Abstract
Pierre Bourdieu makes the point in his preface that Abdulmalek Sayad's investigative concern for Algerian immigrants was based on a principle much more deeply felt than anything that can be taught by a textbook on methodology: ‘a solidarity of the heart’ (xii). The material gathered here, which Bourdieu was instrumental in orchestrating and editing, is the product of more than three decades of research and consideration on the part of Sayad. Evident throughout, as a result, is a rich historical awareness and a personal affinity with its subject matter. Sayad's discussion has that rare poise born of a lengthy engagement and an alertness as to the human reality of what he is presenting. It is an exemplary piece of sociological work. The interviews that he marshals are vivid, illuminating, heart-breaking. He approaches them with absolute respect, refusing to cite them merely as the vindication for his propositions, or as fodder for a transcendent exposition. He regularly includes uninterrupted transcripts that run into pages. ‘The opacity of a language that is not immediately comprehensible’, he argues, ‘is perhaps the most important piece of information […] we could hope for at a time when so many well-intentioned spokesmen are speaking on behalf of emigrants' (7).
Because the book is an amalgam of material produced over a long period it is, in a certain sense, ‘sedimentary’. The studies map the developing patterns of Algerian migration to France and the responses to these among the populations in both countries. It is also possible to recognise the impact on Sayad's arguments of shifting theoretical concerns – from the sociology of development through to identity studies – as well as the varying, and increasingly pejorative, tenor of French public discourse over immigration to which he responds. To say this is not to suggest that the book is bitty. There are numerous unifying threads, including the author's repeated insistence that immigration is always, simultaneously, emigration. To examine migration solely from the perspective of the receiving country is therefore distorting. The experience and existence of migration is only explicable, Sayad maintains, through the ‘total reconstruction of emigrant's trajectories' (29). In this respect he deliberately places the phenomenon in its historical context, as the product of a specific form of colonialism which destroyed the basis of the rural Kabyle economy and dislocated its communal traditions. Here the author's knowledge of Berber language and culture are telling, and this allows him to produce an extraordinary account of the early ‘labour’ immigrants to France and their encounter with a form of work that was utterly alien.
Emigration was made possible, Sayad points out, by a collective misrecognition in which it was portrayed, even by the emigrant to themselves, as a merely temporary act that was undertaken only in order to provide the home community with the economic means to perpetuate itself. In fact, and as became increasingly apparent, the search for monetary capital in France was the result of a process which it, in turn, exacerbated, and whose end result was a terminal crisis for the community: ‘Undermined and amputated by emigration, thrown out of order, wounded deep inside, in other words, in all its structures […] the peasant group finally loses faith in its own values' (52). As objective conditions made it ever more difficult to sustain the illusion that had, itself, sustained migration, a bitter counter-discourse in Algeria re-evaluated the emigrant as a potential traitor or as a voluntary colonisé. Throughout this account, Sayad's analysis is careful, unromantic and anti-voluntarist. He makes a clearheaded recognition of both the economic circumstances that made for the necessity of migration and the colonial history of which it is a part and a consequence. At the same time, he also points out the constitutive role that those involved played by maintaining structures of belief and practice that made emigrant life liveable. There are, nevertheless, harrowing sections (c.f. chapter 7) in which he focuses on the ‘shattering of all the illusions that had helped to give a meaning to a situation which, when reduced to its naked truth, was neither intelligible nor tolerable’ (138).
The later chapters in the book are valuable not least because they represent a marked attempt to bring aspects of Bourdieu's thought into play in the discussion of voguish questions of hybridity and liminality. They deal particularly with the position of the naturalized children of immigrants in France, and with the struggle of those that he calls ‘sub-proletarians in the order of identity’ (258) to assert control over the definitions of themselves and their allegiances. His account of the symbolic violence that marks all contests over identity is strikingly pertinent as we witness the introduction of citizenship ceremonies in Britain and, as he himself points out, the increasing deployment of ‘republican values’ in France as a ‘call to order’ made in the face of a heterogeneity that troubles the diacritical patterns of ‘state thought’.
I should make it clear that although Sayad's work is clearly indebted to the models and the language of his friend and collaborator, there is nothing slavish in this. He broaches issues such as nationalism and allows an explanatory weight to Berber concepts (elghorba – exile; jayah – one who has gone astray), in a way that poses questions for some of Bourdieu's own work. The Suffering of the Immigrant is, in its own right, both challenging and of real importance. Its historical texture and its humane engagement are very refreshing in an area of discussion that has become somewhat abstract.