I come downstairs and put a few endives to boil for your lunch, then I ask you in your language, “Maman, how did your father acquire his lands?” I want another story. After you, I’ll run dry. Smiling, you say, “What I’m going to tell you is true.” It’s the story of the Sheik n’Tabla Sidi Ammar and his seven disciples. One especially harsh winter night, a brotherhood seeks in vain some hospitality while crossing an impoverished and austere region en route to a place of pilgrimage. But it’s no use. Convinced they don’t deserve such guests, the villagers shut themselves up in their homes and call on God. Through prayer, they ward off an inevitable misfortune of which they themselves will be the cause. The strengthening storm, pelting the supplicants with cold, moves the most destitute villager, Sidi Mohand, to pity. He brings the pilgrims into his humble home and has them sit next to the fire. They take off their burnoose cloaks and thank him piously. Then the poor man slaughters his only baby goat for them and hands it to his wife. Fatma Issounal quickly draws some milk and sets to her task in the stable. She cuts the meat and runs a string between the pieces, which she then places in a broth. She’s barely dipped them into the liquid when a surprising and ill-fated thing occurs. All the scorching hot meat spurts out of the cauldron and spills onto the body of her only child. He drops dead. She screams. She screams with all her force. Her cries alert Sidi Mohand, who rushes over to say her behavior is disgraceful. “Stop crying, our guests will hear you,” he tells his wife. Fatma Issounal, wracked with grief, shows him the child. Covered in burns and blood. The father, gripped by horror, says, “I will ask the sheik what we did to deserve such an ordeal. Cover him.” Adding as he leaves, “It’s a sign from God.” The pilgrims, who were singing praises during this time, are unaware of the drama unfolding around them. They continue to say their prayers, eat their meal, and give thanks to their host until late into the evening. At dawn, Sidi Mohand takes the sheik aside. He tells him what took place even as his household was sheltering pious men. “In what way did I wrong God to merit such misfortune?” he asks. “In several months, you will have two sons, twins,” responds the sheik. “You will name the first one Saïd. You will lean on him. The second one, Ali. Through him you will rise. After we leave, take your animals to graze near Djema n’Timulin. You will meet an old man there. A hermit. You will ask him to show you the place known as the Stone of Timulin n’Cherif. In this spot you will see two snakes coiled up against each other. One will turn its head toward the west, toward the sea, the other toward the east, toward the sun. At night, you will return to that spot. You will slide your hand between the two snakes and dig a hole. They will not wake. There, you will find your fortune. You will thank the old man and bury the rest of the gold in your house. You mustn’t tell this story to anybody. Not even your wife. When your sons reach the age of fourteen, you will give each his share and make them leave for seven years. You will send Saïd to the French military academy and Ali to the best madrasah. When both of them return, you will be a rich man. You will leave for a stretch of land that they will split.”
“Once Saïd becomes a caïd,” you say, “he collects his parents from the village and settles with them in Tigzirt. The land that he shared with his brother stretched from Dellys to Azeffoun. Your grandfather, my father, is Saïd’s son. He had eight girls and four boys. Three of those sons would become caïds in their turn. My father was the only one to refuse this calling. They governed all the towns in the region.” I ask you to remind me about each member of this lineage. I hear beautiful names: Micha, Tétoum, Fta. Smiling, I tell you that it can’t all be true. That the land was stolen, pillaged, or acquired by my ancestors via an unnatural alliance. “They didn’t take property that belonged to someone else?” I ask you. “No,” you respond. “It’s all true.” So I softly say, “That money might have belonged to another family, to rebels, to a dispossessed family that hid its Louis d’or coins for safekeeping.”
“It was a Roman treasure, buried for centuries,” you say. “And it’s the Sheik n’Tabla Sidi Ammar who showed the way.”
When you finish your lunch, you add, “The Romans erected a city facing the sea. It was swallowed up and no one came back to live in what became a swampy plain. The Kabyle people live far from the sea, protected, in the mountains. Your ancestors were the first to dwell in the Roman city. They built their homes up high, and with force and will they transformed it into an orchard.”
As I left my mother, I wondered what empowered her to tell such a story. Her conviction about the way her family had acquired its lands emerged as if in defiance of the dispossession she herself had experienced. Ruling out all other possibilities, my mother was wholly immersed in the faraway time she was describing, in the telling of a miracle. The true story, so difficult to impose on her, might have flourished under more forgiving auspices. But when only adversity is left, I told myself, men draw on what they can. For that matter, I no longer believe what is written here and there about oral cultures. A vibrant energy ensures that these civilizations survive outside of texts and archives. Hence their cunning and resistance, especially when faced with violently irrational attitudes, as the speakers of these languages often are. A man from an oral culture carries his library within, and it’s by transmitting it in the same way that he brings it to life. But my mother’s certainty about the tale of hidden treasure conceals a crueler interpretation. The father had to hide the origins of his fortune. Either the money came from a theft or another family, who had hidden it, or the lands were acquired by means other than a straightforward monetary exchange. When the sheik makes it clear that the father will find protection with the son who is to join the French camp, one can’t help but think that the seed was already planted. The French protection doesn’t bring any benefit. The sheik had said, “Ali in a madrasah to raise you up.” And so the long path that led my family to France was etched in its past. You can find wealth and comfort by leaving your family, but it means breaking with the values of your kin.
What future can there be for a family narrative in a country that has erased all signs of it? Expropriation, theft, servitude, and dispossession eat away at dignity, and from all this cruelty emerges the deformed man. The degraded and colonized man. Only a certain savoir-faire and knowing duplicity can keep him alive. This rupture shattered everything literature has a duty to express—the epic song of a people and all it carries of their history and mission. A family saga that my mother can perpetuate only through tales and fables. Colonialism destroyed the heirs to this legacy so that its memories would never be passed on. And revolutionary, modern-day Algeria, to its greatest detriment, was unable to revive this—its own—past.
That afternoon, I looked at a photograph of my great-uncles and my grandfather. They are five, seated facing the camera. All very tall, handsome, and arrogant. Their faces are covered by beards, they’re wearing thick, white turbans, beautiful kaftans gathered behind them, belts of beaded cloth that hold in ample white pants tucked into boots made of thick, black leather. They maintained their grandeur in what can be collectively called a farce. Holding on for dear life, the colonial power was forced to be complicit in this masquerade.