N’Zid? Zid!: Mediterranean Archives and Postcolonial Translation in the Time of Amnesia

Résumé 0

My contribution to this volume interrogates the time and space of postcolonial translation through two items, read through the lens of a Mediterranean archive. The first is Algerian novelist Malika Mokeddem’s 2001 novel N’Zid. The second object is Frantz Fanon’s multilingual passport, located at the Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) archive in Normandy. Published in French and not formally translated, N’Zid is a novel requiring translation— between desert and sea, North and South Mediterraneans, Arabic and French, the decolonial and postcolonial, the space of the archive, and memory and forgetting, in what I am calling the time of amnesia. Memory and forgetting are times of translation for both objects, one floating in Mediterranean space, the other buried in a French archive. The archive necessitates translation, perhaps a very specific kind of translation. Fanon himself becomes translated and strangely silenced in the archive, located at the polar opposite coordinates of his political life—Algeria translated back into Normandy/metropolitan France. A curious burial. Fanon and his passport, as well as N’Zid are chronotopes in the Bakhtinian sense. Bakhtin calls a chronotope ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (84). Both objects will be mapped out, recovered naufrages in a space-time specific to the Mediterranean pasts and postcolonial afterlives.