But you were so beautiful with your long black eye-lashes like a girl’s and your Parisian French, that night in Stockholm “I am a pied noir,” you said “from Casablanca.” We drank wine and smoked hashish one long euphoric kiss hitchhiking to Switzerland in Germany we seduced each other you were Jewish a little shy with the Germans in a chalet by the undulating Rhine awakening to the tinkling of cow bells so happy, my choice seemed so apt and on to Lausanne bliss unending or so it seemed or so it seemed kisses sweeter than Liebfraumilch
** Thank you to Donna for allowing me to repost her poem here. It immediately seduced me. a.
Sarkozy has decided he would like to move Camus to the Pantheon. It's been fifty years since Camus' death, and this is Sarkozy's way of honoring the Nobel laureate. I have read numerous articles and emails from colleagues on this topic. It seems absurd to me to move this man who wrote with such love and nostalgia for his bright and warm homeland, to such a cold solemn place in the heart of Paris. I asked one of my colleagues, what would Camus want?
It's become, of course, a political issue. Jean-Marie Le Pen is calling this an "électoraliste" decision. "Celui d'un écrivain pied-noir à quatre mois des élections régionales où probablement la majorité va subir une lourde défaite, je crois que c'est assez évident". I asked the same colleague, why does anyone care what Le Pen thinks? "C'est de la politique".
Poor Camus. He's being made into a symbol and possibly a monument.
Reportage de SudOuest, le lundi 5 octobre 2009 Jean-Louis Cordier
À l'invitation de France et Michel Delenclos - ce dernier est écrivain et chercheur en histoire contemporaine - plus de 150 Français d'Algérie et leurs amis se sont réunis à la salle des fêtes, dimanche 20 septembre, pour un méchoui. Les responsables des deux associations participantes, Jean-Claude Sanchez, Jean-Marie Roques et Georges Bocquel, lors de l'apéritif, ont salué Pierrette Razé, le maire, et la municipalité, notamment Martine Boyer et Frédéric Guillaudeux, pour leur accueil.
Forum algérianiste
À la veille du 36e congrès national et du Forum algérianiste du livre, qui se tiendra du 23 au 25 octobre à Aix-en-Provence, les participants ont débattu sur le thème « Français d'Algérie, transmettre un combat pour l'histoire. Transmettre à qui ? Comment ? Pourquoi ? » Depuis leur exode de 1962, les Français d'Algérie attendent toujours « les promesses faites par les gouvernements successifs ». Ils mènent un combat « pour la vérité historique, la défense de l'oeuvre de la France en Algérie » et la mémoire de leurs morts et disparus.
Photo: "France et Michel Delenclos ont organisé cette journée des Français d'Algérie." (photo J.-L. c.)
"Entre 2007 et 2009 une bonne centaine d’anciens colons ayant quitté l’Algérie au lendemain de l’indépendance a (re) visité différentes communes de la wilaya de Mascara. Il s’agit le plus souvent de délégations composées des personnes du troisième âge très attachées aux régions où elles ont grandi. Ces anciens colons, une fois sur place, se replongent dans d’intarissables évocations de souvenirs de leur enfance et manifestent un intérêt particulier à revoir leurs anciennes demeures et, leurs souhaits sont souvent réalisés grâce à la compréhension des nouveaux locataires. En outre ces pieds-noirs ne ratent jamais l’occasion pour se rendre aux cimetières".
In 2007 Doug and I were traveling through France as I conducted research during the 45th anniversary of the exile of the Pieds-Noirs. Sète was on our list of places to visit and I very much wanted to see the Cimetière Marin (made famous by Paul Valéry's poem). Instead of staying, however, we were forced to leave. Our hotel had not received our reservation even though we had prepaid through Expedia. The hotel owner and her husband had just taken over the business a few days prior and they were the loveliest people. The husband actually drove us to Toulouse (no rooms were availabe in Sète that night due to the grain auction) and he refused to take money for gas. Not only that - they fed us and gave us beer while we waited. The hospitality we experienced during that entire 5 week stay in France was amazing.
So, not having really visited Sète, I now really long to go there. And now I have legitimate research to do there. On June 7, 2009 a memorial for the Pieds-Noirs was inaugerated in the cemetery.
François Doré wrote the following for MidiLibre:
Plusieurs centaines de personnes ont assisté hier en fin de matinée, dans l'enceinte du Cimetière marin, à l'inauguration du mémorial des Sétois d'Afrique du Nord. Sur une terrasse de 12 m 2 , située face à la mer et délimitée symboliquement par le contour de la côte nord africaine, l'artiste frontignanaise Marina Di Dona (lire notre édition d'hier) a réalisé gracieusement une sculpture en bronze représentant un homme, une femme et un enfant, unis comme une famille pied-noire. Ce mémorial, attendu depuis longtemps, a été porté et défendu par les membres de la maison du pied-noir et le cercle algérianiste, et soutenu par la municipalité qui a offert le terrain.
« Aujourd'hui, nous pouvons être fiers que les filles et fils d'Afrique du Nord, nombreux dans notre ville et ses alentours (1), aient enfin un lieu de recueillement pour rendre hommage à leurs défunts restés sur la terre d'Afrique du Nord », a rappelé le maire François Commeinhes. François Hernandez, président de la maison du pied-noir a, lui, tenu à rendre hommage à son prédécesseur, Jean- Claude Pruniaux, aujourd'hui disparu, et à l'origine de ce projet. Au sujet du monument, il s'est félicité d'y voir « le point d'équilibre entre la tragédie vécue dans le passé, et l'avenir et ses promesses.
(1) 10 000 pieds-noirs vivent dans le bassin de Thau.
Elie Wiesel, Buchenwald survivor and Nobel Laureate, spoke just moments ago during his visit to Buchenwald with Barack Obama and Angela Merkel.
After saying that it is enough - there has been enough visiting cemeteries and enough weeping, he continued:
“Memory must bring people together rather than set them apart. Memories heed not to sow anger in our hearts, but on the contrary a sense of solidarity with all those who lead us. What else can we do except invoke that memory so that people everywhere will say the twenty-first century is a century of new beginnings filled with promise and infinite hope and that time’s profound gratitude to all those who believe in our task wishes to improve the human condition. A great man, Camus, wrote at the end of his marvelous novel The Plague, ‘After all,’ he said, ‘after the tragedy, nevertheless there is more in the human being to celebrate than to denigrate.’ Even that can be found as truth, painful as it is, in Buchenwald.”
I’m trying to finish this article on plural identities in Francophone women’s autobiographies and I’m stuck in thoughts of my fractured sense of self. Ever since Sorenne was born I have had a new appreciation for the women I’ve been reading for years: Cardinal, Cixous, Sebbar, among many others. This child came from me and for the first four and a half months was exclusively nourished by me. Reproduction simply works in that mind-boggling fashion. As much as she was or is a part of me, I feel completely independent from that child. She was her own person from the first time I felt her move in the womb. I never want to be a woman whose identity is caught up in the perceived success and failure of her child. That girl is so completely her own, and while we are deeply bonded (she’s a bit mommy crazy these days), she has her own identity.
I had an awkward moment yet again yesterday when a colleague said she has my eyes. I do not know how to react to these continual statements of, “Sorenne looks just like you,” from friends and strangers. Part of me doesn’t really see it, and the other part just doesn’t know how to react. Is this a complement? Poor girl. Maybe she doesn’t want to look like me. Still, she’s limited somewhat by my genes. Inescapably doubled, or at least divided, but mostly that feeling is driven by a severe lack of sleep.
Call for Papers: Between Present and Past: Nostalgia in Francophone Literature 41st Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) April 7-11, 2010 Montreal, Quebec - Hilton Bonaventure
“Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t,” according to David Lowenthal’s 1989 article, yet many are compelled to cling to their longing for the past. This is especially true for many French and Francophone authors who lived through the end of colonialism. While they may overtly deny their nostalgia, it is difficult to escape the compulsion to recreate the time before their exile. Authors such as Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, and Marie Cardinal, among many others, cannot help but recreate their colonial homes even when they write from a postcolonial position. Rewriting the past can be therapeutic and obsessive. As Judith Butler explains in “The Pleasure of Repetition” (1990), repeating the past is a vain effort “to inhabit that past within the terms of the present and effect its fantasized reconstruction.” In an attempt to understand how nostalgia affects memory writing and how writing sustains nostalgia, this panel will examine the recreation of the past in French and Francophone postcolonial literature. Email Amy L. Hubbell (ahubbell@ksu.edu) with proposed abstracts of 300 words by September 30, 2009.
Please include with your abstract: Name and Affiliation Email address Postal address Telephone number A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)
Additional Conference Information: The 41st Annual Convention will feature approximately 350 sessions, as well as dynamic speakers and cultural events. Details and the complete Call for Papers for the 2010 Convention will be posted in June: www.nemla.org.
Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.
Travel to Canada now requires a passport for U.S. citizens. Please get your passport application in early.
"Pour moi, la question de l'exil continue à se poser. Elle se posera jusqu'à ce que je cesse d'écrire. J'écris dans l'exil, j'écris à partir de l'exil. Ce qui m'intéresse, ce sont tous ceux qui sont ou frappés par l'exil, ou qui ont fait le choix de l'exil. C'est ce que je traite dans tous mes livres."
- Leïla Sebbar, interview with Boniface Mongo-Mboussa
"Entre Exil Et Enracinement: Entretien Avec Leïla Sebbar." Notre Librairie: Revue des Littératures du Sud 165 (2007). p. 127.
In a 1987 interview with Ysabel Saïah, Marie Cardinal stated, “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.”
Is this repetition indicative of a psychological trauma, or is it just a typical impetus for writing?
I received this message from a childhood friend yesterday on facebook, “My parents were just visiting and told me your old house has been razed....new home coming up. This follows a kitchen fire last year but I didn't think they'd take the whole house down!”
I have known for years now that you can never really go home, but now that I know I can never revisit the place, I am pondering what that means. I can’t think of one reason I would want to return there. To remember the address, however, I typed in “Meadowview Ln” into Google Maps which suggested Meadow View Dr, and led me to click on a picture. When I turned just one click to the right, there before me was my house. When I lived there the road wasn’t paved and cattle were kept in the field on “the hill” behind us. So now, I see the house for the first time in ages on the web, and it really no longer exists. I click up and down the street and remember Kory’s house and Kristen’s house and see a lot of houses that weren’t there before.
I told my mom the house was gone and she asked, “OK, so where's the picture??? That is crazy and I think the kitchen is the only part we remodeled!!! Well, it has been a few years, hasn't it.” It’s funny to think of asking for a picture of something no longer there. Proof that it’s gone? An empty lot? We can never go back. Not if we wanted, not if we had to.
Many Pieds-Noirs have been returning to Algeria in recent years. They bring back film that recaptures their homes and they play it for those who cannot physically return. When Jacques Derrida saw his homeland played back for him by Safaa Fathy, he found the past unrecognizable (see Tourner les mots), and Hélène Cixous traveled to Derrida’s Algeria with photos of his past, trying to make sense of what she was witnessing for the first time (Si près). But many Pieds-Noirs do not even see the present when they return. They only see what used to be.
In my case, this picture triggers memories of the dirt road and how big that hill to the right seemed when I rode my bike down it, and many of those houses now there were once just fields and empty lots. I see my past transposed onto the new siding and attempting to erase that ugly truck. But can I see an empty lot?
Today’s New York Times article, “In France, a War of Memories Over Memories of War” sums up much of my research in just two pages. The author, Michael Kimmelman, writes from Perpignan, France. Although he doesn’t discuss it, Perpignan is home to my correspondent Jean-Pierre Bartolini, publisher of La Seybouse. (The most recent edition is from February 1, 2009, No. 81.) Bartolini was recently embroiled in a war of memories of his own with other Pieds-Noirs in the area. Bartolini officially won that battle, but the conflict underscores the sensitivity the former French citizens of Algeria feel about the past and the way it is remembered. Until recently the vision of the past in Algeria was almost unilaterally expressed by Pieds-Noirs, and that past was written as one of peace and love in Algeria and anguish and betrayal in France.
In recent years the past has begun to disintegrate in a sense. An increasingly diverse set of authors is now finding ways to express their experiences, and as the past slips further away (now almost 47 years since the end of French Algeria), memories that are not already fossilized in writing are phantomatically ebbing forth.
The most prolific historian on all things Algerian, Benjamin Stora, had this to say in the New York Times:
“There is a crisis of French national storytelling, in that France historically has seen itself as a place of assimilation and integration, but now minorities want to question that story. That’s partly what the riots were about. And in this climate, the pieds noirs, who look back with nostalgia on the colonial days before the war in Algeria” — an era, Mr. Stora was careful to emphasize, when Algerian Muslims did not have equal rights — “they want to be seen as guardians, keepers of a bygone French nationalism, of Jacobinism.”
The Pieds-Noirs strive to protect the past (sauvegarder la mémoire), but there is no longer just “Une Algérie” available in the history section of French bookstores. We now have multiple visions of the past, or as Leïla Sebbar titled it, Mes Algéries en France.
My absence from this blog, if anyone has noticed, is directly related to a wonderful project I've been working on.
Sorenne was born on December 7, 2008, and now that she's settling into her rhythm, I'm able to get back to writing about the Pieds-Noirs, exile, homeland, and nostalgia.
I'm currently working on a project for presentation at the Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Boston at the end of this month. "Dual, Doubled, and Divided Selves: Women Writing between Algeria and France," focuses on Marie Cardinal, Leïla Sebbar, and Hélène Cixous and how these women wrote multiple versions of themselves, each with a different strategy for representing her identity.
Although I won't have time to address it in this paper, I've also been thinking about language choice and how this has further divided authors like Sebbar and Assia Djebar (the subject of Névine El Nossery's talk on the same panel). Below is an interview with Sebbar on her work, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (Paris: Julliard, 2003).
I'm concurrently writing a book review of Assia Djebar edited by Najib Redouane and Yvette Bénayoun-Szmidt (Paris: Harmattan, 2008) for the French Review. It's taking an eternity (see above image of baby Sorenne), but the collection of essays is providing me with much to think about. Sebbar and Djebar have both stated that if they had chosen (or in the case of Sebbar, been able to) write in Arabic, they would not write at all. Djebar explains the risk of writing herself,
"Prendre conscience que l’écriture devient un dévoilement, cela m’a fait reculer. Je me suis remise en question: si je continue à écrire, je vais détruire ma vie car elle va être perturbée par l’écriture romanesque” (29).
and Sebbar focuses on her need for writing fiction,
“… me placer au cœur, au 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” (Lettres parisiennes, Paris: Barrault, 1986. 147).
For these women, the absence of their language and their separations became their source of expression.
