Leïla Sebbar: Voyage en Algéries autour de ma chambre

While I work on my chapter, "Leïla Sebbar's Review of Algerias Past," I've been catching up on her blog (thanks to Laura Reeck's Writerly Identities which references it), and I see she has continued her Voyage en Algéries autour de ma chambre, published in 2008. Of particular interest, Sebbar includes images of the fabled Jardin d'Essai in Algiers (see Cixous's Si près, among many other post-Algerian memory works that reference it) and a painting of another Algerian cemetery, Cimetière d’El Hamma Sidi M’Hamed, Alger by Catherine Rossi, 2010. The ruins of the past keep coming to the fore, both visually and textually.

Repatriating Remains from Algeria

According to Ennahar Online today, 135 small French cemeteries in Algeria will be regrouped into 22 cemeteries in Algerian cities. There were 523 cemeteries and 210,000 graves gradually abandoned after Algerian Independence.

The Pieds-Noirs who make pilgrimages back to their hometowns often go to the cemeteries to find ancestral graves. The graves that are now in ruins evoke extreme emotion from the Pieds-Noirs who feel helpless to stop the desecration of the abandoned sites. For many who have revisited Algeria, the cemeteries are the penultimate sites of return (see Marie Cardinal's Les Pieds-Noirs and Au pays de mes racines, Hélène Cixous's Si près, and Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy's Tourner les mots).

The decree to regroup the graves apparently also gives French citizens the option of repatriating the remains of their loved ones at their own expense. An interesting choice: let the loved one remain "abandoned" in their homeland, or have them join their families in exile so they can be looked after. Of course, cemeteries are not as much for the dead as for the living.