Colonial Posts

What the Day Owes the Night,Yasmina Khadras tale of love and loss set against the volatile backdrop of political turmoil and violence...

What the Day Owes the Night,Yasmina Khadras tale of love and loss set against the volatile backdrop of political turmoil and violence,is his sixth novel to be translated into English. In 2001,a year after In the Name of God was published,Yasmina Khadra revealed his true identity: that he was Mohammed Moulessehoul,a former Algerian army officer who had adopted his wifes name as a pseudonym to escape military censorship of his creative works,and that he lived and wrote as an exile in France.

After traversing the ravaged wastelands of Afghanistan and Iraq in The Swallows of Kabul and The Sirens of Baghdad respectively,locating love and vengeance and other human emotions in those condemned sinkholes,Yasmina Khadra returns to his native Algeria in What the Day. This is Algeria under French domination from the years preceding World War II right up to the countrys independence from colonial rule recollected in the present day by an old man whose life had intertwined every possible thread of that tumultuous history.

Younes is his name,born to grinding poverty,whose parents move from their native village to Oran after losing their crop and giving up their ancestral land for a pittance. The plague-ravaged Oran of Albert Camus comes to mind,but Oran is also brash and vital and alive,bourgeois in an understated fashion,though it will be a while before Younes gets to learn and live that dream. He tackles the debilitating poverty,the soul-destroying criminality of Jenane Jato,the slum,till one day,his ill-starred father agrees to give him up for adoption to his uncle,a chemist,and his Catholic aunt.

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Younes becomes Jonas,leaves his sordid life behind the life that will consume his parents and a younger,deaf-mute sister for the European enclave of Rio Salado,a beautiful colonial village with leafy streets,a move that is bound to cleave his identity though he is too young to realise that.

Jonas becomes part of a close-knit group of four boys,the other three European,revelling in the material pleasures that his Arab brethren can ill afford whiling away on the beach or frequenting the charming cafes and diners that makes life resemble a lazy afternoon dream. The seeds of future trouble are already visible: in school,a teacher describes Arabs as lazy; a teenage romance is ruptured when the girl finds out that Jonas is an Arab. But these are mere wisps of smoke that even the colonisers,the pieds-noirs as they will be known,dismiss,failing to see the thunderstorm gather strength in the horizon.

Yasmina Khadra,as a general in the Algerian army,took part in brutal encounters against Islamic groups during the Algerian civil violence of the 1990s,and knows what it is to defend stances that are unpopular. In a 2005 Guardian profile,he points out that there were no massacres in the eight years he led the charge against terrorism. His protagonist Jonas abjures violence,refusing to take sides with either the Arabs or the Europeans during the violent struggle for independence,a silent witness to the devastation and the love he lets slip merely through indecisiveness. His contemporaries castigate him as a fence sitter,weak of mind,with an Arab servant sneering accusingly: youre one of us,but you live like one of them,and again: The world is changing or hadnt you noticed?

Yasmina Khadras prose is lyrical and haunting,evoking the passing of an era,capturing the pain and self-righteous anger of the colonialists in being evicted from what they consider their own land,and the dehumanising misery of the natives who loath the encroachers and usurpers.

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In delving into the history of his native land,Yasmina Khadra is far more authentic than in describing the travails of faraway Afghanistan. Far more powerful than obvious allusions (John Steinbeck reporting the war from Oran ) are those individual tales of hope and despair and indifference,created by what we call fate,but which is nothing but our refusal to accept the consequences of our weakness,great and small. The tales that make it worthwhile to read the book.