The Poor Man's Son (CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French)

Mouloud Feraoun (b. 1913, d. 1962) was a Berber, from Kabylie, in Algeria. He was a schoolteacher and also a writer. In the latter role, he was well respected and he achieved such fame that, shortly before the end of the Algerian War for Independence, he was assassinated by the fascist OAS (even though he was a pacifist with no association with the FLN). A journal that he maintained during the War for Independence was published posthumously as "Journal, 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War". It "has become the single most important document from the Algerian war of liberation", to quote the Introduction to this volume.THE POOR MAN'S SON is the first book of Feraoun's to have been published (originally, in 1950). It is classified as a novel, but in essence it is an autobiography of Mouloud Feraoun, with a few details changed, including the name of the protagonist (to Fouroulou Menrad). It is the story of a Berber boy raised in a village of 2,000 in the mountainous Kabylie amongst a clannish people who are subsistence farmers and shepherds with a literacy rate of about ten percent. Many adult males go off to France for a year or so (or for years, or forever) to work at menial and/or dangerous jobs and send money home so that their families might live with a veneer of material comfort (much like the situation with Latinos in the United States over the past several decades). Fortune smiles on Fouroulou Menrad: he is awarded a scholarship to a regional secondary school and then to college at the École Normale, after which he becomes a schoolteacher back in the Kabylie supporting an extended family of upwards to fifteen people.As a novel, THE POOR MAN'S SON is something of a dud. It is short on plot, drama, and suspense. Instead, it should be read either as a memoir of Mouloud Feraoun or as an anthropological portrayal of the Kabyle people in the first half of the twentieth century. In those two guises it was for me worth the several hours required to read its 150 pages. Feraoun has an odd style and he periodically shifts back and forth between the third and the first persons, but I adjusted to the quirkiness of the writing relatively quickly and eventually found the overall self-deprecating tone to be rather endearing.The book divides into two unequal parts -- the first and much longer covers from 1913 to the advent of World War Two, while the second contains a brief portrayal of the Kabyle during the World War and an Epilogue on the uncertain and unsettled status of things in Kabylie after the War, on the eve of the War for Independence. The second part of the book contains some rather biting criticism of the French, especially Vichy France. For example, by 1942 both starvation and disease (especially typhus) were rampant in Kabylie, and natives would do anything to complement their woefully inadequate and corruptly distributed official rations. Feraoun comments: "The newspapers from Vichy, which the Kabyles never read because they do not know how to read, say that the black market is immoral. What a cruel joke! People die of hunger in a country that owns the Mitidja [a fertile plain surrounding Algiers and a major source of food for France proper], and they are told they are committing a sin by not dying faster!" It was probably because of these pointed anti-France sentiments that when THE POOR MAN'S SON was published by a mainstream French publisher in 1954, the second part was omitted. This edition restores the excised material.

I would give this book a 5 star rating if it weren't for the translation.Translation usually do not give justice to the original book. It is simply impossible. I read the book in its published French version and I happen to be from the same area as Feraoun himslef, so I am very familiar with the things that Feraoun talks about. Feraoun is one of the best Algerian writers . In this book which is almost autobiographical Feraoun tells the story of a young boy struggling to finish his studies in colonized Algeria, where there was not much room for the "indigents" (the autochtonous people, ie, the natives). Feraoun is drawn by the French culture that he admires only to discover that France is a brutal nation that is killing his people. I thank the Mr Le Sueur for bringing us the full text (original), because the early publisher (Le Seuil, France) removed parts that dealt with the war between France and Algeria.

This is a great book that talks about the life of one boy who became a man. The setting is Algeria during the French occupation. It helps if you understood the background history. The introduction is of enormous help in putting the historical background in perspective.

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