The Modern Novel

Home » France » Mathieu Belezi »Attaquer la terre et le soleil [Attacking the Earth and the Sun]

Mathieu Belezi:Attaquer la terre et le soleil [Attacking the Earth and the Sun]

I find myself not infrequently commenting, after reading a novel, that it is grim. You will find several reviews on this site with that comment. This one, however, may well be the grimmest.The French, like other colonial powers , are gradually coming to terms with the fact that their colonial rule was was not all glorious and that, indeed, was often horrendous. This book is intended to show hhow horrendous. We are not talking about the bloody war of independence but the early days when France seized the country and colonised it with French people.

We open with a group of French colonists. They have been persuaded by the French government that they are going to a land of milk and honey and have had a long and arduous journey by ship to get there. Five hundred migrants arrived in Algeria on the one ship. On the arrival they get a speech from a a French official official about how the government will look after them.

We follow Séraphine, the narrator, her husband, Henri, and their children and Séraphine’s sister Rosette, her husband, Louis, and their children.

The first disappointment is that the promised housing is not there. It had been promised and is again promised – for the future. They have to live in a tent, shared with another family. The area seems inhospitable – brush, loose stones and low clouds. In short it was far from the Paradise that the government had promised them. Séraphine looks for something to cheer her up and sees a soldier handing out coffee. It looks like coffee but does not taste like coffee.

It gets worse. The first week, there is torrential rain. The tent leaks. It smelt because people were urinating and defecating just outside the tent as they did not want to make the trek to the communal latrines. The bad weather continued for three months. The captain told them to cheer up as spring was on the way. He was right. Engineers arrive and it is now time to start building the houses. The houses are all very crudely built and they still have to share with another family. There is also danger from the natives. The women do their laundry in the nearby river under close guard from the soldiers. One woman elects to do it on her own. Her headless body is found later.

Things cheer up a bit when spring comes and the men start to build a palisade around the colony. However it is at this point that we learn of some of the horrors visited on the native population by the French army. One group capture a harmless village and go on a spree of rape, pillage, looting and murder. Belezi does not spare us any details. We are not angels but soldiers, the captain comments. We get more reports later in the book of the activities of the French army and all are utterly brutal and all end with the narrator – one of the soldiers – repeating the claim that they are soldiers, not angels.

But spring is soon over and it becomes hot, very hot. Many people get a fever and then cholera arrives and sweeps through the colony, killing quite a few. Again Belezi does not spare us any details and our family is affected.

However the colony does develop. A priest arrives and they build a rudimentary church (with the burly priest being very much involved) and a teacher arrives and they build a rudimentary school.

But life us hard. They have their promised seven hectares of land but growing crops in the harsh climate is difficult, not least because that the natives frequently come and steal them and raising sheep and cattle is also hard, not least because of the mountain lions.

things get worse still when a soldier is captured and his headless body found. The captain vows revenge and the troop sweeps through all the local villages with their usual raping , pillaging plundering and murdering. This not surprisingly leads to a Berber uprising with quite a few of the colony being killed as a result, again with our family affected.

Belezi is not going to spare us. The horrors of the French colonisation of Algeria, particularly from the point of view of the native population but also from the point of view of the colonists, tricked into believing that all would be milk and honey, are brought home again and again. No doubt the French behaved badly elsewhere and other colonial powers also behaved badly but judging by what we see here, French policy in Algeria was vicious and it is easy to see why the Algerians sought independence.

Publishing history

First published in 2022 by Le Tripode
No English translation
Published in Italian as Attaccare la terra e il sole in 2024 by Gramma Feltrinelli
Translated by Maria Baiocchi