Maïssa Bey & Erin Twohig - Blue White Green

The aftermath of Algerian independence in 1962 was a time of extraordinary upheaval. Blue White Green by Maïssa Bey, originally published in French and now translated into English for the first time by Erin Twohig, is a coming-of-age tale of two children as they grow up amidst this political and cultural transformation. Read on for a Q&A with the author and translator to learn more.

BEY:
How has your personal experience - especially as a female author - informed your writing?

Most of my heroines find themselves facing the intransigence of a society where women’s condition is determined by a family code inspired by religious guidelines and principles, and that gives women in the status of lifelong legal minors. I am, and always have been, attentive to the turbulence and upheaval my country has experienced throughout its history and I have tried, in many of my works, to recreate segments of that often painful and tormented history, beyond just tales of individual lives.

Which themes from this novel remain important/current today?

I must say that many of the themes are still important today, especially the confrontation between two tendencies within Algerian society: the desire to be freed from paralyzing traditions and embrace modernity, and then the other direction of evolution, which is to say a return to a way of life that draws exclusively on the distant past, and describes it as the only thing compatible with our history.

It must be said, even today, we live in a society that’s plagued by multiple contradictions, torn between the desire for modernity and the influence of a certain interpretation of Islam, one promoted by religious groups and parties that encourage a way of life that’s incompatible with social evolutions of the 21st century.

TWOHIG:

Translating literature can be a difficult task when it comes to balancing the original vision with comprehensibility in the new language. What was it like to grapple with these challenges, and how did you overcome them in the final work?

I was very lucky in that regard. I always think of Blue White Green as a generous book: one that wants its readers to understand Algerian culture and history, even if they don’t know much about it at first. The two narrators Ali and Lilas start out as young children, so they ask a lot of questions and describe the world in a way that invites readers into their lives, with a great deal of clarity. So that helped! One of my favorite challenges in translating the novel was how much the writing style changes across the book. Ali sounds very different as a narrator from Lilas, and they both sound different as adults than they did as children. That evolution happens so seamlessly in the original French, and I thought a lot about my word choice to make sure it happened seamlessly in English as well.