La Répudiation

by Rachid Boudjedra

The narrator, a young Algerian who lives at the expense of reality and hallucination, tries to resuscitate for his French mistress fragments of his childhood and adolescence. As a child, he and his brother Zahir lived in the intensely erotic atmosphere of the very bourgeois paternal house, full of women of all ages, along with the head of the family, Si Zoubir. Si Zoubir has repudiated the mother of the narrator, in favor of a young wife, Zoubida, who excites the sexual desires of all the males of the tribe. Grown in the shadow of this humiliation, as an adolescent, who also felt repudiated, the narrator tried in vain to reconstitute the mythical image of father, but he met only the degraded universe of adults, the traditional games of blood, fear and superstition, puritanism, hypocrisy and violence. Later, after the war of Independence, the narrator was taken prisoner by the Secret Members of a Clan, a kind of occult, an anti-revolutionary congregation, which holds a hand in all the w