Albert Camus and Colonialism

Extract

[...] She wanted us to leave right away. Raymond stood up and laughed, saying we had to hurry up. We went towards the bus stop, which was a bit further away, and Raymond announced that the Arabs were not following us. I turned around. They were still in the same place and looked at the place we had just left with the same indifference.'7 ». One can also notice a sort of palpable tension, a latent hostility between the two groups of individuals and Camus excels in his ability to make this tension felt in a quite empirical, subjective way through the eyes of his strange main character. [...]

[...] However, Albert Camus is decidedly an individual who never finds his place. Indeed, if he seems to have difficulty integrating among the natives, both those belonging to the affluent classes and the others, he does not feel completely at ease with the students who arrived from the metropolis either: was even more disoriented by the young metropolitans that the hazards of his father's career had brought to Algiers. The one who made him think the most was Georges Didier, whom a common taste for French classes and reading had brought closer to Jacques until a kind of very tender friendship, of which Pierre was jealous. [...]

[...] The marginalization of indigenous Algerians, their anonymization in Camus' work, reflects a deeply unequal society. The Algerians, deprived of rights and resources by French colonizers, often appear as shadows in the narrative. Camus, despite his humanism, cannot entirely escape the criticism of the erasure of indigenous identities, which reinforces the theme of alterity in his work. Thus, The First Man explores not only Jacques' personal and religious otherness, but also the colonial divisions that permeate Algerian society, making the experience of otherness both intimate and universal. [...]

[...] This is the reason why Albert Camus readily resorts to the novel. Because the writer who has read Dostoevsky, the great Russian or even American novelists, has become fully aware of the power of the novel to penetrate the psychology of characters, individual dynamics, but not only. As it is said in a somewhat familiar and rapid way, the small story often meets the big History and it is thus that the interactions, the intersubjective dynamics that unfold between individuals reflect phenomena that go beyond them and, in this case, the colonial and post-decolonial dynamics. [...]

[...] If it were not for the murder of an "Arab", a common man, even mediocre, such as Meursault would never have found himself in front of the law: perhaps the French law would not even have noticed this man who did not cry at his mother's funeral. The homicide of an indigenous person becomes the pretext to accuse Meursault of a more serious crime for which he will be executed: his strangeness. This makes Camus' work the novel of human condition and the Absurd. But what about the "Arab" killed? Is his assassination not "absurd8 ? » In addition, Camus uses Meursault's perspective to expose the absurdity and alienation felt by individuals in a seemingly senseless world. [...]