Deconstruction and the Postcolonial

Abstract

‘I do not believe that anyone can detect by reading, if I do not myself declare it, that I am a “French Algerian”’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 46). True, for when I wrote White Mythologies, I knew that you had been born in Algeria, in the very year that had witnessed the celebrations of the centenary of the French invasion. (Something for Algerians to celebrate indeed.) You had once guardedly spoken of your childhood memories, your ‘nostalgeria’, far more briefly though than Cixous had recalled her ‘Algeriance’ (Derrida, 1985; Cixous, 1998). That was, however, my only lead, apart from when I had first seen you in 1979 and understood immediately that you were no ‘français de souche’. What a relief. No blockhead, at least. All the same, even before that moment I already knew that something serious was going on. It was as plain as punch even if I found it impossible then to identify where it was coming from. What was certain was that it was somewhere else, and that it was producing a strong effect of disorientation (for which read ‘disoccidentation’).

When Mahmoud Wad Ahmed was brought in shackles to Kitchener after his defeat at the battle of Atbara, Kitchener said to him, ‘Why have you come to my country to lay waste and plunder?’ It was the intruder who said this to the person whose land it was, and the owner of the land bowed his head and said nothing. So let it be with me. … The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways were originally set up to transport troops; the schools were started so as to teach us how to say ‘Yes’ in their language. They imported to us the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the world had never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago.

Salih, 1969, pp. 94–5