To the others, the old timers, my life matters. As does that of my mother, a woman they know and respect. When I come back, I’m afraid of running into them, in the street. I’m afraid of their attention and their kindness, which intimidate and move me. My rare outings in town, my marriage that isn’t happening, the children I don’t have, my boyfriend no one meets, my absence, I am endlessly reproached for all of it. I sense they haven’t forgotten the dark past, the false starts. They are ashamed of it. They ask me to come back, to settle here forever. I have an infinite tenderness for this village and for all that it retains of our life experiences. Not so long ago, a villager teasingly reminded me of my childhood. “Do you remember?” she said. “You came to our homes and you asked us to change our ways. We were supposed to work for the good of all. You told us the baker would wake up early to make us bread and that money would disappear.”
It’s true. I did it with a certain fervor. I knocked on their doors and I said, “I want to talk to you.” No one could have turned me away. I was a child. I wanted to convince them. At fifteen, I advocated constant revolution to everyone. I became a Trotskyite merely by reading Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed. I was open to any and every enthusiasm. I wanted to win them over. I wanted them to like me. I couldn’t live anywhere else but there. With them! I had nowhere else to go. I owe this frenzy, this rush to live, to the breadth of freedom my mother granted me, prompted solely by her conviction that, even free, I wouldn’t betray her. I chose to dive in unprotected. Testing out all the ideologies possible, and alone. I too, like Richard Wright, wanted to redeem my being alive by existing, by being included in my own country.
Why are we here?” My father doesn’t answer me. This is the only question that disarms him. “Why? Why did you bring me here?” If one of my parents asks me for something, I retort with this question. “Do the dishes.” “No, why am I here?” “Cook.” “No, why am I here?” “Help your sister, stop behaving like that, stop reading, help, help out around the house.” “Why did you bring me here?” I’ve always found myself on the outside.
When I’m twelve, I’m told to go home. “Go home, you’re a Muslim.” When I’m twelve and can’t bear to be in my own house, I’m told to go. “Go home. Keep Ramadan.” I leave, a backpack and Richard Wright’s Black Boy in my pocket as my only company. Thinking myself a hobo in search of a better place. I don’t know how long I’m gone. Four days, eight? I don’t know anymore. Everywhere I go they tell me I have parents. Everywhere they tell me I need to go home. They tell me so from every direction. Someone calls my mother. I make it clear that at the slightest reproach I’ll leave for good. I return. I win the battle. No Ramadan and the right to spend as much time as I want in my attic room. I am nonetheless forbidden from sitting at the table with the pure. The believers being my mother, father, and sister. My brothers have no religious obligations. This is when I begin my fast. I refuse to eat at night, even alone. My sister, scandalized by my stubbornness, grows outraged and turns against me. Taking issue with my mother, reproaching her for our complicity, she bangs at the doors to all my sanctuaries. She bangs loudly to make me come out. I don’t believe in God. I tell her I can’t. “Do what I’m doing. I don’t want any part of their life. Do what I’m doing. Disobey.” She doesn’t stop banging. I close my eyes. I wait. I can’t stand her any longer. I’m overcome by rage and anger with her constant attacks, her vulgar behavior, her taste for fighting, and her North African excesses. I grab my sister and hit her, expressing my disgust for her foolishness. She runs away, screaming that I’m crazy, that I should be committed, heaping insults on me that I reject and which her mouth alone knows how to pronounce. “Arbi ak mweche affouwathim.” May God eat your liver. “Ak mi ghnek.” May He strangle you. “Ak mi weth sou kavach.” May He strike you with an axe. “Thakzent.” Scum. I’m shaken. Shaken by these words that come to me out of the darkness. After these episodes, I bury myself in sad, desolate corners where only my mother joins me in the silence. Where did those words come from? Who taught them to her? My mother says nothing. To me, my sister is a demon. I despise this God who’s given her such license. I hate and avoid her. I make no allowances. I can’t understand the violence within her. I know nothing of the terrible years in Algeria or of her massacred childhood. It’s only much later that I learn all that. But as a child, I can’t imagine the horror she’s lived through. Pushing back against the ghosts of the past assailing us without mercy, she and I compete, blindly, to shed light on their crimes. At this moment, I want the house to be everyone’s prerogative and not solely that of women or girls. I want the same rights as my brothers. I won’t do anything to help them. I say so, and I say so to them. Such an attitude leaves no room for compromise. As a result, I don’t learn to make couscous and all the other good things that my sisters will later cook regularly for me.
Who did I get this attitude from? A teacher no doubt. A French instructor who exuded femininity like feathers drifting through the sky in complete freedom. And free she was, right up to the color of her hair and her perfume. I had never, we had never, smelled anything before her. I can’t describe the shock of her arrival in my life as anything but a violent blow. A reversal of perspective. Revolution via aestheticism. She was the revolution. Beautiful, tall, vivacious, and intelligent, and the daughter of a well-known man. A first in our village.
She asks us to call her by her first name, Anne-Marie. September 1974. She’s a highly certified teacher of literature and comes from Paris. We understand that she left for us. I am twelve years old. I inherit May ’68 and the hippie movement in one stroke. Sartre, Jean-Paul. French philosopher and writer. That’s her syllabus for the year. We read The Wall and Nausea. What’s good about coming from nowhere is that you have nothing to lose. I do the opposite, I beat everyone. At the end of the year, I send the class average soaring.
So there was a country—ours—that produced people like her. I wanted to believe it. She spoke to us of vigilance and action, state violence and power, judgment and the freedom to critique. Because of her, we walked differently. Our bodies and gazes were transformed as a result. Reading became an exercise. We learned what emancipation was. There were no inevitabilities after all. And so I marched confidently toward my future.
But Anne-Marie will only be a mirage. What is good behavior worth when you learn, at your expense, that the exception is not the rule?
In eighth grade, my history and geography teacher violently singles me out. He refuses to let me into class. He systematically asks me to stay outside. One day my schoolmates say, “Don’t stay in the hallway anymore. Come to class with us and if he makes you leave the room, we’ll all go.” I agree. I enter the classroom, where I’m confronted with brutal contempt. The teacher tells me, “Get out.” I refuse. Blows and slaps. He pulls me by my head. Clumps of hair fall out. I cry and Hervé steps in. He’s my friend. He lives in my village. The teacher hits him in the face. His eye is injured, blood lands on the walls. All the students leave outraged. I’ve finally won them over. We lodge a complaint. The man will be transferred. But it’s already too late. Too late for me.