An Act of Lucidity Like An Act Of Faith

What can one say about Camus's conflicted relationship with Algeria? Books have been written on the subject, but some problems seem to defy analysis. His early essay, "Summer in Algiers," is as beautiful as it is, well, misleading. Who are these Algerians he describes? One assumes that Camus intended the Pied-Noirs--the working class French settlers that he came from. In some ways, they are like Tolstoy's peasants minus the inculcated superstitions of organized religion. Unselfconscious, at home in their bodies and in the sun-drenched land, content with the limited offerings of their lives. One can imagine that some of the Pied-Noirs fit that description. But all of the them? And what of the Muslim Arabs and Berbers--the indigenous people of the land? What were they like? It is frankly bizarre that Camus's descriptions of life in Algeria somehow escape the punctuating call of the muezzin. His "Arabs"--a term he appears to use simply to mean the non-settler "natives"--move like dumb shadows across the landscape. For all practical purposes, they do not exist.

And yet, I have often speculated that some sort of symbiosis must have occurred between the working class French and Algeria's dispossessed. How could it not? Even in the segregated southern states of the old Confederacy there was a degree of mixing among white and black sharecroppers. Occupation of the lower social rungs offers that minor freedom.

Camus's apparent silence on this count is deafening--and so I wonder if we have not misread him. Then again, perhaps not. In another essay published in the same collection with "Summer in Algiers," Camus wrote:

But it can happen that when he reaches a certain degree of lucidity a man feels his heart is closed, and without protest or rebellion turns his back on what up to then he had taken for his life, that is to say, his restlessness. If Rimbaud dies in Abyssinia without having written a single line, it is not because he prefers adventure or has renounced literature. It is because "that's how things are," and because when we reach a certain stage of awareness we finally acknowledge something which each of us, according to our particular vocation, seeks not to understand. (Albert Camus, "The Desert").

If these sentences apply to Camus's conflicted relationship with Algeria, they may supply us with a possible explanation for his relative silence on the daily lives of the indigenous people of the land: for once he had reached the level of lucidity he required to carry on his own daily life, he felt that he had gone as far as he could--or needed to. For him, his lucidity; for them, theirs. (Qur'an 109:6).