Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France) 1793617694, 9781793617699

Citation preview

Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture

After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France Series Editor: Valérie K. Orlando, University of Maryland Advisory Board: Robert Bernasconi, Memphis University; Claire H. Griffiths, University of Chester, UK; Alec Hargreaves, Florida State University; Chima Korieh, Rowan University; Mildred Mortimer, University of Colorado, Boulder; Obioma Nnaemeka, Indiana University; Alison Rice, University of Notre Dame; Kamal Salhi, University of Leeds; Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting, Vanderbilt University; Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Tulane University

Recent Titles Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities, by Mona El Khoury The Algerian War in Film Fifty Years Later, 2004-2012, by Anne Donadey Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World: Filiations Past and Future, edited by Rajeshwari S. Vallury Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness and Exile, edited by Valérie K. Orlando and Pamela A. Pears French Orientalist Literature in Algeria, 1845–1884: Colonial Hauntings, by Sage Goellner Corporeal Archipelagos: Writing the Body in Francophone Oceanian Women’s Literature, by Julia L. Frengs Spaces of Creation: Transculturality and Feminine Expression in Francophone Literature, by Allison Connolly Women Writers of Gabon: Literature and Herstory, by Cheryl Toman Backwoodsmen as Ecocritical Motif in French Canadian Literature: Connecting Worlds in the Wilds, by Anne Rehill Front Cover Iconography and Algerian Women’s Writing: Heuristic Implications of the Recto-Verso Effect, by Pamela A. Pears The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity, by Jennifer Howell Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, edited by Ousseina D. Alidou and Renée Larrier State Power, Stigmatization, and Youth Resistance Culture in the French Banlieues: Uncanny Citizenship, by Hervé Tchumkam Violence in Caribbean Literature: Stories of Stones and Blood, by Véronique Maisier

Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture Archiving Postcolonial Minorities

Mona El Khoury

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-7936-1769-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-1770-5 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii 1 Introduction 1 2 From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive: Mapping the (In)visibility of the Jews in Algeria in Hélène Cixous’ Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage 47 3 The Construction of the “Harkive”: Giving a Voice to the Harki Moze by Zahia Rahmani

121

4 The “Métis” Predicament: Nina Bouraoui’s Embodied Memory of the Colonial Split

177

5 “Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”? The Ambiguous Memorial Reintegration of the Pieds-Noirs in Algeria in Boualem Sansal’s L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux

221

Conclusion: Mosaic Fathers and Spectral Truths

277

Bibliography 283 Index 301 About the Author

307

v

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been an academic fulfillment and a personal journey, which started at Middlebury College, where I was once an exchange student. I would like to thank Hector Vila for encouraging me to apply to PhD programs and for his continuous support and enthusiasm regarding my work. In its nascent stages as a doctoral thesis at Harvard University, this book was supported by my advisors to whom I am extremely grateful: Susan Rubin Suleiman for her many careful readings and suggestions, Verena Conley for her insights, and Réda Bensmaïa for his fruitful comments and dedication. Their exemplary interdisciplinary and transnational scholarship has deeply informed my own and continues to inspire me. My sincere appreciation also goes to Stacey Katz for her support and advice throughout the doctorate. At Tufts University, my gratitude first goes to Adlai H. Murdoch, an exceptional scholar and mentor whose help was essential. I also would like to thank my esteemed chair, Pedro Palou, for his care and support. A special thanks goes to Heather Curtis and Elizabeth Foster for their indispensable encouragement and guidance, and, last but not least, to Lisa Lowe for including me in the Mellon Seminar: its climate of intellectual rigor and creativity influenced my thinking and fostered my writing. This book has been supported by a Faculty Fellowship of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts and a visiting scholarship at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. I am grateful to both institutions. In addition, I also express my gratitude to Amanda Gann for proofreading my manuscript and helping me with translations. I am indebted to my friends whose care, patience, and encouragement were invaluable. Be it for our endless and enthralling discussions or for vii

viii

Acknowledgments

their reading of chapters of this book, or simply for their kindhearted support, I wish to particularly thank Caroline D. Laurent, Mikaël Schinazi, Max Faingezicht, Einat Rosenkrantz, Colin Girette, Alice Loughlin, Bruno Marot, Pauline Broutet, Ovadia Abrahami, Walid Berrissoul, Sylvaine Guyot, Sanam Nader-Esfahany, Jeremie Korta, Jacob Lister, Sébastien Stenger, Sara Kippur, and, for everything, Carla. For warmly welcoming me to the unique intellectual community created around her dinner table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I would like to thank Judith Gurewich. Finally, the most important people are the most difficult to thank properly as their contributions are far beyond words. My scholarship would not have been possible without the unconditional love and support of my mother, my father, my sister, and, also, my grandmother and my aunt. I dedicate this book to them. And, ultimately, my most heartfelt love to my husband and my son.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Encounter and rupture are two events that we tend to consider as opposing and diachronic. The first is associated with contact, junction, or reunion, while the second, often thought of as subsequent to the first, is synonymous with separation and disjunction. The colonial history of France and Algeria begins with a rupture. The diplomatic and trade relations that had existed between the French state and the Algiers Regency, which was at the time a part of the Ottoman Empire, ended with Charles X’s invasion of Algiers in 1830. The 132 years of colonization, including the wars of territorial conquest (1830–1880) and the War of Independence from 1954 to 1962, constitute, from a collective point of view, encounters that are also simultaneously ruptures; at their best, they are clashes, and at their worst, they are moments of collision that escalate to the extreme violence of war.1 Between individuals or groups, peaceful encounters do of course occur. Nevertheless, given the colonial context, even these “Franco-Algerian” encounters signify ruptures, in a certain sense. For example, the Algerian Jews who become French in 1870 “meet with” French citizenship, but at the cost of a legal, historical, symbolic, and at times even physical separation with their neighbors (of sometimes more than a thousand years) who remain “indigenous.” In the same way, the Harkis—those natives enlisted in the French army and considered traitors by their own people—are forever rejected by their community of origin. The end of the war, established by the signing of the Evian Accords in July 1962, does not inaugurate a period of postcolonial encounters free from rupture. The withdrawal of France from Algeria, marking the final collapse of the French Empire, and the formation of a sovereign and independent Algerian state constitute a major rupture that leaves remnants. A remnant is “a part or quantity that is left after the greater part has been used, removed, or destroyed”—“a surviving trace.”2 A remnant “ne se laisse pas d’emblée 1

2

Chapter 1

relever dans une forme collective” [does not allow itself to be taken up at once into a collective form].3 In the colonial history between France and Algeria, the remnant produced by the rupture of independence can be defined as that which cannot be immediately subsumed by the French or Algerian nation. In other words, I consider remnants to be any expression of memory that does not blend seamlessly into an official national narrative, whether French or Algerian. This book deals with the narratives of individuals whose identities defy national and cultural categorizations such as they were established first during colonization, and then again with Algerian independence. These identities are “Franco-Algerian” in that the individuals in question either have French nationality by birth or later acquired it, but they lived for some time in Algeria and were made orphans of that homeland, more or less involuntarily. Four demographic groups share (albeit differently) this transMediterranean status of exile: the Algerian Jews, the Harkis, individuals of mixed race, and the Pieds-Noirs (descendants of the settlers). These ethnic, religious, or social identities have been singled out as legal and administrative categories by French colonialism, producing positions of historical minority. By minority I mean that they did not simply belong to one of the two national majorities in confrontation within colonial relations. Nonetheless, their minority quality is not only numerical, but it is relative too. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “majority” in Mille Plateaux, I define minority in opposition to the capacity of domination and imposition of a model of reference.4 Thus, regarding the metropolitan population, the Pieds-Noirs are a minority, both numerical and in terms of power; but they are a majority embodying the model of reference vis-à-vis the indigenous populations in Algeria, all the while being numerically a minority in the colony. At independence, these Jewish, Harkis, métis, and Pieds-Noirs orphans of Algeria never fully embraced—nor were embraced by—France. The Jews were originally indigenous North Africans who became French by a decree in 1870, but they were then excluded from French citizenship during the Vichy regime, made French once again in 1943, and finally lost their land in 1962, upon “repatriation” to mainland France along with the Pieds-Noirs. The Harkis were indigènes who fought alongside the French army during the War of Independence (1954–1962), which caused them to be violently excluded from Algeria, and even massacred, after independence, and yet they found no welcome in France either. Mixed-race individuals had affiliations to both France and Algeria; the antagonism between the two nations made it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for métis to belong, culturally and politically, resembling in many ways the condition of the children of Algerian immigrants in France. Finally, even the Pieds-Noirs, an expression referring to the “Français d’Algérie,” felt different within their national group, for they developed a pioneer and syncretic culture strongly tied to the Algerian land.

Introduction

3

All these minorities are “historical,” inasmuch as their existence (as a minority) is linked to a particular moment in history—French colonial Algeria and the War of Independence—and that time is now over. However, to call these minorities historical also implies that they have been important markers of the past, and, as this book argues, that their legacies still continue, even obliquely, to shape today’s identities in French and Algerian societies. The corpus that I examine in this book is inscribed within a dual context of cultural productions, the postmodern and the postcolonial. Since the 1980s, we have witnessed the return of a “transitive” literature, one that looks outward, that takes a critical perspective on the world and attaches an importance to the subject and to the real. But unlike the “Engaged literature” of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, with its “ideological novels” and their fictive authority,5 contemporary literature includes “fictions critiques” [critical fictions]6 that move away from discourses and ideologies. Rather than relaying this or illustrating that, this literature investigates and questions. As Jean-François Lyotard7 has shown, our era is one of defection from grand narratives, of a sometimes radical detachment with the past. Hence the importance of memory as a theme and a certain obsession with the past: in Les Lieux de mémoire,8 Pierre Nora analyzes the contemporary returns of memory as symptoms of the loss of a “true” memory, a living one, that would adhere to the present. A memorial obsession would thus be a corollary of the “sentiment résiduel de la continuité”9 [residual feeling of continuity], and the proliferation of commemorative phenomena would be a means of consensual reactivation of the past. However, in the case of colonization and of colonial subjects for whom the returns of memory arrived only later, at the end of the 1990s, official memory has always engendered dissensus and the history is still under construction. The last colony to free itself from the French colonial yoke, Algeria has (problematically) become a synecdoche for colonial history in the French national imagination. An annexed territory and the only colony of settlement in the French Empire, Algeria was officially a part of France, and its loss represents a dramatic territorial amputation—more than twice the surface area of metropolitan France. Long repressed, cloistered, and today fragmented and manipulated, the painful and sensitive memories of the colonization of Algeria and the War of Independence have contributed to the construction of a deeply divided society in France. The early 2000s, the period during which the works of my corpus were published, had the particularity of the concurrence of colonial hypermnesia and a persistent occlusion of knowledge, most notably in the discourses of the farright, as, for example, the most recent presidential race has shown.10 The literary writing of memory therefore is given the task of exhuming that which remains buried in the past and which comes to counter a certain (neocolonial) regime of discourse. Indeed, the texts that I have chosen to analyze confront official

4

Chapter 1

narratives and the public understanding of history by presenting a dissonant memorial reconstruction within their particular stories of exile and loss. In each narrative the ghost of colonial Algeria is embodied by the figure of the deceased (or absent) Algerian father. The corpus comprises works by four Francophone writers born and/or raised in Algeria: Hélène Cixous’ Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage (2000); Zahia Rahmani’s Moze (2003); Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (2000) and Mes mauvaises pensées (2005); and Boualem Sansal’s L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux (2002). Conceived as a minority case study, each chapter of this book asks how the writer textually deals with the recovering of a fragmented and often traumatic past and the negotiation of a transnational and multicultural identity, on which the memory of colonial opposition weighs heavily. At the intersection of the postcolonial practice of witness and “filiation narratives”11 merging fiction with historical and biographical research, these texts participate in what Viart calls an “ethics of restitution”12 at once individual and collective: by paying homage to the silent father humiliated by history, the texts reconnect the present to a problematic heritage. Or, put another way, such is my hypothesis: they reconnect a spectral presence to a deeply repressed unconscious drive to eliminate the native father. Through the restoration of the father’s dignity, these literary works attempt to repair wronged collective identities by giving a visibility to an historical minority condition. Indeed, this book seeks to show how the texts of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui, and Sansal create what I call a postcolonial, minor archive. My conception of “minor archive” is influenced by both Foucault’s philosophy of archives and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory on “minor literatures” that are written in the dominant language and, by definition, political and subversive.13 I hence consider a minor archive to be a discursive foundation that renders historical minorities visible by opening up a space for speech in which a narrative identity (under construction) can be reinscribed in history, while thwarting French and Algerian hegemonies (based on “major” archives). Each chapter casts light on the different archiving literary strategies that develop as a means to repair history, or, at least, “réduire le sentiment d’exil politique qu’ont engendré [des] injustices historiques”14 [reduce the sense of political exile that historical injustices have engendered]—artistic attempts at symbolic reparation as a part of the more general contemporary dynamic of “judiciarisation de l’histoire”15 [judicialization of history] in Western societies. REMNANTS OF THE PAST The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century saw the proliferation, in literary criticism, of references to the semantic field of haunting. From historian Henry Rousso’s Le Syndrome de Vichy16 to

Introduction

5

philosopher Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx,17 the theme of the “passé qui ne passe pas” [past that does not pass], the “hantise du passé” [specter of the past], to take up titles of Rousso’s works, is omnipresent in fields of research on contemporary French and Francophone literature, in particular in postcolonial studies.18 Thus, Fiona Barclay begins her book Writing Postcolonial France. Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb (2011), with this statement: “France is haunted. [. . .] France’s ghosts are produced by socio-historical factors, but they cannot be accommodated easily within sociological realities. Exclusion is a recurring motif, a marker which regulates the haunting economy of the specter.”19 According to Barclay, postcolonial subjects, that is to say, individuals with a North African past or origin, are living ghosts in that their presence inevitably invokes the past and gives rise to neocolonial structures of thought.20 The ghost becomes the metaphor for a colonialism that no longer exists in the present as such but whose discriminatory structures still persist. The ghost is an appropriate figure for the colonial in that it no longer properly exists in the present, yet its influence persists and makes it real, hovering somewhere between reality and fiction, or past and present. [. . .] The disruption of linear time destabilizes the notion of the past as fixed and finished, for the ghost’s appearance, perhaps the first of many, opens the haunted subject to the possibility of becoming enmeshed in a cycle of repeated apparitions, or the obsessive return to unresolved memories or colonial structures of thought.21

A rhetoric of the phantom allows for the expression of an idea of nonlinear temporality, of a persistence of the past (which is therefore not entirely past) within the present (which therefore does not present itself entirely as such). This spectral logic is at work in my acceptation of the term “remnants.” However, by remnants I mean a reality that exceeds that of the trace, of a presence erased, or of a palimpsestic past. For, as Ann Laura Stoler emphasizes: The scholarly romance with “traces” risks rendering colonial remnants as pale filigrees, benign overlays with barely detectable presence rather than deep pressure points of generative possibilities or violent and violating absences. The “haunting” trace seems too easily unmoored from material damages and disseminated landscapes, or from border barricades installed as colonialism’s parting gestures.22

Or, one could add, from the imposition of curfews in Parisian suburbs during social crises like the 2005 riots, from the above-average unemployment rate among the young generations of Algerian descent, or from the police identity

6

Chapter 1

checks that affect men of postcolonial background twenty times more than other French citizens, according to the administrative authority Défenseurs des droits.23 For Stoler, these situations are diffuse perpetuations of colonial discriminations, “imperial incarnations but refashioned and sometimes opaque and oblique reworkings of them.”24 She characterizes them by their “hardened, tenacious qualities of colonial effects; their extended protracted temporalities; and, not least, their durable, if sometimes intangible constraints and confinements.”25 Stoler creates a concept to speak about it: “duress,” a term that signifies difficulty, oppression, but also perseverance, resistance, and which shares etymological threads with “durability,” “duration,” and “endurance.”26 Therefore, duress “may sometimes be a trace but more often an enduring fissure, a durable mark.”27 To understand the existence of such a duress within contemporary French society, one must consider the extent and the depth of colonial mourning linked to the loss of Algeria. Indeed, Algeria was a territory (and a fantasy) that had been the object of an investment “autant matériel, militaire, financier qu’idéologique et symbolique (psychique)” [as much material, military, financial as ideological and symbolic (psychic)],28 as classic texts on colonization, such as de Tocqueville’s On Algeria, remind us. One consequence of the traumatic loss of Algeria for France has long been a situation characterized by what Stoler names a “colonial aphasia”: an occlusion of knowledge that is “at once a dismembering of words from the objects to which they refer, a difficulty retrieving both the semantic and lexical components of vocabularies, a loss of access that may verge on active dissociation, a difficulty comprehending what is seen and spoken.”29 This situation is first and foremost a political condition whose genealogy has to do with the National Front (FN), the extreme-right French party whose marginal presence, at its start in 1972, has become progressively normalized in French society such that made it through to the second round of presidential elections in 2002, and again in 2017 with record numbers.30 The history of the FN is linked to the Algerian War, which in a certain way did not end in 1962, since, as Djemaa Maazouzi has pointed out, “la complexité et l’iniquité des statuts coloniaux n’ont pas disparu du jour au lendemain après la guerre” [the complexity and the inequity of colonial statuses did not disappear overnight with the end of the war].31 In fact, from the 1970s, the war continued in mutated forms on French soil. Thus, “Les premières émeutes de la région lyonnaise du début des années soixante-dix [. . .] sont en lien direct avec la guerre d’Algérie, voire une sorte de prolongement: les incidents violents de la cité de La Grapinière à Vauxen-Velin en septembre 1971 impliquent des enfants de Pieds-Noirs, de harkis et d’immigrés algériens”32 [The first riots in the Lyon area in the early 1960s [. . .] are in direct connection with the Algerian War, or even a continuation of it: the violent incidents at the Grapinière housing project in Vaux-en-Velin

Introduction

7

in September 1971 involve the children of Pieds-Noirs, Harkis, and Algerian immigrants]. In the same way, the “Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme” [Walk for Equality and Against Racism] is an enduring fissure, to use Stoler’s terms, of colonial Algeria; for as Alain Gillette and Abdelmalek Sayad have noted, the cause is championed by the French son of “French Muslims,” who would be therefore “nullement concerné, comme de nombreux ‘marcheurs’ par le problème des titres de séjour et de travail”33 [completely unconcerned, like a great many of the “walkers,” by the problem of residence and work permits]. What is in play, then, is a transmission of the feeling of inequality and a renewal of the parents’ colonial struggle. Different groups (or colonial categories of people) with lived experience of the Algerian War all find themselves in France in the 1960s: French of European origin (including the Algerian Jews), French Muslims (including the Harkis), Algerians who immigrated, military veterans (including conscripts), those called back from service, “porteurs de valise” [suitcase carriers] (French who supported the Algerian nationalists), FLN (“Front de libération nationale” [National Liberation Front]) and MNA militants (“Mouvement National Algérien” [Algerian National Movement]), OAS militants (“Organisation armée secrète” [secret armed organization]). The rise of the FN must be analyzed within this context, as the political extension of certain holdovers. Although there are many factors, including social and economic ones, that account for the FN vote, the ideology supporting Le Pen’s discourses is grounded in a colonial and racialized vision of the world, and traces back to French Algeria, more precisely. This is not to say that racism is the determining factor for voting FN, or that only Le Pen’s voter base can be racist.34 However, the genealogy of the FN and its leadership, exclusively held by the Le Pen family, inexorably tie this party to French colonialism in Algeria. Not only was Jean-Marie Le Pen a fervent colonialist who voluntarily enrolled as a paratrooper during the Algerian War and who later publicly boasted about having tortured men during the battle of Algiers in 1957; but also, former partisans of French Algeria and members of the OAS became members of the FN.35 The OAS was a clandestine political and military organization, created on February 11, 1961, and composed of military men, politicians, and civilians. Its goal was to keep Algeria French, and its modalities of action included terrorism on a large scale. The OAS was formed in reaction to De Gaulle’s policy in Algeria, which progressively became less pro-French and ended up accepting a self-determination referendum by the (indigenous) Algerians.36 In the past fifty years, the Front national has continued to be associated with the history of the “jusqu’aux boutistes de l’Algérie française”37 [French Algeria diehards]. A retrospective sense of vengeance toward the “Arabs” has been at the root of the stock-in-trade of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s

8

Chapter 1

political campaigns since the very beginning of the party.38 As Benjamin Stora writes, Toute cette histoire de l’OAS dans les derniers mois de l’Algérie française sera reprise et magnifiée par les fondateurs du Front national dix années plus tard, en 1972, lors de la constitution du mouvement. La revendication de la filiation, ouverte, publique, avec l’OAS permet à l’extrême droite, à la différence d’une appartenance “vichyssoise” dissimulée, de disposer d’un passé de combat politique explicite.39 [All this history of the OAS in the final months of French Algeria gets taken up and magnified by the founders of the Front National ten years later, in 1972, at the time of the movement’s beginning. The open, public claim to a lineage with the OAS, unlike the party’s hidden Vichy affiliation, allows the far-right to make use of a past of explicit political conflict.]

Stora calls “sudisme à la française” [a sort of Confederacy, French style] the persistence of the paradigmatic imaginaire of Algérie française in the ideology of the FN.40 By referring to the American South, the historian points out a French tradition of settler colonialism (with its own forms of enslavement, economic prosperity, and the pioneer spirit associated with the presence of vast lands), the existence of which had come to an end, but the loss of which has never been accepted by the “sudistes” [Confederates], composed of former soldiers, settlers, and OAS activists. For them, “le modèle de cette société coloniale, aujourd’hui disparue, reste plus que jamais valable [. . .] le combat pour cette cause n’est jamais fini”41 [the model of this colonial society, now no longer in existence, remains more valid than ever [. . .] the fight for this cause is never finished]. This “cause” is based on a confrontational model of civilizations that sustains a fear of reversed colonization, which is seen (by conspiracy theorists of the “great replacement” such as Renaud Camus) as happening through immigration and, in recent years, more aggressively through Islamic terrorism.42 Incidentally, the Front national’s vision of the world as a perpetual fight for white and Christian supremacy was once again revived in 2015, and in a particularly significant way following the attack against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January. Unlike many people who claimed “Je suis Charlie,” as a sign of empathic identification with the murdered editorial board members of Charlie Hebdo and as a defense of free speech, Jean-Marie Le Pen claimed to be “Charlie Martel,” making a reference to the historical statesman and military leader Charles Martel, who stopped the advance of the Muslim forces in Gaul in the eighth century. A remnant of the colonialist paradigm, French “sudisme” [Confederacy] involved the transfer of a situation of segregation from the south (French

Introduction

9

Algeria) to the north (France), after 1962. The FN’s constantly growing electoral success cannot help but sustain, in the collective consciousness, a specter of the terrorist violence of the OAS (and, by extension, of imperialism and the war of decolonization). The colonial imaginary is indeed all the more prominent in the present context of Islamic terrorism largely perpetrated by French descendants of North African immigrants, as well as the refugee crisis linked to deep and multifaceted struggles in Arab countries, which are entangled in dictatorial patterns and “imperial durabilities”43 heightened by neocolonial powers, including France. So as Jane Hiddleston underscores it, “Postcolonialism is therefore not just about a return to the past but about the assessment both of changing effects of empire’s legacy and of new forms of neo-imperialist power.”44 One shifting effect of the colonial legacy concerns the French national narrative and collective memory, as the inequalities in status in colonial Algeria are symbolically reflected in the place that immigrants hold in French history and memory. Although indigenous people from the empire have been integrated into the national narrative, there has been no incorporation of their own history.45 One consequence—which is also a cause—is that different group memories have become compartmentalized and have entered into conflict with one another. Since 1962, no unifying national memory has been able to make a consensus of these different memories, a lack that has favorized the “privatisation ou [la] fragmentation en mémoires groupales demandant chacune réparation et reconnaissance” [privatization or fragmentation into group memories, each demanding reparation and recognition], in the terms of Régine Robin.46 THE QUESTION OF LIEUX DE MÉMOIRE FOR THE ALGERIAN WAR AND COLONIZATION In her work on the Algerian War, Catherine Brun discusses the periodization of memory and shows the shortcomings of attempts that carve up its evolution into distinct stages. Indeed, the memory of the War is extremely diverse and depends, in particular, on the social dynamics of the different groups who experienced the conflict. For Brun, the very idea of memory phases, outlined by Rousso regarding the memory of Vichy and German occupation, is inadequate for the analysis of the Algerian War, unless we admit “la relativité extrême des tendances lourdes” [the extreme relativity of dominant trends] and that we specify “systématiquement qui se souvient, où, quand, pourquoi, et de quoi” [systematically who remembers, where, when, why, and what].47 In order to analyze the specificities of returns of memory of the historical minorities examined in this book, it is nonetheless essential to look into these major memorial trends. Scholars consider that the memory dynamics concerning France’s colonial past and the Algerian

10

Chapter 1

War have evolved according to Rousso’s four stages of memory. To discuss collective memory, Rousso calls upon the notion of collective unconscious, or the idea that “Nous sommes traversées, en tant qu’individus, par les mots et les images de notre passé et de notre présent comme par ceux du passé et du présent vécus par le ou les groupes auxquels nous appartenons”48 [As individuals, we carry words and images from our past and from our present, but we also carry those of the past and present of other groups to which we belong]. Rousso borrows certain concepts from psychoanalysis to establish an analogy between individual trauma and collective trauma. Thus, for the Algerian War, as for the Vichy Regime, Anne Donadey’s pioneer work on the anamnesis of the Algerian War in France identifies comparable memorial cycles: a progress from a phase of unfinished mourning through a liquidation of the crisis that lasts a little less than ten years and which ends with the granting of amnesty (1945–1953 for Vichy, 1962–1968 for Algeria); then a second phase of repression of memory, of official amnesia that lasts several years (1954–1971 and 1969–1980, respectively); followed by the “broken mirror,” a third phase of anamnesia, a progressive return of memory coinciding with the passage of a new generation (1972–1980 and 1981–1991, respectively); and, finally, a fourth phase of hypermnesia during which memory becomes an obsession (from 1980 for Vichy and from 1992 for Algeria).49 The respective dynamics of the memory of Vichy and Algeria are not without impact on one another. In fact, the resurfacing of the traumatic memory of the Holocaust on the public scene functioned as a “screen memory”50 for the Algerian War. As Reda Bensmaïa writes, “the trauma and the unresolved problems of World War II were talked about all the more obsessively because it was so difficult to talk about what had happened in Algeria.”51 Later, the trials of Klaus Barbie (1987) and Maurice Papon (1997), as Nazi collaborators, allowed for a collective coming to terms with Papon the former prefect’s role in the bloody repression of the protest of October 17, 1961—in other words, the emergence of a collective memory concerning the Algerian past.52 It must be noted that the fabricated forgetting of the Algerian War and of what actually took place during the colonial period is a phenomenon that occurred in both France and Algeria, but for different reasons. In France, the desire to forget the war can be explained first by reasons that concern the nature of the colonial war, a “dirty” war that shook the very foundations of state power; then, for reasons linked to its outcome, or “une gestion non-assumée (ni nommée, ni montrée) de son déroulement par les perdants qui l’ont gagnée militairement”53 [a failure of management (not named, not overtly manifested) of [the war’s] aftermath by losers who had militarily won it]. In Algeria, the “mémoire empêchée”54 [thwarted memory] is relative to the competition of nationalist forces and dissensions between politicians and military leaders within the FLN, with the latter producing “une mise en récit insérée dans une téléologie destinée à

Introduction

11

contrer l’histoire coloniale et à fonder la légitimité militaire étatique (d’un parti unique)”55 [a narrative inserted within a teleology designed to counter the colonial history and justify the legitimacy of the military state (of a single party)]. The French “memory lapse” amnesia, prevailing in official and academic discourses in France until the early 1990s, started to shrink due to a combination of factors: the partial opening of the archives of the Algerian War, the arrival to university of young second-generation immigrants (the “Beurs”), and the production of a series of works starting to deal with what had previously been totally repressed (the War, Algerians, and immigrants), a denial contrasting with the frequent references to Pieds-Noirs, Harkis, and “tender and marvelous memories” of French Algeria56 during the preceding years.57 This “return of the repressed” that occurs at the same time as a generational renewal on the public stage participates in the “Algeria syndrome” that Anne Donadey writes of in Recasting Postcolonialism,58 and heralds a series of state recognitions. In 1999, the French Republic officially recognized the “War of Independence” (up until then called “events” or “peacekeeping operations”), and, in 2011, it started commemorating the drowning in the Seine of dozens of Algerian immigrants on October 17, 1961.59 Parallel to official acknowledgment by the state, there has been greater interest in this field among international scholars. In France, research on the history of colonization and decolonization developed in the 2000s, although it is still in the margins of national historiography.60 As Hiddleston remarks, “Despite this resurgence of interest in the colonial past in North Africa and its legacies in the present, however, much work remains to be done and this remains a troubled field, at least in France.”61 It is within this “troubled” field that the “Nora affair” takes on its full significance. When Pierre Nora finished the publication of the final volume of his Lieux de mémoire in 1994, a monumental collective work begun in 1984 and which proposes a new writing of French history out of elements that crystalize the notion of identity (collective, social, or national), a controversy emerged surrounding the treatment—or rather the nontreatment—of colonial history. Indeed, in this 5,000-page collaborative book, only a single article (“L’exposition coloniale de 1931: mythe républicain ou mythe impérial?” by Charles-Robert Ageron) is devoted to a colonial theme, and none on the Algerian War or on colonialism as a system.62 This quasi-absence of study of colonial memory is, for Alec Hargreaves, the symbol of the marginalization of French colonialism in institutionalized forms of historical knowledge such as school textbooks and academic research programs. [. . .] When, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, postcolonial studies became a major field of scholarly enquiry in the English-speaking world, the terminology and the problematics of postcolonialism (generally understood to span the colonial period as well as its aftermath) were largely shunned in France.63

12

Chapter 1

This analysis is shared by numerous scholars, such as Enzo Traverso, who deem that “l’entreprise éditoriale de Pierre Nora apparaît comme un miroir somptueux de l’impensé colonial français. Il s’inscrit parfaitement dans le sillage d’une longue tradition qui, d’Ernest Renan à Fernand Braudel, n’a jamais réussi à intégrer le fait colonial dans la définition de l’identité française”64 [Pierre Nora’s editorial enterprise appears as a sumptuous mirror of the French colonial inconceived. At times it follows the lines of a long tradition, which, from Ernest Renan to Fernand Braudel, has never succeeded in integrating the fact of colonialism into the definition of French identity]. Nora’s “oversight” would thus be exemplary on two levels: in the short term, it would perpetuate the amnesiac phase of repression of the memory of Algeria, by resisting the lifting of taboos; in the long term, it would continue the marginalization of the colonial theme within historiography. While the absence of any treatment of the Algerian War and of colonization in Les Lieux de mémoire stems in part from such an oversight, it also proceeds from a conscious logic. The justification furnished by Nora, twenty years later, in response to a reaction by Perry Anderson, is representative of the complexity of the memory of Algeria in France.65 Indeed, beyond the claim of a lack of time as a justification not to treat the Algerian War, Nora explains that evoking this episode in his Lieux de mémoire would have, in a certain way, reduced the colonial enterprise to that single moment, while, according to him, the period of “colonial mourning” would be the real “site of memory.” In 2005, despite a hypermnestic context, Nora considers this conflict still to be a “lieu d’histoire”66 [realm of history] in that it does not participate “à l’existence d’une topologie symbolique de l’histoire nationale plutôt positive, consensuelle et partagée par le plus grand nombre”67 [in the existence of a symbolic topology of national history that is rather positive, consensual, and shared by the greatest number]—in other words, a site of memory. It is true that although the period of official amnesia has ended, there has been no national memorial “travail d’encadrement”68 [framing work] that would allow for the passage of individual memories into a consensual, or at least inclusive, collective memory. To use the terminology of Maurice Halbwachs, the “cadres sociaux” [social frameworks] of memory (family, school, professional organizations, the nation) are what the Algerian War lacks in order for its memory to be inserted into national memory, and all this despite the fact that the war directly concerned some six to seven million people.69 As such, Halbwachs’s idea70 that collective memory never exists in the singular is all the more true when it comes to the colonial history of Algeria. Not only are there as many collective memories as there are social groups, but what is more, because they were never “intégrées et calibrées” [integrated and calibrated] into a shared memory,71 these memories have entered into competition.72 These “wars of memory,” whether we consider

Introduction

13

them as dangerous or rather as a precursor for dialogue, whether they bring greater truth and justice or engender political disorder, have the effect of replicating the historical minority positions of identity groups that existed in colonial Algeria.73 THE PERPETUATION OF HISTORICAL MINORITIES In colonial Algeria, the existence of minorities with legally differentiated statuses is the consequence of a double political discourse, assimilationist for some cases and communitarianist for others (those with “special status”). As Laure Blévis reminds us, assimilation concerned immigrants from the Mediterranean basin (principally Spain, Italy, Malta) who became “neo-French,” and then became undifferentiated among the Algerian French (referred to as Pieds-Noirs after their arrival in mainland France in 1962).74 From 1870, indigenous Jews were also subject to assimilation. However, as far as indigenous peoples were concerned, the categorization was wavering and complicated. As Todd Shepard explains, the two approaches—assimilation, on the one hand, and coexistence (i.e., legal categorization, communitarianism), on the other—shaped the history of French Algeria.75 The tension between the two emerged as early as 1830, a few months after the conquest of Algiers. For example, A military directive of 9 September 1830 declared French-occupied lands legally a tabula rasa on which to inscribe French law. One month later, the directive of 22 October 1830 reversed this decision. Threatened with the revival of armed resistance, the French army reestablished “Muslim” and “Israelite” (a French term for “Jewish”) jurisdictions over their respective communities.76

The constant oscillation between two visions of the territory and its native population demonstrates the inherent contradiction of France’s settler colonialism and its “universalist” modernity stemming from the Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution. On the one hand, colonization meant pushing the natives away (at best, coexisting with them) while integrating the conquered territory into the space of the Republic; on the other hand, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) was supposed to commit the French Republic to its national motto of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” Nonetheless, as Shepard argues, “Until the end of World War II, while forms of administration and domination grounded in coexistence predominated, most officials in Algeria and politicians in the metropole insisted that

14

Chapter 1

their goal was assimilation.”77 There was therefore a constant discrepancy between discourses and legal acts, caused by the same two problems as those regarding education: first of all, it is questionable whether the French were really willing to make the “Algerians” equal citizens, and, second, whether the Muslims and Jews would be willing to “assimilate,” that is, to abandon their “local civil status”—the right to be governed by Muslim or Jewish laws in personal or civil matters. In 1865, Napoleon III established, via the Senatus-Consulte law, three categories of people in Algeria: the Muslims, the Israelites, and the French (including naturalized Europeans). The first two were French nationals: subjected to the French Empire and military administration, they had no political rights until 1919 and had restricted political rights until 1958.78 Emmanuelle Saada explains that “les ‘citoyens’ bénéficient de l’intégralité des droits attachés à la nationalité, alors que les ‘sujets’ sont soumis à un statut inférieur sur le plan civil, pénal et politique”79 [the “citizens” benefit from the totality of rights attached to nationality, while “subjects” are relegated to an inferior status on a civil, penal, and political level]. This colonial regime, established from the first years of colonization in Algeria and Cochinchina, is based on a disparate collection of decrees that make up what was called, starting in 1881, the “Code de l’indigénat” (which is therefore not a “code” of laws in the form of a book).80 Essentially, only a very small number among them were accorded—as examples—French citizenship, in exchange for abandoning their Koranic or Mosaic civil status. A century after the French invasion, only a few thousands Muslims were French: “En 1936, on comptait en tout et pour tout 7817 musulmans algériens naturalisés français et la moyenne annuelle était de . . . 8 jusqu’en 1954!”81 [In 1936, there were all in all only 7,817 Algerian Muslims had been naturalized as French and the annual average was . . . 8 until 1954!]. However, the situation was different for the Israelites. In 1870, the Crémieux Decree massively naturalized Algerian Jews, after (French) metropolitan Jews lobbied and petitioned the French National Assembly for the assimilation of their peers in the colony. Except for the Vichy period (1940–1944) during which they were reverted to noncitizenship, the Jews were therefore separated from the indigenous Muslims from 1870. The latter were granted “half” citizenship after World War II, which permitted the maintenance of local civil status. Hence, they were called “Français Musulmans d’Algérie” (French Muslims of Algeria), a denomination that, as Jim House notes, “introduced an ethnically-inspired sub-category of citizens that Algerians resented.”82 In the same vein, Tom Charbit comments on this change of status by pointing out that Le caractère officiel de cette dénomination ne met pas fin, du jour au lendemain, à l’emploi des autres termes (“indigènes,” “arabes”) qui continuent d’être

Introduction

15

utilisés, au quotidien, par l’administration coloniale [. . .] l’appellation “Français musulmans” réalise en effet une sorte de compromis entre la volonté de ne pas utiliser le terme “Algériens,” politiquement piégé, et celle de ne pas considérer ces “indigènes” comme pleinement français.83 [The official nature of this denomination does not suddenly put an end to the use of other terms (“natives,” “Arabs”) that continue to be employed, in the day to day, by the colonial administration [. . .] the appellation “French Muslims” does indeed effect a sort of compromise between the wish to avoid using the politically thorny term “Algerians” and the wish not to consider these “natives” as fully French.]

This permanent paradoxical inclusion and exclusion from French citizenship lasted until the Algerian War. In order to keep Algeria French, governments, from 1958 until 1962, tried to find ways to “integrate” (and no longer “assimilate”) the “French Muslims from Algeria.”84 However they failed, as the new categories that were created for the population in French Algeria—“Français de Souche Européenne” (FSE) in contrast with “Français de Souche Nord Africaine” (FSNA)—still contained ethnic, and even racial, distinctions. As Shepard comments: France always had made distinctions between its subjects in Algeria. What the hesitation over assigning the labels FSE and FSNA made explicit was the emergence in official terminology and categories of a still amorphous idea of origin that went beyond the jus soli recognition that a French father’s legal recognition of his child extended French nationality to that child. Without touching on the question of nationality, FSE and FSNA85—like the post category FMA [Français Musulman d’Algérie]—embraced a jus sanguinis-type definition of membership as wholly compatible with French citizenship: this (legally or bureaucratically) codified definition was “ethnic”; its reference to “European” suggests, in important ways, “racialized” ethnicity.

Thus, the vast majority of the native population of Algeria remained distinguished from the national majority throughout the colonial period. However, some categories, like the Jews and the Harkis—indigenous soldiers who worked in the French army—were made French by colonialism, unlike, for example, the Kabyles (the largest Berber group in Algeria), who are often singled out as a group in French (racialist) discourses, as Patricia Lorcin analyzes it, but who did not constitute a legal category permitting a different French status.86 Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture focuses on the legacy of the legally French minorities of Algeria: the Pieds-Noirs, the Jews, the Harkis,

16

Chapter 1

and the métis, French citizens with one Algerian parent. After independence, the first ones (former Français d’Algérie and Jews) held the status of “rapatriés”: this administrative category picks up the colonial classification that distinguishes between Algerian French of ordinary civil status (the Europeans) and the Algerian French with civil status under local law (the Arabs/Muslims). I make a distinction, however, between the Jews and the Pieds-Noirs, because, as Maazouzi remarks, Si pendant l’été 1962, à la fin de la guerre d’Algérie, quelques 140 000 Juifs se trouvent mêlés aux “rapatriés” arrivant en France, ils ont souvent une histoire différente de celle des Européens d’Algérie: Juifs à la présence parfois millénaire dans cette région, Juifs séfarades expulsés d’Espagne au XIVe et XVe, Juifs livournais (“Juifs francs”) venant d’Italie entre le XVIe et le XIXe siècles ou encore Juifs ashkénazes craignant la souveraineté prussienne sur l’AlsaceLorraine en 1870 et venus s’établir en Algérie.87 [Although during the summer of 1962, at the end of the Algerian War, some 140,000 Jews find themselves mixed in with the “repatriates” arriving back to France, their story often differs from that of other Europeans from Algeria: Jews with a thousand year presence in the region, Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Livorno Jews (juifs francs) who came from Italy in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, or Ashkenazi Jews fearing Prussian rule over Alsace-Lorraine in 1870 who came to settle in Algeria.]

Therefore, I have preferred to treat the postcolonial fates of these two identities separately, in two different chapters, “From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive: Mapping the (In)Visibility of the Jews in Algeria through Memory. Hélène Cixous’ Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage” and “Aller Postcolonial—Retour Néocolonial? The Ambiguous Memorial Reintegration of the Pieds-Noirs in Algeria: Boualem Sansal’s L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux.” The third identity whose status is French, but which does not belong to the category of “repatriates,” is the Harkis. The history of these indigenous men conscripted into the French army or placed on reserve lists goes back to the first days of colonization, which involved the massive expropriation of lands belonging to the indigenous population, wearing down the traditional social, economic, and cultural structures of the Algerian peasantry. The confiscation of the lands destructured the peasant condition by way of “proletarization” and “déracinement” [uprooting], as demonstrated in Abdelmalek Sayad’s famous work.88 Numerous peasants with no other choice but to join the French army find themselves “transformés, à leur insu, en ‘fidèles serviteurs de la France’ ou en ‘traîtres absolus’

Introduction

17

à la patrie algérienne”89 [transformed, unknowingly, into “loyal servants of France” or into “absolute traitors” to the Algerian homeland]. When the independence struggle finally came to an end in 1962, thousands of Harki families were massacred. The French state was urged to repatriate them in France, where they were received with a mixture of embarrassment and resentment, as their presence was a constant reminder of the failed colonial war and French Empire’s broken promises. Interned in camps, the Harki families suffered not only social segregation but also the Harki fathers’ traumatic silence. This identity is the object of the chapter entitled “The Construction of the ‘Harkive’: Giving a Voice to the Harki Moze by Zahia Rahmani.” Finally, the fourth minority addressed in this book is the mixedrace identity produced by the marriage of a French woman and an Algerian (Muslim) man. During the colonial period, the question of interracial marriages did not often occur in Algeria, despite the existence of certain cases— albeit very few. Mixed-race individuals had affiliations to both France and (soon-to-be) Algeria, the antagonism between which made it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for métis to belong, culturally and politically. Their condition foreshadowed the dilemmas experienced by the second generation of Algerian descents (the “Beur”) born in France, but whose culture is partly inherited from their immigrant parents. The postcolonial mixed-race individual continues to carry this antagonism and to be confronted with the challenges of a dual culture, as the chapter “The ‘Métis’ Predicament: Nina Bouraoui’s Embodied Memory of the Colonial Split” examines. It is about the story of a métis narrator born in France just after the Algerian War of an Algerian father and a French mother and who grew up in Algeria and France. These four identities created as minority conditions by the colonial system persist despite the end of the war, Algerian independence, and the repatriation of certain populations to the metropole. In other words, they have a “devenir postcolonial”90 [postcolonial future] that a sans doute été sous-estimé car ne concernant au départ que les adultes (piedsnoirs: 1 million; immigrés: 400 000 et harkis: 100 000), [mais qui] englobe au fil du temps et des générations enfants et petits-enfants, eux aussi porteurs de mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie et de la colonisation qui, comme le souligne Benjamin Stora, tentent de “différentes manières” de se réapproprier cette mémoire, pour savoir ce qui s’est réellement joué dans le conflit.91 [has doubtless been underestimated because to begin with it concerned only adults (Pieds-Noirs: 1 million; immigrants: 400,000 and Harkis: 100,000), [but which] encompasses over the course of time generations of children and grand-children, themselves also bearers of the memory of the Algerian War and

18

Chapter 1

colonization who, as Benjamin Stora underscores, try in “different ways” to reappropriate this memory, to understand what really played out in the conflict.]

Indeed, in the 2000s, a new generation begins to speak out in the public sphere: the children of those who lived through the Algerian War, and especially those products of Algerian immigration. These new bearers of memory, who now make up a significant group of citizens within French society, lay claim both to their inheritance of the memory of their fathers and their loyalty to their French citizenship. The traditional narrative of the history of colonization is thus disrupted and the need for history—for another history—for the younger generations is great, in order to reduce the gap between familial memory and national history. According to Stora, “la question de l’intégration de l’histoire coloniale et, par là, de l’intégration de l’histoire des minorités dans l’histoire républicaine nationale, est un énorme problème”92 [the issue of the integration of colonial history and, in the same way, of the integration of minority history into the national history of the Republic, is an enormous problem]. In effect, in the early 2000s, there was still no museum of colonization, colonial history was not really taught, and postcolonial studies had just begun to develop. Francophone literatures were rather marginalized, and no public policy of funding for films and documentaries about colonization existed.93 These absences and failures to make connections promote a politicization, or even, as Maazouzi has emphasized, an “overpoliticization,” of issues linked to colonial history.94 In fact, this phenomenon reveals “une récupération et une surenchère auxquelles ont recours depuis la fin de la guerre d’Algérie, par leur organisation en lobbying actif, tant les associations de pieds-noirs que celles d’anciens combattants et celles, certes plus tardives et moins puissantes, de harkis”95 [the reclamation and one-upmanship to which associations, through their organization into active lobbies, have resorted since the end of the Algerian War, associations of Pieds-Noirs, veterans, as well as, though they formed later and are less powerful, of Harkis]. In addition to the construction of spaces for colonial memory, such as museums dedicated to the history of the Pieds-Noirs and steles in tribute to the French soldiers in the Algerian War, one significant example of this politics of memory is the Law of February 23, 2005.96 The law credits the nation and the repatriated French with building an “œuvre” [work]; it also forbids apology for the crimes against the Harkis and the ex-soldiers of the French army. Moreover, article 4 of the Law stipulates that high school teachers must teach the “positive values” of colonialism in class, precisely to “acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa.”97 President Jacques Chirac finally repealed this paragraph in 2006, after accusations of historical revisionism from renowned historians

Introduction

19

and teachers (Stora, Liauzu, Vidal-Naquet, among others). However, this law represents more than just another (problematic) “memory law,” like the Gayssot Law (1990) or the Taubira Law (2001), which respectively prohibit Holocaust denial and recognize slavery as a crime against humanity.98 The 2005 Law not only establishes financial reparations for the repatriated people and the Harkis but also completes, through its article 13, the series of amnesties granted, since 1966, to members of the OAS, thereby fostering a sense of impunity for criminals that Zahia Rahmani notably explores in Moze through the staging of an imaginary trial.99 As Stora says: France resigned never to do what the Americans did during and after Vietnam: bring their own war criminals to justice. Indeed, the November 1982 law, justified by massive pardons, only abetted the OAS’s nostalgia. Leaders of the extreme-right, mustering only 0.8 percent of the vote during the presidential election of 1981, re-entered the French political arena. The tortures, crimes, and racial discriminations perpetrated during the Algerian War were forgiven.100

The 2005 Law only reinforced the legitimization of the OAS’s past actions and the contemporary extreme-right point of view of Franco-Algerian history, and also has the effect of perpetuating minority identifications and the compartmentalization of memories. Essentially, if duress affects historical minorities or if historical minority positions are repeated and renewed, it is because France avoided facing the meaning of colonization and the failure of its supposed republican universalism, as Shepard argues in his book The Invention of Decolonization. Through a discursive and ideological sleight of hand, France, in 1962, managed to establish republican values (the very same ones that legitimized imperialism) as the principle that permitted the end of colonialism in Algeria: “Inventing decolonization” allowed the French to avoid facing the challenges that Algerian nationalism and the Algerian Revolution posed to classic conceptions of French values and history, at least temporarily. [. . .] Because France had made Algeria the preeminent example of how overseas conquest and a commitment to universal values coincided, the Algerian Revolution not only put paid to empire, it forced into view the inextricable links between universalism and imperialism. The ways the French institutionalized Algerian independence sundered them one from each other. The “tide of History” consensus associated these choices with “republican values” (liberty, equality, fraternity, and the Rights of Man) while dissociating republican institutions from what France had done in Algeria. A France without Algeria signified a clear victory for republican values and not evidence that putting values premised in universalism into practice, institutionalizing them in

20

Chapter 1

the French republics, had depended on denying rights to certain people: in this case, “Muslims.”101

The OAS was fought by De Gaulle in the name of the Republic; yet, these French terrorist fighters were immediately exonerated, just as the republican values that commanded imperialist domination have been reinstituted as their opposite, as liberation from colonial oppression. Likewise, “It was under the guise of ending empire that the French government redefined the nation’s boundaries to exclude Algerian ‘Muslims,’ sidelining republican ‘colorblindness’ rather than confronting republican racism.”102 In other words, the conceptual framework behind the idea of nation that sets the border between “us” and the “other” had barely shifted in 1962, without questioning its own blind spot. In the end, Stora is right to say that “la blessure algérienne est restée vive par manque d’ouverture aux raisons de l’Autre et à ses propres déchirements”103 [the Algerian wound has been kept fresh by the lack of openness to the Other’s reasons and to its own suffering]. These unhealed wounds of the past and their transmission, even in silence, to the next generation sustain the specter of colonial differentiation. PATERNAL FILIATION, POSTCOLONIAL WITNESS, AND REPARATION WRITING? Literature has a privileged role in expressing the paradoxical structure of haunting, of the endurance of the past. As Barclay explains it, [. . .] literature operates as a privileged site in which the phenomena latent in contemporary society emerge and can be explored. [. . .] Since haunting occurs due to the return of that which has been written out of history, it is unsurprising that hauntings loom large in literary texts which focus on the legacy of colonialism, and the consequences of decolonization. As a genre, literature can almost be defined by its capacity to generate multiplicities of meaning; as Buse notes, “literature has always been a . . . accommodating place for ghosts, perhaps because fiction itself shares their simulacral qualities: like writing, ghosts are associated with a certain secondariness or belatedness.” The openness of literature to multiple readings, with their pluralities of meaning and interpretation, enables it to welcome the ambivalence of the ghostly for, like the haunted, literature bears traces of earlier texts, of memories and recollections, of apparent absences which are also what Avery Gordon calls “seething presences.”104

Introduction

21

Through a “hospitable”105 literature, the colonial and postcolonial temporalities that derive from forms of the nation-state are contradicted, redistributed in a multidirectional manner and, at the same time, made transnational. The works of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui, and Sansal that I analyze here have the common thread of resurrecting the ghost of colonial Algeria, embodied by the figure of the deceased (or absent) Algerian father. And this return allows for the correction of a collective representation and gives rise to the elaboration of a counter-memory. In the narratives studied here, phantomatic paternal filiation entails an identity quest oriented toward ancestry. Thus, in this respect, the texts of Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, Moze, Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées, but equally the fictional L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux, approach the genre of “filiation narrative,” a “forme littéraire [qui] a pour originalité de substituer au récit plus ou moins chronologique de soi qu’autofiction et autobiographie ont en partage, une enquête sur l’ascendance du sujet” [literary form [whose] originality lies in replacing the more or less chronological narrative of the self that autofiction and autobiography share in common, with an inquiry into the ancestry of the subject].106 The investigation of a familial past and of individual traumas associated with it are central to and characteristic of this type of narrative. Carine Trévisan defines filiation narratives in just this way: Il s’agit de textes qui prennent la forme d’une quête ou d’une enquête sur l’ascendance et s’interrogent sur les liens de filiation, le processus et l’objet de la transmission, enfin sur l’identité du narrateur comme héritier problématique. À la différence du roman généalogique de la première moitié du siècle, roman où s’expose la succession de générations, et où le récit d’une lignée nous conduit d’un ancêtre (mythique) à sa descendance (souvent déchue), la visée du récit de filiation est rétrospective.107 [These are texts that take the form of a quest or of an inquest into ancestry, and they examine ties of filiation, the process and the object of transmission, or the identity of the narrator as a problematic inheritor. Unlike the genealogical novel of the first half of the century, a novel in which the succession of generations is laid out, and where the story of a lineage leads us from a (mythic) ancestor to their descendants (often fallen), the aim of the filiation story is retrospective.]

The scopic inversion of the filiation narrative as compared to the genealogical novel reflects the historicopolitical context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: an era “en déshérence”108 [without heirs] in which the previously reliable foundations (often symbolized by the paternal) have failed to hold. The decline of the historical novel had already signaled the

22

Chapter 1

installation of a reluctance toward the belief in a forward march of history. However, as Alexandre Gefen notes, with the arrival “dans le champ contemporain de formes littéraires comme les récits de passation, de remémoration, de témoignage dont le point commun est de constituer non des programmes littéraires ou des écoles esthétiques mais plutôt des formes d’intervention”109 [of literary forms such as narratives of transfer, remembrance, and witness in the contemporary field; their commonality lies in constituting forms of intervention rather than literary programs or aesthetic schools], as if to “réparer” [repair] the past or “renouer les fils distendus de la communauté”110 [tie up the loose threads of the community], authors are sounding the void left by the disappearance of grand civic and religious narratives. However, for the texts of my corpus, the postcolonial situation somewhat alters the context: unlike the filiation narrative that would be the symptom of an heirless situation that concerns “la caducité des pratiques, des savoirs, des modes d’être et de faire—dont nul n’est ni se veut plus l’héritier, ou dont l’héritage lui-même est devenu irrecevable tant il ne livre que des pratiques et des connaissance obsolètes” [the lapse of practices, knowledge, and ways of being and doing—of which no one wishes to be the inheritor, or whose inheritance itself has become unreceivable because it provides only obsolete practices and understandings], the works of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui, and Sansal present a paradoxical inheritance. While there is indeed an heir through whom a minority past endures, he or she is at the same time separated from it because of a trauma linked to the silence of the father, his death, or a family secret. The narrators are thus “porteurs de mémoire” [bearers of memory],111 but because of this defective transmission, the memory is often “encryptée” [encrypted].112 Thus, in Moze the inheritance certificate reproduced by Rahmani in her text remains “blank,” incomplete. For Bouraoui, the difficulty of transmission is expressed by the narrator through her phobia of cuts and drownings, and her “epidermic” research into her Algerian heritage. In the story of Cixous, her Judeo-Berber-Arab ancestry within a colonial context forms the object of a reconstruction that is at once obsessive and impossible, the status of the father as a French Jew appearing so much like a simulacrum of existence. As for the character in Sansal’s novel, his filial quest is literal in that he discovers that his biological parents are not the Pieds-Noirs couple who raised him but Algerian Arabs, whom he attempts to find by taking a trip that is physical as well as an allegory for Franco-Algerian history. In all these cases, there is a problematic lack of an heir or a contradictory transmission that requires a look back to the past. The stories present the paradox of an inheritance that is at once untransmittable or unarticulated, and yet imposed. This paradoxical situation links to the idea of “duress” (or a phantom) at work in what I have called “historical minorities,” which are these identity formations of the past that are nonetheless “effective” in the present. And as Christiane Chaulet-Achour has stated,

Introduction

23

“Contre ce désespoir de la difficulté à reconstruire des filiations, le choix de l’écriture plaide pour une reconstruction mémorielle” [Against this despair over the difficulty of reconstructing filiations, the choice to write argues for a memorial reconstruction],113 which, I would add, combines intimate storytelling and collective history. Indeed, the disappearance or the absence of the father, symbolizing Algeria and the patronymic familial roots, is recounted as an experience of detachment that is as much genealogical as it is social and political, leaving the narrators in the position of orphans who must carry some familial shame. In response to this situation, the writing of memory (including a fictional one, for Sansal) constructs a “narrative identity” in dialogue with history and collective narratives.114 It is precisely this piecemeal, fragmented transmission of a family history, so in short of a “héritage mineur, de ‘micro-histoire’”115 [minor inheritance, a “micro-history”], that determines the hybrid nature of the literary texts of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui (and, to a certain extent, even of Sansal, whose fiction contains an omnipresence of historical references and reflections). Dominique Viart explains: Tout comme dans le travail historique, la pièce manquante imposée par le silence des pères, centrale, induit la nécessité d’une recherche. Mais faute de récits directs, c’est autour qu’il faut enquêter. Et la littérature doit alors emprunter les chemins de l’enquête historique [. . .], de la recherche socioéconomique [. . .] de la réflexion ethnographique [. . .] [et, j’ajouterais, de l’analyse psychanalytique]. Ce dialogue avec les sciences humaines qui caractérise les récits de filiation, c’est dans la quête de matériaux qu’il prend son origine—mais pas dans les méthodes.116 [Just as in historical work, the central missing piece imposed by the silence of fathers induces the need for research. But in the absence of direct accounts, the inquiry must be made in the surrounding area. And literature must then follow the paths of historical investigation [. . .], of socioeconomic research [. . .] of ethnographic reflection [. . .] [and, I would add, of psychoanalysis]. This dialogue with the social sciences that characterizes filiation narrative stems from a quest for material—but not for methods.]

For if contemporary critical fictions can be called “historiennes”117 [historical], it is in an unconventional sense, almost as an elucidating supplement to the past.118 Nonetheless, the investigative work alters the relationship between writing and the real: a writing that is often hesitant with regard to what it asserts, hypothetical and mistrustful toward discourses and concepts. Viart goes so far as to speak of a “écriture du scrupule”119 [scruple writing, writing of one’s conscience] and the narrators do indeed often express a sense of guilt

24

Chapter 1

relative to their endeavor. In the end, with the exception of Sansal’s novel, which is a fiction with a representational aim (attempting to take account of a particular historical moment, of certain events, although this material is shaped by aesthetic codes), the texts of the three other authors do not hold a representational relation with the real so much as a relation that Viart defines as “figuration”: the work does not “représente [. . .] [le réel], mais elle y trouve son modèle herméneutique”120 [represent [. . .] [the real], but it draws its hermeneutic model from it]. In other words, “La figuration est le texte qui entreprend de dire comment l’écrivain (le narrateur) se figure que les choses ont pu se passer, en fonction des éléments tangibles dont il dispose, des informations accumulées sur ce type d’évènements, sur la période, sur les réalités sociales et les habitus du moment, du milieu, etc.”121 [Figuration is the text that undertakes to tell how the writer (the narrator) figures that things may have happened, based on the tangible elements at his disposal, accumulated information on this type of event, the period, the social realities and the habitus of the moment, the environment, etc.]. In this way, as Janine Altounian points out, the anamnesic work of writing allows the author not only to make the trauma speak in order to break free from it but also to bear witness to the minority history from which it comes: “devenant le scribe des mutiques qu’il porte en lui, l’héritier écrivain raconte leur histoire et, ce faisant, l’histoire du monde qui les a rendus muets” [by becoming the scribe of the mutes that he carries within him, the writer inheritor tells their story and, in so doing, the history of the world that has silenced them].122 Performing a “assemblement narratif” [narrative assemblage] of identity,123 writing restores a filial link that obligates the narrator to bear witness to familial and historical rupture. As Maazouzi explains, “Par l’attestation personnelle et l’inscription biographique dans l’œuvre ou dans son péritexte, la scène d’énonciation fait émerger par la voix de l’auteur celle du porteur de mémoire qui fait acte de se souvenir du passé au présent. La prise de parole de l’auteur est un acte ‘de témoigner de’ [. . .]” [Through personal testimonial and biographical inscription in the work or its peritext, the stage of the utterance brings forth through the authorial voice that of the memory bearer, which effects a remembrance of the past in the present. The author’s speech is an act of “bearing witness to”].124 The definitions and conceptualizations of the witness have been numerous, since the pioneering works of Shoshana Felman and Doris Laub125 and Annette Wieviorka.126 I have chosen to work with Djemaa Maazouzi’s conception of postcolonial witness, which is based on the works of Renaud Dulong and Jacques Derrida. The former insists on “l’implication sociale du témoin par son autodésignation et les conditions sociales de son attestation personnelle” [the social implication of the witness through his self-designation and the social conditions of his personal testimony];127 thus, testimony derives its meaning through

Introduction

25

its force, as speech that has been made public.128 And as Derrida conceives it, testimony must “inventer, de manière quasi poétique, les normes de son attestation. [. . .] L’essence du témoignage ne se réduit pas nécessairement à la narration, c’est-à-dire aux rapports descriptifs, informatifs, au savoir ou au récit; c’est d’abord un acte present” [invent, in quasi-poetic fashion, the norms of his attestation. [. . .] The essence of testimony cannot necessarily be reduced to narration, that is, to descriptive, informative relations, to knowledge or to narrative; it is first a present act].129 From the postcolonial position of its author, the speech of the postcolonial witness brings to light his or her particular situation of enunciation. Because, for Derrida, there are particular “situations” that endow speech with the value of testimony. In Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, when he looks back at Algeria under the Vichy regime, he writes: il y a des situations, des expériences, des sujets qui sont justement en situation (mais qu’est ce que situer veut dire dans ce cas?) d’en témoigner exemplairement. Cette exemplarité ne se réduit plus simplement à celle de l’exemple dans une série. Ce serait plutôt l’exemplarité—remarquable et remarquante—qui donne à lire de façon plus fulgurante, intense, voire traumatique, la vérité d’une nécessité universelle. La structure apparaît dans l’expérience de la blessure, de l’offense, de la vengeance et de la lésion. [there are situations, experiences, and subjects who are precisely, in a situation (but what does situating mean in this case?) to testify exemplarily to them. This exemplarity is no longer reducible to that of an example in a series. Rather it would be the exemplarity—remarkable and remarking—that allows one to read in a more dazzling, intense, or even traumatic manner the truth of universal necessity. The structure appears in the experience of the injury, the offense, vengeance, and the lesion.]130

Beyond a simple egocentric belief or narcissistic effect, what Derrida suggests in this paragraph is that certain individuals represent an historical destiny; that in them, through the expression of their particularity, the mark of collectivity can be read. This is also what Deleuze and Guattari argue in Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure: minor literature is inherently political and “prend une valeur collective” [takes on a collective value],131 because “son espace exiguë fait que chaque affaire individuelle est immédiatement branchée sur le politique. L’affaire individuelle devient donc d’autant plus nécessaire, indispensable, grossie au microscope, qu’une tout autre histoire s’agite en elle” [its cramped space forced each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is

26

Chapter 1

vibrating within it].132 In this perspective, one can consider that the witness is not the embodiment of “truth,” in the sense of the traditional “being itself” of Western philosophy. Rather, in the literary texts that compose my corpus, the particular situation of the memory bearer confers on the writing a quality of witness that brings the fiction closer to history. In other words, through a character’s narration a structure appears, as Derrida says, that of the history of the Franco-Algerian minority from which the narrator comes. The texts that I analyze in this book are thus at the intersection of the postcolonial practice of witness and filiation narrative, which participates in an “éthique de la restitution”133 [ethics of restitution] at once individual and collective. Viart observes how these two literary forms “font effort de reliaison. La restitution relie le présent à son héritage mal transmis; le témoignage destine le passé vécu aux hommes du présent. [. . .] il ne s’agit plus, ou il s’agit moins, de dire une Histoire en soi, ou pour elle-même, mais de reconstituer une Histoire pour autrui” [make a reconnection effort. Literary restitution links the present to its poorly transmitted heritage; testimony addresses the past to the individuals of the present [. . .] it is no longer a question, or it is less so, of speaking a History in itself, or for its own sake, but the task is rather to reconstitute a History for others].134 The texts of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui, and Sansal pay homage to the father humiliated by history and who locked himself up in silence—a father who, for the first two authors, receives a symbolic burial by the book. Through literature, their human dignity is restored. To restore means, first and foremost, to give something back to someone. Through the homage to an individual, literary restitution seeks to make that which was buried reappear, that which escapes, which was not said (and therefore that which could not be fully or consciously passed down through the generations). This work of unveiling has a repairing function, and in this sense the works considered here participate in the contemporary phenomenon of a “therapeutic” literature:135 “Tout se passe, me semble-t-il, comme si, dans nos démocraties privées de grands cadres herméneutiques et spirituels collectifs, le récit littéraire promettait de penser le singulier, de faire mémoire des morts, de donner sens aux identités pluralisées en constituant des communautés”136 [Everything happens, it seems to me, as if in our democracies that have been stripped of their great collective hermeneutic and spiritual frameworks, the literary narrative promised a way to think the singular, to remember the dead, to give meaning to plural identities by constituting communities]—or at least (in the case of my corpus) to give visibility to an historical minority condition. For Gefen, the therapeutic project of literature, which devotes an important role to the empathy of a reader who projects him or herself into the narrative identity produced by the text, “veut réparer nos

Introduction

27

conditions de victimes, corriger ces traumatismes de la mémoire individuelle ou du tissu sociétal”137 [wishes to repair our conditions as victims, correct these traumas of individual memory or of the social fabric]. Consequently, the question that arises, and which the magistrate Antoine Garapon has formulated, is “Peut-on réparer l’histoire?” [can history be repaired?].138 He observes in effect that today, “nous ne nous satisfaisons plus d’être les notaires de cette histoire, nous prétendons en devenir les procureurs”139 [we are no longer satisfied with being the notaries of this history, we claim to be the prosecutors]. This observation finds confirmation, quite literally, in Moze, during the fictional trial of the eponymous character, when the narrator takes on the role of prosecutor, and then of judge, in order to state loudly and clearly the wrongs of which the Harkis were victims and then pronounce a sentence that was never given. In his analysis, Garapon shows that “L’histoire n’est plus le tribunal du monde, elle devient justiciable de la justice des hommes”140 [History is no longer the court of the world, it has become accountable in the courts of men]. This ethicoteleological reversal, which began in 1945 after World War II, took place in several stages: first, history was criminalized, with the establishment of an international system of criminal justice (the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, creation of the International Criminal Court in 1998). Then, justice became “reconstructive” or “transitionnelle,”141 with the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that serve less to judge history than to relieve it of persisting resentment which could cause a repetition of history. The goal is reconciliation in order to rebuild a political community. Finally, in the current phase, according to Garapon, “nous ne cherchons plus à réprimer quelques acteurs ou à réconcilier les peuples après une grave crise, mais nous prétendons réparer les crimes du passé”142 [we no longer seek to censure certain participants or reconcile populations after a severe crisis, but we presume to repair the crimes of the past]. In the literary texts that I analyze, these three aspects of the judicialization of history can coexist. For example, in Moze and in L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux, certain political leaders (French and Algerian) are indicted and held to account, and, at the same time, the writing seeks to restore the image of a father or a community in disgrace. The reparation at stake in literature is a symbolic reparation—even though material or political reparations (such as financial compensation or affirmative actions) can be undertaken as a result of literary action, as was the case for the Harkis in the 2000s. By offering a memorialization of the historical minority identity of the father, the narratives of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui, and Sansal suggest another form of reparation: the creation of an archive.

28

Chapter 1

POSTCOLONIAL ARCHIVATIONS The texts of my corpus can indeed be interpreted as works on the question of archive. As Derrida reminds us in Mal d’archive, etymologically speaking the archive, from the Greek “arkhè,” signifies a beginning (“là où les choses commencement—principe physique, historique ou ontologique” [there where things commence—physical, historical, or ontological principle]) and a commandment (“là où s’exerce l’autorité [. . .]—principe nomologique” [there where authority is exercised [. . .]—nomological principle]).143 In the texts of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui, and Sansal, this principle of commandment is more or less explicitly brought to light and undermined, while the narrative offers a new principle of beginning. Indeed, on the one hand, the works show that within a colonial context, official archives are no longer guarantors of identity, but rather in a situation of oppression they “nient la coïncidence de soi à soi”144 [negate the coincidence of subject and self]. On the other hand, the texts of these four authors constitute an alternative base for discourse, that is to say a minor archive, in dissonance with official memory. First, by giving visibility to historical minorities, the narratives highlight what we might call a “historical repression” in the official archives and which would itself constitute an unconscious archivation. In Mal d’archive, Derrida shows that following from the analyses of Freud, we can understand that the archive truly comes into being precisely where memory breaks down: the archive is “hupómnema, supplément ou représentant mnémotechnique, auxiliaire ou aide-mémoire. Car l’archive [. . .] ce ne sera jamais la mémoire ni l’anamnèse en leur expérience spontanée, vivante et intérieure. Bien au contraire: l’archive a lieu au lieu de défaillance originaire et structurelle de ladite mémoire” [hypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. Because the archive [. . .] if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory].145 However, this location of breakdown should not be understood as a non-memory, a forgetting, but as a repression, the location of the unconscious. For as Derrida points out, “ce qui est intéressant, dans le refoulement, c’est qu’on n’arrive pas à refouler. Le fantôme ainsi fait la loi— même et plus que jamais quand on le conteste” [what is most interesting in repression is what one does not manage to repress. The phantom thus makes the law].146 In reaction to Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable—itself calling out to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism— Derrida argues that repression should not be conceived in opposition to memory, as the scholar in Jewish studies argued for the sake of his argument about the murder of Moses, but that “le refoulement est une archivation”

Introduction

29

[Repression is an archivation].147 Repressing is an unconscious archivation—and the repressed, an underlying archive. This logic of repetition, of reprinting (“l’archive est hypomnésique” [the archive is hypomnesic]),148 in an “lieu extérieur qui assure la possibilité de la mémorisation” [external place which assures the possibility of memorization]149 is, according to Freud, part and parcel with the death drive, which is fundamentally a destructive impulse, “anarchivique.”150 The archive has therefore a paradoxical structure that repeats and destroys at the same time, or as Derrida puts it, “L’archive travaille toujours et a priori contre elle-même” [The archive always works, and a priori, against itself].151 Thus, from a colonial perspective, what is interesting in this logic of impression, repression, and suppression of the archive is that, as Crystel Pinçonnat has pointed out, it echoes the “trois modes de domination de celui que l’on appelait l’indigène: purement et simplement supprimé, ou de façon mois radicale réprimé, ou encore ‘imprimé’ au sens de ‘marqué,’ modelé par l’Empire”152 [three modes of domination over what we used to call the native: purely and simply erased, or in a less radical fashion repressed, or further still ‘imprinted’ in the sense of ‘marked,’ molded by the Empire]. The status of the archive and that of the colonial subject (indigenous or Frenchified) are linked, and the works of my corpus seek to show this analogical relation while making visible the “invisible” archive, the “unconscious” in history. The principle of the traditional archive, ordered by a political concern for the conservation of a certain national past, is brought into question by literature. In fact, up until the 1980s in France, the colonial archives were either missing or inaccessible.153 However, over the course of that decade, with the opening of certain archives as well as the publication of Assia Djebar’s text on Delacroix, archives became more widely used in a manner not only heuristic but also critical,154 with notable thanks to the works of Foucault, Saïd, and Derrida who incite us to a rereading of history and knowledge production.155 Offering a new starting principle based on a “mémoire vive, inquiète, justicière, [dévoilant] une vérité qui passe parfois par le faux”156 [living, anxious, justice-seeking memory, [uncovering] a truth that sometimes passes through falsehood], the postcolonial archives produced by the texts of my corpus, through the polyphonic techniques that are proper to them, create other pasts and give voice to other identities. In Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, the archive is produced by the development of semantic ambiguities of polysemic signifiers and by intertextuality. In Moze, the hybridity of the multiple narrative voices adds to a critical use of deconstructed official archives in order to show their sometimes-mendacious artificiality. In Bouraoui and Sansal, the body of the character becomes a living archive. In all these texts, the elaboration of a new starting principle (that is to say the archive of a minority identity) occurs through a calling into question of the commandment principle of

30

Chapter 1

the traditional archive, which dictates what it is possible to say, and therefore what is, what exists. An archive is not simply “a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, an individual or group of people; or the place where these documents are kept.”157 As Foucault conceives it, the convergence of materials also means a convergence of discourses.158 The archive is “the set of rules which at a given period and for a definite society defined: 1) the limits and forms of expressibility; 2) the limits and forms of conservation; 3) the limits and forms of memory; and 4) the limits and forms of reactivation.”159 In other words, it is a law delimiting what can be said, a set of discursive mechanism establishing what is worth knowing and remembering. The colonial archive, as Saïd pointed through his concept of “orientalism,” informed national knowledge and racist practices which forced individuals to be categorized and to categorize themselves. However, as critiques of Saïd160 note, colonial discourse is not a homogenous group of texts, and resistance to these discursive structures is possible, as the texts of my corpus suggest. Countering the colonial archive in order to create an alternative postcolonial one involves a new discursive foundation negating hegemonic histories and reclaiming a transnational perspective. The production of minor archives for the Franco-Algerian identities dealt with in the texts of my corpus is conditioned by an analytic shift regarding the nations and their histories. The archival base opens up to the “interpenetration”161 of France and Algeria—that is, an “infiltration” of the other in every dimension of French and Algerian societies, social, economic, political, and cultural. Étienne Balibar writes: Le fait que la nation ait été formée dans l’empire veut dire que l’empire est toujours encore dans les nations, pendant très longtemps, après la séparation physique et juridique. [. . .] L’Algérie est irréductiblement présente dans la France comme la France l’est dans l’Algérie. De part et d’autre, le “corps étranger” est d’autant plus impossible à éliminer qu’il ne tient pas seulement à des présences physiques, mais à la mémoire et à la constitution de l’identité.162 [The fact that the nation was formed in the empire means that the empire is still there in the nations, for a very long time, after physical and legal separation. [. . .] Algeria is irreducibly present in France as is France in Algeria. On both sides, the “foreign body” is all the more impossible to eliminate because it is not only about a physical presence but also about memory and the constitution of identity.]

The border between the two nations, as Balibar notes, is incomplete: a “frontière non-entière,” a “fractale,”163 which means, in scientific language,

Introduction

31

that the dimension of national affiliation, in the case of France and Algeria, cannot be represented by whole numbers (one, two), but instead, is better understood through decimal numbers. Thus, according to Balibar’s numerical allegory, France and Algeria added together do not make “two” but rather “one and a half.” Taking up this image, one could say that the literary texts analyzed in this book form an archive that rests not on one pillar but on a pillar and a half. To conceive of a transnational, nonlinear, decentralized discursive base means to affirm the imbrication of national histories and colonial and postcolonial temporalities. The texts resonate with the idea expressed by Achille Mbembe according to which pour des raisons historiques, il est pratiquement impossible aujourd’hui de délier l’histoire des sociétés anciennement colonisées et celle des ex-empires coloniaux. Il y a, entre ces deux entités, une zone d’inséparabilité et de mutualité quasi intractable. Certes, l’historicité propre des sociétés anciennement colonisées toujours excède le travail impérial proprement dit. Il reste tout de même que l’Empire a fait la colonie. La signature impériale est là, partout, souvent sous les formes les plus inattendues, nonobstant la proclamation des indépendances. En retour, la colonie a profondément changé le visage de l’Empire. Elle l’a marquée de traces indélébiles. Il y a eu des effets en retour. [. . .] il y a donc une actualité de la colonie qu’il est difficile de nier. La France n’ayant pas colonisé par accident, la société française s’est nécessairement définie par et dans cette entreprise. Il est illusoire de penser que ce procès de définition n’a pas pris fin parce qu’un jour, on a pris la décision de “décoloniser.”164 [for historical reasons, it is practically impossible today to detach the history of formerly colonized societies from that of ex-colonial empires. There is, between these two entities, a quasi intractable zone of inseparability and mutuality. Of course, the historicity proper to former colonial societies always exceeds the work of empire strictly speaking. Yet still the Empire made the colony. The imperial signature is there, everywhere, often in the most unexpected forms, despite the proclamation of independences. In return, the colony has profoundly changed the face of the Empire. It has left its indelible marks. There have been counter effects. [. . .] thus there is something contemporary about the colony that cannot be denied. Because France did not colonize by accident, French society necessarily defined itself by and through this enterprise. It is specious to think that this process of definition did not come to an end because one day, the decision was made to “decolonize.”]

Thus, by redeploying discourses, the texts that I have chosen to analyze construct a new relationship with the past and envisage the present and future through a perspective that takes different asymmetrical situations with the

32

Chapter 1

postcolonial into account. For as Ella Shohat has noted, “Since the experience of colonialism and imperialism is shared, albeit asymmetrically, by (ex)colonizer and (ex)colonized, it becomes an easy move to apply the ‘post’ also to First World European countries. [. . .] the ‘post-colonial’ can easily become a universalizing category which neutralizes significant geopolitical [. . .].”165 The writers that I have chosen belong to a diverse mix of categories blurring any national crystallization: Bouraoui situates her “I” between the excolonized (through her Algerian father) and ex-colonizer (through her French mother); moreover, after her exile to France, she feels like a displaced hybrid. Rahmani’s identity is at the crossroads between the ex-colonized (ethnically Berber) and displaced hybrid in France, while bearing the particularity of the Harki—which can be defined as an intersection between the colonized and colonizer. Cixous identifies as an ex-colonized, but also, in a particular way due to the different status of Jews in Algeria, as a Pied-Noir, and additionally as a foreigner (her mother being German) eventually displaced to France. Finally, Sansal is an ex-colonized still living in Algeria, while his character embodies an ex-colonial settler who discovers his real Arab (indigenous, hence ex-colonized) roots. National narratives are challenged by the effect of the characters’ borderline position: as embodiments of different sorts of borders, the characters become, according to Nacira Guénif-Souilamas’ expression, “corps-frontière”166 [border-bodies], both joining and separating France and Algeria through their existence, being “dedans et dehors à la fois” [at once inside and outside], and therefore challenging “les mondes statonationaux” [the realms of nation-states].167 By reassessing historical accounts of the past, the texts, through their readership, invite society to take action on what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible”168—that is, to give a new public share of respect, dignity, and memory to the different colonial and postcolonial actors. By constructing a minor archive that creates dissonance with French and Algerian official historical narratives (major archives), the texts of my corpus not only disrupt the public understanding of Franco-Algerian history; employing literature as a tribunal for history, the writers also blame the French and Algerian governments for their responsibility in their personal or collective tragedies as historical minorities. Moreover, I demonstrate how the stories narrated by these writers are about mourning a double loss, that of the Algerian land and, embedded in it, that of the narrator’s father, the embodiment of the country of origin. The four narrators in their respective texts are like orphans of Algeria displaced in France, and the unfolding of the textual space operates as a mourning process for the loss of the fatherland—with Sansal’s novel ending in an ambiguous and provocative twist. The texts examined in this book struggle with the issue of decolonizing memory, which means denationalizing, decentralizing, and delinearizing it.

Introduction

33

Cixous, Rahmani, and Bouraoui’s personal narratives deal more with the French context, while Sansal’s fictional work (indirectly) addresses the question from the other side—the memory of the Pieds-Noirs in Algeria. I found it more interesting to deal with the memory of the Pieds-Noirs not within a framework based on their own national majority, but from the “other” national perspective, the one in which they are par excellence the dissonant minority. As Catherine Coquio rightly points out: “c’est avant tout dans cette littérature [francophone] [. . .] que s’élabore une véritable pensée critique de l’histoire coloniale et postcoloniale, comme une réflexion politique s’y déploie à sa manière propre: une manière où [. . .] la violence historique s’écrit et se réfléchit à partir de ses effets intimes et de ses retours spectraux.” [it is above all in this [Francophone] literature [. . .] that a true criticism of colonial and postcolonial history is elaborated, as a political reflection that unfolds in its own mode: a mode in which [. . .] historical violence is written and reflected through its intimate effects and its spectral returns].169 In a context of scarce postcolonial theory in France, literature provides the basis for the elaboration of multidisciplinary criticism of the vestiges of colonialism in contemporary manifestations of identity. STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK My chapters follow the chronology of the historical moments conveyed by each narrative: colonial Algeria in Cixous’ text; the War of Independence in Rahmani’s; the postindependence period before the Civil War in Bouraoui’s novels; and, with Sansal’s fiction, the Algerian Civil War (1991–2002) referring back to the War of Independence and all the other historical moments. Chapter 2 analyzes how Hélène Cixous portrays the paradoxes of the history of Jews in Algeria, always caught between a surplus of visibility, used by others to exclude them, and an excess of invisibility, which assimilated them into the Pieds-Noirs upon independence. I examine how exclusion, or being an “outcast,” is constructed as the paradigm of Cixous’ condition in French Algeria. The “primal scenes” composing the text, like many emblematic scenes of violence, carry a profound criticism of the French treatment of difference and its political and cultural representations of otherness. By unraveling semantic ambiguities of polysemic signifiers, the narrative redeploys the conditions of what can be said and reveals what has been unsaid, thus creating an alternative archive. In parallel, the narrative process, reaching back to the lost territories of childhood through memory, puts an end to Cixous’ longlasting repression of the memory of her father’s death. The text becomes a symbolic funereal space inhabited by the memory of her dead father, whose

34

Chapter 1

tomb in Algeria is acknowledged as the ultimate trace of French Algeria’s system of exclusion. Chapter 3, focusing on Moze, investigates how Zahia Rahmani’s narrative brings the Harki children’s predicament regarding their father’s enrollment in the French army to its climax. Did these auxiliary soldiers serve France of their own free will, out of practical or ideological considerations, or were they forced to do so? Rahmani explores the traumatic consequences of her father’s alleged choice, while confronting the accusation of betrayal and subsequent stigmatization at the core of Harki identity. Playing with official pieces of archival documents inserted in the text, Rahmani seeks to disclose political manipulations that made possible the constitution of a group of people, called “Harkis,” and thus pleads for justice. While exposing her malaise vis-à-vis Moze’s life choice and death by suicide, Rahmani also implicitly reveals her own wound of a traumatic childhood, between her father’s pathological silence and her secluded life in a ghetto. Nonetheless, by the end, the narrative turns into a symbolic tomb for her father whose story echoing with that of Moses becomes the core of an alternative archive for the Harki—an “harkive.” Chapter 4 explores a contradiction at work in Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées: while reclaiming the existence of a métis identity, Bouraoui presents the contemporary Franco-Algerian as an incarnated perpetuation of the historical tensions that divided France and Algeria. Her narratives simultaneously construct and deconstruct a FrancoAlgerian métis identity by both incorporating a spectral Algerian familial history and rejecting a yet intrinsic French heritage. I analyze how traumatic memories of asphyxiation are a metaphor for Bouraoui’s difficult relationship with her French self, symbolized by the motif of white skin. Through the analysis of a powerful paradigmatic metaphor of the skin, the chapter demonstrates how the texts produce an archivation process through the negotiation of antagonistic forces. Chapter 5 examines Sansal’s complex and provocative novel, which depicts making round trips between France and Algeria, and pasts and presents. L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux is a fictional dialogue between two imprisoned men in contemporary Algeria: a French man, born in colonial Algeria of Arab origin but who became a Pieds-Noirs after being adopted by a French couple, and who returned to Algeria to find his biological mother and the murderer of his Algerian father; and a young Algerian, born after independence and whose existence has been caught between the hammer of the FLN and the Islamist anvil. The story of their respective crimes unfolds several narrative threads corresponding to different time periods: colonial Algeria, the War of Independence, the Algerian Civil War, and the present of enunciation (2000). This chapter casts light on Sansal’s indictment of the FLN and

Introduction

35

his plea in favor of the symbolic redemption of the Pieds-Noirs in their status of historical Algerians. The question of colonial wounds and their remains is brought up through the larger context of contemporary Algerian problems. The narrative poses the complex question of the responsibility of the different political and historical actors in Algeria’s contemporary situation: the previous colonial power, the settlers, the FLN, the Islamists. Sansal transforms the figure of the Pieds-Noirs, a subject of national abjection in Algeria, into an ambiguous figurehead of a Franco-Algerian community to come. While creating a discursive space that reenvisions Pieds-Noirs’ identity, the text nonetheless produces a disconcerting neocolonial epistemic violence.

NOTES 1. Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, “1830– 1880: la prise de possession du pays,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, eds. Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, Sylvie Thénault (Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012), 19–51. And Benjamin Brower, “Les violences de la conquête,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale (Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012), 58–63. 2. https​:/​/en​​.oxfo​​rddic​​tiona​​ries.​​com​/d​​efini​​tion/​​​remna​​nt. 3. Hélène Merlin-Kajman, L’Absolutisme dans les Lettres et la théorie des deux corps. Passions et politique (Paris: Champion, 2000), 20. All translations in Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Milles Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 133. 5. Susan Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1983). 6. Dominique Viart, “Les ‘fictions critiques’ de la littérature contemporaine/ Daewoo de François Bon, Fayard, 300 p./L’adversaire, d’Emmanuel Carrère, Gallimard, «Folio», 219 p./Corps du roi de Pierre Michon, Verdier, 101 p,” Spirale 201 (2005), 10. 7. Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979). 8. Pierre Nora, Les Lieux De Mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). 9. Domonique Viart, “Topiques de la déshérence. Formes d’une ‘éthique de la restitution’ dans la littérature contemporaine française,” in Lieux propices. L’énonciation des lieux/Le lieu de l’énonciation, eds. Simon Harel and Adelaide Russo (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005), 212. 10. During the 2017 presidential campaigns, right- and extreme right-wing candidates “reminded” electors that colonization was about “sharing [our] culture” (François Fillon) or that it was a gift (Marion Maréchal-Le Pen). On the discrepancy between scientific knowledge and testimonies on the one hand, and, on the other, the collective consciousness about the Algerian War, see Catherine Brun, “Quel(s)

36

Chapter 1

savoir(s) pour quelle(s) mémoire(s) de la guerre d’Algérie? Histoire, Ignorance, Mémoire(s),” Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire 117 (2014): 67–74, doi:10.4000/ temoigner.725. 11. Dominique Viart, “Le silence des pères au principe du ‘récit de filiation’,” Études françaises 44, no. 3 (2009): 115. 12. Viart, “Topiques de la déshérence,” 209. 13. Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975). For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the minor quality of a work of literature stems from “les conditions révolutionnaires de toute littérature au sein de celle qu’on appelle grande” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, 33) [“the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1985), 18]. 14. Antoine Garapon, Peut-on réparer l’Histoire?: Colonisation, esclavage, Shoah (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008), 19. 15. Garapon, Peut-on réparer l’Histoire, 13. 16. Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990). 17. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993). 18. Henry Rousso and Eric Conan, Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris: Fayard, 1994). Henry Rousso, La Hantise du passé: Entretiens avec Philippe Petit (Paris: Textuel, 1998). 19. Fiona Barclay, Writing Postcolonial France. Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), xi. 20. Barclay, Writing Postcolonial France, xxii. 21. Barclay, Writing Postcolonial France, xxii–xxiii. 22. Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016), 5–6. 23. https​:/​/ww​​w​.def​​enseu​​rdesd​​roits​​.fr​/f​​r​/act​​us​/ac​​tuali​​tes​/r​​elati​​ons​-p​​olice​​popul​​ ation​​-le​-d​​efens​​eur​-d​​es​-dr​​oits-​​p​ubli​​e​-une​​-enqu​​ete​-s​​ur​-le​​s. 24. Stoler, Duress, 3. 25. Stoler, Duress, 7. 26. Stoler, Duress, 7. 27. Stoler, Duress, 6. 28. Djemaa Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires: La guerre d’Algérie en littérature, au cinéma et sur le web (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), 39. 29. Stoler, Duress, 12. 30. Several small extreme-right and fascist groups, including Jean-Marie Le Pen’s “Ordre nouveau,” merged to create the “Front National” (FN) in October 1972 in preparation for the legislative elections of 1973 (Gregoire Kauffmann, “D’où sort le Front National,” L’Histoire 368 (2011): 94–99). The FN belongs to the tradition of national populism: “une idéologie xénophobe, […] des valeurs classiques de la

Introduction

37

droite extrême (anti-égalitarisme, anti-parlementarisme, préférence nationale associée à une définition ethnique, religieuse ou raciale de la nation), et utilisant une rhétorique politique classique (dénonciation de la décadence, désignation des coupables et proclamation d’un sauveur)” [a xenophobic ideology, […] classical values of the far-right (anti-egalitarianism, anti-parliamentarianism, national preference associated with an ethnic, religious, or racial definition of the nation), and use a classical political rhetoric (accusation of decline, identification of the guilty parties and proclamation of a savior)] [Eric Savarèse, Histoire coloniale et immigration. Une invention de l’étranger (Séguier: Paris, 2000), 9]. The first successes of the FN were the 1982 cantonal elections and the 1983 municipal elections [Jacques Le Bohec, Sociologie du phénomène Le Pen (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 11–16]. Since then, their voter base has kept growing and diversifying. In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election, ahead of Jacques Chirac, leader of the right-wing party “Rassemblement pour la République” (RPR). Moreover, since the 2004 regional elections, the FN’s results have “skyrocketed,” doubling their number of voters from 2004 (14 percent of the suffrage) to 2015 (28 percent) during the regional elections, putting the FN ahead of two main parties—“Les Républicains” on the right and “Parti Socialiste” on the left. In the 2017 presidential elections, Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter who has been the leader of the FN since January 2011, proceeded to the second round of elections against Emmanuel Macron with 21.3 percent, a higher percentage than her party had ever obtained. In the second round, she received 33.9 percent, a significant increase compared to the percentages won by her father fifteen years prior (16.86 in the first round, 17.79 in the second). See respectively Pierre Breteau, “Élections régionales 2015: comment le score du FN a explosé depuis le 1er tour des régionales de 2004,” Le Monde, December 7, 2015, http:​/​/www​​.lemo​​nde​.f​​r​/les​​-deco​​deurs​​/arti​​cle​/2​​ 015​/1​​2​/07/​​comme​​nt​-le​​-fron​​t​-nat​​ional​​-a​-ex​​plose​​-depu​​is​-le​​-prem​​ier​-t​​our​-d​​es​-re​​giona​​l​ es​-d​​e​-200​​4​_482​​6232_​​43557​​70​.ht​​ml; “Présidentielles 2017,” Le Monde, https​:/​/ww​​w​. lem​​onde.​​fr​/da​​ta​/fr​​ance/​​presi​​denti​​​elle-​​2017/​; “Présidentielles 2002,” Le Monde, https​:/​/ ww​​w​.lem​​onde.​​fr​/da​​ta​/fr​​ance/​​presi​​denti​​​elle-​​2002/​. 31. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 39. 32. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 45. 33. Alain Gillette and Abdelmalek Sayad, L’Immigration algérienne en France (Paris: Entente, 1984 [1976]), 244–45. 34. Bohec, Sociologie du phénomène, 84. On the difficulties of providing the determining factors behind the FN vote and pitfalls of categorizations from different academic disciplines, see 50–68 (“Les explications proposées”). 35. See Benjamin Stora, Le Transfert d’une mémoire in Les Mémoires dangeureuses (Paris: Albin Michel, 2016), 108–9 and 112–13, on the reasons why Le Pen, all the while being furiously anti-Gaullist, did not join the OAS. 36. On De Gaulle’s changing attitude and policies toward French Algeria, see Jim House and Neil McMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2006), 3–5. 37. As Stora says, “Le FN n’est pas seulement l’héritier spirituel des émeutiers de 1934 et des collaborateurs des années 1940, il est aussi celui des factieux de la

38

Chapter 1

guerre d’Algérie” [The FN is not only the spiritual heir of the rioters of 1934 and the collaborators of the 1940s, it also traces back to the factions of the Algerian War] (Stora, Le Transfert d’une mémoire, 119). 38. Guy Pervillé, “La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie dans l’extrême droite française: le cas particulier de Jean-Marie Le Pen,” Pour une histoire de la guerre d’Algérie, 2013, http:​/​/guy​​.perv​​ille.​​free.​​fr​/sp​​ip​/ar​​ticle​​.php3​​?id​_a​​​rticl​​e​=311​. 39. Benjamin Stora, Les Mémoires dangeureuses (Paris: Albin Michel, 2016), 127. 40. Stora, Les Mémoires dangeureuses, 75. 41. Stora, Les Mémoires dangeureuses, 76. 42. Stora, Les Mémoires dangeureuses, 227–28. 43. Stoler, Duress. 44. Jane Hiddleston, “État Présent. Francophone North African Literature,” French Studies LXX, no. I (2015): 85. 45. Stora, Les Mémoires dangeureuses. 46. Régine Robin, “Représenter, penser, périodiser le XXe siècle,” in Représenter le vingtième siècle, eds. Marc Angenot and Régine Robin, Discours Social, vol. XIX (Montreal: McGill University, 2004), 19. 47. Catherine Brun, “Résurgences/oublis: L’exemple de la guerre d’Algérie,” French Forum 41 (2016): 65. See also Catherine Brun, “Algérie romans. ‘Rejeux’ et ‘inguérissable’,” in Mémoires occupées: fictions françaises et Seconde Guerre mondiale, ed. Marc Dambre (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2013), 223–31. 48. I define memory according to the definition elaborated by Pierre Nora, for whom “La mémoire est la vie, toujours portée par des groupes vivants et, à ce titre, elle est en évolution permanente, ouverte à la dialectique du souvenir et de l’amnésie, inconsciente de ses déformations successives […]. L’histoire est la reconstruction toujours problématique et incomplète de ce qui n’est plus. La mémoire est un phénomène toujours actuel, un lien vécu au présent éternel; l’histoire est une représentation du passé” (Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire, xix) [Memory is life, always embodied in living societies and as such in permanent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject. […] History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is always a phenomenon of the present, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past]. Collective memory is always an interaction between the memory politics engaged by the state and the memories of a collectivity group. 49. Rousso, La Hantise, 17–18. See also Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy and Anne Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001), 19–42. On the temporalization of Algerian memory, see Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 59–62. 50. In Freudian theory, a screen memory is “a recollection of early childhood that may be falsely recalled or magnified in importance and that masks another memory of deep emotional significance” (http​:/​/ww​​w​.mer​​riam-​​webst​​er​.co​​m​/dic​​tiona​​ry​/sc​​r​ een%​​20mem​​ory).​By extension, screen memory means any memory blocking another memory, preventing it from being remembered.

Introduction

39

51. Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations, or The Invention of the Maghreb, trans. Alyson Waters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003), 42. 52. The massacre took place during a peaceful demonstration against the curfew imposed on Algerian immigrants by police chief (and ex-Nazi collaborator) Maurice Papon. This event reemerged in public discourse in the 1990s. See House and MacMaster, Paris 1961. 53. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 56–57. 54. Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), 1. 55. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 57. 56. Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations, 42. 57. Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, “Le Trou de mémoire colonial,” Hommes et libertés. Revue de la Ligue des Droits de l’Hommes 131 (2005): 34–59. 58. Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism, 19. 59. The recognition of this event, along with others like the “Affaire de la station de métro Charonne” a few months later (February 8, 1962), still provokes fierce reactions among politicians. For example, on the occasion of a commemoration of the massacre in 2012, congressman Christian Jacob (“Député UMP,” right-wing party) expressed reluctance and even irony toward this kind of opening up to memory, as he claimed: “à ce rythme, ne va-t-on pas bientôt mettre en cause de Gaulle lui-même?” Daniel Schneidermann, “17 Octobre 61, la mécanique du silence,” L’Obs avec Rue 89, Rue89.nouvelobs, 2012, accessed October 21, 2012, https​:/​/ww​​w​.arr​​etsur​​image​​s​ .net​​/chro​​nique​​s​/17-​​octob​​re​-61​​-la​-m​​ecani​​​que​-d​​u​-sil​​ence.​ 60. See Enzo Traverso, “L’écrit-évènement: l’historiographie comme champ de bataille politique,” in Les Guerres de mémoires. La France et son histoire, eds. Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 220–29. 61. Hiddleston, “État Présent,” 82. 62. Charles-Robert Ageron, “L’Exposition coloniale de 1931: mythe républicain ou mythe impérial,” in Les Lieux de mémoire. Tome 1: La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 561–91. 63. Alec G. Hargreaves, “Introduction,” in Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism. Legcaies of French Colonialism (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2005), 2. 64. Traverso, “L’écrit-évènement,” 228. 65. Perry Anderson, Pierre Nora, and William Olivier Desmond, La Pensée Tiède: Un Regard critique sur la culture française, trans. William Olivier Desmond (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005). Nora’s response was published in Perry Anderson’s La Pensée réchauffée: une réponse de Pierre Nora (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005), 99–167. 66. Nora, La Pensée réchauffée, 121. 67. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 38. 68. Michael Pollak, L’Expérience concentrationnaire. Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale (Paris: Métaillé, 1990), 29. 69. Benjamin Stora, Les Trois exils. Juifs d’Algérie (Paris: Stock, 2006), 60.

40

Chapter 1

70. Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994 [1925]), and Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire Collective (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997 [PUF 1949, 1950, 1968]). 71. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002). 72. Avishai Margalit calls a “shared memory” a discourse that “integrates and calibrates the different perspectives of those who remember the episode […] into one version.” Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, quoted in Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009), 15. 73. See Daniel Lindenberg, “Guerres de mémoires en France,” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 42, no. 1 (1994): 77–95; Rousso, La Hantise du passé; Benjamin Stora and Mohammed Harbi, eds., La Guerre d’Algérie: 1954–2004, la fin de l’amnésie (Paris: Robert Lafont, 2004); Benjamin Stora, La Guerre des mémoires. La France face à son passé colonial (La Tour d’Aigues: Aube, 2007); Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, eds., Les Guerres de mémoires. La France et son histoire (Paris: La découverte, 2008). 74. Laure Blévis, “La situation coloniale entre guerre et paix. Enjeux et conséquences d’une controverse de qualification,” Politix 104 (April 2013): 87–104. Blévis explains that what is at issue in the judicial process of assimilation is first and foremost the extension of the civil regime of the territory (European pockets of settlement) to the detriment of the regime of military administration (zones of indigenous settlement). 75. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization. The Algerian War and The Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2006), 23. 76. Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 23. 77. Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 24. 78. On the distinction between civil and military administration in Algeria, see Sylvie Thenault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale. Camps, internements, assignations à residence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012). 79. Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie. Les métis de l’Empire français, entre sujétion et citoyenneté (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), 16. 80. On this point, see Sylvie Thénault’s talk at a symposium organized by the French Senate in 2012, available online both in video and in text, accessed January 2019, http:​/​/www​​.sena​​t​.fr/​​ga​/ga​​105​/g​​a1051​​.ht​ml​​#toc1​​0, http:​/​/vid​​eos​.s​​enat.​​fr​/vi​​deo​/ v​​ideos​​/2012​​/vide​​o​1347​​2​.htm​​l. 81. Claude Liauzu, ed., Enjeux urbains au Maghreb (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985), 405. 82. Jim House, “The Colonial and Post-Colonial Dimensions of Algerian Migration to France,” in History in Focus (Institute of Historical Research, 2006, consulted in 2014), http:​/​/www​​.hist​​ory​.a​​c​.uk/​​ihr​/F​​ocus/​​Migra​​tion/​​artic​​les​​/h​​ouse.​​ html.​See also Patrick Weil, “Histoire et mémoire des discriminations en matière de nationalité française,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 84 (October–December 2004): 5–22. As Shepard comments, this new status breaks with “the post-1789 insistence that citizenship be one and indivisible” (Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 39).

Introduction

41

83. Tom Charbit, Les Harkis (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 25. 84. Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 43–54. 85. Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 53 86. On the colonial racialization of Kabyles, who were supposedly “superior” to the Arabs in French colonial discourses, see Patricia Lorcin’s analysis of the “Kabyle Myth,” in Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995). She insists that despite the strong impact of this type of French discourse on the collective imagination, the alleged greater assimilation of Kabyles into French colonial society “was a myth that never became policy in Algeria, for no pro-kabyle colonial legislation was ever passed” (2–3). 87. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 42. 88. Abdelmalek Sayad, La Double Absence. Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999). See also Isabelle Grangaud, “Le droit colonial au service des spoliations à Alger dans les années 1830,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, eds. Abderrahmane Bouchène, JeanPierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault (Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012), 70–76, and Didier Guignard, “Le Sénatus-consulte de 1863: la dislocation programmée de la société rurale algérienne,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, eds. Abderrahmane Bouchène, JeanPierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault (Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012), 76–81. 89. Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 166. 90. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 50. 91. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 50. Benjamin Stora, “La mémoire coloniale de l’Algérie: quand le passé rattrape le présent,” in Les étrangers en France et l’héritage colonial. Processus historiques et identitaires, ed. Hédi Saïdied (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 158. 92. Quoted in Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 47. Benjamin Stora, “Un besoin d’histoire,” in La Situation postcoloniale, dir. Marie-Claude Smouts (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 2007), 297. 93. Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard, “La colonisation: du débat sur la guerre d’Algérie au discours de Dakar,” in Les guerres de mémoires, eds. Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 137–54. On the cancellation in 2014 of the project of a museum in Montpellier on the Franco-Algerian history, see the controversies in the press: “Montpellier abandonne le projet du musée de l’Histoire de la France et de l’Algérie,” Le Midi Libre, June 19, 2014, http:​//​www​​ .midi​​libre​​.fr​/2​​014​/0​​6​/19/​​montp​​ellie​​r​-aba​​ndonn​​e​-le-​​proje​​t​-du-​​musee​​-de​-l​​-hist​​oire-​​de​ -la​​-fran​​ce​-et​​​-de​-l​​-alge​​rie​,1​​01116​​8​.php​; Mathieu Dejean, “A Montpellier, le Musée d’histoire de France et d’Algérie déchaîne les polémiques,” Les Inrockuptibles, June 17, 2014, http:​/​/www​​.lesi​​nrock​​s​.com​​/2014​​/06​/1​​7​/act​​ualit​​e​/mon​​tpell​​ier​-m​​usee-​​dhist​​ oire-​​franc​​e​-dal​​gerie​​-croi​​​see​-c​​hemin​​s​-115​​10473​/ for example. 94. The movement, which became a political party, of the “Indigènes de la République” is one clear example. See Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 48. 95. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 48–49.

42

Chapter 1

96. This law was voted in by the National Assembly, composed of a majority of right-wing deputies from the UMP party (“Union pour une Mouvement Populaire” headed, at the time, by Nicolas Sarkozy) and centrist deputies from the UDF (François Bayrou’s “Union pour la Démocratie Française”). For more details on this law and the controversy surrounding it, see Catherine Coquio, Retours du colonial? Disculpation et réhabilitation de l’histoire coloniale française (Nantes: Atalante, 2008), 12–22. 97. https​:/​/ww​​w​.leg​​ifran​​ce​.go​​uv​.fr​​/affi​​chTex​​te​.do​​?cidT​​exte=​​JORFT​​EXT00​​ 00004​​44898​​&date​​Texte​=​​&cat​​egori​​eLien​​=id. 98. On the danger of memory laws resulting in the crystallization of one version of the past shaped by the agendas of certain pressure groups and imposed on the totality of French society, see Claude Liauzu, “Une loi contre l’histoire,” Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2005, 28. 99. The 1962 Evian Agreements already contained an amnesty provision for those who “committed infractions during the maintenance of order against the Algerian insurrection before 20 March 1962” (Benjamin Stora, “The Algerian War in French Memory: Vengeful Memory’s Violence,” trans. Paul A. Silverstein, Memory and Violence in the Middle-East and North Africa, eds. Ussama Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2006), 164). Stora explains, quoting excerpts from laws: The law of 17 June 1966 granted amnesty to those who committed “infractions against the state security during the events in Algeria.” This law, which concerned the insurrection against the legal government, granted amnesty to members of the OAS as well as to those who fought against it. The law of 31 July 1968 granted full legal amnesty for those infractions perpetrated in relationship to the events in Algeria, including those “committed by soldiers serving in Algeria at the time.” The former leaders of the OAS were all freed after the “events” of May 1968 […] in 1974 Valéry Giscards d’Estaing […] called for reparations for repatriated European Algerians. In addition, the law of 1974 overturned all criminal sentences handed out during or after the Algerian War. […] The socialist government […] did not stop at granting amnesty. It jumpstarted the careers of executives, officers, and generals who had been convicted or reprimanded for having participated in subversive actions against the republic. Paratroopers were welcomed back into the French army in November 1982 (Stora, Memory and Violence, 164–65).

100. Stora, “The Algerian War,” 165. 101. Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 272. 102. Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 272. 103. Benjamin Stora, Imaginaires de guerre: Algérie-Vietnam en France et aux États-Unis (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 190. 104. Barclay, Writing Postcolonial France, xii, xxxvi–xxxvii. 105. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 175. 106. Viart, “Le silence des pères,” 96. 107. Carine Trévisan, L’Intime, l’histoire, l’écriture, https​:/​/ha​​l​.arc​​hives​​-ouve​​rtes.​​ fr​/te​​l​-013​​88138​​​/docu​​ment,​ 65. 108. Viart, “Le silence des pères,” 112. 109. Alexandre Gefen, “Le Projet thérapeutique de la littérature contemporaine française,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 20, no. 3 (2016): 421.

Introduction

43

110. Viart, “Le silence des pères,” 112. 111. I have borrowed the definition from Maazouzi: one who carries memory is “celui qui possède le souvenir de l’événement parce qu’il l’a vécu, mais aussi celui à qui la mémoire de ce qui s’est passé a été transmise dans un cadre familial, groupal” [one who possesses the memory of the event because he lived it, but also the one to whom the memory of what happened has been transmitted in a familial or group context] in Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 74. 112. Indeed, when a trauma has not been consciously thought, accepted, and articulated, there is a transmission of the unsaid, of a secret: that is the birth of the phantom or the trace of the traumatic event within the self. See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’Écorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987). 113. Christiane Chaulet Achour, “Silence de père, écriture de fille. Le père ‘postcolonial’: Maïssa Bey et Zahia Rahmani,” in Pères en textes. Médias et Littératures (Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2006), 114). 114. Ricœur defines narrative identity thus: Sans le secours de la narration, le problème de l’identité personnelle est […] voué à une antinomie sans solution ou bien l’on pose un sujet identique à lui-même dans la diversité de ses états, ou bien l’on tient […] que ce sujet identique n’est qu’une illusion substantialiste. […] Le dilemme disparaît si, à l’identité comprise au sens d’un même (idem), on substitue l’identité comprise au sens d’un soi-même (ipse); la différence entre idem et ipse n’est autre que la différence entre une identité substantielle ou formelle et l’identité narrative. […] À la différence de l’identité abstraite du Même, l’identité narrative […] peut inclure le changement, la mutabilité, dans la cohésion d’une vie. (in Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, vol. 3 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983, 1984, 1985), 443. [Without the recourse to narration, the problem of personal identity would in fact be condemned to an antinomy with no solution. Either we must posit a subject identical with itself through the diversity of its different states, or […] we must hold that this identical subject is nothing more than a substantialist illusion. […] This dilemma disappears if we substitute for identity understood in the sense of being the same (idem), identity understood in the sense of oneself as self-same [soi-même] (ipse). The difference between idem and ipse is nothing more than the difference between a substantial or formal identity and a narrative identity. […] Unlike the abstract identity of the Same, this narrative identity […] can include change, mutability, within the cohesion of one lifetime,” Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1998), 246].

The concept of narrative identity applies both to an individual and to a collective, a community, or a people. In the texts that I analyze, the identity in construction elaborates itself as at once individual and collective—uniquely representing a minority of Franco-Algerian history, as the rest of this introduction will show. On individual or collective identity, see Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), 138. “L’identité narrative, soit d’une personne, soit d’une communauté, serait le lieu recherché de ce chiasme entre histoire et fiction” [“Narrative identity, either that of person or of a community, would be the sought-after place of this chiasm between history and fiction,” Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1992), 114].

44

Chapter 1

115. Viart, “Le Silence des pères,” 107. 116. Viart, “Le Silence des pères,” 108. 117. Viart, “Les ‘Fictions critiques’,” 11. 118. Maryline Crivello and Jean-Noël Pelen formulate this interrogation of textual hybridity thus: “La question de savoir comment le récit intime s’articule aux récits historiques, comment il est travaillé par les représentations de l’histoire, ouvre inévitablement sur celle de savoir s’il n’est pas, lui aussi, en filigrane et à certains égards, une représentation de cette même histoire” [The question of how private stories relate to historical narratives, how it is worked over by representations of history, inevitably raises the question of whether it is not, itself, implicitly and to a certain extent, a representation of this same history]. Maryline Crivello and Jean-Noël Pelen, eds., Individu, Récit, Histoire (Aix-en-Provence: PU de Provence, 2008), 9. 119. Dominique Viart, “Récits de filiation,” in La literature française au present. Héritage, modernité, mutations (Paris: Bordas, 2008), 94. 120. Viart, “Le silence des pères,” 110. 121. Viart, “Le silence des pères,” 110. 122. Janine Altounian, L’Intraduisible. Deuil, mémoire, transmission (Paris: Dunot, 2005), 72. 123. Crivello and Pelen, Individu, Récit, Histoire, 16. 124. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 79. 125. Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992). 126. Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin (Paris: Plon, 1998). 127. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 81. 128. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 81. 129. Jacques Derrida, Demeure. Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 46, 44. Quoted in Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 81. The translation is from Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Standford UP, 2000), 40, 38. 130. Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 47–48. The translation is from Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, Or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998), 26. 131. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, 30; Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature, 17. 132. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, 30; Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature, 17. 133. Viart, “Topiques de la déshérence,” 209. 134. Dominique Viart, “Témoignage et restitution. Le traitement de l’Histoire dans la Littérature contemporaine,” in Présences du passé dans le roman français contemporain, ed. Gianfranco Rubino (Rome: Bulzoni, 2007), 56–57. 135. Gefen, “Le Projet thérapeutique,” 420. 136. Gefen, “Le Projet thérapeutique,” 420.

Introduction

45

137. Gefen, “Le Projet thérapeutique,” 421. Voir aussi Gefen, Réparer le monde: la littérature française face aux XXIe siècle (Paris: José Corti, 2017). 138. Garapon, Peut-on réparer l’Histoire, 10. 139. Garapon, Peut-on réparer l’Histoire, 10. 140. Garapon, Peut-on réparer l’Histoire, 10. 141. Garapon, Peut-on réparer l’Histoire, 11. 142. Garapon, Peut-on réparer l’Histoire, 11. 143. Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive (Paris: Galilée, 2008), 11. The translation is from Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1996), 1. 144. Ines Horchani, “D’Alger à Damas, des auteurs en mal d’archives?” Amnis 13 (2014), accessed May 2, 2018, http:​/​/jou​​rnals​​.open​​editi​​on​.or​​g​/amn​​​is​/22​​22. 145. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 26; Derrida, Archive Fever, 11. 146. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 98; Derrida, Archive Fever, 61. 147. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 103; Derrida, Archive Fever, 64. 148. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 26; Derrida, Archive Fever, 11. 149. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 26; Derrida, Archive Fever, 11. 150. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 25. 151. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 27; Derrida, Archive Fever, 12. 152. Crystel Pinçonnat, “De l’usage postcolonial de l’archive. Quelques pistes de réflexion,” Amnis 13 (2014), accessed April 30, 2018, http:​/​/jou​​rnals​​.open​​editi​​on​.or​​g​ /amn​​​is​/21​​87. 153. Horchani, “D’Alger à Damas.” 154. Horchani, “D’Alger à Damas.” 155. Assia Djebar, “Regard interdit, son coupé,” in Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Paris: Poche, 2002), 145–67. The early 2000s constitutes a second turning point with the use of increasingly complete, digitized archives that are made available and circulated on the Internet. 156. Pinçonnat, “De l’usage postcolonial de l’archive.” 157. https​:/​/en​​.oxfo​​rddic​​tiona​​ries.​​com​/d​​efini​​tion/​​​archi​​ve. 158. By discourse, Foucault means both the set of rules and procedures for the production of particular discourses and the groups of statements themselves, which have some institutionalized force. For the translation, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 159. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2 (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 14–15. 160. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York, NY: Verso, 1992); and Gayatri Spivak, “Bonding in difference,” in Another Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, ed. Alfred Arteaga (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994), 273–85. 161. Étienne Balibar, Droit de cité (La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 1998), 14. 162. Balibar, Droit de cité, 78–79, 80, 81–82.

46

Chapter 1

163. Balibar, Droit de cité, 76. 164. Elsa Dorlin, “Décoloniser les structures psychiques du pouvoir. Érotisme raciste et postcolonie dans la pensée d’Achille Mbembe,” Mouvements 51, no. 3 (2007): 143. 165. Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” Social Text 31, no. 32, Third World and Post-Colonial Issues (1992): 103. 166. Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, “Le Corps-frontière, traces et trajets postcoloniaux,” in Ruptures postcoloniales. Les nouveaux visages de la société française, eds. Nicolas Bancel, Florence Bernault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubeker, Achille Mbembe, and Françoise Vergès (Paris: La Découverte, 2010). 167. Guénif-Souilamas, “Le Corps-frontière,” 217–29, 222. 168. According to Rancière, the social order, which is a set of implicit rules and conventions, determines the distribution of roles in a community and the forms of exclusion operating within it. The social order relies on a “distribution of the sensible”—that is, on a particular understanding—through the senses—of reality. The roles and modes of participation in a common social world are determined by established modes of perception. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York, NY: Continuum, 2004). 169. Coquio, Retours du colonial, 29.

Chapter 2

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive Mapping the (In)visibility of the Jews in Algeria in Hélène Cixous’ Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage

In 1954, around 130,000 Jews lived in Algeria. Naturalized as French according to the Crémieux Decree of 1870, they belonged to the Pieds-Noirs community and were repatriated in large numbers, like other French people in Algeria, at the end of the war in 1962. However, Algerian Jews became “invisible” in postcolonial French society, contrary to Moroccan or Tunisian Jews, who were much less numerous, but who established themselves as representatives of the “Sephardi” identity.1 This identificatory concept pushed further the symptomatic erasure, in the public representation of French and Algerian societies, of the historical particularity of Algerian Jews, who are considered today as being either Sephardic or Pieds-Noirs.2 For example, there are no associations of Jews from Algeria and as Stora notes, their history has not been the subject of an in-depth study in the field of contemporary Algeria. The desire of these Algerian Jewish individuals to render the particularity of their identity and history invisible is part of a long and complex process of assimilation into the French Republic. However, the integration of this population into French society has not completely erased the vestiges of their multi-millennial past in Algeria. Recent artistic, historical, and political reappropriations attest to this, including Hélène Cixous’ Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage (2000), a work that combines history and personal narrative in the context of trauma experience.3 By way of introduction, it is useful to recall the major points of the history of Jews in Algeria in order to highlight their inscription in Cixous’ work. A Jewish presence in the central Maghreb region (today Algeria) goes back to eleventh century BC with the Phoenicians, who had already established 47

48

Chapter 2

trading posts along the Mediterranean. The Hebrews then founded towns (Annaba, Tipasa, Cherchell, Algiers) and mixed with the Berbers (living in the interior of the country), whom they Judaized.4 The Berber origin of many North African Jews is alluded to by Cixous, in a text entitled “Mon Algériance” (to which I will return). She examines the likely Berber origin of her surname and writes: “ce vilain petit canard parmi les patronymes juifs d’Algérie”5 [an ugly duckling among the Jewish patronymics of Algeria], since it is neither a French nor an Arab name. She explains: “des amis berbères reconnaissaient le canard barbare. Cixous, c’est disent-ils un nom de tribu berbère. Comment, par quelle histoire d’amour, de conversion, de guerre de passion, ma famille jadis espagnole était-elle fut-elle ou devintelle ou cessa-t-elle d’être berbère, seul l’oubli le sait”6 [some Berber friends recognized the barbarian duckling. Cixous, they say, is the name of a Berber tribe. How, by what story of love, of conversion, of war, of passion, how my formerly Spanish family was or how it became or ceased to be Berber, only forgetfulness knows]. Already in the name is inscribed an effacement of history, whose trace becomes the enigma contained in the name’s spelling. The destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem established a Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean. The Christianization and then Islamization of Berber lands diminished the influence of Judaism in North Africa, but never eliminated its presence. This presence was further reinforced with the arrival of Spanish Jews in the fifteenth century, exiled after the Hispano-Portuguese kingdom instituted the Inquisition. Cixous traces her paternal roots back to medieval Spain: “ma famille paternelle [. . .] a suivi le trajet classique des Juifs chassés d’Espagne jusqu’au Maroc. Les grands-parents de mon père sont de Tetouan ou de Tanger”7 [my paternal family [. . .] followed the classic trajectory of the Jews chased from Spain to Morocco. My father’s grandparents are from Tétouan or Tangiers]. These Sephardic Jews, fleeing from the persecution of Catholic Spain, were welcomed by the people of the Maghreb and the “Sublime Porte” of the Ottoman Empire. When the French arrived in 1830, there were around 25,000 Jews on Algerian soil, the majority of whom lived in extreme poverty—with the exception of rich businessmen, often from Livorno, who had been established under the Turkish Regency of Algiers that began in 1555.8 The majority of these Jews were Arabic speakers (whereas many Berber tribes were not) and lived both on the coast and in the interior of the country. Like Oriental Christians, they held the status of “dhimmis” (“protected subjects”) in the land of Islam according to the convention of Omar II in the eighth century, which ensured them hospitality and protection, provided that they respect the supremacy of Islam. As Stora notes, the fundamental principles of this status are comprised of both protective laws and discriminatory prohibitions,9 for example, the prohibition against wearing certain clothes containing Islamic

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

49

colors, or the exclusion from certain places reserved for Muslims. This ambiguous condition placed the Jews in a situation of legal inferiority yet at the same time ensured their protection, which translated into extremely diverse experiences: whereas some Jews became ministers, others, under other administrators, suffered from extortion and ostracism. Starting during the first months following the colonial invasion, French authorities (military, administrative, and religious) worked to rally Jews to the colonial cause. The attitude of indigenous Jews varied depending on the region. In Algiers and Oran, where Turkish power was stronger and repressive, the French were welcomed with much favor, whereas elsewhere, the Jews were quite hostile to them. Cixous evokes this versatile, uncertain position of the Jews relative to two opposing powers not only to show the complex and plural identity of Algerian Jews but also to suggest the historicopolitical and existential in-betweenness of the Jews: Où sommes-nous, nous germes de Juifs pendant le monstrueux saccage [des premières années de la colonisation française]? [. . .] du côté des vainqueurs ou des vaincus? Selon mon père, nous fûmes plus arabes que français, mais cela est légende. Selon Jacques Derrida on ne saura jamais. Chez nous pas un mot et sans doute pas une trace [. . .]. De quel côté nous trouvons-nous, toujours à demi égarés, chancelants, nous qui sommes traversés en croix par les bords adverses, les rives opposées, nous qui ne sommes de cœur d’aucune armée [. . .]. Nous qui, en 1830, sommes absents de ces déchaînements et pourtant. Et pourtant nous qui plus tard sommes les résultats, les hôtes et les otages d’une histoire sanglante qui nous dépasse de toutes parts. [Where are we, we Jewish seedlings, during the monstrous sack [of the first years of the French colonization]? on the side of the conquerors or the vanquished? According to my father, we were more Arabic than French, but that’s legend. According to Jacques Derrida, we will never know. Among us, not one word and, no doubt, not a trace [. . .]. On what side did we find ourselves, always half lost, faltering, we who were crisscrossed by adversary borders, adversary shores, we whose hearts are in no army [. . .]? We who, in 1830, were absent from these outbreaks, and yet. And yet we who, later on, were the results, the hosts, and the hostages of a blood-soaked history that surpassed us on all sides.]10

This passage suggests the political manipulations to which the Jews were subjected (“hostages”) by being forced to participate in a French history that was exogenous to them; it also recalls that the Jews remained, despite their presence in the Maghreb for a millennium in some cases, “guests” of Algerian history. The italicization of the verb “trouver” (to find) in the quote

50

Chapter 2

underscores this double position of forced inclusion and de facto exclusion by questioning how much the Jews (“traversés” [crisscrossed]) belong to a Franco-Algerian history. The choice of this verb shows both a geographical interest (where are the Jews, of what history are they a part, to which shore do they belong) and a heuristic concern—Cixous’ texts about Algeria constitute an inquiry into the past, history, the other. This other—the Arabs, the Muslims—reacted negatively to Jewish support to the French conquest. In fact, certain Muslims retaliated blindly against Jewish communities, which caused a massive migration of the latter toward coastal cities, where the French army was largely located. Under pressure from Jews from France, a process of Frenchification of the “Israelites” in Algeria began, a process which was legally finalized through their collective naturalization via the Crémieux Decree of 1870. The religious and cultural effect of this consisted in a “colonization”11 of Algerian Judaism by French Judaism: Après les avoir considérés comme assez semblables à eux et ouverts à une éducation morale, les juifs de France [citoyens français depuis 1789] mettent désormais en valeur le caractère foncièrement “oriental” de ces coreligionnaires lointains—sans pour autant abandonner leur double combat pour la francisation et l’assimilation juridique. Leur “mission civilisatrice” ressemble alors à celle des militaires français. Comme eux, ils élaborent pour leurs “protégés” un projet imposé et considéré comme indiscutable dont ils s’étonnent qu’il ne remporte pas l’adhésion des intéressés. Comme eux, ils les réduisent à une entité étrangère aux critères européens de civilisation, de science, d’éducation, de religion. Comme eux enfin, ils veulent se réserver tout le pouvoir sur la communauté juive algérienne et ne comprennent pas la lenteur de celle-ci à se mettre au pas de la “civilisation.”12 [Having previously considered them as relatively similar to themselves and open to a moral education, the Jews of France [French citizens since 1789] then go on to emphasize the fundamentally “oriental” character of these distant coreligionists—without abandoning, however, their dual struggle for Frenchification and legal assimilation. Their “civilizing mission” thus resembles that of the French soldiers. Like the soldiers, they elaborate an imposed and non-negotiable project for their “protegés,” and find themselves astonished when it does not garner full support from those involved. Like them, they reduce Algerian Jews to a foreign entity according to the European criteria of civilization, science, education, and religion. Finally, like them, they seek to retain complete power over the Algerian Jewish community and cannot understand how it could be so slow to catch up to speed with “civilization.”]

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

51

Caught between a desire to integrate and a refusal of the absolute authority of the Central Consistory, Algerian Jews broke free from North African tradition bit by bit, so much so that they moved away from the Muslim community, which kept the status of indigène and which harbored a certain long-term resentment toward this “betrayal” by their Semitic cousins. The Crémieux Decree, which implied a true cultural rupture and which brought about the progressive loss of the Arabic language, constituted, according to Stora, a first exile from Jewish tradition on Islamic soil. This entry of Algerian Jews into the French Republic was lived in bitterness by the Pieds-Noirs (the European, French, and naturalized colonists, called “néo-français”). Anti-Semitism was widespread among these Europeans from Algeria, and the citizenship of Jews was an insult for them. In addition, they feared these rights might be further extended to the indigenous peoples, thus making them equals. The rise of anti-Semitism in French Algeria, at the end of the nineteenth century and up until the 1930s, came to its peak under the Vichy Regime during World War II, which reserved a second exile, from the French community, for Jews from Algeria: they were stripped of their nationality in 1940. This national expulsion was the cause of a lasting trauma, as demonstrated, notably, by the works of Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, both of whom were victims of this expulsion during their childhoods. While citizenship was given back to them in 1943, Algerian Jews were commanded to leave their homeland, less than twenty years after the Vichy shock, at the time of independence. This third exile from Algerian soil constituted an experience in common with the Pieds-Noirs even though the uprooting was not of the same nature, considering that for the latter it put an end to a presence which dated back a hundred years or less, whereas for the Jews, it consisted in the loss of their millennial roots. As a result of this repatriation and their French citizenship, Algerian Jews did not emerge as a specific community within the larger category of Pieds-Noirs. However, starting in the 1990s and following the appearance of memory wars in France and the contemporaneous Algerian Civil War, which resonated very strongly with those who had lived in Algeria, a number of intellectuals gave visibility, in their works, to their Algerian Jewish heritage.13 Cixous describes a rupture, in 1993, which marked the end of the repression of her original identity in her artistic creation process: “l’année où je n’ai plus réussi à faire obstacle à l’entrée de la Chose Algérie dans mes livres. [. . .] [il fallait] tenter d’arriver à m’approcher de la Chose par les puissants moyens de la littérature.” [the year in which I no longer succeeded in blocking the entrance of the Algeria-Thing into my books [. . .] [I had] to attempt to manage the approach to the Thing through the powerful means of literature.]14 An implicit allusion to Marie Cardinal’s Les Mots pour le dire (1975), a precursor to texts that revive the memory of colonial Algeria, “la Chose” [the

52

Chapter 2

Thing] materializes a trauma—in Cardinal’s account, it names the traumatic relationship that she has with her mother, a real character but also an allegorical representation of Pieds-Noirs Algeria, while in Cixous, Algeria represents the father. Shortly after Si près, several texts by Cixous, which evoke and develop her childhood memories in Algeria, were published.15 Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage (2000) constitutes the culmination of this writing about painful memory that had begun to appear in her texts from 1997. In Les Rêveries, Cixous recounts “Primal Scenes,” as the subtitle—“Scènes primitives”—of the book indicates. The concept of the scène primitive or scène originaire (primal scene) comes from the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. Its first occurrence in the texts of Freud appears as designating “certaines expériences infantiles traumatisantes organisées en scénarios, en scènes sans qu’il s’agisse alors plus spécialement du coït parental” [certain traumatic infantile experiences which are organized into scenarios or scenes [. . .]; at this point Freud gives no special consideration to the type of scene involving parental intercourse].16 Real evidence and retroactive fantasy are mixed in the makeup of a primal scene. Likewise, in Les Rêveries, it is impossible to separate what pertains to autobiography and what is fictional extrapolation. Cixous has always refused to label her work as “autobiography”: for her the “I” is always, as Maired Hanrahan puts it, “a version of a version of herself.”17 The mention of the term “rêveries” in the title strengthens the idea of a point of departure in reality (a daydream carries a certain consciousness, unlike a sleep dream) followed by an imaginary construction.18 The primal scenes in Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage are memories of traumatic situations, which Cixous singles out through the capitalization of the initial letter of the noun and sometimes of the article, making her own semantic unit: la Ville [the City], referring to Oran and then Algiers, La Citroën (a French brand of car), le Vélo [the Bicycle], le Portail [the Gate], La Clinique (her father’s clinic, where her mother also worked), Le Chien (Job, the family’s Dog), Le Lycée (the high school that she attended). Jeanelle Laillou Savona speaks of “micro-récits [. . .] constamment métaphorisés” [micro-stories [. . .] constantly metaphorized].19 The common theme of these memorial scenes of Algerian childhood, which are not narratively distinguished as such and which are intertwined with each other, is the theme of exclusion and a subsequent alienation.20 Exclusion, or being an outcast, is a form of violence that haunts all of Cixous’ works, starting with her first novel, symptomatically entitled Dedans (1969). In Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, in which the paratextual allusion to Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a man who considered himself a pariah, is immediately visible, exclusion becomes the paradigm of Cixous’ condition in French Algeria. But how can such a representation be explained, given that Cixous’ family not only had French nationality but was also well-educated

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

53

(her father was a doctor), and thus had a much higher social level than the indigenous people? Through the writing of her particular situation, Cixous portrays the paradoxes of the history and memory of Jews in Algeria, always caught between a surplus of visibility, used by others to exclude them, and an excess of invisibility, which assimilated them into the Pieds-Noirs upon independence. Furthermore, the primal scenes constitute a profound criticism of the republican treatment of difference and problematic or inexistent representations of otherness in French culture. By implicitly recounting the history of the erasure of the Other (turned invisible) in Algeria—the indigènes who were not citizens (to which the Jews belonged for a time)—Cixous not only avoids a narrative positioning as victim that would compete for memory with those of other colonial victims but also subtly and yet tenaciously denounces the major blind spot of various discursive practices of colonial and postcolonial France. Thus, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage points out the existence of a colonial regime of truth in French collective memory. In the meantime, it constructs through the narrative a postcolonial archive. By “postcolonial archive” I mean here a discourse that redeploys history in a denationalized, decentralized way through the unfolding of the possible semantic fields carried by the “signifiers” of the primal scenes (the City, the Bicycle, the Gate, the Citroën, and so on). Signifiers, in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic sense, stand for “des termes carrefours de données psychiques inconscientes”21 [terms in which different unconscious psychological facts converge]. In this context of French-Algerian history, signifiers precisely are “[d]es mots [. . .] signifi[ant] [. . .] autre chose que leur sens historique précis [. . .] faisa[ant] [. . .] passer [. . .] une charge psychique” [words that signify something other than their precise historical meaning [. . .] channeling a psychological charge].22 This chapter shows how, in Cixous’ text, this charge is transformed into a story. And, in turn, this story constitutes the basis of a different articulation of the past—a counter-history, which opens new visions of the present. First, my analysis focuses on the scenes of French exclusion in Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage. Next, I examine how alienation is (paradoxically) commemorated though the narrative treatment of Judeo-Arab relations. Finally, I consider the different forms of female exclusion relative to the absent country and the death of the father.23 FRENCH EXCLUSIONS: THE GEOGRAPHY OF ALIENATION IN “ALGÉRIEFRANÇAISE” (CIXOUS) Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage opens with a statement that sounds like a spatio-ontological paradox explored throughout the story, and which is

54

Chapter 2

repeated in the last sentence of the text: “Tout le temps où je vivais en Algérie je rêvais d’arriver un jour en Algérie” [The whole time I was living in Algeria I would dream of one day arriving in Algeria].24 Throughout the novel, Cixous explains how, all the while living in Algeria, she was not actually there—“je ne me suis jamais trouvée en Algérie” [I never made it to Algeria]—and wanted with all her heart to be there—“je voulais que la porte s’ouvre” [I longed for the door to open]; “je déversais toutes les forces de ma vie en direction d’Algérie” [I threw myself into heart and soul looking for Algeria].25 This contradiction (to be there while not being there) can be understood in two ways, according to whether the semantic displacement concerns the being (“je”) or the place (“Algeria”). In the first interpretation, Cixous, who was physically in Algeria, was not psychologically or existentially present in that place, finding herself alienated, distant with respect to herself: “she” was not in Algeria. In the second interpretation, the first occurrence of “Algeria” does not have the same meaning as the second, designating another understanding held by Cixous of the meaning of this country, and consequently, she was not in “Algeria” (according to what she considers it to be).26 In fact, both aspects are present in the text and manifest the existence of different regimes of truth in colonial Algeria, or in other words of different relations between government (in this case, colonial) and discourse about truth. Foucault defines regimes of truth as “les types de relations qui lient les manifestations de vérité avec leur procédures et les sujets qui en sont les opérateurs, les témoins ou éventuellement les objets” [the types of relations that link together manifestations of truth with their procedures and the subjects who are their operators, witnesses, or possibly objects].27 The concept of “régimes de vérité” [regimes of truth] allow us to “déplacer l’accent du ‘c’est vrai’ à la force qu’on lui prête” [[to shift] the accent from the ‘it is true’ to the force we accord truth]28 and thereby construct an archeological history. In other words, “une telle histoire ne serait pas consacrée au vrai dans la façon dont il parvient à s’arracher au faux et à rompre tous les liens qui l’enserrent, mais serait consacrée en somme à la force du vrai et aux liens par lesquels les hommes s’enserrent peu à peu eux-mêmes dans et par la manifestation du vrai” [This type of history will not therefore be devoted to the way in which the truth succeeds in tearing itself from the false and breaking all the ties in which it is held, but will be devoted, in short, to the force of truth and to the ties by which men have gradually bound themselves in and through the manifestation of truth].29 Through her narrative, Cixous suggests this “other” history of French Algeria, the one from which her voice emanates and which clashes with official history, because they rely on two different regimes of truth. First, this object (colonial Algeria) around which a “savoir-pouvoir” [knowledge-power] consolidates, Cixous identifies it with a single word,

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

55

“Algériefrançaise”30 [FrenchAlgeria], giving the power of a concept (or, in Si près an “Allégorie”).31 Then, with Les Rêveries, Cixous excavates a specific geography of “Algériefrançaise,” a dual territory formed by the two types of governments and regimes of truth. On the one hand, it is France, with its republican values and laws. But on the other hand, it is a colony that prohibits the indigenous people from accessing the space of the Republic. Historically, from the beginning of the French conquest and up until the interwar period, the territories where indigenous people were assigned to live came under a military regime, whereas Pieds-Noirs territories functioned under a civil regime. This colonial dichotomy continued until the end of the French occupation through a legal and penal regime that was different for indigenous people, despite the fact that in 1944, almost all of the territories were under civil control. Yet, administrators unofficially benefited from disciplinary powers against the indigenous population.32 Echoing the fragmented collective memory and history of such separations, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage suggests physical or symbolic enclosures between the different Algerian spaces. It does so by narrating a succession of closed places and oppressive spaces, which I will analyze throughout my argument. Cixous uses the ambivalent motif of the “porte” [door], declined in variations such as “portail” [gate], “grillage” [grill/fence], “barreaux” [bars], and “mur” [wall], to depict these locking separations, whether in law or in space, between the different populations in French Algeria.33 Beyond the divisions specific to a colonial logic, this lexical field conveys the traditional Western imaginary of the “closed door”: indeed, as ethnologist Pascal Dibie explains, unlike oriental traditions, the Western one, since the Ancient Greeks, has always thought the urban space through the concept of the closing of a door. In the West, the door is normally conceived as being the “partie faillible d’une muraille” [foreceable part of a wall], based on the idea that “l’exploit tient avant tout dans la fermeture et la défense de la cité plutôt que dans son ouverture”34 [the endeavor lies first and foremost in the closure and defense of the city rather than its opening]. In Cixous the doors, which always end up being shut, are sometimes described as being invisible. This invisibility symbolically translates how few visible traces were left by the exception regimes in French Algeria. Thus, Cixous remembers: je suis ramenée aux portes invisibles des villes très différentes d’Oran puis d’Alger, et surtout à leur invisibilité source des mésaventures renouvelées du fait que ne les voyant pas je m’y heurtais ou j’y étais heurtée, en tout cas je les sentais comme une personne aveugle sent bien venir à sa rencontre les barreaux et les portails et avance hérissé disant “je vois un portail, je vois un grillage”en se servant toujours du mot voir justement pour ce qu’elle ne voit pas avec les yeux.

56

Chapter 2

[I am always being taken back to the invisible doors of the quite different cities of Oran then Algiers, and especially to their invisibility source of my constant misadventures inasmuch as not seeing them I banged up against them or I was banged against them, in any case I could feel them the way a blind person feels bars and gates advancing to meet him, and moves with his hair on end saying “I see a gate, I see a grill” always using the word see with everything that takes the place of eyes.]35

In the two Algerian cities where she lived, Oran from 1937 to 1946 and then Algiers from 1946 to 1955, Cixous underwent traumatic experiences of being “mise à la porte”36 [thrown out], expulsions which she decides to recount in her primal scenes. To narrate the experience of “FrenchAlgeria” in these two cities, Cixous chooses a place for each one of them that becomes paradigmatic of the “porte française”37 [French door], which excluded Jews and Muslims: the garden of the Officers’ Club in Oran and the Lycée Fromentin in Algiers. First, Oran: the description of the city is oxymoronic, as on the one hand, it is associated with a certain paradise-like state before the Fall of the Garden of Eden, as suggested by the phrase “Oran [. . .] la Ville promise”38 [promised city]. But, on the other hand, the city of her childhood is also the scene of the first experience of traumatic exclusion—from the garden of the military club.39 The story starts with World War II, when Georges Cixous, Hélène’s father, was posted to the army as a doctor. In 1939, he practiced in the French army on the Tunisian front. Like other employees of the French army, he had the right to visit certain places reserved for soldiers. Therefore, his daughter went to play, like the other children of French soldiers, in the garden of the Cercle Militaire in Oran.40 The “door” thus opened up. However, in 1940, with the advent of the Vichy regime, the Cixous family was subject to several expulsions. After having been accepted in this place at least on a physical level, Cixous finds herself rejected to outside the garden of the Cercle Militaire. The door violently closes. This expulsion comes as the consequence of another one, that of her father, who was prohibited from exercising his profession, as ordered by the anti-Jew laws of October 1940, which also revoked the Crémieux Decree, thus transforming Jews into foreigners.41 In an interview, Cixous recalls: J’avais deux ans et demi et soudain mon père était médecin-lieutenant en 1939, j’ai le droit d’entrer dans ce lieu d’admission et d’exclusion qu’on appelait à Oran le Cercle Militaire. J’entre dans ce jardin: voilà que je n’étais pas dedans. Je fis l’Expérience: on peut être dedans sans être dedans, il y a un dedans dans le dedans, un dehors dans le dedans et ceci à l’infini. [. . .] j’en étais exclue par mon origine juive.42

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

57

[I was two and a half and suddenly my father was a lieutenant doctor in 1939, I am allowed to enter this place of admission and exclusion that in Oran was called the Officer’s Club. I go into this garden: but I wasn’t inside. I had the Experience: one can be inside without being inside, there is an inside in the inside, an outside in the inside and so on, ad infinitum. [. . .] I was excluded from it because of my Jewish background.]

This passage does not only mention the a posteriori construction of a consciousness of anti-Semitism, but it also suggests a transmitted or borrowed memory of the event—the “Expérience,” as Cixous names it. In Les Juifs d’Algérie du décret Crémieux à la libération, Michel Ansky notes that the exclusion of Jewish children from French schools was such a shock for the families that they carried on its memory to the following generations.43 In a text dedicated to her friend and double Jacques Derrida, Cixous mentions the existence of “stigmates précis et datés” [precise and dated stigmata], which pertain to collective memory:44 Alger 1867, 1870, Oran 1940, Alger 1940, 1942, 1954, 1956, toutes ces dates de pâques, passations, expulsions, naturalisations, décitoyennisations, exinclusions, mise à l’index, à la porte, dates de guerres, de colonisation, incorporation, assimilation assimulation, indigè/ne/stion qui constituent l’archive de ce que [Derrida] appelle “ma nostalgérie” et que j’appelle mon “algériance.” [Algiers 1867, 1870, Oran 1940, Alger 1940, 1942, 1954, 1956, all those dates of Passovers, transfers, expulsions, naturalizations, de-citizenships, exinclusions, doors slammed in your face, dates of wars, of colonization, incorporation, assimilation, assimulation, indigene/ni/zations that constitute the archives of what [Derrida] calls “my nostalgeria” and that I call my “algeriance.”]45

These different dates mark moments of violence, whether inclusive, like the Cremieux Decree of 1870, or exclusive, such as the anti-Semitic laws of 1940 or the beginning of the Algerian War in 1954. More than mere marks, these “precises and dated stigmata” form a common identifying and discursive base—they produce an archive, which does not exactly coincide with the French official memory of French Algeria. In Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, the trauma of 1940 is called “Vichyà-Oran” or “Oran-sous-Vichy”46—catachreses picturing the geography of colonialism where France is the invader and occupier of Algeria (as in Vichy in Oran or Oran under the Vichy rule). The exclusion from the Cercle Militaire leads to other exclusions, so much so that Oran becomes, through synecdoche, the paradigm of the “saint externement” [holy outsiderization],47

58

Chapter 2

a sarcastic expression referring to the anti-Semitic rejection ordered by Vichy, a conservative and Christian regime: Tous les grands évènements d’Oran qui refermaient leur filet sur nous étaient des expulsions subites, toujours à l’improviste et au moment où nous croyions justement être admis donc nous croyions avoir atteint un lieu, une situation, le même lieu nous rejetait, d’abord reçus tout de suite après rejetés, le tourniquet du temps, d’abord reçus afin d’être rejetés, admis au Cercle Militaire pour être interdits de Cercle Militaire, incorporés dans l’Armée pour être expectorés, inscrits à l’École pour être rayés de l’École. [. . .] Je m’attendais à être chassée, j’attendais la chasse, j’étais fait à la chasse. [All the big events in Oran that closed their nets around us were sudden expulsions, always without warning and just when we thought we had been admitted thus believed we had got somewhere, a social position, that very place would reject us, first admitted then out again, time’s turnstile, first admitted so as to be rejected, admitted to the Officer’s Club, conscripted into the Army so as to be spit out, enrolled in School so as to be barred from School. [. . .] I expected to be chased away, I was waiting for the chase, I was fit for the chase.]48

The succession of propositions and the repetition of the binary syntactic structure (admitted/rejected) highlight the incessant danger for Jews under Vichy. Moreover, Cixous also suggests a cruel Machiavellian logic played by French authorities: by emphasizing the real purpose (in italics: “afin” [so as]) of the so-called inclusion—namely, its intention to exclude later—Cixous underlines the systematic alienation implemented under the Vichy government. The “chasse” and precisely the act of being “chassé” is the image used to represent the condition of the existence of Jews. And since hunting is a hobby and was no longer a form of sustenance in the first half of the twentieth century, the use of this term (“chasse”) reinforces the idea of a morbid pleasure at the core of the policy of anti-Semitism. In addition, the contraction of the terms “chasse” and “haine”49 [hatred] making a “chaîne”50 reveals the mentality of “Algériefrançaise,” a “pays d’enchaînés” [country of chained-up creatures].51 In “Ce corps étranjuif,” Cixous claims that this fundamental experience of exclusion under the Vichy regime is the origin of the disease that killed her father. Using a metaphor evoking a psychosomatic link, she writes: “Le déshonneur dévore les poumons du renvoyé. Nous avons été chassés cassés dégradés déshonorés. C’est une sensation ineffable” [Dishonor devoured the lungs of the one expelled. We were chased off hunted down broken degraded dishonored. It’s an ineffable sensation].52 The “dévoration” [devouring] is that of tuberculosis, which her father contracted during the war, and which

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

59

killed him in 1948 at a young age. Thus, the primal scene of the fatal illness of her father constitutes the archival core of the memory of “Vichy-à-Oran,” the collective experience of Jews in Algeria also expressed through this phrase: “Juiffrançais en souffrance, en sous-France” [French Jew overdue/ in suffering, in sub-France].53 The contraction of “juif” and “français” creates an entity with a singular fate, and then the homophonic neologism (“souffrance”/“sous-France”) displays an alliteration of “f,” which evokes the closing of French doors, relegating the Jews to subcitizens, subhumans for the Nazis. It is with respect to what she calls, in Les Rêveries, a policy of “effacement de l’être juif” [effacement of the Jewish being],54 that is the annihilation of the existence of Jewish identity by Vichy France, that Cixous evaluates the republican French status of her Algerian father.55 Despite the reestablishment of the Crémieux Decree in 1943, the Vichy episode left a lasting impression on Jews, who saw their past of belonging to the French nation in a new light, in terms of its “hospitalité houleuse, intermittente”56 [stormy, intermittent hospitality], as expressed by Cixous. For her, things are clear: “[. . .] mon père n’est pas français quoiqu’il le croie peut-être lui-même, mon père est un faux mouvement de l’histoire de ce pays, [un] déchet craché destitué des Français [. . .] [un] genre particulier d’Arabe [. . .] un arabizarre” [[. . .] my father is not French although he may believe he is, my father is an anomaly in the history of this country, it is on the one hand as a piece of detritus spit out rejected by the French [. . .] a peculiar kind of Arab [. . .] and arabizarre].57 This cutting criticism, with its harsh words supported by the alliteration of “dé” (“déchet craché destitué”), emphasizes the extreme brutality of the history of the French Jews of Algeria and reveals an illusion proper to the assimilationist politics of the French Republic (“faux mouvement de l’histoire”). This “faux mouvement” means a counterfeit French nationality for the Jews, and, more generally, a fake country: “Algériefrançaise” [FrenchAlgeria]. This idea of forgery is repeated in her later novel Si près: “comment n’être ni d’Algérie ni de France en étant tout le temps dans un faux, un simulacre de pays, en pseudonymie, en simulacreté” [how can one be neither from Algeria nor from France while being all the while in a counterfit, a simulacrum of a country, in pseudonymity, in simulacrity].58 Algeria defined as “French” by France is not France. It is a double country, schizophrenic, since nine-tenths of the population are erased from the field of visibility as designed and implemented by the French Republic. In the quote regarding the status of her father (“mon père n’est pas français . . .”), Cixous’ criticism also presents the sectarianism that paradoxically finds itself at the heart of the “universalist” discourses of the Republic. The indigenous, later called “French Muslims of Algeria,” are not French citizens but find themselves under the forced tutelage of France.59 As set

60

Chapter 2

forth by the discourses of the most eminent republicans (both left and right) of the Third Republic,60 at the bottom of the “universal” ladder of “human races” in Algeria were the “indigenous people,” also called the “Arabs” or, interchangeably, the “Muslims.” The legal category of the indigenous people included non-Europeans and, before 1870, Jews. Commonly grouped under the expression of “petizarabes”61 [kidzArabs] in Cixous’ text because of the widespread use of the expression in French Algeria (which incidentally shows the condescension and/or paternalism of colonial mentalities toward local populations), the Berbers and Arabs constitute a paradigm of the republican exclusion. This condition was to be experienced by Jews under Vichy, making them, once again, “un genre particulier d’Arabe[s]”62 [a peculiar kind of Arab], which Cixous designates through the use of the portmanteau word “arabizarre[s],” whose comical compression of letters suggests the lack of distinction between Jews and Arabs in the eyes of the French of Algeria. And, indeed, Cixous herself experienced exclusion from French Algeria, embodied by her friend Françoise, whose first name obviously evokes a synecdoche for the country France. A classmate of Cixous, Françoise is an ambiguous character. In her, Cixous sees the “porte française”63 [French door], which is represented perfectly by the house where she lives: “drue d’une blancheur militaire” [sturdy and of a military whiteness], “droite dure [. . .] pétrifiée [. . .] pas un arbre pour entamer d’une ombre le blanc du monument. Tout l’alentour est blanc, le sol de craie alors qu’autour de notre maison tout est rouge. Telle est la puissance de la France pensais-je étonnée” [straight hard [. . .] petrified [. . .] not a tree to carve its shadow into the white monument. All around is white, the chalky ground whereas around our house everything is red. Such is the power of France I thought astonished].64 The color white, a metaphor for colonial power through a racial metonymy, is naturally attributed to the existential territory of Françoise. By contrast, around the Cixous’ house, which is located in the Clos-Salembier, an extremely poor and indigenous neighborhood of Algiers, the red ground (probably clay) symbolizes the misery and disease carried by the indigènes, who are imagined to be violent, dirty, infected. However, the dividing line is not just between France/Françoise and the indigenous people/Cixous; it is related above all, for Cixous, to her Jewish identity. The “porte Françoise” of Algiers is a repetition of the “porte française” of Oran: an anti-Jewish barrier that reminds Cixous that she does not really belong to French Algeria. For instance, she writes, about Françoise: “Elle était à trois cents mètres de chez moi, j’étais à deux mille ans de chez elle ou inversement il y avait une possibilité qu’elle vienne chez moi mais que j’aille chez elle était une impossibilité et le nom de cette bizarre coupure radicale entre nos maisons était l’antisémitisme” [She is three hundred yards from my house, I was two thousand years from hers or vice versa it was possible for her

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

61

to come to me but for me go to her house was out of the question and the name of this bizarre radical cut between our houses was anti-Semitism].65 Proximity (represented geographically) and extreme distance (illustrated by time) coexist in the relationship between Hélène and Françoise, reflected by the unbalanced relationship between the Jews of Algeria and the French Republic. The French republican discourse forged during the Third Republic (1870– 1940) and therefore at the heart of colonial expansion contains a fundamental paradox, the clarifying of which allows for the comprehension of the ambiguous situation of Jews and the aporetic one of the indigenous people in French Algeria. The Republic set forth, as an inviolable principle, the indifferentiation between individuals before the state. This is the model of “assimilation” praised by French governments of the Third Republic. However, there was a competing model, “coexistence,” according to which colonial politics incessantly “communitized” these same individuals on the level of rights and land according to their supposed religion.66 Stora even mentions, regarding the extreme geographical communitization of the city of Sétif in the 1940s, that “Le cloisonnement des populations y est inscrit dans la pierre.”67 [The compartmentalization of peoples is written in stone]. In fact, as Sylvie Thénault explains, drawing from Laure Blévis’ analysis, the term “Algerians,” which had been long used in both French and Arabic to designate the inhabitants of the regency of Algiers, was appropriated by the Pieds-Noirs, at the same time nominally reducing locals to their religious beliefs: La taxinomie coloniale effaça cet usage ancien d’“Algériens,” en renvoyant les “indigènes” à leur seule identité religieuse: sous la colonisation, les Algériens devinrent les “musulmans.” [. . .] Un glissement de sens s’opérait alors, “musulman” dépassant son sens strict: un fidèle de l’islam. L’administration alla jusqu’à parler des convertis comme des “musulmans catholiques.” L’oxymore traduit bien ce que valait le terme “musulman.” Il fonctionnait comme la “définition implicite mais pratique de la catégorie d’indigène.”68 [The colonial taxonomy erased the former usage of “Algerians,” by reducing the “natives” solely to their religious identity: under colonialism, the Algerians became “Muslims.” [. . .] A slippage of meaning then took place, and “Muslim” extended beyond its strict definition: a follower of Islam. The administration went so far as to refer to the converted as “Catholic Muslims.” The oxymoron certainly translates the worth of the term “Muslim.” It functioned as the “implicit yet practical definition of the category native.”]

Therefore, in Les Rêveries, when Cixous mentions “Mohammed le Juif errant musulman” [Mohamed [. . .] The Muslim wandering Jew],69 a character of her

62

Chapter 2

childhood, she is making fun of these communitarian categories pushed to the point of becoming contradictory. Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard explain the paradox of a “universal” republic of human rights that developed into a discriminatory colonial power by the existence of a “rupture épistémologique”70 in the republican discourse. On the one hand, it is because France affirms the equality of all men that it grants itself the right to colonize, that is, to impose its model as “universally valid.” On the other hand, France must advocate inequality between humans’ development to be able to justify imposing republican principles onto nonFrench populations, which are supposed to emancipate toward freedom and equality thanks to the Republic’s tutelage. The result is that colonization consisted of an integration of lands and a segregation of men. As Jennifer Sessions shows in her book By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria,71 this dynamic at the core of settler colonialism is to be apprehended as a structure of a modernity that, instead of incorporating the locals, pushed them away. In Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, the settler colonialism principle of territorial addition and human subtraction is summarized through three words: “Substitution, ablation, et fantomisation” [substitution, excision, and phantomization]72 of the indigenous people. For Cixous, this equation constitutes a veritable political “ruse”73 [cunning], which infects Algeria with the disease of “mensonge et [. . .] feinte”74 [lie and dissimulation].75 French Algeria is defined as “une falsification et une tricherie” [deceitful and deceptive]76 in that its denial of the rights and existence of the majority of the population is so deep and institutionalized. Cixous takes the measure of its extent in her experience of the high school, a sort of essence of FrenchAlgeria, after that of the Oran Door, the garden of the Officers’ Club. After World War II, the Cixous family moved to Algiers, and Hélène was enrolled by her father in one of Algiers’s girls’ high schools, the Lycée Fromentin. Cixous describes this choice as an “erreur” and even an “aberration,”77 since that establishment was known for having unofficially kept a numerus clausus since Vichy times, which had made all the other Jewish families flee, placing their daughters in the other girls’ school in the city, the Lycée Delacroix. In the school, there were no indigenous students, and only one tolerated assimilated Jew. Cixous writes: le lycée, un bâtiment somptueux déguisé en lycée de Jeunes Filles, un palais mauresque d’une beauté raffinée où il n’y avait pas de femmes algériennes, pas de mauresque, pas de palais, puisque c’était un palais-changé, dont les occupantes dites jeunes filles avec leur cortège de grandes secrétaires petites secrétaires grande Directrice grands et petits professeurs, répétaient tous les jours sans en être informées donc sans doute avec une efficacité pure de trouble

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

63

et de pensée le programme initial secret: un plan d’effacement de l’être algérien, qui s’accomplissait exactement comme dans tous les pays qui appliquent la substitution totale. Substitution, ablation, et fantomisation [. . .]. La première chose que je voyais en arrivant le matin c’était [. . .] l’énormité excisée [. . .] l’absence énorme du propre pays [. . .] dans une désinfection physique et mentale. [the lycée, a sumptuous building in the guise of a School for Girls, a Moorish palace refined in its beauty in which there were no Algerian women, no Moorish women, no palace, since it was a palace-changed, whose occupants, called girls, with their retinue of big and little secretaries, big Head Mistress big and little teachers, every day rehearsed the initial secret program, without being told, hence doubtless with a trouble—and thought-free efficiency: a plan to efface the Algerian being, carried out in the same way as all comparable plans to efface in all the countries which work to enforce total substitution. Substitution, excision, and phantomization [. . .]. The first thing I saw when I arrived each morning was [. . .] the excised enormity [. . .] the glaring absence of the country proper [. . .] in a physical and mental disinfection.]78

The territorial appropriation combined with a human “evacuation” of the local population from the picture is emphasized by Cixous through the strong image of the “plan d’effacement de l’être algérien” (repeated page 126) [“the plan to efface the Algerian being” (71)].79 This expression also has a variant: “plan d’anéantissement de l’être algérien”80 [the plan to annihilate the Algerian being], a nuance that represents the degrees of violence in the attempt—premeditated, according to Cixous (“programme initial secret”)— to make the indigenous people, or at least their culture, disappear from their own territory. In this way, the text opens up to other memories of colonization than those traditionally commemorated in France; it shapes an archive not only of the violence of marginalization and exclusion but also of the borderline-genocidal practices that took place during the colonial conquest and after, in the Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata massacres of 1945.81 Or, as Achille Mbembe formulates it, after his reading of Fanon, colonial powers are driven by a sort of “force nécropolitique” [necropolitic drive], which is “la raison pour laquelle la relation coloniale oscille constamment entre le désir d’exploiter l’autre (posé comme racialement inférieur) et la tentation de l’éliminer, de l’exterminer” [the reason why the colonial relation constantly fluctuates between the desire to exploit the other (posited as racially inferior) and the temptation to eliminate it, to exterminate it].82 The use of medical vocabulary (“ablation,” “excision,” “désinfection,” and so on), highlighting Cixous’ personal familiarity with the medical milieu (her father was a doctor and her mother a midwife), fleshes out the metaphor of colonial illness. Indeed, Cixous subverts the colonial myth, grounded in

64

Chapter 2

a racist ideology, according to which indigenous peoples (and slaves before them) do not conform to a standard, which, according to Elsa Dorlin in La Matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation française, is first one of health. Cixous’ text can indeed be read as an elucidation of what Dorlin calls, in Foucauldian terms, an “épistémologie de la domination”83: how racial (as well as gender) difference was constructed as a hierarchy by medical discourse, starting from the eighteenth century. A “nosopolitical” racism (that is one relative to categories of healthy and unhealthy), based on a medical science that naturalized differences between human groups, produced a pathologization of certain populations that justified, a posteriori, their economic exploitation.84 Sarcastically inversing the categories of healthy and unhealthy as they had been established by this colonial nosopolitics, Cixous diagnoses a syndrome among the colonists, which consists in a psychic and geographical repression of the presence of the other, either as a human being—the indigenous person becomes a slave or subhuman—or as a being at all—the indigenous person does not exist. The syndrome of this disease (colonial racism) is manifested through the ontological erasure of indigenous people within the spaces of the Republic and in national representations. As Cixous writes in “Mon Algériance,” “L’Algérie était imprégnée, tissée, nourrie, tatouée, de signaux violemment racistes. Dans des établissements publics prétendument laïcs et républicains cela ne se disait pas cela se mentait et s’agissait” [Algeria was soaked, woven, nourished, tattooed with violently racist signals. In the supposedly non-religious and republican public institutions this was not said it was lied and acted].85 The real “ill” subjects (those who adhere to this colonial policy, those who are complicit in it), like the teachers of her Lycée as well as the students, present this situation of exclusion as a “désinfection physique et mentale” [physical and mental disinfection]86 of the social body. The text thus reveals that behind those who claim to bring physical and mental health, a real disease is hidden, as suggested by this sentence: “Cette ‘santé’ du corps social, je l’éprouvais comme une maladie, toutes ces défenses, ces rejets, ces portes j’en faisais mes maladies personnelles” [This ‘health’ of the social body I experienced as illness, all those defenses, rejections, doors I turned into a personal malady].87 The consequences of this “disease” of erasure88 of the other are still visible in postcolonial French society, given that a portion of Pieds-Noirs and metropolitan populations still believe that there were no natives in Algeria, as sociologist Éric Savarese reports in his book L’Ordre colonial et sa légitimation en France métropolitaine. Oublier l’Autre.89 Consequently, in the situation of the highschool described by Cixous, the numerical majority is subtracted from the minority of the population of the Algerian territory (around nine million indigenous people in 1954, ten times more than the French in Algeria). Continuing with the medical metaphor,

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

65

Cixous refers to an “énormité excisée” [excised enormity].90 As the school is a girls’ one, the mention of “excision” is even more significant: the term designates, in surgery, an operation in which a portion of a small volume is removed. By extension, it refers to a mutilating African cultural practice which consists in removing a woman’s clitoris. But Cixous uses the term to refer to young Muslim girls who are banned from high school by French law, which is interesting in several respects. First, against the essentialization of a racist discourse, Cixous inverses the role of the barbarian (usually attributed to the African continent that mutilates its girls) and thereby hints at Montaigne’s idea that one must examine one’s own barbarism before looking for it in others. It is France, which, in the figurative sense, mutilates young Algerians by removing them from society; or, more precisely, it is France that mutilates its universal ideal by excluding some subjects from the Republic. Moreover, the use of this expression allows Cixous to show the implicit link between a sexist logic and a colonial one, and as such it constitutes an intersectional critique (that articulates the superposition of multiple dominations). In effect, as Dorlin explains, in mainland France colonization permitted the transformation of a certain sexist discourse through a transfer of domination (a passage from sexist domination to a domination first over slaves and then over colonies): it is no longer French women who are endowed with a certain “temperament” that makes them unhealthy and inferior, but rather indigenous peoples—women become henceforth valorized for their reproductive and maternal qualities.91 This marks the emergence, in the eighteenth century, of a natalist discourse (and politics) that correlates with the construction of the nation. However, this revalorization of women by means of maternity served another politics of exclusion, that of slaves in the colonies. After the description of the physical erasure of the indigenous presence in the quoted passage, Cixous goes on to mention the symbolic mechanisms of the erasure of Algerian beings (their culture, and, merely, their existence) from people’s consciousness. The most basic technique consists in simply ignoring this reality completely and repressing it: Jamais dans le Lycée poudré jamais il ne fut question de l’être algérien. Jamais le mot Algérie n’entre ici. Dans le Lycée, ici, c’est la France, or ce n’était qu’un immense mensonge délirant qui avait pris toute la place de la vérité, et qui donc était devenu la vérité. Tout ce que je voulais dire au Lycée c’était: “ce n’est pas vrai.” Mais c’était impossible, c’était une absurdité. Quand le pasvrai s’étend à l’infini, il est vrai. [Never in the powder-puff Lycée did anyone mention the Algerian being. The word Algeria never sets foot here. Here in the Lycée, it is France, that is it was one great raving lie, which had taken over the whole place of truth, thus

66

Chapter 2

becoming the truth. All I wanted to say at school was: “It is not true.” But this was an impossible, this was an absurdity. When the nottrue extends to infinity, it is true.]92

This passage creatively expresses the Foucauldian idea that “dans toute société la production du discours est à la fois contrôlée, sélectionnée, organisée et redistribuée par un certain nombre de procédures” [in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures],93 such as, for example, procedures of exclusion. Of these procedures, “La plus évidente, la plus familières aussi, c’est l’interdit” [the most obvious and familiar of these is what is prohibited].94 This is indeed what Cixous underscores as a perversion of discursive practices in FrenchAlgeria that consists in forgetting even the relationship of domination itself. In other words, the text implicitly highlights a colonial regime of truth, according to which “Il se peut toujours qu’on dise le vrai dans l’espace d’une extériorité sauvage; mais on n’est dans le vrai qu’en obéissant aux règles d’une ‘police’ discursive qu’on doit réactiver en chacun de ses discours” [It is always possible one could speak the truth in a void; one would only be in the true, however, if one obeyed the rules of some discursive ‘policy’ which would have to be reactivated every time one spoke]95—what Cixous means through her revolted sentence: “Quand le pasvrai s’étend à l’infini, il est vrai” [When the nottrue extends to infinity, it is true]. The erasure of the other and her history explains why the history of colonization remained and still remains today on the margin of national history in France. Since the 1940s, Cixous has suspected something symptomatic in the teaching of French history and culture in the schools of the Republic: En Algérie, et plus particulièrement au Lycée Fromentin [. . .] chaque énoncé venu de l’histoire, de la culture, du pays-France où je n’avais jamais été [. . .] me paraissait dissimuler un indice, une explication ou une cause de la maladie partagée par la grande majorité des habitants, répandue, sournoise, dans les esprits, dans les rues, les commerces, les établissements, les intérieurs, la chose du monde la mieux partagée c’est-à-dire la pire c’était l’hypocrisie, comme seconde nature. [In Algeria, and more specifically at the Lycée Fromentin [. . .] each utterance having come from history, from culture, of the France-country where I had never been [. . .] seemed to me to hide a clue, an explanation, or a cause of the illness shared by the great majority of the inhabitants, a widespread and cunning illness in the minds, in the streets, the shops, the institutions, the interiors,

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

67

the most widely shared things in the world that is to say the worst thing was hypocrisy, like second nature.]96

In this passage from Si près, Cixous expresses the Foucaldian idea that the education system “est une manière politique de maintenir ou de modifier l’appropriation des discours, avec les savoirs et les pouvoirs qu’ils emportent avec eux” [a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it].97 She highlights the scope of the exclusion: the italics of “chaque énoncé” insist on the omnipresence and omnipotence of this technique of spectralization of the other. The use of the distributive determiner “chaque” specifies the scope of the denial of the other and the total control that the French state (School) has over the power of representation (“chaque” designates the parts of a whole). In addition, the choice of the (very Foucauldian) term “énoncé,” which is very widespread in mathematical, legal, and linguistic vocabulary, suggests an order to be followed issued by an authority that is a source of truth or which holds legal power. Speaking of “énoncé” [utterance] rather than “discours” [speech] or “phrases” [sentences] shines light on the rule to be followed that is contained in the transmission of words. The unfinished phrase and the space left after the listing of various places of this “maladie” portray even more the idea of geographic infinity in which the process that renders the indigenous people invisible takes place. Cixous claims that this situation, which she considers to be a disease, is perpetuated because of hypocrisy: France and its citizens were conscious of ignoring these others (who were quite numerous, proportionally).98 To close this analysis of colonial and anti-Semitic exclusion through the “portes françaises” [French doors] in Algeria, I would like to examine the status of the city of Algiers in Cixous’ text. Capital of one of the three départements of French Algeria, and the most important city in terms of population and activity, Cixous defines it as “sommet et métaphore de toute l’Algérie” [crowning point and metaphor for all of Algeria],99 for it is in Algiers that the colonial disease reaches its height. In effect, Algiers is un coquetier géant et bigarré en forme de poule qui couve des œufs de guerre. Selon moi on ne peut pas faire un pas dans la rue ni entrer dans un magasin sans être instantanément victime complice coupable ou contaminé. Il y a tout de suite quelqu’un en train de pourrir quelqu’un en train d’écraser quelqu’un ou quelqu’un en train de vous regarder fuir quelque spectacle humain insupportable. [a giant motley eggcup in the shape of a hen which broods on the eggs of war. In my opinion you cannot take a step in the street or enter a store without being

68

Chapter 2

instantly victim partner in crime guilty party or contaminated. Right away someone is busy corrupting someone busy crushing someone busy watching you flee some unbearable human spectacle.]100

This systematic stain, which the disease of colonial racism propagates like the immense epidemic described by Camus in La Peste, and that is used to subvert the “nosopolitical” discourse of colonialism and its memory, is evoked throughout the text by a literalization of the medical metaphor.101 Moral evil (le mal), defined as the “inguérissable”102 [incurable] disease of Algiers, is incorporated and transformed into physiological “mal” (disease, sickness). The metaphor becomes literal, everyone is physically sick in Algiers: dans la ville d’Alger personne ne peut plus s’empêcher de vomir et cracher, même sur soi-même [. . .] c’est une maladie continuelle, c’est une maladie morbide, une mode pulmonique, une langue, une toux nerveuse, tout le monde l’attrape la couche en soi la transmet, [. . .]la félicitation culturelle de la glaire verbale émise par le corps social qui dans l’excès s’indifférencie. [in the city of Algiers people can no longer refrain from vomiting and spitting, even on themselves [. . .] it’s chronic, a morbid habit, a pulmonary fashion, a tongue, a nervous cough, everyone catches it incubates it in their organism transmits it [. . .] the cultural self-congratulation for the verbal glair emitted by the body of society grown undifferentiated in its excesses.]103

This condition is created and encouraged by the colonial powers according to Cixous (“félicitation culturelle de la glaire verbale,” my emphasis), and turns life in Algeria into what she repeatedly names an “Enfer”104 [Hell]. It is therefore, as discussed by Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, “l’allégorie de la déchéance de la ville au temps de [l’] enfance [de Cixous], où sont parqués comme dans l’univers concentrationnaire de l’Europe, les Arabes contre les Juifs d’un coté, les Français contre les Arabes et les Juifs de l’autre. Chacun l’un contre l’autre” [the allegory for the decline of the city during Cixous’ childhood, in which, as in the concentration-camp world of Europe, everyone is rounded up, the Arabs against the Jews on one side, the French against the Arabs and the Jews on the other. Everyone against one another].105 In “Mon Algériance,” Cixous, evoking her childhood in Algeria, also mentions the term “camps” in an ambiguous way, connoting both the two “camps” (sides) of a war and the Nazi concentration camps: “Nous vécûmes toujours dans les épisodes d’une Algériade brutale, jetés dès la naissance dans un des camps grossièrement façonnés par le démon de la Colonialité. On disait ‘les Arabes’; ‘les Français.’ Et on était joués de force dans la pièce, sous une fausse identité. Des camps-caricatures” [We always lived in the episodes of

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

69

a brutal Algeriad, thrown from birth into one of the camps crudely fashioned by the demon of Coloniality. One said: ‘the Arabs’; ‘the French.’ And one was forcibly played in the play, with a false identity. Caricature-camps.]106 In this earlier text, the neologism “algériade” foreshadows the colonial disease displayed in Les Rêveries, since the nominal suffix “-ade” adds the notion of collectivity or expresses the result of an action (the War of Independence).107 The forced assignation to a camp recalls the situation of Jews in Algeria, who were used by France in its political battles. Consequently, the crude identity of these camps means that for Cixous, the links were more complex than frontal opposition, and most of all, that these two identities (French, Arab) were very limiting: Berbers, Jews, French supporting independence, Arabs against the FLN, and so on, are not recognized. In this way, even while legally belonging to the “side” of the “French,” Cixous chooses, in her heart, the “side” of the “Arabs.” CIXOUS’ “MAL D’AMOUR” FOR ALGERIAN ALGERIA: THE “MALGÉRIENNE” GEOGRAPHY OF ARAB WALLS At the very beginning of Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, Cixous mentions a “maladie algérie” [Algerian disorder],108 which she describes as a “sensation d’être possédée par une sensation de dépossession” [that feeling of being possessed by a feeling of dispossession].109 This lexical chiasmus indicates the complex and contradictory nature of this maladie from which Cixous claims to suffer. It is an alienation similar to that experienced by the indigenous people with respect to their territory, but one which Cixous experiences, in another form, only under Vichy. This alienation stems from an empathy for the indigenous people, to whom she wishes to move closer, and expresses a real suffering due to being outside of and excluded from this Arab Algerian population. A portmanteau word, the adjective “malgérienne”110 that Cixous creates through the contraction of “maladie” and “algérienne,” contains the two aspects of this alienation: “malgérie” immediately recalls a “mal” [suffering], the “mal d’amour” [lovesickness] coming from the absence of response or reciprocity to her compassion for her indigenous neighbors. Besides, “malgérie” also implies the term “algie” [algia], which refers to a “douleur dont l’origine n’est pas due à une lésion anatomique” [pain whose origin is not caused by an anatomical lesion].111 In Cixous’ case, this is a psychological pain linked to the memory of exclusion. This “malgérienne” situation appears within the story through narrative motifs. Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage reconstructs a myth created during Cixous’ childhood in the neighborhood “Clos-Salembier” in Algiers: that of an original symbiosis between Jews and Arabs. First of all, the specific nature

70

Chapter 2

of the place plays an important role in the construction of the myth. After the war and the “Vichy-à-Oran” episode, Georges Cixous decides to move to Algiers, and more specifically to the neighborhood of the Clos-Salembier, an enclave located in an elevated part of town, “à l’embouchure du Ravin de la Femme Sauvage” [at the mouth of Wild Woman Ravine] and “où s’entassaient sans eau et sans logis des dizaines de milliers de misérables” [tens of thousands of wretched people crowded together without water].112 The place is a slum, within which the Cixous house, surrounded by a gate marking a separation, stands out. The Cixous are both “in” this neighborhood and “outside” of the slum. As a result, just like in Oran, they find themselves in an ambiguous situation of inclusion and exclusion, which Cixous had previously expressed through a play on the meaning of her home town: “ORAN—HORS EN” [OR-AN—OUTSIDE IN].113 No French people live in this neighborhood, and, except for the Cixous, probably no Jews either. However, living among miserable indigènes is a choice made by her father, for whom “le but [était] de tisser des liens algériens” [the idea [was to have] ties with Algerians].114 Georges Cixous’ preference immediately inscribes the family into a complex relationship with the locals, reflecting the ambiguous position of Jews between the French colonizers and the colonized indigènes: as a French doctor, Georges Cixous symbolizes the paternalist colonial power, a participant in the “mission civilisatrice” on the African continent. However, as a native Jew who chooses to reside close to the Muslims, he represents an altruist and humanist fellow human, unlike the vast majority of the French civil doctors in Algeria who predominantly took care of the Pieds-Noirs, who were capable of paying their fees.115 Cixous’ complex relationship to Arabness is expressed, starting in La Jeune Née (1975), through the idea of a “schizophrenic” existence: “Je suis née en Algérie, et mes ancêtres ont vécu en Espagne, au Maroc, en Autriche, en Hongrie, Tchécoslovaquie, Allemagne, mes frères de naissance sont arabes; alors, dans l’histoire, où sommes-nous? Je suis du parti des offensés, des colonisés. Je (ne) suis (pas) arabe” [I was born in Algeria, and my ancestors lived in Spain, Morocoo, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany: my brothers by birth are Arab. So where are we in history? I side with those who are injured, trespassed upon, colonized. I am (not) Arab].116 This “trouble dans l’identité”117 [disorder of identity], also mentioned by Derrida,118 is represented, in Cixous’ last phrase, through the ambivalence created by words between parentheses, permitting a simultaneous double reading.119 Close to Arabs in both history and customs, Cixous is set apart from them through her difference in social, religious, and legal status. In Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, Cixous highlights this paradoxical existential condition, which on the one hand is based on a common origin and hence transmits a desire for brotherhood, but which on the other hand consists of

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

71

social distance. She represents it through a portmanteau word that combines the terms “inséparable” and “arabe”: Le plus insupportable c’est [. . .] que nous étions assaillis au Clos-Salembier par les êtres mêmes que nous voulions aimer, dont nous étions lamentablement amoureux, auxquels nous étions liés pensions-nous par toutes parentés et communautés d’origine, de destin, d’états d’esprit, de mémoire, de toucher, de goût, nos ennemis étaient nos amis, il y avait erreur et confusion de côtés de tous côtés je voulais être de leur côté [. . .] dès qu’il y avait Français j’étais exultation arme où il y avait Arabes j’étais espoir et plaie. Moi, pensais-je je suis inséparabe. C’est une relation invivable avec soi-même. C’est-à-dire avec ceux que nous appelions “les petizarabes,” persuadés obscurément que nous étions d’avoir été depuis le berceau et avant destinés les uns aux autres et séparés comme on le voit dans les contes de Grimm. [The most intolerable [. . .] is that we were assailed in the Clos-Salembier by those whom we wanted to love, with whom we were lamentably in love, to whom we were attached we thought by kinship and communities of origin, by destiny, by our manner of thinking, by memory, by touch, by taste, our enemies were our friends, there was error and confusion on the side on all the sides I wanted to be on their side [. . .] the minute there was French I was exultation arms where there were Arabs I was hope and wound. Me, I thought I am inseparab. This is an unlivable relationship with oneself. By which I mean those whom we called the “kidzArabs,” dimly persuaded as we were of having been since birth and before destined to one another and separated as happens in Grimm’s fairy tales.]120

Playing with the typography, Cixous suggests both an identity (“soi-même”) and a difference with respect to the “Arabs” (with the space left between the terms and the following phrase explaining this “soi-même,” which means the Other). This desire to be a part of the Algeria of the indigènes, which can seem paradoxical, considering the inferior Muslim condition, is explained on an emotional “malgérien” level. Cixous recounts that she and her brother felt “la souffrance réelle des malades d’Algérie” [very real suffering of Algerian invalids],121 and that they were “malades du besoin de l’Algérie, de la réalité intérieure de ce pays [. . .] de la chair, de l’habitat, de l’arabité de l’arabitude” [ill with our need of Algeria, with the inner reality of the country [. . .] from the flesh, from the habitat, from the Arabness of the Arabitude].122 This “maladie,” this lack of love (“mal d’amour”) on the part of the indigenous people who are represented as being inside the country of which Cixous is deprived, is a legacy of her father (Algerian), which her mother (German) is completely unable to understand. As we shall see, Cixous and her brother try

72

Chapter 2

in their own way to reincarnate an ethos of sociability, which was Georges Cixous’ remedy for the “malgérien” lack of love. Cixous writes: “Pendant dix-huit ans j’étais réellement inséparabe. Je m’accrochais au grillage, je guettais le portail j’attendais le message: un visage, une porte, un sourire. La passion pour ce pays c’était moi en ce temps-là” [For eighteen years I was truly inseparab. I hung onto the fence, I watched at the gate I waited for the message: a face, a door, a smile. In those days passion for that country was what defined me].123 In this context, the mention of the term “passion” evokes the “Passion of Christ” and therefore mixes the suffering (of being excluded) with the love (for the “petizarabes”). Her “inséparabité” is communicated through the physical presence of a door—in this case, a gate—separating the Cixous from the indigènes of ClosSalembier. In “Mon Algériance,” Cixous represents this community with the Arabs as desired but fractured by contradictory images and oxymoronic expressions: “Nous n’étions pas séparés, non, nous étions ensemble, dans l’hostilité. Rassemblés dans l’hostilité par l’hostilité [. . .] corps réunis dans l’étreinte de la séparation” [We were not separated, no, we were together in hostility. Gathered together in hostility by hostility [. . .] bodies united in the clutch of separation].124 In Les Rêveries, this inseparable yet impossible state is symbolized by the ambivalent figure of the “portail,”125 an ambiguous motif of separation and of contact which also appeared as early as in her first novel, Dedans. Indeed, as Angeles Sirvent Ramos remarks, “L’incipit de Dedans est révélateur et pose d’emblée le cadre tragique de l’enfance, de l’enfance algérienne de Cixous: ‘MA MAISON EST ENCERCLÉE. ELLE EST ENTOURÉE PAR LE GRILLAGE. DEDANS, nous vivons. Dehors ils sont cinquante mille, ils nous encerclent’” [The opening of Dedans is revealing and poses at the outset the tragic setting of childhood, of Cixous’ Algerian childhood: “MY HOUSE IS SURROUNDED. IT IS SURRONDED BY THE FENCE. INSIDE, we live. Outside they are fifty thousand, they are surrounding us”].126 Even though Algeria is not explicitly mentioned, it appears between the lines as that which is hidden yet omnipresent. Based on the logic of partage (sharing, division), which delimits yet gathers, which excludes yet puts in common, the gate of the house in ClosSalembier separates and unites at the same time, a paradox that Cixous expresses through the portmanteau word “séparérunir”127 [separunite]. She writes: “Entre nous le portail. Nous? Je veux dire ce nous autres que le portail s’est mis à séparérunir en ces petites agonies quotidiennes [. . .]” [Between us the gate. Us? I mean that other us that the gate began separuniting into those small daily agonies].128 The designation of “nous autres” [the other us] puts emphasis on the geographical marginalization and the ontological otherness (with respect to a French norm) of the inhabitants of this extremely poor neighborhood. Beyond the concrete nature of the gate, which physically

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

73

marks a separation of European culture from the other inhabitants of the neighborhood, the phrase insists on the gate’s separating power through the active use of the verb (the gate is the subject of the verb “se mettre à”): the French gate is a metaphor for French policies in Algeria, which communitize the Jews on one hand and the Muslims on the other hand. The expression of distinction “nous autres” also recalls several other traumatic memories: that in 1946, when the Cixous moved to Algiers, both Jews and Muslims underwent extreme traumas (Vichy and the Sétif, Guelma, and Kherrata massacres).129 In contrast to the situation of separation between the Cixous family and the inhabitants of Clos-Salembier, which reflects the fragmentation of childhood memory, the text provides two fable-like stories of displacement celebrating encounters with the Arabs. Directly after the above-cited paragraph on inseparability and the necessity for the “repair” of the link between Jews and Arabs, Cixous narrates a car trip with her father during which Georges Cixous supposedly picks up and drives two Arabs: nous nous sentions des cygnes malpropres, mais promis à la réparation, et nous nous citions mon frère et moi comme signe annonciateur le dernier voyage effectué avec mon père en 1948 dans la Citroën [. . .] mon père avait arrêté la Citröen pour prendre à son bord deux Arabes qui faisaient du stop. Or il faut savoir que ce fait est absolument exceptionnel en ce temps-là. D’autant qu’on ne pouvait jamais être sûr que la Citröen va redémarrer. [. . .] Dans la Citröen c’est la fête inoubliable les deux passagers remercient avec joie pour l’hospitalité inattendue, ils ont eu raison de croire et d’espérer ce sur quoi l’on ne peut raisonnablement pas compter, le monde n’est pas si mauvais qu’on le croit, voilà qu’un Français s’est arrêté [. . .]. En arrivant au tournant du boulevard Laurent-Pichat mon père avait arrêté l’auto en haut de la pente et nos deux humains transfigurés en même temps que nous mon père mon frère et moi, étaient descendus le cœur grand ouvert, la porte, la porte, disant merci tu es un frère merci mon frère dieu te bénisse frère en français et en échange mon père dit que ce sont ses frères en arabe. [. . .] Depuis nous nous racontons chaque année l’histoire de quand les portes du ciel s’étaient ouvertes. [we felt like ugly ducklings but promised redress, and we cited, my brother and I as a prefiguration that last trip we made with my father in 1948 in the Citroën [. . .] my father stopped the Citroën to pick up two hitch-hiking Arabs. This, you understand, was absolutely unheard of in those days. All the more so as one could not be sure the Citroën would start up again. [. . .] In the Citroën an unforgettable fiesta the two passengers thanking us exuberantly for the unexpected hospitality, how right they were to believe in and hope for that which one cannot reasonably count on, the world is better than one thinks, look, a Frenchman stopped for them [. . .]. When we reached to corner of Laurent-Pichat Boulevard

74

Chapter 2

my father stopped the car at the top of the hill and our two humans transfigured at the same time as my father my brother and me, got out, hearts agape, the door, the door, saying thank you you are a brother thank you my brother god bless you brother in French and in exchange my father says that they are his brother in Arabic. [. . .] Ever since each year we retell the story about when the doors of heaven were thrown open.]130

The passage, which sounds like a parable, is filled with biblical references linked to the Transfiguration of Jesus. In the religious context, a parable is an allegorical story. In the Gospels, the Transfiguration is the episode in which Jesus climbs a mountain, accompanied by his disciples Peter, James, and John, and finds himself metamorphosed: “L’aspect de son visage changea et son vêtement devint d’une blancheur éclatante” [the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white].131 Elijah and Moses appear at Jesus’ side and speak to him of “son prochain départ qui allait s’accomplir à Jérusalem” [his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem].132 Through this episode, the Old and New Testaments find a common ground, and this new Alliance symbolizes a new hope. In Les Rêveries the construction of this parable-like depiction of Judeo-Arab fraternity, reminiscent of the Parable of the Transfiguration through its vocabulary, its place (the hill of Clos-Salembier), and its meaning (a hope, a new friendship), starts with a realist narration that later turns into a symbolic register.133 The mention—just before the quoted passage—of the Tales of Grimm indicates the plunge into fable, going from “réparation” to the Annunciation (first sentence), from fragmented memory to myth—or utopic “memory.” The car trip dissolves to become a true spiritual journey, as emphasized by the terms “absolument exceptionnel.” The change in temporality also indicates a parable construction, as through the grammatically incorrect phrase (lack of verb tense correspondence) “on ne pouvait jamais être sûr que la Citröen va redémarrer.” The story shifts between the past tense (imperfect and past perfect) and the present tense (present and future), therefore shifting between factual remembrance and myth, with the present indicative taking on the value of the general truth. In the following sentence, the vocabulary of the spectacular and of joy definitively establishes this anecdote as a fable, the apotheosis of which consists of a “transfiguration” of the protagonists, who become “frères.” Algiers is transformed, during the duration of this voyage, into a paradise (“les portes du ciel ouvertes”), the Arabs become the “compagnons bibliques” [companions biblical], and Georges Cixous is compared to “dieu” [God].134 In addition, his death a few days afterward foreshadows the definitive closing of the doors of Algeria (“le livre des portes s’est refermé” [the book of doors slams shut]135), as I will discuss later. This journey almost becomes a scene of revelation, with a deeply “religious” quality (etymologically, which

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

75

creates some link). In a statement during a conference on the works of her friend Jacques Derrida, Cixous mentions the complementary nature of revelation and the door, which lets the bond of fraternity pass through: “Pas de révélation sans porte. Mais quelle porte? Une non-porte s’effaçant pour laisser passer. Un sourire peut-être, ou la sensation d’un sourire. Une porte pour mieux s’ouvrir. Sourire”136 [No revelation without a door. But what door? A non-door moving aside to let something through. A smile perhaps, or the feeling of a smile. A door to better open yourself. To smile]. In the above passage quoted from Les Rêveries, the two Arabs open the “doors” of the car to step out and announce their fraternal blessing; that is, the “sensation d’un sourire” given to the other. Thus, the journey of ascent from the “côtes d’Alger”137 in the Citroën—a brand of car named after its Jewish founder and whose name symbolizes a certain resistance to the Vichy regime—serves as a “bond” between Jews and indigènes.138 It is at odds with the descent to hell of separation, that is, the colonial alienation of Jews and Arabs in Algeria— with the latter rightfully and not without sarcasm called the “hôtes”139 [hosts], to remind that this country is theirs despite colonial appearances. Cixous’ father’s “hospitalité inattendue” [unexpected hospitality] is represented as the “réparation” of a separation that turns Jews into “cygnes malpropres” [ugly ducklings], a group ostracized from a supposed Algerian community. Furthermore, the mention (before the quoted passage) of the Tales of the Brothers Grimm, the most popular of which is Hansel et Gretel, further reinforces the image of a generous father in contrast with a maternal (German) figure that deprives, since in the fairy tale, it is at the mother’s instigation that the children are abandoned.140 In Cixous’ story, the “cygnes” mutate, thanks to her father, into “signes” of hope of a community to come, reviving a past which is more mythical than real, and creating through her writing a trace of the hope that can link Jews and Arabs; in other words, a minor archive that redeploys past and future temporalities.141 However, just as this original community to come is based on myth and not a real referent, the representation of this myth itself is based on a memory error and is deconstructed during the narration. First, the “fête inoubliable” is based on a quiproquo, a misunderstanding that compromises the desired fraternity from the beginning: indeed the Arabs take Georges Cixous for a generous Frenchman whose hospitality shows that “dans ce pays malade et maudit de haine et totalement impossible, malgré tout, tout était possible” [in this sick and cursed with hatred and totally impossible country, in spite of everything, anything could happen].142 However, the young doctor is not any Frenchman; he is an “arabizarre,”143 a Jewish Arab—in other words, a fact that puts the idea of a fraternity with France out of the question, at the same time annulling the authenticity of a Judeo-Arab friendship. The illusion regarding Cixous’ father’s identity fractures this “utopic memory” (one could

76

Chapter 2

say), the tragedy of which resonates through the mention of his “dernier voyage”144 [last trip]. It is also necessary to highlight the dissident nature of the image of the hope of a Judeo-Arab friendship at the very time when a durable symbolic rupture was produced between the two communities subsequent to the creation of the state of Israel.145 Second, the memory of this Algerian episode is revealed to be a poor trace of the past. Barely after finishing the story of the ascent in the Citröen, the facts are contested in the narration by her brother’s voice: “Selon mon frère les deux hommes ne faisaient pas du stop, cela n’aurait eu aucun sens dit-il, qui, sinon mon père se serait arrêté Chemin des Crêtes et mon père est un être éphémère, qui s’est arrêté de lui-même, [. . .] il aimait s’arrêter et prendre dans sa Citröen des gens qui n’avaient rien demandé.” [My brother claims the two men were not hitchhiking, it doesn’t make sense he says, who but my father would have stopped on Crest Road and my father is an ephemeral being, who stopped all by himself, [. . .] he liked to pick people who hadn’t asked for anything up in his Citroën].146 Not only were the Arabs not asking for the ride and the attitude of the father not exceptional, but moreover the voyage was not an ascent but rather went in the direction of descent, from Clos-Salember to the center of Algiers.147 Cixous’ supposed misunderstanding of the reality of her Algerian past is applicable to the totality of her childhood memories according to her brother. Pierre reproaches his sister for talking about Algeria without having truly gotten to know the country: “Tu n’as pas connu l’Algérie, dit mon frère [. . .] c’était sa sentence et sa conclusion” [You didn’t know Algeria, says my brother [. . .] this was his sentence and its conclusion].148 As the development of my argument will show, the question of faulty, incomplete, or even false memory is a theme that haunts Cixous and, as an internal contention within the story, allows her to drive forward the narrative while creating an original archive that registers both the ruptures and hopes that existed between the two communities. After the death of her father in 1948, Cixous and her brother try despite everything to resuscitate the spirit of Algerian fraternity left behind by Georges Cixous, albeit in a different way. The experience of the journey in the Citroën (sold upon the father’s death) is continued by that of another vehicle, which appears at the beginning of the story and which takes on all of its semantic scope retrospectively through the Citroën episode: the “Vélo” (the Bicycle), “modeste mais fabuleux rejeton de Citroën” [humble but fabulous offspring of the Citroën].149 The long-awaited arrival of the Bicycle by Cixous and her brother—which is, according to Cixous, “le moyen le plus simple et le plus urgent de sortir de notre incarcération dans un périmètre pédestre, l’outil de la conquête du pays, et d’une conquête non violente, ce qui pour nous était le bonheur même” [the simplest and most urgent means of escaping being shut up within walking range, a tool to

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

77

conquer the country, and nonviolently what’s more, which for us was bliss itself]150—ends up being the dividing factor between the two adolescents, a primal scene of fraternal rupture. The Bicycle was supposed to be a men’s Bike, according to Pierre, and yet to save money the mother bought a girl’s Bicycle so that it could be ridden by both children. After a tantrum marking a definitive emotional rupture with his mother—“un crime définitif” [definitive crime]151—Pierre nonetheless takes the girl’s Bicycle and goes out everyday to explore the country. Reminiscent of the religious nature of the events in the Citroën, the Bicycle, which arrives like an “apparition,”152 symbolizes, for the Cixous children, the real “Chose-Vie” [Life-Thing], “Chose-clé” [Key-Thing], which becomes “la porte à roue sur l’Algérie” [the sliding door to Algeria].153 Cixous humorously links the arrival of the Bicycle to the adoption of religious rites by her and her brother, waiting for any holiday to receive the gift: “Du besoin fou du Vélo naissait la nécessité des rites d’une religion à laquelle autrement, en dehors du Vélo, nous n’étions ni formés ni attachés, mais l’urgence [. . .] incontestablement vitale du Vélo pour tous les deux nous obligeait à une conversion à notre propre religion” [Of the Bike craze was born the necessity for the rites of a religion to which otherwise, Bike aside, we had been neither initiated nor attached, but [. . .] incontestably vital urgency of the Bike for both of us made us convert to our own religion].154 The passage suggests, with derision, a profound idea: that the means allowing the childrens’ discovery of the Other (the “Arabs,” Algeria) are linked to their Jewish identity and not their French one. They had to be Jews to receive the Bicycle and therefore go out to discover their neighbors. In the end, the Bicycle functions as both a poison and a cure (like Derrida’s pharmakon), since it leads to the separation of siblings while also leading to the discovery of another “fraternity,” Algeria. The Bicycle allows Pierre to go beyond the doors of the country and to experience the opening on the world that the Bike held—which Pierre’s voice expresses through the pompous remark “Et l’Algérie je l’ai connue” [And Algeria I knew it],155 an echo of the biblical phrase “Et la lumière fut” [And there was light]. Moreover, the primal scene of the Bicycle traces a dividing line between the masculine and feminine condition in Algeria. Cixous implicitly lays out an Algerian geography that is possible for men but prohibited for her. In this respect, Pierre reproaches his sister in a vindictive tone: “Tandis que moi [. . .] je suis parti [. . .] à la découverte du pays [. . .] toi par contre [. . .], dès qu’il y a eu le Vélo, je t’ai vue [. . .] rentrer plus profondément encore dans la maison [. . .] tu ne faisais que travailler” [As for me [. . .] I went off [. . .] exploring the country [. . .] you [. . .], the first day of the Bike I saw you retreat even further into the house [. . .] all you ever did was work].156 But Cixous attempts to show that the Bicycle also allowed her to discover Algeria, though in a different way.

78

Chapter 2

Indeed the initial episode of the Bicycle (just after an introductory and auto-reflective chapter that I will cover in the third part of this chapter), which is first recounted by the voice of the brother, serves as a springboard for the narrative. Then, erecting a sort of tribunal of memory in the background, Cixous recounts her experience of the Bicycle: A mon tour maintenant, pensais-je. Non que mon frère ait fait un faux. Mais il vient de m’accuser de faits bien réels dont je ne suis pas, pensais-je, l’auteur mais la victime. L’importance du Vélo est incontestable, mais ce n’est pas du tout ce qu’il pense. Tout ou presque dans l’histoire de mon frère peut être mis en relation avec le traumatisme inaugural de l’arrivée du Vélo, de cela je suis le seul témoin. Le seul témoin? Non. La seule témoine? La sœurtémoin la sœurt’aime mais non moins, il faudra bien que la langue me porte où je veux nous trouver. [. . .] À mon tour, dis-je. Je reprends le Vélo à zéro. [My turn now, I was thinking. Not that my brother got it wrong. But he has just accused me of very real deeds of which I am not, I was thinking, the author but the victim. The Bike’s role in our destinies cannot be denied, but it is not at all what he thinks. Everything or almost in my brother’s story can be related to the initial trauma of the Bike’s arrival, of that I am the sole witness. Le sole witness? No. La sole witness? The soul sister and witness and loving nonetheless, I pray the language will take me where I want us to go. [. . .] My turn, I say. I start up the Bike from scratch again.]157

The omnipresence of legal vocabulary in this passage, and in particular the use of the term “faux,” just like in Rahmani’s Moze in which she reproduces fake archival documents of the French army, points to the spheres of authority and truth, namely to the question of archives. Trying to embed her own memories in the brother’s narrative of the Bicycle, Cixous produces an archive of Algerian Jewish childhoods within which coexist different versions of the events. By the same token, Cixous justifying herself regarding her knowledge of Algeria, is actually making a meta-narrative commentary on her writing about Algeria and the memory it conveys. For a long time, she remained silent on the subject “pour ne pas risquer de répéter le geste des généraux et colons français qui s’étaient ‘distingués’ sur l’Algérie” [to avoid repeating the actions of generals and French colonists who made their “mark” on Algeria].158 In other words, the fear of adopting a neocolonial attitude that would appropriate the discourse on Algeria preoccupies her and has preoccupied her for a long time. Therefore, the text progresses cautiously, demonstrating evidence of her “good intentions,” as if to transmit a respectful attitude toward (indigenous) Algeria.159 Moreover, the return of memory is also problematized through the opposition of the brother’s voice, which indicates the subjective nature of the

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

79

reconstruction of the past and the singularity of the archival narrative base. And the quotation signals precisely the dynamic of memorial narrative generation for Cixous, when she writes, “Je reprends le Vélo à zéro” [I start up the Bike from scratch again]. In effect, the “Bike” creates the opening of a semantic field constituted by memories of Algeria—an Other archive for the Algerian past. Parallel to the intertwining of puns on the meaning of “seul témoin” [sole witness] that impels the story, and like the meta-narrative commentary “il faudra bien que la langue me porte où je veux nous trouver” [the language will take me where I want us to go], the motif of the Bicycle, in a certain way the origin of the story (its “zero” point), catalyzes an outburst of memories. The five following chapters, which make up half the book, and in which “Vichy-à-Oran” and “Ville” (Algiers) are the subject, start with the Bicycle: “Et en plus ce Vélo,” “Je prends le Vélo” [I take the Bike], “L’expulsion [. . .] par le Vélo” [Expulsion [. . .] by the Bike], “Le Vélo et le Chien” [The Bike and the Dog], “Finalement [. . .] ça a été un bon vélo”160 [In the end [. . .] it was a good Bike]. The Bicycle constitutes a powerful opener for stories in which “v” (alliterated in Vichy and Ville) and “l” consonants connote speed, wings (“Vélo ailé”), “Liberté,”161 and fluidness, images reinforced by the vowels, which allow for the formation of the homophones “vais” “l’eau.” Unfolding the Bicycle narrative, that is, opening up the semantic fields of the Vélo, Cixous writes that even though the Bicycle provided her brother with the key to Algeria, the Bicycle did not give her anything directly, apart from an injury, the scars caused by a falling off the Bike—but this incident is important for the narrative. After the failure to ride the Bike, she plunges into her “rêveries solitaires” [solitary reveries].162 This intertextual revival of the autobiographical work of Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, transposing the banished writer into a “femme sauvage,” excluded from the “monde qu’[elle] désirai[t] plus que tout au monde” [“the world that I wanted more than anything in the world”163].164 The reference to the “femme sauvage” [wild woman] also allows Cixous to establish her story in an Algerian context, since Clos-Salembier is close to the “Ravin de la femme sauvage” [Wild Woman Ravine], the name of a real place, through which the literary displacement takes place via the alliterations of “r” and “v” (from “ravin” to “rêveries”), occasioning the writing.165 According to Alison Rice, it is a lapsus that allows the shift from ravin to rêveries: “Au lieu de porter le nom ‘Le Ravin de la femme sauvage,’ un lapsus a donné lieu à une référence intertextuelle au célèbre livre de Jean-Jacques Rousseau” [Instead of taking the name “Wild Woman Ravine,” a lapsus gave rise to an intertextual reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous book].166 However, there is more than a lapsus when Cixous chooses the term “Ravin”: a desire to let the paronymic and metonymic substitutions

80

Chapter 2

unfold themselves within Cixous’ own voice, an idea that Françoise Coissard expresses in the following way: Pour que se génère un au-delà du lieu, sa circulation dans le texte comme moteur de mémoire et fabrique textuelle, le récit s’appuie sur les espaces dépliés par la métonymie, ses forces désirantes. La localisation répertoriée du toponyme se double d’un espace intérieur, hanté, diégétique. C’est bien une machine à récits que ce signifiant porteur des lettres A R I V: faire arriver relève de ses potentialités.167 [In order to generate a beyond-place, and its circulation in the text as a driver of memory and textual production, the narrative relies on spaces unfolded through metonymy, its desiring forces. The registered location of the toponym is doubled by a haunted, diegetic interior space. It is indeed a narrative machine, this signifier that bears the letters A R I V: to make something arrive leverages its potentialities.]

Through a series of alliterations in “v” that breathe, infuse, propel throughout Cixous’ works, there is a continuity of the writerly project that “advient” [arrives] and “commande” [commands], from La Venue à l’écriture (1976) to the “Venant” [Arriving] of Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, unfolded by the “Vélo.” And just as memory comes through writing, knowledge of Algeria comes to her through the text, a certain language. Indeed, Cixous lays claim to a knowledge other than that of “physical” Algeria, an intellectual and self-sensory knowledge brought about by the Bicycle, or more specifically, its physical negation and sublimation into the imaginary “Vélo ailé” [winged Bike].168 She writes: “je lisais. Je montais sur un livre, je m’asseyais sur la branche la plus éloignée du sol, je m’enfonçais dans les feuilles du livre, je décollais” [I would read. I climbed into a book, I sat down on the branch farthest from the ground, I plunged into the leaves of a book, I flew away].169 Reading becomes her means of transportation, as the Bicycle is for her brother: “Livre et Vélo nous transportent l’un comme l’autre, tout ce que l’on demande c’est la levée d’écrou [. . .] je lis comme il pédale comme je lis nous pédalisons de toutes nos forces” [Book and Bike transport us equally, all we ask is to be released [. . .] I read the way he pedals the way I read we pedaled with all our strength].170 The portmanteau word “pédalisons,” combining to pedal and to read, shows how for Cixous the reading of books is tantamount to Pierre’s riding the Bike on the Algerian soil. The repetition of the adverb of equivalence “comme” underscores the phenomenological equality of Bike and Book. However, it is unsaid how

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

81

this freedom acquired through books (in French, “livres,” a word which also shares the consonants “l” and “v” with “vélo”), into which Hélène plunges with “exaltation,”171 is related to knowledge of Algeria. My hypothesis is that this kind of knowledge echoes the invisibility of the indigènes of Algeria within the French Republic: how can the invisible be seen if not by subtracting the visible from the scene? This “knowledge” of Algeria is an intuition of the indigenous condition occurring through the reading of other stories of marginalization and oppression. Already in La Jeune Née, Cixous mentions the role of literature in her “search” for Algeria: l’écriture. S’il y a un ailleurs qui peut échapper à la répétition infernale, c’est par là, où ça s’écrit, où ça rêve, où ça invente les nouveaux mondes. C’est là que je vais. Je prends des livres, je quitte l’espace réel colonial, je m’éloigne. Souvent je vais lire dans un arbre. Loin du sol et de la merde. Je ne vais pas lire pour lire, pour oublier—Non! Pas pour m’enfermer dans quelque paradis imaginaire. Je cherche: il doit y avoir quelque part mes semblables en révolte et en espoir. [writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds. And that it where I go. I take books; I leave the real, colonial space; I go away. Often I go read in a tree. Far from the ground and the shit. I don’t go and read just to read, to forget—No! Not to shut myself up in some imaginary paradise. I am searching: somewhere there must be people who are like me in their rebellion and in their hope.]172

Thus, through books, her winged Bicycles, Cixous searches for Algerians through a universality of the spirit of revolt against oppression. Therefore, it is through a non-knowledge of the visible aspect of Algeria that Cixous hopes to know Algeria, as she expresses in Les Rêveries: “—Mais qu’estce que ça veut dire connaître—dis-je—l’Algérie, à côté de mon frère, en suivant son silence exactement. Ce qui ne rappelle pas rappelle, dis-je et ne-pas-connaître l’Algérie c’est la connaître aussi” [But what does it mean to know—I say—Algeria, sitting beside my brother, tracking his silences. That which doesn’t remind reminds, I say, and not-to-know Algeria is also to know it].173 How can this apparent contradiction be understood? If we consider that indigenous people are absent from the public stage, invisible in French Algeria, then a way of knowing them is knowing their absence. Hence, Les Rêveries, in both form and content, approaches this constitutive absence.

82

Chapter 2

First, the question of form: writing is a privileged means for invoking the Algeria that belongs to those who are absent (to the Algerians), for as Derrida explains, writing is a relationship to absence: c’est au moment où la distance sociale [. . .] s’accroît jusqu’à devenir absence, que l’écriture devient nécessaire. [. . .] L’écriture a dès lors pour fonction d’atteindre des sujets qui ne sont pas seulement éloignés mais hors de tout champ de vision et au-delà de toute portée de voix. [. . .] Quand le champ de la société s’étend au point de l’absence, de l’invisible, de l’inaudible, de l’immémorable, quand la communauté locale est disloquée au point que les individus ne s’apparaissent plus les uns aux autres, deviennent sujets d’être imperceptibles, l’âge de l’écriture commence. [it is at the moment that the social distance [. . .] increases to the point of becoming absence that writing becomes necessary. [. . .] From then on, writing has the function of reaching subjects who are not only distant but outside of the entire field of vision and beyond earshot. [. . .] When the field of society extends to the point of absence, of the invisible, the inaudible, and the immemorable, when the local community is dislocated to the point where individuals no longer appear to one another, become capable of being imperceptible, the age of writing begins.]174

In this essay, Derrida explains how, in the Western tradition, writing has always been relegated to second place, after speech, considered more authentic with respect to the truth of being, or at least closer to the being that is expressed. Writing is thus considered as a “supplement” to speech. Although Derrida deconstructs the idea of an absolute binary between voice and writing because, for him, the (phonologic) voice already contains an “archi-écriture” (phenomenological voice) and a différance, which necessarily introduces absence, the idea of an implicit “counter” knowledge generated by a text that connects to those absent, pertains to Cixous. It is precisely because the Algerians’ Algeria is invisible and inaudible that the text allows one to approach it, through absence. Writing the invisible is, in Les Rêveries, a knowledge of absence, the basis of the archival process of French Algeria. Second, in the narrative itself, an episode at the school provides a demonstration of this paradoxical knowledge of absence, or, in other words, an intuition of the presence of the invisible. Through a strategy that subverts the traditional models of knowledge, which are associated with visibility, the high school student Cixous carries out an erasure of the visible. By using a broken camera that no longer produces images, Cixous creates an invisibility

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

83

of that which is visible (French Algeria). Cixous calls this manipulation “une sorte de mentir [. . .] comme réponse au propre mentir du Lycée” [a kind of fibbing [. . .] as a reaction to the school’s own lies],175 which carries out a total erasure of Algeria: J’inventai le plan excavateur le plus extraordinaire. Je vais saisir le système d’annulation de l’être algérien réel dans son propre piège. J’en vins à la fantomisation. [. . .] je pris l’appareil photo irréparable de mon père. [. . .] Et j’en fis un outil fantomisant. Je l’imposai dans la salle de classe. Avec l’appareil inhabité je prenais des photos de professeurs. Des dizaines de clichés. Des dizaines de photos inexistantes. Par ce moyen je les inexistais. Toutes. L’une après l’autre. Je les regardais du point de vue de l’absence de regard. [I dreamed up the wildest of excavation plans. I am going to catch the plan to annihilate the real Algerian being in its own trap. This is where phantomization comes in. [. . .] I took my father’s camera, broken beyond repair. [. . .] And I made it into a tool for fabricating ghosts. I forced it on the classroom. With the vacant camera I snapped pictures of the teachers. Dozens of snapshots. Dozens of nonexistent snapshots. I inexisted them. All. One after another. I gazed at them from the point of view of the absence of a gaze.]176

Hence, to know Algeria is to be able to implicitly distinguish it via its outline, from the exteriority which French Algeria constitutes. She expresses this metaphorically through the idea of making inexistent the French Lycée in order to discern the Moorish Palace “behind” it. Essentially, it is about possessing this knowledge of the spectralization that is constantly at work in colonial Algeria. Cixous does to the French what the French did to the Algerians: erase them and leave as little evidence as possible of them (“fantomiser”). And, incidentally, as an echo, in Si près Cixous talks about “obstruer l’autorité française [. . .] en la personne du professeur de France” [block the French authority [. . .] in the person of the teacher from France] calling this a “stratégie de vélocité” [strategy of velocity],177 thus returning to the loop of signifiers related to the vélo. Through the Bicycle, then, the brother and sister each establish a response to the gate that separates them from the “petizarabes.” Nonetheless, for Cixous, this is not a sufficient response, as, just like her mother, she is never invited to an Algerian house. This noninvitation means that Cixous is not welcomed by Algeria, for which she then cannot have any patriotic feelings: “un pays où l’on est jamais invitée est-ce un pays [. . .] un pays sans porte sans seuil” [a country in which one is never invited can you call it a country [. . .] a country without a door without a threshold].178 This country, into which

84

Chapter 2

she is unable to “enter,” cannot, therefore, be the object of a possessive adjective, thus leading to Cixous’ nominal expression “ce pays natal” [this native [. . .] land],179 instead of “mon pays natal” [my native land]. Likewise, echoing Derrida’s formulations on his relationship to the French language,180 designated as his only language but one which is not his, Cixous writes: “ce pays qui était notre pays natal et pas du tout nôtre” [“this country that was the country of our birth but not ours at all”181]. The character of Aïcha is the emblematic incarnation of this lack of a long-desired and yet never offered Algerian invitation. An adored nanny who becomes a substitute for the lost paternal Algerianness, Aïcha is described as being Cixous’ only authentic physical knowledge of Algeria: “Aïcha [. . .] la seule Algérie que j’ai jamais pu toucher frotter retoucher palper” [Aïcha [. . .] the only Algeria that I was ever able to touch rub against touch again handle].182 The portrait of this maternal Algerian figure is based on an extended metaphor of the perfect (maternal) milk, in a style which Susan Suleiman calls, in the context of another text, “lyrical feminine celebration.”183 Cixous writes: “Aïcha lente crémeuse une jatte de lait sur le point de bouillir qui ne déborde pas remue de l’intérieur des épaisseurs désirables une gélatine enivrante à contempler pour son légérissime frémissement” [Aïcha slow creamy a jug of milk about to boil which doesn’t boil over stirring the delectable thickness from within which a jelly delightful to contemplate for its infinitesimal quivering].184 The image of creaminess and of heat communicates the young girl’s love and her desire for osmosis with Aïcha. However, the narrator never goes to Aïcha’s house, a fact that can be very easily explained—why would the daughter of the employer go to the employee’s house, unless Aïcha was taking care of her at her house?—but which Cixous transforms into a paradigm of larger Algerian rejection. Therefore, in the factual and personal affirmation “je n’ai jamais été chez elle” [I have never been to her house], repeated once again in the quote “Tout le temps du Clos-Salembier j’ai rêvé d’aller un jour chez Aïcha dans son chez” [The whole time of the Clos-Salembier I dreamed of going to Aïcha’s house one day], the idea of exclusion is generalized as applying to the whole country: “‘L’Algérie,’ en tant que nom caressant de l’intouchable” [Algeria’ as a name caressing the untouchable].185 Apogee of the distance separating the girl from Algerian Algeria, a few years after Algerian independence Cixous learns that her nanny’s real name was Messaouda.186 This type of error was common in French Algeria, as Cixous mentions the tendency to “fatmatiser”187 women, that is, to call any Arab women “Fatma.”188 The ontological peripheralization and manipulation of the indigenous people is reflected, as it were, in an imprecision in their names, an idea that Cixous expresses, in “Mon Algériance,” in these terms: “docilement Messaouda s’était laissé exproprier et réapproprier”189 [Messaouda had docilely let herself be expropriated and reappropriated].

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

85

However, as Derrida shows, from an ontological point of view, any “proper name,” any “identity” is a creation of a “white mythology” based on writing: the “essence or the energy of the graphein” is “the originary effacement of the proper name. From the moment that the proper name is erased in a system, there is writing, there is a ‘subject’ from the moment that this obliteration of the proper is produced.”190 Writing coincides with the moment of noncoincidence with the self, the dispossession, as the effacement of the proper is indeed related to temporalization, the spacing of difference. But if le propre (cleanness and property) can be a dangerous myth (used in racist rhetorics, for example), it appears only as the moment of nearing the presence, as the “basis of the self-proximity of subjectivity”191 and disappears as soon as it happens—a dynamic that Derrida calls, in Spectres of Marx, “exappropriation” to “name the condition of being always already expropriated.”192 This original violence of the obliteration is followed by the secondary violence: the “healing” of the writing, the creation of the proper name. Then the revealing of the secret, the so-called proper name, constitutes a possible third violence. Moreover, in colonial contexts, there is a fourth violence that Derrida does not mention: the imposition of another layer of writing, of a renaming, like, for example, the case of Aïcha and the other “Fatmas.” The nanny episode shows that Cixous partially participates in this false appearance of Algeria, in its epistemic violence, by calling her Aïcha and not Messaouda. However, by narrating the story of this false name, a distance is created with the “economy” of the proper name, thus diminishing, as it were, the more ontological violence of writing itself (i.e., imposing any name on this woman). The disappointment that Cixous experiences in not being able to enter Algeria is expressed through a telling neologism: “ma Désalgérie” [my Disalgeria].193 The privative suffix “dés” signals the deprivation of Algeria, a lack of Algeria that transforms the country into Désalgérie. All the while insisting on the idea of “déception” and “désillusion” through the link between the alliterations, the term “désalgérie” also transmits the idea of “départ” [departure] and “décollage” [taking off] toward the other side. Cixous illustrates this deprivation of Algeria and this rupture between her and the country in a last primal scene (located near the end of the story), the “histoire de [la] fille coupée en deux” [tale of a girl who gets cut in two],194 the writing of which creates a “multidirectional memory”, to borrow Michael Rothberg’s concept, echoing the history of the Holocaust. The episode takes place in Oran, on one of those sorts of Ferris wheel rides. Here goes the narration of the traumatic memory: La roue tourne, les wagonnets brinquebalent. Devant moi un homme penche et enlace une jeune fille voilée. Soudain comme une folle en feu elle saute comme une fille qui a pris le feu elle saute. L’Algériefrançaise sort de la scène. Le

86

Chapter 2

voile est happé dans un intervalle entre les lattes du manège. La jeune fille est entraînée dans le voile son corps est saisi comme une viande dans le moulin, elle ne peut pas le dégager. Le hurlement qu’elle pousse est entendu jusqu’au port. [. . .] Son corps coupé en deux par le milieu retenu dans le voile tombe comme une masse sur le sol de la place. [. . .] J’ai l’existence coupée en deux. C’est d’avoir vu et regardé le supplice que nul être humain ne devrait voir, dont nul être humain ne devrait détourner le regard, rivés que nous étions dans les wagonnets. [. . .] C’est une tragédie qui est aussi une Ville, un pays, une histoire [. . .] je suis une fille témoin de la victime, coupée de la victime. [The wheel turns, the little carriages swing back and forth. In front of me a man leans over and hugs a girl in a veil. Suddenly like a lunatic on fire she jumps like a girl who has caught fire she jumps. She is all you can see. FrenchAlgeria leaves the stage. The veil gets caught in the slats of the ride. The girl is yanked after her veil her boy is trapped like a piece of meat in a grinder, she can’t extract it. Her scream rings out right to the port. [. . .] Her body cut in two through its middle wrapped in the veil falls like a stone to the ground of the square. [. . .] My existence has been cut in two. It is from having seen and looked at the torture that no human being should have to see, that no human being should turn away from, riveted as we were in the little carriages. [. . .] It is a tragedy that is also a City, a country, a history [. . .] I am a girl the victim’s witness, cut of from the victim.195

First, the scene is primarily narrated as a paradigm of the French barrier that separates Cixous from the “petizarabes.” The man responsible for this drama is a Frenchman, a fact Cixous implies by calling him “l’Algériefrançaise.” As suggested by the generalization of this tragedy, which can also be applied to the “Ville,” to the country and to history, this scene constitutes an allegory of the colonial aggression of Algeria, represented by the veiled woman. The Jews are the “témoin[s],” but are not spared—they go through the historical trauma (“j’ai l’existence coupée en deux”) of being deprived of their local roots, “coupé[s] [des] victime[s].” This scene functions as a repetition of the Jews’ traumatic separation from the indigenous population and their (intermittent) exclusion from the French majority. Since, as Cathy Caruth explains in her seminal work on trauma Unclaimed experience, “In its general definition, trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena.”196 The traumatic identification with the event, and, at the same time, the inability to intellectually grasp it (to formulate its meaning), is expressed through the last sentence of the narration of this scene: “J’ai le sentiment que cela m’est arrivé. Depuis l’accident

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

87

quelque chose en moi me reste voilé” [I feel that that happened to me. Since that accident something inside me is veiled to me].197 The register of affect is separated by the italics (figuring the unspeakable trauma) from the knowledge of the event (“quelque chose”), which now seems unattainable (“voilé”). Indeed, just like with any traumas, as Caruth explains, “the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness.”198 At the same time, this temporal distance expressed through the motif of the veil that blurs the vision also connects distanced cultural identities: a part of Cixous remains veiled, remains Arab. This whole passage in the narrative shows that the archivation of trauma (in the unconscious) is transformed through a work on language and thought and redeployed into an archive that is a literary account producing a more complex comprehension of the self and the world. Second, the story of the girl cut into two also takes on a more universal dimension through lexical and semantic allusions to the Holocaust. Cixous mentions the “wagonnets” several times, which echo the wagons of the death trains that transported people to concentration camps. In addition, she insists on the “hurlement” of the girl, which is so powerful that it is heard even in the outskirts of Oran. This scream evokes those of the deported people in concentration camps and subsequently the gas chambers of extermination camps.199 These screams are indeed often mentioned in works on the concentration camp experience. Charlotte Delbo, in Aucun de nous ne reviendra, describes the death of a woman attacked by an SS dog: “La femme crie. Un cri arraché. Un seul cri qui déchire l’immobilité de la plaine. Nous ne savons pas si le cri vient d’elle ou de nous, de sa gorge crevée ou de la nôtre. Je sens les crocs du chien à ma gorge. Je crie. Je hurle. Aucun son ne sort de moi”200 [The woman lets out a cry. A wrenched-out scream. A single scream tearing through the immobility of the plain. We do not know if the scream had been uttered by her or by us, whether it is issued from her punctured throat, or from ours. I feel the dog’s fangs in my throat. I scream. I howl. Not a sound comes out of me]. The ambiguity of the source of the scream and whether it is collective or individual highlights the existence of shared suffering, as in Cixous’ text, where the scream represents an extreme collective mal (pain and evil), which is impossible to articulate. In Nuit et brouillard, the last words of Jean Cayrol also testify to the fact that the screams of the death camps make all other screams of suffering resonate: “on crie sans fin” [we scream without end].201 Moreover, in the story of the girl cut into two, Cixous describes the feeling of guilt felt by survivors, descendants or witnesses, which is characteristic of the psychological condition of Jews of the post-Holocaust generation (and which she also brings up in other texts of hers). Right after the quoted passage, the texts goes on with: “La faute me prend, ici, dans ce wagonnet. La

88

Chapter 2

faute, son terrible mystère. Je n’ai rien fait. J’étais là. Je suis encore là. J’ai vu. J’ai vécu. Je ne suis pas morte. Il y a faute” [The fault grips me, here, in the little carriage. The fault, its terrible mystery. I did nothing. I was there. I saw. I lived it. There is a fault].202 Cixous is a witness to colonial injustices and atrocities, and is also, through her mother, a descendant of victims of the Shoah, which she reminds us through this multidirectional memorial story of the girl cut in two.203 As such, Cixous experienced the very ambiguity of trauma: “Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?” as Caruth rightfully asks.204 THE GEOGRAPHY OF FEMALE EXCLUSIONS: FROM RUPTURES TO WRITING THE FATHER’S TOMB In addition to the “porte française” and Arab separation, Cixous recounts the exclusion of the Jewish woman via two characters: her mother and “le Chien” (the Dog). In Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, Cixous’ father epitomizes the link to Algeria, whereas her mother, who becomes a midwife upon her father’s death, represents the rupture, the nonrelationship with the country. Indeed, Eve Klein is constantly reminded of her European origin: she was born in Germany and then became French, and remains a foreigner to Algeria and to its Sephardic culture. Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews constitute two worlds foreign to one another, as Cixous writes: Elle [Cixous’ mother] n’a [. . .] pas le sentiment d’appartenir à une communauté dont elle n’avait jamais entendu parler avant d’arriver en Algérie et si son beaupère n’avait pas été mort peu avant son arrivée elle n’aurait probablement pas épousé mon père qui n’aurait pas pu si facilement s’opposer au refus opposé par son père à un mariage avec une ashkénaze qui de son côté n’avait jamais entendu le mot sépharade avant d’arriver à Oran. [She doesn’t have the feeling of belonging to a community she had never heard of before arriving in Algeria and if her father-in-law hadn’t died shortly before she arrived she probably wouldn’t have married my father who could not so easily have opposed his father’s refusal to let him marry an Ashkenazi who had never heard the word Sephardi before coming to Oran.]205

The repetition of the term “opposé(r)” highlights the contrast between the mother and father in Cixous’ evocation of the parental couple. Her mother is a foreigner in Algeria, and according to Cixous, she cannot conceive of the “malgérien” lack of love that affects her children. Cixous illustrates the drastic nature of her mother’s lack of understanding regarding the situation

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

89

of “inséparabité” through the story of the crisis over the Bicycle. She writes, with a touch of humor, “ma mère, structurellement, n’était pas faite pour comprendre la gravité dans l’affaire du Vélo, elle ne voyait pas, structurellement, que [ses enfants étaient] fous et malades du besoin de l’Algérie” [my mother, in structural terms, was not built to understand the gravity of the Bike business, she did not see, structurally, that [her children were] crazed and ill with our need of Algeria].206 The repetition of the adverb “structurellement” recalls the biography of Eve Klein, who was the subject of systematic exclusions, due to her feminine and Jewish identity: from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, in Algeria under Vichy, and then in society as a widow. Eve Cixous experienced so many “exils exclusions expulsions exactions”207 that rejection constitutes her condition, her “structure” of existence. Thus, her mother is portrayed as an outside being. However, in contrast with her children, who wish to “enter” Algeria, Eve Cixous absolutizes her rupture with the world.208 In this sense, her mother is described as an existentially self-sufficient being: “ma mère l’industrieuse qui refaisait chaque fois un nid dans l’exil même, à la fourche même de l’exil” [“my industrious mother who rebuilt her nest every time in exile, in the very fork of exile”209]. Within the Algerian context of omnipresent hostility, she is “absolument étrangère au déversement ordurier d’insultes [. . .] elle fait preuve d’absence à toute scène de violence [. . .] elle est immunisée [. . .]. Cette insensibilité, cette stabilité, c’est troublant. Rien ne la touche dedans” [utterly oblivious to ranting filthy insults [. . .] she calls in absent at any scene of violence [. . .] she is immune [. . .]. This insensitivity, this stability, is troubling. Nothing touches her internally].210 Thus, Cixous constructs a dichotomy within her family between diseased and nondiseased. On the one hand, as a legacy of the father’s suffering from tuberculosis, Cixous and her brother incarnate the psychological “maladie,” the “mal d’amour” for Algeria. On the other hand, there is her mother, “blindée [. . .] par son héritage génétique allemand” [armor-plated ([. . .] by her German genetic heritage] and who incarnates the “bonne santé” [good health], the “poste de bien-portante” [one’s post of the healthy]; in other words, “droiture” [stand up straight] and an “aptitude remarquable au rétablissement” [astounding aptitude for recovery].211 A few pages further along, in a hyperbolic description that mixes physical disease and psychological disease, Eve Cixous is depicted as a sort of Nietzschean “superhuman” who has never gotten sick, and especially not with love. She always remained separated, “cut” from this kind of “disease.” The figure of rupture (“coupure”) represented by the mother is further supported by Eve Cixous’ professional identity. Upon her husband’s death, she becomes a midwife and transforms Georges Cixous’ Hospital into “La Clinique”—a physical place with a highly symbolic connotation, like the

90

Chapter 2

Citröen and the Bicycle, the capital letters of which all reflect the mythification developed by the story. The Clinic represents the bond of life conveyed through the births that take place there. Alternatively, it is personified, with its “grand utérus,” and named, through metonymy, “le Berceau” [Cradle] of the City of Algiers, and also the “moulin à sortir des enfants au jour algérien” [mill for turning babies out into the light of the Algerian day].212 However, for Cixous and her brother, being a midwife is to be a “coup[euse] de cordon” [cutter of cords].213 Therefore, Cixous reduces her mother to a matrix of separation, and emphasizes the rupture in birth rather than the continuity of life. Eve Cixous emblematically becomes one of the “couteaux” [knives]214 that break the symbolic cord between the Algerian homeland and its children. Further along, continuing with the metaphor of birth and rupture, Cixous describes herself as “l’avorton entêté” [stubborn abortion]215 of Algeria, underlining the abortive failure of the mother, who should not have brought her children into the Algerian world. In these two examples, the mother represents the person who breaks the mediation between Cixous and Algeria. Treating Eve Klein with both humor and cruelty, Cixous sums up the “Allemande irréversible” [German, irreversible in my opinion]216 as a brutal and stoic being that breaks all bonds: “Un lien pense-t-elle est fait pour être coupé, un désir sevré. Je me demande, se demande mon frère, si elle n’est pas devenue sage-femme par penchant inné ou acquis pour les coupements de cordon” [A tie she thinks is made to be broken, a desire to be cut off. I wonder, my brother wonders, if she didn’t become a midwife out of an innate or acquired tendency to cut cords].217 However, the portrait of Eve Cixous is more complex and reveals forms of female alienation that the text seeks to archive. Behind the “coupure de cordon” with the indigenous people is another dividing line experienced by the mother: rejection by Algerian Jews. Eve was not familiar with the Sephardi community and did not attempt to integrate into it via the synagogue, where she refused to go, but she experienced rejection regardless. In one passage, Cixous mentions the exclusion of the young widow by the deceased Georges Cixous’ Jewish friends, and her mother’s solitude, which is only interrupted by the presence of her grandmother (her mother’s mother), Omi: elle [Eve] était abandonnée, seule avec Omi-pour-monde, rejetée par la soi-disant communauté des amis de mon père qui la considéraient comme un morceau de viande relevant soit du corps de mon père, soit après la mort du mari, comme devant revenir à leur assiette, un sort qui était tellement loin de l’esprit de ma mère que du jour au lendemain elle s’est retrouvée mise à la porte, comme le sont toutes les veuves jeunes dans tous les pays sous-développés, mais pas en Allemagne. [. . .] elle s’est retrouvée rejetée, mise en quarantaine définitive à

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

91

l’âge de trente-six ans, toutes les portes d’hospitalité et d’amitié verrouillées de l’intérieur. [she [Eve] was abandoned, left with Omi-for-world, rejected by the so-called community of my father’s friends who thought of her exclusively as a piece of meat under the jurisdiction of my father’s body, or after the husband’s death, part and parcel of their own plate, a fate which was so foreign to my mother’s way of thinking that overnight she found doors slammed in her face, as happens to all young widows in underdeveloped countries, but not in Germany. [. . .] she found herself cast out, quarantined for good at the age of thirty-seix, all the doors of hospitality and friendship bolted from within.]218

Through the reaffirmed cultural opposition between Europe and North Africa, the status of women in Algeria is criticized in harsh terms, depicting the female condition as being that of an object to be consumed (“viande”). This state of female inferiority, common in the different communities of Algeria, is also widespread within the Arab slum of Clos-Salembier, so much so that it is much harder to live in this neighborhood after her father’s death and as a single-parent family whose authority is made up of two women, Eve Cixous and her mother Omi. Cixous explains the situation in a few suggestive sentences: cet endroit appelé Clos-Salembier se retourna dès la mort de mon père en lieu d’expulsions multiples et interminables. [. . .] Car ce qui était peut-être possible avec père avec mari avec homme, et qui était d’entrer d’un côté ou de l’autre était absolument exclu pour un groupe sans père sans mari sans homme et plus particulièrement au Clos-Salembier. [this place called Clos-Salembier on the death of my father became once again the site of multiple and endless expulsions. [. . .] For what was perhaps possible under the wing of father husband man, which was to go in and out on both sides was utterly out of the question for a group that was lacking a father husband man and especially in and from the Clos-Salembier.]219

Taking up the image of the door once again, Cixous depicts a situation where it is no longer a question of choosing a side but rather the impossibility of this choice itself for a woman. Without a father, the Cixous are not even able to “see” the door, which becomes a wall, thus excluding them from any community. In La Jeune Née, Cixous creates, in an entirely different context, a portmanteau word that perfectly highlights the condition of Cixous and her

92

Chapter 2

mother in “Algériefrançaise”: “juifemme.”220 Uniting the two attributes of “juif” and “femme,” this lexical contraction of the syllables contains many meanings, according to whether the “f” is attached to the first syllable or the second. Consequently, “juifemme” communicates “juif âme,” which religiously attaches Eve Cixous to the myth of the wandering Jew, the eternal outcast of the goyim (the established nations). Eve Cixous has indeed been itinerant, from Germany, France, and then Algeria, and then to France once again, stopping her from designating a home. And regarding Zionism, the character of Eve Cixous in Les Rêveries claims: “chaque fois qu’il y a un nationalisme je ne vais pas, j’ai toujours été internationale” [every time there is some kind of nationalism I don’t go, I have always been international].221 As Debrauwere-Miller says, in “Le ‘Malgérien’ d’Hélène Cixous,” Eve Cixous is a “passing” figure and reactivates the romantic myth of the “wandering Jew.”222 Moreover, the term can be read as “j’suis femme,” “jouit/s femme,” and “j’ouïs femme.” In these cases, “femme,” which refers to both the female gender and wife, is respectively associated with being, pleasure, and with speaking and listening. It is precisely as a “juifemme,” a strong woman, free in her body and independent, that Eve Cixous is excluded from the different communities in Algeria. The character in Les Rêveries that allegorically represents the condition of the total exclusion of the Cixous family with Eve at its head is “Le Chien” (The Dog)—named “Fips”—always with capital letters, transforming the common name into a unique creature. Long awaited by Cixous and her brother, the Dog is adopted by the family shortly after the death of her father. Very quickly, it becomes a suffering and alienated being, just like the diseased and condemned father—“Tous les deux [. . .] ont ces yeux fiévreux. Tous les deux tendus vers un autre monde” [Both of them [. . .] have feverish eyes. Both of them straining toward another world].223 For that matter, the two characters are linked from the beginning through a common lexical field: “Nous l’avions attendu avec la vénération due au Chien annoncé par notre père, le Chien d’Annonciation, notre frère et enfant. Et maintenant le Chien qui autrefois fut le Roi et le fils de Dieu descend lentement dans la déshéritance, une vie ratée enfermée dans la cage” [We had awaited its coming with the veneration due to the Dog foretold by our father, the Annunciation Dog, our brother and child. And now the Dog who was once the king and son of God is slowly descending into disinheritance, a flop of a life locked up in a cage].224 Grouping together the idea of waiting, hope, and speaking, the play on the lexical field of “annonce,” and notably the term “Annonciation,” with its biblical connotation, repeats the passage on the mythical trip in the Citröen, which is presented as a “signe annonciateur”225 of a Judeo-Muslim community to come. Just as the “annonce” of the Citröen carries the idea of

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

93

a glowing future, that of the Dog promises something happy: “nous qui avions toujours attendu en vain un troisième enfant, nous fûmes transportés de ferveur lorsque notre père nous annonça la substitution: ainsi nous aurions un bébé, un enfant de notre père mourant” [we would had always waited in vain for a third child, we were beyond ourselves with excitement when our father announced the substitute: thus we were to have a baby, a child by our dying father].226 The Dog is substitute for the father, taking his place in a certain way. However, the Dog becomes a prophetic mirror of the condition of total alienation of the fatherless family, as described by Cixous. The second deceitful “signe annonciateur” after the Citroën, the arrival of the Dog is followed by a succession of “enfermement[s]”227 of the animal, foreshadowing the series of exclusions that the family was to go through without Cixous’ father. The metaphorical representation of the Dog as a third child transmits the literal maternal attitude of Cixous and her brother toward the animal, a true nursling-hostage that they try to “incarcérer dans [leur] tendresse” [incarcerate [. . .] in [their] tenderness]228—an oxymoron that reveals a complex relationship of otherness in proximity, like the Arabs for the Jews in Algeria, but most of all like women in a patriarchal and sexist society. The semantic field around incarceration testifies to the prison treatment reserved for the Dog: “Il ne se laisse pas coucher dans le berceau. Nous luttons. Nous le couchons de force, nous lui mettons le drap, nous voulons un enfant, nous l’aplatissons. [. . .] Nous l’attachons, nous le reléguons dans la cage. [. . .] Le Chien est battu. Nous ne le laissons pas se défendre. Le Chien ne dort plus jamais” [He won’t be laid to sleep in the cradle. We struggle. We put him to bed, we pull the sheet up over him, we want a child, we push him down. [. . .] We tie him up, we consign him to his cage. [. . .] The Dog is beaten. We don’t let him defend himself. The Dog stops sleeping].229 The animal is the victim of violent treatment, which is reminiscent of the acts of torture during the Algerian War of Independence, including beatings, imprisonment, and sleep deprivation. Nonetheless, the condition of the Dog is most importantly a miniature version of the Cixous family’s “condition de chien.”230 The animal’s cage condenses “la cage du Clos-Salembier”231 and the stone launched toward a loved one recall the situation at the gate with the attacking petizarabes—with the notable difference that the Cixous are in a much higher social position than the surrounding Arabs, a superiority position that the Dog does not share with regards to the Cixous children. The narration of the primal scene of the Dog does more than create an allegory of the condition of alienation; it also produces a complex archive that opens up to a historicization of the victim’s condition: there is a displacement turning the Arab victims into torturers (of the Dog).

94

Chapter 2

Mixing a touch of humor into the generally serious tone, Cixous poetically describes the mimetic chain of alienation and rewrites (in italics) a passage of Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire: Nous sommes enfermés et là-dessus nous l’enfermons. [. . .] Nous bouclons notre propre frère, pour le Chien c’est l’enfer, nous-mêmes nous mettons aux fers l’héritier de notre père, il n’y a plus de loi, le monde est à l’envers et Le Chien est trahi. [. . .] Est-ce que je suis juif, se demandait Le Chien. [. . .] Mais qu’est-ce que ça veut dire juif, se demandait Le Chien, et arabe, et chien, ami, frère, ennemi, papa, liberté il n’y a qu’injustice et brutalité. Me voici donc seul sur la terre, n’ayant plus de frère, de sœur, de père prochain, d’ami de société que ma solitude. Le plus sociable et le plus aimant des êtres est proscrit d’un accord unanime. Je suis dans cette position de cage comme dans un rêve et je ne dors plus jamais. Et moi, détaché d’eux et attaché au fil de fer, que suis-je moimême? [. . .] Après les attaques j’évitais de passer devant la cage où il hurlait encore longtemps après la fin du mitraillage. Je fuyais son visage épouvantable. Je ne pensais qu’à fuir ce pays d’enchaînés, cette chaîne d’enchaînements, ce déchaînement d’enchaînés qui à leur tour enchaînent. [We are shut in, whereupon we shut him in. [. . .] We lock up our own brother, for the Dog it is hell, we ourselves clamp our father’s heir in irons, there is no more law, the world is topsy-turvy and the Dog has been betrayed. [. . .] Am I Jewish, the Dog wondered I say. [. . .] But what does Jewish mean, wondered the Dog, and Arab, and dog, friend, brother, enemy, Papa, liberty nothing exists save injustice and brutality. Here I am, alone on the earth, having no more brother, sister, no father nearby, no friend only my solitude for company. The most sociable and loving of beings is unanimously outlawed. I am caged as in a dream and I don’t sleep anymore. And I, detached from them and tied to a strand of wire, what am I? [. . .] After the attacks I avoided going to the cage where he continued howling long after the shooting stopped. I fled his fearful face. I only thought about fleeing this country of chained-up creatures, that chain of chainings-up, the unleashing of the chained-up who in their turn start chaining.]232

First of all, the infernal chain of imprisonments starts with the French, who hold the indigènes hostage, who, in turn, represented in Clos-Salembier by the “petizennemis” (the extremely poor people of the surrounding slum) surround the Cixous family, who in turn chain up their dog in a cage. The parechesis of “ère,” and even the accumulation of the syllable “fer” (“enfermés,” “enfermons,” “frère,” “enfer,” “fers,” “père,” “envers”), which stands out in the first sentences of the quote, reinforces the harshness (the rough tone of the voiced consonant “r”) and the seriousness (resonance of the oral vowel “è”

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

95

through the voiced consonant “r”) of the chain of alienation.233 This inexorable mechanism of deprivation and of imprisonment is evoked once again in the last sentence, declining the term “chaîne” with different prefixes and suffixes: “enchaînements,” “déchaînements,” and so on. Through this narration of alienated Algerian Russian dolls, the idea of a general contamination of the social body by the colonial disease reaches its climax, turning all the inhabitants of French Algeria into “des chiens enragés les uns contre les autres” [mad dogs, each against the other].234 She uses again the medical metaphor, developing the parallel between the rage of the Dog and the moral rage of men: “[Le Chien] avait des tiques. La rage se propage. Nous devenions méchants, nous mordions” [[The Dog] had ticks. Madness is catching. We turned mean, we bit each other].235 The colonization of Algeria, through which massacres and expropriations were carried out, is implicitly compared to the propagation of ticks on the animal’s pale body: “Une démographie du cauchemar, [les tiques] naissaient de tout et nulle part, colonisant en lentes frénésies le corps vampirisé” [a nightmarish demography, [the ticks] come up out of everything and nowhere, colonizing the vampirized body in a slow-motion frenzy].236 The image of the vampire echoes the previously analyzed idea of spectralization of the indigenous body in colonial Algeria. As I mentioned, the figure of the Dog allows Cixous to speak of the victim condition of her fatherless family, image of a feminine condition in Algeria, without, however, adopting a victim discourse centered around her own story. Preceding the Rousseau quote in italics, in the passage cited above, the philosophical questioning on identity constitutes a powerful example of such a distancing. This meditation serves as a pivotal point, transforming what could be a scream of absolute victim suffering into an act of interrogating a universal value. The humorous effect produced by the free indirect discourse that supposedly conveys the Dog’s words does not diminish the serious nature of the questioning regarding the pariah condition. On the contrary, it allows for the empathetic potential of such a meditative posture to be opened up to all, with the Dog symbolizing in this case an otherness that all personal identities possess with respect to others.237 The Dog thus incarnates both similarity (victim) and difference (animal), a paradoxical reality that Cixous expresses through the use of the term “transfigure,” the prefix of which (“trans”) signals the passage from one figure to another: “le destin du Chien [. . .] est la métaphore et le cœur de toute l’histoire, la transfigure de la famille et le résumé de nos Algéries [. . .]. Mon âme Le Chien. Ma transfigure sauvage” [the destiny of the Dog [. . .] is the metaphor at the heart of the whole story, the family’s transfigure and the epitome of our Algerias [. . .]. My soul the Dog. My wild transfigure].238 The importance of the term, italicized by the author, allows her to insist on the image of continuity in difference, a process of “diifférance” as Derrida

96

Chapter 2

would say, as if to display a channel of reciprocal transmission between the Dog, “transfigure sauvage,” and Cixous, “femme sauvage” (expression from the book’s title). Furthermore, the transfiguration of the suffering soul takes on a mythical (religious) dimension, since Cixous portrays the Dog as resembling Job, a biblical figure who is the archetype of the victim. She writes: “Job était Le Chien, je ne l’ai compris que trop tard [. . .]. Les fléaux lui sont envoyés, dieu était bien caché” [Job was the Dog, only I understood that too late. [. . .] He is plagued, god was well hidden].239 The subject of a book in the Old Testament and of a text in the Koran, Job is a figure common to the three Abrahamic religions, all present in French Algeria. The biblical tale states that God inflicts suffering on Job, a righteous individual, after making a bet with Satan: Job goes through material and immaterial losses and withstands the suffering of disease without ever losing his faith. The reference to this biblical character in Cixous’ text perfects the portrait of the loyal and wounded Dog (Job never renounces his god) as the image of the Cixous family, who remain in Clos-Salembier (and in Algeria after independence, in the case of the mother and brother), despite all hardships. In the end, this primal scene is about the duality between the drive to live (resistance to evil) and the impetus of death—an interpretation of the Freudian theory developed by Mélanie Klein.240 Furthermore, in the Dog story, the intertextuality (the rewriting of the first sentences of Rousseau’s “Première promenade”) enriches the representation of alienation by making the particularity of the Algerian situation resonate in a deterritorialized dimension.241 The reader’s imagination opens up to another time period (the eighteenth century of Rousseau) and another place (his exile in Switzerland). The reference to Rousseau also reinforces the representation of a diseased society. For the philosopher, human beings are good by nature, but the state of society corrupts and alienates them: “L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers” [Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains] Rousseau writes at the very beginning of his Contrat Social.242 This hypothesis, which is understood through the reiteration of the syllable “fer” in Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, is taken up by Cixous in an implicit way and adapted to the colonial context, through the story of the Dog. The narrative of this cage—social, and specifically colonial—is at the midpoint of the novel, and functions as a narrative fold, dividing the two halves of the book. The episode echoes the other “personalized” places of the novel (Algiers, The School, Clos-Salembier, The Clinic, and so on) as the cage is a sort of essence of all other forms of alienation. In addition, the story of the cage is inserted into a larger portion of the text dedicated to Clos-Salembier, which is itself framed in advance by the memories of the cities of Algiers and Oran and later echoed by the episodes of The Clinic and the French School.

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

97

In other words, there is a textual mise en abyme effect in the story of the Dog, which suggests that regardless of the location of the characters, they are always “dans les fers.” Likewise, this geography is multidirectional memorial writing. All of these “closed” places (the “closed doors” of Algeria), represented in a symmetrical way with respect to an axis that consists of the Dog’s cage, are reminiscent of the prison and concentration camp spaces of Nazi Europe.243 Furthermore, and finally, the narration of all these cages also conveys the idea of the ultimate enclosed space, which is the father’s tomb. While Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage carries out a mourning process for the loss of the Algerian land, which Cixous left behind in 1954,244 behind the image of the deserted land after exile is that of her dead father, whose tomb remains abandoned in the heights of Algiers, in the Jewish cemetery of SaintEugène.245 From her first texts on her Algerian memories and onward, Cixous more or less implicitly associates her lost country with her dead father, and the Algerian soil with his grave. In “Mon algériance,” she writes about the land of her childhood and of her deceased father: J’y ai laissé mon père mêler sa poussière à cette poussière, tribut rendu à une terre d’emprunt. Laisser derrière soi la tombe de son père: par la poussière me vient une sorte d’appartenance invisible à une terre à laquelle je suis liée par mes atomes sans nationalité. A cause du fantôme de mon père, je ne peux m’apatrier nulle part. Une abandonnance retient ma mémoire sur les hauteurs invisitées d’Alger. [I left my father there to mix his dust with that dust, a tribute paid to a borrowed land. To leave behind the grave of one’s father: through dust I acquire a sort of invisible belonging to a land to which I am bound by my atoms without nationality. Because of the phantom of my father I cannot be patriated anywhere. An abandonment retains my memory on the unvisited heights of Algiers.]246

A borrowed land (“terre d’emprunt”) for all of the human beings who are only passing through, but in particular, for the “peuple sans terre” [people with no homeland], Algeria is linked to the father via the common and universal denominator of dust (“poussière”).247 Cixous’ obsession with her father, combined with an inability to settle (“je ne peux m’apatrier nulle part [. . .] retient [. . .] sur les hauteurs [. . .] d’Alger” [I cannot be patriated anywhere]), betrays the absence of mourning and even displays a certain guilt. As suggested by the ending of the neologism “abandonnance,” Cixous feels a throbbing pain from having left her father’s corpse in a distant cemetery. Indeed, the trauma of her father’s death commingles with that of her exile, to such an extent that both of them were long absent from any of her work.

98

Chapter 2

Cixous mentions this repression in Si près, a 2006 text that follows up on certain memorial scenes started by Les Rêveries. Speaking of the severe trauma caused by the death of her father in hyperbolic terms (“malheur monstrueux dont l’événement entraîne la destruction du monde” [a monstrous misfortune whose event entails the destruction of the world]),248 she writes: “Cette prise de pouvoir par la catastrophe cette tyrannie pure, absolue, de l’injuste, je suis dans l’incapacité physique et mentale de l’admettre. [. . .] La mort de mon père, je ne l’ai pas crue. [. . .] Je disais: il n’est pas mort.” [I am physically and mentally incapable of admitting this seizure of power by catastrophe this pure, absolute tyranny of what is unjust. [. . .] I did not believe my father’s death.].249 The death of her father was repressed for several decades and at the same time, no mentions of Algeria figured in Cixous’ books.250 Algeria, the fatherland, remained, physically and intellectually, out of her reach for decades. Fleeing her own emotions linked to the country of her father and of her childhood, Cixous confesses having reduced for a long time her Algerian past to an idea—a cold reality devoid of emotion and of the sensuality of her experiences—which she archived in the depths of her memory: Je reconnais qu’une allégorie a depuis trente-cinq ans pris la place de l’Algérie dans ma tête. Et dès avant que l’allégorie se produise, je n’ai de mémoire que si profondément plantée dans les replis de ma chair, si gravée dans ma grotte personnelle, qu’il me semble, dès que je dis cette phrase, être dans l’Antiquité d’une fiction que j’invente et dont je suis l’invention. [I recognize that for thirty-five years an Allegory has taken the place of Algeria in my head. And before the allegory was produced, I have no other memory except so profoundly planted in the folds of my flesh, so engraved in my personal grotto that, as soon as I say this sentence, I seem to be in the antiquity of a fiction I invent and whose invention I am.]251

Cixous completely “derealized” her Algerian history in her own eyes. However, repressed memories always return, and it is through the reappearance of Algeria in a dream that she started working on Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, which starts in this way: “une porte vient de s’entrebâiller dans la galerie Oubli de ma mémoire [. . .] toute la nuit, à travers le flot abondant des rêves et le chaos des civilisations l’Algérie m’avait envoyé des paquets de traces, des visions, expédiant des colis à travers des milliers d’obstacles, ressuscitant à neuf des personnages complètement oubliés” [a door has cracked open in the Oblivion Wing of my memory [. . .] all night long, through an abundant flow of dreams and the chaos of civilizations Algeria had sent me a sea of traces, visions, relaying packages across

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

99

thousands of obstacles, bringing totally forgotten people to life].252 As she mentions at the beginning of the book, in a sort of nocturnal trance, Cixous hurries to write down the remaining snippets of her dream about Algeria in a notebook: “quatre grandes pages de lignes serrées en caractères épais hâtifs qui sentaient l’encre la terre le galop la sueur les naseaux haletants” [four big, single-spaced pages, fragrant with ink earth galloping sweat panting nostrils].253 This image, evoking the speed of a horse and the thirst of memory, represents a reenactment of the “traumatic” desire for Algeria—traumatic, because this desire is always followed by a violent exclusion and a situation of being locked outside. Cixous thinks she has finally reached the memory of Algeria that she had lost. However, upon waking up, there are no longer any sheets or memories. The Algerian “disease” thus returns: “C’était la même douleur qui me rendait folle, celle de ne pas trouver la chose même” [It was this same anguish that was driving me crazy, the anguish of not finding the thing itself]254—“la chose,” in the past, was the interior of Algeria and its native population, whereas in the present, this “chose” is the sheets on which the memory of Algeria according to the dream is written. The inaccessibility of Algeria is reenacted. As DebrauwereMiller writes: “la disparition mystérieuse de ses feuilles prétendues écrites, réserve de la mémoire, sont à l’image de l’Algérie inaccessible qu’elle croyait tenir en rêve et qui contient le trépas du père [. . .].” [the mysterious disappearance of these supposedly written pages, storehouse of memory, is an image of the inaccessible Algeria that she thought she grasped in the dream, and which contains her father’s death].255 Indeed, what is being expressed in this repeated loss of Algeria is a previous trauma: the disappearance of her father, who died of tuberculosis. The symptoms of this disease (fever, sweats, cough, and so on) appear in Cixous’ description of her “malgérie,” which returns when she looks for the notebook sheets. Following the “fièvre de la nuit de juillet” [fever of a July night] and the “sueur” [sweat], Cixous claims to have gone through “délire” [delirium] and “frénésie” [frenzy],256 and affirms that the reappearance of her “malgérienne” pain “se met à [l]’occuper, à [l]’envahir, à [lui] monter dans les poumons, aux oreilles, à la tête, [. . .] tout [son] corps [est] une algie insupportable” [starts to take over, to invade [her], invest [her] lungs, [her] ears, [her] head, [. . .] [her] whole body [is] a searing pain].257 The first body part mentioned is precisely the organ affected by tuberculosis: the lungs.258 Furthermore, the disease of the body (fever and respiratory pains that resemble her father’s tuberculosis) and the disease of the soul (“maladie algérie” or “malgérie”) are linked to one another from the beginning of the text, representing a single psychosomatic disease. Further along in the text, the psychosomatic link is made clear through a metaphor: “je saisis le mal que j’aperçois [the omnipresent alienation in French Algeria], j’ai l’Algérie dans

100

Chapter 2

mon poumon dans mon gosier [. . .] elle me donne les fièvres et meurtri[t] ma toile mentale de bavures envenimées” [I grasp the evil I see, I’ve got Algeria in my lungs in my throat [. . .] it [turns] me hot and cold and [bruises] my nervous system with its toxic overflow].259 FrenchAlgeria is the source of the disease, which affects the father first in the form of “Vichy-à-Oran,” and which causes the fever and “bavures envenimées”—that is, the hateful “rage” that affects the daughter.260 However, just like the body, which “sweats out” the fever, writing externalizes a pain that has been repressed until that moment. The text of Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage represents a means of working through the trauma of the loss of her father, just as the rewriting of the lost pages demonstrates, through their very existence, an acceptance of this loss. The narration of the primal scenes records the loss of her father’s tomb, at the same time taking the place of the burial site. In fact, Cixous’ writing links back to an ancestral practice of using writing as a means of burying the dead. As Michel de Certeau points out, “au sens ethnologique et quasi religieux du terme, l’écriture joue le role d’un rite d’enterrement; elle exorcise la mort en l’introduisant dans le discours” [writing plays the role of a burial rite, in the ethnological and quasi-religious meaning of the term; it exorcises death by inserting it into discourse].261 Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage is a book-grave. This idea of a scriptural tomb was actually expressed by Cixous in 2008, when, upon her editor’s request, she republished one of her first novels, Tombe (1973). In the preface, entitled “Mémoires de Tombe,” she writes: Tombe est un livre et une tombe. Les deux. Une tombe peut être un livre. [. . .] Tombe a la racine tubercule. La pierre se végétalise. La mémoire repousse sous l’oubli qui l’enterre. [. . .] J’avais totalement oublié, perdu, invisité cette Tombe. [. . .] Par chance, je venais de retrouver tombe, comme on retrouve terre, la tombe de mon père, c’est-à-dire mon père tombé et relevé au cimetière SaintEugène à Alger. [. . .] Toutes les tombes de ma vie sont nées de la Tombe de mon père. Jamais revu la Tombe depuis cinquante ans. [Tombe is a book and a grave [tombe]. Both. A grave can be a book. [. . .] Tombe has a tubercular root. The stone covers itself with plants. Memory grows again beneath the oblivion which buries it. [. . .] I had completely forgotten, lost, unvisited this Tombe. [. . .] Luckily, I had just got back to tomb, as one gets back to earth, the tomb of my father, that is to say, my father has fallen to his grave and raised [tombé et relevé] at the Saint-Eugène cemetery in Algiers. [. . .] All the tombs of my life were born from the Tomb of my father. Never seen the Tomb again for fifty years].262

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

101

The meaning of this preface takes roots in the initial metaphor, a semantic and homophonic play on the “racine tubercule” of the tomb. The botanical meaning of the term designates a swelling with a round appearance located at the base of a plant. In old cemeteries, tombs are often adorned with trees, the bulbs of which are located under the tombstone. However, “tubercule” also has an anatomical meaning: “une petite éminence arrondie située à la surface d’un organe” [a small, round protrusion located on the surface of an organ].263 This term lends its name to the disease that kills Georges Cixous, which displays the formation of tubercles through the enclosing and trapping action of Koch bacillus (bacteria). Cixous’ poetic phrase can be read as a metaphorical trope that is related to the death (“tombe”) of her father, the origin of which (“racine”) is tuberculosis (“tubercule”). A memory long repressed, this founding event, the source of all the books she has written (“toutes les tombes de ma vie sont nées de la Tombe de mon père”), came back to her shortly before the writing of this preface, she says, always continuing with the botanical metaphor (“la mémoire repousse sous l’oubli qui l’enterre”). As I have shown, Les Rêveries encouraged this return to memory as much as it stemmed from it, an aspect that is expressed explicitly in Si près, a later text, in which she “revisits” her father’s tomb.264 The writing of Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage participates in a mourning process that carries out, at the same time, an exorcism of the “Algerian disease.” Accepting to live without her father is to recognize living in a sort of exteriority and to exist in a form of absence. The conjuration of the disease via the neutralizing, yet not completely scarring, power of writing appears in the form of an order in one of Cixous’ first texts, “La venue à l’écriture” [Coming to Writing], in which she tells herself, addressing all women: “Surmonte l’atroce, l’angoissant dégoût, non de la mort, mais de la condamnation, du travail de la maladie. [. . .] Agis. Réponds. Tu as perdu la main qui écrit? Apprends à écrire de l’autre main. [. . .] D’une main, souffrir, vivre, toucher du doigt la douleur, la perte. Mais il y a l’autre main: celle qui écrit” [Overcome the atrocious, anguishing disgust, not at death but at the condemnation, the work of sickness [. . .] Act. Respond. You’ve lost the hand that writes? Learn to write with the other hand. [. . .] With one hand, suffering, living, putting your finger on pain, loss. But there is the other hand: the one that writes”].265 Writing allows Cixous to arm herself against “malgérie,” and the neutralization of affect permits a reconciliation with the memory of her Algerian past, as demonstrated by the very last sentences of Les Rêveries: “maintenant plus j’en parle et plus j’y reviens surtout avec mon frère plus je me sens chez moi au Clos-Salembier [. . .] autant j’y suis chez moi maintenant que je n’y suis plus enchaînée et maintenant que j’en parle” [now the more I talk about it and the more I go back there especially with my brother the more

102

Chapter 2

I feel at home in the Clos-Salembier [. . .] so I am at home there now I am no longer chained up and now I talk about it].266 This complex relationship to the homeland is just as difficult for the Harkis and their children, most of whom associate Algeria with the prison where their father was locked up, as the next chapter examines.

NOTES 1. Stora, Les Trois exils, 9. Stora cites the revealing example of the popular film La Vérité si je mens, which inscribed the image of the Tunisian Jew “arpentant les planches de Deauville ou s’affairant dans le quartier du Sentier” (9) [roaming the boardwalks of Deauville or bustling about the Sentier quarter] into French memory. The Algerian Jewish origin of numerous French personalities, such as the philosopher Jacques Derrida or the actor Roger Hanin (whose real name is Lévy), was often discovered upon the death of these famous men, or at least in their later life. In 2002, there were two times fewer Jews of Moroccan and Tunisian origin than Jews from Algeria, according to a study carried out by the Fonds social juif unifié. Erik H. Cohen, dir. Les Juifs de France, valeurs et identités (Paris: FSJU, 2002), 6. French law prohibits census by religion, which explains the absence of exact statistics. 2. Jews from North Africa have been laying claim to the “Sephardic” identity since the middle of the 1980s. It allows these populations to link themselves to a history that is longer than that of colonization, which defined them as “Israelites” and then “Jews.” In reality, the term designates the Iberian Peninsula in Hebrew, and goes back to the Spanish and Portuguese past from before the Inquisition, which chased the Arab civilization (including Jews) out of Europe and toward the Maghreb. See, for example, Chantal Benayoun, “Juifs, Pieds-noirs, séfarades ou les trois termes d’une citoyenneté,” in Marseille et le choc des décolonisations (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1996), 125–32. 3. Hélène Cixous is a writer and philosopher born in Oran, Algeria, of an Algerian Jewish father and a Jewish German mother, naturalized French. For bibliographical references, see Mireille Calle-Gruber and Hélène Cixous, “Albums et Légendes,” in Photos de racines (Paris: Des Femmes, 1994), 177–207. 4. For details on the various diasporic Jewish waves to the ancient Maghreb, see Stora, Les Trois exils, 10–11, and Richard Ayoun and Bernard Cohen, Les Juifs d’Algérie: 2000 ans d’histoire (Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1992). 5. Hélène Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” Les Inrockuptibles 115 (August– September 1997): 72. 6. Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” 73. 7. Calle-Gruber and Cixous, “Albums et Légendes,” 183. The translation is from Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 2003), 182.

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

103

8. Benjamin Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale (1830–1954) (Paris: La Découverte, 1991, 2004), 31. 9. Stora, Les Trois exils, 31. 10. Hélène Cixous, “Ce corps étranjuif,” in Judéités: questions pour Jacques Derrida, eds. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 59–83, 60. “Ce corps étranjuif,” in Préface in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. and trans. Bettina Bergo, eds. Joseph Cohen, Raphael Zagury-Orly, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York, NY: Fordham UP, 2007), 53–54. 11. Stora, Les Trois exils, 48. 12. Stora, Les Trois exils, 47. 13. The most noteworthy example is probably that of the internationally renowned philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who spoke for the first time about his Algerian origin in 1991, in Circonfession, and subsequently in 1996, in Monolinguisme de l’autre. 14. Hélène Cixous, Si près (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 19. For the translation, see: Hélène Cisxous, So Close, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009), 8. 15. Five texts were published in the four years after the “revelation” of 1993, with this lapse in time being due to the “job” of memory in the writing that took shape: OR, les lettres de mon père (1997), a book dedicated to her father, who was a doctor in Algeria; “Pieds nus” (1997), a short text written for Une enfance algérienne, a collection of autobiographical novels coordinated by Leïla Sebbar; “Stigmata, or Job the dog” (1997), an allegory of the lost encounter between diverse populations of colonial Algeria; “Mon Algériance” (1997), article on leaving her homeland; and finally, “Lettre à Zohra Drif” (1999), the heroine of the Battle of Algiers, with whom Cixous was classmates in Algiers. On this chronological order, see Christa Stevens, “Hélène Cixous, auteur en ‘algériance’,” Expressions maghrébines 1, no. 1 (Summer 2002): 77–97. 16. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 2007), 432. As explained by Laplanche and Pontalis, this first acceptance of “primal scene” dates back to 1897. Later, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and most of all in The Wolf Man (1918), Freud mainly uses the expression with the meaning of “scène de rapport sexuel entre les parents, observée ou supposée d’après certains indices et fantasmée par l’enfant. Elle est généralement interprétée par celui-ci comme un acte de violence de la part du père” [scene of sexual intercourse between the parents which the child observes, or infers on the basis of certain actions. It is generally interpreted by the child as an act of violence on the part of the father] Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 432. This sexual meaning of the “primal scene” does not seem relevant to me in the understanding of Les rêveries de la femme sauvage. In addition, if we consider the union between Eve Klein (Cixous’ mother) and Georges Cixous (the father) as a metaphor for the collision between Europe (maternal Germany) and Africa (paternal Africa), then the colonizing continent is the mother. Furthermore, in Cixous’ text, both parents are represented as transmitters of violence: her father dies very young of tuberculosis, brutally leaving his family to abandonment and violence, whereas her mother is seen as the cultural

104

Chapter 2

barrier between her children and the Algeria in which they live, further aggravating the feeling of isolation of Cixous and her brother. 17. Mairead Hanrahan, “Of Altobiography,” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 23, no. 3 (2000): 282–95, 293. On this point, many studies have been published. See for example the works of Verena Conley, Claudine Fisher, and Susan Sellers. 18. Cixous, just like Derrida does in another way, claims that she has not been able to write a biography. For example, she affirms: “même si tout ce que j’ai écrit est pensé à partir des expériences que j’ai pu faire, je me trouve relativement absente de mes textes considérés comme autobiographiques. L’essentiel de ce qui a été moi est complètement secret. J’écris à partir de cette tension entre ce qui se cache et ce qui advient, c’est-à-dire le livre. Le livre m’arrive, il a un pouvoir supérieur à celui de la personne qui croit écrire le livre. Mes livres sont plus forts que moi, ils m’échappent. Ils me soumettent à la traduction” [even if all my writing is conceived from experiences that I have had, I find myself relatively absent from those of my texts that are considered autobiographical. The essence of that which was me is completely secret. I write from this tension between what hides itself and what comes forward, that is to say the book. The book happens to me, it has a power superior to that of the person who thinks she is writing the book. My books are stronger than I am, they surpass me. They subject me to translation]. Genèses Généalogies Genres. Autour de l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous, eds. Mireille Calle-Gruber and Marie Odile Germain (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 23. Importantly, as an epigraph to a family photo album that she added comments to, Cixous “forewarns”: “Toutes les biographies comme toutes les autobiographies comme tous les récits racontent une histoire à la place d’une autre histoire,” Calle-Gruber and Cixous, “Albums et Légendes,” 183 [All biographies like all autobiographies like all narratives tell one story in place of another story]. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, 178. 19. Jeanelle Laillou Savona, “Retour aux sources: Algérie et judéité dans l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous,” Études littéraires 33, no. 3 (2001): 95–108, 96. 20. Alienation is defined as “toute limitation ou tout conditionnement objectivement imposé à l’individu par le fonctionnement actuel de la société, et éprouvés comme une atteinte révoltante aux droits humains fondamentaux” [any limitation or condition objectively imposed on the individual by the current functioning of society, and experienced as a shocking violation of fundamental human rights] (Trésor de la Langue Française). 21. Claude De La Genardière, “D’une Algérie à l’autre. Des parcours narratifs entre histoire et psychanalyse,” in Individu, Récit, Histoire, eds. Maryline Crivello and Jean-Noël Pelen (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2008), 211. 22. De La Genardière, “D’une Algérie à l’autre,” 211. 23. Incidentally, this progression more or less corresponds to the “triple walls of interdiction, triple walls of difference: foreignness, Jewishness, femininity,” discussed by Susan Suleiman regarding walls mentioned in “La venue à l’écriture” in Risking who one is: encounters with contemporary art and literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994), 80.

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

105

24. Hélène Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage. Scènes primitives (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 9, 168. The quoted sentences are in italic in Cixous’ text because they refer to another temporality in the narration. I go back to this detail in the third part of this chapter. The translation is from Hélène Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes, trans. Beverly Bie Brahic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2006), 3. 25. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, respectively 9, 9, and 14; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, respectively 3, 3 and 5. 26. This idea of alienation and exteriority with respect to what would be an “être-en-Algérie” [being-in-Algeria] is expressed once again in Si près through the same lexical field of the exterior and of separation. 27. Michel Foucault, Du Gouvernement des vivants: Cours au Collège de France 1979–1980 (Paris: EHESS, Éditions du Seuil, 2012), 98. The translation is from Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 100. 28. Foucault, Du Gouvernement des vivants, 98; Foucault, On the Government of the Living, 101. 29. Foucault, Du Gouvernement des vivants, 98; Foucault, On the Government of the Living, 101. 30. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 142. 31. Cixous, Si près, 67. 32. See Sylvie Thénault, Violences ordinaires dans Algérie coloniale. Camps, internements, assignations à résidence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012). Thénault explains how the “mixed communities” where more than 75 percent of the indigenous people lived, up until World War II, contained the traces of the military administration, whose methods of power they perpetuated unofficially. 33. Pascal Dibie, Ethnologie de la porte (Paris: Métailié, 2012). 34. Dibie, Ethnologie de la porte, 48. 35. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 48–49; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 26. 36. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 61. 37. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 123. 38. Cixous, Les rêveries de la femme sauvage, 137. 39. Oran is, in other texts, described as a colorful, aromatic, and sensual city—a pallet that recalls the carefree joys of childhood, the true paradise (Hélène Cixous, “Ce corps étranjuif,” in Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, eds. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 59–83, 70). 40. A cercle militaire [Officers’ Club] is a public establishment of an administrative nature, which is made up of a lodging center and catering center for the families of soldiers on duty. 41. See also Cixous, Si près, 22. On the “statut des juifs” of October 3, 1940, and more generally, on the whole Vichy episode, see Stora, Les trois exils, 80–90. The Cremieux Decree was abolished on October 7. Other laws, in 1941, reinforced prohibitions and discriminations. Jews were prohibited from exercising most professions, and for other professions, there was a strict numerus clausus. As noted by Michaël Marrus and Robert Paxton, even before the anti-Semitic laws were enacted by the

106

Chapter 2

Vichy regime, anti-Semitic measures were taken by the governor general of French Algeria, so much so that, according to them, “c’est Vichy qui subissait les pressions d’Alger et non l’inverse” [it is Vichy that felt the pressures of Algiers, and not the reverse]. Vichy et les Juifs (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1981), 275. 42. Aliette Armel, “Du mot à la vie: un dialogue entre Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous,” Le Magazine Littéraire 430 (2004): 22–29. 43. Michel Ansky, Les Juifs d’Algérie du décret Crémieux à la libération (Paris: Le Centre, 1950). 44. Hélène Cixous, Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 12. 45. Cixous, Portrait de Jacques Derrida, 12–13. The translation is from Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2004), 5. 46. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 61 and 100. 47. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 126; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 72. 48. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 126; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 71–72. 49. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 47–48. 50. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 34, 77, 86, 87, etc. 51. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 77; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 44. 52. Cixous, “Ce corps étranjuif,” 71; Cixous, “Ce corps étranjuif,” trans., 65. 53. Cixous, “Ce corps étranjuif,” 80; Cixous, “Ce corps étranjuif,” trans., 74. 54. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 126 (Cixous uses the italics in her text); Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 71. 55. Hélène Cixous is not entirely of Algerian and French Jewish origin, since her mother is a German naturalized French citizen. Eve Klein’s mother moved to Strasbourg, which became French once again in 1918, and then left again for Germany where her daughter (Eve) was born. They left when the Nazis took power. 56. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 127. 57. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 46; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 24–25. 58. Cixous, Si près, 35; Cixous, So Close, 21. 59. For a detailed description of the status of Jews and Muslims in Algeria, see “Muslim French Citizens from Algeria. A Short History” in Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 19–54. 60. See Pascal Blanchard, “Les origines républicaines de la fracture coloniale,” in La Fracture coloniale (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 41. 61. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 45, 75. 62. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 46. 63. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 123. 64. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 123 and 117; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 70 and 76.

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

107

65. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 122; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 70. 66. On these two models between which France’s Algerian politics oscillated, see Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 19–54. 67. Stora, Les Trois exils, 111. 68. Sylvie Thénault, “1881–1918: l’apogée de l’Algérie française et les débuts de l’Algérie algérienne,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, eds. Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault (Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012), 165. 69. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 139; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 78. 70. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La Fracture coloniale (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 39. 71. Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2011). 72. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 124; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 70–71. 73. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 110, 130. 74. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 150. 75. The idea of a dirty colonial world (“la souillure” repeated twice on page 44) that is eaten away by cheating echoes the works of Albert Memmi. In La Statue de sel in particular, colonization is described as a disaster worthy of “Sodome et Gomorrhe.” Albert Memmi, La Statue de sel (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 76. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 40; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 22. 77. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 122 and 125. 78. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 123–24; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 70–71. 79. Hélène Cixous, “Lettre à Zohra Drif,” Leggendaria 14 (1999): 4–9. Already in her “Lettre à Zohra Drif,” Cixous brings up the lexical field of invisibility to describe the situation of institutionalized exclusion of the indigenous people. She writes, regarding the absence of Muslims and Jews at the French high school: “C’est ainsi que je fis mes études dans un lycée où les juives se comptaient sur la main […] Il y avait seulement des signes invisibles: absences de juives, absence de musulmanes […] Dedans, il n’y avait que l’Algérie sans Algériens” (6–7). [That is how I came to study in a high school where you could count the Jewish girls on one hand […] There were only invisible signs: the absence of Jews, absence of Muslims […] Inside there was only Algeria without the Algerians]. 80. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 144. 81. These massacres were the bloody repression of independence protests that took place between May 8 and May22, 1945, after the deception of many indigenous people over not having obtained an extension of their French rights, despite their large sacrifices in battles during World War II. The massacres caused tens of thousands of deaths and were an extreme violence, notably those of Gulema and Kherrata, where

108

Chapter 2

bodies were burned to cinders by French soldiers, as to not leave behind the evidence. See Charles-Robert Ageron, “Mai 1945 en Algérie. Enjeu de mémoire et histoire,” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 39, no. 39–40 (1995): 52–56. 82. Achille Mbembe, “Qu’est-ce que la pensée postcoloniale?” Esprit 12, no. 330 (2006): 117–33, 119. 83. Elsa Dorlin, La Matrice de la race (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 12. 84. Dorlin, La Matrice de la race, 262. It must be noted, as Dorlin does, that the pathologization can work in two directions: although the other is inferior, in certain cases he can however be superior (e.g., the Black man has a stronger body and therefore has better resistance to disease). Another example of this contradiction lies in the apprehension of the sexuality of Black men, both devirilized and overvirilized by medical discourse of the period. Thus, in both cases, the other is pathological, abnormal. 85. Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” 74; Cixous, Sigmata, 139. 86. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 124; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 71. 87. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 124; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 70. 88. The first instance of this theme of erasure (as well as the neologism “Algériefrançaise”) is found in one of Cixous’ first texts, La jeune née, in which she describes the mystifications of “Algerian Algeria” as the result of the colonial “aveuglement” [blindness] (Hélène Cixous, La Jeune née (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1975), 128; Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 70). The history of independent Algeria provided another example of the universality of this mechanism of the erasure of otherness (Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 71). 89. Éric Savarèse, L’Ordre colonial et sa légitimation en France métropolitaine. Oublier l’Autre (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). 90. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 124; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 71. 91. Dorlin, La Matrice de la race, 200. 92. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 150; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 84. 93. Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 10. The translation is from Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1972), 216. 94. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, 11; Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 216. 95. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, 37; Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 224. 96. Cixous, Si près, 31–32; Cixous, So Close, 18. 97. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, 46; Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 227.

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

109

98. In this way, Albert Camus, who represents none or very few indigenous people in his works, is able to honestly depict this compartimentalized world. The question is whether his fictional works have a realist intention or whether they aim to open up political possibility through imagination. 99. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 41; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 21. 100. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 40–41; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 22. 101. Albert Camus, La Peste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). 102. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 41. 103. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 109; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 63. 104. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 121, 122, 144, etc. 105. Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, “Le ‘Malgérien’ d’Hélène Cixous,” MLN 124, no. 4 (2009): 859. 106. Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” 72. The translation is from Hélène Cixous, Stigmata, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 2005), 128. 107. Regarding the suffix “-ade,” which comes from southern Roman languages, see Pierre Bec, Manuel pratique d’occitan moderne (Paris: Picard, 1973), 135. 108. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 16; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 7. 109. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 16; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 7. 110. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 111, 124. 111. Trésor de la langue française. 112. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 62; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 35. 113. Hélène Cixous, Jours de l’an (Paris: Des femmes, 1990), 16. 114. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 62; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 35. 115. The indigenous people had much less access to health care. In addition to “empiriques” (i.e., indigenous) doctors (with non-European methods), two other types of doctors could take care of the indigènes: military doctors and, most of all, at the beginning of colonization, colonization doctors (civil doctors placed in the service of the colonial administration). Regarding the complex situation of health care in colonial Algeria, see Abid Larbi, La Pratique médicale en Algérie de 1830 à nos jours and Raymond Fery, L’Œuvre médicale française en Algérie. 116. Cixous, La Jeune Née, 130; Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 71. 117. Cixous, La Jeune Née, 14. 118. Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 37. 119. In Si près, a largely posterior text, Cixous moves further away from the Arab identity to highlight a multitude of origins, and notably Ashkenazi Jews, which impedes her from laying claim to one homeland and of a “chez soi” (Cixous, Si près, 102–3) (Cixous, So Close, 73). As for her relationship with the land of Israel, it is characterized by the same impossibility of conceiving moving there, as she explains in

110

Chapter 2

“Mon Algériance”: “La France ne fut jamais la Terre promise, Dieu merci. La phrase ‘l’an prochain à Jérusalem’ m’émeut et me fait fuir. L’envie, la nécessité d’arriver ‘chez soi’ je ne les connais pas. Je les comprends et ne les partage pas […] Le sionisme m’est apparu en 1948 comme une figure de tragédie […] si par malchance j’y avais été menée [en Israël] […] la question Et après? Et ensuite? se serait éteinte […] Je suis du côté de Moïse, celui qui ne rentre pas” (Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” 74) [France was never the Promised Land. The sentence “next year in Jerusalem” moves me and makes me flee. The desire, the necessity of arriving “home,” I understand them and do not share them […] Zionism appeared to me in 1948 as a figure of tragedy […] if by misfortune I had been brought [to Israel] […] the question What next? would have been extinguished […] I am on the side of Moses, the one who does not enter] (Cixous, Stigmata, 138–39). As Brigitte Weltman-Aron puts it, “For Cixous there is only departure, but not from the stability of a legitimate anchoring place; there are only beginnings in the plural, never an arrival; it is a questions of departing (so as) not to arrive” (Brigitte Weltman-Aron, “The Figure of the Jew in North Africa,” in Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, eds. Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia Lorcin, and David Troyansky (Lincoln, NE and London: U of Nebraska P, 2009), 271). Cixous does not lay claim to any state or national homeland, and considers that her “pays d’accueil” [host country] is virtual: “la littérature” [Hélène Cixous, L’amour même dans la boîte aux lettres (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 91]. Cixous’ particular position regarding nationalism (Jewish or other) is not representative of Jews in Algeria. Regarding the complex and diverse relationship between Algerian Jews and Zionism and Israel, see Stora, Les Trois exils, 151–55. 120. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 44–45; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 24. 121. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 54; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 30. 122. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 57; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 32. 123. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 89; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 51. 124. Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” 74; Cixous, Stigmata, 139. 125. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 69, etc. 126. Angeles Sirvent Ramos, “Les signes de l’Algérie dans l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous,” Expressions maghrébines 2, no. 2 (2003): 128. 127. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 69, 155. 128. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 65; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 39. 129. On the significance of the indigenous uprising followed by these massacres, see Jean-Louis Planche, Sétif 1945. Histoire d’un massacre annoncé (Paris: Perrin, 2006), and Marcel Reggui, Les Massacres de Guelma, Algérie, mai 1945. Une enquête inédite sur la furie des milices coloniales (Paris: La Découverte, 2006). 130. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 45–47; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 24–25. 131. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha (Luc, 9.28).

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

111

132. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha (Luc, 9.30). 133. Clos-Salembier, renamed El Madania upon independence, is located at around 150 meters altitude. 134. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 47; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 25. 135. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 47; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 25. 136. Hélène Cixous, “Quelle heure est-il ou La Porte (elle qu’on ne passe pas),” in Le Passage des frontières—autour de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 83. 137. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 45. 138. Citröen factories were partially closed during World War II under Nazi pressure, but the brand held out and remains one of the large names in French automobile production. 139. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 46. 140. The tales of the Grimm brothers are gathered in a collection entitled Kinder— und Hausmärchen (1812). Perrault’s tale Le Petit poucet [Tom Thumb] repeats many of the numerous motifs of the tale Hänsel und Gretel, notably that of the abandonment of children in the forest. Cixous’ choice of the German myth is indicative of her maternal cultural environment. 141. The Jewish Franco-Tunisian writer Albert Memmi writes about the existence of a certain nostalgia among Jews from the Maghreb, which unconsciously embellishes the past in their native Orient [Albert Memmi, Juifs et Arabes (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 57]. However, Cixous’ position is more complex, as it does not consist of nostalgia but rather hope, in the same way that she claims neither harmony nor hostility, but rather a more nuanced position of “inséparabe” compassion—to be “with,” all the while remaining separated and distinct. 142. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 47; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 25. 143. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 46. 144. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 46. 145. In 1948 in Algeria, Israel was not yet the divisive topic that it would later become. The rupture between the Jews and the Arabs truly happened a few years later with the Algerian War of Independence. Regarding this question, see Stora, Les Trois exils, 119, 151, 155, in particular. Pierre, Cixous’ brother, enlisted on the side of independence. He was later sentenced to death by the OAS and exiled from Algeria in 1961. However, he went back and stayed there, with his mother, Eve Cixous, until 1971. See Cixous, Photos de racines, 209–10. 146. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 47–48; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 25. 147. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 48. 148. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 19, repeated 21; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 9. 149. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 53; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 30.

112

Chapter 2

150. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 22; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 11. 151. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 35; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 17. 152. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 27. 153. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 54; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 30. 154. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 28–29; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 14. 155. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 26; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 12. 156. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 25; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 12. 157. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 25–26; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 12–13. 158. Hélène Cixous, “Algéries, Premières douleurs,” Expressions maghrébines 2, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 160. 159. In Si près, Cixous further expresses this reservation by mentioning a double constraint, which corresponds to her situation of double alienation (Jew for the French, French for the Muslims): “J’avais été dès ma naissance condamnée, par ma généalogie et par les circonstances mondiales catastrophiques dont j’étais la résultante et l’héritière, d’une part à parler toujours la première devant les Français […] D’autre part j’étais condamnée inversement à ne jamais parler la première devant ceux parmi lesquels j’étais née sans naître, lesdits Arabes plus tard dits Algériens, je m’en serais voulu de prendre la parole qui n’était pas la mienne mais aurait dû être la leur en premier et dont l’accès était constamment tenu derrière des barreaux […]” (Cixous, Si près, 35) [I had been condemned from birth, by my genealogy and by the catastrophic worldwide circumstances whose result and heir I was, on the one hand to be always the first to speak in front of the […] French […] On the other hand I was condemned inversely never to speak first in front of those among whom I was born without being born from them, the said Arabs later called Algerians, I would have been cross with myself if I had taken over the speech that was not mine but that should have been theirs first and to which access was constantly held behind bars (Cixous, So Close, 20–21)]. 160. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, respectively 39, 51, 61, 71, and 86. 161. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 53. 162. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 53; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 30. 163. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 52; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 29. 164. The “femme sauvage” of the text is “Hélène,” her real first name, but also that of the figure of Greek mythology, abducted by Paris, and whose story figures in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the writer on whom Cixous wrote her PhD thesis. Cixous mentions Helen of Troy in La Jeune Née, and depicts this character from Homer’s

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

113

poem as a figure of exclusion and of “dehors” [outside] (Cixous, La Jeune Née, 124). Through this array of connotations, starting with its title, the text is grounded on an overdetermination of signifiers. 165. There are several “Ravin de la Femme Sauvage” in Algeria. In Nedjma, Kateb Yacine mentions one of them, located close to Bône. The origin of the name “Ravin de la Femme Sauvage” is quite mysterious. It is probably based on a legend dating back to colonial times, since the name is Francophone. The different versions of the legend can be summed up as a mother who loses her children, who probably fell into the ravine of Oued Kniss, and who becomes desperately “sauvage,” living in the forest in the hope of finding them—a legendary solitude that prefigures that of Cixous and in a more general sense, the abandonment of the inhabitants of Clos-Salembier to their misery. The painter Auguste Renoir painted the “Ravin de la Femme Sauvage” in 1881 during his first trip to Algiers. It depicts the forest of the ravine of Oued Kniss, and is found in the Orsay Museum in Paris. See Amelia Peral Crespo, “Cixous et Rousseau en rêveries,” in Le XVIIIe siècle aujourd’hui: présences, lectures et réécritures, eds. F. Lafarga, A Llorca Tonda, and A. Sirvent Ramos (Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2011), 53. 166. Alison Rice, “Rêveries d’Algérie. Une terre originaire à perte de vue,” Expressions maghrébines 2 (2003): 92. 167. Françoise Coissard, “Battre le fer-Jeu de la chaîne. Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage d’Hélène Cixous,” Rue Descartes 32 (2001): 89. 168. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 53; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 30. 169. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 79; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 45. 170. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 82–83; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 47. 171. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 79. 172. Cixous, La Jeune Née, 132; Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 72. 173. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 89; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 51. 174. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 399. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1974, 1997), 281–82. 175. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 149; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 84. 176. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 149; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 82. 177. Cixous, Si près, 35; Cixous, So Close, 21. 178. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 98–99; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 58. 179. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 157; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 95. 180. Derrida’s exact quote is: “je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne,” in Le monolinguisme de l’autre, 15. Through this phrase, he means that on one hand, all

114

Chapter 2

humans are foreign to their language, in the sense that they do not possess it, but on the other hand, that Jews of the Maghreb, because of their particular history of French integration, lost the Arabic, Berber, Hebrew, and Ladino (language of Sephardic Jews from Spain) languages, and therefore only speak the language of the colonizers. For Cixous, the question of languages is both more complex and less of a problem, as her native language is German and her chosen language is English (Cixous is a professor of English literature), contrary to Derrida, whose family was completely Frenchified. Cixous always immersed herself, in Algeria, in multiple languages, including French, German, Spanish, English, Arabic, and Hebrew. And as Mireille Calle-Gruber remarks, about the “sport linguistique” (Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” 73) practiced by the Cixous family, “La gymnastique des signifiants […] enseigne la dépropriation, et avec elle la démystification de quelque appartenance d’origine” [The acrobatics of signifiers […] teaches dispropriation, and with it the demystification of some originary belonging] (Mireille Calle-Gruber, “La langue des alliances. Mon Algériance,” Études littéraires 33, no. 3 (2001): 88). 181. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 57; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 32. 182. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 90; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 51. 183. Susan Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 84. 184. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 90; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 52. 185. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, respectively 90, 92, and 91–92; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, respectively 52, 53, and 52. 186. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 93. 187. This neologism “fatmatiser” is by Cixous in “Mon Algériance,” 72. 188. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 93. 189. Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” 72. 190. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 98. 191. Simon Skempton, Alienation after Derrida (London and New York, NY: Continuum, 2010), 18. 192. Skempton, Alienation after Derrida. As Skempton says, “Whereas the traditional term ‘expropriation’ implies the loss of the proper, the term ‘ex-appropriation’ is intended to imply that there was never anything proper in the first place” (Skempton, Alienation after Derrida, 14). 193. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 69; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 39. 194. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 144; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 81. 195. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 145–46; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 81–82. 196. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 91.

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

115

197. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 146; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 82. 198. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 91–92. 199. Recently, during the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp and concentration camp, the survivor Esther Berjano recalled that “Chaque nuit, quand des convois arrivaient, on entendait les cris, les pleurs. On savait que c’était les cris des gens dans les chambres à gaz” [Every night, when the convoys arrived, we would hear the screams, the crying. We knew they were the screams of people in the gas chambers.] (Interview by France Info, accessed March 2015, http:​/​/ geo​​polis​​.fran​​cetvi​​nfo​.f​​r​/bur​​eau​-b​​erlin​​/2015​​/01​/2​​2​/on-​​enten​​dait-​​les​-c​​ris​-d​​es​-ge​​ns​-da​​ ns​​-le​​s​-cha​​mbres​​-a​-ga​​z​.htm​l). 200. Charlotte Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra (Paris: Minuit, 1970), 48. The translation is from Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1995), xxi. 201. Jean Cayrol, Nuit et brouillard (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 43. 202. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 146; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 81. 203. Many of her family members were deported and killed by the Nazis. Cixous’ mother comes from a family with multiple European roots: German, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, and Austrian. See Cixous, “Albums et légendes,” 206. 204. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 7. 205. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 101; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 59. 206. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 57; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 32. 207. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 58. 208. The Latin prefix “ab” indicates deprivation, and therefore “absolutize” means to cut all links and mediation. 209. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 58; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 33. 210. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 108–9; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 63. 211. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, respectively 55, 54, 54, and 55; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 31. 212. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, respectively 16, 41, 15; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, respectively 22, 6. 213. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 58; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 33. 214. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 41; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 22. 215. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 96; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 55. 216. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 99; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 58.

116

Chapter 2

217. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 58; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 33. 218. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 54–55; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 31. 219. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 61–62; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 35. 220. Sorties, 187, in Cixous, La jeune Née, 114–246. This neologism relies on an intertextual echo: Cixous takes her inspiration from James Joyce, who creates a “Jewgreek” in Ulysses. In it, he writes: “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet,” sentences that are taken up once again by Derrida in “Violence et métaphysique” in L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 117–228, an essay in which he analyzes and comments on Emmanuel Levinas’s questioning of the meaning of being Jewish and of being Greek. 221. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 107; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 62. 222. Debrawere-Miller, “Le ‘Malgérien’ d’Hélène Cixous,” 865–67. 223. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 74–75; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 43. 224. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 51; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 29. 225. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 45. 226. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 74; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 42. 227. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 72. 228. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 74; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 43. 229. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 74–76; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 43–44. 230. The comparing of Jews and Arabs to dogs was normal in French Algeria. During the 1930s and 1940s, there were many billboards and signs in the windows of businesses that said “Interdit aux Juifs et aux chiens” [No Jews no dogs]. Likewise, all throughout the colonial period, the indigenous people were banned from numerous public spaces. In Garçon manqué, Bouraoui mentions signs that read “Interdits aux chiens et aux Arabes” on the beaches of Algiers. 231. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 83. 232. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 76–77; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 44. 233. A parechesis is a rhetorical device that consists in excessively combining an identical syllable in two successive words. A voiced consonant is produced by the vibration of the vocal cords. 234. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 78; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 45. 235. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 78; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 45.

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

117

236. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 81; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 46. 237. What I highlight to be a strategic touch of humor provoked by the discrepancy man/animal is analyzed in a completely different way by Michelle B. Slater. According to her, Cixous, like Derrida, is trying to “deconstruct” the radical separation established between man and animal by dominant Western thinkers. While Slater article discusses human–animal relationships, many aspects of Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage and implicit references (notably Rousseau) remain undiscussed. See Michelle B. Slater, “Rethinking human-animal ontological differences: Derrida’s ‘animot’ and Cixous’ ‘Fips,’” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16, no. 5 (2012): 685–93. 238. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 81; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 46. 239. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 81; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 46. 240. Mélanie Klein, “Les stades précoces du conflit œdipiens,” in Essais de psychanalyse (Paris: Payot, 2005). 241. Rousseau’s text is repeated almost word for word: only certain meaningful terms are added to it, whereas others are erased. Here is the original text: “Me voici donc seul sur la terre, n’ayant plus de frère, de prochain, d’ami, de société que moimême. Le plus sociable et le plus aimant des humains en a été proscrit par un accord unanime. Ils ont cherché dans les raffinements de leur haine quel tourment pouvait être le plus cruel à mon âme sensible, et ils ont brisé violemment tous les liens qui m’attachaient à eux. J’aurais aimé les hommes en dépit d’eux-mêmes. Ils n’ont pu qu’en cessant de l’être se dérober à mon affection. Les voilà donc étrangers, inconnus, nuls enfin pour moi puisqu’ils l’ont voulu. Mais moi, détaché d’eux et de tout, que suis-je moi-même?” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 35) [I am now alone on earth, no longer having any brother, neighbor, friend, or society other than myself. The most sociable and the most loving of humans has been proscribed from society by a unanimous agreement. In the refinements of their hatred, they have sought the torment which would be cruelest to my sensitive soul and have violently broken all the ties which attached me to them. I would have loved men in spite of themselves. Only ceasing to be humane, have they been able to slip away from my affection. They are now strangers, unknowns, in short, nonentities to me—because that is what they wanted. But I, detached from them and from everything, what am I?] (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), 1)]. Cixous adds “soeur,” and “père” (evoking her own family) and replaces “humains” with “êtres” to designate the Dog. She then deletes all of the following sentences to express the quintessence through the image of the “cage” and “wire,” which keeps the pariah separated from everyone else. For a more detailed commentary on the comparison between the two texts, see Crespo, “Cixous et Rousseau en rêveries,” 56–58. 242. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), “Livre I,” “Chapitre I,” 42. For the translation, see The Social Contract or the Principles of

118

Chapter 2

Political Rights, trans. Rose M. Harrington (New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 6. 243. Interpreting the geography of Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage in a similar but slightly different way, Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller writes: “S’imprimant dans la mémoire de Cixous comme des constellations métonymiques de l’Algérie recluse, chaque lieu a pour similarité cet espace clos sur lui-même, reproduction de l’univers carcéral ou concentrationnaire de l’Europe nazie, et qui détient une ethnie ou une nationalité […] ces lieux asphyxiés par la maladie et étouffants par leur clôture se rétrécissent progressivement dans le livre de la mémoire: l’Algérie sollicitée au départ se réduit à la ville d’Alger, circonscrite elle-même par le lycée français, d’une part, et le Clos-Salembier, de l’autre, et qui finit par se transformer en cage du chien” (Debrauwere-Miller, “Le ‘Malgérien’ d’Hélène Cixous,” 864). 244. Cixous left for France in 1954 to continue her study of literature. She traveled to Algiers several times to visit her mother, up until 1971, the date on which the latter definitively left Algiers. Cixous would not return there. 245. “La tombe de mon père est […] une tombe perdue. Elle est en Algérie. Plus personne n’y va ou n’ira jamais” (Cixous, Photos de racines, 191) [My father’s grave is […] a lost grave. It is in Algeria. No one ever goes there anymore or will ever go (Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, 189)]. 246. Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” 71; Cixous, Stigmata, 127. 247. Likewise, in this case, “poussière” also draws a line of filiation with the maternal family, a large portion of whom disappeared during the Shoah—a loss of which the only physical traces are made up of ashes. Cixous writes, regarding the subject of her double ancestry: “une partie de moi dans les camps de concentration, une partie de moi dans les ‘colonies’” (Hélène Cixous, “La venue à l’écriture,” in Entre l’écriture (Paris: Des femmes, 1986), 26) [one part of me in the concentration camps, one part of me in the “colonies”]. 248. Cixous, Si près, 19; Cixous, So Close, 8. 249. Cixous, Si près, 19–20; Cixous, So Close, 9. 250. As I wrote in the introduction, the first text written on her childhood dates back to 1997. 251. Cixous, Si près, 121; Cixous, So Close, 46. 252. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 9–11; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 4–5. 253. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 10; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 3. 254. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 16; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 7. 255. Debrauwere-Miller, “Le ‘Malgérien’ d’Hélène Cixous,” 853. 256. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, respectively 9, 10, and 11. 257. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 16; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 7. 258. The majority of tuberculosis is pulmonary, and it is also the type that killed Georges Cixous.

From Primal Scenes to the Other(’s) Archive

119

259. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 110–11; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 64. 260. I am using Cixous’ term, “rage,” from “Mon Algériance,” in which she writes regarding the impossibility of identifying with a country other than suffering Algeria: “Si jamais je m’identifiai, ce fut à sa rage d’être blessée, amputée, humiliée” (Cixous, “Mon Algériance,” 73) [If ever I identified it was with its rage at being wounded, amputated, humiliated (Cixous, Stigmata, 137)]. 261. Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 139. The translation is from Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1988), 100. 262. Hélène Cixous, Tombe (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2008), 7–9. The translation is from Hélène Cixous, Tomb(e), trans. Laurent Milesi (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014), 2–4. The bracketed, italicized words have been included by the translator. 263. Definition from the Trésor de la langue française. 264. Cixous’ use of the invented term “invisité” should be noted, as she uses the same term in the cited passage from “Mon Algériance” to evoke the uplands of Algeria, and, through metonymy, Saint-Eugène cemetery and her father’s tomb. 265. Cixous, Entre l’écriture, 7–69. The translation is from “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, trans. Sarah Cornell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991). 266. Cixous, Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 167–68; Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 95.

Chapter 3

The Construction of the “Harkive” Giving a Voice to the Harki Moze by Zahia Rahmani

The term “Harkis” is originally designated to the indigenous Algerians who fought in the French army during the Algerian War of Independence. The word comes from the Arabic “har’ka,” which means “movement,” and was used by the French army to name the mobile garrison house where native auxiliary soldiers were recruited, from 1954 to 1962. However, the noun has progressively been used by extension to identify a much larger population. Since the end of the war, Harkis has metonymically denoted not only the natives who served as an auxiliary workforce in any of the French army groups (not only the mobile ones) or who were merely veterans of other wars1 but also those who worked in the French administration as civil servants or councilors.2 The politicization of the word implied that any native who had even a loose connection to the French power could be called a Harki.3 Between 1954 and 1962, the number of these auxiliaries (in French, supplétifs) amounted to several hundred thousand.4 Condemned as traitors by the Algerians, and abandoned by France after the Treaty of Evian (March 18, 1962), which ended the war, these demobilized auxiliary soldiers and workers were tortured, mutilated, and, in many instances, killed.5 Yet, the history of these supplétifs of the French colonial power was unknown to their fellow Algerians and the majority of the French population, thus depriving the Harkis of the possibility of justice and leaving the wrongs they endured unpunished. Today the word Harki, which now includes the children and grandchildren of the former auxiliary forces, is still understood from an ideological perspective according to which these natives were supposedly pro-French during the war and thus “traitors” to their own people. Such allegations are perpetuated in the collective imaginations of the French and the Algerians through false and misleading stereotypes of Harkis conveyed in military 121

122

Chapter 3

communications and in political discourses of both countries’ officials. For example, on September 25, 2001, Jacques Chirac, then president of the French Republic, while inaugurating a commemorative day for the Harkis, the “Journée d’hommage aux harkis,” repeated the idea that the Harkis made a good choice (“le choix de la France”) during the War of Independence.6 A year before, during an official visit in France in June 2000, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika did not hesitate to call the Harkis “collabos,” drawing a parallel, also found in Algeria’s history textbooks and commonly accepted by the population, with the French collaborationists of World War II.7 Before the 2000s, the very scant academic research on Harki history and the absence of cultural representations of the Harki identity made possible the circulation and perpetuation of this contrived image.8 But, in the past two decades, not only has historical research developed, but also a cultural production by the children of Harkis, who refuse to carry on their fathers’ silence, has emerged, thus providing a counter-history to the states’ versions. Proving that only an extreme minority of Algerians was ideologically proFrench, these academic and creative works dismantle the official histories, which resulted from an “exogenous historicization,” that is, a symbolic negotiation among the different political actors of the Algerian War—state institutions, upholders of the colonial power and its opponents, and the indigenous elite.9 On the contrary, contemporary creative works by Harkis, both visual and written, focus on the diversity of scenarios and the singular reasons that prompted the recruitment of supplétifs or that shaped their connection with France. In addition to numerous videos uploaded on the Internet, displaying testimonies of Harkis, informal reports, and other pieces of information, the visual production consists of documentaries, such as Des pleins de vides (2005) by Fatiha Mellal and Nicolas Strauss and Le choix de mon père (2008) by Rabah Zanoun. Unlike the documentaries, the films on the Harkis are mostly produced by non-Harkis.10 The written creations of Harki children are mainly texts of testimonies and confessional discourses. The first such book, Harkis, crime d’État by Azni Boussad, published in 2002, is more of a polemical lampoon. The following year, other narratives, more or less accusatory and testimonial, appeared: Mohand le harki by Hadjila Kemoum, Moze by Zahia Rahmani, Mon père ce harki by Dalila Kerchouche, Fille de harki by Fatima Benasci-Lancou, and Destins de harkis: aux raciness d’un exil by Stéphane Gladieu and Dalila Kerchouche. In 2006, Leïla (Dalila Kerchouche), Nos mères, paroles blessées: une autre histoire de harkis, and Treize chibanis harkis (Fatima Benasci-Lancou) were published. Zahia Rahmani’s France, récit d’une enfance came out in 2006, and Karim Brazi’s Le vilain petit berbère in 2007, and so on. In 2017, the granddaughter of a Harki man Alice Zeniter published an acclaimed novel on her family history, L’Art de perdre, which won numerous prizes.

The Construction of the “Harkive”

123

All these works raise a complex question of responsibility, which determines what charges can be held against the French government regarding the Harki “tragedy”:11 did the supplétifs serve France of their own free will, out of practical considerations, or were they forced to do so? In either case, the Harki children reveal their difficulties in facing a father’s enlistment. In the first scenario, if there are understandable reasons (money and supposed protection by the colonial power) for enlisting in the French army in order to survive, how to accept that their father made a “wrong” choice by not siding with their own people who won their independence? Bearing such a legacy is hard not only with regard to the massacres but also in light of the past and present social marginalization experienced by the Harki community in the country with which they sided. In the second scenario, the children of Harkis have to assume their fathers’ status of total victim: drafted into the army, erroneously perceived as ideologically pro-French, therefore victims of atrocities, and finally, marginalized in France while banned from Algeria. This chapter deals with Zahia Rahmani’s first book Moze. Born in 1962 in Makouda, Algeria,12 Rahmani spent the first five years of her life without ever seeing her father, who was imprisoned for being a Harki. After managing to escape, her father rejoined his wife and children, and under great duress they found a Red Cross boat to take them to France. Once in France, the family first reached a Harki camp in Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise. Then, French authorities resettled the family in the Oise region, where her father became a forest ranger. With an early passion for American literature and for culture, Rahmani succeeded in getting an education. She is now an art historian with an international career, and research director at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. In 2003, she published her first novel, Moze, followed by two other texts, “Musulman” roman (2005) and France, récit d’une enfance (2006).13 Titled after the fictional name of her father, Moze is about Rahmani’s father, Mohammed Rahmani, who was a civil servant during the War of Independence. In 1991, Moze committed suicide. A filiation narrative, the text was written in reaction to Rahmani’s father’s brutal death. This book brings the Harki children’s predicament to a climax, while dramatizing the traumatic legacy of the narrator. In a narrative structured like a classical tragedy, divided into five parts consisting mostly of dialogues, with a prologue and an epilogue, Rahmani plays a postcolonial Antigone delivering a powerful “plaidoyer-réquisitoire”14 [defense speech-indictment]. She makes public Moze’s tragic life and seeks to make sense out of her father’s suicide, as well as her own life as the daughter of a Harki man, while blurring all sorts of dichotomies: “l’opposition entre les vivants et les morts, le féminin et le masculin, [. . .] ascendance et descendance”15 [the opposition between the living and the dead, the feminine and the masculine [. . .] the ancestry and the descendants]. Moreover, Moze constitutes a powerful reflection about the

124

Chapter 3

nature of an archive and what the archiving process means: the unveiling of the Harki history through the text allows an identification of “the conditions of possibility that shaped what could be written, [. . .] what stories could not be told, and what could not be said.”16 My analysis more or less follows the progression of the narrative: from the first chapter, which deals with history through a dialogue between the narrator (Moze’s daughter) and an investigator who has come to collect information after Moze’s death; to the question of justice through the appearance of Moze’s daughter before a “national reparations commission” tasked with evaluating the wrongs done to Moze; and finally to the epilogue, which examines a kind of Harki metaphysics, by putting multiple memorial imaginaries into dialogue and by consecrating the narrator’s mourning. Indeed, in the first part of this chapter, I analyze how the text confronts the accusation of betrayal and the stigmatization at the core of Harki identity through the public exposure of concealed historical political manipulations behind what she considers to be a “mot pacte,”17 a word that tragically seals some Algerians’ destiny to France, namely the “Harki.” As a filiation narrative, Moze can be considered a type of “investigative literature” (on the model of “investigative journalism”), seeking to reconstruct an account of Harki history that is more accurate than French state’s official version. The text reflects and gives cause for reflection on the notion of archive, not only by integrating reproductions of archival documents into the body of the text but also by elaborating a commemorative discourse that serves as a site of speech for Harki identity—what can be called a “harkive,” a portmanteau word for “Harki” and “archive.” But the narrator of Moze goes even further: the second part of the chapter shows that, for Rahmani, it is not enough to publically rectify the understanding of Moze’s story; the criminals must also be judged. The text then takes the form of a Kafkaesque trial in which Moze’s daughter plays by turns the role of witness, prosecutor, and judge to express precisely this lack of justice endured by Harkis and their children. Like an Antigone who refuses to submit to state laws that flout the eternal laws of human dignity, Moze’s daughter is not satisfied with the sham justice offered by the “national commission.” The tribunal setting allows Rahmani to show how the “performance” by Moze’s daughter constitutes another regime of truth, based in embodied memory, which threatens French ideals of assimilation and solidarity. Finally, the third part of the chapter examines the text from the angle of mourning. In order to give her father dignity in death, the narrator liberates her father’s speech within herself, and rehumanizes the figure of the Harki. Moze constitutes a symbolic sepulcher constructed by the daughter who inscribes her father in a “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg), linking the

The Construction of the “Harkive”

125

Harki destiny and memory to that of another persecuted and stigmatized minority, the Jews. REDEFINING MOZE: DECONSTRUCTION OF THE “HARKI” AND ELABORATION OF A COUNTER-PUBLIC HISTORY Moze était un Algérien. Un musulman d’origine algérienne selon les termes en vigueur. La France conquérante et reconnaissante, aimant ses terres, ses ancêtres et son pouvoir, l’a fait Français musulman d’Algérie. Ce qu’il est devenu.18 [Moze was an Algerian. A Muslim of Algerian origin according the terms in use at the time. A conquering and grateful France, lover of its lands, its ancestors, and its power, made him a French Muslim of Algeria. Which is what he became.]

Before the Algerian War, Moze was a city councilor in Kabylie, a Berber region of Algeria. In the above quote, and often in the narrative, Rahmani suggests that her father becoming part of the colonial administration is the result of a colonial strategy, which, according to Patricia Lorcin’s Imperial Identities. Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria, consisted in exploring the differences between “Arabs” and “Kabyles.”19 In the above quote, we can first notice a contrast between the description of passivity on the part of Moze and a proactive attitude on the part of the French state toward Moze, who receives the status of “French Muslim”—a step toward French citizenship in exchange for his loyalty to France. At the end of World War II, France admitted that a Muslim civil status was compatible with French citizenship, and thus “granted full political rights to a specified list of Algerian elite men (some 65,000 individuals).”20 Rahmani does not provide any date as to when Moze became a French Muslim, which makes it difficult to figure the compass of Moze’s involvement in the colonial system. But from the above quoted passage, it seems clear that Rahmani seeks to convey the idea that, from the start, Moze did not actively endeavor to become a French Muslim of Algeria, but that he was made such because of an unpredictable French policy. This is a way, for Rahmani, to blur her father’s alleged loyalty toward the French government and to debunk the myth of the Harkis’ “choice” of France. She minimizes Moze’s freedom of choice, and, by contrast, she stresses the power of the colonial system to suggest that France is responsible for her father’s French affiliation. Throughout, the text suggests that Moze, who sought to fight for his Algerian brothers, should not be held responsible for any negative

126

Chapter 3

consequences of his actions since his intentions (while taking part in the colonial system) were “noble,” in favor of the colonials he sought to represent. For example, when in 1947 France created an Algerian Assembly designed to give a bit more representation to indigenous peoples, Moze agreed to represent his fellow natives (of “Muslim status”) and thereby defend them against the flagrant injustice upon which this institution was based. Indeed, the assembly (disbanded in 1956) was composed of two electoral colleges (one for representatives with French status—and a few Muslims with “local” status—and a second for natives with Muslim status), and each college had sixty members; yet, while there were less than one million French in Algeria, the indigenous population numbered close to nine million. At the time, the French system represented legality. However, as with any system of power, justice and legality were not necessarily synonymous in its practice. Thus, Rahmani suggests that an interpretation condemning Moze’s participation cannot be but retrospective, taking into account, a posteriori, the event of the War of Independence. En Algérie, Moze s’est glissé sans difficulté dans l’habit qu’on lui a prêté. Il espérait sans doute le garder. C’était un élu du deuxième collège. Celui des Arabes. Une poignée d’hommes pour neuf millions d’indigènes! Une assemblée blanche à quatre-vingt-dix pour cent, pour un million d’Européens. Neufs melons pour un poireau! Maire, conseiller général, vice-président du Conseil général et qui sait, bientôt député! Et Moze a accepté que sa voix compte pour si peu.21 [In Algeria, Moze slipped easily into the costume that he was lent. He hoped no doubt to keep it. He was elected to the second college. The Arab one. A handful of men for nine million natives! A ninety-percent white assembly, for a million Europeans. Mayor, general councilor, vice president of the General Council and who knows, soon representative! And Moze accepted for his vote to count for so little.]

The very last sentence of this paragraph counterbalances the idea of complicity with the French in the previous sentences. Placing Moze in a pathetic position (“Moze a accepté”) of weakness (“pour si peu”) exonerates him from his participation in colonial domination. The focus here is on the unfairness of the colonial system: the disproportionate, and thus unfair, representation of natives in the legislative assemblies (“collèges électoraux”) created in French Algeria after World War II. Eventually, the reader feels sorry for Moze who did try to improve the natives’ conditions by participating in the colonial assembly. In other words, Moze was operating within the limits imposed on his agency by the French system.

The Construction of the “Harkive”

127

Indeed, Moze reveals the mechanisms behind the construction of the “Harki.” Throughout the text, Rahmani rejects any responsibility on the part of the natives in their collaboration with France’s Machiavellian colonial strategy in Algeria, which consisted of dividing the indigenous population (“politique de la séparation”).22 She describes this situation of division among Algerians as a “pulvérisation opérée par la politique coloniale”23 [pulverization operated by colonial policy], and further explains, in blunt and reproving terms: “la politique algérienne de ce pays était fondée sur ce principe. Elle était étroite, raciste et lâche. On a vilipendé les Arabes pour mieux christianiser les Berbères et on a dit que les Juifs deviendraient des citoyens pour mieux franciser les Italiens.”24 [The Algerian policy of that country was based on this principle. It was narrow, racist, and cowardly. They vilified the Arabs in order to better Christianize the Berbers and they said that the Jews would become citizens in order to better Frenchify the Italians]. The creation of the “Harkis” was just another such division of the indigenous population. Furthermore, there were two reasons why France created groups of native auxiliary soldiers during the War of Independence. The first one was economic, as historian Valérie Esclangon-Morin explains: the war’s social and financial cost made it difficult for France to maintain its power in the different regions of Algeria, despite the sending of extra soldiers overseas and the lengthening of military service in 1956.25 The involvement of more indigenous men—there were already many Algerians in the French army—was the cheapest option. The second reason was strategic: recruiting natives, who knew the countryside much better than the French, into the camp of the colonial army was a way for France to psychologically and socially undermine the FLN, the nationalist separatist movement.26 On the natives’ side, diverse situations pushed indigenous men to enlist in harkas. As contemporary historical and sociological research shows, they made a “choice of circumstance” determined by many factors.27 Fatima Benasci-Lancou and Gilles Manceron sum up these types of enrollments: l’engagement “réactif” à l’assassinat par des maquisards d’un membre de sa famille; l’engagement “obligé” à la suite d’une manœuvre ostensible des militaires français pour compromettre des individus [. . .]; l’engagement de militants nationalistes pour fuir la violence et l’autoritarisme meurtrier de certains petits chefs de maquis; l’engagement résultant d’une logique de fidélité à une appartenance clanique, dans un contexte de rivalités entre tribus, villages ou familles [. . .]; l’enrôlement essentiellement dicté par le besoin d’un maigre revenu pour faire vivre sa famille, de la part de paysans peu informés du contexte politique; ou bien d’autres raisons encore. Sans oublier le cas des anciens de l’ALN [Armée de Libération Nationale—bras armé du FLN] fait prisonniers

128

Chapter 3

et torturés, soumis à l’“action psychologique” et contraints à être “retournés” pour avoir la vie sauve.28 [“reactive” enlistment in response to the killing of a family member by resistance fighters, “obligatory” enlistment following an ostensible maneuver by French soldiers to compromise individuals [. . .]; enlistment of nationalist militants fleeing the violence and deadly authoritarianism of some minor chiefs of the resistance; enlistment resulting from a logic of loyalty to clan identity, in a context of rivalry between tribes, villages or families [. . .]; enrollment essentially dictated by the need for a meager income to support a family, from peasants with little knowledge of the political context; or still other reasons. Not forgetting the case of ALN [National Liberation Army—military wing of the FLN] veterans who had been imprisoned and tortured, subjected to “psychological operations” and constrained to being “turned” in order to escape with their lives.]

The diversity of enlistment situations undermines the “discours mémoriel inventé”29 [made up memorial discourse], which carries the erroneous image of a group of ideologically homogeneous natives. In fact, only one man is publicly known for his pro-French engagement: Said Boualam, a Harki officer and colonel in the French army, who published a few books after independence in which he revived all the myths of the colonial discourse. This extreme minority position was manipulated, first by the “jusqu’aux boutistes de l’Algérie francaise” [French Algeria diehards] (represented by OAS),30 and then by the French government, to represent the position of all the Harkis.31 In Moze, Rahmani declares this idea of a so-called Harki commitment to the French cause to be a lie; she writes for example: “On nous a dit que tous ces gens se sont présentés de leur plein gré à l’armée française! L’activité des militants de l’Algérie française n’étant pas en reste, ils nous trouveront des spécimens maghrébins chic et intégrés qui, l’amour de la France rivée au cœur, soutiendront ce mensonge. En Algérie il en va de même avec leurs embrigadés du cerveau. Ils n’y voient pas très clair”32 [We have been told that all these people just presented themselves to the French army of their own free will! Not to be outdone, militants for a French Algeria will go out and find you chic and integrated indigenous specimens who, with a love of France embedded deep in their hearts, will prop up this lie. In Algeria they are equally brainwashed. They don’t see very clearly]. In other words, the lie of Harki “engagement” worked just as well on the Algerian side, because the FLN propagated the myth. In addition to the regular soldiers and the auxiliary ones, France co-opted the French Muslim of Algeria working in the colonial administration. This is, according to Rahmani, what happened to her father:

The Construction of the “Harkive”

129

“La guerre venue, ce Français a été réquisitionné”33 [When the war came, this Frenchman was requisitioned]. However, Rahmani does not mention the possibility of desertion that Moze could have chosen. It would have been a hard move, but some men did choose this option and hid or joined the FLN. She explains Moze’s decision in the light not only of the co-option obligation but also of social promotion: “La guerre est arrivée. Et durant cette guerre, M. le Maire devint, après les premiers évènements et le meurtre de son père, salarié civil de l’armée française avec le grade de sergent. Il fallait bien une carotte! Sergent!”34 [The war arrived. And during this war, M. the Mayor became, after the first events and the murder of his father, a civilian employee of the French army with the rank of sergeant. There had to be some carrot! Sergeant!]. The emphasis on the incentive, through the repetition of “sergent,” the exclamation marks, and the idea of necessity conveyed through the verb “falloir,” shows Rahmani’s desire to minimize her father’s responsibility and betrays her own malaise vis-à-vis his enrollment. While dismantling the mythical discourse about ideological enrollment, Rahmani purposely confuses her father’s (somewhat) privileged situation— he was a literate man with a relatively powerful job—with the vast majority of Harkis, who truly had very few options to survive: L’armée ayant peu de Français, peu de catholiques et peu de volontaires sur le territoire, elle a cantonné les villageois hors de chez eux, dans des terrains vagues, derrière des barbelés avec ration de semoule limitée, Tu veux bouffer? Descends ton steak! Elle a refilé une arme à chacun, Je te file les balles, je te file un grade. Tu flingues ou je te flingue! Moze était dans sa harka, son nouveau bled. Vous savez, comme ces millions de déplacés installés dans mille merveilleux villages en toile de tente. [. . .] Des femmes et des enfants terrorisés. Un peu de palu, un peu de typhus et, dans le noir, la nuit, des pères et des maris affamés. Et on dit de ça que c’était une armée de volontaires!35 [As the army had few French, few Catholics, and few volunteers in the field, they confined the villagers outside of their homes, in wastelands, behind barbed wire with limited rations of semolina, You want to eat? Get your ass down here! They gave a weapon to each man, Here are some bullets, here’s a rank. Shoot or I shoot you! Moze was in his harka, his new dump. You know, like those millions of displaced people set up in a thousand marvelous village of canvas tents. [. . .] Terrified women and children. A bit of malaria, a bit of typhus and, in the dark, at night, starving fathers and husbands. And they called this an army of volunteers!]

The crude style of these sentences, the use of the pronoun “tu,” denoting a relationship of domination, and the exclamatory orders seek to convey

130

Chapter 3

the brutality of the colonial regime and the dire misery prevailing in the environment in which most indigenous men were recruited. The ideological ignorance of these men, suggested by the sense of confusion created by the succession of clauses separated only by commas, is made metaphor in the image of darkness (“noir,” “nuit”) surrounding these men. In fact, as Mohammed Harbi underscores, many indigenous people, especially in remote countryside areas, did not know about the existence of an Algerian nationalist movement.36 The intransitive use of the verb “flinguer” implies that the Harkis did not know at first whom they were supposed to shoot. Finally, Rahmani emphasizes the preconceived, contrived identity imposed on the Harkis by choosing the impersonal pronoun “on” (“Et on dit de ça que c’était une armée de volontaires!”), connoting both the concealed identity of political manipulators and the anonymous human mass spreading rumor-like opinions (“on dit . . .”). This clear expression of anger, particularly stressed in the sarcastic description of harkas (“merveilleux villages en toile de tente”), hardly conceals Rahmani’s attempt to undifferentiate Moze’s case. Instead of singling his story out, she places Moze among the miserable mass of Harkis, and suggests a dynamic more general to colonialism in Algeria, the capitalist exploitation of the labor force, or, in the words of Fanon, the dehumanization and dispossession of the indigenous people.37 Essentially, Moze tells a story that differs from the official one disseminated through public and political discourses. Rahmani asserts: “Cet homme concerne l’histoire. Il n’en est pourtant pas. Il n’aurait pas dû être. On le nomme vite, très vite, ‘harki’”38 [This man has to do with history. He is not of it, however. He shouldn’t have been. Very, very quickly he gets called a “harki”]. As this passage forebodes, Moze brings into tension two regimes of truth, that is to say, two discursive systems whose coherence relies on a certain relation to the world. The friction between these two regimes—the official version of the Harkis’ history and the narrator’s personal, familial version—culminates when she speaks about Moze’s role as a supplétif. To take stock of this discrepancy, Rahmani reproduces within her text some official archives of the French state and army, and makes adjustments to them. The four archival reproductions can be found in the first chapter “la mort. Entretien sur Moze” (“Death. Inquest on Moze”), a sort of historicaldetective inquiry about the death of Moze. The first archive is a certificate of inheritance, modified by Rahmani,39 which the investigator likely brought to Moze’s family after his death (figure 3.1). The document is inserted just after a digression on the part of the narrator (in conversation with the investigator) about Ali, Moze’s brother, also a Harki, who died in a psychiatric hospital after suffering mistreatment and violence, an affair classed in the official record as “Death by heart attack.” Already introducing the theme of French judiciary injustice toward Harkis,

The Construction of the “Harkive”

131

Figure 3.1  Certificate of inheritance. © Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2003.

Rahmani concludes this passage by invoking the deceased uncle’s “Sept enfants, harki de merde!”40 [Seven children, fucking harki!], now orphans, but who have to be reminded that France is their country. Directly after, and before the narrative picks up again, the reader is confronted with the certificate of inheritance, on which no inheritor names appear. Why place this not yet completed document in the narrative, in the middle of a conversation with the investigator? First, the visible rupture—the difference in textual material between the narrative and the copy of the archival document—prompts the reader to reflect on the discursive status of the archive. What type of truth does the archive produce? Is it continuous or discontinuous with the narrative’s regime of truth? In its etymology, the archive, from the Greek arkhe,

132

Chapter 3

signifies “‘a public building,’ ‘a place where records are kept,’”41 but also the “beginning” and the “commandment.” Thus, the archive is closely linked to the notion of truth, as Diana Taylor has pointed out: “By shifting the dictionary entries into a syntactical arrangement, we might conclude that the archival, from the beginning, sustains power. Archival memory works across distance, over time and space. [. . .] Insofar as it constitutes materials that seem to endure, the archive exceeds the live.”42 The archive therefore possesses stabilizing power and is associated with “enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones).”43 It forms an authority. In Moze, however, the first archive is presented as incomplete because the document is not filled out. Rahmani thereby suggests multiple possibilities. On the one hand, if the document has not yet been filled out, and thus does not bear the names of Moze’s children, it not only questions the narrator’s status as a legitimate heir. But also, it underscores in an allegorical way the scotomization of Harkis, to whom French authorities have denied an existence—because under the archive’s regime of truth, that which is invisible—here: not written—does not exist.44 On the other hand, if the document has remained blank, then in this case Rahmani indicates the incompleteness of official archives that forget or ignore an entire portion of Moze’s life. The continuation of the narrative confirms both hypotheses: the development of the story will allow the narrator to found and legitimate her own speech as a Harki daughter, witness to her father’s tragedy, at the same time as the inherent authority of official archival memory is deconstructed. A process of supplementation of official history is thus at stake. Moreover, the order in which the archives are inserted is interesting in that it is not chronological, and begins with the end, with the certificate of inheritance, in other words with the death of the father. In a sense, only the father’s disappearance renders the archive necessary because the oral history is absent. But also, this order suggests that the story of Moze according to his daughter runs against what is officially written. Indeed, the insertion of three other pieces of archive within the text allows Rahmani not only to deconstruct the official commemorative discourse about her father’s history but also to construct a “counterpublic testimony,”45 or stylized account of the past that controverts history as it is publicly understood and officially transmitted. Two documents are inserted on pages 62 and 63: a “Proof of service in the auxiliary forces” produced by the Ministry of Defense and a document from the Ministry of Veterans Affairs attesting to Moze’s repatriation to France after various internments in camps in Algeria. The first archival document certifies that Moze took part in various regiments and battalions, and that in 1984 he received state money in recognition of his services (“prime de recasement et licenciement”).46 Next to it, the other document attests to Moze’s experience in Harki camps in Algeria. It mentions Moze’s detention in four transit camps in Algeria, from July 1962 until

The Construction of the “Harkive”

133

Figure 3.2  Proof of service in the auxiliary forces. Certificate from the Ministry of Veterans Affairs. © Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2003.

134

Chapter 3

May 1967: the camps of “Maréchal, Maison Carrée, Berrouaghia,” and last “Hussein Dey” from which, according to the document, Moze escaped. These are real names of camps that served, after the signing of the Treaty of Evian (March 19, 1962), to intern Harkis who maintained the illusion of transfer to France. While the French forces were evacuated from Algeria, the indigenous soldiers who were placed in camps became targets for the FLN’s social cleansing.47 The document says that, after his successful escape from the camp of Hussein Dey, Moze was later transferred to France on a boat called “Méditerrannée.” The document is undated, but signed by “M. Le Meillour,” the actual name of a former French secretary for veterans affairs who was in charge in the 1990s (figure 3.2).48 The inclusion of these copies of archival documents in the narration produces what Arlette Farge calls an “effet de réel”49 as if we were actually reading true (i.e., “real-life”) archival documents, and it places the reader in the position of a historian trying to decipher and interpret the past. However, the place chosen for the insertion of these documents negates the sense of truth generated by this effet de réel. Indeed, the pages that precede them are still devoted to the dialogue with the investigator (we remain in the first part, entitled “Death. Inquiry on Moze”), and more precisely the narrator is speaking about Moze’s status as a “soldier.” While Moze’s daughter recounts the humiliations and insults to which Harkis and their children were continuously subjected even after the war, the investigator reminds her that her father was first and foremost a soldier. But the narrator’s reply tears into what she considers to be a myth (the notion that Moze was indeed a soldier): Je lui réponds que ces gens-là n’étaient pas recensés dans les effectifs de l’armée. Ils avaient un contrat civil. On les a immatriculés sans les additionner. Servir cinq ans et aucun droit à faire valoir! Pour être léger on peut dire que leur treillis était un déguisement. On avait besoin d’eux temporairement, voyez-vous! Juste pour une petite guerre qu’il fallait faire tout de même. Un cdd renouvelable. C’était une petite fiction que cette guerre-là! [. . .] Le temps d’une production avec, d’un côté, des centaines de figurants déguisés en soldats français, en face, d’autres figurants, des milliers, mais en guenilles, en vêtements de pauvres et, au loin, à l’arrière, dans le fond du décor et comme appui, on a mis des vrais acteurs, ceux qui portent les costumes de guerre épais, avec de vraies médailles.50 [I tell him that those people were not counted in the number of army troops. They had a civilian contract. They were registered without being added. Serve five years and no rights to claim! To put it mildly one could say that their military dress was a costume. They were only needed temporarily, you see! Just for a little war that would have to be done all the same. A renewable, fixed-term

The Construction of the “Harkive”

135

contract. It was a little fiction, that war! [. . .] The span of a production with, on one side, hundreds of extras dressed up like French soldiers, opposite them, other extras, thousands of them, but in rags, in poor clothing and, behind, in the distance, in the background and as support, they put the real actors, those ones who wear the thick battle uniforms, with real medals.]

Moze’s daughter disputes the idea that her father was actually a part of the French army: he was an auxiliary registered on a list in case the army needed him. The text goes even further, and suggests that the army produced a fake document: “Si vous lisez ses états de service, il [Moze] a même été chasseur alpin. Mais lui, il ne l’a jamais porté, l’uniforme, et encore moins celui des chasseurs alpins”51 [If you read his statements of service, he [Moze] was even a mountain infantryman. But him, he never wore a uniform at all, even less that of a mountain infantryman]. In an interview for the journal de(s)générations, Rahmani attests that these documents were false: “En fait, j’ai cru que mon père était un harki, jusqu’au jour où j’ai découvert que ses documents militaires étaient faux”52 [In fact, I thought that my father was a Harki, up until the day when I discovered that these military documents were fakes]. Official memory is confronted by the speech of the daughter, bearer of a familial memory that rejects the idea that Moze ever belonged to these regiments. But what is interesting is the metaphor that Rahmani uses to dismantle the official discourse on Moze. She stages the war as if it were a type of fiction, or more specifically a film. The metaphor continues to develop right up to the textual rupture of the archival documents: Le spectacle est devenu sérieux. Il y a une explosion de figurants en lambeaux, des tonnes de pauvres traversaient les plateaux. [. . .] Les techniciens ont fini par prendre peur. Les commanditaires ont du changer de scénario [. . .]. Quels spectacles ils nous ont offerts! Batailles d’Alger et des Aurès [. . .], rafles et incendies, oliviers dynamités, forêts ravagées, déserts minés [. . .], exode, misère, torture, famine et putsch. [. . .] Il en a fallu de la bobine, ça jouait partout. Et ça traînait, ça traînait. C’est le super-producteur qui a mis un terme à toute cette dépense. Trop long, trop cher, pas clair, pas précis, pas de héros. [. . .] Une pure fiction je vous dis. Et le film n’est jamais sorti.53 [The spectacle got serious. There is an explosion of extras in shreds, tons of poor people. [. . .] The technicians ended up getting scared. The backers had to change the script. [. . .] What spectacles they gave us! The Battles of Algiers and the Aurès [. . .] raids and fires, dynamited olive trees, ravaged forests, exploded deserts [. . .], exodus, misery, torture, famine and military coup. [. . .] It took quite a lot of reel, there were performances happening everywhere. And it went on, and on. It was the super-producer who put an end to all this expense. Too

136

Chapter 3

long, too costly, unclear, unspecific, no hero. [. . .] A pure fiction, I tell you. And the movie was never released.]

In this comparison of the Algerian War to a thwarted, large-scale film production, all the (social) agents of the war are depicted as participants in a film shoot (De Gaulle as super-producer, the populations as extras, politicians as film technicians, and so on). What Rahmani implies, of course, is not that the Algerian War did not exist, but that its official story, for her, comes under a kind of imaginary construction that plays tricks with reality, as does a cinematographic fiction. In other words, and in light of Michael Warner’s definition of a “public” as “a social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse,”54 the story of the Algerian War in general, and that of Moze in particular, is not the one that has been publically disseminated. To insert archival documents directly after this passage thus follows this logic of fictionalization and mystification in order to draw attention to it and thereby denounce it. The documents are struck with a fictional status, and their “reality” effect is paradoxically transformed into a fiction effect. By contrast, Rahmani elaborates a counter-discourse (or, in Warner’s terms, a “counter public address”55) through the authority of a counterpublic that, as Michael Rothberg explains, “sets itself against the dominant by producing and circulating a stigmatized identity through forms that challenge the supposed neutrality and transparency of the ‘general public.’”56 Rahmani writes what the archival documents and the official story left unsaid. Thus, contradicting the “Proof of auxiliary service,” the narrator holds that Moze never wore a uniform, and by completing the information furnished by the Ministry of Veterans Affairs mentioning Moze’s time in multiple Algerian camps, she evokes the massacre of Harkis that French authorities have covered over: “l’horreur, le massacre, la persécution et le pillage de tant d’hommes [. . .] frappés, coupés, étranglés [. . .] cinq mille, cent mille, cent cinquante mille [hommes tués]”57 [the horror, massacre, persecution, and ravaging of so many man [. . .] beaten, cut, strangled [. . .] five thousand, a hundred thousand, one hundred and fifty thousand [men killed]]. She notably explains that Moze remained alive thanks to money regularly paid by his family to the FLN. In the same way, contrasting the neutrality of the phrase “His repatriation took place on May 25, 1967 aboard the ‘MÉDITERRANÉE,’” Rahmani specifies the conditions of Moze and his family’s transfer to France, recalling in passing that France had refused to repatriate Moze and other Harkis at the end of the war in 1962: En 1962, il n’a pas eu le droit de venir en France et les militaires de la métropole étaient passibles du tribunal militaire s’ils s’avisaient de soutenir un harki en le faisant partir. [. . .] Le jour où [Moze] s’est échappé de prison, mon frère

The Construction of the “Harkive”

137

a déposé mon père à l’ambassade de France. Contrainte de le sauver et nous de le suivre! Une nuit, un camion de la Croix-Rouge est venu nous prendre. Nous l’avons retrouvé; maigre et muet.58 [In 1962, he was not allowed to go to France and soldiers from mainland France were liable to be court marshaled if they dared to support a harki by getting him out. [. . .] The day that [Moze] escaped from prison, my brother dropped my father off at the French embassy. Compelled to save him and us to follow him! One night, a Red Cross truck came to get us. We were reunited with him; thin and mute.]

The day after, the French army carried them, along with other Harki families, to the other side of the Mediterranean. Moze’s emaciation and his silence speak volumes on the trauma of his imprisonment and the conditions of repatriation to France, and Rahmani’s counter-narrative thus allows two regimes of truth about Harki history to be put in tension, that of the counterpublic witness and that of the state, “bringing embodied truth into contact and conflict with a certain formation of the [. . .] public sphere.”59 In a way, through the narration of her own version of the past contradicting or completing the official archive, Rahmani produces an interesting form of “prothèse du dedans” [prosthesis of the inside], as Derrida calls it, as if her counterpublic narrative was a sort of “unconscious” of the official memory.60 Indeed, the archival pieces she inserts in her text are a record of the official memory of the French state; the very archival documents are traces, more precisely impressions (imprint), of the past as represented (reconstituted) by the army/the state. This archive is “external” to history, in a similar way as individual spontaneous memory (in Greek, “mnémè”—memory—and “anamnémè”—work of remembering) is to the psyche: a form of conscious recording, storing. However, since psychoanalysis exists, one can conceive an unconscious type of memory, or an “internal” archive, “inner prosthesis” as Derrida calls it in Mal d’archive: En tenant compte de la multiplicité des lieux dans l’appareil psychique, il [le modèle extérieur, l’archive extérieure] intègre aussi, au-dedans de la psukhè même, la nécessité d’un certain dehors, de certaines frontières entre du dedans et du dehors. Et avec ce dehors domestique, c’est-à-dire avec l’hypothèse d’un support, d’une surface ou d’un espace internes sans lesquels il n’y a ni consignation, enregistrement ou impression, ni répression, censure ou refoulement, il accueille l’idée d’une archive psychique distincte de la mémoire spontanée, d’une hupomnesis distincte de la mnémè et de l’anamnèsis, l’institution, en somme, d’une prothèse du dedans.

138

Chapter 3

[Taking into account the multiplicity of regions in the psychic apparatus, it [the exterior model, the exterior archive] also integrates the necessity, inside the psyche itself, of a certain outside, of certain borders between insides and outsides. And with this domestic outside, that is to say also with the hypothesis of an internal substrate, surface, or space without which there is neither consignation, registration, or impression nor suppression, censorship, or repression, it prepares the idea of a psychic archive distinct from spontaneous memory, of a hypomnēsis distinct from mnēmē and from anamnesis: the institution, in sum, of a prosthesis of the inside.]61

Derrida describes here the reality of the “intangible” unconscious memory, whose existence is nonetheless implied by the hypothesis of memory “repression,” in other words, by an outside of (conscious) memory that remains memory, where other—unwanted—memories are stocked. This place of memory that is inaccessible through consciousness is thus outside and inside at the same time (“dehors domestique”). As far as the metaphor between the individual’s and the state’s memory holds, one can say that Rahmani produces an internal archive, inner prosthesis of history (as recorded through official memory, that is, as narrated in the military reports). The narration surrounding the archival pieces works as their “unconscious,” the story (Moze) claiming to expose the repressed memories of history. Finally, through one last archival document, this “unconscious” of the official Harki history is brought to the fore like a “return of the repressed.” Rahmani plays with a famous 1962 telegram from Louis Joxe, the former French Secretary of State for Algerian relations, addressed to the General Inspectorate of the Air Force. This highly confidential document, made public in 1992 with the opening of the archives of the Algerian War, commands the abandonment of the Harkis. The telegram is reproduced on page 42 of Moze: Télégramme 125—IGAA du 16 mai 1962, ultrasecret: demande à hautcommissaire de rappeler que toute initiative individuelle tendant à installation métropole Français musulmans est strictement interdite. En aviser d’urgence tous chefs SAS et commandants d’unités—Louis Joxe, ministre d’État, chargé des Affaires algériennes.62 [Telegram 125—IGAA of May 16, 1962, top secret: request High Commissioner to remind that any individual initiative to move Muslims to mainland France is strictly forbidden. Immediately inform all SAS chiefs and squad commanders— Louis Joxe, minister of State for Algerian affairs.]

Joxe, signatory of the Evian Treaty who died in 1991, was politically responsible for the decision to abandon the Harkis in the transit camps. Benjamin

The Construction of the “Harkive”

139

Stora, quoting this telegram in his book Ils venaient d’Algérie; L’immigration algérienne en France (1912–1992), states that the message unambiguously proves France’s betrayal: “Cette politique du ‘pas d’histoire’ avec le Consulat algérien annonce l’abandon volontaire d’une communauté”63 [This policy of “no story” with the Algerian consulate announces the voluntary abandonment of a community]. Another directive from July 1962, again signed by Louis Joxe, confirms this abandonment, stating that that “any auxiliaries who have arrived in mainland France not according to the plan will be sent back to Algeria.”64 Indisputable yet “repressed” proof of the culpability of the French state in the deadly abandonment of the Harkis, this missive is transformed on the following page by Rahmani, who thereby draws out another, embedded, message: Avis à la population: demande à haut-commissaire de rappeler que toute initiative individuelle tendant à installation métropole Français musulmans est strictement interdite. En aviser d’urgence tous chefs SAS et commandants d’unités—Louis Joxe, ministre d’État, chargé des Affaires algériennes.65

By changing the addressee and crossing out some words, the new message is delivered as if it had always been embedded in the original one as a logical consequence: “Public notice: asking high-commissioner to call Louis Joxe back,” so that he can appear before a judge. This passage clearly sounds like a pamphlet or the beginning of a manifesto, intended to rally people, echoing this later call in the narrative: “Tout est vif. Il faut agir. L’histoire qui nous concerne n’est pas close”66 [Everything is live. We must act. The affair that concerns us is not closed]. Actually, the publication of Moze in March 2003 did have an impact on children of Harkis, nine of whom decided, in the fall of the same year, to press charges against Pierre Messmer, former French Secretary of State for the Armies during the Algerian War and who orchestrated the abandonment of the Harkis.67 Writing a literary text that elaborates, or reconstructs, the father’s story in the dialogic form of an interview with an investigator was a necessary means of understanding, against the accepted official story, Moze’s history and suicidal gesture. The writing, the putting into a narrative constitutes a kind of “third,” a mediation that Rahmani lacked in her quest for meaning as well as her mourning process: Je ne trouvais pas le tiers qui aurait pu m’instruire sur ce qui était le plus inquiétant pour moi: ce qui avait déterminé ma présence en France. En écrivant Moze, j’ai fini par fabriquer ce tiers. J’en ai conclu qu’il manque à l’histoire tout un pan de compréhension de l’événement, car toujours elle écarte un possible récit de l’“ennemi.” [. . .] Il me fallait en tant qu’enfant d’un homme mort sans

140

Chapter 3

précaution vérifier que la mort que s’était infligée mon père ne lui avait pas été donnée d’une main extérieure. J’ai depuis appris encore plus sur la question. L’histoire est un matériau vivant.68 [I found no third party who could enlighten me on the question that troubled me most: what had determined my presence in France. In writing Moze, I ended up creating this third party. From this I concluded that story is missing a whole part to its rendering of the event, as it always removes a potential story of the “enemy”. [. . .] As the child of a man who died in an untimely way, I had to verify that this death was not inflicted on him by an outside hand. I have since learned even more about the question. History is a living substance.]

After the third-party figure of an “investigator,” Rahmani imagines another that will permit her, after reconstructing Moze’s story, to judge her father. In other words, through a figure that mediates justice, the writing enables the author at once to stage the trial that Moze never had, but also to think, to evaluate his suicide, and thereby contribute to his daughter’s mourning process. JUDGING MOZE: THE PERFORMANCE OF JUSTICE AND THE DOUBLE WITNESS On avait promis à Moze l’entente et le respect de ses biens. Ce qui s’est passé ensuite, il faut nous l’expliquer. Pourquoi sciemment l’horreur, le massacre, la persécution et le pillage de tant d’hommes? Pourquoi abandonner à la mort tant de pères?69 [Moze had been promised an understanding and respect for his property. What happened after, someone must explain this to us. Why the willful horror, killing, persecution and pillage of so many men? Why abandon so many fathers to death?]

Throughout the book, Rahmani links the question of the French authorities’ abandonment of the Harkis to an interrogation of the figure of the traitor. The narrative allows Rahmani to displace the figure of the traitor from Moze to the French authorities. In a long accusatory passage, she repeats the idea that France did not keep its commitment and abandoned her father in spite of both his loyalty and his French Muslim status: Alors que le père de Moze avait été tué de plusieurs balles dans le ventre pour avoir servi des denrées alimentaires à des soldats français, alors que ses oncles devaient subir le même sort, alors que tous ses frères avaient été arrêtés et

The Construction of the “Harkive”

141

enfermés, alors que sa famille a été par la suite spoliée, torturée et volée en raison d’une complicité de fait et réelle avec la France, alors qu’il s’était évadé après cinq ans d’internement, eh bien ni la fuite, ni la Croix-Rouge, ni les cicatrices, ni les stigmates de la torture, la maigreur et l’extrême absence, ne suffisaient pour cette nationalité. Le pire, c’est qu’il était en possession devant ses juges de sa carte d’identité française avec bande tricolore sur laquelle on peut encore lire aujourd’hui qu’il doit être fait au porteur de cette carte les honneurs dus à sa fonction.70 [Although Moze’s father had been killed by several bullets in the stomach for serving food rations to French soldiers, although his uncles had to suffer the same fate, although all of his brothers had been arrested and imprisoned, although his family had then been dispossessed, tortured, and robbed because of their very real complicity with France, although he had escaped after five years of internment, neither the escape, nor the Red Cross, nor the scars, nor the marks of torture, emaciation, extreme absence, could suffice for this nationality. The worst is that as he stood before his judges, he was in possession of his tricolor banded French identity card on which you can still read today that the bearer of this card must be rendered the honors befitting his function.]

Already preparing “Act III” of the novel where the narrator testifies in court, this passage serves as an indictment in which the narrator takes on the role of a prosecutor, recounting the facts of the case, through the repetition of the conjunction “alors que,” the accumulation of clauses in the long sentence of this paragraph, and the multiplication of past participles mimicking the typical phrasing of a French judicial document. Rahmani’s criticism targets the French system of social integration and citizenship, which she deplores as a deception: “la politique française d’assimilation est un mensonge”71 [the French policy of assimilation is a lie]. Moze was not “French enough” to be repatriated with the army, as Rahmani cynically implies through this rhetorical question: “N’est-ce pas que le colonialisme se nourrit de résidus humains et de citoyenneté inachevée?”72 [Doesn’t colonialism feed itself on human residue and incomplete citizenship?]. In the Louis Joxe telegram altered by Rahmani, the message created by the crossing out (“call back Louis Joxe”) prefigures a transformation in the narrative economy. After the important Chapter I (“la mort. Entretien sur Moze” [Death. Inquiry on Moze]) and a brief Chapter II (“la sépulture. Les filles de Moze retournent dans le pays de leur père” [Burial. Moze’s daughter return to the country of their father]) in which the narrator dialogues with her sisters about the subject of their father’s funeral, the third “act” of the novel, entitled “la justice. La fille de Moze est reçue par la Commission nationale de réparation” [justice. Moze’s daughter is received by the National Reparations

142

Chapter 3

Commission], stages the justice that Moze never received. The space of the text becomes a fictive tribunal in which Rahmani “invents a third”73—the authority of law—to which her father never had recourse. In Chapter II, the narrator receives a “Convocation à témoigner”74 [Call to Testify], before a national reparations commission, whose ostensible goal is to evaluate the harm done to Moze and redress the injustice. Rahmani invents such a commission, probably drawing inspiration from the existence of numerous commissions designed to make amends for damage or compensate the victims of dispossession.75 Chapter III opens with a line from the president of the commission who orders the narrator to approach. The following phrase sets the tone of the chapter: “Ainsi commence l’acte de justice”76 [So begins the act of justice], Moze’s daughter comments. In effect, this chapter, highly theatrical, resembles a trial, which is “la mise en scène ritualisée, institutionnalisée de la parole qui fait tiers”77 [the ritualized, institutionalized staging of speech that creates a third party]. Through the means of fiction, Rahmani thus succeeds in articulating and transmitting her testimonial at the same time as she creates a third, a fictional legal body. From the first exchanges between the narrator and the president of the commission, Rahmani specifies that the context is one of testimony: – Parlez librement, nous vous écoutons, me dit un homme. – Je jure de dire toute la vérité. – C’est une commission, pas un tribunal. Nous avons pour mission de recueillir dans la transparence et l’équité votre témoignage concernant votre père. Vous n’avez pas à prêter serment.78 – [Speak freely, we are listening, a man says to me. – I swear to tell the whole truth. – This is a commission, not a court. Our mission is to collect, with transparency and fairness, your testimony regarding your father. You do not have to take an oath.] From the start of her testimony, Moze’s daughter establishes a link between her position as “témoin sans qualité precise”79 [unspecified witness] and her own trauma inherited from her father’s status: “selon le pays concerné, je suis fille de traître ou de victime”80 [depending on the country in question, I am the daughter of either a traitor or a victim]. This testimony quickly takes on an accusatory, or at least critical, tone toward the French authorities (political, judicial), which have never given the Harkis a voice: Depuis quarante ans que ces survivants encombrent les allées de ce pays qui les a faits, aucun d’entre eux n’a été invité à dire mot de son existence. Aucune invitation. [. . .] On parle de Vichy, de 1941, de la guerre et de la collaboration.

The Construction of the “Harkive”

143

On dit qu’il faut toutes ces paroles pour s’en servir en bien et eux, qui entendent, ne comprennent pas qu’on enterre leur histoire avec eux.81 [In the forty years that these survivors have clogged up the paths of this country that made them, not one has been invited to say a word about his existence. No invitation whatsoever. [. . .] People talk about Vichy, 1941, the war and collaboration. They say that all these words are necessary in order to make good use of them and they, the ones who hear, don’t understand that their history is being buried with them.]

The Harkis have been made invisible and muted. Moze’s daughter continues by asking questions, thereby initiating a process of role inversion (the commission was supposed to ask the questions and the daughter to provide her testimony): “Faut-il rendre justice à Moze? Que peut-on lui rendre? Que lui a-t-on pris? Sa vie, sa liberté, ses biens, son honneur? Peut-on les lui rendre? Que lui a-t-on fait? On l’a désarmé, abandonné? On lui a menti? On l’a utilisé, exploité, méprisé?”82 [Must we render justice to Moze? What can we render him? What was taken from him? His life, liberty, property, honor? Can we give them back to him? What was done to him? He was disarmed, abandoned? Lied to? Used, exploited, scorned?]. And she comes up with her own answer, and in so doing shows her power to create a third through fiction: “On ne peut rien lui rendre. Et que peut-on me rendre? Il va falloir trouver. Me donner ce qu’on ne peut me rendre! Moze était mon père, un père que je n’ai pas eu. Un père qui ne l’était pas”83 [We can’t give him anything back. And what can you give me? You’ll have to find something. Offer me what can’t be given back! Moze was my father, a father that I never had. A father who wasn’t one]. Taking on the role of prosecutor more and more clearly, the narrator levies an accusation on two counts: “J’accuse le peuple français de m’avoir abandonnée. J’accuse ce pays d’avoir tué mon père”84 [I accuse the French people of abandoning me. I accuse that country of killing my father]. The accusation is thus collective, and the first sentence (on the fate of Harki children) stands as the consequence of the second (the fate of Harki fathers). I will first analyze the accusation of the father’s murder. In the following passage, Rahmani suggests that her father’s suicide is an indirect consequence of his enrollment as a Harki, and a direct effect of France’s “omertà coloniale”85—the law of silence still shrouding colonization and the Algerian War: Moze a salué le monument aux morts. Entouré des élus, lui, le revenant d’une guerre inconnue, lui, le soldat inconnu, a salué le monument absent d’une guerre qui a eu lieu. Moze a salué le monument aux morts absents d’une guerre qui l’a

144

Chapter 3

enfoui. Il a salué le monument aux victimes d’une guerre avant de se tuer, de mourir d’une guerre qui n’aurait pas eu lieu!86 [Moze saluted the monument to the dead. Surrounded by the elect, he, revenant from an unknown war, he, the unknown soldier, saluted the absent monument of a war that did take place. Moze saluted the monument to the missing dead of a war that engulfed him. He saluted the monument to the victims of a war before killing himself, dying of a war that supposedly never happened!]

On Armistice Day, November 11, 1991, Moze drowns himself in the communal pond facing the monument commemorating the dead. Through his official salute, Moze hailed the Algerians who died for France during the Algerian War of Independence. This war, which French officials are still reluctant to acknowledge (“une guerre qui n’aurait pas eu lieu”), to name (“une guerre inconnue”), and thus to commemorate (“monument absent”) would have caused, decades after its end, Moze’s death, as the verb “engulf” suggests. However, the word “revenant” (specter) shows that Rahmani considers that her father was already dead by the end of the war. This is the first part of her indictment: France psychologically assassinated the Harkis, by exiling them existentially and then physically from their country. To describe this “assassinat de [la] conscience,”87 Rahmani first starts by using the figure of the dog, standing for the remains of colonized men: “ils n’étaient que des chiens” [they were nothing but dogs], “humilié comme le chien”88 [humiliated like a dog]. The recurrent term “humiliation” in Moze emphasizes the process of alienation to which the indigenous population was subjected. The text abounds in sharp criticisms of the colonial condition, described in blunt, and sometimes sarcastic, terms, as in these sentences: “Ce peuple a été piétiné et il l’a su” [This people had been trampled and he knew it]; “Les musulmans ont été méprisés. On les a tués en si grand nombre [. . .] que vraisemblablement ils n’étaient bons qu’à être exploités et domestiqués pour les nécessités du moment . . . [ils] l’ont été, à force de luttes, de vols et de séquestres. [. . .] Certains étaient même montrés dans des foires”89 [Muslims were despised. They were killed in such great numbers [. . .] that in all likelihood they were only good for exploiting or domesticating for the needs of the moment . . . [they] were indeed, through fighting, theft, and confinement. [. . .] Some were even exhibited at fairs]. While insisting on the colonials’ victimhood, the text also places them in a position of resistance (“luttes”), which nuances the portrait of the supposedly inferior beings. However, in the specific case of the Harkis, Rahmani takes the metaphor of the alienated human consciousness to the extreme: among the “animals”, to borrow Fanon’s concept,90 those who enrolled in the French army became

The Construction of the “Harkive”

145

“dead” inside. Underscoring the process of spectralization, Rahmani creates a neologism to define the Harkis that echoes Fanon’s “pseudo-petrification”:91 they are “soldatmorts,”92 the two words soldats and morts being forever stuck together. She explains: “La mort les ronge [. . .]. Tout en eux est mort. Ce sont des loques. Aphasiques parmi les vivants! [. . .] L’asile d’aliénés est leur seule demeure”93 [Death eats away at them [. . .]. Everything in them is dead. They are wrecks. Aphasics among the living! [. . .] The insane asylum is their only home]. She insists on this psychological death that characterized her father: “Vivant, il était mort” [Living, he was dead], “Moze est mort avant sa mort” [Moze died before his death], “Mon père, je ne l’ai connu qu’absent”94 [My father, I only knew him absent]. She invents other phrases to specify her father’s state of living-death: “père-absent-déjà-mort [. . .] pèremort.”95 Moze’s exile is expressed as a death before death, the Harkis being “des cadavres vivants [. . .] des hommes sans vie”96 [living corpses [. . .] lifeless men]. This phantomization of the Harkis resonates with the Nazi enterprise of dehumanization of the Jews, insofar as death contaminates life and the past invades the present. Nadine Fresco interestingly compares the Nazi’s genocide as a “colonisation de la vie par la mort”97 [colonization of life by death] and explains that transgenerational trauma can blend as well as blur antonymic notions like death and life to produce oxymoronic figures such as the “living dead.” Creating an echo with the figure of the “muselmannn” from Nazi concentration camps, Rahmani’s text here produces a “mutlidirectional memory”, to borrow the expression of Michael Rothberg, that brings together the memory of the Holocaust with that of the Harkis. Like Moze the French Muslim, soldatmort, the “muselmann,” these “Mummy-men, the living dead”98 of Auschwitz and elsewhere, were likely thus called because their famished bodies made them bend over and crouch,99 like “praying Arabs.”100 As Marie Bornand notes, despite the uncertain origin of the use of the word “Muslim” in the concentration camp context, “Dans tous les cas, le terme est issu d’un imaginaire collectif qui perçoit le musulman comme un être dégradé et méprisable, attitude raciste dont le nazisme a représenté la manifestation extrême”101 [in any case, the term came out of a collective imaginary that perceives the Muslim as a disgraced and despicable being, a racist attitude of which Nazism represented the extreme manifestation]. Those spectral men, who no longer had the physical or psychical strength to resist the dire conditions, constitute, for Giorgio Agamben, witnesses par excellence, although paradoxical: their silence, bearing witness to an internal death, carries the value of testimony on the extreme atrocity of the concentration camps. Criticized for this conception that seems to devalue the testimony of those who escaped and to open the door for potential Holocaust denial (because “le vrai témoignage serait alors indicible”102 [the real testimony would then be unsayable]), Agamben allows

146

Chapter 3

nevertheless to understand the importance of the dialectic between the speech of the witness-survivor and that of the witness-cadaver, such as Primo Levi has expressed in his texts. It is the surviving witness who will connect the nonexistent speech of the dead witness to his/her own, and therefore speak in his/her own name and yet for the dead: Tout comme un tuteur reprend les droits civiques de son pupille, qui ne peut pas les assumer, tout comme l’auctor-écrivain parle, crée pour celui qui ne sait pas le faire, le témoin-survivant parle aussi pour celui qui ne peut le faire. La parole du témoin est partiellement désubjectivée: le témoin parle non seulement en son nom propre mais aussi au nom des morts. [. . .] une figure du témoin comme lien entre vivants et morts.103 [Just as a guardian takes on the civil rights of a minor, who cannot yet assume them, just as the auctor-writer speaks, creates for those who do not know how, the survivor-witness also speaks for those who cannot do so. The witness’s speech is partially desubjectivized: the witness speaks not only in his own name but in the name of the dead. [. . .] a figure of the witness as a link between the living and the dead.]

Although Moze’s daughter was not a direct witness of the camps in which Moze was imprisoned in Algeria, she was nonetheless a witness to both her father’s trauma and the “repatriation” (that is to say, exile) to France, in the transit camps, then in the forest “ghettos.” In spite of the limitations to this comparison with the witnesses (surviving or dead) of the Nazi camps, certain mechanisms are similar, in particular the theme of the transgenerational transmission of trauma. In this sense, Moze’s daughter is at once a survivorwitness and a second-generation witness. As anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano analyzes in his field studies on the Harkis, the “living version” of Freud’s symbolic “dead father” plays a strong role in the child’s life: “the living-dead father [. . .] who experiences himself, and is experienced by this issue, and others around him, as dead but alive, alive but dead” is a central reference for the Harki child because she “has assumed the wounds [of her father] and articulates her identity in terms of those wounds. She shares, if vicariously [. . .] her parents’ sense of having been betrayed, abandoned, and humiliated.”104 Moze suggests this transgenerational transfer of trauma when Rahmani says: “cette faute [. . .] que je porte, qui n’est pas mienne [. . .] culpabilité endossée” [this fault that I carry, which is not my own [. . .] shouldered guilt], “sa honte [. . .] rejaillissait sur nous” [his shame [. . .] spilled over onto us], “Il nous disait, Vous n’êtes rien! Ni exilés, ni immigrés, vous n’êtes rien. Rien. Être harki, c’est être ce rien, c’est vivre en étant ce rien! Il nous apprenait à vivre

The Construction of the “Harkive”

147

avec son mal. À devenir son mal. Il voulait de nous des semblables”105 [He would tell us, You’re nothing! Not exiles, not immigrants, you’re nothing. Nothing. To be a harki is to be this nothing, it is to live being this nothing! He taught us to live with his pain. To become his pain. He wanted us to be his peers]. The sentences imply a phenomenon of circulation of affects of shame and guilt through which Moze’s trauma is also lived by others. In order to indicate her incorporation of her father’s trauma, Rahmani chooses metaphors of corporeal inclusions: “La faute de Moze, je veux dire qu’elle est ma chair et mon habit. [. . .] cette enveloppe”106 [Moze’s fault, I mean that it is my flesh and my clothing]. The daughter and her father are in a physical continuum, but also in a moral one, as this sentence implies: “je rappelle, étant sa fille, que je suis [. . .] ce qui est venu par lui et qui le continue. Un legs. Une exécution testamentaire ouverte par son salut aux morts”107 [I remind you, as his daughter, that I am [. . .] what came from him and what continues him. A legacy. An executed will opened by his salvation for the dead]. So, when in front of the reparations commission, she explains that despite her disagreement with her father’s “choice” she feels the moral obligation to bear witness for this man: Je dois pourtant plaider non pas pour le réhabiliter ou le disculper mais pour dire ce que signifie le devoir de témoignage dont je suis moi le légataire. Sa mort lui donne un rôle que sa vie durant il n’a pu exprimer. Je sais que cet homme était dans l’impossibilité même de dire qu’il ne pouvait pas dire ce qu’il avait vécu. Ça je l’ai partagé, je l’ai vécu.108 [Yet I must testify not to rehabilitate him or exonerate him but to say what this duty to testify, which I have inherited, means. His death gives him a role that he could not express while he was living. I know that this man could not even say that he could not say what he had lived through. That, I shared it, I lived it.]

As Alison Rice notes, and speaking more generally of North African women writers, These writers are producing works in the wake of unjust acts committed against people in their common country of origin, Algeria. The personal emphasis of traditional autobiography (which is meant to be “universal” but in an arguably selfish manner) has turned outward to encompass families, clans, indeed to embrace entire groups of people who have been wronged. Such writing does not seek to expose sin and have it forgiven—and forgotten. It seeks instead to testify, to bear witness, to give testimony.109

148

Chapter 3

Establishing herself as a direct witness to her father’s silence, that is to say his psychological death, Moze’s daughter pictures herself as a continuation of her father’s being. Even her handwriting, she claims, is informed by that of her dead father; so much so that her own signature is his, as though Moze’s body were haunting hers, making the testimonial act into the performance of an embodied memory. And this memory is also her remembering of what she considers to be her own abandonment from France. There is indeed a subtext in Moze that helps to understand Rahmani’s accusation of the French people for having abandoned her. Some passages pointing to Rahmani’s own memory show that she also speaks of her own trauma through that of her father. First, her remark on her writing follows from an interesting comment in which shes claims that she could “refaire toutes ses lettres, les falsifier, changer sa vie, faire des faux, continuer à le faire vivre, harceler ses supérieurs, ses maîtres, écrire à ses geôliers. Devenir un fantôme. Un fantôme qui aurait compris ce qu’il a à faire. Un soldatmort revenu de la mort!”110 [rewrite all his letters, falsify them, change his life, make fakes, continue to make him live, harass his superiors, his masters, write to his jailors. Become a ghost. A ghost who would have understood what he has to do. A deadsoldier come back from the dead!]. In other words, it is not only Moze who perpetuates himself in his daughter, but it is the daughter who “becomes” Moze, carries him to the point of becoming him (the ghost). Thus, the vicarious wound that Rahmani claims as her own is in fact triggered by another trauma that she experienced directly and to which the text refers only briefly, reflecting the difficult memory of this rupture: her childhood in a Harki camp in France. The Rahmani family, like many other Harkis who managed to get to France, was placed in transit and redeployment camps (“camps de transit et de reclassement”) that were managed by the army. There were seven camps, which had been used as internment camps during World War II (for Jews, Spanish Republican refugees, Gypsies, and so on) and during the Algerian War (for Algerian nationalists). The camps of Bourg-Lastic (in the Puy-deDôme département in central France) and Larzac (in the Aveyron, further south) accommodated more than 11,000 Harkis from June to October 1962, and were quickly saturated, which pushed the French authorities to open more camps, such as Rivesaltes (in the Pyrénées-Orientales département), SaintMaurice-l’Ardoise (in the Gard), Bias (in the Lot-et-Garonne), and La RyeLeVigeant (in the Vienne). According to Abderahmen Moumen, “Almost 42,000 people passed through one of these camps between September 1962 and December 1964, while over 40,000 others managed to avoid them, settling all over France, often through acquaintanceship networks.”111 The Rahmani family arrived in France in 1967 and was placed in the camp of Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise, where, in Moumen’s words, “the remaining families (widows, large families, disabled people, etc.), considered ‘lost

The Construction of the “Harkive”

149

causes’ by the administration, were sent.”112 Rahmani’s description of SaintMaurice-l’Ardoise is concise. In one paragraph, she grasps the lugubrious essence of this military camp where every single commodity and basic comfort was lacking: Nous sommes descendus des camions. Il y avait des baraquements et des tentes, des tours de guet vides, des haut-parleurs qui ne servaient à rien, des barbelés rouillés. [. . .] Je ne vois pas d’arbre. Il faisait chaud. Il y avait un commandant, des officiers, des vestes de l’armée, des vêtements pour les hommes, des couvertures grises et des lits de l’armée. Des lits en fer et des nuits sans sommeil. Il n’y avait que l’armée. [. . .] Nous, on regardait plus loin, au-delà des grilles en fer, là où il n’y avait rien à voir. Tout était vide et sec. [. . .] Voilà pour l’infamie.113 [We got out of the trucks. There were barracks and tents, deserted lookout towers, loud-speakers that didn’t do anything, rusty barbed wire. [. . .] I see no trees. The weather was hot. There was a commander, some officers, military jackets, clothing for the men, some gray blankets and army beds. Iron beds and sleepless nights. There was nothing but the army. [. . .] We kept looking out, past the iron bars, out to where there was nothing to see. Everything was empty and dry. [. . .] So there’s abjection for you.]

Confinement in this transit camp devoid of any reassuring sign of humanity constitutes a sort of primitive scene of violence, of the relation to France, for Rahmani (it is the first point she reached on mainland France). Rahmani does not specify how long she and her family stayed in Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise, but the memory of being ghettoized grew with the subsequent displacement of the Rahmanis to a forest hamlet—forest ranger being among the only jobs offered to the Harkis, who continued to experience a social and spacial exclusion.114 And there as well, the trauma of being confined in a sort of void, physical and psychological, is repeated and even caused by Moze who would lock his children indoors once they moved into the Oise house, to keep them from going outside and living: “Au début, nous vivions dans le noir. Il verrouillait la porte et les volets avant de partir. [. . .] tout nous était étranger”115 [At first, we lived in the dark. He would bolt the door and the shutters before leaving. [. . .] everything was unknown to us]. Moze reproduces the banishment of which he was a victim, and, as Maazouzi puts it, “s’acharne à nier le temps et l’espace qui ont cessé d’être pour lui depuis le départ du pays”116 [desperately attempts to negate the time and space which had ceased to be for him since he left his country]. Replaying his own wartime trauma, he traumatizes in turn his children, who relive the shock of the military camp at Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise. Indeed, the passage where Rahmani recounts how the father would tell his children, “Vous n’êtes rien!” [You are nothing!],

150

Chapter 3

continues with an evocation of a memory of her father’s posttraumatic stress disorder: “La nuit, il hurlait, il pleurait dans son lit [. . .]. Une nuit, il nous a réveillé pour nous tuer. Il a pointé sur nous son fusil et il nous a demandé de le suivre dans la cour. Il nous a alignés. Il avait le regard d’un fou”117 [At night, he shouted, he wept in his bed [. . .]. One night, he woke us up to kill us. He pointed his rifle at us and he asked us to follow him into the yard. He lined us up. He had the look of a madman]. In fact, the lived trauma of Moze’s daughter completely informs the narrative Moze. The first two pages of the text are indeed two evocations of the traumatic memory of the camp, and of its iterations as confinement within the house. Je me souviens. Écris que tu te souviens. Que tu t’en souviens. Je me souviens de mon lit en fer, de tous des lits de fer, du hangar gris, de la petite musique militaire.118 [I remember. Write that you remember. That you remember it. I remember my iron bed, all the iron beds, the gray hangar, the little military music.]

The first poem alerts the reader to two things: first, the narrative that follows will be concerned with traumatic childhood memories, since the phrase “Je me souviens” inevitably evokes Georges Perec’s book Je me souviens (1978), made of fragments of memory of his childhood marked by World War II and the loss of his parents in the Holocaust.119 Rahmani, who was born in 1962 before the end of the Algerian War, inscribes her text in a literary tradition of what Suleiman calls the “1.5 generation,” whose narratives typically uncover childhood trauma, paradoxically through what is unsaid or only in scattered ways.120 Second, the introduction of the second-person singular in her poem announces a second voice in dialogue with the “I,” or rather imposing itself on the I. So, in retrospect the reader understands that this second person is Moze, precisely Moze’s commanding voice imagined by his daughter who considers her father’s life and memory as a legacy to be transmitted within

The Construction of the “Harkive”

151

her own voice. And indeed this epigraph is repeated at the very beginning of the last section of the book, devoted to a dialogue between Moze and his daughter and suggestively titled “MOZE PARLE. La voix de Moze se glisse en sa fille.”121 The second poem somehow exemplifies the complex interweaving of Rahmani’s and Moze’s traumatic memories. On the one hand, this memory is Rahmani’s, the narrator of Moze speaking in the first person. The grey imagery carried by the color of the “hangar” and by the iron material connotes the sadness of the living conditions in Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise, and the absence of hope. The assonance in “er/aire” conveys the persevering harshness of survival in the camp. However, on the other hand, the poem could also refer to Moze’s experience in Algeria, where he spent five years in camps (prison). Moreover, the significant “commencing” place of the poems means, etymologically (in Greek, arkè, which gives archive), a “commanding” place, as if the poem determined the writing of the rest of the text, and constituted the archive of the story. The strategic place commands the opening of speech, an order later echoed in the text, when Rahmani writes: “Il faut parler, parler de ce qui a eu lieu! [. . .] parler pour que la parole exerce son droit”122 [We must speak, speak about what happened! [. . .] speak in order for speech to exercise its right]. Like other children of Harkis, Rahmani expresses her anger against the French authorities and her need for recognition of her trauma. The text points up the juridical void surrounding the question of the Harkis, whose abandonment is regularly classified as a crime against humanity by the children generation, but never officially recognized as such.123 When she is speaking to the reparations commission, Rahmani strongly deplores the politicians’ impunity and asks for a trial, that is, for justice: “Nous les voulons ces jugements qui nous sont dus. Vite, des proclamations, des placards, des affiches et des livres. Des mots qui le disent!”124 [We want them, the judgments that we are due. Quickly now, proclamations, placards, posters and books. Words that say it!]. The judicial lock, existing in French law, prevents trials for colonial crimes, such as the abandonment—and resulting massacre—of the Harkis. Jurist Sévane Garibian explains this judicial lack (“vide juridique”125) surrounding colonial crimes as a result of the problematic French definition of crimes against humanity. The criminal chamber of the Final Court of Appeal (Cour de cassation) stated in its judgment of 1993, after a complaint was made “contre X” for colonial crime against humanity, that: “en l’état du droit, ‘les faits dénoncés par les parties civiles, postérieurs à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, [ne sont] pas susceptibles de recevoir la qualification de crimes contre l’humanité’”126 [under current law, “the actions denounced by civil parties, after the Second World War, [are] not liable to receive the qualification of crimes against humanity”]. Garibian describes the complexities of this

152

Chapter 3

legal situation thus: first, in order to avoid accusing France for crimes against humanity during World War II, French judges limited, in space, the definition of such crimes, which were recognized as having been committed only in Germany (and not in France): la restriction opérée par les juges dans cette jurisprudence [de l’accusation de crimes coloniaux] [. . .] est en grande partie le produit d’une stratégie de politique juridique: l’enjeu est alors de concilier la répression des crimes contre l’humanité commis par un ressortissant français et la raison d’État. En limitant la définition du crime contre l’humanité aux crimes nazis commis “pour le compte d’un pays européen de l’Axe,” alors qu’ils avaient eux-mêmes préalablement élargie aux crimes commis “au nom d’un État pratiquant une politique d’hégémonie idéologique” (lorsqu’il s’agissait de condamner l’Allemand Klaus Barbie), les juges de cassation esquivent habilement la question de savoir si l’État français a mené ou non une politique d’hégémonie idéologique.127 [the restriction performed by the judges in this jurisprudence [of the accusation of colonial crimes] [. . .] is in large part the product of a strategy of juridical policy: the aim is thus to reconcile the punishment of crimes against humanity committed by a French national with reasons of state. By limiting the definition of a crime against humanity to Nazi crimes committed “on behalf of a European Axis country,” although they themselves had previously broadened it to include crimes committed “in the name of a State practicing a policy of ideological hegemony” (in order to condemn the German Klaus Barbie), the appeal judges deftly evade the question of whether the French state did or did not enact a policy of ideological hegemony.]

Second, after this spatial restriction was lifted, another constraint impeded the trial of colonial crimes: the legislators limited the definition of “crime against humanity” in time, namely, only crimes committed after 1994 could be tried. So, Garibian concludes: “Une telle configuration juridique soulève évidemment le problème de l’impunité des crimes contre l’humanité autres que les crimes nazis, exécutés avant le 1er mars 1994”128 [Such a judicial configuration clearly raises the problem of impunity for crimes against humanity other than Nazi crimes, committed before March 1, 1994]. Moze transposes this deadlock in a dramatic way. Rather than speaking directly about the law mentioned above, the text shows the blocked dialogue and miscommunication between Moze’s daughter and the president of the reparations commission. While the narrator calls for trials, judgments, and history to be taught, the president of the commission answers her: “On a reconnu le malheur de vos familles!”129 [We have recognized the hardship of your families!]. But the narrator is not looking for this kind of recognition,

The Construction of the “Harkive”

153

which only feeds the competition between victims. She comments thus: “Le président ne l’entend pas comme moi. Je lui dis que je veux l’ambitieuse vérité et pas une inscription au calendrier national”130 [The president does not mean the same thing that I do. I am telling him that I want the ambitious truth and not an inscription on the national calendar]. Moze’s daughter does not ask for financial compensation, nor for symbolic commemorations, but for an official epistemological research around France’s responsibility in the making of the Harki and a collective transmission of history (“tant qu’on parle d’indemnisation on ne parle pas des massacres”131 [as long as we talk about compensation we do not talk about the massacres]). Essentially, this would help the narrator make sense of what she considers to be a hollow citizenship: “On a malmené mon identité. Un malentendu rend précaire, fragile, ma nationalité. Il y a comme un trou dans ma citoyenneté et c’est difficile à vivre. Aussi difficile à vivre qu’une ablation vécue dont il faut supporter le manque. Ce membre-là ne m’a pas été rendu, ni même échangé. Cette justicelà a manqué!”132 [They have mishandled my identity. A misunderstanding makes my nationality precarious, fragile. There is something like a hole in my citizenship and it is difficult to live with. As difficult to live with as the removal living flesh whose absence must be endured. That piece was never given back to me, or even exchanged. That justice was missing!]. What Rahmani points up in this passage is the “false” role of French children that the Harki children have to play: by accepting the families of surviving Harkis, France puts itself in a position to exact gratitude from the Harkis, whose children were able to grow up safely on the mainland. What is left unsaid in this configuration, however, is that France is at fault for making these people Harkis in the first place. So, the Harkis are “stuck,” because even if they reject their French nationality, they cannot thereby become Algerian. So, Rahmani demands prosecutions: “Retrouvez les ministres, ceux des Armées, de l’Intérieur et de la Justice, les présidents et les chefs de la police et de la propagande, convoquez-les! Demandez-leur pourquoi ils ont fait ça! Et s’ils sont morts lisez les ordonnances!”133 [Find the ministers, of the Armies, the Interior, and of Justice, the presidents and the chiefs of police and propaganda, summon them! Ask them why they did that! And if they’re dead read the ordinances!]. But the president of the commission obstinately hammers home that the trial of colonization is none of his business: “c’est un autre procès [. . .] La commission n’est pas concernée!” [that is another trial [. . .] The commission is not involved with that], “C’est une commission de réparation. Pas un tribunal”134 [It is a reparations commission. Not a courtroom]. Indeed, Garibian observes that historically the Algerian and Indochinese questions are a hot topic that the judges obviously did not want to go in.135 With his attitude reflecting the political decision of forgetting about Algeria (and the subsequent amnesty laws), the president of the commission

154

Chapter 3

“mishears” Moze’s daughter, in the sense that he does not want to hear what she has to say. Such a situation has been described by Rancière as a “mésentente”: a particular moment that undermines certainty and suggests that a wrong is at the basis of the order of reality as it is experienced.136 Following Rancière’s definition of the political, Rahmani’s text is “political” for three reasons: it counters the “droit du plus fort” [right of the fittest]; it undoes the discourse of the authorities in charge of “la politique” [politics]; and it transforms the order (command) executed by the weak ones into a problematic situation—a balance of power, which is thus challenged by new actors. As Rancière writes, “le politique existe là où le compte des parts et des parties de la société est dérangé par l’inscription d’une part des sans-parts”137 [politics exists wherever the count of the parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part]. Moze precisely unveils this political (and intentional) “miscalculation” of the weak ones’ “parts” in the context of colonial and postcolonial situations. Through her text, Rahmani elaborates a “part des sans parts,” that is, a discursive space where claims of existence and justice can be heard. The order of society commanded by la politique is troubled by Moze, which publicly counters the denial of existence that has evacuated the Harkis and their history from the legal and political scene. Jurists call this situation (unique to colonization) when a trial cannot happen for state-related reasons an “amnésie volontaire de la loi.”138 In other words, it is about the self-amnesty of political authorities. So, on the one hand, archives make evident the responsibility of some politicians and military men in colonial crimes, but, on the other hand, the French state makes it impossible to try them because of national interest. Obviously, this national interest leaves apart the Harkis and other former indigènes who directly suffered from colonial crimes, while perpetuating a form of exclusion. In the end, Rahmani’s text raises the issue of state justice, namely the constitutive links between the political realm and the judicial one in a nation-state. The lost dignity of Moze cannot be “repaired” (“cette injustice qui a fait [. . .] des individus dépossédés de leur dignité”139 [this injustice that created [. . .] individuals dispossessed of their dignity], nor can his death or all the crimes caused by colonization. However, granting forgiveness to France would “brise[r] la dette et brise[r] l’oubli”140 [break the debt and break the omission]. But Rahmani does not forgive; she cannot forgive, as long as France does not acknowledge its responsibility in colonial crimes. Moze conveys this impasse of French justice, which means, as Garibian says, a privation from accessing history: “la privation de l’accès au prétoire participe [. . .] de celle d’un accès à l’histoire [. . .]. Prescrits, amnistiés ou exclus d’emblée du champ du droit des crimes contre l’humanité, les crimes français commis dans le contexte de la décolonisation sont insaisissables par le droit”141 [privation from access

The Construction of the “Harkive”

155

to the courtroom participates [. . .] in one of access to history [. . .]. Lapsed, granted amnesty or excluded outright from the legal scope of crimes against humanity, French crimes committed in the context of decolonization elude the reach of the law.] Since there is no official justice for Moze, Rahmani makes literature a space where fictional speech can stand as a judgment. As Maazouzi points out, “dans la colère de la fille au sujet du harki déshumanisé, dans la force de la parole qui fait surgir l’humanité du colonisé, pourrait se reconnaître aussi la libération symbolique de la pensée de la décolonisation”142 [in the daughter’s anger over the dehumanized Harki, in the force of those words that bring forth the humanity of the colonized, the symbolic liberation of the thought of decolonization can be recognized]. In a certain way, Moze narrativizes what Mbembe calls “la déclosion du monde” [the disclosure of the world], or “le processus par lequel le colonisé s’éveille à la conscience de lui-même, s’approprie subjectivement son moi, démonte les enclos et s’autorise à parler à la première personne”143 [the process by which the colonized awakens to a consciousness of himself, appropriates the self subjectively, dismantles the enclosure, and gives himself the authority to speak in the first person]. Rahmani pushes this first person beyond its limits, in appropriating the position of a third party. Indeed, after her unfruitful exchange with the president of the commission, Moze’s daughter changes roles and adopts the stance of a judging authority. It is a passage that could belong to a metamorphosis scene, somewhat reminiscent of The Trial by Kafka, to whom Rahmani gives a nod when she describes her meeting with the commission as taking place “dans un grand espace face à un haut mur”144 [in a large space in front of a high wall]. After exhaustion due to her repeated attempts to make herself understood (“A ce moment, je suis une femme entêtée qui dit sans arrêt la même chose. Et je poursuis”145 [Right now, I am a stubborn woman who keeps saying the same thing over and over again. And I keep going], she stops the accusatory stammer and adopts a more neutral position. Like a judge who needs to comprehend a situation, she speaks about the Harki enrollment: “Il nous faut maintenant comprendre ce qui a permis que ces hommes lâchent leurs frères”146 [It is now necessary for us to understand what allowed these men to leave their brothers]. Her didactic tone suggests the position of authority. When she claims “vous ne m’empêcherez pas de penser que la colonisation fut une erreur grave”147 [you will not stop me from thinking that colonization was a grievous error], she appropriates the standpoint of someone who must deliver a statement while listening to advocates’ arguments. Then, like a judging authority weighting all the elements of the complex situation of the Harkis, she draws a conclusion: “Ce qui doit être condamné dans la condamnation de Moze c’est ce qui a permis son existence”148 [What must be condemned in Moze’s condemnation is that which permitted his existence].

156

Chapter 3

Highlighting the complexity of the case, she does not exonerate the Harkis on a moral point of view. She contends, however, that the system that produced such a moral and psychological deviation should be legally condemned. Through this dramatic judgment, worthy of an Antigone who would defend her Algerian brothers made French, Rahmani provides herself with her own liberating words that allow her not to be ashamed of her father’s so-called choices, and which above all displaces the Harki shame onto the French state.149 Indeed, Rahmani achieves the climax of her sentence about Moze’s case by performing a personification of France’s legal and political authorities that finally recognize their fault and shame: Oui, monsieur le juge. Je m’adresse à lui et me vient tout à coup l’envie, le désir d’être lui. Lui le président de cette commission. Je lui tourne le dos, je regarde le vide et je dis, Oui, c’est pour tuer son frère qu’il a trahi son frère pour moi. Moi qui devais tuer son frère, je lui ai fait commettre ce crime. Je lui ai fait tuer son frère que je devais tuer. Cette guerre je ne voulais pas la faire. [. . .] Cette terre ne nous souhaitait pas; nous avons fabriqué le frère ennemi. [. . .] Je sais ce que j’ai fait. J’ai fait tuer son frère par lui. Je haïssais son frère! Mais lui, Moze, comment ne pas le honnir. Il me répugnait!150 [Yes, your Honor. I am speaking to him and suddenly I get the urge, the desire to be him. Him, the president of this commission. I turn my back on him, I look out into space and I say, Yes, it is to kill him brother that he betrayed his brother for me. Me, the one who was supposed to kill his brother, I made him commit that crime. This war, I didn’t want to wage it. [. . .] This land did not want us; we created the enemy brother. [. . .] I know what I did. I had him kill his brother. I hated his brother! But him, Moze, how could I not abhor him. He disgusted me!]

Through this personification Moze’s daughter articulates the shame that French authorities are unable to “spit out”—the Harkis are France’s “tabou des tabous.”151 As Évelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand and Anne Martine Parent indeed point out: Sa parole performative de l’humanité du père harki rapproche en effet la narratrice de Moze d’une figure d’Antigone, notamment là où elle met la France en demeure de reconnaître ses fils illégitimes, les laissés-pour-compte du grand récit national, nés de la prise de force de l’Algérie et de la violente rupture qui s’en est suivie. Comme Antigone face à Créon, la narratrice de ce récit aux accents dramaturgiques défie l’état (post)colonial français, le sommant de reconnaître sa propre honte dont il s’est déchargé sur les harkis.152 [Her speech, which performs the humanity of her Harki father, does indeed liken the narrator of Moze to an Antigone figure, especially where she defies France

The Construction of the “Harkive”

157

to recognize its illegitimate children, the rejects of the grand national narrative, born of the forcible taking of Algeria and the violent rupture that followed. Like Antigone before Créon, the narrator of this story with theatrical touches challenges the (post)colonial French state, ordering it to recognize its own shame, which it has thrown onto the Harkis.]

In contrast with her previous angry exclamations, Moze’s daughter finally asserts with calm: “Trahir son frère est un crime mais trahir celui qui a trahi son frère pour toi est pire qu’un crime si tu ne le fais pas pour rendre justice au frère trahi”153 [To betray one’s brother is a crime, but to betray someone who betrayed his brother for you is worse than a crime if you don’t do it to bring justice to the betrayed brother]. So, for Moze’s daughter, France is twice criminal: first, because it created “criminals” (the Harki condition), and second, because it “killed” the criminals not even to do justice to the victims. Rahmani does not put the Harki in the position of an absolute victim (she does recognize their moral responsibility), but she positions France (the state) as the absolute wrongdoer. That is why at the end of her imaginary trial, Rahmani finds the words she needed to forgive her father for twice having chosen death. Moreover, this passage shows a true performance by Moze’s daughter before the commission, who serves as audience. But, as Taylor explains, “Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity. [. . .] performance also functions as an epistemology.”154 Performing the justice that Moze never received in front of the commission, the narrator inscribes herself discursively in what Taylor calls the “repertoire”: “performance, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.”155 In Taylor’s theory, archive and repertoire form two alternative modes of knowledge: while the former embodies a knowledge (mainly Western) based on a tangible, stable memory and a system that relies on the visibility of proof, the repertoire, which “enacts embodied memory,” is based on “the concept of performance, as an embodied praxis and episteme.”156 In other words, the body contains knowledge, whose memory is, unlike the archive, ephemeral, shifting, intangible. Rahmani’s text therefore produces a sort of epistemological “double entry,” because the performance of Moze’s daughter is, in fact, archived by the text. Taylor does note that “the live performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive. A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is part of the repertoire).”157 This is also the case for any text that would describe a performance (and, of course, a theatrical text is a prime example: it does not coextend with the play itself).

158

Chapter 3

Still, Taylor concedes that archive and repertoire “usually work in tandem. [. . .] Innumerable practices in the most literate societies require both an archival and an embodied dimension: weddings need both the performative utterance of ‘I do’ and the signed contract; the legality of a court decision lies in the combination of the live trial and the recorded outcome; the performance of a claim contributes to its legality.”158 By narrating the trial, that is to say by “recording” the “outcome” of her (fictional) appearance before the commission, the narrator, who also (imaginarily) “performed” the trial, offers the reader a representation of the archive and the repertoire of Moze’s story. Except that, of course, because the fictional text does not have the same status as a legal decision, Rahmani’s discourse, like the performance of Moze’s daughter before the commission, is not performative. In other words, justice for Moze has not actually been done. Nevertheless, the text invites the reader to think about this gap between performance and performativity, in the sense that justice for the Harkis remains inaccessible, incomplete, and Rahmani shows that other means of “doing justice” exist and must be created through the arts. The staging of justice in Chapter III does still allow Rahmani to present what Jean-Gérard Lapacherie calls an “un procès d’extimation” [extimation process/trial], or a “procès d’extériorisation de l’intime”159 [process/trial of exteriorizing the intimate]. It is a sort of configuration in which what is intimate to the subject and that which is outside it meet, converge, and have an effect on one another. The subjectivity of Moze’s daughter, along with her deepest traumas, is “projetée hors du sujet, vers l’extérieur, montrée ou exhibée en quelque sorte, et traitée par le sujet qui écrit en objet étranger comme si cet objet était situé hors de soi, dans le lieu le plus éloigné de soi”160 [projected outside the subject, toward the exterior, shown or exhibited in a way, and treated by the writing subject as an external object as if this object were situated outside the self, in the furthest place away from the self]. Fundamentally, the trial takes place in order to save the daughter from death or madness, more than to obtain redress for the father. BURYING MOZE If justice for Moze affects the daughter more than the dead man, then the challenge, for Rahmani, is not only to mourn her father but also to give him a symbolic sepulcher that restores his dignity as a human being. The question of Moze’s tomb was posed explicitly in the second chapter of the book entitled “Burial. Moze’s daughters return to the country of their father.” It presents a dialogue between Moze’s daughters. It offers a reflection on the burial of the father in relation to the banishment of the Harki, but

The Construction of the “Harkive”

159

also that of his children, who still carry to this day a stigma as children of traitors. The relation of Moze’s daughters to Algeria (where they traveled) is examined, as well as their different relationships to mourning: – Tu es là pour autre chose que cette tombe que nous lui voulons! – Cette tombe, crois-tu que je la lui dois? Je ne lui dois rien. Lui il me doit de me quitter, de quitter mon esprit, il me doit de partir. Il me doit de ne plus revenir. Je suis venue ici pour m’en débarrasser! – Tu es scandaleuse.161 – [You are here for something other than this grave that we want for him! – This grave, you think I owe it to him? I don’t owe him anything. But him, he owes it to me to leave, leave my thoughts, he has got to go. He has to leave me and never come back. I came here to get rid of him! – You’re outrageous.] For Maazouzi, this confrontation between two understandings of mourning and the burial ground shows the weight of the impossible and paradoxical relation to Algeria made from hatred, from resentment of both the father and his country that does not have the means to beg pardon and is afraid of the truth. And, at the same time, the relationship with Algeria is made from an intimate link that pushes the daughters to go there, to take an interest. Incidentally, the chapter ends on a promise to dialogue with Algeria, with the maternal family who still live there. However, the question of the father’s burial remains unresolved in the text. Little by little, we gather that, for Rahmani, the father’s true grave rests in the book itself. As the homophony in the title “Moze” suggests, the text symbolizes a “mausolée” (a monumental tomb) for the narrator’s father; it is, in Pinçonnat’s words, a “texte-stèle” [text-stele].162 The construction of Moze’s textual mausoleum coincides with the narrative deployment of a mourning process. In “Le ‘Harki’ comme spectre ou l’écriture du ‘déterrement,’” Rahmani explains that in order to give Moze a mausoleum she needs to disinter him through writing: Le déterrement dont je parle ne renvoie pas à un acte physique qui consisterait à soulever avec une pelle un morceau de terre qu’on dépose à proximité tout en laissant apparaître un trou. Cet acte peut au contraire servir de métaphore. Le geste qui soulève serait l’ensemble animé, agité même, par la pratique analytique, et la terre soulevée qui est en reste et qui est le fond, la “matière” servant à combler le trou, désignerait la vacance de l’être mort sur lequel vous pleurez.163 [The disinterment I am talking about does not go back to a physical act that would consist of digging up a bit of earth, depositing it to one side, and letting

160

Chapter 3

a hole appear. This act can instead serve as a metaphor. The gesture of digging would be the whole as animated, troubled even, by the analytical practice, and the dug up earth would be that which is leftover and at bottom, the “matter” serving to fill the hole, would designate the vacuum of the dead person whom you are mourning.]

This disinterment as metaphor, as literary practice, sets to work from the start of Moze, with the gesture that unearths, that of the narrator who reconstructs the story of her Harki father and confronts the speech of the other. But disinterment also carries a figurative meaning in the text, through the invention of the figure of the soldatmort who has “lost his face” and to whom the narrator must restore a human one. The popular expression “to lose face” means to lose one’s dignity, to become an object of ridicule. I use the expression here in this sense, but also in a more literal one: the Harkis’ loss of dignity can be represented as a loss of their human face, as a disfigurement—in the literal and the figurative sense. From this perspective, giving Moze back his face consists, for Rahmani, in restoring his ability to speak. Throughout Moze, she insists on the importance of the liberating powers of speech, as in this passage, where the verb “parler” is obsessively repeated: Il faut parler [. . .]. Parler [. . .]. Parler [. . .] parler pour que le visage existe, parler pour que les larmes viennent enfin, parler pour que l’homme ne tue plus, parler pour que cesse le mépris, parler pour que l’homme se réconcilie, parler pour que fondent les armes, parler [. . .], parler pour que l’homme aime, parler pour que les hommes chantent, parler pour dire la mémoire, parler pour ne plus avoir honte, parler pour pouvoir se regarder, parler pour ne plus avoir peur, parler pour ne plus être seul pour ne plus souffrir, parler pour ne plus haïr, parler pour vouloir vivre, pour ne plus oublier son père. Parler pour ne plus salir les tombes. Pour faire taire la mort.164 [One must speak [. . .]. Speak [. . .]. Speak [. . .] speak so that the face exists, speak so that the tears finally come, speak so that man kills no more, speak so that contempt ends, speak so that man reconciles himself, speak so that weapons melt, speak [. . .], speak so that man may love, speak so that men may sing, speak to tell the memory, speak so as not to have shame anymore, speak to be able to look oneself in the face, speak so as not to be afraid anymore, speak not to be alone anymore not to suffer, speak so as not to hate, speak to want to live, to not forget one’s father. Speak to no longer desecrate the tombs. To silence death.]

Multiple concerns are expressed in these phrases, real exhortations to use words to heal wounds. Among them, this idea that in order to mourn her

The Construction of the “Harkive”

161

father, Rahmani needs to put a face (“que le visage existe”) on her animalized and living-dead father so that he may cease to be a persona non grata and become simply a person again. She will therefore resurrect Moze, in order to bury him. In the dialogue between Moze’s daughters (Chapter II), a voice calls for Moze’s resurrection; more exactly, it asks the narrator to revive Moze: “Ramène-le de chez les morts” [Bring him back from the dead], “A toi de faire exister cet homme. Ramène-le. Dis son existence. [. . .] Donne une langue à Moze. Fais-le parler”165 [It’s your task to make this man exist. Bring him back. Speak his existence. [. . .] Give Moze a tongue. Make him speak]. Rahmani uses different textual strategies to produce a revival effect of Moze. First, the recurrent expression of filial relationships creates an effect of “life” in the depiction of the dead man. The narrator defines herself (and her family) through him, thus continuing his life: “fils d’un traître” [son of a traitor], “fille de traître” [daughter of a traitor], “descendants des individus dépossédés de leur dignité” [descendants of individuals stripped of their dignity], “mon père [. . .] mon frère [. . .] ils sont les corps d’une même chose”166 [my father [. . .] my brother [. . .] they are the bodies of a single thing]. The image of the specter is omnipresent and allows for the erasure of borders, the collapse of the space of otherness. As Derrida shows in Specters of Marx, a discourse of spectrality emphasizes the challenge that the ghost poses to the distinction between the present and the nonpresent, from both a temporal and a spatial point of view. The ghost also blurs the distinction between presence and absence, as the specter is that which is present despite its absence, and even because of its absence. The last part of Moze (Part V) manifests the success of Moze’s textual resurrection: it is titled “MOZE PARLE,” the active grammatical voice giving him agency and allowing him to speak in a dialogue with his daughters. The subtitle of this final part of the story, “la voix de Moze glisse en sa fille”167 [Moze’s voice slides into his daughter], indicates that the resurrection is made through a fusion (“glisser en”) of Moze and his daughter in a sort of spectrality. Rahmani insinuates this displacement of Moze’s voice from the start of the novel, when she speaks to her dead father and explains that she underwent an ontological transformation, becoming another being, “un insecte, une petite chose”168 [an insect, a tiny thing]. The metamorphosis of Moze’s daughter, which hints at Kafka’s short story in which the narrator becomes an insect, is a complete transformation: physical, with the shaking of the body; discursive, with the disappearance of the daughter’s own voice; and psychical, the fall into mental depression meaning a fusion with her father in death. Rahmani becomes “dead” with her father, and the narrative reads as her journey back from a psychological near-death experience—the realization of her father’s death by suicide.

162

Chapter 3

The fusion “in” or “from” death between Moze and his daughter is further recalled when the narrator, recounting her depression period, says, “Je vais mourir, je vais mourir, je suis de l’eau, de l’eau”169 [I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I am water, water]. She becomes water, the element in which her father died, drowned in the communal pond. In “Le ‘Harki’ comme spectre ou l’écriture du ‘déterrement,’” Rahmani explains that, to her, the name Moze is “la contraction du prénom de mon père et du mien”170 [the contraction of my father’s first name and my own]. The name itself is a result of the liquid fusion, “Mohammed” becoming “Mo,” and Zahia, “Ze.” The name “Moze” also suggests the passage of death (which begins with the syllable “mo” in French) into word (“mot”), into speech, which happens by virtue of he/she who dares (“ose,” phonetically “oz”) to speak. In the same text, Rahmani claims that she was haunted by her father: “Être habité par le spectre, c’est être parmi les vivants avec eux, les morts, et même en eux”171 [To be inhabited by the specter, is to be among the living with them, the dead, and even inside them]. Thus, in a sense, through Rahmani’s writing, Moze lives in his daughter, as she becomes a “fantôme du futur”172 [phantom of the future], to borrow Kerchouche’expression: someone who succeeds Moze and who can articulate the father’s history in the present tense while taking on his guilt and shame as her own. The text abounds with expressions of such transgenerational transfers of Moze’s guilt and shame. For example, Rahmani mentions “cette faute [. . .] que je porte, qui n’est pas mienne [. . .] culpabilité endossée”173 [this fault [. . .] that I carry, which is not my own [. . .] shouldered guilt]. The use of the term “endossée” suggests an almost physical aspect (“dos”) of Moze’s resurrection. This image of somatization is symptomatic of what Anne-Lise Stern calls “parenteral transmission”174 (not by mouth)—a medical term she uses to symbolize the kind of transmission that takes place in the case of the second generation of Holocaust victims. Stern emphasizes the depth of the transference, which is not only cognitive but also corporeal. Rahmani’s work suggests that this kind of transference happened in Harki families too. For instance, when she explains that “sa honte [. . .] rejaillissait sur nous”175 [his shame spilled over onto us], the verb “rejaillir” implies a relation of causality and insinuates that he is inside his children as a cause (since he is their genitor). And as the narrative unfolds, Moze’s guilt and feelings of shame predominate in his daughter, who claims, “La faute de Moze, je veux dire qu’elle est ma chair et mon habit. [. . .] cette enveloppe”176 [Moze’s fault, I mean that it is my flesh and my clothing. [. . .] this envelope]. In fact, the liberation of Moze from his shame and guilt is inscribed as the goal of the narrative right from its epigraph, a quote by the writer Elias Canetti: “L’unique bien qui soit resté à l’homme: libérer la honte”177 [The only good that has remained with man: liberating shame]. The use of the verb in

The Construction of the “Harkive”

163

its direct transitive form underscores the idea of urgency but the fact that it is the object itself (shame) that must be allowed to express itself. But then, does this imply that Rahmani constructs her father’s identity through shame? And if such is the case, “What does it mean to claim an identity through shame?,” to take up Sara Ahmed’s question in The Cultural Politics of Emotion.178 In a sense, shame forms part of the Harki identity and even grants access to a certain dignity, as Rahmani reminds the reader in her text: “[Moze] parlait peu, très peu. Il n’oubliait jamais de vous rappeler que vous manquiez de cette chose essentielle qui est la honte. Tu n’as pas de honte, nous disait-il. Et ce à quoi sa dignité s’est accrochée c’est à cette honte”179 [[Moze] spoke little, very little. He never failed to remind you that you lacked this essential thing that was shame. You have no shame, he would tell us. And what his dignity held on to, it was this shame]. Precisely as Ledoux-Beaugrand and Parent point out, “dans la mesure où il ne possède rien d’autre que sa honte, [Moze] tente d’en faire quelque chose de positif, de la transformer en une forme de dignité qu’il cherche à transmettre à ses enfants”180 [in that he possesses nothing but his shame, [Moze] attempts to make something positive from it, to transform it into a type of dignity that he tries to pass on to his children]. What shame is it, however? It seems that Rahmani seeks to liberate, to give voice to the shame that Moze has for France, more than for himself. She writes: “Moze avait honte de ce pays où il vivait. Il avait honte pour ce pays; Encore plus que pour lui”181 [Moze was ashamed of the country where he lived. He was ashamed of this country; even more than he was of himself]. In other words, the shame that Moze carries is above all that of the country that made the Harki and his shame. Thus, Rahmani’s approach makes sense: “la honte d’être le survivant d’une telle honte, il n’a pas à l’emporter dans la tombe”182 [the shame of being the survivor of such shame, he didn’t take that with him to the grave]. To tell the story of Moze’s “shameful” identity amounts to telling the story of the creation and abandonment of the Harkis (to liberate the shame), and in a sense this liberates Moze from his shame. The rehumanization of Moze thus passes through a recreation of his “face” in the liberation of his shame, or, in a Levinassian sense, of his intersubjective humanity. The “défigur[ation]”183 of Moze culminates in his fatal act, when he—an “unknown soldier”—commits suicide in front of the monument dedicated to the dead of World War I. The final part of the book, the “Épilogue,” consists of a dialogue between two of Moze’s bar “pals” talking about their dead “bar-mate.” For the first time in the narrative, Moze is presented in a social network, as a human being outside his family, as a friend. This aspect of Moze’s being is touching as we learn that he used to drink alcohol with his friends but that he was ashamed of it (as it is forbidden in his religion) and that he feared his wife’s reaction were she to learn of his drinking. The conversation between “Jean-Marie” and “Denis,” whose French names symbolically anchor

164

Chapter 3

Moze’s in French society, is mostly about a dispute between Moze and his wife over an animal bought for the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Adha, the most important holiday of Islam. Traditionally, a sheep is “sacrificed” and eaten, but once, Moze got a calf instead of a sheep. Faced with his wife’s categorical refusal to cook a calf for the “festival of the lamb,” Moze decided to bury the animal in their garden. This image is suggestive: through displacement, one can see in it the burial of Moze’s own “animality,” his inability to speak, and the remaining memory of Moze’s human face through his mistake. Throughout the narrative the constructed memory of Moze resonates with other (hi)stories. Thus, for example, the text creates an interesting echo between the character Moze and Elie Wiesel’s character in Night,184 called Moshe the Beadle. Like Moshe, who was deported from Sighet to a camp and who comes back to tell the story of his death, Moze, who had been imprisoned in a camp (first in Algeria and then in France), returned as a “dead soldier” and testified to his existential death through his silence. The parallel between Moze’s story and that of Jewish deportation is even more explicitly suggested when the narrator, in an attempt to understand analytically what drove men (the Harkis) to betray their brothers, evokes the “sonderkommandos,” the Jewish prisoners in concentration camps who were forced to work in service of the final solution: “Il nous faut maintenant comprendre ce qui a permis que ces hommes [les Harkis] lâchent leurs frères. Quelle promesse leur a été faite? Les sonderkommando portaient la toile du condamné à mort, du Juif condamné. Le traître était quant à lui habillé comme l’occupant”185 [We now must understand what allowed these men [the Harkis] to give up their brothers. What promise was made to them? The sonderkommandos wore uniform of the death sentence, of the condemned Jew. The traitor however was dressed like the occupier]. Rahamni does not draw a true comparison between the two, as the metaphor is immediately interrupted by the remark that unlike the sonderkommandos, the Harkis wore the uniform of the French military. Nevertheless, the comparative perspective is opened, and the motif of the uniform appears somewhat weak, as she has reminded elsewhere that her own father never wore a uniform and was still categorized as a “Harki.” The parallel between these two pariah histories is also implicitly suggested through the theme of registration. The narrator recalls that in fact Moze had a “matricule”186 [ID number], and that she, as his daughter, was likewise numbered—“Je suis fille du harki numéroté. J’ai son numéro. Je suis à sa suite dans le fichier. Je suis fichée comme telle”187 [I am the daughter of a registered Harki. I bear his number. I come after him in the register. I am registered as such]—as if the “quality” of Harki were a natural characteristic or a chosen identity. This passage of course recalls the registration of Jews before and during World War II, notably in France, where the existence of a single Jewish grandparent justified inscription in the registry. Moreover, a

The Construction of the “Harkive”

165

complicity of destiny between Harkis and Jews exists not only with those of Europe but also with those of Algeria. When Rahmani speaks of the policy of separation carried out by the colonization of Algeria, she implicitly invites a comparison with the fate of those individuals “made French” for the needs of the imperialist power and forced into exile after independence. The text thus creates what Rothberg calls a “multidirectional memory,” or a resonant, “productive and not privative” memory, with “intercultural dynamic.”188 To conceive a multidirectional memory allows for the “interaction of different historical memories.”189 But Rahmani’s text goes even further, by linking not only two histories but also the story of Moze with a religious myth: that of Moses. In “Le ‘Harki’ comme spectre, ou l’écriture du ‘déterrement,’” Rahamani comments on her choice of the name “Moze”: “[Moze] convoquera d’autres mots; ‘Oz,’ ‘mausolée,’ ‘Moïse.’ L’absence du i, du bâton dans ce qui aurait pu être un ‘Moïse,’ renverrait à la tombe, au corps absent, au corps tombé”190 [[Moze] will call up other words; “Oz,” “mausolée,” “Moïse.” The absence of i, of the staff in what could have been a “Moïse,” calls back to the grave, the absent body, the fallen body]. Moze is he who shares a certain Mosaic destiny, but who is not Moses precisely because of his lack of symbolic tomb (the failure to recognize his death as what the “Harki” truly was). By providing a symbolic tomb for Moze through her text, Rahmani in a sense transforms Moze into Moses. Beyond the homophony of the two names, the text conveys several striking Mosaic references. First, Moze was “reborn” in the pond through the fusion with his daughter; this echoes the story of Moses who was saved from the Nile’s waters at his birth by the Pharaoh’s daughter (Pentateuch). Moses belongs to a minority, the Hebrew tribe. Moze is part of an Algerian minority, the Kabyles (a Berber tribe, with its own language and culture). Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, and is a figure of exile, and yet he never reached the Promised Land because he died of punishment before entering Israel. In a similar displacement pattern, Moze got banished from the country where he was born, and yet he never symbolically reached France, since he was never recognized as French and never felt French. Furthermore, both Moses and Moze lost their ability to speak. On the one hand, Moze was traumatized during his experience in camps in Algeria and refused to speak again. On the other hand, according to a Midrash on Exodus 4.10, Moses’s tongue and lips were burnt, making it difficult to speak and leaving a big scar.191 Rahmani, playing on the synecdoche contained in “langue” (physical muscle and language), suggests a similarity with Moses’s loss when she says that Moze lost his tongue. The epigraph for the third part of the novel is a sentence from Egyptian-Lebanese director Youcef Chahine’s Le sixième jour: “Vous avez un beau sourire. / Ce n’est pas un sourire. C’est une cicatrice”192 [You have a lovely smile. / It’s not a smile. It’s a scar]. Like

166

Chapter 3

an echo of Moses’s story, Rahmani implies that the “defacement” of Moze pertains also to the loss of his lips, besides the loss of his tongue. And Moze too stammers: the short poem at the opening of the novel (“Je me souviens. / Écris que tu te souviens. Que tu t’en souviens.”193 [I remember. / Write that you remember. That you remember it], which incidentally sounds like a divine commandment, is repeated identically at the beginning of the fifth part. Moreover, both Moses and Moze faced a religious ordeal embodied in the bovine animal. Moses turned his people away from the Golden Calf, while Moze buried a calf for Eid. Finally, both Moses and Moze accomplished miracles or, more profanely for the latter, “magic.” Indeed, “Moze le magicien” (title of the epilogue), like a wizard of Oz, gave the secret of life to the flourishing peach tree planted above the buried calf.194 By suggesting a parallel between Moze and Moses through their individual tragedies and their people’s stigmatized history, Rahmani both consecrates her father as an exemplary victim and inscribes him in a history that she considers, while it is not his own people’s, “parallel” and enlightening. Thus, Rahmani’s text constructs a multidirectional memory discourse, through the recollection of the history of Moses while describing that of Moze; that creates innovative forms of solidarity between two group experiences, instead of putting their memories in competition. In Rahmani’s second novel, “Musulman,” Roman, the connection made between Moze’s story (as a Harki) and the history of the Jewish people is thought-provoking: En Arabie, bien avant l’Islam, ceux qui ne croyaient pas encore au dieu unique appelaient le Dieu des Juifs et des Chrétiens “Rahman” pour dire le Clément, le Miséricordieux. Ce nom qui est aussi le mien s’est propagé. Ailleurs il est dit que la racine de ce mot, rahman, en hébreu signifie la matrice. À mon enfant j’aurai aimé dire, Il n’y a qu’un Dieu unique et c’est au mont Sinaï qu’il nous mène tous. Au peuple de ce Dieu, tu n’appartiendras pas. Mais ce peuple, tu le respecteras plus que tout autre. Ta vie, tu la scelleras à son orbite pour que jamais tu n’oublies que c’est son histoire et sa singularité qui t’éclairent. Je n’ai pas fait d’enfant.195 [In Arabia, long before Islam, those who did not yet believe in the one god called the God of the Jews and the Christians “Rahman” to mean the Clement, the Merciful. This name which is also my own spread. Elsewhere it is said that the root of this word, rahman, in Hebrew means womb. I would have liked to say to my child, There is only one God and it is to Mount Sinai that he is leading us all. To the people of this God, you will never belong.

The Construction of the “Harkive”

167

But this people, you will respect it more than any other. Your life, you will lock it to its orbit so that you never forget that it is their history and their singularity that enlighten you. I did not have a child.]

By saying that her name contains three superimposed scripts she makes literal the image of a “palimpsestic memory”—what Maxim Silverman defines as “interconnected memory layers,” a “superposition and interaction of different temporal traces to constitute a sort of composite structure, like a palimpsest, so that one layer of traces can be seen through, and is transformed by, another.”196 Through “Rahman(i)”—the name of God, onto which the missing ‘i’ of Mo(ï)ze has been transplanted—the history of the three monotheisms can be seen. The narrator overdetermines her father’s destiny through the etymology of his name, and excavates a past Jewish identity that cannot be reappropriated presently, but that can be lived as a model. This second novel, which is about so-called “Muslim” identity, shares with Moze concerns of humiliation, marginalized silenced histories, and lost dignity. The above quote retrospectively sheds light on the parallel intimated in Moze between the eponymous character and Moses. Not only does Rahmani develop a discourse on the Harki as a figure, a “harkilogy”; she also leads an “archaeological” investigation by analyzing the epistemological origins of the Harki history. In this sense, Moze builds a “harkeology”—to take up the expression coined by another Harki daughter author, Dalila Kerchouche—which seeks to recover the Harki past. The issue of embodied memory and diversity within identity is also central for mixed-race Franco-Algerian individuals. The following chapter deals with the narratives of one of them, Nina Bouraoui, who was born, after the War of Independence, of an Algerian father and a French mother. NOTES 1. Indigenous men served in the French army during all the French wars, in particular World War I and World War II. 2. Fatima Benasci-Lancou and Abderahmen Moumen, Les Harkis (Paris: Le cavalier bleu, 2008) and Charles-Robert Ageron, “Les supplétifs algériens dans l’armée française pendant la guerre d’Algérie,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 48 (1995): 3–20. There were five categories of auxiliary formations that helped the French army during the war (and all of them had, paradoxically, a civil status): the “Groupes mobiles de police rurale” (GMPR) created in 1955 and which became the “Groupes mobiles de sécurité” (GMS) in 1958; the “moghaznis,” formed in 1955, which was a group of special administration of the territory during the war;

168

Chapter 3

the “Unités Territoriales” (UT), formed in 1956 by the colonial administration; the “Unités de réserve” (UR), which replaced the latter in 1960; and, finally, the “Groupes d’autodéfense” (GAD) in charge of surveillance of villages and informing the army on the FLN’s movements. See also Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 166. 3. See Raphaëlle Branche, “Une politisation du mot,” in La Guerre d’Algérie: une histoire apaisée? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005), 354. 4. Research estimates the number of indigenous auxiliaries who worked during the period between 1954 and 1962 oscillates between 300,000 and 500,000. See Fatima Besnaci-Lancou and Gilles Manceron, eds., Les Harkis dans la colonisation et ses suites (Paris: L’Atelier, 2008), 15 and Fatima Besnaci-Lancou, Benoit Falaize, and Gilles Manceron, eds., Les Harkis. Histoire, Mémoire et Transmission (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2010), 32. 5. The estimations vary between 70,000 and 150,000 Harkis killed during the massacres after independence. See Mohand Hamoumou, “Les Harkis, un trou de mémoire franco-algérien,” Esprit 161 (1990): 26; Vincent Crapanzano, “The Dead but Living Father. The Living but Dead Father,” in The Dead Father. A Psychoanalytic Inquiry, eds. Lila J. Kalinich and Stuart W. Taylor (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), 164; Benasci-Lancou et al., Les Harkis, 70; Charbit, Les Harkis, 52–53; Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 200–2. For a comprehensive list of these sources, see Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 110–11. 6. Emphasis added. Jacques Chirac’s speech reiterates many times the idea that the Harkis’ enrollment stemmed from an active decision to defend France. The whole text is available here: http:​/​/www​​.jacq​​uesch​​irac-​​asso.​​fr​/fr​​/wp​-c​​onten​​t​/upl​​oads/​​2010/​​ 04​/Ho​​mmage​​-nati​​onal-​​aux​-h​​arkis​​​-sept​​embre​​-2001​​.pdf.​ 7. Lydia Aït Saadi, “Les Harkis dans les manuels scolaires,” in Les Harkis. Histoire, mémoire et transmission (Los Angeles, CA: ATELIER, 2010), 206–7. 8. On the quasi-absent historiography on the subject, see Françoise Lantheaume, “Des figures de l’absence: les harkis dans les manuels d’histoire de lycée de 1962 à 1998,” in Les Harkis. Histoire, mémoire et transmission, eds. Fatima BesnaciLancou, Benoît Falaize, and Gilles Manceron (Los Angeles, CA: ATELIER, 2010), 178–86, and Nicolas Bancel, “L’histoire difficile: esquisse d’une historiographie du fait colonial et posctolonial,” in La fracture coloniale, eds. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 85–95. 9. “Historicisation exogène” (Giulia Fabbiano, “Écritures mémorielles et crise de la représentation: les écrivants descendants de harkis,” Amnis, Revue de civilisation contemporaine Europes/Amériques 7 (2007), doi:10.4000/amnis.831). 10. Valérie Esclangon-Morin’s “L’image des harkis à travers l’écran,” in Les Harkis. Histoire, mémoire et transmission, provides an examination of several documentaries and films, such as La Trahison by Philippe Faucon (2005), Mon colonel by Laurent Herbier (2006), Harkis by Alain Tasma, and L’Ennemi intime (2007) by Florent-Emilio Siri. 11. Such a word is commonly used to describe the abandonment, the massacres, and then the ghettoization of the Harkis in France. See, for example, Georges Buis’ article, “La tragédie des harkis,” in L’Algérie des Français, ed. CharlesRobert Ageron (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), 313–17, and Isabelle Clarck, Daniel

The Construction of the “Harkive”

169

Costelle, and Saïd Taghmaoui’s documentary, La Blessure, la tragédie des harkis, 2010. 12. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 84. 13. Zahia Rahmani, Moze (Paris: Sabine Wespieser, 2003); Zahia Rahmani, “Musulman” Roman (Paris: Sabine Wespieser, 2005); Zahia Rahmani, France, récit d’une enfance (Paris: Sabine Wespieser, 2006). This latter book has been translated in English by Lara Vergnaud: France. Story of a Childhood (New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP, 2016). 14. Chaulet Achour, “Silence de père, écriture de fille,” 111. 15. Pinçonnat, “De l’usage postcolonial de l’archive,” 496. 16. Stoler, Duress, 91. 17. Rahmani, Moze, 22. 18. Rahmani, Moze, 112. 19. Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 2. 20. Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 39. 21. Rahmani, Moze, 37. 22. Rahmani, Moze, 122. 23. Rahmani, Moze, 135. 24. Rahmani, Moze, 122–23. 25. Esclangon-Morin, “L’image des harkis à travers l’écran,” 126. 26. The FLN (Front de Libération National), in return, used the category “traitor Harki” to consolidate its nationalist cause and its own legitimacy. Indeed, as historian Mohammed Harbi demonstrates in La Guerre commence en Algérie, the new nation built itself on three foundational myths, one of which was the idea of one homogenous people who gloriously fought against the French. According to the FLN’s discourse, this homogenous group was made up of the peasant population, who fought the “Revolution” (i.e., the War of Independence) while the city-dwellers were more “Frenchified” and less fervent to the nationalist cause. Casting light on the real history and sociology of the Harkis, whose great majority were noneducated, non-Frenchified peasants, would contradict this myth and disrupt the national narrative. 27. Benasci-Lancou and Moumen, Les Harkis, 10. 28. Besnaci-Lancou and Manceron, eds., Les Harkis dans la colonisation et ses suites, 16. See also Giulia Fabbiano, “Enrôlements de mémoire, mémoires d’enrôlement,” in Les Harkis. Histoire, mémoire et transmission, eds. Fatima Besnaci-Lancou, Benoit Falaize, and Gilles Manceron (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2010), 98–114. 29. Besnaci-Lancou and Manceron, Les Harkis, 96. 30. Organisation de l’armée secrète: a secret armed organization, which was a dissenting paramilitary group of the French army, conducting terrorist actions even after the war-ending agreements in order to keep Algeria French. 31. Besnaci-Lancou et al., Les Harkis, 95. 32. Rahmani, Moze, 133. 33. Rahmani, Moze, 112. 34. Rahmani, Moze, 37. 35. Rahmani, Moze, 37–38.

170

Chapter 3

36. Mohammed Harbi, “L’Algérie en 1954, une nation en formation,” in Les Harkis. Histoire, mémoire et transmission (Los Angeles, CA: ATELIER, 2010), 20. 37. Frantz Fanon, Œuvres (Paris: La Découverte, 2011), 456. 38. Rahmani, Moze, 22. 39. The document is supposed to be issued by a town called “Fressy” in the Oise département. But there is no such town in France. As for the mayor’s name, “Yves AMICAL,” it sounds too ironic to be real, just like Moze’s name is a fictional one, and the town’s name too. 40. Rahmani, Moze, 34. 41. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003), 19. 42. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 19. 43. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 19. 44. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 24, 36. In psychology, scotomization designates a process of denial about the existence of something experienced in the past but that was unbearable. It is different from “repression,” which is about the negation of desire, and not of the object of the desire (Antoine Porot, Manuel alphabétique de psychiatrie (Paris: PUF, 1996), 632). 45. Michael Rothberg, “Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 162. 46. The certificate is signed by a lieutenant-colonel “Gouatre”; I found it impossible to verify the authenticity of this name, since it appears nowhere else. However, this absence may be explained by the privacy of the archive from which the certificate comes. 47. On the numbers, see Abderahmen Moumen, “Les massacres de harkis lors de l’indépendance de l’Algérie” in Les Harkis (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 63–77, and Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli, 200–2. The controversial number of assassinated victims varies from a few thousand people to 200,000. Stora gives an estimation between 10,000 and 25,000 deaths. 48. The plausibility of this information can be found here: http:​/​/www​​.legi​​franc​​ e​.gou​​v​.fr/​​affic​​hText​​e​.do?​​cidTe​​xte​=J​​ORFTE​​XT000​​00017​​​6467&​​dateT​​exte=​. During her visit to Harvard in October 2016, I asked Zahia Rahmani about the authenticity of these documents and she said that these were copies of the real documents. 49. Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 12. 50. Rahmani, Moze, 59. 51. Rahmani, Moze, 37. 52. Zahia Rahmani, “Territoire, exigence, Edward Saïd, trahison, liberté…,” conversation with Arnaud Zohou, published in de(s)générations 5 (February 2008): 56. 53. Rahmani, Moze, 62–63. 54. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, NY: Zonebooks, 2005), 90. 55. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 87. 56. Rothberg, “Between Auschwitz and Algeria,” 120. 57. Rahmani, Moze, 42. 58. Rahmani, Moze, 38–39.

The Construction of the “Harkive”

171

59. Rothberg, “Between Auschwitz and Algeria,” 220. 60. Derrida, Mal d’archives, 38. 61. Derrida, Mal d’archives, 37–38. The translation is from Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 18. 62. Rahmani, Moze, 42. 63. Benjamin Stora, Ils venaient d’Algérie: L’immigration algérienne en France (1912–1992) (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 406. 64. Stora, Ils venaient d’Algérie, 406. On the responsibility of French government in the massacres of the Harkis in Algeria, see Abderahmen Moumen, “La notion d’abandon des harkis par les autorités francaises,” in Les Harkis (Paris: La Découverte, 2006). 65. Rahmani, Moze, 43. 66. Rahmani, Moze, 125. 67. See Besnaci-Lancou and Manceron, eds., Les Harkis dans la colonisation et ses suites, 96–97. See also, Geoffroy Tomasovitch, “Les harkis attaquent Pierre Messmer” Le Parisien, February 10, 2014, http:​/​/www​​.lepa​​risie​​n​.fr/​​faits​​-dive​​ rs​/le​​s​-har​​kis​-a​​ttaqu​​ent​-p​​ierre​​-mess​​mer​-1​​0​-02-​​​2004-​​20047​​46599​​.php,​ and “Pierre Messmer accusé de crime contre l’humanité?” Le Nouvel Obs, November 6, 2003, http:​/​/tem​​psree​​l​.nou​​velob​​s​.com​​/soci​​ete​/2​​00311​​02​.OB​​S9072​​/pier​​re​-me​​ssmer​​-accu​​se​de​​-crim​​e​-co​n​​tre​-l​​-huma​​nite.​​html.​ 68. Zahia Rahmani, “Le harki, figure postcoloniale du banni, interview with Fabbiano,” Revue de(s)générations 9 (September 2009): 66. 69. Rahmani, Moze, 42. 70. Rahmani, Moze, 48. 71. Rahmani, Moze, 120. 72. Rahmani, Moze, 61. 73. François Ost, “L’invention du tiers: Eschyle et Kafka,” Esprit, 2007, 147. 74. Rahmani, Moze, 88. 75. See the article by Thierry Sénéchal, “Dédommagement, réparation, restitution: instruments de ‘vérité’?,” Topique 1, no. 102 (2008): 23–39. 76. Rahmani, Moze, 107. 77. Ost, “L’Invention du tiers,” 149. 78. Rahmani, Moze, 108. 79. Rahmani, Moze, 108. 80. Rahmani, Moze, 108. 81. Rahmani, Moze, 109. 82. Rahmani, Moze, 109. 83. Rahmani, Moze, 109. 84. Rahmani, Moze, 125. 85. Rahmani, Moze, 95. 86. Rahmani, Moze, 129. 87. Zahia Rahmani, “Le ‘harki’ comme spectre ou l’écriture du ‘déterrement’,” in Retours du colonial? Disculpation et réhabilitation de l’histoire coloniale, ed. Catherine Coquio (Nantes: L’Atalante, 2008), 233.

172

Chapter 3

88. Rahmani, Moze, 45, 48. 89. Rahmani, Moze, 137, 94–95. 90. Fanon, Œuvres, 456. 91. This state of being “dead” inside corresponds to what Fanon calls “pseudopétrification” (Fanon, Œuvres, 465) and which he precisely sees as something that the colonist wishes for the colonized but that is usually not achieved. For Fanon, the colonized is animalized in the gaze, discourse, and praxis of the colonist, but he remains alive and all the more human when he realizes the animalization process which he is the object (“Le colonisé sait tout cela et rit un bon coup chaque fois qu’il se découvre animal dans les paroles de l’autre. Car il sait qu’il n’est pas un animal. Et précisément, dans le même temps qu’il découvre son humanité, il commence à fourbir ses armes pour la faire triompher” (Fanon, Œuvres, 457). Therefore, the Harki, “deadsoldier,” represents the success of the colonialist process of animalization of the colonized. 92. Rahmani, Moze, 20. 93. Rahmani, Moze, 31. 94. Rahmani, Moze, 19, 109. 95. Rahmani, Moze, 23. 96. Rahmani, Moze, 84. 97. Nadine Fresco, “La Diaspora des cendres,” L’Emprise 24 (1981): 209. 98. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York, NY: Zone books, 1999), 43. 99. Pollak, L’Expérience concentrationnaire, 288. 100. Ryn and Klodzinski, quoted in Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 45. 101. Marie Bornand, Témoignage et Fiction. Les récits des rescapés dans la littérature de langue française (1945–2000) (Genève: Droz, 2004), 53. 102. Bornand, Témoignage et Fiction, 54. 103. Bornand, Témoignage et Fiction, 54. 104. Crapanzano, “The Dead but Living Father,” 163, 165. 105. Rahmani, Moze, 23, 65, 73–74. 106. Rahmani, Moze, 24. 107. Rahmani, Moze, 24. 108. Rahmani, Moze, 131–32. 109. Allison Rice, Polygraphies: Francophone Women Writing Algeria (University of Virginia Press, 2012), 45. 110. Rahmani, Moze, 77. 111. Abderahmen Moumen, “Housing the ‘Harkis’: Long Term Segregation,” trans. Olivier Waine, Metropolitics, April 4, 2012, www​.m​​etrop​​oliti​​ques.​​eu​/Ho​​using​​the-​​harki​​s​-lon​​g​-ter​​m​.htm​​l. 112. Mounen, “Housing the ‘Harkis’.” 113. Rahmani, Moze, 41. 114. On the forest ranger positions given to the former Harkis, see Benjamin Stora, “Les Harkis,” in La France en guerre d’Algérie: novembre 1954–juillet 1962, eds. Laurent Gervereau, Jean-Pierre Rioux, and Benjamin Stora (Paris: Musée d’histoire contemporaine-BDIC, 1992), 291. 115. Rahmani, Moze, 50.

The Construction of the “Harkive”

173

116. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 131. 117. Rahmani, Moze, 73, 74. 118. Rahmani, Moze, 11, 13. 119. Georges Perec, Je me souviens (Paris: Hachette, 1978). The fragments cover fifteen years of memories, between 1946 and 1961. 120. Susan Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors and the Holocaust,” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277–95. Suleiman characterizes the 1.5 generation as child survivors … too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there … the 1.5 generation’s shared experience is that of premature bewilderment and helplessness … The operative word however, is “premature”—for if all those who were there experienced trauma, the specific experience of children was that the trauma occurred (or at least began) before the formation of stable identity that we associate with adulthood and in some cases before any conscious sense of self. Paradoxically, their “premature bewilderment” was often accompanied by premature aging, having to act as an adult while still a child (Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation,” 277).

121. Rahmani, Moze, 173. 122. Rahmani, Moze, 136. 123. “Neuf harkis portent plainte pour crimes contre l’humanité,” Le Nouvel Obs, August 30, 2001, www​.n​​ouvel​​obs​.c​​om​/so​​ciete​​/2001​​0830.​​OBS79​​20​/ne​​uf​-ha​​ rkis-​​porte​​nt​-pl​​ainte​​-pour​​-crim​​es​-co​​ntre-​​l​-hum​​anite​​.html​; “Harkis: un crime contre l’humanité est imprescriptible,” Le Monde, December 3, 2010, www​.l​​emond​​e​. fr/​​idees​​/arti​​cle​/2​​010​/1​​2​/03/​​harki​​s​-un-​​crime​​-cont​​re​-l-​​human​​ite​-e​​st​-im​​presc​​ripti​​ble​_1​​ 44870​​8​_323​​2​.htm​​l. 124. Rahmani, Moze, 114. 125. Sévane Garibian, “Qu’importe le cri pourvu qu’il y ait l’oubli,” in Retours du colonial?, ed. Catherine Coquio (Nantes: L’Atalante, 2008), 133. 126. Garibian, “Qu’importe le cri pourvu,” 132, quoting “Crim. 1er avril 1993.” 127. Garibian, “Qu’importe le cri pourvu,” 133. 128. As Garibian explains: […] les articles 211–1 à 212–3 du nouveau Code pénal [s’appliquent] pour la seule répression des crimes contre l’humanité perpétrés après leur entrée en vigueur (soit après le 1er mars 1994), au regard du principe de nonrétroactivité des nouvelles incriminations françaises. [[…] articles 211–1 to 212–3 of the new penal code [apply] only to the punishment of crimes against humanity perpetrated after their enactment (thus after March 1, 1994), according to the principle of non-retroactivity of new French incriminations.] Garibian, “Qu’importe le cri pourvu,” 134. 129. Rahmani, Moze, 114. 130. Rahmani, Moze, 114. 131. Rahmani, Moze, 92. 132. Rahmani, Moze, 115. 133. Rahmani, Moze, 117. 134. Rahmani, Moze, 117, 89. 135. Garibian, “Qu’importe le cri pourvu,” 137.

174

Chapter 3

136. Jacques Rancière, La mésentente (Paris: Galilée), 1995. 137. Rancière, La mésentente, 169. 138. Garibian, “Qu’importe le cri pourvu,” 134. 139. Rahmani, Moze, 108. 140. Olivier Abel, Le Pardon: briser la dette et l’oubli (Paris: Autrement, 1991), 61–62. 141. Garibian, “Qu’importe le cri pourvu,” 137. 142. Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 149. 143. Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (Paris: La Découverte, 2010), 69 quoted in Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 149. 144. Rahmani, Moze, 107. 145. Rahmani, Moze, 130, repeated 132. 146. Rahmani, Moze, 133. 147. Rahmani, Moze, 135, emphasis added. 148. Rahmani, Moze, 136. 149. The interchangeabilty of brother and father in the Antigone myth resonates in an interesting way with a certain confusion of these two figures at the start of Moze, when Rahmani dedicates her text in this way: “à la mémoire de mon frère Mokrane” [to the memory of my brother Mokrane], this brother who, as Ledoux-Beaugrand and Parent note, “fait office de ‘père […] véritable’ (Rahmani, Moze, 140)” [serves as a “real […] father”] (Évelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand, Anne Martine Parent, Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, and Ching Selao, “Telle Antigone, relever le père Harki. Le récit comme sépulture dans Moze de Zahia Rahmani,” Études Françaises 52, no. 1 (2016): 57). And as Pinçonnat remarks more generally, “la confusion généalogique est le fait de l’héritage colonial: il a éradiqué l’ordre ancien et brisé les liens de parenté sur lesquels il reposait. […] En ce sens, l’ordre familial a été contaminé par le régime colonial et a produit un legs négatif qui […] perturbe le rapport au père” [the genealogical confusion is the result of a colonial legacy: it eradicated the old order and broke the kinship ties on which it rested […] In this sense, the family order was contaminated by the colonial regime and produced a negative legacy that […] disrupts the relationship to the father] (Pinçonnat, “De l’usage postcolonial de l’archive,” 507). 150. Rahmani, Moze, 140–42. 151. Mohand Hamoumou, “Les Harkis, un trou de mémoire franco-algérien,” Esprit 161 (1990): 26. 152. Ledoux-Beaugrand et al., “Telle Antigone,” 72. 153. Rahmani, Moze, 143. 154. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2, 3. 155. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20. 156. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20, 17. 157. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20. 158. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 21. 159. Lapacherie, quoted in Maazouzi, Le Partage des mémoires, 122. 160. Jean-Gérard Lapacherie, “Du procès d’intimation,” in L’intime, l’extime, eds. Aline Mura-Brunel, Franc Schuerewegen, and Richard Millet (Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi, 2002), 12.

The Construction of the “Harkive”

175

161. Rahmani, Moze, 85. 162. Pinçonnat, “De l’usage postcolonial de l’archive,” 10. 163. Rahmani, “Le ‘harki’ comme spectre,” 229. 164. Rahmani, Moze, 136. 165. Rahmani, Moze, 94, 96. 166. Rahmani, Moze, 100, 108, 139. 167. Rahmani, Moze, 173. 168. Rahmani, Moze, 15–16. 169. Rahmani, Moze, 148. 170. Rahmani, “Le ‘harki’ comme spectre,” 229. 171. Rahmani, “Le ‘harki’ comme spectre,” 226. 172. Dalila Kerchouche, Mon père, ce harki (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003), 32. 173. Rahmani, Moze, 23. 174. Anne-Lise Stern, “Sois déportee […] et témoigne! Psychanalyser, témoigner: double bind?” in La Shoah: témoignages, saviors, oeuvres, eds. Anne Wieviorka and Claude Mouchard (Vincennes: PU de Vincennes, 2000), 15–22. 175. Rahmani, Moze, 65. 176. Rahmani, Moze, 24. 177. Rahmani, Moze, 9. 178. Sarah Ahmed, quoted in Ledoux-Beaugrand et al., “Telle Antigone,” 64. 179. Rahmani, Moze, 123–24. 180. Ledoux-Beaugrand et al., “Telle Antigone,” 66. 181. Rahmani, Moze, 110. 182. Rahmani, Moze, 99. 183. Rahmani, Moze, 114. 184. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2017). 185. Rahmani, Moze, 133. 186. Rahmani, Moze, 120. 187. Rahmani, Moze, 120. 188. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3. 189. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3. 190. Rahmani, “Le ‘harki’ comme spectre,” 129. 191. Midrash is a set of commentaries by rabbis interpreting the Torah. On the elaboration of this biblical episode, see Marc Shell, “Moses’ tongue,” Common Knowledge 12, no. 1 (2006): 150–76. 192. Rahmani, Moze, 107. 193. Rahmani, Moze, 11. 194. Rahmani is very familiar with American popular culture, as she claims in “Musulman” Roman. 195. Rahmani “Musulman,” Roman, 140. 196. Maxim Silverman, Palimpestic Memory. The Holocaust and Colonialism in Francophone Fiction and Film (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2013), 3.

Chapter 4

The “Métis” Predicament Nina Bouraoui’s Embodied Memory of the Colonial Split

“Porter une identité de fracture. Se penser en deux parties. [. . .] La France ou l’Algérie?” [enduring a fractured identity, seeing myself as divided. [. . .] France or Algeria?]1

In the context of Franco-Algerian history, using the term métis, which means in French “mixed-race individual,” may initially seem inappropriate. Indeed, Algeria was the only colony in the French Empire where there was no “métis question,” as historian and sociologist Emmanuelle Saada reminds us in her book Les Enfants de la colonie. Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté.2 She demonstrates that from Indochina to French West Africa, and with the exception of Algeria, métis constituted not a collective common identity but rather a legal and administrative criterion inscribed into colonial law.3 Philanthropists, administrators, and jurists created a métis category that progressively allowed these children who were most often illegitimate, not recognized, and then abandoned by their fathers to be included in the domain of French citizenship. The inclusion into citizenship of these transitional people, born in the majority of cases to a European man and an indigenous woman, had several motivations, ranging from demographic considerations based on populationist theories to arguments related to colonial political strategies, in which the métis allowed for the forging of a bond between the colonists and the colonized. After independence, these métis, most of whom came from Indochina, were “repatriated” to France—though their father’s homeland was often unknown to them—a displacement that created a brutal rupture with their emotional and sociocultural environment: namely, their mother, their language, and their customs. 177

178

Chapter 4

At a glance, this history does not have much in common with Nina Bouraoui’s story, as narrated in Garçon manqué (2000) and Mes mauvaises pensées (2005): daughter of a French woman and an Algerian man, she was born in 1967 in Rennes and grew up in Algiers up until the 1980s.4 Not only is the gender relationship reversed (compared to the stereotypical métis situation) and the parents’ union legal and recognized, but also the temporal referent is no longer the colonial period, which constitutes a major difference. Nonetheless, Bouraoui’s stories, which recount childhood memories and being torn between two lands, two cultures, and two parents, clearly pertain to this history of métis identity, “une identité de fracture”5 [identity of fracture] induced by colonialism in Algeria.6 Moreover, the stories connect to the history of the children of Algerian immigrants in France, who also construct themselves between two cultures. I began by stating that there was no métis question in French Algeria, which is true from the point of view of politics and law. The term is absent from official documents and archives as well as from the discourse of historians, geographers, and demographers, who mention the fusion of races through intermarriages between French and “néo-Français” (colonists from the Mediterranean basin). Likewise, Franco-Algerian métis have not been or have been very sparingly represented in the cultural field, to which their absence in literary and artistic representations from the colonial period attests. Even Emile Zola, who represents the society of his time with particular attention, only offers a timid description of the eponymous character of his novel Thérèse Raquin, in which he describes a woman with “yeux noirs” [black eyes] and “sang africain” [African blood], born in Oran to a Vernon native and an indigenous woman.7 However, this lack of representation of Franco-Algerian métis becomes surprising when we consider that, demographically speaking, such mixed individuals did exist. Most were in the poor classes of French Algeria, but métis could also be found in the middle class, such as the writer Leila Sebbar, born in 1941 to an Algerian father and French mother, both of whom were schoolteachers.8 These mixed-raced children were less numerous than in other French colonies for at least two reasons.9 First, contrary to Indochina and other territories in the French Empire, Algeria was a colony of settlement, which means that the male–female ratio was not as disproportionate as it was in mainly military territories.10 Second, the structure of feminine sexuality in the Maghreb region would explain the low frequency of sexual relations between male colonists and female colonized. In nineteenth-century Maghrebi land, Muslim culture leaves little within reach of women other than the household or the tribal clan.11 Despite this situation, Franco-Algerian métis did exist, but remained invisible. Invisibility is at the heart of the two books by Nina Bouraoui that this chapter examines. Saada provides two hypotheses to explain the Franco-Algerian

The “Métis” Predicament

179

métis’ invisibility. The first hypothesis is that the métis “ont pu être intégrés à une structure familiale: si l’adoption n’est pas reconnue en droit, elle est courante en fait”12 [were able to be integrated into a family structure: although adoption may not have been legally recognized, it was in fact widely practiced]. Testimonies from the 1950s recall the integration of children of indigenous mothers and French fathers into indigenous families. Saada’s second hypothesis claims that contrary to other territories in the empire, the criteria that differentiated French and indigenous populations were more about religion than race.13 Métis individuals were therefore able to pass as white, just like a Pieds-Noirs of Spanish or Italian origin, due to the physical resemblance between people from the Mediterranean basin, resulting from the intermingling of historic migrations.14 Therefore, when the differentiation criterion is religion, “mixed marriages” become visible in colonial Algeria. Their number, which was very small in the nineteenth century, became larger and larger after World War I. As Saada notes, these mixed marriages “présentent une valence des genres inversée par rapport à la ‘question métisse,’ puisqu’ils unissent des hommes indigènes à des femmes françaises. Les contemporains analysent ce phénomène comme une conséquence des migrations masculines vers la métropole, pendant le conflit et au-delà”15 [present an inverted gender valence relative to the “métis” question, because they paired indigenous men with French women. Contemporaries analyze this phenomenon as a consequence of male migrations to the mainland, both during the conflict and after].16 We must also add that one of the possible reasons for the singularity of the Algerian case derives from Muslim marriage custom, according to which it is more acceptable for a Muslim man to wed a non-Muslim woman (who must then convert) than the reverse. This situation of union between a French woman and an indigenous Muslim man is that of Nina Bouraoui’s parents. In 1960, in the midst of the Algerian War, Rachid Bouraoui, a brilliant economics student who came to France to pursue his studies, met Maryvonne, Bouraoui’s mother; both were students at the University of Rennes. In her novel Garçon manqué, Bouraoui alludes to the difficulties for Franco-Algerian couples to be accepted by French society in the 1960s and 1970s: “Des étudiantes françaises tombent amoureuses de ces hommes-là. Et parfois d’Africains d’Afrique noire. On se moque d’elles à la fac. De ces couples-là. On les insulte. On les salit” [French female students fall in love with these men and sometimes with sub-Saharan Africans as well. These couples are mocked at school; they get insulted and sullied].17 After Rachid and Maryvonne got married in France, they still experienced racism, as the narrator of Garçon manqué recalls her parents being referred to as “la Blanche avec l’Algérien. La femme du Français musulman” [The White woman with the Algerian, the French-Muslim’s wife].18 Perhaps this is the reason why shortly after their second daughter’s birth (Nina’s), the

180

Chapter 4

family moved to Algiers and lived there for fourteen years.19 However, during a vacation in Brittany, Maryvonne’s homeland, in the summer of 1981, the parents decided that the family would not go back to Algiers. The political processes of Arabization and Islamization of the country, foreshadowing the downward spiral of the war during the Black Decade (1991–2002), threatened diversity in Algeria, especially the French way of living like that of mixed families.20 Bouraoui recounts in Garçon manqué: Nous sommes déjà dans la guerre. La guerre à peine annoncée. La guerre pressentie. Leurs regards sur la plage. Nos corps trop nus. Leurs yeux derrière les buissons. Leurs mots. Leurs insultes. Tout se presse soudain. La haine revient. La haine vient. Ils nous accusent. Ils disent. Vous êtes des Pieds-Noirs de la deuxième génération. Vous êtes des colons. Vous êtes encore français. [We are already at war, the recently declared war, the now declared war. Their stares on the beach. Our bodies noticeably naked. Their eyes behind the bushes. Their words. Their insults. Suddenly, everything quickens. Hatred returns. Hatred rises. They accuse us. They say: “You are second-generation PiedsNoirs.” “You are colonizers.” “You are still French.”]21

These sentences show a brutal opposition, highlighted by the choppy style, between a visible (“nos corps trop nus”) and European (“Pieds-Noirs”) “us” (“nous”) and a violent “them” (“ils”) in the background (“derrière les buissons”). Two elements of this quotation are important to note and revealing of a certain tonality in Bouraoui’s novel. On the one hand, the “others,” the non-métis Algerians, are reduced to their eyes and their insults, as though their presence were limited to a malevolent surveillance. On the other hand, the misperception of the métis families, inaccurately perceived as “PiedsNoirs” by Algerians (according to Bouraoui), brings back the antagonism of the colonial period and shows a certain spectrality of historical roles—the “them” (the Arabs) being portrayed as the aggressive ones, a myth of colonial times which Bouraoui revives. Despite the independence of 1962, the lines of colonial divide and confrontation persist, an idea expressed through the sentence: “la guerre d’Algérie ne s’est jamais arrêtée. Elle s’est transformée. Elle s’est déplacée. Et elle continue” [the Algerian War has never stopped. It has been transformed. It has shifted. And it still goes on].22 This war did indeed continue in shifts, on both sides of the Mediterranean, with, on the Algerian side, a marked Islamization and Arabization of the country in the 1980s that led to a sort of normalization of attitudes rejecting the other—a phenomenon exacerbated by policies that instated a biased national history. Reviving colonial paradigms, Bouraoui’s texts also echo some contemporary French political discourses that tend to ethnicize identities, proving

The “Métis” Predicament

181

the point of scholars who contend that since the late 1990s in France there has been a “return of the colonial mindset” in contemporary debates.23 For example, in September 2015, French politician Nadine Morano, a former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy, publicly declared that France is a “white race” country—all the while ignoring the “economic, political, and cultural deformative traces [of colonialism] in the present.”24 This growing sociopolitical context in which identities are racialized and difference presented as radically other and antagonistic to a fantasized “us” is key to understanding Bouraoui’s textual struggle with claiming a Franco-Algerian identity and creating an archive for the métis condition. While giving visibility to her hybrid identity through a representation of her body as a live archive, Bouraoui casts light on the métis figure as the embodied perpetuation of the historical tensions that have opposed France and Algeria. In other words, Bouraoui’s narratives question “postcolonialism” by presenting enduring binary structures of opposition and challenging core postcolonial concepts such as ambiguity, cultural hybridity, mobility, and liminality. In this sense, Bouraoui helps reveal what Neil Lazarus calls the “postcolonial unconscious”:25 namely, the postmodern “presumptions” according to which the “‘old’ order of ‘modernity’ (whose constituent features and aspects—unevenness, revolution, the centrality of the nation even imperialism—are seen to have lost their explanatory power)” has irrevocably come to an end, and made way for a “‘new world order’ of fully globalized capitalism” and post-racial mixed populations or multiculturality.26 In this chapter, I show how Bouraoui’s narratives make up an archive by both constructing and deconstructing her Franco-Algerian métis identity as a result of a continued history of imperialism. I first study how Bouraoui paradoxically reappropriates her Algerian body through her French writing. Then I analyze metaphors of rejection of Bouraoui’s French legacy. Finally, I examine how Bouraoui does or does not succeed in producing a métis archival self. RECLAIMING HER ALGERIAN SKIN In Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées, Bouraoui presents her mixed identity as the embodiment of a historical antagonism. In the first novel, she speaks of her personal story as if it were a microcosmic representation of a larger, historical frame: “Je viens de la guerre. Je viens d’un mariage contesté. Je porte la souffrance de ma famille algérienne. Je porte le refus de ma famille française. Je porte ces transmissions-là. La violence ne me quitte plus. Elle m’habite. Elle vient de moi. Elle vient du peuple algérien qui envahit. Elle vient du peuple français qui renie” [I am forged by the war. I come from a

182

Chapter 4

controversial marriage. I bear the suffering of my Algerian family. I remember the rejection of my French kin. I carry these transmissions. Violence no longer leaves me. It inhabits me. It comes from me. It comes from Algerian people who invade. It comes from French people who disown].27 First, the quantitative gradation from “I” (“je”) to a bigger entity, the family, and then to an even larger one, the people (“peuple algérien [. . .] peuple français”), reads as an inclusion of the collective history into the personal story. The “I” is depicted as the carrier of familial legacies and shaped by national violence. Second, the similar construction of sentences, working in pairs, builds equivalence between what happens in the family and what takes place on a national scale. In “Je viens de la guerre. Je viens d’un mariage contesté,” the verb’s complement alone changes from one sentence to the other, and because the two sentences are not linked by a coordinating conjunction, the period reads as a “that is to say” type of ellipsis. Thus, “war,” which pertains to the collective historical frame, and “controversial marriage,” which belongs to the familial story, form synonyms, as it were. The same kind of semantic parallel can be made with the other pair of coupled sentences: “Je porte la souffrance de ma famille algérienne. Je porte le refus de ma famille française [. . .]. Elle vient du peuple algérien qui envahit. Elle vient du peuple français qui renie.” Through a chiasm (Algerian/French/Algerian/French), Bouraoui links the suffering of her Algerian family to a political matter, Algerian immigration (“Algerian people who invade”), and by the same token, she suggests a parallel between her story and that of “Beur” individuals. Moreover, Bouraoui associates her French family’s rejection of her Algerian heritage with a national political stance: the French denials about Algeria and colonial history. For Trudy Agar-Mendouse, “La guerre apparait dans ses textes comme un héritage douloureux, une histoire de famille plutôt qu’un épisode dans l’Histoire de ses deux pays”28 [The war appears in her texts as a painful inheritance, a family history rather than an episode in the History of her two countries]. Indeed, Bouraoui does not dissociate the two (hi)stories; rather, she subtly merges collective history and familial history within her own story. The representation of embedded familial and collective histories into Bouraoui’s personal story is more explicit and dramatic in Mes mauvaises pensées, playing on the ambiguous French term “histoire” (story and history). Referring to her Algerian and French heritages, she says “cette histoire, au fond de moi”29 [this history, deep within me], implying both that the story of her parents is the cause of her existence (au fond meaning here “at the foundation”), and that Franco-Algerian history determines her existence—au fond, deep inside as a concealed working principle. Toward the very beginning of Mes mauvaises pensées, Bouraoui hyperbolically claims that she embodies the colonial split: “C’est au delà de l’histoire des corps, je suis dans une conscience politique, je suis dans le partage du monde”30 [It is beyond the

The “Métis” Predicament

183

history of bodies, I am in a political consciousness, I am in the dividing up of the world]. Situating again her existence beyond the mere story of her parents’ union (“au delà de l’histoire des corps”), she represents her family as a microcosm of the colonial fracture. But instead of highlighting the commonality implied or created by the “partage” (sharing), she constantly emphasizes the other French meaning of the term “partage,” which is division. Merging familial level and national scale, Bouraoui uses hyperbole and exaggeration in order to create an image of total opposition between her maternal and her paternal heritages: “venir de deux familles que tout oppose, les Français et les Algériens.”31 [to come from two families which everything opposes, the French and the Algerians]. Throughout Mes mauvaises pensées, Bouraoui’s double legacy is apprehended via this internal division, which she regularly refers to as a psychological trauma: “Je pense que je suis cassée, je pense que ma cassure vient de cette maison” [I think that I am broken, I think that my fracture comes from this house], “il y a une déchirure en moi” [there is a rip within me].32 Describing herself as the victim of historical antagonisms (“[mon] corps rassembl[e] les terres opposées” [[my] body reunite[s] the conflicting lands]),33 Bouraoui further suggests the impossibility of harmony in the Franco-Algerian métis’ sense of self. For instance, she does not allude to a “mixed” identity or self. Instead, she says her identity is “double et brisée” [dual and broken],34 while claiming to have a dual being, two separate parts: “mon corps français et mon corps algérien”35 [my French body and my Algerian body]. As Caroline Beschea-Fache notes, the body “becomes a deconstruction site (and ultimately a deconstructed entity) in which each parent’s community tries to find where parts fit and where they belong in order to re-appropriate what the other has taken.”36 In Garçon manqué, Bouraoui highlights the singularity of mixed-race children, like her and her friend Amine, through a geographical image: “Nous sommes entre la France et l’Algérie. [. . .] Nous ne serons jamais comme les autres. [. . .] Deux bâtards sur la plage. Deux métis”37 [We are in-between France and Algeria. [. . .] We will never be like the others. [. . .] Two bastards on the beach. Two mixed-race children]. Associating the word métis (in the Franco-Algerian context) with the pejorative word “bâtard,” she builds an opposition between the orphan-like placeless métis, significantly located on the beach on the Mediterranean Sea between France and Algeria, and the “others,” the ones who belong to one or the other country. Further, the allusions to Amine’s story reveal the social invisibility of the Franco-Algerian métis that Saada points out. Speaking about Amine’s emigration to France, Bouraoui writes, as if the narrator were addressing him in a prophetic tone: “En France tu ne seras pas un métis. Ta peau est blanche mais tes cheveux sont trop noirs. En France tu ne seras pas un bon Arabe. Tu ne

184

Chapter 4

seras rien. De mère française. De père Algérien” [In France you will not be mixed-race. Your skin is white, but your hair is too black. In France you will not be a good Arab. You will be nothing: born of a French mother, born of an Algerian father].38 The use of the future tense makes these sentences sound prophetic for all the Franco-Algerian métis, whose history has been concealed and which Bouraoui’s narrative seeks to make visible. The repetition of the pattern of two separate nominal sentences mentioning the mother and the father’s origins suggests that racializing collective discourses about the métis based on physical appearances imposed a sort of schizophrenic duality on the mixedrace individuals, while excluding them from national affiliations. Like Amine, Bouraoui describes herself as “inclassable” [unclassifiable], “pas assez typée” [not ethnic enough] to be an Arab, but “trop typée” [too ethnic] to be French in the eyes of others.39 When she mentions her and Amine’s solitude, and repeats “De mère française. De père Algérien. Deux orphelins contre la falaise” [Born of French mothers. Born of Algerian fathers. Two orphans facing the void],40 she implies that rather than belonging twice, that is, embodying the number “two” for France and Algeria, the métis is barely “one,” cut in two halves. Like the Jews of Algeria, and because of the silence enshrouding their history, some métis were assimilated with the Pieds-Noirs—a confusion that Bouraoui opposes. She writes, still about Amine, and implicitly about herself: “Tu n’aimeras pas certains Pieds-Noirs. Tu n’aimeras pas leurs façons. Tu n’aimeras pas leurs mots. Tu n’aimeras pas leurs regrets. Ils te diront: Tu es comme nous. Mais tu seras si différent, Amine, si différent. Toi tu aimais l’Algérie des Algériens” [You will not like the Pieds-Noirs—at least some of them. You will not like their ways, their words, and their regrets. They will tell you: ‘You’re like us.’ But you will be different, Amine, so different. Unlike them, you loved the Algeria that belongs to Algerians].41 However, through Amine’s story, Bouraoui exposes the difficulty of defining the métis situation, which to some extent is similar to that of Algerian immigrants, and more specifically of the second generation, the children of immigration who also relate to both France and Algeria and are culturally mixed. While Bouraoui reproaches Amine for passing himself off as a mere Kabyle, because “En France ce sera mieux d’être kabyle. Mieux qu’Algérien. Moins compliqué que franco-algérien” [In France it will be better to be Kabyle, better than being Algerian, and less complicated than being Franco-Algerian],42 she also seems to rebuke him for not empathizing with the (economic) migrants of the 1960s and 1970s, the Algerian immigrants, or with their children (born in France and raised in the banlieue), still discriminated against like their foreign parents: Tu diras. Je ne sais rien de l’immigration. De cette déportation. De cette misère. Je ne sais rien des usines. Des chantiers. Des constructions. Je ne sais rien

The “Métis” Predicament

185

des harkis. Des travailleurs. De leurs femmes. Du regroupement familial. Ce n’est pas mon histoire. Ce n’est pas mon malheur. Non, je ne suis pas un fils d’immigré. [. . .] Non, je ne suis pas comme eux. Ces étrangers. Cette souffrance. Ces enfants de la deuxième génération. Je n’ai pas leur mémoire. Je suis vraiment très différent. Non, je ne sais rien de la banlieue. Ces immeubles après les bidonvilles. Cette concentration. [You will say: “I don’t know a thing about immigration, deportation, or misery. I don’t know a thing about factories, construction sites, or buildings. I know nothing about Harkis, workers, their wives, or family reunification. It’s not my story. It’s not my misfortune. No, I am not a son of immigrants.” [. . .] “No, I am neither like these foreigners with their suffering, nor like these secondgeneration children. I don’t share their memories. I am really different. No, I don’t know a thing about the other side of the tracks, these buildings beyond the ghetto, this concentration.”]43

Beschea-Fache argues conversely that Bouraoui’s insistence on her dual citizenship means a rejection of an immigrant status. However, this above passage shows that Bouraoui does not completely separate her case from the fate of immigrants. In the quote, she indeed implies that despite their difference, métis individuals, like her and Amine, are closer to these immigrés than to the French. The systematic use of periods rather than any other punctuation mark reinforces the idea of an antagonism between Amine’s position and Bouraoui’s. She manifests empathy and takes on the responsibility of expressing solidarity with the immigrants’ condition and of commemorating through literature the memory of their immigration and the suffering it entailed. Moreover, by calling immigration a “déportation” (repeated later), and naming the insalubrious and secluded suburban buildings where immigrants are forced to live with the term “une concentration,” Bouraoui makes a symbolic connection to (which is evidently not an equivalence with) the history of Europeans Jews during World War II. The image of mass and inhuman accumulation, associated with the word “déportation,” which resonates with the term “camp” mentioned a little earlier,44 brings up, as a subtext, the memory of the Holocaust. The use of these collectively connoted words not only creates, in Rothberg’s terms, an “intercultural dynamic”45 with another historical memory but also reinforces the idea that Algerian immigrants have been victims of outrages. However, the power of multidirectional memory conveyed by the text must be considered with a critical eye, as it reinforces the artificiality of Bouraoui’s victimary stance. While the narrator condemns Amine because he takes on a made-up identity (“Kabyle [. . .] cette nouvelle définition. Ton confort. Ton secret. Ton mensonge” [Kabyle [. . .] this

186

Chapter 4

new identity: your comfort, your secret, and your lie])46 and conceals his maternal origin (“Tu effaceras ta mère” [You will erase your mother]),47 Bouraoui appropriates a wronged identity in order to speak up. Throughout her narratives, she assimilates her pain with that of Algerian immigrants. For example, she says: “je suis triste à cause de cela, je suis comme cet homme un jour, à Barbès, qui crie: ‘Je vous déteste tous parce que vous avez oublié les Algériens’”48 [That is why I am sad, I am like that man who, one day, in Barbès, shouts: “I hate you all because you have forgotten the Algerians”]. She thus compares her sadness with the sorrow of this man from Algeria in Barbès—a poor Parisian neighborhood where many North African and subSaharan African immigrants live. In Garçon manqué she clearly compares her move to France to the emigration of Algerian economic immigrants: “Je porte ma valise à deux mains. Une énorme valise. [. . .] Ma vie algérienne et apportée. Comme tous les Algériens. Comme tous ces étrangers qui descendent du train, du bateau, de l’avion, chargés. Une maison entière à soulever. Une famille à déplacer, à emporter” [I carry my suitcase with both hands. It’s a huge suitcase. [. . .] my Algerian life that I bring along with me [. . .] like all Algerians and like all these foreigners who get off the train, the boat, the plane, encumbered. A full house in their hands, an identity to lift, a family to move, to bring along].49 Obviously Bouraoui’s empathy for the “étrangers” results from her identification with their loss, which she shares: the loss of the country where she grew up, Algeria. From an ethical perspective, however, to what extent can she speak, out of empathy, in the “subaltern’s voice” without reproducing the subalternity of the immigrant position? While Bouraoui may be seen as depriving the “étrangers” of their own agency as subjects, doesn’t her solidarity with the Algerian immigrants somewhat hide her identity as a socially privileged, mixed-race woman? In her book Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism, Jean Wyatt addresses (in the context of the African-American experience) this issue of speaking for someone else. According to her, “identification carries with it the convenient, though unintentional, effect of erasing the power differential between whites and women of color.”50 The risk is indeed that whites “overlook their own structural implication in racist systems,”51 and, as Sonia Kruks notes, “it is as if they were personally exonerated from white racism by virtue of the depth of their empathy.”52 Bouraoui’s situation is more complex because she is not “white” but mixed. Nevertheless, by singling out and choosing the Algerian side she seeks to shadow her white legacy and prevents her métis identity from being represented.53 After having revived the colonial antagonism by embedding it in the presentation of her familial history, Bouraoui progressively positions the Franco-Algerian métis against France and on the side of Algeria, as if the

The “Métis” Predicament

187

latter’s cause for independence were still at stake. In this regard, the contrast is striking between the beginning of Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées. The opening of the first book is filled with contradictory sentences showing Bouraoui’s questioning of the nature of the métis identity. For example, she writes, “Ne pas être algérienne. Ne pas être française” [I don’t want to be Algerian. I don’t want to be French],54 and speaking of her métis friend Amine, “sa peau blanche” [his white skin] and later “sa peau brune” [his brown skin].55 She claims not to be able to be fully Algerian because of her inability to speak Arabic: “Cette langue qui s’échappe comme du sable est une douleur. Elle laisse ses marques, des mots, et s’efface. Elle ne prend pas sur moi. [. . .] Elle rompt l’origine. C’est une absence. [. . .] Je reste une étrangère [en Algérie]. [. . .] Je reste, ici, différente et française” [This language slipping through my fingers like sand makes me suffer. It leaves its scars, a few words, and disappears. It doesn’t take to me. [. . .] [It] disrupts my lineage. It’s an absence. [. . .] I am [. . .] a foreigner. [. . .] I am here, different, and French].56 But immediately after, she adds: “Mais je suis algérienne. Par mon visage. Par mes yeux. Par ma peau” [But I’m Algerian: it’s in my face, my eyes, my skin],57 emphasizing the ethnicization of the body over cultural identity. As the narrative progresses, Bouraoui reclaims an “algerianness” through what she elaborates as a corporeal archive. As Beschea-Face notes, the recurrence of the word “body” throughout the narrative reminds us that “métissage is bound to the racial axiom, [and hence to] the question of representation of the body, and all exterior signs (phenotype and other visible markers).”58 Bouraoui represents her Algerian genealogical connection as an embodied inheritance. She repeats that she is “traversée”59 [traversed, crossed], haunted by the bodies of her paternal family. Following on the sentence, previously quoted, “mais je suis algérienne [. . .],” she specifies: Par mon corps traversé du corps de mes grands-parents. Je porte l’odeur de leur maison. Je porte [. . .]. Je porte la main de Râbia [her Algerian grandmother] sur mon visage fiévreux. Je porte la voix de Bachir [her Algerian grandfather]. [. . .] Elle me rattache aux autres. Elle m’inclut à la terre algérienne.60 [my body inhabited by the body of my grandparents. I bear within me the smell of their house. [. . .] I carry Rabiâ’s hand on my feverish face. I bear Bachir’s voice beckoning his children. [. . .] His voice links me to others, uniting me with the land.]

The insistence on the ambiguous verbal expression “je porte” (to carry, to bear, to convey, to wear) repeated seven times, defining both a physical gesture and an intellectual one, indicates the psychosomatic nature of the legacy.

188

Chapter 4

The transmission of an Algerian identity is further mentioned throughout the novel through expressions highlighting the intergenerational transfer of what constitutes identity: “[par] mon père [. . .] par ses parents dans son corps, une invasion” [[through] my father [. . .] through his parents inhabiting his body like occupiers].61 Bouraoui seeks to represent processes of identification taking place through that which is beyond or below discourse; in other words, through the body. Such a paradigm can be understood through the sociohistorical context in which Bouraoui grew up, that is a familial and societal environment dominated by silence over the Franco-Algerian past. While, on the one hand, it became difficult and dangerous to show off “Frenchness” in Algeria after independence, on the other hand, in France where Bouraoui reconstructs herself after exile, everything related to Algeria was suppressed from the public scene and absent from representation. Historians Benjamin Stora and Raphaëlle Branche explain this historical-social silence, which reigned up until the 1990s, as the result of a political desire for collective amnesia. In Garçon manqué, Bouraoui points out this omnipresent and sickening silence about Algeria in France: “le silence prendra tout. Silence sur les massacres en Algérie. Sur la douleur. [. . .] Un silence qui court. Qui se transmet par contagion. Une vraie maladie. Une peste. Une épidémie. Silence sur toutes les lèvres. Silence de la France. Du monde entier” [silence will take over. Silence about the massacres, the suffering in Algeria. [. . .] A silence that spreads contagiously, a real disease, a plague, an epidemic. Silence on every mouth. The silence of France. The silence of the whole world.]62 Silence is thus compared to a disease affecting the social body, while Bouraoui’s body, imagined as an archive of métis history and identity, can be seen as performing resistance to this silence. Contrasting with Garçon manqué, Mes mauvaises pensées rarely shows the noun “Algeria” with its full ontological weight, but rather the country of the father appears as an adjective (“Algerian”) that modifies negatively charged nouns: “ma tristesse algérienne” [my Algerian sorrow], “ma nuit algérienne” [my Algerian night], “Il y a un mythe algérien” [There is an Algerian myth], and “Il y a une histoire triste et algérienne”63 [There is a sad and Algerian story]. These expressions suggest the story of a loss, whose trace appears through the use of a lexical field of the wound:64 “l’Algérie est dans mon cœur qui saigne”65 [Algeria is in my bleeding heart]. The exile from Algeria entails in Bouraoui’s self an irreversible split, typical in individuals experiencing a post-traumatic stress disorder: “je sais que j’ai deux histoires, il y a avant et après”66 [I know that I have two histories, there is before and after]. And as Helen Vassallo notes, “If in Algeria attempts were made to eradicate the memory of French colonial rule, and in France to forget the twenty-three consecutive years of war and the ignominies of [the Algerian] conflict, then

The “Métis” Predicament

189

those with dual nationality [like Bouraoui] were doubly silenced.”67 Bouraoui indeed writes: “Sous mes livres, il y a cette histoire de silence”68 [Underneath my books, there is this history of silence], a silence about history that Vassallo highlights as “transmitted” through generations.69 In this particular situation of double concealment, history and memory are not articulated through speech. Instead, in Bouraoui’s narratives, the body appropriates a familial heritage expressed physically; it becomes a living archive. As Garçon manqué’s narrator says: “Chaque corps est la contamination d’un autre corps. Chacun forme la strate de l’autre”70 [Each body gets contaminated by another. Each one becomes the stratum of the other]. The body is conceived as a sort of cross-section of a familial terrain bearing the elements of past generations. In a context of silenced history, Bouraoui’s parents’ and grandparents’ psychological wounds (and not an articulated memory) are transmitted to her—“leur blessures transmises”71 [transmitted wounds], she says—through a psychosomatic transfer, suggesting that flesh contains memory. Hence when Bouraoui claims “Je porte la guerre d’Algérie”72 [I bear in me Algeria’s War of Independence], we should read it as if the trauma of the war suffered by her grandparents were her own. Thus, when mentioning her anger provoked by a racist comment about Arabs made by her maternal (French) grandfather, Bouraoui says: “quand ma colère vient, je crois qu’elle passe par ce lien [entre elle et son père], je crois qu’il y a une information familiale, on ne transmet pas seulement la chair à ses enfants mais aussi les conflits”73 [when my anger comes, I believe it travels through this link [between herself and her father], I believe there is such a thing as familial information, we transmit not only flesh to our children but also conflicts].74 In addition to suggesting a transgenerational transmission of a wound, Bouraoui presents through the metaphor of the “link” what Teresa Brennan calls a “transmission of affect,” accompanying the “projection or introjection of a judgment.”75 For instance, in the scene where Bouraoui alludes to her anger, the grandfather makes a judgment about Arabs, implicitly attacking Bouraoui’s father. Rachid makes no reply, but his affect, this “physiological shift”76 as Brennan would write—which probably consists of a mix of anger and pain—is transmitted to his daughter who gets angry for her father. In the later narrative, Mes mauvaises pensées, Bouraoui elaborates a paradigm, that is, a framework of images representing a sort of affective archive, a transmission of a heritage of affects based on the motif of the skin. The word “skin” is already omnipresent in Garçon manqué, but it truly becomes an obsessive theme in Mes mauvaises pensées.77 This contact zone between self and other represents the location where transmission of affects occurs and where a psychosomatic archive is constituted. Hence, Bouraoui provides images of her skin in contact with her paternal relatives’ skins, a contact that

190

Chapter 4

becomes an embodiment or an inclusion: “mon grand-père algérien, [. . .]. Il y a sa peau sous la mienne” [my Algerian grandfather [. . .] his skin is underneath my own], “Je suis la peau de ma grand-mère” [I am my grandmother’s skin], “au travers de ma peau [. . .] mon père” [through my skin [. . .] my father], “J’ai le visage de Râbia. J’ai la peau de Bachir” [I have Râbia’s face. I have Bachir’s skin], adding “Rien de Rennes. Rien. Qu’un extrait de naissance. Que ma nationalité française” [Nothing from Rennes. Nothing but a birth certificate and my French nationality].78 Bouraoui represents her body as an archive looking like a skin palimpsest whose layers are made of her paternal family’s skin, conceived as a legacy of affects regarding history. The affects “contained” within a body can circulate from one individual to another thanks to the porosity of the skin. That is what Bouraoui represents through her phrase “peau buvard”79: literally a “blotting” skin, absorbing like blotting paper. She writes: “Je lis dans un livre qu’il y a un sujet buvard dans une famille, que c’est dans le système même de la famille, une peau qui prendrait tout”80 [I read in a book that there is a blotting subject in a family, that it’s in the very system of the family itself, a skin that would take in everything]. What does this “everything” signify? How can circulating affects bond someone to the history of someone else? Through her metaphorical “peau buvard” Bouraoui claims to receive affects that are correlated to her family members’ representations of the past—in other words: to their personal memory. In her book The Generation of Postmemory, Holocaust scholar Marianne Hirsch calls this inheritance of “something” that resembles memory but is not memory a “postmemory,” which she characterizes as the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.81

Typically, the generation “before,” who experienced trauma, does not speak out their memory to the generation after, as the rupture defining traumatic events cannot be apprehended through conscious or direct representations.82 Yet, the traumatic memory is still somehow communicated through the convoluted modes of stories, images, and behaviors (including silence) that induce affects linked to the trauma. Suggesting that she carries this sort of postmemory, Bouraoui says: “Avant je ne pensais pas qu’on pouvait souffrir de ses grands-parents, je me disais que la famille commençait à partir de soi, de sa naissance et donc de ses géniteurs”83 [I used to think that you couldn’t suffer from your grandparents. I thought that family began with the

The “Métis” Predicament

191

self, so with your parents]. Yet, she realizes that their stories “font aussi partie d’[elle]”84 [are also a part of [her]]. In Garçon manqué, a picture of Rachid’s brother, Amar, killed during the War of Independence, catalyzes such a relation of postmemory for Bouraoui: Je garde la photographie d’Amar. Mon secret. Sa dernière photographie. Prise au maquis. [. . .] Pour se souvenir. De la douleur. Du combat. De l’Algérie française. [. . .] Il vise toute ma famille française. Amar est le fils aîné disparu. Amar est le frère perdu. Amar est le silence de mon père. [. . .] Amar vient la nuit par sa dernière image, mon obsession. [. . .] Je suis dans la guerre d’Algérie. Je porte le conflit. Je porte la disparition de l’aîné de la famille, sa référence. [I keep Amar’s photograph, my secret. It’s his last photograph, shot on the battlefield. [. . .] a reminder of the pain, the battle, and French Algeria. [. . .] [he aims] away at my whole French family. Amar is the oldest son, who passed away. Amar is the lost brother. Amar is my father’s silence. [. . .] Amar appears at night through the last photograph of him, my obsession. [. . .] I am in the midst of the Algerian War of Independence. I bear the conflict. I bear the absence of the eldest son of the family and the memory of his disappearance.]85

Bouraoui affectively invests the picture, as if this image of Amar, who died before her birth, belonged to her own memory. The relationship she bears to Amar’s story is intensely emotionally charged, as if she had known her uncle. She probably saw her father or grandparents’ pain while looking at the picture, and this affect was transmitted to her like an obsession, “so deeply,” as Hirsch writes, that she made the painful memory her own—“je porte,” as she repeats. Bouraoui’s narrative appropriation of her Algerian family’s memories and histories is at the root of her claiming of an Algerian “skin.” The emphasis on her Algerian skin also entails a deconstruction of the narrator’s gender.86 During her childhood in Algeria, Bouraoui started to be a whole new queer persona, a tomboy (garcon manqué), which was poles apart from the role of the French little girl that she was supposed play. As she says in Garçon manqué, “Non, je ne laisserai pas mes cheveux longs. Non, je ne marcherai pas comme une fille. Non, je ne suis pas française. Je deviens algérien” [No, I won’t let my hair grow long. No, I won’t walk like a girl. No, I’m not French. I become an Algerian man].87 The masculine character that Bouraoui “wears” as her own skin is a way to be closer to her father, who is the one who involuntarily prompted the invention of this new persona: “Mon père invente Brio. Mon père laisse Brio. Tu veilleras sur la maison. Ses départs fondent mon désir. Changer. Se transformer. Je deviens Brio. [. . .] Brio pour toute l’Algérie. Brio contre toute la France.” [My father invents Brio and leaves Brio behind. You will watch over the house.

192

Chapter 4

His departures are the root of my desire to change, to transform myself. I become Brio. [. . .] Brio stands up for all of Algeria. Brio stands up against all of France].88 The father, who had to be away from home very often, told his daughter to take care of the household—a discourse denoting a sign of paternal love and his will to teach his daughter a sense of responsibility. However young Bouraoui’s interpretation of her father’s trust led her to embody a fantasized boy, a miniature of her father. The adoption of this masculine and Algerian new skin betrays Bouraoui’s craving for an affiliation with Algeria, an affiliation that she constructs as antagonistic to a French identity (“contre toute la France”89 [against all of France]) and femininity. As Agar-Mendousse notices, in Bouraoui’s texts Algeria (“le pays des hommes”90 [the country of men], in Bouraoui’s words) is always associated with masculinity, dark colors, vitality, and the body.91 This gender division subverts the colonial metaphor of the colonized land as a woman, which is subject to conquest.92 In order to be Algerian, Bouraoui thus becomes a “garçon manqué” (tomboy). Furthermore, this gender trouble is more deeply connected with Bouraoui’s cultural predicament. First, Bouraoui’s adoption of a masculinity and rejection of males’ bodies is individually motivated, as she was sexually abused when she was a little girl, in Algeria. Bouraoui writes about her aggressor: “Cet homme est ma défaite. Jamais je ne donnerai ma main. Jamais je ne céderai mon visage. [. . .] Cet homme fonde ma peur” [This man is my defeat. Never will I give him my hand. Never will I yield my face. [. . .] This man is at the root of my fear].93 As with any trauma, the moment of terror itself is erased from memory: “Je ne me souviens pas. C’est un instant blanc. Ma mémoire ne rentre pas dans ce lieu [. . .]” [I don’t know; it happened in a flash. My memory doesn’t go back there].94 As a consequence of this personal shock, Bouraoui’s transformation stands for a rejection of any form of feminine submission, and even of any form of femininity.95 She writes: “Je veux être un homme. [. . .] Être un homme en Algérie c’est devenir invisible. Je quitterai mon corps. Je quitterai mon visage. [. . .] L’Algérie est un homme” [I want to be a man. [. . .] To be a man in Algeria means becoming invisible. I will leave my body, my face. [. . .] Algeria is a man], “Je deviendrai un homme pour venger mon corps fragile” [I will become a man to avenge my fragile body], and finally, “Mon corps [. . .] Il fera resistance” [My body [. . .] will resist].96 Second, Bouraoui’s masculine queering of her identity is related to collective history. The first shock of individual aggression is recalled by a second, overwhelming one: the discovery, in the family’s apartment in Algiers, of arms that presumably have been used to kill Algerian women.97 These women were raped and assassinated by French men of the terrorist organization OAS (Organisation armée française) during the War of Independence. The arms

The “Métis” Predicament

193

have been hidden in this apartment in Algiers, located in a residence probably inhabited by Pieds-Noirs families in the past. Bouraoui explains: On retrouve des coupes à champagne enroulées dans du papier journal daté de 1962. On retrouve des couteaux ensanglantés. Dans l’appartement. Du sang de 1962. [. . .] L’année du massacre des femmes algériennes de la Résidence. L’année du massacre de l’OAS. Leur dernier massacre. [. . .] On retrouve leurs armes sous les tuyaux de la salle de bains. [We find champagne glasses wrapped in newspaper from 1962. We find bloody knives in the apartment. Blood from 1962. [. . .] the year of the massacre of the Algerian women from La Résidence, the year of the OAS massacre. It was their last massacre. [. . .] We find their weapons and alcohol under the bathroom plumbing.]98

Such slaughters were common during the Algerian War, and even more at the end with the “jusqu’au-boutistes” [diehard] OAS fighters; yet women victims have not been mentioned in any official reports or historical accounts, either in France or Algeria.99 By narrating this episode, which could only be known through familial or private oral memory, Bouraoui’s story incidentally alters the public understanding of history. Her indirect testimony of the “Massacre of the Women of the Residence,” relying on her familial memory, is a “counter-public” (Warner) statement implying a supplementation of the French and Algerian official historical narratives, in which no trace of this massacre exists. To come back to the gender question, the traumatic discovery of the knives, which haunts Bouraoui, prompts her gender transformation. She clearly makes the link between the two events: “Vivre avec l’image de ces femmes égorgées. Avec leur cris. [. . .] En pleurer. [. . .] C’est ainsi que je vis notre [Amine and hers] histoire algérienne. En combat. [. . .] C’est venger les femmes algériennes massacrées par les hommes de l’OAS” [We must live with the image of these women with their slit throats, their cries, [. . .] cry at night [about the massacre]. [. . .] This is how I experience our Algerian history. In combat. [. . .] Avenge the Algerian women massacred by the OAS men].100 And finally, she adds: “Mon corps contre les hommes de l’OAS” [My body confronts the men of the OAS]101 as if her masculine persona, and also her archive-body carrying the wounds of her family, could be erected against the OAS fighters. Therefore, Bouraoui’s change of gender identity is, in this way, historically overdetermined in the economy of the narrative. In the end, the position of the métis is historicized through Bouraoui’s depiction of her life as a combat against the past. The narratives indeed suggest that she seeks revenge against a segment of the French population, “une

194

Chapter 4

certaine France,”102 which perpetuates colonial paradigms or performs neocolonial ethos. But the narrator does not take the stance of a public renderer of justice. Instead, she takes action at the individual level, both inside the narrative with her attempt to psychologically get rid of her white skin, and thus suggesting contradicting drives at the core of an archiving process, and outside the text, as a writer who testifies to an unresolved historical problem. DISTANCING HER FRENCH LEGACY Both Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées refer extensively to stories of asphyxiation, which connect with the issue of Bouraoui’s Frenchness. First, there is a series of episodes of near-drowning experiences involving, each time, a white woman. Two of them, one in Garçon manqué and the other in Mes mauvaises pensées, are particularly revealing of the metaphoric connection that Bouraoui creates between drowning and her apprehension of French identity. At the beginning of Garçon manqué, Bouraoui recounts that during her childhood in Algeria she almost drowned during an outing to Zeralda’s beach (in the suburbs of Algiers) with Amine and his (French) mother. Bouraoui and Amine ventured off the beach’s perimeter supervised by Amine’s mother. They ended up climbing the walls of a deserted hotel and wandered in its gardens until they found the swimming pool. Bouraoui jumped from the diving board, but she remained stuck in the depths of the pool and suffocated. Amine dove in and rescued her. She writes, through short, sharp sentences characteristic of the style of this indicting, brutal text: Le soleil est une folie. Le soleil est un homme qui dévore l’Algérie. On fuit la plage. [. . .] On va vers l’hôtel de Zeralda. On escalade un mur. [. . .] Le soleil vient jusqu’à l’hôtel de Zeralda. Je saute du plongeoir. [. . .] Je reste au fond longtemps. Le soleil incendie. Le feu contre mon souffle. Le feu contre ma volonté. [. . .] Le soleil révèle. Je ne suis pas algérienne. [. . .] Le soleil est une vengeance. Je ne suis pas d’ici. Je ne remonte pas. [The sun is madness. The sun is a man who devours Algeria. We run away from the beach. [. . .] We are headed to Zeralda’s hotel. We climb a wall. [. . .] The sun reaches Zeralda’s hotel. I jump off the diving board. [. . .] I stay at the bottom for a long time. The sun scorches like fire against my breath, against my will. [. . .] The sun uncovers the truth: I am not Algerian. [. . .] The sun is a kind of vengeance. I am not from here. I will not resurface.]103

The passage reads as an opposition between Bouraoui and the omnipresent sun, a fight between Algeria’s natural conditions and Bouraoui’s body. Like

The “Métis” Predicament

195

in Camus’ L’Étranger, the sun is an ordeal that has to do with death:104 while Meursault finds the heat of the sun more unbearable than his mother’s burial and is later pushed by it to kill the Arab, Bouraoui faces the truth (“le soleil révèle”), which is her failure to belong to Algeria (“Je ne suis pas algérienne. [. . .] Je ne suis pas d’ici”), a sort of death of the métis ideal. The scene symbolizes the ordeal that the métis confronts by bringing to the fore (via intertextuality) the spectrality of Pieds-Noirs Algeria. Moreover, the swimming pool drama happened at the same time as another scene, whose parallel narration casts light on the meaning of Bouraoui’s representation of her near-drowning. Indeed while Bouraoui and her friend were venturing away in Zeralda, Amine’s mother was also fighting against the sun: “La mère d’Amine. Sa peau blanche. Son visage contre le soleil, une guerre. Elle est démunie, là, sur la plage algérienne. [. . .] Elle est écrasée par l’Algérie. Elle est plus qu’une étrangère. C’est une femme française. [. . .] Le soleil brûle la peau blanche de la femme française. Il tombe sur les corps. Il étouffe les voix” [Amine’s mother, with her white skin and face, confronts the sun. It’s a war. She is powerless here, on the Algerian beach. [. . .] She is crushed by Algeria. More than a foreigner, she’s a Frenchwoman. [. . .] The sun burns the white skin of the French woman. It falls on bodies, muffles voices].105 Both women (young Bouraoui and Amine’s mother) are devoured by the sun, against which they are fighting (“contre,” “guerre”). Both are asphyxiated: “Noyer le visage de la mère d’Amine. [. . .] Noyer ma vie algérienne” [to drown [. . .] the face of Amine’s mother [. . .] and my Algerian life].106 Beyond the sexual metaphor of a masculine domination (both French and Algerian) over women, the two passages, which are textually intertwined, establish a web of equivalences that is to be found throughout the two novels: first, white skin is clearly defined as a synonym of stranger to Algeria—the métis skin defines a form of strangeness, while the all-French skin, like Amine’s mother, is “plus qu’une étrangère,” more than a foreigner and a stranger combined: it is the enemy. Moreover, white skin is associated with a form of guilt: whether Bouraoui’s sense of guilt for having escaped the adult’s protection, or for being unable to swim up to the surface, or Amine’s mother’s guilt for being more concerned with her sun tan than looking after the kids (“La mère d’Amine est sans nous. Elle ne surveille pas. Le soleil est son obsession” [Amine’s mother is not with us. She is not watching. She is obsessed with the sun]).107 The second and important imagery that the passage sets up is the link between “white” people and suffocation (“étouffe”) or drowning (“noyer”). These two paradigmatic connections are fleshed out in Mes mauvaises pensées, in which allusions to near-drowning events recur throughout the narrative. In the first pages of the text, Bouraoui mentions the cry of a beaten woman heard at night from her apartment: “La nuit [. . .] je me souviens

196

Chapter 4

d’une voix de femme qui appelait au secours, je me souviens avoir entendu des coups contre une fenêtre fermée: on frappait un corps”108 [At night [. . .] I remember a woman’s voice calling for help, I remember hearing pounding against a closed window: someone was striking a body]. Here again, there is an intertextual resonance with Camus’ La Chute,109 in which the narrator Jean-Baptiste Clamence, whose name itself alludes to the biblical figure of John the Baptist “crying in the desert” (with clamens being the Latin for cry),110 hears at night the cry of a drowning woman that forever changes his life. In Bouraoui’s narrative, Adrienne Angelo notices, “These phantom cries [. . .] are all related to the women in her life.”111 The first cry initiates the return of repressed traumatic memories shifting progressively toward neardrowning scenes. Bouraoui writes: “Il y a eu un glissement de la violence sur ma violence, ces cris ont réveillé d’autres cris, si secrets, si noyés au fond de moi”112 [There was a slippage of that violence onto my violence, those cries awoke other cries, so secret, drowned deep within me]. The use of the word “noyés” announces the narration of near-drowning memories. Indeed a few pages later Bouraoui evokes: “L’Amie a failli se noyer à cause d’un enfant, l’Amie a failli mourir et je n’ai rien vu. Tout commence dans la baie de Nice, le 17 août dernier, tout revient aussi, c’est mon corps dans la piscine de Zeralda; j’ai failli me noyer et je ne l’ai dit à personne, mon enfance repose sur ce secret”113 [The Friend almost drowned because of a child, the Friend almost died and I didn’t see anything. It all starts in the bay of Nice, last August 17th, everything also comes back, it’s my body in the Zeralda swimming pool; I almost drowned and I didn’t tell anyone, my childhood rests on this secret]. Her girlfriend’s near-drowning experience triggers the traumatic memory of the Zeralda drama, which comes back to her consciousness along with other repressed childhood memories. In fact, the Mediterranean Sea embodies the resonant space through which memories are reflected on each side. Most of the shifts from one group of memories to the other happen through the evocation of a “water episode.”114 One symptomatic memory in particular returns to the narrator’s mind during her therapy; it is the memory of the second near-drowning that I would like to examine in what follows. Mes mauvaises pensées is composed of the narrator’s monologue to her doctor, and the run-on sentences connote the flow of a backlash of repressed memories. This near-drowning episode is articulated right in the middle of the text, suggesting how central this event is in the drowning semiotic chain. It is about the near-death of a young girl at the house of Bouraoui’s sister’s friend, where Bouraoui was staying while her mother was running some errands: une fille de mon âge, elle longe la piscine, puis vient vers moi, elle cherche madame B. [. . .] il y a le corps de cette fille debout, devant moi, cette fille qui

The “Métis” Predicament

197

commence à rire, à tourner autour de moi, c’est comme une danse au début, puis c’est comme une folie dans ma tête, je me relève, je me tiens au bord de la piscine, elle dit: “Attention, tu pourras tomber,” et c’est elle qui tombe, [. . .] je ne sais pas ce que j’ai fait mais elle se noie, devant moi, et je ne l’aide pas, je la regarde, parce que je sais que c’est ma main qui l’a poussée, au début, pour rire, vite, parce que je ne supporte plus son corps et sa peau blanche.115 [a girl about my age, she walks along the pool, then comes over to me, she is looking for Madame B. [. . .] there is the body of this girl standing, in front of me, this girl who starts to laugh, to run around me, it’s like a dance at first, then it’s like a madness in my head, I get up, I stand at the edge of the pool, she says: “Careful, you might fall,” and she’s the one who falls, [. . .] I don’t know what I did but she’s drowning, right in front of me, and I don’t help her, I watch her, because I know it was my hand that pushed her, at first, as a joke, quickly, because I can’t stand her body and her white skin.]

Bouraoui eventually ended up rescuing the girl. Nonetheless, it is striking that Bouraoui sees herself in that girl, and the reason why she felt the urge to commit this almost-crime is the white-skinned body of the girl (“parce que je ne supporte plus son corps et sa peau blanche”). A few pages later, the color of the skin is confirmed as being the apparent motivation of Bouraoui’s violent and aggressive act: “Après ce jour, toutes les nuits se font écho, des nuits à penser à madame B., des nuits à revivre le jour de février, l’orage, mes mains, la peau blanche de la fille, ses mots, aneti mahboula: ‘tu es folle.’”116 [After that day, all the nights echo one another, nights thinking about Madame B., nights reliving that day in February, the storm, my hands, the girl’s white skin, her words, aneti mahboula: “you’re crazy”]. After confessing this memory to the analyst, Bouraoui mentions the collusion of images in her mind: “la superposition d’images, de mon corps sous l’eau de Zeralda, et un jour le corps de l’Amie dans la baie de Nice”117 [the superposition of images, of my body under the water at Zeralda, and one day the Friend’s body in the bay of Nice]. The drowning episodes are about white women getting asphyxiated by water. These memories were repressed, as Bouraoui specifies, and she even kept secret her own near-drowning in Zeralda. In a way, this mental repression traces back to the very first near-drowning experience in life: the baby in the mother’s waters. “Mère” (mother) and “mer” (sea) symbolically become a unique motif connected to Bouraoui’s unease with her French identity (white skin), which she inherited from her mother. These obscured near-drowning memories function like what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok call a “phantom,” that is, an unconscious “concern” caused by a shameful secret inherited from a family member:

198

Chapter 4

The phantom is a formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious— for a good reason. It passes [. . .] from the parent’s unconscious to the child’s [. . .]. The phantom is what works on the unconscious from an unspeakable shameful secret belonging to another. [. . .] Its manifestation, the haunting, is the phantom’s return in the form of bizarre words and actions.118

Abraham and Torok demonstrate that the child does not consciously understand the secret that the parents bear in silence, but she acts it out, driven by a “thing” wedged in her unconscious. So a question arises: what shameful secret of asphyxiation does Bouraoui’s mother carry and how does Bouraoui textually present it? This question leads me to the second type of asphyxiation present in the story, a suffocation caused not by water but by lack of air. Bouraoui’s mother, Maryvonne, suffers from asthma, a metaphorical drowning which Bouraoui does not fail to highlight: “l’asthme, c’est comme la noyade, l’asthme c’est sa propre noyade”119 [asthma, it’s like drowning, asthma is her own drowning]. She often mentions her mother’s “illness”:120 “ma mère qui étouffe, sa peau bleue” [my suffocating mother, her blue skin], “son asthme” [her asthma], “œdème” [edema], “trachéotomie” [tracheotomy], “l’asphyxie de ma mère” [my mother’s asphyxiation], “ses asphyxies”121 [her asphyxiations]. But asphyxiation, literally referring to the pathological condition of lack of normal breathing, has a figurative sense: “étouffement de facultés intellectuelles ou morales dû a la contrainte ou au milieu de vie”122 [suffocation of intellectual or moral faculties due to constraint or life circumstance]. Maryvonne’s shameful secret lies precisely in this shift from literal to figurative. The portrayal of Bouraoui’s ill mother in Mes mauvaises pensées functions as a literal and somatic representation of a mental, psychic condition: precisely, the mother’s anxiety created by her own parents’ racism. In the narrator’s recollections, the maternal grandfather is described as nostalgic for French Algeria, as a racist man who refers to Arabs with insulting names (bicots, bougnoules), and who threatened his daughter with a “tu n’épouseras pas un Algérien” [You won’t marry an Algerian]123 when she met Rachid, Bouraoui’s father. The grandfather later admonished his daughter through violent statements, such as “tu vas mal finir” [you will end badly] and “Tu es la honte de la famille”124 [you are the disgrace of the family]. Bouraoui often highlights her maternal family’s abjection of her Arab identity, an abjection which informed her public identity, in her very name. Indeed, Bouraoui’s desire to change her first name from Yasmina to Nina is presented as a reaction to her grandparents’ decision to name their black poodle “Jasmine”125 as if Arabic names were only good for dogs—a comparison often made by the grandmother, as narrated in Garçon manqué.126 Ironically, this change of name satisfied the grandparents who once mentioned, during a

The “Métis” Predicament

199

family vacation in their native Brittany, “On préfère t’appeler Nina plutôt que Yasmina. Nina ça arrange. Ca fait espagnol ou italien. Comme ça on n’a pas à expliquer nos fréquentations”127 [We’d rather call you Nina than Yasmina. Nina’s easier. It sounds Spanish or Italian. That way we don’t have to explain why we’re with you]. For Bouraoui, the childhood memory of her vacation in Brittany is forever marked by the discovery of French racism toward the Arabs, and the Algerians in particular: Cette violence. [. . .] Le rejet de l’Algérie. [. . .] Ça se trouvera au cœur de familles rencontrées par hasard. En vacances. Dans leur haine tissée. Dans leurs jugements. Dans leurs sentences. Les Arabes dehors. Dans leur impossibilité à aimer vraiment ce qui est étranger. Ce qui est différent. [. . .] C’est de l’inhumanité de ces familles-là que viendra ma haine d’une certaine France. [. . .] Une géographie familiale. Le lieu du règlement de compte. [This violence. [. . .] The rejection of Algeria. [. . .] The problem resides at the heart of families met by chance on vacation; its woven into their hatred, their judgments, and their verdicts. Arabs out. The problem lies in their inability to truly love what is foreign, what is different. [. . .] My hatred for a certain kind of France comes from the inhumanity of these families [. . .]. A family geography, the place where debts are settled.]128

On the one hand, Bouraoui points out a sort of collective neurosis around “the Arab.”129 In another passage, she emphasizes this widespread French rejection of the figure of the Arab, when she says, “ARABE contiendra toutes leurs névroses, tous leurs fantasmes” [ARAB is a projection of their neuroses and fantasies].130 The capitalization seeks to show that the word itself encapsulates many different fears and abjections, all concentrated toward one identity. The capitalized term may also provoke a special attention from the reader, who is thus invited to reflect upon her own associations attached to the “Arab”—as if it were a swear word. On the other hand, at the end of the quoted passage, Bouraoui clearly suggests that her feeling of being rejected as an Arab and her subsequent violence come from an intimate sphere, her maternal family. Antagonism within a narrow space such as the family is the paradigm through which Bouraoui sees and feels the world. So, the writing of the inherent tension of her dual identity through a struggle between female bodies and fluid elements (water, air) undermines the idea of a mixity that would mean a harmonious diversity, a seamless hybridity embodying a postcolonial world rid of asymmetries between ex-colonized and ex-colonizer. The narratives echo Ella Shohat’s thoughts about hybridity and hegemonic relations in her “Notes on the ‘Post-colonial,’”131 when the narrator considers herself to be “une peau déchirée.”132 Bouraoui’s texts

200

Chapter 4

exhibits other principles of commandment and commencement: an articulation of the self and world based on binary structures of opposition, challenging the notions usually associated with postcolonialism, such as ambiguity, cultural hybridity, mobility, liminality, etc.133 The archive of the métis body that Bouraoui produces reintroduces questions regarding racial hierarchies and sociocultural disparities through the narration of a history of familial rejection subtending the author’s own latent hostility. (IM)POSSIBLE MÉTIS? All the childhood memories returning to the narrator of Mes mauvaises pensées provoked behavioral troubles, as the title of the book announces, which prompted the narrator to go see a professional. Significantly, one of the obsessive “bad/evil thoughts” that Bouraoui confesses to her doctor directly relates to her French grandfather and symbolically deals with her mixed identity. She narrates a memory about a family dinner with her maternal relatives. Despite the grandfather’s warning, young Bouraoui orders a “pied de cochon” (pig’s trotter)—a big piece of pork that, according to the grandfather, a little girl can hardly eat by herself. The threat and anger of the old man (“Tu as intérêt à le manger!”134 [You had better eat it or else!]) terrorizes Nina, who is then unable to eat the dish because it is too big a portion: “le pied arrive [. . .] et je ne peux pas le manger [. . .] et bien sûr mon grand-père est en colère, et il m’en veut et il me punit, et je me couche sans dîner”135 [the trotter arrives [. . .] and I can’t eat it [. . .] and of course my grandfather is furious, and he holds this against me and punishes me, and I go to bed without dinner]. While rejecting her grandfather’s authoritarianism, Bouraoui’s inability to ingest the pork—an animal whose consumption is forbidden under Islamic dietary laws but associated with classic French cuisine—incidentally represents a symbolic resistance: she cannot swallow France’s imperialism, which rejects difference and is embodied by her grandfather. But my point is about her subsequent evil thought. She writes: “tout se lie, puisque dans mes mauvaises pensées il y a l’idée fixe d’un ongle géant qui gratterait ma peau jusqu’au sang”136 [it’s all linked, because in my evil thoughts there’s this obsessive idea of a gigantic nail scratching my skin until it bleeds]. The pig hoof’s scratching her skin is a literalization of a metaphor associated with the grandfather who wishes to “Frenchify” Nina (and whom she literally sees as being the pig): that is, to remove the melanin of her mixed skin, to scratch off the Algerian layer of her skin as it were. The physical skin is linked to the psychological one in an anaphoric relation. This is what psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu calls the “ego-skin” (Moi-peau): it is a fantasized reality, a representation that the child uses in early phases of her development

The “Métis” Predicament

201

to represent herself as a “me” based on the experience of her body surface. In his book Le Moi-peau, Anzieu explains how the defining interface ego/ skin in child psychology is based on a similarity of structures and functions between the ego and the skin that he summarizes with the concepts of limitation, capacity or composure, and organization. Hence the scratching of the skin is analyzed as an attempt to feel the limits of one’s ego-skin: “Les mutilations de la peau—parfois réelles, le plus souvent imaginaires—sont des tentatives dramatiques de maintenir les limites du corps et du Moi, de rétablir le sentiment d’être intact et cohésif” [Skin mutilations—sometimes real, but most often imaginary are drastic attempts to maintain the boundaries of the body and the Ego, to restore a feeling of being intact and cohesive].137 The narrator’s fantasized scratching should be understood as her attempt to hold her identity as different from that of her French family, as a virtual inscription of her Algerian difference on her ego-skin. Through the narration of this fantasized psychosomatic inscription of Franco-Algerian identity, Bouraoui textually imprints a sense of hybridity in her written self. But she also means that this hybrid self is a traumatized one, since the story represented the literal sense of “trauma,” from the Ancient Greek “τραυμα” which means a breach in the body forming a wound, just like the aspect of a skin that has been scratched. The scratching of the skin is not only a fantasy; the narrator claims to rub her skin for real, because she wants to “to get rid of [her] shame.”138 Expressions of shame and guilt come back recurrently in the novels, especially in Mes mauvaises pensées,139 and they manifest the idea of intergenerational guilt, which Bouraoui’s mother (ashamed of her own father) is shown to have physically manifested through her illness. Indeed, speaking of the confinement (“claustra”140) and “porosity” between her mother and herself, Bouraoui says: “la tristesse de ma mère que je reprends comme une maladie, que je revis comme un devoir” [my mother’s sorrow that I pick up like an illness, that I relive like a duty], “c’est comme si mon corps avait la mémoire du corps de ma mère”141 [it’s as if my body had the memory of my mother’s body]. And, significantly, most of Bouraoui’s evil thoughts, which are diagnosed as “phobies d’impulsion”142 [obsessive compulsions] by her doctor, are about her mother’s body, specifically her white skin. She repeatedly claims such ideas: “ma mère [. . .] sa peau [. . .] la beauté de sa peau que j’ai peur d’ouvrir avec une petite paire de ciseaux qu’elle a laissée près du téléphone”143 [my mother [. . .] her skin [. . .] the beauty of her skin that I’m afraid to cut open with a little pair of scissors that she left next to the telephone]. Further in the text, she says: “Dans mes mauvaises pensées, il y a la vision de cette peau que j’ouvre au couteau et de ces viscères que je déchire comme du tissu fin [. . .] entailler, dépecer, saigner”144 [Among my bad thoughts, there’s a vision of this skin that I cut open with a knife and

202

Chapter 4

these entrails that I rip like fine fabric [. . .] slice, carve up, bleed]. How to interpret such images? In the chapter “Chosen Trauma: Unresolved Mourning” of his book Bloodlines, psychiatrist Vamik Volkan examines a case of transgenerational transmission of trauma, which he defines as “when an older person unconsciously externalizes his traumatized self onto a developing child’s personality. The child becomes a reservoir for the unwanted, troublesome parts of an older generation.”145 He explains that, whether or not what is transmitted changes, the mechanism of transmission is the same: “The person in the first generation of this family [. . .] may be said to have had a traumatized (imprisoned) self-representation that he enveloped and externalized onto a member of the second generation in an attempt to repair it. The person in the second generation, who has absorbed the wish of his elder, in turn externalized his and his [parent/whoever who transmitted the trauma] aspects onto [the object associated with trauma]” and takes action upon it “in an effort to erase the bad feelings” it “represented.”146 Using Volkan’s terminology—which actually coincides with Bouraoui’s own vocabulary—the child becomes a “reservoir” for the parent, who “envelope[s] and externalize[s] the unacceptable aspect of [herself] onto others who fit [her] perception of [her] traumatized self.”147 In this way, in Bouraoui’s text, the narrator’s fantasy of cutting off and getting rid of her mother’s white skin is the repairing externalization of her mother’s transmitted traumatic self-representation. The desire to be “more brown” is, at it were, the correlate of Fanon’s perspective on the colonized’s subjugated desire to be “more white.” In her analysis of Lawrence of Arabia, Kaja Silverman develops the idea that colonialism can entail a “double mimesis,” that is, not only the mimetic alienation pinpointed by Fanon but also a desire of the colonizer to assume the identity of the native: “the colonial relation can also give rise to an inverse desire [. . .] [a] curious paradox whereby a white man, ostensibly working on behalf of Imperial Britain, comes to assumes the psychic coloration of the Arabs he seeks to organize.”148 Silverman shows how, by adopting the Arab dress and customs, Lawrence performed both a homoerotic identification with Arabs, and expressed a desire to be more “Arab” than the Arabs, that is, to deprive them of their Otherness. Although Bouraoui’s novel is not about a white man and the British Empire, Silverman’s theory is still fruitful for an analysis of Bouraoui’s depiction of her mother’s problems. Despite her family’s racist stances, Maryvonne decided to marry an Arab, to follow him to live in Algeria, and to name her daughters Jamila and Yasmina. Maryvonne desires, to some extent, to wear a brown mask. While Maryvonne’s identity trouble remains on the level of mute expression in the form of illness, in Mes mauvaises pensées, the narrator’s inherited maternal trauma is exposed as a kind of disease, and thereby opens up

The “Métis” Predicament

203

to be potentially healed through the construction of what I call an archival self. Early on in the narrative the written text is implicitly compared to a body, whose blood would be tantamount to ink. Bouraoui indeed repeatedly evokes the chiasmic expression of “bleeding” writing: “langage qui saigne”149 [language that bleeds], “l’écriture qui saigne”150 [writing that bleeds], “une écriture physique, comme ce peintre qui peint avec son sang”151 [a physical writing, like that painter who paints with his blood]. Recounting “l’enfance qui saigne”152 [the bleeding childhood] and “l’Algérie [. . .] dans [son] coeur qui saigne”153 [Algeria [. . .] in [her] bleeding heart] in French entails a linguistic reenactment of Bouraoui’s traumatic separation from Algeria, from her father, and, more generally, from her Algerian roots. French words harm, so to speak, Bouraoui’s writing, as French language represents a powerful arm of colonialism. It is like “une lame de rasoir”154 [a razor blade] inducing “trauma,” a surgical wound, in the primary sense of the term. Bouraoui designates this linguistic predicament as a sort of disease embedded in words: “je pense que mes mots sont parfois comme une maladie, comme si chacun d’entre eux cachait ceux que je ne peux pas dire”155 [I think that my words are sometimes like a sickness, as if each one of them were hiding those that I cannot say]. The words she cannot say are the “unspeakable” ones articulating the trauma; more specifically, they are Arabic words she cannot utter. From this perspective, Mes mauvaises pensées echoes Marie Cardinal’s 1985 Les Mots pour le dire, the pioneer of illness narrative about returning memories of a Pieds-Noirs childhood.156 Like Cardinal, Bouraoui’s narrative is about coming to terms with a double separation: from the mother and from the land. “Illness narrative” is a concept coined by sociologist Arthur W. Frank, in his book The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics.157 He distinguishes three types of illness narratives, or frameworks, that the ill person uses to explain/understand her illness. First, there is the “restitution narrative” expressing the “desire to get well and stay well”:158 it is “the storyline of restoring health.”159 He points out, “Restitution stories attempt to outdistance mortality by rendering illness transitory.”160 Second, Frank distinguishes the “chaos narrative” that “is the opposite of restitution” as “its plot imagines life never getting better.”161 In chaos narrative, there is an “absence of narrative order,” as the illness moves randomly, from worse to bad, to worse again, and thus “negates expectation.”162 As the sociologist writes, “Chaos stories are sucked into the undertow of illness and the disasters that attend it.”163 Third, Frank characterizes the “quest narrative”: the ill person “meet[s] suffering head on; [s/he] accept[s] illness and seeks to use it. Illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest.”164 Bouraoui shifts back and forth between these three narrative structures within Mes mauvaises pensées, which is typical of illness narrative as “actual tellings combine all three, each perpetually interrupting the other two.”165 Nevertheless,

204

Chapter 4

in its whole, the story is about the search for a livable hybrid identity, and thus embodies more of a quest narrative. Indeed, Bouraoui seeks a form of professional assistance, the self-analysis process through which she retells and comes to grips with her own origin story, that lends itself to such a narrative sequence. Mes mauvaises pensées is presented by Bouraoui as a “confession.” She mentions the noun on the very first page, repeats it several times throughout, and ends the novel with this sentence, addressed to her doctor, and indirectly speaking to the reader: “Quand je viens vous voir, je garde l’idée d’une confession”166 [When I come to see you, I keep in mind the idea of confession]. Her confession can have two different meanings. On the one hand, Bouraoui revives the original Christian confession that conveys an implied guilt following a sin.167 Through the narrative she indeed avows the guilt and shame she feels for her maternal family, and more generally, from a stance that moralizes history, for France’s domination in Algeria. From this perspective, the narrative is like a “cleansing confession.”168 On the other hand, when Bouraoui the Algerian girl confesses, the text becomes testimonial, in the sense that Derrida gives to “testimony”—a narrative that implies “en lui la possibilité de la fiction, du simulacre, de la dissimulation, du mensonge et du parjure—c’est-à-dire aussi de la littérature, de l’innocente ou perverse littérature qui joue innocemment à pervertir toutes ces distinctions” [in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacrum, dissimulation, lie, and perjury—that is to say, the possibility of literature, of the innocent or perverse literature that innocently plays at perverting all of these distinctions].169 In this sense, to testify implies to let oneself be haunted by fiction in order to, perhaps, paradoxically, catch sight of reality. The difficulty of speaking about Algeria has constantly been highlighted by writers, such as Assia Djebar and Mohamed Dib, to name only two, and Bouraoui’s narratives also ask this question of how to talk about Algeria. As Ching Selao notes in her article “Porter l’Algérie: Garçon manqué de Nina Bouraoui,” Bouraoui uses her surname’s etymology as an overdeterminated motivation for her testimony. Bouraoui says, “Bouraoui. Le père du conteur. D’abou, le père, de rawa, raconter” [Bouraoui, the storyteller’s father. It comes from abou, meaning the father, and rawa, meaning to tell a story].170 And as Selao comments: “son nom à lui seul révèle déjà sa position de transmetteuse, elle pour qui l’écriture est le territoire créé en marge de l’Algérie et de la France [. . .]” [her name alone reveals already her position as a transmitter, one for whom writing is the territory created at the margins of Algeria and France].171 In the making of her public name, the writer inscribes her duality—“Nina,” rather than Yasmina, as a sign of forced Frenchification, and “Bouraoui” for her Algerian side—to

The “Métis” Predicament

205

create a discursive base (a point of departure, the archival commandment, and commencement) informed by history. Bouraoui manifests the need to testify insofar as Algeria has become a ghost to her, since her emigration: “il y a la disparition en moi de l’Algérie. Plus de traces, plus rien, je m’efface de l’intérieur, je suis mon propre parasite, il y a la négation totale en moi de l’Algérie: la renonciation à mon père, à ce qu’il est, à ce qui le précède, c’est d’une grande violence, c’est d’une grande injustice aussi”172 [Algeria has disappeared from within me. Not a trace, nothing, I’m erasing myself from the inside, I am my own parasite, within me there is the total negation of Algeria: the renunciation of my father, what he is, what came before him, it is very violent, it is also extremely unjust]. As Derrida writes in Mal d’archive, “ce qui est intéressant, dans le refoulement, c’est qu’on n’arrive pas à refouler. Le fantôme ainsi fait la loi” [what is most interesting in repression is what one does not manage to repress. The phantom thus makes the law].173 The ghost of Algeria invades Garçon manqué, in a prophetic mode (use of the future tense): “L’Algérie reviendra comme un fantôme. L’Algérie reviendra par la petite porte noire d’une morgue immense. Tu seras hanté” [Algeria will return like a ghost. Algeria will return through the small black door of an immense morgue. You will be haunted],174 Bouraoui says to Amine. In Mes mauvaises pensées, she speaks of “un fantôme de l’Algérie”175 [a ghost of Algeria].176 Writing in French and from France about Algeria and her childhood memories conveys, for Bouraoui, a sense of completed reappropriation of her several identities and constitutes at the same time the foundation of an archive of the métis experience through the recovering of the past via writing: “L’écriture c’est la terre, c’est l’Algérie retrouvée [. . .] je couvre la terre quittée”177 [Writing is the land, it is Algeria regained [. . .] I cover the abandoned land], she writes at the end of the book. Yet, there is a notable evolution between Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées. The first book is divided into four parts: “Alger,” “Rennes,” “Tivoli,” and “Amine.” The first two parts, roughly equal in length, compose most of the narrative: on the one hand, the memories from Algeria, on the other, the memories from France. This division reflects her schismatic sense of self. Then, the four pages entitled “Tivoli” recount how a trip to Italy modified Bouraoui’s struggle with her identity. She says: “Je n’étais plus française. Je n’étais plus algérienne. Je n’étais même plus la fille de ma mère. J’étais moi. Avec mon corps. [. . .] Je suis devenue heureuse à Rome. [. . .] Je venais de moi et moi seule” [I was no longer French. I was no longer Algerian. I was not even my mother’s daughter anymore. I was myself, comfortable with my body. [. . .] I became happy in Rome. [. . .] I came from myself and myself alone].178 So

206

Chapter 4

there is a sort of radical unresolution of her problems: all together geographical distance (since she is neither in France nor in Algeria), affective distance (she is not with any family members), and a new libidinal economy (“le désir”179) allowed Bouraoui to regain a sense of self and agency (“Je venais de moi et de moi seule”180 [I came from myself and myself alone]), after the emotional and textual integration of her dual legacy.181 This idea of an unresolvable binary métis identity (which echoes back to many of Djebar’s texts, notably La Disparition de la langue française)182 is confirmed at the end of the book. The very last three pages of Garçon manqué entitled “Amine” are a letter to her friend, a note of disappointment following a reunion after Bouraoui’s trip in Rome. She says that Amine looked at her differently, sensing a new body full of desire. While recognizing an indelible trace of Amine on her identity (“Il restera toujours une trace de toi, Amine. Sur ma peau. Un petit tatouage bleu, comme le ciel d’Alger” [There will always be a trace of you on my skin, Amine. It’s a small blue tatoo, the color of the sky of Algiers]),183 she distances herself from her double, a mirror-métis friend. At the end of Garçon manqué, the métis “compromise” is left unresolved, to the advantage of the anonymous desiring body that occupies the textual space. The de-ethnification of the body has left room for its sexualization. Yet, five years later, the question is back in Mes mauvaises pensées, which opens up new perspectives for her métis self-writing, archiving process. Compared to Garçon manqué, the very textual form of Mes mauvaises pensées is striking: the 277-page narrative is written as one paragraph devoid of chapter divisions. As Angelo notes, “this structure reproduces the narrator’s self-identifying metaphor ‘ma vie est d’un trait’ [my life is all in one go] (Mes mauvaises pensées 245).”184 Angelo remarks that the polysemic possibilities of the word “trait” suggest both rupture and forgetting, and incorporation: on the one hand, “trait” recalls the expression “tirer un trait sur quelque chose” (literally: to draw a line; to forget about something); but, on the other hand, it calls for the phrase “boire à grands/à longs traits” (to drink in one gulp, in one go). So, between integration of a traumatic past in the self and separation from it through writing, the text eventually reads as “trait-d’union” (hyphen) between Bouraoui’s different selves and always-changing identities. Significantly, the “vision” of Bouraoui’s incorporative self does not occur in Algeria, or in France, but in a third space: Boston and Provincetown (in the United States).185 She considers Boston as her favorite city, and praises Provincetown, where she feels freed from her inherited wounds (“si libre, si libre de moi,”186 [so free, so free of myself]). Only there can she claim: “Je ne confonds rien à Provincetown, je sais qui je suis, je sais ce que je désire [. . .] tout a disparu en moi, la peur, la tristesse, l’exil [. . .] je suis rentrée, dans un pays que je connaissais bien avant de le visiter, le pays de mon enfance”187 [I don’t get anything mixed up in Provincetown, I know who

The “Métis” Predicament

207

I am, I know what I desire [. . .] everything in me has disappeared, fear, sadness, exile [. . .] I have come home, to a land that I knew well before I ever visited dit, the land of my childhood]. She names America the country of her childhood because her father, who used to work there, would always return to Algeria with souvenirs for her. Bouraoui is reminded of peaceful memories of her childhood. She casts her “new” self in this world of representations, which is a chosen territory, unlike the birth land and the imposed country after exile. In Provincetown, Bouraoui claims feeling a great connection to herself: “je ne me suis jamais sentie aussi solidaire de moimême”188 [I have never felt so at one with myself]. Furthermore, she says: “C’est en arrivant à Provincetown que je sais d’où je viens [. . .] je suis chez moi à l’intérieur de moi, [. . .] c’est comme si des milliers de souvenirs se rassemblaient pour ne former qu’une seule vérité, qu’une seule ligne”189 [It’s in arriving in Provincetown that I know where I come from, [. . .] I am at home within my self, [. . .] it’s as if thousands of memories were gathering in order to form one sole truth, one single line]. The line she mentions, formed by the diverse layers of memory, is the orientation of Bouraoui’s inclusive vision of herself. The line draws her becoming, while integrating her legacy. The line is the curve of writing: “il y a une écriture qui se forme dans ce lieu, une écriture fine et pure, une écriture du cœur”190 [there is writing that takes shape in this place, a fine and pure writing, writing of the heart]. In Provincetown, Bouraoui constructs a “textual self,” a figurative corporeal archiving process occurring through the writing of Mes mauvaises pensées. The pages are a metaphorical prosthesis for the writer’s skin. Corporeal and textual bodies conflate. She declares: “je ne suis plus l’auteur du roman, je suis à l’intérieur du roman”191 [I am no longer the novel’s author, I am inside the novel]. She “is” her text. In the American world where Bouraoui starts writing her novel, there is (surprisingly!) no violence whatsoever, and she claims: “je ne me suis jamais sentie aussi bien dans un pays, dans une communauté, [. . .] je suis en paix, il n’y a plus de colère en moi”192 [I have never felt so good in a country, in a community, [. . .] I’m at peace, there is no more anger in me]. The anger, at the root of her desire for revenge—feeling that was prevalent in Garçon manqué, or in other texts such as Poupée Bella (“Mon écriture est une vengeance”193 [My writing is revenge]), and during Nina’s therapy in Mes mauvaises pensées—is turned into a more appeased and melancholic question. In an essay about “racial melancholia,” David L. Eng and Shinhee Han demonstrate that, in some cases, melancholia is a consequence of mourning. Contradicting the Freudian idea that mourning implies the end of melancholia, they show that in the context of exile and immigration, melancholia is the result of mourning, understood as a process of assimilation in the new country.194 For subjects with conflicted ethnic identity, assimilation does not

208

Chapter 4

happen, and the mourning of this ideal leads to melancholia. Eng and Han claim that immigration and assimilation might be said to characterize a process involving not just mourning or melancholia but the intergenerational negotiation between mourning and melancholia. Configured as such, this notion begins to depathologize melancholia by situating it as the inherent unfolding and outcome of the mourning process that underwrites the losses of the immigration experience.195

Melancholia is more a subjective structure, “a crucial touchstone for social and subjective formations”196 in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, than a pathology resulting from failed mourning. As Eng and Han explain, the insistence on loss, like in Mes mauvaises pensées, produces a “world of remains,” a presence that entails “a world of new representations and alternative meanings. [. . .] While mourning abandons lost objects by laying their histories to rest, melancholia’s continued and open relation to the past finally allows us to gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects.”197 While writing was considered as “une arme” for revenge in Garcon manqué,198 Mes mauvaises pensées asks: “Est-ce que l’écriture est une arme?” [Is writing a weapon?].199 Writing is an arm of self-defense, in the way that it is a “dis-harming” tool for Bouraoui. In Mes mauvaises pensées, the writing of her textual self correlates with the understanding and isolation of the familial “common skin.” Bouraoui closes the pores of her “peau buvard” by imposing the distance of writing between her and her family. She claims: “je ferme ma peau” [I am closing my skin].200 She repeats the necessity of “se défaire du lien des ventres”201 [free [her]self of the visceral link] and of replacing it with a symbolic link, namely, writing. Affect is transformed into writing. Bouraoui integrates hybridity to her textual self with harmony: “l’écriture vient [du] père”202 [writing comes from the father], while French language comes from the mother. The text incorporates both her mother and her father. She says: “Je construis un pont, j’ai toute ma vie pour faire l’écart entre les deux terres, entre mon père et ma mère”203 [I am building a bridge, I have my whole life to make the split between the two lands, between my mother and my father]. “Faire le grand écart” is, precisely, performed by writing. Hence, the space of the page becomes a site of an inclusive identity. Although Boston is a place where Bouraoui inherits no history, contrary to Algeria and France whose traumas she has inherited in her skin, the third space, fertile site of creativity which becomes that of the book, allows her to write a new story in which her body is reconciled with itself. She is inside the story, and her textual self, constructed via the writing of a text-skin that

The “Métis” Predicament

209

operates as an archive, carries her dual legacies in an active way. Through writing, Bouraoui claims agency; she transforms the passivity of the heir, who receives the past of others via the blotting skin, into an active integration of history. As suggested by the anaphoric “je garde,” repeated nine times at the end of Mes mauvaises pensées, Bouraoui chooses which stories to keep or reject, among the many that were imposed. She creates a dynamic site of memory through her textual self: different layers of memories (hers and others) in interaction with each other. The integration in the story of different histories of family members reflects, in its plurality of levels, the structure of the skin, which is formed by several epidermic layers, each containing identity “information,” and all together shaping the self. Silverman calls this type of interconnected memory layers “palimpsestic memory.”204 He defines it as a “superposition and interaction of different temporal traces to constitute a sort of composite structure, like a palimpsest, so that one layer of traces can be seen through, and is transformed by, another.”205 Mes mauvaises pensées constructs a “palimpsestic memory” of the (family) Bouraoui’s Algeria. Her writing tells the story of her personal loss when she left Algeria, and, behind it, underneath the first layer of her writing, it murmurs colonial wounds endured by her relatives. This way, the narrative conveys a sense of hybridity in Bouraoui’s writing of the self. Significantly, Mes mauvaises pensées ends with an image of cultural mixing: Bouraoui mentions Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), who was an officer of the French army but who, after a revelation in the Algerian desert, became a Catholic Priest. He then decides to go and settle in the Hoggar region in the Sahara and live with the Tuaregs. Ending a series of sentences beginning with “Je garde . . .” [I keep/I remember . . .], Bouraoui says: “Je garde l’image du couvent du père de Foucauld, dans le desert”206 [I keep/remember the image of Father de Foucauld’s convent, in the desert]. This reference to a Frenchman who became a sort of Algerian offers a vision of hybridity as a potential place of peacefulness, but at the cost of loneliness. This place is created through writing, as Bouraoui already suggests in Garçon manqué: “Je reste entre les deux pays. Je reste entre deux identités. Mon équilibre est dans la solitude, une unité. J’invente un autre monde” [I remain between these two countries. I am between two identities. My equilibrium lies in my solitude, a unifying force. I invent another world].207 This “other world,” which is induced by writing, is located between fiction and history, precisely where testimony resides, according to Derrida. So while the narrative paradoxically creates who Bouraoui “is,” it also produces the space where she, as a Franco-Algerian, becomes. The Franco-Algerian future is the question that underpins the following chapter.

210

Chapter 4

NOTES 1. Nina Bouraoui, Garçon manqué (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2000), 19. The translation is from Nina Bouraoui, Tomboy, trans. Marjorie Attignol Salvodon and Jehanne-Marie Gavarini (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2007), 10. 2. Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 15. 3. Indochina was a “laboratory” for the métis question, linked to the “‘danger’ que représentait pour la colonie l’existence de milliers d’enfants illégitimes et abandonnés” (Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 15) [“danger” that the existence of thousands of illegitimate and abandoned children represented for the colony]. As such, in 1928, the first decree on the status of métis in Indochina was passed, aiming to integrate them into the community of French citizens. These rights of the métis in Indochina were taken up once again in the following years to regulate other territories in the empire: in French West Africa (AOF), French Equatorial Africa (AEF), Madagascar, New Caledonia, Togo, and Cameroon. 4. Garçon manqué [Tomboy] and the Renaudot Prize – winning Mes mauvaises pensées [My Bad/Evil Thoughts] are referred to by Bouraoui as autobiographical: “Le ‘je’ est un vrai ‘je,’ qui fait référence à soi” [The “I” is a real “I,” which refers to the self] (http​:/​/ww​​w​.ama​​zon​.f​​r​/exe​​c​/obi​​dos​/t​​g​/fea​​ture/​-​/636​​63​/17​​1​​-784​​5551-​​54050​​ 65). Trudy Agar-Mendousse, in her Violence et créativité de l’écriture algérienne au féminin (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), considers that Bouraoui’s autobiographical turn starts with a previous book, Le Jour du séisme [The Day of the Earthquake] (1999), also written in the first person, with a narrator who bears the same name as the writer, and which draws on publicly known autobiographical facts. Nina Bouraoui’s other works are: La Voyeuse interdite (1991), Poing mort (1992), Le Bal des murènes (1996), L’Age blessé (1998), Le Jour du séisme (1999), Garçon manqué (2000), La Vie heureuse (2002), Poupée Bella (2004), Mes mauvaises pensées (2005), Avant les hommes (2007), Appelez-moi par mon prénom (2008), Nos baisers sont des adieux (2010), Sauvage (2011), Standard (2014), Beaux rivages (2016), Tous les hommes désirent naturellement savoir (2019), Otages (2020). 5. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 19. 6. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué. Bouraoui refers to herself and her sister as “enfants métisses” (Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 114) [multiracial children]. And in Mes mauvaises pensées (Paris: Stock, 2005), she mentions “une déchirure” (202, 250) [a tear], and claims to be “déracinée” (18) [uprooted], and “orpheline d’une terre” (270) [orphan of a country]. 7. Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1970), 73, 93, in Saada’s Les Enfants de la colonie. As Emmanuelle Saada notes, the only occurrence of “métis” in official documents appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, regarding isolated territories in the south of Algeria subject to the military regime and therefore where the colonial population was masculine in its majority. 8. Emmanuelle Saada cites the words of Edmond Doutté, an “érudit orientaliste en poste dans l’administration algéroise [et qui] dès 1901, […] note que ‘les unions irrégulières entre Indigènes et Européens sont, dans les classes laborieuses, beaucoup plus fréquentes qu’on ne se le figure’” (Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 39) [erudite

The “Métis” Predicament

211

orientalist stationed in the Algerian administration and who from 1901, […] notes that “irregular unions between natives and Europeans are, among the working classes, much more common that one imagines”]. On Leila Sebbar, I refer to Helen Vassallo’s book The Body Besieged. The Embodiment of Historical Memory in Nina Bouraoui and Leila Sebbar (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012). 9. Emmanuelle Saada advocates a large degree of caution regarding quantitative considerations, as there is a lack of statistics on the subject. 10. Among the other territories, Indochina was the one with the greatest number of métis. This overrepresentation of métis is explained above all by the lack of regulation of colonial prostitution, an “organisation de la sexualité” [organization of sexuality] (Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 37) that took place in other parts of the empire. In Indochina, the civil and military administration supported concubinage. See Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 37. 11. Incidentally, in her first novel La Voyeuse interdite (1991), Bouraoui deals with the public place of women in postindependence Algeria and depicts the absence of female visibility in the public sphere as a true imprisonment. 12. Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 40. 13. On the use of the term “race,” see Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 40. Saada’s book is based on the discovery of a surprising use of this term in the 1928 decree on the status of métis in Indochina. Saada explains that “dans les années 1920, le mot ‘race’ désigne tout à la fois une réalité biologique et un ensemble de propriétés sociales et de compétences culturelles qui se manifestent dans les comportements” (Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 14) [in the 1920s, the word “race” designates both a biological reality and an ensemble of social properties and cultural competencies manifested through behaviors]. Her analysis shows that contrary to the use of the word “race” by the Vichy regime, whose goal was to exclude Jews from the French community, the “race française” invoked in this decree had an inclusive goal: to allow métis from Indochina to integrate into the French community. This analysis can’t be applied to colonial Algeria, first of all because, according to Saada, the differentiation criterion was religion, and also because this criterion was a way to mark and exclude the “indigenous” people from citizenship. Nonetheless, other contemporary analyses, with different historiographical tendencies, show that “race” was, in fact, invoked in colonial discourses regarding Algeria and that the motif was used precisely to exclude. As this chapter shows, the works of Bouraoui present an imaginary space (imagination) of racial oppositions. 14. Emmanuelle Saada relies on the Rapport général. Exposition coloniale de 1931, Volume V: Les sections coloniales (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1933), to show that the physical anthropology of the time considered the indigenous people to be of “races blanches” [white races]. Saada also takes on the analysis of Lorcin in Imperial Identities, in which she explains that the problem of the time was mainly that of exploring the differences between “Arabs” and “Kabyles.” In addition, when the métis question was brought up directly in Algeria, that is, in the territories of the south, it was linked to the fact that the population of the Sahara has darker skin— which made people qualify them as “nègres.” See Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 40–41.

212

Chapter 4

15. Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 42. 16. On the status of the couple and children, see Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 42. Essentially, a European could not legally become “indigenous,” and the children benefited from the French citizenship of the mother. In a 1923 text from the president of the Court of Appeal of Algiers to the Minister of Justice, he mentions, not without sectarianism and contemptuous cultural prejudices, the refusal to see Europeans or the children of a mixed marriage become “indigenous (“s’indigèniser”) see Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie, 42. 17. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 127; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 76. 18. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 149; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 89. 19. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 109–10. As narrated later in the same book, this move was a consequence of Bouraoui’s father not finding a job in France; although he was a brilliant economist (132–33), after 1962, being an Algerian citizen did not help him in France. 20. For details about the mandate of Chadli Bendjedid (1979–1988) and the “Arabization” and Islamization of the country, see the chapter on Boualem Sansal’s L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux. Like the majority of children from mixed marriages, Nina Bouraoui went to a French school and did not speak Arabic well, despite the school’s Arabic lessons (Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 11). In Garçon manqué (80–81), she describes through laconic sentences how her family was intimidated by violent threats during this period (e.g., 80–81). 21. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 72; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 42. 22. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 101. Translations are mine unless endnotes indicate the reference of the translated book Tomboy. 23. For example, see Didier Fassin and Éric Fassin, eds., De la Question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société française (Paris: La Découverte, 2006); Catherine Coquio, ed., Retours du colonial?, eds. Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, Les guerres de mémoires. La France et son histoire (Paris: La Découverte, 2008); Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Ahmed Boubeker, Le Grand repli (Paris: La découverte, 2015). 24. Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-colonial’,” 105. On Morano’s statement, see “Nadine Morano évoque la ‘race blanche’ de la France,” Le Monde, September 27, 2015, http:​/​/www​​.lemo​​nde​.f​​r​/pol​​itiqu​​e​/art​​icle/​​2015/​​09​/27​​/nadi​​ne​-mo​​rano-​​evoqu​​ e​-la-​​race-​​blanc​​he​-de​​-la​-f​​ran​ce​​_4773​​927​_8​​23448​​.html​. The video can be found here: “ONPC—Nadine Morano: la France, un pays ‘de race blanche’,” Le Point, September 29, 2015, http:​/​/www​​.lepo​​int​.f​​r​/med​​ias​/o​​npc​-n​​adine​​-mora​​no​-la​​-fran​​ce​-un​​-pays​​-de​-r​​ ace​-b​​lanch​​e​-27-​​0​9​-20​​15​-19​​68451​​_260.​​php. 25. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2011), 14. 26. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 14. 27. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 32; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 18. 28. Trudy Agar-Mendouse, Violence et Créativité de l’écriture algérienne au féminin (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 189. 29. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 53 (emphasis added).

The “Métis” Predicament

213

30. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 18. 31. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 53 (emphasis added). 32. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 175, 202. 33. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 8; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 4. 34. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 29; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 16. 35. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 213. 36. Caroline Beschea-Fache, “The Métis Body: Double Mirror,” in Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility, eds. Cybelle H. McFadden and Sandrine F. Teixidor (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010), 102. 37. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 21, 23, 29. 38. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 38; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 21. 39. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 33. 40. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 8, 35; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 19. 41. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 74; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 43. 42. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 56; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 31. In Garçon manqué, Bouraoui uses kabyle as the trope for the “good” indigenous as implied by the French colonial hierarchy. 43. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 58–59; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 32–33. 44. Bouraoui depicts her absence of memory of the sexual aggression she underwent when she was a child in these terms: “C’est un camp. C’est une concentration” (Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 48) [It’s a camp, a concentration] (Bouraoui, Tomboy, 26). 45. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 5. 46. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 57; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 31. 47. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 58; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 32. 48. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 25 (emphasis added). 49. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 100; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 60. 50. Jean Wyatt, Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism (Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 2004), 4. 51. Wyatt, Risking Difference, 4. 52. Sonia Kruks quoted in Wyatt, Risking Difference, 4. 53. In Garçon manqué, Bouraoui testifies to the violence in Algeria, and shows how complex her position is vis-à-vis her indirect testimony. Through her books, Bouraoui thus seeks a readership that can listen to her testimony and then confer a certain legitimacy upon her. On this question of the necessity to have a listener who bonds to the (indirect) witness, in case of a trauma testimony, see Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 70–71. 54. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 33; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 18. 55. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 35; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 19. 56. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 11–12; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 6. 57. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 12; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 6. 58. Beschea-Fache, “The Métis Body,” 104. 59. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 92.

214

Chapter 4

60. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 12. 61. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 23–24; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 13. 62. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 115; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 70. 63. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, respectively 170 and 238, 266, 250, 268. 64. The use of the vocabulary of the “wound,” when speaking of Algeria, is not exclusive to literary texts; it is also present in historical essays and testifies to an unresolved historical problem, a “crisis of memory” (Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crisis of Memory and the Second World War (Camrbidge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), a problematic legacy. See, for example, the volume edited by Harbi and Stora, La Guerre d’Algérie, where such expressions overflow: “panser les plaies” [to bind the wounds], “vieilles blessures qui n’en finissent pas de cicatriser” [old wounds that never quite heal over], “cette mémoire qui saigne encore” [this memory that still bleeds], etc. 65. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 250. 66. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 112. 67. Vassallo, The Body Besieged, 13. 68. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 36. 69. Vassallo writes that “silence is transmitted” (Vassallo, The Body Besieged, 13), and she speaks further of a “generational transmission of historical silence” (Vassallo, The Body Besieged, 71). 70. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 40. 71. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 130. 72. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 30. 73. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 157. 74. The idea of an intergenerational transmission of a wound in a context of silenced history is expressed by Nadine Fresco in her article “La diaspora des cendres” about families of Holocaust’s victims. She draws from Michel Schneider’s notion of “blessures de mémoire,” defining parents who suffered and who would not communicate their traumatic memory. Fresco argues that this interruption of transmission of memory (“blessures de mémoire”) makes the wound become the idea standing for memory (“blessures pour mémoire”): “Aux enfants, à qui la mémoire était refusée, on transmettait seulement la blessure … Du deuil inachevé des parents les enfants héritent,” [To children, from whom memory would be refused, we transmitted only the wound … The children inherit the unfinished mourning of their parents] “La diaspora des cendres,” 217. 75. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004), 5. 76. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 5. 77. Just to mention some occurrences of “skin” (peau) in Mes mauvaises pensées, see 24, 45, 54, 62, 69, 70, 76, 81, 82, 85, 88, 90, 102, 117, 121, 123, 125, 127, 130, 139, 143, 145, 193, 196, 197, 202, 203, 204, 210, 254, 283. 78. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 45, 36; Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 92; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 65. Rennes, in Brittany, is the place where Bouraoui was born. Her mother is from this region, and her maternal grandparents live there. 79. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 66. 80. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 28.

The “Métis” Predicament

215

81. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2012), 5. 82. As psychiatrist Judith Herman says, “Traumatic memories […] are not encoded like ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into ongoing life story […] [They] lack verbal narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensation and images,” in Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (London: Pandora, 2001), 37–38. 83. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 144–45. 84. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 208. 85. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 30–31; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 16–17. 86. In this paragraph I link the theme of “algerianness” with that of gender in Bouraoui’s two novels. However, I do not delve into the gender question, as a detailed discussion of Bouraoui’s lesbian identity is not relevant for my general argument. 87. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 51; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 28. 88. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 50–51; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 27–28. 89. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 50. 90. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 114. 91. Agar-Mendousse, Violence et Créativité, 202. On page 41 in Garçon manqué, Bouraoui depicts the street as a masculine location that she cannot access. This idea is also found in Assia Djebar’s work. 92. This colonial conception, based on a larger patriarchal ideology, is particularly visible through the cartography of the time: the maps, and especially their captions, elaborated during the colonization of Algeria manifest a strong desire to possess the country. On this point, see the 2016 exhibition “Made in Algeria. Généalogie d’un territoire” at the MuCEM, http:​/​/www​​.inha​​.fr​/f​​r​/age​​nda​/p​​arcou​​rir​-p​​ar​-an​​nee​/e​​n​-201​​6​/ jan​​vier-​​2016/​​made-​​in​-al​​geria​​-gene​​alogi​​​e​-d​-u​​n​-ter​​ritoi​​re​.ht​​ml. 93. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 45; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 25. 94. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 47–48; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 26. 95. Bouraoui’s teen years coincide with the start of the Islamization of the country. On this point, see the chapter on Sansal’s L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux. Bouraoui’s work, including her fictional pieces like La Voyeuse interdite, constantly denounces the “prisons … masculines” [masculine … prisons] (Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 124) that lock women and deprive them of agency. 96. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, respectively, 37, 46, 60; Bouraoui, Tomboy, respectively, 21, 26, 34. 97. Already in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) Freud characterizes trauma by two events echoing each other. As LaCapra phrases it, “an early event for which one was not prepared to feel anxiety and a later event that somehow recalls the early one and triggers a traumatic response.” [Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), 81]. 98. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 60; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 34. 99. Since Independence, literature has been a means to speak of the role of women in the Algerian War, and thus reintegrate their history into nonofficial narratives about the past. For example, already in 1985, Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la

216

Chapter 4

fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985) provided a textual space for the voices of women who fought for independence, but who have been completely erased from national memory in Algeria. 100. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 61–62; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 34–35. 101. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 92; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 56. 102. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 94. 103. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 28–29; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 15. 104. Albert Camus, L’Étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). On the sun in Camus’ work, see Claudia Esposito, The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 3–33. 105. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 27; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 14–15. 106. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 29; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 16. 107. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 28; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 15. 108. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 10. 109. Albert Camus, La Chute (Paris: Gallimard, 1956). 110. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha (Mark, 1.3). 111. Adrienne Angelo, “Sujet Buvard, Sujet Bavard: Nina Bouraoui’s Words to Say It,” Women in French Studies 19 (2011): 84. I discovered Angelo’s article after having written this chapter, and I realized that her argument and mine share a lot of remarks about drowning and asphyxiation in Bouraoui’s novel. Yet, I believe my argument about skin is not to be found in any other works. 112. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 10–11. 113. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 14. 114. Here are most of the memory shifts “passing” through water that I noted: from the bay of Nice to the swimming pool of Zeralda (13), the sea in Nice/Algiers (28), the sea in general/the Rocher Plat in Algeria (36), sinking in the woods in France/drowning in Zeralda/sea in Cap-Martin (41), water of the beach in La Baule and Cap Ferrat/swimming pool of Zeralda (43), bay of Nice/Alger (54), the Keller swimming pool in Paris/Zeralda (106), the sea in Miami/Algeria (116), feet, swimming pool/Zeralda (125), beach of Cap-Ferrat/“club des Pins” in Algiers (129), Nice/ Algiers (170), the underwater of Mexico/the swimming pool in Zeralda (196). 115. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 138–39. 116. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 143 (emphasis added). 117. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 139. 118. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 173, 189. 119. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 60. 120. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 28, 30, 37, etc. 121. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, respectively 24, 55, 56, 59, 178, 197. 122. Dictionary, Le Petit Robert. 123. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 31; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 15. 124. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 97, 232. 125. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 137. 126. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 127, 130–32, 153. 127. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 123. 128. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 94–95; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 57.

The “Métis” Predicament

217

129. On this historical condition, see Benjamin Stora, “La guerre d’Algérie dans les mémoires françaises: Violences d’une mémoire de revanche,” L’Esprit créateur XLIII, no.1 (2003): 7–31. He writes: “Le problème de l’immigration découvre un conflit obsessionnel, jamais disparu. Derrière l’‘immigré,’ l’‘Arabe,’ derrière l’‘Arabe,’ le ‘Maghrébin’ et, derrière le ‘maghrébin,’ l’‘Algérien’” [The problem of immigration uncovers an obsessive conflict, which has never disappeared. Behind the “immigrant,” the “Arab,” behind the “Arab,” the “Maghrebin” and, behind the “Maghrebin,” the “Algerian”] (Stora, “La guerre d’Algérie,” 25). 130. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 88; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 51. 131. Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-colonial’,” Introduction, 17–18. 132. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 60. 133. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 13. 134. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 210. 135. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 210. 136. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 210. 137. Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-peau (Paris: Dunoz, 1985), 42. The translation is from Didier Anzieu, The Skin-Ego, trans. Naomi Segal (London: Karnac Books, 2016), 22. 138. “Je frotte ma peau pour me défaire de la mort, pour me défaire de ma honte” [I rub my skin to get rid of death, to get rid of shame] (Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 85). 139. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 75, 85, 99, 171, 220, etc. 140. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 43. 141. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 28, 218. 142. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 12. 143. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 24. 144. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 123. 145. Vamik Volkan, Bloodlines. From ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 43. 146. Volkan, Bloodlines, 44. 147. Volkan, Bloodlines, 42. 148. Kaja Silverman, “White Skin, Brown Masks: The Double Mimesis, or Lawrence in Arabia,” in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 299. 149. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 14, 155. 150. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 21, 35, 185. 151. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 35. 152. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 14. 153. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 250. 154. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 153. 155. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 102. 156. Marie Cardinal, Les Mots pour le dire (Paris: Grasset, 1975). On Cardinal’s work, see Amy L. Hubbell, Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noir, Identity, and Exile (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2015). 157. Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago, IL and London: U of Chicago P, 2013).

218

Chapter 4

158. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 78. 159. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 77. 160. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 115. 161. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 97. 162. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 97. 163. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 115. 164. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 115. 165. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 76. 166. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 286. 167. On this point, see Jacques Derrida, L’Animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 21. 168. See Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2000). Brooks highlights the “multiform nature of confession” while distinguishing five uses of confession: “cleansing, amelioration, conversion, counseling, as well as conviction” (Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 87). 169. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 31. The translation is from Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Meridian, ID: Crossing Aesthetics, 1998), 29. 170. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 96; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 55. 171. Ching Selao, “Porter l’Algérie: Garçon manqué de Nina Bouraoui,” L’esprit Créateur 45, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 76. 172. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 100. 173. Derrida, Mal d’archives, 98; Derrida, Archive Fever, 61. 174. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 75; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 43. 175. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 116. 176. For an analysis of Bouraoui’s “testimony” through Agamben’s conception, see Selao, “Porter l’Algérie,” 76–77. Selao’s conclusion about Bouraoui’s testimonial dynamics converges with my analysis of her métis identity, which is both constructed and deconstructed through the text. 177. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 201. 178. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 184–85; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 111–12. 179. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 184. 180. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 185. 181. This symbolic displacement toward a foreign city can also be found in Assia Djebar’s La Disparition de la langue française (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2006), and demonstrates, as in Bouraoui, the necessary choice of a third space in order to rearticulate history. 182. Assia Djebar, La Disparition de la langue française (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003). 183. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 188–89; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 116. 184. Angelo, “Sujet buvard, sujet bavard,” 88. 185. Provincetown is a famous town in Cape Cod (off the coast of Boston) known for being very “gay friendly,” welcoming of homosexuals. This choice of place is of course significant for Bouraoui, who can freely express her love for women there.

The “Métis” Predicament

219

186. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 184. 187. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 192. 188. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 188. 189. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 187. 190. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 195. 191. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 187. 192. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 195. 193. Nina Bouraoui, Poupée Bella (Paris: Stock, 2004), 81. 194. Freud defines mourning as a psychic process in which the libido gradually withdraws from the lost object and invests in a new one. Melancholia is a “mourning without end,” since the loss always ends up being reinvested by the libido. 195. David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, “Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2003), 353. 196. Eng and Han, “Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” 23. 197. Eng and Han, “Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” 4–5. 198. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 132, 145. 199. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 86. 200. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 187. 201. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 172, 173, 178. 202. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 186. 203. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 255. 204. Silverman, Palimpestic Memory. 205. Silverman, Palimpestic Memory, 3. 206. Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées, 286. 207. Bouraoui, Garçon manqué, 28; Bouraoui, Tomboy, 14.

Chapter 5

“Aller Postcolonial— Retour Neocolonial”? The Ambiguous Memorial Reintegration of the Pieds-Noirs in Algeria in Boualem Sansal’s L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux

The origin of the expression “Pieds-Noirs” is uncertain. Some people claim that the word was invented by Arab and Berber populations who were surprised to see the French disembark in 1830 with black boots on their feet. Others explain it by the color of the feet of French winemakers in Algeria trampling the grapes to make wine.1 Finally, some people suggest that the nickname Pieds-Noirs originally referred to the Arabs, who were insulted for their “dirty feet” by those who called themselves “Algerians”—French people living in Algeria.2 This semantic inversion demonstrates the extent to which the use of the expression Pieds-Noirs has varied over the course of the political struggles to gain control of the Algerian territory. It was during the War of Independence (1954–1962) that the meaning of the expression Pieds-Noirs was established as designating Europeans who immigrated to Algeria during colonization (starting in 1830 and continuing throughout the colonial period), and their descendants (called “Français d’Algérie”), born in Algeria and repatriated to mainland France in 1962.3 This nonhomogeneous group of individuals was, from the first decades of colonization, mainly composed of French people, but also included, in descending order of population, Spaniards, Italians, Maltese, Germans and Swiss, who were officially distinguished from the indigenous people by an 1831 decree and given French citizenship by the law of June 26, 1889.4 While soldiers conquered the vast country that was a region of the Ottoman Empire, France was recruiting men, starting in the 1830s, to populate the territory, which was systematically subject to a policy of expropriating land from the native population.5 Consequently, the 109,400 Europeans who emigrated to 221

222

Chapter 5

Algeria between 1830 and 1846 had, one century later, increased their numbers almost tenfold: there were 984,000 at the beginning of the war in 1954. Whereas the first colonists, who migrated for diverse economic, social, and political reasons, included many manual laborers, artisans, small businessmen, farm workers, fishermen, and investors who had come to make their (more or less substantial) fortune by becoming colonial entrepreneurs or land dealers,6 the Pieds-Noirs society became more diverse over time and, on the eve of the war, was mainly made up of civil servants, merchants, artisans, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and traders. It was the 1962 arrival of almost a million people in the homeland that officially introduced the category of Pieds-Noirs. These people built their collective identity after the experience of repatriation, caused by what they considered to be abandonment on the part of the Republic and which they lived as a traumatic experience of exile. The uprooting associated with being a non-Muslim French citizen (and notably different from the uprooting of French Muslim subjects such as the Harkis, or that of immigrants) constitutes the founding of identity strategies used by the Pieds-Noirs to produce “un groupe solidaire, structuré et politiquement influent” [a solidary, organized, and politically influential group].7 However, this public image does not accurately reflect the diversity of histories and memories that the people who were repatriated from Algeria brought along with them. Some of them even denounced political manipulations, such as the widespread idea in both French and Algerian society that the Pieds-Noirs expressed unanimous and total support for the OAS.8 In fact, as Éric Savarèse points out, there are not many scholarly works that specifically discuss the Pieds-Noirs; the subject is often covered as part of a more general study on the war or on Algeria.9 In addition, the works that do exist, in almost all cases, are by the Pieds-Noirs themselves, which Savarèse calls “ego-histoire,”10 and is more or less subjective depending on the text.11 This situation of production is the result of what Savarèse calls the “historiographic rupture”12 induced by Algeria’s independence: the end of the historiographic monopoly held by the former colonizers and the advent of a new history, a national narrative, written by Algerians. France reacted to this rupture with an official silence (often characterized as an amnesia) of more than forty years regarding the Algerian war and colonization. Meanwhile in Algeria, the advent of a national history mirrored what France had done in its own writing of history, namely the erasure of indigenous people from the French national history of France. Like an echo, Algeria suppressed the Other—the former occupier—in its founding narrative. According to French sociologist and anthropologist Jacques Berque, “les Occidentaux sont alors victimes d’un procédé qu’ils avaient eux-mêmes élaboré et expérimenté sur le terrain colonial: la négation de l’Autre comme instrument de légitimation

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

223

politique” [Westerners thus become victims of a process that they themselves developed and tested in the colonial field: the negation of the Other as an instrument of political legitimation].13 Following the analyses of the Algerian historian Mahfoud Kaddache, Éric Savarèse develops: À l’encontre d’une histoire de l’Algérie largement francisée et nationalisée par l’ancienne puissance coloniale, au point d’affirmer que l’Algérie n’existait que par l’action d’une France qui l’avait inventée, les historiens nationalistes algériens renversent la perspective: il s’agit alors de définir les ressources mobilisées par la société algérienne pour se construire en tant que nation et lutter contre le colonialisme [. . .]. D’où la recherche d’une identité et de traditions antérieures à l’Algérie des Français, contestée en tant que système de domination mais niée comme élément intervenant dans la formation de la nation algérienne.14 [Against a history of Algeria largely Frenchified and nationalized by the former colonial power, to the point of claiming that Algeria existed only through the action of a France that invented it, Algerian nationalist historians reverse the perspective: it is then a matter of defining the resources mobilized by Algerian society to construct itself as a nation and fight colonialism [. . .]. Hence the quest for an identity and traditions that predate France’s Algeria, contested as a system of domination but rejected as an intervening element in the formation of the Algerian nation.]

This last sentence clearly highlights the complexity of the situation: the new nation built itself against France, all the while relegating the founding adversity to “outside” of its history, and denying any Algerian qualities in the Pieds-Noirs or other groups associated with France, such as the Harkis. This is clearly manifest in the lack of history regarding the colonial period in Algerian school textbooks, and in the mythification of the War of Independence presented as a “revolution” carried out by a united and unanimous people who “sacrificed martyrs” for the “cause.”15 For the French, the political and physical consequence of this epistemological and rhetorical stance of the new Algerian power was the expulsion of the Pieds-Noirs after independence.16 The historiographical deficit and the spread of stereotypes have led to a perpetual renewal of the colonial fracture in the realm of collective memory. Two antagonistic discourses, developed on the two sides of the Mediterranean, oppose each other: there were the voices that called the PiedsNoirs history a tragedy whose injustice implied a hatred of Algerians and a rejection of the immigrant; and there were those who rejected France and the French, who considered the Pieds-Noirs as the quintessential manifestation of colonialism. In this context of a war of memories, Algerian writer Boualem

224

Chapter 5

Sansal’s novel L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux challenges such discourses and representations by bringing into dialogue several identities that are most often viewed as opposing. Educated as an engineer and economist, Boualem Sansal ferociously denounces in his work, from his first novel, Le Serment des barbares (1999), the corruption, hypocrisy, and tyranny of those who have governed Algeria since independence, and abandoned the country to Islamism.17 Fired from his position in the Algerian Ministry of Industry in 2003, Sansal became a controversial public intellectual, living under constant threat from the Bouteflika government, which does not hesitate to censor his works. Sansal is often accused by multiple Algerian circles of being “proFrench” and of exonerating France from its colonial crimes.18 Sansal’s second novel, L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux (2000), presents a dialogue between Pierre Chaumet, a man of Arab origin born in French Algeria but who became a Pieds-Noirs after being adopted by a French couple who relocated to France after independence, and Farid, a young Algerian, the offspring of a country indoctrinated by the FLN. On her deathbed, Pierre Chaumet’s adoptive (French) mother tells him that he was born “Khaled El Madauri” on June 12, 1958, and encourages him to find his biological mother, Aïcha. Pierre then undertakes a trip to Algeria to search for his mother and inquire about the death of Omar, his biological father, killed by an FLN boss. During his genealogical quest, thanks to which he finds his mother, who has gone crazy and been locked away in an asylum, Pierre devises a strategy to kill Si Mokhtar, his father’s murderer. Accused of the murder of Si Mokhtar and arrested, the Frenchman is incarcerated in Lambèse prison, where he becomes friends with his cellmate Farid. Born in El-Harrach on the Algerian coast in a very poor family, Farid worked for an Islamist group during the Black Decade in the 1990s. Nonetheless, having discovered a collusion between the state powers and the Islamists—the two official opponents in a war that ravaged the country—Farid decided to kill one of the corrupt judges who drew profit from terrorist activities, all while officially condemning them. L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux is a difficult book because of the interweaving of several complex narrative threads that require in-depth historical knowledge. The text is composed of four stories that correspond to the same number of different time periods. First, there is the dialogue between Pierre and Farid about their current condition at the end of the 1990s (the prison, diplomatic maneuvers, and so on). But within that dialogue, three stories are inserted, which become progressively autonomous, a dynamics mimicking the elaboration (in the present) and flows of memory: the story of Pierre’s trip back to his homeland and of the search which led him to prison (several months beforehand), that of Farid before he was incarcerated (the 1990s), and, finally, the narrative of Pierre’s childhood (his Algerian parents

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

225

during the War of Independence and his French childhood in the 1960s). The opaqueness of the text reflects that of history at that moment: the Algerian “Civil War,” more accurately called by historians “Black Decade” (1991– 2002). This conflict is very complex, as the official opposition between the state power and the Islamists hides other power relationships that were made and remade during this atrocious war—in many aspects much like during the War of Independence. Making roundtrips between France and Algeria and between the stories of the two Algerian wars, Sansal’s novel first appears as an indictment of the FLN. But there is a second layer of the book: the return of Pierre to Algeria is an allegory of the reintegration of the Pieds-Noirs in Algerian memory. The novel constitutes an archiving process through the symbolic redemption of the Pieds-Noirs in their status as historical Algerians. The question of colonial wounds is brought up through the larger context of contemporary Algerian problems, which Sansal shows as being an exclusive result of Algerian politicians. But does that mean that the novel seeks to create a memorial discourse exonerating France (the French state? Its politicians? Society?) from the long-lasting crimes of colonization, making Pieds-Noirs (a heterogeneous group) innocent bystanders acquitted of all responsibility? This complex question, which haunts the text, is posed through the story of Pierre Chaumet. As the embodiment of the national historical mix between France and Algeria, the prisoner Chaumet only had the right to a “farce” of a trial, just like the Pieds-Noirs who were only “judged” by populations (both French and Algerian) based on prejudiced beliefs. Nonetheless, at the end of the novel, Pierre is freed thanks to a secret agreement between Algeria and France, and strives to accomplish his dream: “fonder une colonie” [found a colony], which will give birth to “une grande nation” [a great nation].19 What does he mean by “colonie”? Why does Sansal reintroduce this motif? How are we to understand the desire to undertake such an enterprise on the part of a man who has discovered that he was born as a colonized Arab? Does the text suggest that remembering the Pieds-Noirs (Pierre’s other identity) necessarily entails a redemption of the colonial ideology, or that a new narrative between Algeria and France could allow for the development of a new link between the French people and the Algerians? Do Algeria and France still remain locked in a colonial (rather than “postcolonial”) configuration (as much conceptual as diplomatic)? Through the story of Pierre’s parental quest, Sansal’s novel presents a national quest from two angles: an Algeria in search of a “national father,” that is to say an authority figure capable of giving every person, every wounded memory, a place, by making sense of both past and present; a “motherland” whose identity is to be found in the in-between, the mixing of France and Algeria, like the two mothers of Pierre. These two aspects of the problem of transition from colony to postcolony are linked to the question of

226

Chapter 5

a “juste mémoire”20 about the past between France and Algeria: a memory that would be multiple as well as accepting of the multiplicity of origins of the Algerian nation. How is it possible to construct a common FrancoAlgerian future by sharing the memory of colonization among the different actors without distorting or manipulating this history for political ends that divide everyone (the French from the Algerians, and the citizens within each country)? Sansal suggests an interesting yet hazardous path: he transforms the figure of the Pieds-Noirs, the object of national disgrace in Algeria, into an ambiguous figurehead of a Franco-Algerian community to come. The novel generates a sort of archive of the future, or a discursive space that reenvisions Pieds-Noirs identity while nonetheless producing a disconcerting neocolonial epistemic violence. This chapter explores the perspectives opened by such an archival temptation as well as its limits and the problem it poses in terms of reception and memory wars. THE PIEDS-NOIRS SYMPTOM AND THE “GUERRE GIGOGNE”:21 THE RETURN OF THE PROBLEMS OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE DURING THE CIVIL WAR Commenting on the situation of his country during the Black Decade, Abderahmane Khiouane, the former president of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic in 1962, writes, in 1997: “Des Algériens francophones, et surtout francophiles, occupent des postes clefs dans les secteurs stratégiques de l’État. C’est une minorité qui cherche à défendre ses privilèges face au courant islamique majoritaire, à l’image des Pieds-Noirs sous la colonisation française.” [Francophone, and especially Francophile, Algerians occupy key positions in the State’s strategic sectors. It is a minority that seeks to defend its privileges against the tide of Islamic majority, as did the Pieds-Noirs under French colonization].22 Khiouane refers of course to the military caste that had held power since independence. However, the reappearance of the motif of the Pieds-Noirs in his discourse (and in that of others) in the 1990s accompanies the return of a violence whose structure seems similar to that of the war of 1954–1962: an outburst of atrocities in battles described as frontless and faceless. As Stora explains, La “première” guerre d’Algérie fut longtemps une guerre sans visages. Après l’éviction politique du leader indépendantiste Messali Hadj, peu de Français et d’Algériens connaissaient les noms des responsables de l’insurrection de novembre 1954. [. . .] L’histoire semble se répéter: qui donc connait les noms d’“interlocuteurs valables” dans la conduite des négociations entre le pouvoir et les islamistes armés? [. . .] Les “soldats” des deux camps demeurent

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

227

invisibles d’un bout à l’autre du conflit, à l’image des fameux “ninjas,” ces hommes des services de police dont le visage est dissimulé par une cagoule noire.23 [For a long time, the “first” Algerian war was a faceless war. After the political overthrow of Independantist leader Messali Hadj, few French and Algerians knew the names of those responsible for the November 1954 insurrection [. . .]. History seems to repeat itself: who indeed knows the names of “valid interlocutors” in the conduct of negotiations between the government and armed Islamists? [. . .] The “soldiers” of both camps remain invisible throughout the conflict, like those famous “ninjas,” these men of the police force with faces hidden behind a black balaclava.]

This return of an opaque structure of opposition, along with a reappropriation of words, manifests the lack of resolution of problems related to the founding of the Algerian nation. In his novel, Boualem Sansal translates the reappearance of the Pieds-Noirs on the public discursive scene by the physical return of Pierre Chaumet to Algeria,24 thereby recalling the gendered distribution of colonial patterns: a story of amorous conquest between a colonizer (male), who penetrates the territory, and an indigenous woman, representing the colony. Moreover, Sansal chooses to situate his novel right in the heart of the Civil War conflict. The story takes place during the second half of the 1990s and the main character, who is incarcerated in a place of state power, has an interlocutor who is supposedly an Islamist. This Black Decade is portrayed in Sansal’s novel as the result of the authoritarian measures implemented by successive Algerian governments.25 It is also the consequence of a dramatic social inequality exacerbated under the mandate of Chadli Bendjedid (1979– 1988).26 Miloud Zaater shows that the 1980s were the stage of the explosion of corruption, worsening of inequalities, and return of mass unemployment following the drastic shift toward an unbridled and exclusively economic liberalism for the benefit of a minority close to the power circles. Moreover, the very conservative president Bendjedid comprime les dépenses sociales, pousse plus loin la généralisation de l’arabisation, fait adopter en 1984 le code de la famille d’inspiration Islamiste qui restreint les droits des femmes, achève la réalisation d’une gigantesque université islamique à Constantine, ouvre la télévision à des prêcheurs égyptiens et yéménites et lance de nombreuses campagnes de “moralisation” de la société.27 [cuts back on social expenditures, furthers the generalization of Arabization, passes in 1984 a Family Code of Islamist inspiration that restricts the rights of women, finishes the building of a gigantic Islamic university in Constantine,

228

Chapter 5

gives television access to Egyptian and Yemeni preachers and initiates numerous campaigns for the “moralization” of society.]

Thus, all of the problems that existed under Boumediene reached their climax under the military rule of Chadli Bendjedid. L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux regularly reflects this legacy of Bendjedid through satiric commentary on different aspects of Algerian society. Notably, the disrespectful and patriarchal treatment of women in Algerian society is highlighted through sarcastic expressions, such as “créatures de bas étages” [lower order creatures]28 to designate women, who are indeed reduced, in Islamist-inspired discourses, to either mothers or prostitutes, that is, creatures to either hide or rape (“planquer,” “violer”29). Furthermore, throughout the text, the FLN is represented as a dysfunctional, dictatorial, and completely corrupt governing party: it is ruled by individuals depicted as mafia bosses, “bureaucrates indignes” who ruined Algeria, “abîmé ses gens, éteint son soleil, vidé ses touristes, sans bouger de leurs chaises” [damaged its people, extinguished its sun, drove away its tourists, without budging from their chairs].30 The Algerian so-called democracy is also mocked by Sansal, who suggests that the country learnt the practice and meaning of democracy poorly and superficially— “apprise par la méthode Assimil.”31 He calls this alleged democratic system “la plus horrible dictature,” governed by a “tyran.”32 Sansal’s text points to a continued cycle of (colonial) exploitation after independence. Applying Basil Davidson’s analysis about Sub-Saharan countries in The Black Man’s Burden to North Africa, one can say that the gap between the people and the state widened rather than narrowed after independence: “the extraction of wealth from [. . .] already impoverished [societies] [. . .] [was] in no way halted by the [ending of colonial rule]. The national conflict, embodied in the rivalries for executive power between contending groups or individuals among the elites took priority over a social conflict concerned with the interests of most of the inhabitants of these new nation-states.”33 So, as Lazarus adds: leaders and ruling elites come to identify their own maintenance in power as being of greater importance than the broader “social” goods of democratization, opportunity, and equality, and they increasingly used the repressive apparatus and technologies of the state (often inherited from the colonial order) to enforce order and to silence or eliminate opposition.34

Indeed, in Algeria, under Chadli Bendjedid the rapid impoverishment of a large majority of the population, juxtaposed with the outrageous and provocative enriching of a minority as well as with political and cultural suppression, provoked large-scale riots in October of 1988. This rebellious movement was led by young people from poor neighborhoods and largely repressed by

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

229

the army, which fired on the Algerian people for the first time. These events concluded with the collapse of the sole political party (the FLN) and constituted the prelude to the Black Decade. The opening up to pluralism was accompanied by a series of serious incidents provoked by Islamist militants from 1989 to 1991. In the parliamentary elections of December 26, 1991, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) emerged as the clear winner. However, a few days later, on January 11, 1992, the army forced President Chadli Bendjedid to resign, canceling the second round of elections.35 Leaving no time for an Islamist retaliation, the army placed Mohamed Boudiaf, a veteran of the War of Independence and one of the founders of the FLN in 1954 and therefore a legitimate power figure, as the head of state on January 16.36 Nonetheless, on June 29, 1992, he was assassinated, not by Islamists but rather by a member of the state security services. The country then tumbled into a period of extreme violence. Boudiaf’s assassination is heavy with significance and decisive in the works of Sansal, who dedicates his “lettre de colère et d’espoir” [letter of anger and hope] Poste restante: Alger (2006) to the memory of Boudiaf. First of all, the regime, which was stripped of its legitimacy by the ballot boxes, also found itself robbed of its historical legitimacy, which stemmed from the “Algerian Revolution.” Moreover, the disappearance of the founding figure of Boudiaf produced a revival of the 1954 situation: an inexorable war and an infinite search for a legitimate and trustful founding father, yet always undermined by a chronic elimination of such “fathers.” Indeed, L’effacement des figures capables de produire du sens national est une forme de retrouvailles avec la guerre précédente. La “révolution” de 1954 a en effet démarré par la mise à l’écart des “pères” du nationalisme. La violence se déploie comme moteur central de l’action, au détriment de la patiente accumulation politique. [. . .] Face à cet oubli des “pères fondateurs,” se fabriquera ainsi la valorisation extrême des traditions de la guerre gagnée par la violence contre l’ancienne puissance coloniale. Cette culture de la guerre se transmettra et peut permettre de comprendre, en partie, l’incroyable violence perpétuée à l’intérieur de la société algérienne.37 [The elimination of figures capable of producing national meaning is a kind of reunion with the previous war. The “revolution” of 1954 did in fact begin with the alienation of the “fathers” of nationalism. Violence unfolds as a prime driver of action, to the detriment of gradual political evolution. [. . .] Faced with this forgetting of “founding fathers,” the extreme valorization of traditions of war won through violence against the former colonial power will be constructed. This culture of war gets handed down and provides an understanding, in part, of the incredible violence perpetuated within Algerian society.]

230

Chapter 5

This passage of Stora’s analysis is extremely important for understanding the criticism levied by L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux. Two ideas should be examined: on the one hand, the marginalization of the “founding fathers” of nationalism and the specter of the War of Independence within the Civil War; and, on the other hand, the continuation of the war through the perpetual false trial of colonialism. First, the specter of the War of Independence during the Black Decade is evoked, in Sansal’s text, by the story of Pierre Chaumet, which constantly switches between the Civil War present (the situation of utterance: the dialogue with Farid) and the past of the War of Independence (narrative about Pierre’s biological parents discovered during his present trip). The novel suggests the historical “stacking” of the first war within the second from the beginning, when an extradiegetic narrator, who pretends to recount the whole story (the text), mentions the Fifties as a hidden point of departure in the story of Pierre’s trip during the 1990s—a story which, through flashbacks, will articulate that of the 1950s. A particular type of recurrence provokes the revival of the War of Independence: the repetition of a situation of exclusion from political legitimacy to the benefit of the extreme violence of the fighting. As historians such as Benjamin Stora and Mohammed Harbi show, the FLN ousted the founders of Algerian nationalism and their ideas from the anti-colonial victory as well as from Algerian national history. Three large nationalist movements existed at the beginning of the 1950s:38 the reformist movement of the Ulamas, founded in 1931 by the Sheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis (who remained president until his death in 1940); the Jeune Algérien intellectual movement run in the 1930s by Ferhat Abbas, a pharmacist from a family of Kabyle peasants; and the radical nationalist movement embodied by Messali Hadj, starting as the Étoile nord-africaine (ENA, founded in 1926, dissolved in 1937 by a French general), and then moving on to the Parti du peuple algérien (PPA) in 1937, which was rebuilt as the Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratique (MTLD) in 1945 (date as of which the movement contained almost 20,000 militants).39 However, the revolt of November 1, 1954, in Algeria, the official date of the beginning of the War of Independence, was claimed by the Front de Libération Nationale, a previously unknown organization which took advantage of the vacuum produced by the dissolution of the MTLD in 1954 by the French Council of Ministers.40 At its head were six men from the PPA-MTLD who had separated from its founder Messali Hadj after the end of WorldWar II: Larbi Nem M’Hidi, Didouche Mourad, Rabah Bitat, Krim Belkacem, Mohamed Boudiaf (the same one who was killed in 1992), and Mostefa Ben Boulaïd.41 An immense and painful disappointment for the indigenous people, the Sétif Massacre of May 8, 1945,42 perpetrated by French police against thousands of Algerian nationalist protesters who laid claim to more

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

231

civic rights (including French citizenship), constituted a turning point for many members of the PPA-MTLD. They no longer believed in emancipation via politics (strikes, petitions, protests, and so on) and encouraged action via armed conflict. The FLN, governed by young men aged between twenty-six and thirty-seven, confronted its former leader Messali Hadj and his new party created in 1954, the MNA. Progressively, as the FLN sought to be the sole force in dialogue with the colonial state, the competition between the two parties became a “guerre dans la guerre” [war within the war]. France also of course played upon this division and manipulated each side in an attempt to regain power. Finally, the complex and fratricidal conflict between the FLN and the MNA ended, for Messali Hadj, in his marginalization and forced exile in France, where he remained until his death in 1974.43 And so, as Stora writes, “Il sera difficile de savoir qui est vraiment Messali, défini après 1962 comme celui qui s’est opposé au déclenchement de l’insurrection du 1er novembre 1954. Et ce seront finalement ses ‘fils’ qui dévoreront la figure du père (devenu ‘traître’) à travers la révolution anticoloniale, selon le schéma classique d’autres révolutions” [It becomes difficult to know who Messali truly is, defined after 1962 as the man who opposed the start of the insurrection on November 1, 1954. And, eventually, the “sons” will devour the figure of the father (become “traitor”) through the anticolonial revolution, following the classical pattern of other revolutions].44 The other important nationalist leader, Ferhat Abbas, united the FLN in 1956 and became the prime minister of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (1958–1961). However, after independence, he abandoned his duties following a profound disagreement with the policy of the “sovietization” of Algeria initiated by Ben Bella. He was then not only banned from the FLN, but also subsequently imprisoned and put under house arrest, where he wrote his memoirs, including L’Indépendance confisquée (1984). He died in 1985 “dans la solitude et dans l’anonymat” [in solitude and anonymity], as Sansal recalls in Poste Restante (77). Many other “founding fathers” of nationalism were eliminated, even within the FLN, from its beginnings. A noteworthy example is the emblematic figure that incarnated Algerian diversity, the Kabyle Abane Ramdane, one of the founders of the FLN, who always advocated linguistic and cultural pluralism. He was assassinated during a trip to Morocco in 1957. The occultation of such episodes contributes to the creation of shared oblivion at the root of the Algerian nation.45 Repeated at the time of the Civil War with the assassination of Boudiaf, who had become the “former” leader just like Hadj and Abbas, the elimination of the “founding fathers” and their erasure from national history are a central theme in L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux. Through the story of Pierre’s Algerian father, Sansal uses the literal meaning of the word “father” to recount the assassination of Omar El Madauri (Pierre’s biological father) by

232

Chapter 5

FLN agents. Omar, “un homme de bien” [a man of virtue], is depicted as the incarnation of a certain wisdom like a spiritual father, since he was a “forgeron, un art béni des dieux” [blacksmith, an art blessed by the gods].46 At the beginning of the revolution, he helped the Front by repairing weapons and making traps. Subsequently, “le voyant honnête et apprécié de tous, le Front lui confia le soin de collecter l’impôt du djihad auprès des frères” [seeing that he was honest and valued by all, the Front entrusted him with the duty of collecting the Jihad tax from his brothers].47 However, in carrying out his job very conscientiously, Omar realized that a portion of the money did not go to the Front and was certainly set aside for personal use. Naive and willing to help his superiors, Derradji (nickname, during the war, for Si Mokhtar) and Gourari (Si Ahmed), he asked them how he could preserve their life and honor. Sansal then describes, in a raw and subversive way, the world of FLN workings, whose one of the pillars consists in encouraging the ignorance of the people destined to be submissive or executed: Le Front ayant pour règle de sanctionner par le couteau et de déclarer le coupable harki. C’est encore la plus infâmante des insultes car, [. . .] après trente années d’indépendance et d’acharnement dans le travail, les comptes ne sont pas réglés. Ils réagirent comme réagissent les voleurs pris la main dans le sac: ils rigolent, ils menacent, puis ils tuent.48 [The Front had as a rule to punish by knife and declare the guilty man a harki. It is still the most defamatory of insults because, [. . .] after thirty years of independence and doggedness in their work, accounts have still not been settled. They react like thieves react when caught red-handed: they laugh, they threaten, then they kill.]

Therefore, “Omar a été tué par Mokhtar, alias Derradji le commissaire politique, et son lieutenant Gourari, non parce que la Thaoura [revolution] l’exigeait mais pour le plus pressant des motifs chez les hommes de cet acabit: l’argent” [Omar was killed by Mohktar, also known as Derradji the political commissar, and his lieutenant Gouarari, not because the Thaoura required it but for the most pressing of motives among the men of that sort: money].49 The “Cadi,” a former judge from Tiaret and a distant cousin of Omar whom Pierre meets in the course of his search, mentions the trickery and fraud of the FLN and the disillusionment of the population: Les nouvelles qui nous parvenaient de la révolution étaient un enchantement pour nos esprits tombés dans la clandestinité, mais ici, dans le Sersou [le plateau définissant la région de Vialaret Tiaret], ce n’était que rapine et brutalité de la part de ses hommes. Nous avions la tête pleine de héros et de martyrs, sous nos

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

233

yeux s’agitaient sangsues et scorpions. Ils nous reprochaient d’avoir tardivement rejoint le djihad et de rester à la France de cœur fidèles. Non la vérité est ailleurs. La région était riche, ils la pressuraient sans relâche, ils œuvraient à nous en faire déguerpir. Le commissaire politique se comportait en tyran, ses hommes en brigands.50 [The news of the revolution that reached us enchanted our spirits, which had gone underground, but here, in the Sersou [the plateau demarcating the region of Vialar and Tiaret], there was nothing but pillage and brutality on the part of his men. Our heads were filled with heroes and martyrs, leeches and scorpions writhed before our eyes. They reproached us for being late to join the Jihad and remaining loyal to France in our hearts. No, the truth is elsewhere. The region was rich, they pressured it relentlessly, working to make us flee. The political commissar behaved like a tyrant, his men like brigands.]

Starting during the war and up until the 1990s, the FLN robbed the people and distorted “democracy,” since, as Sansal ironically writes, Si Mokhtar and a “poignée d’hommes hors du commun que le monde nous envie [. . .] font et défont les gouvernements sur un claquement de doigts”51 [a handful of extraordinary men who the whole world envies [. . .] form and dissolve governments with a snap of their fingers]. This elimination of the “founding fathers” is repeated in the story, since Si Mokhtar was himself killed, not directly by Pierre, who arranged everything for him to be killed. Indeed Gourari fell into Salim (a former cop and Pierre’s travel companion) and Pierre’s trap, in a plan that consisted in kindling Gourari’s jealousy and resentment toward his former boss Si Mokhtar—a strategy of infiltration and intoxication methods used by the French army during the War of Independence in order to weaken the FLN. Throughout the text, Sansal insinuates that the confiscation of independence by the FLN to the detriment of the Algerian people—“Derradji [. . .] était vilain de cette vilénie que nous reprochions au colon” [Derradji [. . .] was a villain of that same villainy for which we blame the colonizer]52—is of the same type as the expulsion of the Pieds-Noirs people from the national territory and official history. This is clearly suggested by such a sentence: “cette guerre qui voulait libérer les uns au détriment des autres et vice versa alors qu’une partie de cartes bravement arrangée pouvait les calmer tous et de surcroît les sortir de leur statut de pauvres types” [this war that sought to liberate some to the detriment of others and vice versa, while a skillfully arranged card game could calm all of them down and, what is more, raise them out of their status as poor fools].53 Implicitly placing colonial power (France) on the same level as anti-colonial forces (the FLN) in the expressions “les uns [. . .] [les] autres” and “vice versa,” Sansal groups the Algerian

234

Chapter 5

people and the Pieds-Noirs under the same designation of “pauvres types,” victims of the two opposing powers. This problematic comparison between the status of exiled Algerians within or outside of their country and the one of repatriated Pieds-Noirs is further suggested when Sansal comments on “Jeannot Lapin” and “Mohamed,” the identities invented by Pierre and the former cop Salim so that they can remain “incognito”: “Mohamed, l’émigré [. . .] Jeannot Lapin, le gentil pied-noir [. . .]. Jeannot Lapin est Mohamed et Mohamed est Jeannot Lapin, en raison de ce qu’ils ont vécu dans le même terrier” [Mohamed, the emigrant [. . .] Jeannot Lapin, the nice pied-noir [. . .]. Jeannot Lapin is Mohamed and Mohamed is Jeannot Lapin, since they both lived in the same burrow].54 Ignoring the differences in legal status and the whole colonial system producing such differentiations, Sansal favors the intimate experience of a common homeland—the image of the inaccessible burrow of the rabbit (“Lapin”)—as a criterion for equal status when faced with the loss of the precious territory confiscated by the FLN, who, in this context, behave like the great colonizers of the colonial period. This danger is underscored by Fanon who, in Les Damnés de la terre, explains that the anti-colonial struggle is often co-opted by “leaders” who end up acting just like the colonial bourgeoisie exploiting the proletariat: after independence, “le leader est objectivement le défenseur acharné des interêts aujourd’hui conjuguées de la bourgeoisie nationale et des ex-compagnies coloniales”55 [the leader as seen objectively is the fierce defender of these interests, today combined, of the national bourgeoisie and the ex-colonial companies].56 And, further, “La caste bourgeoise, cette partie de la nation qui annexe à son profit la totalité des richesses du pays, par une sorte de logique, inattendue d’ailleurs, va porter sur les autres nègres ou les autres Arabes des jugements péjoratifs qui rappellent à plus d’un titre la doctrine raciste des anciens représentants de la puissance coloniale”57 [The bourgeois caste, that section of the nation which annexes for its own profit all the wealth of the country, by a kind of unexpected logic will pass disparaging judgments upon the other Negroes and the other Arabs that more often than not are reminiscent of the racist doctrines of the former representatives of the colonial power].58 In Sansal’s novel, it is also through this perspective that we must understand the choice of Aïcha, Pierre’s biological mother, who entrusts the fate of her child to the Chaumets, a welcoming Pieds-Noirs family, rather than to an indigenous couple who could have had links to the FLN. The idea that the “revolution” was “a war for nothing” for the simple inhabitants of Algeria is taken up once again in an article by Sansal that appeared in the French newspaper Le Figaro on November 5, 2014, the date of the official commemoration in Algeria of the beginning of the war.59 In it, he denounces the “abominable dictature” [abominable dictatorship] of the FLN “autrement plus dure que le fût le régime colonial” [harsher in other

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

235

ways than was the colonial regime], a hypocritical power that, all the while claiming to have liberated the Algerian people, has stolen all their freedom. In this sense, in L’Enfant fou, Sansal’s sarcasm is visible through the official discourse of judges who pay tribute to Si Mokhtar for being “ce chantre de la liberté, ce militant infatigable, ce citoyen émérite, ce frère au grand cœur” [this champion of freedom, indefatigable militant, model citizen, dedicated brother].60 The justice system appears as an unjust device that upholds the interests of the powerful, just as the colonial system rested on the notion of “privilège,”61 to borrow Albert Memmi’s term, and therefore on inequality as well as de facto and de jure injustice between colonizers and colonized. Sansal demonstrates that the actions of the FLN repeat those of the colonizers, to the extent that the anti-colonial struggle would have served only to remove the French exploiters and replace them with indigenous ones. As the novel underscores, the hypocrisy of the official discourse culminates in the Algerian state’s positions toward France and the Pieds-Noirs. This is the second point of Benjamin Stora’s initial quote: the idea of a perpetual false trial of colonialism that maintains, and is sustained by, a continuation of the war after independence. Starting with the War of Independence and up to today, the FLN has implemented a rhetoric of infinite condemnation (that is to say, renewable when needed) of France. This attitude is permitted by the French legal vacuum that exists surrounding colonial crimes and fed by the restoration and vindication of colonialism in French politics. Fanon explains the “leader’s” attitude and rhetoric with regards to his dependence on the postindependence indigenous bourgeoise, which blocks the emancipation of the people, the advancement of the country toward the future: Le leader, parce qu’il refuse de briser la bourgeoisie nationale, demande au peuple de refluer vers le passé et de s’enivrer de l’épopée qui a conduit à l’indépendance. Le leader—objectivement—stoppe le peuple et s’acharne soit à l’expulser de l’histoire, soit à l’empêcher d’y prendre pied. Pendant la lutte de libération le leader réveillait le peuple et lui promettait une marche héroïque et radicale. Aujourd’hui il multiplie les efforts pour l’endormir et trois ou quatre fois l’an lui demande de se souvenir de l’époque coloniale et de mesurer l’immense chemin parcouru. [The leader, because he refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie, asks the people to fall back into the past and to become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch which led up to independence. The leader, seen objectively, brings the people to a halt and persists in either expelling them from history or preventing them from taking root in it. During the struggle for liberation the leader awakened the people and promised them a forward march, heroic and unmitigated. Today, he uses every means to put them to sleep, and three or four times a year

236

Chapter 5

asks them to remember the colonial period and to look back on the long way they have come since then.]62

In this sense, in Sansal’s novel, the indirect discourse of the prosecutor during Pierre’s trial, in which he is accused of killing Si Mokhtar, synthesizes the main arguments of the FLN since independence: that France is racist in its “essence,” a thief and the cause of both past and present problems in Algeria: Monsieur le Président, l’affaire est claire comme de l’eau de roche. Pierre Chaumet a tué par racisme, par plaisir, par vengeance. C’est un nostalgique de l’Algérie française. On connaît la chanson. Pris par un besoin que nous avons mis à nu, l’intrus est venu chez nous pour soi-disant revoir son village natal. En vérité, il venait récupérer ses biens, des biens spoliés par ses parents durant la colonisation.63 [Mr. President, the affair is crystal clear. Pierre Chaumet killed out of racism, pleasure, vengeance. He’s a nostalgic for French Algeria. It’s the same old song. Gripped by a need that we have uncovered, the intruder came back here to see his so-called hometown. In truth, he returned to reclaim his property, that property despoiled by his parents during colonization.]

During this umpteenth rhetorical “procès du colonialisme” [trial of colonialism]64 in Algeria, in which the French are represented homogeneously as brigands, each time that Mr. Laskri (Pierre’s lawyer) responds to the prosecutor, a gun is shot outside, as if to call the judge to order in the event that he should become sensitive to the arguments of the defense. Sansal here suggests a double register: the FLN legitimates itself discursively by demonizing France—the identification of an outside enemy being supposed to unify the people inside the country; but also, the FLN seeks to remind that its posture is not merely talk—deadly acts can follow when words no longer suffice. In this trial, whose outcome (to make France into a scapegoat) is fixed in advance by the FLN, the judge retorts to Mr. Laskri, who puns that Pierre is “un homme de cœur que la raison d’État ignore” [a man of heart whom the reason of the State ignores]: “Je vous arrête maître. L’effet n’est pas la cause. Dire le colonialisme étranger à nos malheurs est du révisionnisme, et il vous en coûtera. Tenez-vous à la ligne” [I must stop you, counselor. The effect is not the cause. To say that colonialism has nothing to do with our troubles is revisionism, and you will pay for it. Stick to the line.]65 Through this false logic (highlighted by the contextual absurdity of the expression “l’effet n’est pas la cause”), the automatic blame of the colonial history in virtue of which Pierre “était un Français, et comme tel responsable des maux [de l’Algérie]” [was a Frenchman, and as such responsible for

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

237

[Algeria’s] miseries],66 seeks to mask the FLN’s responsibility in the country’s postindependence difficulties. Hence the rhetorical question of the prosecutor: “Qu’en sera-t-il lorsque la démocratie, et nous en serons bientôt les champions, nous fera baisser la garde?” [What will happen when democracy, and we will soon be its champions, makes us let our guard down?].67 Tackling again the Algerian democracy through a sarcastic comment, Sansal seeks to show how the justice system’s authorities participate in the FLN’s rhetoric, which states loud and clear the necessity of the state’s (FLN’s) protection of the country faced with the French “pillage”68 even after independence. The FLN reproduces, or perpetuates, the logic of colonial violence. As Memmi explains, in his Portrait du colonisé; précédé du Portrait du colonisateur, colonial society is organized such as a “pyramide de tyranneaux” [pyramid of tyrants] whose apex derives maximum benefit from “profit,” creating a real situation of “privilège,” which itself transforms its beneficiaries into “usurpers.”69 Sansal goes even further in his denunciation of the Manichean and stigmatizing rhetoric of the FLN. He wants to show the backdrop of anti-Semitism present in the FLN’s Arab discourse on the “Occident” and the fantasy of a “Zionist plot.” Pierre says: “Nous étions leurs colons, nous voilà leurs Juifs. [. . .] Les colons que nous étions ont été boutés hors du pays, c’est bel et bon; faut-il à leur bonheur que les Juifs qu’ils voient en nous soient expédiés au fin fond de la Pologne? Trop c’est trop” [We were their colonizers, now we are their Jews. [. . .] The colonizers that we were have been tossed out of the country, that’s all well and good; to please them, must the Jews that they see in us be shipped off to the depths of Poland? Enough is enough].70 The theory of the scapegoat practiced by the FLN gives insight as to its purpose, which seems to be to find, at the “core” of the entity supposedly called “Occident” and hidden behind the “hateful” state that is France, the “Jew,” the essence of evil.71 The lack of self-criticism on the part of the Algerian powers leads to a paradox that Sansal does not miss the opportunity to highlight: on the one hand, the FLN adopts a victim’s discourse, demanding that France repent; whereas on the other hand, it glorifies the heroes of the revolution, who are supposedly representatives of the Algerian people, and it extols national happiness (“A la mi-journée, l’Algérie a été déclarée en banqueroute, puis il a été décidé au journal de 20 heures qu’elle était la nation la plus favorisée” [At midday, Algeria was declared bankrupt, then it was decided in the eight o’clock news that it was the most privileged nation]).72 This is a contradiction about which Sansal comments in the preface to Alain Vincenot’s book Pieds-Noirs. Les bernés de l’histoire: On ne parle plus d’humiliation quand on clame à longueur de temps qu’on a lavé l’affront par le sang des martyrs. L’Algérie est indépendante, et se lamenter est

238

Chapter 5

la négation même de l’indépendance. [. . .] La demande de repentance, lancée au moment même où le FLN et son président, M. Bouteflika, faisaient miroiter la signature d’un traité d’amitié entre les deux pays, est indécente.73 [We no longer speak of humiliation when we are all the time proclaiming that we washed away the insult with the blood of martyrs. Algeria is independent, and lamenting is the very negation of independence [. . .]. The demand for repentance, thrown out at the same time that the FLN and its president, M. Bouteflika, were dangling the promise of a signed treaty of friendship between the two countries, is obscene].

Admittedly, the demand for repentance is kindled by the French legal blackout that prevents all judgment of colonial crimes. In addition, it is also certain that colonization left long-lasting effects in terms of trauma and social dysfunction—which Sansal’s character Farid (Pierre’s cellmate) sums up in one sentence that is as vulgar as it is efficient: “Ya zébi, vous les Français, vous êtes drôles, on vous prendrait presque pour des saints. Vous nous avez enculés pendant un siècle et demi et maintenant, les mains dans les poches, vous nous demandez pourquoi on marche de travers” [Dicks, you French, you’re strange, one could almost take you for saints. You fucked us in the ass for a century and a half and now, with your hands in your pockets, you’re asking us why we walk funny].74 However, what Sansal suggests in Vincenot’s preface is that the real reason behind this rhetoric of repentance from the FLN is not the search for justice but rather the continuation of the logic of the war. All throughout L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux, the writer attempts to show that the FLN does not miss out on any opportunity to maintain a bellicose culture (“l’Algérie des Martyrs est trop éprise de paix pour laisser passer la provocation” [The Algeria of Martyrs is too enamored with peace to let provocation slide]),75 all the while luring people in with treaties of friendship with France or peace treaties with other countries, like neighboring Morocco. This omnipresent war culture in Algeria, which, according to Sansal, rests on the essentializing glorification of the Arab notion of “nif” [pride/honor], can transform any man into “un Algérien, un chaâbi, un homme du peuple bourré de complexes, environné de haine, une ruine irrécupérable, une névrose ambulante [. . .] enfin en guerre” [An Algerian, a chaâbi, a man of the people chock full of complexes, surrounded by hate, a ruin beyond repair, a walking neurosis [. . .] indeed at war].76 According to this “logic,” the search for an authentic “founding figure,” a just authority, a democratic pater nation, and therefore the base for a national archive, is constantly jeopardized and paradoxically leads to the elimination of potential “candidates.” The contradictions and hypocrisy of the ruling powers were exacerbated in the 1990s during the Civil War. As Stora explains in La Guerre invisible,

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

239

the nontransmission of history and in particular that of Algerian nationalism has led to the establishment of Islamist ideology in society: “L’Islamisme radical naîtra de ce trou de mémoire” [Radical Islamism will be born out of this lapse of memory].77 Successive governments have let fundamentalism spread, starting with independence, which saw, as Sansal describes in his essay Gouverner au nom d’Allah, the arrival of Islamist preachers and teachers by busload from the Middle East.78 Admittedly, there already existed a tradition of religious groups disputing state power since the appearance of an Islamist movement against the French colonial state. A certain defiance regarding the state is indeed deeply rooted in Algerian society.79 However, as Sansal’s novel suggests, what happened in the 1990s was not just due to a simple conflict between the Islamists and the state. It is very difficult to know what truly happened during these years of war, because as the country fell into continuous atrocities, it closed up completely, notably with the help of a succession of laws and decrees that banned external observation and drove Algerian journalists into silence or self-censorship. In addition, as Stora notes, “l’opacité dont s’entourent de longue date les plus hautes sphères du pouvoir algérien empêche, comme toujours, tout décodage de la situation et favorise les rumeurs” [the opacity with which the highest spheres of Algerian power have long been surrounded prevents, as always, any decoding of the situation and promotes rumor].80 However, in the 2000s, eyewitness testimony followed by trials showed that soldiers were implicated in the massacres supposedly perpetrated by the Islamists.81 In other words, it is likely that state powers manipulated the Islamists and that the army even pretended to be Islamists, which had the result of relegitimizing the men of the FLN in the context of the fear of “Islamist” horrors.82 In L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux, which opens with the sarcastic evocation of the 1995 presidential elections,83 during which “un général et ses compagnons d’armes ont conquis le palais d’El Mouradia au terme d’une compétition électorale merveilleusement arrangée” [a general and his comrades in arms conquered the El Mouradia palace at the end of a marvelously arranged electoral race],84 Farid explains to his cellmate Pierre how he killed a judge from Batna with ties to the mafia because the latter was playing a double game regarding the Islamists. Through the story of Farid, whose sociological profile is representative of the Islamist groups in the Civil War, Sansal suggests, as early as 2000 (so before the end of the war), that the division between powers (judiciary, political, and military) on the one hand and the Islamists on the other hand is not so clear.85 According to him, the manipulations were flagrant when, in 1999, the government proposed a “Charte pour la paix et la réconciliation nationale,” which granted amnesty to the “Islamists” who committed atrocities during the Civil War.86 For Sansal, this amnesty is disgraceful not only because it feeds the fundamentalism of the most disadvantaged areas

240

Chapter 5

(“cents bandits ont été amnistiés; deux cents chômeurs ont rejoint le maquis en promettant de ne jamais en descendre” [one hundred bandits were given amnesty; two hundred unemployed men joined the underground promising never to leave it]);87 but, most importantly, because it exonerates the soldiers who commanded or played the role of Islamists during the war. Sansal wrote about this outrage and anger a few years later in Poste restante: Alger (2006). He discussed the referendum of September 2005 (which, according to him, was certainly fixed) that led to the amnesty of the Islamists: Ce 29 septembre 2005, nos voix ont été réquisitionnées pour amnistier ceux qui, dix années durant et jusqu’à ce jour, nous ont infligé des douleurs à faire pâlir de jalousie Satan et son armée infernale. Alors que la victoire du courage et de la raison sur la folie et la lâcheté était acquise, nous avons subitement perdu le souffle et l’attention. Que s’est-il passé? Les urnes ont été bourrées, d’accord, mais pourquoi n’avons-nous pas réagi? Amnistier en masse des Islamistes névrosés et blanchir des commanditaires sans scrupules tapis dans les appareils d’État n’est pas comme élire un Président imposé, que l’on ne connaît que trop [Bouteflika, élu en 1999, suite à la surprenante démission de Zeroual]. [. . .] c’est douloureux de vivre avec l’idée que nos urnes ont servi de machine à laver le linge sale des clans au pouvoir.88 [On September 29, 2005, our votes were requisitioned to grant amnesty to those who, for the past ten years and up to that date, inflicted upon us suffering that would make Satan and his infernal army livid with jealousy. When the victory of courage and reason over madness and cowardice had been won, we suddenly lost our breath and our attention. What happened? The ballot boxes were stuffed, certainly, but why didn’t we react? To give blanket amnesty to neurotic Islamists and whitewash unscrupulous commanders ensconced within the apparatus of the state is not like electing an imposed President, which we know all too well [Bouteflika, elected in 1999, following Zeroual’s surprising resignation]. [. . .] it is painful to live with the idea that our ballot boxes served as a washing machine for the dirty laundry of the clans in power.]

However, what Sansal does not say, and which further highlights the hypocrisy of the FLN regarding France and the Algerian people, is the (self-serving) support of France given to the people in power in Algeria, since independence and particularly in the fight against Islamism.89 L’Enfant fou takes place in 1998, the year during which foreign delegations came to inquire about the violence of the Civil War. In fact, the narrative mentions the imminent arrival of an international commission whose findings we will never know. However, historically, the conclusions of the European and international missions unambiguously condemn the armed Islamists while remaining very

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

241

reserved with regard to the state power’s responsibilities.90 Nonetheless, Sansal shows the superficiality and the ridiculousness of the commission’s investigative visit to the Lambèse prison, where a large number of Islamists are imprisoned. As former Algerian soldiers reveal, the secret services of the two countries (the French DST and the Algerian DRS), which had been collaborating since independence in Algeria, had a common program to fight against Islamist networks.91 Therefore, by granting amnesty to “le tueur fou et le kapo sans foi [. . .], le cirque qui a enfanté ces phénomènes n’est pas démonté” [the crazed killer and the faithless kapo [. . .], the circus that birthed these phenomena remains standing].92 Called a “guerre gigogne” [a war hiding another war] by Stora,93 the Algerian “Civil War” was the theater of the reappearance of unresolved problems related to the formation of the Algerian nation. Sansal’s novel, through its intergenerational story, allows for a simultaneous double and complicated reading of the two tangled wars, whose principal actors and ghosts are the French and the Algerians. The ambiguous relationship between the people in power in Algeria and France continues, as suggested in the novel through the exchange between Algerian and French diplomats regarding the release of Pierre Chaumet. Pierre, just like the PiedsNoirs, is not sentenced to death, but he must leave the country, a deportation negotiated outside of the justice system, repeating the historical situation of those repatriated from Algeria in 1962. Nonetheless, instead of ending there, and in an echo of history, the story takes an interesting turn. Historically, the “repatriation” of Pieds-Noirs became a necessity after the OAS’ terrorist activities. However, it was not initially planned either by the FLN or by the French state. In a sort of anachronistic contrafactual move, Sansal decides to make possible the imagination of Pierre not leaving Algeria. The hero decides to live there, even if illegally, so that he can found a new nation. Could Pierre embody a new father of the nation, product of a dual genealogy, and become the figure of a new AlgeroFrench archive, inclusive of Pieds-Noirs history and minority positions? THE AMBIGUOUS REINCORPORATION OF THE PIEDS-NOIRS INTO THE ALGERIAN NARRATIVE: FRANCO-ALGERIAN INTERMIXING AND THE FANTASY OF A NEW COLONY L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux constitutes a violent critique of the AraboMuslim identity discourse and aims to restore to the Pieds-Noirs identity its place in the representation of the Algerian nation. The Pieds-Noirs have indeed been removed from the national narrative by the FLN since independence. More generally, the imposition of the Arabo-Muslim identity ideology

242

Chapter 5

implied the erasure of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity from the Algerian (official) national self-imagination. Since the emergence of Algerian nationalism, the question of “particularisms” was posed and is still being posed for Berber minorities today.94 While the FLN deemed it necessary to ignore the differences among indigenous peoples in order to unite against France, others, such as the Kabyle Ferhat Abbas or Messali Hadj, did not only allow for ethnic, linguistic, or cultural differences but even included Europeans in their vision of a future independent state. Throughout the novel, Sansal sarcastically denounces the forced Arab and Muslim identity that holds an exclusive monopoly in and on Algeria. The Islamists, called the “chevelus” [hairy]95—a satirical twist on their tendency to be “barbus” [bearded]—are responsible for having imported the Saudi way of life from the Arab Peninsula into Algeria. Their rigorism is made ridiculous, such as in this comment on the ritual of the Ramadan fast: “Un membre signalé du Conseil islamique l’a certifié: durant le ramadan, sauver un noyé ayant bu la tasse est proprement éliminatoire. Déglutir sa salive est licite si, et seulement si, le jeûneur n’a pas l’esprit à la bouffe; dans le doute, on se fait une ablution” [An official member of the Islamic Council has confirmed: during Ramadan, saving a drowning man who has taken in water is strictly forbidden. Swallowing one’s saliva is licit if, and only if, the fasting man does not have food on his mind; when in doubt, perform an ablution].96 Moreover, bordering on insult, Sansal makes a pun on the word “bâtard” when Farid claims that he is “un Algérien décidé à ne se reconnaître aucun lien avec ces bâtards autoproclamés nos frères en religion et nos maîtres en droit” [an Algerian determined not to recognize any tie to those bastards who proclaim themselves our brothers in religion and our masters in law].97 The insulting word “bastard” stands for the Arabs (originally from the Peninsula) who claim to be “frères” of Algerians (who were Berbers before the Arab invasions from the seventh century on) and “maîtres” (hear, Islamists who impose the civil code). Sansal implicitly claims that Arabic culture and religion come from elsewhere and do not have anything to do with Algerian “identity,” paradoxically making an essentializing claim. Sansal’s criticism of a “racisme érigé en système de défense de l’État” [racism elevated to a system of State defense]98 is omnipresent in his work. For example, in Poste restante: Alger, he writes that “l’affirmation entêtée d’une arabité cristalline descendue du ciel, est d’un racisme effrayant. [. . .] Pourquoi veut-on faire de nous les clones parfaits de nos chers et lointains cousins d’Arabie? De quoi, de qui ont-ils peur?” [the stubborn affirmation of a god-given, pristine Arab identity is appallingly racist. [. . .] Why do they want to make us into perfect clones of our dear, distant cousins from Arabia? What is it, what are they afraid of?], with “ils” referring to the bigwigs of the irremovable FLN.99 However, Sansal does not make any connection between

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

243

this situation and the racist colonial domination of the past. He does not consider the remains of French colonial politics. Indeed, French imperialism had, on a cultural level, the effect of eradicating Muslim and Arab identity (which included the Berbers) from national and collective representations. The absence of individualized indigenous people in French literature (notably in Camus’s work) has been analyzed by Edward Saïd and Kateb Yacine, for example. However, through a long-lasting traumatic effect, those same people who were excluded from representation reversed the situation when they came into power. This is how Étienne Balibar explains it, in his conference text “Algérie, France: une ou deux nations?”: En déclarant “départements français” le territoire algérien, la France déniait la domination impérialiste qui la constituait, elle déniait jusqu’à l’existence des dominés. Ce qui se traduisait non seulement par les formes de discrimination que nous savons, mais par une véritable éradication culturelle. Mais le fait que la nation ait été formée dans l’empire veut dire que l’empire est toujours encore dans les nations, pendant très longtemps, après la séparation physique et juridique. Cela se traduit notamment aujourd’hui par la façon dont le multiculturalisme dans l’espace social algérien autant que français se trouve dénié et réprimé par les politiques administratives et culturelles. Le phénomène n’est certes pas symétrique—pas plus que la colonisation elle-même—mais il existe des deux côtés. [By declaring the Algerian territory a “French department,” France denied its imperialist domination of it, to the point of denying the existence of those it dominated. Which was translated not just into the forms of discrimination with which we are now familiar, but into a veritable cultural eradication. But the fact that the nation was formed as part of the empire means that the empire remains part of the nation for a long time after the physical and juridical separation. This is seen in particular today by the way in which multiculturalism in the Algerian, as well as French, social space is denied and repressed by administrative and cultural politics. The phenomenon is certainly not symmetrical—no more than colonization itself is—but it exists on both sides.]100

Reminiscent of Berque’s idea about the erasure of the “Other” (mentioned in the introduction of this chapter), Balibar argues that the persistence of an imperialist imagination on both sides is made visible through the impossibility of the advent of multicultural societies in France and Algeria. The reversal of the domination-erasure model during independence to the detriment of non-Arabo-Muslims is, in this perspective, a colonial vestige.

244

Chapter 5

L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux reincorporates other Algerian identities by desacralizing Arab identity. For example, in the following passage, Pierre places the Arab presence in Algeria in the larger context of a history of successive invasions: J’eus une pensée pour ceux qui sont passés dans ce pays, depuis le premier primate remontée d’Ethiopie au sud du Nil bleu, jusqu’au Français venu du Nord, débarqué à Sidi Ferruch [. . .]. Ah! les Arabes, que n’en dit la voix du peuple quand tout va de travers! Ils arrivèrent par l’est, ce qui tout au long de l’histoire a été reconnu comme la route la plus fréquentée par les envahisseurs.101 [I had a thought for all those who have passed in this country, from the first primate who came up from Ethiopia to the south of the blue Nile, to the French who came from the North and landed at Sidi Ferruch [. . .]. Ah! the Arabs, how the people’s voice speaks of them when everything goes wrong! They arrived from the east, which throughout history has been recognized as the route most often used by invaders.]

Like in his other works, and like other writers such as Rachid Boudjedra who denounced “l’enferment algérien et la construction d’un mauvais roman des origines” [the Algerian confinement and the construction of a bad novel about origins],102 Sansal underscores the young nation’s “heterophobia,” to borrow the term from Memmi, who defines the concept as a rejection of any form of alterity in identity.103 So, against this exclusion, Sansal tries to remind its audience that Algerians are “des produits de l’histoire [. . .] des métis depuis l’origine des temps” [products of history [. . .] mixed-race from the beginning of time].104 He recalls that Algeria was inhabited by “mille peuples [. . .] et autant de langues et de coutumes [apportées par] de grandes civilisations, la numide, la judaïque, la carthaginoise, la romaine, la byzantine, l’arabe, l’ottomane, la française” [a thousand peoples [. . .] and as many languages and customs [brought by] great civilizations, Numidian, Judaic, Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman, French].105 The desacralization of the Arabo-Muslim identity happens through the use of teasing, often affectionate and at times harsh. For example, instead of saying correctly the name of “Pierre,” Farid addresses “Bier,” as the letter “p” does not exist in the Arabic language; he speaks of “bilevard Bijou,”106 pronouncing the name of Alger’s famous Boulevard Bugeaud with an Arabic accent. Then at some point, Pierre recounts becoming accustomed to Arab culture: “j’ai mangé et roté au rythme du Cadi, puis, comme je le vis faire avec beaucoup de lourdeur gracieuse, j’ai allongé les jambes pour m’aérer le cerveau et péter à l’aise. Se vautrer à l’arabe est un exercice à saisir au vol” [I ate and belched to the rhythm of the Cadi, then, as I had seen him do, with such gracious heaviness, I stretched

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

245

out my legs to air out my belly and fart in comfort].107 The mockery becomes indeed more provocative. Later Pierre tells Farid: “Tu es jeune, arabe et en cela porté sur le pessimisme et la fainéantise” [You are young, Arab, and therefore given to pessimism and laziness].108 Such a sentence works as both a deconstruction of the French racist cliché about immigrant Algerians through the grotesque categorization articulated as a general truth and as a challenge to the essentialization made by the Arabo-Muslim ideology. In certain passages, the sarcastic tone is even more provocative: “Tu n’imagines pas comme les Arabes savent tout, ils sont ainsi, leurs antennes sensibles au plus petit frémissement, leurs oreilles plus avides de méchants ragots que d’heureuses nouvelles. De leur sourire, n’attends rien, c’est préférable” [You can’t imagine how the Arabs know everything, that’s how they are, their antennae are sensitive to the slightest quiver, their ears hungrier for wicked gossip than for good news. Don’t expect anything of their smile, it’s for the best],109 and further along: “Comment leur expliquer les lois abracadabrantes avec lesquelles se gouvernent les Arabes? En dehors de la complicité, ils connaissent seulement la soumission et la révolte aveugles, passant de l’une à l’autre lorsqu’on s’y attend le moins. Frères en religion, cousins par le sang, voisins dans la promiscuité, mais ennemis dans l’âme, ainsi sommes-nous” [How to explain to them the ludicrous laws by which the Arabs govern themselves? Besides complicity, they know only blind submission and blind revolt, moving from one to the other when you least expect it. Brothers in religion, cousins by blood, neighbors in promiscuity, but enemies at heart, that is how we are].110 Sansal does not denigrate Muslim Arabs, but being able to laugh at them allows him to deconstruct the myth of an untouchable and exclusive identity. He also mocks the French, in particular their misunderstanding of the other’s culture and nonmastery of the Arabic language. For example, it is the confusion between “motard” and “Mokhtar” that leads Pierre to error. His mother had told him that a certain “motard” (which means motorcyclist in French) had killed his father. However, she meant Mokhtar, but the “kh” sound is difficult to pronounce for monolingual French speakers. In another passage, Sansal shows the irony of the simplistic French racism toward Algerians, when the president of the commission, “un roublard rompu aux accommodements” [a wily one used to compromises], speaks of “empafés de bronzés” [suntanned morons] or “chimpanzés,” and calls Africans “nègres.”111 Sansal does not miss highlighting that France is the “berceau de la contradiction soutenue” [cradle of heightened contradiction] and denounces “cette vieille Europe coincée dans le classicisme” [that old Europe stuck in classicism].112 Simultaneously, countering the “purity” given to Arab identity by the FLN, L’Enfant fou is all about the mixed Algerian history, whose most recent vestiges are French. As the extra-diegetic narrator says at the beginning of

246

Chapter 5

the text, “l’histoire est difficile à raconter, puisant à plusieurs sources, à deux langages, à deux visions du monde” [the story is difficult to tell, drawing from several sources, two languages, two world views].113 First of all, the existence of this extra-diegetic voice itself shows a subversive perspective regarding the colonial division. In addition to recalling eighteenth-century frame-tale novels (such as Jan Potocki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse114), and thus immersing the reader in a transhistorical cultural reference, the extra-diegetic narrator also subverts the traditional preface writer’s position in colonial ethnographic narratives produced by indigenous writers. Indeed, twentieth-century indigenous ethnographic discourse in Africa was always signed (or at best co-signed) by a French patron/proposer who had the authority to guarantee the authenticity and nonsubversive quality (in terms of colonial domination) of the narrative.115 However, in Sansal’s novel, the narrator—whose origin is unknown—frames not only the indigenous voice (Farid) but also Pierre’s discourse. Of course, we discover that Pierre is in fact an Arab, but this revelation does not modify the fact that, from a national and cultural perspective, he is a French man. Consequently, the idea that a narrator—acquainted with Pierre and Farid’s stories—frames both Algerian and French voices opens up a third position across the colonial and postcolonial divide. Second of all, the first description in the narrative is about a hybrid place, the Lambèse prison. On top of Roman ruins, Lambèse was built as a jail by the French in 1850.116 More precisely, it was a “penal colony—reserved for 450 political deportees.”117 But as Ann Stoler notes, “‘Colonies pénitentiaires’ was a term and a concept that moved across multiple domains. It could designate children’s rural institutions, rural sections of prisons in France, or the penal colonies of empire.”118 In fact, Lambèse also served as an agricultural colony for political dissidents during colonization. Lambèse served as much as a punitive as a curative “dispositif,”119 as per Foucault’s concept, and it is significant that Sansal chooses this place to ground his story, placing the question of what is a colony, what does it produce, and what can be said about it at the center of his narrative. Renamed Tazoult upon independence, Lambèse then became a prison for the opponents of the current regime.120 In L’Enfant fou this place functions as a “dispositif allégorique” [allegorical device], to borrow Abdelbaki Allaoui’s expression; it condenses the history of Algeria into a spatial frame, with the space then acquiring a “valeur testimoniale dans la mesure où il est dépositaire [. . .] des traces de mémoire” [testimonial value to the extent that it is the custodian [. . .] of traces of memory].121 From the beginning of the story, the reader finds herself submerged in a historical palimpsest that superimposes French Algeria onto independent Algeria and establishes continuity between two still different regimes and sovereignties—while again, erasing structural differences at the

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

247

risk of leveling the wrongs and dysfunctions of colonial France and postindependence Algeria. The deployment of a certain Franco-Algerian hybrid discursive space is also conveyed through language. Sansal creates a Franco-Algerian imaginary by combining the French language with a large number of Arabic terms, written phonetically in the Latin alphabet, and without translation, spread out through the narrative, such as: “kofr” (he who doesn’t believe in God), “Ya dini” (my religion), “Ya zébi” (penis), “nif” (a mix of pride, honor, and dignity), “châabi” (popular), “moukhabarate” (name of the intelligence service, a sort of secret police), “nababs” (boss or dignitary), “mektoub” (fate, destiny), “chibani” (literally: he who has white hair, but by extension the term refers to old Algerian immigrants who worked all their life as laborers in France), “thaoura” (revolution), “cadi” (judge), “calame” (pencil), “Allah Akbar” (God is the Greatest), and so on.122 Sansal also forms expressions by mixing the two languages in the same phrase, a reflection of the diglossia that one can notice in the streets of Algiers: “le pur hasard du mektoub,” “un Français, un Gaouri” (a foreigner),123 and so on. In addition, the diversity of the types of languages used in the novel shows that French culture has extensively impregnated Algeria. For example, Sansal often uses French slang (“pépère” [lame], “nichons” [tits], “trognon” [cute]) as well as idioms such as “la nuit porte conseil” [sleep on it] or “en chacun sommeille un flou” [in every man there sleeps a grey area]124—a particular use of the popular proverbial form that starts with “en chaque homme sommeille . . .” and which underscores the idea of identity blurrings and hybridity. Furthermore, the stylistic appropriation of the canons of French humanism gives a double culture (Arabo-Berber and French) to the “archive of the future,” or imaginaire created by the text. Such is the case in some paragraphs in which the descriptive abundance, filled with puns and combined with digressions, caused by homophonic declensions, is strikingly similar to that of the texts of Rabelais. In addition, the dialogue between Pierre and Farid often takes deceitfully absurd or paradoxical turns like in the works of Diderot, notably Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, Le Neveu de Rameau, and Le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville.125 The intertextuality, covering the alphabet “de Villon à Vian,” is immediately visible in the recycling of certain expressions, adapted to the context of L’Enfant fou, such as this phrase, which echoes that of Voltaire’s Candide: “une fois le sang séché, on cultive son jardin” [once the blood has dried, one tends one’s garden], or the reuse of one of Françoise Sagan’s title within a noun phrase: “bonjour tristesse et regrets” [hello sadness and regrets].126 This presence of French references in the text strengthens the idea of an Algerian culture imbued with the French one and a diglossia on a national scale—just like in Lambèse, in the country, “on [. . .] parle français” [French is spoken].127

248

Chapter 5

The archive of the future relies on a reenvisionment of such a hybridity (be it fantasied or real), which is a specific type of encounter, that Mireille Rosello coins “encontre”: L’encontre [. . .] constitue [. . .] une sorte d’exception à la règle de la séparation des peuples, des individus, des villes coupées en deux par la violence. [. . .] L’encontre est ce moment de médiation textuelle inscrit dans le récit, dans une métaphore, dans une structure romanesque [. . .] dans l’effet produit par la combinaison de techniques narratives, d’images apparemment incompatibles, de genres qui devraient s’exclure mutuellement.128 [The encontre [performative encounter] [. . .] constitutes [. . .] a sort of exception to the rule of separation between peoples, individuals, cities sliced in two by violence [. . .]. The encontre is that moment of textual mediation inscribed in the narrative, in a metaphor, in a fictional structure [. . .] in the effect produced by the combination of narrative techniques, of apparently incompatible images, of genres that should mutually exclude.]

In L’Enfant fou, the “encontre,” this sort of projected hybridity, this otherwise forbidden encounter, between France and Algeria, culminates via the character of Pierre, veritable man-archive, who embodies the “trait d’union entre deux familles, deux peuples et [. . .] deux religions” [hyphen between two families, two peoples and [. . .] two religions].129 Indeed, the choice of the first name Pierre is significant. According to the Gospel of Matthew, it is said that Jesus gave Simon Bar-Jona the name of “Kephas” (“Pierre” in Hellenized Aramean), and said to him: “Pierre, tu es pierre et sur cette pierre je bâtirai mon assemblée” [Peter, you are rock and on this rock I will build my church].130 Pierre Chaumet is the bearer of the hope of a new “community,” that is, a new discursive space, reflected by what the Cadi (old judge) tells him: “Tu es d’une certaine manière l’avenir de ce pays” [You are in a certain way the future of this country].131 Pierre the apostle receives two keys from Jesus, a “heavenly” one made of gold and an “earthly” one made of silver, thanks to which he is able to link and unlink the Earth from heaven.132 In Pagan mythology, the Roman god Janus, Pierre’s counterpart, also receives two keys, that of the past and that of the future. Therefore, the name Pierre appears to be overdefined and goes well with that of Khaled, Pierre’s birth name, whose Arab etymology is “eternal.” The character becomes an embodied archive, a symbolic stratigraphy of Algeria, the land (“pierre” [stone, in French]) bearing the (“eternal”) history past and to come, palimpsest of the intermixing between the French and indigenous populations. This is why, at the end of his genealogical quest, which coincides with the beginning of the narrative, this computer engineer, who appears to have all the qualities

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

249

of an “average” Frenchman, is “un Français, qui ne l’est plus vraiment” [a Frenchman, who isn’t really one anymore].133 Moreover, when he daydreams in the Lambèse prison, Pierre remembers the persona he created with his three childhood friends in Avallon (France): he was “Magic Boy,” an adventurer who had left to conquer Africa and whose name promised miracles for an Algeria that, according to Sansal, has been struck by a “malédiction” and that needs a powerful exorcism.134 Here again, Sansal’s text suggests a colonial prophecy, as if Algeria needed an external hand to redress itself. The four boys in the story, all of whom were born in territories that France colonized or dominated in some ways—in Tunisia for “Merdax,” in Guadeloupe for “Goulou,” and in Gabon for “Zembla”—had a “pacte [qui] consistait, une fois les études abandonnées, à retourner ensemble, tous pour un, un pour tous, dans [leurs] paradis” [pact [that] consisted in, once they had left their studies, to return together, all of one, one for all, to [their] paradises].135 While inciting the idea of the need for a neocolonial relationship between France and previously (Algeria, Tunisia, Gabon) or still actual (Guadeloupe) appropriated territories, Sansal’s text implicitly claims that the Pieds-Noirs belong to the Algerian territory, as if a memory of a place conferred a right to belong to it (“I have been there so I belong there”). Pierre’s attachment to Algeria is constructed through mnesic traces filled with the emotions left behind by the few months he lived there: Je suis né en Algérie mais j’y ai vécu douze mois, pas un de plus, neuf dans le ventre de ma mère et trois dans ses bras à téter le sein. Pourtant, ma tête est pleine de sable, de siroccos, de koubbas, de palmiers, de flûtes enrhumées, d’ânes braillants et de chameaux assis en tailleur, d’arbres poussiéreux bâillant d’ennui au-dessus de mendiants [. . .]. De Mohamed, d’Ali et de Kadour, enturbannés comme des momies. De Fatma, de Zineb et de Khéïra [. . .]. De Pérez, de Martinez, de Garcia, etc.136 [I was born in Algeria, but I lived there twelve months, not one more, nine in my mother’s womb and three in her arms, sucking at her breast. However, my head is full of sand, of sirocco winds, of cupolas, of palm trees, of stuffy flutes, of donkeys braying and camels sitting cross-legged, of dusty trees yawning in boredom above the beggars [. . .]. Of Mohamed, Ali and Kadour, turbaned like mummies. Of Fatma, Zineb, Kheïra [. . .]. Of Perez, Martinez, Garcia, etc.]

Blurring the separation between his Arab and Pieds-Noirs identities, Pierre expresses himself as a “mere” human being connected to an emotional and cultural Algerian territory. The succession of Arab first names and last names typical of the Pieds-Noirs (French of Spanish origin) suggests a sort of “melting pot” rather than hierarchical relationships or conflict. In this way, the

250

Chapter 5

text creates a myth of harmony, or, at least, of peaceful coexistence, between communities that, in history, were in a systemic relationship of domination and opposition. Indeed, the social intermixing between Europeans and indigenous people hardly happened, as Savarèse and other scholars show.137 The historian Claude Liauzu even speaks of a caste society built upon a total segregation.138 Specifically, it was the advent of French colonization that broke a secular Mediterranean tradition of exchange. Since the Middle Ages, after the Arabs left Andalucía, there was a relatively equal balance in the Western Mediterranean, despite the existence of corsairs.139 But the arrival of the French in 1830 caused dramatic changes in the partner relationships (notably commercial partnerships), with France “changeant unilatéralement les règles du jeu” [unilaterally changing the rules of the game].140 According to Jocelyne Dakhlia, there was no “créolisation coloniale.”141 On the contrary, 1830 signified the rupture of the “continuum culturel ou au moins d’apprentissage intime de la culture de l’autre (langue, usages et techniques, religion . . .) que des siècles d’échanges et d’interactions—certes parfois conflictuelles—avaient tissé” [cultural continuum or at least of the up-close learning of the other’s culture (language, customs and techniques, religion . . .) that centuries of exchanges and interactions—certainly conflictual at times—had woven].142 The financial and commercial trade in the Mediterranean basin had been taking place for dozens of centuries as well as the conflictual interactions linked to wars. Algeria was Europe’s breadbasket for at least two centuries (the seventeenth and eighteenth), and the French expedition that started colonization was launched by taking advantage of an economic dispute—an invoice unpaid by France from the Dey of Alger who had delivered an ordered shipment of wheat. Yet, all throughout the novel, Sansal chooses to only show harmonious relationships between Pieds-Noirs and indigenous people, even hiding the unequal relationships of domination inherent to the colonial society. This “pacificist” reading of history turns colonial shock into a “cultural encounter,” an expression that, according to Dakhlia, euphemizes the relations of domination and leads easily to a partner-like and peaceful vision of colonial society.143 In L’Enfant fou, the Chaumet family (Pierre’s parents) embodies the image of the benevolent, humanist, and pacifist Pieds-Noirs family par excellence: “ils sont jeunes, aimants, désintéressés. Une utopie les a fait venir en Afrique, soigner les lépreux, secourir les femmes, protéger les enfants” [they are young, loving, disinterested. A utopia made them come to Africa, heal the lepers, save the women, protect the children].144 The Cadi (old judge and notary in the city of Tiaret) even tells Pierre about his French parents: “ton père était un brave homme [. . .] L’on disait aussi beaucoup de bien de son épouse” [your father was a good man [. . .] Everyone also spoke well of

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

251

his wife],145 so much so that Aïcha El Madauri chose to entrust her son to that family. This type of “good colonizer” can neither fully nor truly exist. Memmi has shown that we can conceptually distinguish three types of colonizers: the “colonial,” the “colonisateur,” and the “colonialiste.”146 The colonial “serait l’Européen vivant en colonie mais sans privilèges, dont les conditions de vie ne seraient pas supérieures à celles du colonisé de catégorie économique et sociale équivalente. Par tempérament ou conviction éthique, le colonial serait l’Européen bienveillant, qui n’aurait pas vis-à-vis du colonisé l’attitude du colonisateur” [is a European living in a colony but having no privileges, whose living conditions are not higher than those of a colonized person of equivalent economic and social status. By temperament or ethical conviction, a colonial is a benevolent European who does not have the colonizer’s attitude toward the colonized].147 And Memmi concludes on this type of profile: “Eh bien! Disons-le tout de suite, malgré l’apparente outrance de l’affirmation: le colonial ainsi défini n’existe pas, car tous les Européens des colonies sont des privilégiés” [All right! Let us say right away, despite the apparently drastic nature of the statement: a colonial so defined does not exist, for all Europeans in the colonies are privileged].148 Memmi explains in effect that even the least fortunate of Europeans will always have a position of superiority relative to the most fortunate of the colonized because the colonial system and the colonizers have their interests aligned. Indeed, “Le colonisateur participe d’un monde supérieur, dont il ne peut que recueillir automatiquement les privilèges” [The colonizer partakes of an elevated world from which he automatically reaps the privileges].149 Thus, any colonial “est en posture immediate de colonisateur” [immediately assumes the role of colonizer],150 that is to say, according to Memmi’s typology, a “colonisateur qui se refuse” [colonizer who refuses to see themselves as such], a “colonisateur de bonne volonté” [benevolent colonizer]151—contrary to the third type of colonizer, the “colonialiste” who is “le colonisateur qui s’accepte” [colonizer who accepts to see themselves as such]152 and legitimizes colonization. In Sansal’s novel, the Chaumet family corresponds to this second type of colonizer: they refuse colonization through what Memmi calls “une position de principe” [a position of principle],153 they are outraged yet still do not act, they are against the system of domination but take part in it in spite of themselves. In other words, this colonizer is at the heart of a contradiction that he cannot resolve. “En somme, refusant le mal, le colonisateur de bonne volonté ne peut jamais atteindre au bien, car le seul choix qu’il lui soit permis n’est pas entre le bien et le mal, il est entre le mal et le malaise” [Thus, while refusing the sinister, the benevolent colonizer can never attain the good, for his only choice is not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness.]154 Thus, in L’Enfant fou, the depiction of the

252

Chapter 5

Chaumet family mystifies the paradoxical posture of the colonizer who does not accept; in other words, Sansal prevents the reader from conceiving the nuances of a system producing contradictions and repressed resistance to it. Moreover, the portrait of the Chaumet family present in Algeria for only one generation dissipates or attenuates the image of the colonist of the first generations who came to survive or get rich to the detriment of the indigenous population. On the contrary, Pierre’s parents, whose father was a loved and respected doctor in the town, provided their help to the population with whom they became friends. This friendly relationship, which the text elevates as exemplary, has a very weak echo in historical accounts of colonial Algeria, since, as Stora highlights, while “formes d’amitié et de complicité [. . .] ont pu se nouer, parfois, avec les voisins musulmans [. . .] les deux univers restent fondamentalement étrangers l’un à l’autre, y compris à la campagne, où les Algériens musulmans forment la masse du prolétariat agricole”155 [forms of friendship and complicity [. . .] did develop, in some cases, with Muslim neighbors [. . .] the two spheres remain fundamentally foreign to one another, including in the country, where Algerian Muslims form the bulk of the agricultural proletariat].156 In the novel, the terms “amitié” [friendship] and “amour” [love] are repetitively used to describe the relationships between the French and indigenous people.157 Not mentioning the history of military aggression and permanent coercive violence, Sansal revives the popular myth of the “love” story between Algeria and France that experienced, according to the extradiegetic narrator, “un mariage fou [. . .] divorce dans la folie”158 [a mad marriage [. . .] divorce in madness]. This myth is perpetuated by Pierre and Farid, between whom “se tissait une histoire d’amour” [developed a love story].159 Through this positive representation of Europeans in Algeria, L’Enfant fou therefore does justice to those of the Pieds-Noirs whose generosity and humanism were officially erased by the stereotypical image of the “rich and cruel colonist.” This image, part of the “mythe de l’unité” [myth of unity], according to Savarèse,160 was spread around by the FLN since the beginning of its independence struggle, scorning—just like French historiography until recently—the large diversity of the Pieds-Noirs reality in terms of political behavior, ideologies, and perceptions. Farid warns Pierre when he mentions a French cemetery in ruin at the time: “ne te fais pas d’illusion, le gouvernement ne traitera jamais vos morts comme il se doit. Pour lui, ils n’ont rien à foutre chez nous, ce sont tous des colons”161 [don’t delude yourself, the government will never treat your dead as it should. In its eyes, they have no fucking business here, they are all colonizers], implying that the French are land robbers, rich, and that they oppress the indigenous people. However, more specifically, Sansal restores a historical perspective denied by those in power in Algeria, namely, that not all of the Pieds-Noirs were colonists,

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

253

and that their standards of living were much lower than in the Metropole.162 In fact, during the first decades of colonization, three-quarters of the emigrants came from cities, and the majority of them moved to cities. While it is true that they were also systematically implicated in land expropriation, the responsibility mainly lies with the French state that systematized land seizure and organized the sale of these spaces to European immigrants.163 As for rural people, they only decreased in number throughout the colonial period, as in 1872, they represented 40 percent of the European population, and on the eve of the war, they only made up 20 percent (among which the family members of actual colonists are included).164 However, this decrease should not obscure a situation of total expropriation from indigenous peasants (that is to say, the majority of the local population), because, on the contrary, it signifies the advance of “la colonisation privée marquée par la concentration des terres et la dépossession foncière” [private colonization marked by the consolidation of properties and land dispossession] set in motion by the Warnier law of 1873.165 Nonetheless, this reality does not correspond to the “mythe du colon paysan”166 [myth of the peasant colonist], which is supposedly representative of all the Pieds-Noirs. This representation is therefore based on a qualitative illusion, created notably by the manifestations of French Algeria’s centenary, which glorified the “peasant colonist” as being “brave and resistant to hardships,” making him the essence of a Frenchman in Algeria.167 This image is also founded on a quantitative illusion reinforced by the fact that “les colons sont, de loin, les Français d’Algérie les mieux organisés et représentés, d’abord dans les délégations financières, ensuite et surtout au parlement français, via l’influence du parti colonial, groupe de pression qui possède, au tournant du siècle, environ 100 députés”168 [of the French in Algeria, the colonists are, by far, the best organized and represented, first in the financial delegations, then and above all in the French parliament, through the influence of the colonial party, a lobby group that possesses, at the turn of the century, around 100 deputies]. Sansal’s narrative, which gives another face to the Pieds-Noirs, nonetheless raises questions of a political nature. On the one hand, doesn’t such an image arouse a competition between memories for the recognition of victim’s status? Given that Sansal’s reader base is in its large majority French, showing the injustice of the exile of the Pieds-Noirs may reinforce the victim’s discourse that is already widespread throughout Pieds-Noirs communities.169 In addition, writing sentences such as “vendredi, jour de prière des tueurs”170 [Friday, day of prayer for killers] produce more than a provocation: for a contemporary French reader, such words coming from an educated Algerian can reinforce the idea that Islam is the same as terrorist Islamism. On the other hand, since Sansal is not published in Algeria (his publisher is Gallimard) and his imported books are subject to the censorship committee

254

Chapter 5

of the Algerian Ministry of Culture, what impact can his works have on Algerian Francophone readers for whom his satire of the government makes real sense? The discrepancy between the target of his discourse (Algeria) and the land of its reception (France) can produce an awkward criticism effect, since each group bearing a different memorial discourse, instead of being persuaded into dialogue, is, on the contrary, reinforced in its positions. Proof of this is that the Algerian government continues to censor Sansal’s works when it thinks fit and that reviews of his writing in Algeria are often very negative, whereas in France, Sansal is adorned with prizes and is regularly solicited by the media. According to Kaoutar Harchi, Ces éléments témoignent de la domination idéologique qui s’exerce sur la pratique littéraire de l’écrivain algérien francophone. Domination qu’exacerbe l’inscription de Sansal au sein d’un univers littéraire français à partir duquel il agit et s’exprime [. . .]. [. . .] l’inclusion littéraire rapide et intense de Sansal [dans le champ français] a provoqué, selon une quasi-symétrie, son exclusion définitive de l’univers professionnel algérien, le contraignant ainsi à faire l’expérience des concurrences, des contradictions et des luttes à mort symboliques qui régissent les relations entre les espaces algériens et français.171 [These elements bear witness to the ideological domination exerted over the literary practice of the Francophone Algerian writer. A domination exacerbated by Sansal’s inscription at the heart of the French literary sphere from which he acts and expresses himself [. . .]. [. . .] the swift and intense inclusion of Sansal [in the French field] provoked, according to a quasi-symmetry, his definitive exclusion from the professional Algerian sphere, thereby constraining him to experience the competitions, contradictions, and symbolic fights to the death that govern relations between Algerian and French spaces.]

This situation results from the fact that Sansal’s work, like, for example, that of Kamel Daoud, is very often understood from a political angle, or, in Harchi’s terms, according to “une approche critique [. . .] sous-tendue par une dimension extralittéraire”172 [a critical approach [. . .] underpinned by an extraliterary dimension]. In other words, in the case of Sansal (and several others), the text is “prétexte à l’évocation d’une question sociopolitique globale”173 [a pretext for raising a global sociopolitical question], in this instance that of Islamism (and terrorism). In a certain way, this relation of French criticism to the literary production produced from the former colonial empire is not new. This problem of literary legitimacy has already been formulated many times since the emergence of postcolonial literature, for instance, through Said’s differentiation of the “specific” and the “specified,”174 and in the following passage from Reda Bensmaïa’s Experimental Nations:

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

255

What has long struck me was the nonchalance with which the work of these [Maghrebi, postcolonial] writers was analyzed. Whenever these novels were studied, they were almost invariably reduced to anthropological or cultural case studies. Their literariness was rarely taken seriously. And once they were finally integrated into the deconstructed canon of world literature, they were made to serve as tools for political or ideological agendas. This kind of reading resulted more often than not in their being reduced to mere signifiers of other signifiers, with a total disregard for what makes them literary works in and of themselves.175

Thus, as Sansal’s work faces extraliterary criteria and judgments, it is often the object of “valorisations instrumentales”176 [instrumental valorizations] on the part of critics. One of the recent examples being the praise of Sansal’s 2015 futuristic novel 2084, La fin du monde by Michel Houellebecq, who exonerates himself from any “Islamophobia” by claiming that Sansal’s book is much more “radical” than his own novel Soumission, published the same year and accused by certain critics of Islamophobia.177 This “appropriation intéressée”178 [self-interested appropriation] by Houellebecq or literary critics or journalists can work to Sansal’s advantage (by giving him visibility), but it can also harm him, by associating him with certain personalities or political orientations. Sansal himself at times adopts an ambiguous position, and notably when he speaks about the question of the origin of the Algerian nation. In seeking to deconstruct the myth of an entirely resistant populace, this idea that the whole Algerian people would have been against the arrival of the French in 1830 then, a century later, with the FLN, Sansal remains sometimes hazy on what he means by “Algeria”—the nation or the country. Because although we can indeed consider that Algeria, with its current borders, is a creation of colonial France, it would be reductive to deem the Algerian nation a simple product of colonization. Let us consider this passage from Dis-moi le paradis, published one year after L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux: Mort de l’Ottoman, vive le Franc, disaient les nouveaux opposants à la Sublime Porte, ulémas, propriétaires terriens, éleveurs de chevaux, gardiens d’esclaves, maîtres de harems, chambellans, imams de cours, chaouchs, cadis, et autres fonctionnaires de justice, tous nourris dans le sérail. Brûler le burnous, jeter le tarbouche, enfiler une casquette, un galurin, un béret, un passe-montagne, se rouler dans un coutil, un tweed, et s’aligner au passage du nouveau maître ne leur prit que le temps de voir où était leur intérêt. L’Algérie était née. Le ministre de la Guerre, Antoine Schneider, venait de le décréter en levant le verre: “Le pays occupé par les Français dans le nord de l’Afrique sera appelé à l’avenir Algérie. Exécution!”179

256

Chapter 5

[Death of the Ottoman, long live the Frank, said the new opponents of the Sublime Porte, ulemas, land owners, horse breeders, slave keepers, harem masters, chamberlains, court imams, bailiffs, cadis, and other court personnel, all raised in the seraglio. It took them only the time to see where their interest lay to burn the burnoose, throw out the fez, put on a helmet, a hat, a beret, a balaclava, wrap up in a linen, a tweed, and get in line behind the new master. Algeria was born. The minister of War, Antoine Schneider, had just decreed it, raising his glass: “The country occupied by the French in the north of Africa will be henceforth known as Algeria. So be it!”]

In this passage, Sansal puts the emphasis on France and the French as the creators of an Algeria that was supposedly welcomed with the self-serving consent of most of the locals: he cites a long list a groups favorable to the French, as if all the people were against the Ottomans. Therefore, Sansal’s criticism seems to simply invert the orientation of the people, still suggested as being a whole. A similar ambiguity can be found when Sansal accuses the FLN of erasing history, by giving July 5 as the date for commemoration of independence: le calendrier est trafiqué de tous les côtés, l’indépendance n’est pas intervenue le 5 juillet 1962, mais le 3. C’est ce pauvre diable Ben Bella qui a déplacé le signet. Il venait de s’emparer du pouvoir avec les blindés du colonel Boumediene. Il se croyait tout permis, tuer des gens, ruiner le pays, falsifier l’histoire. Par ce tour de passe-passe, il entendait effacer le 5 juillet 1830 qui a vu le Dey d’Alger, Hossein Pacha, capituler devant l’armée française [. . .].180 [The calendar is rigged on all sides, Independence didn’t happen on July 5, 1962, but on the 3. It’s that poor devil Ben Bella who moved the mark. He had just gotten hold of power with Colonel Boumediene’s tanks. He thought all was permitted, killing people, ruining the country, falsifying history. With this sleight of hand trick, he meant to erase July 5, 1830, which saw the Dey of Alger, Hossein Pacha, surrender to the French army [. . .].]

Later in this Figaro article, Sansal claims that Algeria’s true independence took place during the seventeen years between 1830 (the end of Ottoman domination) and 1847 (surrender of the nationalist resistance led by emir Abdelkader to the French), and that the FLN falsified all the official dates, benefitting their “national heroes”—sarcastically called, in L’Enfant fou, “parvenus mégalomanes” [megalomaniacal upstarts] and “ces salopards que la révolution a ennoblis [pour leurs] crimes commis sous couvert de causes sacrées”181 [those scumbags that the revolution ennobled [for their] crimes committed under the cover of holy causes]. He rectifies the date of

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

257

independence from July 5 to July 3, 1962, but, in elaborating his reflection on the “true” independence that would have happened between 1830 and 1847, he places French colonial domination on the same level as the FLN’s postcolonial dictatorship, thereby diminishing at least the symbolic reach of independence. Indeed, Sansal often plays in the “grey zone”182 of colonization, considering it as what Gayatri Spivak calls an “enabling violation.”183 According to Spivak, colonization is a violation, an aggression (thus a negative thing) even though it permits the advent of some “good” things, or, as Dakhlia puts it, a “souffrance féconde”184 [fertile suffering], such as in the case of the construction of roads, and so on. Spivak writes: My generation in India, born before Independence, realizes only too well that many of the functionaries of the civilizing Mission of imperialism were wellmeaning. The point here is not personal accusations. And in fact what these functionaries gave was often what I call an enabling violation—a rape that produces a healthy child, whose existence cannot be advanced as a justification for the rape. Imperialism cannot be justified by the fact that India has railway and I speak English well.185

Admittedly, Sansal does not justify colonization through its supposed positive effects—he expressed his contemptuous indifference to the French law of February 23, 2005, in Poste restante: Alger. However, without suggesting the omnipresent coercive violence and brutality of colonial society, he brings forward the positive effects of “enabling violations” and, this way, seeks to vindicate the very historical legitimacy of the Pieds-Noirs in Algerian history. This is demonstrated in L’Enfant fou through one of Pierre’s lawyer, Maître Laskri’s diatribes: Ses parents, des fonctionnaires de haute valeur morale n’en déplaise à ceux qui réclament un djihad au simple énoncé de Pierre, Paul ou Jacob, y ont été mutés par leurs administrations respectives, le père en qualité de médecin et la mère de maîtresse d’école. Allez-vous nous reprocher d’être né en Algérie et d’y avoir vécu notre prime enfance? Allez-vous reprocher à nos parents d’avoir soigné vos pères et de vous avoir éduqué?186 [His parents, civil servants of high moral character (with all due respect to those who call for jihad at the simple mention of Peter, Paul or Jacob), were transferred here by their respective administrations, the father as a doctor and the mother as a schoolteacher. Are you going to blame us for being born in Algeria and spending our earliest childhood here? Are you going to blame our parents for healing your fathers and educating you?]

258

Chapter 5

As Spivak highlights, it is important to differentiate the responsibility of the state from individual actions. Caring for people and educating them are actions that can only be desirable. However, the context left out by Sansal is crucial: Algeria was not a blank slate where all contributions could only be positive. Therefore, while the contribution of French medicine was welcomed positively bit by bit by Algerians, the imposition of the French educational system, on the other hand, destroyed traditional educational methods and resulted in a very slow and weak increase in (French) literacy, and a diminution of capacities in Arabic (Berber languages were oral ones).187 As historian Sylvie Thénault recurrently mentions, the assimilation was a process of depersonalization through an institutionalized violence that reserved discriminatory treatment and disciplinary sanctions for indigenous people, both regarding criminal matters (existence of a penal system for the indigenous people) and the domains of taxation, education, and marital status.188 Maybe out of the anger stemming from his personal opinion of Islam or maybe out of desire to promote forgiveness for his fellow Algerian citizens (even though France has never asked for forgiveness), Sansal seems to be trying to banalize and represent the colonial episode in Algerian history as neutral, at the least, and positive, at the most—or rather as a (clumsy) attempt to transcend binarities with the goal of finding a space of encounter that is always absent from monolithic discourses (from the FLN, or the Islamists, especially).189 Strikingly, he writes, in L’Enfant fou: “Le colon n’est pas la bête la plus méchante de la terre. Peut-être même pressentaient-ils [les paysans algériens] d’en rencontrer de plus terribles dans les terres à venir” [The colonizer is not the most wicked beast on earth. Perhaps they [the Algerian peasants] even sensed that they would meet with some more terrible ones in the lands to come].190 Such a phrase, which is clearly trying to criticize Algerians in power, also has the side effect of ignoring the history of the progressive and long-lasting pauperization of the large majority of the peasant portion of indigenous society. This impoverishment of the peasantry is the result of the social destruction caused by colonial expropriation and seizure policies, to which exploitation and urban marginalization must be added. Sansal is therefore trying to tone down the colonial situation, which has the effect of masking the shock and historical trauma caused by colonization. And yet, in some passages of Poste Restante: Alger, Sansal seems to seek to convey an interpretation intended as nonpartisan and removed from an affective reading of history, as for example in the following sentences: l’évolution historique d’un peuple, savoir le passage d’une forme d’organisation à une autre, d’un mode de pensée à un autre, se fait toujours sous l’effet de phénomènes imprévisibles, souvent exogènes: une découverte technique, la naissance d’une nouvelle théorie, le développement des réseaux commerciaux,

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

259

la rencontre avec un peuple plus avancé, ou une invasion brutale. Dans un cas, il évolue à son rythme, en ligne droite, dans l’autre il est détourné de sa voie et engagé de force dans une autre. L’Algérie n’eut guère de chance, des invasions, elle en a connu depuis la carthaginoise et chacune a laissé sa marque, les Vandales sont venus et ont tout saccagé, les Arabes sont passés en coup de vent et nous ont laissé l’islam et leur science naissante, les Ottomans ont fait de nous des pirates et des galériens, la France a placé nos terres en son sein et fait de nous des Indiens indésirables chez elle. C’est une évolution en zigzag.191 [the historical evolution of a people, as in the passage from one form of organization to another, from one mode of thought to another, always happens under the effect of unpredictable, often exogenous, phenomena: a technological discovery, the birth of a new theory, the development of trade networks, the encounter with a more advanced people, or a brutal invasion. In one case, it evolves at its own pace, in a straight line, in the other it is diverted from its path and forced onto another. Algeria had little luck, it has known quite a few invasions since the Carthaginians, and each one has left its mark, the Vandals came and ransacked everything, the Arabs swept through and left us Islam and their early science, the Ottomans made us into pirates and galley slaves, France placed our lands in its breast and made us into undesirable Indians on its territory. It’s an evolution by zigzag.]

Sansal adds, several pages later, that one must take into account that which the Algerians have taken from those that passed through, such as the name of the country “Algeria” thereby reversing the roles of the robbers and the robbed. As the saying goes, Sansal is trying to “see the glass as half-full” rather than half-empty with regards to the relationship between contemporary Algeria and French colonization and leave behind the victim’s discourse proclaimed by the FLN in their hypocrisy and contradictions. However, the metaphors he uses in this quote are ambiguous regarding colonial history. The image of the straight line that is diverted no matter how simple its route may be is not a clear historical symbolic account either. Parallel to how the notion of encounter is not fitting to describe the colonial regime, the idea of a first contact that bends the trajectory does not take into account the mutual knowledge of one another that the French and Algerians shared and which France used to support its conquest of Algeria.192 As opposed to the colonization of America, for example, the French colonization of Algeria was based on a knowledge of the other. Dakhlia emphasizes the amnesia of French and Algerian historiographers regarding the secular links between the two countries before colonization, and insists on the fact that “Le choc de 1830 fut ainsi celui d’une colonisation brutale et destructrice, mais non celui d’une confrontation soudaine à l’autre”193 [The shock on 1830

260

Chapter 5

was thus one of a brutal and destructive colonization, but not one of a sudden confrontation with the other]. Likewise, the image of the zigzag in the quote from Poste restante: Alger has a strong connotation of a métisse Algerian history that should be recognized and valued, as opposed to what the FLN has done—“ils ont insulté sa [l’Algérie] mémoire et compromis son avenir avec une note éliminatoire en histoire”194 [they insulted its [Algeria’s] memory and compromised its future with a failing grade in History]. However, it is still important to note that the intermixing between equal and opposing partners took place before colonization and stopped precisely in 1830, date marking the end of a certainly conflictual, but mutual, history. Sansal rebels against the desire for purity so dear to the Islamists as well as the FLN. He argues—and rightly so—for the constitutive hybridity of the nation. Nevertheless, certain ambiguous turns of phrase occlude the stakes and power structures of colonization (as is the case in the education system). In other words, although the hybridity of the Algerian nation must now be recognized, it should not conceal that it was made on the basis of spoliation. Perhaps the ambiguity of Sansal’s narrative culminates in the motif of the eponymous character. A powerful symbol, “l’enfant fou” [the crazy child], represents both the interbreeding between France and Algeria and a missed opportunity for establishing a cultural mix. The crazy child’s mysterious story is progressively revealed throughout the narrative. We learn of the child’s existence from the first pages: this “inexplicable” being, whose parents, origin, and reason for being in Lambèse seem to be unknown to everybody, finds himself “enchaîné par la folie des hommes à un arbre sec”195 [chained by the folly of men to a desiccated tree], in the middle of the prison courtyard. Another prisoner, the polyglot “vieux soldat” [old soldier], symbol of the ancestral memory of Algeria who was a witness to all wars and invasions—in other words “un condensé d’histoire” [an abridged history], tells Pierre and Farid that the crazy child, just like others, was born of the rape of an “amazigh” woman.196 Like with the other bastards, “on l’attachait à un arbre pour l’empêcher de se mêler à la marmaille de la tribu”197 [they tied him to a tree to keep him from mixing with the other kids of the tribe], the old man specifies. A little further along, faced with the disbelief of his interlocutors, he gives his version of the story, explaining that the child is the offspring of the Northern invader. The child symbolizes the colonial “product,” the result of the French conquest in Algeria. However, the fact that he is tied to a hollow tree, an image of a country (Algeria) emptied of its riches (by the French? By the FLN?), influences the interpretation of this figure of the lost opportunity for cultural intermixing. The child is kept chained by the people in power in Algeria, to which the prison authorities belong. Sansal seems to be implying that Algerians held back and refused to mix with the French. Another element supports this interpretation. A “rejet de la raison”198 [reject of reason], the

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

261

child regularly screams in a way unbearable to others, and possesses another frightening monstrosity, as Pierre recounts when he first noticed: L’enfant leva la tête vers moi. [. . .] J’étais ému, j’attendais de son regard une révélation sur le sens profond de la vie; un peu d’insouciance aussi, j’en avais besoin. Je reçus une décharge électrique et je suis tombé à la renverse. J’étais terrifié, le fond de l’abîme ouvrait sur un autre abîme. [. . .] Dieu, où es-tu? Où sommes-nous? Est-ce possible? Je ne voulais plus rien, seulement mourir. L’enfant n’avait pas d’yeux.199 [The child lifted his head up to me. [. . .] I was moved, I expected his gaze to reveal something about the deep meaning of life; a little insouciance too, I was in need of it. I received an electric shock and I fell over backward. I was terrified, the bottom of the abyss opened onto another abyss. [. . .] God, where are you? Where are we? Is it possible? I didn’t want anything anymore, only death. The child had no eyes.]

No other information is given as to the child’s lack of vision. Was he born without eyes? Were his eyes taken out by someone? The wise old man does not know any more about it. Given the satiric tone of the novel, the reader is led to believe that sadistic Algerian men in power mutilated the child. In other words, Algeria itself supposedly destroyed the fruits of its colonial history, with the lack of visibility symbolizing an exit from history, of which Lambèse is a “tare”200 [blemish]. The blindness and madness of the child is an echo of that of Khaled’s (Pierre’s) mother, Aïcha, who lost her mind because of the FLN, who not only executed her husband but also moved her to abandon her child. It is precisely with respect to this condition of the mad child that Pierre’s colonialist and nationalist project must be understood. The mad child symbolizes an inaudible (the child screams) and illegible (the child cannot see) archive, in the sense not only of a record but also of a discursive space. “Fonder une colonie” [found a colony] to wage a “guerre à la mafia [politicofinancière]” [war on the [politico-financial] mafia] (that is to say, on the FLN, in Boudiaf’s words), revives a historical situation of the founding of the country, which Pierre expresses in these terms: to found “une grande nation”201 [a great nation]. Sansal seems to deliberately ignore the fundamental nature of a colony. Stoler defines it this way: Although a colony stands apart, as a political entity it is part of, and attached to, something else. Ontologically, it exists in virtue of its dependent political status as a subset of another, prior, more substantial polity that wields authority over it. Those who inhabit a colony stand in relationship to a broader biopolitical norm,

262

Chapter 5

and legal status that those in a colony are imagined to aspire to and desire but, by design, cannot.202

Which “more substantial polity” does Pierre’s colony depend on, if not France? In this sense, Sansal’s discourse implies that hybridity (which he praises) goes along with a certain neocolonial project. However, we can understand “colony” in a slightly different way, Stoler suggests, but still not contradicting its fundamental features quoted above: not only as a place where people are forced to migrate but also “as a political concept [. . .] a principle of managed mobilities, mobilizing and immobilizing populations according to a set of changing rules and hierarchies that orders social kinds.”203 In other words, Pierre’s colonial project can be interpreted as a project of mobility, of migration of both French and Algerians in order to perform the reality of the 1.5 nation, as Balibar says—a nation that will include both populations that are mixed geographically and in their memory. Furthermore, since a colony “organizes visions and imaginaries,”204 Pierre’s project could also aim at creating a sense of a Franco-Algerian or Algero-French nationalist feeling. Giving the term “colony” the meaning of that of a laboratory where new forms of identity and mobility are created, Pierre’s story, a bridge between two countries, materializes a wish: the dream of a common future among two populations and diverse identities. Pierre says: “J’étais un homme quelconque, un Français disposant d’une honnête moyenne, me voilà avec deux familles, deux religions, deux langues [. . .] deux visions du monde aux antipodes, et au lieu d’en être écartelé, je me sens accompli”205 [I was just an ordinary man, a Frenchman possessed of average honesty, and here I am with two families, two religions, two languages [. . .] two diametrically opposed world views, and instead of being torn apart by it, I feel complete]. The colony project would bring together these two visions in order to create a third one, a synthesis. Nevertheless, Sansal’s text does not provide more detail about the colonial project. Pierre remains a being made of “deux en un sans solution de continuité”206 [two in one with no resolution of continuity]. The Franco-Algerian nation is just one of Pierre’s dreams—and is not at all shared by Farid, who dreams only of escaping to the United States, thereby revealing a lack of concern about France on the part of a large segment of Algerian youth born after independence.207 Nonetheless, L’Enfant fou suggests an answer to the question of whether a nation can recklessly kill its founding fathers and forget about them with impunity. Indeed, the repressed came back through the physical return of Pierre to Algeria, and it has not been collectively (by both Algeria and France) taken in charge. In this light, Pierre’s act of violence (the murder of his father’s murderer) is a result of this lack of a collective (binational) recognition (i.e., articulation and memorialization) of what was the

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

263

end of colonization. Another way of saying it would be to name this recognition an archivation, and consider that Pierre’s body internalized the otherwise apparently missing archive. Moving away from exclusive nationalist narratives, L’Enfant fou seeks to provide the condition for a fairer understanding of history and identities, possibly permitting the emergence of a new bond between French people and Algerians. Paradoxically, Pierre and Farid were never so free as when they were in prison—“Liberté confisquée et rêve libéré marchent ensemble” [confiscated liberty and the liberated dream walk together], the extradiegetic narrator claims.208 Through their criminal acts, each of them distances himself from French and Algerian national categories. On the one hand, Pierre, by avenging his father, Omar, symbolically reinscribes himself into a filiation that France, symbolized by his adoptive mother, had hidden from him. Through the allegorical shift in meaning from the adoptive mother to the French “Motherland,” Sansal highlights the French policy of hiding the Algerian history of France by suppressing or marginalizing the colonial history within the history of the Republic. Farid, on the other hand, is temporarily safe from the trap comanaged by both the people in power and the Islamists, and can imagine his future freely. Second of all, the novel suggests that attempting to create bonds with the other seems to be a necessity, even at the cost of the “délire” [madness] which possibly constitutes the novel’s dialogue between two characters whose words can be summed up as “des monologues non miscibles par nature”209 [monologues by nature immiscible]! However, this is of no importance, since the genre of fiction precisely allows authors to invent “new forms of solidarity and visions of justice”210 that sometimes may provoke unexpected acts of empathy. L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux is an ambiguous text regarding the history of the Pieds-Noirs and of colonial Algeria more generally. However, it would be too simplistic to categorize Sansal’s work as monolithically belonging to a certain colonial nostalgia. The idea that emerges from L’Enfant fou, at times in ambivalent and often very provocative ways, is that friendship has more value than hostility. In this sense, Sansal’s preface to Alain Vincennot’s book Pieds-Noirs. Les bernés de l’histoire is a continuation of this idea: “Nous voulons nous retrouver et parler de ce que nous aurions pu faire, de ce que nous aurions dû faire pour éviter la guerre et ses malheurs. Et pour voir ce que nous pourrions faire pour une réconciliation totale et définitive. La guerre est finie, il faut maintenant inventer la paix et la vivre ensemble”211 [We want to get together and talk about what we could have done, what we should have done in order to avoid the war and its evils. And to see what we could do for a total and definitive reconciliation. The war is over, now we must invent peace and live it together]. The peace (or reconciliation) that Sansal evokes may be conceived as another noun for a shared archive—a common regime

264

Chapter 5

of discourse about the history of France and Algeria—that is turned toward the future, just like Pierre’s project of a new colony, perhaps a happier one, certainly an utopian one. With the pronoun “nous” standing for Sansal and Vincennot, and more generally the Algerians and the French, Sansal’s writing provides a model for a common voice, at the cost of idealizing history and leveling historical wrongs. NOTES 1. Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 25. 2. Éric Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs (Paris: Séguier, 2002), 15. Savarèse bases his analysis on documents from Pieds-Noirs and the work of Guy Pervillé, entitled “Comment appeler les habitants de l’Algérie avant la définition légale d’une nationalité algérienne?” (Cahiers de la Méditerranée 54 (June 1997): 55–60). See also Lemnouar Merouche, Recherches sur l’Algérie à l’époque ottomane (Paris: Bouchène, 2007). 3. Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 25; Savarèse, L’Invention des PiedsNoirs, 51. By extension, the Europeans (ten times more numerous) who settled in the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia were also designated Pieds-Noirs, even though this usage is incorrect, given that these Europeans did not constitute a colony or settlement and were not expelled (neither in Morocco nor in Tunisia in 1956 during independence) or repatriated following a war of more than seven years. On the differentiation between “Pieds-Noirs” and “français d’Algérie,” see Hubbell, Remembering French Algeria, 7–13. 4. Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 28. See also Kamel Kateb, Européens, “Indigènes” et Juifs en Algérie (1830–1962). Représentations et réalités des populations (Paris: INED, 2001), 187, 172. Jennifer Sessions, “Les colons avant la IIIe République: peupler et mettre en valeur l’Algérie,” Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale (1830–1962), eds. Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault (Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012), 64–65. On the Spaniards, see Anne Dulphy, L’Algérie des piedsnoirs: entre l’Espagne et la France (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2014). It is worth recalling that the Senatus-consulte of 1863 (legal text written under the authority of Napoleon III) divided the Algerian population into three categories: the French (colonizers from mainland and Europeans), the Israelites, and the Muslims. In 1870, the Jews became French citizens thanks to the Crémieux Decree whereas the Muslims remained “indigenous.” In 1881, the creation of the “Code de l’indigénat” made the latter national “subjects” and not French citizens. The “indigenous” people therefore had unequal legal status until the end of colonization. 5. On populating and the evolution of recruitment, see Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 26–28; Sessions, “Les colons avant la IIIe République,” 66–67 and Hugo Vermeren, “Les migrations françaises et européennes vers l’Algérie au début de la IIIe République,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, eds. Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

265

Sylvie Thénault (Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012), 194–200. On expropriation, see Grangaud, “Le droit colonial au service,” 70–76; Guignard, “Le sénatus-consulte de 1863,” 76–82; Tassadit Yacine, “La Kabylie entre 1939 et 1871: construction identitaire et répression coloniale,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, eds. Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault (Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012), 114–20; André Nouschi, “La dépossession foncière et la paupérisation de la paysannerie algérienne,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, eds. Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault (Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012), 189–94. 6. Sessions, “Les colons avant la IIIe République,” 68; Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 87. 7. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 17. On the identity constructions of the Pieds-Noirs, see also the works of Jean-Jacques Jordi, La Tragédie des PiedsNoirs (Rennes: Ouest France, 2012); Jean-Jacques Jordi, Les Pieds-Noirs (Paris: Cavalier Bleu, 2008), and so on. 8. See, for example, the recent work of a Pieds-Noirs who intends to show, through eye-witness testimony, that the voice of the Pieds-Noirs was suppressed by the extremists of French Algeria: Bernard Zimmermann, Les Résistances pieds-noirs à l’OAS (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014). Opposed to the OAS partisans, there was in fact a small minority of “pieds-rouges,” who were revolutionary communist and anticolonial; they fought alongside the independence fighters and refused to be repatriated to France. On this point, see the autobiographical novels of Nathalie Funès, Mon oncle d’Algérie (Paris: Stock, 2010) and Nathalie Funès, Le Camp de Lodi: Algérie 1954–1962 (Paris: Stock, 2012). 9. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 26. One exception should be noted: Claire Eldridge’s 2016 book on Harkis and Pieds-Noirs memory, From Empire to Exile. History and Memory within the Pied-Noir and Harki Communities, 1962–2012 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016). 10. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 27. 11. For example: Jean-Jacques Jordi, Danielle Michel-Chich, the novelists Emmanuel Robblès, and Marie Cardinal. For details on their works, see Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 36–37. See also the autobiographical text of the journalist Brigitte Benkemoun, La Petite fille sur la photo: la guerre d’Algérie à hauteur d’enfant (Paris: Fayard, 2012). 12. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 29. 13. Jacques Berque, Les Arabes (Paris: Delpire, 1959), in Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 30. 14. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 30. The reference for Mahfoud Kaddache is L’Algérie des Algériens: de la préhistoire à 1954 (Paris: ParisMéditerranée, 2003), Mahfoud Kaddache, Histoire du nationalisme algérien. 1919– 1951 (Paris: Paris-Méditerranée, 2000). 15. On the three founding myths of the official discourse of Algeria, see the analysis of Mohammed Harbi, La Guerre commence en Algérie (Brussels: Complexe, 1984).

266

Chapter 5

16. Only a very small minority, called “pieds-verts” (including the “piedsrouges”), remained in Algeria after independence and took Algerian nationality. One of the most well-known pieds-verts is the poet Jean Senac. 17. Sansal has written, to date, seven novels, a dozen short stories, and three essays. He has received numerous literary prizes. 18. The writer discusses this, for example, in these interviews: Grégoire Leménager, “Sansal censuré,” Le Nouvel Obs, March 11, 2008, http:​/​/bib​​liobs​​.nouv​​ elobs​​.com/​​roman​​s​/200​​80311​​.BIB0​​959​/s​​ansal​​​-cens​​ure​.h​​tml and “La censure, c’est la démocratie qui tue la démocratie,” Le Point, May 18, 2013, http:​/​/www​​.lepo​​int​.f​​r​/ cul​​ture/​​boual​​em​-sa​​nsal-​​la​-ce​​nsure​​-c​-es​​t​-la-​​democ​​ratie​​-qui-​​tue​-l​​a​-dem​​ocrat​​ie​-1​8​​-05​ -2​​013​-1​​66954​​3​_3​.p​​hp. 19. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 307, 345. 20. Stora: “trouver la ‘juste mémoire,’ entre répétition des guerres anciennes dans le présent et effacement de faits pouvant ouvrir à un négationnisme généralisé,” [to find the “middle memory,” between a repetition of former wars in the present and an erasure of facts that could lead to generalized revisionism] Preface, in Les Guerres de mémoires, eds. Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 11. 21. “War within a war.” Benjamin Stora, La Guerre invisible. Algérie, années 90 (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2001), 11. 22. Abderahmane Khiouane, La Crise de 1962 (Alger: Dahlab, 1997), 49 quoted in Stora, La Guerre invisible, 52. 23. Stora, La Guerre invisible, 60, 41. 24. The theme of the return of the Pied-Noirs is also questioned from the other side of the Mediterranean, as, for example, Alexandre Arcady’s film Là-bas, mon pays (2000) demonstrates: a Pieds-Noirs (also called Pierre) goes back to Algeria because of his job as a journalist investigating the Civil War. He then relives his love with the young Muslim girl of his childhood. 25. The term “civil war” seems somehow inappropriate since the identity of the actors was never clarified. 26. It is worth recalling the chronology of the successive presidents of the Algerian Republic since independence: Ahmed Ben Bella (one of the leaders of the 1954 revolt) governed from 1962 to 1965 in a one-party regime (FLN) until the coup d’état of Houari Boumediene (who occupied a key post in Ben Bella’s government) reversed this, notably after the minister of foreign affairs (Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the current president) was fired. Socialism and self-governance, implemented by Ben Bella, aggravated the economic situation of a country that was not prepared for such management. The colonel Boumediene ran the country from 1965 to his death in 1978. The authoritarian nature of the state was strengthened while the nationalization of profits multiplied (agricultural profits, profit from hydrocarbons, and from the “oil godsend” that were supposed to be redistributed). In addition to the ever-growing inequality and corruption, there were sociocultural problems (that blocked the educational apparatus) linked to the question of the definition of the identity of Algeria. Boumediene continued and intensified the process of Arabization of the culture and society, colliding with certain resistance groups who favored pluralism (notably,

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

267

Berber and Francophone). Likewise, Islam became a part of the state, which provoked the opposition of certain Islamist movements (Benjamin Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie depuis l’indépendance. Tome 1: 1962–1988 (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), and Miloud Zaater, L’Algérie de la guerre à la guerre (1962–2003) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). 27. Zaater, L’Algérie de la guerre, 12. 28. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 14. 29. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 353. 30. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 352, 353. 31. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 123. 32. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 173, 17. Assimil is a French publishing house that offered a “method” for people to easily (intuitively) and quickly learn foreign languages by themselves. This method became very popular and is often the object of parodies and, in everyday language, it refers to an uncertain piece of knowledge. 33. Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation State (New York, NY: Times Books, 1992), 219, 114. 34. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 5. 35. A cancellation that Bouteflika, elected in 1999, recognized as “violence”: “En précipitant les militants du FIS dans la clandestinité, en cassant ses structures d’encadrement, les dirigeants du pays ont joué avec le feu” [By forcing the FIS militants underground, by breaking its framework structures, the leaders of the country were playing with fire] (Stora, La guerre invisible, 19). On the other hand, “playing” the game of democracy once again left the Islamists the possibility of running the country (which happened elsewhere, in some Arab countries and territories), which occidental powers gave themselves the right to firmly and more or less tacitly oppose, by lending their support to military dictatorships (in Maghreb, Egypt, and the Middle East). 36. Boudiaf had just returned from exile, promulgating a policy of “clean up the corruption.” Becoming rapidly aware that this was not merely talk, some were thrown off guard. 37. Stora, La Guerre invisible, 38. 38. I am not including the Algerian Communist Party here because its base was primarily European, and the small number of Algerian Muslims that it did contain joined the FLN in 1956 (See Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 70). 39. See Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 68–72, 79, 104–5. Messali Hadj came from a family of artisans and farmers from Tlemcen. He did his military service in Bordeaux in 1918 and then did all sorts of odd jobs to survive in Paris. The Rif War (1921–1926) triggered his political involvement, a career that started while an immigrant and in contact with the French Communist Party. 40. The FLN intercepted many of Messali Hadj’s “disoriented” militants after the arrest of hundreds of those in charge of the MTLD. See Stora, Histoire de la guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962), 33. 41. Outside the country, the exiles Rocine Aït Ahmed, Ahmed Ben Bella, and Mohamed Khider made sure of the FLN’s representation in Cairo (Stora, Histoire de la guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962), 10).

268

Chapter 5

42. And those that followed during the subsequent days, notably at Guelma and Kherrata, where tens of thousands of bodies were smoked out and thrown into wells. 43. The FLN/MNA conflict caused more than 9,000 wounded on the metropolitan land along with 6,000 deaths and 14,000 wounded in Algeria (Stora, Histoire de la guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962), 35). 44. Stora, La Guerre invisible, 38. 45. On the shared oblivion and the Algerian War as a “lieu de mémoire” in the Algerian collective imagination, see Abderrahmane Moussaoui, “L’Algérie d’une guerre à l’autre. Une violente mémoire,” in Algérie. D’une guerre à l’autre, ed. Catherine Brun (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2014), 85–101. 46. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 166, 167. 47. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 167. 48. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 195. 49. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 197. 50. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 246. 51. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 206. 52. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 169. My emphasis. 53. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 74. 54. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 209. 55. Fanon, Œuvres, 557. 56. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Farrington (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1968), 165. 57. Fanon, Œuvres, 557. 58. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 166. 59. Boualem Sansal, “Une guerre pour rien,” Débats, Le Figaro, November 5, 2014, 16. 60. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 31. 61. Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé: précédé du portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1957), 47. 62. Fanon, Œuvres, 558; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 168. 63. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 31. 64. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 33. 65. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 33–34. 66. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 213. My emphasis. 67. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 31. 68. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 31. 69. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 54, 47. 70. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 213. 71. The topic of Arab anti-Semitism is addressed in more depth by Sansal in the novel Le Village de l’Allemand (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), as well as in his essay Gouverner au nom d’Allah (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). 72. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 317. 73. Alain Vincenot, Pieds-Noirs. Les bernés de l’histoire (Paris: Archipel, 2014), 14. 74. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 127.

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

269

75. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 13. 76. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 134. My emphasis. 77. Stora, La Guerre invisible, 38. 78. The majority were members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were persecuted in the Middle East, which was governed by secular pan-Arabist governments at the time, such as Nasser’s in Egypt, el Assad’s in Syria, the powerful Baath party (secular) in Iraq, King Hussein in Jordan. See Sansal, Gouverner au nom d’Allah, 12. 79. “Face à un État puissant, arbitraire, autoritaire, il existe une tradition de refuge dans un espace privé (qui s’appellerait le religieux), permettant de résister à un État considéré comme impie et antireligieux. Cette mémoire-là va de la résistance de l’émir Abd el-Kader au début du XIXe siècle, à la pénétration coloniale française, jusqu’à la guerre d’Algérie. Le rapport de défiance à l’État par instrumentalisation du religieux va se transmettre” (Stora, La Guerre invisible, 39) [In the face of a powerful, arbitrary, and authoritarian State, there is a tradition of seeking refuge in the private space (which could be called religious), allowing for resistance against a State considered to be impious and antireligious. That memory goes from the resistance of emir Abd el-Kader at the beginning of the 19th century, to the French colonial arrival, up to the Algerian war. The relationship of defiance against the State through instrumentalization of the religious sphere will be transmitted]. 80. Stora, La Guerre invisible, 41. 81. See in particular: Habib Souaïda, Le Procès de la sale guerre. Algérie: le général-major Khaled Nezzar contre le lieutenant Habib Souaïda (Paris: La Découverte, 2002). This was the retranscription of the defamation trial of July 5, 2002, of this lieutenant, accused by General Nezzar (ex-leader of the regime and former minister of defense) of having defamed him during a television show (on French channel 5, “Droit d’auteurs, spécial Algérie,” on May 27, 2001), during which he said: “Chez nous […] les hommes politiques sont des généraux, c’est eux qui décident. Il n’y a pas de président, plus même. Il y avait des généraux, ce sont eux les politiciens, c’est eux qui ont fait cette guerre. C’est eux qui ont tué des milliers de gens pour rien du tout. C’est eux qui ont décidé d’arrêter le processus électoral, c’est eux les vrais responsables” (Souaïda, Le Procès de la sale guerre, 19–20) [Back home […] politicians are generals, they are the ones who decide. There is no president—There were generals, they were the politicians, they are the ones who waged this war. They are the ones who killed thousands of people over nothing. They are the ones who decided to stop the electoral process, they are the ones who are truly responsible]. See also: Mohammed Samraoui, Chronique des années de sang. Algérie: comment les services secrets ont manipulés les groupes Islamistes (Paris: Denoël, 2003). This former soldier, exiled, gives testimony of his experience in the army and provides information on the Groupes Islamistes Armés (GIA), which completely contradicts the official version, the Manichean vision of a state and its army fighting against Islamists. 82. In his testimonial book, Qui a tué à Bentalha?, Nesroulah Yous, one of the survivors of the atrocities that happened in Bentalha, a village that was plunged into terror between September 22 and 23 year (women, babies, and elderly people massacred with axes or with their throats slit), asks himself about the responsibility of law enforcement forces in the fate of 417 tortured bodies: “Pourquoi ces dernières

270

Chapter 5

ont-elles empêché les habitants des quartiers voisins d’intervenir? Pourquoi les blindés déployés au plus fort du massacre n’ont-ils pas bouclé les issues pour empêcher les tueurs de fuir?” Yous presents the idea of the existence of a special unit in the army, a sort of “death squad” that perpetrated these massacres in the name of Islamists (see Stora, La Guerre invisible, 33). 83. The election of the general Liamine Zeroual, on November 16, 1995. 84. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 19. 85. Historians consider that the armed conflict and the urban territory between the years 1993 and 1995 was run by young men between twenty and thirty years of age who came from poor areas, who were poorly educated, and who were unfamiliar with religion. In Sansal’s novel, the Islamist group to which Farid belonged is not mentioned. However, he mentions the GIA, a veritable fundamentalist network, that was composed of “des ‘anciens’ de la guerre d’Afghanistan et des hommes ayant appartenus à un premier maquis Islamiste mis en place dès 1982 […]” (Stora, La Guerre invisible, 18) [‘veterans’ of the Afghan war and men who had belonged to a first Islamist underground militia created in 1982]. In addition to the GIA, several other armed groups fought during this war: le Mouvement de l’État islamique and le Front islamique du Djihad armé, notably responsible for the wave of assassinations of intellectuals in 1993. 86. The amnesty was partial in 2002 and was expanded in 2005. 87. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 314. 88. Boualem Sansal, Poste restante: Alger. Lettre de colère et d’espoir à mes compatriots (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 71. 89. Stora, La Guerre invisible, 63. This French support nonetheless was related to a dynamic of neocolonial domination (Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Postcolonial’”), as monitoring Algeria and meddling in its affairs gave France not only a diplomatic upper hand but also economic advantages (gas export agreements, and so on). 90. Stora, La Guerre invisible, 47. 91. Samraoui, Chronique des années de guerre, 9, 12, 228, etc. In addition, France, accused of holding up the Algerian regime, underwent a wave of attacks on its own soil, from July to December 1995. However, as Benjamin Stora highlights, “Si la situation dans ce pays [l’Algérie] est perçue comme une ‘menace,’ ce n’est pas tant par possibilité de transfert du terrorisme d’une rive à l’autre de la Méditerranée que par l’appréhension fantasmatique de l’islam, arrivée par le souvenir de la guerre d’Algérie. La fausse neutralité du regard français se dévoile dans cette logique de préjugés continués” (Stora, La Guerre invisible, 58) [If the situation in this country [Algeria] is perceived as a “threat,” it is not so much from the possibility of terrorism transferring from one side of the Mediterranean to the other as out of the phantasmal fear of Islam, received through the memory of the Algerian War. The false neutrality of the French perspective is revealed in this logic of continued prejudices]. 92. Sansal, Poste restante, 71–72. 93. Stora, La Guerre invisible, 13. 94. In 1976, a charter completely erased the existence of the Berber language and culture in Algeria. The “Berber spring” in April 1980 constituted, in vain, an attempt

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

271

to correct that injustice, which betrays the FLN’s denial of the existence and the rights of Berbers. These demands are still current today. 95. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 121, 131. 96. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 313. 97. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 21. 98. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 199. 99. Sansal, Poste restante, 47. 100. Étienne Balibar, “Algérie-France: regards croisés,” Lignes 30 (February 1997): 7–22, 13–14. The translation is from Étienne Balibar, “Algeria, France: One Nation or Two?,” trans. Adele Parker, in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, eds. Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (London: Verso, 1999), 166. 101. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 286–87. 102. Kaoutar Harchi, Je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne (Paris: Pauvert, 2016), 16. 103. Albert Memmi, Le Racisme: description, definition, traitement (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). 104. Boualem Sansal, Rue Darwin (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 87. 105. Boualem Sansal, Poste restante: Alger. Lettre de colère et d’espoir à mes compatriotes (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). 15. In this essay addressed to his fellow citizens, Sansal deconstructs concisely and efficiently the four “Constantes nationales” (40), that is to say, the myths that the official discourse disseminates and that people are not allowed to question: “Le peuple algérien est arabe” [The Algerian people is Arab] (45), “Le peuple algérien est musulman” [The Algerian people is Muslim] (49), “L’arabe est notre langue” [Arabic is our language] (53) and the glory of martyrs in “La guerre de libération et son histoire” [the war of independence and its history] (62). In particular, he shows that the majority of the Algerian population is made up of Berber peoples (“Kabyles, Chaoui, Mozabites, Touaregs, etc.,” 45), but that it also includes “juifs, pieds-noirs, Turcs, coulougis, Africains” (45), in addition to the small Arab minority, which according to him, represents 16–18 percent, grosso modo. Since there are no official ethnic statistics, it is difficult to evaluate Sansal’s perspective on this. 106. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 78, 229. 107. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 245. 108. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 266. 109. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 251. 110. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 254. 111. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 174, 177, 178, 71. 112. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 95, 93. 113. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 21. 114. Jan Potocki, Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse. Version de 1804 (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). 115. Vincent Debaene, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? Cotonou 1935,” Speech at Harvard University, “France and the World” Seminar, October 21, 2015. For example, see the text “Le Soudan français,” Revue Europe, February 15, 1929, written by Malian author Fily Dabo Sissoko and signed by Edouard Monod-Herzen. See also

272

Chapter 5

Eleni Coundouriotis, Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1999). 116. According to the Larousse Encyclopedia, the city is home to the remains of a camp of the Roman III Augusta legion, established under Vespasian. 117. Stoler, Duress, 101. 118. Stoler, Duress, 93. 119. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 349. 120. Bernadette Rey Mimoso-Ruiz, “Boualem Sansal: les yeux grands ouverts sur l’islam,” in Les Écrivains maghrébins francophones et l’Islam: constance dans la diversité, ed. Najib Redouane (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013), 390. 121. Abdelbaki Allaoui, “Harraga de Boualem Sansal,” in Mémoires et imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraïbe, eds. Samia Kassab-Charfi and Mohamed Bahi (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013), 145 and 148–49. 122. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 77, 81, 99, 134, 135 and 209, 146, 171, 196, 225, 277, 331. 123. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 353, 28. 124. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 20, 232, 245, 12. 125. Denis Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste et son maître (Paris: Flammarion, 1997); Denis Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau (Paris: Gallimard, 2006); Denis Diderot, Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (Genève: Droz, 1955). 126. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 215. 127. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 11. 128. Mireille Rosello, Encontres méditerranéennes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 32. 129. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 261. 130. Matthew 16, 16–18. 131. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 261. 132. Matthew 16, 16–19. 133. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 21. 134. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 71, 188. 135. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 298. 136. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 73. 137. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 64. 138. Liauzu, Enjeux urbains au Maghreb, 1985. 139. Jocelyne Dakhlia, “1830, une rencontre?,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période colonial (Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012), 146. 140. Dakhlia, “1830, une rencontre?,” 146. The historian shows that medieval and modern colonial situations differ from nineteenth-century European imperialism in the fact that the latter constituted a unilateral domination whereas the former two were based on relatively balanced geopolitical relationships. 141. Dakhlia, “1830, une rencontre?,” 144. 142. Dakhlia, “1830, une rencontre?,” 144. 143. Dakhlia, “1830, une rencontre?,” 143. 144. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 220. 145. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 249.

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

273

146. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 48. 147. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 48; Albert Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized, trans. Howard Greenfield (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967). 148. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 48; Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized, 10. 149. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 51; Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized, 13. 150. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 57; Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized, 18. 151. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 57. 152. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 83. 153. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 58; Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized, 24. 154. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 80; Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized, 43. 155. Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 89. 156. However, the possibility of a biographic influence must be noted in the story of this friendship between Pieds-Noirs and native families: Boualem Sansal’s family retrieves, during independence, the house of Pieds-Noirs’ friends leaving for France, see Kaoutar Harchi, Je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne (Paris: Pauvert, 2016), 235–36. Sansal’s maternal family was highly Francophile, especially the grandfather who had strong ties to France (Harchi, Je n’ai qu’une langue, 227–29). 157. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 11, 21, 38, 82, 220, 343, 360, etc. 158. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 48. 159. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 11. The long duration of the violence of the battles of conquest shows that the establishment of the French presence in Algeria did not fall under the consent of local populations. See auteur “1830–1880: la conquête coloniale et la résistance des Algériens,” in Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 19–45. The Dey of Alger’s famous “coup d’éventail” to the French consul, pretext for the 1830 invasion, did not constitute a gallant act of invitation but rather the opposite: it communicated the Dey’s discontent regarding debts unpaid by France (See Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 12–18). 160. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 66. 161. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 269. 162. Stora describes this myth regarding the Pieds-Noirs as a “légende tenace qui les voit dans la campagne surveillant de près leurs grands domaines” [stubborn legend that has them in the countryside closely surveilling their large estates] (Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 87). 163. See Grangaud, “Le droit colonial au service,” 70–76; Guignard, “Le sénatusconsulte de 1863,” 76–82. 164. Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 87 and 89; Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 74. 165. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 68. In the beginning, the creation of a French peasantry in Algeria went through “la création [de] villages de colonisation encadrée par l’armée, où les colons, qui bénéficiaient des concessions de terres

274

Chapter 5

gratuites, sont conduits, chaque matin vers leur lopin de terre par des soldats” [the creation [of] colonization villages surrounded by the army, where the colonists, who received free land concessions, are led each morning to their bit of earth by soldiers] (68). Subsequently, with the development of private colonization, the concentration of land was the same as it was in 1930. For example, of the 26,000 colonists, only 5,000 of them “accaparaient 74% de la richesse produite à partir de la terre” (73, according to Daniel Leconte’s statistics in Les Pieds-Noirs. Histoire et portrait d’une communauté and those of Raymond Aron in Les origines de la guerre d’Algérie). 166. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 68. 167. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 68. 168. Savarèse, L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, 73. 169. His discourse also has the almost certainly inadvertent consequence of removing responsibility from the OAS, as neither the French government nor the FLN had anticipated this exile (Shepard). 170. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 338. 171. Harchi, Je n’ai qu’une langue, 249, 250. 172. Harchi, Je n’ai qu’une langue, 254. 173. Harchi, Je n’ai qu’une langue, 254. 174. Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 175. Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations, or the Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 6. 176. Harchi, Je n’ai qu’une langue, 272. 177. On this point, see the analysis of Harchi, Je n’ai qu’une langue, 267–68. 178. Harchi, Je n’ai qu’une langue, 281. 179. Boualem Sansal, Dis-moi le paradis (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 266. 180. Boualem Sansal. “Une guerre pour rien.” Le Figaro, November 5, 2014. https​ :/​/ww​​w​.lef​​i garo​​.fr​/v​​ox​/hi​​stoir​​e​/201​​4​/11/​​05​/31​​005​-2​​01411​​05ART​​FIG00​​181​-u​​ne​-​gu​​ erre-​​pour-​​rien.​​php. 181. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 199. 182. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, NY: Summit Books, 1988). 183. Gayatri Spivak, “Bonding in difference,” in Another Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, ed. Alfred Arteaga (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994), 277. 184. Dakhlia, “1830, une rencontre?,” 143. 185. Spivak, “Bonding in Difference,” 277. 186. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 37. 187. Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 98–99. Germaine Tillon stated in 1957 that less than 10 percent of the indigenous population was literate and had access to education. 188. Thénault, “1881–1918,” 166, 168. See also Sylvie Thénault, Une Drôle de justice. Les magistrats dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 2001), and Thénault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale.

“Aller Postcolonial—Retour Neocolonial”?

275

189. On Sansal’s anti-religious sentiment and personal misadventures with the Islamists, see Harchi, Je n’ai qu’une langue, 250–51. 190. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 218–19. 191. Sansal, Poste restante, 78–79. 192. Sansal’s idea is oddly echoed in former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 infamous Dakar Speech, in which he states: “La colonisation fut une grande faute mais de cette grande faute est né l’embryon d’une destinée commune” [Colonization was a great fault but from this great fault the embryo of a shared destiny was born]; Nicolas Sarkozy, “Le Discours de Dakar,” Le Monde, November 9, 2007, http:​/​/www​​.lemo​​nde​.f​​r​/afr​​ique/​​artic​​le​/20​​07​/11​​/09​/l​​e​-dis​​cours​​-de​-d​​akar_​​​97678​​6​_321​​ 2​.htm​​l. In other words, colonization is recognized as a wrong, but its effects are—or, at least, can be—positive. 193. Dakhlia, “1830, une rencontre?,” 144. 194. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 353. 195. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 16, 179. 196. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 320, 322, 324. “Amazigh” is the Berber term for “Berber.” 197. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 325. 198. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 16. 199. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 287–88. 200. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 98. 201. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 307, 308, 345. 202. Stoler, Duress, 78. 203. Stoler, Duress, 117. 204. Stoler, Duress, 117. 205. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 32. 206. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 432. 207. To Las Vegas in particular (23, 120, 267), that is, a place where history does not “matter” (as long as one likes to gamble), where one is free of becoming a new individual through money. 208. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 70. 209. Sansal, L’Enfant fou, 16, 11. 210. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 5. 211. Sansal in Vincenot, Pieds-noirs, 15.

Conclusion Mosaic Fathers and Spectral Truths

Through the narratives analyzed in this book, what I would call a “question of the father” emerges: the narrators’ fathers, because of their minority condition as well as their absence, have involuntarily blocked the transmission of their Algerian history and, at the same time, provoked a “mal de vérité” [truth fever] (to borrow Coquio’s expression) in their descendants, that is to say a painful desire to know this past.1 The four fathers in the works of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui, and Sansal are all Mosaic figures caught in an acute dialectic between identity and strangeness, one that poses the question of the double and therefore the question of historical truth. Indeed, the fathers that haunt these texts are “double”—and even two, as in Sansal: born in Algeria, they are—have become—French (in Sansal, the biological father is Arab, the adoptive father is French). However, these fathers are strangers to France (due to either state policies, or a cultural difference, or even at times their lack of direct experience with the physical territory of mainland France), as well as estranged from Algeria, the nation from which they are excluded. The Mosaic fate that Zahia Rahmani suggests, in Moze, regarding her Harki father, is, in a sense, shared by other minority fathers. As in the case of Moses, a double man, Jew and non-Jew, Midianite and Egyptian, one with a prophetic destiny and, at the same time, a more than human death, and who, on the threshold, will not enter the Promised Land—in short, as in the case of “Fragile Moses,” to take up the title by Jean-Christophe Attias, there is no third path for these fathers who are at once “exemplary” (in the Derridean sense of representative) and historically fragile.2 It is their fate never to enter a “Promised Land.” Except that in our texts, it is not God who hands down the death sentence, but rather it is colonial history which prevented these men from negotiating the viability of a complex identity, and which, in the end, killed them—as the tuberculosis 277

278

Conclusion

metaphor in Cixous reminds us, or the direct and colossal accusation of Rahmani (“J’accuse la France d’avoir tué mon père” [I accuse France of killing my father]), or again, in Sansal, the murder of the biological father by a member of the FLN. As filiation narratives staging the paradoxical inheritance of a blocked transmission, these texts display symptoms of the legacy of colonial minority identities. And, by definition, symptoms always trace back to something larger than themselves. Traces are often conceived as “déchets” [scraps] or “données marginales” [marginal phenomena], which, as Carlo Ginsburg says, “permettent d’appréhender une réalité plus profonde” [allow one to grasp a deeper reality].3 However, this comprehension via the symptom unfolds with resistance. Georges Didi-Huberman, whose symptom paradigm is close to Ginsburg’s theory, explains: “le symptôme est un événement critique, une singularité, une intrusion, mais il est en même temps la mise en œuvre d’une structure signifiante, un système que l’événement a pour charge de faire surgir, mais partiellement, contradictoirement, de façon que le sens n’advienne que comme énigme ou phénomène-indice” [the symptom is a critical event, a singularity, an intrusion, but it is at the same time the implementation of a signifying structure, of a system that the event is charged with making surge forth, but partially, contradictorily, in such fashion as the meaning is expressed only as an enigma or as the appearance of something].4 Such are the structures that I perceive within the singular narratives of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui, and Sansal: these texts bring to the fore a truth that is spectral, oblique. Often the authors use fiction, following the double meaning of the French expression “faire la verité”: to “discover” it and to “fabricate it”—two endeavors that are not contradictory, as René Major underscores following from Derrida’s remark, because one can imagine truth within the horizon of its discovery, and can discover by imagining.5 The spectral or oblique character of the truth of each colonial minority comes, of course, from a collective repression of Algerian history in France and of French history in Algeria, but it also derives—I would like to propose—from a repression of the colonial fantasy (which, at times, became a reality) of killing the Algerian father. The colonization of Algeria was not a genocide, but, according to my hypothesis, there was, in the colonialist mindset, an unconscious and unmentionable drive to exterminate.6 The texts analyzed in this book all manifest, in very different ways, a psychoanalytic relationship to history: not only through the presence of psychoanalysis within the narrative (an obvious presence in Mes mauvaises pensées or Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage), but above all in the sense that the narratives bring to light (in a paradoxical gesture) the archiving of a colonial unconscious of the father’s murder.7 In order to explain this idea, we must return to Moses and to the tryptic formed by the texts of Freud, Yerushalmi, and Derrida.

Conclusion

279

One of the central hypotheses of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism is that the Hebrews, after an uprising, killed the one who had given them monotheism, Moses, and that this murder, while repressed from collective memory, shows through in symptoms. In Freud’s Moses. Judaism Terminable and Interminable, Judaism historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi reacts to this idea by asserting that the real question—the one on which the validity of Freud’s analogy between religious tradition and individual neurosis depends—has less to do with the historical truth of Moses (did Moses truly give the religion of Akhenaten to the Hebrews, who then killed him) than with determining whether such a murder of the father can be repressed and forgotten.8 Indeed, Yerushalmi recalls that Jewish tradition has always refused to hide the crimes of the Jews, and that the Hebrew Bible rigorously and precisely recounts the uprising of the Hebrews, who, on the verge of stoning Moses and his brother Aaron, did not kill them. Yerushalmi thus invalidates Freud’s hypothesis by asserting that such a murder would have been remembered. Yet, in Mal d’archive, Derrida responds to Yerushalmi by claiming that acts of memory and repression are not contradictory: it is possible to “rappeler et archiver cela même qu’on refoule, l’archiver en le refoulant (car le refoulement est une archivation), c’est-à-dire archiver autrement, refouler l’archive en archivant le refoulement” [to recall and archive the very thing one represses, archive it while repressing it (because repression is an archivization), that is to say, to archive otherwise, to repress the archive while archiving the repression].9 Thus, the Hebrews could very well have both remembered and “forgotten,” that is to say retained the memory by archiving. Thus, the texts I analyzed in this book can be considered archives in two senses: on the one hand, in the “classic” sense, as they constitute a trace of a past that is revealed through the registration of its absence. But also, on the other hand, they produce an archive by indicating a repression, precisely that which is found in the interstices of the spectral presence of a murderous past. As a consequence, according to this Freudian perspective, the official archive (state narratives) can be read as a “principe archontique” [archontic principle]10 whose authority can only be questioned through a repressed or suppressed patricide—of the “other” fathers (Algerian ones in terms of France, and vice versa). In the works that I have examined, the mobilization of a multidirectional memory, as Michael Rothberg has defined it, highlights the need to resort to other stories (to the stories of Others) to speak oneself, to tell one’s own (hi)story. The echoes, the illuminating parallels, or even mobilizing metaphors with Jewish history are very present in these texts. One could say that there is a sort of “becoming Jewish” or a “Jewish model” of minority memories. Indeed, the construction of a Mosaic paternal figure comes to enhance the archive, not, as Derrida says, as an “autorité absolue et méta-textuelle” [absolute and meta-textual authority]11 but rather as an

280

Conclusion

auctoritas, or authorial self: “l’interprétation de l’archive [ici, Mosaïque] [. . .] ne peut éclairer, lire, interpréter, établir son objet, à savoir un héritage donné, qu’en s’y inscrivant, c’est-à-dire en l’ouvrant et en l’enrichissant assez pour y prendre place de plein droit” [the interpretation of the archive [here, Mosaic] [. . .] can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object, namely a given inheritance, by inscribing itself into it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it enough to have a rightful place in it].12 The archive has a spectral structure, as Derrida emphasizes, and it is from the future that it is produced. But what I call “Jewish,” in the “becoming Jewish” of these minority memories, depends on a certain irreducibility of Jewishness (in contrast with Judaism and religion, which are “terminable,” as Yerushalmi elaborates, in a book whose title specifies this opposition). This irreducibility, which defies any attempt at definition, is precisely “l’ouverture du rapport à l’avenir, l’expérience de l’avenir” [the opening of a relation with the future, the experience of the future].13 And the masterful stroke by Derrida, in his conversation with Yerushalmi, is to conceive the opening of this future (i.e., to add a dimension to the opening), which also signifies an “injonction à la mémoire” [injunction of memory],14 not only for the Jews but also for “tous les lieux et tous les peuples qui seraient prêts à se reconnaître dans cette anticipation et dans cette injunction” [all the places and all the peoples who would be ready to recognize themselves in this anticipation and in this injunction].15 By refusing the exclusivity and the exclusion inherent in the conception of the One, the unique, Derrida allows for the expression of a discourse hospitable to “tout autre” [every other] : “s’il est juste de se rappeler l’avenir et l’injonction de se rappeler, à savoir l’injonction archontique de garder et de rassembler l’archive, il est non moins juste de se rappeler les autres, les autres autres et les autres en soi” [if it is just to remember the future and the injunction to remember, namely the archontic injunction to guard and to gather the archive, it is no less just to remember the others, the other others and the others in oneself].16 A necessary condition for multidirectional memory, this opening of the archive through and by inclusion of “other” discourses takes place in the texts of Cixous, Rahmani, Bouraoui, and Sansal. While dealing with the negotiation of an identity that defies national and cultural categorizations, these texts create solidarities between different group experiences and go against a competition between victim memories. The identity at stake in each story is always in flux, open to otherness and its self-alterity. To return to and conclude on the question of the symptom revealed by these texts: the repression of a colonial desire for patricide necessarily comes with a spectral sense of colonial Algeria. As long as this unconscious remains, the imaginaries of French Algeria will continue to haunt. And this is why French society (and, consequently and differently, Algerian society) is

Conclusion

281

in the paradoxical current situation, at once of hypermnesia (of the past) and of denial—of what that past truly was, what it truly meant.17 The stumbling block that prevents memory from finding peace, the past from becoming past, is indeed that of the collective unconscious of patricide and of the hierarchies that stem from it. Therefore, this is why the France/Algeria binary and the difficulty of constructing a postcolonial imaginaire that overcomes the colonial opposition are omnipresent in our texts. Even when the narratives evoke larger frameworks, spaces are always envisioned as dichotomous: France and the Maghreb; the Mediterranean region divided between Europe on the north side and a “Muslim” world on the southern side; and finally, a globalized North versus South. While noting the persistence of colonial separations in the post(after)-colonial space-time, the transnational itineraries of the main characters come to upset the dichotomous worlds in which they move. I have tried to show how these works invite readers to shift our understanding of “French” and “Algerian” identities toward a transnational perspective. The critical urgency of this issue is underlined in the current environment by increasing political tensions in France surrounding national identity, history, and immigrant flows. It is also accentuated by the growing demands for new public commemorations that seek to acknowledge silenced memories of trauma but that, in doing so, may further divide society. Dissent about appropriate and inappropriate subjects for commemoration reflects an innate disagreement over the identity of the nation; such dissent revives democracy while paradoxically undoing national borders. Contemporary debates about Islam in France, laïcité, the Muslim-Jewish relationship, and feminism seem to confirm what Ethan Katz claims in his book The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France: that the reality of a de facto multiethnic and multireligious French society was more accepted during colonialization (at the price of an unequal condition) than in the postcolonial Republic, which struggles with the public display of difference, and, therefore, ultimately with the idea of equality for all.18 The hysterical tensions around the public wearing of the veil often transform the media and political debates into caricatures: a position of rigid “laïcisme” (and correlative French feminist positions) oblivious of its own ethnocentrism and of colonial legacies that should inform our vision of justice, on the one hand, and, on the other, a defensive position associating any legitimate critical discourse of the dogma of the Islamic religion with Islamophobia, that prevents fruitful discussion of religion in relation to France’s republican ideals. Essentially, the situation stresses the very same problem as the colonial one: the antagonism between extremist views advocating assimilation and others extolling coexistence, that is, exclusive difference. France has yet to find its inclusive model of diversity.

282

Conclusion

NOTES 1. Catherine Coquio, Le Mal de vérité ou l’utopie de la mémoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015). Coquio derives her expression from Derrida’s “mal d’archive” [archive fever], which he defines as: not only “souffrir d’un mal, d’un trouble” (Coquio, Mal d’archive, 142) [to suffer from a sickness, from a trouble (91)] but also “brûler d’une passion. […] n’avoir de cesse, interminablement, de chercher l’archive là où elle se dérobe” (142) [to burn with a passion […] never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away (91)]. The expression “mal de …” thus designates both a lack and craving, hence my use of the expression “painful desire.” 2. Jean-Christophe Attias, Moïse fragile (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2016). 3. Carlo Ginsburg, “Signes, traces, Pistes. Racines d’un paradigme de l’indice,” Le débat 2 (1980): 3–44, 11, 12. 4. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image. Questions posées aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 307. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park, TX: Penn State Univ Press, 2009), 261. 5. René Major, “La Vérité spectrale de l’homme Moïse,” Revue germanique internationale [En ligne], 14|2000, mis en ligne le 30 août 2011, Accessed Mai 4, 2019, URL: http://journals​.openedition​.org/ rgi/814 ; DOI : 10.4000/rgi.814. 6. One could wonder whether such a collective death drive is a paradoxical consequence of the development of modernity. 7. Derrida defines psychoanalysis as a science of memory and archive (Coquio, Mal d’archive, 56). 8. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 9. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 103; Derrida, Archive Fever, 64. 10. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 147–48; Derrida, Archive Fever, 40. 11. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 109; Derrida, Archive Fever, 68. 12. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 108; Derrida, Archive Fever, 67. 13. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 115; Derrida, Archive Fever, 68. 14. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 121; Derrida, Archive Fever, 75. 15. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 122–23; Derrida, Archive Fever, 77. 16. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 123; Derrida, Archive Fever, 77. 17. The work Entendez-vous dans les montagnes … by Maïssa Bey articulates this difficulty of recognition or admission of guilt without resorting to a figure (e.g., the personification of France in Moze): it directly depicts a man who perpetrated (or was at least complicit in) an act of torture against the (Algerian) narrator’s father. And as Mildred Mortimer points out in her analysis of this text, if, at the end of the book, the man comes close to speaking the truth, this truth turns out to be too painful to be uttered, and its ethical and moral responsibilities too painful to be accepted: “he admits his connection to her father and his tragic demise without clearly assuming responsibility or avowing any culpability” [Mildred Mortimer, Women Fight, Women Write: Texts on the Algerian War (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 123]. 18. Ethan Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood. Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

Bibliography

Abel, Olivier. Le Pardon: briser la dette et l’oubli. Paris: Autrement, 1991. Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. L’Écorce et le noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Translated by Nicolas T. Rand. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994. Agar-Mendouse, Trudy. Violence et Créativité de l’écriture algérienne au féminin. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1999. Agence France Presse. “Montpellier abandonne le projet du musée de l’Histoire de la France et de l’Algérie.” Midi Libre, June 19, 2014. https​:/​/ww​​w​.mid​​ilibr​​e​.fr/​​2014/​​ 06​/19​​/mont​​pelli​​er​-ab​​andon​​ne​-le​​-proj​​et​-du​​-muse​​e​-de-​​l​-his​​toire​​-de​-l​​a​-fra​​nce​-​e​​t​-de-​​l​ -alg​​erie​,1011168​.php. Ageron, Charles-Robert, ed. L’Algérie des Français. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993. Ageron, Charles-Robert. “L’exposition coloniale de 1931: mythe républicain ou mythe impérial.” In Les lieux de mémoire. Tome 1: La République, 561–591. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Ageron, Charles-Robert. “Les supplétifs algériens dans l’armée française pendant la guerre d’Algérie.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 48 (1995): 3–20. Ageron, Charles-Robert. “Mai 1945 en Algérie. Enjeu de mémoire et histoire.” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 39–40 (1995): 52–56. Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London and New York, NY: Verso, 1992. Allaoui, Abdelbaki. “Harraga de Boualem Sansal.” In Mémoires et imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraïbe, edited by Samia Kassab-Charfi and Mohamed Bahi, 145–162. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013. Altounian, Janine. L’Intraduisible. Deuil, Mémoire, Transmission. Paris: Dunot, 2005. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London and New York, NY: Verso, 2006. 283

284

Bibliography

Anderson, Perry, Pierre Nora, and William Olivier Desmond. La Pensée Tiède: Un Regard critique sur la culture française. Translated by William Olivier Desmond. In Suivi de La Pensée réchauffée/Réponse de Pierre Nora. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005. Angelo, Adrienne. “Sujet Buvard, Sujet Bavard: Nina Bouraoui’s Words to Say It.” Women in French Studies 19 (2011): 79–90. Ansky, Michel. Les Juifs d’Algérie du décret Crémieux à la libération. Paris: Le Centre, 1950. Anzieu, Didier. Le Moi-peau. Paris: Dunoz, 1985. Anzieu, Didier. The Skin-Ego. Translated by Naomi Segal. London: Karnac Books, 2016. Armel, Aliette. “Du mot à la vie: un dialogue entre Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous.” Le Magazine Littéraire 430 (April 2004): 22–29. Ayoun, Richard, and Bernard Cohen. Les Juifs d’Algérie: 2000 ans d’histoire. Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1992. Balibar, Etienne. “Algérie-France: regards croisés.” Lignes 30, 7–22. Paris: Hazan, February 1997. Balibar, Étienne. “Algeria, France: One Nation or Two?” Translated by Adele Parker. In Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, edited by Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin. London: Verso, 1999. Balibar, Etienne. Droit de cité. La Tour d’Aigues: L’Aube, 1998. Bancel, Nicolas. “L’histoire difficile: esquisse d’une historiographie du fait colonial et postcolonial.” In La Fracture coloniale, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, 85–95. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Bancel, Nicolas, and Pascal Blanchard. “La colonisation: du débat sur la guerre d’Algérie au discours de Dakar.” In Les Guerres de mémoires. La France et son histoire, edited by Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, 137–154. Paris: La Découverte, 2008. Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard, and Ahmed Boubeker. Le Grand repli. Paris: La Découverte, 2015. Bancel, Nicolas, Florence Bernault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubebker, Achille Mbembe, and Fraçoise Vergès, eds. Ruptures postcoloniales: Les nouveaux visages de la société française. Paris: La Découverte, 2010. Barclay, Fiona. Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb. Lanham, MD and Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2011. Bec, Pierre. Manuel pratique d’occitan moderne. Paris: Picard, 1973. Berjano, Esther. “On entendait les cris des gens dans les chambres à gaz.” Géopolis. Francetvinfo, 2015. Accessed March 12, 2015. Benayoun, Chantal. “Juifs, pieds-noirs, séfarades ou les trois termes d’une citoyenneté.” In Marseille et le choc des décolonisations, edited by Jean-Jacques Jordi and Emile Temime, 125–132. Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1996. Bennington, Geoffrey, and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991. Bensmaïa, Réda. Experimental Nations, or the Invention of the Maghreb. Translated by Alyson Waters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Bibliography

285

Bensoussan, Albert. L’Échelle de Mesrod, ou Parcours algérien de mémoire juive. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1984. Berque, Jacques. Les Arabes. Paris: Delpire, 1959. Beschea-Fache, Caroline. “The Métis Body: Double Mirror.” In Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility, edited by Cybelle H. McFadden and Sandrine F. Teixido, 99–124. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. Besnasci-Lancou, Fatima, and Abderahmen Moumen. Les Harkis. Paris: Le cavalier bleu, 2008. Besnaci-Lancou, Fatima, and Gilles Manceron, eds. Les Harkis dans la colonisation et ses suites. Paris: L’Atelier, 2008. Besnaci-Lancou, Fatima, Benoit Falaize, and Gilles Manceron, eds. Les Harkis. Histoire, Mémoire et Transmission. Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2010. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2004. Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds. La Fracture coloniale. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Blanchard, Pascal, and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, eds. Les Guerres de mémoires. La France et son histoire. Paris: La Découverte, 2008. Blévis, Laure. “La situation coloniale entre guerre et paix. Enjeux et conséquences d’une controverse de qualification.” Politix 104 (April 2013): 87–104. Bornand, Marie. Témoignage et fiction: les récits de rescapés dans la littérature de langue française (1945–2000). Genève: Droz, 2004. Bouchène, Abderrahmane, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, eds. Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Branche, Raphaëlle. La Guerre d’Algérie: une histoire apaisée?. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Breteau, Pierre. “Elections régionales 2015: comment le score du FN a explosé depuis le 1er tour des régionales de 2004.” Le Monde, December 7, 2015. https​:/​/ ww​​w​.lem​​onde.​​fr​/le​​s​-dec​​odeur​​s​/art​​icle/​​2015/​​12​/07​​/comm​​ent​-l​​e​-fro​​nt​-na​​tiona​​l​-a​e​​xplos​​e​-dep​​uis​-l​​e​-pre​​mier-​​tour-​​des​-r​​egion​​a​les-​​de​-20​​04​_48​​26232​​_4355​​770​.h​​tml. Brun, Catherine, ed. Algérie. D’une guerre à l’autre. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2014. Brun, Catherine. “Algérie romans. ‘Rejeux’ et ‘inguérissable’.” In Mémoires occupées: fictions françaises et Seconde Guerre mondiale, edited by Marc Dambre, 223–231. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2013. Brun, Catherine. “Quel(s) savoir(s) pour quelle(s) mémoire(s) de la guerre d’Algérie? Histoire, Ignorance, Mémoire(s).” Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire 117 (2014): 67–74. doi:10.4000/temoigner.725. Brun, Catherine. “Résurgences/oublis: L’exemple de la guerre d’Algérie.” French Forum 41 (2016): 63–74. Bouraoui, Nina. Garçon manqué. Paris: Livre de Poche, 2000.

286

Bibliography

Bouraoui, Nina. Tomboy. Translated by Marjorie Attignol Salvodon and JehanneMarie Gavarini. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Bouraoui, Nina. Mes mauvaises pensées. Paris: Stock, 2005. Bouraoui, Nina. Poupée Bella. Paris: Stock, 2004. Bouraoui, Nina. La Voyeuse interdite. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and literature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Brower, Benjamin. “Les violences de la conquête.” In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, edited by Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, 58–63. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Calle-Gruber, Mireille. “La langue des alliances.” Mon Algériance. Études littéraires 33, no. 3 (2001): 83–94. Calle-Gruber, Mireille, and Marie Odile Germain, eds. Genèses Généalogies Genres. Autour de l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous. Paris: Galilée, 2006. Camus, Albert. La Chute. Paris: Gallimard, 1956. Camus, Albert. L’Étranger. Paris: Gallimard, 1942. Camus, Albert. La Peste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Cardinal, Marie. Les Mots pour le dire. Paris: Grasset, 1975. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Cayrol, Jean. Nuit et Brouillard. Paris: Fayard, 1997. Certeau, Michel De. L’Écriture de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Certeau, Michel De. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1992. Charbit, Tom. Les Harkis. Paris: La Découverte, 2006. Chaulet Achour, Christiane. “Silence de père, écriture de fille. Le père ‘postcolonial’: Maïssa Bey et Zahia Rahmani.” In Pères en textes. Médias et Littératures, 103–117. Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2006. Chirac, Jacques. “Discours de M. Jacques CHIRAC, Président de la République, à l’occasion de la journée d’hommage national aux Harkis.” Avec le Président Chirac. jacqueschirac​-asso​.​fr, September 5, 2001. http:​/​/www​​.jacq​​uesch​​irac-​​asso.​​ fr​/ar​​chive​​s​-ely​​see​.f​​r​/ely​​see​/e​​lysee​​.fr​/f​​ranca​​is​/in​​terve​​ntion​​s​/dis​​cours​​_et​_d​​eclar​​ ation​​s​/20​0​​1​/sep​​tembr​​e​/fi0​​02240​​.html​. Civil, Marie. “Made in Algeria – Généalogie d’un territoire.” Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, December 10, 2015. https://mia​.hypotheses​.org​/138. Cixous, Hélène. “Algéries, Premières douleurs.” Expressions maghrébines 2, no. 2 (2013): 151–162. Cixous, Hélène. “Ce corps étranjuif.” In Judéités: questions pour Jacques Derrida, edited by Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, 59–83. Paris: Galilée, 2003. Cixous, Hélène. “Ce corps étranjuif.” In Préface in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, edited and translated by Bettina Bergo, edited by Joseph Cohen, Raphael Zagury-Orly, translated by Michael B. Smith, 53–54. New York, NY: Fordham UP, 2007. Cixous, Hélène. Entre l’écriture. Paris: Des femmes, 1986.

Bibliography

287

Cixous, Hélène. Jours de l’an. Paris: Des femmes, 1990. Cixous, Hélène. La Jeune née. Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1975. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. London: I.B. Tauris, 1996. Cixous, Hélène. L’Amour même dans la boîte aux lettres. Paris: Galilée, 2005. Cixous, Hélène. Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage. Scènes primitives. Paris: Galilée, 2000. Cixous, Hélène. Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes. Translated by Beverly Bie Brahic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006. Cixous, Hélène. “Lettre à Zohra Drif.” Leggendaria 14 (1999): 4–9. Cixous, Hélène. “Mon Algériance.” Les Inrockuptibles 115 (August–September 1997): 70–74. Cixous, Hélène. OR, les lettres de mon père. Paris: Des femmes, 1997. Cixous, Hélène. “Pieds nus.” In Une enfance algérienne, edited by Leïla Sebbar, 57–66. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Cixous, Hélène. Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif. Paris: Galilée, 2001. Cixous, Hélène. “Quelle heure est-il ou La Porte (elle qu’on ne passe pas).” In Le Passage des frontiers – autour de Jacques Derrida, 83–98. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Cixous, Hélène. Si près. Paris: Galilée, 2006. Cixous, Hélène. So Close. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2009. Cixous, Hélène. “Stigmata, or Job the dog.” In Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 243–261. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. Cixous, Hélène. Stigmata. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. London: Routledge, 2005. Cixous, Hélène. Tombe. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2008. Cixous, Hélène. Vivre l’orange. Paris: Des femmes, 1979. Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Hélène Cixous. Photos de racines. Paris: Des femmes, 1994. Cohen, Erik H., ed. Les Juifs de France, valeurs et identités. Paris: FSJU, 2002. Coissard, Françoise. “Battre le fer – Jeu de la chaîne. Les rêveries de la femme sauvage d’Hélène Cixous.” Rue Descartes 32 (2001): 87–94. Coogan, Michael, Marc Brettler, Carol Newsom, and Pheme Perkins. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford: Oxford UP USA – OSO, 2018. Coquio, Catherine. Le Mal de vérité ou l’utopie de la mémoire. Paris: Armand Colin, 2015. Coquio, Catherine, ed. Retours du colonial? Disculpation et réhabilitation de l’histoire coloniale. Nantes: L’Atalante, 2008. Coundouriotis, Eleni. Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999. Crapanzano, Vincent. “The Dead but Living Father. The Living but Dead Father.” In The Dead Father. A Psychoanalytic Inquiry, edited by Lila J. Kalinich and Stuart W. Taylor, 163–173. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008. Crapanzano, Vincent. The Harkis. The Wound that Never Heals. Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 2012.

288

Bibliography

Crivello, Maryline, and Jean-Noël Pelen, eds. Individu, Récit, Histoire. Aix-enProvence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2008. Debaene, Vincent. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? Cotonou 1935.” France and the World Seminar, Harvard University, October 21, 2015. Dakhlia, Jocelyne. “1830, une rencontre?” In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, edited by Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, 142–149. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Davidson, Basil. The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State. New York, NY: Times Books, 1992. Debrauwere-Miller, Nathalie. “Le ‘Malgérien’ d’Hélène Cixous.” MLN 124, no. 4 (2009): 848–867. Dejean, Mathieu. “A Montpellier, le Musée d’histoire de France et d’Algérie déchaîne les polémiques.” Les Inrocks, Lesinrocks, June 17, 2014. https​:/​/ww​​w​.les​​inroc​​ ks​.co​​m​/201​​4​/06/​​17​/ar​​ts​/ac​​tuali​​te​/mo​​ntpel​​lier-​​musee​​-dhis​​toire​​-fran​​ce​-da​​lg​eri​​e​cro​​isee-​​chemi​​ns/. De La Genardière, Claude. “D’une Algérie à l’autre. Des parcours narratifs entre histoire et psychanalyse.” In Individu, Récit, Histoire, edited by Maryline Crivello and Jean-Noël Pelen, 211–224. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2008. Delbo, Charlotte. Aucun de nous ne reviendra. Paris: Minuit, 1970. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. Translated by Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Milles Plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit, 1975. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. Demeure: Maurice Blanchot. Paris: Galilée, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony.” In The Instant of My Death. Translated by Elisabeth Rottenberg, edited by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. L’Animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. L’Écriture et la différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967. Derrida, Jacques. Le Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other, Or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Mal d’archives. Paris: Galilée, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques, and Eric Prenowitz. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 9–63.

Bibliography

289

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. Dibie, Pascal. Ethnologie de la porte. Paris: Métailié, 2012. Diderot, Denis. Supplément au voyage de Bougainville. Genève: Droz, 1955. Diderot, Denis. Jacques le fataliste et son maître. Paris: Flammarion, 1997. Diderot, Denis. Le Neveu de Rameau. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Devant l’image. Questions posées aux fins d’une histoire de l’art. Paris: Minuit, 1990. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. Translated by John Goodman. University Park, TX: Penn State Univ Press, 2009. Djebar, Assia. L’Amour, la fantasia. Paris: Albin Michel, 1985. Djebar, Assia. La Disparition de la langue française. Paris: Albin Michel, 2003. Djebar, Assia. “Regard interdit, son coupé.” In Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Paris: Poche, 2002. Donadey, Anne. Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001. Dorlin, Elsa. La Matrice de la race. Paris: La Découverte, 2006. Dorlin, Elsa. “Décoloniser les structures psychiques du pouvoir. Érotisme raciste et postcolonie dans la pensée d’Achille Mbembe.” Mouvements 51, no. 3 (2007): 142–151. Dulphy, Anne. L’Algérie des pieds-noirs: entre l’Espagne et la France. Pairs: Vendémiaire, 2014. Eng, David L., and Shinhee Han, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Esclangon-Morin, Valérie. “L’image des harkis à travers l’écran.” In Les Harkis. Histoire, Mémoire et Transmission, edited by Fatima Besnaci-Lancou, Benoit Falaize, and Gilles Manceron. Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2010. Esposito, Claudia. The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Fabbiano, Giulia. “Ecritures mémorielles et crise de la représentation: les écrivants descendants de harkis.” Amnis, Revue de civilisation contemporaine Europes/ Amériques 7. Amnisrevues​.or​g, 2007. Accessed November 23, 2013. https​:/​/jo​​ urnal​​s​.ope​​nedit​​ion​.o​​rg​/am​​​nis​/8​​31. Fabbiano, Giulia. “Enrôlements de mémoire, mémoires d’enrôlement.” In Les Harkis. Histoire, mémoire et transmission, edited by Fatima Besnaci-Lancou, Benoit Falaize, and Gilles Manceron. Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2010. Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte, 1985. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1968.

290

Bibliography

Fanon, Frantz. Œuvres. Peau noire, masques blancs/L’an V de la Révolution algérienne/Les damnés de la terre/Pour la revolution africaine. Paris: La Découverte, 2011. Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975. Farge, Arlette. Le Goût de l’archive. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997. Fassin, Didier, and Éric Fassin, eds. De la question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société française. Paris: La Découverte, 2006. Foucault, Michel. L’Archéologie du savoir. Gallimard: Paris, 1969. Foucault, Michel. L’Ordre du discours. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Foucault, Michel. “Orders of Discourse.” Social Science Information 10, no. 2 (April 1971): 7–30. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1972. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, vol. 2. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Allen Lane, 1979. Foucault, Michel. Du Gouvernement des Vivants: Cours au Collège de France 1979–1980. Paris: EHESS: Éditions du Seuil, 2012. Foucault, Michel. On the Government of the Living. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Frémeaux, Jacques. Les Colonies dans la grande guerre: combats et épreuves des peuples d’outre-mer. Soteca: 14–18 Éditions, 2006. Frères d’armes. Rachid Bouchareb and Pascal Blanchard, 2014. February 10, 2016. Fresco, Nadine. “La diaspora des cendres.” L’Emprise 24 (1981): 203–220. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1955. Freud, Sigmund. L’Homme aux loups. D’une histoire de névrose infantile. Paris: Payot, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. L’Interprétation du rêve. Paris: PUF, 2012. Garapon, Antoine. Peut-on réparer l’Histoire: Colonisation, escalavage, Shoah. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008. Garibian, Sévane. “Qu’importe le cri pourvu qu’il y ait oubli.” In Retours du colonial?, edited by Catherine Coquio, 129–146. Nantes: L’Atalante, 2008. Gefen, Alexandre. Réparer le monde: la littérature française face au XXIe siècle. Paris: José Corti, 2017. Gefen, Alexandre. “Le Projet thérapeutique de la littérature contemporaine française.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 20, no. 3 (2016): 420–427. Gillette, Alain, and Abdelmalek Sayad. L’immigration algérienne en France, 244– 245. Paris: Entente, 1984 [1976]. Ginsburg, Carlo. “Signes, traces, Pistes. Racines d’un paradigme de l’indice.” Le débat 2 (1980): 3–44. Grangaud, Isabelle. “Le droit colonial au service des spoliations à Alger dans les années 1830.” In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, edited

Bibliography

291

by Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, 70–76. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Guénif-Souilamas, Nacira. “16. Le Corps-frontière, Traces Et Trajets Postcoloniaux.” In Ruptures Postcoloniales, edited by Nicolas Bancel, Florence Bernault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubebker, Achille Mbembe, and Fraçoise Vergès, 217–229. Paris: La Découverte, 2010. Guignard, Didier. “Le Sénatus-consulte de 1863: la dislocation programmée de la société rurale algérienne.” In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, edited by Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, 76–81. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Hamoumou, Mohand. “Les Harkis, un trou de mémoire franco-algérien.” Esprit 161 (1990): 25–44. Hanrahan, Mairead. “Of Altobiography.” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 23, no. 3 (2000): 282–295. Harbi, Mohammed. La Guerre commence en Algérie. Brussels: Complexe, 1984. Harchi, Kaoutar. Je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne. Paris: Pauvert, 2016. Hargreaves, Alec. “Chemins de traverse vers une connaissance de la postcolonialité en France.” Mouvements des idées et des luttes 51 (2007): 24–31. Halbwachs, Maurice. Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994 [1925]. Halbwachs, Maurice. La Mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel, 1997 [PUF 1949, 1950, 1968]. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. London: Pandora, 2001. Hiddleston, Jane. “État Présent. Francophone North African Literature.” French Studies 70, no. 1 (2015): 82–92. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012. Horchani, Ines. “D’Alger à Damas, des auteurs en mal d’archives?” Amnis 13, September 27, 2014. http:​/​/jou​​rnals​​.open​​editi​​on​.or​​g​/amn​​​is​/22​​22. Houellebecq, Michel. Soumission. Paris: Flammarion, 2015. House, Jim. “The colonial and post-colonial dimensions of Algerian migration to France.” History in Focus. Institute of Historical Research, 2006. Accessed March 10, 2014. House, Jim, and Neil McMaster. Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hubbell, Amy L. Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noir, Identity, and Exile. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Print. Indigènes. Dir. Rachid Bouchareb. Perf. Djamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roshdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila. Mars Distribution, 2006. Ireland, Susan. “Facing the Ghosts of the Past in Dalila Kerchouche’s Mon père: ce harki and Zahia Rahmani’s Moze.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13, no. 3 (2009): 303–310. Kateb, Kamel. Européens, “indigènes” et Juifs en Algérie (1830–1962). Représentations et réalités des populations. Paris: INED, 2001.

292

Bibliography

Katz, Ethan. The Burdens of Brotherhood. Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Kauffmann, Gregoire. “D’où sort le Front National.” L’Histoire 368 (2011): 94–99. Kerchouche, Dalila. Mon père, ce harki. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003. Khiouane, Abderahmane. La Crise de 1962. Alger: Dahlab, 1997. Klein, Mélanie. Essais de psychanalyse. Paris: Payot, 2005. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Laillou Savona, Jeanelle. “Retour aux sources: Algérie et judéité dans l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous.” Études littéraires 33, no. 3 (2001): 95–108. Lantheaume, Françoise. “Des figures de l’absence: les harkis dans les manuels d’histoire de lycée de 1962 à 1998.” In Les Harkis. Histoire, Mémoire et Transmission, edited by Fatima Besnaci-Lancou, Benoît Falaize, and Gilles Manceron, 178–186. Los Angeles, CA: ATELIER. Lapacherie, Jean-Gérard. “Du procès d’intimation.” In L’intime, l’extime, edited by Aline Mura-Brunel, Franc Schuerewegen, and Richard Millet, 11–22. Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi, 2002. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. Paris: PUF, 2007. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Le Bohec, Jacques. Sociologie du phénomène Le Pen. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Ledoux-Beaugrand, Évelyne, Anne Martine Parent, Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, and Ching Selao. “Telle Antigone, relever le père Harki. Le récit comme sépulture dans Moze de Zahia Rahmani.” Études Françaises 52, no. 1 (2016): 55–72. Leménager, Grégoire. “Sansal censuré.” BibliObs, March 11, 2008. https​:/​/bi​​bliob​​s​. nou​​velob​​s​.com​​/roma​​ns​/20​​08031​​1​.BIB​​0959/​​sansa​​l​​-cen​​sure.​​html. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York, NY: Summit Books, 1988. Liauzu, Claude, ed. Enjeux urbains au Maghreb. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985. Ligue des Droits de l’Homme. “Hommes et libertés.” Revue de la Ligue des Droits de l’Hommes 131 (2005): 267736. Lindenberg, Daniel. “Guerres de mémoires en France.” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 42, no. 1 (1994): 77–95. “Liste des communes de l’Oise.” Wikipedia, L’encyclopédie libre. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Last modified September 23, 2019. https​:/​/fr​​.wiki​​pedia​​.org/​​wiki/​​ Liste​​_des_​​commu​​nes​_d​​e​​_l​%2​​7Oise​. Loyd, David. “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 2 (2000): 212–228. Lorcin, Patricia. Imperial Identities. Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria. London: I.B. Tauris, 1995. Lyotard, Jean François. La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979.

Bibliography

293

Maazouzi, Djemaa. Le Partage des mémoires: La guerre d'Algérie en littérature, au cinéma et sur le web. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015. MacMacster, Neil. Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–1962. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Malabou, Catherine, and Jacques Derrida. La Contre-Allée. Paris: La Quinzaine littéraire, 1999. Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Marrus, Michael, and Robert Paxton. Vichy et les Juifs. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1981. Mbembe, Achille. De La Postcolonie, essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine. Paris: Karthala, 2000. Mbembe, Achille. “Qu’est-ce que la pensée postcoloniale?” Esprit 12, no. 330 (2006): 117–133. Memmi, Albert. Portrait Du Colonisé: Précédé Du Portrait Du Colonisateur. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1957. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Translated by Howard Greenfield. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967. Memmi, Albert. Juifs et Arabes. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Memmi, Albert. Le Racisme: description, definition, traitement. Paris: Gallimard, 1982. Memmi, Albert. La Statue de sel. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Merlin-Kajman, Hélène. L’Absolutisme dans les Lettres et théorie des deux corps. Passions et politique. Paris: Champion, 2000. Merouche, Lemnouar. Recherches sur l’Algérie à l’époque ottomane. Paris: Bouchène, 2007. Morano, Nadine. “Nadine Morano évoque la ‘race blanche’ de la France.” Le Monde, September 28, 2015. https​:/​/ww​​w​.lem​​onde.​​fr​/po​​litiq​​ue​/ar​​ticle​​/2015​​/09​/2​​7​/nad​​ine​m​​orano​​-evoq​​ue​-la​​-race​​-blan​​che​-d​​e​-la-​​fran​c​​e​_477​​3927_​​82344​​8​.htm​​l. Morano, Nadine. “‘ONPC’ – Nadine Morano: la France, un pays de ‘race blanche’.” Le Point, September 28, 2015. https​:/​/ww​​w​.lep​​oint.​​fr​/me​​dias/​​onpc-​​nadin​​e​-mor​​ano​l​​a​-fra​​nce​-u​​n​-pay​​s​-de-​​race-​​blanc​​he​-27​​-09​​-2​​015​-1​​96845​​1​_260​​.php. Mortimer, Mildred. Women Fight, Women Write: Texts on the Algerian War. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2018. Moumen, Abderahmen. “Housing the ‘Harkis’: Long Term Segregation.” Translated by Olivier Waine. Metropolitics, April 4, 2012. www​.m​​etrop​​oliti​​ques.​​eu​/Ho​​using​​the-​​harki​​s​-lon​​g​-ter​​m​.htm​​l. Moussaoui, Abderrahmane. “L’Algérie d’une guerre à l’autre. Une violente mémoire.” In Algérie. D’une guerre à l’autre, edited by Catherine Brun, 85–101. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2014. Nora, Pierre. Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Nouschi, André. “La dépossession foncière et la paupérisation de la paysannerie algérienne.” In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, edited by Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, 189–194. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Nouvel Observateur. “Pierre Messmer accusé de crime contre l’humanité?” L’Obs, November 6, 2003. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nou​​velob​​s​.com​​/soci​​ete​/2​​00311​​02​.OB​​S9072​​/pier​​ re​-me​​ssmer​​-accu​​se​-de​​-crim​​e​-con​​​tre​-l​​-huma​​nite.​​html.

294

Bibliography

Oliver, Kelly. The Colonization of Psychic Space. A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Ost, François. “L’invention du tiers. Eschyle et Kafka.” Esprit 337, no. 8/9 (2007): 147–165. Peral Crespo, Amelia. “Cixous et Rousseau en rêveries.” In Le XVIIIe siècle aujourd’hui: présences, lectures et réécritures, edited by Francisco Lafarga, Angeles Llorca Tonda, and Angeles Sirvent Ramos, 49–60. Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2011. Perec, Georges. Je me souviens. Paris: Hachette, 1978. Pervillé, Guy. “La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie dans l’extrême droite française: le cas particulier de Jean-Marie Le Pen.” Pour une histoire de la guerre d’Algérie, December 14, 2013. http:​/​/guy​​.perv​​ille.​​free.​​fr​/sp​​ip​/ar​​ticle​​.php3​​?id​_a​​​rticl​​e​=311​. Peyroulou, Jean-Pierre, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault. “1830–1880: la prise de possession du pays.” In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, edited by Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, 19–51. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Pinçonnat, Crystel. “De l’usage postcolonial de l’archive. Quelques pistes de réflexion,” Amnis 13 (2014). Accessed April 30, 2018. doi:10.4000/amnis.2187. Planche, Jean-Louis. Sétif 1945. Histoire d’un massacre annoncé. Paris: Perrin, 2006. Pollak, Michaël. L’Expérience concentrationnaire. Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale. Paris: Métailié, 1990. Pollak, Michaël. “Mémoire, oubli, silence.” In Une identité blessée: études de sociologie et d’histoire, 13–40. Paris: Editions Métailié, 1993. Porot, Antoine. Manuel alphabétique de psychiatrie. Paris: PUF, 1996. Potocki, Jan. Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse: version de 1804. Paris: Flammarion, 2008. Rahmani, Zahia. Moze. Paris: Sabine Wespieser, 2003. Rahmani, Zahia. “Musulman” Roman. Paris: Sabine Wespieser, 2005. Rahmani, Zahia. France, récit d’une enfance. Paris: Sabine Wespieser, 2006. Rahmani, Zahia. “Territoire, exigence, Edward Saïd, trahison, liberté ….” Discussion avec Arnaud Zohou. Revue de(s)générations 5 (February 2008): 51–56. Rahmani, Zahia. “Le ‘harki’ comme spectre ou l’écriture du ‘déterrement’.” In Retours du colonial? Disculpation et réhabilitation de l’histoire colonial, edited by Catherine Coquio, 221–237. Nantes: L’Atlante, 2008. Rahmani, Zahia. “Le harki, figure postcoloniale du banni.” Entretien avec Giulia Fabbiano. Revue de(s)générations 9 (September 2009): 61–88. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London and New York, NY: Continuum, 2004. Rancière, Jacques. La Mésentente. Paris: Galilée, 1995. Reggui, Marcel. Les Massacres de Gulema, Algérie, mai 1945. Une enquête inédite sur la furie des milices coloniales. Paris: La Découverte, 2006. République Française. “Arrêté du 27 mars 1992 portant détachement (services extérieurs).” Legifrance. Accessed November 18, 2013. https​:/​/ww​​w​.leg​​ifran​​ce​.go​​uv​.fr​​/ affi​​chTex​​te​.do​​?cidT​​exte=​​JORFT​​EXT00​​00003​​39782​​&c​ate​​gorie​​Lien=​​id.

Bibliography

295

République Française. “Loi n° 2005-158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés.” Legifrance. Accessed March 15, 2016. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nou​​velob​​s​.com​​/poli​​tique​​/2006​​ 0104.​​OBS09​​04​/la​​-loi-​​du​-23​​-fevr​​​ier​-2​​005​.h​​tml. Rey-Debove, Josette, Alain Rey, and Paul Robert. Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire Alphabétique et analogique de la langue française. Paris: Le Robert, 2016. Rey Mimoso-Ruiz, Bernadette. “Boualem Sansal: les yeux grands ouverts sur l’islam.” In Les Écrivains maghrébins francophones et l’Islam: constance dans la diversité, edited by Najib Redouane, 385–403. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013. Rice, Alison. Polygraphies: Francophone Women Writing Algeria. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Rice, Alison. “Rêveries d’Algérie. Une terre originaire à perte de vue.” Expressions maghrébines 2 (2003): 92–108. Ricœur, Paul. Temps et récit, vol. 3. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983. Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative, vol. 3. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Ricœur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Ricœur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Robin, Régine. “Représenter, penser, périodiser le XXe siècle.” In Représenter le vingtième siècle, edited by Marc Angenot and Régine Robin. Discours Social, vol. XIX. Montreal: McGill University, 2004. Robiquet, Paul, ed. Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry. Paris: Armand Colin & Cie, 1893–1898. Rosello, Mireille. Encontres méditerranéennes. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Rothberg, Michael. “Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness.” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 158–184. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du contrat social. Paris: Flammarion, 2001. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. Paris: Champion, 2010. Rousso, Henry, and Eric Conan. Un passé qui ne passe pas. Paris: Fayard, 1994. Rousso, Henry. La Hantise du passé: entretien avec Philippe Petit. Paris: Textuel, 1998. Rousso, Henry. Le Syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 à nos jours. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Saada, Emmanuelle. Les Enfants de la colonie. Les métis de l’Empire français, entre sujétion et citoyenneté. Paris: La Découverte, 2007. Saïd, Edward. Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978. Said, Edward. Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Sansal, Boualem. Dis-moi le paradis. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Sansal, Boualem. Gouverner au nom d’Allah. Islamisation et soif de pouvoir dans le monde arabe. Paris: Gallimard, 2013.

296

Bibliography

Sansal, Boualem. “La censure, c’est la démocratie qui tue la démocratie.” Le Point, May 19, 2013. https​:/​/ww​​w​.lep​​oint.​​fr​/cu​​lture​​/boua​​lem​-s​​ansal​​-la​-c​​ensur​​e​-c​-e​​st​-la​​ -demo​​crati​​e​-qui​​-tue-​​la​-de​​mocra​​tie​-1​​​8​-05-​​2013-​​16695​​43​_3.​​php. Sansal, Boualem. L’Enfant fou de l’arbre creux. Paris: Le livre de Poche, 2002. Sansal, Boualem. Le Village de l’Allemand, ou le journal des frères Schiller. Paris: Gallimard, 2008. Sansal, Boualem. Poste restante: Alger. Lettre de colère et d’espoir à mes compatriotes. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Sansal, Boualem. “Pourquoi l’islam a cédé la place à l’islamisme.” Jeune Afrique, December 18, 2013. https​:/​/ww​​w​.jeu​​neafr​​ique.​​com​/1​​35205​​/poli​​tique​​/boua​​lem​-s​​ ansal​​-pour​​quoi-​​l​-isl​​am​-a-​​c​-d​-l​​a​​-pla​​ce​-l-​​islam​​isme/​. Sansal, Boualem. Rue Darwin. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Sansal, Boualem. “Une guerre pour rien.” Le Figaro, November 5, 2014. https​:/​/ ww​​w​.lef​​i garo​​.fr​/v​​ox​/hi​​stoir​​e​/201​​4​/11/​​05​/31​​005​-2​​01411​​05ART​​FIG00​​181​-u​​ne​-g​u​​ erre-​​pour-​​rien.​​php. Sarkozy, Nicolas. “Le discours de Dakar de Nicolas Sarkozy.” Le Monde Afrique, November 9, 2007. https​:/​/ww​​w​.lem​​onde.​​fr​/af​​rique​​/arti​​cle​/2​​007​/1​​1​/09/​​le​-di​​scour​​s​de-​​dakar​​​_9767​​86​_32​​12​.ht​​ml. Savarèse, Éric. Histoire coloniale et immigration. Une invention de l’étranger. Paris: Séguier, 2000. Savarèse, Éric. L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs. Paris: Séguier, 2002. Savarèse, Éric. L’Ordre colonial et sa légitimation en France métropolitaine. Oublier l’Autre. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998. Sayad, Abdelmalek. La Double Absence. Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999. Schneidermann, Daniel. “Massacres du 17 Octobre 1961: la mécanique du silence.” L’Obs avec Rue 89. Rue89.nouvelobs, 2012. Accessed October 21, 2012. Selao, Ching. “Porter l’Algérie: Garçon manqué de Nina Bouraoui.” L’esprit Créateur 45, no. 3 (2005): 74–84. Sénéchal, Thierry. “Dédommagement, réparation, restitution: instruments de ‘vérité’?” Topique 1, no. 102 (2008): 23–39. Sessions, Jennifer. By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Sessions, Jennifer. “Les colons avant la IIIe République: peupler et mettre en valeur l’Algérie.” In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, edited by Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, 64–70. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Shell, Marc. “Moses’ Tongue.” Common Knowledge 12, no. 1 (2006): 150–176. Shepard, Todd. The Invention of Decolonization. The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ‘Post-colonial.’” Social Text 31, no. 32 (1992): 99–113. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. Silverman, Maxim. Palimpestic Memory. The Holocaust and Colonialism in Francophone Fiction and Film. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2013.

Bibliography

297

Sirvent Ramos, Angeles. “Les signes de l’Algérie dans l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous.” Expressions maghrébines 2, no. 2 (2003): 127–150. Skempton, Simon. Alienation after Derrida. London and New York, NY: Continuum, 2010. Slater, Michelle B. “Rethinking Human-Animal Ontological Differences: Derrida’s ‘Animot’ and Cixous’ ‘Fips’.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16, no. 5 (2012): 685–693. Souaïda, Habib. Le Procès de la sale guerre. Algérie: le général-major Khaled Nezzar contre le lieutenant Habib Souaïda. Paris: La Découverte, 2002. Spivak, Gayatri. “Bonding in Difference.” In Another Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands. Edited by Alfred Arteaga, 273–285. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. Stern, Anne-Lise. “Sois deportee … et témoigne! Psychanalyser, témoigner: double bind?” In La Shoah: Témoignages, Saviors, Oeuvres, edited by Annette Wieviorka and Claude Mouchard, 15–22. Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2000. Stevens, Christa. “Hélène Cixous, auteur en ‘algériance.’” Expressions maghrébines 1, no. 1 (2002): 77–91. Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016. Stora, Benjamin. “Un besoin d’histoire.” In La Situation postcoloniale, edited by Marie-Claude Smouts, 293–297. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2007. Stora, Benjamin. Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale (1830–1954). Paris: La Découverte, 2004. Stora, Benjamin. Histoire de l’Algérie depuis l’indépendance. Tome 1. 1962–1988. Paris: La Découverte, 2004. Stora, Benjamin. Ils venaient d’Algérie: L’immigration algérienne en France (1912– 1992). Paris: Fayard, 1992. Stora, Benjamin. La Gangrène et l’oubli. La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: La Découverte, 1991. Stora, Benjamin. “La guerre d’Algérie dans les mémoires françaises: Violence d’une mémoire de revanche.” L’Esprit Créateur XLVIII, no. 1 (2003): 7–31. Stora, Benjamin. Imaginaires de guerre: Algérie-Vietnam en France et aux ÉtatsUnis. Paris: La Découverte, 1997. Stora, Benjamin. La Guerre des mémoires. La France face à son passé colonial. La Tour d’Aigues: Aube, 2007. Stora, Benjamin. La Guerre invisible. Algérie, années 90. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2001. Stora, Benjamin. “Les Harkis.” In La France en guerre d’Algérie: novembre 1954-juillet 1962, edited by Laurent Gervereau, Jean-Pierre Rioux, and Benjamin Stora, 289–292. Paris: Musée d’histoire contemporaine-BDIC, 1992.

298

Bibliography

Stora, Benjamin. Les Mémoires dangeureuses. Suivi d’une nouvelle édition de Transfert d’une mémoire. Paris: Albin Michel, 2016. Stora, Benjamin. Les Trois exils. Juifs d’Algérie. Paris: Stock, 2006. Stora, Benjamin. “The Algerian War in French Memory: Vengeful Memory’s Violence.” Translated by Paul A. Silverstein. In Memory and Violence in the Middle-East and North Africa, edited by Ussama Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein, 151–174. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006. Stora, Benjamin, and Mohammed Harbi, eds. La Guerre d’Algérie: 1954–2004, la fin de l’amnésie. Paris: Robert Lafont, 2004. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Crisis of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors and the Holocaust.” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277–295. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Thénault, Sylvie. “1881–1918: l’apogée de l’Algérie française et les débuts de l’Algérie algérienne.” In Histoire de l’Algérie à la Période Coloniale, 1830–1962, edited by Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, 159–188. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Thénault, Sylvie. “France-Algérie. Pour un traitement commun du passé de la guerre d’indépendance.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 85 (2005): 119–128. Thénault, Sylvie. “Le régime pénal de l’indigénat algérien, au cœur de la discrimination coloniale.” Algérie-France: comprendre le passé pour mieux construire l’avenir, 2012. Accessed November 12, 2013. http:​/​/www​​.sena​​t​.fr/​​ga​/ga​​105​/g​​a1051​​.htm​l​​#toc1​​0. Thénault, Sylvie. Une Drôle de justice. Les magistrats dans la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: La Découverte, 2001. Thénault, Sylvie. Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale. Camps, internements, assignations à residence. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012. Tomasovitch, Geoffroy. “Les harkis attaquent Pierre Mesmer.” Le Parisien, February 10, 2004. http:​/​/www​​.lepa​​risie​​n​.fr/​​faits​​-dive​​rs​/le​​s​-har​​kis​-a​​ttaqu​​ent​-p​​ierre​​-mess​​mer​ -1​​0​-02-​​​2004-​​20047​​46599​​.php. Traverso, Enzo.“L’écrit-évènement: l’historiographie comme champ de bataille politique.” In Les Guerres de mémoires. La France et son histoire, edited by Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, 220–229. Paris: La Découverte, 2008. Trévisan, Carine. L’Intime, l’histoire, l’écriture, 2006. https​:/​/ha​​l​.arc​​hives​​-ouve​​rtes.​​ fr​/te​​l​-013​​88138​​​/docu​​ment, 65. Vassallo, Helen. The Body Besieged. The Embodiment of Historical Memory in Nina Bouraoui and Leila Sebbar. Lanham, MD: Lexigton Books, 2012. Vermeren, Hugo. “Les migrations françaises et européennes vers l’Algérie au début de la IIIe République.” In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962,

Bibliography

299

edited by Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, 194–200. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Viart, Dominique. “Les ‘fictions critiques’ de la littérature contemporaine/Daewoo de François Bon, Fayard, 300 p./L’adversaire, d’Emmanuel Carrère, Gallimard, «Folio», 219 p./Corps du roi de Pierre Michon, Verdier, 101 p.” Spirale 201 (March–April 2005): 10–11. Viart, Dominique. “Récits de filiation.” In La Littérature française au présent. Héritage, modernité, mutations, edited by Dominique Viart and Bruno Vercier, 79–101. Paris: Bordas, 2008. Viart, Dominique. “Topiques de la déshérence. Formes d’une ‘éthique de la restitution’ dans la littérature contemporaine française.” In Lieux propices. L’énonciation des lieux/Le lieu de l’énonciation, edited by Simon Harel and Adelaide Russo, 209–224. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005. Viart, Dominique. “Témoignage et restitution. Le traitement de l’Histoire dans la Littérature contemporaine.” In Présences du passé dans le roman français contemporain, edited by Gianfranco Rubino, 43–63. Rome: Bulzoni, 2007. Viart, Dominique. “Le silence des pères au principe du ‘récit de filiation’.” Études françaises 44, no. 3 (2009): 95–112. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. “Entretien avec Hervé Nathan.” Libération, April 14, 2005. Vincenot, Alain. Pieds-Noirs. Les bernés de l’histoire. Paris: Archipel, 2014. Volkan, Vamik. Bloodlines. From ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York, NY: Zonebooks, 2005. Weil, Patrick. “Histoire et mémoire des discriminations en matière de nationalité française.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 84 (2004): 5–22. Weltman-Aron, Brigitte. “The Figure of the Jew in North Africa.” In Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, edited by Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia Lorcin, and David Troyansky, 264–288. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Wieviorka, Annette. L’Ère du témoin. Paris: Plon, 1998. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2017. Wyatt, Jean. Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004. Yacine, Tassadit. “La Kabylie entre 1939 et 1871: Construction identitaire et répression coloniale.” In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, 1830–1962, edited by Abderrahmane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ouanassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault, 114–120. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh, 2012. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Zaater, Miloud. L’Algérie de la guerre à la guerre (1962–2003). Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003. Zimmermann, Bernard. Les Résistances pieds-noires à l’OAS. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014. Zola, Emile. Thérèse Raquin. Paris: GF Flammarion, 1970.

Index

Abraham, Nicolas, and Torok, Maria, 43n112, 197–98, 216n118 Agamben, Giorgio, 145, 218n176 Agar-Mendouse, Trudy, 182, 192, 210n4 Ahmed, Sara, 163, 175n178 Allaoui, Abdelbaki, 246, 272n121 Altounian, Janine, 24, 44n122 Algerian Civil War. See Black Decade Algerian Revolution. See War of Independence Algerian War. See War of Independence alienation, 52–53, 69–75, 90–100, 104n20, 105n26, 112n159, 144, 202 amnesia, 10–12, 188, 222, 259 amnesty, 10, 42n99, 153–55, 239–41 Anderson, Perry, 12, 39n65 Angelo, Adrienne, 196, 206, 216n111 Ansky, Michel, 57, 106n43 anti-Semitism, 51, 57–61, 237, 268n71 Anzieu, Didier, 200–201, 217n137 Arabization, 180, 212n20, 227, 266n26 archive, 4, 11, 27–34, 57, 63, 76–79, 87, 90, 98, 124, 130–38, 151, 154, 157–58, 181; corporeal, 187; embodied, 248; living, 29, 189; major, 4; minor, 4, 28–32, 75; postcolonial, 4, 29, 53 Attias, Jean-Christophe, 277

Balibar, Etienne, 30–31, 243, 262 Bancel, Nicolas, 62, 168n8, 212n23 Barclay, Fiona, 5, 20 Benasci-Lancou, Fatima, 122, 127, 167n2, 168n5 Bensmaïa, Réda, 10, 254 Berque, Jacques, 222, 243 Beschea-Fache, Caroline, 183–87 Bey, Maissa, 282n17 Black Decade, 180, 224–30 Blanchard, Pascal, 62, 106n60 Blévis, Laure, 13, 40n74, 61 Bornand, Marie, 145 Boudjedra, Rachid, 244 Bouraoui, Nina, 4, 17, 21, 28–34, 116n230, 167, 177–219, 277–80 Branche, Rapahëlle, 168n3, 188 Brennan, Teresa, 189 Brooks, Peter, 218n168 Brun, Catherine, 9, 35n10 Calle-Gruber, Mireille, 114n180 camps, 17, 68–69, 87, 115n199, 132–38, 145–51, 164–65, 185 Canetti, Elias, 162 Cardinal, Marie, 51–52, 203 Caruth, Cathy, 86–88 Cayrol, Jean, 87 Certeau de, Michel, 100 301

302

Index

Chahine, Youcef, 165 Charbit, Tom, 14—15 Chaulet-Achour, Chrsitiane, 22 citizenship, 1–2, 14–18, 40n82, 51, 125, 142, 153, 177, 185, 211n13, 212n16, 221 Cixous, Hélène, 4, 16, 21–33, 47–119, 277–80 Coissard, Françoise, 80 colonial aphasia. See occlusion of knowledge colonial hypermnesia, 3 colony, 2–3, 31, 55, 177–78, 225–27, 241–64 counter-public, 125, 193 Coquio, Catherine, 33, 42n96, 277, 282n1 Crapanzano, Vincent, 146, 168n5 Crémieux decree, 14, 47–59, 105n41, 264n4 crime, 18–19, 27, 34, 151–57, 173n128, 224–25, 235–38, 256, 279 critical fictions, 3 Crivello, Maryline, and Pelen, JeanNoel, 44n118 Dakhlia, Jocelyne, 250, 257, 259, 272n140 Davidson, Basil, 228 Debrauwere-Miller, Nathalie, 68, 92, 99, 118n243 Delbo, Charlotte, 87 Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix, 2, 4, 25, 36n13 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 24–29, 49, 51, 70, 77, 82, 85, 103n13, 113n180, 116n230, 137–38, 161, 204–5, 218n167, 279–80, 282n56 Dibie, Pascal, 55 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 278 dignity, 4, 26, 32, 124, 154, 158–67, 247 Djebar, Assia, 29, 206, 215n99, 218n181 Donadey, Anne, 10, 11

Dorlin, Elsa, 64–65, 108n84, 111n96 drowning, 11, 25, 194–98, 216n111, 242 duress, 6, 19, 22 Eng, David L., and Han, Shinhee, 207 Esclangon-Morin, Valérie, 127, 168n10 ethics of restitution, 4, 26 exclusion, 5, 15, 33, 46n169, 49–70, 84–99, 107n79, 113n164, 149, 154, 230, 244, 280 exile, 2, 4, 32, 51, 89, 97, 145–47, 165, 188, 207, 222, 234, 253 Fanon, Frantz, 130, 145, 172n91, 202, 234–35 Farge, Arlette, 134 father, 4, 17–34, 52–53, 75, 88–102, 103n16, 115n54, 122–24, 139, 146, 161, 174n149, 208, 225, 229–33; murder of, 143, 278–81 filiation narratives, 4, 21–26, 123–24, 278 forgiveness, 154, 258 Foucault, Michel, 4, 29–30, 45n159, 54, 246 founding figure. See father Frank, Arthur W., 203 French Algeria, 7–15, 33–34, 37n36, 51–67, 81–84, 95–99, 116n230, 126–28, 178, 246, 253, 280 French Muslim of Algeria, 125, 128 Fresco, Nadine, 214n74 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 38n50, 103n16, 215n97, 219n194, 278–79 Front de libération nationale (FLN), 7, 10, 34–35, 69, 127–36, 169n26, 224– 61, 266n26, 267nn40, 41, 268n43, 270n94, 278 Garapon, Antoine, 27 Garibian, Sévane, 151–54, 173n128 Gefen, Alexandre, 22, 26 generation, 5, 10, 18, 20, 57, 79, 146, 151, 188–90, 201–2, 214n69, 252;

Index

1.5, 150, 173n120, 262; second, 11, 17, 146, 162, 180, 184, 202; trans-, 145–46, 162, 189, 202 ghost, 4–5, 20–21, 83, 148, 161, 198, 205, 241 Gillette, Alain, and Sayad, Abdelmalek, 7 Ginsburg, Carlo, 278 Guénif-Souilamas, Nacira, 32 Halbwachs, Maurice, 12 Harbi, Mohammed, 230 Harchi, Kaoutar, 254, 273n156, 274n177, 275n189 Hargreaves, Alec, 11 Harkis, 1–2, 6–7, 11, 15–19, 27, 34, 121–65, 168nn5–6, 222–23 harkive, 17, 34, 124 haunting. See ghost heirs. See legacy heritage. See legacy Herman, Judith, 215n82 Hiddleston, Jane, 9, 11 history, 1–4, 11–13, 16–33, 38n48, 47–55, 137–40, 166–67, 177–85, 239–46; colonial, 1–3, 11–12, 18, 33, 66, 182, 236, 256–63, 277; counter-, 53, 122; minority, 18, 24; national, 12, 18, 66, 180, 222–31; official, 54, 132, 233 Holocaust, 10, 19, 85–88, 118n247, 145, 150, 162, 185, 190, 214n74 House, Jim, 14, 37n36 identity, 4–5, 11–13, 16–17, 21–35, 43n114, 85, 122–30, 157, 163–67, 177–205, 218n176, 222–26, 241–47, 277, 280 imperialism, 9, 19, 32, 181, 200, 243, 257, 272n140 inheritance. See legacy invisibility, 33, 53–56, 81–83, 107n79, 178–83 Islamism, 224, 239–40, 253–54 Islamization, 48, 180, 212n20, 215n95

303

Islamophobia, 255, 281 Jews, 1–2, 7, 13–16, 32–33, 47–61, 68–77, 86–93, 102nn1–2, 105n41, 107n79, 109n119, 111n145, 116n230, 115n154, 121n241, 125– 27, 145, 148, 164–66, 184–85, 237, 264n4, 279–81 Joxe, Louis, 138–39, 141 Joyce, James, 116n220 justice, 13, 27, 29, 34, 121, 124–26, 140–42, 154–58, 235–41, 263, 281 Katz, Ethan, 281 Kerchouche, Dalila, 122, 162, 167 Khiouane, Abderahmane, 226 Lacan, Jacques, 53 Lambèse prison, 224, 241, 246, 249, 260–61 Lapacherie, Jean-Gérard, 158 Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, JeanBertrand, 103n16 law of February, 23, 2005, 18, 257 Lazarus, Neil, 181, 228 Le Bohec, Jacques, 37n30 Ledoux-Beaugrand, Évelyne, and Parent, Anne Martine, 156, 163, 174n149 legacy, 4, 9, 15, 18, 20–26, 34, 51, 71, 89, 123, 130–32, 147, 150, 174n149, 182–83, 186–90, 206–7, 214n64, 228, 278–80 Levi, Primo, 146 Liauzu, Claude, 250 Lorcin, Patricia, 15, 41n86, 125 Lyotard, Jean-François, 3 Maazouzi, Djemaa, 6, 16, 18, 24, 43n111, 149, 155, 159 Major, René, 278 Manceron, Gilles, 127 Margalit, Avishai, 40n72 Marrus, Michael, and Paxton, Robert, 105n41

304

Index

Mbembe, Achille, 31, 63, 155 Memmi, Albert, 111n141, 235, 237, 244, 251 memory, 3, 9–12, 21–33, 38n48, 43n111, 209, 223–26, 262, 279–81; embodied, 17, 124, 148, 157, 167; familial, 18, 135, 193; individual, 27; multidirectional, 85, 124, 145, 165–66, 185, 279–80; official, 3, 28, 57, 135, 137–38; post-, 190–1; repressed, 12, 33, 98–99, 101 Messmer, Pierre, 139 métis, 2, 16–17, 34, 167, 177–88, 195, 205–6, 210nn3–7, 211n10, 244 minority, 2–4, 13–19, 22, 24–29, 33, 43n114, 122, 128, 165, 226–28, 277–81 mixed-race. See métis Mortimer, Mildred, 282n17 Mosaic. See Moses Moses, 14, 28, 34, 74, 111n119, 165– 67, 277–80 Moumen, Abderahmen, 148, 170n47, 171n64 mourning, 6, 10, 12, 32, 97, 101, 124, 139–40, 159, 207–8, 219n194 Mouvement National Algerien (MNA), 7, 231, 268n43 nation, 2, 18, 20, 30, 65, 154, 169n26, 223, 226–31, 238, 241–44, 255, 260–62, 277, 281 nationalism, 19, 92, 110n119, 229–31, 239, 242 Nora, Pierre, 3, 11, 38n48 occlusion of knowledge, 3, 6 Organisation armée secrète (OAS), 7–9, 19–20, 111n145, 128, 192–93, 222, 241, 265n8, 274n169 patricide. See father, murder of Perec, Georges, 150 phantom. See ghost

Pieds-Noirs, 2, 6–7, 11, 13, 15–18, 22, 33–35, 47, 51–55, 221–27, 233–41, 249–53, 264n3, 266n4 Pinçonnat, Crystel, 29, 159, 174n149 postcolonial witness, 4, 24–25 primal scenes, 33, 52–56, 100 prosthesis, 137–39, 207 racism, 7, 20, 64, 68, 179, 186, 198–99, 242, 245 Rahmani, Zahia, 19, 22, 34, 123–67, 174n149, 277–78 Rancière, Jacques, 32, 46n169, 154 regime of truth, 53, 66, 124, 131–34 remnant, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8 reparation, 4, 9, 19–20, 27, 73–75, 124, 142, 147, 151–53 repertoire, 157–58 Rice, Alison, 79, 147 Ricoeur, Paul, 43n114 Robin, Régine, 9 Rosello, Mireille, 248 Rothberg, Michael, 85, 124, 136, 145, 165, 185, 279 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 52, 79, 94–96, 12n252 Rousso, Henry, 4, 5, 9–10 Saada, Emmanuelle, 14, 177–79, 183, 210n3, 210nn7–8, 211nn9–14 Saïd, Edward, 29, 30, 243, 254 Sansal, Boualem, 4, 16, 21–23, 26–29, 32–35, 221, 224–64, 266n17, 268n71, 271n105, 277–78, 280 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 275n192 Savarèse, Éric, 36n30, 64, 222–23, 250, 252, 273n165 Savona, Jeanelle Laillou, 52 Sayad, Abdelmalek, 7, 16 Sebbar, Leila, 103n15, 178 Selao, Ching, 204, 218n176 Sessions, Jennifer, 62 Sétif massacre, 230

Index

shame, 23, 146–47, 156, 162–63, 201, 204 Shepard, Todd, 13–15, 40n82, 274n169 Shoah. See Holocaust Shohat, Ella, 32, 199 signifiers, 29, 33, 53, 83, 113n164, 255 silence, 20, 26, 34, 81, 122, 137, 143– 48, 167, 188–91, 214n69, 222 Silverman, Kaja, 202 Silverman, Maxim, 167, 209 Sirvent Ramos, Angeles, 72 Skempton, Simon, 114n192 skin, 34, 181, 184, 189–202, 206–9 specter. See ghost Spivak, Gayatri, 257–62 Stoler, Ann Laura, 5–7, 246, 261–62 Stora, Benjamin, 8, 18–20, 37n37, 42n99, 47–48, 51, 61, 102n1, 139, 170n47, 217n129, 226, 230, 238–39, 252, 269n79, 270nn85, 91, 273n162 subjectivity, 85, 158 Suleiman Rubin, Susan, 84, 104n23, 150, 173n120, 214n64 symptom, 22, 226, 278–80 Taylor, Diana, 132, 157–58 testimony, 24–26, 132, 142–47, 193, 204, 209, 213n53, 218n176, 239 Thénault, Sylvie, 61, 105n32, 258 Tocqueville de, Alexis, 6 tomb, 34, 88, 97, 100–101, 148, 158–65 trace. See ghost transmission. See legacy

305

trauma, 10, 17, 21–24, 43n112, 47, 51– 57, 73, 86–88, 97–100, 145–58, 183, 190–93, 201–8, 215nn82, 97, 281 Traverso, Enzo, 12 Trévisan, Carine, 21 trial, 10, 19, 27, 124, 140, 142, 151–58, 230, 235–36, 239, 269n81 Vassallo, Helen, 188–89, 214n69 Vestige. See remnant Viart, Dominique, 4, 23–24 Vichy, 2, 4, 8–10, 14, 25, 51, 56–62, 69–70, 73, 75, 79, 89, 100, 105n41, 211n13 Vincenot, Alain, 237–38 Volkan, Vamik, 202 Warner, Michael, 136, 193 War of Independence, 1–3, 11, 33–34, 69, 93, 111n145, 121–23, 126–27, 144, 189–92, 221–33 Weltman-Aron, Brigitte, 110n119 Wiesel, Elie, 164 witness, 4, 22, 24–26, 78–79, 88, 145– 48, 213n53, 260 World War II, 10, 13–14, 27, 51, 56, 62, 107n81, 122, 125–26, 148–52, 164, 185, 230 Wyatt, Jean, 186 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 28, 278–80 Zaater, Miloud, 227 Zola, Émile, 178

About the Author

Mona El Khoury is assistant professor of French and Francophone Literature at Tufts University. She works and teaches on the interaction of literature, history, and memory; philosophy, politics, and postcolonial theory; migrations and ecocriticism. Recent publications include “Lampedusa, ou la nuit de l'Europe. à ce stade de la nuit de Maylis de Kerengal” (French Cultural Studies, 2019) and “Impérialismes alternatifs: Le cosmopolitisme dans Kamal Jann de Dominique Eddé” (International Journal of Francophone Studies, 2018).

307