FRANCE: Comedian Fellag has dared to tackle the divisions between his people and France, writes Lara Marlowe, in Paris.
The Algerian comic Fellag says the modern history of his country "is imprinted on me." His humorous, bittersweet portrayal of the Algerian predicament, and Algeria's fraught relations with its erstwhile French colonisers, have made him one of the most popular entertainers on both sides of the Mediterranean.
Fellag (his first names, Mohand Saïd, are almost never used) has just completed the successful two-month run of Opéra d'Casbah, a musical he wrote and starred in, at the Paris Opéra Comique. In March, the French Culture Minister started the "Week of Francophonie" by awarding Fellag the €10,000 Grand Prix Raymond Devos for "exploiting the excellence, the intelligence and the vivacity" of the French language.
On the eve of our meeting, Fellag received another award, the Prix de la Francophonie, given by the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, founded by Beaumarchais in the 18th century.
"The French language is paying me back what I gave her," laughs Fellag, ensconced at a café table around the corner from the Opéra Comique. "In the Berber language, I find the path to the collective subconsciousness of my Maghrebin people; in the beauty and complexity of Arabic, I find the hidden secrets of souls. The French language helped me open myself to the world, to modernity." Born in 1950 in the Kabyle village of Azzefoun, Fellag grew up during the 1954-1962 war of independence against France. His father, a hydraulics engineer, went into hiding as a political militant with the National Liberation Front (FLN). Fellag remembers his dad sneaking home in the middle of the night, once every six months, to kiss his children while they slept.
In Boat for Australia, the one-man show that Fellag performed across France in 2000 and 2001, and which was released on video and DVD last month, he begins a sentence with the words, "When independence came - or was it when it left? - anyway, it didn't stay very long. . ." As a teenager, Fellag saw the hope of the revolution degenerate into one-party rule and dictatorship. He was 15 when a speeding lorry knocked his father's car into a ravine and killed him.
His mother raised six children "without anything to eat - I have known physical hunger." He parodies the monotony of beans, couscous and macaroni - all without meat - in song, in Boat for Australia. Fellag's output of plays, films and books is prodigious, but It's in Algiers, the collection of novellas published by JC Lattès last year, stands out for its powerful writing and dark, tragic content. As one character laments, "We should have been born somewhere else." In the first chapter, a secret police torturer under the Boumediènne regime tells his victim, "Of all the vermin proliferating in society, you intellectuals are the worst species, the most dangerous. You sow doubt everywhere. . ." The scene was based on personal experience. After a stint as director of the cultural centre in the Kabyle capital of Tizi Ouzou, Fellag was beaten in the local police commissariat for "subversion". He went into exile in Québec until the mid-1980s. On his return to Algiers, "I realised that the street, contrary to the theatre, had evolved a great deal. The theatre was in the street. . . In the street, I laughed, I was amazed. I hung around, I went everywhere. I'd take the bus for hours, to listen to people."
The fruit of Fellag's re-immersion in Algerian life, a series of one-man comedy shows, made him a star in Algeria. All Algerians could relate to the hospital scene, where patients wait for four hours, only to be told, "Sorry, the doctor's at a conference in Paris." But by the mid-1990s, the war between the military regime and Islamic fundamentalists reached horrific proportions, with entertainers often singled out for throat-slashing. Fellag went into exile again, this time in France.
Fellag regards the Algerian military and Islamists with equal scorn. "If the government had allowed people to be free, I don't think they would have gravitated towards fundamentalism," he tells me. In Opéra d'Casbah, even a monologue about the North African speciality couscous becomes a way of ridiculing the generals. "The couscous of an authoritarian regime is made of lead semolina, with more rigid grain than those found in other Maghreb countries," he recites. "In the market, you find all kinds of small, medium and heavy calibre."
Many of Fellag's jokes centre on the housing shortage in Algiers. In Boat for Australia, the narrator's brother and sister-in-law are given the only remaining space in an apartment housing 42 relatives: the bathtub. But because the water supply is sporadic, they must keep the tub full. The couple grow scales and fins, and their first child is a sardine.
Macho Algerians who sequester their wives, sisters and daughters are the butt of many Fellag stories. "The first man who hit his wife with a club and told her not to go outside the cave anymore invented politics," says a woman in It's in Algiers. But Fellag's lucid assessment of the place of North African immigrants in French society draws the most laughter. "It's easy to recognise a Frenchman," he says in Opéra d'Casbah. "He's the one who shrinks back when an Arab tries to kiss him."
In the same show, Fellag urges the French to eat couscous: "Accepting that we've become part of your social and cultural environment will do you good," he says. "You'll get rid of your ulcers. If you integrate us, you'll forget us!" Fellag explains, "I try to make bridges, by sticking my finger in wounds. And it works!"
His audiences are more than half French. "After my shows, people tell me, 'Now we realise that Algerians aren't a monolithic bloc. We don't see them the same way anymore.' " The Jewish-American comedian Lenny Bruce, is one of Fellag's heroes. "Lenny Bruce used to say, 'I say the word 'nigger' 20 or 30 times a day, until it becomes void of all meaning.' I work on the same principle; I take prejudices and blow them up until they burst, because they're so ridiculous."