverb. Naïma’s quest for her family’s past works through and against official policies of memorial erasure, the self-protective silence of the first generation of immigrants and the self-assimilationist strategies of their children and, as such, aims at a ‘somewhere’, also represented by her physical journey to Algeria. Far from being devoid of an ending, a spatial and moral telos, the narrative does not, however, seek to arrive or land in a determinate place despite its tripartite structure that suggests clear divisions between generations or historical experiences, with its titles resembling signposts along the road to integration: ‘L’Algérie de Papa’, ‘La France froide’, and ‘Paris est une fête’.

Instead, through layering, juxtaposing or code-switching, the text becomes a kaleidoscope of references that blur the lines between past and present, East and West, high and low culture, alternating between Homer and family lore, personal anecdotes and transcriptions from official documents, politically committed films like La Bataille d’Alger or Indigènes or art movies like La Ligne rouge by Terence Malick and popular entertainment like Hollywood or spaghetti Westerns, the 1950s Sissi film series, or comic books. Homer in particular appears first as a cultural indicator of the heroine’s classical education, itself a means of social integration into the French Republican model, before being deployed as a true narrative model for representing Naïma’s family’s story. Although it is characterised by distance, irony and a refusal of the communal pathos that characterised the first generation of Maghrebi-French writers (that of Azouz Begag or Driss Chraïbi) which have entered the postcolonial Francophone canon under the heading of beur literature, the novel is also distinctly different from ‘la littérature des banlieues’ (represented by Faïza Guène or Mohamed Razane) since it does not display features of popular literature such as the oral and unadorned style, the use of slang, or a direct first-person narrative. Zeniter’s narrative lays claim, unapologetically and unhesitatingly, to a prestigious literary heritage. This move can be interpreted as a quest for legitimacy for the story she recounts as well as for herself as a writer. In one particularly gripping scene from Naïma’s father’s past, the feast to celebrate the coming-into-manhood of a Kabyle boy in the midst of the Algerian war, the classical intertext signifies that his experience is worthy of the same attention as the feast of Odysseus’s companions after they slaughter the Oxen of the Sun. The theme of sacrificial blood that connects the ancient and modern episodes buttresses this analogy. Moreover, at the beginning of the second part of the novel, which recounts the family’s arrival in ‘cold’ France and their experience in the Harki settlement camps, references to Vergil’s Aeneid remind the reader that Zeniter herself has embarked on a family saga of war, loss, exile and quest for the homeland reminiscent of the Greek and Roman epic poems. To follow Eric Auerbach’s oppositional scheme, unlike the religious biblical narrative, the Homeric one is not predicated on the truth because its externalised representation of the world projects its own conception of reality, one in which the abundance of details distracts the audience from the gravest crisis and reorients their attention towards the flow of the world. ¹ Zeniter’s quotations from the Odyssey when recounting her father’s coming-of-age experience (2017: 78) confirm the implied narrator’s statement that fiction can fill in the gaps left by the imperfect or reluctant family legend while at the same time signalling the narrator’s awareness of the fact that the novel shares the same fictional condition and could never claim to be a substitute for authentic, fact-based and truth-seeking history.

Bessora’s Zoonomia is a Bildungsroman that explores the potential along with the limits of the novel to operate as a genealogical laboratory. The book’s seminal epigraph, borrowed from La Bible de Sacy (also known as the Bible de Port-Royal), is God’s address to the daughter of Zion from the Book of Micah: ‘Je réserverai les restes de celle qui était boiteuse, et Je formerai un peuple puissant de celle qui avait été affligée.’ Anchored into this prophetic truth, the narrative unfolds backwards from the present time of its character to the inaugural time of the biblical afflicted recipients of God’s promise.

Intertextuality with its virtually endless network of connections and associations operates as a matrix for Johann Duchelieu’s worldwide quest allowing him to journey across different countries and continents to gain access to different racial and social milieux, and to cross the biological borders between human and animal. As the brief critical apparatus featured at the end of the book explains, the character is inspired by Paul Belloni Du Chaillu, a French-American explorer born in 1831 in Réunion who travelled the world as an adventurer and naturalist, leaving behind several books, which include a volume documenting his journey through Equatorial Africa (Bessora, 2018: 423). Setting out to find his father and, barring that, to become his own author by achieving international fame as the first ‘white’ man to have seen and hunted gorillas in Africa, the young nineteenth-century mulatto from the Réunion draws his story from the foundational texts of modern literature (Stendhal, Balzac, Conrad), history (Abbé Grégoire, Thomas Jefferson, David Livingstone) and science (Erasmus Darwin, whose work Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life provides the novel’s title). In a dizzying combination of historiography and fantasy, archival research and boundless poetic licence, realistic plotting and metafictional discourse, the narrative emerges as a second-degree, ironic and self-conscious rewriting of Oriental journey narratives and accounts of colonial exploration that both enacts and questions the phantasmagorical nature of filiation and its attendant delusions of racial domination, colonial conquest and scientific mastery of the world that can be found at the core of the modern Western project.

L’Art de perdre cites almost the entire contents of the Évian Accords interpolating it with narratorial comments in a free indirect style that makes apparent to the reader Naïma’s critical reaction to the documents. The documentary inserts emphasise the discrepancy between the archival representation of the past, on the one hand, and the reality that remains unaccounted for when it is not simply hidden behind the bureaucratic veil, on the other. Such is the case of the harki whose lived experience stands in stark contrast with the stipulations of the agreement regarding the protection of the individual rights of all Algerians in the newly independent republic. Born of the confrontation between the apparently neat surface of official documents and the messy entanglement of the family archive, the novel is imagined as a dwelling place for those who are left out of both, a ‘story without heroes’ (Zeniter, 2017: 165).

While rejecting heroic versions of history, be they global, national or communal, Zeniter’s and Bessora’s novels stage the theatre of identity politics, past and present, in order to manifest both its ever-present burden and the urgency of dismantling it. In Zeniter’s book, Naïma’s strategy when faced with the expectations associated with her ethnic group is to dismiss them as a way of affirming without stating her successful integration into the French middle class. When asked whether she ever read works by postcolonial authors like Fanon and Glissant, she rejects her association with such topics, answering flippantly: ‘Je ne vois pas pourquoi’. This is in keeping with Naïma’s own perception of herself as a successful, largely self-fashioned project in Republican integration: as a young girl, she strove to integrate into the ‘dominant culture’ and acquire the appropriate ‘codes’; as a student, to ‘infiltrate’ the ‘host culture’ in order to subvert it from within; and finally, as a young adult, she nested inside a dominant culture (which proved to be ‘toujours plus vaste’), feeling content to ‘y être à l’aise comme un poisson dans l’eau’ (Zeniter, 2017: 372). The vocabulary, filled with binaries between dominant and dominated, guest and host, is redolent of the condition of the ‘intranger’, a person who is an ‘étranger dans son propre pays’. ²

Even though she shares her co-worker’s experiences (schools attended, degrees obtained, tastes and habits acquired and displayed), Naïma is keenly aware of their different socio-economic backgrounds, degrees of wealth and access, inheriting from her father a secret fear of betraying her non-belonging through slippages big and small. Current events like terrorism intensify the feeling of being revealed as one of ‘them’ (Zeniter, 2017: 380), precipitating the character’s quest for her roots which starts with her questioning ‘cette impression qu’elle paiera pour tout ce que font les autres immigrés de France’ (2017: 375). Political discourse, media representations and everyday conversations persist in assigning Naïma a well-circumscribed identity: she is equally surprised by the repeated use of the phrase ‘les musulmans de France’, a phrase that emerges in the media after the 2015 attacks, who are perceived as ‘une communauté indivisible qui pourrait s’exprimer d’une seule voix’ (2017: 380) and by her reaction which, in trying to explain their behaviour to those who summon her to speak for her would-be community, only confirms their assumptions. Irritated by the change in attitude and tired of feeling the people’s gaze on her and others who look like her, she angrily rejects a colleague’s remarks that French ‘Muslims’ did not condemn the attacks: ‘Tu veux que j’appelle ma grand-mère et que je te la passe pour qu’elle te présente ses excuses?’ (2017: 378). Struggling with her own ambivalence, the character recognises that in the case of a civil war pitting ‘us’ against ‘them’, she would not be able to choose a side since she finds herself standing in opposition both to ‘le discours victimaire’ which makes immigration an excuse for crimes and ‘le discours conservateur musclé’ which implies that second-generation immigrants inevitably become unassimilable criminals (2017: 375). Neither plot nor discourse brings a positive – that is, definitive – resolution to the character’s dilemma of having to choose between betraying ‘the cause of the immigrants’ and risking exclusion from society. However, the ending does leave Naïma in a state that combines reflection and feeling, in which the re-examination on her life leads neither to acceptance nor despair, neither to ataraxy nor anguish, but instead fuels her ‘anger’ (2017: 433) that operates as a crucible for an open-ended transformation.

Finally, the construction of a plural perspective through the oscillation between first and third person by Zeniter and the use of the second person in Bessora is what transforms these novels into true narrative laboratories. Bessora’s Zoonomia is an ‘alternal’ novel that follows its main character in a dizzying worldwide journey from the island of Réunion to France to Gabon and to the United States before returning to Gabon and finally to France. An ‘alternal’ text refers to an archival or historiographic narrative that switches between distinct points of view in order to support a poetics of empathy that conveys the experience of an Other construed as ideologically and ontologically different (Panaïté, 2017: 48–9). This is achieved through an authorial discourse that alternates between documentary statements and personal commentary and combines strategies of distanciation (irony) and identification (empathy). Rather than offer a critical examination of his personal ambitions and desire for social advancement, the authorial voice explains the actions of the protagonist by immersing the reader in the imaginary world and thick descriptions of the nineteenth century, as is the case in Zoonomia. The second-person narrative that addresses its hero rather than representing or expressing his thoughts and actions immediately stands out as a daring storytelling device that transcends the idiosyncratic limitations of the first-person novel while refusing to accept the false objectivity of the third-person narration. Never losing sight of its subject, the narrative voice questions, interrogates, examines and cross-examines him, lays bare his angst and mocks his self-assurance, but above all teases out all the identitarian contradictions of the modern Frenchman. Johann Duchelieu is both a democratic citizen and an imperial subject, striving to achieve an idealised version of whiteness while relentlessly visited by reminiscences of ‘la chose noire’, a motif also present in the writings of Marie NDiaye:

L’Afrique, avais-tu pensé, ces naturels qu’on éduque et qu’on étudie. Le tout, c’était de ne pas en être, de n’être pas de ceux qu’on catalogue et qu’on décortique, comme Juliette [the father’s wife] te scrutait en ce moment. Dans les zoos humains, tu te voulais du bon côté de la cage. (Bessora, 2018: 17)

Imagining himself a citizen of the world and a crusader against primitive ignorance, while falling prey to the basest human instincts (jealousy, cowardice, cruelty), he seeks to achieve fame through heroic colonial exploration and scientific conquest while settling for fame achieved through bribery, manipulation and appropriation of the African natives’ work. Bessora reactivates the trope of the ‘tragic mulatto’ not only to subvert it through the picaresque narrative of a character who uses his light complexion to achieve worldwide success, but also to exploit its phantasmagoric and political potential. The novel’s hero, Johann, experiences the wrenching doubts and boundless hopes of a self-loathing biological hybrid who in his worldwide quest to erase what he thought to be the black half of his genealogy comes to discover that his ‘whiteness’ has always already been flawed and impure. Thus, the encounter with the idolised figure of the father reveals a disappointing reality: first, a physical defect, a limp, that forces the son to contemplate the unfathomable notion of an ‘Aryen boiteux’ (Bessora, 2018: 18), and, later, a more profound and irreparable imperfection: ‘Ton père . . . fils d’ange blond, petit-fils de singesse. Ton père, les trois seizièmes d’un gorille’ (2018: 178).

For the ‘mûlatre’ or, in the language of the book, ‘le blanc nègre’ (2018: 179), whose skin allows him to ‘pass’ in white society, this disillusionment strikes at the heart of the colonial fiction. Johann’s quest for proof of his superior genealogy informs everything he does: his crisscrossing of the globe from 1848 revolutionary Paris to Philadelphia or Brooklyn in the US, and to Libreville and the Ogooué Delta in Gabon, his desire to become a world-celebrated naturalist, and his sense of adventure as he seeks to come face-to-face with the object of his Melvillian  obsession and the eventual victims of his hunt, the gorillas. Instead, he is forced to come to grips with the evidence held in the ‘Negrophile’ Abbé Grégoire’s writings that attest to his black paternity:

Tu étais le descendant d’une découverte.

L’arrière-petit-fils d’une fiction. (2018: 183)

The voice that sounds out this realisation, taking on almost biblical overtones as it addresses the character, is associated with the ‘I’ of his ancestor, Johanna Banneky, called ‘la singesse’. Instead of offering absolution, her haunting (and hunted) figure stands for the repressed but undeniable branch of Johann’s lineage, shattering his hopes of resembling his father who is instead reduced to being ‘like’ his son: ‘Jean-Marie Duchelieu, une espèce de métis? Comme toi? Mais ton père n’avait pas à être comme toi! C’est toi qui devait ressembler à ton père!’ (2018: 178).

Whereas Bessora’s ironic, irreverent and probing prose exposes the circular logic of the genealogical and racial hierarchy, Zeniter’s intimate and figurative style reveals the contradictions of genealogy and ideology. Rather than providing the key to understanding the world and making it legible, family ties and generational succession are fraught with inconsistency, forcing characters to devise new interpretive models rather than relying on the ones inherited from a simplified and standardised view of the past. Thus, upon realising that his father’s choices did not align with those of his generation of Algerian revolutionaries, as a consistent and homogeneous political perspective would have it, Naïma’s own father finds himself grappling with the very substance and structure of the world:

Il est furieux et gêné qu’au moment où le monde lui est devenu lisible dans ses grandes lignes politiques, les choix de son père constituent non pas un simple grain de sable mais une boule illogique et opaque, coincée dans ses grilles de lecture. (Zeniter, 2017: 271)

In Zeniter’s book, the female protagonist is troubled both by the fact that ‘les musulmans de France’, a phrase that emerges in the media after the attacks, are perceived as ‘une communauté indivisible qui pourrait s’exprimer d’une seule voix’ and by her reaction which, trying to explain their behaviour, confirms this assumption and struggles with her own ambivalence. These examples are characteristic of the pluralising stance reflected in the narrative techniques adopted by both writers in their treatment of the subject-matter which affect the way history, and in particular colonial history, is refracted, rather than reflected, in the novels. The famous ‘memory wars’ surrounding the Algerian war are called in L’Art de perdre ‘des versions contradictoires qui ne paraissent pas être l’Histoire mais des justifications ou des revendications, qui se déguisent en Histoire en alignant les dates’ (2017: 428–9). Pluralisation also touches the discursive and linguistic levels of the book which mirror the clash between different frames of reference for representing the world. One example is the misunderstanding of the word ‘martien’ used by the grandfather Ali to describe a late-comer to the FLN ranks and, thus, to the fight for Algeria’s independence (designating those who adopted a pro-independent stance after March 1962), which contrasts with his son’s Hamid’s image of the little green men in his comic books: ‘Il finira par comprendre . . . Mais pour l’instant, elle ne signifie rien, n’évoque même pas les créatures vertes et lumineuses qu’il découvrira sur les pages crépusculaires des bandes dessinées. C’est une insulte flottante et dépourvue de sens’ (2017: 144–5). The language used to describe the lived experience of history is composed of floating islands or signifiers which every individual, group or generation invests with a different meaning. Social situations are also vectors of divergence, as revealed in the absurdist conversation between the grandfather and the French officer who had used him as an informant during the war:

– Écoute, mon vieux, dit-il dans un dernier effort, tu n’avais qu’à choisir le bon côté.

– Toi, tu as choisi le mauvais?

– Non, mais moi je suis français.

– Moi aussi. (2017: 148)

The sparse and laconic dialogue, implying a shared code between people who experience two different versions of the same reality, captures the hypocrisy disguised as frankness of the French officer, his self-delusion followed by the Algerian’s disappointment, and their common awareness of the inevitable outcome. Zeniter’s book includes countless examples of perspective clashes along temporal and generational lines for which she relies heavily on the technique of prolepsis – for instance on the question of love and marriage: ‘Il [the grandfather] ignore que pour ses enfants et encore plus pour ses petits-enfants ces quelques secondes de rêve qu’il s’autorise parfois deviendront la norme à partir de laquelle ils jugeront leur vie sentimentale’ (2017: 114). Ideological and ethical relativism is another constant of both Zeniter’s and Bessora’s books: for the former, the fallacy of the argument on religious purity or impurity is denounced when ‘le cheikh guérisseur du village’ complains: ‘Les oulémas ne nous supportent pas. Ils disent que nous avons perverti l’islam avec ce qu’ils appellent notre idolâtrie. Ils parlent au nom d’un islam pur. Mais qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?’ (2017: 119).

Both novels feature an open-ended conclusion. In L’Art de perdre, neither Naïma’s trip to Algeria not her return to France point to a narrative closure which both the tone and the grammar of the text forego without pathos. Instead, the authorial discourse reaches across the boundaries between fiction and reality and, through a singular metalepsis, invites the reader to imagine its heroine not only in motion but as motion itself: ‘Elle n’est arrivée nulle part au moment où je décide d’arrêter ce texte, elle est en mouvement, elle va encore’ (2017: 506). The ending of Zoonomia stages its exhaling hero, who has reached the end of a long life full of adventure, fame, infamy, controversy and relentless (self-)denial, in a conversation that ultimately shifts from the predominant second person of the narrative to an unnamed first person:

Et toi, tu t’agrippes à nos emblèmes.

Denier souffle.

Je suis en train de mourir. (Bessora, 2018: 421)

Although the final « je » can be attributed to Johann Duchelieu himself, thus suggesting a final reconciliation with the ‘emblems’ of his black ancestors that the character has spent his entire life running away from, the inchoative aspect of the verb ‘mourir’ stresses the unfinished, still unfolding nature of the event.

Zeniter and Bessora draw on biographical and historiographical narrative models to question and experiment with the ways in which fiction can remain engaged while also engaging in new ways with issues like memory, identity, belonging and responsibility. Their fictional laboratories not only reimagine way of situating oneself in the world but they redefine the meaning and function of ‘world’ altogether. Narrators and characters evolve across imaginary spaces that are mapped onto a real geopolitical framework while at the same time blurring and contesting established lines of demarcation between people, languages, ‘races’ and cultures. Inviting readers to imagine situations taking place in ‘une Amafriqueasie’ (Bessora, 2018: 256) or characters whose parents were buried ‘chacun d’un côté de la Méditerranée’ (Zeniter, 2017: 352) without feeling a sense of loss, exile or alienation but by adopting a lucid, critical and empathetic attitude is as far from an ‘impassive treatment of “world” and anaemic planetary politics’ (Apter, 2013: 335) as fictionally possible.