SubStance

SubStance 32.2 (2003) 111-116

Abdel-Jaouad, Hédi. Rimbaud et L'Algérie. New York-Tunis: Les Mains Secrètes, 2002. Pp. 174.

Those familiar with Rimbaud's life know that Africa is his last adventure, once the phase of his poetic production has ended. In Rimbaud et l'Algérie, Hédi Abdel-Jaouad shows that Algeria has, in fact, been present in Rimbaud's work from the very beginning of his poetic career, playing an important role in the creation of his poetic principles and ideals. Rimbaud et l'Algérie focuses on Jugurtha, an early text Rimbaud wrote in Latin at the age of 14 for a competition organized by the Académie de Douai in 1869. Jugurtha made an impression on the jury, who awarded him the prize. Unlike Abdel-Jaouad, however, the jury did not notice the text's irony. Although these "vers de collège" have usually been dismissed, if not forgotten, by the majority of critics, Abdel-Jaouad holds them as a decisive political and poetic statement in Rimbaud's career as a writer.

In his composition, Rimbaud uses the character of Jugurtha to address the unfortunate destiny of the Arab rebel Abdelkader, who attempted to keep Algeria free from French occupation. Jugurtha's ghost appears first to Abdelkader's parents, when Abdelkader is still a child. Jugurtha tells his own story of opposing the Roman invaders and exhorts Abdelkader, who is presented as a "new Jugurtha," to rise and defend his country against France, a European invader, like the earlier Romans. In the second part of the poem, the same Jugurtha speaks to the adult Abdelkader, who has been captured by the French. Quite mysteriously, Jugurtha now seems to advise Abdelkader to submit to the French Emperor.

The political dimension of Jugurtha is manifested, according to Abdel-Jaouad, in the fact that Rimbaud uses the Numidian hero to criticize the colonization of Algeria. Simultaneously, this Latin text allows Rimbaud a first try at working out some of the essential features of his future literary work in French, in particular the "voyance," or clairvoyance developed in later works such as the so-called Lettre du voyant.

In the first chapter of the book, Abdel-Jaouad rapidly describes the context of the French colonization of Northern Africa. Many French perceived colonization through the lens of a "neo-Latin myth," as Abdel-Jaouad calls it: they saw themselves as the new Romans justly taking back a region from the Arab people that had belonged to their ancestors. Only a handful of intellectuals were against the majority, the most famous being Lamartine. With Jugurtha, the precocious Rimbaud follows the footsteps of the [End Page 111] opponents. Jugurtha is, Abdel-Jaouad says, "une vraie provocation anti-nationaliste et anti-patriotique" (18). Abdel-Jaouad provides convincing arguments for his thesis that goes against decades of criticism that saw Jugurtha as praising the Second Empire and the way the Emperor treated Abdelkader.

After a detailed summary of the circumstances of Jugurtha's composition and a description of the construction of the poem (Abdel-Jaouad uses Marc Ascione's French translation), Abdel-Jaouad focuses in chapter two on the essential role prosopopoeia plays in Jugurtha. This rhetorical figure, while giving a voice and feelings to the dead Jugurtha, let Rimbaud play with the imposed topic and give it the direction he wanted, instead of abiding by historical facts. Through his use of prosopopoeia, Rimbaud brings a number of what Abdel-Jaouad calls "intertexts" into his poem, which he identifies as Sallust's Bellum Jugurtinum, Virgil's Aeneid, some poems by Victor Hugo, and a sentence by Guez de Balzac (quoted by Rimbaud in the epigraph of his text). Abdel-Jaouad closely examines these intertexts in chapters three to six.

Sallust's Bellum Jugurtinum is the most obvious intertext. Abdel-Jaouad meticulously examines all the parallels that Rimbaud draws between Abdelkader and Jugurtha: the similarities between their respective fights and military geniuses, the corruption of the European conquerors, the treason by their allies, the insulting and disloyal attitude of the Roman/French winners toward the...