ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of French military expansion in North Africa, the experiences of North African colonial troops have inspired much writing about their lives, their character and their ‘attachment’ and serviceability under French military regime. The ‘exotic’ fighters of the Berber mountains were written about with admiration and fascination for their ‘rustic’ qualities and exploits under French military officers during the colonial expansion between 1912 and 1934. Today in the high Atlas Mountains of Morocco, elderly Berbers still carry with them the silent memories of their exploits under French command. Many of these Berbers served in the goums and have astonishingly vivid memories of their fighting in Tunisia, Italy, France, Germany and Indochina. Yet their memories have been predominantly captured in printed materials which silence them and inscribe them in a particular mode of colonial and paternalist discourse. In order to bring back the voices and lives of such subaltern groups, it is important at this time to analyze how they came down to us through a colonial print culture. This chapter looks at the ways in which French officers represented the goumiers and Berbers in the colonial military novel. By unpacking the narratives of the novels, I would like to shed some light on the colonial cultural logic of the officers who used the goumiers as cannon-fodder during the Second World War.
