What's Up With the Arabs?

Meursault is a very observant character – we see this time and again when he watches the world around him and notes details most people would overlook. Even if he thinks what he sees is strange, or he can’t interpret people’s actions, he still observes a lot of things about the people around him. But one set of characters he doesn’t seem to acknowledge much (and so we as readers don’t get much insight into, and that’s the Arabs. Meursault is very aware of the people around him – for example at the vigil, he is very aware of the other grievers – but for some reason he doesn’t pay much attention to the Arabs other than to note that they are Arabs. During the fight on pages 53 and 54, all he describes is the actions of Raymond and Masson in detail, the Arabs are left a bit vague.

To start, calling the Arabs “the Arabs” is pretty bizarre. It gives them a kind of uniformity that is almost subhuman. What I mean by that is first, there seems to be no difference between them: Meursault always refers to them as things like “an Arab” or “the other Arab”, with no physical descriptions of any kind (not even a “the one with the red shirt” or “the one with longer hair” or anything). For the reader, this gives an effect of uniformity: that it’s just three near-identical Arabs, their only distinction being their relation to Meursault, Masson, or Raymond. In the fight scene specifically, it gives the effect that’s a little like an action movie: those scenes where the hero is being pummeled from all sides by identical-looking monsters or soldiers, all identifiable as the enemy because of how they look (example). It is very much so a fight of Meursault, Masson, and Raymond against the Arabs, not the White Dudes against the Arabs – the Arabs are all grouped together, with no distinguishing characteristics or even names.

And even the whole premise of the fight is a bit strange. Raymond has beef with one person who is an Arab, so for some reason that means that “the Arabs” as a collective are now the enemy. When Raymond first tells Meursault about how the Arabs are keeping tabs on him on page 40, he says he’d been followed by “a group of Arabs”, and tells Meursault to watch out. In Algeria, that could literally be anyone – there are so many native Algerians, giving the description of “Arab” seems strange. This furthers the idea that the Arabs are a collective, regardless of individuality, and by taking away this individuality it makes them seem less human.

And then, even in court, the name of the Arab who was killed is never spoken. The court focuses more on Meursault’s relationship with his mother than on the victim of the crime. The only witnesses called forward are those who have a relationship with Meursault (even the irrelevant girl in the coffee shop who Meursault doesn’t even talk to is considered a valuable witness), even though there are key witnesses that relate to the victim (such as the other two Arabs, and the victim’s sister who was assaulted by Raymond). The court takes the case of a murder of a person, and makes the victim so irrelevant he isn’t even named.

While I was reading, I wondered what the meaning of all this was. Was this Camus’ commentary on Algerian social stratification of the time? This could easily be a critique of the colonial society, and how native Algerian people were not treated as well as the white colonists. But also, if this isn’t on purpose, it just reveals how ingrained in society racist colonialism was, and how those attitudes became a subconscious part of the book.