After all, I’m not nor ever will be a part of this history that I’m learning. I’m made to understand that I know nothing. My people know nothing. I have no origins. My genetic code was cut short. And my rebellion? Nothing will come of it.
Three
Some time ago, a man I met in a symposium told me, “You know, as children we all had the same map of France in our classrooms. And our colonies, all of them pink and far away, were the stuff our dreams were made of. I’m going to be honest with you. I’m a communist, okay, but as children we loved those territories. They were ours. Ours, you know? We weren’t worried about you. We knew nothing about you. Those colonies were home to us. Ask all the men here my age, ask them, they all had the same map of France in their classrooms. And that’s what France was—Indochina, Africa, all the islands. We liked it that way. We were children, you see. We loved that France. You understand. We were children and we could go to all of those places. That was our country. I didn’t know a single thing about you. You understand.”
“Yes, I understand. You’ve lost all of that,” I replied.
“All of that” was a beautiful hope, a land of plenty that needed a little improvement, but whose backdrop was already in place. Some nomads, of course, but if need be only imaginary ones. “Youths, straddle our African Orient, reenergize yourselves from its light and ruins, you give new life to our art,” wrote Théophile Gautier. La Varende outdid him: “Become a man—this is a land for legends.” Yes, you’ve lost all of that, but how long do I have to keep paying for it, I thought. I entered your narrative only to get stuck in it.
“Good god, we were stupid. I mean we never even set foot there. We were so stupid. What the hell were we doing over there, huh? What the hell were we doing there? It was pink, on the map. The territories were pink and, as for us, we knew absolutely nothing about you.”
“My father was a Harki,” I said. “I know the story.”
“We were children and they made us swallow it up, you know. We swallowed it whole. Pink territories and here we are, all in the same mess. We no longer have a country to escape to. Not a one.”
He left, telling me he couldn’t stand it anymore.
It was the end of the colonies too. There will be no more “elsewhere” apart from where you live. No more enemies on the other side of the ocean. It’s alone that you have to come to terms with this ending—the death of your enemy.
For the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Algerian War, a reporter based in France asks me to write an article for the Algerian newspaper El Watan. “Not so very long ago I would never have spoken to you,” she says. “I can’t talk to you Harkis.”
“I’m not a Harki,” I respond. “You’re confusing me with my father.”
Her comments are proof of a conflict that’s only gotten worse. After leaving Algeria to escape bombings and the murder of civilians, this journalist now proves her loyalties to her homeland by renouncing her existence on French soil and everything it might represent to her compatriots. I write the article. I entitle it “Everything/one I left behind” and give it to my brother, my longtime protector, for his feedback.
“If they accept it,” he tells me, “it will mean that the generals over there have changed a lot.”
I counter his argument. “It’s an article for the children,” I say. “They can’t refuse an article for the children.”
“That’s exactly why it will be refused. They’re the only ones with the right to say what you experienced and who you are. And whatever you do, don’t ever tell them they did the wrong thing. They’re heroes, you know. Heroes.”
I understand all that. But I want to believe otherwise. I submit the piece anyway. November 1, 2004, approaches and I still haven’t heard back. I call and ask for the editorial desk. They tell me the journalist is in Algiers. I leave several messages, but no one calls me back. I telephone and, not knowing who is on the other end, say, “But I did write an article. The least you can do is give me a response, tell me what’s wrong with it. Your newspaper requested it.” They refuse to answer me. I insist, I don’t give my name, I insist. And by chance, I’m connected to the journalist. “Hello, what seems to be the problem?”
“Why haven’t you called me back?”
Amid a testosterone-fueled din in the editing room, she very loudly tells me, “This article is an offense and an insult to the Algerian people. It shames our martyrs.”
I don’t say anything. Can El Watan be refusing it? I’m speechless. Always the same dictum. They want me in tears in order to ease their own consciences. Later, I publish the op-ed in the French journal Drôle d’Époque. I read it over, now with the header: “Rejected for offense and insult to the Algerian people.”
I was born in September 1962 in Grande Kabylie. I spent my first five years in Algeria withdrawn from everything and ostracized because of my father’s conviction as a Harki. He was in prison during this time. In 1967, my family left definitively for France. Since then, I have made five trips to Algeria in total.
The first was in 1981. I wanted to reconnect with my parents’ country and my birthplace. I cried in Kabylie. I loved the people and the land. But in Algiers, nothing of the country’s recent past resonated with me. On television, I heard Arabic, a language I didn’t understand, and patriotic songs glorifying martyrs who seemed to me more like ghosts than conquering heroes. The montages of images with reverential overtones struck me as a masquerade. Because of my own history perhaps, I have always had a very pronounced appreciation for the counter angle. On the television screen, I saw a people being exploited, and oriented toward single-minded worship of its own glory. As for the Algerians, they blindly followed the directive given them to love one another amid hardship. Once the emotions stirred up by the songs commemorating the dead had passed, I was gripped by a feeling of anxious skepticism. Why would anyone want to build such a nation on a single memory of a war and its violence? How would the Algerian people escape this perverted nationalism? I wanted to commiserate with their suffering. But I felt alienated by the inner workings of the political system that had emerged (seductive though it appeared) and which was forged by the idea of “Algerian-ness.” Everything was exclusive. I had no place here. I couldn’t say who I was without a sickening discourse about the conquerors and the conquered being thrown in my face. I was spared nothing. And so we, the children of the Harkis, couldn’t return to this country. We alone elicited the violence that the Algerians, who were unable to direct it against their former oppressors, turned against themselves—here I’m voluntarily paraphrasing Franz Fanon—as well as against all the men and women who didn’t fit into their leaders’ plans.
Harkis were killed. Some have spoken of a massacre. But why weren’t the others—the survivors who would leave well after July 5
*
and who were labeled as Harkis or pied noirs—eliminated? Weren’t they all, to cite the revolutionary propaganda, torturers? If that was the case, were they left alive out of kindness? Knowing the emotions that the word “Harki” still triggers in Algeria, it’s hard to believe that people wanted to let them live if they really were what others said—monsters. Once condemned in the public eye, how many families had their possessions stolen for the benefit of others during this civil war that is so difficult to elucidate? Those who fled the country were judged guilty of treason for life by their compatriots, without the benefit of a fair trial or even the semblance of historical research. As a result, one can imagine that the Algerians, heedless of their responsibility, were able to justify the Harkis’ arbitrary banishment and dispossession. We mustn’t, Ben Bella