"If my principal had only known how I envied him! This average Frenchman from Burgundy, with his old culture and good background, a university man and a Republican of good family, suffered because he was in a foreign land! I am ill at ease in my own land and I know of no other. My culture is borrowed and I speak my mother tongue haltingly; I have neither religious beliefs nor tradition, and am ashamed of whatever particle of them has survived deep within me. To try to explain what I am, I would need an intelligent audience and much time; I am a Tunisian but of French culture... I am Tunisian, but Jewish, which means that I am politically and socially an outcast. I speak the language of the country with a particular accent and emotionally I have nothing in common with Moslems. I am a Jew who has broken with the Jewish religion and the ghetto, is ignorant of Jewish culture and detests the middle class because it is phony. I am poor but desperately anxious not to be poor, and at the same time, I refuse to take the necessary steps to avoid poverty."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from FranceEssayists from FranceNovelists from FranceJews from FranceNovelists from Tunisia
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Memmi
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Albert Memmi
Albert Memmi (Arabic: ألبرت ميمي‎; born 15 December 1920, in Tunis, died 22 May 2020 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) was a Tunisian Jewish writer and essayist who migrated to France. His most famous work is The Colonizer and the Colonized.
45 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Albert Memmi →
Related Quotes
"Sleep, when one has no worries, tastes like honey."
"Then the long walk in the sun brought us back to the coffeehouse where we always found the same crowd of Sabbath frie…"
"Oh yes, poverty is something to be ashamed of, and this was clear to me from the mutterings of my own parents, from t…"
"Since that day, I have slowly acquired the uneasiness about my clothes that characterizes the poor who are ashamed. I…"
"My mother tongue is the Tunisian dialect, which I speak with the proper accent of the young Moslem kids of our part o…"
"I was cornered, without any escape, and began to think of death for the first time in my life. Without being at all s…"
"In moving to this new street that we called the Passage, Mother saw an old dream of hers come true. She was now livin…"
"It was in the Passage that I discovered tribal life and learned to hate it. How happy had been the intimacy of our bl…"
"How vain and futile are all theoretical and philosophical constructions of the mind when compared to the brutal reali…"
"We lived at the bottom of the Impasse Tarfoune, in a little room where I was born one year after my sister Kalla. Wit…"