You can never go home

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?

The Pieds-Noirs’ War of Memories in the New York Times

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.