A short life of the author
Albert Memmi (15 December 1920 – 22 May 2020) was a Tunisian-born French novelist, essayist, and sociologist whose work on colonialism, racism, and the psychology of domination made him one of the most important political thinkers of the decolonisation era. His essay The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) — a penetrating analysis of the mutually deforming relationship between colonial master and colonial subject — stands alongside Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Edward Said’s Orientalism as a foundational text of postcolonial thought. His fiction, less widely known, draws on his own experience as a Tunisian Jew — a figure who belongs fully to neither the colonising European world nor the colonised Arab world — to explore the existential predicament of identity in conditions of domination.
Early Life
Memmi was born in Tunis, in the Jewish quarter (the hara), the son of a Tunisian Jewish family of modest means. His father was a harness-maker. Memmi grew up speaking Arabic at home, French at school, and Hebrew at the synagogue — a trilingual existence that embodied the cultural complexity that would become his central intellectual subject. He attended the Lycée Carnot in Tunis on scholarship, where he received a French classical education, and studied philosophy at the University of Algiers and the Sorbonne.
During the Second World War, Memmi was interned in a forced labour camp under the Vichy regime — an experience that confirmed his understanding that the categories of coloniser and colonised were not merely political but existential: to be a Tunisian Jew under French colonial rule and Vichy collaboration was to belong to no category at all.
La Statue de sel / The Pillar of Salt (1953)
Memmi’s autobiographical first novel, introduced by Albert Camus, follows Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche — a Tunisian Jewish boy from the hara — through his education in French colonial schools, his growing awareness of the contradictions of his identity, and his ultimate rupture with the world of his childhood. The novel’s title refers to Lot’s wife, who looked back and was turned to salt — a metaphor for the impossibility of both remaining in and leaving the colonial world.
The novel is remarkable for its refusal to resolve the protagonist’s contradictions. Benillouche cannot become fully French (he is a colonial subject), cannot remain fully Tunisian (he has been educated out of his origins), and cannot be simply Jewish (his Judaism is itself shaped by both Arab and French influences). This triple alienation — which was Memmi’s own — gives the novel a psychological density that transcends autobiography.
The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957)
Memmi’s most important work, published with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, is structured as a pair of portraits: the portrait of the coloniser (who profits from the colonial system while rationalising it with myths of civilising mission and cultural superiority) and the portrait of the colonised (who internalises the coloniser’s contempt while struggling to preserve or reconstruct an authentic identity).
Memmi’s analysis is notable for its attention to the psychology of both parties. The coloniser, he argues, is trapped in a moral contradiction: he benefits from a system of exploitation that his own values condemn, and his response is either to become a “coloniser who refuses” (who opposes colonialism but cannot escape its benefits) or a “coloniser who accepts” (who embraces the system and develops racist justifications for it). The colonised, correspondingly, can either assimilate (attempting to become the coloniser, which is impossible) or revolt (recovering or inventing an authentic identity in opposition to colonial culture).
The book’s influence on subsequent postcolonial thought has been immense. Fanon drew on it in The Wretched of the Earth; Said acknowledged it in Orientalism; and the concepts of internalised oppression and the coloniser’s bad faith have become standard analytical tools in postcolonial studies.
Portrait of a Jew (1962) and Dominated Man (1968)
Memmi extended his analysis of domination beyond colonialism to examine other forms of social subordination. Portrait of a Jew (Portrait d’un Juif, 1962) analyses the Jewish experience — particularly the experience of North African Jews — through the same lens of domination and identity. Dominated Man (L’Homme dominé, 1968) broadens the framework further to include women, Black people, servants, and other dominated groups, arguing that domination creates consistent psychological patterns regardless of its specific form.
Later Works
Le Scorpion (The Scorpion, 1969) is an experimental novel that combines autobiography, fiction, and philosophical meditation. Racism (1982, expanded 2000) is a theoretical analysis of racist thought and practice. Decolonization and the Decolonized (2004) reassesses the postcolonial world fifty years after independence, noting with characteristic honesty that decolonisation had produced its own forms of domination, corruption, and cultural impoverishment.
Critical Standing
Memmi’s reputation rests primarily on The Colonizer and the Colonized, which is one of the most cited texts in postcolonial studies. His fiction is less widely known but deserves greater attention — particularly The Pillar of Salt, which offers one of the most psychologically complex portraits of colonial identity in francophone literature. His insistence on honesty — including the uncomfortable honesty that decolonised nations often replicate the structures of their former colonisers — distinguishes him from more ideologically committed postcolonial thinkers and gives his work a durability that more polemical texts lack.
Collecting Memmi
Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur (1957, Buchet/Chastel) in French first edition is the primary collectible. The first English translation, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1965, Orion Press), is also sought. Memmi’s novels are less commonly collected but are of interest to specialists in francophone and postcolonial literature.