Si près

Hélène Cixous has written numerous things that have marked me, but lately I'm only interested in her remarks on Algeria. I'm reading Si près (Galilée, 2007) for a paper I'm writing on return narratives and her premise here is that she said to her 95 year old mother, "j'irai peut-être à Alger" (16). She expounds later on:

L'idée de vouloir revoir l'Algérie une dernière fois, celle-là je ne l'aurai en aucun cas. C'est une idée de mort. Cela voudrait dire que l'Algérie va mourir. Si des deux c'était moi qui allais mourir, je garderais naturellement ma mort pour moi. (42)

Algerian-born Yves Saint Laurent dies in Paris at age 71

YSL, fashion icon and Pied-Noir, died on Sunday, June 1. According to the New York Times (and multiple other sources), Saint Laurent’s career spanned from 1957 to 2002 and included putting women into traditionally male clothing … i.e. pants, peacoats, trenchcoats, and tuxedo jackets. He was known to inspire artists such as Picasso, Miró and Matisse and to dress women such as Catherine Deneuve, Paloma Picasso, Lauren Bacall, and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. He became famous in 1958 when he was only 21 when he showed his Trapeze collection for Christian Dior after Dior’s death. After his “rich peasant” collection showed in New York, Saint Laurent said, “The clothes incorporated all my dreams, all my heroines in the novels, the operas, the paintings. It was my heart — everything I love that I gave to this collection.”

Pieds-Noirs (and others) have been busy today posting their homage to the master de couture online. One person wrote on a forum today, “Condoléances à tous les pieds noirs, dont Yves était de la famille.” Another who remembers his shop in Marseille writes, “il laisse un grand vide dans le coeur de tous les Pieds-Noirs.”

Yves Saint-Laurent was a Pied-Noir, born in Oran on August 1, 1936. His father was a lawyer and insurance broker and his mother had great style. His childhood home was a villa on the Mediterranean, the sea that dominates most Pied-Noir memories. The young Yves disliked sports – except swimming—and took to fashion at a very young age, even designing his mother’s clothes. While his parents wanted him to become a lawyer, he went to Paris at the age of 17 (around 1953, just before the tensions of the war would be felt) to work in theatrical fashion design. Dior quickly recognized his talent and snatched him up.

In September of 1960, the same year he made his last collection for Dior, Saint Laurent was called up for 27 months of military service in Algeria. According to the NYTimes, “He had previously been given deferments because 2,000 jobs depended on his talent.” About three weeks after beginning his compulsory service he was hospitalized for a nervous “collapse.” He was discharged from the army and he entered a private clinic near Paris. He returned to work on his own, having been replaced at Dior by Marc Bohan. Just months before Algerian independence, on January 19, 1962, the first Yves Saint Laurent collection was shown.

At his retirement in January 2002, Saint Laurent said, “Every man needs aesthetic phantoms in order to exist. I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober.”

His phantoms, although personal, are shared by many in his Pied-Noir family.

Blogging ... and not blogging

[Photo taken May 2008 in Vieux Montréal]

I've recently become an avid reader of multiple blogs, most of them written by Americans living in Paris, and I realize that what keeps me going back to them is knowing there will be somewhat regular posts, creatively written, and engaging. I have not done a great job, if I have any regular readers, of keeping my blog up to date, but I also have not forgotten the very specific topic that I've chosen.

Right now I'm in Montreal (and soon in Quebec City) with a Canadian Government "faculty enrichment" research grant and my topic is not Pied-Noir studies. Instead, I am working on including Canadian (Quebec) content into my commercial French course and textbook which is in development. While this has been my focus for the past several months, I have not stopped working on Pied-Noir literature. I am in the process of reworking a paper for publication on Pied-Noir Photo-documentary works and I'm writing another about the recent Pied-Noir returns to Algeria for presentation in July. My first article in French, “« La valise ou le cercueil » : un aller-retour dans la mémoire des Pieds-Noirs” should be coming out later this year in the Revue Diasporas: histoires et sociétés later this year.

As I finish up my work in Canada in a couple of weeks, I will be getting back to my passion and hopefully finding my blog-voice. Part of the issue is that I'm still grappling with what I, a young American French professor, have to say about the traumas of the Pieds-Noirs. I have much to say ... in English or in French ... but to whom, here in a blog post, written in English?