Sponsored by the Center for International Studies and the French Department, Algerian writer Mohamed Kacimi is on campus this week to discuss Arab, francophone and religious identity. This interview was translated from the original French.
You're a prolific author, known for your plays, novels and translations. It seems like the common thread in your work is an exploration of contemporary Muslim identity. What prompts you to focus on this theme?
The theme is religion. In every piece, what interests me--and this applies not only to Islam--is the relationship between humans and religion, or the relationship between society and religion, or the relationship between one individual and God. I ask, why is this relationship so conflicted? And that's as much in Western society as in the cultures of the Middle East and the Arab world.
In your opinion, how did we get here? What led us to this crisis, at this juncture in history?
At this juncture, societies have already been swept away--all societies, in the South as well as the North--by a vision of 20th-century utopia. The utopia was to be a society without class distinctions, an egalitarian society. So we find modern societies, denied their utopia, unable to achieve the revolutionary dream, will shift their expectations, will shift their dreams, will shift their utopia into the religious sphere.
This seems to apply to Western societies, but do you feel this is the case with traditionally Arab or Muslim societies as well?
That is the case, and even more so. Today, we see a return to religion in the United States as well as Europe, even in France. But in the Arab world, the tendency is exacerbated, because those societies have more fragile structures and less of a tradition, less of a cultural foundation. In the Arab world, you'll find societies without any kind of freedom. There's no freedom of thought, no freedom of expression, no freedom for the individual, no freedom to love, no freedom to create. So religion assumes the duties of all the spaces for individual expression that are forbidden to society.
Where do you situate yourself in this religious sphere? How do you identify?
I'm originally from a very, very religious family. I think I spent my adolescence, my young adulthood, my entire developmental trajectory trying to leave, to get free, to purify myself, to totally break with that culture. I'm at the crossroads, and have been for years, between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I'm an atheist who spends his time running after God.
In an interview you did with the newssite Liberation two years ago, you said that Arab intellectuals "speak only to themselves," that they're "preaching in the desert." Do you identify with this group of thinkers? Are they your colleagues?
There's a certain bankruptcy among intellectuals today, in France as well as in the Arab world. But more specifically, it's true that we intellectuals are in crisis. We're living at a time of violence; we're living at a time of praise and affirmation of identities, like a cultural bonfire. And calm voices--reflective voices--don't have a place in that. Inevitably, there will be an intellectual who deconstructs that worldview, who deconstructs those truths. And unavoidably, his voice will not be tolerated, because it contradicts public opinion. An intellectual is out of sync with a society caught up in emotions instead of taking a rational look at reality.
You've spoken rather negatively about the intellectual's fate. So what do you hope to accomplish with your work? What do you expect will come of your novels, your translations, your plays?
In the sixties, we saw that the Marxists' weapon--even before then, at the turn of the century--was literature and poetry. Little by little, we saw that literature doesn't change the world. So, maybe I write because I see clearly literature's lack of influence. Most importantly, I write to preserve some of the humor that we're losing. My work is intended to defuse some of the darkness of this pessimist world.
Who are you trying to reach with your work--the francophone world, the Arab world, everyone? You're here in the U.S., where many students would say that the francophone world has nothing to do with them. So how do you respond to that? Why come here to speak to us?
I don't know if I imagine a particular audience. But it's writing for the people who take the time to read my work, to watch, to listen.
What can American students learn from your work? How should we use the ideas and theories in your pieces?
It's really for me to say, "what can I learn from the United States?" It's more for me to learn, as an author, from Algeria, living in France, and having an enormous number of preconceptions about the United States, just as everyone does. I had the chance to work in Tennessee on a piece called "Babel" and to see the considerable differences between our conceptions of that country--a jumbled, whiny cult that eats McDonald's drunk, and who all vote for the right--and to come back and testify both to the vitality and the opposition that exists in that country, and to the open-mindedness you find in the United States. What really got me excited during my first visit to Knoxville with the Clarence Brown Theatre was the intellectuals' lack of a priori worldview. People ask questions without saying, "we have all the answers." And this distance in the American point of view really fascinated me.
