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.
1 comment:
Vision of the past in Algeria in France is almost unilaterally expressed by lefty political groups owning press and capable to organize protests and other visible demonstrations (L'Appel des 100).
Then while those organizations gives their "official" position centered on exploitation/colonization/torture, Pieds-noirs just go on celebrating their past life, with ridiculous means compared to those who mock them.
History section on Algeria in bookstore is a place where both positions have always been opposed, thanks god a scientific approach on history still exists.
Lefty historians (aka "historiens militants") like Mr Stora count now on descendants of muslims immigrants from Maghreb to support their vision of the past and erase from the books the Pieds-Noirs memory, depicted as nostalgia but nothing less than the testimony of actors of the history. Who just left the war.
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