An Interview with David Carroll

In Albert Camus the Algerian David Carroll concentrates on Camus’ conflicted relationship with his Algerian background and finds important critical insights into questions of justice, the effects of colonial oppression, and the deadly cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism that characterized the Algerian War and continues to surface in the devastation of postcolonial wars today. nnQuestion: Why is the book entitled Albert Camus The Algerian?nnDavid Carroll:The Nobel laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), one of the most widely read and influential writers of the twentieth century, was born and grew up in extreme poverty in what was until 1962 French colonial Algeria. Three of his novels and four short stories take place in Algeria, and in numerous essays written between the late 1930s and 1958, he regularly denounced the injustices suffered by Arab and Berber Algerians under French colonial rule and demanded equal rights and justice for all Algerians. By focusing on the place of Algeria in Camus’ literary texts and political essays and what he called “the Algerian” in him, this book challenges the prevalent postcolonial criticism of Camus in the hope that his attempts to defend the rights of poor and oppressed Algerians will be better appreciated and his voice once again listened to in the context of current political debates.nnQ: Given that Camus did not support the Algerian National Liberation Front (the FLN) in its armed struggle for independence, why should we not follow Camus’ harshest critics and treat him as a pro-colonialist writer?nnDC: Even though he had been a severe critic of colonialism since the mid-1930s, when hostilities broke out in Algeria in November 1954 and the violence against civilians continued to escalate throughout the war, Camus condemned the undemocratic, repressive nature of the FLN and attacked especially its use of terrorism against the different civilian populations of Algeria. In his political essays, he argued that colonialism should end but also insisted that a democratic postcolonial Algeria should nonetheless remain federated with France. At the same time he condemned the use of torture and summary executions by the French army and the politics of the extreme right, which supported at any costs the continuation of French rule in Algeria. This book analyzes the way his political texts search for alternatives to radically opposed political extremes and how his literary texts both express the ideals of justice and hospitality in which he believed and convey the anguish he claimed the overwhelming majority of Algerians felt over the horrible effects of the violence that was destroying their homeland. In spite of harsh criticisms of his position from both the political left and right, Camus stubbornly continued to believe in the possibility of creating a democratic, multi-cultural society in a postcolonial Algeria in which all populations would have equal rights. Two years after his death Algerian independence was achieved at an incredible cost in human lives, but Camus’ vision of a multi-cultural Algeria, what he called an “Algeria of justice,” was never realized. Whatever the practical limitations of the political solutions he proposed for ending France’s “dirty war,” this book demonstrates why it is a serious mistake to equate his vision of an “Algeria of justice” with a defense of French colonialism.nnQ: What does Camus’ first published novel, The Stranger, have to do with current events?nnDC: Two summers ago, the attention of the media was suddenly focused on Camus’ first published and most famous novel, The Stranger, after it was announced that President Bush had read the novel during the summer. The novel was generally described by journalists as the story of a Frenchman in Algeria who, after a scuffle on a beach in which one of his friends is wounded by an Arab wielding a knife, returns alone to kill the Arab who knifed his friend. Journalists seemed intent on linking this novel, published in 1942 during the German Occupation, to the armed struggle in Iraq between different Arab factions and the United States. Various theories have been proposed as to why the President might have chosen to read this novel, but whatever his reasons, journalists have tended to misrepresent the novel by focusing almost exclusively on its most sensational aspect: the murder of an Arab. The chapter in this book devoted to The Stranger shows how after his arrest and throughout his trial, Meursault, the protagonist and first-person narrator of the novel, is radically transformed by his prison experience and the loss of his privileged place as a free French citizen in colonial society. He is ultimately judged, convicted, and sentenced to die not for the murder he actually committed but because he is judged as lacking a soul and thus as being of a different and inferior species or “race” from the French who sit in judgment of him, but who at the same time speak for him and exclude him from his own legal proceedings. Rather than an expression of or justification for colonial violence, the novel portrays rather the injustice of colonial “justice” and of the death penalty in general. Meursault dies as and in the place of the indigenous other in French colonial society, in the place in fact of his Arab victim. Their fates are equally tragic. Read in this way, the novel would thus be an excellent choice for anyone’s summer reading.nnQ: Do Camus’ politics during World War II and later during the Algerian War, no matter how much they seem to differ, have anything in common? Or is it more accurate to claim, as his opponents did during his lifetime and major postcolonial critics have continued to claim ever since, that during the cold war and then even more radically during the Algerian War, he moved from the left to the right?nnDC: After writing severe critiques of colonial injustices for a socialist newspaper in Algiers before World War II and then editing and writing editorials for the clandestine resistance newspaper Combat during the war, Camus’ politics did evolve, but no matter how harsh his criticisms of militantly anti-colonialist “Parisian intellectuals,” he continued to attack the extremist politics of right-wing colonialists and their attempts to defend “Algérie française” at all costs. During the cold war Camus attacked Stalinist forms of Marxism and wrote polemical critiques of both the concept and reality of revolution in general. But at the same time he remained critical of what could be called imperialist forms of democracy, as well as what he feared was an emerging Islamic empire rooted in political and religious fanaticism. What his pre-World-War-II politics, his resistance politics, his postwar politics, and his Algerian War politics have in common is that they are all rooted in an uncompromising opposition to the death penalty. Rather than moving from the political left to the right, this book argues that Camus became increasingly convinced of the injustice of capital punishment or what he called “legalized murder,” whether death sentences were imposed by courts of law or decided by military or political organizations. By extension, he attacked all justifications for the assassination of political opponents, indiscriminate bombings of cities and villages, the torture and execution of suspects, and the use of both terrorist and counterterrorist tactics against civilians. Camus placed justice before politics, the protection of the lives of individual civilians before the achievement of political goals, no matter how just those goals were claimed to be or in fact actually were. This explains why during the Algerian War he repeatedly denounced the criminal nature of both the French army’s counterterrorist strategy and the FLN’s use of terrorism against civilians. This book argues that the most compelling aspect of Camus’ writings on the Algerian War for readers today is their unrelenting and often anguished demand for justice for the people of Algeria who were being sacrificed during the war, a demand that was ignored by both sides during the war.nnQ: What are the ethical and political questions raised by Camus’ literary texts that have the most relevance today?nnDC: A list of these problems (with the relevant literary texts indicated in parentheses) would include the following: 1) the recognition of and respect for those considered to be foreign or other (The Stranger); 2) the ideal of total freedom, which in Camus’ work provides a critical perspective not just on colonial inequalities but on economic and political oppression in general (“The Adulterous Woman”); 3) the notion of unlimited hospitality as a founding ideal of society (“The Host”); 4) the mad and totally destructive nature of blind faith in “the Truth” and the image of political hell that is produced by the cycle of violence created by opposing religions or ideologies engaged in total war against each other and against what each considers “Evil” (“The Renegade”); 5) the spontaneous resistance of human beings to deadly oppression and the limits that need to be placed on all political action (The Plague); and 6) the moral necessity to acknowledge the limits of politics in general and the priority that needs to be given to the protection of innocent lives in the pursuit even of noble goals such as freedom, independence, or justice (The First Man).nnQ: What did Camus mean when he described the era in which he lived as “an age of terror?”nnDC: “An age of terror” in Camus’ terms is not simply an age in which innocent civilians are sacrificed and their deaths justified as the necessary means to achieve allegedly noble ends. It is also an age in which all conflicts are “total,” struggles between Good and Evil, Justice and Injustice, “Us” and “Them.” It is an age in which dissent is attacked or violently repressed because it is considered by both sides to be treasonous and to serve the enemy; it is an age in which each individual is given the stark choice between being either with “us” or against “us,” a true believer or an infidel. It is an age in which politics is treated as religion, and religion, the belief in an absolute Truth, considered the unquestionable basis for politics. This book argues that Camus’ political and religious agnosticism, his lack of faith in any absolute “Truth,” is as vital a weapon against political absolutisms today as at any other time. Following Camus, one would have to say that an age of terror cannot be brought to an end by waging war on terror, since war is what defines the age of terror in the first place. And a “war on terror” that causes the deaths of countless innocent civilians will not fail to escalate the very terror against which it is waged. In his short story, “The Renegade,” Camus depicts such a cycle of potentially unending violence as self-destructive madness. This book argues that there may be no better time than the present to take seriously Camus’ rejection of such madness and his emotional appeal for a civilian truce in the midst of the Algerian War in order to immediately end the cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism destroying the people of Algeria, not for political but humanitarian reasons. Both sides in the war ignored his warning that to win such a war through the use of terror or the equally or even more violent suppression of terror was not in reality to end the cycle of violence but rather to set the stage for the next cycle. This book asks whether we can really afford to continue to ignore such warnings today?