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The Scorpion
Memmi, Albert
242 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1971
About the author
Albert Memmi
67 books142 followersTunisian Jewish writer and essayist who migrated to France.
Born in Tunisia under French protectorate, from a Tunisian Jewish mother, Marguerite Sarfati, and a Tunisian-Italian Jewish father, François Memmi, he speaks French and Tunisian-Judeo-Arabic. He claims to be of Berber ancestry. He was educated in French primary schools, and continued on to the Carnot high school in Tunis, the University of Algiers where he studied philosophy, and finally the Sorbonne in Paris. Albert Memmi found himself at the crossroads of three cultures, and based his work on the difficulty of finding a balance between the East and the West.
His best-known nonfiction work is The Colonizer and the Colonized, about the interdependent relationship of the two groups. It was published in 1957, a time when many national liberation movements were active. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface. The work is often read in conjunction with Frantz Fanon's Les damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) and Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism. In October 2006, Memmi's follow-up to this work, titled Decolonization and the Decolonized, was published. In this book, Memmi suggests that in the wake of global decolonization, the suffering of former colonies cannot be attributed to the former colonizers, but to the corrupt leaders and governments that control these states.
Born in Tunisia under French protectorate, from a Tunisian Jewish mother, Marguerite Sarfati, and a Tunisian-Italian Jewish father, François Memmi, he speaks French and Tunisian-Judeo-Arabic. He claims to be of Berber ancestry. He was educated in French primary schools, and continued on to the Carnot high school in Tunis, the University of Algiers where he studied philosophy, and finally the Sorbonne in Paris. Albert Memmi found himself at the crossroads of three cultures, and based his work on the difficulty of finding a balance between the East and the West.
His best-known nonfiction work is The Colonizer and the Colonized, about the interdependent relationship of the two groups. It was published in 1957, a time when many national liberation movements were active. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface. The work is often read in conjunction with Frantz Fanon's Les damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) and Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism. In October 2006, Memmi's follow-up to this work, titled Decolonization and the Decolonized, was published. In this book, Memmi suggests that in the wake of global decolonization, the suffering of former colonies cannot be attributed to the former colonizers, but to the corrupt leaders and governments that control these states.
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May 10, 2019
I like being the first reader to review a really obscure book. I feel like an explorer entering uncharted waters.
Albert Memmi was [correction: is! Still kickin at age 98!] a French-Tunisian writer best known for his 1957 text The Colonizer and the Colonized. Born and raised in French Tunisia, Memmi lived through and documented the effects of Tunisian Independence in 1956 and its aftermath. Memmi, who supported the independence struggle against the French colonizers, found himself in the awkward position of being “asked to leave” the independent state, because his French background and Jewish faith were deemed “not Tunisian enough.” The sometimes unexpected effects of decolonization strongly influence The Scorpion, a story about a writer who mysteriously disappears from his homeland.
I dislike coming-of-age stories, especially when they are little more than the author’s own thinly-veiled memoir, and I get salty when I feel I’ve been duped into reading one under false premises. While Memmi’s life story is undoubtedly intriguing (he once escaped from a Nazi prison camp), he opts to focus mainly on a number of uninteresting episodes from his childhood, mainly involving his father, an uninteresting man. Herein lies the danger of fictionalizing one’s own childhood. While Memmi’s father was surely a towering figure in the author’s own life, I found myself frequently skimming through these mundane episodes in the text. The gist of the story is this: Emile, a writer, has disappeared. His brother Marcel, a doctor, is rummaging through his brother’s notes and unfinished stories looking for clues regarding the disappearance. Memmi relies on different fonts to differentiate Emile’s writing (the coming-of-age story) and Marcel’s commentary.
Some of the most interesting parts of the book can be found in these commentaries. Marcel gives us infrequent asides about his own work as a doctor and how the medical field is faring under decolonization. A subtext quietly emerges, tucked away in side notes here and there, about a colleague named Neil, a successful doctor, who is being asked to leave the country. At first, Marcel laments that “after the euphoria died down” following Independence, that he’s learned the new politicians aren’t much better than the old guard. “Colleagues are leaving discreetly,” Marcel notes. Once Neil’s contract is not renewed at the medical center, suddenly “he is a foreigner. That’s also part of the end of colonization, and I wanted it too… It’s madness to get rid of valuable technicians that way just so as to follow independence strictly to the letter. Who’s to replace him now? Amar, his assistant, I suppose, who’s never worked in any other hospital and received all his training from Neil himself? Europeans have become foreigners, they have to leave.” Later, Marcel cryptically notes that “Neil knows, and he looked at things in a way no one could stand.”
My first instinct was that Memmi should have focused the narrative of his story on Neil and the crisis at the medical center. But, by the end, I began warming to the structure. I like the feeling of something troubling happening in the background, just out of focus, and the childhood story reinforces the assertion that Marcel and Emile (clearly Memmi himself in disguise) are as Tunisian as anyone else.
Then the story jumps forward to a series of heated debates between an adult Emile and his former pupil regarding decolonization. “Colonization, for instance, stirs violence, because it is violence itself, and nothing but greater violence can put an end to violence… oppression is everywhere and all power is oppressive.” These debates are the highlight of the book. Slowly, over the course of four Thurdsays, the disillusioned student methodically strips away all of Emile’s defenses. We learn that Emile was active in the independence movement and admired as a philosopher by the youth. But, in the end, his writings have failed to make the impact everyone had hoped for, and eventually the student stops paying him visits.
Then the book gets weird. Marcel himself leaves the country and decides to dump a large number of fragments of Emile’s unfinished stories, which, in turn, is Memmi simply throwing in all the scraps of unpublished stories he’s written over the years, or at least the ones he likes. Thematically these tidbits do come back around to the earlier narrative, but as a writer myself it was just too obvious what Memmi was doing in terms of salvaging unpublished fragments without fleshing them out.
So while the dust jacket promises that “crowded North African streets, the struggle for decolonization, interracial conflicts and religious prejudices provide the background,” I found The Scorpion lacking depth in all those areas save decolonization, unless there are some very abstract cryptic metaphors in the final collection of pseudo-stories that I am not brilliant enough to grasp. It’s one of the more unique books I’ve read recently, but not a story that made me curious enough to check out Memmi’s other works.
Albert Memmi was [correction: is! Still kickin at age 98!] a French-Tunisian writer best known for his 1957 text The Colonizer and the Colonized. Born and raised in French Tunisia, Memmi lived through and documented the effects of Tunisian Independence in 1956 and its aftermath. Memmi, who supported the independence struggle against the French colonizers, found himself in the awkward position of being “asked to leave” the independent state, because his French background and Jewish faith were deemed “not Tunisian enough.” The sometimes unexpected effects of decolonization strongly influence The Scorpion, a story about a writer who mysteriously disappears from his homeland.
I dislike coming-of-age stories, especially when they are little more than the author’s own thinly-veiled memoir, and I get salty when I feel I’ve been duped into reading one under false premises. While Memmi’s life story is undoubtedly intriguing (he once escaped from a Nazi prison camp), he opts to focus mainly on a number of uninteresting episodes from his childhood, mainly involving his father, an uninteresting man. Herein lies the danger of fictionalizing one’s own childhood. While Memmi’s father was surely a towering figure in the author’s own life, I found myself frequently skimming through these mundane episodes in the text. The gist of the story is this: Emile, a writer, has disappeared. His brother Marcel, a doctor, is rummaging through his brother’s notes and unfinished stories looking for clues regarding the disappearance. Memmi relies on different fonts to differentiate Emile’s writing (the coming-of-age story) and Marcel’s commentary.
Some of the most interesting parts of the book can be found in these commentaries. Marcel gives us infrequent asides about his own work as a doctor and how the medical field is faring under decolonization. A subtext quietly emerges, tucked away in side notes here and there, about a colleague named Neil, a successful doctor, who is being asked to leave the country. At first, Marcel laments that “after the euphoria died down” following Independence, that he’s learned the new politicians aren’t much better than the old guard. “Colleagues are leaving discreetly,” Marcel notes. Once Neil’s contract is not renewed at the medical center, suddenly “he is a foreigner. That’s also part of the end of colonization, and I wanted it too… It’s madness to get rid of valuable technicians that way just so as to follow independence strictly to the letter. Who’s to replace him now? Amar, his assistant, I suppose, who’s never worked in any other hospital and received all his training from Neil himself? Europeans have become foreigners, they have to leave.” Later, Marcel cryptically notes that “Neil knows, and he looked at things in a way no one could stand.”
My first instinct was that Memmi should have focused the narrative of his story on Neil and the crisis at the medical center. But, by the end, I began warming to the structure. I like the feeling of something troubling happening in the background, just out of focus, and the childhood story reinforces the assertion that Marcel and Emile (clearly Memmi himself in disguise) are as Tunisian as anyone else.
Then the story jumps forward to a series of heated debates between an adult Emile and his former pupil regarding decolonization. “Colonization, for instance, stirs violence, because it is violence itself, and nothing but greater violence can put an end to violence… oppression is everywhere and all power is oppressive.” These debates are the highlight of the book. Slowly, over the course of four Thurdsays, the disillusioned student methodically strips away all of Emile’s defenses. We learn that Emile was active in the independence movement and admired as a philosopher by the youth. But, in the end, his writings have failed to make the impact everyone had hoped for, and eventually the student stops paying him visits.
Then the book gets weird. Marcel himself leaves the country and decides to dump a large number of fragments of Emile’s unfinished stories, which, in turn, is Memmi simply throwing in all the scraps of unpublished stories he’s written over the years, or at least the ones he likes. Thematically these tidbits do come back around to the earlier narrative, but as a writer myself it was just too obvious what Memmi was doing in terms of salvaging unpublished fragments without fleshing them out.
So while the dust jacket promises that “crowded North African streets, the struggle for decolonization, interracial conflicts and religious prejudices provide the background,” I found The Scorpion lacking depth in all those areas save decolonization, unless there are some very abstract cryptic metaphors in the final collection of pseudo-stories that I am not brilliant enough to grasp. It’s one of the more unique books I’ve read recently, but not a story that made me curious enough to check out Memmi’s other works.
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