The Stranger Or the Boy from Belcourt

THE STRANGER, OR THE BOY FROM BELCOURTBut school was not without personal struggle for Camus. The French-Algerian childfrom the poor district of Belcourt had to navigate between two worlds: “one of materialpoverty, which clung to the spare and tattered possessions [of his family], the other ofspiritual wealth, found in the waves breaking in the distance and star-strewn sky sweepingover his head.” 95 96 This kind of double consciousness (to borrow from W.E.B. Du Bois)between scarcity and fullness, silence and clamor, defined much of Camus’s early life. 97School taught Camus to ponder his identity and to think in binaries because it was the firsttime he had to venture beyond the four walls of his home. “Only school gave Jacques and[his friend] Pierre these joys,” Camus writes. “And no doubt what they so passionately lovedin school was that they were not at home, where want and ignorance made life harder andmore bleak, as if closed in on itself; poverty is a fortress without drawbridges.” 98Louis Germain was one of the gatekeepers to this wider world. As the ten-year-oldCamus’s primary instituteur, Germain also played the role of a father-figure to an otherwisefatherless child. (Germain too, was a soldier during World War I, except that he survived.)Camus says as much in a chapter entitled “School” (“L’école”) in Le Premier homme, whereJacques Cormery is to Albert Camus as Monsieur Bernard is to Louis Germain:This man had not known his father, but he had often spoken to [Jacques] of him in arather mythological way, and, in any case, at a critical moment, he had known how toreplace this father. That is why Jacques had never forgotten him, as if, having neverreally felt the absence of a father he had not known, he had recognized nonethelessunconsciously, first as a child, then all throughout his life, the only fatherly gesture,both thoughtful and decisive, which had intervened in his childhood life. ForMonsieur Bernard [Louis Germain], his final instituteur in primary school, hadthrown in all his weight, at a given moment, to shape the destiny of this child whomhe was responsible for, and whom he had changed indeed. 99To Germain, Camus was not like other students; 100 he both excelled in class and wasable to win the affection of his comrades. Meanwhile, Camus thought Germain projected alui fit sa mère, je suis contente quand tu es là.” “She never used a subjunctive,” the author remarks in anannotation to the manuscript. (p. 91) We might say for Camus, then, that home was the realm of the concreteand real (the past), while school represented the possible and abstract (the future).95supra Zaretsky, Robert. Albert Camus: Elements of a Life. p. 1196 To Zaretsky’s description of “the spiritual” we might add the symbolic and abstract; that is, the linguistic,historical, mathematic, and scientific concepts Camus learned in school.97 In The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays on race published in 1903, African American intellectualW.E.B. Du Bois defined double consciousness as “a peculiar sensation…this sense of always looking at one’sself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in an amusedcontempt and pity.” Although Du Bois’s term applied specifically to the psychological challenge of reconcilingan African heritage with a European upbringing and education, it resonates strongly with the French-AlgerianCamus’s experience of poverty and social mobility achieved via education.98supra Camus, Albert. The First Man. trans. by David Hapgood, p. 14599ibid. p. 136, with minor changes made to translation100 If he had been, then Camus’s name might be lost to history.142