Camus’s absurdist themes grew out of his colonial and impoverished childhood

Evidence

Since his lonely interlude in Paris in 1940, Camus had travelled to and from Algeria a few times. His wife Francine was still there, having become stuck in the country when Allied forces captured it — Albert being near Lyons at the time, receiving treatment for a bout of the tuberculosis from which he suffered throughout life. He had now finished the ‘absurds’ he had been working on three years earlier; these spoke above all of his dislocated experience as a French Algerian, caught between two countries and never fully at home in either. They also reflected his early experience of poverty: the Camus family had never been well off, but their situation had become dire after Camus’ father Lucien died in the first year of the First World War. (Being recruited into an Algerian regiment, he was sent into battle wearing a picturesque colonial uniform of red trousers and a bright blue waistcoat, fatally inappropriate for the grey mud of northern France.) Albert, born on 7 November 1913, was then less than a year old. He grew up in a sordid apartment in Algiers with his brother, his grieving illiterate and deaf mother, and his grandmother, who was both illiterate and violent. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 479

Categorization

• XREF: The colonial costume detail resonates with the immodesty/moral-panic article’s interest in colonial dress signaling — a vivid material contrast between French and Algerian uniforms. — connects to: Camus’s absurdist trilogy emerged directly from pre-war Paris alienation — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 452; Poverty shaped Camus’s entire sensibility and worldview — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 480; A normal colonial child becomes abnormal on contact with the white world

Broader Connections

• Poverty shaped Camus’s entire sensibility and worldview #corroborates (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 480
• A normal colonial child becomes abnormal on contact with the white world #expands (0.70)