Under the Sun of Algiers 1942–1949 29
tone knowing that it was never really mine; I was respond-
ing to what was expected of me or I was fi nding myself in the
mirror held out to me by the other. I said to myself: I can write
everything and so I can’t write anything.^28Like many teenagers, Jackie kept a diary, fi lling his school exer-
cise books with private autobiographical notes and refl ections on
his readings. He also liked to write directly on the pink paper sheet
covering his table, before cutting out the fragments that he liked.
While he was less tempted by the novel form, this did not stop him,
at the age of fi fteen, dreaming up a plot based on the theft of a
newspaper, and an act of blackmail.
At that period, Jackie took a great interest in literary life. He
devoutly read the literary reviews and supplements, sometimes out
loud. Actually, Algiers had become a sort of second French cultural
capital at the end of the war and the start of the postwar period.
At the end of 1942, Edmond Charlot, who published Camus’s fi rst
works, set up the series ‘Les Livres de la France en guerre’ (‘The
books of France at war’); in it he reissued Vercors’s The Silence of
the Sea, before publishing Gide’s Interviews imaginaires, Kessel’s
Army of Shadows, and works by Jules Roy, Max-Pol Fouchet, and
several others. The review L’Arche, edited by the Kabylian poet
Jean Amrouche, set out to rival the Nouvelle Revue Française, which
was compromised by its part in collaboration. In 1947, Emmanuel
Roblès founded Forge, soon a home for writers such as Mohamed
Dib and Kateb Yacine.^29
Derrida wrote poems at this period; he later said he hated them,
and forced himself to get rid of them, with the exception of one
line of verse, quoted in Glas: ‘Glu de l’étang lait de ma mort noyée’
[‘Glue of the pool milk of my death drowned’].^30 But at the time,
he sent them to several reviews. In March 1947, Claude Bernady,
who ran Périples, revue de la Méditerranée, assured him that he
had taken ‘real pleasure’ in reading his poetry: ‘You possess very
fi ne qualities and you owe it to yourself to cultivate them.’^31 He
promised to publish one of the poems in the next issue of the review,
but Périples ceased publication before this could actually happen.
Although other texts do seem to have been published in those years,
these were in little reviews that I have been unable to fi nd.
While Jackie’s reading was exceptionally wide and deep for his
age, this did not make him a good pupil. Ever since he had been
expelled from the lycée, in his second year there, he had been
casual about his high school studies and was still poor at certain
basic subjects. He was really not strong in mathematics or Latin,
or in modern languages, though he was not particularly bothered
by this. But when, in June 1947, he failed the fi rst part of his