Nîmes, pèlerinage de Notre Dame de Santa Cruz 2011

This year marks the 49th anniversary of the Pieds-Noirs' exile from Algeria and preparations have long since begun for the commemoration of 50 years to take place in 2012. Because I have a conference in Aix-en-Provence and am presenting June 1, I've been able to stitch in a quick trip to Nîmes for Ascension on June 2. I've already made contact with a few Pieds-Noirs who will be there, but if you are interested in talking to me (in French or in English) about your memories of Algeria or any return trips you may have made since 1962, please do contact me. I'd love to talk to you in person.

Et pour les francophones, je le dis en français: je serai à Nîmes le 2 juin pour l'Ascension et le pèlerinage de Notre Dame de Santa Cruz. J'arrive à Nîmes vers la fin de la matinée, mais j'espère être à Mas de Mingue vers midi. Si vous aimeriez me parler de vos souvenirs de vote patrie, si vous avez écrit un texte au sujet de votre passé en Algérie, ou si vous avez fait un voyage de retour depuis 1962, je serais très contente de vous rencontrer. Je travaille actuellement les voyages récents (depuis 2000) en Algérie, surtout ceux qui ont été filmés. Contactez-moi, donc. Malheureusement je dois repartir le 3 juin, mais je me réjouis de pouvoir retrouver des anciens et nouveaux amis pieds-noirs.

Vidéo du pèlerinage en 2007. http://piedsnoirs.blogspot.com/2007/05/plerinage-de-santa-cruz.html

Marie Cardinal, ten years and so much more

on my desk today

Ten years ago today, Marie Cardinal passed away. I was in Paris when I heard the news. I had hoped to meet her in 2001 while I was living in Switzerland and frequently traveling to France for my doctoral research, but that was not to be in my future.

Her passing, though, had little bearing on the direction of my research. Hardly a day has gone by when I haven't thought of something that she has written or that her work hasn't in some way influenced the way I think or see things. When I first discovered her, thanks very much to an undergraduate professor at Truman State University, I thought I had discovered my adoptive mother. "Les Mots pour le dire," je les ai trouvés. It was as though someone was finally speaking my language, albeit in French. Her words soothed, her pain made me feel understood, her vulnerability drew me in.

While I read, obsessed, and wrote about her during the dissertating years, I also grew to loathe the woman. She truly was like a literary mother to me. I became so sick of her whining, so unforgiving of her obsessive recreation of Algeria, so intolerant of her struggles and supposed victories. Why wasn't she strong enough to divorce her husband? Why was she so afraid of losing Algeria and so unable to see or really accept that it had gone on without her? Why did she refuse to openly criticize the Pied-Noir people, as she blatantly said in Les Pieds-Noirs.

And now I'm writing about her again, and again and again, all these years later. She kept repeating and I can't stop writing about her need to repeat. I have even found new angles to look at that obsessive memory and its manifestations. As I have come to know members of her community and understand the struggles the Pieds-Noirs have faced, I find she is much easier to forgive. She openly confronted traumas that many could not articulate, some I still cannot understand, even though I feel I've tracked her down and pinpointed so many details of her past.

Marie Cardinal, I'm sorry I've only known you through your writing, but perhaps that is the best way to know you, to keep you at your word, there in front of me, always within arm's reach.

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.