Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile [Hardcover ed.] 0803264909, 9780803264908

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R E M E M B E R I N G F R E N C H A LG E R I A

REMEMBERING FRENCH ALGERIA Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile

AMY L . HUBBEL L

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

© 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Portions of chapter 6, “Real Returns: Confrontation, Blindness, and Ruins,” were published as “Looking Back: Deconstructing Postcolonial Blindness in Nostalgérie” in Revue CELAAN Review 3, no. 1-2 (Fall 2004): 85– 95; “(Re)turning to Ruins: Pied-Noir Visual Returns to Algeria” in Modern and Contemporary France 19, no. 2 (May 2011): 147– 61; and “The Past Is Present: Pied-Noir Returns to Algeria” in Nottingham French Studies 51, no. 1 (March 2012): 66–77. A previous version of chapter 7, “The Return of Algeria: Relieving and Sustaining the Phantom Limb,” was published as “An Amputated Elsewhere: Sustaining and Relieving the Phantom Limb of Algeria” in Life Writing 4, no. 2 (2007): 247– 62, and excerpted and rewritten from “The Wounds of Algeria in Pied-Noir Autobiography,” in Dalhousie French Studies 81 (Winter 2007): 59– 68. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hubbell, Amy L. Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noir, identity, and exile / Amy L. Hubbell. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8032-6490-8 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8032-6988-0 (epub) ISBN 978-0-8032-6989-7 (mobi) ISBN 978-0-8032-6990-3 (pdf ) 1. French prose literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Pieds-Noirs in literature. 3. Group identity—Algeria. 4. Collective memory— Algeria. 5. Decolonization in literature. 6. Algiers (Algeria)—In literature. I. Title. PQ629.H83 2015 840.9'355— dc23 2015004317 Set in Lyon by M. Scheer. Designed by N. Putens.

CONTENTS

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Note on Translations 1. Introduction: Narrative Strategies in Rewriting Algeria

xiii

1

PART 1. REPEAT 2. The Pieds-Noirs: Fighting against Forgetting

47

3. Fixing the Past: Marie Cardinal’s La Mule de corbillard

75

4. Pleasures of a Painful Past: Writing to Remember, Writing to Forget

99

PART 2. RETURN 5. (Re)turning to Algeria: Nostalgia, Imagination, and Writing

137

6. Real Returns: Confrontation, Blindness, and Ruins

171

7. The Return of Algeria: Relieving and Sustaining the Phantom Limb

203

Notes

233

Bibliography

257

Index

269

P R E FAC E

In preparation for yet another move to another country, in late 2010 I began sifting through my belongings and letting go of what I could not take with me. As part of that effort, I reviewed videos of my travels and my family that had been stored on a camera for more than five years. As I watched the moving images of people who are no longer a part of my life and places I had forgotten, the experience of viewing what was not originally seen and long since forgotten recalled my vicarious returns to Algeria. Having never been to Algeria myself, my experience of the country is intertwined with shared memories from the Pied-Noir community and Algerians living in France. In 2007 I attended the Amicale de Saïda’s eighteenth reunion in Toulouse, France. Five-hundred PiedsNoirs, along with their friends and family, came together to watch Saïda, on revient ! Sur les pas de notre enfance, an amateur film chronicling a return voyage to Saïda, Algeria, undertaken by numerous members of the association in 2006. The shaking amateur footage assembled from the cameras of multiple travelers attempted to offer a unified trip back in time. I struggled through my motion sickness to see Algeria, as it is and as it was. The Pieds-Noirs both on the screen and in the audience called out their recognition of the places of their past. Although the tension between what was being displayed on the screen and what the audience (as well as the travelers in the film) were seeing was apparent to me, vii

P R EFACE

those around me were transported to their homeland. Without having experienced Algeria, I could not recollect, but my mind still strained to recognize the landscape and to match the projected images to my vision. In this way I remember Algeria. Layered testimonials, literary accounts, film clips, photos of streets, homes, and people, coupled with voices expressing loss, pain, and love, compose my memories. These images, accompanied by vague sensations of extraordinary light, heat, and sea, are implanted memories that have been transmitted to me as the result of years of research, interviews, and social networking. I experience what Marianne Hirsch has called “postmemory,” “a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created” (“Past Lives,” 659). My vision of Algeria is certainly less real than that of the Pieds-Noirs, but is my secondhand memory less valid? Without having been there, I remember Algeria through the numerous accounts, visual and textual, that have taken me there over the past fifteen years. My experience, although more distant, is akin to Leïla Sebbar’s as she expressed it in Voyage en Algéries autour de ma chambre, “Je suis née à Aflou [. . .]. Je connais Aflou par la voix et les mots des autres, rencontrés au hasard de mes routes” (I was born in Aflou [. . .]. I know Aflou through the voice and words of others, met by chance on my paths) (15). And as one who legitimately cannot see what she did not know, I have received the same blindness to Algeria’s present that the Pieds-Noirs have transmitted to me alongside their memories. Like them, I primarily know the Algeria of French colonial memory. My work, based on readings and viewings of personal memoirs, is not positioned to assess the real and independent Algeria of the present. In a sense, I am doomed to repeat the same blindness that plagues those caught in the perpetual return to the past. The best I can do is to acknowledge my own shortcomings and inability to depict Algeria as it exists today. viii

P R EFACE

If Algeria can recur in my memory, the memory of its exiles is undoubtedly riddled with its reappearance. As exile-writer Milan Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “The myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing” (3). It is against that nothingness that the Pieds-Noirs struggle still today. Caught in a cycle of perpetual return to their lost homeland, they labor to bring the past into the present and to sustain their vision of their childhood home. They cannot let Algeria die, for their identity depends on it; yet Algeria no longer exists in the way they wish to remember it. Kundera continues, “The idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine” (4). The Pieds-Noirs fight to keep their memory alive, refusing to accept Algeria as past, but the transitory nature of Algeriaremembered has them caught in a perpetual cycle. They nostalgically cling to their homeland, now a shadow or a ghost that is not quite there but refuses to leave them. Through eternal return, “the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make” (5). The work of the Pieds-Noirs is imbued with a sense of duty. The community labors to preserve its past and to make its colonial home known to its French compatriots who struggled to forget their past in Algeria from the moment of its independence in 1962 until the 1990s. Now that the willful silence surrounding the war has ended for the French, how should the work of the Pieds-Noirs be classified? How does it fit into the context of “Algerias,” past and present, as they are represented in France today? What do the collective and divergent stories of the Français d’Algérie teach us about nostalgia’s role in connection to trauma and loss of home? These questions inform this study of how French Algeria is remembered in literature and film from 1962 to the present. ix

AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

This book is the culmination of twenty years of research and discovery, and I am indebted to many individuals and institutions that helped along the way. I would like to thank Pi Delta Phi for awarding me with the Yedlicka Scholarship in 1995 to study at the Institute for American Universities in Avignon where I first learned about the Pieds-Noirs. I was subsequently awarded a Fulbright / Institute of International Education (IIE) teaching fellowship in 1996– 97 that allowed me to begin my research in Rennes, France, where I met Pieds-Noirs eager to tell me about Algeria. I thank the University of Michigan, Kansas State University, and the University of Queensland for various research funding schemes that allowed me to conduct research at the Bibliothèque Nationale; to attend Pied-Noir community events in 2002, 2007, 2011, and 2012; and to conduct numerous personal interviews with authors, film directors, and artists. I also thank the Northeast Modern Language Association for their summer research fellowship in 2007. Although she will never read this, I continue to be moved by Marie Cardinal’s courage to put her trauma into words. Her writing still speaks to me like a mother. From the Pied-Noir community, I specifically thank Christian Pastor, Jean-Pierre Bartolini, Geneviève de Ternant, Alphonse San Miguel, Louis (Loulou) Baylé and the Baylé family, the Amicale de Saïda, Robert Jesenberger, Max and Andrée Ouahnich, Patrick Altes, and xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

so many others who have taken time to talk to me and share their work. This book could not have been completed without the help of MarieClaude San Juan, who has shared her poetry and who introduced me to Nicole Guiraud. In turn, I am forever grateful to Nicole, who tangibly battles trauma to represent it in her art and who has become a friend. I would like to thank Charly Cassan, Marie Havenel, and Jean-Pierre Lledo, who have shared their testimony and films with me and my students in Australia. Without the many members of the Pied-Noir community who have been able to express to me what it means to be cut off and to suffer from a lost homeland, this book would not exist. For support in the writing process, I thank my dissertation adviser, Jarrod Hayes, whose editorial feedback was formative. I am grateful to Alison Rice for her insightful review of my work, to the other reviewers of this book, and to my collaborators on related projects, Névine El Nossery and Natalie Edwards, for always pushing me forward. Thank you especially to Kristen Elias Rowley, Ann Baker, and the entire team at University of Nebraska Press for support and encouragement throughout the publication process. On a personal level, my French host family, Christian, Hélène, and Stéphanie Maillot, have always opened their homes to me, providing emotional and intellectual support throughout my studies. My partner, Douglas Powell, has continually and carefully edited and encouraged me to be more incisive while providing love and support throughout this journey. My daughter, Sorenne Powell, has helped me understand family, and her unconditional love has allowed me to see the profound suffering of exile for those studied in this book.

xii

N O T E O N T R A N S L AT I O N S

Translations to English are my own unless otherwise indicated. Where I have provided the translation, only one page reference is given to indicate the corresponding page in the original published work. After previously published translations, a page number is given for both the original text and its translation, and the translator’s name and the title of the translation appear alongside the translation page references.

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1 Introduction NARRAT IV E S T R AT EG IE S IN R EW RITING A LG E RIA

Reflecting on the political situation in North Africa during the Arab Spring in early 2011, a fifty-three-year- old Pied-Noir, Didier Lestrade, wrote “Pied-Noir et pro-Arabe” for the Revue Minorités: Et je me dis que la dernière génération de pieds-noirs à laquelle j’appartiens devrait manifester sa joie et l’imposer à l’autre partie des pieds-noirs, plus âgée, celle qui truste les associations et les leaders politiques, celle qui empêche littéralement la France de sortir de cette rancœur vis-à-vis des arabes. À cause d’eux, l’Algérie souffre toujours, à cause d’eux on ouvre des musées qui glorifient le colonialisme et on vote des lois qui lavent leur conscience. À cause d’eux, la classe politique française ne peut dépasser le traumatisme de l’indépendance et accompagner le développement des autres départements français qui souffrent encore du colonialisme comme les Antilles. C’est toute une chaîne de blocages qui est entretenue par les anciens pieds-noirs. And I think that the last generation of Pieds-Noirs, to which I belong, should demonstrate its joy and impose it on the other, older PiedsNoirs, those who monopolize the associations and who are the political leaders, those who literally keep France from getting over this resentment toward the Arabs. Because of them, Algeria is still suffering; because of them, we open museums that glorify colonialism 1

INTRODUCTION

and we vote for laws that clear their conscience. Because of them, the French political class cannot get past the trauma of independence and join the development of other French departments that are still suffering from colonialism, like the French Caribbean. It’s a whole chain of blockages that is kept up by the old Pieds-Noirs. The burden of memory, particularly that imposed by the older generation of Pieds-Noirs, has rarely been laid so bare in a public forum. Lestrade calls to end the reign of the first generation in order to heal the relationships between France and its former colonies so that he and other Jeunes Pieds-Noirs can one day return to their homeland and form relationships of their own: Notre amour de nos racines n’a pas pu être exprimé à cause de ces origines dramatiques. Nous n’avons pas pu développer de vraies amitiés et de vraies histoires d’amour avec des arabes car le poids des morts reste entre nous. L’immense majorité d’entre nous n’a pas eu le bonheur de retourner sur son lieu de naissance et c’est le moindre des prix à payer pour l’histoire. Our love of our roots could not be expressed because of these dramatic origins. We could not form true friendships and true love stories with Arabs because the weight of the dead remains between us. The vast majority of us have not had the chance to return to our birthplace, and this is the least of the prices to pay for history.1 The desired healing and future collaboration between the communities can only begin when the oppressive communal memory is laid to rest. Since the end of the Algerian War for Independence in 1962, France has had considerable difficulty dealing with its colonial past, often repressing it through what historian and Pied-Noir Benjamin Stora has described as collective amnesia: “In the period 1963–81, France appeared increasingly occupied with erasing the traces of a war she had lost and her presence in Algeria; with liquidating concepts such as ‘integration,’ ‘pacification,’ and ‘assimilation’; with minimizing her ‘Algerian years’ putting them ‘between parentheses’” (“Women’s Writing,” 84). Todd Shepard, in The 2

INTRODUCTION

Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France, argues that decolonization “allowed the French to forget that Algeria had been an integral part of France since the 1830s and to escape many of the larger implications of that shared past” (2). The brutal seven-year war for Algerian independence from France included numerous acts of torture and terrorism and ended in the exodus of nearly one million Français d’Algérie, who took up residence in France. The Evian Accords, which marked the end of the war on March 19, 1962, and several subsequent French laws granted amnesty to the Algerian rebels and French military for offenses committed during the war (Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 247).2 Amnesty only allowed the French to further suppress their memory of involvement. However, as the French now uncover what was “willfully forgotten,” to borrow historian Richard Derderian’s term (“Algeria,” 29), narratives about the war and the French colonial presence in Algeria are becoming increasingly common. Many of these written memoirs of Algeria are controversial as the different parties attempt to shift the blame for colonization and the war on each other. Some groups, such as the former French colonists and French military officers, began inscribing their innocence in their versions of the war during the immediate silence that followed Algerian independence in 1962. Algeria and the Algerian War are no longer “forgotten,” but the selfjustifying narratives remain. In his article “Algeria as a lieu de mémoire: Ethnic Minority Memory and National Identity in Contemporary France,” Derderian largely supports Stora in stating that the war could not be, and indeed was not, forgotten because of the many people who participated.3 In Imaginaires de guerre: Algérie-Viêt-nam en France et aux Etats-Unis, Stora refers to the memories of the war as “mémoires tronquées” (truncated memories) or “mémoires cloisonnées” (cloistered memories) because until recently the memories had been isolated by communities (190). Each of the parties involved in the war fostered its own version of Algeria, holding on to separate pieces of the past. While the French minimized its importance, the war became the foundation for the construction of the fledgling Algerian identity after independence. Stora explains in an interview with Kersten Knipp for Qantara.de: 3

INTRODUCTION

For a long time—for almost 30, 40 years—France primarily fostered a culture of forgetting. People didn’t speak of Algeria; they wanted to put that era firmly behind them—the war and, of course, the defeat, the ignominy of ultimately having to withdraw from Algeria. After all, the French considered this North African nation to be an integral part of their national territory. The Algerians, on the other hand, were faced with “too much” history. For them, it was about a memory that they could use to legitimise the existence of the nation and, above all, political power, which they tried to legitimise through heroic stories. (“Bitter Legacy”) With little correspondence between the varied versions of history, Algeria remains fragmented in the French imagination. Thus, Derderian suggests an interrogation of the “communit[ies] of memory,” or the cloistered memories of diverse groups and private citizens, as well as a collaboration of texts that would challenge “the multiple imaginings of the Algerian War” (Derderian, “Algeria,” 31). Part of this recasting of the history of colonial Algeria began in 1999, when the French National Assembly finally recognized the “conflict” as the Algerian War in order to meet the demands of former combatants. More recently, when France passed the unpopular French law that obliged teachers to instruct their students on the positive values of colonialism (February 23, 2005), the ensuing debates reanimated discussion of France’s colonial past. Stora argued in L’Humanité in December 2005, En valorisant l’œuvre coloniale, il ne reconnaît pas les aspirations des peuples colonisés qui s’étaient exprimées sur les principes du passage aux indépendances politiques. Cette régression est dangereuse, elle choisit de privilégier une mémoire contre une autre. Ce morcellement de la mémoire nationale ouvre sur de nouvelles guerres mémorielles pouvant conduire aux pires débordements. By putting a favourable slant on the colonial project, it denies the aspirations of colonized peoples who had gained a voice in the transition to political independence. In favouring one memory over another, 4

INTRODUCTION

this represents a dangerous step backwards. Such a fragmentation of the collective national memory opens up the possibility of further memory wars, with potentially more serious consequences.4 (“Début”; Drummond, “Colonialism”) In spite of the recent increased investigations into the French-Algerian past, in a 2010 interview with Paris Match, Stora insisted the Algerian War remains taboo because “elle a été, aussi, une guerre civile francofrançaise, et algéro-algérienne. Elle ne s’est jamais terminée par un consensus entre Français, et une réconciliation avec l’Algérie indépendante. Cette absence de vision commune ne facilite pas l’écriture sereine de l’Histoire” (it was also a civil Franco-French and Algero-Algerian war. It never ended by a consensus among the French and a reconciliation with independent Algeria. This lack of common vision does not allow history to be peacefully written) (“Algérie,” 32). Stora confirms that much remains to be reconciled in the history of the Algerian War, but likewise, the position Algeria maintains in French memory today needs to be interrogated. He explains in Imaginaires de guerre that in addition to the traumas invoked by the war, the official censure in France had a strong impact on the version of the war that has been presented and accepted by the French public.5 This book joins individual and communal memories to a broader context. Because of the complexities, shame, and trauma invoked by the war, literature from each community, especially from the Pieds-Noirs and former French and Algerian military officers, has taken the place of history. By analyzing the narrative strategies that the former French citizens of Algeria employ to talk about Algeria’s past, this study attempts to appropriately situate their writing among the many voices on Algeria. Primarily through the study of perpetual return, I demonstrate the use of autobiographical writing and film as a means of creating stability after the loss of a homeland. The inherent movement in these return narratives, however, is a destabilizing force that can ultimately deconstruct the attachment to the past. The process of return sustains the community, but it also threatens to undo the unification it strives to create. 5

INTRODUCTION

The need to return to Algeria through shared memories and both written and physical voyages is predominant in Pied-Noir texts. Even for those who never travel back to Algeria, the idea of returning haunts them. Monique Ayoun and Jean-Pierre Stora address the anxiety surrounding return in the preface to their work Mon Algérie: “Et si on allait à Alger ?” Jean-Pierre Stora, mon cousin, a lancé un jour cette idée dans l’air et elle y est restée, quelques mois, sans qu’aucun de nous deux ose la reformuler. Ces mots : “Alger-Algérie”, sonnaient comme l’impossible, comme l’interdit. Acheter un billet pour Alger, c’était s’offrir un voyage dans le temps, croquer la madeleine proustienne. On ne peut franchir ce pas sans appréhension : quelles choses enfouies en soi par le travail des années va-t-on brusquement éveiller ? Ne risque-t-on pas de faire surgir quelque monstre insidieusement lové dans les recoins les plus cachés de la mémoire ? Doit- on tirer de leur repère les images endormies ? Et si c’était la déception, ou pis encore, l’indifférence ? “And if we went to Algiers?” my cousin Jean-Pierre Stora one day threw this idea out into the air, and it remained there for several months, and neither of us dared repeat it. These words—“Algiers-Algeria”—rang out like the impossible, like the forbidden. Buying a ticket to Algiers was equivalent to buying a trip back in time, to bite into the Proustian madeleine. We could not take this step without apprehension: What things buried inside ourselves over the years were we going to abruptly awaken? Aren’t we running the risk of conjuring up some monster insidiously curled up in the most hidden corners of our memory? Must we drag out the sleeping images from where they belong? And if it meant disappointment, or even worse, indifference? (17) While many exiles return with precisely this mission of chasing after the sensations—the rhythms, the sounds, and the tastes— of Algeria, Ayoun and Stora fear resurrecting the essence of the past. Likening this return to Proustian memory, which is most often associated with pleasure, they, like many Pied-Noir writers, recognize the possibility of also awakening 6

INTRODUCTION

a beast within. Most, however, seek to sustain the pleasure of the past through writing, and by continually reliving specific memories, they suppress others. This book explores repetition and return as fundamental elements of Pied-Noir identity. Although the Pieds-Noirs claim to use repetition as a means of preserving the past, as a psychological practice, repetition is a means of fixing and rehearsing the past to avoid the present. While many of the authors studied in this book concentrate on the physical sensations of the past evoked through real returns and memoir writing, a few directly address their fixation on the past and their inability to overcome nostalgia. Algerian-born authors Albert Camus, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Leïla Sebbar, and Marie Cardinal, among many others, wrote multiple post-exile works centered on Algeria. Regardless of the authors’ overt textual goals, they continually evoke Algeria, demonstrating that the repetition of homeland is never complete. To more completely understand the importance of Algeria in French memory today, this book undertakes Derderian’s project of interrogating the cloistered memories of colonial Algeria so they might be integrated into a context of Algerian histories. The colonial experience in Algeria is an important factor to both the present of Algeria and that of France, but the problem for most Pied-Noir writers is that the Algeria that interests them no longer exists. Thus, this book focuses on authors who have traditionally been viewed outside the Pied-Noir community but who employ many of the same strategies of remembering. These authors offer both reductive and productive models for examining a colonial past. In addition to establishing a place for colonial memory, Remembering French Algeria attempts to distinguish the strategies at play in communal memory and to express how individual memories are often incorporated into larger efforts. WHO ARE THE PIEDS- NOIRS? The term “Pieds-Noirs” is used in this study to loosely refer to the Frenchborn citizens of colonial Algeria who were exiled to France during and after the Algerian War for Independence (1954– 62). When referring to 7

INTRODUCTION

the French still living in the Algerian colony, the term “Français d’Algérie” will be used. While the majority of authors studied in this text, notably Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Leïla Sebbar, are not generally identified as Pieds-Noirs, their attachment to and repetition of Algeria, deconstructed as it may be, is no less powerful and apparent. Even Marie Cardinal, whom I read as representative of Pied-Noir identity, struggled to articulate something separate from her community’s experience.6 Consequently, these authors provide a valuable counterbalance to the predominant nostalgic re- creation of colonial Algeria. Likewise, while I would argue that Albert Camus was not a Pied-Noir because he was exiled from Algeria in 1940, long before the Algerian War for Independence, and he died in 1960, before it ended, his nostalgia for and repetition of his homeland are significant factors in his literary and philosophical work, and in many ways he provides the model for the authors who followed. Although the term “Pied-Noir” can also refer to those Europeans from Tunisia and Morocco, this book will only consider memory of Algeria. Unlike the military protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco, Algeria was a colonie de peuplement, or a settler colony. As a result, the Français d’Algérie were generationally implanted in their country after the Algerian conquest in 1830. Because many Français d’Algérie had family ties in Algeria dating back more than a century, they felt that they had a strong ancestral claim to the land. The longevity of their presence in Algeria further created a more specific culture and political climate for the European settlers than it did in other colonies. Equally specific to Algeria is the difficulty of decolonization. Officially a part of France beginning in 1848, Algeria was liberated through a war that continued from 1954 to 1962. This war was particularly complicated because French officials refused to label it as such and both sides practiced torture.7 Furthermore, the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), formed in 1961, threatened physical attack on the Français d’Algérie not aligned with the group’s ideals of maintaining a French Algeria. Civilian massacres and the widespread use of torture intensified the traumatic departure from Algeria. As Jean-Jacques Viala documents in Pieds-Noirs en Algérie après l’indépendance (Pieds-Noirs in Algeria after independence), many had hoped, and a minority did try, 8

INTRODUCTION

to remain in Algeria after independence, but they soon found that this would be impossible.8 The violence surrounding their departure together with the absence of their homeland made the compulsion to return and repeat their experiences even more potent. PIED- NOIR IDENTITY The articulation of a collective Pied-Noir identity has always been based on the concept of return: it was on their so-called return to France that the Français d’Algérie earned the nickname Pieds-Noirs. While it is often assumed that the Français d’Algérie were returning to their homeland, most had never been to France, and a significant percentage were not of French heritage but were naturalized citizens. The French term “Français d’Algérie” is preferred in this book to refer to the colonial French because it clearly indicates that the Pieds-Noirs were French citizens from Algeria.9 Whereas the Pieds-Noirs sometimes insist on their dual identity because it lends them a sense of authority and belonging, few of them are what would be called today “Franco-Algérien.” The once pejorative term “Pieds-Noirs” is packed with conflicting myths of its origins, two of which will be explored here. The predominantly held source of the term is that native Algerians saw the black boots of the French soldiers during the conquest in 1830 and called the colonists “Pieds-Noirs.” The second major myth is that the Pieds-Noirs stomped their grapes to make wine, leaving a black resin on their feet.10 In both versions the term “Pied-Noir” is attributed to the Algerians, and both attribute the coining to a time before the term’s actual invention. If indeed the indigenous Algerians created the name, there is no explanation for the beginning of the term in French, especially as there was a great linguistic gap between colonized and colonizer in the early nineteenth century. Although it has not entered into Pied-Noir mythology, the official version conveyed in French dictionaries is that the term was created in 1901 to refer to the driver of Algerian boats (Robert, Petit Robert, 1433; Domas, Maxidico, 841). The Robert dictionary, whose author, Paul Robert, was a Pied-Noir, also cites the term as later being used to refer to an “Arabe d’Algérie” in 1917 (1433). The Petit Larousse illustré uses 9

INTRODUCTION

Pied-Noir to refer to a “Français d’origine européenne installé en Afrique du Nord, et plus partic. en Algérie, jusqu’à l’indépendance” (French of European origin living in North Africa, and more specifically in Algeria, until independence) (781).11 These conflicting versions of the “origins” of the Pieds-Noirs reconfirm another important aspect of Pied-Noir identity: the source of origin is eternally displaced, and it is the return toward an origin that defines the Pied-Noir. The truth of the Pieds-Noirs is that their feet were never considered black until those French colonists who had been born in the North African colonies began their “repatriation” in France as early as 1956 (Hureau, Mémoire, 7). As almost a million Français d’Algérie arrived in France, primarily between 1961 and 1963, the term “Pieds-Noirs” was used as an insult to express disgust with the political and social climate of the time. Cardinal explains in Les Pieds Noirs, “Nous n’avons été Pieds Noirs qu’au moment de partir. On dit que ce sont les Arabes qui nous ont appelés comme ça du temps de la Conquête, parce que les premiers colons débarquaient avec des souliers noirs [. . .]. En vérité, ce sont les Français de France qui nous ont donné ce nom” (We didn’t become Pieds-Noirs until the moment we left. They say it was the Arabs that called us that during the Conquest, because the first colonists landed with black shoes [. . .]. The truth is it was the French from France that gave us this name) (80). Historian Jean-Robert Henry believes that the French gave this term to the “Français d’Algérie rapatriés” (repatriated French of Algeria) in order to show themselves superior to those colonists who were soiled by Algeria: they were both planted in the soil and dirtied by the country (Martini, Racines, 3). At first a derogatory term, “Pied-Noir” eventually was reappropriated to this group and became a symbol of pride.12 Cardinal explains, “Au début nous avons pris ça pour une insulte ou pour une moquerie, ça nous ‘faisait perdre la fugure’ de nous appeler comme ça. Et puis nous nous y sommes faits. Personnellement je suis fière d’être Pied-Noir” (In the beginning we took it as an insult or a joke; it made us “lose face” to call us that. And then we got used to it. Personally, I’m proud to be a PiedNoir) (Pieds-Noirs, 80). Eventually, this visually evocative name became 10

INTRODUCTION

a mark that the Français d’Algérie were proud to carry. It further became a source of collective identity once the Pieds-Noirs were transplanted in France, and some emphasized certain stereotypical aspects of their identity to more readily identify their community.13 In the 1980s, when most of France remained publicly silent about the end of colonial rule in Algeria, associations for Pieds-Noirs sprang up around the country, and they are still largely active today. Because of their mixed origins, when arriving in France, the Pieds-Noirs seemed markedly different from the Français de souche, or native-born French. Many of the Pieds-Noirs were of Spanish heritage. In Oran in 1911, for example, there were ninety-five thousand people of French ancestry, ninety-two thousand naturalized French citizens of Spanish origin, and ninety-three thousand Spanish citizens living in Algeria as foreigners (Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 31). Stora writes that the first Français d’Algérie were a mix of peasants who had lost their social standing in the Industrial Revolution, of exiled peoples, and of “communards” who would eventually want to become landowners (31). Added to this mix were Maltese, Italians, Corsicans, and many other less populous groups of peoples. The Crémieux Decree naturalized the Algerian Jews in 1870: as the Jews were not Arab, they could then be incorporated into what was “European” at the time. There has been recent speculation that the decision to give French citizenship to the Jews already living in Algeria long before colonization was the cause for great animosity from the Arab population of Algeria at the time. Adding to the diversity of the colonial population, the law of June 26, 1889, imposed French citizenship on any foreign-born person in Algeria who did not claim the nationality of his or her father (32). The melding of the group, although begun in the colony, would predominantly take place through communal reinforcements once in France. As Patricia Lorcin points out, “The defensive mechanism of the pieds-noirs, against both metropole French and the loss of their former identity, was to coalesce into a tight-knit community of ‘exiles’” (Historicizing, 171–72). While the term “Français d’Algérie” allows for a variety of people (at least of different social classes and religions) to belong to the group, 11

INTRODUCTION

the visually descriptive term “Pied-Noir” reinforces the idea that only one kind of person participated in colonization. Jean-Pierre Hollender gives a detailed physical description of this type in his Plaidoyer pour un peuple innocent: gros, gras, rouges et suants, cigare aux lèvres, jetant nos billets de banque par la portière de notre voiture ou fouettant les glaneurs qui osaient ramasser les blés abandonnés par les grosses moissonneuses batteuses. Les femmes étant couvertes de bijoux et passant leurs journées affalées sur des sofas en mangeant des “loukoum,” pendant que des négrionnes au moyen de grands éventails chassaient les mouches en les ventilant. fat, sweaty, a cigar on the lips, throwing our banknotes out the door of our new car or whipping the gleaners who picked up wheat left behind from our big combine-harvesters. The women, covered in jewels and spending their days on couches and eating Turkish Delight while their black servants chased away flies with large fans while fanning them. (16) Conglomerating all the Français d’Algérie under the rubric of Pied-Noir erases the great variety of cultures, classes, and ethnicities as well as a diverse history of those people who participated in the colonization of Algeria. This erasure, however, is perhaps necessary for sustaining the Pied-Noir population in France at a time when its members feel they are dying out. The derogatory term “Pied-Noir” additionally served to create a type of person who participated in colonization of North Africa. The Pieds-Noirs were perceived to talk differently, eat differently, and dress differently from the metropolitan French, and their differences were thus viewed as the group’s identity. The literary figure of Cagayous, who appeared in Algeria near the end of the nineteenth century, became one of the primary fictional representations of the Europeans of Algeria. Although his stories (published by Musette) appeared between 1894 and 1920, he still clearly represents this difference of 12

INTRODUCTION

the “colonial race,” as historian David Prochaska calls it in his article “History as Literature, Literature as History: Cagayous of Algiers.” Cagayous was a conglomerate of French, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese (among others) and spoke a “pataouète” (675), and many Pied-Noir organizations still use Cagayous as a representation of their collective identity.14 The Pieds-Noirs find both strength and communal ties by recuperating the stereotypes placed on them in the postcolonial world. Numerous recent texts written by Pieds-Noirs embrace and reinforce the image of the “merguez-and- couscous-loving Pied-Noir in Algeria.” This act of endorsing the Pied-Noir stereotype serves to further the common identity of the Pieds-Noirs. As an example of this reinforcement, an invitation to a Pied-Noir gathering in Uzès for June 1, 2003, states, Vous trouverez sur place: Boissons, merguez et pâtisseries orientales. Bônois, Constantinois, anciens de Tunisie, Pieds Noirs de tous horizons, amis et sympathisants, venez nombreux participer à cette journée, afin de retrouver des visages connus, d’échanger des souvenirs impérissables et d’assurer dans la joie et la bonne humeur le succès complet de cette manifestation. Chacun apporte son “Couffin” ou sa “Cabassette”, sa petite table et chaises pliantes. N’oubliez pas les verres pour l’Anisette (se délecter avec modération). On site you will find: drinks, merguez and oriental pastries. Bônois, Constantinois, and the older generation from Tunisia, Pieds-Noirs from all backgrounds, friends and supporters, come one come all to participate in this day, to reunite with familiar faces, to exchange everlasting memories, and to ensure the total success of this gathering with joy and good humor. Bring your own “Couffin” or “Cabassette,” your folding table and chairs.15 Don’t forget the anisette glasses (to be enjoyed in moderation). (ABCT, “Rappel La Saint-Couffin!”) The Pieds-Noirs themselves now embrace this collective label as their survival is dependent on their unity and, thus, sometimes conformity to these stereotypes. 13

INTRODUCTION

COLLECTIVITY AND UNITY Between 1954 and 1963, as the Pieds-Noirs arrived in France, multiple identities that once existed in the colony were condensed into one collective image of the Pied-Noir. This heretofore unknown unity erased differences, such as social class and ethnic origin, that may have caused important distinctions in Algeria. As the individuals collectively tried to reestablish themselves in a new country, their point of origin shifted.16 Instead of being more French than the French, more patriotic, more Catholic, and so on, as they often attempted to portray themselves in Algeria, the new focal point of their collective identity became the perceived abandonment of French Algeria and the great absence it represented to them in France. According to historian Jean-Jacques Jordi, “Les incertitudes dues à l’exil contribuent au renforcement d’une conscience commune au-delà d’une unité religieuse, ethnique ou linguistique qui lui fait défaut” (The uncertainties caused by exile contribute to the reinforcement of a common consciousness beyond a religious, ethnic, or linguistic unity that is lacking) (De l’exode, 14). Instead of recognizing former ethnic origins (Spanish, Italian, etc.), the specific city in Algeria from which they hailed became the new originating location. In addition to gaining a new sense of geographical origins, the group became divided on generational lines once in France. Cardinal does not consider those who lived most of their life in Algeria before coming to France (those who came to France as senior citizens and who were born at the turn of the twentieth century) Pieds-Noirs because their identity was formed in Algeria as Français d’Algérie and they maintained great reverence for France. The shift to France was more problematic for middle-aged “rapatriés” (thirty to fifty years old) who felt firmly implanted in Algeria at the time of exodus. This generation experienced World War II in Algeria and felt their histories were irrevocably interdependent, and yet they felt culturally distant from the motherland: Je crois que pour les générations qui ont précédé la mienne, la sensation d’ambiguïté était moins grande, je n’en suis pas certaine et les anciens ne sont plus là pour me le dire. Il me semble qu’ils étaient 14

INTRODUCTION

moins “pieds-noirs” que nous. [. . .] La patrie était plus lointaine pour nous, presque symbolique. Les gens avaient fait leur place, ils avaient ensemencé la terre, bâti des maisons [. . .]. Ils n’étaient plus des exilés, des immigrés, des aventuriers, maintenant ils avaient pris racine là, ils étaient de là. [. . .] La France demeurait la mère, l’aïeule plutôt, mais elle n’était pas notre terre. I believe for the generations that came before mine, the sense of ambiguity was greater. I’m not sure, and the elderly are no longer here to tell me. It seems that they were less “Pieds-Noirs” than us. [. . .] The homeland was farther away for us, almost symbolic. People had made their place, they had planted the land, built houses [. . .]. They weren’t exiles, immigrants, adventurers any more. Now they had taken root there, they were from there. [. . .] France remained the mother, the foremother rather, but it was not our land. (Pieds-Noirs, 46) Cardinal emphasizes the underlying ambiguity on which Pied-Noir identity, always straddled between two countries even though the attachment to each shifted over time, is established. As a result of their noted stability in Algeria at the time of their “repatriation,” the major writers of Pied-Noir identity are those who were young to middle-aged adults when they left Algeria. For those who lived half of their lives in each country, the questioning of their identity often becomes the foundation of who they are. On the contrary, those who were children at the time of their repatriation were not as significantly affected by their exodus from Algeria and were offered more opportunities to develop their identity as French as a result of their age (Stora, Transfert, 71– 99). While Algeria was transmitted to them as an ancestral ghost, they possess few, if any, memories of their own in the so- called homeland.17 Instead, these young Pieds-Noirs and their children grapple with “postmemory,” causing their relationship to the transmitted Algeria to be highly nuanced. Thus, the youngest generation of Pieds-Noirs are often more able to express, as demonstrated by Lestrade at the opening of this introduction, what the older generations would have found unspeakable. These generational separations demonstrate that 15

INTRODUCTION

the experience of “repatriation” remains one of the greatest dividing points among the Pieds-Noirs. While Marie Cardinal attempts to show diversity in the community of Pieds-Noirs, her work highlights that the Pieds-Noirs hold in common an imagined elsewhere and that her people were French citizens: Il existe autant de sortes de Pieds-Noirs que de familles pieds-noirs. Nous étions différents les uns des autres, mais nous avions tous en commun le fait d’être d’ici et d’ailleurs. Même pour ceux—la majorité— qui n’avaient jamais voyagé, il existait un coin de terre sacrée quelque part sur l’autre rive de la Méditerranée. Nous étions différents les uns des autres, mais nous vivions ensemble dans une réalité que se partageaient plusieurs religions, plusieurs langues, plusieurs lois . . . Même si, à l’origine, nos ancêtres étaient venus de France, d’Espagne, d’Italie, de Grèce . . . nous n’avions qu’un seul drapeau et nous en étions fiers, il était bleu, blanc, rouge. Tous, nous avons été élevés et instruits dans sa vénération. There are as many types of Pieds-Noirs as there are Pied-Noir families. We were different from each other, but we all had in common the fact that we were from here and there. Even for those—the majority—who had never traveled, there was a sacred piece of land somewhere on the other side of the Mediterranean. We were different from each other, but we lived together in a reality that shared several religions, several languages, several laws. . . . Even if, in the beginning, our ancestors were from France, Spain, Italy, Greece . . . we had only one flag, and we were proud of it—it was blue, white, red. All of us were raised and educated to revere it. (Pieds-Noirs, 9) Sharing the same colonial past, albeit diverse, is the point that brought the Pieds-Noirs together.18 Once they had “returned” to France, they had the shared absence of a homeland in common, and this became the foundation for the “religious memory” of Algeria. Cardinal, although quick to point out her differences from the Pied-Noir community and especially her family, shares the pain of separation and the nostalgic 16

INTRODUCTION

re-creation of her homeland throughout her works. In writing this documentary on her people, she has clearly identified herself with the core Pied-Noir values. Among the diverse groups who have been collected into Pied-Noir identity, the Jewish Pieds-Noirs still stand apart in many histories and memoirs. The large community of Algerian Jews was established in Algeria before colonization and was granted French nationality with the Crémieux Decree. Prochaska argues that the Jews were not included in the Français d’Algérie (“History as Literature,” 675), and the Jewish Pieds-Noirs often have a different perspective on their Algerian past largely because of their long history in Algeria and their exclusion during the Vichy years. Accounts of the Pied-Noir juif are often given separately from accounts of the rest of the Pied-Noir community (Leïla Sebbar’s “Chronique Rapatriée” in Histoires d’elles, for example, or Dominique Fargues’s collected testimonials in Mémoires de Pieds-Noirs), underscoring that the term “Pied-Noir” does not implicitly include everyone who lived in Algeria before the war.19 Nonetheless, many of the narrative strategies practiced by Jewish Pieds-Noirs are similar if not the same as those of the larger group of writers.20 RETROACTIVE NAMING AND ADVANTAGEOUS IDENTITIES The term “Pied-Noir,” invented by the French to refer to the Français d’Algérie who arrived in France in the 1960s, has been and is now consistently used to refer to the French colonists who were born in Algeria.21 Thus, its retroactive use in contexts before Algerian independence skews the perspective on both Pied-Noir identity and French colonial history. Even historians participate in the invasive retroactive labeling of the Pieds-Noirs. Raphaël Delpard, for example, wrote L’Histoire des Pieds-Noirs d’Algérie (1830–1962), a time frame that clearly precedes the actual invention of the Pieds-Noirs. While many historians and authors recognize the term “Pied-Noir” as given to the Français d’Algérie by the metropolitan French, few historians (much less French citizens) take account of the implications of mislabeling the community. As Benjamin Stora writes, “Lorsque, dans l’année 1962, des centaines de milliers 17

INTRODUCTION

de pieds-noirs franchissent la Méditerranée, les métropolitains qui les observent ne font pas de différence. Pour eux, tous appartiennent à la même communauté des Français d’Algérie s’installant massivement en France après l’indépendance de l’Algérie” (While in 1962 hundreds of thousands of Pieds-Noirs were crossing the Mediterranean, the metropolitan French who were watching did not distinguish among them. For them, they all belonged to the same community of Français d’Algérie that was moving en masse into France after Algerian independence) (Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 35). Although Stora is one of the only historians to ever distinguish between Français d’Algérie and Pieds-Noirs, he uses the term “Pieds-Noirs” to label the community at the very moment of its becoming. The misuse of “Pied-Noir” began almost as soon as the term was appropriated, and this slippage underscores the confusion between present and past inherent in the Pied-Noir community. The temporal confusion of Pied-Noir history has advantageous outcomes for the Pieds-Noirs and French alike. Using the term “Pied-Noir” to refer to the Français d’Algérie distances the guilty colonial party (those perceived to be les colons) from the metropolitan French: removing the “French” from the term “Français d’Algérie” simultaneously relieves the French from colonization and shifts the blame onto the Pieds-Noirs. Furthermore, the term “Pied-Noir” both physically and verbally removes Algeria from the group, aiding the public amnesia of the French-Algerian “conflict.” In short, the Pieds-Noirs are no longer considered French, the French are no longer related to Algeria, and this separation aids in the willful forgetting of the lost war. The retroactive naming of the Pieds-Noirs is ubiquitous. Marie Cardinal, for example, wrote her photo-documentary book titled Les Pieds-Noirs in 1988 to uncover the history of the Français d’Algérie before 1954.22 Although Cardinal overtly comments on the correct moment of naming, she retroactively calls her people Pieds-Noirs throughout the text in phrases such as “Je crois que pour 99,5% des Pieds-Noirs qui vivaient en Algérie en 1940 l’appel du 18 Juin a été lancé en chinois” (I think that for 99.5 percent of the Pieds-Noirs living in Algeria in 1940, General de Gaulle’s Appeal of June 18 was made in Chinese) (57). Cardinal also 18

INTRODUCTION

writes accounts of so-called Pieds-Noirs who remained in Algeria and never came to France after the Algerian independence in Au pays de mes racines (184). This simultaneous use of the name Pied-Noir to refer to past and present is indicative of the group’s split identity. As the PiedsNoirs ride the fence between two places and two times, physical and written return are needed to sustain their ambiguous identity as exiles. The collective identity of the Pieds-Noirs is additionally complicated because it is strategically lodged between Algeria and France, and neither the French nor the Algerians can easily accept this positioning. The goal of Pieds-Noirs to integrate their history into the whole of French and Algerian history, according to Jordi, is a valuable ambition: Cependant, à la différence d’autres communautés qui fondent leur identité et leur force sur le souvenir historique, les Pieds-Noirs, ces Français de “là-bas”—tentent de confondre l’histoire de l’Algérie, et plus généralement l’histoire coloniale, à celle de la France alors que les Français de souche ont bien du mal à faire entrer dans leur propre histoire celle de la colonisation et de la décolonisation. However, unlike other communities that found their identity and their strength on historical memory, the Pieds-Noirs, those French from “over there”—try to merge the history of Algeria, and more generally colonial history, with that of France while the native-born French have trouble entering colonization and decolonization into their own history. (De l’exode, 184) Although Jordi supports this process of integrating Pied-Noir history into the larger rubric of History, this effort may also be read as an attempt to maintain authority in Algeria and to regain power in France after the destabilization of decolonization. The Pieds-Noirs attempt to remind the French of their “forgotten” colonial past and to remove public shame surrounding the Algerian War by erecting official monuments commemorating military deaths in the war and including the inscription “Mort pour la France” (Died for France). The subscription to a common identity and past, combined with the 19

INTRODUCTION

will to mix French colonial history into the history of France, unified the Pied-Noir struggle to be remembered, not as the culprits of colonization, but as an innocent party that lived in the French colony. Many Pied-Noir authors, including Marie Cardinal, Anne Lanta, and René Lenoir, write to set the record straight about their relationship with Algeria.23 Daniel Leconte, in his personalized “history” of the Pieds-Noirs, Les Pieds-Noirs: Histoire et portrait d’une communauté, explains the stereotype laid on the Pieds-Noirs on their arrival in France: “En ce temps-là, il est vrai, on ne faisait pas de détail. Français d’Algérie, nous ne pouvions qu’être colonialistes, et plus tard OAS, et cet amalgame contribuait à nier en nous ce que nous étions en rejetant ce que nous incarnions” (During this time, it’s true, they didn’t distinguish among us. As Français d’Algérie, we could be only colonialists, and later OAS, and this amalgam contributed to denying in us what we were by rejecting what we stood for) (17). Jean-Pierre Hollender made one of the sharpest counterattacks on the French reception of the Pieds-Noirs in Plaidoyer pour un peuple innocent, in which he aggressively fights to break the stereotype of the Pied-Noir aristocrat and colon who lived by oppressing others (8). Hollender’s specific goal is to protect the name of the Pieds-Noirs for his children and grandchildren, who never lived in Algeria, so they would not be ashamed of their heritage. Anne Lanta also writes to displace blame as she constantly describes herself as fair and loving to her native Algerian friends and servants. This struggle to be correctly understood deeply influences these writers’ history. In their attempts to deal with their displacement, the Pieds-Noirs have shifted the blame placed on them for colonization onto the metropolitan French. This has largely been achieved as a result of the public silence on the Algerian “conflict” in the immediate years after the war. During this time many Pieds-Noirs addressed their losses and established themselves as the only voice, and thus the historical authority, on Algeria. In addition, these self-justificatory works often demonstrate the author to be different from the typical colon and thus innocent of colonization and, at the end of the war, OAS operations. By “Othering” not only the Arabes but also the French (often called Patos), a position of Pied-Noir 20

INTRODUCTION

superiority emerges. Contributing to this effort, many Pieds-Noirs blame the French for their abandonment and subsequent discriminatory practices, creating a position as innocent victim in their history and thereby freeing themselves from responsibility in colonization. This victimization is analyzed in Claire Eldridge’s article “Blurring the Boundaries between Perpetrators and Victims: Pied-Noir Memories and the Harki Community,” as well as in Derderian’s work, in which he points out in no uncertain terms that these histories lean on myths in a purposeful effort to propagate a politically advantageous image of the community: “In the case of both the community of French settlers and that of the military, long established myths employed to interpret the Algerian past still function as powerful exculpatory or self-redeeming devices in the present. Mythical self-constructions of the pied-noir community as the dispossessed and damned people of Europe continue to help mitigate what Fanon denounced as the harsh reality of an inegalitarian colonial system based above all on fear and coercion. Self-victimization can function as a powerful galvanizing form of identity that many groups will discard only reluctantly” (Derderian, “Algeria,” 32). The Pieds-Noirs’ new identity is based on a past in which they lived side by side the Algerian natives in a fraternal relationship until the French abandoned the colony. Although the retroactive labeling of the Pieds-Noirs and the displacement of blame skew Pied-Noir history, this constant looking backward, or returning, defines Pied-Noir identity today. As the Pieds-Noirs struggle to remember personal losses and to gain recognition in French history, they use their supposed confrontation with the past to create a firm position in France that is bolstered by their writing. They write, whether professionally or personally, to remember and to remind. Their fight against forgetting in autobiographical narratives furthers the self-justification process as it places the blame for forgetting the war onto the French. They also write to work through the dual trauma of leaving Algeria and being rejected in France. As Lucienne Martini and Joëlle Hureau contend in their works on Pied-Noir literature and memory, these efforts to recall the past or return to the past are largely manifestations of the need for stability within the new context of France. The attempt to create 21

INTRODUCTION

stability, however, also functions to create authority and eventually to repress what is “unholy” to the communal memory of the Pieds-Noirs. HISTORY AND MEMORY In his work Benjamin Stora proposes that the Algerian War was forgotten because it was impossible for the different parties to come to a consensus about what had happened. He equally suggests that the creation of an acceptable version of history was aided by censures that were strong during France’s Fifth Republic, from 1958 to 1962 (Imaginaires, 190). Although his work is focused on the memory of the Algerian War, this idea applies to the memory of postwar Algeria because the amnesia of the war directly led to a forgetting of Algeria after 1962. Furthermore, because the memories of Algeria are divided, or cloistered, by community, there is also a type of “religious” memory to which each group must subscribe to protect or sustain its history. “Mémoire religieuse” for Stora is “une mémoire ritualisée de sorte que chaque événement ne prend son sens que par rapport à l’organisation légendaire d’un passé” (a ritualized memory so that each event only makes sense in relationship to the legendary organization of a past) (190). The ritualistic aspect of this memory relies on repetition. As these rewritings of the past enter the literary or historical scene, they join a context of Pied-Noir writing that adds their voice to a larger community. Each individual experience, however, reiterates elements of the common or collective experience, often in a similar style of conformism in memory. While there are thousands of Algerias, through repetition of the same familiar touchstones of Algeria, a “singular” experience eventually emerges and the PiedsNoirs effectively create a unified context of Algeria. Only recently are divergent and specifically traumatic memories finding a place in the context of Algerias, and in an effort to layer histories of Algeria, this book incorporates divergent memoirs that deconstruct the idea of a uniformed past all while contributing to a complex history. Pied-Noir histories, like Daniel Leconte’s Les Pieds-Noirs, are often constructed from personal narratives or testimonials of the colonial years and the war and usually recounted many years after the end of 22

INTRODUCTION

colonial reign. Academics such as Jeannine Verdès-Leroux in Les Français d’Algérie de 1830 à aujourd’hui, Jean-Jacques Viala in Pieds-Noirs en Algérie après l’indépendance, René Domergue in L’Intégration des PiedsNoirs dans les villages du Midi, and Dominque Fargues in Mémoires des Pieds-Noirs openly lean on testimonials as historical sources in their texts, preferring to let the Pieds-Noirs speak for themselves. Eric Savarèse in L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs cautions, however, “En revanche, la lecture des travaux scientifiques sur les Pieds-Noirs doit être associée à une variable inédite : ils sont assez largement le fait d’individus qui, eux-mêmes, sont comptabilisés parmi les Pieds-Noirs” (On the other hand, you have to take into account a unique variable when reading research about the Pieds-Noirs: these texts are mostly undertaken by individuals who are, themselves, counted among the Pieds-Noirs) (27). In fact, it is largely accepted that the Pieds-Noirs should give their own account of their history. In De l’exode à l’exil, Jordi explains, “Pour que la communauté pied-noir existe, il lui faut une histoire-référence. Or, celle- ci ne peut pas être l’histoire de France” (For the Pied-Noir community to exist, it needs a historical reference. Moreover, this cannot be the history of France) (14). Thus, the community writes its own history, a position defended in the biographic guide for the Français d’Algérie distributed by the Centre d’Etudes Pied-Noir: “Eux seuls (les Pieds-Noirs) peuvent dire ce qui s’est réellement passé, quelles ont été les difficultés, les succès, les erreurs, les malentendus [. . .]. Seuls les Pieds-Noirs peuvent légitimement parler de leur vie quotidienne en Algérie, et raconter ce que furent les faits, grands et petits, qui en ont constitué la trame” (They [the Pieds-Noirs] alone can say what really happened, what were the challenges, successes, mistakes, misunderstandings [. . .]. Only the Pieds-Noirs can legitimately speak about their daily life in Algeria and recount what were the facts, both great and small, that made up their story) (quoted in Savarèse, Invention, 35). Even during the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, a significant number of historical texts were published from within the community. For example, Harmattan included in its series “Graveurs de Mémoire” (Memory Engravers) a volume by Pied-Noir historian Robert Lopez, Le Bonheur perdu des exclus: 1962 Les Conditions désastreuses de 23

INTRODUCTION

l’exode des pieds-noirs et des harkis (The lost happiness of the exiles: 1962, the disastrous conditions of the exodus of the Pieds-Noirs and Harkis). This account, like its many predecessors, uses personal experience in its attempt to give a history of the exodus; Harmattan classifies it as biography, autobiography, history, and testimonial.24 Savarèse calls for more objective and critical works on the Pieds-Noirs and specifically from a non-Pied-Noir community (Invention, 37). While he criticizes the way in which Pied-Noir history has been sustained, he also maintains that these memoirs are “des fragments d’une histoire complexe” (fragments of a complex history) and one that he begins to analyze by separating memory and history (26). In spite of any objective pretense, when memory is used as history, personal ambitions, rather than the evidence of events, lead the way. As long as the Pieds-Noirs dominate the historical market, maintaining authority over Algerian memory, the history of Algeria will remain obscured. This is not to say that Pieds-Noirs have not written valuable histories of Algeria: some of the most widely accepted and validated versions of Algerian history are written by Pieds-Noirs (including Benjamin Stora, Jean-Jacques Jordi, André Nouschi, and Xavier Yacono). Rather, Pied-Noir histories, or even Algerian histories, that are written as autobiography and meant to represent the entire Pied-Noir community, or all of colonial Algeria, must be carefully scrutinized.25 Gilles Manceron and Hassan Remaoun, whose project was to combine French history with Algerian history, wrote D’une rive à l’autre: La guerre d’Algérie de la mémoire à l’histoire in 1993. This critical look at the history of the war specifically has further-reaching applications for the history of Algeria because much of what the Pieds-Noirs have written has passed into history in the absence of official discourse. In their work Manceron and Remaoun underscore collective memory’s role in forming history: Il est certes indispensable de cultiver la mémoire de certains faits essentiels du passé, mais ne faut-il pas aussi prendre des précautions ? La mémoire est une sorte de construction collective qui relève d’un groupe donné où se crée une sorte de consensus, au mépris de l’effort 24

INTRODUCTION

individuel de chacun de ses membres pour exercer son esprit critique. Dans ce processus, les individus ont tendance à reconstruire ce qu’ils ont vécu sous l’influence de leurs pairs, leurs récits “inter-réagissant” les uns sur les autres jusqu’à aboutir à une sorte de vérité consacrée. En cela, l’instrumentalisation de la mémoire apparaît comme un processus jahidin, celle des pieds-noirs, des appelés d’Algérie ou de tous les autres groupes acteurs du conflit. Le matériau de l’histoire ne doit-il pas être constitué que par les mémoires de groupes ? Although it is certainly indispensable to cultivate the memory of essential facts about the past, isn’t it also necessary to use some precaution? Memory is a sort of collective construction that comes from a given group in which a sort of consensus is formed, to the detriment of each individual member’s effort to use his own critical thinking skills. In the process, individuals tend to reconstruct what they lived under the influence of their peers, their stories “cross-reacting” with each other, leading to a recognized truth. Thus, the instrumentalization of memory seems to be a jahidin process, that of the Pieds-Noirs, the French military conscripts, or all the other groups that had a role in the conflict. Shouldn’t history’s material be composed solely by group memories? (D’une rive, 281) Manceron and Remaoun comparatively evaluate memory and history as approaches to the past. The authors caution that memory can serve as a manipulative force, forming a “cult of the past.” History, on the contrary, looks not only at what is remembered but also at what has been forgotten. The danger of history lies in that it can silence memory and even emphasize a certain form of forgetting, as we have seen in the discussion of the Algerian War. “Et l’histoire peut parfois aussi contribuer à faire taire les mémoires et à préconiser une certaine forme d’oubli” (And history can sometimes also contribute to silencing memories and to advocating a certain form of forgetting) (Manceron and Remaoun, D’une rive, 281). Derderian likewise stated, “The simplified narratives of cloistered memories also tend to override or suppress the diversity of individual experiences and perspectives within groups” (“Algeria,” 34). 25

INTRODUCTION

Although one type of Pied-Noir memory, a nostalgic and loving account of the past, has long dominated the vision of Algeria, divergent views are beginning to challenge the reconstructed communal memory of Algeria. As Lestrade plainly expresses in “Pied-Noir et pro-Arabe,” Nous sommes la dernière génération de pieds-noirs, il n’y en aura pas d’autre après nous. Nous sommes nés juste avant ou pendant l’indépendance et nous n’avons pas à payer pour les erreurs de nos parents et de leurs familles. Mais, en fait, nous avons déjà payé toute notre vie leur influence. Notre amour de nos racines n’a pas pu être exprimé à cause de ces origines dramatiques. [. . .] Nous nous sommes sacrifiés car nos parents refusaient de s’excuser une bonne fois pour toutes comme cela s’est passé dans tous les pays colonialistes de manière à passer, enfin, à autre chose. Ces vieux pieds-noirs nous empêchent de vivre. Ce sont de mauvais parents puisqu’ils imposent un état de fait à leurs enfants qui payent le prix de la bêtise obstinée des anciens. Et ce qui se passe aujourd’hui dans les pays arabes les met encore plus dans une position fautive. Que faut-il penser ? Que la France ne s’excusera jamais devant l’Algérie tant que le dernier pied-noir d’extrême droite ne sera pas mort ? Mais qu’il meure alors ! Qu’on l’enterre plus vite ! We are the last generation of Pieds-Noirs, there will never be another after us. We were born just before or during Algerian independence, and we do not have to pay for our parents’ mistakes or the mistakes of their families. But, actually, we have already paid our whole lives for their influence. Our love of our roots could not be expressed because of these dramatic origins. [. . .] We sacrificed ourselves because our parents refused to apologize once and for all for all that happened in the colonial countries in a way that would let us move on to something else. These old Pieds-Noirs are keeping us from living. They are bad parents because they impose this situation on their children, who pay the price for the obstinate stupidity of the elderly. And what’s happening today in Arab countries makes them even more culpable. What should we think? That France will never apologize to Algeria as long 26

INTRODUCTION

as the last Pied-Noir from the Far Right isn’t dead? Well, let him die then! And let’s bury him as quickly as possible! (Lestrade’s emphasis) Through the individual’s recognition of the past and expression of personal memory without accounting for an entire population, the histories of the Algerias may be made, and France will be able to coexist with its wounded populations, the former colonized and colonizers alike. PIED- NOIR WRITING OF FRENCH ALGERIA Pieds-Noirs who write today do so largely through autobiography and travelogues. As a result of the difficult circumstances of departure, many Pieds-Noirs try to re-create their homeland the way they remembered it before the war. In a way that makes the past present to both the author and reader. Literary critics such as Joëlle Hureau in La Mémoire des PiedsNoirs (86) and Lucienne Martini in Racines de papier (2) classify this type of writing as Nostalgérie. The term “Nostalgérie” is the invention of Marcello Fabri, a French writer from Algiers whose 1938 poem of the same title expressed his physical longing for Algeria during a long stay in France. This particular form of writing often demonstrates psychological motivations at work in the texts, such as the compulsion to repeat, avoidance of the present, and the need for fictive stability. Prevalent in autobiography, novels, and travelogues that focus on returning to the past in Algeria, Nostalgérie is a cross-genre style present in a wide range of works, including Marie Cardinal’s photo-documentary Les Pieds-Noirs as well as Emmanuel Roblès collective work Les Pieds-Noirs, which comprises autobiography, history, and literary criticism. This style is pervasive and sensually appealing to writer and reader alike. It also plays a part in the collective memory of the Pieds-Noirs, as the authors lean on the same familiar aspects of Algeria that each Pied-Noir, regardless of ethnicity or social class, can appreciate: for example, the authors make references to the sun, the heat, the winds, the sea, and different parts of the largest cities, such as Algiers or Oran, in such a way that the reader is transported to this past location.26 Pied-Noir literature, frequently marked by the simultaneity of a joyous 27

INTRODUCTION

colonial past and a painful present in France, continues to proliferate. Whereas the war was met with an immediate public silence, now more than fifty years later, the volumes of testimonials, memoirs, and histories increase almost exponentially each year. The Pieds-Noirs are prolific writers imbued with a sense of urgency, as they fear that their culture and history are dying out. As Danielle Michel- Chich explains in her collection of Pied-Noir testimonials, Déracinés, “L’angoisse des piedsnoirs aujourd’hui est d’être oubliés: non pas oubliés des autorités, de l’Etat comme dans les années soixante, mais effacés et surtout engloutis corps et âme dans cette métropole avec laquelle ils entretiennent des relations ambiguës” (What the Pieds-Noirs fear today is to be forgotten: not forgotten by authorities, by the state, like in the 1960s, but erased and above all swallowed up body and soul in the Metropole, with which they maintain an ambiguous relationship) (150). In spite of the rampant increase in Pied-Noir literary production, objective criticism is remarkably sparse. Hureau’s Mémoire des PiedsNoirs, published in 1987, is one of the first major works to approach the Pied-Noir community. Prior texts were primarily personal accounts that attempted to represent a communal history or articles that collected data about the Pieds-Noirs. For example, Janine de la Hogue’s article “Les Livres comme patrie,” which appeared in 1982, broadly outlines the major Pied-Noir writers and categorizes their writing. Later works on the Pieds-Noirs were still predominantly written by the Pieds-Noirs themselves but began to take on a more scientific study of the community. Lucienne Martini’s Racines de papier is another foundational work on Pied-Noir written expression, but this and her second text, Maux d’exil, mots d’exil, are the only studies that specifically address Pied-Noir literature. Appearing in 1997, Racines de papier is academic but uncritical. Martini contributes substantially to the field of Pied-Noir studies by enumerating the many works, authors, and major categories of identity for the community, but she does not question the contribution these works make to French or Algerian literatures or to their histories on the whole. Instead, Martini declares that Pied-Noir texts are not intellectually ambitious: “Chantres de la mémoire collective, ils ne tentent pas 28

INTRODUCTION

d’écrire une histoire intellectuelle” (Cantors of collective memory, they do not attempt to write an intellectual history) (Racines, 219). Savarèse in L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs, however, succeeds in moving beyond the general categorization of Pied-Noir intellectual work and begins to uncover the underlying strategies at play specifically within their literature. At the same time, Savarèse attempts to reintegrate Pied-Noir writing on Algeria into a wider community of writers on colonial Algerian history while undertaking a broader exploration of nostalgia and its function in exile writing. Within this community of writers are many individuals who might serve as examples of Pied-Noir writing, particularly in the use of return and repetition. Representative Pied-Noir authors include Jean-Pierre Hollender, Anne Lanta, René Lenoir, Jean-Pierre Pascuito, and Jean Pélégri. The growing popularity of Pied-Noir memoir writing lends itself to an endless survey of texts that is practically impossible given the everincreasing numbers. The main corpus examined in this book, however, diverges from characteristic Pied-Noir writing by questioning identity and nostalgia while underscoring the repetition evoked within the texts. Although each author is an Algerian-born French citizen exiled from Algeria, each has in some ways been separated from Algeria by his or her own desires and by French readership. One of the primary models for this book is author Marie Cardinal. Cardinal, who was born in 1929 and died in 2001, continually rewrote her homeland from her first published novel in 1962, Écoutez la mer, until her last work, L’Inédit, a collection of recorded dialogues and diary entries posthumously published in Montreal in 2012. Cardinal reworked the same select scenes in Algeria and recontextualized them among nine of her sixteen works, cutting and pasting from fiction to autobiography and vice versa. In an interview with Ysabel Saïah in Pieds-Noirs et fiers de l’êtres, Cardinal said of this rewriting, “J’écris toujours le même livre dont l’empreinte est là-bas. La vie d’une femme vivant sur une terre ravagée par le conflit des humains” (I always write the same book whose imprint is back there. The life of a woman living on a land ravaged by human conflict) (“Marie Cardinale,” 105). She furthered this idea in Au pays de 29

INTRODUCTION

mes racines: “Dans chacun de mes manuscrits je reprends un passage d’un manuscrit précédent. Pour faire la chaîne, pour indiquer que je n’écrirai jamais qu’un seul livre qui sera fait de tous mes livres” (In each of my manuscripts, I take up a passage from a previous manuscript. To make a chain, to indicate that I will only ever write one book that will be made up of all my books) (177). Effectively, Cardinal did write only one book; although each of her works uses different characters, different relationships, and different conflicts, there is only one relationship to Algeria in her texts that serves as a thread throughout her oeuvre. Specific to her style, Cardinal recycled excerpts from one text to the next to form a collage of women unified by the backdrop of Algerian memories. Although Marie Cardinal’s rewriting is entirely unique in the Pied-Noir context, her continual return to past experiences in Algeria is common. Cardinal’s use of repetition to create continuity demonstrates her belief in repetition’s potential for resurrecting what she fears losing: the essence of Algeria. Cardinal is not only one of the most prominent and prolific but also one of the first Pieds-Noirs to write her experience of separation from her homeland.27 In spite of her early attention to her lost roots, however, Cardinal is known and appreciated today because of her feminist contribution to literature. Specifically, her personal experience of psychotherapy, of understanding herself and her relationship to her mother, and of accepting her independence as a woman have taken center stage in her critics’ works for the last forty years. Whereas most feminist criticisms accordingly read Cardinal’s repetitions as a feminist technique, this book will read them as an expression of the dual trauma Cardinal suffered in the expulsion from her mother and motherland that coincides throughout her works. Cardinal’s own psychoanalysis only strengthens the necessity of a psychoanalytic investigation of repetition in both Cardinal’s literature as well as in that of the Pieds-Noirs on the whole. The desire to read Marie Cardinal uniquely as a feminist writer has minimized her experience in Algeria to make her an example of French “female culture” as Carolyn Durham writes in her work The Contexture of Feminism: Marie Cardinal and Multicultural Literacy (20, 57). While it 30

INTRODUCTION

is undeniable that Cardinal uses certain tactics in her writing to draw attention to feminist issues (women’s sexual and material independence, for example), her repetitions serve to create a community of women from (but not living in) a devastated land or, in other words, of PiedNoir women. When Durham writes, “This insistent contextual emphasis that she places on the male-female relationship and, in particular, on the threat of male sexuality encourages us to decode colonialism as a metaphor for women’s ambivalent cultural position” (21), she minimizes Cardinal’s colonial upbringing in order to shift Cardinal’s experience as a metaphor for women as a whole. While Durham’s study prioritizes feminist concerns over postcolonial ones, Cardinal reacted against such classification in her 1996 interview with Claire Marrone in Women in French Studies. Cardinal even expresses shock that others believe they have something in common with her because her colonial experience is so specific. Refusing to be categorized, she rejects the feminist label all while embracing women’s struggles: “Je ne m’appelle pas féministe, mais je pense que la cause des femmes, est la cause plus importante qui soit” (I do not call myself a feminist, but I believe women’s issues are the most important there are) (“Un Entretien,” 125).28 Rather, in her brief entry in Les Carnets de l’exotisme in 1992, she emphasizes that her mixed cultural background is of utmost importance (77). Her continued consideration of herself as Algerian at that time indicates her refusal to be separated from Pied-Noir culture. Although many critics recognize that Cardinal’s experience as a PiedNoir is somewhat significant to her writing, few deal directly with this aspect. For example, in “Privileged Difference and the Possibility of Emancipation: The Words to Say It and A l’autre bout de moi,” Françoise Lionnet points out Cardinal’s colonial heritage as a creative source in her writing (191) but then turns to Cardinal’s writing as a demonstration of “rediscovering the body in its female specificity as the source of her own discursive practice” (196), which remains the theme throughout the rest of the chapter. Although this conforms to the dominant line of criticism surrounding Cardinal,29 postcolonial feminist studies such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s article “Under Western Eyes: Feminist 31

INTRODUCTION

Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” demonstrate women’s roles cannot be divorced from their cultural contexts. Mohanty writes that when women’s dependence is magnified, an “analysis of specific historical differences becomes impossible, because reality is always apparently structured by divisions—two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive groups, the victims and the oppressors” (59). Her premise that women of different societies mother differently would seem to underscore the argument that Cardinal’s separation from her mother is dependent on the colonial situation of Algeria (60). By the 1990s some critics had begun reading Cardinal in a postcolonial context. Among them are Winifred Woodhull in Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures (1993), Patrice Proulx in “Marie Cardinal: Sa poétique de l’exil” (1996), and to some extent, Marie-Paule Ha in “Outre-mer/Autre Mère: Cardinal and Algeria” (1995), which begins to address the problems of considering Cardinal uniquely as a feminist writer. The earliest critique attempting to read Cardinal in a postcolonial context is Marguerite Le Clézio’s “Mother and Motherland: The Daughter’s Quest for Origins” (1981), but Le Clézio’s analysis remains in the realm of feminist criticism. Although Cardinal’s popularity has waned, more recently Alison Rice analyzes Cardinal’s connection to homeland in her comparative study “La Terre Maternelle: Algeria and the Mother in the Work of Three Women Writers from Algeria, Marie Cardinal, Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar,” which appeared in Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives in 2006 and was republished in Polygraphies: Francophone Women Writing Algeria (2012). Likewise, Fiona Barclay studies Cardinal’s relationship to Algeria as a mother in “Writing from Algeria: Haunted Narratives in Cardinal and Cixous” in her book Writing Postcolonial France (2011), and Patricia Lorcin takes a similar but historical approach to Cardinal’s texts in “Happy Families, Pieds-Noirs, Red Strangers, and a ‘Vanishing Africa’: Nostalgia Comes Full Circle” in Historicizing Colonial Algeria (2012). In spite of her image as a writer of feminist issues, Cardinal emphasized that it was not just the body that was essential; it was also the country. As she said to Saïah, it was both a woman and a devastated land that served 32

INTRODUCTION

as the platform for her work, and the two will be examined together in this book. In almost every one of Cardinal’s abundant works, the central character is a suffering woman concurrently separated from her homeland and her mother. Cardinal’s writing of the violent separation she experienced from both her mother and Algeria is characteristic of Pied-Noir writing on the whole. Because it is difficult for many Pied-Noir writers to return physically to Algeria, they use writing as a tool to return to the Algeria they remember in order to sort out their lost or troubled identities. Returning simultaneously to her mother and motherland, Cardinal practices a literary (and psychological) return in her works such as La Clé sur la porte, Les Mots pour le dire, Autrement dit, and Au pays de mes racines. One of the most visible means of dealing with the painful process of loss and reintegration is in the written testimonials that make up a large part of Pied-Noir literature. It is here, at the site of mental anguish, that Marie Cardinal serves as one of the foremost examples of Pied-Noir identity. In “Women’s Writing between Two Algerian Wars,” Benjamin Stora investigates narrative strategies of both French and Algerian women in dealing with violence and victimization in Algeria: “Before the malaise became too strong, perhaps it was necessary to attenuate the shock of exile through writing, to fill the void left by the disappearance of the native land, to soften the anguish of the vertigo” (84). Stora, one of few critics to see the narrator’s mental and physical alienation in Les Mots pour le dire as a result of something more than trauma caused by a psychological separation from her mother, attributes Marie Cardinal’s main character’s psychological and physical disorders to her separation from Algeria. Cardinal pursued psychotherapy and writing as venues for healing and for establishing her new identity (and that of her characters) as what she refers to as a “créole.” She effectively used psychoanalysis not only to reconcile herself with her mother, but also to reconcile her Algerian past with her French present, to sustain her dual identity as French and Algerian. Although she has a specific background (having left Algeria before the war in 1954 and claiming to be pro–Algerian independence), Cardinal is representative of the Pied-Noir stereotype: she is the daughter of 33

INTRODUCTION

bourgeois landowning Catholic colons. Unrevealed until her posthumously published autobiography, L’Inédit, in 2012, this is an identity with which she struggled. Reflecting on her ambiguous relationship with the PiedNoir community, Cardinal writes, Je ne supportais pas de les entendre, je les jugeais bornés, racistes, ignorants. Mais je ne voulais pas les renier. Alors je n’allais pas à leurs réunions, je ne les voyais pas. Pourtant, leur vocabulaire me manquait, leur couscous, leur goût de la fête. [. . .] Et puis j’avais toujours peur qu’on me prenne pour une Pied-Noir OAS, alors j’en remettais dans le sens contraire. J’en mettais trop. [. . .] Pourquoi n’être pas rentrée dans leurs rangs [. . .]. Je ne sais pas. Je les ai fuis. J’ai pris mes enfants et j’ai claqué la porte au nez des “autres”. I couldn’t stand listening to them. I decided they were narrow-minded, racist, ignorant. But I didn’t want to reject them. So I didn’t go to their reunions. I didn’t see them. But I missed their vocabulary, their couscous, their way of celebrating. [. . .] And then I was always afraid that people would think I was an OAS-supporting Pied-Noir, so I moved in the opposite direction. I moved too far. [. . .] Why not fall into their ranks [. . .]. I don’t know. I fled from them. I took my children, and I slammed the door in all of their faces. (116–17) Although she expresses clear separation from the community in L’Inédit, Cardinal proposes in Les Pieds-Noirs that Pied-Noir history is a family history, and she presents her family as a model of that past. Thus, her traumatic relationship to her mother cannot be separated from the trauma that she expresses in breaking with Algeria. Cardinal has been read rather positively as a writer on Algeria in the few articles that approach this subject (see Woodhull and Proulx), and yet her expression of Pied-Noir identity is riddled with contradictions that are inherent in the group’s identity and developmental process. She complicates her experience with Algeria by making her relationship to it intimate, sexual, and sensual; her seductive words dangerously repossess the land. The author sets herself continually as an authority 34

INTRODUCTION

and staunchly refuses to criticize her own colonial values. In her 1996 interview with Marrone, Cardinal insisted, “J’ai plus de rapport avec des écrivains algériens. Moi, je me sens algérienne” (I have more in common with Algerian authors. I feel Algerian) (“Un Entretien,” 127). Cardinal’s repetitions, read as a feminist technique of building a context or even a community of women, need to be examined as a practice of return to an unreachable destination: Algeria. Algerian-born French authors from minority groups bring a different perspective to the rewriting of Algeria. Derrida, Cixous, and Sebbar were, for various reasons, already separated from Algeria within the colony, and their sometimes painful existence in Algeria was not simplified when they later moved to France. These authors are generally excluded from studies of the Pieds-Noirs but are included here because each expresses an important attachment to Algeria, whether nostalgic or not, and Algeria figures both literally and figuratively (in word and in image) in multiple volumes of their work. Just as it guides the work of Pied-Noir authors proud to claim this identity, the compulsion to return to the past affects those who also refuse specific identity labels. In addition, each author’s specific position, both within colonial Algeria and later in France, provides highly pertinent, although unique, perspectives and articulation of memory and identity. In a 1991 interview, Jacques Derrida included himself in a group of “jeunes pieds-noirs un peu voyous que nous étions” (us young pieds-noirs who were a little tough) (Points, 352; Kamuf et al., Points, 341),30 and in one of his last published essays, “Moi, l’Algérien” (Me, the Algerian), written in 2006, Derrida begins, Mes héritages : je voudrais parler comme Algérien, né juif d’Algérie, de cette partie de la communauté qui avait reçu en 1870, du décret Crémieux, la nationalité française et l’avait perdue en 1940. Quand j’avais 10 ans, j’ai perdu la citoyenneté française au moment du régime de Vichy et pendant quelques années, exclu de l’école française, j’ai fait partie de ce qu’on appelait, à ce moment-là, les juifs indigènes, qui ont rencontré parmi les Algériens de l’époque plus de solidarité 35

INTRODUCTION

que de la part de ce qu’on appelait les Français d’Algérie. C’est l’un des tremblement de terre de mon existence. Il y en a eu d’autres. My heritages: I would like to speak as an Algerian, born an Algerian Jew, from that part of the community that received French nationality in 1870 through the Crémieux Decree and lost it in 1940. When I was ten years old, I lost French citizenship during the Vichy regime, and I was expelled from the French school for several years. I was part of what they called back then the indigenous Jews who were treated with more solidarity by the Algerians of the time than by what we called the Français d’Algérie. It was one of those earth-shattering events of my existence. There were others. (“L’Anti-Macias”) While Derrida calls himself a Pied-Noir, he had a greatly complicated position. His Jewishness had separated him “from the French in Algeria, and his French-ness later required him to carry out military service in Algeria during the Algerian War. Geoffrey Bennington notes in his biographical work with Derrida, Jacques Derrida, that the philosopher taught French and English to Algerians and Français d’Algérie from 1957 to 1959” (Hubbell, “Separation,” 82).31 Bennington explains Derrida’s attachment to French Algeria as follows: J. D. a toujours (au moins depuis 1947) condamné la politique coloniale de la France en Algérie mais a espéré, jusqu’au dernier moment, en 1962, qu’une forme d’indépendance serait inventée qui rendrait possible la cohabitation avec les Français d’Algérie. Il a même fait pression sur ses parents pour qu’ils ne quittent pas l’Algérie en 1962. A vite reconnu ensuite ses illusions à ce sujet. J.D. parle souvent de sa “nostalgérie”. J.D. always (at least since 1947) condemned France’s colonial policy in Algeria, but he hoped, up to the last moment in 1962, that a sort of independence would be invented that would make cohabitation with the Français d’Algérie possible. He even pressured his parents to stay in Algeria in 1962. Soon after recognized his illusions on this topic. J.D. often speaks of his “nostalgérie.” (Jacques Derrida, 303) 36

INTRODUCTION

Although Derrida expressed a desire to avoid new separations and maintained a “nostalgérie” similar to that cited by the Pieds-Noirs, much like his compatriot Hélène Cixous, Derrida ultimately defines his identity as a “sentiment de non-appartenance” (feeling of non-belonging) (Points, 130; Kamuf et al., Points, 121) owing to multiple layers of exclusion he suffered.32 In her book Strategies of Resistance in the Dramatic Texts of North African Women, Laura Chakravarty Box cites Hélène Cixous’s expression of non-belonging given at a 1996 conference on Algeria at Cornell University. Cixous situated herself as being “encircled by categories (Jew, pied noir, colonizer, woman, and later Amazigh) that intersected in such a way that she was both inside and outside, and that shifted with time and circumstance” (Box, Strategies, 86). As Box eloquently puts it, “She prefers exile, to be the ‘one who does not enter,’ because by not choosing a society in which to take refuge, she opens herself to the realm of possibility” (86). This is a position that Cixous herself articulates, along with the associated suffering, in her essay “Mon Algériance” (“My Algeriance”) (1997): “Je n’ai pas perdu l’Algérie parce que je ne l’ai jamais eue, et jamais été. Je souffrais qu’elle fût perdue pour elle-même, séparée d’elle-même par la colonisation. Si jamais je m’identifiai ce fut à sa rage d’être blessée, amputée, humiliée” (I did not lose Algeria, because I never had it, and I never was it. I suffered that it was lost for itself, separated from itself by colonialization [sic]. If ever I identified it was with its rage at being wounded, amputated, humiliated) (73; Prenowitz, “My Algeriance,” 274). Although perhaps not able to identify with Algeria, she clearly understands that it, even the Pied-Noir part of it, affected her. In her later work, Insister, dedicated to Jacques Derrida, Cixous makes references to her repeated linguistic mistake, “qu’est-ce que” instead of “ce que”: “Moi aussi je me demande comment je peux faire cette faute. Ce n’est peut- être pas ma faute. Ce n’est pas une faute de ma mère. Et si c’était une faute pied-noir ?” (Me too I wonder how I can make this mistake. Perhaps it’s not my mistake, not my fault. It’s not a mistake of my mother’s. And what if it were a pied-noir mistake?) (118; Kamuf, Insister, 166– 67). 37

INTRODUCTION

Rather than repossessing Algeria, Cixous and Derrida use a deconstructionist approach to problematize the commonly held notion that one can resurrect the past through writing. While both authors practice forms of repetition, they draw attention to displacements that occur, allowing multiple Algerias to arise through writing. Cixous writes, D’un côté j’ai entendu parler de l’Algérie dis-je, et j’en entends parler aujourd’hui encore par milliers, il y a des millions d’Algéries, il y a aussi des centaines de milliers de Villes d’Oran, et chaque Ville par centaines de milliers et des centaines de milliers de façons d’en entendre parler. D’un autre côté j’ai entendu parler l’Algérie, dis-je, mais si peu un filet d’eau pour mon désert. In one way I have heard of Algeria I say, and I hear of it still today all the time, there are millions of Algerias, there are also hundreds of thousands of Cities of Oran, and each City by the hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of ways of hearing about it. In another way I have heard of Algeria, I say, but so little a trickle of water for my desert. (Rêveries, 89– 90; Brahic, Reveries, 51) Cixous recognizes the impossibility of cloistering memory, as there is no one memory that is shared. Rather, she accepts a diverse model of a country she claims was never hers. Through depicting fragments of Algeria, Cixous manages to displace attachment to or recolonization of the past. Benjamin Stora also supports this idea of multiple layered Algerias in Le Transfert d’une mémoire: “A travers l’enfermement dans chacune des mémoires, se dessine le paysage de plusieurs Algérie, qui se superposent et semblent ne pas se connaître” (Through the closing off in each one of these memories, a landscape is drawn of several Algerias that are superimposed but seem to not know each other) (76). Likewise, Leïla Sebbar creates in her writing a community of mixed identities that are gathered between France and Algeria, thereby emphasizing these many Algerias in her cross-genre books, such as Mes Algéries en France, Journal de mes Algéries en France, and Voyage en Algéries autour de ma chambre. This process of layering versions of Algeria together seeks 38

INTRODUCTION

to deconstruct the prior movement of re- creating and preserving one image of Algeria.33 Yet I hope to demonstrate that whether individual or collective, fragmented or unifying, each text still contributes to the memorialization of the former colony. PIED- NOIR RETURNS Through the constant motion of returning to a fictive Algeria, one that has been greatly elaborated through the process of repetitive remembering, the Pieds-Noirs attempt to find freedom from their present malaise. They seek a paradise in the midst of a perceived hell, and yet most never grasp the impossibility of this task. Paradise, by definition a location beyond reach or an unattainable goal, can never be reached, much less lost. Yet, as the Pieds-Noirs refer to Algeria as their “paradise lost,” they are unable to recognize the fictitiousness of the imagined past. As much as the Pieds-Noirs attempt to repossess the past, their past also possesses them. For those who do realize that their perpetual state of return will only continue (or that they will never arrive at Algeria) and that it is the process of return that matters most, there is an opportunity for freedom. The perpetual return to the past is represented in Albert Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe, published in 1942.34 Sisyphus, the figure of the absurd, was condemned to the perpetual task of pushing a rock up a hill without any promise of ending his toil. The gods had deemed that “il n’est pas de punition plus terrible que le travail inutile et sans espoir” (there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor) (163; O’Brien, Myth, 96). Each time Sisyphus arrived at the goal, his burden would slip away from him again, requiring him to return to the fate at the bottom and recommence this task. Camus proposed that the tragedy of Sisyphus was in the moments of nostalgia: J’imagine encore Sisyphe revenant vers son rocher, et la douleur était au début. Quand les images de la terre tiennent trop fort au souvenir, quand l’appel du bonheur se fait trop pesant, il arrive que la tristesse 39

INTRODUCTION

se lève au cœur de l’homme : c’est la victoire du rocher, c’est le rocher lui-même. L’immense détresse est trop lourde à porter. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. (166, my emphasis; O’Brien, Myth, 98) Sisyphus is nearly crushed under the weight of his memories of earth as he struggles back to the beginning of his task. This nostalgia for what is behind him is the burden he must bear. Yet, as he suffers, Sisyphus also knows his strength and joy in the moment of descent, for it is in those moments that he is the master of his own fate: “Toute la joie silencieuse de Sisyphe est là. Son destin lui appartient. Son rocher est sa chose” (All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing) (167; O’Brien, Myth, 98). As Sisyphus continually returns with his burden (the essence of what he has left behind) toward the summits, he discovers a world in each step: “Chacun des grains de cette pierre, chaque éclat minéral de cette montagne pleine de nuit, à lui seul forme un monde. La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme” (Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart) (168; O’Brien, Myth, 99). In his resignation to his fate of never being able to finally arrive but of constantly needing to return, Sisyphus finds freedom and even joy. He recognizes what he has lost and that his only connection with it is in dredging his burden, a small piece of his lost land, back up toward his unreachable destination. Although usually read as a model for Camus’s philosophical work, I read the Myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor for the Pied-Noir who continually struggles to bring the past Algeria back to the present in France, all while confronting the futility of this task. The falling rock, represented as terre (earth), souvenir (memory), and victoire (victory), can be read as the devoir 40

INTRODUCTION

de mémoire, or the mission of preserving the past that many Pieds-Noirs endlessly pursue in their works. It can equally be read as nostalgia, which is the intense longing for the past that often drives the Pied-Noir on this mission of pursuing memories. As the burden of the Algerian memory furtively slips away, the Pied-Noir returns to the depths empty-handed, only to recommence the heavy and impossible task. There is no future arrival for the Pieds-Noirs. It is in motion, in the process of returning, that the Pied-Noir finds joy, as it is at these moments that the Pied-Noir can control his or her image of Algeria. In examining the burden, it becomes a world in itself. The Pied-Noir can effectively represent Algeria in such a way that it is fixed in its past state and appears permanent and stable to them in a present consumed with the slipping away. Cardinal, like so many other Pieds-Noirs, continually plunged to the depths of her past in search of some piece (or ruin) that would support her, and it weighed heavily on her shoulders as she strove to bring it back to the forefront. As she wrote in Les Pieds-Noirs, “Notre Histoire commence par sa fin” (Our History begins by its end) (80), and she worked through her past using the concept of “le passé empiété” (the backstitch). Founded on a progressive motion of return that continually leads the author to a preceding referent each time it takes a step toward the future, this backstitch motion never allowed her to complete her mission in spite of her frequent claims that she did indeed return to Algeria. Instead, she remained in the perpetual motion in her writing, condemned to return in each of her works, with the last one appearing to be a near reproduction of her first fifteen. Unrecognized by Cardinal, it was the journey, not Algeria, that was the goal. The absurdity of the task lies in understanding the impossibility of completion, but Sisyphus also attained freedom by accepting his condemnation. Although equally caught in the motion of return and driven by longing for the past, the works of Cixous, Derrida, and Sebbar examine the process of absurd displacement from past to present, allowing them to articulate different forms of identity. As the exiles look back into the depths, the fragments to which they cling can be both a burden to bear and a source of recognition and joy. 41

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER SUMMARIES The foundation of Pied-Noir identity is the return to a past Algeria. Thus, this book is structured around the themes of repetition and return in Pied-Noir narratives. The structure emulates the Pied-Noir approach to the past and the changes within the community since the exodus. First limited to a desperate hope to save their recently lost culture, the group began repeating and reconstructing what was lost, both in memory and in word. When return voyages became possible in the 1980s and again (although sporadically) since 2000, the community’s sense of homeland began to shift, even as it always remained bound up in the concept of return. In Part 1, “Repeat,” repetition is demonstrated as both a literary and psychological technique that seeks to create stability while recasting history. Although the Pieds-Noirs are compelled to preserve their own history, or “fight against forgetting,” as sociologist Eric Savarèse problematizes, “les mémoires ont pris le pas sur l’histoire” (memories have overtaken history) (Invention, 25). This section of the book will situate the history, memory, and literature of the Pieds-Noirs and then take on concrete literary analysis, demonstrating how repetition functions with nostalgia to rehearse and fix memory, rather than readdressing the traumas of the past. Chapter 2, “The Pieds-Noirs: Fighting against Forgetting,” evaluates the community’s feverish work to save memories and demonstrates how repetition functions toward this effort. Because of the immediate official silence after the Algerian War, the Pieds-Noirs eagerly put forth their version of the story. In light of new sources, the current so- called memory wars in France, and a movement away from one unified version of the past, this continuing effort necessitates reexamination. Continuing the development of repetition in Pied-Noir works, chapter 3, “Fixing the Past: Marie Cardinal’s La Mule de corbillard,” analyzes Cardinal’s 1963 novel to demonstrate repetition as a technique for avoiding an exiled present filled with the absence of Algeria. Cardinal’s text shows the reconstruction of the past to be more satisfying than the present, and 42

INTRODUCTION

her narrator proposes that this type of revisiting the past is healing. On the contrary, through the compulsion to repeat, which is an indication of a repressed trauma, the present is almost completely eclipsed with memories of the past. The fourth chapter, “Pleasures of a Painful Past: Writing to Remember, Writing to Forget,” explores the practice of repetition in texts by Hélène Cixous and Marie Cardinal. Specifically, through an evaluation of Freud’s pleasure principle, the possibility of mastering the past will be uncovered. For Cixous, the repetitions of the past create a context of displacements as she demonstrates that the past is resistant to her control. For Cardinal, repetition functions as a practice of committing to memory, until one acceptable version of her past is performed in her entire oeuvre. As the author attempts to master her past, this practice replaces recollection. For both women, the act of repetition becomes a source of relief even when what is repeated is at the root of their pain. In Part 2, “Return,” I analyze a number of imagined and real returns to the homeland to uncover the role return plays in the construction of the community’s identity. Although undertaken with the goal of relieving the pain of nostalgia, return often continues the cycle of longing for the past. Chapter 5, “(Re)turning to Algeria: Nostalgia, Imagination, and Writing,” offers a detailed investigation of the various types of imagined return practiced by the community, beginning with an oral tradition of shared memories and continuing into the various forms of written returns performed throughout decades of exile. This chapter specifically focuses on the practice of “Nostalgérie,” or the written re- creation of Algeria as a paradise lost, as a form of return and demonstrates this paradise to also be a hell. Whether real or imagined, the return to Algeria will always be part fiction. Chapter 6, “Real Returns: Confrontation, Blindness, and Ruins,” examines Pied-Noir pilgrimages to Algeria undertaken with the hope of renewing contact with the homeland. During the process the traveler participates in a form of tourism to the past without recognizing that Algeria presently continues without him. Instead, the trip serves as a sort of comparison with memory. Through an analysis of travelogues by 43

INTRODUCTION

Marie Cardinal and Jacques Derrida, this chapter explores the inherent blindness to Algeria’s present and proposes the concept of ruins as an effective means of articulating return. While the Pieds-Noirs remember Algeria as a point of pleasure, reproducing the pain of Algeria is often inevitable. Chapter 7, “The Return of Algeria: Relieving and Sustaining the Phantom Limb,” demonstrates how the Pieds-Noirs keep the pain of Algeria alive, and the phantom pain of their amputated limb thus remains fresh. While some write to lay the limb to rest, others acknowledge they are unable to overcome the separation and attempt to accommodate the ghosts of the past.

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2 The Pieds-Noirs FIGHTING AGAINST FORGET TING

The October 2011 newsletter for the Centre de Documentation Historique sur l’Algérie (CDHA) bore in bold characters across the front, “Une étape décisive pour le conservatoire de notre mémoire” (A decisive step for our memory’s conservatory), as it announced the intended expansion of its offices to meet their growing needs. Since the 1970s Pied-Noir organizations in France have relied on the fight to save memory as a guiding principle, with slogans such as “Sauvegarder la mémoire,” “Devoir de mémoire,” “Lutter contre l’oubli” (Saving Memory, Duty to Memory, and Fighting against Forgetting). The PiedsNoirs’ nearly religious calling to protect their history in Algeria was particularly pertinent during the many years of France’s willful silence about the Algerian War, when the country’s amnesia both encouraged and sustained the Pied-Noir need to repeat. In the absence of French acknowledgment of the lost war, lost colony, and acts that contributed to these losses, the Pieds-Noirs felt even more compelled to recount their Algerian past, despite the evident emotional difficulties involved. Since the 1990s, however, as France’s history has slowly yet increasingly opened to closer inspection, the Pied-Noir battle to protect the past has not wavered. As the Pieds-Noirs age, their mission becomes all the more urgent. The fight against forgetting is working to integrate Pied-Noir history 47

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into French history while offering the community a sense of continuity in its disrupted present. In addition to the numerous Pied-Noir organizations, cultural works, such as monuments, books, and paintings, as well as archives and libraries, contribute to this fundamental concept. The Cercle Algérianiste was founded in 1973 to “sauver une culture en péril” (save a culture in peril) and the Centre d’études Pied-Noir, founded in Nice in 1985, aims to “sauvegarder une culture menacée de disparition [. . .] dans un but d’exploration scientifique et de sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel intéressant plus particulièrement la présence française en Algérie de 1830–1962” (save an endangered culture [. . .] with the goal of scientific exploration and safeguarding a cultural heritage of interest, more specifically the French presence in Algeria from 1830 to 1962) (quoted in Martini, Racines, 38). Going even further, certain Pied-Noir associations, such as Jeune Pied-Noir, believe, “Notre communauté est en danger de ‘génocide mémoriel’!” (Our community is in danger of “memory genocide”!).1 As exemplified in the CDHA’s use of “notre mémoire,” this fight to protect memory seeks to save a specific, collective, and conforming memory of Algeria that requires the Pieds-Noirs to repeat and reproduce the culture to which they once belonged. The Pieds-Noirs’ use of repetition is commonly regarded as repeating to remember: the Pieds-Noirs repeat their stories to preserve them for themselves and for generations to come (Hureau, Mémoire, 86),2 but repetitions of the past also function to re-create a sense of unity after the traumatic impact of exile. In this sense, repetition reveals the same separations it tries to cover. Through the “devoir de mémoire” or the “lutte contre l’oubli,” Pied-Noir writing often, although not always intentionally, justifies the colonial position. By evaluating repetition as a means of assimilation or of imposing unity, it becomes clear that the mission to remember is a struggle to eliminate what is unholy in the Pied-Noir past. The question remains, though, why the Pieds-Noirs continue to wage the so- called memory wars today and what nonconforming and potentially subversive memories are allowed to coexist in Pied-Noir texts. 48

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PAPER HOMELAND From the earliest texts to the most recent, Pied-Noir writing openly seeks to preserve communal memory. Books dedicated to the community, such as Pieds-Noirs: Identité et culture (2004) by Marie-Claude San Juan, share the mission to “sauvegarder notre mémoire de l’oubli” (save our memory from oblivion).3 Lucienne Martini proposes in Maux d’exil, mots d’exil that Pied-Noir writers think of themselves as scribes and “gardiens non pas de la loi, mais de la mémoire” (not guardians of the law, but guardians of memory) (25). For the most part, these authors demonstrate that they believe it is possible to eternalize a recognizably true version of Algerian history through their writing. In a poignant example of the efforts the Pieds-Noirs endure to write about their collective past, Geneviève de Ternant explains her mission on the back cover of Maître Sauzède et le bureau du Maréchal Clauzel (Oran 1831–1871), published in 2007: J’achève en cet automne plein de soleil un livre qui m’a envahie depuis près de quatre ans. [. . .] J’ai vécu durant ces quatre années, plus schizophrène que jamais, entre le temps présent, avec ses combats pour la vérité de l’histoire et les mille tracas quotidiens, et ce temps jadis— devrais-je dire naguère ?— où la France entreprenait sans le savoir, une geste pathétique. [. . .] Petite pierre apportée à l’édifice considérable des ouvrages écrits par beaucoup d’hommes et de femmes depuis 1830 et surtout depuis notre exode de 1962. Certains trouveront des racines lointaines aux événements qu’ils ont vécus, d’autres, sans doute, liront comme un roman l’aventure étrange d’un pays dont, à travers mille tribulations, les habitants, autochtones ou importés, ont fait une nation. Enfant rebelle qui renie son A.D.N. français sans pouvoir s’en détacher. Puisse cet ouvrage dont le seul mérite est la sincérité, contribuer à une meilleure compréhension. Puissent les hommes d’aujourd’hui aimer un peu les hommes d’hier : Ils croyaient si fort apporter du bonheur. 49

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During this sunny autumn, I am completing a book that has invaded me for almost four years. [. . .] Over the last four years, I have lived, more schizophrenic than ever, between the present with its battles for truth and history and a thousand everyday problems and this long ago time— or should I say not long ago?—when France was undertaking a pathetic gesture without realizing it. [. . .] This is only one little stone added to the considerable building of works written by many men and women since 1830 and especially since our exodus in 1962. Some will find distant roots to the events that they lived through, others will undoubtedly read this like a strange adventure novel about a country whose inhabitants—indigenous or imported— created a nation through a thousand trials. Rebellious child who denies his French DNA without being able to escape it. May this work, whose only merit is its sincerity, contribute to better understanding. May men today love those of the past, if even just a little: they so strongly believed they were bringing happiness. A prolific author on Pied-Noir history and culture as well as a literary writer on her lost homeland, Ternant suggests that her study of one man might represent the positive values of the Pied-Noir community on the whole. She articulates her own courage as she plunges into the depths of her community’s past to bring back a fragment of history worth preserving for the generations to follow. Ternant is far from alone in undertaking such a mission: preserving fragments of the lost past to reconstruct a whole story in the present is the ostensible work of numerous volumes of Pied-Noir history and identity. Humble as she is, Ternant has a specific kind of past to share with her community, no matter how resistant or unreceptive her readers may be. One of the primary motivations for transmitting the past is the basic fear of being wiped out of history on the whole. Danielle Michel-Chich, a Jewish Pied-Noir journalist who lost her left leg when she was a child in the 1956 Milk Bar explosion in Algiers, explains that to maintain a sense of relevance, the Pieds-Noirs emphasize their difference from the French: 50

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Se ressentant comme différents, à part de la masse des métropolitains, leur plus grande fierté est d’énoncer la liste de leurs propres valeurs, des caractéristiques qui les différencient, leur plus grande inquiétude est de les voir disparaître lentement dans la machine à broyer du XXIe siècle. Qui pourrait accepter de gaieté de cœur d’appartenir désormais à une espèce en voie de disparition ? Feeling as though they are different, separate from the majority of Metropolitan French, they take the greatest pride in listing their values and characteristics that distinguish them. Their greatest worry is seeing themselves disappear slowly, mashed up into the twentyfirst century. Who could joyfully accept belonging forevermore to an endangered species? (Déracinés, 150) As Michel-Chich highlights, in the effort to be remembered, the PiedsNoirs are joined together in their difference, and they identify themselves in opposition to the French to undertake that effort. To counteract the fear of being forgotten, they must salvage a communal past in a homeland that can now exist only on paper. Their frantic writing urgently seeks to sustain and validate what they experienced both in and after Algeria. One of the earliest authors to study Pied-Noir memory, Joëlle Hureau affirms writing is necessary to sustain the mental homeland. In La Mémoire des Pieds-Noirs de 1830 à nos jours (1987), Hureau claims that because Algeria is no longer available to the Pieds-Noirs, they must re-create the land through the expression of memories in order to preserve the past: La terre des pieds-noirs est désormais inaltérable. Ce que la mémoire a sélectionné a été soigneusement engrangé et fixe les limites de l’espace reconstruit mentalement. Plus aucun souvenir algérien ne viendra le modifier. Il n’est cependant pas indestructible ; il durera aussi longtemps que le souci de le transmettre. A la première défaillance de la mémoire, dès que tomberont dans l’oubli les préoccupations auxquelles il se rattache, il s’évanouira. The Pieds-Noirs’ land is from now on unalterable. What memory has chosen has carefully been stored, and the limits of the mentally 51

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reconstructed space have been fixed. There will never be another Algerian memory that will come along to modify it. It is not, however, indestructible; it will last only as long as the need to transmit it. At memory’s first failure, as soon as the concerns attached to it fall into oblivion, memory will fade away. (86) Hureau recognizes the limitations of the reconstructed Algeria, but she contends that Algeria can no longer be altered by additional memories; Algeria is fixed in memory. Although this stable image of Algeria is, in her opinion, unchanging, it is also fragile. A remembered Algeria can be destroyed by the absence of a transmitter or even by the absence of need. Hureau does not examine the possibility of memory being altered in its transmission, especially as it is passed from one generation to the next, nor does she imagine the possibility of new recollections in the postcolonial world. Furthermore, she explains the Pied-Noir need to transmit memory as a simple and necessary act of preserving the past: Chez ceux-là, la volonté de ne pas oublier et de transmettre reste vivace. Perpétuer et faire connaître ce qu’a été “leur” pays perdu leur paraît essentiel, précisément parce qu’il a disparu et qu’avant de disparaître à leur tour, ils tiennent à lui bâtir un mausolée. For them, the will to not forget and to transmit remains vivid. To perpetuate and to make known what was “their” lost country seems essential to them, precisely because it disappeared, and before they also disappear, they are committed to constructing a mausoleum in its honor.4 (80) According to Hureau, in its transmission memory becomes monumental and unchanging. As Hureau points out, the Pied-Noir effort to repeat the past both orally and in writing is justified. If the community does not want to be erased from history, Pied-Noir writing is a necessity, and this affirms the underlying belief that that something is conserved through repetition.

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Although Hureau’s work was one of the earliest of its kind, the justification of Pied-Noir writing as necessary in preserving memory reappears in subsequent works, such as those by Danielle Michel- Chich (1990) and Lucienne Martini (1997). In Déracinés: Les pieds-noirs aujourd’hui, Michel-Chich reinforces the idea that the Pied-Noir must insist on his or her past in order to be integrated into French history: Il aurait fallu pour qu[e les Pieds-Noirs] affrontent plus sereinement la mémoire de ce qu’ils ont vécu qu’elle soit prise en charge par la collectivité nationale, intégrée à l’Histoire de France. Or la France a commencé à se livrer à une entreprise inverse, celle de l’oubli salutaire ou du refoulement : elle a voulu effacer le souvenir de la colonisation, dont on se vante bien peu désormais et, en même temps, l’époque sanglante de la décolonisation, sujet honteux et tabou, encore de nos jours. Par la même, ce sont cent trente années de l’histoire de l’Algérie Française que l’on préférerait effacer de la mémoire collective, alors que les plaies des pieds-noirs sont ouvertes. For the Pieds-Noirs to more peacefully face the memory of what they experienced, national authorities would have needed to protect that memory and integrate it into the History of France. But France took up an opposite mission, that of salutary forgetting or repression: France wanted to erase the memory of both colonization, of which they have rarely boasted since, and the bloody era of decolonization, a subject that is still shameful and taboo today. Moreover, they would rather erase these 130 years of history in French Algeria from collective memory while the Pieds-Noirs’ wounds remain open. (71–72) As in the predominant discourse on Pied-Noir writing, Michel-Chich justifies Pied-Noir repetition in a way that precludes a critical examination. RELIGIOUS MEMORY According to Martini in Racines de papier, Pied-Noir authors often write as part of a duty toward communal solidarity and personal continuity:

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L’écriture remplit une fonction de sauvegarde de certains des principes fondateurs dont on a vu qu’ils architecturaient tout édifice socioculturel. Le fait de prendre la plume, en tant que Pieds-Noirs, pour écrire sur les Pieds-Noirs est, déjà, en soi, une démarche de solidarité et, puisque cette écriture privilégie le regard vers le passé et les traditions, elle assure, dans la même démarche, le principe de continuité, et celui de sacralité. Pour les Pieds-Noirs, plus que pour d’autres, mémoire et écriture sont indissociables. Writing plays the role of saving certain foundational principles on which they have evidently built all sociocultural constructs. As Pieds-Noirs, the act of taking up the pen to write about the Pieds-Noirs is already in and of itself a collective effort. Because this writing privileges looking toward the past and tradition, it simultaneously ensures the principles of continuity and sacredness. For the Pieds-Noirs, more than others, memory and writing are inseparable. (42) Martini suggests that writing becomes a communally constructed monument that protects traditions and lends continuity to the Pieds-Noirs in France. By using the word “sacralité” (sacredness), she underscores the need for conformity to the religious memory of the community that moves beyond the need to repeat and preserve a history forgotten in France. Like Hureau and Michel-Chich, Martini believes that if the Pieds-Noirs want their culture to survive, they must transmit it to their children, and the most effective way to do so is through writing: Il ne s’agit pas seulement de donner à connaître une histoire mais de transmettre aussi aux générations à venir ce sol mental, ces racines sans lesquels on ne peut pas vivre, essentiel fait à la fois de l’image d’une terre et des qualités de ses hommes. It is not only a question of making their history known but also transmitting to future generations this mental ground and these roots without

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which they cannot live. This is essential both to the image of a land and the traits of its men. (48) Rather than problematizing the assimilation of individual accounts to the religious memory of Algeria, an essential part of sustaining the PiedNoir community, Martini reads these texts more simply as a necessary and natural part of the preservation of the past. A secondary but just as self-justificatory ambition in protecting memory is the need for healing. Michel-Chich’s psychologically focused study suggests memories must be confronted because the wounds are still open (Déracinés, 72), and this confrontation provides an opportunity for healing—“pour qu[e les Pieds-Noirs] affrontent plus sereinement la mémoire de ce qu’ils ont vécu” (so that the Pieds-Noirs more calmly face the memory of what they experienced) (71). However, the discourse of wounding and healing allows the Pieds-Noirs to approach their pasts with a sense of bravery and accomplishment that lets them off the hook, so to speak, for any part in their own exile. Political scientist Eric Savarèse gives a detailed criticism of the Pieds-Noirs’ “égo-histoire” in his work L’Invention des Pieds-Noirs (2002). Although the author does not examine the underlying strategies at play, he argues that the majority of works that participate in the fight against forgetting are written as part of the process of mourning, and this is evident because the majority of works about the Pieds-Noirs are written by the Pieds-Noirs: Si la production militante ou les témoignages sont classiquement élaborés pour défendre la cause des Pieds-Noirs, si l’analyse de la production romanesque doit être associée à des stratégies de “transfert littéraire”, un fait demeure exceptionnel : une grande partie des travaux historiques et scientifiques sur les Pieds-Noirs reste, à ce jour, en France, l’œuvre de Pieds-Noirs. If the militant production of testimonials is classically elaborated in order to defend the cause of the Pieds-Noirs, so the analysis of the novelesque production must be associated with strategies of “literary

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transfer,” one detail remains exceptional: the large part of the historical and scientific works on the Pieds-Noirs remains, up to this day, in France, the work of the Pieds-Noirs. (35–36, Savarèse’s emphasis) Although Pied-Noir history is predominantly guarded and recounted within the community, Savarèse is quick to point out that many of these works manage to avoid becoming “plaidoyers en faveur d’une cause communautaire, ou des tentatives de réhabilitation du temps des colonies” (pleas for a communal cause, or attempts to rehabilitate colonial times) (37). He notes the works of Hureau, Martini, Daniel Leconte, and JeanJacques Jordi as particularly successful in remaining objective. I would argue that Leconte, a journalist who was born in Oran in 1949, undertakes a Pied-Noir history based on his own experience of integration. FIGHTING AGAINST FORGETTING OR FIGHTING TO FORGET More than a means of remembering, repetition also serves its own function, eventually replacing memory. Jacques Mauger’s analysis of repetition in “Pratiques de mémoire, pratiques de répétition” inverts the theory Freud asserted in “Recollection, Repetition and Working Through,” which focuses on repetition as a physical manifestation of repressed memory. Mauger claims that repetition has traditionally served as a means of discovery, assimilation, learning, conservation, mastering, expertise, and identification, but above all, as a tool to remember (11). His study, however, also reveals that repetition replaces memory rather than protecting it: “Mais qui aurait pu dire, même dans ces temps-là, qu’il fallait aussi répéter pour répéter, répéter à la place de se souvenir?” (But who could have said, even at that time, that it was also necessary to repeat in order to repeat, to repeat instead of remembering?) (11). Mauger explains that because the compulsion to repeat seeks to create unity, it often indicates a cut between the self and the reality on which the self is created: “La compulsion de répétition pointe vers cette coupure moi/réalité, où la réalité est à la fois perçue et ignorée par le moi, celui-ci échappant à ce qui l’excède, à partir de quoi il prend pourtant forme et fonction” (The compulsion to repeat points toward this rupture between ego/reality, in which reality is 56

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at the same time perceived and ignored by the ego as it escapes from what exceeds it. It is from this same schism, however, that the ego takes on form and function) (20). When pointing Mauger’s analysis toward the PiedsNoirs, the group’s repetitions can be read as evidence of the split between self-perception based on a residual image and the reality of the present. Mauger further explains that the return to one’s origins through repetition is only a natural desire to re- create the unity of the self: “Cette tendance automatique à rétablir l’état antérieur force le retour vers l’origine, origine de toute mise en forme de la pulsion, origine du moi et de son réseau de souvenirs liés, origine du moi-individu et du sentiment d’unité et d’unicité” (This automatic tendency to restore the prior state forces the return toward the origin, origin of all forming of impulse, origin of the ego and its network of related memories, origin of the individual self and of the feeling of unity and uniqueness) (20). This desire to re-create a certain unity that once existed and to return to a time that precedes trauma motivates many of the returns in Pied-Noir writing, but unity is created through the false fixedness of representation of memory rather than through a reattachment of the self with the past. Repetition indicates the split between self and reality. Rather than being the result of repression, repetition attempts to preempt or repress remembering. Whereas Freud proposed that the compulsion to repeat is an indication of an underlying repressed memory, Mauger’s approach allows us to read Pied-Noir repetitions not as an indicator of the repressed trauma of Algeria, but inversely, as the practice that allows them to repress the nonreligious (or non-unified and non-unifying) memory of Algeria. This concept is outlined in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, originally published in 1968, in which he states, “I do not repeat because I repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat. I repress, because I can live certain things or certain experiences only in the mode of repetition. I am determined to repress whatever would prevent me from living them thus: in particular, the representation which mediates the lived by relating it to the form of a similar or identical object” (20). Deleuze’s concept of repetition offers a useful approach to Pied-Noir literature. In the written representation of Algeria, the Pieds-Noirs relate their lived experience 57

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into a similar object, their paper roots, as Martini calls it. The multiple repetitions of Algeria then, rather than being a means to fight against forgetting, are in fact a means of repressing what is unwelcome in the past. According to Deleuze, the process of repetition allows the transformation of what happened into a nonmalleable and singular representation: “Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing. Movement, for its part, implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation [. . .]” (67). The solitary representation of Algeria in literature, then, is a false depth. As repetition functions to unify and singularize, it also tips off the reader to separation and discontinuity. While repetitions seek to repress what might undermine stability, the deconstructionist use of movement allows for an expression of difference, for multiple perspectives, and for what Homi Bhabha refers to as the in-between-ness of the postcolonial figure.5 SELF- JUSTIFICATORY REPETITIONS Along with Pied-Noir writing that seeks to conserve history and confront painful memories, a large number of works seek to justify the colonial position in Algeria and to fight against stereotypes that were used in France to discriminate against the community. This specific fighting against forgetting works to repress a painful integration rather than to confront the trauma of the “repatriation” into France. Many Pied-Noir memoirs, for example, repeat the common desire to explain to those French who seem to have stereotyped or rejected them exactly what colonial life was really like. Martini cites this effort for justification as a common goal: “S’il est un caractère absolument commun à tous les textes écrits par les Pieds-Noirs sur cette période, c’est bien le désir de souligner le sentiment de non-culpabilité, et l’horreur injuste de ce qu’ils ont vécu” (If there is one absolutely common characteristic in all the texts written by the Pieds-Noirs during this time, it is the desire to underscore the feeling of non-culpability, and the unjust horror of what they experienced) 58

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(Racines, 71). The fact that most Pieds-Noirs were not colons, for example, is repeated in a wide range of works—from history to autobiography and fiction. Another oft-repeated element is that the Algerians loved the Pieds-Noirs and did not want them to leave the colony. Moreover, the Algerians were like family and well loved by the Pieds-Noirs. Finally, one of the most frequent repetitions is that the French came to a land of nothing and built an empire from which Algeria still profits. All of these examples, although perhaps created without the intention of modifying history, work to justify the presence of the Français d’Algérie in Algeria. These repetitions, in light of the relative absence of French testimonials and histories of the colonial years and the war, work to justify colonization in a dangerous way.6 Under the guise of fighting against forgetting, the Pieds-Noirs attempt to clear themselves from blame.7 Instead of taking an introspective approach, they accuse the French of stereotyping, silencing, and slandering. In particular, the act of repeating to remember allows the evacuation of guilt for colonial crimes because it shifts the Pieds-Noirs into a place of innocence and bravery. In “Blurring the Boundaries between Perpetrators and Victims: Pied-Noir Memories and the Harki Community,” Claire Eldridge studies Pied-Noir innocence, especially through associations that demonstrate how the community has “constructed and mobilized a collective memory of French Algeria that legitimates their perception of themselves as innocent casualties of a destructive and erroneous historical force: decolonization” (125). She explains, “Thus, while in the eyes of the rest of the world the pieds-noirs were at best complicit in, and at worst the perpetrators of, a system of colonial domination that for more than a century denied the people of Algeria many rights and freedoms, including the fundamental freedom to rule themselves, this is not how the pieds-noirs understand their history. Instead, they regard themselves as key contributors to both France’s civilizing imperial oeuvre and to the grandeur of the French nation itself ” (124–25). In Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature and the Maghreb, Fiona Barclay confirms the use of memory among Pied-Noir communities as an identity marker: 59

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The activism of pied noir associations offers one instance in which memory acquires a totemic power. Since memory forms the only remaining connection to the Algerian motherland from which thousands were abruptly torn in 1962, its loss would mark the final act in a drama of loss which has been played out over fifty years. Moreover, the memory of life in Algeria, and of the injustice of defeat and exile have come to define the contemporary identity of the pied noir collective, whose identity is established and maintained through the repeated performance of myths constructed around the shared sentiments of nostalgia and suffering, and the unfulfilled demands for recognition and reparation of the wrongs inflicted. Memory serves to attach this group to the past, a past which is by definition lost but which cannot be allowed to be lost definitively, at the price of the erasing of the identity which defines thousands of individuals. (57) In addition to using memory to position themselves as innocents, the Pieds-Noirs have also aligned themselves with other victimized groups, such as the Harkis, the Algerians who fought alongside the French during the Algerian War (Eldridge, “Blurring the Boundaries,” 125).8 By recuperating an even more recognizably victimized group of individuals, the Pieds-Noirs further solidify their brave reputation as fighters for memory: “Indeed, the pieds-noirs maintain that the entire history of the harki community has been ignored, if not actively occulted, by everyone except them” (129). One of the most effective strategies for protecting and propagating their stories has been through literature. The rapid growth of PiedNoir literature during the years of French silence also contributed to shifting blame, as the community’s willingness to address the past focused attention on the French refusal to remember or acknowledge the country’s role.9 Textual examples that justify the Pied-Noir presence in Algeria abound. In the “Avertissement” (Warning) of his work Plaidoyer pour un peuple innocent (1997), Jean-Pierre Hollender expresses his desire to correct the French memory and written history of the Pieds-Noirs: 60

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J’écris ce plaidoyer pour que nos petits fils et nos petites filles n’aient pas un jour à rougir de nous quand les médias à force de désinformation et de mensonges seront parvenus à faire de notre communauté des émules de Klaus Barbie. Car, comme le dit FIGARO : “Calomniez, il en restera toujours quelque chose.” I am writing this plea so that our grandsons and granddaughters will not have to blush one day because of us when the media manages to make us out to be like Klaus Barbie through its lies and misinformation. Because, as Figaro puts it: “Slander, and something will always remain.” (n.p.) Hollender makes a fierce attack against the French who “slandered” the Pieds-Noirs on their arrival in France. Like most Pieds-Noirs, Hollender writes to preserve what he perceives to be the real history for his children and grandchildren. Likewise, in her plaidoyer (defense speech), Camille Brière preserves her memory for “ceux qui ne savent pas ou qui ont été trompés par l’erreur et le mensonge” (those who do not know or who have been misled by errors and lies) (Ceux qu’on, 12). These repetitions serve to assimilate a certain kind of memory to the Pieds-Noirs. In a similar self-justificatory style, Jeanne Cheula writes her memoir, Hier est proche d’aujourd’hui (1979), as an attack against the French for their abandonment. The author makes statements such as “La France partait ; et non seulement elle abandonnait ses amis, ces hommes engagés à ses côtés, à qui elle avait tant promis, mais elle les laissait désarmés en face de leurs bourreaux” (France left; and not only did she abandon her friends, these men dedicated to her flanks, to whom she had promised so much, but she left them disarmed in front of their executioners) (199); “L’OAS avait tenu tête courageusement aux forces de l’ordre et tout le dispositif ” (The OAS bravely stood up to law enforcement and the entire operation) (201); and similarly, “Alors, comme tous les autres, nous avons été ceux qui allaient partir puisqu’on ne nous laissait pas d’autre issue que la terreur ou l’exil. Il n’y a plus de place, plus de liberté pour les Pieds-Noirs dans le nouvel Etat qui va naître” (So, like all the 61

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others, we were those who were going to leave because there was no other solution than terror or exile. There is no room left and no more freedom for the Pieds-Noirs in the new state that was about to be born) (233–34). By claiming the courage of her people and evacuating her own responsibility in the war and in colonization, Cheula shifts the blame onto France for any political failures. Although this is Cheula’s version of the past that must be protected, it is the same past that many PiedsNoirs want to propagate. Although most Pieds-Noirs write to maintain a certain memory of the way things were, not all share in this blatantly militant position against France. For many Pied-Noir writers the justification of their colonial position is far more subtle. One predominant repetition in Pieds-Noirs works, which is prevalent throughout both Anne Lanta’s and Marie Cardinal’s writing, is that the Arabs, Berbers, and so forth were friends and family to the Pieds-Noirs. Marie Cardinal blatantly states her innocence in these terms in Au pays de mes racines, and she distances herself from her own family to do so: Je n’ai rien à me faire pardonner. Bien que pied-noir, je n’ai jamais été pour l’Algérie française. Dès mon enfance j’ai été en conflit avec ma famille pour des raisons personnelles d’abord, ensuite ces raisons sont devenues politiques. J’étais contre ce que représentait ma famille : la France et ses conquêtes, son empire colonial, sa morgue, son mépris, son racisme, son humanitarisme hypocrite. J’ai eu bien avant la guerre d’Algérie, des amis arabes et des amis français de gauche (pas de la festive gauche parisienne). Ils ont tous été tués ou chassés par l’OAS. I have nothing to excuse myself for. Even though I’m a Pied-Noir, I was never for French Algeria. Since my early childhood I was in conflict with my family, first for personal reasons, and then for reasons that became political. I was against what my family represented: France and its conquests, its colonial empire, its morgue, its mistrust, its racism, its hypocritical humanitarianism. I had Arab friends and leftist French friends (not the festive Parisian Left) well before the Algerian War. They were all killed or chased out by the OAS. (153– 54) 62

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Cardinal secures her position as anticolonialist to further set herself apart from the guilty colon stereotype, and although she says she will not excuse the Pieds-Noirs for their faults (“je ne cherche pas à excuser le peuple des Pieds-Noirs dont je fais partie. Il est inexcusable” [I’m not trying to excuse the Pied-Noir people of whom I’m a part. It is inexcusable] [67]), she at the same time does excuse them: Il y avait peu de pieds-noirs riches. Très peu. [. . .] Je sais qu’il y avait des intérêts et même, pour une poignée de pieds-noirs, des intérêts importants. Mais ce ne sont pas ces intérêts qui ont fait l’OAS, c’est l’amour aveugle du pays, l’amour fou de cette terre. There were few rich Pieds-Noirs. Very few. [. . .] I know that there were interests and even, for a handful of Pieds-Noirs, important interests. But it wasn’t these interests that contributed to the OAS. It was blind love of country, the mad love for this land. (68) After having attempted to break the French stereotype, she then uses love to justify violence in sustaining the possession of Algeria. She continues, “On ne tue pas pour ça, en soi, non. Mais pour ce que ça suscite en chacun d’année en année, de génération en génération” (They don’t kill for that, in and of itself. No. But for what that excites in each individual, year by year, and from generation to generation) (69). She does, however, begin to understand a certain responsibility in what happened during her return voyage to Algeria. As she prepares for her trip, she expresses guilt: “Mauvaise conscience d’avoir vu exploiter le peuple algérien sans rien dire et mauvaise conscience d’avoir laissé faire la guerre que nous lui avons faite” (Guilty conscience from having seen the Algerian people exploited without speaking up and guilty conscience for having let the war that we made happen) (73). In spite of certain understanding of her own role in colonialism, Cardinal persistently relies on her proximity to the family’s servants to demonstrate her love for the Algerian people. This paternal relationship, now a common subject of criticism in Algerian histories but not in Pied-Noir works, is discussed at length in Jeannine Verdès-Leroux’s 63

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Les Français d’Algérie de 1830 à aujourd’hui. However, in this historical study there is only one testimonial of a Pied-Noir who grew up in the same social class as the Algerians, and even she says that her family was greatly respected in the neighborhood where she lived because they were European. Cardinal’s Les Pieds-Noirs is a strong example of unperceived colonial paternalism. Throughout her personal memoirs, Cardinal tries to be sensitive to the native Algerians, but she clearly writes from the European perspective. In her loving accounts of the indigenous Algerians she knew, Cardinal repeats the descriptions of the same workers until they take on an iconic value (certain repetitions give them even a caricatured aspect because of the flatness of representation). As she repeatedly emphasizes her affection for the characters, to the reader it seems Cardinal possesses and controls the figures. Nonetheless, she deploys these descriptions to justify her colonial position and relationship with the Algerians. For example, Cardinal describes how she respected one of her family’s servants who was Berber: “Tout ça est pour toujours lié à la clarté des yeux de Barisian, à son nez aquilin, à ses pommettes hautes. Il m’expliquait les labours [. . .] à sa manière” (All this is forever tied to the lightness of Barisian’s eyes, his Roman nose, his high cheekbones. He explained to me his work [. . .] in his way) (12). The expression “à sa manière” (in his way) positions the man as Other from Cardinal, all while she attempts to integrate him into her family history. She continues to completely describe each of the Algerians she knows (Barded, Aoued, and Youssef ) with the same detail and affection, explaining how each had participated in her life and education, often referring to them as fathers as her own was absent but refusing to acknowledge that each was employed by her family. In Les Pieds-Noirs Cardinal further makes a clear but subconscious parallel between the indigenous Algerians and the land (17). She attempts to empower the family’s servants with language such as “Youssef était le prince des parfums” (Youssef was the prince of fragrances) (17). Yet we cannot forget that she has repeatedly claimed the land for herself (“ma terre”) and thereby claims those who work on it. These descriptions of the workers are repeated in several of Cardinal’s 64

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texts, most notably in her return travelogue, Au pays de mes racines, helping her sustain her relationship to the workers while allowing control and continuity. The repeated relationships also demonstrate the characters to be interchangeable and unvarying from reality to fiction. For example, Cardinal’s description of Barded (14–15) in Les Pieds-Noirs, written in 1988, closely echoes the description (7–9) in Au pays de mes racines, which was written eight years before in 1980. Aoued appears in the autobiographical Au pays (28) and as a fictional character in La Clé sur la porte (1972) (110). Barded, Youssef, Barisian, and Aoued appear as fictional characters in Écoutez la mer (1962) (27–29, 49– 50, etc.), and Barded, Aoued, and Youssef figure in the novel Amour . . . Amours . . . (1998) (37–40). The wedding scene of Cardinal’s childhood friend “Zorah” first appears in Au pays (61– 64) and is recounted with an ethnological gaze in Les Pieds-Noirs as an account of Muslim wedding rituals. This scene is later repeated with the name “Meriem” in Amour . . . Amours . . . (44–45).10 These repetitions cause her readers to question whether Cardinal knew any other Algerians than the beloved ones who worked on her land and who seem to populate her texts. While the author tries to justify her colonial position through a discourse of love, she continually repossesses the characters that surrounded her through her writing. Like Cardinal, Anne Lanta in Algérie, ma mémoire (1999) explains her need to write her memoir not simply as a justification but in order to portray her country with the love she and other Pieds-Noirs felt toward both the land and its people: De deuils en espoirs, de refus en défis, s’écrivait là-bas une autre histoire de liberté. A travers elle, je l’ai reconnu, ce peuple fier et endurant, et j’ai eu envie de vous le faire aimer, comme j’y suis parvenue moimême, au fil des jours, et au hasard des rencontres. Car par-delà la tristesse des guerres, c’est une histoire d’amour que je veux dire ici. Celle d’abord de mon pays d’enfance où fleurissaient les orangers, mon pays aux forêts d’oliviers, au soleil dur, à la mer tendre, celui dont je n’ai jamais perdu le goût ni le parfum, et où nous vivions en aveugles heureux. Celle du pays inconnu que me faisait découvrir celui 65

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dont je partageais la vie, et celle d’un peuple, le peuple fantôme de mon enfance qui sortait des coulisses et occupait toute la scène. Les acteurs m’ont séduite. Ils disaient leur vie, leur histoire, avec humour et dignité. Ils étaient bons, Mohammed, Leïla, N’Fissa, N’Bia, mes acteurs préférés. From mourning into hope, from denial into accomplishments, another story of freedom was written over there. Through it, I recognized, this proud and enduring people, and I wanted to make you love them just like I had come to love them over time and through chance encounters. Because, beyond the sadness of wars, it’s a love story that I want to tell here. First of all, a love for my childhood country where orange trees blossomed, my country with forests of olive trees, a harsh sun, a tender sea, a country for which I never lost the taste or smell, and where we lived in blind happiness. A love for an unknown country that the man with whom I shared my life helped me discover, and a love for a people, a phantom people of my childhood that came out of the wings and took center stage. The actors seduced me. They told me their life, their story, with humor and dignity. They were good, Mohammed, Leïla, N’Fissa, N’Bia, my favorite actors. (11–12) All while she shows herself to not be like the typical colonial figure, Lanta insists that the land is hers through the repetition of “mon pays” (my country). In this passage two common repetitions among Pied-Noir works become clear: Lanta describes both her country and its inhabitants with great affection and love. Perhaps without realizing it, her expression of this love, a vestige of the paternal relationship between the Français d’Algérie and the indigenous Algerians, attempts to exonerate the author from any part she played in colonization. The second repetition exemplified in this passage is the transformation of her beloved Algerians into fictional characters. Much as in the work of Marie Cardinal, we see the description of real people joined with words such as “acteurs,” an identification that further allows Lanta to possess and control the characters as if they were participants in her drama. The author identifies the roles in her play, but she does not see the fiction she creates. 66

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While Lanta and Cardinal try to reverse a stereotype of the indigenous Algerians and thereby justify their own presence in Algeria, the repetitions of love in their texts cause their readers to question what is being covered. Like Deleuze, Homi Bhabha furthers the concept of the fixedness of representation with the investigation of the colonial stereotype in his chapter “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” stating, “The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (which the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations” (75, Bhabha’s emphasis). He continues, “The stereotype can also be seen as that particular ‘fixated’ form of the colonial subject which facilitates colonial relations, and sets up a discursive form of racial and cultural opposition in terms of which colonial power is exercised” (78, Bhabha’s emphasis). Because Cardinal and Lanta repeatedly fix their characters in their works by attaching them to the possessed land, the authors are able to sustain control over those “actors” through the discourse of love. Repetition and, by extension, stereotypes are a technique for furthering the colonial relationship outside the colony, effectively repressing an absence that greatly consumes them.11 ASSIMILATING MEMORY Repetition helps transmit culture and create unity for the Pied-Noir community, but if Mauger and Deleuze’s theory that repetition is a mechanism for repression holds true, what lies in the gaps and silences of these unified testimonies becomes all the more important. These gaps are what Daniel Bertaux refers to as “zones blanches” in his sociological text Les Récits de vie. Bertaux proposes that these blanks could indicate a matter that seems too mundane to elaborate, or contrarily, “il s’agisse de moments ou segments que le sujet préfère ne pas évoquer” (it’s about moments or segments that the subject prefers not to evoke) (78). As Cardinal demonstrates in Au pays de mes racines and Les Pieds-Noirs, there are 67

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unspeakable moments and memories of her past that she cannot address in public. Thus, she must personally assimilate her memories before she can write them because they risk disturbing her love for Algeria.12 Silences, like discrepancies in Pied-Noir testimonials, are rarely questioned. Rather, the common approach is to let the Pied-Noir speak, and whether accurate or not, the testimonial is accepted because it is what the Pied-Noir remembers. In her work on the Français d’Algérie Verdès-Leroux specifically states, “On voit qu’il y a l’Histoire telle que les historiens pensent pouvoir l’établir, et la remémoration que les hommes se font d’un événement ; la remémoration peut être différente de l’Histoire réelle, mais c’est elle qui les fait agir, penser, réagir” (We see that there is History such as historians think they can establish it, and remembrance that men have of an event; remembrance can be different from actual History, but it’s what makes them act, think, react) (Français d’Algérie, 219, Verdès-Leroux’s emphasis). With her argument that what is recollected is what affects the Pied-Noir, Verdès-Leroux justifies her use of memory and testimonial in history, but she does not problematize the motivations behind the testimonies she has received. Instead, her approach leaves us, just like the rest of the history market at the time, taking the Pieds-Noirs’ word for it. Historian Jean-Jacques Viala takes a similar approach as expressed in the postscript to his study Pieds-Noirs en Algérie après l’indépendance (2001): Il n’aura pas échappé au lecteur attentif qu’il y a des divergences entre les souvenirs des contributeurs, non seulement dues à leur différence d’approche, mais même dans les faits objectifs rapportés. C’est là une preuve de plus de la fragilité des témoignages, même donnés sans arrière pensées, mais ce n’est pas étonnant après quarante ans. The attentive reader will have noticed that there are discrepancies between the memories of the contributors, not only resulting from their different approaches, but also in the objective facts reported. This is even further proof of the fragility of testimonials, even when given without an ulterior motive, but this is not surprising after forty years. (311) 68

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Once again the divergence between reality and the self is recognized but then left without further analysis. Instead, Viala’s work contextualizes the experience into a unified history by collecting largely repetitious testimonials from members of the medical community who remained in Algeria. In the conclusion of his work, Viala recognizes that not all the facts given in the testimonies coincide with reality, but rather than problematizing this position, he refers back to the fight against forgetting: La dernière conclusion issue de ces témoignages est que des blessures reçues par les pieds noirs, celles qui ne sont pas effacées, et qui ne s’effaceront que dans la mort, si les enfants et les petits enfants ne les reprennent pas à leur compte, sont celles reçues des français [sic]. The final conclusion taken from these testimonials is that the wounds of the Pieds-Noirs, those that are not erased, and those that will be erased only by death if their children and grandchildren do not take them on, are those incurred by the French. (314) What will remain from the Pieds-Noirs, at least according to Viala, is the pain inflicted by the French, which needs to be pursued by future generations so that the French injustices will not be forgotten. Once again, the fight against forgetting is deemed as the most essential aspect of these testimonials. MARIE CARDINAL’S FIGHT AGAINST FORGETTING It is with the overt intention of fighting against her own forgetting and maintaining continuity that Marie Cardinal claims she uses repetition in her texts (see her interview with Ysabel Saïah in Pieds-Noirs et fiers de l’être). Cardinal ties her fictional and autobiographic texts together by repeating certain passages from one text into the next. While this repetition has often been read as a feminist technique,13 it is useful to explore the consequences of her desire to create continuity between fiction and reality as well as of her need to repeat the same stories throughout her career in the context of Pied-Noir repetitions. What Cardinal veils as a need for continuity, however, functions to repossess 69

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the lost land, to assimilate her memory of Algeria to her present, and to repress its absence. Although it is common practice to repeat one’s personal experiences in fiction, this tactic becomes problematic when repetitions from fiction appear in historical documents. At the end Cardinal’s 1980 travelogue Au pays de mes racines, it seems the author has come to terms with Algeria’s independence and is able to continue her existence with a new perspective on both her past and her separation. In 1988, however, Cardinal published Les Pieds-Noirs, which is in large part a repetition and continuation of Au pays de mes racines. Unlike her travelogue, however, Les Pieds-Noirs is a large photo- documentary book with beautiful black and white images of Algeria complete with descriptions of the improvements that the French created there during colonial rule. Cardinal’s writing of her own family history serves as a model for the text, whose title indicates that this history represents all Pieds-Noirs. The text Cardinal has written to accompany the imperialist images, although masked in vague selfconscious criticism, are almost as colonialist as the photos.14 For example, “Entre 1920 et 1950 nous étions un petit million de chrétiens et de juifs à y vivre en compagnie de huit millions de musulmans. Le pouvoir était entre les mains des chrétiens et des juifs” (Between 1920 and 1950 we were nearly a million Christians and Jews living there alongside eight million Muslims) (11). Cardinal walks a precarious line between history and autobiography in this text; while she appears somewhat objective by giving historical facts about the colonial situation, at the same time she repossesses the land and its inhabitants in her autobiographical pieces that echo her fiction. In the context of this documentary work, Cardinal repeats the same complaint that appears in each of her works. She expresses the extreme pain she feels from being separated from her homeland: “Je ressens toujours le même mal, la même douleur vive, là où, au plus profond de moi, je suis amputée de ma terre. C’est une douleur absurde et obstinée, qui ne cessera jamais car on ne peut pas séparer la terre du cœur” (I still feel the same hurt, the same sharp pain, there where, in the deepest part of me, I am amputated from my land. It’s an absurd and obstinate 70

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pain that will never stop because you cannot separate the land from the heart) (Les Pieds-Noirs, 11, my emphasis). This complaint translates into a written repossession of the land and its inhabitants as she continues, “Je ne savais pas que ma terre ne serait plus jamais ma terre” (I didn’t know that my land would never again be my land) (11, my emphasis). This passage appears at the outset of her text, just before she describes her homeland paradise and the years of her youth. In this context Cardinal is clearly expressing her own attachment to the land and her right to be there. All while trying to portray Algeria to the French, she continues to possess the land. From the outset of her description of the geographical situation of the land, Cardinal writes, “Ma terre est rouge” (My land is red) (12). Once again, she reclaims the land that she has lost and whose independence she has supposedly accepted some eight years before as recorded in Au pays de mes racines. As she reconquers her country through images and written memories in Les Pieds-Noirs, Cardinal repeats many elements from her various fictive novels as well as from her autobiographical works. The mixing of her fiction and autobiography in repetitions of long passages throughout her different works, regardless of the genre, is sometimes unnerving.15 For example, the confession of her mother’s attempted abortion is repeated in La Clé sur la porte (fiction), Les Mots pour le dire (autobiographical fiction), Au pays de mes racines (autobiography/travelogue), and Autrement dit (autobiography).16 Cardinal clearly states in Au pays de mes racines that she writes to reattach herself to her origins and to fight against forgetting. If the goal of these texts is to fight against historical distortions and personal memory gaps, it does not follow that Cardinal would try to preserve reality by mixing both reality and fiction through repetition. By pasting her fiction into historical texts and vice versa, she shows little concern for the actual events of her past. Rather, she seeks to assimilate her past through its representation. At the end of Les Pieds-Noirs, Cardinal more clearly demonstrates her unwillingness to give the whole story of her past as she states, “Personnellement je suis fière d’être une Pied-Noir. Je ne renie pas mon peuple, je l’aime. Mais je le juge et c’est ce jugement que je ne veux pas écrire. Les histoires de famille se règlent 71

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en famille” (Personally, I’m proud to be a Pied-Noir. I do not deny my people, I love them. But I judge them, and it’s this judgment that I do not want to write. Family problems should be resolved in the family) (80). Cardinal thus participates in the same willful repression of the past of which the Pieds-Noirs so often accuse the French. A DIGITAL HOMELAND If repetition fails to serve as a part of remembering, what are the consequences of passing off repetition as necessary? Pied-Noir organizations, as well as the many literary works that pretend to sustain and save PiedNoir culture, must give the semblance of remembering. Pied-Noir culture would not survive without the charade of French forgetting that justifies it. Jordi explains in De l’exode à l’exil that France’s difficulty accepting its colonial past especially inspires the Pieds-Noirs to mix their history with France’s (184). Because France has continually been accused of forgetting the war and the crimes it committed in Algeria, the PiedsNoirs have found a secure niche for their pasts. Both the French and Pieds-Noirs have long been engaged in a game of blame shifting for the crimes of colonialism, and the Pieds-Noirs often say that they must recount their history to portray the whole story of what happened in Algeria.17 The danger, however, is that Pied-Noir memory is never critically received. Either it is rejected as unreliable because of the group’s inability to remain objective and the stereotype that the Pieds-Noirs were colons, or it is wholeheartedly accepted and integrated into history as testimonial without further explanation. Many Pieds-Noirs, regardless their background in history, have published historical accounts and directed documentaries about life in French Algeria before 1962 that are marketed as authentic accounts even some fifty years after their last contact with the homeland. Because of France’s immediate rejection of its past in Algeria, the Pieds-Noirs became, at least temporarily, the only authority on French Algeria. Accepting repetition as necessary in remembering allows a certain recolonization of the past. The Pied-Noir has been permitted to recount and recapture the past to counteract French amnesia. In fact, the Pied-Noir 72

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author is able to justify written representations that fix and reclaim the Algerian land and citizens as possessions of the Pied-Noir past while repression continues. Until the fight against forgetting becomes a genuine fight (or more accurately, fights) to remember, the Pieds-Noirs will continue to create a version of the story under the guise of preservation, communal solidarity, and justification rather than confronting the real sources of trauma and separation in their pasts. As the French slowly recover from their amnesia, logically the PiedsNoirs would be gradually liberated from the mission to protect memory. In fact, dissidence has begun to emerge in their stories, violence and trauma occasionally overtake the nostalgically peaceful memories, and a self-critical approach is becoming possible. This is especially true as the community moves further from a paper homeland and increasingly toward a digital one—a territory captured on Internet sites and film, conglomerated through multiple perspectives on Algeria. These accounts of Algeria, not vetted by large publishing and distributing companies, still contribute to the fight against forgetting. Much of the struggle now takes place through active blogs and social networking sites like Facebook.18 Memory no longer has to conform to a singular account of Algeria, yet the mission to remember remains. Deleuze’s emphasis on movement and distortion in representation accounts for what is seen in this digital homeland. However, Deleuze questioned, “Is it enough to multiply representations in order to obtain such effects? Infinite representation includes precisely an infinity of representations— either by ensuring the convergence of all points of view on the same object or the same world, or by making all moments properties of the same Self. In either case it maintains a unique centre which gathers and represents all others, like the unity of a series which governs or organises its terms and their relations once and for all” (Difference, 67– 68). Pied-Noir representations of the past rarely approached what was unholy in the past before the mid-2000s. After the French National Assembly had voted in 1999 to officially use the expression “La Guerre d’Algérie” (the Algerian War) in place of “opérations effectuées en Afrique du Nord,” (military operations in North Africa) the discourse on 73

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Algeria began to slightly shift, and the younger generation of Pieds-Noirs began examining the intense violence they experienced as children.19 No matter how diverse the angles or divergent the stories about Algeria, however, as long as the representations converge on the same object (a past Algeria), the past is in many ways reduced to a singular and stable representation. Because there can be no new stories to disturb the singular past, only uncovered latent memories or recent return voyages might disrupt unified vision of the past by bringing something truly different to the discourse on Algeria.

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3 Fixing the Past MARIE CARDINAL’S L A M U L E D E C OR B I L L ARD

As the Pieds-Noirs found themselves transplanted in France without a referent to the colonial markers that once defined them, they often felt a need to re-create the homeland to establish a sense of permanence and to protect their history. This type of re-creation, referred to as reproduction in psychoanalytic works and labeled as restorative nostalgia in Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, is achieved in Pied-Noir literature through repeating elements of the past. To fix or stabilize the past, the author continually rewrites a new version, a paper homeland that attempts to fill the void felt in the present. These written reproductions, however, fail to permanently satisfy the longing for roots and instead compel the author to continually take up the pen to rewrite the homeland. The repeated and layered images become solidified over time, and this fixed or religious version of the past becomes more concerned with permanence than accuracy. Although it is clear the Pieds-Noirs write to regain stability, their reconstruction of the past is also a result of their inability to accept the absence of Algeria in the present. Their repeated and solidified reproductions of the past are markers of instability and repressed discontinuity in the dissatisfying present. Because she is the most prolific Pied-Noir author, Marie Cardinal’s texts serve as a prime example of the process. She recounts her psychoanalysis as a quest for healing from a disturbed 75

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and unachieved present, and her journey causes her to plunge into the depths of her past in Algeria. As she, like other Pied-Noir writers, dwells on elements of the past, she brings the unruly pieces of memory under control through their representation. She expresses her need for stability, or her fear of Algeria’s present, in Autrement dit: Finalement, ce que je crains c’est d’être confrontée à la vérité de mon amour pour cette terre que j’ai possédée. J’y suis née propriétaire, fille de propriétaire, petite-fille de propriétaire, arrière-petite-fille . . . etc. Est- ce que je saurais y passer seulement ? Est- ce que je pourrais la regarder comme je regarde le reste du monde ? In the end, what I fear is to be confronted with the truth of my love for this land that I owned. I was born there as a landowner, the daughter of a landowner, granddaughter of a landowner, great-granddaughter, . . . etc. Would I just be able to pass through it? Would I be able to look at it as I look at the rest of the world? (16; Cooper, In Other Words, 11) What she cannot control in reality, Cardinal can easily manipulate through writing that allows her to reproduce what was lived in a tolerable manner. Although the Pieds-Noirs often believe themselves to be addressing painful but necessary memories, the authors are at least initially able to repress the painful absences in the present in the process. Cardinal’s La Mule de corbillard exemplifies this, as the narrator, convinced that she is working through the past, uses repetition to escape a present marked by a series of painful absences. The narrator’s reproductions and the juxtaposition of the past and present reveal how repetition attempts to fix (and affix) the past. NEED FOR STABILITY Early critiques of Pied-Noir writing by Joëlle Hureau and Lucienne Martini primarily attributed the reconstruction of the past to a need for permanence and stability in a time when foundations had been lost. Because the Pieds-Noirs had been uprooted from the past and needed continuity, they created a monument on paper. Hureau underscores 76

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the process of fixing the memory of Algeria: “L’Algérie reconstruite par cette mémoire autarcique confine à la nostalgie. Ce qu’elle perd en réalité, elle le gagne en stabilité. Aucune modification de statut, aucune revendication d’indépendance ne peut plus l’atteindre” (The Algeria that has been reconstructed by this autarkic memory is confined to nostalgia. What it loses in reality, it gains in stability. No further status changes, no demand for independence will be able to reach it) (Mémoire, 80). The rewriting of the past creates a shrine to what once was—a place of commemoration that, like a replica, evokes the past. Not only is the past fixed (both repaired and solidified) in this reconstruction, but in the process only one specific version of past survives— one that precedes the rupture with Algeria. As Hureau explains, Pied-Noir repetitions serve to create something timeless that remains outside the bounds of change. In Racines de papier Martini also evokes re- creation as an attempt to create stability and permanence: “On tente de combler le vide que l’on ressent par une sorte de ‘re- création’ du monde perdu, dans une démarche d’écriture un peu magique” (They attempt to fill the void that they feel with a kind of “re-creation” of the lost world, through a writing process that is a little magical) (6). This re- creation is specific to the land that is missing: “Il faut donc reconstruire aussi le terroir. Ce sera la fonction des monographies de toutes sortes qui font revivre, historiquement et géographiquement, tel ou tel village, tel ou tel haut lieu symbolique” (They must then also reconstruct the terrain. This is the purpose of all kinds of monographs that bring this or that village, this or that symbolic place, historically or geographically back to life) (41). Like Hureau, Martini writes that not only is this re- creation a way to replace Algeria, it is also a way to re-create continuity for the Pied-Noir: “Le fait d’exprimer ce qu’il est, ce qu’il a été, ce qu’il a vécu permet au Pied-Noir de se ‘retrouver’ après des événements traumatisants, alors qu’il a perdu tous ses repères et qu’il vit une situation de ‘reconversion’ ou d’ ‘intégration’ difficile” (The act of expressing what is, what was, and what was lived allows the Pied-Noir to “find himself ” after traumatic events, even though he lost all of his bearings and he lives in a situation 77

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of “redeployment” or “difficult” integration) (6). Pied-Noir writing is consistently attributed to the need for stability or permanence, but like Hureau, Martini does not investigate the inherent problems faced when transforming a dynamic past into a static piece of literature. Martini does, however, indicate that repetition arises from trauma, thereby opening Pied-Noir work to psychoanalytic criticism. REPETITION AND REPRODUCTION Psychoanalytic theory on repetition and reproduction is elucidatory in understanding the effect of reconstruction in Pied-Noir works beyond the creation of a fixed or permanent past.1 Whereas re-creation relates to the evocation of past events in writing, reproduction implies the transference of a present motivation into the re-creation of the past as a result of a repression that has taken place. For example, past traumas are not simply reenacted in Pied-Noir writing; rather, they are reproduced in a way that allows the author to take control of the situation. By performing the violence in writing rather than being victimized by it a second time, the Pied-Noir is able to meet the needs of the uncomfortable present. This chapter looks beyond the literary strategy of repetition to analyze the reproduction of Algeria in Pied-Noir writing; this analysis reveals that repression is also at work. In “Recollection, Repetition and Working Through,” originally published in 1914, Freud writes, “The patient reproduces instead of remembering, and he reproduces according to the conditions of the resistance [. . .]” (“Further Recommendations,” 371). As in his analysis of repetition, Freud views reproduction as the result of what is repressed. Jacques Mauger, in “Pratiques de mémoires, pratiques de répétition,” further demonstrates the reproduction of the past to be separate from recollection because it is based on a present need: A la place de la remémoration, surgit la reproduction de quelque chose qui appartient manifestement à un autre système. Dans l’expérience transférentielle, ce qui se reproduit en force [. . .], s’oppose à ce qui se remémore, et surtout révèle par contraste ce qu’une certaine mémoire 78

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doit au monde de la représentation pour lequel existe un passé, un présent et un avenir. En revanche, ce qui se reproduit ne semble connaître que l’actuel, l’immédiat de la mise en acte qui devient défaut de remémoration consciente, même si cette insistance est aussi une manière inconsciente de se souvenir par la reproduction intemporelle et hallucinatoire. In place of recollection, the reproduction of something obviously belonging to another system emerges. In the transferential experience, what is forcefully reproduced [. . .] opposes what is recalled and, more importantly, reveals by contrast what a specific memory owes to the world of representation for which a past, a present, and a future exist. On the other hand, what is reproduced seems to know only the present, the immediate of the enactment, which becomes a flaw of conscious recollection, even if this insistence is also an unconscious way of remembering through atemporal and hallucinatory reproduction. (18) Reproduction is not what is recalled; instead of looking to the past, it results from a present need to repress. Reproducers transfer their memories into an activity that so closely resembles recollection that it allows them to believe that they have indeed remembered the event. Consequently, even though reproduction might be an unconscious effort to remember, it is not a successful one because the present of the reproduction is the basis, and not the past itself. While the writer reproduces the past and believes she is working through it, she is not confronting memory. According to Mauger, reproduction is the act of casting the present situation onto the past. Judith Butler further establishes reproduction’s link to the present in her article “The Pleasures of Repetition,” which is based on Freud’s work Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Although this article is primarily concerned with sadistic repetitions, Butler leaves open the possibility for her article’s application to literature (273).2 Butler proposes that repetition itself is indicative of the subject’s inability to accept the present: “The repetition is a vain effort to stay, or indeed, to reverse time; such repetition reveals 79

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a rancor against the present which feeds upon itself. [. . .] In effect, repetition is associated with the re-presentation of the past, and hence, it indicates a way in which the ego fails to inhabit present time” (272–73). Butler further proposes that the subject uses repetition to repair the past because it is the past that has made the present uninhabitable. She demonstrates, however, that repetition is not a successful reparation because it is an evasion of the present. Indeed, “repetition is wishful reparation, the assimilation of the present to the past in order to inhabit that past within the terms of the present and effect its fantasized reconstruction” (264). The fact that this reconstruction is “fantasized” indicates the shift that has taken place between repetition and reproduction. Even though it is the location of trauma, the past, which is now controllable through memory, is preferable to the present. Like Mauger, Butler proposes that repetition is not recollection because the repeated past is constructed on present needs. Butler’s emphasis on the impossibility of fixing the past (“wishful,” “vain”) is key to understanding Pied-Noir literature that uses repetition to stabilize the past and often attempts to pass off reproduction as history. In Le Principe de répétition: Littérature et modernité, Marie-Laure Bardèche expounds on the inability of the traumatized repeater to inhabit the present: Ces personnages en charge de la mémoire, voués à répéter le souvenir d’un événement traumatique, vivent dans un présent intemporel qui n’est pas un présent pur mais un temps fait de rétentions (souvenir et reconstruction des traces passées) et de protentions (projection de ces souvenirs). Une relation de pure successivité entre passé, présent et futur ne suffit pas à en rendre compte. These characters who are responsible for memory, destined to repeat the memory of a traumatic event, live in an atemporal present that is not a pure present but a time composed of “retentions” (memory and reconstruction of past traces) and of “protentions” (projections of these memories). A relationship of pure successions among past, present, and future does not sufficiently account for it. (145) 80

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Although Bardèche does not distinguish memory from repetition, she addresses how trauma prevents the one who repeats from continuing in the present. Because of the constant backward reflection and the projection of this memory onto the present, a fiction is created to replace the “pure” present. The reproducer has effectively created a point outside time, either by living in memory or by projecting memories onto the present. This existence outside the constraints of time is demonstrated in the slipping tenses and the continual flashbacks particularly evident in Cardinal’s La Mule de corbillard. The aforementioned works by Butler, Mauger, and Bardèche allow several important conclusions about reproductions of the past. Butler and Bardèche reveal that reproduction, often the result of trauma, is caused by the inability to deal with the present, and consequently, the victim creates an atemporal space divided between past and future, all while remaining under the control of the traumatizing event. According to Mauger, what is reproduced is not genuinely remembered because it is dictated by the present condition. Instead of remembering, the repeater creates a fiction of the past that is dictated by absences in the present. This process of manipulating the once uncontrollable past, although potentially causing modifications, allows the one who reproduces to create a sense of permanence. At the same time, reproduction seems to fill the voids left by the losses that weigh heavily in the present. None of the critics suggests that this process leads to the modification, or even amelioration, of the present, and it remains to be explored whether healing actually comes through this process of reproduction. If repetition of the past, or the “vain effort” to stay the past, results from transference and not recollection, the resulting reproduction of the past creates a fiction of stability for the Pieds-Noirs. Repetition allows the Pieds-Noirs to manipulate elements of the past in order to create a fictive and static space in which they can escape the discomfort of the present. At the same time they fictionalize their pasts, the Pieds-Noirs believe they have confronted and are working through rather than repressing the past. Not having purely recalled the events, but believing they have 81

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done so, leaves the Pieds-Noirs with an unstable resolution.3 This perhaps explains the multiple repetitions or returns that certain Pied-Noir writers undertake. While refashioning the past may be a momentarily successful tactic, it is impossible to completely escape the present.4 The repeating subject often confuses the past and present and does not recognize it is the present that pains them. Marie Cardinal’s La Mule de corbillard clearly illustrates this strategy. REPRODUCTIONS IN LA MULE DE CORBILLARD From the beginning of her career as a novelist, Cardinal repeatedly wrote the story of a woman very attached to her homeland. Her 1963 work, La Mule de corbillard, fits this trend as it portrays a woman’s intense love for her lost land and her escape from the difficult present through the reconstruction of the past. Published soon after Algerian independence, La Mule is the retrospective of an elderly woman who has suffered multiple losses including her homeland and her lover. Although the narrator’s losses are evident from the outset of the work, Madeleine Couturier reconstructs her land and her lover in such a way that she makes them both permanently present for her. In fact, the text is so concerned with the past that the narrator is able to almost completely evade her present, as expressed through the confusion of past and present in the text. The narrator believes her reconstruction of the past to be a source of strength, and she takes time each day to reproduce certain scenes from her past, modifying her stories at it suits her. In this way, Madeleine escapes the pain of her present loss by reproducing and repossessing both her land and her lover.5 La Mule de corbillard presents a mise en abime of reproductions ranging from biological to artistic to psychological. The narrator, an elderly woman who now has almost nothing left in her life, begins making absences present by reproducing her lost land, continues by reproducing her lost lover, and then reconstructs the lost monument (a miniature cathedral) to her lost lover. After these reproductions are complete and she finally reproduces the actual moment of losing her land at the end of the text, Madeleine then begins to discuss the future reproduction of her cathedral. 82

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She effectively skips over the present and instead lives her life between imagined past and future. In what Butler would call an attempt to “stay or reverse time” (“Pleasures,” 272), Mademoiselle Couturier first reconstructs the land on which she once lived. These five hectares are where Madeleine was born, her parents died, and she has spent almost every day of her life working the vineyards and all their vegetation. Madeleine has intimately reproduced every inch of her land throughout the years. Although in the story’s present, the landowner, Garcia, has repossessed the farm, Madeleine believes herself to be the true proprietor. At the beginning of the narrative, Madeleine calls out, “Bonjour ! Bonjour ma terre, bonjour mon ciel” (Hello! Hello, my land. Hello, my sky) (Cardinal, La Mule, 9), immediately invoking her land, which is already lost before this work has begun. The seventy-year- old begins every day taking a walk around her property, although she recognizes that the land does not officially belong to her: “Je sors à l’heure où le soleil est bon, je me promène pendant trois ou quatre heures et puis je rentre . . . sur une terre qui ne m’appartient pas” (I go out when the sunlight is good, I walk for three or four hours, and then I return . . . on a land that doesn’t belong to me) (9). During these walks, she is accompanied by the repetitive dream of her past: “Me revoilà comme chaque jour, prête à aller vous visiter, prête surtout à rêver dans le bois de pins. Il y a vingt ans que ma vie est réglée de cette manière” (There I am again like every day, ready to go visit you, ready especially to dream in the pine forest. My life has been arranged like this for twenty years) (9). From the outset, the narrator repossesses her land with words, evoking the absent foundation of this text. The reconstruction of the land is so complete that Madeleine is permeated by its reproduced presence: she absorbs the sights, smells, and sounds of her surroundings. In fact, her descriptions are even more intense than reality.6 She is both saturated with and invested in her land. The symbiotic relationship is clearly expressed as the grape harvest begins: Ne pas essayer de faire sortir les cigales de ma tête. Au contraire, les y enfoncer. Qu’elles fassent partie de moi. Quand elles cessent je me 83

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redresse, je détends mes reins. Quand elles recommencent je recommence. Faire comme elles : plus il fait chaud plus elles crient ; plus il fait chaud plus je travaille. Don’t try to get the cicadas out of my head. On the contrary, push them in. Let them become a part of me. When they stop, I stand up, I stretch my waist. When they start back up, I start back up. Do like they do: the hotter it is the more they screech; the hotter it is the more I work. (78) Although the narrator makes a strong case for her ability to manipulate and control her land, Madeleine is as controlled by the land as by her reproduction of it. She says, “Depuis, je garde, enfoncée en moi, la certitude que j’appartiens à la terre et qu’elle m’appartient. Il y a un secret entre nous. Il y a des liens et des correspondances qui font que nous sommes un couple inséparable” (Since then I have held on to the certainty, plunged deep within me, that I belong to the land and that it belongs to me. There’s a secret between us. There are ties and connections that make us an inseparable couple) (35). The narrator has gone so far into re- creating her land that she has forgotten that she is indeed separated from it. Eventually, Madeleine even reproduces the moment of her loss, but she cannot move into her present existence without her land. Although Madeleine’s reconstruction of her land almost obscures the sensation of its absence, she is not entirely satisfied. She creates another reproduction, this time of her love affair with Pierre Landrieux, a French engineer who had come to develop the land around her property in the 1920s.7 Madeleine hosts and falls in love with Pierre. He is her only access to the outside world, and the only time she ever leaves her land is to accompany him into the nearest town. Called back to northern France because of family obligations, however, Pierre, promising to return, leaves Madeleine but is never heard from again. Madeleine painstakingly reconstructs every detail of the love affair every day into her old age: “Au cours des années j’ai reconstruit tous les jours, toutes les heures. J’ai retrouvé les gestes, la voix, le regard” 84

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(Over the years, I reconstructed every single day and each hour. I found the gestures, voices, and facial expressions) (52– 53). She hesitates over small details, such as what chore she was doing when she met the man, how hot it was, why her hands were full, and so on. As in the evocation of her absent land, she continually finds herself in the engineer’s room, reliving his presence, his body, and his words. As in her first major loss, Madeleine is able to recount Pierre’s unexpected disappearance, but she is unable to accept his absence. After long awaiting his return, she finally turns to reliving her memories of him every day. After her lover’s abandonment, Madeleine redoubles her efforts to attach herself to her surroundings. While she absorbs herself even more by working her land, she also becomes obsessed with the construction of a monument to herself and Pierre, the Cathédrale Madelonne. Built with items Madeleine has found on her property (shells, reeds, etc.) and created inside the room the engineer had occupied in the house, the miniature cathedral, like the past in general, becomes a child to Madeleine. This creation brings her in contact with the outside world just as Pierre once did. After fifteen years of construction, Madeleine is obliged to abandon her home with the cathedral in it. Like Pierre’s disappearance, the loss of the cathedral and the land are completely unpredicted, and for the third time the narrator is able to reproduce the moment of loss (this time she recounts loss in violent detail), but she cannot tolerate the absence of her of cherished creation.8 In La Mule de corbillard, the narrator believes her reproduction of the past to be a source of strength and a necessary act for her present survival. For Madeleine, reproduction occurs on many levels—natural reproduction related to agriculture and childbearing, as well as the fictive reconstruction of the past—and demands careful preparation: “Une longue expérience m’a appris que pour mieux le vivre je devais tout régler ici, d’abord. Ensuite, je ferme le livre du présent et du futur et je retrouve mon passé. Je le réchauffe à chaque promenade, chaque jour” (Many years of experience have taught me that in order to best relive it, first I have to take care of everything here. Then I close the book on 85

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the present and the future, and I find my past. I warm it up during each walk, every day) (45). For the successful undertaking of the reproduction of the past, the narrator must first sweep away her present duties and then close herself off, regressing into a place where she can reconstruct her past without being interrupted by the pressing responsibilities of her current surroundings. After the gestation period required to birth the past into the present, Madeleine embodies her past possessions in the creation of a child. This figurative child represents Madeleine’s splitting between past and future existences and provides her comfort and diversion in the painful present. Madeleine’s past is a reproduction of herself that, like a child, she can control and direct. At several points in this text, the orphan Madeleine articulates her attachment to her past as a mother- child relationship. She finds that this embodiment of her losses brings her joy, strength, and satisfaction: Mon passé, c’est mon enfant que je dorlotte, c’est ma joie, c’est la source de ma force : Une terre do do ninette un homme A la violette une construction délicate My past is my child that I coddle. It’s my joy, it’s the source of my strength: A land do do ninette a man in the violet A construction so delicate (45) Madeleine integrates her land, her lover, and her cathedral into a child she wants to coddle. This embodiment provides her with an eternal presence that is submitted to her wishes— one she can control and love,

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one that will accompany her to the end of her life because she is the one who chooses its presence and absence. Madeleine believes that courageously confronting the past can provide her with strength: Je me demande pourquoi je ramène au jour tous ces vieux souvenirs. Est-ce que par hasard j’aurais peur de Madeleine Couturier ? Est- ce que cette fille ce n’était pas moi ? Est-ce que la vieille Couturier aurait peur de regarder la jeune Couturier ? Bien au contraire, ma vieille, ce moment-là, devant lequel tu recules, c’est une source. I wonder why I am bringing all of these old memories back up. Could it be, perhaps, that I’m afraid of Madeleine Couturier? Isn’t this young girl me? Is old lady Couturier afraid to look at her young self? On the contrary, my dear, this moment from which you shrink back is a source. (76) Instead of shrinking from her past, however, she embraces it to avoid the present. She gladly relives even the most painful losses—the points of separation—because, in fact, she cannot tolerate the present absence of her land and lover. She concentrates her efforts on filling voids (her story, a cathedral, her plants, etc.), but she does not manage to deal with her losses. Adept at justifying her choice to live in the past, Madeleine convinces herself that the difficulty lies in what she already lived. At the loss of Pierre, she states: L’amour d’un homme était une matière périssable sur laquelle je ne pouvais rien construire. Il me fallait un élément solide qui accompagnerait toute ma vie. J’oubliais Pierre lentement. Je m’acharnais sur mes cultures, sur les rendements. Je n’ai commencé à m’occuper de la cathédrale Madelonne que dix ans après le départ de l’ingénieur. Dix ans de divagations nocturnes, de plaintes, d’hystérie. Dix ans interminables. Dix ans nécessaires à la trouvaille.

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A man’s love was a perishable thing on which I couldn’t build anything. I needed something solid that would keep me company throughout my life. I forgot Pierre slowly. I furiously focused on my crops and on the yields. I only started working on the Cathédrale Madelonne ten years after the engineer’s departure. Ten years of nightly ravings, moanings, and hysteria. Ten interminable years. Ten years needed for discovery. (113) Although Madeleine believes she has healed from the pain of her past, she has not forgotten it. Rather, this tactic diverts her attention from the present and keeps her submitted to her losses. Even though separated from her land, Madeleine almost completely erases her present as she burrows into her reproductions. At the end of the novel, she says, “Rien n’était changé. Entre la terre et moi il y avait maintenant un accord paisible. Nous étions un très vieux ménage : incapables de vivre l’un sans l’autre. Nous nous connaissions parfaitement bien. Je n’avais plus les grandes impatiences ou les peurs de ma jeunesse” (Nothing had changed. Between the land and me there was now a peaceful agreement. We were a very old couple: incapable of living without each other. We knew each other perfectly. I no longer experienced the great impatience and fears of my youth) (133). The narrator’s precarious position between past and present realities becomes apparent. Although a few pages before she articulated her feelings toward her land in the present tense (115–16), Madeleine here refers to her peaceful agreement in the past. Although she begins with the thought that nothing has changed, she completes this statement with her own changed relationship to the land. Her mixing of past and present, presence and absence, continues to the end of her story. After she has reproduced all the elements that she has lost in her life, Madeleine still evades the present. When Garcia comes to repossess the land (recounted at the end of the text, also in a flashback), Madeleine tries to offer a solution so that she will not have to make such a sacrifice. 88

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When her proposal is rejected, however, she is unable to fight. As she accepts the eminent loss, she can only answer his arguments with silence. Her passivity or docility is never questioned, and her acceptance allows her the martyr’s role. Madeleine slips into self-pity, which is later turned to anger, but she never manages to take responsibility for her own inaction. She describes the loss as an unbearable emptiness she will never overcome: “Ou bien j’acceptais de suivre son mouvement inhumain comme un mouton qui part à l’abattoir, ou bien je restais en arrière pour regarder, pour essayer de comprendre, et je sombrais alors dans une angoisse moite. J’étais devenue vieille” (Either I accepted to follow its inhumane movement like a sheep going to slaughter, or I stayed back to watch, to try to understand, and then I sunk into clammy anxiety. I had become old) (144–45). As in Cardinal’s autobiographical work Au pays de mes racines, the discourse of self-victimization in this text frees the narrator from responsibility. FROM PAST TO FUTURE In the rare moments Madeleine focuses on her present situation, she is unable to remain in that empty space for long: Ma vie était creuse et inutile. Après tant d’années d’efforts, après avoir fait avec ardeur de ma terre la plus belle terre du pays, voilà que je me retrouvais les mains vides sans le moindre grain de sable, sans la plus petite motte rouge. Plus de grappes, plus de fruits, plus d’épis, plus de fleurs. C’était un vide si profond que ma tête tournait à essayer de la considérer. My life was empty and useless. After so many years of trying, after having arduously made my land the most beautiful land in the country, I found myself empty-handed without even a speck of sand, without the littlest clump of red earth. No more clusters of grapes, no more fruit, no more stalks, no more flowers. It was such a profound void that my head spun when I tried to think about it. (Cardinal, La Mule, 145) 89

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Although she acknowledges the emptiness she feels at the loss of her land, she cannot dwell on it. Instead of taking responsibility for her own part in this loss, Madeleine falls ill and sustains her fiction of victimization. When she arrives at partial recognition of her losses, she begins to project herself into the future. As she nears the end of her story, Madeleine projects herself into the future rather than accepting her present absences: “La tête à tête avec ma terre confisquée est douloureux. C’est un spectacle qui excite ma vengeance. Là je suis enterrée vivante. On m’a pris mon enfance et mon adolescence” (The time alone with my confiscated land is painful. It’s a sight that provokes my vengeance. There, I am buried alive. They took away my childhood and my adolescence) (115–16). As she turns her mind toward thoughts of vengeance against the one who repossessed the land, she destroys her own work rather than leaving it to be decayed or occupied by someone else. Madeleine eventually contents herself to know that even though she has been uprooted, she is still stronger than the one who uprooted her and that she will one day control his land, which is much greater than hers, if not her own. Unable to accept her present, Madeleine must divide her time between reproducing her past and projecting her hatred into the future as a creative force. Madeleine says that when her vengeance is complete and Garcia is dead, she will rebuild the cathedral. Thus, Madeleine transfers her trauma into projected vengeance or future reproductions rather than taking on the absences of the immediate present. When Madeleine’s land is confiscated,9 she turns her attention toward the future. As she acknowledges, she continues to reproduce her losses daily, but she also begins to replace them with the dream of a future vengeance: Qu’on arrache ma terre, qu’on détruise ma maison, qu’on ravage tous ces lieux peuplés de mes souvenirs, qu’on enterre sous les décombres de mon toit le beau fantôme de Pierre Landrieux, cela m’était égal. Je me vengerais et ma vengeance serait terrible.

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Let them rip away my land, destroy my house, ravage all of the places populated with my memories, bury the beautiful ghost of Pierre Landrieux in the rubble of my roof; it didn’t matter to me. I would get revenge and my vengeance would be terrible. (146–47) Later in the text the narrator reiterates the transformation of loss into hatred. This time, however, Madeleine feels she has lost her offspring: Je ne pouvais pas emporter l’ombre de Pierre et la cathédrale. Ils ne pouvaient exister que là. Chaque jour je les visite. Je reste avec eux plusieurs heures. J’emplis mon cœur de douceur. Toute cette tendresse cachée se manifeste, une fois la colline descendue, sous forme de haine. I could not take Pierre’s shadow and the cathedral with me. They could only exist there. Each day I visit them. I stay with them for several hours. I fill my heart with sweetness. The moment I get to the bottom of the hill, all of this hidden tenderness comes out as hatred. (154) When even the reproductions of things lost are lost, Madeleine targets her hatred toward the real landowner, Garcia. At no point does she accept or take responsibility for the loss. Madeleine’s use of repetition to transform her past into a future hope of vengeance can be explained by Butler: “Perhaps [repetitions] serve in part to bind the past and future together, to provide ritualized and sensuous occasions for the invocation of the past and the convocation of the present. Indeed, what other route than repetition instates the pleasure of temporal continuity between the irrevocable past and the unknowable future?” (“Pleasures,” 273, Butler’s emphasis). Madeleine’s repetition itself allows relief from the present, but she also plans to reproduce her cathedral after she has taken everything from Garcia and seen him to his grave. The projected rebuilding of an object substituting loss gives Madeleine the transition she needs between past and future to circumvent the present.

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AFFIXING THE PAST Throughout La Mule de corbillard, reproduction allows the creator complete power over her past. Madeleine remembers what she desires, changing elements to suit her needs, while forgetting outliers. She can revisit her past at will, as she demonstrates in speaking directly to her personified memory: “Allons, à demain. Soyez paisibles. Laissez-moi partir sinon je prendrais froid. Et que deviendriez-vous si je ne venais pas ? Hein ? Je n’ai pas pu vous transporter mais vous n’êtes pas abandonnés. Je m’en vais” (Go on, see you tomorrow. Rest easy. Let me go now or else I’ll get cold. And what would become of you if I didn’t come back? Eh? I couldn’t take you with me, but you’re not abandoned here. Okay, I’m leaving) (155). Madeleine’s past is her child, a reproduction of herself that is fully submitted to her. Her selective memories, like her cathedral, are at all times submitted to her present needs. Madeleine alone can control their presence and absence. She is the one who creates, destroys, and will rebuild her reproduction(s) in the end. In this way she practices full control over her losses. On the other side of the narrator’s multiple reproductions are Cardinal’s own reproduced losses.10 In both Cardinal’s fiction and her autobiography, she evokes her colonial past and reproduces the absent Algeria. In particular, Les Mots pour le dire, an autofictional story about learning to live in the present by resolving the conflict in the past, testifies to her psychological inability to accept the present.11 Because of the anguish, caused by a trauma and an absence, that lives inside of her— or what Cardinal refers to as “La chose” (the Thing, or It)—she must reproduce her past in psychotherapy.12 After having lost her homeland (Algeria), Cardinal re-creates a farm similar to the one she knew as a child. In Les Mots pour le dire, Cardinal expresses that the farm was a location where she lived in harmony with her mother: “Mes souvenirs heureux, mes vraies racines s’accrochent à la ferme, comme des guirlandes à un arbre de Noël” (Happy memories[, my true roots,] were attached to the farm like garlands to a Christmas tree) (104– 5; Goodheart, Words to Say It, 83).13 Cardinal follows this

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passage with yet another detailed reconstruction of the farm in Algeria, with all the vegetation, sights, and smells that appeared in La Mule de corbillard: “Sur les vignes et jusqu’à l’horizon flottait une odeur sage de terre aérée. Dans les jardins c’était la folie des narines du matin à la nuit : le jasmin, l’oranger, le figuier, le datura, le cyprès” (Over the vines and as far as the horizon floated the smell of freshly turned earth. The gardens from morning to night were an ecstasy for the nostrils: jasmine, orange, fig, datura, cypress) (Les Mots, 105; Goodheart, Words to Say It, 83). Cardinal reproduces the farm and her attachment to the land for a third time in her 1977 work, Autrement dit, only this time she places them in the historical context of generations of cultivation: Cette terre, je la connais par cœur. Je sais tout d’elle. Je sais où son raisin est le meilleur, le plus sucré, je sais où ses olives sont les plus grosses. Je sais le moindre de ses vallonnements, je sais où l’érosion met ses cailloux à nu comme des os, je sais comment la pluie la fait rougir. I know this earth by heart. I know all of it. I know where its grapes are the best, the sweetest, I know where the fattest olives grow. I know its smallest vales, I know where erosion has laid its stones bare like bones, I know how the rain turns it red. (19; Cooper, In Other Words, 13) These repetitions are not unique: Cardinal evokes Algeria in almost all of her works with the same love and sense of possession. In La Mule Cardinal is able to approach the recent and personal loss of her land by evoking its presence in writing. She, like Madeleine, is unable to accept the present absence of Algeria and thus reproduces what was lost to find strength and comfort.14 Further clarifying Cardinal’s personal investment in re-creating her lost homeland, in her posthumously published autobiographical work, L’Inédit, her attachment to La Madelène is clearly documented. In 1983 she and her husband, Jean-Pierre Ronfard, bought a home in the Vaucluse, France, which they named La Madelène: “Elle retrouve dans cet ancien monastère transformé en ferme l’atmosphère et le décor de la maison familiale, en Algérie, La Salamandre” (In this old monastery

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transformed into a farm, she was reunited with the decor of her family home in Algeria, La Salamandre) (Cardinal, Inédit, 254). Throughout her diary entries between 1984 and 1991, Cardinal calls La Madelène a paradise (96). In May 1985 she writes, “L’odeur des lilas à La Madelène. Par bouffées. L’odeur des sept brins de muguet, l’odeur des giroflées sauvages, l’odeur de la menthe, l’odeur du thym. Je ne sais pas vivre” (The scent of lilacs in La Madelène. Long whiffs. The scent of seven sprigs of lily of the valley, the scent of wild wallflowers, the scent of mint, the scent of thyme. I can’t bear it) (127). In 1985 she again raves about the perfect life at the house (133), and in 1991 she ties the home in with her family writing, “Isadora et Louise sont nées. Alice est enceinte. La Madelène est superbe. Et moi je suis toujours dans ma solitude et mon errance, c’est vraiment une question de caractère. Sale caractère” (Isadora and Louise were born. Alice is pregnant. La Madelène is splendid. And me? I am still alone and wandering. It’s a personality thing. Bad attitude) (187). Although Cardinal ultimately created a physical replacement for her lost paradise later in life, in mid-1963, when La Mule de corbillard was published, the colonial losses were still fresh for the Pieds-Noirs. Cardinal had already been separated from her land in 1957, whereas most PiedsNoirs left shortly before or after 1962. When Cardinal left Algeria, she was not aware that it would be her definitive departure. She expresses in Autrement dit that her loss is particularly difficult to accept because she was not able to make a sort of last mental image of her country: Je ne savais pas, ce jour-là, que je ne reviendrais plus. Si je l’avais su j’aurais scruté les détails des détails, j’aurais imprimé en moi l’heure, la chaleur, la lumière, les visages. Alors que je ne sais même plus si j’ai pris l’avion ou le bateau. On that day, I didn’t know that I would never return. If I had known it, I would have scrutinized the details of details, I would have had the time, the heat, the light, the faces imprinted in me. As it is, I no longer even remember if I took the plane or the boat. (12; Cooper, In Other Words, 8)

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She repeats this sentiment in another reproduction of her last trip to Algeria in Les Pieds-Noirs, eleven years later: Les années d’insouciance, celles de mon enfance, de mon adolescence, et les premières années de ma vie de femme . . . les premières amours . . . le premier enfant . . . Le poids de cette légèreté, de cette beauté, de cette tendresse, de cette inconscience ! Peut- être que cela palpite toujours en moi parce que je n’ai jamais quitté ces images pour toujours, jamais je ne les ai rangées dans un tiroir ou une valise, jamais je n’ai regardé la terre de ma jeunesse en me disant que je n’y serais plus chez moi. La dernière fois que j’en suis partie, je ne savais pas que c’était la dernière fois. [. . .] Ensuite je suis repartie avec ma fille dans mes bras, c’était l’été, je reviendrais pour Noël. Je ne savais pas que, désormais, je n’aurais plus de maison. Je ne savais pas que ma terre ne serait plus jamais ma terre. The carefree years, those of my childhood, my adolescence, and the first years of womanhood . . . first loves . . . the first child . . . The weight of this lightness, this beauty, this tenderness, this unawareness! Perhaps it still pulsates in me because I never permanently left these images, I never put them away in a drawer or a suitcase, I never looked at the land of my youth while telling myself that I would never again be home. The last time that I left, I didn’t know it would be the last time. [. . .] Then I left again with my daughter in my arms, it was summer, I would come back for Christmas. I didn’t know that, from then on, I would no longer have a home. I didn’t know that my land would never again be my land. (11–12) Her unexpected permanent exile evoked her passionate and continual need to return, and as her later autobiographical works demonstrate, Cardinal continually clung to her memories of Algeria, to keep Algeria present.15 In addition to the traumatic loss of homeland, Cardinal continually wrote about her traumatic separation from her mother, as will be analyzed in chapter 4. Near the end of Les Mots pour le dire, the narrator visits her

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mother’s tomb and remembers her in a softer disposition than throughout the rest of the work. The strikingly tender scene is reminiscent of the obsessional construction of the Cathédral Madelonne in La Mule de corbillard. Cardinal shows admiration for the woman who could create beautiful objects from the shells that she and her daughter collected on the beach near the farm: Vous vous souvenez ? Vous m’emeniez à la chasse au trésor avec vous. Les vagues avaient déposé leur petit butin en lignes de guirlandes festonnées sur le sable humide. Vous disiez que j’avais des yeux de lynx, que je savais trouver mieux que personne les nacres, les porcelaines, les escargots pointus, les oreilles de mer, les couteaux roses. [. . .] Ensuite vous les perciez, vous les polissiez, vous les vernissiez et avec du fil de laiton et du carton vous les assembliez, vous les colliez et pour finir il sortait de vos mains un merveilleux bouquet. Je passais les longues soirées d’été à vous regarder faire avec admiration pendant que la mer poussait ses soupirs réguliers dans la nuit chaude. Do you remember? You took me with you on a treasure hunt. The waves had deposited their meager spoils in lines of garlands festooned on the moist sand. You said I had the eyes of a lynx, that I knew better than anyone how to find the mother-of-pearl shells, cowries, pointed sea snails, ear shells and the pink razor clam shells. [. . .] Then you would make holes in them, polish them, varnish them, and put them together on brass wire with some cardboard and glue, and then from your hands would come a marvelous bouquet. I spent long summer evenings watching you at work with admiration while the sea heaved steady sighs in the hot night. (Les Mots, 340; Goodheart, Words To Say It, 291) As much as it represents an act of controlling what is present in absence (see Freud’s “Fort-Da,” explained in chapter 4), the cathedral in La Mule de corbillard also evokes a loving mother-daughter relationship built on collaboration. In Les Mots pour le dire, written twelve years after La Mule de corbillard, Cardinal therapeutically repeats her deepest losses: the 96

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cathedral is a child not only created by a lost lover and Madeleine, but also brought up somewhere between Cardinal’s mother and herself.16 REPRODUCTION AS RECOLLECTION In their work on the compulsion to repeat, Laplanche and Pontalis point out, “Ce qui définit le symptôme en psychanalyse, c’est précisément qu’il reproduit, de façon plus ou moins déguisée, certains éléments d’un conflit passé” (What defines the symptom in psychoanalysis, is precisely what it reproduces, in a more less disguised way: certain elements of a past conflict) (Vocabulaire, 86). La Mule de corbillard exemplifies the reproduction of past conflict to escape an unbearable present absence. Madeleine Couturier’s loss of her homeland is parallel to the loss the Pieds-Noirs experienced as they left Algeria in the early 1960s. Although Butler claims that the use of repetition to restore or reproduce the past is “a vain effort to stay, or indeed, to reverse time” (“Pleasures,” 272), it is not always so clear to the Pied-Noir author that this effort is vain nor even that she is trying to stay the past. In Cardinal’s oeuvre, and specifically in La Mule de corbillard, reproduction of the past is portrayed as an act of bravery and as a source of strength.17 All the while, narrator and author remain incognizant of the harmful or distortive outcomes of this process. Because the unbearable aspect of the present cannot be separated from the loss of Algeria for most Pieds-Noirs, an effort to (af )fix a colonial past runs the risk of reconstructing or sustaining the colony. In La Mule de corbillard, Madeleine Couturier uses reproduction to avoid acknowledging what lies outside her control. While Cardinal avoids recolonization by carefully dislocating the story, the text is situated in a Mediterranean-like climate and contains numerous hints that recall Algeria.18 While Cardinal has removed the colonial context, she has reproduced the loss of a homeland, the loss of dominion, and the attempt to replace both through obsessive memorialization. La Mule de corbillard is emblematic of Pied-Noir works that try to control the past through a present perspective at the expense of objective criticism. Writing to escape the unbearable present or rewriting 97

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the past in the way the author would have liked things to happen offers temporary relief. Butler explains this attempt to repair or fix the past: “Repetition signals a fantasized return to the past for the purposes of repairing an injury there incurred. One may well interpret the strategy of return as an effort to rewrite or reconstruct a history that remains painful in contemporary experience. Hence, return is always linked with the desire to redo or repair; repetition is wishful reparation, the assimilation of the present to the past in order to inhabit that past within the terms of the present and effect its fantasized reconstruction” (“Pleasures,” 264). This fantasized reconstruction often appears in Pied-Noir autobiography and fiction staged in a land that is now absent to the author. As we have seen in La Mule de corbillard, Madeleine repeats her past not to work through its pain, but rather to supplant the pain of absences that remain in her present. Reproduction allows her to control the terms of those losses and to reorder the past in a way that brings her pleasure in her present. The pleasure of repetition for Madeleine is the pleasure of escaping a time in which she is uprooted and powerless over her surroundings. Reproduction bridges her past to her future in a way that relieves her pain and allows her to believe she has fixed the past. Madeleine Couturier and many other Cardinalian characters are Pieds-Noirs whose present is littered with and sometimes consumed by repetitions of the past. Although repetition may bring certain pleasure and a feeling of empowerment, avoiding the present and controlling the past through reproduction replaces the act of recollection and distorts the perspective on the past. As the following chapter will demonstrate, repetition further ties the repeating subject to the pain of the past and disrupts healing. It remains to be seen, however, whether the Pied-Noir can definitively work through the painful past or if she is destined to continually drudge back to the lost homeland. Whatever the outcome for these authors, repetition has not served remembering but instead pushes away both recollection and present pain. Until the reality of loss is fully acknowledged, true fixing cannot begin.

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4 Pleasures of a Painful Past WRITING TO REMEMBER , WRITING TO FORGET

Beyond the act of saying or doing something again, the French word “répétition” indicates rehearsal and practice. Psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Mauger’s article “Pratiques de mémoire, pratiques de répétition” explores three types of practice founded on repetition: the mastery of an art such as music, the success of psychotherapy, and the religious experience. Repetition lies at the foundation of mastery, and Mauger explains that once something is memorized, there is no longer need to recall. Instead, the repetition comes forth without recollection as a somewhat automatic response. In this way, memory itself can be mastered through repetition. Repeated often enough, the memory is no longer remembered, and its substance becomes controlled through practice. Specifically in the case of traumatic events, the memory is condensed through repetition to a point that feeling can be evacuated and the substance interpreted. As Mauger suggests, L’interprète doit faire oublier la répétition pour faire croire à la nouveauté. Il a besoin d’échapper à la répétition pour reprendre un certain pouvoir d’une mise en sens toujours renouvelée, oublieuse de ce qui s’y répète. Réinterpréter sans fin, à sa façon, la Bible, la Torah, [. . .] sur-interpréter selon le pouvoir infini de l’imaginaire.

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The interpreter must erase the rehearsal to make it appear new. He needs to escape repetition to regain a certain power over an ever-renewed meaning, oblivious to what is repeated. Endlessly reinterpreted, in its own way, the Bible, the Torah, [. . .] over-interpreted according to the infinite power of imagination. (12) Through mastery, creativity emerges to give birth to something new. Many Pieds-Noirs repeat their stories to preserve the past or to avoid the painful absence in their present lives. Repetition has been viewed as a necessary part of the process of committing to memory, causing the Pied-Noir to believe he or she has worked through the past, but this sense of closure is false. Because the past no longer exists in the present, it is only the present relationship to the past that can be mastered. Once a certain version of events has been sufficiently committed to memory, and a fiction has been created, there is no longer need to recall omitted details and other details will have been indelibly exaggerated. In the works of Pied-Noir writers, written interpretation inevitably creates a certain deformation of memory. Cathy Caruth explains repetition resulting from trauma in her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History: “The wound of the mind [. . .] is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that [. . .] is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (3–4). In this study of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Caruth uncovers the psychic wound that continually resurfaces in its attempt to be integrated. Repetition is the logical means of accessing the unknown or inassimilable piece of the past, “so trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (4). Trauma is thus diffuse throughout the repetitions and continually haunts its victim. For the Pieds-Noirs, the impetus for writing is often to quell this painful separation from Algeria. 100

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Whatever the intention of the author, repetition eventually replaces recollection, provides a sense of mastery, and gives way to interpretation. In the majority of texts that reconstruct an Algerian past, the practice of repetition is partially exposed and examined. Through a study of texts by two Algerian-born French authors who blatantly use repetition, this chapter demonstrates repetition to fictionalize the past. Marie Cardinal’s progressive repetitions draw her nearer to reality until her repetitions eventually result in mastery and subsequent pleasure. In Hélène Cixous’s work, repetition of symbols of absence eventually evacuate the reality of the past, demonstrating it to be resistant to control. In both cases repetition replaces recollection; however, one author reaches a sense of completion, whereas the other is undone by her words. Whether they draw nearer to or fall farther from their birth country, both continue the pleasurable and painful process of repeating. RÉPÉTITION IN MARIE CARDINAL’S OEUVRE Most of novelist Marie Cardinal’s major works articulate a life much like her own: “La vie d’une femme vivant sur une terre ravagée par le conflit des humains” (The life of a woman living on a land ravaged by human conflict) (Cardinal, “Marie Cardinale,” 105).1 Cardinal, like her characters, was separated first from her mother and then from Algeria. In her most celebrated novel, Les Mots pour le dire (1975), she writes about her traumatic relationships under the guise of fiction. Later, in Autrement dit, a transcribed interview with Annie Leclerc that appeared in 1977, Cardinal says that this fiction was, for the most part, autobiographical (27). Then in 1980, Cardinal made a pilgrimage to her lost Algeria and wrote a travelogue documenting her return, published as Au pays de mes racines. In this autobiographical work, Cardinal once again addresses her separation from her mother. Yet this time Cardinal copies a large portion of her novel Les Mots into her autobiography rather than recounting the memory in the moment she is confronted with its original context, a street in Algeria. Cardinal’s use of repetition has long been pointed out by her critics, such as Françoise Lionnet, who draws out the relationship between 101

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Algeria and mother in Autobiographical Voices (201); Patrice Proulx in “Marie Cardinal: Sa poétique de l’exil”; and Anne Donadey Roch in her article “Répétition, maternité et transgression dans trois œuvres de Marie Cardinal.” Donadey Roch uses psychoanalytic theory in her feminist reading of Cardinal, laying the groundwork for my analysis. Where Donadey Roch claims writing liberates Cardinal from the compulsion to repeat (“Répétition,” 569),2 I argue that, on the contrary, Cardinal binds herself to the repetition because it provides her with a sense of control and sustains her identity. As Cardinal herself points out in Au pays de mes racines, she uses repetition purposefully, “pour faire la chaîne, pour indiquer que je n’écrirai jamais qu’un seul livre qui sera fait de tous mes livres” (to make a chain, to show that I will always write only one single book that will be made up of all of my books) (177). Although repetition is generally accepted as necessary for committing something to memory, Mauger points out that technology easily replaces the need for such memorization, and thus, repetition must serve other purposes (“Pratiques,” 11). The multiplying number of autobiographies, Internet sites, and blogs related to the Pieds-Noirs confirms that writing and publishing have not diminished the Pieds-Noirs’ desire or need to repeat. Cardinal, whose past and memories had already been saved in published works, suggested that her repetition functions to build continuity in her texts. What she does not address, however, is that this continuity with her past partially results from the replacement of painful recollection with pleasurable interpretation. As she writes near the end of Au pays de mes racines, she attempts to master the past: “Je voudrais comprendre l’Histoire, je crois pouvoir la maîtriser ou me l’approprier, mais elle est plus forte, elle me dépasse” (I would like to understand History; I believe I can master it or make it my own, but it is stronger and it eludes me) (160). In spite of her efforts to assimilate it, the reality of the past will always escape her control. Les Mots pour le dire recounts the seven-year-long psychoanalysis of a Pied-Noir woman who is estranged from her mother, her husband, and her homeland and who had suffered constant vaginal hemorrhaging until she began therapy. The central scene in Les Mots, and the turning point 102

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in the narrator’s therapy, comes when she is finally able to recount her mother’s terrible avowal of having attempted to miscarry her daughter. This avowal scene, like the author’s connection to her homeland, appears in different versions at least five times throughout her oeuvre. Cardinal’s repetitions progress in proximity from distant (the event happens to someone else) to gradual intimacy (the event happens to Cardinal herself in various contexts); finally, the event becomes mastered in fiction that is later pasted into Cardinal’s autobiography. The surroundings of the event also draw closer to reality, progressing from the comfort of the narrator’s home to an unwelcoming street in Algeria. Cardinal and her narrators move emotionally in relationship to Algeria as she recounts this scene with great fear and disgust and then intense love, embracing the country as a whole. Significantly, the author is never willing or, perhaps, able to recount the scene in a completely autobiographical voice. It is only through the repeated telling that she is able to approach the reality of what happened, and yet she never arrives. When physically close to the actual context of the scene during her return to Algeria, Cardinal cannot be objective. Once removed again from the context and returned to Paris, she can safely analyze her feelings about her experience and investigate other memories that had been covered on site. The first time the attempted abortion appears in Cardinal’s texts is in her 1972 work La Clé sur la porte. This novel is about a mother of three children who opens her home to the neighborhood teenagers in a sort of experiment. In this preliminary account, the narrator is an outsider and far more distanced than she will appear in later repetitions. The children’s adolescent friend Moussia is in the narrator’s living room when she tells her about her mother’s avowal:3 Tu sais ce qu’elle a fait ma mère, quand j’avais douze ans, pour m’expliquer que j’allais avoir mes règles? —Non, qu’est- ce qu’elle a fait ? —Eh bien, elle m’a expliqué qu’elle avait essayé de se faire avorter de moi au début de sa grossesse. —Qu’est- ce que tu racontes ? Qu’est-ce qu’elle t’a dit ? 103

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—C’était pour me faire comprendre qu’un jour une femme avait ses règles et qu’elle pouvait alors avoir des enfants [. . .]. D’abord elle m’a raconté tout ce qu’elle avait fait pour ne pas garder cet enfant [. . .]. “Do you know what my mother did when I was twelve to explain that I was going to have my period?” “No, what did she do?” “Well, she explained to me that she had tried to miscarry me at the beginning of her pregnancy.” “What are you talking about? She told you that?” “It was to make me understand that one day a woman had her period and then she could have children [. . .]. First, she told me everything she did to not keep this child [. . .].” (150– 51) Moussia goes on to explain in detail— detail later confirmed as Cardinal’s reality in Au pays de mes racines—all the methods her mother allegedly used to provoke a miscarriage. The narrator becomes a protective surrogate to the young girl, and yet she tries to justify the mother’s confession while the teenager continues to express hurt and disgust for her mother’s act (150– 51). Immediately after the recounting, the narrator raises her guard when she realizes some of the adolescents are taking advantage of her, and then the book quickly ends with a graphic “ballade des fœtus mal aimés,” an abortion song written by Moussia (154). This passage is subsequently re-created from the mother’s perspective, but not repeated verbatim, in Les Mots pour le dire (169–70). In La Clé sur la porte, the failed abortion story validates the narrator’s project and brings closure to the novel. In La Clé sur la porte, Cardinal tells the personally traumatic story from the perspective of a youth in a setting in which the narrator is in control: the narrator is an adult, in the living room of her own home, playing a protective role for the traumatized girl. In addition to making the story a secondhand account, the author adds an additional level of distance by not disclosing the setting in which Moussia’s mother admitted to the attempted abortion.4 In fact, Algeria is altogether absent from the story. However, the girl shares many biographical details with Cardinal, such as the name Moussia, which was Cardinal’s childhood nickname. As such, 104

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this dialogue becomes an internal conversation between Cardinal the youth and Cardinal the mother. Cardinal manages to simultaneously distance herself from the scene and internalize it through a “fantasized reconstruction” of the events (Butler, “Pleasures,” 264). The avowal scene is repeated twice in Les Mots pour le dire. The first time the scene is explored in therapy, the narrator lies to her therapist about the context of the events. She creates a setting that is more comfortable for her to accept—the living room of the Algerian farmhouse. Cardinal takes great care in writing the lengthy description of both the setting and the elegance and love of the narrator’s mother as she recounts the events, but she boldly prefaces it by saying she is addressing the “saloperie de ma mère” (my mother’s villainy) (131; Goodheart, Words to Say It, 105). In this first version the narrator imagines how she would have liked to have received the news. Cardinal concludes the more acceptable version: À la vérité, cela ne s’est pas passé comme ça. Nous n’étions pas à la ferme, dans le salon, en face d’un feu de bois. Tout son monologue, toutes les précisions, les révélations et les instructions qu’elle me donnait sur la condition des femmes, sur la famille, sur la morale, sur l’argent, c’est dans la rue qu’elle me les débitait.5 In truth, this is not how it went. We were not in the living room at the farm in front of the wood fire. Her entire monologue, all the particulars, the revelations and the instructions she gave me about the condition of women, the family, morality, money, were told to me in the street. (160; Goodheart, Words to Say It, 131) The lie in therapy is a safe rehearsal for the more truthful version that soon follows. In the second version of the story in Les Mots, Cardinal focuses on the discomfort of being in the street in Algiers and the alienation of location. The narrator elaborates her wish that the scene had unfolded in a safer setting: A chaque fois que je repensais à cette scène, je chassais la rue. Je créais un cadre rassurant pour soutenir le souvenir de cet unique entretien 105

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avec ma mère. Je me remémorais souvent son discours et, au cours des années, j’élaborais un décor dans lequel j’avais des prises et des possibilités d’évasion. Je me rappelais ses moindres mots, les moindres intonations de sa voix, les moindres expressions de son visage aperçues à chaque fois qu’un silence trop long me faisait lever la tête vers elle, pour voir où elle en était. Mais je ne voulais à aucun prix me rappeler que nous étions dans la rue. Cela devenait alors insupportable pour moi. When I thought about it later, I’d eliminate the street and create a more reassuring framework to be able to endure the memory of that unprecedented interview. I was often reminded of all she’d said, and over the years, a setting emerged in which I had some influence and a chance to escape. I recalled her slightest words, the merest change in her expression whenever an overly long silence caused me to raise my head in her direction, to see what she was getting at. Not at any price did I want to remember that we were really on the street. I’d seen too many things there and heard them and felt them. (161; Goodheart, Words to Say It, 132–33) Although Cardinal claims she could remember her mother’s words (although she has changed them from the first to second telling), she is not able to accept that her mother committed such violence in the street. For both Cardinal and her narrator, the street represented violence, and later war. Cardinal had always been protected from the street, and her mother constantly warned her of its dangers. The author also frequently equated the street with sexuality in works such as Les Pieds-Noirs and Au pays de mes racines, in which she describes its grit and seduction in detail.6 Her mother’s choice of setting expulses Cardinal from the safe womb of the home into the sexuality and violence of the street, and the child endures the confession like living through an abortion: “Là dans la rue, en quelques phrases, elle a crevé mes yeux, elle a percé mes tympans, elle a arraché mon scalp, elle a coupé mes mains, elle a cassé mes genoux, elle a torturé mon ventre, elle a mutilé mon sexe” (There on the street, in a few sentences, she put out my eyes, pierced my eardrums, scalped 106

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me, cut off my hands, shattered my kneecaps, tortured my stomach, and mutilated my genitals) (Les Mots, 164; Goodheart, Words to Say It, 135). Rather than hating her mother for the violent act of confession, the narrator resents her mother’s choice of setting. The scene is again evoked in Cardinal’s autobiographical work Autrement dit but not in specific details. Cardinal declares that the avowal really was not as significant as it became through its repetition in writing. She says to Annie Leclerc, Au contraire, l’histoire de l’aveu de l’avortement raté de ma mère n’a pas eu une grande importance dans ma psychanalyse parce que j’en avais un souvenir très précis et que j’en avais tiré toutes les conclusions possibles avant de commencer le traitement, je n’ai donc pas eu à fouiller beaucoup là- dedans avec le docteur. Mais en l’écrivant, c’est devenu énorme, ça a pris une place formidable. On the other hand, my mother’s confession of her unsuccessful attempt to abort me didn’t have great importance in my psychoanalysis because I had a very clear memory of this confession and I had already drawn all possible conclusions about it before beginning the treatment; so I didn’t have to pry into that as much with the doctor. But in writing about it, it became enormous—it occupied a formidable place. (28; Cooper, In Other Words, 21) Through repetition, Cardinal’s interpretation becomes bigger than the event itself, but she also claims her fiction came closer to the reality of her past: “Je me suis rendu compte en l’écrivant que cette histoirelà valait toutes les raclées du monde, elle était même plus forte, elle marquait mieux le rejet de la petite fille. On était déjà loin de la vérité et pourtant on était en plein dedans” (I realized in writing it that this story was worth all the beatings in the world, it was even more powerful. It best marked the rejection of the daughter. We are already far from the truth, and yet fully within it) (28; Cooper, In Other Words, 21). Cardinal explains in an interview with Jean Royer in 1978: “Au fur et à mesure que j’écris un livre, je me débarrasse de plus en plus de choses. 107

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Je viens plus près de moi” (Little by little as I write a book, I get rid of more and more things. I come closer to myself ) (“Pour une autre humanité,” 60). The transformations through repetition measurably bring Cardinal closer to the supposed reality of her trauma, notably giving a violent firsthand account after several rehearsals, but this is only true to a point. The final appearance of the avowal scene, at least during Cardinal’s lifetime, is in the autobiographical travelogue Au pays de mes racines. Although Cardinal has already explored this memory in fictive contexts, this time when she evokes the scene, she writes as though returning to Algeria has brought back many memories that she had wanted to suppress or had forgotten. She further claims that accepting these memories is far more difficult than she ever would have anticipated. Cardinal eventually becomes tired of remembering and begins to desire forgetting. Before recounting the traumatic moment, she explains her newfound discomfort with revisiting the past. She goes so far as to refuse specific physical returns that were once the motivation of her voyage because, as she says, “Pour quoi faire ? [. . .] Ça me paraît malsain. Ça me paraît indécent” (What for? [. . .] That seems unhealthy to me. That seems indecent to me) (162). Cardinal, who considered the farmhouse to be her real home in Algeria and the source of her roots, decides it is indecent to go there. She soon after reveals, however, that she is exhausted from the constant memories that are uncontrollable on site. When approaching the particularly difficult memory of the abortion avowal scene, she is initially unable to write what she recalls. She chooses instead to repeat from her fiction into her autobiography. Repeating a memory that has been rehearsed, mastered, and fictionalized is easier than confronting certain realities of the past each time they are evoked. This exercise allows her to stop recollecting. On visiting the actual street where the avowal occurred, Cardinal inescapably recalls the painful events. She tries throughout the book to avoid recounting her reaction when confronted with the street and delays writing until her voyage is nearly complete. What she claims was insignificant in therapy (in Autrement dit) destroys her when she meets 108

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the place physically. In spite of her prior literary répétitions, she cannot write the scene autobiographically: Pourquoi faut-il que j’attende aujourd’hui pour écrire mon émotion du premier jour, de la première heure, en voyant la Grande Poste? [. . .] Pendant cet instant, je ne voyais qu’une solution : fuir, repartir, il n’y avait que du passé ici, un passé qui me torturait. [. . .] C’est que rien n’a changé à cet endroit, impossible d’oublier. Why must I wait for today to write of my emotion on the first day, in the first hour, upon seeing the Central Post Office? [. . .] For that moment, I saw only one solution: flee, leave, there was only the past here, a past that tortured me. [. . .] It’s that nothing had changed in this place, impossible to forget. (Au pays, 176–77) Her inability to control the scene while physically confronting the location incites the author to flee. A past she previously saw as soothing is now one that “tortured” her. On recollection, she attempts to repress the memory. It is only when Cardinal feels safely reaffirmed in her relationship to Algeria that she is able to recount the memory. In spite of her confidence of her love for Algeria, however, she is still unable to presently recount the trauma. Instead, Cardinal repeats the passage from her fictional work Les Mots pour le dire. Although repeating previously written words, in Au pays de mes racines Cardinal evolves the repetition by changing the location of its recounting. Whereas in Les Mots she tries to practice the scene in a safer context, attaching herself to her home, in the repetition Cardinal adds new text to focus her attention and affection to the outside, creating her comfort zone in all of Algeria and attaching herself to the land. C’est là qu’elle m’a abandonnée, au coin de la Grande Poste, dans la rue. Je me suis accrochée à ce que j’ai pu, à la ville, au ciel, à la mer, au Djurdjura. Je me suis agrippée à eux, ils sont devenus ma mère et je les ai aimés comme j’aurais voulu l’aimer, elle. Pourquoi est- ce que j’écris cela aujourd’hui et pas au commencement de mon séjour ? Parce que je n’étais pas sûre de nous, pas sûre 109

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de nous aimer encore, l’Algérie et moi. Peut- être que les années et l’Histoire avaient tout démoli. Mais non, je suis bien là, cette terre est toujours ma mère. It was there that she abandoned me, at the corner of the Central Post Office, in the street. I latched onto what I could: the city, the sky, the sea, the Djurdjura Mountains. I grabbed onto them, they became my mother, and I loved them like I would have liked to love her. Why do I write this today and not at the beginning of my trip? Because I wasn’t sure about us, not sure that we would still love each other, Algeria and I. Perhaps the years and History had demolished everything. But no, I am really there; this land is still my mother. (Au pays, 181) Unlike the scene in Les Mots pour le dire, which expelled her into the unwelcoming street, this version of the avowal brings Cardinal closer to her country. The violence and sexuality of the Algerian street are removed, and Cardinal transforms Algeria into a sort of cradle for the unwanted fetus. Algeria becomes her second mother. On the day she returns to France, Cardinal finally dares to discuss her repression of both her mother’s act and the violence in Algeria: En ce qui me concerne, je remarque que j’ai supprimé, dès le début, dès la vision de la Grande Poste intacte, tout ce qui pouvait me faire pleurnicher ou provoquer mes lamentations. C’était insupportable, ce bâtiment, ces rues, ces immeubles inchangés, témoins de crimes irréparables. [. . .] Confrontée à ce lieu, ce nombril de la ville, que j’espérais différent, modifié par les années, mais qui, dans la réalité, était le même, j’ai pensé suffoquer. [. . .] Le cru, le vif, le sanglant, le cruel étaient là, dans la souvenance des pierres et du végétal. [. . .] Je ne veux pas me laisser envahir par vous, je vous déteste, je vous hais. Inconsciemment donc, en quelques secondes, j’ai évacué ça dans la mémoire, j’ai chassé ça hors du terrain privé de mes souvenirs personnels. J’ai anobli ces assassinats.

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In my case, I notice that I suppressed, from the beginning, from the first sight of the intact Central Post Office, everything that could make me whine or cause me to lament. It was unbearable, this building, these streets, these unchanged apartment buildings, witnesses to irreparable crimes. [. . .] Confronted with this place, the center of the city, that I had hoped would be different, changed through the years, but that, in reality, was the same, I felt suffocated. [. . .] The raw, quick, bloody, cruel were there, in the memory of stones and plants. [. . .] I don’t want to let myself be invaded by you, I detest you, I hate you. Unconsciously then, in a matter of seconds, I removed that from memory, I chased it out of the private land of my personal memories. I ennobled the murders. (Au pays, 191– 92) The physical confrontation with this place that Cardinal had tried to re-create in her fiction was overwhelming. In trying to suppress painful memories, she recognizes that there had been no healing for her past and that, although she could master her memory in writing, she could not control her recollection on site. Furthermore, she must again repress feelings of hatred for a location that had heretofore evoked nostalgia in her writing. In this quotation Cardinal makes reference to a double violence experienced in this street. As in other works, she writes that no one could return the life to these “cadavres entassés du carrefour” (cadavers piled in the intersection) (Au pays, 191). Cardinal repeatedly hints at this image but never clearly recounts what occurred or what she potentially witnessed there. Her memory is intermittently troubled. In Les Mots pour le dire, the narrator claims to have forgotten the name of the street where the scenes take place: “Une longue rue en pente dont, comme par hasard, j’ai oublié le nom. Une rue qui allait de la grande poste à l’hôtel Aletti” (We were on the slope of a very long street, the name of which I have by chance forgotten. The street led from the main post office to the Hotel Aletti) (160 [also Au pays, 178]; Goodheart, Words to Say It, 131). However, she does retain specific images of this street, likely the Boulevard Bugeaud.7 In Les Mots, and again in Au pays, she describes the scene,

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une rue du centre pleine de passants, de bruit. [. . .] Le même trottoir sur lequel coulera plus tard le sang de la haine. Le même trottoir sur lequel, vingt ans après, j’aurai peur de tomber, acculée à la mort par la chose. a downtown street, a street full of noise and passersby. [. . .] The same sidewalk on which later would run the blood of enmity. And, twenty years later, the same sidewalk on which I would be afraid of falling, driven into a corner with death, by the Thing. (161 [also Au pays, 178]; Goodheart, Words to Say It, 132) Much earlier, in her first novel, Écoutez la mer (1962), however, Cardinal situates a remarkably similar scene in the Rue Michelet: Elle recherchait le rythme des dalles de la rue Michelet sur le chemin de son école mais elle ne le retrouve pas. [. . .] Elle pense qu’aujourd’hui les dalles de la rue Michelet servent à autre chose qu’à faire sautiller les petites filles. Elle voit une grande flaque de sang noir qui a trouvé, à peine formée, la route de la plus grande pente et les vallées des jointures. Ainsi, ce sang d’homme mort continue à vivre et se trace un chemin zigzaguant vers le ruisseau où il aboutit après avoir passé mollement, en gouttes lourdes, le rebord du trottoir. C’est un sang moderne qui conduit son existence avec des angles droits et de grands élans rectilignes. Le regard de Maria est fixe, elle ne voit rien, elle imagine. Ses visions lui donnent envie de vomir. Elle secoue la tête : elle ne veut pas penser à cela, elle ne peut pas penser à cela. She sought the rhythm of the flagstones on Michelet Street on her way to school, but she couldn’t find it. [. . .] She thinks that today Michelet Street’s flagstones serve another purpose than to make little girls hop. She sees a big puddle of black blood that, barely formed, found its way to the biggest slope and into the valleys of the cracks. Thus, this dead man’s blood still lives and traces a zigzagging path toward the stream where it ends after having limply passed over the curb in heavy drops. It’s a modern blood that leads its life with right angles and large straight strides. 112

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Maria’s gaze is fixed; she sees nothing; she imagines. Her visions make her want to vomit. She shakes her head: she doesn’t want to think about that; she cannot think about that. (144–45) This second trauma of flowing blood on the street is frequently and singularly paralleled with the first, but the massacre to which Cardinal refers is never clearly recounted. Cardinal creates the clearest image of it in Au pays de mes racines: Nous avions dépassé la Grande Poste. C’est que rien n’a changé à cet endroit, impossible d’oublier. Là, pendant la guerre d’Algérie, une voix jeune et affolée qui hurlait : “Cessez le feu ! Cessez le feu !” Mais le feu n’a pas cessé. Tuerie de la foule à bout portant. Des corps, du sang, les gens qui marchaient dessus, dedans, les gens qui criaient, qui se sauvaient, qui tombaient. L’épouvante. Des tas de cadavres. Là, au même endroit, il y a quarante ans, ma mère m’arrachait l’esprit. We had passed the Central Post Office. It’s that nothing has changed in this place, impossible to forget. There, during the Algerian War, a distraught young voice yelled, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” But the bullets did not stop. Massacre of the crowd at close range. Bodies, blood, people walking over, in, people shouting, who were running away, who were falling. The horror. Piles of corpses. There, in the same place forty years ago, my mother ripped out my soul. (177) As Cardinal explains, she tried to repress these memories when confronted with the place. Even when on site in Algiers, she repeats the forgotten street name, indicating her intentional erasures. Through a combination of Cardinal’s descriptions, the reader might recognize the Rue d’Isly Massacre of March 26, 1962, to which Cardinal was not likely witness as she was no longer living in Algeria at the time. Whatever the reality of this secondary trauma, Cardinal is never able to fully recount 113

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it. She may, in fact, be interpreting her memory, placing it inside a traumatic event from her people’s history, in an effort to join herself to the suffering Pied-Noir community. After Cardinal’s documented return to Algeria in 1980, the practice of repeating both the avowal and the massacre scenes subsides. The author does, however, continue to repeat the story of a woman from (not in) a land ravaged by war, as well as her familial and sexual relationships, in her following works, including Le Passé empiété (1983), Les Pieds-Noirs (1988), and in her last novel, Amour . . . Amours . . . (1998), which is entirely constructed on repetitions of her past works.8 In her posthumously published autobiography, L’Inédit, she recounts the abortion scene in dialogue with an unnamed author. She initially makes reference to the scene but refuses to recount it: Je vais me chercher des excuses et des explications historicosociologiques alors que l’origine du mouvement qui s’est opéré dans ma réflexion est purement personnelle. J’étais en conflit avec ma mère. Je l’ai écrit mille fois, je ne vais pas encore l’écrire. I am going to search for excuses and sociohistorical explanations while the source of the change that occurred in my thought process is purely personal. I was at odds with my mother. I have written it a thousand times, and I am not going to write it again. (113) Later in the text, however, she imagines the attempted abortion with shocking and unprecedented detail: Elle a préféré risquer de mourir. Elle y est allée avec des aiguilles à tricoter, fameux ouvrage de dame. Ca a raté. Elle y est allée avec de l’aspirine, la quinine : sang empoisonné. Ca a raté. Elle y est allée avec le cheval et le vélo. Branle-bas du diable. Ca a raté. Restait l’avorteuse qui vous enfilait une sonde dans l’utérus sur sa table de cuisine dans l’odeur de la soupe de poireau-pomme de terre, dans la lumière de l’ampoule qui pendait du plafond. Elle ne l’a pas fait parce qu’elle habitait une petite ville, que ça se serait su.

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Plutôt vivre avec la haine au ventre que de perdre sa réputation, celle de sa famille. She preferred to risk her life. She went at it with knitting needles, infamous women’s work. That failed. She went at it with aspirin, quinine: blood poisoning. That failed. She went at it with bicycling and horseback riding. Shaken like a devil. That failed. The only thing left was the abortionist who would put a probe in your uterus on her kitchen table with the scent of leek and potato soup in the dim light of a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. She didn’t do that because she lived in a small town—it would have been talked about. Better to live with hatred in the belly than to tarnish her and her family’s reputation. (138) The structure of L’Inédit makes the date of this account unknowable, but using the interspersed journal entries in the text, we can surmise it was between 1985 and 1988 that she shared this story. Cardinal never again reconstructs the story of her mother’s confession, and in Amour . . . Amours . . . she reduces the circumstances of her narrator’s birth to a few lines: “La procédure du divorce était à peine engagée quand Mimi a dû admettre qu’elle était enceinte. La petite Lola est donc née en plein scandale” (The divorce proceedings had barely begun when Mimi had to admit that she was pregnant. Thus, little Lola was born in full-blown scandal) (37). Cardinal’s process of mastering memory appears to be complete, and she would no longer need to recall the traumatic events. By dragging the trauma from novel into the autobiography, Cardinal indicates there is no division between her fiction and reality. At the same time, repetition and imagination allow her protective distance and control, keeping her slightly separated from the real violence committed in the Algerian street through writing. As she expresses in a 1988 journal entry, “J’ai tellement dit, tellement dit que je disais, que je me suis murée dans mes ‘confessions’. Aveux distillés, passés au peigne fin, architecturés” (I have said so much, said so much that I was saying, that I walled myself off in my

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“confessions.” Distilled avowals, gone over with a fine-toothed comb, carefully constructed) (L’Inédit, 143). Because Cardinal ceased to publicly repeat the avowal scene but continually rewrote her relationship to Algeria, it is unclear if she successfully worked through the traumas of her past in her texts. Laplanche and Pontalis define “working through,” or “perlaboration,” in Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse as une sorte de travail psychique qui permet au sujet d’accepter certains éléments refoulés et de se dégager de l’emprise des mécanismes répétitifs. La perlaboration est constante dans la cure mais plus particulièrement à l’œuvre dans certaines phases où le traitement paraît stagner et où une résistance, bien qu’interprétée, persiste. [. . .] La perlaboration est bien une répétition mais modifiée par l’interprétation et de ce fait susceptible de favoriser le dégagement du sujet à l’endroit de ses mécanismes répétitifs. a type of psychical work that allows the subject to accept certain repressed elements and to free himself from the grip of repetitive mechanisms. Working through is constant in the cure but more particularly at work in certain phases where the treatment seems to stagnate and where resistance, although interpreted, persists. [. . .] Working through is, in itself, a kind of repetition, but it is modified by interpretation, thus possibly allowing the subject to disengage himself from his repetitive mechanisms. (305– 6) Although repetition is part of the process of the cure, Laplanche and Pontalis assert that it is interpretation that potentially allows the analysand to let go of his or her repetitive mechanisms. Curiously, Cardinal, who underwent her own psychoanalysis before writing about it and who claims in Autrement dit to have worked through the abortion confessional scene with her analyst, continues to repeat and interpret this trauma in writing. Although the most traumatic events eventually fade, she is never cured of her need to repeat Algeria. The author’s past still permeates her 116

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final work, Amour . . . Amours . . . , intimating that her repetitions may serve a purpose beyond working through. THE PLEASURE OF REPETITION Like many Cardinalian characters, Lola in Amour . . . Amours . . . appears cut off from Algeria and floating without roots. Cardinal uses her to expound on the need to repeat: Pourquoi revenir là-dessus ? Pourquoi ne pas évacuer ça une fois pour toutes. Il faudrait qu’elle s’exprime, qu’elle écrive, qu’elle dise. Ecrire que la Méditerranée est proche que tout la chante autour d’elle. [. . .] Ecrire les oliviers, les figuiers et la vigne. Ecrire, écrire, écrire. Pour partager, pour exorciser, pour travailler. Petites lettres, petits mots, petites pages, petit ouvrage de rien du tout, de tout. Dire, dire, dire, dire. Pour entendre des sons, pour entendre des mots, pour les sentir rouler dans les joues, pour que la langue les suce, pour que les lèvres les baisent. Pour que la gorge les crache. Why come back to all this? Why not evacuate this once and for all. She has to express herself, to write, to speak. Write that the Mediterranean is near, that everything sings it around her. [. . .] Write the olive trees, the fig trees, the vines. Write, write, write. To share, to exorcise, to work. Little letters, little words, little pages, little work of nothing at all, at all. Say, say, say, say. To hear the sounds, to hear the words, to feel them roll in the cheeks, so that the tongue sucks them, so that the lips kiss them. So that the throat spits them out.9 (81–82) Here, Cardinal articulates her own theory of repetition. Repetition brings physical pleasure alongside the psychological pleasure of recreating her former surroundings. Repetition allows her to “exorcise” 117

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the past without evacuating it completely. She sensually embraces the words. Just as Lola sucks and kisses her words in Amour . . . Amours . . . , throughout her oeuvre Cardinal repeatedly makes love to her re- created Algeria. This sensuality becomes explicit at the end of Au pays de mes racines when Cardinal swims in the Mediterranean before her departure to France: Je nage loin, je m’éloigne de la terre. La mer dans les cheveux, le long du dos, entre les fesses, sous les bras, en bouillons sous la plante des pieds, entre les doigts de pied. Je suis une fête foraine, un pavois. [. . .] Salut ! Je m’en vais pour avoir le plaisir de revenir bientôt. Ce ne sera pas long. La planche, histoire de se reposer, de se détendre dans le meilleur hamac du monde, le plus berceur, le plus douillet, le plus frais. Je ferme les paupières pour que le soleil ne me brûle pas dedans. Le monde est rose, veinulé de rouge avec des zigzagures d’or par moments. Le monde est une soie brodée. Le monde est un lit de coussins. Le monde est ma nourrice, il me tient en sécurité dans ses bras, il m’enchante. I swim far; I move away from the earth. The sea in my hair, the length of my back, between my buttocks, under my arms, in bubbles under the soles of my feet, between my toes. I am a fairground, a bulwark. [. . .] Hello! I’m going away to have the pleasure of coming back again soon. It won’t be long. The board, a place to rest, to relax in the best hammock in the world, the most soothing, the coziest, the freshest. I close my eyelids so that the sun doesn’t burn me inside. The world is pink, veined with red and with little golden zigzags here and there. The world is embroidered silk. The world is a bed of cushions. The world is my nurse, it holds me safely in its arms, it enchants me. (185–86) In this intimate moment between Cardinal and the permeating sea, she recognizes that return brings pleasure. She further controls her relationship to her homeland by transforming the painful memory of violence 118

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in Algeria into a pleasurable womb.10 Judith Butler explains the impulse to join a place of death with one of life in “The Pleasures of Repetition”: “As a yearning for the protection associated with the womb, this yearning which we call the death instinct may be less a desire for literal death than a call for a radical protection within the terms of life” (274). Rejoined to her world, which has become a new mother to her, Cardinal establishes a place of comfort and total security.11 Cardinal’s extreme pleasure in her return, continually re-created in terms of jouissance, can be explained through the pleasure principle. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud departs from his earlier work that proposes pleasure as the primary motivation for humans. In this text Freud develops the concept of the compulsion toward death, which runs concurrently with the pleasure of repetition.12 Repetition not only evokes pleasure but can also evoke pain, and in fact, it is the drive toward death that dominates the drive toward pleasure. In Freud’s discussion of “Fort-Da,” he observes a young child at play and recognizes that the child has found extreme pleasure in reproducing the departure of his mother by throwing toys across the room.13 Whereas the child was passively and painfully separated from his mother, in his own reenactment of the separation in play he takes control of the formerly traumatic situation and experiences pleasure in the repetition (Freud, Beyond, 14–15). Butler explains, “The game allows the young child to gain a sense of mastery over the experience of separation from his mother, first by substituting the toy for the mother, and second, by gaining control over the conditions under which the departure and return of the toy occurs” (“Pleasures,” 261). The act of controlling the presence and absence of an object through repetition and interpretation clearly emerges in Cardinal’s writing, especially through her character Madeleine Couturier in La Mule de corbillard, which was examined in chapter 3. On losing both her beloved land and a lover, Madeleine transfers that love into her art project, the Cathédrale Madelonne. She then actively participates in the loss by destroying the cathedral. The author likewise takes an active part in her losses by rewriting them in ways that seem comfortable to her, allowing her to accommodate the painful experience and take part in the pleasurable 119

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game. Even though Cardinal claimed to accept the loss of Algeria and to support the independence of her country, she perpetually returned because of both the physical pleasure of interpreting through words and the perverse pleasure of repeating trauma.14 In her study of repeating the past, Butler evaluates sadism as a pleasurable repetition with a goal “to understand those peculiarly (self-) destructive postures of pleasure as the dramatized fantasies of traversing time in order to repeat and repair a history that one wishes never was” (“Pleasures,” 261). She grounds her argument in the fact that Freud himself referred to sadism as “impulsion to mastery” in his work “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” and that he viewed sadism and masochism as “efforts to eroticize a present and actual pain and, through that eroticisation, to subordinate pain to a pleasurable sexual fantasy” (Butler, “Pleasures,” 262). Masochism equally evokes pleasure through mastery because, as the inverse of sadism, it allows the subject to take a passive role and then places another subject in the role of the sadist. Butler develops sadism as “a primary urge toward self-preservation” that is pleasurable in its ability to empower the victim through mastery, and she highlights that the pleasure of mastery “is always in some sense the pleasure of a contemporary victory over the past” (263). The masochistic act of approaching the painful past is particularly apparent in Cardinal’s Amour . . . Amours . . . , in which Lola likens her past to a sadistic master: “Le passé est antérieur, pourtant il est aussi là, au présent. Le passé mord les orteils et tire les cheveux. Il fonctionne comme un pantin qui dresse les bras et écarte les jambes quand on actionne ses ficelles” (The past is anterior; however, it is also there, in the present. The past bites toes and pulls hair. It functions like a marionette who lifts his arms and spreads his legs when someone pulls on his strings) (31).15 Cardinal’s character Madeleine Couturier in La Mule de corbillard also expresses her hellish loss: “C’était un mal insupportable au cœur, à l’estomac, aux genoux. C’était la prison la plus noire. C’était le choléra, la peste” (It was an unbearable pain in the heart, the stomach, the knees. It was the darkest prison. It was cholera and the plague) (145). Nonetheless, her re-creation provides her a sense of control. Thus, a discourse of 120

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pleasure emerges: “Mon passé, c’est mon enfant que je dorlotte [sic], c’est ma joie, c’est la source de ma force” (My past is my child that I coddle, it’s my joy, it’s the source of my strength) (Cardinal, La Mule, 45) and “ce moment-là, devant lequel tu recules, c’est une source” (this moment, in front of which you’re backing away, is a source) (76). Rather than evacuating the past and letting go of repetition, Cardinal sustained her power through her (re)writing, which in turn sustained her. As Donadey Roch explains, “Pour Cardinal, l’écriture est l’ultime répétition, grâce à laquelle elle peut se façonner un espace à elle, créer sa propre vérité et contrôler les aspects de sa vie qui lui échappaient” (For Cardinal, writing is the ultimate repetition, thanks to which she can fashion a space for herself, create her own truth, and control the aspects of her life that escaped her) (“Répétition,” 568). The repetition of trauma in Cardinal’s oeuvre works for her as both a writer and a Pied-Noir. Susan Suleiman’s analysis of mourning in “‘Oneself as Another’: Identification and Mourning in Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder,” further explains this process in psychoanalytical terms: Freud, in his well known essay on “Mourning and Melancholia,” opposed the former to the latter as the normal to the pathological: mourning for a lost object has an end, eventually allowing the subject to “move on” and form attachments to other objects, while melancholia (in which the subject “incorporates” the object in an extreme form of identification) is potentially endless and debilitating. But if Lacan is right that the work of mourning takes place in the register of the signifier, then for a writer, an endless mourning is not necessarily debilitating: it can be an endless source of creativity. (341) Cardinal’s written repetitions emphasize endless mourning for her country, an eternal source of creativity, and an overall sense of pleasure in taking control over the past through a game of fiction. CIXOUS’S DISPOSSESSION OF THE PAST If Cardinal’s writing demonstrates that the repetition of loss provides pleasurable mastery in the present, Hélène Cixous’s work shows that 121

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repetition of a dispossession—an object never possessed so never lost— can bring a similar sense of (dis)pleasure. Répétition, according to Mauger, is prevalent in the practices of psychoanalysis, music, religion, and writing and is implicit in both remembering and forgetting. In Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage (2000), Cixous uses different practices, such as medicine, psychoanalysis, writing, and most prominently, religion, to demonstrate the past as resistant to her control. Rather than seeking mastery, Cixous repeats symbols to undermine control. Each object that would potentially allow her to approach Algeria (Vélo, Chien, Aïcha) leads to another unsuccessful attempt.16 Having long been forgotten, these elusive objects allow Cixous to gradually deconstruct the possession of the past. As religion itself is based on repetition of symbols of absence (the cross representing an absent Christ, for example), Cixous fittingly begins her novel under the pretext of a spiritual revelation. As a Jew employing Judaic, Christian, and Islamic symbols, Cixous even further removes the meaning from the ceremony and highlights her own and her community’s distance from other major religious groups in Algeria. The book begins with a relic, the beginning paragraph of five pages that were given to her in the middle of the night. Cixous recounts the Coming (“le Venant”), focusing on the intensely religious experience: J’avais noté les premières lignes que le Venant me dictait [. . .] don des dieux dont je ne connais même pas le nom. Puis une fois reçu le viatique absolu je m’aventurai à allumer, et comme si j’avais à la bouche, à la bouche de l’âme et de la main, et sur ma langue de nuit l’hostie qui répand chair et sang du Venant dans mon corps, tout en suçant et absorbant, j’avais écrit à la suite de la première semence quatre grandes pages [. . .] je remercierai les donateurs demain matin, pensais-je [. . .]. I had noted the first lines that the Com[ing] dictated to me, [. . .] gift of gods whose names I don’t even know. Once the absolute viaticum had been received I ventured to switch on the light, and as though I held the Host to disperse the Com[ing]’s flesh and blood through my body in my mouth, in my soul’s mouth and my hand’s, and on my 122

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night tongue, as I let it dissolve, in the trace of that initial seeding, I had scrawled four big, single-spaced pages, [. . .] I’ll thank the donors tomorrow morning, I thought [. . .].17 (Rêveries, 10; Brahic, Reveries, 3–4) Here and throughout, Cixous uses religious symbolism (Catholicism, in this instance) to extricate herself from the process of the text and to distance herself from memories. The author clearly articulates that the gods and Algeria, both absent figures, brought this work to her, and as a passive receptacle, Cixous portrays herself as incapable of remembering. By attributing this text to the divine “Coming,” Cixous is only submitting to the gods of writing and memory.18 Further showing her passivity in remembering, Cixous claims that Algeria sent the images to her: 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, tu crois qu’il n’y a rien dans les décombres, mais tiens penche- toi sur la rampe, qu’est- ce que tu vois ?! Mohamed ! Je voyais : Mohamed ! 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 thousands of obstacles, bringing totally forgotten people to life, good as new, you imagine there’s nothing left in the rubble, but have a peek over the railing here, what do you see?! Mohamed! I saw: Mohamed! (10–11; Brahic, Reveries, 4) In this religious experience (this time evoking Islam), Cixous evades the problem of reproducing the past by making her memories the object of the gods’ imaginations. Cixous remains unable to remember without divine inspiration (or fraternal provocation19) throughout the text. Immediately after the divine revelation, however, Cixous loses the pages, creating multiple new absences. Not only has the inspiration disappeared in the daylight, but the inspired text is also gone. What remains is a remnant, the first paragraph of the text, which becomes all the more precious because of the absence it represents. Cixous repeats from the 123

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truncated relic to underscore the absence of Algeria. With religious fervor, she frantically searches for the lost pages. The sky becomes black in the middle of the day (12), and she is ready to offer up her own life or her mother’s as a sacrifice to make her forget her loss (13). At no point, however, does she try to reproduce the missing pages. A shard of work that represents many larger absences replaces recollection. At the loss of her five pages of divinely inspired writing, Cixous recognizes that she lost Algeria in a similar way, and this primary absence forms the structure of Les Rêveries: Eh bien, c’est exactement ce qui se passait avec Algérie, du temps où j’y vivais : je l’avais, je la tenais— je ne l’avais plus, je ne l’avais jamais eue, je ne l’ai jamais embrassée. Exactement : je la poursuivais, et elle n’était pas loin, j’habitais en Algérie [. . .] je cherchais une entrée et elle m’échappait. Now this is exactly what used to happen with Algeria, when I was living there: I had it, I’d got a grip on it—I didn’t have it any longer, I’d never had it, I’d never held it in my arms. Precisely: I’d go after it, and it wasn’t too far off, I used to live in Algeria [. . .] I’d be looking for the entryway and it kept eluding me. (13; Brahic, Reveries, 5) Like Sisyphus’s rock that continually slipped away, Algeria was never attainable. It was “intouchable” (13). Although Cixous admits she tried to possess, she does not attempt to re-create the missing pages (Algeria) or to remember what was on them. Rather, she blatantly refuses to remember the pages: “Je ne cherchai d’ailleurs à aucun moment à me remémorer ces pages, l’idée de les reconstituer était inacceptable, je voulais celles-là, celles qui m’avaient été données et qui par un tour totalement inexplicable s’étaient volatilisées” (It never entered my mind to try and recall those pages, the idea of reconstituting them was unacceptable, I wanted those ones, the very ones that had been given me and which by an utterly inexplicable sleight of hand had vanished into thin air) (12; Brahic, Reveries, 4– 5). Desiring the original and not a copy, Cixous refuses to re- create an Algeria that she never 124

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possessed. She instead focuses on her quest for the loss and absence of Algeria. After the missing inspired pages have been put into question, Cixous begins dissecting individual symbols of her dispossession. The first of these symbols of absence is the Bicycle (Vélo). Cixous and her brother had prayed and begged for a bicycle as children. For four years the two waited at every birthday and religious holiday for the divine object that would give them liberty and power to possess (and escape) Algeria, “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” (the simplest and most urgent means of escaping being shut up within walking range, a tool to conquer the country, and nonviolently what’s more) (22; Brahic, Reveries, 11). The continued lack of a bicycle, which paralleled the absence of the children’s father, only increased its value until it became a cult object: “Il ne vient pas, il ne vient pas, il ne vient pas, et c’est comme cela qu’un vélo devient tout pour nous, par une nonvenance record” (It doesn’t come, it doesn’t come, it doesn’t come, and that’s how a bike becomes everything for us, by a record of notcoming) (29; Brahic, Reveries, 14). The Bicycle became a symbol of faith in that the children did not stop hoping in spite of the setbacks: 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 nous faisait joindre les mains et courber la tête, l’urgence incontestablement vitale du Vélo pour tous les deux nous obligeaient à une conversion à notre propre religion à peine connue—puisqu’il fallait bien croire, croire ou crever, croire qu’il pourrait y avoir un miracle [. . .] voilà comment Le Vélo nous agenouillait. 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 the urgency made us join hands and bow our heads, the incontestably vital urgency of the Bike for both of us made us convert to our own religion which we barely knew—since we had to believe, 125

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believe or burst, believe that a miracle could happen [. . .] that’s how the Bike brought us to our knees. (28–29; Brahic, Reveries, 14) Once again, Cixous places her faith in a power outside herself. As in the case of the inspiration needed for writing, Cixous believed that the Bicycle was necessary for her to know Algeria. It was a tool for possessing which inevitably dispossesses her of what she desired. The Bicycle, when it finally arrives, represents another absence for the children. As the symbol of faith, or hope in what is not seen, the Bicycle proves to be an object of religious frustration: “Nous avons continué à croire au “ciel”, voilà notre erreur or le ciel signifie : une tombe sur la tête” (We continued to believe in “heaven,” that was our mistake, given that heaven means: a tomb on your head) (30; Brahic, Reveries, 15). When the Bicycle crosses from imagined to real, it evokes disappointment. The children’s mother had bought them a women’s bicycle so that both of them could ride it. The overly desired object becomes representative of hell: “L’enfer c’est ça: la caisse du ciel qui tombe sur la tête, et juste au moment où tu lèves la tête croyant l’heure de voler arrivée” (That’s hell for you: the crate of heaven that lands on your head, just when you look up thinking the time has come for you to fly) (31; Brahic, Reveries, 15). Cixous later makes the parallel between the disappointment of the Bicycle and the loss of Algeria when she reiterates, “Tout ce que nous perdons est paradisiaque dit mon frère. C’est infernal dis-je. L’enfer du paradis” (Everything we lose is paradisiac says my brother. It’s hellish I say. The hell of paradise) (121; Brahic, Reveries, 69). Algeria is the hell of paradise because, like the Bicycle, even if possessed, it would never be what Cixous imagined. The disillusionment of the Bicycle changes everything for the two children: Cixous and her brother are torn apart because he uses the women’s bicycle to discover Algeria and she rejects it. As a result of disappointed faith, Cixous never discovers Algeria while she is there. The supposed vehicle of possession only renders Algeria more elusive and frustrating. The next object of dispossession in Les Rêveries appears in the form of the dog Fips, a gift from Cixous’s dying father (74). As they had wanted the Bicycle, the children had also dreamed of having a younger sibling: 126

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Il y avait eu : Le Chien. 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. There had been: the Dog. 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 the cage. (51; Brahic, Reveries, 29) Using Christian rhetoric to liken the dog to the Messiah, Cixous describes another disappointment from a desired object as the deity is debased.20 The children once again tried to practice their supreme authority, but in spite of the many methods they used to contain him, the Dog resisted control: D’un bond puissant il franchit les piques du haut portail et ensuite sans fléchir ni ralentir survole tout le quartier jusqu’au terminus du trolley. Nous qui voulions l’incarcérer dans notre tendresse. 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, il ne se laisse pas couler [. . .]. Ce pincement de perte de l’objet sur mesure que nous n’avons jamais eu. With a great bound he cleared the spikes of the high gate and then without turning or slowing down soars over the whole neighborhood right to the end of the trolleybus line. We who wanted to incarcerate him in our tenderness. 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, he won’t stay put [. . .]. This twinge of loss of the made-to- order object we never had. (74; Brahic, Reveries, 43) The last sentence of this quotation clearly articulates the paradox of Cixous’s objects of possession and her relationship to Algeria. She 127

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simultaneously attempts to possess and is unable to control the Dog. The Dog represents an absence of power over the Other. Cixous’s discourse of love for the Dog (“Nous qui voulions l’incarcérer dans notre tendresse” [We who wanted to incarcerate him in our tenderness] [74; Brahic, Reveries, 43]) is evocative of the European colonial power faultily justified through a discourse of fraternal love. Authority cannot be maintained without degrading the subject. In this case, the Dog resists Cixous’s force. After the death of Cixous’s father, another level of absence in the story, the children increase their efforts to control the Dog, imprisoning him in a sad and degraded form of possession. Cixous develops a guilt complex because the children cruelly master the dog that so loved his freedom. The Dog suffered the children’s confinement without the same privileges: Pour Le Chien le malheur est à double tour. Il subit notre sort et le sien par-dessus le marché. Nous sommes enfermés et là- dessus nous l’enfermons. Il subit le double malheur d’être nous et de ne pas être nous. 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. For the Dog the calamity is double. He suffers our fate and his own to boot. We are shut in, whereupon we shut him in. He suffers the double misfortune of being us and of not being us. 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. (76–77; Brahic, Reveries, 44) Toward the end of her allegory, Cixous recounts that one day the Dog believed she was about to attack him and violently bit her, leaving her scarred by his act of resistance. After having been bitten, Cixous expresses her desire to flee: “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” (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 128

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turn start chaining) (77; Brahic, Reveries, 44). Cixous makes a double commentary: the Dog desired to break the chains that kept him in his place just as the oppressed in Algeria sought to break from the colonial power. Rather than liberating the Dog, however, Cixous and her family’s servant, Aïcha, punish him to a point of near death. The powerless Dog inevitably dies evoking great guilt for Cixous. Cixous describes her relationship to the Dog as Judas to Christ, once again using a foreign religious discourse around the symbol of supposed possession. The Dog is divine: “Voilà Le Chien mon frère nié, le plus misérable des dieux et le plus divin de tous les misérables qui s’écriaient ou hurlaient jappaient dans l’amphithéâtre algérien balayé de vents bleus violents” (There is the Dog my brother denied, the most wretched of the gods and most divine among the wretched who shrieked and howled yapped in the Algerian amphitheater swept by violent blue winds) (73; Brahic, Reveries, 42). At his first and last appearances in the text, the Dog is positioned in the Judeo-Christian tradition, yet the Dog, like Cixous, questions his identity: “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” (Am I Jewish, the Dog wondered [. . .]. But what does Jewish mean wondered the Dog, and Arab, and dog, friend, brother, enemy, Papa, liberty nothing exists save injustice and brutality) (77; Brahic, Reveries, 44). After having betrayed the Dog, Cixous resurrects him as Job, the righteous man of the Hebrew and Christian scripture who lost his health, fortune, and family: “Job était Le Chien, je ne l’ai compris que trop tard comme on comprenait Job, trop tard et à côté. Les fléaux lui sont envoyés, dieu était bien caché, le père qui était mère est mort, et maintenant les pestes et les ulcères” (Job was the Dog, only I understood that too late the way one understood Job, too late and in part. He is plagued, god was well hidden, the father who was mother is dead, and now the pestilences and sores) (81; Brahic, Reveries, 46).21 By recounting the Dog within a Judeo-Christian religious practice, and by intertwining real and religious accounts, Cixous’s memory becomes a parable of the wrongful and impossible attempt to oppress another. In the end, the Dog becomes Cixous’s master: 129

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J’ai son âme sous le crâne, j’ai ses dents et sa rage peintes sur mes pieds et mes mains, j’ai Le Chien, tout Le Chien, depuis les origines jusqu’aux suites, gravé dans la membrane de ma mémoire. J’ai le Chien pour Maître et abandon, pour guide pour être vital être mortel et pour être trahi. Mon âme Le Chien. Ma transfigure sauvage. I have his soul in my skull, I have his teeth and his rage painted on my feet and hands, I have the Dog, the Whole Dog, from the origins to what came next, engraved in the membrane of my memory. I have the Dog as Master and abandon as guide as vital being as mortal being and as betrayed being. My soul the Dog. My wild transfigure. (73; Brahic, Reveries, 42) As much as she tried to control the Dog, Cixous could not possess him any more than she could possess Algeria. Objects of possession become the possessors. The next major symbol of absence in Les Rêveries is the servant, Aïcha.22 Like the Bicycle and the Dog, Aïcha represents desired possession and inability to control. Cixous continually refers to her relationship to Aïcha as one of love and affection and as a means of knowing or approaching Algeria: “Je me serrais contre le corps d’Aïcha et elle me laissait en riant serrer son pays pendant un mince instant sans suite autre que les centaines de portes du Clos-Salembier qui par-delà le grillage du jardin tournaient vers nous leurs paupières baissées” (I snuggled up to Aïcha’s body and laughing she let me hug her country for a fraction of a second and that was all, except for the hundreds of doors of the Clos- Salembier which, from beyond the garden grill, slid lowered eyes in our direction) (14; Brahic, Reveries, 6). While many Pied-Noir authors lovingly evoke servants in the context of family in order to show the proximity of Algerians to the Français d’Algérie, Cixous demonstrates a radically different relationship.23 Cixous’s story of Aïcha illustrates the unsuccessful possession of Algeria through its people. Cixous carefully maintains that as much as she believed Aïcha to be part of the family, reality demonstrated otherwise. For example, Aïcha

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never invites Cixous’s family into her home. Cixous expresses this paradoxical intimacy and separation: Surtout en la personne d’Aïcha, car c’est la seule Algérie que j’aie jamais pu toucher frotter retoucher tâter palper arquer mon dos à son mollet fourrer ma bouche entre ses seins ramper sur ses pentes épicées. Je me niche contre Aïcha depuis ses genoux je regarde ses dents être la blancheur dans le rouge de sa bouche. J’étais sur elle, dis-je. Mais je n’ai jamais été chez elle. From Aïcha especially, for that is the only Algeria that I was ever able to touch rub against touch again handle stroke arch my back against her calf clamp my mouth between her breasts crawl around on her spicy slopes. I snuggle up to Aïcha from her knees I look at her teeth being the whiteness in the red of her mouth. I was right up against her, I say. But I have never been to her house. (90; Brahic, Reveries, 51– 52) Cixous, in a (catlike) way, makes love to Aïcha without gaining the intimacy desired. In the same way, Cixous’s family lived in Algeria without being able to penetrate the country. Although in her childhood Cixous felt in possession of Aïcha, she knew little about her or her home: “Et je ne suis jamais allée. Dans sa maison. Y avait-il une maison ? On ne le sait pas” (And I never went. To her house. Was there a house? We don’t know) (92; Brahic, Reveries, 53). Cixous later discovers that in spite of delivering Aïcha’s baby, even her mother had not been in Aïcha’s home. Clearly, the French, Jewish, and Algerian communities were divided, even though different passions and common elements of their daily lives and history joined the groups together. Aïcha and Algeria resist Cixous. In an even more dramatic demonstration of Aïcha’s independence, Cixous discovers that her name was not actually Aïcha. When the now adult children try to recollect their nanny, Cixous expresses her feelings of guilt for having not known Aïcha’s real name: J’aimais le toucher du nom Aïcha, rien de sentimental, tout sensuel et infantile. Et finalement elle ne s’appelait pas Aïcha et de même

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qu’aucun d’entre nous ne sait d’où était venu ce nom qui n’était pas le sien, de même aucun d’entre nous ne sait maintenant qui de nous l’a appris de qui et comment. A présent tous nous savons qu’Aïcha s’appelait Messaouda en vérité. Mais trop tard. I loved the feel of the name Aïcha, nothing sentimental, all sensuous and infantile. And in the end her name wasn’t Aïcha and just as none of us knows where this name that wasn’t her name came from, so none of us knows which of us learned it from whom and how. Now we all know that Aïcha was really called Messaouda. But too late. (93; Brahic, Reveries, 53) Too late, Cixous realized that the Dog was Job and Aïcha was Messaouda. This reflection on the misnamed Aïcha causes Cixous to question the realities of each Algerian woman they had known. Although changing names to suit the colonial sense of efficiency (Barta became Fatma, for whatever reason) may have been a possessive act, Cixous realizes it also represented the rupture between the realities of the two groups. Algerian women maintained independence as they kept their names as well as their private lives to themselves.24 Thus, even though Cixous tried to possess Aïcha with her gaze (“Je l’ai regardée. [. . .] Je la regarde enlever le voile qui la berce [. . .]” [I have watched her. (. . .) I watch her lower the veil that cradles her (. . .)] [90; Brahic, Reveries, 52]), she can never possess the independent person beneath. Aïcha reappears throughout Les Rêveries as a reminder of Cixous’s failed intimacy with Algeria. Cixous did not really know Aïcha or her dog, Fips; she never really possessed the pages of inspired text; and Algeria was never really hers. Each symbolic object reminds not of Algeria but of its absence and independence both now and in the past. THE PLEASURE OF FORGETTING Like Cardinal and other exiles who rely on repetition, Cixous repeats because even though she never possessed Algeria, its absence is painful. She refers to this painful situation between possession and dispossession as her “maladie algérie” (Algerian disorder):

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Cela ressemble tellement à cette sorte de maladie algérie que je faisais en Algérie ou qu’elle me faisait, cette sensation d’être possédée par une sensation de dépossession et la réponse que je produisais, ce combat pour conquérir l’introuvable qui peut me conduire à l’autodestruction, tout comme autrefois, ici, dans mon bureau, après si longtemps. En proie à l’indeuillable mon âme se remord jusqu’aux sangs. But quite the contrary. It is incredibly like that sort of Algerian disorder I used to get in Algeria or that Algeria got to me, that feeling of being possessed by a feeling of dispossession and the response I produced to this, that struggle to vanquish the unfindable that can lead to selfdestruction, just like old times, here, in my study, after so many years. Prey to the unmournable my soul gnaws at me till it draws blood. (16–17, Cixous’s emphasis; Brahic, Reveries, 7) In spite of her dispossession, Cixous, does not want to replace what is absent (“l’idée de les reconstituer était inacceptable, je voulais celles-là” [the idea of reconstituting them was unacceptable, I wanted those ones] [12; Brahic, Reveries, 4]). Instead of re-creating memory, she reflects on symbols of her past that continually refer back to absence, resistance, and independence. She recognizes that she wants only what she originally had and that she never really had anything.25 Similar to Marie Cardinal’s use of repetition for mastery, Cixous’s repetition allows her to evade recollection. Both authors knowingly create fiction through their writing and continually return to Algeria as a creative source. Cixous calls this her “force malgérienne” (malgerian force), a strength that wounds her (Rêveries, 111; Brahic, Reveries, 64), and Cardinal her “enfant” (child) and “source de ma force” (source of my strength) (La Mule, 45). Neither author can recover from Algeria, and they remain with the “Algerian disorder.” Cardinal continually tries to possess her past, and Cixous is “possessed by a feeling of dispossession” (Brahic, Reveries, 7). Whether the Algerian past is an object of intense joy or pain, through repetition both authors are relieved of memory and are able to translate their pain and mourning into creativity.

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5 (Re)turning to Algeria NO STALIGA , IMAGINAT ION, AND WRITING

In Nina Bouraoui’s autobiographic novel Garçon manqué (Tomboy), published in 2000, the author begins her exploration of dual identity with descriptions of Algeria. She and her bi-cultured friend Amine embrace the openness of the sea: “Je longe les vagues chargées d’écume, des explosions blanches. Je cours avec la mer qui monte et descend sous les ruines romaines. Je cours dans la lumière d’hiver encore chaude. Je tombe sur le sable. J’entends la mer qui arrive” (I follow the waves capped with foam, white explosions. I run with the sea as it rises and falls under the Roman ruins. I run in the still warm winter light. I fall on the sand. I hear the sea coming) (9). In spite of opening her novel with a harmonic depiction of the Algerian landscape, Bouraoui, who was born in 1967 to a French mother and Algerian father, experiences serious tensions within Algeria, going so far as to call her Algerian existence a lie (13). She sets Amine’s French mother apart, describing her in this opening scene sitting in the car: “Elle reste à l’abri des vagues, du vent, de la nostalgie des ruines romaines” (She stays sheltered from the waves, the wind, the nostalgia of the Roman ruins) (9). While the mother is impervious to the Algerian landscape, the narrator maintains a nostalgic attachment to it in spite of her layers of non-belonging. Bouraoui, who was born in France and spent much of her youth in 137

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Algeria, expresses a conflicted sense of foreignness in what is supposed to feel like a homeland. Although the light and sun of Algiers give life to Algeria as a sort of third character in the novel, the narrator remains at odds where she is supposed to feel connection. Algeria represents a series of exclusions and unnatural behaviors that leave the young woman ill at ease with her fatherland. As she recollects her early adolescence during a pivotal moment between France and Algeria, the adult Bouraoui returns to Algeria in her writing, describing her desire to belong and her feeling of being ostracized because of her dual gender and national identities. Garçon manqué provides a counterpoint to the writing of the former French citizens of Algeria who long to return to the homeland in unambiguous terms. While Bouraoui has joint heritage in France and Algeria, she demonstrates discontinuity with both countries and an ever-present and uncomfortable sense of non-belonging in both contexts. For most Pieds-Noirs, whether they return in reality, writing, or memory, their descriptions of Algeria are full of satisfying reunions.1 A fundamental part in the healing of trauma, return is one of the primary themes in PiedNoir literature. Colonial identity was always established in relationship to a symbolic elsewhere—first France and then, after exile, Algeria. The shift in point of origin from France to Algeria inspires the Pieds-Noirs to persistently pursue the lost homeland through communal gatherings, shared memories, and especially writing. While physical return does not always satisfy a need for Algeria,2 the Pieds-Noirs fix Algeria as a paradisiacal point of reference and the location of unattainable desire through continually revisiting the past. Longing for the eternally absent lost paradise is commonly referred to as Nostalgérie. As a literary tactic, it encloses its reader and writer in the re-created country. Although most Pieds-Noirs desire to continue this paradisiacal discourse as a part of their contribution to collective memory, they become engaged in re- creating a version of Algeria at which they can never arrive and become trapped in the cycle of return. As such, they pursue nostalgia in a to-and-fro movement across the Mediterranean and back in time. Imagined returns, both oral and written, reinforce Pied-Noir identity, all while reaffirming underlying instability. 138

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Often for the Pieds-Noirs, return begins as a compulsive act to verbally repeat their lost past or to remember certain parts of their history. It is then sustained through writing and sometimes culminates in a physical return to Algeria before the cycle begins again. Laplanche and Pontalis explain in Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, “D’une façon générale, le refoulé cherche à ‘faire retour’ dans le présent, sous formes de rêves, de symptômes, de mise en acte” (Generally speaking, the repressed seeks to “go back” in the present, in the form of dreams, symptoms, or enactment) (86– 87). This need to bring the past into the present may take various forms, but until what is repressed in the past is revealed, the return will continue. Return is an important aspect of identity for displaced peoples as it allows a sense of stability, continuity, and permanence.3 Joëlle Hureau in La Mémoire des Pieds-Noirs explains it is not that the Pieds-Noirs are uninterested in the present of Algeria, but rather that because their identity comes from Algeria’s past, it is the past to which they want to return. Herein lies the complication of Pied-Noir identity: the shift in time and location is often unrecognized. While the Pieds-Noirs understand Algeria is far removed, nostalgics are unable to imagine Algeria’s present independent of the colonizer. They cling to the belief that return is possible, if not in reality, at least through memory. Bouraoui, who only knew Algeria postindependence, avoids this trap by demonstrating memory as important for founding the future rather than clinging to the past: “Regarde la baie d’Alger pour ta mémoire. N’oublie rien. Tu fais ici ton histoire. Ton présent fonde ton avenir” (Take in the Bay of Algiers for your memory. Don’t forget anything. You’re making your story here. Your present is the foundation for your future) (Garçon manqué, 72). Where she is able to look forward, most Pied-Noir authors cannot stop looking back. BEGINNINGS OF NOSTALGIA Turning to France was not easy for the Pieds-Noirs, who were an unwelcome symbol of failed colonial rule, confusion, and violence in an unspeakable war. Many French citizens died trying to save French Algeria, and the bitterness of these losses was fresh as almost a million 139

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Français d’Algérie arrived in the motherland. As outlined in chapter 1, the conditions of the so-called return to France were difficult on many levels, but the first obstacle the Pieds-Noirs confronted was the voyage to France. In January 1962 the French government began asking transportation companies to limit the number of voyages in an attempt to stop a massive arrival of repatriated citizens. On May 16, 1962, however, the navigation companies went against French authorities and increased their services for the departure from Algeria. The newspaper Est républicain on May 18, 1962, expressed the desperation to leave many experienced: “Partir, quitter cette terre d’angoisse et de violence est devenu l’obsession de dizaines de milliers de Français d’Algérie” (Departing, leaving this land of anguish and violence became the obsession of tens of thousands of Français d’Algérie) (quoted in Jordi, 1962, 19). The crowded piers and long lines at the Port of Algiers stand out as a prominent piece of PiedNoir collective memory. Many of the Pieds-Noirs have a last memory of Algeria surrounded by burning cars and destroyed property. One woman referred to as Madiana D. remembers, “J’ai assisté à des scènes atroces; c’est que les gens qui pouvaient embarquer et qui étaient arrivés avec leur voiture y mettaient feu avant de s’embarquer. Ceux qui ne pouvaient pas emporter tous leurs bagages les détruisaient sur place. Enfin, c’était l’exode” (I witnessed atrocious sights; people who could go on board and who arrived with their car would set it on fire before boarding. Well, it was the exodus) (quoted in Jordi, 1962, 21). The difficult political and physical conditions of the departure compounded the trauma of exile. Once the former Français d’Algérie arrived in France, they were harshly criticized and poorly integrated. Jean-Jacques Jordi, who writes at length about Pied-Noir repatriation, explains in De l’exode à l’exil that while the few Harkis who were able to move to France were given governmental aid in repatriation, the Pieds-Noirs were not helped by any public organization because of their status as French citizens (10).4 Adding to the difficulties, many of the Pieds-Noirs had no family in France and found themselves empty-handed in a land to which they were attached only by a symbolic value transmitted to them in Algeria. Furthermore, the French were not prepared to welcome this influx of people: 140

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Cet accueil reste toutefois sans aucun suivi. Rien n’est prêt pour ceux qui ont absolument besoin d’un hébergement provisoire. Ceux qui ont un point de chute en France s’y rendent comme ils peuvent, les autres restent à Marseille dans ce qu’ils ressentent comme une indifférence totale. This welcome, however, was never followed up. Nothing was ready for those who were in dire need of temporary housing. Those who had a landing spot in France got there as best they could; others remained in Marseille in what felt like complete disregard. (Jordi, 1962, 28) Beyond the difficult conditions, the very concept of repatriation was problematic for the Pieds-Noirs because it implied they belonged to a nation that never originally existed for many of them and one that clearly did not want them when they arrived. Their misconceived status complicated integration, causing the Pieds-Noirs to cling to memories of Algeria. Pied-Noir identity was founded on these immediate difficulties, as Jordi explains: Ce n’est pas 1830 qui crée le Pied-Noir mais 1962. Le rapatriement massif, le déracinement et l’éparpillement sur le sol français, les incertitudes dues à l’exil contribuent au renforcement d’une conscience commune au- delà d’une unité religieuse, ethnique ou linguistique qui lui fait défaut. It is not 1830 that created the Pieds-Noirs but 1962. The large-scale repatriation, the uprooting, the scattering on French soil, the uncertainties due to exile contributed to the reinforcement of a collective conscience beyond the religious, ethnic, or linguistic unity that they were missing.5 (De l’exode, 14) Arriving in France, the Pieds-Noirs were confronted with a very different reality in the motherland than what had long guided their imagination. While France had been the source of their purpose in Algeria, when the Pieds-Noirs came to France they found no gratitude for having fulfilled 141

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the mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) nor for having served their country during World Wars I and II. Instead, they were met with resentment. The Pieds-Noirs often responded in kind and turned their contempt toward France for this double abandonment. The schism between the Français d’Algérie and their two countries brought on psychological anguish, and many suffered subsequent neuroses.6 According to Jordi, “le déracinement, l’exode, l’exil ont provoqué des lésions morales et affectives dont on n’a toujours évalué l’ampleur et qu’on croyait résoudre avec des priorités au logement et à l’emploi” (the uprooting, the exodus, the exile provoked moral and affective lesions whose magnitude still has not been evaluated and that were thought to be resolved with a priority of housing and work) (“Pieds-Noirs,” 187). Suffering was so prominent in the community that it became a part of collective identity. Pied-Noir novelist Albert Bensoussan suggests in “La Tomate dans la tête” (The tomato in the head) that suffering created a stronger communal identity: “Parce qu’ils ont souffert dans leur chair, parce qu’ils ont l’expérience du perdu et de l’abandonné, ils ont eu à cœur de prouver qu’ils valaient mieux que ce que sous- entendaient les reniements, les injures et les lâchetés” (Because they suffered in their flesh, because they had experienced loss and abandonment, they had it in their hearts to prove that they were better than the implied denials, insults, and cowardice) (75). Those who survived their loss of position and slow integration into French society had to negotiate new ways of creating stability in France. The often hostile and violent context of both the departure and arrival is a major contributor to the nostalgic view of Algeria. Bensoussan demonstrates trauma’s effect: “Quand les larmes ont cessé de couler et que les valises vidées, ont rejoint les placards sombres, que reste-t-il ? Un souvenir littéraire ému qui coule cependant comme le sang d’une blessure encore fraîche et qui a toute l’irradiation du soleil de là-bas” (When the tears stopped falling and the suitcases were emptied and put away into dark closets, what remains? A literary emotional memory that flows like blood from a still-fresh wound that has all the sun’s irradiation from back there) (“La Tomate,” 72). The writing that followed the departure exudes 142

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the corporeal effect of Algeria. Immediately imbued with the pain, the literature of the Pieds-Noirs also projected what was most loved of the past. In “Les Livres comme patrie,” Janine de la Hogue explains these contradictions and distortions to be the result of the anger and violence the writers feel at the time of writing the past. Instead of acknowledging the problems within their community, however, the Pieds-Noirs’ attention almost immediately shifted to the homesickness they felt for Algeria. As Marie Cardinal expressed in Autrement dit, Aujourd’hui je rêve souvent de retourner à Alger et j’imagine que ça se passera comme ça se passait quand j’étais petite. J’ai beau me dire que plus rien n’est pareil, qu’il n’y a plus ma maison dans la ville, cela ne fait pas changer le défilé des images que projette mon esprit. Today, I often dream of returning to Algiers, and I imagine that it will be as it was when I was little. It is no use to tell myself that nothing is the same, that my house is no longer in the village—that doesn’t change the procession of images that my soul projects. (14; Cooper, In Other Words, 9–10). The author longs for Algeria as it existed in her memory. Although nearly all Pieds-Noirs experienced longing for Algeria, they often struggled against and vehemently denied their nostalgia. Nostalgia was negatively stigmatized in the latter part of the twentieth century for being “reactionary, regressive, ridiculous,” according to David Lowenthal (“Nostalgia,” 20). Thus, many Pieds-Noirs struggle against it all while being compelled to return. For example, in Hier est proche d’aujourd’hui (1979), Jeanne Cheula insists that her memories are all authentic: Un monde de souffrance nous sépare maintenant de ce passé que je n’ai pas embelli à force d’en parler. Tout naturellement, mes souvenirs personnels ont aidé ma mémoire, et j’ai retrouvé les moindres faits quotidiens gravés en moi avec une force que je ne soupçonnais même pas. Exilée dans mon propre pays, je suis devenue, comme tant d’autres, plus algérienne que si j’étais restée là-bas. Tout ce passé, tout ce que j’ai aimé, s’est détaché pour commencer de vivre en moi une 143

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nouvelle existence. Huit années de terreur, de folies et de sang n’ont pas terni ce passé lumineux ; hier est proche d’aujourd’hui. [. . .] C’était tout ce soleil perdu, ces splendeurs renouvelées chaque jour [. . .]. A world of suffering separates us now from this past that I have not embellished from speaking about it. Quite naturally, my personal souvenirs helped my memory, and I found the slightest facts of daily life engraved in me with a force that I hadn’t even suspected. Exiled in my own country, I became, like so many others, more Algerian than if I had remained there. All of this past, all that I loved, broke away and began to lead a new life within me. Eight years of terror, madness, and blood have not tarnished this luminous past; yesterday is close to today. [. . .] It was all this lost sun, these splendors renewed each day [. . .]. (97, my emphasis) Cheula articulates major contradictions that show the tension between her sense of obligation to history and her personal interpretation of the past. For example, while she starts the passage saying that her repetitions have not exaggerated Algeria, as she continues she recognizes that her past separated from her and began an existence of its own. This is precisely the Nostalgéric process. The past has become so sacred that it no longer exists as memory but instead begins to develop and be sustained in its own right, influenced by its transmission and its sharing with other similar histories until one nostalgic version of the past is represented. All the while claiming that it is not nostalgia that lives in her, Cheula proceeds to nostalgically re- create the odors and tastes of Algeria that plague her in the present. Just like Cheula, Cardinal refuses her longing, as she explains: J’étais consciente d’être là. Je n’écris pas cela cinquante ans plus tard, la tête pleine de nostalgie, je n’ai aucune nostalgie. Je savais que le bonheur entrait en moi, j’étais attentive à son poids et à sa qualité. C’est en fonction de ce bonheur-là que, pour le restant de mes jours, j’ai estimé ensuite le bonheur. J’étais heureuse à en pleurer et amoureuse du monde, de ce monde, je n’en désirais pas d’autre. 144

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I was aware of being there. I’m not writing this fifty years later with my head full of nostalgia. I have no nostalgia. I knew that happiness was entering into me; I was attentive to its weight and its quality. It is in relation to that happiness that, for the rest of my life, I would gauge happiness. I was happy to tears and in love with the world, with this world. I didn’t want another one. (Les Pieds-Noirs, 19) Cardinal insists she is not nostalgic, all while demonstrating her longing. These contradictions are commonplace when the authors attempt the nearly impossible task of recounting accurately today what happened so many decades ago. Notwithstanding the negative associations with nostalgia, it is a normal part of dealing with the trauma of separation, and it offers a stable reference system for those who feel fragmented.7 Lowenthal explains that as early as the seventeenth century, nostalgia was considered as a physical rather than mental condition. Up to the Second World War, it was still treated as a standard malady and even considered possibly fatal (Lowenthal, Past, 10–11). In psychological studies, nostalgia is understood to create a sense of security in the present and is seen as the result of the inability to criticize a painful past, such as one based on violence and exile. Although nostalgia manifests itself as exaggerations of the past, literary critic Linda Hutcheon, in “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” cites nostalgia as dependent on the present: “Nostalgia, in fact, may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia’s power— for both conservatives and radicals alike. This is rarely the past as actually experienced, of course; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and desire. In this sense, however, nostalgia is less about the past than about the present” (Hutcheon’s emphasis). Like Hutcheon, Lowenthal, in “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t,” demonstrates nostalgia to be dependent on the present situation of its producer: “A perpetual staple of nostalgic yearning is the search for a simple and stable past as a refuge from the turbulent and chaotic present” (21). 145

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In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym explains there are two major types of nostalgia: restorative and reflective. Whereas reflective nostalgia “cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes spaces” (49), authors such as Cardinal are best characterized by restorative nostalgia, which “ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time” (49). Restorative nostalgia focuses on “rebuild[ing] the lost home and patch[ing] up the memory gaps” (41). Cardinal’s La Mule de corbillard, examined in chapter 3, presents an excellent example of the attempt to restore a past time in the present search for stability. The exile reproduces the lost homeland in painstaking detail to experience a reattachment to what is missing, all while denying what might be forgotten. The sole focus is to remember. Boym goes further, though, to distinguish nostalgia from melancholia, stating, “Nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory” (Future of Nostalgia, xvi). Not only is the re-created homeland a personal memory, but it must participate in the religious and communal memories of Algeria to be fully functional for the Pieds-Noirs. Even with a community, nostalgia only temporarily restores the Pied-Noir and the re- creation must be constantly evoked. Boym underscores the inherent tension in nostalgia: “Nostalgia tantalizes us with its fundamental ambivalence; it is about the repetition of the unrepeatable, materialization of the immaterial” (xvii). Instabilities peek through the writing as much as the Pied-Noir writer attempts to erase or suppress what lies outside the holy memory of Algeria. The trauma of departure and the violence left behind being particularly intense, the re- creation of Algeria was almost immediately nostalgic. In Lettre au president Bouteflika sur le retour des Pieds-Noirs en Algérie, Raphaël Draï recounts his experience with nostalgia as beginning as soon as the Français d’Algérie began integrating in France: Et, sans crier gare, nous rejoignait l’absence taraudante du pays perdu. Nous l’incrustions dans nos mémoires, avec les maisons où nous étions nés, sans cesse revisitées mentalement, les écoles où nous avions 146

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commencé à lire et à écrire, les rues où nous nous promenions, les ombrages où nous protégions nos premiers rendez-vous. And without warning, the striking absence of the lost country came back to us. We incrusted it in our memories, with the houses where we were born, eternally revisited in our minds, the schools where we had started to read and write, the streets where we would walk, the shadowy places that harbored our first dates. (67) For those who suffered the same separation, a sense of fraternity developed. Slowly, the negative aspects were lifted out until through the process of repetition a unified nostalgia began to immerge. Nostalgia, then, a desire for unity after trauma(s), is most easily expressed through forming communities and in sharing memories with others. According to Cameroonian activist and author Calixthe Beyala, in suffering the individual does not exist.8 For nostalgic PiedsNoirs today, suffering has meant the necessity of reaffirmation through communal gatherings and also the apparent inability to recognize that return to their Algeria is an impossible endeavor. Because of this difficulty, the Pieds-Noirs today engage in numerous activities that allow them to re- create the past, as evidenced in annual memorial gatherings. In his preface to Les Pieds-Noirs, Roblès furthers the importance of community as he makes a distinction between the nostalgia for the Français d’Algérie who chose to live in France and that for those who moved to North America. He claims that the nostalgia of French PiedsNoirs has nothing to do with that of expatriate Pieds-Noirs without communal contacts: Ces quelques souvenirs, je les rapporte à dessein pour que ne soient point oubliés dans ce livre ceux qui, au loin, vivent l’exil le plus amer sans les possibilités de communication, d’entraide morale dont bénéficient leurs compatriotes sur cette rive. Au vrai, c’est la communauté que forment ces derniers que l’on veut évoquer et définir dans cet ouvrage, en tête d’une collection consacrée à toutes les minorités qui font la France comme, aussi bien, la corse, la juive, la protestante. 147

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I relate these few memories so that those who live by far the most bitter exile without the opportunity to communicate, without the moral support that their compatriots benefit from on this side of the Mediterranean, will not be forgotten in this book. In truth it is the latter community that I want to discuss and define in this book, at the head of a collection dedicated to all the minorities that make up France, including Corsicans, Jews, Protestants. (12) Without a community with whom to share the past, nostalgia can become crippling. For this reason Internet communities that allow a portable and international network have become important for the Pieds-Noirs. Even the most alienated Pieds-Noirs now have a place to share and sustain their identity. In nostalgia’s quest for creating unity and in its need for conformity, certain aspects of the past are softened. Although some authors manage to remain critical of their Algerian experience in spite of their proximity to the history, the majority tend to gloss over pain or to propose their own experience as that of all Pieds-Noirs. Michel-Chich explains, Réduits à la nostalgie qui embellit les souvenirs et gomme les aspects négatifs d’une réalité, qui pourtant n’était certainement pas toute rose, pour n’en sélectionner que les images agréables, ils peuvent en être les victimes trop consentantes : délectation du pincement au cœur lorsque l’on repense aux moments heureux d’un passé révolu. Reduced to nostalgia that embellishes memories and erases negative aspects from a reality that was certainly not all rosy, to only choose nice images, they may be too willing victims: pleasure from a sad twinge when they think about the happy moments of the past. (Déracinés, 97) In spite of distortions that arise from this nostalgia, legitimate emotions and memories remain. Lowenthal proposes that all pasts are distorted: “Every account of the past is both more and less than that past— less because no account can incorporate an entire past, however exhaustive the records; more because narrators of past events have the advantage of knowing subsequent outcomes” (Past, xxii). Lowenthal argues then 148

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that nostalgia’s value is its ability to “envisage a time when folk did not feel fragmented [. . .], a past that was unified and comprehensible, unlike the incoherent divided present. [. . .] What we are nostalgic for is not the past as it was or even as we wish it were; but for the condition of having been, with a concomitant integration and completeness lacking in any present” (29). It is the completion and finality of the past that comforts the Pieds-Noirs in an uncertain present. Returning to the past, for them, is the ability to look back with relief.9 Place and community play a large role in alleviating suffering: “Attachment to familiar places may buffer social upheaval, attachment to familiar faces may be necessary for enduring association. Nostalgia reaffirms identities bruised by recent turmoil” (13). The desire for peace with the past drives the Pieds-Noirs to return to it. Cardinal says of her physical return to Algeria, “Ainsi, dès la première heure, j’ai été libérée du passé. Il était là partout, il aurait fallu que je sois aveugle pour ne pas le voir, mais il ne me pesait pas” (And like that, from the first moment, I was freed from the past. It was everywhere there. I would have had to have been blind not to see it, but it didn’t weigh on me) (Au pays, 192– 93). Comforting as such reunions can be, once this feeling is achieved, it again slips away. The memory of Algeria cannot be sustained in the present without constant effort. The Pied-Noir must return to retrieve it again from the depths. Because of the unachievable nature of their goal, it becomes clear that it is not Algeria that the Pieds-Noirs seek; rather, they strive toward and labor under the burden of their nostalgia.10 IMAGINED RETURNS From June 22 to 23, 2002, hundreds of Pieds-Noirs gathered in Nîmes, France, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of their exodus, just as they do every year for Ascension.11 The official letter of invitation from the Association des Français d’Afrique du Nord et d’Outremer to the “40 ans l’exode” conference cites the necessity of this event: La mission qui vient de nous être confiée, s’inscrit dans le droit fil de notre devoir de mémoire, puisqu’elle porte principalement sur l’œuvre 149

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coloniale de la France et de son rayonnement à travers le monde, par le travail, la sueur et le labeur de nos ancêtres. Certes, nous ne prétendons pas refaire l’histoire, mais nous souhaitons Nous Pieds Noirs, descendants d’une civilisation de pionniers, faire connaître à nos concitoyens ce que la France a pu apporter dans toutes les parties du monde où son empire s’étendait. Il ne s’agit pas pour nous, non plus, d’engager une polémique envers certains historiens qui à travers les différents drames que nous avons subis, ont encombré les vitrines ou les écrans grands et petits, avec leur vérité . . . Il serait vain de croire, que l’oubli peut laisser refermer une plaie, que certains se complaisent à vouloir ouvrir à l’occasion de telle ou telle manifestation. Nous sommes et voulons le rester apolitiques, mais doit-on pour cela, se laisser conduire à l’autel du sacrifice sans réagir faisant ainsi outrage à la mémoire de nos parents ou grands-parents ?? Une telle comédie est indigne de notre âge. Beaucoup de nos jeunes “enfants” croiraient qu’à plus de soixante ans nous adopterions l’attitude de vivre en étranger. A cause de notre comportement ils se laisseraient égarer eux aussi, et Nous, pour un misérable moment de reste de vie, nous attirerions honte et déshonneur. C’est pourquoi, aujourd’hui, c’est à dire dès maintenant, il nous faut nous montrer dignes de notre passé et de celui de nos Anciens. The mission that has just been entrusted to us falls directly in line with our duty to remember since it is principally linked to France’s colonial works and its influence throughout the world through the work, sweat, and labor of our ancestors. While we do not claim to rewrite history, we Pieds-Noirs, the descendants of a pioneering civilization, we wish to make known to our compatriots what France was able to bring to all the parts of the world reached by its empire. For us, it is not about starting a debate with certain historians who, through the different tragedies that we have endured, have filled up the display cases or the big and small screens with their truth . . . 150

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It would be futile to believe that forgetting could let the wound close up, that certain people take pleasure in wanting to open up for each and every gathering. We are and we want to remain apolitical, but why should we let ourselves be led to the sacrificial altar without reacting, thus insulting the memory of our parents or grandparents?? Such histrionics are unworthy of our age. Many of our young “children” would think that at more than sixty years of age we would adopt an attitude of living like foreigners. Because of our behavior, they would let themselves be led astray as well, and We, for what miserable time there remains to live, we will draw shame and dishonor. This is why today, starting right now, we must show ourselves worthy of our past and that of our Elders. (Association’s emphasis) This letter is reminiscent of discourse from the height of colonialism that attempted to glorify the colonial structure. The author demonstrates resistance against the present and seeks to perpetuate the history of the Français d’Algérie as it was portrayed in the time preceding the colonial exhibition in 1930. His invitation demonstrates a desire for stability and unity as he calls for his compatriots to join him in the colonial mission of making France proud of its colonial offspring. Just as the letter beckons, the “40 ans l’exode” conference in Nîmes represented a proud display of the colonial accomplishments in Algeria primarily undertaken by the Pieds-Noirs. Providing a return trip to a lost time and place through communal sharing of memories, the conference evoked Algeria by regions and cities practically reconstructed through showcases of each location. The Hôtel Atria Garden Room was sectioned off with boards covered with images from each location represented (Oran, Alger, Bône, etc.). Class photos were arranged in binders for the PiedsNoirs of various communities to identify their classmates. The effort to reconstruct their homeland just as it stood in their memories (through various points of time) prevailed as the overlying mode of the conference. The Pieds-Noirs at this particular conference earnestly expressed their anxiety that no one understands them and that no one will continue their country and history once they have passed away. Jean-Pierre Bartolini 151

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from the Amicale des Bônois and director and editor of the Internet journal La Seybouse said to me that they were extraterrestrials “en voie de disparition” (becoming extinct).12 This two-day conference was filled with returns created through food, music, photos, films, demonstrations, speeches, and reunions. Its main objective was, as cited in the letter, a communal reinforcement through renewing memory. In an effort to reestablish communities, participants continually asked each other if they had known such and such person from such and such town.13 Not only were there memorial services with flowers lain at the city’s war monument, but through dialogue and photos, many of those present found their memories renewed as if they had once again made a trip back to the past and across the Mediterranean. Through a shared narrative and reinforcing dialogues, with each shared memory influencing others, Algeria was reconstructed and the intended return was accomplished, even if the return was brief and artificial. This conference, which is reproduced annually along with other similar events across France, was another part of the effort to preserve the past. For a variety of the reasons explored previously, Pieds-Noirs often return to their pasts through the sharing of memories in interviews and conferences, but also through the many Pied-Noir organizations throughout France and abroad (e.g., Association Nationale des Français d’Afrique du Nord d’Outremer et de leurs Amis, Amicale des Pieds-Noirs Bônois, Pieds-Noirs d’aujourd’hui, Le Cercle Algérieniste, Jeune Pied-Noir, Entre2rives, Pieds-Noirs et Harkis, and Salon du Savoir-Faire Pieds-Noirs). Other Pieds-Noirs have found a return to their roots through extensive genealogical research, and increasingly, web-based communities like Facebook are the most convenient way to transmit their memories. All of these mechanisms serve the same purpose of sharing nostalgic memories to re- create a stable sense of community in a fragmented postcolonial present. WRITTEN RETURNS: NOSTALGÉRIE From the outpouring of imagined returns displayed at conferences and other Pied-Noir gatherings, writing has arisen as a popular mechanism 152

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for diffusing the return for the community. Lucienne Martini in Racines de papier explains that exile naturally leads to return and to the writing of that return: “Toute situation d’exil, nous le savons, est propice à la création. L’individu, privé de ses racines et de ses modes de vie habituels, développe une tendance naturelle au retour sur soi et à l’expression écrite, confidence, réflexion, analyse, prise de recul forcée” (As we know, every kind of exile is favorable to creation. The individual, deprived of his roots and his habitual way of life, develops a natural tendency to return on himself and to written expression, confidentiality, reflection, analysis, and taking a forced step back) (219). While the orality of memory is a significant part of the return for the Pieds-Noirs, setting down their memories on paper provides a more widely diffusible and lasting version of their past. Dans le cas des Pieds-Noirs, l’exil est double : éloignement concret et définitif mais aussi exil intérieur. Et le besoin personnel de s’exprimer se trouve lié, pour eux, au désir d’expliquer. Témoins et acteurs des événements, mais aussi de la vie quotidienne, ils veulent présenter une histoire vécue de l’intérieur, qui est, aussi, une histoire des humbles. Chantres de la mémoire collective, ils ne tentent pas d’écrire une histoire intellectuelle. In the case of the Pieds-Noirs, their exile is double: concrete and definitive estrangement but also an internal [interior] exile. And the personal need to express themselves is, for them, tied to the desire to explain. Witnesses and actors in the events, but also in the daily life, they want to present a history lived on the inside that is, just as much, a story of common people. Cantors [champions] of communal memory, they are not trying to write an intellectual history. (Martini, Racines, 219) Because the Pieds-Noirs are both exiled from their homeland and exiled from their prior identity, they feel the need to unite personalized nostalgic histories rather than to pursue intellectual ones. Thus, the majority of these written returns are autobiographies that participate in collective memory and reattach the authors to a lost community and homeland. 153

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Marie Cardinal’s autobiographical, fictional, and documentary writings all exemplify the written return to Algeria. The author’s continual propulsion toward her homeland is emblematic of the Pied-Noir condition on the whole. While she fixes Algeria as a reference point, her desire to arrive there is never attenuated. In her chapter “Marie Cardinal’s Roots and the Flowering of Neocolonialism,” Winifred Woodhull suggests that Cardinal’s writing fixes Algeria outside real contexts and transforms the meaning of Algeria: “‘Algeria’ also appears as a non-manipulable force operating in a space that is absolutely divorced from democratic struggles and the institutions they seek to change. Simultaneously subjective and cosmic, this space is always coded feminine and always situated outside of power, outside of history” (Transfigurations, 155). Such a fictive state, positioned uniquely in writing, can never be attained. Cardinal’s works attest that return is the perpetual state of the Pied-Noir. Throughout her thirty-six-year literary career, Cardinal never successfully stabilized the two destinations, France and Algeria. In an unstable present marked by movement and turbulence, Algeria begins to appear as a static backdrop in Pied-Noir writing. According to Martini, Même si l’Algérie n’est pas le sujet constant de leurs œuvres, elle demeure une sorte de “matrice littéraire” qui les a profondément marqués dans leur lIbido [sic], leur sensibilité et les personnages qu’ils créent vivent et sentent avec un inconscient commun : une sorte d’aveuglement qui ressemble à de l’innocence [. . .] en même temps qu’une sorte de fascination pour la mort. Even if Algeria is not the constant subject of their works, it remains a type of “literary matrix” that has profoundly marked them in their libido, their sensitivity, and the characters that they create live and feel with a common subconscious: a kind of blindness that resembles innocence [. . .] at the same time as a type of fascination with death. (Racines, 224) 154

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Algeria is blended into the present to add comfort and security. In Cardinal’s first novel, Écoutez la mer, the return to Algeria begins as the narrator remembers her homeland. These memories appear as flashes amid the confused present of Paris, Hamburg, and Montreal: according to the narrator, Maria, “Paris se mélange à Hambourg dans les phrases qui me parviennent” (Paris is mixed with Hamburg in the sentences that come to me) (104). Maria continues this confusion throughout the work: “Elle cherche partout une partie d’elle-même, un frère, une sœur, une herbe d’Algérie, un bleu comme celui des yeux de Karl, une odeur d’Afrique” (She looks everywhere for a part of herself—a brother, a sister, a bit of Algeria, a blue like the one in Karl’s eyes, a scent of Africa) (123). Mixing Algeria with traces of the present is the prime occupation of the narrator and the collective group of Pieds-Noirs as they attempt to create a more solid foundation and a greater sense of permanence. The nostalgic elaboration of Algeria both in imagination and in writing is commonly called Nostalgérie.14 Now regarded as a cross-genre style of writing, Nostalgérie is a term said to have originated in a 1938 poem by Marcello Fabri titled “Nostalgérie” in his collection Les Chers Esclavages.15 Fabri wrote the poem during a long stay in Europe: —Alger, je t’ai rêvée ainsi qu’une amoureuse toi parfumée, et soleilleuse, et pimentée ; tu es plus belle encor d’être si loin, la pluie d’ici, la pluie habille comme une magie le gris du ciel, avec- tout-l’or-de- ton-soleil —Algiers, I dreamed you just as a lover you scented, and sunny, and spicy; you are even more beautiful from being so distant, the rain here, the rain dresses like magic the grey sky, with-all-the-gold-of-your-sun (104) Typical of Nostalgéric writing, this poem evokes the tactile aspects of Algeria (the sun, the odors, the tastes) while exaggerating the beauty and exalting it over any other place. In her collection of testimonials, 155

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Michel-Chich discovers that “la mer est certainement l’élément clé du décor perdu. Un élément fondamental dont les pieds-noirs n’imaginaient pas devoir se passer un jour” (The sea is certainly the key element of the lost decor. A fundamental element that the Pieds-Noirs never imagined having to live without one day) (Déracinés, 100). The landscape of the past becomes heightened in the nostalgic imagination. Even for Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy, who perform a counter-return in Tourner les mots, Nostalgérie is founded on basic elements and locations of the past. Derrida is not exempt from its pull:16 Il faut d’abord revenir à des paysages aimés, et ce sont surtout des espaces désertiques, océaniques ou marins, des terres sèches, des côtes et des plages, des lieux connus ou des lieux rêvés (l’Algérie de ce que l’Acteur appelle sa “nostalgérie”—El Biar, Alger et la Kabylie—, la maison d’enfance, les lycées, les maisons de culte [. . .]). First you must return to the beloved landscapes, and these are especially desert, ocean or marine spaces, dry lands, coasts and beaches, places known or dreamed of (the Algeria that the Actor calls his “nostalgérie”— El-Biar, Algiers, and Kabylia—the childhood home, the high schools, the places of worship [. . .]). (23, Derrida and Fathy’s emphasis) The Nostalgéric style is seductive as it tries to enclose both the author and reader in the re- created Algerian world, relying heavily on physical references to the heat, wind, and sea, but also to common landmarks, such as the Rue de la Poste, le Coq Hardi, le Milk Bar, and la Rue Michelet in Algiers. What begins as a personal voyage to the past becomes evocative for the community of former Algerian citizens. Most Pied-Noir authors re-create Algeria by intertwining personal stories with a unified backdrop of Algeria so that the story becomes as much about the lost country as about the self. Although a look at lesserpopulated regions of Algeria, in Algérie, ma mémoire (1999), Anne Lanta creates Algeria’s precise textures with her words. At the beginning, Lanta focuses on the water and light:

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C’est une somptueuse journée de juillet, et la mer est si lisse et la lumière d’une telle beauté que je crois y voir mon rêve : un vrai rêve, pas celui qu’on vit éveillé mais qui illumine une nuit de sa splendeur inattendue, celle d’une grande mer blanche de soleil et qu’enjambent de grands ponts irisés. Mais les ponts se sont évanouis et plus rien ne nous relie au port maintenant disparu. It’s a gorgeous day in July, and the sea is so smooth and the light so beautiful that I believe I see my dream there: a true dream, not the one that you see when you’re awake but one that illuminates a night with its unexpected splendor, the one with a great sea whitened by the sun and that is straddled by great iridescent bridges. But the bridges have faded, and there is no longer anything that ties us to the now absent port. (13) This echoes Cardinal’s re-creation of Algeria as a distant mirage at the outset of Au pays: “Bruissement sec des feuilles d’eucalyptus agitées par le vent du désert. Tintamarre des cigales. La sieste. La chaleur fait bouger le paysage. Rien n’est stable, tout est éternel. Le ciel est blanc” (Dry rustling eucalyptus leaves stirred by the desert wind. Din of cicadas. A nap. The heat moves the landscape. Nothing is stable, everything is eternal. The sky is white) (6). Both authors recognize the mixing of dreaming with reality. Although the two are conscious of the fact that the present reality of Algeria is different, neither arrives at this present in her writing. It is only through physical return that reality will intercede with memory. Much like nostalgia, Nostalgérie is enmeshed in the Pieds-Noirs’ instability after leaving Algeria. Although it is a term broadly used, according to Hureau it is also specifically literary: “Pour désigner ce territoire imaginaire et instable, on emploie parfois la contraction ‘Nostalgérie.’ [. . .] La Nostalgérie est surtout une terre de papier” (To indicate this imaginary and instable territory, the contraction “Nostalgérie” is sometimes used. [. . .] Nostalgérie is especially a paper land) (Mémoire, 86). Writing is essential to Nostalgérie because it allows the author to fix a certain image in time and space, and this re-created land based on printed word is one that will not change or disappear with the passing of time: “La terre des pieds-noirs 157

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est désormais inaltérable. Ce que la mémoire a sélectionné a été soigneusement engrangé et fixe les limites de l’espace reconstruit mentalement” (The Pieds-Noirs’ country is henceforth unalterable. What memory selected was then carefully stored, and it sets the limits of a mentally reconstructed space) (86). Although Hureau supports the idea that Algeria has become fixed through writing, she believes that the Pied-Noir stories will remain only as long as the concern to transmit their history is present: “La Nostalgérie ne se réduit pas aux textes et images figés sur le papier. Elle est aussi une terre conviviale. Les associations et amicales foisonnent” (Nostalgérie cannot be reduced to texts and images fixed on paper. It is also a convivial land. Organizations and associations abound) (87). The nostalgic re-creation of Algeria in literature is also often picturesque: “La ‘nostalgérie’, cette nostalgie d’une Algérie que chacun porte en soi, une Algérie qui n’a pas changé, pas vieilli, un pays plutôt embelli par le souvenir, a fait naître l’envie de revoir des images et encouragé l’édition de livres illustrés” (“Nostalgérie,” this nostalgia for an Algeria that each carries within himself, an Algeria that has not changed, not aged, a country rather embellished by memory, has given birth to the desire to review the images, and it has inspired the publication of illustrated books) (Hogue, “Livres,” 121). Thus, with an aim to re- create what was once lived in Algeria, Nostalgérie does not limit itself to prose. It is heavily prevalent in photo-documentary-style books such as Cardinal’s Les Pieds-Noirs, and the Souvenirs de là-bas series by Elisabeth Fechner, with works such as Alger et l’Algérois (2002) and Constantine et les Constantinois (2002).17 Each city (Constantine, Oran, Algiers, etc.) is re- created in its colonial splendor in these photo- documentary books. History and postcolonial issues are never critically approached; rather, images stand as testimonies to the past colonial glory and represent the strengths of the past Algeria that have now been tarnished with time. PARADISE OR HELL LOST Hureau proposes that since Algeria’s physical removal, it has become a paradisiaque without which the Pied-Noir could not exist: “Ses imperfections, ses laideurs, ses nuisances n’ont plus cours. [. . .] Un brouillard de 158

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rêve enveloppe la terre natale d’une nappe imprécise, d’où surgissent, çà et là, des détails que leur banalité ou leur futilité rend saugrenus” (Its imperfections, ugliness, and pests are no longer relevant. [. . .] A dreamlike fog envelopes the birth country with a hazy sheet from which rises, here and there, details rendered absurd by their triviality or futility) (Mémoire, 81).18 Because of the time lapse and the distance between the Pieds-Noirs and their lost referent, Algeria is often translated into a paradise lost. This is evidenced in nostalgic autobiographies and idyllic re-creations by a wide range of Pieds-Noirs, such as Gabriel Conesa’s Bab-el-Oued: Notre paradis perdu, Jean-Pierre and Georgette Pascuito’s Terre natale, l’impossible oubli, Jules Roy’s Adieu ma mère, adieu mon coeur, and René Lenoir’s Mon Algérie tendre et violente. In Le Transfert d’une mémoire, Benjamin Stora notes that the war caused the embellishment of the past and that trauma impeded criticism: Après 1962, la mémoire de l’Algérie française va d’abord se transmettre, essentiellement, par les tenants d’un “pays perdu”. Dans la douleur de l’arrachement à leur terre natale, une majorité de piedsnoirs, en quittant massivement l’Algérie in 1962 (près d’un million entre 1962 et 1964), ont porté le souvenir d’une sorte d’ “Eldorado” ou d’Atlantide engloutie. After 1962 the memory of French Algeria was first primarily transmitted by the tenants of the “lost country.” From the pain of being wrenched from their native land, the majority of the Pieds-Noirs, leaving Algeria en masse in 1962 (nearly a million between 1962 and 1964), carried the memory of a sort of swallowed up “Eldorado” or Atlantis. (72) Because of the abrupt end to the perceived paradise, many prefer not to recall the trauma at the end of the colonial years, and often they do not write of their departure from Algeria. The numerous absences in their historical works have largely gone uncriticized, but their silences recall a part of their history that was less than a paradise. Although some historians, such as David Lowenthal, believe that there is no true form of history and that nostalgia is only a frame for looking at the past, Nostalgérie and 159

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the perception of Algeria as a paradise allow many myths about Algeria to be sustained.19 Some authors have begun uncovering the awful memories that coexisted with their paradise. Cardinal, for example, briefly addresses the harsh face of Algeria in Au pays de mes racines, Les Mots pour le dire, and Autrement dit. During her physical return to Algeria, she was no longer able to repress in writing the painful memories that came back to her, and she wrote of the hellish side of her lost paradise: “Le paradis. Oui mais un paradis que je vais perdre bientôt. Et aussi un paradis où j’ai connu l’horreur. Paradisenfer. Paradis à double face” (Paradise. Yes, but a paradise that I will soon lose. And also a paradise where I knew horror. Paradise-hell. Two-faced paradise) (Au pays, 176). Years later, in a heightened passage of Nostalgérie in Amour . . . Amours . . . , the narrator Lola evokes the best memories of landmarks of her past. One phrase slips into her dream state and disrupts the other exaggerated references: “Nos villes, nos bien-aimées, nos enfers, nos écrins, nos prisons, nos bals” (Our towns, our loved ones, our hells, our jewel cases, our prisons, our formal balls) (12).20 The narrator seems to want to push beyond the preserved memories into the erased bits to explore what is unholy about her Algerian past, yet she never manages to do so. She remains entrapped in a fiction of her past that prevents her from existing in the present. While Hureau affirms the nostalgic version of Algeria can no longer be modified and will never become independent (Mémoire, 81), neither can the Pied-Noir be liberated from the nostalgic version of Algeria. This past is a prison and a hell. This lost paradise as hell does not figure into the religious memory of Algeria, and therefore, it must be sequestered or cloistered in phrases of love and adoration for the country. Some authors hint at the negative aspects of their past, but they rarely dare to delve into real criticism of what they lived. Rather, most feel compelled to defend their experience or to simply portray their pasts in the most positive light possible. Even in the acclaimed work Les Oliviers de la justice, in which the author attempts to criticize his colonial father, Jean Pélégri continues to glorify his colonial past—including his own position of superiority—as he relives childhood memories. Cardinal does much the same. Finally able to criticize small 160

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aspects of her motherland and recognize the anguish Algeria represented to her in Au pays, she ends the text in religious conformity with a resolve of pure love for and fidelity toward her homeland (196). As Jean-Jacques Jordi points out, nostalgia writing and thus the subscription to the religious memory of Algeria yield a large degree of communal conformity: On a cru, dans les immédiates années d’après 1962, que l’idéalisation de la terre perdue allait être le ciment d’une identité à construire. [. . .] De fait, les pieds-noirs jouent une solidarité excessive et quasi exclusive qui se manifeste au quotidien par la recherche du médecin rapatrié, du boulanger rapatrié [. . .] avec lesquels on pourra parler de “là-bas” et évoquer un passé regretté qui ne saurait revivre, certes, mais qui n’appellerait pas en retour des condamnations ou opprobres. [. . .] Le souvenir est alors un frein à l’intégration et le deuil de l’Algérie inlassablement porté. It was believed, in the years immediately after 1962, that the idealization of the lost land was going to be the cement for constructing an identity. [. . .] In fact, the Pieds-Noirs perform an excessive and quasi-exclusive solidarity manifested daily through the search for the repatriated doctor, the repatriated baker [. . .] with whom they can talk about “back there” and evoke a regretted past that can never be again, of course, but that will also not call up condemnation or shame. The memory is then an obstacle to integration and the mourning for Algeria relentlessly borne. (“Pieds-Noirs,” 21) These strong communal bonds became a new obstacle to integrating into French society and to overcoming attachments to the past. The restrictions built into the Pied-Noir community combined with the difficulty of viewing the past in the postcolonial present make the reviewing of Algeria quite painful if not impossible. The hell is that return does not allow for a moving forward and integration into France, nor does it allow arrival at the paradisiacal vision of Algeria. The Pieds-Noirs will always be trapped between two destinations in a perpetual cycle of motion 161

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until Algeria’s independence is accepted. As long as the Pieds-Noirs push toward Algeria, it will always slip away. Their nostalgic re-creation always sends them back toward France. This eternal return is demonstrated in Camus’s Mythe de Sisyphe when this story is read as an allegory for Pied-Noir identity. Sisyphus, full of nostalgia for the pleasures of earth, was condemned to eternally toil under the burden of a rock, a symbol of what was lost. Yet each time Sisyphus arrived at the summit, he was sent back again to the depths to recommence his task (165). The perpetual nature of the punishment comes in the fact that the return is dual: Sisyphus must return to the lower world to regain the burden of his nostalgia. The author identifies Sisyphus’s freedom in the moment of recognition of impossibility and yet resignation to continue the cycle: C’est pendant ce retour, cette pause, que Sisyphe m’intéresse. [. . .] Je vois cet homme redescendre d’un pas lourd mais égal vers le tourment dont il ne connaîtra pas la fin. Cette heure qui est comme une respiration et qui revient aussi sûrement que son malheur, cette heure est celle de la conscience. A chacun de ces instants, où il quitte les sommets et s’enfonce peu à peu vers les tanières des dieux, il est supérieur à son destin. Il est plus fort que son rocher. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. [. . .] I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing space that returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock. (165; O’Brien, Myth, 97) As Sisyphus resigned himself to return to the depths in search of his rock, he found strength in those moments of liberation from his burden. For the Pieds-Noirs, the need to continually return to France is just as significant as the need to return to Algeria. The Pied-Noir cannot exist without a nostalgic longing for an unreachable destination. 162

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SYMBOLIC ELSEWHERE Before the invention of their name and before any written or physical returns were undertaken, the Pieds-Noirs created their identity in relationship to an elsewhere. No matter their ethnic or national origin, each Pied-Noir has an absent referent that drives them. This ailleurs (elsewhere), as Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy label it in Tourner les mots, embodies displacement and emphasizes the turning as much as return: “Ils reviennent sur les lieux mais ne veulent pas y arriver. Ni d’ailleurs y conduire. Les lieux doivent rester ailleurs, inaccessibles au retour, et surtout hors de la portée pour tous les discours qui, après coup, tenteraient de s’y mesurer” (They come back to the places but do not want to arrive there. Nor, moreover, do they want to lead there. The places must remain elsewhere, inaccessible to return, and especially out of reach of all speech that, in retrospect, would attempt to confront it) (13, Derrida and Fathy’s emphasis). The authors demonstrate the ailleurs is unreachable and moves throughout time, but it is very real to the exile as the location of desire. During the colonial years, the Français d’Algérie began looking back to a distant referent, an absent country, the one that commissioned their existence elsewhere. When the first European families settled in Algeria, France first loomed as a symbol of greatness and the reason for their existence. Colonial identity was constructed on nostalgia for France. As Patricia Lorcin points out in Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia, “In the colonial context, the possibility of loss— of power, of territory, of the upper hand—was an ever-present, if subliminal, anxiety. Nostalgia, therefore, was inherent to the settler psyche and colonial nostalgia was built into the settler system from the outset” (10). The Français d’Algérie were proud to serve the motherland, but as generations passed, the importance of France progressively faded. It loomed in the background not as a home but as an abstract notion. Although the Français d’Algérie expressed pride in serving the motherland, France was physically present only in small ways. For Marie Cardinal there were objects brought and leftover from France that served as daily reminders of this elsewhere: “Seul quelques objets, quelques 163

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meubles embrillantés par l’âge, moins sauvages que ceux de l’artisanat local, témoignaient d’un autre passé, d’un avant, et pouvaient jeter le doute sur l’ancienneté de la propriété familiale et privée de cette campagne” (Only a few objects, a few pieces of furniture that have become shiny with age, less crude than the local artisan work, testify to another past, a before, and could cast doubt on the age of the family and private property from this campaign) (Au pays, 13). Beyond the tangible aspects of France in the colony, the motherland held more symbolic value as the source of existence. France represented restrictions and controls that represented a hell to Cardinal during her early childhood (Autrement dit, 15; Cooper, In Other Words, 10). With sarcasm, Cardinal explains France’s role in everyday life in Algeria: Un lieu sacré lointain : la France, effacée mais vénérée, flottait en précieux filigranes d’or dans les tremblotements de la chaleur algérienne. [. . .] La métropole c’était très loin et il y a très longtemps. [. . .] La France créait la différence en nous haussant, puisque tout ce qui venait d’elle était “meilleur”. A sacred faraway place: France, faded but venerated, floated in precious golden filigrees in the trembling of the Algerian heat. [. . .] The Metropole was very far and long ago. [. . .] France created difference by elevating us, since everything that came from there was “better.” (Au pays, 13–14) Although for many Français d’Algérie and Algerians, World War II marked the first physical contact with the French, many of the upper- class colonial citizens were long accustomed to regular trips to France. These trips were often inspired by family obligations or an effort to maintain a good faith relationship with the Metropole. The voyages also contributed to maintaining identity in Algeria as the dominant class. Cardinal situates her family summers in France in this category: La France, je la connaissais. Ainsi que tous les Français fortunés d’Algérie nous y allions en été, du début de juillet jusqu’au 15 août. Nous rentrions pour les vendanges. Nous allions à la Rochelle dans 164

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ce qu’il restait de la famille de mon père et nous allions à Paris dans ce qu’il restait de la famille de ma mère. I knew France. Just like all the fortunate French of Algeria, we went there in summer, from the beginning of July until August 15. We came back for the grape harvest. We would go to La Rochelle to visit what remained of my father’s family, and we would go to Paris to visit what remained of my mother’s family. (Les Pieds-Noirs, 47) Returns legitimized power by renewing contacts with France, but the desire to return began to wane for the younger generation of Pieds-Noirs.21 While Marie Cardinal clearly portrays her mother’s pride in her French roots, Cardinal’s generation began to resist France. The motherland no longer held the same power, as Cardinal explains: “La France demeurait la mère, l’aïeule plutôt, mais elle n’était plus notre terre. Et puis, nous étions heureux chez nous, oui, heureux” (France remained the mother, the grandmother rather, but it was no longer our land. And then, we were happy at home. Yes, happy) (Les Pieds-Noirs, 47). For Cardinal, France was always associated with a certain strictness of manner, whereas Algeria was freedom and unconstraint. During dreaded visits to France, usually during the summer months, Cardinal remembers desiring a return home, her return to Algeria: Pendant tout le temps de mes séjours en France, je ne pensais qu’à une seule chose : le retour, l’instant où le bateau s’éloignerait de PortVendres ou de Marseille pour rentrer. [. . .] Aucune autorité n’aurait pu m’empêcher de me lever la première et de courir jusqu’à l’avant du paquebot, le plus près possible de ma terre qui venait lentement vers moi. The whole time during my stays in France, I thought about only one thing: return, the moment when the boat moved away from PortVendres or Marseille to return. [. . .] No authority could have stopped me from being the first to get up and run to the front of the liner, as close as possible to my land that slowly came toward me. (Les PiedsNoirs, 48) 165

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The distance from her country began to train her desire for return at a young age. During World War II Cardinal was relieved that these returns to France were impossible (Les Pieds-Noirs, 47). This new desire for Algeria, begotten of distance and demonstrated through the eager looking toward the homeland, rather than looking back to the motherland, symbolizes the beginning of the identity of the Pieds-Noirs independent from both Algeria and France. The first absence from Algeria led many Français d’Algérie, like Cardinal, to look back longingly toward Algeria as their new elsewhere. Cardinal sets most of Les Pieds-Noirs during the Second World War, a crucial historical period for the development of her people. Algeria’s importance soared at this time not only because the Français d’Algérie fought the war against the Germans after the French had conceded, but also because the colony remained France’s only zone libre (free zone) throughout the entire war. As Cardinal writes, Algeria was France during the war years, and yet the war cut off Algeria from the Metropole: La guerre a, à la fois, creusé un fossé entre la France et nous, et tissé des liens qui nous ont unis à elle de façon particulière, faisant de nous de “drôles de citoyens”. Une chimie qui, plus tard, nous empoisonnera, s’est alors effectuée à notre insu. Cette guerre-là nous a coupés de la Métropole. Il y a eu la zone occupée, la zone libre, et nous, nous étions encore plus libres, comme si nous n’étions plus des Français, tout en l’étant encore. Beaucoup de nos hommes étaient de l’autre côté, tués, prisonniers. The war both dug a trench between France and us and, at the same time, knitted ties that united us in a particular way, making us into “strange citizens.” A chemistry that would later poison us started to take effect without us even realizing it. This war cut us off from the Metropole. There was the occupied zone and the free zone, and we, we were even more free, as though we were no longer French, all while still being French. Many of our men were on the other side, killed, taken prisoner. (Les Pieds-Noirs, 47) 166

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This ambiguous position of being both cut off and free from France while being ever more committed to saving her lead to the initial schism. As Algeria began a more independent existence both politically and socially during the war, its people also began to see themselves as other than French. The Français d’Algérie progressively built their identity in opposition to, rather than as a derivation of, the Patos, or Metropolitan French. Cardinal goes so far as to distinguish her community by declaring war crimes that Algeria did not commit: En Algérie il n’y a pas eu d’étoile jaune. En Algérie il n’y a pas eu d’occupation. Jamais vu de SS en uniforme. Jamais vu le moindre bidasse allemand avec la croix de fer autour du cou. Jamais vu flotter le drapeau à croix gammée sur ma ville. Jamais vu les noms de mes rues écrits en caractères gothiques. En Algérie il n’y a pas eu de ligne de démarcation. In Algeria, there was no yellow star. In Algeria, there was no occupation. Never saw an SS in uniform. Never saw the least German squaddie with the iron cross on his neck.22 Never saw the swastika flag fly above my town. Never saw the names of my streets written in gothic letters. In Algeria there was no Demarcation line. (Les Pieds-Noirs, 57) The change in power and the unique colonial freedom during the war cemented the distance between the colony and its referent. Ainsi, le front s’est éloigné, Paris a été libéré et Alger a retrouvé son calme. Pendant près de deux ans nous avions été le nombril de l’Occident et c’était chez nous qu’avait battu le cœur de la France. Une certaine idée de la France est entrée dans certains esprits, une certaine idée du pouvoir, une certaine idée de notre terre qui n’avait été considérée, jusque-là, que comme une annexe. Thus the front withdrew, Paris was liberated, and Algiers regained its calm. For nearly two years we had been the belly button of the 167

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West, and it was on our land that France’s heart had beaten. A certain idea of France entered into certain minds, a certain idea of power, a certain idea of our land as an annex that had never been considered until then. (Les Pieds-Noirs, 72) Cardinal’s repetition of “une certaine idée” (a certain idea) emphasizes how France began to change in the Algerian imagination. France began to lose its symbolic value, and the Français d’Algérie began to view Algeria as the real center of their universe. Algeria’s desire for its own authority threatened to usurp France’s position, according to Cardinal: Pour la première fois dans notre Histoire, commencée en 1830, nous étions entrés dans l’illégalité vis-à-vis du pouvoir français de France, celui du maréchal Pétain [. . .]. A partir de 1943, parce que c’était sur notre sol que la France moderne s’était légitimement, sinon légalement, mise à exister, nous avons cru que nous étions vraiment des Français, que nous avions des droits sur la France, sur la conduite de sa politique, d’autant plus que nos hommes, une fois de plus, tombaient comme des mouches en Italie, en Corse, en Provence. Nous sommes devenus plus français que les Français, c’est là, je crois, que, sans le savoir, nous sommes devenus des Pieds-Noirs. For the first time in our History, begun in 1830, we had entered into an illegal situation in relation to French power in France, that of Marshal Pétain [. . .]. Starting in 1943, because it was on our soil that modern France legitimately, if not legally, began to exist, we believed that we were truly French, that we had rights over France, over its political direction, even more so because our men, once again, had fallen like flies in Italy, Corsica, Provence. We became more French than the French. It’s then, I believe, that without knowing it, we became Pieds-Noirs. (Les Pieds-Noirs, 72) Using nous (we) and notre (our) versus the Français (French) demonstrates Cardinal’s identity as other than French. At this point in history, the Français d’Algérie began to ask for more 168

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rights, privileges, and representation in France. Many also envisioned a free Algeria in which they could remain, independent from France. As discussed in chapter 1, some leftist philosophers, such as Albert Camus and Jacques Derrida, subscribed to this idea of independence.23 Although Derrida condemned French colonial politics in Algeria, he hoped that cohabitation would be possible (Derrida and Bennington, Jacques, 303), and he tried to stay in Algeria after 1962 but quickly understood this impossibility. Like him, many Pieds-Noirs who claimed to favor an Algérie libre (free Algeria) believed they would become Algerian citizens in the event of colonial freedom. In Jean-Jacques Viala’s work Pieds-Noirs en Algérie après l’indépendence, those who remained had believed in this sort of future, but they soon discovered that they too would have to leave.24 Having long been characterized by yearning for their country and the inability to accept their separation from their land, on Algerian independence the Pieds-Noirs found themselves figuratively trapped between two lands, looking eagerly toward the homeland and yet unable to arrive. Once the Pieds-Noirs were returned permanently to France between 1954 and 1963, their enduring need for an elsewhere turned completely toward Algeria.

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6 Real Returns C ONFRON TAT ION, BLINDNE SS, AND RUINS

In the 1995 novel Bab el-Oued, Algerian author Merzak Allouache includes the return of a blind Pied-Noir woman to her former apartment in Algiers. The elderly woman’s nephew, Paulo Gasen, describes the view: “Si tu voyais! Rien n’a changé” (If you could see! Nothing has changed) (118). Although visibly stunned by the nephew’s commentary, the Algerian women who now occupy the apartment remain welcoming toward the visitors. Paulo explains to them, “On fait une sorte de pèlerinage” (We’re making a sort of pilgrimage), as his aunt begins reminiscing tearfully about her past in the apartment (119). Paulo exaggerates the scene to his aunt: “Si tu voyais le spectacle, tata ! Tous les immeubles sont d’une blancheur immaculée. Ça donne un mélange avec le ciel bleu. Fantastique ! Si j’étais peintre, c’est ici que je viendrais pour l’inspiration” (If you could see the sight, auntie! All of the buildings are immaculately white. What a combination with the blue sky. It’s fantastic! If I were a painter, I would come here for inspiration) (121). The reality of the scene is but a ruin of Paulo’s description, and the resident Algerians express pity and disgust toward the Pieds-Noirs. The owners’ son, Saïd, wonders, “Pourquoi ils sont revenus ? Ils ont oublié quelque chose ?” (Why have they come back? Did they forget something?) (120). This duplicitous remark gets at the multiple levels of blindness in Pied-Noir return voyages. The scene of Pieds-Noirs’ revisiting familiar places has become 171

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increasingly commonplace since the end of the Algerian Civil War. In May 2007 five hundred Pieds-Noirs and their families, originally from Saïda, Algeria, met in Toulouse, France, to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of their exile. I was invited to their eighteenth biannual reunion to view the film Saïda . . . On revient! sur les pas de notre enfance (Saïda . . . We’re coming back! In the steps of our childhood), which chronicles the 2006 return voyage of eighty-some members of the community and their encounters with the places of their Algerian past. This amateur film, produced by two participants in the trip, Amicie and Bernard Allène, is the composite of multiple travelers’ cameras, and its goal is to provide a return to Algeria for the Pieds-Noirs from Saïda who could not physically make the journey. As such, the film participates in the collective memory of Algeria. During the film’s debut, I witnessed the Pieds-Noirs both on screen and in the audience calling out in recognition, “Ah! C’est le magasin de mon voisin. Là, c’est chez toi. Voilà la boulangerie” (Oh! That’s my neighbor’s store. There, that’s your house. There’s the bakery), even though what they were viewing was clearly now something else. Aiding their recognition of the places from their past through the editing process, a voiceover points out former landmarks in Saïda. For example, the film of a bare hillside is accompanied by the narrator’s announcement, “la montagne de la croix,” and then, through digital manipulation, a cross appears on the hilltop before quickly disappearing again. Likewise, the narrators confirm, “Ah, ici ça n’a pas changé” (Ah, it hasn’t changed here), as the travelers peer out the windows of the minibus that carries them into Saïda. This visual return to iconic locations partially confirmed what was remembered but also ruined the past for some of the Pieds-Noirs around me. What was projected was not what they had lived forty-five years prior, and what they recognized in the film was the past transposed on the filmed present. Similar to Allouache’s depiction, this film and its reception demonstrate the blindness that occurs for the Pieds-Noirs when they revisit and remember their homeland. Whereas the filmed images demonstrate the present state of Algeria—and this present is obvious to someone unfamiliar with Saïda—the Pieds-Noirs who once lived there see their 172

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memories transposed on the screen and become blind to anything else. In an odd moment of recognition of the gulf between memory and reality, however, my neighbor in the theater, who had made the voyage with the group, lamented the crumbling buildings in the film: “Mais non, ils ne doivent pas montrer ça. Ce n’était pas si mal que ça !” (No! They shouldn’t show that. It wasn’t that bad!). He repeated this while shaking his head throughout the film. What he saw on the screen did not correspond to what he had experienced during his return a few months prior, and what he remembered from his recent return was not the ruins he saw in the film. This man’s response is emblematic of the ruptures created in Pied-Noir returns—real, written, or filmed— especially when there is responsibility to communal memory. The apparent ruins and their partial erasure underscore the disconnection that occurs when memory is confronted with place. Albert Camus, Marie Cardinal, Jacques Derrida, and Hélène Cixous have all participated in written and real returns to Algeria throughout their literary careers, and each author reflects on the ruins of Algeria that haunt them in exile. Filmed returns, such as D’ailleurs, Derrida (1999), demonstrate the tenacity of the past and the fragmentation that occurs when the homeland is revisited. This chapter will explore the literal and visual representations of ruins in return narratives as the Pieds-Noirs confront iconic locations of the past. By analyzing the Pieds-Noirs’ inability to see present ruins, returns will be shown to hold potential for ruining the stability of the past. CONFRONTATIONS WITH RUINS Many Pieds-Noirs who make the pilgrimage return to Algeria inspired by a psychological compulsion to reconcile the past with their present. In Déracinés: Les pieds-noirs aujourd’hui, Danielle Michel-Chich identifies physical return as a cure for the invasive nostalgia that often hinders integration in France: Le voyage en Algérie constitue un moment marquant pour le piednoir qui le fait, une étape dans la reconstruction permanente de son 173

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équilibre, un répit dans la bousculade des souvenirs et, souvent, un apaisement de la nostalgie maladive dont il souffre depuis 1962. The journey to Algeria forms a memorable moment for the PiedNoir who makes it. It is a step in the permanent reconstruction of his balance, a respite from the crush of memories, and often, a relief from the morbid nostalgia from which he has suffered since 1962. (141) Physical return often becomes a project of collecting and reassembling the missing pieces in an archaeological type of endeavor. The travelers gather evidence of a society that is now extinct and attempt to integrate those pieces into their identity as exiles. Michel-Chich proposes that return will bring relief and fulfillment that does not come from writing alone, but the encounter will also be a shock.1 Algeria may deceive the Pied-Noir’s imagination: Ceux qui s’étaient peu préparés à cette confrontation reviennent déçus, parfois aigris. Il faut savoir ce que l’on cherche, lorsque l’on se replonge ainsi dans les lieux de son passé, et surtout savoir que l’on ne va pas y trouver les images que l’on a dans la tête. La colonie française qu’ils avaient connue et aimée est aujourd’hui un pays tout jeune qui traverse de graves difficultés. La réalité ne peut donc en aucun cas correspondre à l’image du pays d’antan. Those who were ill prepared for this confrontation come back disappointed, sometimes bitter. They have to know what they are looking for when they plunge back into the places of their past like that, and especially know that they are not going to find the images that they have in their heads. The French colony that they had known and loved is today a young country that is going through serious difficulties. Reality cannot in any way correspond to the image of their bygone country. (141) Dr. Maurice Porot finds that return can offer a different sort of revelation to the nostalgic Pied-Noir. Rather than experiencing a reconnection 174

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with the homeland, the traveler may discover the reality of an Algerian present absent of colonial influence: Il est absolument indispensable pour les Pieds-Noirs de retourner voir leur pays. Leur nostalgie ne disparaît pas après ce voyage, mais elle devient supportable: aller revoir les lieux où l’on a vécu et voir que l’on n’appartient plus à ce monde permet de tirer un trait et d’avoir, ensuite, une attitude positive. Les Pieds-Noirs qui vont en Algérie se rendent compte à quel point ils ont tout embelli et magnifié dans leurs souvenirs. Ils découvrent, d’autre part, de leurs yeux, que l’Algérie de cette fin de XXe siècle n’a rien à voir avec la colonie française, leur terre natale. Il est très important d’aller à la rencontre de son passé au lieu d’en faire une sorte de douloureux fantasme. It is absolutely necessary for the Pieds-Noirs to return to see their country. Their nostalgia does not disappear after this journey, but it becomes bearable: going to see the places where they lived and seeing that they no longer belong to this world allows them to close the parentheses and to have, then, a positive attitude. The Pieds-Noirs who go to Algeria realize just how much they had embellished and magnified everything in their memories. They discover, on the other hand, with their own eyes, that Algeria at the end of this twentieth century has nothing in common with the French colony, their birth country. It is very important to go meet their past instead of painfully fantasizing about it. (quoted in Martini, Racines, 7) Porot predicts that nostalgia will not obscure the vision of an independent Algeria. Instead, he positions the physical return as necessary for healing from past wounds. Likewise, in her analysis of return travelogues, Lucienne Martini expects confrontation with Algeria’s present: “Ces textes du retour peuvent se lire, tous, comme des retrouvailles avec une terre et une confrontation au regard de l’Arabe, moment de vérité, dont l’avant comme l’après ne sont pas faciles à vivre” (These return texts can all be read like reunions with a land and a confrontation with respect to the Arab. A moment of truth where the before just like the after is not easy 175

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to tolerate) (Racines, 57). The Pieds-Noirs must confront and understand the mental exaggeration of Algeria in order to accept its independence and to be freed from their painful attachments. Not all critics, however, believe that a return voyage is a healing prospect, particularly because not all Pieds-Noirs confront the past during the return visit. In La Mémoire des Pieds-Noirs, Joëlle Hureau recognizes that it is the curiosity of what has changed in Algeria that often provokes the trip,2 but she also explains that too many Pieds-Noirs return to the past like time-traveling tourists: Ce pèlerinage nostalgique prend l’aspect d’un séjour d’agrément individuel ou collectif. Ses participants vivent une existence de touristes et ne prennent pas pied dans la réalité quotidienne du pays nouveau. [. . .] Certes, le pied-noir sera tenté de comparer avec le passé ; le touriste ordinaire compare avec son propre pays : la différence est infime. La relation reste donc superficielle à l’occasion de tels voyages [. . .]. This nostalgic pilgrimage becomes a type of individual or collective pleasure trip. The participants live like tourists and do not set foot in the daily reality of the new country. [. . .] Of course, the Pied-Noir will be tempted to compare with the past. The regular tourist compares with his own country: the difference is minute. The connection thus remains superficial during such journeys [. . .]. (91) Whereas the tourist compares the new country to his or her own country, the Pieds-Noirs compare the present Algeria to their own past views, eventually seeing only what they once lived rather than assessing the changes in the country. This experience of renewal, as Hureau expresses, brings about a sense of reconciliation: Pour certains, au- delà des bouleversements constatés, la texture de l’air, l’assaut des senteurs, le galbe d’une colline font du premier retour en Algérie une véritable rédemption. Quelque chose leur manquait qu’ils ont retrouvé et ce n’est pas en vain qu’ils ont vécu vingt ans “entre parenthèses”. 176

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For some, beyond noted upheavals, the texture of the air, the assault on the senses, the curve of a hill make the first trip back to Algeria a real redemption. They found something they had been missing, and it wasn’t in vain that they lived twenty years “between parentheses.” (91) The reconnection, however, is always eventually undone because the Pieds-Noirs must return to their new homes, where longing may recommence: “Elle [la rédemption] n’est que momentanée, car tous repartent, avec espoir de retour, certes, mais ils prouvent ainsi que, même dans son simple appareil, l’Algérie ne leur suffit pas” (It [the redemption] is only momentary because everyone leaves again, of course with a hope of returning, but in this way they prove that even in its simplest state, Algeria is not enough for them) (91). Few, if any, Pieds-Noirs can plainly see that Algeria is not enough. CARDINAL’S BLINDNESS TO RUINS This experience of reunion, if only temporary, is predominant in the written travelogues of Pieds-Noirs and is precisely the experience that Marie Cardinal writes about. Not always openly aware of her blind spots, Cardinal attempts to reveal her Algeria to the French public in her 1980 work Au pays de mes racines, which documents her first return to Algeria, approximately twenty years after her departure. The book is an amalgam of recollection, re-creation, and new experience and is riddled with contradictions. During the journey Cardinal suffers anxiety at the thought of being foreign in her homeland, and she struggles to reconcile her present position as a foreigner in relationship to her residual image of past dominance. According to psychologist Barbara A. Cohen, “An archaic self-image/body-image is a residual from the past. As long as we cling to it, it does not allow for choice in the present moment. Every time some portion of the old image is remembered, feelings, thoughts, and behavior are influenced to some degree. Our past has been transported to the present. Our outward expressions are guided by this old image” (“Psychology,” 1). Thus, when Cardinal insists throughout her work that she is still that young child she left behind in Algeria, she becomes once 177

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again the colonial daughter. The return she undertakes is more than physical; it is also temporal. While it is clear that the return voyage changes her, Cardinal never arrives at a point of accepting her own independence from Algeria. She clings to her existence bicéphale, or her dual existence, based on the combination of what she considers to be her French-ness and Algerian-ness (Au pays, 17). Cardinal’s residual self-image keeps her blinded to the present. Hureau’s question of whether the Algerians can accept the Pieds-Noirs and the Pieds-Noirs Algeria is at the heart of Cardinal’s quest. A large part of Au pays de mes racines is centered on her fear of returning to Algeria, and she consequently writes more in preparation for her voyage than she does while she is actually in her homeland. This anxiety preexisted her travels as she articulated it in Autrement dit (1977): Je pense souvent à cet abordage de ma terre. J’ai un désir profond d’y être de nouveau, de la sentir, de la humer, de la toucher. Mais j’ai peur en même temps, si j’y retournais, d’être assaillie et ligotée par la méduse gluante du sentiment, de l’attendrissement, des souvenirs de famille. I often think of this return to my soil. I have a strong desire to be there again, to smell it, to take it in, to touch it. But at the same time I am afraid that if I return, I will be attacked and bound by the sticky jellyfish of sentiment, of tenderness, of family memories. (15; Cooper, In Other Words, 10) Her fear is not that Algeria will be different, but rather that it will overpower her and that she will no longer be able to control her position, which has been sustained in post-1962 France through the elaboration of her memories. As she says from the outset of Au pays de mes racines, she is returning to renew the Algerian part of her, to revisit the past, rather than to see the present.3 On her arrival Cardinal experiences several phases of recognition of the places of her past. Using landmarks, she is able to navigate through the past without discovering a different present, and she 178

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feels as though she had never left. The author sees the country at first glance, as even better than she had remembered: “Les falaises d’El-Biar sont plus hautes que dans mon souvenir. Je trouve tout plus beau mais je m’empêche de le penser” (The cliffs of El-Biar are higher than I remembered. I find everything is more beautiful, but I stop myself from thinking it) (Au pays, 110). Although she recognizes some danger in her feelings, the separation that Cardinal has struggled to annihilate for decades in her memory and writing evaporates as the past overcomes her: “Plage. Soleil. Méditerranée. Ce sable. Cette côte. Ces dunes. Je ne les ai jamais quittés. Il n’y a pas de retrouvailles. C’est un jour de soleil comme tous ceux que j’ai déjà vécus ici” (Beach. Sun. Mediterranean. This sand. This coast. These dunes. I never left them. There is no reunion. It’s a sunny day like all the days I already lived here) (150). Cardinal is immediately swept up in the joy of her memories and the familiarity she finds in Algiers: “Quelle joie de te revoir, quelle joie profonde ! Bonjour ma mère, ma sœur, mon amie. Tu es encore plus belle qu’avant” (What joy to see you again, what a profound joy! Hello, my mother, my sister, my friend. You are even more beautiful than before) (111). Where Algeria is better, it is also the same, and this allays Cardinal’s fears of a second loss: “Je dis que ça n’a pas changé et mes hôtes ont l’air de trouver que j’exagère, que ça s’est beaucoup modernisé, beaucoup construit. Oui, c’est vrai. Mais c’est pareil quand même” (I say that it hasn’t changed, and my hosts seem to think I’m exaggerating, that it has really modernized and built up. Yes, that’s true. But it’s still the same) (112). As Hureau suggests, Cardinal’s residual image of Algeria dominates and blinds her altogether to the present Algeria. Continuing this insistence on the fidelity of her memory, in another passage Cardinal writes, “Le centre d’Alger n’a absolument pas changé. Les souvenirs affluent à une vitesse vertigineuse. Ma mémoire s’ouvre comme une grenade mûre et pleine. Mais tout cela ne me bouleverse pas. Ce sont des souvenirs, et, curieusement, ils me mettent en gaieté” (Central Algiers is absolutely unchanged. Memories rush back at a breakneck speed. My memory opens up like a ripe full pomegranate. But none of this overwhelms me. 179

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These are memories, and strangely, they make me cheerful) (Au pays, 120). Cardinal allows her memory to overcome the present and shield her eyes from the changes or even the degradations, much like Paulo Gasen does for his blind aunt. Equally akin to Gasen’s fictionalizing of the present to forge the past, Cardinal repaints Algeria in terms that are muddied with memories: “Même pas question de souvenirs. Le présent se confond tellement avec le passé que je n’ai pas besoin de me rappeler” (Not even a question of memories. The present is so mixed with the past that I do not need to remember) (147). She has so completely returned that Cardinal no longer needs to open her eyes: “Laissez-moi là, je sais où je suis et vous verrez que je retrouverai tous les chemins. Je ne peux pas me perdre ici” (Leave me here; I know where I am, and you will see that I can find all the paths again. I cannot get lost here) (112). At the same time, and without her realizing it, Cardinal’s certainty that she can practically find her way blindfolded also reinforces her blindness: “Je voudrais tout voir et je ne vois rien” (I would like to see everything, and I see nothing) (111). She cannot see because the past has fully inscribed itself on the present. Once Cardinal begins to recognize her past, she then moves into a phase of denial and indifference. She acknowledges changes that have taken place, socially and architecturally, but she repeats that she is unmoved by these modifications. For example, she pretends not to care that Arabs are living in formerly French homes, even her own: J’avoue avoir pensé, quand je suis entrée dans ce quartier de villas: “Qui habitait par là avant ? Sûrement pas des Arabes.” Mais cette question est vite sortie de ma tête. Ça ne m’intéresse pas. De même, je n’éprouve absolument plus la curiosité de savoir qui habite chez moi. Cela m’est totalement égal. I admit having thought when I entered this neighborhood of villas, “Who lived there before? Surely not Arabs.” But this question quickly left my thoughts. That doesn’t interest me. Just like I no longer have even the slightest curiosity about who is living in my house. I’m completely indifferent. (13) 180

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When the opportunity to visit her father’s house is interrupted, she insists, “D’ailleurs je n’en ai pas envie. Pas envie d’entrer. Je n’ai aucune curiosité. Tout ça est fini depuis si longtemps ! Mon indifférence me surprend un peu” (Moreover, I don’t want to. No desire to enter. I’m not the least bit curious. All of that ended for me a long time ago. My indifference surprises me a little) (122). The repetition of her lack of curiosity is a tip-off to her deception. If it were indeed the case that Cardinal had no desire to return, evidently she would not have made this trip to Algeria. Instead, she is beginning to confront both the pain of the past and that of the present. To preempt these painful feelings, she refuses to revisit certain monuments of her past. Ultimately, Cardinal decides not to return to the family farm.4 This decision is surprising given that Cardinal has repeated in various works that for her the farm was emblematic of Algeria itself and that it was the farm that she loved more than any other place. As she writes in Les Mots pour le dire, Mes souvenirs heureux, mes vraies racines s’accrochent à la ferme, comme des guirlandes à un arbre de Noël. Pourquoi ? Est- ce parce que j’y passais mes vacances et que le temps m’y appartenait plus que durant les périodes scolaires ? Est-ce à cause de l’espace sans limites ? A la ferme c’était l’Algérie, en ville c’était la France. Je préférais l’Algérie. Happy memories[, my true roots,] were attached to the farm like garlands to a Christmas tree. Why? Was it because I spent my vacations there, where time was more my own than during the school year? Was it because the space was limitless? The farm was Algeria, the city was France. [I preferred Algeria.]5 (104– 5; Goodheart, Words to Say It, 83) In spite of or because of this deep affection, Cardinal cannot physically return. Rather than claiming indifference, this time she claims that she is saturated with her return, that her desires are attenuated, and that it is, furthermore, an unhealthy activity: Le passé m’ennuie, mon passé particulièrement. J’ai beaucoup de souvenirs, tant mieux. Mais je n’ai pas envie de me rouler dedans. 181

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[. . .] Uniquement pour rencontrer des lieux et les confronter à mes souvenirs. Ça me paraît malsain. Ça me paraît indécent. The past bores me, especially my past. I have a lot of memories, all the better. But I don’t want to roll around in them. [. . .] Only to meet places and confront memories. That seems unhealthy to me. That seems indecent to me. (Au pays, 162) Cardinal goes on to enumerate the many reasons that the trip to the farm is not feasible: it is too far, too expensive, and simply too complicated (162). Her lengthy list leaves little doubt that the return to the farm would simply be too painful. Almost immediately after this decision, Cardinal claims she no longer wants or needs to write down every experience of this voyage, and she nearly abandons her journal (164). As she begins to acknowledge changes in Algeria, Cardinal also becomes critical of them, as is common among Pieds-Noirs. Some have a deep reaction to Algeria’s present struggles with independence and feel that the Algerian Civil War is a manifestation of the country’s inability to exist without the colonial influence.6 On reading an article written by an Algerian woman who blames colonization for the oppression of Algerian women, Cardinal reacts: Quelle chance de pouvoir encore croire que l’oppresseur c’est l’étranger et qu’il suffit de le chasser pour que ça aille mieux du côté des femmes ! Ça m’a laissée rêveuse. Voilà bientôt dix-huit ans que les oppresseurs sont partis et cette brave dame va bientôt se rendre compte de ce que c’est que la condition féminine. What luck to be able to still believe that the oppressor is the foreigner and that you only have to chase him out so that everything will go better for women! That made me wonder. Now almost eighteen years after the oppressors left and this brave lady is soon going to realize that this is the feminine condition. (119) 182

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Cardinal also expresses dissatisfaction with the gender roles in Algeria, complaining that she cannot go to a café alone for fear that Algerian men will make sexual advances toward her:7 “Une femme seule ne peut pas vivre à Alger. Elle est traquée” (A single woman cannot live in Algiers. She’s stalked) (121). Here Cardinal furthers a stereotype of Arab men and Islam without analyzing the present social and cultural context. She does not consider that she may appear out of place in the new context of Algeria or that perhaps she is unwelcome. All the while acting as an objective ethnographer of her own civilization, she never questions the cultural structures in place that influence the very same Arab men nor does she recognize that she is objectifying the country during her visit. After having expressed exaggeration, at-home-ness, indifference, and criticism, the author begins catching glimpses of the present through the cracks of her memories. Cardinal begins to see that Algeria has gone on without her, and she begins to accept and partially embrace this independence: Mais il y a une chose d’eux que j’apprends à connaître, qui n’existait pas avant dans leur comportement, j’apprends à les voir évoluer chez eux, dans leur pays. C’est une nouveauté qui me passionne, j’apprends à regarder un peuple jouir d’être un peuple. Cela me bouleverse d’autant plus que je n’ai pas l’impression, personnellement, d’appartenir à un peuple et que souvent cela me manque. Il y a entre le peuple français et moi l’espace d’une terre qui n’est pas la France : l’Algérie. But there is one thing that I learn to recognize from them that wasn’t part of their behavior before. I learn to see them evolve at home, in their country. This is a new thing that enthralls me. I learn to watch a people enjoy being a people. It overwhelms me even more so because I do not have the personal impression of belonging to a people, and I often miss that. Between the French people and me, there is a gap the size of a land that is not France: Algeria. (132) Even as she begins to view Algeria as independent, Cardinal constantly inscribes herself into that experience, as evidenced in the excessive use of 183

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personal pronouns here. Algeria’s independence is another exiling force. She feels that her attachment to her past has kept her from integrating into France, and in this moment she comes closest to seeing the country objectively: “Pour la première fois je regarde un pays et un peuple en train de naître. Ça me fascine, mais aussi ça m’angoisse” (For the first time I watch a country and a people being born. It fascinates but also distresses me) (142). She cannot look beyond herself. As she begins to see Algeria as continuing without her, Cardinal experiences simultaneous peace and instability: Plus les jours passent, plus je me rends compte que mon voyage prend un tour inattendu. Je venais chercher ce qu’il y a en moi de plus archaïque, de plus ancien, les rythmes du commencement. J’ai trouvé tout ça intact, dès mon arrivée. Je nage dedans à longueur de journée, je m’y baigne avec délices, je sais que je n’ai pas trahi, que je ne me suis pas dévoyée. J’en ressens une profonde paix, une satisfaction, un bonheur. Mais je me trouve en même temps confrontée à ce qu’il y a en moi de plus récent, de plus nouveau, de plus instable. As more days pass, I further realize that my trip is taking an unexpected turn. I came to look for what was the most archaic, the most ancient in me: the rhythms of the beginning. I found all of that intact, as soon as I arrived. I swim in it all day long, I bathe in it with delight, I know that I have not betrayed or been misguided. I feel a deep peace, a satisfaction, a happiness. But I find myself at the same time confronted with what is the most recent, the newest, and the most instable in me. (145) Cardinal resumes her experience in Algeria by layering herself on it, only investigating her relationship to the country. She eclipses the present with her memory: Les deux premiers jours j’ai retrouvé le pays intact, aussi beau que dans mes plus beaux souvenirs, et même quelquefois plus beau. Et puis, très rapidement, cette base immuable et magnifique s’est transformée en présent. Un présent qui ressemble aux champs fleuris de 184

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mon enfance : je ne sais plus penser, il y a trop de choses nouvelles, trop de réflexions possibles. The first two days I found the country intact, as beautiful as in my fondest memories, and even more so sometimes. And then, very quickly, this unchanging and magnificent base transformed into the present. A present that resembles the flowering meadows of my childhood; I no longer know what to think. There are too many new things, too many possible thoughts. (160) In spite of recognitions of the present, Cardinal cannot address an Algeria independent of her. She cannot quite elaborate what those many new things and her reaction to them might be, as she cannot bear to see that she is no longer to this country what it remains to her. Although the changes seem unbearable, Cardinal discovers that her blindness is a painful handicap: C’était insupportable ce bâtiment, ces rues, ces immeubles inchangés, témoins de crimes irréparables. Personne ne me rendra jamais mon esprit tel qu’il était avant que ma mère m’assomme, au tournant de ces marches. Personne ne rendra la vie aux cadavres entassés du carrefour. It was unbearable this building, these streets, these unchanged highrises, witnesses to irreparable crimes. No one will ever return my soul to the way it was before my mother knocked me out at the turn in the stairs. No one will ever return the life to the piled up cadavers in the intersection. (191) Her blindness imprisons her to the past and tortures her there, yet Cardinal is inclined to continue returning in both her writing and her memory. In a reversal of roles, Paris begins to represent the safe haven for Cardinal’s memory. Once returned to the safety of her home in Paris, Cardinal addresses the most traumatic memories and finally makes her judgment of the present Algeria: “Une autre impression. Une certitude plutôt. Un poids, une masse, une rondeur, un équilibre en moi, un rire quand je pense à ce coin-là du monde : je l’aime” (Another impression. A certainty, rather. 185

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A weight, a mass, a roundness, an equilibrium in me, a laugh when I think of this part of the world. I love it) (196). She does not, however, offer Algeria’s final verdict on her. As long as Cardinal continues to reserve parts of the past as her territory without letting it make a judgment on her, the author will never be able to free herself from Algeria’s power. REINFORCING BLINDNESS AND RECOGNIZING RUINS Hureau points out that the collectivity of the return for the Pieds-Noirs further impedes them from seeing the present. Many Pieds-Noirs who are able to return often do so with obligations to the Pied-Noir community on the whole, and these obligations weigh on what is revisited and how it is seen: Dans ce domaine, les associations jouent le rôle important de relais. Elles publient à l’intention de ceux qui sont restés sur la rive nord, le compte rendu des voyages collectifs sur la rive sud. Leurs bulletins donnent des nouvelles des familles algériennes connues de toute l’ancienne communauté villageoise ou urbaine, des champions cyclistes ou footballeurs que tous ont acclamés, transmettent des souvenirs amicaux, des invitations pressantes. In this area, organizations play an important intermediary role. For those who stayed on the north shore, they publish accounts of collective voyages to the south shore. Their newsletters share updates from Algerian families known from every old community, be it a village or a city, of champion cyclists or soccer players whom everyone adored, and they transmit friendly memories and urgent invitations. (Hureau, Mémoire, 93) This is the kind of work completed by the Amicale de Saïda in 2006 as well as by others, such as Jean-Pierre and Georgette Pascuito in Terre natale, l’impossible oubli (1999). The Pascuitos guided a group of young Pieds-Noirs back to their birth country to revisit the monuments of their parents’ pasts. With itineraries filled with the obligation of return on behalf of others, it is nearly impossible for the Pieds-Noirs who make the voyage to truly investigate the independent Algeria they have yet to discover. 186

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Hureau questions what Pied-Noir identity will be in relation to its former Other now that the French are no longer in the superior position: “La question ne se résume pas en effet, à savoir si les Français d’Algérie acceptent l’Algérie actuelle. Elle consiste aussi à vérifier si la réciproque est vraie” (The question cannot be summed up by knowing if the Français d’Algérie accept Algeria today. It also means verifying if the opposite is true) (Mémoire, 94). Written from an independent Algerian perspective, Allouache’s Bab el-Oued enlightens the blind quest for what is forgotten or left behind by returning the blind gaze of the Pieds-Noirs who insist on nostalgic reminiscing. By speaking the unseen, the Algerian women undo the visitors’ vision: Hanifa et les femmes ont brusquement cessé leur badinage, elles observent en silence Paulo et sa tante. Hanifa est ébahie par les propos que tient l’homme. —Mais il capte ou quoi ? Il lui raconte que les immeubles sont blancs. Que tout est beau. C’est incroyable . . . —Il ne voit pas les ruines et la saleté ? ajoute Lynda. —Normal ! La vieille, elle ne voit pas. Il ne veut pas lui faire de peine, surenchérit Hannane. Zohra, la voisine du quatrième, compatissante, approuve Paulo. —Je lui donne raison ! Les femmes trouvent là l’occasion d’une nouvelle discussion. —Il voit ce qu’il veut voir . . . —En tout cas, il y a une chose de vrai dans ce qu’il raconte. Le ciel est vraiment bleu. Hanifa and the women briskly stopped their chatter. They silently watch Paulo and his aunt. Hanifa is flabbergasted by what the man is saying. “Does he get it or what? He’s telling her that the buildings are white. That everything is beautiful. It’s unbelievable . . .” “He doesn’t see the ruins and the grime?” asks Lynda. “Of course he does! The old woman can’t see. He doesn’t want to hurt her,” Hannane adds. 187

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Zohra, the fourth-floor neighbor, sympathetically supports Paulo. “I think he’s right!” The women then take the opportunity to change the subject. “He sees what he wants to see . . .” “Anyway, he’s got one thing right. The sky is really blue.” (122) Playfully deconstructing the Pied-Noir vision, the women lay bare the ruins of the colonial past. Allouache has returned the blind gaze of the Pieds-Noirs, revealing what is true about their vision of the present Algeria. He has effectively undone the power structure meant to be sustained by postcolonial blindness. Now it is the Algerian who sees, who has the power to invest in the reality of the present and to turn the colonial gaze on herself. Now that Algeria is liberated and clearly able to return the Pied-Noir to fiction, it is for the Pied-Noir to understand his or her own independence from Algeria in the face of blindness. Paulo’s fiction is a means of protecting his nostalgic aunt, but the Algerian women lucidly question whether he is not also blind. Lynda’s question of whether Paulo actually sees the ruins of his past cuts to the quick of Pied-Noir return narratives. Cardinal has shown that the PiedNoir often remains in between the past and the present, choosing to see what she longs to see and ignoring or erasing what does not fit into the story needed for collective memory to survive. Allouache’s positioning of this return in the context of a present and independent Algeria demonstrates Algeria’s resistance to those who attempt to return. Whereas the Algerians may resist this continued colonial blindness, the Pieds-Noirs struggle to integrate the place now before them with the one they once lived in. Some of the exiles remain horribly traumatized by their former experiences, and consequently, their willingness to be blinded is only strengthened. Dylan Trigg, in “The Place of Trauma: Memory, Hauntings, and the Temporality of Ruins” (2009), articulates the disconnection between place and body when revisiting the location of trauma as memory supersedes the present. For Trigg, a ruin is a “location of memory, in which trauma took place and continues to be inextricably bound with that location in both an affective and evidential manner” (88). 188

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Ruins, then, do not need to be a physical or built environment, but a place of recognition and recollection of the past. While many Pieds-Noirs, believing in the possibility of reunification, revisit Algeria in an attempt to restore themselves with the past, Trigg’s essay demonstrates that the return to a location of trauma disrupts the logic of time and simultaneously renders memory insufficient at recovering the past. Ruins recall absence, contesting the idea that memory can be contained by place: “In short, we are faced with a phenomenology of negative space, a location defined not only by what has ceased to exist, but also what cannot be accommodated spatially. [. . .] The significance of this tension is that the ruin mirrors the internal ‘terrain’ of the witness to trauma, and so achieves a testimonial dimension” (Trigg, “Place of Trauma,” 96). Many who return to Algeria are confronted with this tension but are unable to articulate it. Instead of seeing ruins, they insist on the recognition of the past and the faithfulness of their memory to the reality of their experience. Authors like Marie Cardinal do experience fragmentation when returning, and this eventually becomes evident in Au pays de mes racines, but most cannot fundamentally accept an Algeria that has gone on without them. Even so, Trigg writes, “the ruin’s capacity to haunt the viewer effectively undercuts a claim of temporal continuity and, instead, offers a counter-narrative in which testimony becomes guided by voids rather than points of presence” (89). He continues, “The encounter pushes the ruin beyond place, beyond time and toward an otherworldly landscape comprised from remains that ought to have been confined to the interior of the unconscious, but now stands before consciousness as a leftover in the world of appearances” (99, Trigg’s emphasis). Whether viewed or filmed, the ruin as a moment of personal recognition represents the inability to articulate the past and the traumatic event “trembles as an incommensurable void is given a voice between the viewer and the place” (99, Trigg’s emphasis).8 As what happened in the past “trembles” before them, the PiedsNoirs have an opportunity to reflect on the absence and voids that now appear. Especially through visually documented returns, subsequent opportunities to revisit the (ruined) location arise, now from a safe 189

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distance, and the return may be repeated ad infinitum for deeper inspection. Disturbing, however, is that in collective returns multiple pasts are gathered into one image that must be recognized as meaningful. Communal returns attempt to elicit a certain type of memory from iconic locations, but all of this meaning condensed into one image necessarily creates tensions, distortions, and movement. This “trembling” between recognition and past is an opportunity for what Boym calls reflective nostalgia, which “cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes spaces” (Future of Nostalgia, 49). Whether the confrontation takes place in a journey or through visual encounters in books or film, the exile may find it productive to explore the distortions that time has marked on the ruin. REAL RUINS REVISITED In addition to the unperceived present ruins, ruins of past civilizations sporadically appear in texts by a variety of Algerian born authors but specifically in works by Albert Camus, Marie Cardinal, Jacques Derrida, and Hélène Cixous.9 Camus, who was born in 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria, and lived primarily in France from 1943 until his death in 1960, repeatedly rewrote Algeria. Long before Algeria became independent, and roughly around the time of his first departure, Camus nostalgically reproduced a location symbolic of a dead past in his 1938 essay “Noces à Tipasa” (11– 21). Tipasa is known for the ruins of three great churches that represent the Christian (Latin-based) society that preceded the Arabs. Its Arabic name, Tefassed, means soiled or badly damaged. Now a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) world heritage site, Tipasa was the destination of many class trips for the young Français d’Algérie during the colonial years and is widely recognizable by the Pied-Noir community.10 Camus describes the site: Au printemps, Tipasa est habitée par les dieux et les dieux parlent dans le soleil et l’odeur des absinthes, la mer cuirassée d’argent, le ciel bleu écru, les ruines couvertes de fleurs et la lumière à gros bouillons dans les amas de pierres. [. . .] 190

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Nous arrivons par le village qui s’ouvre déjà sur la baie. Nous entrons dans un monde jaune et bleu où nous accueille le soupir odorant et âcre de la terre d’été en Algérie.11 In the spring, Tipasa is inhabited by the gods, and the gods speak in the sun and the odor of absinth, the sea armored with silver, the unbleached blue sky, the ruins covered with flowers, and the light with fat droplets in clusters of stones. [. . .] We arrive through the village that is already opening onto the bay. We enter into a yellow and blue world where we are welcomed by the pungent and acrid sigh of summer earth in Algeria. (“Noces à Tipasa,” 11) Camus evokes the odors of Tipasa and inserts himself into the landscape before turning his attention to the ruins: “Dans ce mariage des ruines et du printemps, les ruines sont redevenues pierres, et perdant le poli imposé par l’homme, sont rentrées dans la nature” (In this marriage of ruins and springtime, the ruins turn back to stone and, losing the polish imposed by man, return into nature) (13). He re-creates Algeria and yet witnesses the ruins as they fade before him, returning to nature and losing their value as markers of the past: Comme ces hommes que beaucoup de science ramène à Dieu, beaucoup d’années ont ramené les ruines à la maison de leur mère. Aujourd’hui enfin leur passé les quitte, et rien ne les distrait de cette force profonde qui les ramène au centre des choses qui tombent. Like these men that much science brings back to God, many years have brought the ruins to their mother’s house. Today their past finally leaves them and nothing distracts them from this profound force that brings them back to the center of things that fall. (13) While Camus appears to understand the need to move beyond the ruins, his nostalgic attachment to Tipasa remains intact. Much like Tipasa, the archaeological site Timgad stands out in literary and visual texts on Algerian memory. For example, Timgad is pictured 191

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in the photo-documentary work L’Algérie oubliée: Images d’Algérie (1910– 1954) by Gérard Guicheteau and Marc Combier (2004), which attempts to question the memory of Algeria in a historical context, and is revisited by Marie Cardinal in her 1980 return travelogue Au pays de mes racines. Although Cardinal ultimately demonstrates that she feels returned to Algeria, her recognition of other histories and other peoples that preceded her on the same land seems to indicate otherwise. The ruins of Timgad evoke other rulers whose reign has ended. Cardinal recalls a childhood visit and writes as though she were actually on site: Tout autour de moi, partout, il n’y a que des constructions détruites. Combien de milliers d’habitants vivaient ici ? La ville est grande. Combien de Romains ? Pas seulement des soldats, mais aussi des citoyens sûrement, des hommes, des femmes, avec leurs enfants. Des paysans, des boutiquiers. Une ville comme une autre faite pour que des gens y vivent. All around me, everywhere, there are only destroyed buildings. How many thousands of inhabitants lived here? The city is big. How many Romans? Not only soldiers, but also certainly citizens: men, women, and their children. Peasants, shopkeepers. A city like another made for people to live there. (Au pays, 107) This Roman colony, like Cardinal’s, was a settler colony, meant to endure for generations. Although projecting herself back to childhood, Cardinal seems to foretell the fate of the French colony also to be left in ruins. Whereas these ruins indicate a time beyond return, Cardinal evokes them in tandem with her own past: Les colonnades paraissent extrêmement hautes et longues à force de ne plus rien supporter. Elles se dressent. Elles témoignent depuis longtemps qu’un peuple conquérant a vécu là. Et qu’il est mort. Elles ont pris sa place et elles vivent immobiles, rigides et belles. The colonnades appear extremely high and long because they no longer support anything. They stand up. They have testified for a long time 192

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that a conquering people lived there. And that it is dead. They took its place, and they live immobile, rigid, and beautiful. (Au pays, 107) This recollection is symbolic of the ruins Cardinal would uncover in her own dead civilization, and it demonstrates her attempt to substitute written and visual memory for the past. The leftover columns, once functional, are anachronistic monuments that now serve to remind of parallel pasts and evoke an ahistorical Algeria. Although the fall of French colonial rule seems evident, Cardinal makes no direct connection between the ruins of a past before hers and the ruins of her own past, which she was preparing to encounter in Algeria. Instead, throughout her travels, Cardinal strives to reconnect the past to the present (to materialize the immaterial), and she turns a blind eye to the changes that occurred in Algeria during her absence. DERRIDA’S BLINDNESS FROM RUINS The questions of blindness and ruins guide Derrida’s approach to return in Tourner les mots: Au bord d’un film (2000) in which Derrida and Safaa Fathy deconstruct their 1999 film, D’ailleurs, Derrida. Both the film and the book exemplify how the filmed return home is a ruin that can ruin the past. With Derrida unable to return to Algeria himself (although he had previously done so in 1984), film director Fathy made the trip on his behalf with a list of monuments to be captured.12 When Fathy returns from Algeria and shows Derrida her filmed version of his return, Derrida sees that his memories and the specific icons representing his Algeria come through only in ruins—faded versions of lived experience that are impossible to translate or completely access. Fathy states that what she filmed was “encore plus ruines que les ruines. Sans corps” (even more ruins than ruins. Disembodied) (Tourner, 56). The result is a filmed version of Derrida in an Algerian-looking decor—somewhere that is not Algeria—spliced together with brief scenes of his hometown, El-Biar. In D’ailleurs, Derrida, Derrida reflects on the meaning of ruins and changed spaces, specifically religious monuments, within the context of Algeria. In the film the two revisit many ruins (literal and figurative) of the places 193

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that played a significant role in Derrida’s life: France, Algeria, Spain, and California. While they “revisit,” they do not directly return to the past, nor do they have the intention of returning. Instead these returns are constantly displaced. Through the concept of ruins, the authors express the destabilizing nature of returns. They recognize that each piece of the past, each monument that is revisited in the present cannot have the same meaning as it did before. These monuments are, in fact, an anachronistic repetition that changes each time it appears. After having filmed these varied pseudo-returns, the two recount their movie in Tourner les mots, which explores the importance of the untranslatability of film into book and past into present while investigating the overarching theme of return. Untranslatability also indicates the impossibility of pinning down a location in film and book as the location is always ailleurs as a result of its past. Derrida expresses this impossibility as a result of the multiplicity of identity throughout time. As Derrida and Fathy repeat the voyages to Derrida’s homelands in their book, the contexts are recast from the present, problematizing history, memory, and the very concept of return. Unlike what occurs in restorative nostalgic works, the authors revisit locations of nostalgia in order to destabilize the fixedness of these imagined places and to demonstrate the impossibility of return (Derrida and Fathy, Tourner, 23). When Fathy visits Derrida’s former home in Algiers, she is not even sure she has arrived at the right location. Not only have the street names changed, the entire context of the home is so different that is unidentifiable from the past description and photo she has received from Derrida. Only the woman who now lives in the home is able to recognize the photo and confirm that it is the same house. Thus, it is only from the present that the identification of the past occurs. Apart from the changing context of the home, even the changed present political situation contributes to the difficulty in placing the home. The film crew’s permission to film was contingent on acceptance of an army escort, and this entourage makes any sort of authentic “return” to Derrida’s home even more impossible for Fathy (Tourner, 38–39). The present occupants are unwelcoming, making Fathy and her assistant stand in the doorway rather than allowing 194

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them to enter. Furthermore, Fathy notes that the occupants now speak yet another foreign language (Bulgarian), distancing the present even more from the past and making the location even more inaccessible. All of these changes create a new context of Algeria— one that is foreign from the past because the one returning (Derrida) is not present to recognize or, indeed, misrecognize it. In spite of this disjunction, in the end, shards of ruins will still be relayed to Derrida, who will have the opportunity to reassemble them in his viewing. One particularly powerful symbol of Derrida’s fragmented return is the mismatched tile in the author’s former house. In the entryway to the home, there is one point at which the star-like tile pattern is broken as one tile had been inserted upside down. Under the photograph of these tiles in Tourner les mots is the caption: “Qui est ce carreau [. . .] mal ajusté, disjoint, désajusté, déplacé ou mal placé ?” (Who is this tile [. . .] maladjusted, disjointed, misaligned, displaced, or misplaced?) (n.p.). In fact, this unfitting piece symbolizes Derrida. As he tells Fathy, he, like the tile, is both destabilized and destabilizing. His present and presence disrupt unity with the past, and he is an anachronistic representation recalling an elsewhere that is no longer relevant. In fact, the troubling tile, like Derrida, who resists and deconstructs, is simply a replication of all the others. Only the position determines the pattern, and the one that is remembered perturbs the entire picture. Derrida too demonstrates the impossibility of monumentalizing himself on the screen as he exists in multiple copies. The one fixed in film perturbs an infinite pattern. As in this slippage between selves present and past, Derrida can return neither to one Algeria nor to one self. There are many Derridas and many Algerias. Both the tile and Derrida are pictured ruins, representing the un-fixedness of the past, disrupting nostalgia and the potentially unifying return home. More than being just emblematic of the author, however, this tile, much as in Cardinal’s discussion of ruins in Au pays de mes racines, is evidence of those who came both before and after Derrida: Ce mauvais carrelage, après soixante ans, reste bien là, survivant. Qui est ce carreau ? Il survit et assiste impassiblement à mon enfance 195

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comme il survivra probablement à ceux qui, aujourd’hui, nous ont succédé dans la même maison. Cette survie fait alors un signe qui s’étend vers une exemplarité plus générale: c’est toujours à partir d’une tension, d’une interruption, d’un défaut, depuis la blessure d’une dissymétrie que la mémoire s’organise, en quelque sorte. This bad tile, after sixty years, is still there, surviving. Who is this tile? It survives and impassibly witnesses my childhood like it will probably survive those who today have succeeded us in the same house. This survival thus makes a sign that extends toward a more general exemplarity: it is always around a tension, an interruption, a mistake, from the wound from an asymmetry that memory in some way organizes itself. (Tourner, 93) The tile as a ruin holds different values at any given time in history. Its dissymmetry is cause for contemplation and remembrance. The tile’s mistake (or the mistake of the tile) has survived those who have walked on it, and its function and symbolic meaning have evolved throughout time, much like the Roman ruins in Cardinal’s work. The columns, strangely out of place now that they no longer support walls, are unrecognizable, unfixed and slipping figures. Absence is inherent in the ruin. The symbolic return (or the turning toward Derrida’s past) is even further complicated because Derrida’s absence allows the film crew access to places Derrida could not go. For example, the film crew manages to visit Derrida’s school, from which he had been expelled during the Vichy years.13 Fathy and Derrida recognize this vacuity: Même si l’on sait que c’est la maison de Derrida, et même si l’on sait que c’est sa chambre, il n’en reste pas moins que les fruits se sont déjà affranchis de cette information qui les fait exister. Dans la plénitude, ils deviennent une métaphore de l’absence. Even if we know that this is Derrida’s house, and even if we know that this is his room, it remains true that the fruits are already liberated

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from this information that makes them exist. They fully become a metaphor for absence. (Tourner, 68) Bien que la maison des Derrida soit habitée, elle n’en reste pas moins une ruine, la ruine de ce qu’elle a été, de ce qui a eu lieu là et nulle part ailleurs. Even though the Derrida house is inhabited, it is no less a ruin, the ruin of what it was, of what happened there and nowhere else. (40) If we look at these objects and locations as Derrida’s, we also know that they have been freed from Derrida; they recall the fact that they are no longer his. Because Derrida did not physically return, nor did he direct this return, value is evacuated from the past when he passively views the shard of memory. Derrida’s secondhand return, reduced to a fixed point on film, carries instability within it, allowing a different interpretation each time it is viewed yet without offering a new perspective. The author only experienced a ruin of the ruin of his home, as the smells, sounds, and textures are evacuated in the two-dimensional space over which he has little control. The captured ruins are further devoid of meaning because the one who should recognize them could not within their new context. Derrida points out the only way of seeing in this shifting perspective: “Il faut s’aveugler à tous ces possibles pour voir ce qu’on voit en effet” (You must blind yourself to all these possibilities in order to see what you actually see) (Tourner, 79, Derrida and Fathy’s emphasis). CIXOUS: CREATING BLINDNESS In a similar way, Derrida’s longtime friend and compatriot Hélène Cixous returns to Algeria both in her writing and in reality to dispossess herself of the past. Much like Derrida, Cixous had Jewish heritage that caused multiple layers of separation for her while she was still living in Algeria, and she suffered from her not-Frenchness and her inability to arrive in Algeria. In her essay “Une virginité de mémoire” (A virginity

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of memory) (1989), Cixous writes of her unwillingness to return to her hometown, Oran: Je sens que j’ai envie de ne pas retourner à Oran. J’ai envie de garder Oran dans une virginité de mémoire. Parce que si j’y retourne, cela provoquera une grande joie, mais cela provoquera aussi ce que provoquent tous les retours, l’effacement du souvenir, et le remplacement d’un souvenir ancien par un souvenir récent. I feel that I want to not return to Oran. I want to keep Oran in a virginity of memory. Because if I return there it will provoke great joy, but it will also provoke what all returns provoke: erasure of memory and the replacement of an old memory by a recent memory. (89– 90) Cixous’s fear of approaching the places of her past is not at all unlike Cardinal’s, but whereas Cardinal desperately wants to overcome that fear and see her memory renewed, Cixous blatantly wants to keep the original memory undisturbed. Cixous’s reaction is not uncommon, and as Michel-Chich points out, many refuse to return because ils veulent protéger leurs souvenirs, se protéger eux-mêmes d’un choc qui pourrait menacer leur équilibre précaire, ne pas découvrir une réalité qui leur fait peur car le problème n’est pas seulement de revoir les lieux que l’on a aimés et d’où l’on a été arraché, il faut aussi affronter le changement. they want to protect their memories, to protect themselves from a shock that could threaten their precarious equilibrium, to not discover a reality that scares them because the problem is not only to see the places they loved and from whence they were torn, they must also confront change. (Déracinés, 135) Cixous realizes her attachment to memory, and the lack of desire or inability to return or even arrive is a recurrent theme in her works, especially in her 2007 novel Si près, which documents her return voyage to Algeria. Her return, however, is clouded and confused as she 198

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attempts to find landmarks of her own past as well as those of the now absent Jacques Derrida. Cixous uses photos published in Derrida’s works, possibly the same ones Fathy used, to guide her return. Seeking what she calls TonAlger in El-Biar—“Où je ne suis jamais allée” (I have never gone there) (Si près, 174; Kamuf, So Close, 129)— Cixous is lost in her former homeland. Whereas Cardinal feels she could never get lost in her homeland, Cixous is surrounded by ruins of other pasts, hers included, and she is unable to recognize the past in the present. Although her fragmentation is clear, Cixous does experience reunion and recognitions on some level. In the end, she finds her father’s grave and states, “J’ai trouvé: c’est la construction absolue” (I found: the absolute construction) (209, Cixous’s emphasis; Kamuf, So Close, 157). She is rejoined to that essential missing piece left in Algeria—another person, a ghost—rather than a recognizable location. Unlike Cardinal, who declares renewed love for her homeland, Cixous finds “L’immortel chagrin” (Immortal sadness) (212; Kamuf, So Close, 159) in Algeria. Cixous declares that she had always resisted film—“je n’ai jamais eu l’envie soudaine de garder une trace visuelle” (I never had the sudden urge to keep a visual trace) (99; Kamuf, So Close, 70)—and that she would not film Algeria. Yet she does film, as though to add another filter between her memory and her experience of Algeria. On her return to France, she shows the film to her nonagenarian mother and her brother. The camera allows Cixous to visualize the fragmentation that she often expresses in her writing: “Je vois et je vois que je vois [. . .] Je vois ce que je n’ai jamais encore vue ce que je ne verrai jamais” (I see and I see that I see [. . .] I see what I have as yet never seen what I will never see) (100; Kamuf, So Close, 71). Cixous’s experience resonates with those who viewed the film Saïda . . . On revient! They saw in the film what they had missed when on site in Algeria. The camera does not capture everything, however, and Cixous points out the absences and vacuity of the image—“Ce que ne voit pas la caméra” (What the camera does not see) (210; Kamuf, So Close, 157)—and what she did not see in Algeria until she saw the film in France. She sees that she does not see: 199

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Je n’ai pas vu le coq. Mais la caméra l’a vu. C’est drôle. Cette caméra qui voit ce que je ne vois pas. [. . .] Quand je reviendrai à Paris, je me verrai voir le coq avec ma mère, tout d’un coup, avec ma mère je me verrai au Clos-Salembier, dans l’escalier, je me verrai ne pas voir le coq en haut de l’escalier dans le film, à droite, au-dessus de ma tête [. . .] puis je verrai tout le coq que je n’ai pas vu, sur l’écran, le coq et moi, dans le même plan, je verrai que je ne vois pas. I didn’t see the rooster. But the camera saw him. It’s funny. This camera that sees what I don’t see. [. . .] When I return to Paris, I will see myself seeing the rooster with my mother, all of a sudden, with my mother I will see myself at ClosSalembier, in the staircase, I will see myself not seeing the rooster from the top of the staircase in the film, to the right, above my head [. . .] and then I will see the whole rooster that I did not see, on the screen, the rooster and me, in the same shot, I will see that I do not see. (151; Kamuf, So Close, 111) Cixous deconstructs the visual elements captured, demonstrating that film and experience are not the same: “La caméra regarde, je ne regarde pas ce qu’elle regarde. [. . .] La caméra ne voit pas les abîmes. Je tombe” (The camera is looking, I do not look at what it is looking at. [. . .] The camera doesn’t see the abysses. I fall) (137; Kamuf, So Close, 100–101). The movement among memory, experience, and reflection is stupefying in Cixous’s work, and she allows the readers to stumble along with her to Algeria and back again: “Je suis venue dans ce pays d’Algérie où je suis née et chaque fois que j’ai cherché une entrée je me suis trouvée égarée” (I came to this country of Algeria where I was born and each time I sought an entrance, I found myself losing my way) (179; Kamuf, So Close, 134). Rather than pursuing a discourse of being at home, like Cardinal and others who want nothing more than a reunion with Algeria, Derrida and Cixous uncover their absence, dispossession, foreignness, and incapacity to return (Derrida and Fathy, Tourner, 74). As a result of these displacements, blindness is laid bare and shown to be inescapable no matter 200

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how much the exile strains to see clearly. As Peter Fritzsche explains in “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity,” “What the ghostly remains of other pasts recall is the fact of other presents and other possibilities. It makes sense, then, to reconsider nostalgia not as blindness but as sightfulness, which completes the modern experience of time with its insistent perception of disaster and its empathy to strangers stranded in the present” (1592). This blindness, or sightfulness, is what is laid bare in the film Saïda . . . On revient!, with its nauseating shaking and multiple views spliced together. As the film attempts to portray a communal trip to the past, it easily betrays the unity of the experience. The ruins tremble as the exiles move between past and present, verbalizing and projecting the anachronous memories onto the changed reality of Algeria. By recognizing these distortions (the disturbed image of conformed memory and the mismatch among experience, memory, and the subsequent narrative), the crippling nostalgia for ruins may be undone. Recognition of the impossibility of arrival allows the foreigner to bear the past; and through the motion of return, as displayed in the imagined, written, and visualized returns of the Pieds-Noirs, the exile finds strength to unhinge the attachment to the location of ruins and to continue the impossible journey.

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7 The Return of Algeria R E L I E V I NG A N D S U S TA I N I NG T H E P H A N T OM L I M B

Fiona Barclay in Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature and the Maghreb (2011) affirms, “France is haunted” (xi). Algeria and the Algerian War have long haunted France, and those who have been touched by the two countries still struggle to put the ghost to rest, whether by returning or simply remembering the influence the countries have on each other. The former French citizens of Algeria are specifically haunted because of their deeply severed roots; they have been amputated from both a country and a past.1 Consequently, the phantom limb of Algeria continually reappears to the Français d’Algérie no matter how many times they try to bury it. In Au pays de mes racines, Marie Cardinal writes that when returning to her homeland, her ambition is to avoid having one of her heads amputated: Pourquoi vouloir retourner là-bas, pourquoi écrire ces pages sinon pour essayer de comprendre l’équilibre ou le déséquilibre que créent en moi l’alliance ou la guerre de deux cultures ? Mon désir, ma demande, mon exigence, ont cette prétention : je voudrais pouvoir être tranquillement bi-culturée sans que la névrose s’empare de ma personne bicéphale, sans que le reniement guillotine l’une de mes deux têtes, sans avoir à faire un choix impossible.

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Why do I want to return there? Why write these pages if not to try to understand the balance or imbalance that the marriage or the war of the two cultures creates within me? My desire, my request, my requirement, is this: I would like to be able to be tranquilly bi-cultured without neurosis taking hold of my bicephalous being, without renunciation guillotining one of my two heads, without having to make an impossible choice. (17) Although already separated from her homeland for almost twenty years when she wrote this text, Cardinal’s severance from Algeria was traumatic and final enough to evoke the guillotine image. Cardinal, like most Pieds-Noirs, left her homeland during the Algerian War for Independence and lived out most of the rest of her life in France.2 While separation is painful, many Pied-Noir authors articulate their traumatic and often violent exile from their homeland in order to sustain memory and cultivate communal identity. As their writing is filled with colorful re- creations of the physical landscape of Algeria, bringing life back to the part of them from which they have been removed, they, in a sense, sustain their amputated homeland through writing. For most of the exiles, however, the source of their pain remains unidentified. This sustained connection to the amputated past haunts the severed exiles like phantom-limb pains that plague amputees. Medically documented cases of phantom-limb pain began appearing in the nineteenth century, parallel to the rise in popularity of ghost stories, as Stephen Meuse explains in “Phantoms, Lost Limbs, and the Limits of the BodySelf.” Like a ghost, the phantom limb is involuntary, uncontrollable, and unpredictable, yet it is also a source of significant real pain for its victim. The phenomenon of phantom-limb pain is characterized by sensations of prickling or burning in the lost limb or the feeling that the limb is strangely contorted or missing part of itself. For example, one may feel a phantom foot protruding directly from the knee. According to Meuse, “In a few terrible cases, amputees assert that their absent limbs have remained permanently twisted in the grotesque postures they experienced while awaiting medical attention, as if the memory of their 204

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trauma were too awful to be forgotten” (“Phantoms,” 50). In “Doubtful Arms and Phantom Limbs: Literary Portrayals of Embodied Grief,” James Krasner outlines the impact of this malady, stating, “Amputees experience the absences as physical sensation and are literally disabled by them” (220). To overcome this disabling loss, the Pieds-Noirs use writing like a prosthesis to reconnect to the past, even now, fifty years after their separation. This chapter will uncover the pain that Algeria, the phantom limb, represents for its former French citizens, the ways that pain is articulated, the ways in which writing and memory become a prosthesis for the amputee—uncomfortably reattaching them to the past—and the ways in which some have managed to accommodate the recurring ghosts of the past. ATTACHMENT AND AMPUTATION The Français d’Algérie came from both recent immigrants to Algeria as well as from families implanted there soon after colonization began in 1830, yet when they left Algeria, both groups melded into the singular identity of Pieds-Noirs.3 In L’Identité Alex Mucchielli suggests that when a community shifts location, as is the case for cultural migrants, its identity will forcibly shift as well: Lorsque les individus restent dans leur milieu de formation, normalement tout va bien, ils sont “en phase” avec le système culturel du milieu, ils fonctionnent bien dans la logique des contraintes de leur cadre de vie. Mais, dissonances, tensions et finalement réactions de défense de l’identité apparaissent lorsque l’individu se trouve dans un autre milieu— qui n’a plus la même logique—, soit que ce milieu ait changé soit que lui individu du groupe, ait changé de milieu. Le drame des migrants culturels n’est pas dû seulement à ce traumatisme culturel. Il est aussi dû aux processus d’exclusion dont ils sont souvent victimes. Ils sont rejetés de la société dite “d’accueil” comme étrangers, ils sont rejetés de leur société d’origine comme différents. While the individuals remain in the setting of their upbringing, normally everything is fine. They are “in sync” with the cultural system 205

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of the setting, they function well in the logic of constraints of their way of life. But dissonances, tensions, and eventually mechanisms to protect the identity appear when the individual finds himself in another setting— one that does not have the same logic—whether the setting itself has changed or the individual has changed settings. The drama of cultural migrants is not only caused by this cultural trauma. It is also a result of the process of exclusion of which they are often victims. They are rejected by the so-called host society like strangers; they are rejected from their original society as different. (117, Mucchielli’s emphasis) In Mucchielli’s words trauma is caused by both the change of setting and the subsequent exclusion the individual experiences. In the case of the Pieds-Noirs, trauma was compounded by the often violent process they underwent to leave Algeria, the unwelcoming atmosphere in France after the war, the poor living conditions upon their arrival, and then again by their inability to return home after Algerian independence.4 Pied-Noir author Jeanne Cheula writes in her autobiography Hier est proche d’aujourd’hui, “Un monde de souffrance nous sépare maintenant de ce passé [. . .]. Exilée dans mon propre pays, je suis devenue, comme tant d’autres, plus algérienne que si j’étais restée là-bas” (A world of suffering separates us now from this past [. . .]. Exiled in my own country, I became, like so many others, more Algerian than if I had stayed there) (97). Cheula sets the example that to survive this difficult separation from the homeland, the Pieds-Noirs cultivate their relationship to the past, feeding their lost limb and making it feel even more present than before the loss. Phantom-limb pain takes place, according to Krasner, “when the limb feels abnormally present although it is abnormally absent. The body registers the dissonance between these two abnormalities as pain, which may be avoided through contortions” (“Doubtful Arms,” 226). While the Pieds-Noirs are for the most part now integrated in France, they still publicly insist on and cultivate their differences, creating an identity that positions Algeria as more present than ever. They contort themselves to accommodate the overly strong 206

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sensations the lost Algeria brings. Furthermore, because this separation has become their most important identity marker, it is continually reinforced and repeated through communal gatherings, storytelling, and writing. Bringing the Pieds-Noirs’ sense of amputation into its sharpest focus, artist Nicole Guiraud has become a community symbol.5 When Guiraud was ten years old, she survived the bombing of the Milk Bar during the Battle of Algiers, but her arm was amputated as a result of injuries she sustained in the attack. Guiraud originally fled to France toward the end of the Algerian War. Now living primarily in Germany, she is a spokesperson for victims of terrorism worldwide, and she continually struggles to articulate her personal trauma and that of her community through her artwork. Through a series of interviews during commemorative events recognizing the fiftieth anniversary of Pied-Noir exile in June and July 2012, Guiraud expressed to me that her prosthesis is troublesome. She said she wears it in public only for the comfort of those around her, yet for her the prosthetic arm is a fatigue-inducing burden and source of irritation. In July 2012 Guiraud wrote an original text, “Amputation et membre fantôme” (Amputation and phantom limb), for the purpose of this book. It is printed here, unedited: Une amputation, c’est comme un deuil qui ne peut se faire. Une absence qui reste une présence . . . On ne peut faire le deuil du membre perdu, comme on ne peut faire le deuil du pays perdu. Dans un cas, le corps est privé d’une partie de soi. Dans l’autre c’est l’âme qui en est privée. L’amputation d’un membre, comme le déracinement du pays natal, ne peut se faire oublier. On peut essayer de vivre avec cette absence, ce manque, au prix d’une sorte d’anesthésie, ou d’amnésie. Mais OUBLIER est impossible. Le souvenir est là pour relier sans cesse en nous passé et présent. 207

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La présence physique et corporelle, l’intégrité du “territoire” personnel, a disparu. Mais “l’ombre portée” de l’espace disparu reste indéfectiblement inscrite en nous, comme membre fantôme dans le cas d’une amputation, comme souvenir ou nostalgie dans le cas du déracinement. Et dans les deux cas, cette réminiscence peut parfois surgir dans la douleur. Particulièrement dans mon cas, qui suis à la fois amputée d’un bras ET déracinée de mon pays natal. Il ne reste plus que l’aura, cette mémoire du corps et de l’esprit, notre “corps astral” indestructible, pour tenter de rétablir l’unité rompue. Le corps et l’âme sont inséparables. An amputation is like mourning that cannot be done. An absence that remains a presence . . . You cannot mourn a lost limb, just like you cannot mourn a lost country. In the first case, the body is deprived of a part of itself. In the second, it is the soul that is deprived. Amputation of a limb, like uprooting from the birth country, cannot be forgotten. You can try to live with this absence, this lack, though not without some type of anesthesia, or amnesia. But FORGETTING is impossible. The memory is there to eternally rejoin the past and present within us. The physical and bodily presence, the wholeness of personal “territory,” has disappeared. But the silhouette of the missing space remains indefectibly inscribed in us, like a phantom limb for the amputee, like memory or nostalgia for the uprooted. And in both cases, this recollection can sometimes suddenly emerge in pain. Especially in my case, as I have had my arm amputated AND I am uprooted from my birth country. The only thing remaining is the aura, this bodily and spiritual memory, our indestructible “astral body” that can attempt to reestablish broken unity. Body and soul are inseparable. 208

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Guiraud’s experience of double amputation is replete with meanings. She is the physical manifestation of the trauma of loss— of both country and body. Today she is the embodiment of her community’s suffering, a role she bears a bit like her prosthesis. She gracefully expresses the violence that engenders her work, indelibly marked on her body and in her memory, but the constant attempt to reattach to an absence becomes exhausting for her at times.6 Few Pieds-Noirs can comprehend the corporeal loss Guiraud confronts daily, but they feel the lost homeland in a similar way. When addressing their lost limb, many Pieds-Noirs re- create their roots, tracking their ancestry and preserving their personal experiences in the homeland, to the point of expressing how their bodies were marked by Algeria while they lived there. In reinforcing the Pied-Noir identity, these bodily “contortions,” to use Krasner’s term (“Doubtful Arms,” 226), persist in their exodus. In her first novel, Écoutez la mer, Cardinal explains that certain mannerisms, even the way she positions her body while seated, are influenced by her Mediterranean homeland. The main character of the book, Maria, says that it would take her years to learn to mask her natural sense of movement with European gestures: “Il y a, en toute terre, une cadence qui lui est propre. Celle de mon pays s’est naturellement développée en moi et n’en sortira plus jamais” (There is, in every land, a cadence that is its own. My country’s rhythm developed in me naturally, and it will never again leave) (29–30). Like a stroke victim who has gone through extensive physical therapy to relearn formerly habitual tasks, Maria had to relearn all of her movements so as to fit into Parisian culture. In her own home, however, she could revert back to her comfortable being. Cardinal herself says that in France she feels most amputated from the rhythm and heat that guided her in Algeria. In Au pays de mes racines, her longing to be rejoined to this freedom of bodily movement becomes obvious: Pour continuer à vivre avec les autres je dois retourner là-bas, laisser ces rythmes me pénétrer de nouveau, retrouver les échos les plus 209

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anciens du sang qui bat en moi comme en nous tous. Parce que c’est là que je les ai perçus pour la première fois. Il me faut ce cadre-là, cette chaleur, ces palmiers, ce langage, ces vagues, ce sol, ces odeurs, ce sec, ce pourri, pour rencontrer peut-être ce que je cherche. To continue living with the others, I must return there, to let these rhythms penetrate me again, to find again the oldest echoes of blood that beats in me like in all of us. Because it’s there that I noticed them for the first time. I need those surroundings, that heat, those palm trees, that language, those waves, that sun, those odors, that dryness, that foulness, to be able to perhaps meet what I’m looking for. (88) The author needs to be reconnected to her land in order to comfortably maneuver again in her present and to “continue living.” PAIN OF ALGERIA As amputees from Algeria, the Pieds-Noirs saturate their literature with accounts of suffering.7 These plaints have made the community even more difficult for the French to accept as Renée Léonardi-Laigaisse writes in Nous n’avions rien compris: Ce dont je suis sûre, c’est que nous n’avons pas été faciles à vivre ! le cœur à vif, notre rage et notre désespoir sont trop visibles. Les gens n’aiment pas le malheur ! Et puis, on se lamente trop ! Chez nous, le soleil chauffait plus fort . . . Chez nous, c’était plus beau . . . Chez nous, chez nous . . . nous n’avons plus de chez nous et on agace par nos lamentations. What I know for sure is that we were not easy to get along with! the heart exposed, our rage and our despair are too apparent. People don’t like misery! And then, we complain too much! At home, the sun shone brighter . . . 210

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At home, it was more beautiful . . . At home, at home . . . we no longer have a home and our lamenting is annoying. (53) The repeated lamentations for the past that are expressed as a collective experience in this passage (notre/nous/on) are mixed with exaggerations as the community tried to rework its identity outside its original context. By joining the pain of the past with nostalgia for it, LéonardiLaigaisse demonstrates the arduous process required to reckon with identity outside the homeland and to be accepted in the new country. According to Nicole Barthe-Hugon’s work Récits de vie des agriculteurs français d’Algérie (1830–1962), identity lines were not just blurred in the repatriation process; rather, the two cultures conflicted in a way that evoked “le malaise au niveau de la définition de soi, une rupture entre soi et certains autres, une déchirure entre des aspects de ce qui était soi et soi-même. Tout cela aboutit à l’obligation de la redéfinition de son être propre” (discomfort when defining self, a rift between oneself and others, a rupture between aspects of what was self and what it is now. All of this resulted in an obligatory redefinition of one’s very being) (228). Integration was a progressively painful process that began with malaise and moved to rupture and déchirure before a new identity could be forged. For many Pieds-Noirs, attempting this process was too painful to bear. This traumatic loss at the core of their identity evokes phantom pains emanating from the Pieds-Noirs’ amputated limb: Algeria. These authors feel physically cut off from a part of themselves and the absent mass becomes, through nostalgia, the best part of their lives, often taking on a life of its own in their literature.8 Effectively, the former Français d’Algérie write a “bruised memory” that always evokes “somewhere else,” as Benjamin Stora states in “Women’s Writing between Two Algerian Wars” (91). While the Pieds-Noirs are both eager and reluctant to write about their past, they cannot evoke it without feeling the bruise and subsequently falling back on their nostalgia for an undisturbed Algeria. Each memory simultaneously recalls the trauma of amputation and fantasizes about 211

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the greater part that was lost—the phantom limb that has grown larger than it ever was in reality. Monique Ayoun captures the infectious pain of the exaggerated Algeria in her essay “L’Algérie imaginaire”: A vrai dire, l’Algérie m’a fait du mal. Elle a été trop belle, trop intense. Elle m’a éblouie et s’est éclipsée. Elle a juste eu le temps de me verser sa lumière dans les yeux, de m’inoculer le virus du rêve, de m’imprégner de l’illusion et du besoin incurables d’un ailleurs. To tell the truth, Algeria hurt me. It was too beautiful, too intense. It dazzled me, and then it slipped away. It had just enough time to pour its light in my eyes, to infect me with the virus of a dream, to impregnate me with the incurable illusion and need of an elsewhere. (Mon Algérie, 77) Ayoun illustrates Algeria’s corporeal impact on her. Algeria struck her as it struck many, with its sensual presence incorporated in her being like an incurable illness. In another visceral example of the painful amputation from Algeria, Geneviève de Ternant articulates the loss of Algeria as corporeal suffering in an editorial for L’Echo de l’Oranie: Mon Algérie, je n’ai pas besoin de la reconnaître. Elle est en moi. Je peux dire “mon Algérie” comme je dis mon œil, ma main. Elle est mes tripes, mes muscles, elle est mon regard, et ce sera comme cela jusqu’à ce que mes yeux se ferment pour toujours, que mon souffle s’arrête dans un soupir qui sera encore mon Algérie.9 I don’t need to recognize my Algeria. It is in me. I can say “my Algeria” just like I say my eye, my hand. It is my guts, my muscles, it is my way of seeing, and it will always be like that until my eyes close forever, until my breath stops in a sigh that will still be my Algeria. (“Devoir de mémoire”) Like many Pied-Noir writers, Ternant demonstrates the intricate link between Algeria and her body. She is completely overcome by the influence of this lost country, and she writes as though she is inseparable from 212

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Algeria, when, in fact, she is separated. Similarly, Cardinal expresses Algeria as a body part, and her separation as an evisceration: “M’arracher l’Algérie c’est arracher ma tête, mes tripes, mon cœur et mes âmes” (To rip Algeria out of me is to rip off my head, my guts, my heart, and my souls) (Au pays, 73). Cardinal’s use of the plural “souls,” even though she says she cannot have Algeria removed from her, demonstrates how she is separated within herself. Cheula also demonstrates how her separation creates its own uncontrollable existence inside her: “Tout ce passé, tout ce que j’ai aimé, s’est détaché pour commencer de vivre en moi une nouvelle existence” (All of this past, all that I loved, detached itself from me and began to live a new existence inside me) (Hier est proche, 97). After the amputation Algeria begins a life of its own in the form of a phantom limb, a detached entity that is paradoxically inside the sufferer. Even Leïla Sebbar, who is careful to exclude herself from almost every potential identity that comes out of the Maghreb, shares in the suffering from Algeria. Born to an Algerian Arab father and a French mother who raised their children in colonial Algeria, Sebbar refers to herself as a “croisée” (crossed) or “bigarrée” (multicolored) (“Jeunes Filles,” 193). When she explains her identity “à la croisée” in her epistolary exchange with Nancy Huston in Lettres parisiennes, Sebbar explains that only in fiction can she feel free and strengthened by her exile: “C’est là et seulement là que je me rassemble corps et âme et que je fais le pont entre les deux rives [. . .]. Ailleurs [. . .] je suis presque toujours mal, en risque permanent d’hystérie ou de mélancolie” (It is there and only there that I reassemble body and soul and that I bridge over the two shores [. . .]. Elsewhere [. . .] I am almost always poorly off, risking permanent hysteria or melancholia) (148). In Lettres parisiennes these exclusions, instead of being a source of suffering, hold much potential: “Je m’aperçois que cette division dont j’ai pu souffrir, aujourd’hui j’y tiens et je veux la préserver” (I realize that this division from which I could suffer, today I cling to it and want to preserve it) (28, Sebbar’s emphasis). Fiction is what allows Sebbar to bridge over the painful separation. As she tries to maintain her difference and use her amputation as a source, she also creates a prosthesis from her writing, “me placer au cœur, au 213

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centre, dans la fiction fictionnelle, c’est me placer dans un lieu unitaire, rassembleur des divisions [. . .] pour moi, la fiction c’est la suture qui masque la blessure, l’écart entre les deux rives” (to place myself at the heart, in the center, in fictional fiction, is placing myself in a unifying place, reassembling the divisions [. . .] for me, fiction is the suture that masks the wound, the distance between the two shores) (Sebbar, Lettres, 147, my emphasis). Unlike many exiles who write fictions of their homeland in an attempt to repair the past, Sebbar is fully aware that fiction, while potentially healing, is only superficially unifying. REPETITION AND RETURN AS PROSTHESIS In the works of Albert Camus, this physical influence of Algeria is nowhere better expressed than in his most celebrated novel, L’Etranger (The Stranger), which was published in 1942.10 The protagonist, Meursault, is more affected by the Algerian heat during his mother’s burial than the actual loss of his mother. His only defense besides le hasard (chance) for killing an Arab man on the beach is that the sun was beating down on him and he wanted to cool down. His body is contorted, in a sense, because of Algeria’s external influences; the same landscape that gives him intense experiences of joy also subjugates him. Once condemned and separated from the world he loves so much, Meursault passes his days in his jail cell looking at the sky and studying its changing colors as the sun moves across it. Meursault is an amputee, separated in Algeria from Algeria because of his imprisonment: J’ai été assailli des souvenirs d’une vie qui ne m’appartenait plus, mais où j’avais trouvé les plus pauvres et les plus tenaces de mes joies : des odeurs d’été, le quartier que j’aimais, un certain ciel du soir, le rire et les robes de Marie. And then a rush of memories went through my mind—memories of a life which was mine no longer and had once provided me with the surest, humblest pleasures: warm smells of summer, my favorite streets, the sky at evening, Marie’s dresses and her laugh. (Camus, L’Étranger, 105; Gilbert, Stranger, 65) 214

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Although cut off, Camus creates a strategy for passing time in jail that consists of reconnecting himself to the lost limb, by remembering in minute detail every facet of his apartment in Algiers. His practice is so complete that he manages to almost completely forget that he is separated, severed from his home, by reattaching himself to what no longer exists.11 Meursault’s example is resonant with Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942), in which Sisyphus learns to accept separation from the earth that he loved too much by reveling in the details of the rock he is condemned to push for eternity to the summit of a hill without ever completing the task. This task is painful, requires physical labor, and is undertaken with the memories of earth still in Sisyphus’s head: J’imagine encore Sisyphe revenant vers son rocher, et la douleur était au début. Quand les images de la terre tiennent trop fort au souvenir, quand l’appel du bonheur se fait trop pesant, il arrive que la tristesse se lève au cœur de l’homme : c’est la victoire du rocher, c’est le rocher lui-même. L’immense détresse est trop lourde à porter. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. (Camus, Mythe, 166; O’Brien, Myth, 98) Sisyphus’s suffering was in his separation from earth, and he endures pain in that truncated part of himself. Yet Sisyphus embraces his prosthesis, his rock, and it is when he discovers a world within this rock, that this rock represents the very earth from which he is severed, that he finds his freedom. He creates a tenable situation through his contortions, and in the discomfort of his painful task, he is even able to find joy: “Chacun des grains de cette pierre, chaque éclat minéral de cette montagne pleine de nuit, à lui seul forme un monde. La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme” (Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle 215

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itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart) (168; O’Brien, Myth, 99.) In his reconnection to what he has lost, a small piece of his former land, Sisyphus can continue toward his unreachable destination with joy. Both Sisyphus and Meursault accept their separations and overcome their condemnation rather than reveling in the pain, but they do so by attaching themselves to fragments of what they left behind. For some this reappearance of the past, or experience of the phantom limb, is so intense that the victim is unable to recognize the amputation. According to Krasner, “The suffering caused by phantom limbs derives not from the loss but from the sufferer’s belief in the limb’s enduring presence” (“Doubtful Arms,” 226). Meuse suggests further, “Patients often find it impossible to believe that they have suffered amputation until they confirm the truth of it by sight” (“Phantoms,” 49). As explored in the previous chapter, many Pieds-Noirs need to make return voyages to Algeria in order to see Algeria as separate from them. Unfortunately, the voyage often serves to further reconnect the Pied-Noir to the past. These returns may offer a temporary reconnection, but they must be repeated each time the discomfort grows. No physical return to the homeland can permanently undo the painful separation, as Michel-Chich points out: “Pour les pieds-noirs, la relation au terroir est une déchirure : difficile réalité que d’être né dans un pays qui n’existe plus” (For the Pieds-Noirs, the relationship to their region is a rupture: a difficult reality to be born in a country that no longer exists) (Déracinés, 133). As long as the limb is not recognized as separate, the haunting pain that accompanies the lost limb will endure. In Journal de Mes Algéries en France, Leïla Sebbar underscores her constant desire to rejoin France and Algeria, whether that be by bringing fragments of Algeria together in France or reassembling pieces of France in memories of Algeria: Après Mes Algéries en France, je poursuis et je poursuivrai encore l’Algérie en France. Prise par un besoin fébrile de mêler l’Algérie à la France, depuis la naissance, presque . . . L’œil fixé sur l’objet du désir, tendre prédateur, collectionneur fou, tendu vers ce qui s’exhibe et se dérobe, je tente par les mots, la voix, l’image, obstinément, d’abolir ce qui sépare. 216

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After Mes Algéries en France [My Algerias in France], I pursue and will continue to pursue Algeria in France. Seized by a feverish need to mix Algeria with France, since birth, almost . . . The eye fixates on an object of desire, tender predator, mad collector, straining toward what is exhibited and concealed, I obstinately try with words, voice, image to abolish what separates. (11) Sebbar is perpetually compelled to rejoin France and Algeria through her words and her interpretation of others with shared experiences and attachments.12 Her impossible mission is an attempt to create a supplement through images and words that will rejoin the two countries. Like Sebbar, who says she will continually repeat this task of reconnection, the Pieds-Noirs repeat their experiences to create a rigid, unalterable version of their history. This permanent tribute or fixed past becomes a prosthesis that allows the Pieds-Noirs to maneuver between Algeria and the present, in a way overcoming the disabling amputation. The prosthesis, however, does not resolve the phantom pains and in itself causes pain. Krasner writes in reflection on Derrida’s article “By Force of Mourning”: “Again and again we make the mistake of positioning ourselves to touch the lost body, and these erroneous acts amount to our body’s grief ” (“Doubtful Arms,” 223). Krasner, who is referring to the lost body of a loved one, demonstrates a fundamental problem for the Pieds-Noirs. As they constantly contort themselves to find a comfortable position, to touch their lost land, grief and pain will always accompany the familiar act that is meant to bring relief. The prosthesis, while allowing the group to keep in touch with the past, will continually rub their nubs raw, ever reminding them of their separation. The Pieds-Noirs’ collective memory may replace the lost limb and temporarily reconnect them to the past, but like the phantom, this connection is never completely controllable or predictable. This is especially manifest for the French-born children of the Pieds-Noirs, as Michel-Chich explains, “l’Algérie est une inconnue, un regret, un rêve qui les laisse rarement indifférents, le fantôme omniprésent de toutes les familles piedsnoirs” (Algeria is an unknown, a regret, a dream that leaves them rarely 217

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indifferent—the omnipresent ghost of all Pied-Noir families) (Déracinés, 149). This is equally applicable to the surviving Pieds-Noirs, who have now almost all lived more of their lives in France than in Algeria. Even though the group writes to nurture a bond to a part of them that no longer exists, the past that still haunts them has been given a life of its own. It becomes another member of the family, one that is unseen but influential. As Meuse states, “Like its ghostly namesake, the phantom part is often unpredictable in its coming and going, at one moment or time of day vividly present, at another entirely withdrawn” (“Phantoms,” 49). Sebbar confirms the need to touch that ghost, “Notre exil est un fantasme. Un fantôme. C’est-à-dire : un mort qu’on a eu besoin de ressusciter afin de l’interroger, l’ausculter” (Our exile is a fantasy. A ghost. I mean: a dead body that we needed to ressuscitate in order to interrogate and examine it) (Lettres, 209–10). ACKNOWLEDGED AMPUTATIONS While many struggle against their losses, Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida openly acknowledge their amputations and demonstrate the uncontrollable, indomitable nature of Algeria in their writing. As explored in previous chapters, Cixous and Derrida both were outcast within Algeria owing to their Jewish heritage, but Cixous was even further separated because her first language was German and not French.13 The two had to grapple with belonging and separation long before their exile, but both were nonetheless deeply affected by Algeria and write about their experiences in multiple texts. Derrida and Cixous both suffered from anti-Semitism and segregation during World War II. As recounted in Jacques Derrida, Derrida was separated from both his education and his French citizenship when the Crémieux Decree was repealed in Algeria under the Vichy regime, and he was expelled from his school in 1942 (59).14 Lee Morrissey explains Derrida’s position in “Derrida, Algeria, and ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’”: “Overnight he was a Jew and was not French. Being both was seemingly no longer possible” (9). Cixous, who was enrolled in an anti-Semitic high school by mistake (Rêveries, 122), expresses her painful separation in Algeria in the opening lines of her 218

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book Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage (Reveries of the Wild Woman): “Tout le temps où je vivais en Algérie je rêvais d’arriver un jour en Algérie, j’aurais fait n’importe quoi pour y arriver” (The whole time I was living in Algeria I would dream of one day arriving in Algeria, I would have done anything to get there) (9; Brahic, Reveries, 3).15 Although madly desired, the connection to Algeria always eluded Cixous. Even though amputated from Algeria while in Algeria, Derrida and Cixous still negotiate their relationship to their cut off limbs, and they do this in terms that sometimes resemble Pied-Noir writing in its physical representation. The internalized trauma, however, becomes a source for their writing rather than a means of impossibly reconnecting themselves to Algeria. Cixous experienced the corporeal separation from Algeria as a trauma and, more specifically, expresses its absence, although ghostly, as painful: Ma mère constamment vierge, moi toujours imprimée, je saisis le mal que j’aperçois, j’ai l’Algérie dans mon poumon dans mon gosier je ne trouve pas étrange qu’elle me donne les fièvres et meurtrisse ma toile mentale de bavures envenimées. My mother forever virginal, untouched, me printed once and for all, I grasp the evil I see, I’ve got Algeria in my lungs in my throat I don’t find it strange that it should turn me hot and cold and bruise my nervous system with its toxic overflow. (Rêveries, 110–11; Brahic, Reveries, 69) Algeria for Cixous is also like a missing limb in which she still feels pains, tremors, and sensations, although she can plainly see the limb was cut off before it was fully grown. Meuse proposes that this gradual loss of limb may be easier to integrate into the identity: “Studies performed on lepers who have lost limbs gradually due to attrition and on children with congenital limb loss have demonstrated that it is the sudden and traumatic loss of the limb that produces the phantom, that phantoms are not experienced when limb loss has been very gradual or has predated the firming of ego boundaries. With time, adjustments to new body boundaries may be made” (“Phantoms,” 59). This may explain why Cixous and 219

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Derrida are able to approach their lost limb without attempting to use their writing to reattach it. They recognize that reattachment is futile because they were already dispossessed in the colony. While many exiles have great difficulty locating the source of their pain, throughout Les Rêveries, Cixous refers to her attachment to Algeria as a “force malgérienne” (malgerian force) (111; Brahic, Reveries, 69), condensing her image(s) of Algeria into both a sickness and a strength and inscribing the pain of exclusions onto her own body:16 J’attribue à la force malgérienne de mon imagination les cicatrices de mon corps ponctué, mais ce n’est pas que je pense voir ce que je ne vois pas, c’est que je pense ce que je vois et je vois ce que les Français ne voient pas. I attribute the scars of my marked body to the malgerian force of my imagination, but it’s not that I think I see what I don’t see, it’s that I think what I see and I see what the French do not see. (111; Brahic, Reveries, 69) She literally has a pain in the Algeria, which she also calls her “maladie Algérie” (Algerian disorder) (16; Brahic, Reveries, 7).17 Algeria has infected the author like a virus or snakebite, and it has punctured her because she is both an insider and an outsider who sees what others cannot. She absorbs what the French created and suffers from it. Like Cheula, who expressed that she was left with “les moindres faits quotidiens gravés en moi avec une force” (the smallest mundane details engraved in me with a force) (Hier est proche, 97), Cixous writes that her memory was first absolute magic (“Une virginité de mémoire,” 90) but has since become a force that punctures, infects, and scars. Algeria has become like a missing limb in which one still feels pains, tremors, and sensations, although one can plainly see the arm has been cut off.18 Cixous’s inseparable attachment to Algeria has fractured her. Her own amputations began because of her inherited separations from her parents contrasted with her incessant desire for Algeria: 220

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Tandis que maman, dit mon frère, a toujours été une amputée, souffrant de ne pas souffrir et atteinte d’afolie qui est la maladie de ceux qui ne connaissent pas la maladie. [. . .] Elle ne voyait pas, structurellement, que nous étions fous et malades du besoin de l’Algérie. While mother, says my brother, has always been an amputee, suffering from not suffering stricken with a-madness which is the sickness of those who do not know what sickness is. [. . .] She did not see, structurally, that we were crazed and ill with our need of Algeria (Rêveries, 57; Brahic, Reveries, 32). Cixous and her brother, irreparably infected by Algeria, were misunderstood even by their mother, who was perceived as more completely severed, and by their father, who passed away while they were young. This division caused the children to desire Algeria more fiercely, but the country, in turn, slipped further away. Unlike Cardinal, who needs to return and reaffirms her relationship to Algeria, Cixous vows to never return there because being in Algeria was a source of suffering for her: Je partirai je laisserai toute l’Algérie Clos-Salembier derrière moi, je ne reviendrai plus jamais, même en pensée, tout ce qui existe autour de moi ici, pensais-je en lisant, et dans l’exaltation de la lecture, aura disparu à jamais, je ne souffrirai plus jamais, je n’aurai plus mal aux aveugles, aux Arabes, aux culs- de-jatte, il n’y aura plus trace de chien, ni de lycée, ni de trolley, ni de bidonville, tout sera effacé, emporté, anéanti, pensais-je, mais de temps à autre je pensais le contraire, et parfois j’aimais ce que je haïssait en dépit de moi en dépit de tout. I will depart, I will leave all of Algeria Clos-Salembier behind me, I will never come back, even in my imagination, everything that surrounds me here, I used to think as I read, in the exaltation of reading, will vanish forever, I will never suffer again, I will never hurt for the blind, the Arabs, the cripples, there will be no trace of the dog, nor of the high school, nor of the trolley bus, nor of the shantytowns, everything will be erased, blown away, annihilated, I would think, 221

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but from time to time I thought the contrary, and sometimes I would love what I hated in spite of myself in spite of everything. (Rêveries, 79; Brahic, Reveries, 50) Cixous uniquely treats Algeria as a source of anguish, of unfulfilled desire that renders one ill by its inaccessibility. Rather than using a discourse of suffering to rejoin herself to community, Cixous approaches the pain of separation within the colony that differentiates her from her compatriots. She undoes her nostalgia all while recognizing that she cannot really escape it. Even though Derrida and Cixous were displaced in Algeria before being completely severed from their homeland, they both recognize its ghostliness. Cixous remembers Clos-Salembier and what it was like to enter into her French school: “Dans la cour intérieure, des choses invisibles m’effleurent, dès que je suis seule je suis touchée par les fantômes, je suis doublée double” (Invisible things brush past me in the inner courtyard, as soon as I am alone I am touched by the ghosts, I am doubled, double) (Rêveries, 79; Brahic, Reveries, 71). Her separations provide accessibility that both isolates and privileges her. She sees what others cannot, becomes a medium for the ghosts around her, and channels these spirits in her writing. As explained in chapter 6, when Cixous does return to Algeria and documents the voyage in Si près, she invites the ghosts to accompany and guide her. Although Cixous never minimizes the pain endured while being split apart or amputated in Algeria, through her writing of the past she is in many ways dispossessed of it. She returns without being able to return. She is haunted without being able to prove her haunting. Cixous, having been divinely inspired with several pages of nostalgic revelation during the night, awakes in the morning to find that her rewritten Algeria is missing. Its absence torments her: “Une douleur capable de rivaliser avec la douleur qui me tenait dans les fers. [. . .] On va mourir et il n’y a pas de mort. [. . .] Perdre mais pas tout à fait perdre” (Some kind of suffering able to vie with the suffering that held me clamped in irons. [. . .] One is going to die and there is no death. [. . .] To lose but incompletely 222

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to lose almost.) (Rêveries, 13; Brahic, Reveries, 5). She recognizes that her would-be prosthesis, her rewritten homeland, is lost and, furthermore, was only imagined. The ambiguity of being trapped between life and death, existence and nonexistence, possession and dispossession, plagues Cixous. Yet, as the author feels harassed by her Algerian past, it is even more difficult for her to integrate this past into her present as she never experienced the connection to Algeria in the way that many Pieds-Noirs did. Her nostalgia reflects back only onto absence, not the presence of Algeria. While evoking many of the same sentiments of Pied-Noir nostalgia writers, she manages to undo the typical prosthetic effect of writing that attempts to regain possession and control of the lost Algeria if only in imagination and on paper. Derrida addresses his attachments to and disconnections from Algeria in multiple works and often refers to his Nostalgérie (Tourner, 23; Jacques, 303). He participated in both real and filmic return voyages that demonstrate his uninterrupted ties to Algeria.19 Lee Morrissey points out how this connection influenced Derrida’s writing: This traumatic indirect relation to reference may account for the oftnoted elasticity, obscurity, generalization, a-historicism of Derrida’s work; it could be the result of a traumatic incomprehension or of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic event. For the problem of reference that haunts the reception of Derrida’s work is in fact the problem of reference that is indicative of a response to trauma, i.e., having the feeling of living in conditions where it was both difficult and therefore necessary, urgent, to say things that are not allowed. Derrida’s recent discussion of wanting “to render both accessible and inaccessible” could thus be read as the traumatized wish to speak, but not speak too much or too directly, about the trauma. (“Derrida,” 18) Derrida articulates the balance he lived in Algeria between attachment and separateness in both his philosophy and autobiography. This inbetween position is a sort of living in the nerve endings that once joined the limb to the body, and it allows him to touch the difficulties of possession and dispossession of the lost limb without reinhabiting it. 223

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In “Circonfession” (Circumfession), a set of footnotes accompanying Bennington’s text in Jacques Derrida, Derrida demonstrates his ghostly attachment to the land: “Je ne suis plus loin de toucher terre à la fin, elle me guette, elle attend que j’aie terminé, elle attend que je sorte, nous partirons ensemble, elle me donnait la main” (I am not far from touching ground in the end, it lies in wait for me, it waits for me to finish, it waits for me to go out, we leave together, it offers me its hand) (250). This passage, accompanied by a picture of Derrida and his niece, Martine, in front of his elementary school during his 1984 return, does not literally specify the ground as Algeria. Indeed, Derrida is not on the ground, but he is accompanied by it, in tandem to it, moving parallel, but not rejoined. The ghost of Algeria maintains its presence, but the author, in this statement, is not touching what is no longer there to be touched. He understands his separation. By displacing Algeria here and elsewhere in his writing, Derrida makes way for just that: the elsewhere. This elsewhere, as Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy use it in Tourner les mots, embodies displacement and emphasizes the action of returning rather than return itself (13). As in Cixous’s expression of her inability to arrive in Algeria, the authors demonstrate the ailleurs, or elsewhere, to be an unreachable destination, one that is not fixed or controlled. It moves and changes throughout time but continues to be imagined as the location of unattainable desire. Although he internalized his separation(s) from Algeria, Derrida is not immune from desiring a return. As discussed in the previous chapter, Derrida participated in Safaa Fathy’s film D’ailleurs, Derrida but was unable to make the journey to Algeria himself. Instead, he sent a delegation with precise instructions, yet Fathy states that what she filmed was “Sans corps” (Disembodied) (Tourner, 56). More than an amputation, the very body is missing. Here Derrida puts the cinematic prosthesis of this return into question: “Délégation de l’œil, donc, mandat optique, représentation armée d’une caméra, voilà qui rappelle et relance autrement la grande question de la prothèse” (The eye’s delegation, then, an optical mandate, representation armed with a camera, that’s what revives, in another way, the great question of the prosthesis) (Tourner, 224

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94). Derrida’s prosthesis (or the prosthetic Derrida in this case) is of a phantom nature in itself. It is disembodied, displaced, and unfixed, and it cannot rejoin him to what he no longer recognizes through the eyes of another. It can only help him momentarily reach that land. ENDURING PAINS Whereas Cixous and Derrida displaced, dislocated, and recognized the phantom nature of Algeria even while they lived there, others who have been cut off from Algeria are not able to relinquish control. As Krasner writes, “While the phantom limb is an illusion, it is one based on stability; the way we have always felt our bodies stubbornly endures” (“Doubtful Arms,” 223). To remain Pied-Noir, the Pieds-Noirs need to maintain their identity in relationship to Algeria. As Fiona Barclay explains, Haunted by the past, with no promise of progress or redemption, subjects are condemned to perpetual victimhood, or to eternal attempts at reparations. [. . .] Memory serves to attach this group to the past, a past which is by definition lost but which cannot be allowed to be lost definitively, at the price of the erasing of the identity which defines thousands of individuals. Remembrance in this context prevents the pieds noirs from laying to rest the ghosts of the past, because those ghosts are what defines them; without their haunting presence, the pieds noirs as such would simply cease to exist. (Writing Postcolonial France, 57) As long as they insist on touching the lost body, their grief will endure, their phantom limb pain will continue, and their writing will remain the prosthesis that allows them to move about in France. In Les Pieds-Noirs Cardinal expresses this enduring grief: “Je ressens toujours le même mal, la même douleur vive, là où, au plus profond de moi, je suis amputée de ma terre. C’est une douleur absurde et obstinée, qui ne cessera jamais car on ne peut pas séparer la terre du cœur” (I still feel the same ache, the same sharp pain, there where, in the deepest part of me, I am amputated from my land. It’s an absurd and obstinate pain that will never stop because no one can separate the land from the heart) (11). Cardinal will 225

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always keep her two heads, in spite of her fears of losing one, but the one born in Algeria becomes deformed, sometimes tangled, grotesque, and artificially sustained through repetition; it is her phantom limb. In Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the compulsion to repeat, he states, “A thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken” (“Analysis of a Phobia,” 122).20 The Pieds-Noirs cannot lay the ghost of Algeria to rest, nor do they want to, because they cannot recognize their limb as completely separate. In his article “Phantoms, Lost Limbs, and the Limits of the Body-Self,” Meuse cites the story of an amputee who had buried his limb but dug it up on multiple occasions to lay it again to rest in a new position. He does this in search of relief from his phantom-limb pain. This is effectively what the former French citizens of Algeria do in their writing. The Pieds-Noirs will sustain their connection to their homeland by repeating it, fixing it, readjusting it, repositioning themselves to find a comfortable location between their amputated selves and their former homeland. They will never arrive at laying the limb to rest because it is the reconnection that they seek, the nurturing of the lost part of themselves, the sustenance of the ghost. ACCOMMODATING GHOSTLY LIMBS Almost immediately after the Algerian War, Marie Cardinal was transposing Algiers onto other cityscapes in her novels. Leïla Sebbar has created collages of such impressions of Algeria in France and France in Algeria in numerous works. Hélène Cixous cannot stop herself from seeing a superimposed past on her present experience during a return voyage to Algeria, and Jacques Derrida receives filtered visions of a current Algeria played back to him in France, while only remnants of memory and recognition occur. For its former inhabitants, revisiting Algeria is also a process of Algeria revisiting them; Algeria is a homeland that will haunt them forever, an image or sentiment that residually recurs without relief, a phantom presence reminding them of loss. The haunting of Algeria in France appears as early as 1962 in Marie Cardinal’s first novel, Écoutez la mer. As the Pied-Noir woman Maria 226

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drives through Paris on her way to meet her German lover Karl, Algiers quietly overlays Paris. The city lights rush past her as Maria re- creates the experience of swimming in the Mediterranean Sea: Oh ! ma mer, ma grande mer. Aux carrefours, elles nagent comme des folles: les enseignes lumineuses, les vitrines des grands magasins, les réverbères, les feux rouges et orange et verts. Ce sont les jambes et les bras du crawl qui battent, qui barattent vivement. Oh ! ma mer bleue, tiède, douce. Oh! My sea, my great sea. At the intersections, they swim like crazy: the lighted signs, the department store windows, the street lamps, the red, yellow, and green traffic lights. These are the legs and the arms flying in the crawl, forcefully churning. Oh! My blue, warm, sweet sea. (45) As clips of Maria’s past come to the forefront, the present home becomes increasingly absent. Paris’s nightlife, in which the couple wanders, is overshadowed by childhood memories of gardening on the farm. Maria’s colonial past overlays her soon to be postcolonial present, much in the way the French originally assimilated Algeria during colonization.21 While Maria’s relationship with Karl disintegrates, so does the situation in her homeland: “Les nouvelles d’Algérie sont très mauvaises. Ils se battent là-bas, ils cassent tout ! Les nouvelles d’Algérie sont très mauvaises” (The news from Algeria is very bad. They are fighting there, they are breaking everything! The news from Algeria is very bad) (136). Although the homeland is being destroyed, the narrator sees her source of trauma as the inevitable loss of Karl. Maria becomes so deeply disturbed she chooses to flee. While with her husband in Montreal, she takes to the streets running and tries to recall the sidewalks in Algeria. She desperately tries to superimpose the past onto her present, to rejoin herself to her homeland. Eventually, she manages to recall an evening of celebration in her childhood. While lying on the ground in a public park in Montreal, Maria loses herself in Algeria by reinscribing her body into the country’s rhythm and traditional dance. In this memory, surrounded 227

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and watched by her Algerian servants, she abandons her body to the festive music; she faints, and the Algerians stretch out her body under a fragrant bush. In a foreign and separated present, Maria invites the phantom presence to overtake her.22 Reflecting on her past in Algeria, Marie-Claude San Juan writes in “Souk-Ahras, mes villes . . . ,” “Une ville n’est jamais réduite à une ville. Même à Paris j’habite parfois à Souk-Ahras, Alger, Oran, Oujda, ou Constantine, maintenant, par le jeu des surimpressions visuelles, des échos, des visages aussi. Il ne manque que les odeurs, la mer, et le ciel étoilé” (A town is never reduced to a town. Even in Paris, I sometimes live in SoukAhras, Algiers, Oran, Oujda, or Constantine, now, through the game of visual superimpositions, echoes, and faces, too. Only the odors, the sea, and the starry sky are missing).23 San Juan’s “game” of superimposed images is the expression of haunting many who once lived in Algeria experience. Cixous expresses the same superimposition of imagined pasts in Si près: “En mélangeant les lettres des noms des villes je me suis trouvée partout à la fois, très vite, j’ai assisté à des transplantations inédites, rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme” (While mixing letters of the names of cities I have found myself everywhere at once, very quickly, I have witnessed unprecedented transplantations, nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed) (56– 57; Kamuf, So Close, 37). For Cixous this blending, or “transplantation” as she calls it, is not a loss but a transformation. Although the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s completely cut off most Pieds-Noirs from Algeria and subsequently created a new generation of exiles, the specter of their homeland never left the community. In the last decade numerous groups of Pieds-Noirs have recommenced their pilgrimages to what they call home. These returns, especially as documented in film, demonstrate the community’s inability to lay the phantom homeland to rest. This is precisely what is witnessed in Henri Alleg’s filmed return to Algeria, Un rêve algérien: Le Retour d’Henri Alleg en Algérie (2003) by Jean-Pierre Lledo. The director and the witness return to the house where Alleg was tortured by French paratroopers during the French Algerian War. Alleg, who had been the director of the communist 228

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newspaper Alger Républicain and the author of his testimonial La Question, boldly approaches what he calls “cette triste maison de torture” (this sad house of torture) in El-Biar.24 He unabashedly engages with the Algerians who now live in the building, which was still under construction at the time of his torture.25 While Alleg asks the residents in French if this is the place he remembers, children are laughing happily in the background. A man holding a baby appears in a window; affirms, “Il faut pas oublier” (We mustn’t forget); and thanks Alleg for remembering. Alleg proceeds to enter the darkened stairwell of the building, climbing the stairs with Lledo and recounting the screams he would hear at night. Filmed almost entirely from the back, Alleg confronts the place and rediscovers his memories as he testifies not only about his own experience, but also about his friend Maurice Audin, who died in the torture house. Alleg is visibly emotional in both this place and in his later confrontation with the prison where he was held from the end of July 1957 until June 1960. His greatest emotional trembling occurs as he confronts the hatred and desire for vengeance he experienced, even if momentarily, when he believed his wife had been tortured as well. This sordid and painful return for Alleg, combined with many reunions with Europeans and Algerians he had known in Algeria and who remained there, contains iconic images often included in Pied-Noir return films. Alleg visits the grave of Henri Maillot, who had worked for Alger Républicain and fought alongside the Algerians during the war. “Mort pour l’Algérie sans être musulman ou arabe [Died for Algeria without being Muslim or Arab],” Lledo says. Maillot was the symbol of Lledo’s Algerian dream. The filmed visit to Clos-Salembier gives a classic view of the cemeteries, symbols of all ghosts left behind in Algeria, to which the Pieds-Noirs often make pilgrimages today. Finally, the return also becomes about Lledo as he revisits his childhood home with his friend Abdelkader (Kader) Smaïn. Lledo shares his early memories of Algeria with Alleg as they are joined by a curious current resident who claims to vaguely remember Lledo’s mother. Lledo produced another filmed pseudo-return in 2003, Algéries, mes fantômes (Algerias, my phantoms), based on his haunting by Algeria in 229

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France in 1998 and 1999.26 Lledo is of Jewish, Berber, and Spanish origins, and his immediate family stayed in Algeria after independence. He remained there until 1993, when he was condemned to death by Islamists during the Algerian Civil War for having created a committee against torture.27 Lledo’s search for his own ghosts of Algeria in France began in 1998, coincidentally on March 19 at the commemoration of the end of the Algerian War. His film ends just after France had won the World Cup in 1998. His camera lingers on two celebrating fans waving flags, one Algerian, one French. The flags intertwine and overlap. Lledo says in the final scenes, Seul un jeune de cette génération peut faire ce geste-là. Un geste qui allait rester dans la gorge de tous les nationalistes et tous les intégristes. Qu’ils étouffent ! Mes fantômes pouvaient retourner dans leur patrie. Et moi, quand retournerais-je dans la mienne ? A moins que la mienne ne soit la patrie des gens de passage. Only a youth of this generation could make that gesture. A gesture that would remain caught in the throats of all the nationalists and all the fundamentalists. Let them choke! My ghosts could return to their homeland. And me? When would I return to mine? Unless mine is a homeland of transients.28 Lledo’s search for his Algeria is complex and moving. The film’s opening scene at the Port of Marseille with his daughter, Naouel, explaining nostalgia as a manque (lack) frames Lledo’s movement as he travels all around France to talk about his films on Algeria. His encounters with multiple memories of Algeria—from French soldiers who admit to having seen Algerians tortured during the war, to Pieds-Noirs and Algerians who suffer from their exile, to the child of Harkis who struggles to understand her father’s shame— do not evoke nostalgic reunions. Lledo’s film becomes a prosthesis; it supplements the lost limb even while it assesses the many ways in which the phantom continues to haunt him and others. In this way, Algerias arise, innumerable versions of a past, each one severed at a different moment and in a different way. Each amputee, no 230

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matter the traumatic story of excision or the ways in which he copes, still carries the haunted limb within his memory, still feeling the pain from the now absent homeland. Those who manage to integrate their amputations into their identity learn to walk without their limbs and somehow write a more liberating yet equally troubling relationship to their ghostly past. For exiles such as Guiraud, Cixous, Derrida, and Lledo, the ghost that was recognized before their departure stays with them, but they ably maneuver in their art, overcoming the disabling or paralyzing effects of the past. Derrida lays the wound bare in Tourner les mots: Une mémoire apaisée n’a plus aucune chance, il ne lui reste qu’à s’endormir. Une mémoire harmonieuse, réconcilié, euphorique, une mémoire heureuse, ne n’imagine pas qu’elle puisse faire autre chose que se perdre. Autre façon de lier la mémoire au mal et son essence au remords. La blessure signe l’œuvre. An appeased memory no longer has a chance. The only thing left for it to do is to go to sleep. A harmonious, reconciled, euphoric memory, a happy memory cannot imagine that it can do anything other than be lost. Another way to tie memory to pain and its essence to remorse. The wound signs the work. (93) The ghosts of Algeria are still present, but the phantom limbs, even somewhat subdued by recognition of their troubling and uncontrollable nature, render these amputees only more aware of what remains: themselves. While the prosthesis allows an artificial connection to the ground, an amputee who acknowledges the falseness (or fiction, in Sebbar’s terms) of the unifying attachment can learn to maneuver without the limb, growing accustomed to the inescapable elsewhere that constantly rubs the wound.

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N OT E S

1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

1. INTRODUCTION This translation was first published on my blog, Pied Noir Identity. The Pieds-Noirs, however, are quick to point out that this amnesty was not extended to leaders of the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), which fought to keep Algeria French up to the end of the war. Several members were executed for treason in 1962 and 1963. See the 2011 film La Valise ou le cercueil, directed by Charly Cassan and Marie Havenel, for a complete analysis. As Derderian points out, Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire ironically makes no reference to the Algerian War in the making of French memory, although before this work Nora had independently written Les Français d’Algérie. See also Claude Liauzu’s “A War with France’s Past,” which gives a nuanced account of the complexities raised through the law, specifically the undermining of a 2001 law recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity. Liauzu states, “This law was intended to settle the relation between memory and history and between historians and the state. But the canonical historical memory that it seeks to impose is contrary not only to the freedom of thought at the heart of secularism but also to the conventions of academic research.” Stora has long been under attack in France for dominating the market of the Algerian War. See Cardinal’s posthumously published autobiography L’Inédit (116–17), cited later in this chapter.

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7. The Algerian War was never declared. In fact, French politicians and journalists continually referred to it as a “conflict” throughout its seven years. Bertrand Tavernier and Patrick Rotman deal with testimonials from this Guerre sans nom (war without a name) in their documentary film of the same title (1991). In June 1999, however, the French National Assembly officially recognized the “events in Algeria” as a war. 8. Pierre Daum proposes that the Pieds-Noirs did not have to leave Algeria in Ni valise ni cercueil (2012). His book has been heavily debated and publicly refuted by Pied-Noir historians such as Jean-Jacques Jordi, who had published Un silence d’Etat (2011) just prior to Daum’s book release. 9. Many Pieds-Noirs referred to themselves as “Algériens” during the colonial years. 10. Along with these two explanations, Pieds-Noirs Georges and Josiane Gomez give a long list of possible origins for the term, including a lesser-known version: “Pour d’autres, ils auraient donné ce nom aux déportés, expédiés en Algérie de 1848 à 1874, qui travaillaient jusqu’à mi-cuisse dans la fange noire de la plaine de la Mitidja, surnommée ‘le tombeau des Roumis’” (For others, they would have given this name to the deportees, sent to Algeria from 1848 to 1874, who worked up to their thighs in the black mud of the Plain of Mitidja, nicknamed the “tomb of the Roumis”) (“La Nostalgérie”). In Sebbar’s “Chronique rapatriée I: Oran 1962,” the Jewish Pied-Noir woman claims De Gaulle gave the name because of the soldiers’ black boots at the conquest. See Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France, in which these stories are republished. 11. The retroactive labeling of the Pieds-Noirs will be addressed in the following sections. 12. See Rosello’s Declining the Stereotype. 13. Georges and Josiane Gomez express this common desire in “La Nostalgérie”: “Peut être [sic] éprouvions-nous le besoin de nous rassembler sous une bannière commune, afin de conserver notre identité, malgré notre dispersion, et ne pas nous diluer dans la masse des Métropolitains que nous appelions les ‘Patos’” (Maybe we felt the need to gather under a common banner in order to conserve our identity, in spite of our dispersion, so as not to be diluted in the mass of Metropolitan French whom we called “Patos”). 14. See Musette’s Les Amours de Cagayous and Cagayous anitjuif or Jean Gabin’s portrayal of the title character in Pépé le Moko, a 1936 film about a gangster who was a Français d’Algérie. The role became the emblematic image of the Français d’Algérie to the French public. 15. Couffin and cabassette are both Pied-Noir terms referring to a picnic lunch.

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16. Charles-Robert Ageron points out in Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine that the influx of immigrants of non-French origin was almost simultaneous with the beginning of colonization: “De 1830 à 1840 avait été pratiquée une colonisation libre, pour mieux dire anarchique [. . .]. Des balancelles amenèrent d’Espagne, des Baléares, de Malte ou d’Italie un flot de pauvres hères. De plus des ouvriers parisiens, des émigrants allemands, suisses, furent officiellement introduits” (From 1830 to 1840 free, or better put, anarchical colonization was practiced [. . .]. Great shifts brought a flood of poor wretches from Spain, the Balearics, Malta, and Italy. In addition to Parisian workers, German and Swiss emigrants were also officially introduced) (23). Although the differences among different groups in Algeria were sustained throughout colonial years, there is no research of which I am aware that documents these social divisions, and this type of research would be counterproductive to the Pied-Noir goal of maintaining a unified identity in postcolonial France. 17. I use the term “Jeunes Pieds-Noirs” to refer to those who were infants and small children when they left Algeria. Some children of Pieds-Noirs born in France, however, refer to themselves as “Pieds-Gris.” Authors like Michel-Chich question whether this generation can be considered Pieds-Noirs. Although they have no memory of their own in Algeria, the past still haunts them through their parents’ memories. At the “40 ans l’exode” conference in Nîmes in June 2002, some Pieds-Noirs expressed dissatisfaction at their children’s disinterest in their Algerian heritage. In my many interviews with Pieds-Noirs, I have heard that their grandchildren are more curious about the past than are their children. This is undoubtedly a result of the disappearing stigma of being Pied-Noir, which was strongest in the 1960s and early 1970s, when much of the second generation was born and beginning school. See Baussant, Pieds-Noirs: Mémoires d’exils, for a detailed breakdown of labels for the Jeunes PiedsNoirs (442). 18. Historian David Lowenthal proposes, “Awareness of history likewise enhances communal and national identity, legitimating a people in their own eyes. ‘A collectivity has its roots in the past,’ in Simone Weil’s phrase” (Past, 44). 19. On the other hand, Jewish Pieds-Noirs Monique Ayoun and Jean-Pierre Stora include many Jews and Catholics in their collected interviews in Mon Algérie, which portrays a variety of Algerias. See Sarah Sussman’s 2002 dissertation, “Changing Lands, Changing Identities,” which deals specifically with Jewish Pieds-Noirs.

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20. In addition to these distinctions in the Pied-Noir community, during the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s (also known as la décennie noire), a new wave of exiles left Algeria for France. Among these exiles are Algerian Jewish film producer Jean-Pierre Lledo, who now lives in three countries—Algeria, France, and Israel—and Aziz Chouaki, an Algerian author and musician. In his short autobiographical story “Confiture et bobos,” Chouaki writes, “Beaucoup d’Algériens entre trente ans et plus dans ces années 2000, peuvent être considérés [. . .] comme des pieds-noirs musulmans à part entière” (Many Algerians thirty years old and older now in the 2000s can be considered [. . .] in their own right Muslim Pieds-Noirs) (72). 21. See the aforementioned definition in the Petit Larousse illustré (781). 22. Anne Lanta in Algérie ma mémoire also consistently uses the term retroactively. 23. Combining récit d’enfance and Nostalgérie, Lenoir’s work Mon Algérie tendre et violente is typical of Pied-Noir writing. Unlike some nostalgic writers, however, Lenoir tries to objectively criticize his compatriots for their racist attitudes and to understand the social structures in place in the colony (88). 24. A review of Lopez’s work, titled “Rencontre avec Robert Lopez à ‘Plaisir de Lire,’” states that Lopez offers “une voix qui interroge la grande et la petite histoire en s’appuyant sur une expérience individuelle à résonance universelle. Sans ressentiment mais pour accomplir le devoir de mémoire, pour réhabiliter toute une communauté qui, à un moment, a dû affronter incompréhension ou mépris à la suite de son exode” (a voice that interrogates both History and history by drawing on individual experience that resonates universally. Without resentment but in order to fulfill the duty to memory, to rehabilitate an entire community that, at a certain time, had to face misunderstanding or contempt after its exodus). 25. See Camille Brière’s angry account of the “Algériens-Français” in Ceux qu’on appelle les Pieds Noirs ou 150 ans de l’histoire d’un peuple, which includes personal commentary based on her background and experience with the loss of Algeria. 26. Running counter to Nostalgéric writing, and often within the same texts, is a discourse of courage as the authors express their confrontation of a painful past. Indeed, nostalgia is often ignored or denied. The insistence on the importance of their written endeavors conflicts with the nostalgic and possessive style with which the majority of Pied-Noir writers recount their pasts, and this tension results in written plaints remaining unaddressed by a wider French audience.

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27. Stora argues in his article, “Women’s Writing between Two Algerian Wars,” that it was Pied-Noir women who were first able to write their experience in Algeria after the loss of the colony, beginning with Francine Dessaigne’s Journal d’une mère de famille pied-noir (1962), Anne Loesch’s La Valise et le cercueil (1963), Marie Elbe’s Et à l’heure de notre mort (1963), and Marie Cardinal’s La Mule de corbillard (1963), although Cardinal was already writing about Algeria in her first novel, Écoutez la mer, in 1962 (Stora’s mistake). Stora proposes that this writing was necessary to attenuate the shock of losing the colony (84). 28. This is a sentiment Cardinal confirms in L’Inédit through lengthy discussions with another author (13–18, 125). 29. At the “Marie Cardinal: A Retrospective” conference at the University of Sheffield, UK, in January 2003, of the sixteen presenters, I was the only one to approach Cardinal’s work from a postcolonial perspective, although Colette Trout made reference in her keynote address “Cardinal and Us: ‘Quels Mots pour la dire’?” to the need for such postcolonial studies of Cardinal. My paper was met with some resistance as it criticized Cardinal’s repossession of her past. 30. In this interview with François Ewald, originally published in Magazine littéraire, Derrida retroactively labels himself as a Pied-Noir when recounting the memory of an influential teacher in Algeria. 31. In “Separation and Return in the Intellectual Work of the Pieds-Noirs,” I extensively situate the philosophical work of Derrida, Cixous, Camus, and Cardinal as directly related to their Algerian upbringing. 32. See also Lynne Huffer’s essay “Derrida’s Nostalgeria,” which examines Derrida’s Monolinguism of the Other as a complex demonstration of how the “myth of Algeria interfaces with the equally powerful myth of the French intellectual” (229). It is in Monolingualism of the Other that Derrida identifies his “nostalgeria.” 33. For an in-depth study of Sebbar’s use of layering in J’étais enfant en Algérie alongside Nicole Guiraud’s published journals from her exodus titled Algérie 1962, see my article, “Accumulated Testimony.” 34. Camus was exiled to France long before independence because of the political climate in Algeria. Written during World War II (1942), Le Mythe de Sisyphe was published when the Français d’Algérie were first separated from both Algeria and France. Many European Algerians served in France during the war and began experiencing nostalgia for their homeland. At the same time, Algeria was the only unoccupied zone of France during part of the war, and

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NOTES TO PAG ES 48–58

those who normally made ritual voyages to France were then unable to do so. These two separations catalyzed notions of independence for both the colonizing and indigenous citizens of Algeria. 2. PIEDS- NOIRS 1. Email from Bernard Coll, secretary general of Jeune Pied-Noir ( JPN), to JPN Information listserv on February 22, 2008. He repeats this language in other communications to the group, and it has since become a tag line to the weekly JPN Newsletter: “Sauvons la communaute harkis/pieds-noirs d’un genocide memoriel” (Let’s save the Harki and Pied-Noir community from a memorial genocide) (no. 243, September 17, 2011). 2. Critical works by Hureau, Martini, and Savarèse do not directly explore the use of repetition in Pied-Noir works. Hureau dismisses the need to address repetitions in Pied-Noir memory as follows: “Évoquer les répétitions, les bégaiements de l’histoire pour les confirmer ou les infirmer tourne actuellement au cliché. L’histoire pied-noir n’a pas disposé de la durée nécessaire au déclenchement de ces vices de style ou de ces troubles d’élocution” (Evoking repetitions, history’s stammerings, in order to confirm them or invalidate them, is now starting to become cliché. Pied-Noir history does not have the necessary length to resolve stylistic vices or problems of elocution) (Mémoire, 143). 3. Luc Demarchi writes in a review of San Juan’s book that the author’s goal is to “sauvegarder notre mémoire de l’oubli, expliquer qui nous sommes et ce que nous avons vécu” (save our memory from forgetting, to explain who we are and what we have lived) (“Pieds-Noirs”). For San Juan, however, “l’objectif est de déclencher des interrogations, de tenter de casser des préjugés, de présenter une culture de peuple (entre deux rives), de donner envie de lire des écrivains, de découvrir des artistes, et, à travers eux, de mieux connaître une réalité collective qui souffre d’ignorances et d’amalgames” (the goal is spark questions, to try to break the prejudices, to introduce a culture of people [between two shores], to make you want to read the writers, to discover the artists, and, through them, to better know a collective reality that suffers from ignorances and amaglams) (Pieds-Noirs, 4– 5). 4. This citation is resonant with Cardinal’s use of the Cathédrale Madelonne, to be examined in chapter 3. 5. See Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy’s Tourner les mots and Hélène Cixous’s Si près, analyzed in chapter 6, for examples of movement in deconstructed return narratives.

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6. The majority of French testimonials are from conscripted soldiers who fought in the war. There is little motivation for others to write about Algeria or Pied-Noir integration unless they are somehow intimately connected to the community or to the country. 7. According to Eldridge, The ability of the pieds-noirs to manipulate the past in this way was initially facilitated by the silence of the harki community who, as a forgotten and disempowered minority, were unable to mobilize a collective memory of their own to challenge externally generated narratives. However, it was also the case that the silence more generally surrounding France’s colonial past, especially with respect to Algeria, benefited the pieds-noirs because it meant that there were few dissenting voices that associations needed to deal with, leaving the way clear for them to construct their own, internally directed version of the past. (“Blurring the Boundaries,” 133) 8. It is estimated that as many as 210,000 Harkis were active in 1958 and less than 100,000 were expatriated to France after the war. Those who remained in Algeria were subject to discrimination, acts of retribution, torture, and murder, whereas those who moved to France were subject to prison-like conditions in camps or welcome centers (Eldridge, “Blurring the Boundaries,” 126). 9. What becomes obscured in the process is that the Pied-Noir is not necessarily more successful at remembering the past; he simply repeats it more frequently and ardently. 10. A similar scene appears at the end of Cardinal’s first novel, Écoutez la mer, but the narrator recounts it as a celebration of the end of the harvest (152– 59). 11. An effective counterexample of this strategy arises in Hélène Cixous’s novel Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, in which the family’s beloved servant “Aïcha” is discovered later on to have a different name. See chapter 4 for a closer analysis. 12. For example, Les Pieds-Noirs is the history of the Français d’Algérie up to 1954 because the author prefers not to approach the unspeakable in the war. 13. In Durham’s The Contexture of Feminism, Cardinal’s repetitions are read as “a model of women’s culture, of female reality” (57). 14. Although Cardinal is credited as the author of this book, some captions written by Pied-Noir authors Béatrix Baconnier, Albert Bensoussan, Francine Dessaigne, and Janine de la Hogue accompany the pictures. 15. In “Autobiography as De-Facement” Paul De Man writes, “But just as we seem to assert that all texts are autobiographical, we should say that, by the

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16. 17.

18.

19.

same token, none of them is or can be. The difficulties of generic definition that affect the study of autobiography repeat an inherent instability that undoes the model as soon as it is established” (70). These repetitions are considered as a practice in chapter 4. Todd Shepard explains in “Pieds-Noirs, Bêtes Noires” that initially on the arrival of the Pieds-Noirs, the French press focused on ensuring acceptance of “French Algerians” in France while the readers were actively criticizing the Pieds-Noirs (159). Facebook has hosted numerous public and private Pied-Noir groups such as Pieds-Noirs!! Non c’est pas une mauvaise graine, Une main devant une main derrière, Pieds-Noirs d’AFN 2012, Recensement Pieds-Noirs, Union Rapatriés, and Vous savez que vous avez des grands-parents pieds-noirs. These groups are actively used to communicate political and social movements in the community, as well as to share memories and promote new cultural works, such as films and books. See my chapter, “Unspoken Algeria,” in The Unspeakable for a thorough study of four diverging visual representations of violence suffered in Algeria. See also Danielle Dahl’s memoir, Sirocco, in which she recounts her childhood in Algeria with great love while not sparing the violent details of the war. Sirocco is the first Pied-Noir autobiography to be written in English.

3. FIXING THE PAST 1. Psychoanalytic theory, and more specifically, Freudian psychoanalysis, is highly relevant to this study as Cardinal herself underwent seven years of therapy from a Freudian approach: “Or j’ai découvert que j’étais une femme, ce que cela veut dire ‘être une femme’, grâce à la psychanalyse la plus freudienne qui soit” (But I’ve discovered that I am a woman, what it means “to be a woman,” thanks to the most Freudian type of analysis there is) (Autrement dit, 10; Cooper, In Other Words, 6). 2. As Butler points out, “The consideration of repetitive pleasures might well extend beyond those experiences of repetition that are clearly compulsive” (“Pleasures,” 273). She then points to the pleasures of jokes, music, and poetry, which rely on alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme. 3. See the exploration of the fictive return in chapter 5. 4. Again the elastic image appears: the Pieds-Noirs are somewhere in between the past and the present, nearer and further as is convenient. 5. Cardinal personally recognized the dangers of possession in Autrement dit: “Je suis tellement persuadée que le fait de posséder est un cancer que je me

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NOTES TO PAG ES 83–92

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

demande si je ne vais pas découvrir une blessure ignoble là où je crois qu’est le sol bien-aimé où s’enfoncent mes racines” (I am so persuaded that the fact of possession is a cancer, that I ask myself if I will not discover a filthy wound there, in the beloved land where my roots are sunk) (16; Cooper, In Other Words, 11). At the same time, the first several pages of Autrement dit are a near repetition of La Mule de corbillard. Salvador Dali said, “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant” (Secret Life, 38). As in Cardinal’s other works, when she makes a reproduction in her text, it is often far more intense and detailed than when she recounts a recollection. Pierre Landrieux could also be read as a reproduction of Cardinal’s father, who came to Algeria from France under similar conditions. The ability to reproduce the violent loss is a means of gaining control over the trauma. By performing the loss herself, Madeleine is no longer victimized. The land is in fact returned to its rightful owner, but the narrator has managed to turn the story in such a way that this loss is represented as a devastating injustice. This echoes the Pieds-Noirs’ discourse about their lost land, which is still commonplace today. Cardinal wrote this work before completing her psychotherapy and, thus, before writing Les Mots pour le dire and Autrement dit, in which she places great importance on the psychological process of remembering and of healing through memory as well as of remembering Algeria properly in its present context. While Cardinal makes a sincere effort in later works to not repossess her land, she is never quite able to free herself from this process of possession through writing. This is something she admits in Autrement dit (16). Les Mots pour le dire is widely regarded as an autofictional novel, and Cardinal supports this in Autrement dit: “D’accord, j’ai vécu tout ce que vit la femme du livre, mais je l’ai vécu au jour le jour. Si j’avais pris des notes quotidiennes à cette époque et que j’aie publié ces notes une fois la psychanalyse terminée, cela aurait donné un document sur la psychanalyse. Mais ce n’est pas le cas” (Agreed, I lived all that the woman in the book lived, but I lived it from day to day. If I had made daily notes then and had published these notes once the analysis was finished, that would have been a document on psychoanalysis. But that isn’t the case) (27; Cooper, In Other Words, 20). See Camus’s reference to Sisyphus’s nostalgia as sa chose (his thing) in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (167).

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NOTES TO PAG ES 92–97

13. Brackets indicate my translation of original text cut from the published translation. 14. It is possible to read the love relationship between Pierre and Madeleine as a representation of the relationship between France and Algeria that was lost. Furthermore, the cathedral could be read as a metaphor for the Pied-Noir monuments (tombs, shrines, etc.) lost when Algeria won its independence. 15. Although she tries repeatedly to accept Algeria’s continuation without her and she openly recognizes she can longer possess the land, Cardinal also continually slips back into calling it her country and reproducing it in a way that suits her needs. Autrement dit begins with a long analysis of her conflict between the desire to return and the need to accept Algeria’s independence. 16. Although Cardinal eventually discovers a softer side of her mother, she more often reproduces her mother as Clytemnestra in works such as Le Passé empiété and Autrement dit: “Ainsi par ma mère, qui participe plus que toute autre personne à mon squelette—non seulement parce qu’elle est ma mère mais parce qu’elle était terrible, tour à tour Clytemnestre, Electre et Iphigénie—par elle, je n’ai pas de patrie (puisque je n’ai plus le droit d’appeler ainsi l’Algérie) et pas de nom” (So, from my mother, who participates more than anyone else in my upbringing—not only because she is my mother but because she was terrible, Clytemnestra, Electra and Iphigenia by turns— from her I have no motherland [because I no longer have the right to call Algeria so], and no name) (Autrement dit, 22; Cooper, In Other Words, 16). These reproductions are not likely actual memories or authentic confrontations with the past, but instead they are strategic in dealing with absence. Le Passé empiété, an investigation into Cardinal’s father’s past, was published in 1983, well after her mother’s death. This work carefully reconstructs her father’s life in Algeria and serves to fill another great personal absence. 17. Chapter 2 analyzes how the discourse of bravery functions to produce a sense of innocence. 18. Markers are never specifically given, and the named characters have only European lineages. The narrator labels Pierre Landrieux a foreigner, but only because he comes from northern France. Among the numerous hints that Madeleine might be a Française d’Algérie, however, is her nickname, “Madelon,” given by her lover Pierre (La Mule, 40). “Quand la Madelon” is a famous song from World War I with lyrics by Louis Bousquet (1870–1941) and music by Camille Robert, who was coincidentally born in Batna, Algeria. According to a letter from Jean Bayol, printed in the Algérianiste (no. 3 [June 15, 1985]: 71–72) and quoted in “La Madelon était pied-noire,” Bousquet wrote

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NOTES TO PAG ES 101–106

the song for a girl named Madeleine whom he met in Batna while serving in the Sixth Battalion. The lyrics bear out a strikingly similar story to the love affair between Madeleine and Pierre in La Mule. La Madelon, a sweet, young, and light-footed servant, lived in a house with ivy-covered walls in a forest. Under an arbor, she served the soldiers who all wanted to kiss and marry her, but Madelon instead prefers to love them all and continue serving them wine. 4. PLEASURES OF A PAINFUL PAST 1. Furthermore, Cardinal’s statement to her interviewer, Ysabel Saïah, is erroneous; she almost never writes of a woman living in a ravaged land, except in vague references to violence her narrators may have witnessed. 2. “Les tentatives d’avortement de sa mère sur elle sont répétées inconsciemment et de façon destructrice par ce flot incontrôlable, jusqu’au moment où, après sa psychanalyse, la narratrice peut se libérer du traumatisme de cette expérience en la confiant à du papier, en la restructurant” (Her mother’s attempts to abort her are unconsciously repeated in a destructive manner by this uncontrollable flood, until the moment when, after her psychoanalysis, the narrator can be liberated from the trauma of this experience by confiding it in paper, by restructuring it) (Donadey Roch, “Répétition,” 569). 3. Cardinal’s daughter, Bénédicte Ronfard, refers to her as Moussia in her epilogue to Au pays de mes racines, which is titled “Au pays de Moussia.” In Les Pieds-Noirs Cardinal’s mother calls her Moussia (23), and in Au pays Cardinal writes, “Il n’a pas d’âge. Moi non plus, je suis la Moussia” (It is ageless. Me too; I am the Moussia) (151). 4. Adding another layer of distance, the teenaged Moussia is recounting something that had happened to her several years prior, giving the character her own time to process her mother’s act before sharing. 5. The repetitions herein are multiplied as Les Mots pour le dire is supposed to be the written version of a real psychotherapy that Cardinal underwent for seven years. Each written part of the book, then, had already been orally interpreted before it was repeated in writing—making the psychotherapy itself a répétition for the literary work. 6. In Les Pieds-Noirs Cardinal describes la rue Michelet: “Il y avait bien des manières de ‘faire la rue Michelet’, bien des manières de cambrer les reins [. . .], bien des manières d’onduler des fesses, à l’heure de la promenade, entre le boulevard Saint-Saëns et la Grande Poste. Un peu trop et votre réputation était faite, vous étiez ‘une fille de rien’, ‘une Marie couche-toi là’, une de celles

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NOTES TO PAG ES 112–120

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

dont ‘il n’y a que le tramway qui ne lui a pas passé dessus’, ‘une écervelée’, comme disait plus abstraitement la directrice de mon pensionnat” (There were many ways to “walk Michelet Street,” many ways to arch your back [. . .], many ways to sway your butt while strolling between the Boulevard Saint-Saëns and the Central Post Office. A little too much and your reputation was made, you were a “girl of no virtue,” “a loose girl,” one of those whom “only the tramway hasn’t mounted,” “a scatterbrain,” like the director of my boarding school said so abstractly) (27–29). Here the sexuality of the street is clearly described near the Central Post Office, which is omnipresent when Cardinal writes the abortion avowal scene. The Rampe Bugeaud is pictured on the website Algéroisement . . . vôtre and is accompanied by the following caption: “La rampe Bugeaud. Elle commençait à quelques pas des escaliers de la grande Poste. Descendait en pente douce vers la rue Colonel Colonna d’ Ornano et les escaliers de la rue Joinville” (The Rampe Buguead. It began a few feet from the steps to the Central Post Office. Descending in a slight slope toward Rue Colonel Colonna d’Ornano and the steps of Rue Joinville). Cardinal also repeats these themes in a novel published between Les Mots pour le dire and Au pays de mes racines titled Une vie pour deux in 1978. This passage is echoed in Cixous’s description of her family’s servant Aïcha (Rêveries, 90). The blood zigzagging down the street as described in Écoutez la mer (144–45) is echoed here in the comforting golden zigzags of the world. Here and throughout the end of Au pays de mes racines, Cardinal promises to return to Algeria. If she did make another return voyage during her lifetime, however, it is undocumented in her writing. LaPlanche and Pontalis examine this process as the double play of pleasure and displeasure (plaisir et déplaisir) (Vocabulaire, 333). Fort is the German word for “gone” and Da translates as “there.” Effectively, the child is playing on disappearance and return. Cardinal continues her repetitive mechanisms because, in addition to the pleasure factor, they sustain the nostalgia required for Pied-Noir identity. Through repetition, Pieds-Noirs are able to master the past and take part in the “primary urge toward self-preservation” (Butler, “Pleasures,” 263), but they must continually repeat the pain, trauma, and loss to maintain their role as victim. Cardinal says in Autrement dit, “Tu sais, on ne peut pas brutaliser quelqu’un qui a suivi une analyse. Ou alors c’est que ça lui plait d’être brutalisé” (You

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NOTES TO PAG ES 122–133

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

know, you can’t bully someone who has been through a psychoanalysis. Unless of course they want to be bullied) (26; Cooper, In Other Words, 19). Cixous’s position is not necessarily based on her stance as pro–Algerian independence. She was ironically advantaged in understanding her dispossession of Algeria because of her social class and religion. A Jewish family, the Cixous were of lower status than the French bourgeois. Cixous, having grown up during the Vichy years, was particularly marked by separation and did not feel French. In Les Rêveries she addresses the resulting inability to “possess” or “arrive” in Algeria. In “Pieds nus,” a short story about Jewish difference in Algeria, Cixous also explains, “Je connus la paix des pauvres et l’exultation des hors-la-loi. Sans patrie, sans affreux héritage, avec une poule sur le balcon, nous étions incroyablement heureux comme des sauvages absous de pêcher” (I knew the peace of the poor and the exultation of the lawless. Without a homeland, without horrid heritage, with a chicken on the balcony, we were unbelievably happy, like savages absolved of sin) (63). Cixous effectively separates herself from other Algerian-born French citizens. Beverley Bie Brahic, the translator, uses the name “Comer” for “le Venant,” but I prefer “Coming.” Submission is one of the main themes in Mauger’s article on repetition and practice. He proposes that one submits him or herself to what is repeated and to the one to whom one repeats in the psychoanalytic practice (“Pratiques,” 12). Cixous’s repeated symbols in conversations with her brother fall into the psychoanalytic practice. Cixous further distances herself from the Dog by not depicting him as the Jewish messiah but instead likening him to the son of God in the Christian tradition. Cixous ostensibly ignores the remainder of Job’s story, in which he regains all he lost twofold in reward for his faith. See Alison Rice’s analysis of Aïcha as “fully woman” and representative of “Algeria itself,” in “La Terre Maternelle” in Polygraphies (67). Marie Cardinal writes frequently of Barded and Youssef, Anne Lanta evokes N’Bia in Algérie ma mémoire, and Leïla Sebbar calls her family’s servant “A.” in “Sur sa culotte bleue en toile à matelas.” It is not clear whether Algerian men were renamed in their community. See chapter 7 for a more thorough study of Cixous’s expressions of pain and Algeria.

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5. (RE)TURNING TO ALGERIA 1. Feeling like foreigners in their homeland is one of the Pieds-Noirs’ most often expressed fears and one that is swiftly removed in written return narratives. 2. In a personal interview with a Pied-Noir right-wing politician in NîmesCourbassac on June 2, 2011, he told me that his return voyage to Algeria absolutely cured him of his nostalgia as he felt that the beauty of the country was being destroyed. He also claimed that anyone who told me otherwise was not being honest. 3. See chapter 3 for a thorough study of the stability created. 4. For more information on the Harkis, see chapter 2 and also Susan Ireland’s chapter in The Unspeakable, titled “Trauma and Imprisonment in Works Representing the Harkis,” which explores the traumatic memory of the Harkis’ experience in France. The Harkis are often invited to participate in Pied-Noir ceremonies and conferences, and the Pieds-Noirs often express great sympathy for the Harkis, who were left behind in Algeria and tortured or killed. Some Harkis and their children participate alongside the PiedsNoirs in their fight against forgetting. See Claire Eldridge’s study on this topic, “Blurring the Boundaries between Perpetrators and Victims.” 5. See chapter 1, which explains how the return to France gave the Pieds-Noirs their name. 6. The only known work dealing with this psychological trauma is Danielle Michel-Chich’s Déracinés, in which the author includes Pied-Noir testimonials of the trauma accompanied by sparse analysis. In the joint autobiography Quatre Soeurs (2001) by Frédérique Boblin, Eve Calo, Nelly Collet, and Fabienne Rozotte, the four sisters explain their psychological and emotional damage and demonstrate it to be related to their exile. See my chapter, “The Words That Say It,” in Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives for a detailed analysis of this book. 7. See Lowenthal’s “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t” for a summary of scathing criticism of nostalgia and an interesting reevaluation of the value of nostalgia in today’s economy. 8. Cited from a talk given by Calixthe Beyala at the University of Michigan, Department of Romance Languages, on March 10, 2003. Susan Schwartz supports this idea in her article “Reconfiguring the Colonized Body,” when she writes, “The revolutionary subject’s identity is contingent on his incorporation into a community of fighters identified with Revolution” (131). 9. See Le Mythe de Sisyphe: “le but est atteint” (the purpose is achieved) (165; O’Brien, Myth of Sisyphus, 97). Relief is also demonstrated in Camus’s text.

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NOTES TO PAG ES 149–155

10. This process is apparent in Cardinal’s inability to confront Algeria until she has physically left Algeria and returned to France. She can only articulate her relationship to Algeria while she is elsewhere. 11. Thanks to funding from Kansas State University, I also attended the pilgrimage at Notre Dame de Santa Cruz in 2007 and 2011. Over the years the main activities have remained the same, but the mood of the crowd was much more subdued during the rainy 2011 gathering in Nîmes-Courbessac. Many of my Pied-Noir contacts were absent from this event as they instead planned to make the trek for the fiftieth anniversary in 2012. 12. This remark was made on June 22, 2002, after I had expressed to him my feeling that I had landed on another planet as they each broke into their local Algerian dialects. Bartolini said, “En fait, c’est nous les extraterrestres” (Actually, we’re the extraterrestrials). 13. This need to have connections in the Pied-Noir community to reestablish a certain social structure is developed in Michèle Baussant’s Pieds-Noirs, in the section “La mémoire et sa transmission.” 14. Although I am only interested here in Nostalgérie written by Pieds-Noirs, a France 2 report explored the Nostalgérie of the Harkis, describing it as follows: “A l’occasion de la visite en France du Président Algérien Abdelaziz Bouteflika, la communauté Harkis (estimée aujourd’hui à 150.000 personnes) a beaucoup de mal à accepter le refus, une nouvelle fois signifiée, d’un droit au retour en Algérie” (On the occasion of the Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s visit in France, the Harki community [currently estimated at 150,000 people] is struggling to accept the refusal, once again affirmed, of the right to return to Algeria). 15. Janine de la Hogue proposes a different origin for the term: “Ce terme de ‘nostalgérie’, si émouvant, a été sinon créé du moins utilisé pour la première fois par le docteur Guignon qui l’avait pris comme titre de l’un de ses livres” (This term “nostalgérie,” which is so moving, was if not created at least used for the first time by Doctor Guignon, who used it as a title for one of his books) (“Livres,” 121). La Hogue is likely referring to Gaston Guignon’s autobiographical book Nostalg . . . érie, published in 1971 in Salon de Provence, France. Jean Brager’s dissertation, “Le Minaret des souvenirs,” also attributes the term to Dr. Guignon, who was “responsable d’observations cliniques de Pieds-Noirs atteints de dépression, victimes de neurasthénie chronique allant jusqu’à des pensées suicidaires est considéré comme le père du néologisme, fusion des deux termes ‘nostalgie’ et ‘Algérie’” (in charge of clinical observations of depressed Pieds-Noirs,

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NOTES TO PAG ES 156–160

16. 17. 18.

19.

victims of chronic neurasthenia, all the way up to suicidal thoughts, he is considered the father of the neologism, which is a fusion of the two terms “nostalgia” and “Algéria”) (76). I discovered Marcel Fabri’s poem thanks to Georges and Josiane Gomez, who explained the origins on a now nearly defunct website for the Amicale des Anciens d’Attatba titled La Nostalgérie. Geoffrey Bennington’s “Curriculum Vitae” in Jacques Derrida also notes that Derrida often refers to his Nostalgérie. See also Le Bateau du retour by Jean-Pierre Etchebeheity. Hureau titles this section of her text “Les Paradis perdus” (lost paradises), which allows for different versions of the same paradise. She clearly states that the paradises expressed are not necessarily shared by all Pieds-Noirs: “Il ne traduit que la vision de ceux qui ont une propension à s’exprimer. Les minorités pieds-noirs, provenant des villes de faible importance ou de l’intérieur, sont maintenant trop dispersées pour former une communauté cohérente, propre à imprimer sa touche particulière à l’esquisse stéréotypée de l’Algérie” (It only reflects the vision of those who had a propensity to express themselves. The Pied-Noir minorities, coming from smaller towns or from the country’s interior, are now too dispersed to form a coherent community, to add their own special touch to the stereotypical sketch of Algeria) (Mémoire, 81). Eric Savarèse sees Nostalgérie as a second moment in Pied-Noir writing. Although I do not distinguish Pied-Noir writing by periods because many Pieds-Noirs still write Nostalgérie today and others have written sound histories since the time of the war, Savarèse writes, “La production littéraire des Pieds-Noirs en atteste : les premiers écrits, rares mais virulents, sont produits sur le ton de l’accusation et de la désignation des coupables de leur exil ; les textes suivants correspondent au temps de la Nostalgérie, un temps où les Pieds-Noirs cherchent refuge dans un passé récréé ; enfin, seuls les ouvrages les plus récents, postérieurs au travail de deuil, sont assez largement édités, sans doute parce qu’ils sont mieux acceptés par le grand public” (The literary production of the Pieds-Noirs proves this: the earliest writing, rare but virulent, was produced with an accusatory tone that points out the guilty party for their exile; the following texts correspond to a period of Nostalgérie, a time when the Pieds-Noirs were looking for refuge in a re-created past; finally, only the most recent works, post-mourning, are fairly widely published, undoubtedly because they are better accepted by the general public) (Invention, 34).

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NOTES TO PAGES 160–178

20. The narrator’s next reflection is similar, “Ma ville, mon berceau, ma belle parfumée d’épices et de pisse” (My town, my cradle, my beauty scented with spice and piss) (Cardinal, Amour, 12). 21. The film Outremer by Brigitte Rouän offers a clear representation of this growing difference and deference to the French across generational lines and the idea that “On est plus français que les Français !” (We are more French than the French!). The eldest sister, Zon, is depicted as a patriotic French woman who deeply admires her motherland while fully believing in Algeria. The youngest sister, Gritte, is, however, anti-French and clearly pro–Algerian independence. Although she is the only of the three sisters to actually be transplanted to France, she is also the only one who actively resisted the French system during her life in Algeria. 22. Bidasse is a familiar word meaning soldier. “Squaddie” is the British equivalent. 23. See David Carroll’s article “Camus’s Algeria,” in which the author clearly demonstrates Camus’s position as favoring Algerian independence and returning the land to the “wretched of the earth,” which included poor Arabs and French people (547). 24. Pierre Daum insists that the Pieds-Noirs were able to remain in Algeria and that 200,000 of them became Algerian citizens. See Ni valise ni cercueil. 6. REAL RETURNS 1. In her preface Michel-Chich says that she is making a return of her own by collecting the testimonials: “Cette enquête est donc un voyage au pays d’un chez-moi que je n’ai guère connu mais dont j’ai des souvenirs. Un pays pour moi lointain mais que mes parents pleurent. Compatir et comprendre. Ecouter l’histoire des autres en découvrant la mienne. Tenir un micro et trouver un miroir” (This study, then, is a journey to the country of a home that I barely knew but from which I have memories. A faraway country for me but a country my parents cry over. Sympathize and understand. Listen to the story of others while discovering my own. Holding a microphone and finding a mirror) (Déracinés, 11). 2. “Le sentiment que quelque chose pourrait avoir changé en Algérie, par rapport aux débuts de l’indépendance, l’inspire” (The feeling that something could have changed in Algeria, since the beginning of independence, inspires it) (Hureau, Mémoire, 92). 3. Because she is afraid to return by herself, she asks her youngest daughter, Bénédicte Ronfard, to accompany her (her third child is the only one who had not been to Algeria, and she adds her own travelogue at the end of Au pays

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NOTES TO PAG ES 181–196

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

titled “Au pays de Moussia”). Hélène Cixous similarly invites her mother to join her on her return to Algeria but instead is accompanied by phantomlike presences from the real and imagined Zohra Drif to the memories of her friend Jacques Derrida and her father, Georges Cixous. See also chapter 4 for a brief analysis of this refusal to return to the farm. The experience of interrupted return to a colonial past is committed to the screen in Claire Denis’s 1988 film Chocolat. Denis’s main character, France, makes a return to her native Cameroon, and although she manages to return to her past through recounting her memories, she never arrives at her actual home, the location of those events. Although not explicitly, in this case France acknowledges the displacement of the past. Brackets indicate my translation. The last sentence was omitted from the published translation. See Renée Léonardi-Laigaisse’s Nous n’avions rien compris, in which she writes, “Depuis notre départ, tout ne va pas pour le mieux chez eux, alors, ils viennent chez nous. La générosité de la France n’est-elle pas légendaire?” (Since our departure, nothing is going better for them, so they come to us. Isn’t France’s generosity legendary?) (63). This fear runs contrary to Cardinal’s lengthy passage in Les Pieds-Noirs in which she explains “la drague” (trawling or flirting) on the Rue Michelet as an important part of her community’s culture. Trigg concludes, “What is experienced is less a direct fragment of a broken narrative, and more a murmur of the place where that narrative once existed” (“Place of Trauma,” 99, Trigg’s emphasis). Nina Bouraoui evokes Roman ruins at both the beginning and end of Garçon manqué. Today Tipasa is also the site of a stele to Camus with a quote from “Noces à Tipasa” engraved on it. This paragraph is also reproduced in Cardinal’s Les Pieds-Noirs to introduce the second portion of the book, “Terre et hommes” (85). Derrida cannot return for the fear of risking his life. One of his Algerian friends was assassinated for organizing a conference in Algeria in Derrida’s honor (Derrida and Fathy, Tourner, 94). Derrida did return to Algeria before this film, however, in 1962, 1971, and 1984 (Derrida and Fathy, Tourner, 89; Derrida and Bennington, Jacques, 305). In Jacques Derrida by Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, there is a photograph of the school with the following caption: “La façade du lycée de Ben Aknoun, un ancien monastère, près d’El-Biar. J.D. y entre en sixième, en est

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NOTES TO PAG ES 203–209

expulsé l’année suivante (octobre 1942) à l’application des lois antijuives. Le lycée est transformé en hôpital militaire à l’arrivée des Alliés. J.D. y est réintégré après la guerre et y finit ses études secondaires” (The facade of the Ben Aknoun high school, an old monastery, near El-Biar. J.D. started there in sixième and was expelled the following year [October 1942] when the anti-Semitic laws were imposed. The high school was transformed into a military hospital when the Allies arrived. J.D. was reintegrated there after the war and finished his secondary education there) (59). Two pictures of Derrida’s first home in El-Biar are also included in this text (400–401). Fathy used these images, taken during Derrida’s 1984 return to Algeria, to find the house during her visit in 1999. Cixous later uses Derrida’s photos to find his home in Si près. The return on behalf of another, living or dead, is likewise the goal of the film Saïda . . . On revient ! 7. RETURN OF ALGERIA 1. Although it is too often leaned on as an excuse and plays into a discourse of victimization, part of the amputation is the result of France’s slow and inadequate response to the traumas of the Algerian War. 2. Cardinal did not leave during the height of the war or at independence, and she did not leave because her life was in danger. She and her husband lived in various countries as educators before she settled in Paris in the early 1960s. 3. While the Pieds-Noirs estimate that only 3 percent of them were from important, long-standing, landowning families, or grands colons, Cardinal’s family is one of those that had been in Algeria for more than a century and operated a farm in addition to owning city homes and country villas. 4. Pied-Noir novelist Albert Bensoussan suggests in “La Tomate dans la tête” that suffering strengthened communal identity: “Parce qu’ils ont souffert dans leur chair, parce qu’ils ont l’expérience du perdu et de l’abandonné, ils ont eu à cœur de prouver qu’ils valaient mieux que ce que sous-entendaient les reniements, les injures et les lâchetés” (Because they suffered in their flesh, because they have the experience of loss and abandonment, they had it in their hearts to prove that they were worth more than what was implied in the denial, the insults, and the cowardice) (75). 5. See my chapter in The Unspeakable, titled “Unspoken Algeria,” for detailed analysis of the representation of trauma in Nicole Guiraud and Jean-Pierre Lledo’s art and film. 6. Danielle Michel-Chich, cited elsewhere for her study Déracinés, was another child wounded in the Milk Bar explosion on September 30, 1956.

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7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

In 2012 she published Lettre à Zohra D. (Letter to Zohra D.) addressing the woman who is ultimately responsible for Michel-Chich’s amputated leg and the death of her grandmother. Michel-Chich vividly recounts how her phantom leg eerily danced around the hallways at night during her childhood (21) and how she had to hide both her prosthesis and her handicap (29). Though she was not ashamed of her leg, Michel-Chich writes, it was her mother’s preference to hide it: “Ne pas montrer, et ne pas voir, c’était s’épargner des questions gênantes ou douloureuses. C’était faire disparaître à ses yeux et aux yeux des autres l’objet de la souffrance” (Not showing and not seeing spared us from embarrassing or painful questions. It hid the object of suffering from her eyes and from those of others) (34). These texts, appearing as early as 1962, were particularly numerous in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. Marie Cardinal’s La Mule de corbillard (1963), examined in chapter 3, is one of the best examples of this phantom pain taking on a life of its own in a substitute form, becoming a prosthesis meant to restore the whole. In an email message to me on May 26, 2007, Geneviève de Ternant confirmed her quote, saying, “Bien des années plus tard, je ne retire pas un mot” (Even years later, I wouldn’t take back a single word). The Pieds-Noirs claim Camus as one of their own, even though the group technically became “Les Pieds-Noirs” during and after Algerian independence. Camus, who was born in Algeria, moved to France for political and professional reasons in the late 1930s and thus knew separation from his homeland. His literature is marked by many traits common to other PiedNoir authors, such as re-creations of the sea and sun and use of nostalgia and repetition. Camus died in 1960 before Algerian independence, but his last, mostly autobiographical novel Le Premier Homme (The first man), published posthumously, is representative of the themes discussed here. Perhaps ironically, at the same time he works this method of reattachment, Meursault expresses his growing indifference to the things he once needed. He learns to surmount his condemnation. Sebbar’s trilogy includes Mes Algéries en France, Journal de mes Algéries en France, and Voyage en Algéries autour de ma chambre, each one taking place in France as homeland, demonstrating how France too is haunted by Algeria. Her earlier project, C’était leur France, produces a similar result by studying how France haunted Algeria during colonial years within the memories of Algeria’s former inhabitants. See my chapter, “Viewing the Past through a

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NOTES TO PAG ES 218–223

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

‘Nostalgeric’ Lens,” in Textual and Visual Selves for more thorough analysis of visual representations of Algeria. Cixous left Algeria to study in France before the end of the war circa 1959; Derrida went to France after his baccalauréat in 1950 but continued regular returns to Algeria until 1962. In Jacques Derrida there is a long description of how Derrida and his family members suffered anti-Semitism during the Vichy years when their citizenship was repealed (300). Later Cixous expresses this with more detail emphasizing her pain: “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” (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 ) (Rêveries, 45, Cixous’s emphasis; Brahic, Reveries, 24). See Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller’s article “Le ‘Malgérien’ d’Hélène Cixous,” which traces Cixous’s writing of Algeria to mourning for her father (849). This is confirmed in Cixous’s novel Si près. Cixous uses the term “trace malgérienne” to talk about the erasure of the existence of the real Algeria in the French colonial education system. By framing the term in a context of “substitution, ablation, et fantomatisation” (substitution, excision, and phantomization) (Rêveries, 124; Brahic, Reveries, 70–71), she creates a metaphor for disinfection: “Je ne voyais plus de traces plus aucune trace malgérienne, je voyais l’énormité excisée de tout ce que je venais de voir juste avant de passer le portail gardé en montrant mon passeport d’élu légitime au portillon, exorcisée, je voyais l’absence énorme du propre pays” (I could no longer discern a trace not a single trace of malgeria, I saw the excised enormity of all I had seen just before I walked through the guarded gate, my passport showing that I belonged to the gate’s elect, exorcised, I saw the glaring absence of the country proper) (124; Brahic, Reveries, 71). See David Wills’s Prosthesis, which explores the prosthesis or supplement of writing as recalling absence. This is similar to Bardèche’s idea that forgetting only recalls what was once remembered. Derrida returned to Algeria from 1957 to 1959 to complete his military service by teaching French and English near Algiers (Jacques, 303), in 1971 he returned to Algeria for the first time since Algerian independence in 1962 (305), and in 1984 he visited landmarks from his youth, such as his home

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20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

and his school (pictured in Jacques, 251, 310–11). Although he was always against colonial rule, Derrida hoped even up to the last moments before independence that a kind of cohabitation would be possible for the French and Algerians (303). Shayna Kessel’s dissertation, “Open Wounds,” demonstrates that Freud’s analysis of the traumatic event did not come to complete resolution and that Derrida suggests the wound must remain open (6). See my chapter, “Slipping Home in Marie Cardinal’s Écoutez la mer,” in Gender and Displacement for a complete analysis of this novel. Although Cardinal continually sought Algeria in France, she also expressed much fear of the ghosts of her past. In Autrement dit she writes, Je pense souvent à cet abordage de ma terre. J’ai un désir profound d’y être de nouveau, de la sentir, de la humer, de la toucher. Mais j’ai peur en meme temps, si j’y retournais, d’être assaillie et ligotée par la medusa gluante de sentiment, de l’attendrissement, des souvenirs de famille. Je pense déjà au cimetière Saint-Eugène où sont enterrés mon père et ma soeur, je crains d’y aller [. . .]. J’ai peur des fantômes affables de casques coloniaux, d’ombrelles de dentelles. J’ai peur des maisons fraîches dont les portes me seront fermées. J’ai peur des ruines de la guerre. I often think of this return to my soil. I have a strong desire to be there again, to smell it, to take it in, to touch it. But at the same time I am afraid that if I return, I will be attacked and bound by the sticky jellyfish of sentiment, of tenderness, of family memories. I already think of SaintEugène cemetery where my father and sister are buried; I am afraid to go there [. . .]. I’m afraid of ghosts dressed up in colonial helmets or with lace parasols. I’m afraid of large airy houses whose doors will be closed to me. I’m afraid of the ruins of war. (15–16; Cooper, In Other Words, 10–11) This passage was cut from the cited publication but was sent to me by the author with the full article. Alger Républicain was sympathetic to Algerian nationalism and continuously struggled against censorship during the war. Alleg also revisits the newspaper’s offices and recalls the ways in which they worked around the censure. In this case the ruin is somewhat reversed. When Alleg originally experienced the place, it was still being built, and when he returns there, he has to erase the completed construction from his mind to rediscover the bones of the building where he was held captive and tormented. I am grateful to Jean-Pierre Lledo, who sent me all of his films on DVD in 2007 and has continued to offer insight into his works through personal

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correspondence. I am also indebted to Marie-Claude San Juan, who initially put us in contact and who has sent me many of her own texts. 27. This is explained by Rachid Boudjedra in the first ten minutes of Algéries, mes fantômes. 28. My translation differs from the English subtitles on the DVD.

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268

INDEX

abandonment, 14, 21, 61, 85, 142, 251n4 abortion, 71, 103–4, 106, 108, 114–16, 244n6 absence, 5, 9, 14, 16, 24, 42, 47, 52, 59, 67, 70, 75–76, 81–82, 84– 85, 87–88, 90, 92– 93, 96– 98, 100– 101, 119, 122–26, 128, 130, 132–33, 146–47, 159, 166, 189, 193, 196– 97, 199, 200, 205, 207– 9, 219, 222–23, 242n16, 253nn17–18 Algerian War for Independence, ix, 2– 5, 7–8, 19, 22, 25, 33, 36, 42, 47, 60, 62, 113, 203–4, 207, 226, 228, 230, 233n3, 234n7, 251n1 Algiers (Alger), 6, 13, 27, 50, 105, 113, 138–40, 143, 151, 155– 56, 158, 167, 171, 179, 183, 194, 207, 215, 226–28, 253n19 Alleg, Henri, 228, 229, 254n24 Allouache, Merzak, 171–72, 187–88 amicale, 158, 248n15 Amicale de Saïda, vii, xi, 186

Amicale des Anciens d’Attatba, 247–48n15 Amicale des Bônois, 152 Amicale des Pieds-Noirs Bônois, 152 amnesia, 2, 18, 22, 47, 72–73, 208 amputation, 37, 70, 204– 5, 208, 210, 214, 221, 225–26, 230, 231 assimilation, 2, 48, 54, 56, 61, 68, 70– 71, 80, 98, 100, 102, 227 association: and organization, vii, 1, 11, 48, 59, 60, 149, 151– 52, 158, 186, 239n7; and relationships, 145, 149p autobiography, 24, 27, 29, 34, 59, 70, 71, 92, 98, 101–3, 108, 114–15, 153, 159, 206, 223, 233n6, 239n15, 240n19, 246n6 Ayoun, Monique, 6, 212, 235n19 Bab el-Oued, 159, 171, 187 Bartolini, Jean-Pierre, xi, 151, 247n12 Bensoussan, Albert, 142, 239n14, 251n4

269

I N D EX

Bône, 151 Bouraoui, Nina, 137–39, 250n9 burden, 2, 39–41, 149, 162, 207 Cagayous, 12, 13, 234n14 Camus, Albert, 7– 8, 39–40, 169, 173, 190– 91, 214–15, 237n34, 249n23, 250n10, 252n10; Myth of Sisyphus, 39, 162, 215, 237n31, 237n34, 241n12, 246n9; Stranger, 214 Cardinal, Marie, xi, 7– 8, 10, 14–16, 18, 20, 29–35, 41, 42–44, 62– 67, 69–72, 75–76, 81, 89, 92– 97, 101–21, 132–33, 143–46, 149, 154– 55, 157– 58, 160, 163– 68, 173, 177– 85, 188– 90, 192– 93, 195– 96, 198–200, 203–4, 209, 213, 221, 225–26, 233n6, 237nn27–29, 237n31, 238n4, 239n10, 239nn13– 14, 240n1, 240n5, 241nn6–7, 241nn10–11, 242nn15–16, 243n1, 243n3, 243nn5– 6, 244n8, 244n11, 244nn14–15, 245n21, 247n10, 251nn2–3, 254n22 Cardinal, Marie, works of: Amour . . . Amours . . . , 65, 114–15, 117–18, 120, 160, 249n20; Au pays de mes racines, 19, 29, 33, 62, 65, 67, 70, 71, 89, 101–2, 104, 106, 108–13, 118, 149, 157, 160– 61, 164, 177– 80, 182, 189, 192– 93, 195, 203, 209, 213, 243n3, 244n8, 244n10, 249n3; Autrement dit, 33, 71, 76, 93– 94, 101, 107– 8, 116, 143, 160, 164, 178, 240n1, 240n5, 241nn10–11, 242nn15– 16, 244n15, 254n22; Ecoutez la mer, 29, 65, 112, 155, 209, 226,

237n27, 239n10, 244n10, 254n21; L’Inédit, 29, 34, 93– 94, 114–16, 233n6, 237n28; Les Mots pour le dire, 33, 71, 92– 93, 95– 96, 101–2, 104– 5, 107, 109–12, 156, 160, 181, 241nn10–11, 243n5, 244n8; La Mule de corbillard, 42, 76, 81– 98, 119–21, 133, 146, 237n27, 241n5, 242n18, 252n8; Le Passé empiété, 114, 242n16; Les Pieds-Noirs, 10, 15–16, 18, 27, 34, 41, 64– 65, 67, 70–71, 95, 106, 114, 145, 158, 165– 68, 225, 239n12, 243n3, 243n6, 250n7, 250n11 Carroll, David, 249n23 cemetery, 229, 254n22 Cercle Algérianiste, 48, 242n18 Cheula, Jeanne, 61– 62, 143–44, 206, 213, 220 childhood, ix, 62, 65– 66, 90, 95, 104, 131, 156, 160, 164, 172, 185, 192, 196, 227, 229, 240n19, 252n6 Cixous, Hélène, 7–8, 32, 35, 37–38, 41, 43, 101, 121–33, 173, 190, 197–200, 218–24, 225, 226, 228, 231, 237n31, 238n5, 239n11, 245n16, 245nn19– 21, 245n25, 250n3, 251n13, 253n13, 253nn15–17; Rêveries de la femme sauvage, 38, 122–33, 218–23, 239n11, 244n9, 245n16, 253n15, 253n17; Si près, 198– 99, 222, 228, 238n5, 251n13, 253n16 Clos-Salembier, 130, 200, 221–22, 229 Coll, Bernard, 238n1 colony, viii–ix, 1–4, 7– 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17–18, 19–24, 26, 28, 29, 31–32, 35, 36–37, 39, 47, 48, 56, 58– 59, 62– 67, 70, 72, 75, 92, 94, 97, 128–29,

270

I N D EX

132, 138, 139, 150– 51, 158– 60, 163– 64, 166– 67, 169, 174–75, 178, 182, 188, 190, 192– 93, 213, 220, 222, 227, 234n9, 235n16, 236n23, 237n27, 239n7, 250n4, 252n12, 253n17, 254n19, 254n22 colon (colonists), 3, 9–10, 17–18, 20, 34, 59, 63, 72, 251n3 community, vii, ix, xi–xii, 5, 7–8, 11, 16–18, 21–24, 28–29, 31, 34–36, 38, 42–43, 48– 50, 52, 54– 56, 58– 60, 67, 69, 73, 114, 122, 142–43, 146– 9, 152– 53, 156, 161, 167, 172, 186, 190, 205, 207, 209–11, 222, 228, 236n20, n24, 238n1, 239n6, 239n7, 240n18, 245n24, 246n8, 247nn13–14, 248n18, 250n7 Constantine, 158, 228 Corsica, 11, 148, 168 Crémieux Decree, 11, 17, 35–36, 218

double, 111, 128–29, 142, 153, 160, 209, 222, 244n12 duty (devoir), ix, 40, 47–48, 53, 149– 50, 156, 212, 236n24 El Biar, 156, 179, 193, 199, 229, 250n13 empowerment, 64, 98, 120 engraving, 23, 130, 144, 220, 250n10 exile, xii, 7–8, 14, 33, 37, 42–43, 48, 55, 60, 62, 95, 138, 140–45, 147–48, 153, 172–73, 183, 204, 206–7, 213, 218, 230, 237n24, 246n6, 248n19; exiles (people), ix, 6, 11, 15, 19, 24, 29, 41, 132, 146, 163, 174, 188, 190, 201, 204, 214, 220, 228, 231, 235n17, 236n20; exile writing, 29; and post- exile, 7 exodus, 3, 14–15, 24, 42, 50, 140, 142, 149, 209, 236n24, 237n33 Fabri, Marcel, 27, 155, 248n15 family, 8, 16, 34, 59, 62– 64, 70, 72, 84, 94, 105, 115, 129–31, 140, 164– 65, 178, 181, 218, 230, 239n11, 244n9, 245n16, 245n23, 251n3, 253n14, 254n22 Fathy, Safaa, 156, 163, 193– 97, 199– 200, 224, 238n5, 250nn12–13 feminism, 30–32, 35, 69, 102, 154, 182, 239n13 fight, ix, 20–21, 42, 47–48, 55, 56, 58– 60, 69, 71, 73, 89, 227, 246n4, 246n8 film, vii–xii, 5, 73, 152, 172–73, 189– 90, 193– 97, 199–201, 223–24, 228–30, 233n2, 234n7, 234n14, 236n20, 240n18, 249n21, 250n4, 250n12, 251n13, 251n5, 254n26

D’ailleurs, Derrida (film), 173, 193, 224 deconstruction, 5, 8, 22, 38–39, 58, 122, 188, 193, 195, 200, 238n5 Denis, Claire, 250n4 Derrida, Jacques, 7– 8, 35–38, 41, 44, 156, 163, 169, 173, 190, 193– 97, 199–200, 217, 218–20, 222–25, 226, 231, 237nn30–32, 238n5, 248n16, 250n3, 250nn12–13, 253nn13–14, 253n19, 254n20 difference, 12, 14, 16, 31, 32, 50– 51, 57– 58, 67, 164, 176, 206, 213, 235n16, 245n16, 249n21 discrimination, 21, 58, 67, 239n8 division, 32, 115, 213–14, 221, 235n16 documentary works, 17, 70, 154; film, 234n7; photo, 18, 27, 70, 158, 192

271

I N D EX

forgetting, ix, 3–4, 13, 18, 21–22, 25, 42–43, 47, 52– 53, 55, 56– 59, 64, 69, 72, 92, 108– 9, 113, 122, 124, 139, 151, 171, 208, 215, 229, 238n3, 253n18; and the fight against, 21, 42, 47, 55, 58, 69, 71, 73, 246n4 “Fort Da,” 96, 119 Français d’Algérie, ix, 3, 8–12, 14, 17– 18, 20, 23, 36, 59, 66, 68, 130, 140, 142, 146–47, 151, 163– 64, 166– 68, 187, 190, 203, 205, 211, 234n14, 237n34, 239n12 freedom, 39–41, 59, 62, 66, 128, 162, 165, 167, 169, 209, 215, 233n4 French Algeria, ix, 5, 8, 14, 18, 36, 53, 59, 62, 72, 139, 159 Freud, Sigmund, 43, 56– 57, 78–79, 96, 100, 119–21, 226, 240n1, 254n20 future, 2, 41, 54, 69, 79– 83, 86, 90– 91, 98, 139, 169 ghost, ix, 15, 44, 91, 199, 201, 203– 5, 218–19, 222, 224–26, 229–31, 254n22. See also phantom Grande Poste, 109–11, 113, 243n6, 244n7 grave, 91, 199, 229 Guiraud, Nicole, xii, 207– 9, 231, 237n33, 251n5 Harki, 21, 24, 59– 60, 140, 152, 230, 238n1, 239nn7–8, 246n4, 247n14 haunting, 6, 100, 173, 189, 203–4, 216, 218, 222–23, 225–26, 228–31, 235n17, 252n12 healing, 2, 33, 43, 55, 75, 81, 88, 98, 100, 111, 138, 175–76, 214, 241n10

hell, 39, 43, 120, 126, 128, 158, 160– 61, 164 Hogue, Janine de la, 28, 143, 158, 239n14, 247n15 home, viii–ix, xii, 85, 93– 95, 103–4, 106, 109– 9, 131, 146, 156, 163, 165, 177, 180, 183, 185, 193– 95, 197, 200, 206, 209, 211, 215, 227–29, 249n1, 250n4, 250n13, 251n3, 253n19; and at-home-ness, 183; and homeland, viii–ix, xii, 2, 5, 7– 9, 15–17, 27, 29–30, 32–33, 42–43, 49– 51, 70–73, 75, 82, 92– 93, 95, 97– 98, 102–3, 118, 138, 146, 151, 153– 55, 161, 166, 169, 172–73, 175, 177–78, 194, 199, 203–4, 206, 209, 211, 214, 216, 222–23, 226–28, 230– 31, 237n34, 245n16, 246n1, 252n10, 252n12; and homesickness, 143 Hureau, Joëlle, 10, 21, 27–28, 48, 51– 52, 54, 56, 76–78, 139, 157– 58, 160, 176, 178–79, 186– 87, 238n2, 248n18, 249n2 identity, ix, 9, 11–15, 19, 21, 28–29, 33–35, 37–38, 41, 43, 59– 60, 102, 129, 137–39, 142, 148–49, 153, 161, 163– 64, 166– 68, 174, 194, 204–7, 211, 213, 219, 225, 231, 234n13, 235n16, 235nn18–19, 246n8, 251n4; Algerian, 3; collective, 11, 13–14, 19, 142; colonial, 138, 163; PiedNoir, 7–10, 15, 17, 21, 33–34, 42, 50, 138–39, 141, 162, 187, 209, 244n14 image, vii–viii, 6, 13–14, 21, 32, 35, 39– 41, 52, 54, 57, 70–71, 75, 94– 95, 111, 113, 123, 143, 148, 151, 157–158, 172, 174, 177–79, 190, 199, 201, 204,

272

I N D EX

215–17, 220, 226, 228–29, 234n14, 240n4, 251n13 imagining, viii, 4, 16, 39, 43, 52, 83, 100, 105, 112–15, 123, 126, 138–39, 141, 143, 145, 152, 155– 57, 168, 174, 194, 201, 215, 220–21, 223–24, 228, 231, 250n3 independence, 2, 4, 8–10, 30–31, 70, 77, 120, 131–32, 133, 169, 176, 178, 182–83, 188, 251n2; Algerian, ix, 3–4, 17–19, 23, 26, 33, 36, 70, 82, 139, 162, 169, 183, 206, 230, 237n34, 242nn14–15, 245n16, 249n21, 249n23, 249n2, 252n10, 253n19. See also Algerian War for Independence innocence, 3, 20–21, 59– 60, 62, 154, 242n17

105, 109–10, 118–19, 128, 130–32, 143–45, 156, 160– 61, 174, 181, 185, 198– 99, 213–15, 217, 222, 239n11, 240n19, 241n5, 242n14, 242n18 lover, 84–87, 97, 155, 227, 242n18 Lowenthal, David, 143, 145, 148, 159, 235n18, 246n7

Jeune Pied-Noirs, 2, 35, 48, 152, 235n17, 238n1 Jordi, Jean-Jacques, 14, 19, 23–24, 56, 72, 140–42, 161, 234n8 Lanta, Anne, 20, 29, 62, 65– 67, 156, 236n22, 245n23 Lestrade, Didier, 1–2, 15, 26–27 Lledo, Jean-Pierre, xii, 228–31, 236n20, 251n5, 254n26 Loesch, Anne, 237n27 loss, viii–ix, 5, 11, 20–21, 33, 47, 60, 81–82, 84– 96, 97– 98, 119–21, 124– 27, 139, 142, 163, 179, 205– 6, 209, 211–12, 214, 216, 218–19, 226–28, 236n25, 237n27, 241nn8– 9, 244n14, 251n4 love, viii, 2, 26, 50, 59, 63, 65– 68, 72, 76, 82, 84, 87– 88, 93, 95, 103,

Malta, 235n16 Marseille, 141, 165, 230 Martini, Lucienne, 21, 27–28, 49, 53– 58, 76–78, 153– 54, 175, 238n2 Mauger, Jacques, 56– 57, 67, 78– 81, 99, 102, 122, 245n18 Mediterranean, 16, 18, 97, 117–18, 138, 148, 152, 179, 209, 227 memory, vii–ix, 2–8, 13, 15, 19, 21–26, 30, 35, 38, 40–43, 47–49, 51– 61, 67– 68, 70–74, 76–77, 79– 81, 85, 87, 91– 92, 95, 99–103, 106– 9, 111, 113–15, 118, 123, 129–30, 133, 138–49, 151– 53, 155, 157– 61, 173–75, 178– 86, 188– 94, 196–201, 204– 5, 208– 9, 211, 214–16, 220, 225–27, 229–31, 233nn3–4, 235n17, 236n24, 237n30, 238nn1–3, 240n18, 241n6, 241n10, 242n16, 249n1, 249n3, 250n4, 252n12, 254n22; cloistered, 3–4, 7, 22, 25, 38, 160; collective, 5, 24, 27, 29, 53, 59, 138, 140, 146, 153, 172, 188, 217, 239n7; colonial, viii, 7; communal, 2, 5, 7, 22, 26, 49, 146, 153, 173; mastery of, 40, 43, 56, 99–103, 108, 111, 115, 119–22, 128–130, 133, 244n14; personal, 7, 27, 71, 111, 146; and postmemory, viii, 15; religious, 16, 22, 53– 55, 146, 160– 61; traumatic, 22, 185, 246n4

273

I N D EX

Michel-Chich, Danielle, 28, 50– 51, 53– 55, 148, 155, 173–74, 198, 216– 17, 235n17, 246n6, 249n1, 251n6 Milk Bar, 50, 156, 207, 251n6 mission, 6, 41, 47– 50, 53, 73, 149–151, 217; and mission civilisatrice, 142 mother, xi, 15, 30, 32–34, 37, 71, 86, 92, 95– 97, 101–7, 110, 113–15, 119, 124, 126, 129, 131, 137, 165, 179, 185, 191, 199–200, 213, 214, 219, 221, 229, 242n16, 243nn2–4, 250n3, 252n6 motherland, 14, 30, 32–33, 60, 140– 41, 161, 163– 66, 242n16, 249n21 mourning, 55, 66, 121, 133, 161, 208, 217, 248, 253n16 nation, 4– 5, 49– 50, 53, 59, 138, 141, 146, 163, 235n18; and nationalist movement, 230, 254n24; and nationality, 11, 17, 35–36 neurosis, 142, 204 Nîmes, 149, 151, 235n17, 246n2, 247n11 Nostalgérie writing, 27, 36–37, 43, 138, 144, 152, 155–163, 223, 236n26, 252n12 nostalgia, ix, 7–8, 29, 32, 39–43, 60, 77, 111, 137–38, 143–49, 157– 59, 161– 63, 173–75, 194– 95, 201, 208, 211, 222–23, 230, 236n26, 237n34, 241n12, 244n14, 246n2, 246n7, 247n15, 252n10; reflective, 146, 190; restorative, 75, 146, 194 Notre Dame de Santa Cruz, 247n11 OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète), 8, 20, 34, 61– 63, 233n2 Oran, 11, 27, 38, 49, 56, 151, 158, 198, 228, 234n10

Other, 20, 64, 67, 128, 187 Outremer (film), 249n21 pain, viii, 16, 28, 33, 35, 43–44, 58, 69– 71, 76, 82, 86–88, 90, 98, 99–102, 108, 111, 118–20, 132–33, 143, 145, 148, 159, 160– 61, 175–76, 181–82, 185, 204– 6, 208, 210–13, 215–20, 222, 225–26, 229, 231, 236n26, 244n14, 245n25, 252n6, 252n8, 253n15 paradise, 39, 43, 71, 94, 126, 138, 158– 60, 248n18 past, mastery of. See memory, mastery of Patos, 20, 167, 234n13 Pélégri, Jean, 29, 160 phantom, 66, 204, 217, 219, 225–26, 228–30, 249n3, 253n17; and phantom limb, 44, 203–8, 212–13, 216, 218, 225–26, 231, 251n6; and phantom limb pain, 204, 206, 225–26; and phantom pain, 44, 211, 217, 252n8 photographs, viii, 70, 151– 52, 194– 95, 199, 250n13; and photodocumentary, 18, 27, 70, 158, 192. See also documentary works physical therapy, 209 pilgrimage, 43, 101, 171, 173, 176, 228– 29, 247n11 postcolonialism, 13, 31–32, 52, 58, 152, 158, 161, 188, 227, 235n16, 237n29 power, 4, 19, 60, 67, 92, 100, 121, 125–26, 128–29, 145, 154, 163, 165, 167– 68, 178, 186, 188; and powerlessness, 98, 129 presence, 2–3, 8, 48, 59– 60, 67, 83, 85, 87– 88, 92– 93, 119, 189, 195, 207– 8, 212, 216, 223–26, 228, 249n3

274

I N D EX

preservation, ix, 7, 39, 41, 42, 48– 52, 54, 55, 61, 71, 73, 100, 120, 152, 160, 209, 213, 244n14 prosthesis, 205, 207, 209, 213, 215, 217, 223–25, 230, 231, 252n6, 252n8, 253n18 protection, 20, 22, 47–48, 53– 56, 60, 62, 73, 75, 104, 106, 115, 119, 188, 198, 206 psychoanalysis, 30, 33, 75, 92, 97, 99, 102, 107, 116, 122, 240n1, 241nn10–11, 243n2, 243n5, 245n15 psychotherapy, 33, 92, 99, 102–3, 105, 108, 240n1, 241n10, 243n5 recollection, viii, 43, 52, 56, 68, 78– 81, 98, 99, 101–2, 108– 9, 111, 124, 131, 133, 138, 177, 189, 193, 208, 241n6 reconstruction, 25–26, 42, 50, 52, 75–78, 80, 82–86, 93, 97– 98, 101, 105, 115, 146, 151– 52, 158, 173–74, 242n16 re-creation, viii, 8, 17, 27, 39, 43, 48, 51, 57, 75, 77–78, 84, 92– 93, 104, 111, 117–20, 124, 133, 138, 144, 146– 47, 152, 156– 59, 162, 177, 191, 204, 209, 227, 248n19m 252n10 remembrance, viii–ix, 7, 20–21, 25, 27, 33, 39, 43, 44, 48, 51– 52, 56– 57, 59, 60, 68, 72–73, 78–79, 81, 92, 94, 96, 98– 99, 106, 108, 122–24, 139–40, 146, 150, 155, 165, 172–73, 177, 179– 80, 195– 96, 203, 215, 222, 225, 229, 239n9, 241n10, 253n18 repetition, viii, 6– 9, 22, 27, 29–31, 35, 37–38, 42–43, 47–48, 52– 54, 56– 62, 64– 67, 69–72, 75–82, 91,

93, 95– 98, 99–105, 107– 9, 111, 113–23, 132–33, 139, 144, 146–47, 168, 173, 180–81, 190, 194, 207, 211, 214, 216–17, 226, 238nn1–2, 239n9, 239n13, 239n15240n16, 240n2, 240n5, 242n15, 243n2, 243n5, 244n8, 244n14, 245nn18– 19, 252n10 reproduction, 41, 44, 48, 75–76, 78– 86, 88, 90– 93, 95, 97– 98, 119, 123–24, 146, 152, 190, 241nn6– 8, 242nn15–16, 250n11 restoration, 57, 97, 146, 189, 252n8. See also nostalgia, restorative return, vii–ix, 2, 5–7, 9–10, 16, 19, 21, 27, 29–30, 33, 35, 39–44, 57, 65, 82, 83– 85, 94, 95, 98, 100–101, 108, 110–11, 114, 118–20 133, 138–40, 143, 147, 149, 151– 57, 161– 63, 165– 66, 169, 171–78, 180– 82, 185–201, 203–4, 206, 210, 215–16, 221–22, 224, 226, 228–30, 237n31, 241n9, 242n15, 244n11, 244n13, 246n5, 247n10, 247n14, 249n23, 249n1, 249n3, 250n4, 250nn12–13, 253n13, 253n19, 254n22, 254n25; filmed, 173, 193, 223, 228–29; imagined, 43, 98, 138, 149, 152; narratives, 5, 173, 188, 238n5, 246n1; physical (return voyage), vii, 33, 42, 63, 74, 103, 108, 138–39, 149, 157, 160, 163, 171–76, 178, 198, 216, 223, 226, 244n11, 246n2; visual, 172; written, 19, 43, 152– 54, 240n3, 246n1 reunion, vii, 34, 138, 149, 152, 172, 175, 177, 179, 199–200, 229–30 Roblès, Emmanuel, 27, 147

275

I N D EX

roots, 2, 15, 26, 30, 43, 50, 54, 57, 75, 92, 108, 117, 152– 53, 154, 165, 181, 203, 209, 235n18, 241n5; and uprooting, 76, 90, 98, 141–42, 208 Roüan, Brigitte, 249n21 rue d’Isly, 114 rue Michelet, 112, 156, 243n6, 250n7 ruins, 41, 43–44, 137, 171–73, 177, 186– 97, 199, 201, 250n9, 254n22, 254n25 rupture, 56, 77, 132, 173, 211, 216 Saïda, vii, xi, 172, 186, 199, 201, 251n13 Sebbar, Leïla, viii, 7– 8, 17, 35, 38, 41, 213–14, 216–18, 226, 231, 234n10, 237n33, 245n23, 252n12 Sebbar, Leïla, works of: “Chronique rapatriée,” 17, 234n10; J’étais enfant en Algérie, 237n33; Journal de mes Algéries en France, 38, 216, 252n12; Lettres parisiennes, 213; Mes Algéries en France, 38, 216–17, 234n10, 252n12; Voyage en Algéries, viii, 38, 252n12 separation, 8, 15–16, 18, 24, 29–37, 44, 48, 58, 70–71, 73, 84, 87–88, 94– 95, 97, 100, 101, 115, 119, 131, 144–45, 147, 169, 179, 197, 204–7, 213–220, 222–25, 228, 237n31, 237n34, 245n16, 252n10 severing, 203–4, 215, 221–22, 230 soldier, 9, 192, 230, 234n10, 239n6, 242n18, 249n22 stability, 5, 15, 21, 22, 27, 41–42, 52, 58, 74, 75–78, 80–81, 139, 142, 145–46, 151– 52, 154, 157, 173, 225, 246n3; and destabilization, 5, 19, 194– 95;

and instability, 75, 82, 138, 146, 154, 157, 184, 197, 239n15 Stora, Benjamin, 2– 5, 11, 17–18, 22, 24, 33, 38, 159, 211, 233n5, 237n27 struggle, vii, ix, 8, 20–21, 31, 34, 40, 48, 73, 127, 133, 143, 154, 177, 179, 182, 188, 203, 207, 215, 218, 230, 254n24 suffering, xii, 1–2, 30, 33, 37, 40, 60, 82, 102, 114, 128, 142, 144, 147, 149, 162, 174, 177, 197, 206, 209, 210, 212–13, 215–16, 218, 220–22, 230, 238n3, 240n19, 251n4, 251n6, 253n14 suitcase (valise), 95, 142, 234n8. See also La Valise ou le cercueil (film) survival, 13, 54, 72, 77, 85, 188, 195– 96, 206–7; survivor, 100, 142 Ternant, Geneviève de, xi, 49– 50, 212, 252n9 terrorism, 3, 207 testimonial, viii, xii, 17, 22–24, 28, 33, 55, 59, 64, 67– 69, 72, 155, 158, 189, 229, 234n7, 237n33, 239n6, 246n6, 249n1 therapy. See physical therapy; psychotherapy torture, 3, 8, 106–7, 109, 185, 228–30, 239n8, 246n4 transmission, viii, 15, 50, 52, 54, 67, 140, 144, 152, 158– 59, 186, 247n13 trauma, viii–ix, xi–xii, 1–2, 5, 8, 21–22, 30, 33–34, 42–43, 48, 57, 58, 73, 77–78, 80– 81, 90, 92, 95, 99–100, 101, 104, 108– 9, 113–16, 119–21, 138, 140, 142, 145–47, 159, 185, 188– 89, 204–7, 209, 211, 219, 223,

276

I N D EX

227, 231, 241n8, 243n2, 244n14, 246n4, 246n6, 250n8, 251n1, 251n5, 254n20 travelogue, 27, 43, 65, 70–71, 101, 108, 175, 177, 192, 249n3 unity, 13–14, 48, 56– 57, 67, 73, 141, 147–48, 151, 195, 201, 209 La Valise ou le cercueil (film), 233n2 victim, 21, 32–33, 59– 60, 78, 81, 89– 90, 100, 120, 148, 204–7, 209, 216, 225, 241n8, 244n14, 247n15, 251n1 violence, 9, 33, 63, 73–74, 78, 106, 110–11, 115, 118, 139–40, 143, 145– 46, 209, 240n19, 243n1 voyage, vii–viii, 6, 16, 42, 63, 74, 108, 140, 156, 164, 171–73, 175–76, 178, 182, 184, 186, 194, 198, 216, 222–23, 226, 238n34, 244n11, 246n2, 249n1 war, 66, 114, 152, 204, 254n22; and Algerian Civil War (décennie

noire), 172, 182, 228, 230, 236n20; and Algerian War for Independence, ix, 2– 5, 7– 8, 17–19, 22, 25, 36, 42, 47, 59– 60, 62, 72, 106, 113, 139, 159, 203–4, 206–7, 226, 228–30, 233nn2–3, 233n5, 234n7, 239n6, 239n8, 239n12, 240n19, 248n19, 250n13, 251nn1–2, 253n13, 254n24; of memory, 5, 42, 48; and World War I, 142, 242n18; and World War II, 14, 142, 145, 164, 166– 67, 218, 237n34 women, 12, 29–33, 35, 37, 43, 50, 82, 95– 96, 101– 6, 114–15, 126, 132, 138, 140, 171, 182– 83, 187–88, 192, 194, 226, 234n10, 237n27, 239n13, 240n1, 241n11, 243n1, 245n22, 249n21, 252n6 working through, 56, 76, 78–79, 81, 116–17 wound, 27, 37, 53, 55, 69, 100, 133, 142, 151, 175, 196, 214, 231, 241n5, 251n6, 253n15, 254n20

277