REVIEW: ALGERIA IS BEAUTIFUL LIKE AMERICA HC

Despite its title, Lion Forge“s astute translation of “Algeria is Beautiful Like America” has very little to do with America except for its nuanced grasp of the American travelogue genre of literature. Olivia Burton“s autobiographical journey to grasp the complexities of her family“s history enmeshed (as it is) in French colonial hegemony is poignantly written and drawn — by Mahi Grand.

Nascent writers are often advised (or encouraged) to write about what they know. Most experienced writers understand the limitations of this advice ”“ particularly writers of fiction who must rely on a mysterious relationship with their own imaginations that resists the binds of reality and, at times, history itself. For Burton, this conundrum presents the central challenge of her journey as a non-fiction writer and graphic novelist. She challenges herself to write honestly about her family ”“ something she both knows and doesn“t know. She knows her parents and grandparents as the people who shaped her upbringing, but at the start of “Algeria is Beautiful Like America” she cannot quite reconcile the family that she knows with the complicated colonial history of France and her family“s fraught relationship within the ongoing French-Algerian racial and geo-political conflicts.

This is heady and heavy stuff – the stuff of which colonial history is made real for readers. “Algeria is Like America” is like a personal primer on the impossibility of binary approaches to European colonialism. Burton is descendent from French colonists, poor French people who were promised the limitless possibilities of an uncharted frontier in Algeria. Except that the Algerian frontier was charted. Burton“s ancestors thrived in their new homeland ”“ not always aware of the broader racial, religious and national implications of their colonizing presence. And yet they commenced to acquiring land and prospering.

They were “Black Foot”“ folks, but if you think you fully understand the meaning of the term, then Olivia Burton will de-familiarize it for you. If you only know of the “Black Foot”“ of Native American lore than, again, Burton“s narrative works to connect the dots of global colonialism in ways that can only be achieved in the non-fiction graphic novel form.

Her search and discovery mission is animated by her brutal honesty both with herself ”“ and by extension ”“ with her readers. Burton uses her own photography ”“ deftly reproduced by Mahi Grand, in order to authenticate her journey, but also to provide her readers with the visible symbolism of the vast differences between memory and reality, between family tales and complicated histories.

She refuses to skirt the anti-Arab racism of her relatives or the oppressive conditions of a modern-day Arab theocracy. She is honest about the inextricable links between France and Algeria with all of their attendant violent, oppressive, and regressive contexts. The history she uncovers is personal but public; it is hers, but it is also France“s; it is also Algeria“s and through her vision she makes it ours, a glorious knotty entanglement of the world“s immediate colonial past. 4.5/5.

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(W) Olivia Burton (A/CA) Mahi Grand