Visualizing Algiers, Reconstructing Marie Cardinal's Memory

I've spent the greater part of the morning on a sort of archeological dig via the Internet. I'm revising a chapter of my book related to the pleasure of repetition, and one of Cardinal's recurring stories needed some backup. She often recounts a very violent scene, most probably the Rue d'Isly massacre, intertwined with her mother's traumatizing avowal of having attempted to provoke a miscarriage when pregnant with Cardinal. This secondary and more recent violence is always somewhat fuzzy, and in Les Mots pour le dire, Cardinal claims she forgets the name of the street where she was. Nonetheless, she remembers other street names and can give a precise visual description of the location in Algiers.

image of Rampe Bugeaud 1961 from
http://jf.vinaccio.free.fr/site1000/alger08/alger037.html 

Thanks to the marvels of the Internet and the many Pieds-Noirs who have recreated Alger on their websites, I was able to use Google maps combined with a 1930s city map, Elisabeth Fechner's photos from Alger et l'Algérois, and some photos of the Hôtel Aletti to identify the street in question. I had always thought that Cardinal was disingenuous in her claim to forgetting, because I believed she was talking about the Rue Michelet (which she cites elsewhere). Now that I know the Hôtel Aletti is today called Hôtel Es-Safir and I have been able to transpose multiple maps and descriptions, I'm fairly sure the Boulevard (or sometimes called Rampe) Bugeaud is where the confession took place.

Why this matters, I'm not entirely sure - except that I'm proving repetition does not keep us from forgetting. Furthermore, we no longer need to remember because technology can do it for us. We repeat for other reasons, to fulfill other impulses, and even sometimes repeat to forget, repeat to erase unwanted details, repeat to take control of the painful recollections.

Now that I have an image of where Cardinal was in 1943 when her mother committed the unforgivable act of confession, I somehow feel the haunting sadness from the image. I remember these images from similar but inconclusive research undertaken a few years back: I'm creating my own sort of memory of Algiers, a city I've never visited. I'm sharing in a visual part of Cardinal's past, but through images and maps she likely never studied, because these are places she willfully tried to forget.

Stora on the War of Memories

Benjamin Stora gave an interview with Kersten Knipp published on Qantara.de as "The Bitter Legacy of Past Franco-Algerian Relations" on March 4, 2011 (and apparently translated from German to English - does Stora speak German?). Stora expounds upon France's reluctance to remember the loss of Algeria and Algeria's use of this history to legitimize their country today. I copy a snippet of the text below:


Knipp: France and Algeria have completely different memories of their common history. How would you characterise these memories?

Benjamin Stora: For a long time – for almost 30, 40 years – France primarily fostered a culture of forgetting. People didn't speak of Algeria; they wanted to put that era firmly behind them – the war and, of course, the defeat, the ignominy of ultimately having to withdraw from Algeria. After all, the French considered this North African nation to be an integral part of their national territory.

The Algerians, on the other hand, were faced with "too much" history. For them, it was about a memory that they could use to legitimise the existence of the nation and, above all, political power, which they tried to legitimise through heroic stories.