‘Naïma has always known that her family came from Algeria – but up until now, that meant very little to her. Born and raised in France, her knowledge of that foreign country is limited to what she’s learned from her grandparents’ tiny flat in a crumbling French sink estate: the food cooked for her, the few precious things they brought with them when they fled.
On the past, her family is silent. Why was her grandfather Ali forced to leave? Was he a harki – an Algerian who worked for and supported the French during the Algerian War of Independence? Once a wealthy landowner, how did he become an immigrant scratching a living in France?
Naïma’s father, Hamid, says he remembers nothing. A child when the family left, in France he re-made himself: education was his ticket out of the family home, the key to acceptance into French society.
But now, for the first time since they left, one of Ali’s family is going back. Naïma will see Algeria for herself, will ask the questions about her family’s history that, till now, have had no answers.’
A deserving winner of the lucrative Dublin Literary Award, The Art of Losing is a beautiful novel, weaving the stories of three generations of an Algerian-French family so as to explore the complexities of identity and belonging in a post-colonial context without losing sight of the humanity, absurdity, and richness of the lives of individual characters. Subtle and self-aware, the narrative dances between the perspective of an enigmatic, unnamed ‘I’ and third-person omniscience, reminding readers of the lacunae deliberately planted in the novel as it seeks to patch tears in history with imagination, redrafting memory and reality in the process. Similarly, Zeniter draws attention to the inevitability of diasporic myth-making even as she draws explicit parallels between her tale and the epics of Homer: the deeply human impulse to aggrandise and universalise individual or family experience, to render personal traumas and achievements in terms of cultural or national histories, is presented to readers with a subversive combination of bathetic knowingness and generous understanding.
The distinctive playfulness and sophistication of The Art of Losing gripped me from its opening pages. The first chapter of the novel introduces readers toNaïma, a woman in her thirties of Algerian-French parentage who works in a Parisian gallery. Any expectations readers may have of the priorities and experiences of such a character are immediately subverted as Zeniter portrays Naïma struggling under an oppressive hangover, and questioning, familiarly, the motives behind her drinking habits. In many ways, the insouciance of this opening, its tongue-in-cheek defiance, characterises the novel as a whole; Naïmafalls into the category, newly in vogue, of millennial women navigating the complexities and inanities of modern life, neither ingenues nor femmes noirs, but real and recognisable characters full of contradictions and inconsistencies. Less zany than Fleabag, more substantial than the women of Sally Rooney, Naïma happens to have an Arabic name and an Islamic family background, but Zeniter refuses to allow her to be constrained by Western exoticisation. Nonetheless, Algeria looms large in Naïma’s psyche, and in that of her relatives. The narrator is clear: Naïma cannot and should not be defined by her ethnicity, religion, or family history, flattened into a two-dimensional representative of the Algerian-French diasporic experience; and yet, how can her story be understood without unspooling the threads of racism, violence, intergenerational trauma, and displacement that meander through her consciousness? This double-edged quandary, to explore a particular post-colonial history without dehumanising individual characters, forms the spine of Zeniter’s novel, and is handled with nuanced understanding and masterful sensitivity throughout the narrative:
‘Has she forgotten where she comes from?
When Mohamed says these words, he’s talking about Algeria. He is angry with Naïma’s sisters and their cousins for forgetting a country they have never known. Not that he ever knew it, either, having been born in a cité in Pont-Féron. What was there for him to forget?
If I were writing Naïma’s story, it wouldn’t begin in Algeria. Naïma’s birth in Normandy. That’s where I would begin. With Hamid and Clarisse’s four daughters playing in the garden. With the streets of Alencon. With holidays in Cotentin.
And yet, if Naïma is to be believed, Algeria was always present, somewhere in the background. It was the sum of different parts: her first name, her dark complexion, her black hair, the Sundays spent with Yema. This is an Algeria she has never forgotten, since she has carried it within her, and on her face. If someone were to tell her that what she is talking about has nothing to do with Algeria, that these are simply distinguishing factors of North African immigration in France, of which she represents the second-generation (as though immigration were a never-ending process, as though she herself were still migrating), and that Algeria, meanwhile, is a country that physically exists on the far side of the Mediterranean, Naïma might pause for a moment before acknowledging that yes, it is true that, for her, the other Algeria, the country, did not exist until much later, not until the year she turned twenty-nine.
The journey was a necessary part of that. She would have to watch from the deck of a ferry for Algiers to appear, for the country to re-emerge from the silence that cloaked it more completely than the thickest fog.
It takes a long time for a country to re-emerge from silence, especially a country like Algeria. Its surface area is 2,381,741 square kilometres, making it the tenth largest country in the world, and the largest country in Africa and the Arab world. Eighty per cent of that area is taken up by the Sahara. This is something Naïma found out from Wikipedia, not from family stories, not from setting foot in the country. When you’re reduced to searching Wikipedia for information on the country you supposedly come from, maybe there is a problem. Maybe Mohamed was right. But this story does not begin with Algeria.
Or rather, it does, but it does not begin with Naïma.’
This passage is worth citing at length as it encapsulates Zeniter’s apprehension of the variegated impact of colonialism: the fractured identities and splintered allegiances that are carried across borders both national and generational; the complexity of ideas of home and belonging in the context of displacement and diaspora; and the insidious ways in which historical or cultural resentments can mask all manner of personal struggles and frustrations.
The Art of Losing, to paraphrase James Joyce, frames the nightmare of twentieth-and twenty-first century history through the eyes of Ali, Naïma’s grandfather, her father Hamid, and Naïma herself, punctuating overarching political narratives with grounding moments of familial significance and human comedy. Zeniter has an acute sense of the moral murkiness brought to bear on political allegiances in the post-colonial context, and of the complexity of trying to remain on the right side of history while the sands of righteousness and integrity keep shifting beneath you. Ali, as a veteran of the French army during the Second World War, is condemned as a harki by Algerian nationalists; omitted from the heroic narratives of Western resistance of Nazi hegemony, Ali is viewed as a traitor by his own countrymen and as a burdensome colonial of dubious loyalty by the French. Furthermore, Ali bears witness to the atrocities and horrors perpetuated by both the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Front) and the French army sent to quash the independence struggle, as the narrative muddies any identification of heroes or villains in colonial conflicts, rather emphasising the involuntary cooption of civilian lives and safety, and the pain of ordinary people caught in a political crossfire in which they have little interest. From the outset, I was struck by the parallels between the novel’s exploration of these impossible double binds and Irish history, but was wary of identifying too easily with experiences of North African imperialism. However, Zeniter herself draws explicit comparisons between the two histories, showcasing the terribly formulaic outcomes of colonisation and conquest:
‘In 2010, Naïma spends a night drinking beer in the deserted gallery of an Irish artist who is exhibiting photographs of a devastated Dublin. Warning her that it is a mediocre film, he insists on showing her a scene from Michael Collins, saying:
“This is what a war of independence looks like.”
On the small computer screen, the armoured cars, angular as praying mantises, bristling with machine guns, enter Croke Park stadium during a Gaelic football match. The crowd watching the match are families, all wearing green and white, smiling and cheering. It is obviously a Sunday. She watches as the tanks roll onto the pitch. They stop. One of the players completes a play beneath the turrets of these strange beasts. The crowd cheers. The British open fire, randomly shooting into the fifteen thousand spectators.
This is what a war of independence looks like: in response to the violence committed by a handful of freedom fighters who, for the most part, were trained in a cellar, a cave, some dark corner of a forest, a professional army, shimmering with cannons, marches out to crush civilians going about their business.’
The subtlety of this passage is typical of Zeniter: on the one hand, there is a knowing irony in the portrayal of the unnamed Irish artist’s presumptuousness, as a white man, in explaining the nature of a war of independence to Naïma; on the other hand, this irony is immediately countered by the poignancy of the account of Bloody Sunday, and by the realisation of the horrific banality and inevitability with which crumbling empires launch their dying assaults. Similarly, Ali’s witnessing of the FLN bombing of the Milk Bar in Algiers reads like passages from Anna Burns’s Milkman, in which the brutally random impact of sectarian violence and paramilitary terrorism during the Troubles in Northern Ireland is conveyed through the jaded and traumatised eyes of a teenage girl. The thrust of Zeniter’s narrative is both damning and relentlessly humanising: the awful cheapness of life in wars built on reprisals, ambushes, and summary executions is made all the more nauseating by the dispassionate, matter-of-fact style with which violence and bloodshed are documented in the novel, while the uncompromising ruthlessness of honour codes built on paranoia, shame, and terror is rendered all the more absurd:
‘At this stage of the “events”, the “troubles”, the “war” – call it what you will – one would have to be a fool not to realise that death is looming over everyone, regardless of which side they are on. And besides, the villagers in the mountains probably find a corpse less frightening than all the disappeared whose absence has left memories with a wound that takes on their shape, their voice, a wound that smiles on clement days and is mournful when it rains.
There are disappeared waiting in the watery depths for someone to claim them, there are others in holes out in the desert, at the bottom of some mountain gorge. There are the disappeared whose bodies are found, but not the faces, which acid has obliterated.’
Zeniter’s core message could be glibly summarised by the cliché that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, but for the urgent arterial appeal running through such passages: can violence in the name of abstract claims of sovereignty or counter-terrorism, of political self-determination or imperial hegemony be justified when terror attacks leave children mutilated, when kangaroo courts demand the utter erasure of civilians from history, and when government-ordered armies slaughter indiscriminately?
As the narrative of The Art of Losing shifts from Algeria to France, the focus of the novel swerves from the heady volatility and immediacy of life in a war-torn country to the liminal existence of refugees in an apathetic host nation. Zeniter strikes at the heart of contemporary and historical tragedies as she provides a chilling account of the dehumanising circumstances of life in the camp in Rivessaltes in which Ali and his family are confined: the novel is piercing in its documentation of the nightmarish trauma of subsistence living in flimsy tents; the indignity of forced dependence on aid provided by a government holding its nose and gritting its teeth; and the erosion of individual consciousness through institutionalised degradation. While the injustice, state-sanctioned violence, forced medication, and poverty of the Algerian refugees of the early 1960s is rendered with stark clarity, Zeniter is most powerful in her haunting understanding of the deeply-felt unreality of such a life, the ghostliness of existing on the margins of a society that refuses to recognise your humanity:
‘Sometimes, Ali can no longer bear the camp or the forest, and he goes walking through the countryside for hours in search of something else. More often than not, when he comes to a neighbouring town he simply sits on the edge of the fountain and watches. From time to time, he goes into a tobacconist and buys a pack of Gitanes – in Algeria, the government is preparing to nationalise “all assets, rights and obligations of factories processing tobacco and making matches” – or biscuits for the children in the grocer’s; the Decree of 22 May 1964 nationalised the flour mills, and the factories making semolina, noodles and couscous. After each conversation with a shopkeeper, however brief, he feels an overwhelming relief: he is not invisible. In the camp, he sometimes wonders. He has a recurring dream: one of his children is ill and urgently needs to be taken to hospital. Ali walks down as far as the road and tries to hail a car. In the middle of the ribbon of tarmac, he waves his arms at cars hurtling towards him, but they do not slow down. They drive straight through his hazy body without even registering his presence.’
Later in the novel, this corrosive sense of invisibility is poignantly contrasted with the hyper-visibility subsequently felt by both Hamid and Naïma as Algerian or French-Algerian citizens, epitomising the seamless elegance with which Zeniter glides between three generations and the various challenges they face. While Ali feels as though his identity is dissolving, Hamid’s appearance or background can incite violence from white French aggressors or Algerian nationalists who despise the descendants of harkis. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks, meanwhile, Naïma is forced to navigate a climate in which she could as easily become another victim of terrorism as she could be suspiciously regarded as a possible perpetrator, sealing her in a bind of doubled fear, a double consciousness in which she must be vigilant of her own safety while remaining wary to the ways in which she is perceived by others. And yet, Zeniter manages to sustain a sincere compassion for French citizens who behave in bigoted ways towards Ali, Hamid and the wider family; without purporting to excuse xenophobia or racism, the novel proposes an understanding of such outbursts of fear or hatred within a prism of refracted shame, anger, disillusionment, and ennui. The even-handed lucidity of this treatment is immensely to Zeniter’s credit as she exposes the pathetic insecurity and, often, thwarted machismo, that form the foundations of such self-erected cages of division.
The same sensitive intelligence is brought to bear on the tangled web of gender relations and colonial experiences. There is clear-eyed acuity in Zeniter’s sense of the complexity of female experiences in colonial and post-colonial Algeria, from Yema’s arranged marriage to Ali as a young teenager to Naïma’s confrontation of the realities of curtailed rights in more conservative areas of the country. Once again, Zeniter refrains from resolving the morass of conflicting truths: French colonisation of Algeria is understood as an act of imperial avarice and violence, and paternalistic claims of protecting the rights of Algerian women are shown to be hollow and Islamophobic; nonetheless, the fate of Ali’s first wife, the lack of agency afforded to Yema, and the double standards in the treatment of Hamid and his sister, the instinctively angry Dalila, are directly incompatible with the modern sensibilities of Naïma and, presumably, most readers. Zeniter is also consistently subversive in her negotiation of gender; the chapter documenting Hamid’s circumcision is tender and shocking, inverting gendered assumptions of control, power, and helplessness while mythical undertones and explicit references to Homer’s Odyssey suggest elements of ritual sacrifice, of the betrayal of Iphigenia by Agamemnon, and of innocence destroyed through deceit:
‘A moment later, pain hits like the lash of a whip. He wants to howl again, but already his uncles are congratulating him: You were very brave. You’re a brave little man. We’re all proud of you. And Hamid does not want to make liars of them. Before the circumcision, he could still allow himself to cry, but now? On this day, without knowing it, he sets out on a life of clenched teeth and fists, a life without tears, his life as a man. (Later, by a kind of cultural reflex, he will sometimes say, “I was moved to tears,” to indicate that he feels overcome, but in truth his eyes ran dry when he was five years old.’
The emotive potency of this incident, of Hamid’s strangely contradictory induction to manhood through a feminised theft of bodily autonomy, is counterbalanced by the education of his French-born friend Annie in the patriarchal logic of colonisation, as she is schooled in the history of French politics and her country’s claims over Algerian territory. In many ways, although the novel opens and concludes with Naïma’s story, Hamid’s experiences of being forced to grow up too quickly, and of simultaneously replacing his father as man of the house in some ways, feeling himself to be emasculated by his helplessness to reform the system in which he lives, and the fear with which his presence as a North African man is met, suggest that he is most grievously imprisoned by conflicting identities and expectations. Zeniter’s exploration of the ways in which forced displacement or migration can warp the apparent natural order of familial hierarchies is fascinating and poignant; Ali and Hamid’s relationship is irrevocably marked by Hamid’s experience as a mediator between his parents and the language of French bureaucracy, by the pressure placed on him to rise above the poverty and frustrations of his community through academic success. Even as Ali grates at his sense that Hamid disregards his position as patriarch, feeling unmanned by his eldest son, the communal focus on literacy and French fluency as the vehicle of social mobility force Hamid to teach himself to read, overcoming his fundamental cultural alienation from the available texts of Enid Blyton to assimilate in a manner that is so painstakingly halted as to seem visceral, almost physically wounding. It is not until much later in the novel that the damage caused by the carapace Hamid has built for himself, the walls he erects around his childhood and his psyche, is exposed,as Zeniter conveys an insightful understanding of the beautiful necessity of vulnerability to love and intimacy, particularly for those struggling under the weight of past trauma.
As is evident from the bulk of this review, Zeniter’s style is elegant and understated; the prose is meticulously crafted even as it seeks to convey the tensions and mutual incomprehension that arise from the barriers erected by failures of language. There are lovely symmetries in the writing, particularly in descriptions of dark nights at the beginnings of chapters, that hint at the circular rhythms of time and memory so integral to the narrative. Though I have previously mentioned the dispassionate curiosity with which Zeniter writes of extreme violence and horror, emphasising the inhumanity of post-colonial conflict while avoiding gratuitous mawkishness, the narrative is powerfully atmospheric, particularly in capturing the heart-in-throat panic of life lived on the edge of fear and instability. Throughout The Art of Losing, Zeniter consistently balances muted subtlety and descriptive richness, studding the narrative with beautifully-crafted turns of phrase such as ‘war marches on under the cover of euphemism’ or:
‘They are laughing because they can laugh. They are laughing at the realisation that, in their minds, the war has retreated, like the waves at low tide, and on the rediscovered beach they can use the vocabulary of horror without giving in to panic.’
Overall, The Art of Losing is a triumph for author and translator alike, as Frank Wynne’s rendering of the novel into English is measured, precise, and gorgeous. The novel sings of love, family, identity, belonging, and the persistence of humanity in spite of the violence of history, and is well worth reading for its deep understanding of post-colonial fragility as well as for its insightful navigation of individual psychology.