Pèlerinage recap

Indeed, I was in Nîmes for Ascension again this year, but under the rain and grey skies, the event took on a different tone. I apologize to those I was supposed to meet. I looked, asked around, and texted, but did not find them. Instead, I met a few new characters in the street and at their booths, and I believe they provided me with enough material in just a few minutes of conversation to help me find my way to the end of my book.

I can't tell if it's apparent here, but I'm struggling with my experience in Nîmes this year. I predict that next year's gathering which will mark the 50th year of exile will be a different sort of celebration, but somehow seeing all these aging people, some crippled, make their way up the long path to the sanctuary under the rain -- it troubled me this year. In 2007 my experience was joyful and I was treated to open strangers who happily shared their pasts with me. This year I felt distant ... what was I doing there by myself? People still openly talked with me when I approached them. I was still led around by my elbow and introduced to relevant figures in the community, but this year I was approaching a community that is slowly becoming a part of my own past. My research interests are shifting and maybe revisiting Nîmes was suddenly a personal effort to return to my own past.

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.