Albert Memmi and The Problem with Postcolonialism

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Albert Memmi and The Problem with Postcolonialism

The Franco-Tunisian Jewish writer and social philosopher Albert Memmi died in the spring of 2020, having lived a full century, at least a half of which he devoted to developing an arc of thought with great relevance to some of the most vexing questions now facing the societies of the Middle East, the region where he was born, although he eventually found his intellectual and literal home in the West. We need him now.

Memmi was born in 1920 in the Jewish quarter in Tunis, at the time a French protectorate. The eldest son of a poor Italian Tunisian saddlemaker and an illiterate mother of Bedouin Berber heritage, he spoke Judeo-Arabic at home and studied Hebrew in a traditional religious school. Ambitious and studious, he won a scholarship to the most prestigious French high school in Tunisia, and went on to study philosophy at the University of Algiers. Forced to return to Tunisia after Vichy France expelled Jews from public institutions throughout the mainland and the colonies, Memmi was interned briefly in a labor camp after the Nazi occupation of Tunisia in 1942. After liberation from Nazi rule in May 1943, he decided to continue studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he became deeply engaged in Jewish intellectual life and thought and embarked on a life of letters. Returning to Tunisia in 1949, he worked as a high school teacher teaching philosophy and literature, and three years later he helped to found the Centre de Psychopédagogie de Tunis, where he studied the psychological dimensions of colonial oppression. After Tunisian independence in 1956 he returned to France, teaching in a number of universities and eventually being appointed in 1970 a professor of sociology in the University of Paris.

Memmi is remembered today chiefly for his research and his novels about the psychological impact of colonialism, which he produced when he was in his thirties, in the 1950s. He became a hero of the anti-colonial left with his novel The Pillar of Salt, a fictionalized autobiography of his childhood in French-colonized Tunisia that appeared in 1953, and his study The Colonizer and the Colonized, which appeared four years later. Promoted in the pages of Les Temps Modernes, the leading French intellectual journal that was edited by Jean-Paul Sartre, who also wrote a preface to the book, The Colonizer and the Colonized was a study of the sociological and psychological dimensions of the dependence and the privilege created by a colonial hierarchy.

This “lucid and sober” book, wrote Sartre, describes the predicament of its author as “caught between the racist usurpation of the colonizers and the building of a future nation by the colonized, where the author ‘suspects he will have no place.’” (He will have no place because he is a Jew.) The Colonizer and The Colonized made Memmi a giant of anti-colonialism, along with such writers as Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, Albert Camus (who also wrote a preface to Memmi’s book), and Aime Cesaire; one of the key figures of what later came to be dubbed the postcolonial school of thought defined by works ranging from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in 1961 to Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. But slowly Memmi’s thinking began to change. His later works sought to generalize the insights from his early phase into a broader sociological account of dependence, privilege, and racism. (He published a deep study of racism in 1982.) Memmi came to view racism and colonialism as only one instance of the more general human trait of what he called heterophobia, the fear of difference, which motivates groups to dominate, to condemn, and to exclude other groups. Memmi’s understanding converged with thinkers such as Niebuhr, for example, for whom “the chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men”; and his emphasis upon the challenge of heterogeneity anticipated an important theme in contemporary social and political philosophy.

I believe that Memmi’s work is a vital resource to make sense of contemporary failures of governance, not least in his own region, the Middle East and North Africa. The World Bank report of 1996 noted, for example, “a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years” in almost every country in Africa, adding the melancholy remark that “the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess.” The Arab Human Development Reports prepared for the United Nations in 2003 and 2004 highlighted how isolated Arab countries are from the diffusion of the world’s knowledge, mentioning as an example that the number of books translated into Arabic is miniscule. (It noted that whereas Spain translates ten thousand books into Spanish a year, the same number of books have been translated in total into Arabic since the ninth century CE, and that between 1980 and 1985 the number of translations into Arabic per million potential readers was 4.4, less than 0.8 percent of the number for Hungary and less than 0.5 percent of the number for Spain.) Likewise it highlighted the widespread ignorance and the culture ripe for conspiracy theories and irrational resentments that result from this isolation. Study after study since the 1980s has found the Middle East and North Africa to be the most repressive region in the world, with almost all countries ruled by (occasionally elected) authoritarian regimes (the only exception as a liberal democracy is, for all its agonies, Israel), and that the lowest levels of human freedom in the world are in the Middle East and Africa, and that this translates into having the highest levels of serious armed conflict in the world and the highest concentration of fragile or failing states.

This is a crisis about which Memmi has a lot to teach. It is therefore a great loss that much of the world remains unaware of his contribution. The left disinherited him because his later works took positions contrary to progressive and postcolonial stances. The discerning and unsentimental eye that he trained on the internal limitations of the postcolonial societies as they struggled and often failed to achieve the original lofty goals of independence and democratic self-governance generated insights that admirers of his early anti-colonialist work came to deplore. Memmi’s concerns about post- independence societies went far beyond the struggles that necessarily accompanied independence. He also sought to shed light on the situation of the individual in the aftermath of independence, whose struggle for meaning could not be reduced to the political and social opposition to colonialism. The experience of colonialism and racism may have shaped the quest to belong, but Memmi put the onus on the individual to transcend them. He believed in inner emancipation – or in the words of a nineteenth- century Zionist thinker, in “auto-emancipation.” This inner emancipation was the condition for the creation of free and functioning societies.

Although he was not a political theorist, Memmi thought deeply about politics. He was an early proponent of a pragmatic and social democratic model of liberal nationalism. In contrast to the unrealistic utopianism of the socialist left or the Manichaeanism of the postcolonial revolt, he saw a pragmatic social democratic nationalism as the most appropriate political program for achieving individual and collective freedom within a non-utopian politics. (This was decades before academic philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, David Miller, and Yael Tamir began to adumbrate a revival of liberal nationalism.) He surveyed the possibilities and limits of the newly independent countries of the Middle East with open eyes, that is, without naivete or romanticism. In this context he refused to vilify the state of Israel.

If the Islamic countries of the region had followed Memmi’s positive assessment of Israel’s contributions to furthering economic development and pluralism in the region, they would have avoided years of futile and costly antagonism. Indeed, official and popular animosity to Israel’s existence remains one of the major causes of the backwardness of many Middle Eastern societies. It also contributes to the continued suffering of many Palestinians, whose intellectual and political leaders insist on making the perfect the enemy of the good. Memmi favors a progressive liberal nationalism as a model for the countries of the region; he endorses Israel as a legitimate partner for development and peace; and he calls for a culture that enables each individual to grapple freely with the meaning of their lives, alone and in community. He bequeathed a deep and rich bounty for the beleaguered peoples of the region, weighed down by anger, tyranny, poverty, theocracy, and despair. And this bounty was the work of a liberal Francophile Jew who came from their own region.

In his early nonfiction and his fiction, Memmi established himself as a keen observer of the psychological effects of societies built on the asymmetrical power and privilege that defined colonial systems of domination. In the writings of his early Third Worldist phase, from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, Memmi was still working with the standard anti-imperialist binary. Like his contemporaries Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire and many subsequent Western leftists, his depiction of the colonized individual was more or less essentialized: the existence of the oppressed was almost entirely defined by the oppressor. In The Colonizer and the Colonized, which remains his most famous work, Memmi claimed that all colonial societies were founded on a “pyramid of petty tyrants” whereby gradations of proximity to the colonizer and his institutions conferred privilege and feelings of superiority over those lower in the hierarchy. Such proximity might be afforded by accepting roles such as police officer, teacher, and government official in the colonial institutions — but also by acknowledging the superiority of European culture. Memmi described those at the base of the pyramid as the “true” inhabitants of the colony.

“The colonial relationship,” he wrote, “chained the colonizer and the colonized into an implacable dependence, molded their respective characters and dictated their conduct.” Referring directly to his experiences in Tunisia, he observed that “the Jew found himself one small notch above the Moslem on the pyramid which is the basis of all colonial societies. His privileges were laughable, but they were enough to make him proud and to make him hope that he was not part of the mass of Moslems which constituted the base of the pyramid. To that end, they endeavor to resemble the colonizer in the frank hope that he may cease to consider them different from him… But if the colonizer does not always openly discourage these candidates to develop that resemblance, he never permits them to attain it either. Thus, they live in painful and constant ambiguity.” Yet Memmi never lost sight of the existential dimension, the lived dimension, of these psychological and sociological observations: “I undertook this inventory of conditions of colonized people mainly in order to understand myself and to identify my place in the society of other men.”

The popularity of Memmi’s historical study of colonialism has obscured the fact that it was only one part of his lifelong struggle to find a place for himself amid the class, ethnic, and cultural contradictions between the “third world” and Europe. (Later he pointedly rejected the term “Global South” as too broad and ideological.) Already by the early 1950s, his struggle to come to terms with his mixed family background and his experiences growing up in a Jewish ghetto in French-colonized North Africa during and after the Second World War became the central preoccupation of his writings. Two novels from this period, The Pillar of Salt and Strangers, amply illustrate these concerns.

The Pillar of Salt is a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in the Tunis ghetto. An intelligent and ambitious young man named Mordechai Benillouche sees mastering French culture and language as his path out of the ghetto. He understands that he will be turning his back on his past: “I protested against everything that I saw all around me, against my parents, these tradesmen, this city that is torn apart in separate communities that hate each other, against all their ways of thinking.” He chooses philosophy over medicine as a profession because, he tells us, it was a channel through which he could rebel against everything in his social background. It was as if the abstractions of philosophy could hoist him above the fetid realities of his marginalization that he fervently wished to escape — the “sordid lanes, where the gutters ran with muddy water.” The study of philosophy and a life of writing, Benillouche (and no doubt Memmi) imagined, would be the salve for his fractured soul, permitting him to embrace “this terrifying and exhausting search for one’s real identity that philosophy implies.”

At the same time, Benillouche is constantly reminded of the uncertainty of his quest, admitting in exasperation, “How naive it was of me to hope to overcome the fundamental rift in me, the contradiction that is the very basis of my life!” Whereas in the prologue to the novel he expresses a tentative hope — “Perhaps, as I now straighten out this narrative, I can manage to see more clearly into my own darkness and to find a way out” — at the end of the novel he confesses that “I am ill at ease in my own land and I know of no other.” Although Memmi’s long and successful career as a writer living mostly in France suggests that his own fate was better, he never shook off his ambivalence toward the discordant parts of his former attachments, particularly in relation to his Jewish identity. The novel Strangers, which appeared in 1955, symbolized this failed rapprochement in the melancholy marriage of a Paris-trained Jewish Tunisian doctor and his French Christian wife when they settle back in Tunis. Unable to manage his inner conflicts and disappointments, his feelings of resentment and alienation, the protagonist takes out his frustration on his wife, insisting that she embrace all the worst and backward aspects of the city that he himself now feels ambivalent about. He exhorts her to “see and appreciate our people in their native haunts,” but to himself (and the reader) he admits that “I too in secret was struggling with…wholeheartedly accepting this world.” Ultimately, he reflects that “I was annoyed that my wife should reveal to me my own difficulties in her person.” Memmi, in other words, knew more about identity than we seem to know now: he appreciated that it is not a monolithic and seamless dispensation, but rather is a collision of attributes and qualities that we must somehow negotiate.

This complexity was the gift of a difficult history. Memmi’s early work is set against the wrenching historical transformation of societies after the Second World War, when the devastated European powers allowed their colonies to move towards national independence. At the same time these writings also depict the trajectory of a young man striving for his own independence, and for a place in the context of his country’s postcolonial journey. Tunisia threw off French tutelage in 1956, achieving its adulthood, as it were, but Memmi shows how much more complicated the individual journey to adulthood can be, at least for the reflective and self-aware individuals depicted in his novels. For Memmi’s protagonists, personal independence could come only from achieving distance from, if not outright rejection of, family, tribe, religion, language, and even the civilization of the “East.” This private search for a self cannot be divorced from the contexts of social and political power that Memmi deciphered so acutely in his non-fiction work, but his fiction shows how they operate on related but independent planes, psychologically and even spiritually, each with their own twists and obstacles.

The individual’s striving to find his place among his fellow humans, to take one of Memmi’s recurring themes, is a process in which authenticity and alienation, otherness and community, are simultaneously fused together and in tension. This profound unsettledness was the outcome of his bone-deep sense of displacement. It was likely this aspect of Memmi’s work that Camus most admired, seeing in his writings (particularly in The Pillar of Salt) a “beautiful” depiction of the Sisyphean toil of searching for oneself. Memmi’s fiction, in other words, is valuable precisely because it grapples with, in Faulkner’s famous words, “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” These existential themes go far beyond the concerns of his sociological studies of colonialism; their significance has outlasted the now-obsolete circumstances of colonial societies.

Most of the literature of postcolonial studies presents a Manichean struggle of an oppressed “East” resisting a monolithic Western “imperialist oppression.” Of course such simplifications made sense for nationalist struggles for independence and may even have been necessary for the mobilization of a sense of collective agency to press for national independence; revolutions are made with slogans, not with scholarship. This was almost certainly the case in the decade leading up to independence in Tunisia and Algeria, in 1956 and 1962 respectively. They formed the backdrop to Memmi’s writings during what one French critic called his “age of revolt.” These are his writings to which the contemporary left still kindles, when they read him at all. But it was not long before Memmi’s thinking led him to conclusions that would be of no use to them. Memmi’s third-worldism did not survive the developments of the 1960s. His evolution from anti-colonialist icon to critic of left-wing anticolonial causes began in this period, when he moved away from the singular focus on colonialism and turned his focus to the issue of Jewish identity and Jewish-Arab relations, including the question of Israel and nationalism.

This evolution was triggered by three critical transformations. The first was the persecution of the Jewish community in Tunisia after it achieved independence in 1957. The Jewish community in Tunisia numbered over a hundred thousand in 1948. While these Jews had experienced significant repression and impoverishment under Vichy France, their distance from Hitler’s death camps left most of them alive and undeported by the end of the war. (Memmi was himself imprisoned in a labor camp, which he escaped.) Yet as much of the postwar world became more hospitable to Jewish people in the wake of the great catastrophe, Tunisia became less so. Following the Six-Day War, the country passed discriminatory laws against Jews and there were riots targeting them. By 1970, less than ten thousand Jews remained in Tunisia. The majority of Tunisian Jewry, once a great community, had emigrated to Israel or to France, where Memmi himself had settled by that time.

Witnessing this anti-Semitic oppression disabused Memmi of any illusions regarding the redemptive virtues of formerly colonized peoples. It cured him of the romance of the Third World. He watched the radical movements of North Africa and the Middle East reject Enlightenment “Western” culture, and interpret its universalist teachings as nothing more than a mask for power; and this revolted him. His thinking began to take on a more sober and realistic cast. A colonized Arab might have ignored the implications of Tunisian anti-Semitism, but Memmi’s other otherness, his Jewishness, had begun to nurture in him a different kind of identity and consciousness. He now had a third vantage point. It led him to reject the reductive Manicheanism of the radical postcolonial left that had celebrated his work in the 1950s.

A second significant factor was Memmi’s unwillingness to countenance the left’s equation of anticolonialism with socialism. In 1958, only one year after the publication of The Colonized and the Colonizer, Memmi called out the fatal contradiction of the socialist left’s equation of anticolonialism with liberation, in a powerful essay called “The Colonial Problem and the Left.” He took to task the left’s embrace of some of the most repressive (and anti-Semitic) Middle Eastern Arab regimes, and their active and military opposition to Israel as expressive of a misguided political standpoint. Memmi identified the poisonous contradictions of the New Left a decade before they came to fruition in 1967 in their response to the Arab-Israeli war, when, as Susie Linfield shows in her brilliant study of Zionism and the European Left, “much of the Western Left hailed some of the world’s most horrifically repressive — and racist — regimes as harbingers of justice and freedom” while reviling Zionism “as a thing apart.” (Her analysis now needs to be extended to the “progressive” response to the Hamas atrocities of last October.) Never Marxist or pro-communist, Memmi called for a genuinely progressive type of social democracy and a left-leaning liberal nationalism at a time when nationalism was a dirty word in European intellectual circles.

Against the backdrop of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, Memmi’s heterodox commitments and intellectual boldness enabled him to develop a startling diagnosis of what ailed the post-independence societies of the region, an interpretation at odds with the conventional narrative of the postcolonial left. While others were celebrating what they viewed as the thrilling new millenarian ideology of world revolution that would vindicate the “wretched of the earth,” Memmi identified some of the key weaknesses of these movements in psychological terms, as expressions of the unresolved neuroses of alienated and disoriented individuals. Memmi developed this critique most pointedly with regard to Fanon, whose method of analysis was also psychological, and he kept his distance from Western intellectuals such as Sartre and his circle, who were still hanging on to increasingly indefensible defenses of communist doctrine, such as the necessity for terror to build “socialism,” and the idea that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was running the country and its economy for the benefit of the working class.

Although Memmi drew from the Marxist left in his analysis of economic injustice, he recoiled at the fact that “the European Left remains impregnated with Stalin-like and Soviet Manichaeanism…I could not abide the collective discipline imposed on people’s thinking, the excessive consistency between thought and action, which inevitably gave rise to dogmatism and intolerance.”

Memmi’s critique of Fanon applies to most versions of contemporary postcolonial criticism. Memmi knew Fanon in Tunis, when he worked as director of an institute of child psychology and Fanon was editor of a newspaper and a psychiatrist at a local hospital. Before he left Tunis, Memmi had been an admirer of Fanon’s, eager to be adopted by the North African Arab independence movement; but a decade later, in an extraordinary essay called “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” which appeared in 1971, Memmi coolly dissected the psychological roots of what he depicts as the “neuroses” that lay behind Fanon’s ideas. Nothing more clearly illustrates Memmi’s break from the postcolonial left’s political imaginary than this essay, in which the psychoanalyst Fanon was himself psychoanalyzed. Fanon, Memmi suggested, had succumbed to “the temptation of messianism” and was “gripped by a lyrical fever, by a Manichaeism that constantly confuses ethical demand and reality.” In Memmi’s view, Fanon had fallen for “an illusion”: the idealizing myth of “the solidarity of the oppressed.” He traced Fanon’s compulsive desire to become an Algerian revolutionary to his “disappointment at the impossibility of assimilating West Indians into French citizens,” remarking that “Fanon broke with France and the French with all the passion of which his fiery temperament was capable.” Fanon, remember, was West Indian. He was born in 1925 in Martinique and grew up there, and then studied medicine and psychiatry in France. He fought with the Free French during the war and often referred to himself as French. In 1953 he took up a medical post in Algeria and joined the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN) in its struggle against French colonialism. He lived in Algeria for all of four years. He was expelled in 1957, and went to Tunis. He died in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was being treated for leukemia, in 1961.

Algeria was perfectly suited to what Memmi described as Fanon’s neurosis because it was “a land where French was spoken but where one could hate France. Algeria was precisely the right substitute, in the negative and the positive sense, for Martinique which had let him down.” As Memmi wrote,

The extraordinary Algerian phase of Franz Fanon’s life has been accepted as a matter of course. Yet it is scarcely believable. A man who has never set foot in a country decides within a rather brief span of time that this people will be his people, this country his country until death, even though he knows neither its language nor its civilization and has no particular ties to it. He eventually dies for this cause and is buried in Algerian soil.

In Memmi’s account, Fanon did not understand the culture that he entered and wished to adopt Algeria as the vehicle of his messianic revolutionism, but he was neither Arab nor Moslem, both of which were intrinsic to the independence movement that he sought to join. Fanon’s identity adventure, Memmi argued, scanted not only the particularities of Algeria and Arab North Africa, but also of Africa as a whole. It represented “a false universalism and abstract humanism based on neglecting all specific identity and all intervening social particularities.”

Memmi’s repudiation of Fanonism in the early 1970s estranged him from the left in the West as well as in countries such as Iran. There, an unholy alliance of communist and Marxist parties with anti-Western Islamists was mesmerized by the paroxysmal politics championed by Fanon, which found its tragic denouement in the Iranian revolution in 1979. French intellectuals such as Foucault were similarly beguiled by the ayatollahs’ revolution. They saw in it a revolt against modernity, and the realization of the outlines of the new world and the new man that Fanon and his acolytes had envisioned. Memmi prophetically warned that the haters of the Enlightenment and the West, the secular and religious revolutionaries in love with power rather than justice, were on a path to doom. His antidote to their philosophical and political depredations was liberal nationalism, and so it still remains.

The third historical development that modified Memmi’s worldview was the storm over the establishment of the new state of Israel, in particular the denunciation of it by the left as a “settler colonial” outpost of Western imperialism. Memmi’s experiences of anti-Jewish prejudice no doubt shaped his conviction that the establishment of the Jewish state should be seen rather as a national liberation struggle, called Zionism. The Jews, too, were entitled to such a struggle and to such a liberation. Many of these ideas were expressed in the essays collected in Jews and Arabs in 1974, where he forcefully expresses his impatience with the utopian pieties of leftist intellectuals. Jonathan Judaken, the editor of a fine collection of Memmi’s writings in English translation, describes Jews and Arabs as Memmi’s symbolic divorce from the Arab-Muslim world.

Memmi’s responses to the three developments were increasingly more explicit elaborations of his emerging heterodoxy. In Portrait of a Jew, for example, Memmi recognized that Jewish communal and religious life carries within itself a national dimension. A few years later he wrote that “a nation is the only adequate response to the misfortune of a people…Only a national solution can exorcize our shadowy figure. Only Israel can infuse us with life and restore our full dimensions.” (Later Michael Walzer came to much the same conclusion: “The link between people and land is a crucial feature of national identity… The theory of justice must allow for the territorial state, specifying the rights of its inhabitants and recognizing the collective right of admission and refusal.”) Memmi had become a Zionist, and he regarded Zionism as a progressive nationalism, as an inclusive political project. He rejected the idea that a national project must by definition be ethnonationalist or shaped only by tribal and religious criteria.

Memmi identified Zionism as the necessary expression of the national liberation struggle of the Jewish people and nationalism as the inevitable form that political self- determination takes. Whereas Fanon denounced nationalism according to proper Marxist doctrine as a “petty bourgeois” deviation from proletarian internationalism “with its cortege of wars and ruins,” Memmi posited an enlightened nationalism that was a natural and inevitable aspiration of all peoples seeking autonomy, safety, and self- determination. Memmi’s preferred form of Zionism was secular, tolerant, and social democratic. While critical of the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel currents in the Muslim Arab countries, Memmi also drew attention to what he saw as injustice inside Israel, such as the prejudice leveled against Mizrahi Jews; and he was an advocate for a two-state solution as a solution to the plight of the Palestinians. His inflection of nationalism was a combination of realism and decency, of pragmatism with an acute ethical sensitivity to the persistent inequalities and depredations in both colonial and postcolonial circumstances. As it happens, such a standpoint is precisely what is now needed by all the countries of the region.

This Tunisian Jewish anti-colonialist Zionist liberal has a lesson for the Muslim countries of our day. It is that feverish messianism and unresolved psychological anger at former colonial powers is a large part of the reason that the societies of the Middle East and North Africa remain unable to fulfill their potential. The obsessive hatred of Israel and the refusal to relinquish the futile opposition to the Israeli state is, as Memmi described it, a collective neurosis. Framing the plight of the severely disadvantaged Palestinians as the wretched of the earth in search of a messiah, or at least a Mandela, is also a hobbling collective neurosis; what they need is an Adenauer, who can accept an imperfect and unsatisfactory reality in the present to achieve a better future.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a calamity for the Muslim Middle East as well as for the United States and the West in general. In their aftermath, it was natural for observers concerned with the region to ask what went wrong. How had the once glorious civilization of the Islamic Middle East become a haven for medievalist fanatical zealots and a redoubt for terrorists who saw themselves in an apocalyptic struggle with modernity and the West? Over the course of two or three centuries, the once dominant and culturally thriving lands of the Islamic Middle East had become, in the words of Bernard Lewis, “poor, weak, and ignorant.” Historians and intellectuals have provided a long list of explanations to account for the decline of their civilization. Some blame the Mongols, or the Jews, or the British, and especially the Europeans, with their ideology of racial superiority and their imperialism. (In recent decades the Americans and their “neoliberalism” have been added to the inventory of external villains.) Some critics have pointed accusingly to supposedly inauthentic versions of Islam — to the enemy within. Notwithstanding the weight of this discourse, Lewis also noted that “growing numbers of Middle Easterners are adopting a more self-critical approach,” which he hoped would lead them to “abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their talents, energies, and resources in a common creative endeavor [so] they can once again make the Middle East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization.”

Lewis did not identify any of these self-critical thinkers, but one of the pioneers of this new approach was certainly Fouad Ajami, whose book The Arab Predicament, which appeared in 1981, remains a benchmark for a new enlightenment, for the dream of democratic and liberal reform in the Middle East. It was a book that Memmi must have admired. Memmi himself was among these forward-looking and far-seeing Middle Eastern intellectuals, a unique and authoritative voice that could be counted among the ranks of “native” critics. (He once referred to himself through a semi-autobiographical fictional character as “a native in a colonial country, a Jew in an anti-Semitic universe, an African in a world dominated by Europe.”) Still, it is far from clear that he harbored hopes for an imminent renaissance. His clear-eyed view of the region’s many failures made such hopes harshly unrealistic.

It was in the context of the turmoil and misfortune brought upon the Middle East by the reactions to the 9/11 attacks — specifically the American and Western occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan — that Memmi’s evolution as a genuinely independent critical thinker culminated in his book Decolonization and the Decolonized, in 2004. Returning to his earlier sociological methods, he witheringly surveyed the corruption and the tyranny of half a century of independent states. Surveying the myriad problems besetting the Middle East and Africa — calamitous violence, civil war, failed states, systemic corruption, repressive governments, massive human rights abuses, appallingly low levels of social freedoms, persecution of minorities and women, and low levels of educational attainment and cultural production — Memmi arrived at a scathing indictment: “Why… has the tree of national independence provided us only with stunted and shriveled crops?” Rejecting the obfuscating argot of the postcolonial left, he noted how often it attributed the problems of the third world “to a new ruse of global capitalism, or ‘neocolonialism,’ a term sufficiently vague to serve as a screen and a rationale.” Memmi urged postcolonial countries to acknowledge their failures to achieve democracy and development as largely self-inflicted wounds. He called on them to abandon the cheap excuse of blaming external forces. Memmi offered his criticisms not to disparage but to counsel; he eschewed the haughtiness of conservative historians who suggested that the hopes for decolonization were misguided from the start. He believed that the postcolonial countries could be independent, free, and fair places to live, and he called on them to make themselves so.

Memmi was right to sound the alarm, to urge the region’s peoples to get over their fixation with the past. Indeed, he was only echoing words of the African Development Bank’s report in 2003, which declared that “more than four decades of independence… should have been enough time to sort out the colonial legacies and move forward.” Economic historians have persuasively demonstrated that the impact of past colonial experiences on current political and economic dynamics has diminished to almost negligible levels in many cases. The followers of Fanon and contemporary postcolonial perspectives persistently obscure this. They are the true reactionaries.

Memmi’s work provides a powerful intellectual alternative, an antidote even, that could have inoculated generations against the futile and self-destructive utopias chased by revolutionaries, from Iran in 1979 to certain theories expounded in the Western academy today. Consider the quixotic effort by a prominent representative of the postcolonial school of criticism to retrieve the anti-colonial legacy for contemporary so-called anti-globalization struggles. The same year in which Memmi’s negative assessment of decolonialized societies appeared in print, the Indian-British postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha asserted in a preface to a reprint of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that institutions such as the International Money Fund and World Bank have “the feel of the colonial ruler,” since they, allegedly, create “dualistic,” not developed, economies. He claimed that this “global duality should be put in the historical context of Fanon’s founding insight into the ‘geographical configuration of colonial governance,’ namely the idea [of] ‘a world divided in two…inhabited by different species.’” We are urged by Babha to adopt the “the critical language of duality —whether colonial or global” because “a progressive postcolonial cast of mind” naturally spawns a “spatial imagination [of] geopolitical thinking” that incorporates this language: “margin and metropole, center and periphery, the global and the local, the nation and the world.” (This dichotomous vocabulary recently appeared in a comment by Rashid Khalidi on the Hamas-Israel war: “If you believe this theoretical construct — the colony and the metropole — then what activists do here in the metropole counts.”) Since he cannot let go of the Manicheanism of revolutionary politics without which the Marxist and postcolonial schema of “colonized and colonizer” collapses, Bhaba is forced to shoehorn what is in reality a fractured, multipolar world into a reductive antinomy, so that he can combat it within the only framework available to him.

Bhabha applauds Fanon’s grandiose claim that “the Third World must start over a new history of Man.” Bhabha and Fanon (and Cornel West) seem to suggest that anti- globalization struggles are the route to international proletarian solidarity and revolution, and that the colonial/native dichotomy offers a workable foundation for such an eschaton. But as we have seen, Memmi knew better. He never suffered from a romanticization of the oppressed, even as he denounced their oppression. Moreover, he knew that the world cannot be neatly divided into the oppressed and the oppressors.

The oppressed, after independence and even before, have a way of oppressing each other. He rejected terms such as “neo-colonialism” for obscuring the role of the elites of the independent Third World states in perpetuating injustice. He refused to accept that the culpability of these elites should be seen as merely another result of victimization by larger external forces.

Memmi’s critique also applies to “decolonial” studies, the latest version of the Marxist- inspired anti-Western and anti-capitalist ideology making the rounds of Western academia (associated with writers such as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, and others). It is a fatuous and often bizarre messianic theory, premised on a stupendously simplified picture of what is in fact a maddeningly complicated and tragically fragmented world. Anti-essentializers, heal yourselves! (The guiding intellectual light for some of these decolonial theorists is not Martin Luther King Jr., or Nelson Mandela, or Mahatma Gandhi, but — really — Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatista insurgency.) The crusade to make everything postcolonial has become so pervasive that it has finally elicited forceful responses. In his heretical book Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, for example, the Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (who has appeared in these pages) decries the “proliferation of the decolonization trope” because of its “pernicious influence and consequences.” The idea of decolonization, he asserts, “has lost its way and is seriously harming scholarship in and on Africa.” Echoing many of Memmi’s concerns, Táíwò rejects the “absolutization of colonialism, the accompanying repudiation of [Enlightenment] universalism and the paradox that a Manichaean worldview generates.”

The more worrying consequences of the postcolonialist dogmas are not intellectual but material and political, directly effecting living standards and livelihoods. The main problem of the decolonization worldview is that it is of no use to the people it purports to help. As Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay observe in their survey of the postcolonial and the decolonial, this work is of very little practical relevance to people living in previously colonized countries, who are trying to deal with the political and economic aftermath. There is little reason to believe that previously colonized people have any use for a postcolonial Theory or decoloniality that argues that math is a tool of Western imperialism, that sees alphabetical literacy as colonial technology and postcolonial appropriation…

Worse, postcolonial theories can actually harm people in previously colonized countries, who are some of the poorest people in the world — for instance, when these ideas are applied to the issue of climate change, and a simplistic and misleading binary is generated, according to which we must choose between an evil white hyper-developed plundering West and an idyllic view of indigenous peoples’ beautiful relationship with nature, resurrecting long-discredited notions of the noble savage and calling them progressive. These ideas misrepresent the realities of climate change and lead to dubious climate policy recommendations that would likely impose enormous economic costs on those who need economic development the most.

Ultimately, of course, the effects of this fallacious worldview are most pernicious in the world of politics. They include the radical regimes of Iran, Nicaragua, Hezbollah, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. These regimes represent in practice what many of these theories espouse. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance, perspectives paralleling Fanon’s, represented by influential works such as Jalal al-e Ahmad’s Westoxification, an attack on the West that deserves to be better known in the West, and also routinely expressed by the official ideologists of the regime, are still a significant part of the ideological edifice of the anti-liberal, anti-Western dictatorship that has been in power for over four decades. It is no longer just the rhetoric of tenured radicals, unless you count tyranny as a kind of tenure.

Given Memmi’s perspicacity in uncovering the blind spots of the postcolonial left in Europe as it related to the question of the Middle East, it is unfortunate that Memmi decided to weigh in on the American struggle for black civil rights. He was insufficiently aware or appreciative of many complex facts of the American situation with regard to race. Indeed, he never visited the United States. In 1965 he dedicated the English edition of The Colonizer and the Colonized to the “American Negro, also colonized” because he perceived that community to be subject to the same type of oppression that he described in the book. This timing was not exactly propitious, as it coincided with the passage of the historic civil rights laws that finally, a century after the American Civil War had failed to remove many institutions of racial oppression and official apartheid against formerly enslaved black Americans, had achieved a revolutionary progress. To be sure, laws by themselves could not be expected to remedy all the evils overnight. Yet it is precisely the essentializing and binary framework of his early period that he stubbornly projects, erroneously, onto the American scene, and thereby distorts its complexities and accomplishments. This is starkly illustrated when he fails to discern the different strands of the black civil rights movement:

King, Baldwin, and Malcolm X do not represent three different historical solutions to the black problem, three possible choices for the Americans. [ . . . ] King, Baldwin and Malcolm X are signposts along the same inexorable road of revolt.

This false generalization leads Memmi to claim that “King is the victim of oppression who persists in wanting to resemble his oppressor. The oppressor will always be his model.” This, of course, is spectacularly wrong.

Binary assumptions never illuminate, even in Memmi. Memmi’s error in this case resulted from the application of the abstract dichotomies and assumptions of postcolonial theory to a racist society that had little in common with European colonialism. Unfortunately we see examples of this today, for example in the Manichaean binaries put forward by writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Black Lives Matter theoreticians, and The 1619 project, whose assumptions and implications have been cogently called into question in these pages by Daryl Michael Scott, among others. Memmi’s later voice of moderation would be a salutary contribution to today’s debates about the legacy of colonialism.

There is a clear and strong message that emerges from an appreciation of Memmi’s evolution as a writer and a thinker. It is that the concept of “coloniality” and its cognates retains little relevance for understanding the challenges facing countries in the developing world and the relations between rich and poor countries more broadly. “Haven’t I got better things to do on this earth,” Fanon wrote in the remarkable conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, “than avenge the blacks of the seventeenth century?” Coloniality as a topic should be confined as much as possible to the history departments.

Whereas firebrands such as Fanon in his revolutionary mode called for cathartic violence as the road to redemption, Memmi was a pragmatic liberal nationalist social democrat who had the courage to say to his fellow third world citizens, especially in the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa, that they had for the most part failed to achieve the objectives of independence and that they had for the most part no one to blame but themselves. This bracing assessment represents a necessary corrective to the simplifying radicalism of the postcolonial schools of thought that trace most if not all of the problems besetting developing countries to external forces, be they Western “imperialism,” global capitalism, “systemic racism,” “neoliberalism,” “globalization,” or any other single explanation for everything. (The Uyghurs in China, the Christians and the political prisoners in Iran, and the women under the rule of the Taliban would all be surprised to learn that they suffer from white supremacist hegemony.)

Developing countries, especially in the Islamic Middle East which was of most concern to Memmi, can ill afford the misguided counsels of a worldview which posits that “colonialism” has not in fact ended and therefore, to quote a typical statement, “every analysis of the present is impossible to understand except in relation to the history of imperialism and colonial rule.” Instead, what former colonies need most desperately is to break free of this debilitating straitjacket and move beyond the obsessive preoccupation with the colonial past to the urgent tasks at hand. Sartre was wrong in his critique of Memmi: colonialism was not a “system,” an essentially permanent, almost metaphysical condition of human existence. Rather, as Memmi held, it was a “situation,” one that has now passed. Today there exist new inequities, new hierarchies, and new cruelties, which will not be ameliorated by stale formulas or a morbid lingering over the unhappy centuries gone by. Postcolonial societies could do worse than repeat Memmi’s own evolution. The struggle for justice requires that we live in the present. [END]