Since the Middle Ages the white man has had the habit of naming Africa’s and Asia’s mountains— even the animals and tiny beasties there. What he deliberately does not acknowledge or like to name, are the human beings that he encounters there. Why is the European philosophy, “Philosophy”, and why is the African and the Asian philosophy, “ethnophilosophy”? Why is Mozart’s music, “Music”, and the classical Pakistani and Indian ragas, “ethnomusicology”?
The 1942 novel, The Stranger, by French author Albert Camus is a representation of this ideology. The Meursault Investigation, written by Algerian journalist, Kamel Daoud, nearly 70 years after The Stranger is but a strident retaliation to it.
The novels The Stranger by Albert Camus, and The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud, are pieces of literature created in a way that both can be viewed under a post-colonial lens. The Stranger intrinsically touches upon many ideas and abstractions that a post-colonial readership could connect to and relate as ‘the colonial masters addressing their subjects’, whereas The Meursault Investigation is typically one that could be defined as the ‘empire writing back to the colonial masters’.
The Stranger portrays the France of 1940s and 1950s— World War II had just ended— and the idea in which Camus has his protagonist, Meursault, set, communicates the same age-old and conventional attributes as any of the European characters that appeared in the books published before The Stranger— absolutely immersed in a sense of rationalistic superiority. Apparently, Meursault is portrayed as a character that is cognizant of everything in the universe. Carrying out an exegesis into this very idea, one could analyze this concept by juxtaposing it with the idea of imperialism—how the colonial masters established that they knew everything and that whatever they knew was right, whereas what the colonized Africans and Asians knew, were only borrowed forms of knowledge from the western cannon — hence making the Africans and the other colonized segments of the world view their epistemological and ontological selves with disdain.
During the time of the World War II, when the Nazi camps in France had been established, Sartre had remarked, “We have never been freer than we have been in the German-occupied France”, defining how consuming the idea of freedom can be and that it can only be in imprisonment that one can veritably understand the essence of freedom and be responsible for it. This idea of freedom is precisely what the Africans too display when from among the African masses, people like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka embrace the political challenge of writing in English and address the western masses. They are synonymous to the peripheral and ‘otherized’ entities that flex enough to claim from within the mainstream a space of their own.
The killing of the Arab in the novel, is another instance that proves how The Stranger can be dealt, not as a book, but as a mindset that propagates a sense of hatred that the Europeans have towards the people they ruled over as colonizers. It resides in the disgraceful way that the Arab had been killed on the beach and then in the thoroughly illogical, irrational and nonsensical justification that Meursault— a character immersed in rationalistic superiority— gives for his committed crime: he was dazzled by the sun. The idea portrayed here is synonymous to establishing that it is perfectly human to kill Africans, Asians, as they are not humans in the first place. Even the way that the prosecutor acts in the novel— completely oblivious to the cause of the murder of the unarmed, innocent Arab— establishes this idea, as the prosecutor, too, is Camus’s own character and a product of the same psychological construct.
On the other hand, in Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, is an archetypal example of the ‘empire writing back’. Every word of the book has a complete religious background to it. From naming the characters (Musa and Haroon) to the light insolent blows towards The Stranger as part of its narratology, The Meursault Investigation, is by all means a dialogue with Camus. The stance taken by Daoud is a political realization to establish that books and characters have an afterlife too, and The Meursault Investigation represents the justice being done to the nameless, lapidated and unvalued Arab. Just like the European colonizers considered the African culture, knowledge and tradition as invalid and therefore never placed any value onto it.
What Kamel Daoud establishes through his novel is the fact that intellectual history needs to be given credit where due, justice be maintained and humans be considered humans at the least. Chinua Achebe in his Things Fall Apart, makes the same political choice of writing in English and goads the western audiences into believing that Africa is not a wasteland— it is one resourceful hub of culture, norms, intellect, tradition and rationality. What Daoud does, is to concretize before the western writers, is an abstract notion that they need to put an end to labelling social norms, knowledge, culture and intellect with tags that befit their personal definitions of these things.
Knowledge is not any particular region’s private property, nor is the idea of writing books in a particular language. By employing the French linguistic facility, Daoud chooses to break the stereotypes of language-ownership that stigmatize a particular language to be used by only a few (to which the language originally belongs), just like Soyinka and Achebe ‘chose’ to write in English and show a mirror to their own as well as the European society.
In a nutshell, both novels—The Stranger and The Meursault Investigation— are ideally synonymous to a catalyst in terms of understanding what the West did to the ones they colonized, and how shall the colonized segments of the world’s calendar reflect back to the atrocities that they witnessed. It is not merely about the way that the novels have been written but also the complexities, the concerns and the cadences that they address and how these pieces of literary works transcend their respective writers in terms of pushing the readership into understanding the undiscovered labyrinths of truth and the quest for identity in a world where colonization and “otherization” exist as two fundamental dilemmas.