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Les figuiers de barbarie
Deux hommes se retrouvent côte à côte dans le vol Alger-Constantine. A dix mille mètres d’altitude, en un peu moins de d’une heure, c’est leur destin – et celui de tout un pays à travers le leur –, qui va se jouer au fil de la conversation et des réminiscences. Ils sont unis par les liens du sang, par l’expérience traumatisante de la guerre d’Algérie, mais aussi par le souvenir d’un été torride de leur adolescence, épisode dont jamais ils n’ont reparlé mais qui symbolise la jeunesse perdue de leur patrie. Rachid, le narrateur, a toujours voué une admiration mêlée d’envie et de ressentiment pour son cousin Omar ; celui-ci, devenu un célèbre architecte, parcourt le monde pour mieux fuir ses démons. Et ce sont ces fantômes que Rachid va le forcer à exorciser : son grand-père Si Mostafa, propriétaire terrien, l’homme aux « figuiers de Barbarie », symbole d’une Algérie prospère et paisible ; son père Kamel, commissaire soupçonné d’avoir collaboré avec les autorités françaises pendant la guerre ; son frère Salim enfin, engagé dans « l’Organisation », mort dans des circonstances mystérieuses. Autour de l’évocation de ce « père collabo » et de ce « frère OAS », c’est toute l’histoire de l’Algérie déchirée, depuis la conquête française jusqu’à l’indépendance, de l’enfance dorée et sensuelle aux horreurs de la torture et du terrorisme, qui défile dans les souvenirs du narrateur.
272 pages, Paperback
First published March 3, 2010
About the author
Rachid Boudjedra
57 books82 followersRashid Boudjedra, رشيد بوجدرة, (born September 5, 1941, Aïn Beïda, Algeria) prolific and revolutionary Algerian writer whose first novel, La Répudiation (1969; The Repudiation), gained notoriety because of its explicit language and frontal assault on Muslim traditionalism in contemporary Algeria. Because of that work, Boudjedra was hailed as the leader of a new movement of experimental fiction.
Boudjedra was given a traditional Muslim upbringing in Algeria and Tunisia, then continued his education in Spain, Algeria, and Paris, where he obtained a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne. He later taught philosophy in Paris and at Rabat, Morocco, before returning to Algeria and working for the Algerian Bureau of Cinematography.
La Répudiation drew upon Boudjedra’s difficult youth. Conventional values and the smug complacency of the established powers in newly independent Algeria were rejected by Boudjedra, whose unorthodox sexual fury and lyrical savagery defied traditional morality. Boudjedra’s next novel, L’Insolation (1972; “Sunstroke”), evoked experimental states of mind, confounding dream with reality. His later works employed different styles. Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée (1975; “Ideal Topography for a Specific Aggression”) took as its protagonist an illiterate Berber peasant drawn to the city by the prospect of work; lost in the capital’s subway, he is bombarded by a host of bewildering scenes and events. In L’Escargot entêté (1977; The Obstinate Snail), a petty bureaucrat exposes his mediocre life and values, symbolizing the incompleteness of the Algerian revolution. With Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie (1979; “1,001 Years of Nostalgia”), Boudjedra created a satire of an imaginary Saharan village confronted with what he viewed as the newest symbol of contemporary cultural imperialism, an American film company. After writing his first several novels in French, Boudjedra switched to Arabic, often translating his own work into French. He returned to writing in French in the 1990s. His later works include Le Démantèlement (1982; “The Dismantling”); Greffe (1984; “Graft”), a collection of poems; Le Désordre des choses (1991; “The Disorder of Things”); Les Figuiers de barbarie (2010; The Barbary Figs); and Printemps (2014; “Spring”).
Boudjedra was given a traditional Muslim upbringing in Algeria and Tunisia, then continued his education in Spain, Algeria, and Paris, where he obtained a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne. He later taught philosophy in Paris and at Rabat, Morocco, before returning to Algeria and working for the Algerian Bureau of Cinematography.
La Répudiation drew upon Boudjedra’s difficult youth. Conventional values and the smug complacency of the established powers in newly independent Algeria were rejected by Boudjedra, whose unorthodox sexual fury and lyrical savagery defied traditional morality. Boudjedra’s next novel, L’Insolation (1972; “Sunstroke”), evoked experimental states of mind, confounding dream with reality. His later works employed different styles. Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée (1975; “Ideal Topography for a Specific Aggression”) took as its protagonist an illiterate Berber peasant drawn to the city by the prospect of work; lost in the capital’s subway, he is bombarded by a host of bewildering scenes and events. In L’Escargot entêté (1977; The Obstinate Snail), a petty bureaucrat exposes his mediocre life and values, symbolizing the incompleteness of the Algerian revolution. With Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie (1979; “1,001 Years of Nostalgia”), Boudjedra created a satire of an imaginary Saharan village confronted with what he viewed as the newest symbol of contemporary cultural imperialism, an American film company. After writing his first several novels in French, Boudjedra switched to Arabic, often translating his own work into French. He returned to writing in French in the 1990s. His later works include Le Démantèlement (1982; “The Dismantling”); Greffe (1984; “Graft”), a collection of poems; Le Désordre des choses (1991; “The Disorder of Things”); Les Figuiers de barbarie (2010; The Barbary Figs); and Printemps (2014; “Spring”).
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 27, 2022
Winner of the 2010 Arab Book Prize.
Algeria was considered a part of France, not a mere colony, from 1830 to 1962. It was not like the country treated the Algerians as French people, for all they were officially citizens. After the war for independence was won, the country began the process of yeeting itself into a civil-warring mess.
Interrogating this process of disintegration is a life-long project for Author Boudjedra, born in 1941 and still with us as of this writing. He attempts to encapsulate his own life by trapping two estranged cousins, Omar and Rashid, on a one-hour flight from Algiers to Constantine, Algeria's second city. They reminisce, as we're all prone to do; they talk about love, sex, and death, and they don't shy away from the anger these conflicting needs and desires evoked then. The issue is repetition, as it is in all life stories. Are we here again, the reader wonders wearily; as I am an old man with some young people in my life, I cringe a little in self-reflective recognition. Sorry, Rob, I'll try to rein this behavior in.
Most of all, though, I want others to know that this is a story of great resonance, that its title is its organizing metaphor for fecundity and sweetness in many colors and shapes that no longer appear with regularity in public markets. Author Boudjedra's long, fatwa-filled career as resister of the colonizers, then resister of the religious mobs, is summed up in this rumination on what the past offers and what it does not. I think he said it best and most succinctly in a letter from the 1990s quoted in the translator's Afterword:
His eloquence and his fighting spirit shine through a translation that I can't say scintillates, though it is not pedestrian or plodding. I doubt it's inspired, though, as the source text won a literary prize. Albeit, I must say, one that appears to have vanished as of 2012....
Algeria was considered a part of France, not a mere colony, from 1830 to 1962. It was not like the country treated the Algerians as French people, for all they were officially citizens. After the war for independence was won, the country began the process of yeeting itself into a civil-warring mess.
Interrogating this process of disintegration is a life-long project for Author Boudjedra, born in 1941 and still with us as of this writing. He attempts to encapsulate his own life by trapping two estranged cousins, Omar and Rashid, on a one-hour flight from Algiers to Constantine, Algeria's second city. They reminisce, as we're all prone to do; they talk about love, sex, and death, and they don't shy away from the anger these conflicting needs and desires evoked then. The issue is repetition, as it is in all life stories. Are we here again, the reader wonders wearily; as I am an old man with some young people in my life, I cringe a little in self-reflective recognition. Sorry, Rob, I'll try to rein this behavior in.
Most of all, though, I want others to know that this is a story of great resonance, that its title is its organizing metaphor for fecundity and sweetness in many colors and shapes that no longer appear with regularity in public markets. Author Boudjedra's long, fatwa-filled career as resister of the colonizers, then resister of the religious mobs, is summed up in this rumination on what the past offers and what it does not. I think he said it best and most succinctly in a letter from the 1990s quoted in the translator's Afterword:
All great literature has incorporated history as a fundamental element of the interrogation between the real and the human, operating in a more subjective mode than one would think in so far as it is the one fruitful and interesting mode of inquiry, becoming far more than just a reading of the past that is immediate, official, fossilized, academic, mechanistic and opportunistic, always co-opted, distorted, and travestied for the sake of the cause.
His eloquence and his fighting spirit shine through a translation that I can't say scintillates, though it is not pedestrian or plodding. I doubt it's inspired, though, as the source text won a literary prize. Albeit, I must say, one that appears to have vanished as of 2012....
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August 28, 2013"In 162 pages, Rashid Boudjedra provides a history en petit of Algeria since the French invasion of 1830..." - M. D. Allen, University of Wisconsin–Fox Valley
This book was reviewed in the September 2013 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/15frdou
This book was reviewed in the September 2013 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/15frdou
August 19, 2025
War is hell and so is the aftermath of war, when societies attempt to establish themselves and the power mongers and inter fighting leads to more fighting. It repeats and it happens everywhere and it’s depressing. This book was well-written and I appreciate reading it. The prose circled back on itself and was heavily laced with burgeoning adulthood, sexuality and men trying to make peace with who they came from, what they did, who they’ve become and what is to come.
September 10, 2024
The Barbary Figs ** Read in Algiers and Constantine, Algeria (July 2024)
September 23, 2023
Deeply disturbing on so many levels.
June 22, 2021
can read alongside joseph andras
March 19, 2016
The savagery of the colonial war waged by the French against the Algerians is best captured in a letter of the French General Saint-Arnaud (1801-1854) sent to his family "Frankly speaking, brother, Algeria simply loses its poetry without a good deal of massacres and smoke-outs"
Quotes from these letters and headlines of the newspapers are interwoven in Rashid Boudjedra's very engaging style of writing that forces the reader to be with the narrator as he related the story of his life, his family's life and that of his closest cousin's in the context of the tumultuous history of Algeria from the war of independence to the civil war.
One of the most intense and memorable piece:
'War, this carnival to which foolish soldiers traipsed off and always lost, trudging through the muddy Vietnamese marshes, catching all sorts of diseases like foot-and-mouth, yellow fever, dying as they cried out for their mothers, their mouths full of mosquitoes, their flocculent bodies slowly decomposing, rotting, deteriorating in a very short space of time because the tropical climate is quicker than any ambulance, any rescue helicopter, any combat fighter, any chemical or nuclear weapon....Bubbling with heat, its slimy, marshy vapours and that unbelievable sweat trickling from God knows where, as if the body was capable of pumping it up and out again at a frightening pace.
These stupid, perennial losers of the colonial wars, yomping through the icy Algerian winters and the mossy Vietnamese jungle, contracting all types of hepatitis, dying as they cried out for their fathers , their mouth full of ants, their frozen bodies washed away by the made, raging streams flooding down from the Atlas mountains, bodies later found torn to shreds in oases like Mchouneche, Tolga and Timimoun, where the first heat waves of the Saharan spring stripped them to the bone in the blink of an eye, helped by voracious horned vipers and the countless ants...'
Rashid Boudjedra is a clear-eyed and great writer; great for his unwavering fearlessness in exposing the hypocrisy of the state and the brutality of colonialism. He comes from the tribe of activists whose courage comes from not allowing injustice to perpetuate. Salute!
Quotes from these letters and headlines of the newspapers are interwoven in Rashid Boudjedra's very engaging style of writing that forces the reader to be with the narrator as he related the story of his life, his family's life and that of his closest cousin's in the context of the tumultuous history of Algeria from the war of independence to the civil war.
One of the most intense and memorable piece:
'War, this carnival to which foolish soldiers traipsed off and always lost, trudging through the muddy Vietnamese marshes, catching all sorts of diseases like foot-and-mouth, yellow fever, dying as they cried out for their mothers, their mouths full of mosquitoes, their flocculent bodies slowly decomposing, rotting, deteriorating in a very short space of time because the tropical climate is quicker than any ambulance, any rescue helicopter, any combat fighter, any chemical or nuclear weapon....Bubbling with heat, its slimy, marshy vapours and that unbelievable sweat trickling from God knows where, as if the body was capable of pumping it up and out again at a frightening pace.
These stupid, perennial losers of the colonial wars, yomping through the icy Algerian winters and the mossy Vietnamese jungle, contracting all types of hepatitis, dying as they cried out for their fathers , their mouth full of ants, their frozen bodies washed away by the made, raging streams flooding down from the Atlas mountains, bodies later found torn to shreds in oases like Mchouneche, Tolga and Timimoun, where the first heat waves of the Saharan spring stripped them to the bone in the blink of an eye, helped by voracious horned vipers and the countless ants...'
Rashid Boudjedra is a clear-eyed and great writer; great for his unwavering fearlessness in exposing the hypocrisy of the state and the brutality of colonialism. He comes from the tribe of activists whose courage comes from not allowing injustice to perpetuate. Salute!
August 13, 2014
"This war: this cancer!"
Boudjedra examines the ongoing war of post-colonialism through an Algerian prism in this little gem of a book. Two men (cousins, sort of) are trying to make sense of their experiences, their lives, as they sit on a plane between two Algerian cities. The war for independence is long past, but they are still dealing with the guilt and disappointment, the confusion and ambiguity of that fight. And the battle appears to have never truly ended, there is still more confusion and violence to be had in the present day.
So for all the very human thoughts on war, violence, idealism, guilt, family, etc, it was a fantastic read. But the mention of the female characters in the book made me more than a little uncomfortable. They weren't the focus of the book, and so the value of the story supercedes that problem, but it was enough to keep it from being a 5-star for me. A lot of the material here seems to be quasi-autobiographical (the accompanying essay on Boudjedra's work indicates as much, and indicates that these particular characters and childhood events appeared in his earlier work as well). In the end I really enjoyed it. It doesn't offer answers to the ambiguities of war, but at least recognizes them, and paints them out in full color for us.
Boudjedra examines the ongoing war of post-colonialism through an Algerian prism in this little gem of a book. Two men (cousins, sort of) are trying to make sense of their experiences, their lives, as they sit on a plane between two Algerian cities. The war for independence is long past, but they are still dealing with the guilt and disappointment, the confusion and ambiguity of that fight. And the battle appears to have never truly ended, there is still more confusion and violence to be had in the present day.
So for all the very human thoughts on war, violence, idealism, guilt, family, etc, it was a fantastic read. But the mention of the female characters in the book made me more than a little uncomfortable. They weren't the focus of the book, and so the value of the story supercedes that problem, but it was enough to keep it from being a 5-star for me. A lot of the material here seems to be quasi-autobiographical (the accompanying essay on Boudjedra's work indicates as much, and indicates that these particular characters and childhood events appeared in his earlier work as well). In the end I really enjoyed it. It doesn't offer answers to the ambiguities of war, but at least recognizes them, and paints them out in full color for us.
June 18, 2013
I know so little about Algeria. Based on the following quote from the Afterword to this book, consider the Barbary Figs to be a fantastic introduction:
"All great literature has incorporated history as a fundamental element of the interrogation between the real and the human, operating in a more subjective mode than one would think in so far as it is the one fruitful and interesting mode of inquiry, becoming far more than just a reading of the past that is immediate, official, fossilized, academic, mechanistic and opportunistic, always co-opted, distorted, and travestied for the sake of the cause."
"All great literature has incorporated history as a fundamental element of the interrogation between the real and the human, operating in a more subjective mode than one would think in so far as it is the one fruitful and interesting mode of inquiry, becoming far more than just a reading of the past that is immediate, official, fossilized, academic, mechanistic and opportunistic, always co-opted, distorted, and travestied for the sake of the cause."
December 7, 2016
J'ai beaucoup aimé le mélange d'histoire personnelle et d'histoire de la colonisation. C'est un livre dur et en même triste sur les horreurs et les conséquences psychologiques à long terme de la guerre d'Algérie. Aussi d'une certaine deception politique après l'Indépendance. C'est un livre plein de de poésie et de souvenir d'enfance, histoire de vies parallèles et d'amitié.
September 9, 2015
Strange book. Stark and poetic, yet very repetitive. Threads of the tale begin to unfold, then retreat and starts again. Again and again. Bleak, mournful and unexpectedly sexual.
December 12, 2016
Algeria's wars, class, colonialism, gender relations... it was interesting but not memorable. Would like to read other works by Boudjedra.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews