Many Voices, One Struggle: Polyphonic Resistance And The Reclamation Of Decolonial Identity In Joseph Andras's Tomorrow They Will Not Dare Murder Us (2016)
Auteurs : Zenadji Lilia .
Résumé
The article examines the decolonial usefulness of literary form in the novel Tomorrow They Will Not Dare Murder Us by Joseph Andras, which narrates the life of the pied-noir and communist activist, Fernand Iveton, when the French executed him due to his involvement in the Algerian liberation movement activities in the year 1957. Existing scholarship has tended to read the novel as the psychological portrait of a single conscience, that of Iveton's solitary decision to break with his own nation and the price he pays for it. This reading; however, remains incomplete. It isolates Iveton from the many voices through which the novel speaks (Algerian, French, communist, nationalist) and, in doing so, risks reproducing the very individualism that colonial power depends on to numb collective mechanisms of resistance. The article builds on the ideas of violent self-reclamation by Frantz Fanon, Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of polyphony and cultural return by Aimé Césaire. It implies that Andras's narrative structure is polyphonic, combining ideas of solidarity, sacrifice, and memory in the struggle to dismantle the dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized. Through textual analysis using four current interpretative axes, the paper will identify the erosion of the colonizer/colonized binary, the construction of fraternity beyond blood and nation, the re-signification of revolutionary sacrifice as self-authorship, and memory as a strategy of insurgency against colonial erasure. The article's central claim is that Tomorrow They Will Not Dare Murder Us does not resolve the tension between Fanon's model of rupture and Césaire's model of cultural recovery; it diffuses that tension across a plurality of voices. Decolonial identity, in this reading, is not a possession but a negotiation: always plural, always contested, always unfinished.
Mots clés
decolonization ; Bakhtin's polyphony ; Fanon ; Cesaire ; cultural memory
