The Earthquake

INTRODUCTION

by William Granara

'I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.'

Notes from Underground

This opening line of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1864 novella in which the nameless hero introduces himself to the reader could just as accurately introduce Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah, the lone main character of Tahir Wattar's novel The Earthquake (al-Zilzal). Both characters are subjects of psychological narratives which tell the story, in painful detail, of the inner turmoil of living on the edges of history and humanity.

It is Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah who gives this work its form and substance. His grotesque physique, his wobbling, rotund body sweating profusely in the murderous Constantine sun and his spiteful, cantankerous and conniving personality mould a most interesting and complex literary figure. Readers of Western literature may find in The Earthquake similarities with Rabelais' (d. 1553) Pantagruel, his literary construction through which he sought to satirise the religious, cultural and legal institutions of sixteenth-century France. One is also reminded of Alfred Jarry's (d. 1907) Ubu Roi, the central character in a theatrical trilogy, whose grotesque body, repulsive manners and vulgar speech were created to assault the artistic and ethical sensibilities of bourgeois French society and whose opening night in 1896 sent shock waves throughout even the most libertine of Parisian theatrical circles.

In the same vein, Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah is a shocking character. In fact, he is more than a man in physical, mental and spiritual decline: pathetic like the nameless narrator of Notes from Underground, and spiralling out of existence like Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the narrator of Albert Camus' novel La chute (The Fall, 1956), Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah is truly evil, a character completely devoid of any saving grace.

Ironically, the reader of modern Arabic fiction may find Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah more difficult to place. He or she may see him as somewhat of a surprise, if not an anomaly. It is indeed rare to find in modern Arabic literature an unequivocally evil character as a central figure. Certainly, there are all kinds of villains and antagonists: swindlers, profligates, traitors and collaborators, killers, drug addicts, deserters and social outcasts. The difference is that these characters are cast in the margins of both the narrative and social discourse. They are constructed to serve as victims of society's ills, as symbols of religious, social and political aberrations. They are the constructs of a particular kind of didacticism that underlines the social and ethical dimensions of modern Arabic literature. In the end, one way or another, they reintegrate into society or they fade away into literary condemnation.

The modern Algerian novel made its first appearance in the French language in the 1950s, at the time when Algerians were engaged in a struggle for national liberation from a century of French colonial rule that began with France's conquest of Algeria in 1830.* Their war for independence, which Algerians call 'The War of a Million Martyrs', began in 1954 and ended with independence in 1962. Naturally, this long, hard-fought struggle figures prominently in the shaping of this new novel. As Aida Bamia observes, 'This burning desire to reveal their existence and their true nature to the world characterised the beginning of a national Algerian literature.'┼ This new-born novel, written in the language of the colonist, and being the only language available to many of its writers, confronted the enemy in their own idiom and, at the same time, sought to articulate an Algerian national consciousness and identity.╬ Most important, this first-generation Algerian novel brought attention to the misery of both urban and rural poverty, as well as the social injustice suffered by the indigenous population at the hands of the colonial government and the communities of privileged European settlers.

The first Arabic-language novels in Algeria, by contrast, come almost a decade after independence. The events of the long and bitter struggle and the bitter memories of it provide both the context and the inspiration for these first Arabic novels.* The political, social and religious disputes that formulated the modern Algerian national discourse, and which were set aside in common cause in the struggle against French occupation, resurfaced in this new Arabic fiction in its various characters, plots, settings and points of view. In a very real sense, the Arabic Algerian novel is a post-colonial novel.

Tahir Wattar is a pioneer of the Arabic novel in Algeria. He was born in eastern Algeria in 1936, received a traditional (religious) education in Algeria and studied at the prestigious al-Zaytouna University in Tunisia where he lived during most of the war of independence. After his return to Algeria he wrote for literary journals before launching his own career as a writer. He has written plays and collections of short stories but is most widely known for his novels. Wattar's first novel al-Laz (The Ace), written between 1965 and 1972 and published in 1974, and its sequel, al-Laz: al-'ishq wa al-mawt fi al-zaman al-harashi (al-Laz: Love and Death in Terrible Times), published in 1982, are prime examples of this Algerian Arabic independence literature.*

His second novel, al-Zilzal (The Earthquake), was also published in 1974. If al-Laz is to be considered his 'classic' novel of the Algerian struggle for independence, then The Earthquake is Wattar's 'classic' postcolonial novel. In it there is much that draws upon both Western and Arabo-Islamic literary traditions and themes (which will be discussed in some detail below), a key factor that distinguishes the Arabic novel in Algeria from its French counterpart. Beyond the mere difference of language, the Arabic novel delves into a history, religion and mentality that most Algerians share with a huge number of Muslims and Arabs, past and present, in ways that the French novel of Algeria failed - or chose not - to do.

Reading Tahir Wattar's The Earthquake is a challenging enterprise. In no way could it serve as an easy 'entry' into modern Arabic - or even Algerian - literature. In addition to its cultural complexity, there is the stark, consciously unaesthetic, black-and-white prose, the sudden and frequently shifting stream(s) of consciousness from the third-person narrative to first-person monologues, interspersed with dialogues that take place in both the present and the past, all the classic literary devices of the modern novel that challenge the reader to interpret its meanings. The embedding of stories within stories, evocative of the narrative technique of A Thousand and One Nights, has at times a dizzying effect. The bleak descriptions of strewn garbage, the stench of human filth, images of urban poverty and suffering and recollections of heinous crimes against the innocent, force the reader to share in the experience of Wattar's disturbing visions of an imaginary universe, of a society going wrong.

The basic structure of the novel is the journey (rihla), a popular subgenre in Arabic literature in all its phases. Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah sets out from the capital, Algiers, and drives nine hours to Constantine (the site of an actual earthquake in 1947) in search of relatives in whose names he intends to register his land in an attempt to prevent the government from nationalising his property. Thus the plot follows faithfully the historical reality of agrarian reform which was one of the cornerstones of the post-independence restructuring of the 1970s. The novel begins with his arrival in Constantine, and all of its events take place, reminiscent of Joyce's Ulysses (1922), in one long, tortuous afternoon. His quest to deceive the government in its campaign to launch a programme of agrarian reform leads Boularwah through a labyrinth of back alleys and past memories. In the process he becomes the consummate rogue, the deceitful trickster whose chaotic adventures and reminiscences, both real and imaginary, derail this journey into the picaresque. As he traverses the city of Constantine, precariously perched high on a rock, and makes his way across its seven bridges, he battles the forces of a rapidly changing society while confronting the demons of his past. The sequence of his recollections constructs an autobiographical narrative whose subject, a defiantly proud scion of a family of ruthless, rural landowners, swindlers, traitors and collaborators with the colonial authorities, tells his story of modern Algeria from a consistently adversarial and surrealistically twisted point of view.

The young Abdelmajid Boularwah's journey to Tunisia to receive an 'Islamic' education and his return to Algeria as a man of religion and learning provide the sharp ironic tone of the novel. It is also in keeping with a traditional motif of the satire of religion endemic to the picturesque'.* His vocation as a traditionally educated headmaster of a high school associates him with the class of Muslim clerics, often the subjects of lampoons in modern Arabic literature. Throughout the Arab - and Muslim - world, much of twentieth-century culture and politics has centred around debates pitting tradition against modernity, East against West, religious against secular and faith against science and technology. It...