Eleanor Kaufman  (University of California, Los Angeles)
"That there should be no difference between disaster and none at all":
The Refusal of Mouloud Mammeri and Bouganim Ami

This paper compares two sets of narratives situated during the catastrophic events of World War Two and its aftermath. Given the historical context, both narratives are shockingly 'apolitical' in their central focus. Bouganim Ami's Récits du Mellah is a series of short stories that depict the final days of the flourishing Jewish community in the Mellah-the Jewish ghetto-of Mogador in Morocco. This is a community full of madness, laughing crazy rabbis, profligate sons returned from their studies in France, and American Zionists trying to encourage a mass relocation to the newly created state of Israel. Despite the impending dissolution of this ancient Moroccan Jewish community, what is striking in these stories is an insistence on a localized madness that refuses to engage with the impending diasporic relocation.

In a similar fashion, Mouloud Mammeri's La colline oubliée details the intricate social dynamics of an Arabo-Berber village in the Atlas mountains of Morocco during World War Two. Once again (and La colline oubliée was much criticized for this at the time of its publication in 1953), the narrative refuses to engage with the war--a war that takes the men away from the small village and brings only some of them back--except in the most perfunctory of ways. Instead they are preoccupied much more with a local case of potential wife repudiation. It seems that the community in question retains a state of quiet explosiveness whether or not many of its central members are present. Through a close reading of these two narratives, I wish to delineate the possibilities and the ethics of a different form of community that defines itself in its refusal to engage with the larger events that reshape its very essence. In this regard, these texts refuse a lens that would examine them through the already-vexed relation of Magrebian Jewry to French colonialism. Rather than foregrounding this complexity-something we see in the poetic and philosophical meditations of writers such as Edmond Jabès, Albert Memmi, Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous-the texts in question displace it by way of an insistence on the tragedy of ordinary life. In reading these challenging texts, I draw on Maurice Blanchot's notion of the community shaped through a complex relation to disaster, and Ann Smock's stunning preface to Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster (from which the quote in the title is taken). In short, these texts mark the uncanny moment in the middle of socio-political upheaval and just before a diasporic exodus, a moment that refuses to acknowledge the ways in which it is overdetermined. But could it be said that such a refusal is itself a means, and perhaps the only means at hand, of surviving the disaster?