By the time France officially conceded Algerian independence in 1962, French colonists and their descendants had been in North Africa for over 160 years. Narratives around the well-documented cycles of violence and reprisal are a source of contention in France, as they are with most nations responsible for their own colonial sins. But where fiction is concerned, there is a dearth of literature about the French in Algeria, especially the early waves of French soldiers and settlers that first arrived under the naive pretense of civilizing the people that were already living there. For many French citizens, the subject is still a painful taboo. Attacking Earth and Sun is a novel that has triggered much discourse in France’s ongoing struggle to reconcile the modern republic’s claims of progress with the failures of its colonial past.
The writer Gérard-Martial Princeau has authored over a dozen novels, some under his own name, some under the pseudonyms Anne-Marie S. and Mathieu Belezi, the name that is credited as the author of Attacking Earth and Sun. Until Attacking Earth and Sun, Belezi’s novels struggled to reach more than a few thousand readers, despite his having won the Marguerite Audoux prize for his first novel, The Little King. Belezi, who taught in Louisiana at one point in his career, compares the voices in his own writing to those of William Faulkner. The absence of punctuation throughout Attacking Earth and Sun (except for dialogue) lends itself to the streams of consciousness embodied by Belezi’s dual narrators: Séraphine, a young settler; and an unnamed French soldier. Together, their complementary views summarize early French attitudes towards Algeria as a land of opportunity for the working poor and also a place full of savages that need civilizing by military force. Tunisian-born translator Lara Vergnaud, whose work has focused on authors like Marouane Bakhti, Mohamed Leftah, Yamen Manai, and Prix Goncourt winner Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, is a natural fit for this first English edition of Attacking Earth and Sun.
As disease and retaliatory killings claim the lives of her fellow settlers, Séraphine gradually questions her husband and ultimately her future in a place that proves hostile to their survival. She admits, “I began to understand that I had spent my life going around in circles inside one tiny world, but that there were plenty of other worlds on this earth and whether I liked it or not I wasn’t at the center.” Despite moments like these that offer the faintest possibility of self-awareness, her decisions are guided more by self-preservation instinct rather than sympathy for the Algerian Arabs who the settlers vilify.
Her sincere, though ignorant, observations about settler life are woven between the rapacious narrations of the soldier whose captain repeatedly reminds his men, “You’re no angels!” The captain presides over myriad war crimes with a Kurtz-like persona that is either intentionally unaccountable to a larger chain of command or unintentionally detached from any shared reality with those around him. He addresses his own soldiers along with his Algerian hostages in the same way, “seated like a pasha on a throne of carved wood that he found in the watchtower, which he uses to give his orders and set his law on the flock of moukères”. For the soldiers, the authority of their commander isn’t questioned any more than the morality of the tactics they use to coerce the Algerians they treat with such cruelty.
But while Séraphine’s internal questioning forces her to confront the harshness of her daily existence with the promises made by the colonial patriarchy comprised of French government officials, her husband, and even the captain himself, the soldier remains inexplicably stalwart in his enthusiasm for murder, rape, and plunder. Without articulating any motives of his own, even if they really are just loot and sex, the soldier appears daft without reason. It’s a simple, though difficult, proposition to follow for nearly half the novel that leaves the soldier without any real chance to internalize his own realizations in the way that Séraphine does.Yet Belezi supports the soldier’s myopic views with passages that sound like letters sent home to France narrating war crimes so matter-of-factly that the horrors all seem like part of the colonizers’ duty. One fragment that sounds like it could be lifted from the archives of the era reads, “trapped deep within the caves by suffocating smoke, they fall one by one, their tortured lungs desperately seeking a respite from this hell”. The captain responds to the narrator-less passage by saying, “Enough already! can the remarks and leave us in peace!” In response to a similar passage, he remarks, “enough, goddamit! war is war!” No, Belezi’s narrators are certainly no angels then, but who amongst them and their descendants can claim to be? Belezi prods this dark period of French history with care, prompting questions about how France will choose to teach its children about Algeria and how other colonial powers can reconcile their own pasts with the consequences they still live with.
HISTORICAL FICTION
Attacking Earth and Sun
By Mathieu Belezi
Translated by Lara Vergnaud
Other Press
Published October 28, 2025
