Albert Memmi Quotes

Before one scoffs at national pride and the fatherland, at wealth and good manners, love of one's country, family, and traditions, one must have arrived at a proper evaluation of one's country, have had enough to eat, and have received a good education. Then one can look on from afar and make wisecracks. But I have no sense of humor and not enough courage to be cynical.

If my nose had been too long that might have been fixed in a couple of weeks in a clinic, or a gangrenous arm could be amputated, but I had a heart that was defective. My misfortunes were never chance encounters, and I could not easily avoid them. The more I get to know myself, the more aware I become of this. To put an end to this state of affairs would mean putting an end to myself, to die or to go mad. My principal's temporary appointment would end one day, but I would never find the solution to my problem because I am that problem.

Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous adventures, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge.

Once I had overcome my rage against Vichy, the numerus clausus, and the Fascist Legion, I began to doubt the treason of France. To accept it would indeed have been unbearable. All my ambitions, my studies, and my life were founded on this choice. How much would I have to uproot in myself now? What would be left of me? It was in this dreadful moment that I finally caught a glimpse of my ruin. If I rejected what I was becoming would I be able to return to what I had been?

How vain and futile are all theoretical and philosophical constructions of the mind when compared to the brutal realities of the world of men! The European philosophers build the most rigorous and virtuous moral codes, and their politicians, brought up by these teachers, foment murders as a means of government.

It was in the Passage that I discovered tribal life and learned to hate it. How happy had been the intimacy of our blind alley, now lost for good! As long as I had lived alone, I had lived in peace.

In moving to this new street that we called the Passage, Mother saw an old dream of hers come true. She was now living again with all her family... All day long, whether for a pinch of pepper or a sprig of parsley, to find out what time it might be or even for no good reason at all, the whole staircase re-echoed with their various names. Actually, they derived comfort and pleasure from constantly finding each other at home, and the other tenants felt like trespassers in this hive of solidarity. After dinner every evening there was a gathering of the clan in Uncle Aroun’s flat, where a detailed post-mortem of the day’s events would take place, while everyone gossiped and munched squash seeds. Thus, each of us remained completely visible to all the others, and the whole family, by pooling its problems and its hopes, acquired a collective soul.

I was cornered, without any escape, and began to think of death for the first time in my life. Without being at all strange or foreign, this idea of suicide was born within me quite spontaneously and gently, like the world coming to life at dawn. At once, suicide seemed familiar to me, like a release, and I was surprised how convenient and tempting so serious an action could seem. The ultimate solution to my problems was within my own power.

My mother tongue is the Tunisian dialect, which I speak with the proper accent of the young Moslem kids of our part of town and of the drivers of horse-trucks who were customers of our shop. The Jews of Tunis are to the Moslems what the Viennese are to other Germans: they drag out their syllables in a singsong voice and soften and make insipid the guttural speech of their Mohammedan fellow-citizens. The relatively correct intonations of my speech earned me the mockery of all: the Jews disliked my strange speech and suspected me of affectation, while the Moslems thought that I was mimicking them.

Since that day, I have slowly acquired the uneasiness about my clothes that characterizes the poor who are ashamed. I was no longer at my ease in any suit: I felt that I was badly dressed and that I attracted the attention of all. I feared, even when wearing a new suit, the mockery of others at my unsuccessful attempts. That is how I became what is known as careful of my clothes.

Oh yes, poverty is something to be ashamed of, and this was clear to me from the mutterings of my own parents, from their remarks about the Oukala of the Birds and their pity for the Choulam family. As for me, I despised the poor. Fraji had to pay with shame the price of his poverty and I too, if we were poor, would have to pay with my own shame. In the disorder of my awareness, I made that day a great and unhappy step forward. I noted that I too wore new clothes only rarely and was forced to receive, like Fraji, bundles that stank of mildew and dirty linen and from which all the expensive buttons had been removed. I now understood his suffering fully, the shame that I had poured forth upon him in the presence of Chouchane and the other kids. His suffering and shame were my own too; on my own shoulders I now felt the burden of the same contempt, as if I had his hair, all clammy with filth, and his eyes like the headlights of a car. I felt that I had become Fraji.

Then the long walk in the sun brought us back to the coffeehouse where we always found the same crowd of Sabbath friends, cheerful and loud, smelling of eau de Cologne and of snuff. How blessed was the Sabbath coffeehouse where we remained pure because there was no cigarette smoke and where our conversation remained courteous because we were forbidden to play cards! In addition, I enjoyed a child’s privileges: everyone had a smile for me and welcomed me, making room for me. Seeing myself treated in this manner by grown men, I felt that I assumed a man’s dignity.

Sleep, when one has no worries, tastes like honey.

We lived at the bottom of the Impasse Tarfoune, in a little room where I was born one year after my sister Kalla. With the Barouch family we shared the ground floor of a shapeless old building, a sort of two-room apartment. The kitchen, half of it roofed over and the rest an open courtyard, was a long vertical passage toward the light. But before reaching this square of pure blue sky, it received, from a multitude of windows, all the smoke, the smells, and the gossip of our neighbors. At night, each locked himself up in his room; but in the morning, life was always communal, running along the tunnel of a kitchen, mingling the waters from the kitchen sinks, the smells of coffee, and the voices still muffled with sleep.