Tag Archives: Algeria

Empire, Intersections

Fredrika Bremer: Sketches of Sweden and its Aristocracy

1 Comment

Fredrika BremerFredrika Bremer (1801 – 1865) was a Swedish writer and feminist reformer. Wikipedia (which I was forced to turn to as the 1844 introduction to the book spoke only of translation, not the author herself) states she is she is regarded as ‘the Swedish Jane Austen’ and further that ‘her novel Hertha prompted a social movement that granted all Swedish women legal majority at the age of 25 and established Högre Lärarinneseminariet, Sweden’s first female tertiary school.’ Also that in ‘1884, she became the namesake of the Fredrika Bremer Association, the first women’s rights organization in Sweden.’

Worth a read, then.

Fredrika Bremer -- New Sketches of Everyday LifeNew sketches of every-day life: a diary as translated by her contemporary Mary Howitt (released in 1844 in its English edition)  is widely available for free, which is why it is the book I have read. It is quite an enjoyable romance, complete with women’s rights and corruption in the regiments bringing ruin onto ‘good’ families and evil old rakes, and I enjoyed the form of diary entries. While I hate that people call her the Swedish Jane Austen (and she is far more romantically and grandly melodramatic), yet there is quite a similarity in morals and manners along with a sprightly heroine. I suppose this isn’t surprising given how interwoven European monarchies were, and the centrality of French culture. But how curious that apart from a host of references particular to Sweden and descriptions of scenery, I should never have guessed this did not take place in England or France.

Felix in the mean time is better, but his health appeared deranged by the irregular life which he has led. He recovers slowly. Lennartson endeavours to animate his mind, and to cheer his spirits. He often spends the evenings in reading Sir Walter Scott’s romances to him. (250)

Does Scott explain everything?

I am reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters on Sweden at the same time, which is fascinating. Bremer actually shares more with her, I think, both in terms of judgments laid upon polite society, as well as the exclamatory sentimentality afforded to emotions, especially those raised in relation to love, friendship and scenery.

I am leaving for Sweden today! Hurrah!

I am not above exclamation points myself. I have been reading much in preparation, as I enjoy, so there shall be a slew of Swedishness upcoming. But back to Bremer.

On Women

Women and the romanticism of their connections to nature, and much on the constraints of society (though quite a bit on its joys as well):

…I was a violent child, and in my whole being the opposite of the lovely and the agreeable, which my stepmother so highly valued, and of which she unceasingly spoke in quotations from the romances of Madame Genlis. I was compared with the enchantresses in these romances, and set down in proportion. In one word my stepmother could not rightly endure me, and I could not endure—Madame Genlis and her graces, who occasioned me so much torment. Ah! the sunburnt, wild girl grown up in the ‘moors’ of Finland, whose life had passed in woods and heaths, among rocks and streams, and amid dreams as wild and wonderful as the natural scenery amongst which she grew; this girl was in truth no being for the salon, for a French Grace. Transplanted from the fresh wilderness of her childhood into the magnificent capital, where huge mirrors on every side reflected every movement, and seemed scornfully to mimic every free outbreak which was not stamped by grace,—she was afraid, afraid of herself, afraid of everybody, and especially of the goddess of the palace. The governess and the servants called me ‘the Tartar-girl, ‘ ‘the young Tartar.’ (18-19)

I like how she describes two periods in relation to her step-mother, the ‘period of my adulation’, from 11-15 and the ‘epoch of opposition’  during her later teens. The ‘diary’ starts with her having returned after an unnamed disappointment at the age of 30. She is admired:

My stepmother said I was exactly at the handsome, ‘modern age,’ for a charming woman; in one word, ‘la femme la trente ans, la femme de Balsac;’  (26)

There are remarks throughout praising kindness, simplicity and virtue, and noting its absence in many women of society:

The Baroness Bella B., the Beauty, and Helfrid O Rittersvard, paid us a visit. Afterwards, Ake Sparrskold, Felix, and others. ‘The Beauty’ expatiated (quite mal-a-prapos, methinks) on the unhappiness and disagreeableness of ugliness. She pities ‘from her heart, plain people;’ but they must at least know that they are plain, and must stop nicely at home, and not exhibit themselves out in the world, and in society, where they can awaken only disagreeable feelings. I was provoked at this speech (93)

Thus it is, that the meoldrama emerges from ugliness underneath — what she likens to a volcano more than once:

Among all these dissipations, which reign in the house; amid all those beautiful toilets and artificial flowers, and all these so-called pleasures, still strange symptoms break forth, which testify of the volcanic soil upon which they dance. (142)

Hers remains a terribly romanticised vision of women’s place, and the happiness they may attain.

I now know very well that I never can love Felix properly, because I cannot highly esteem him, as I will and must highly esteem my husband; but”
“But what, my sweet Selma?”
“If I can make him and others happy, then—neither shall I myself be unhappy. And then—God will give me, perhaps, a child, which I can love, and in which I can have pleasure in the world.”
“With this Selma wept quite softly, leaning on my shoulder. (141)

But not all of them…there is another kind of life possible for women, one more of the mind and culture. There is a desire independence here, though clearly it requires independence of money and position:

I like Brenner greatly; but not so much as I love my own independence, the peace of my soul, and the prospect of a peaceful and care-free future. I will be his friend, but no more. I dread marriage; I dread that compulsion, that dark deep suffering, which the power of one being over another so often exhibits. I have seen so much of it. (191)

Thus class and gender intersect, though Bremer would claim all the suffering for the wealthy even as she acknowledges the poverty around her — though this is one of the very few places she does so:

On the long ill-built street, I saw a herd of ragged, pale children, old women and aged men, living pictures of sickness, of poverty, and age; and I contemplated misery in all gradations of human life—in all its weeping shadows. And amid all these shadow-figures there yet probably was not one who would have exchanged his lot with mine, if he could have seen into my heart. Ah! the severest kind of-wretchedness is not that which exhibits its rags in the streets, and at night conceals itself in great deserted buildings — it is that which smiles in polite companies, which shews to the world a joyful exterior whilst sorrow gnaws its heart. (222)

Fredrika Bremer is herself of this wealthy class, of course.

fredrika bremer

On the Country

I love these descriptions of nature, and pearls! Who knew these could be found there…

On the shore where I was born, on the alder- fringed streams of Kautua, I often went, as a child, pearl-fishing, when the heat of the sun had abated the rigour of the water. I fancy still that the clear cool waves wash my feet; I fancy still that I see the pearl muscles [sic mussels they must be] which the waterfall had thrown together in heaps in the sand of the little green islands. Whole heaps of these muscles I collected together on the shore, and if I found one pearl among them what joy! (23)

On Stockholm

We dwelt upon the Blasieholm, exactly upon the limits of the fields planted with trees, where the Delagarde Palace, with its towers, had elevated itself for centuries, and had been burnt down in one night. I look out from my window, and see and hear the roaring of the broad stream which separates the city from Norrmalm, and on whose shores have been fought so many bloody battles; on the haven, the bridge of boats, the royal castle, with the Lion Hill; the river promenade, further on, beneath the north-bridge; and on the other side of the island of the Holy Ghost, the blue water of the Malar, and the southern mountains. From among the masses of houses upon the different islands, raise themselves the bold spires of the church-towers. To the left I have that of St. Catharine; to the right, that of St. James; and further off, the royal gardens, with their rich alleys, and I should never come to an end, were I to name all that I have and govern—from my window. And in my chamber, I have my pencils, my books, and myself. (29)

The older sections:

…over the bridge and through the streets into the city. There are the oldest memories of Stockholm; here is the heart of the Stockholm city, which also has the form of a heart; here flowed the blood of the nobles of Sweden in streams from the hand of Christiern; here the streets are narrow, the lanes dark; but here also is the Castle of Stockholm; and here lift themselves even now, a mass of houses, which shew by their inscriptions cut in stone, the strong fear of God which built up in ancient times the realm of Sweden. (169)

And this, on what a city, particularly a capital city of a hierarchical and cultured society, should be:

Once saw I a chief-city without any towers, with- out any one building exceeding in beauty and size the rest; all were equal, and people said, ‘see here the image of a true social community.’

But no! thus appears it not. When a people come to the consciousness of its full life, its cities and its buildings will testify of it: there must the flaming spires of the temples ascend to the sky; there must columns of honour stand in memorial of great men; there must magnificent palaces (not private ones!) express the sense of greatness in a noble public spirit; there must the beautiful express in manifold forms the good in the life of the state. (89-90)

On the pageantry of the aristocracy’s life

This is ongoing — glittering balls in glittering palaces and a parade of notables in beautiful dresses.

I confess, I love the dresses.

She makes much of the sledges, and I could almost wish we were going at a time when we could have done something similar

Felix wished to drive Selma, and St. Orme invited Flora to his sledge. This was to be covered with tiger-skins, and would be drawn by fiery piebalds, which Flora had seen, and found much to her liking. This sledge was to lead the procession, which was to drive through the principal streets of the city to the park, where they were to dine, and after that were to dance, and so on. (74)

There is more:

Yet is it a purely-northern enjoyment, which a purely northern life has—such a pleasure-excursion as this in the clear winter air, under the bright blue heaven, upon the snow-white earth! They fly away so gaily and lightly,—the open ones covered with skins and with white nets, which flutter over fiery, foaming horses, they fly along so fleetly to the play of the jingling bells. And it feels so irresistibly pleasant thus to drive away over the earth in a train of joyous people, and by the side of a friend who participates in every feeling, every impression. (195)

On even the Swedish benefiting from the ‘adventure’ of colonialism

I think this means Brenner joined the French Foreign Legion, and helped conquer Algeria…and this saved him.

at the time when France made war on the States of Barbary. Lennartson managed so with Brenner’s connexions that he should take part in this campaign, and fitted him out at his own expense, though at that time he was anything but rich. Lennartson, in his plan, had rightly judged of his friend, and accomplished his salvation.

With strong natures there is only one step between despair and heroism. With a lock of Lennartson’s hair upon his breast, and his image deeply stamped upon his soul, the young Brenner plunged forward upon a path on which dangers of every kind called him forth to combat. To him, there was more than the conquering of people and kingdoms; to him, there was the winning again of honour; the winning again the esteem of himself, of his friends, and of his fatherland. And with the most joyful mad-bravery, he ventured his life for that purpose. The young Swede divided dangers and laurels with the Frenchmen. And upon the wild sea waves, in battle before the walls of Algiers, in combats with Arabs and Kabyles on the soil of Africa, the French learned highly to esteem a bravery equal to their own (a greater is impossible), and to love a humanity towards vanquished foes, with which they are not so well acquainted.

Afterwards, Brenner accompanied some French learned men on their dangerous journey into the interior of Africa. (67)

I am bewildered at the gap by what she imagines his travels in Algeria and Africa to have been, and the harsh reality of conquest as they actually were. Small wonder he rarely spoke of them:

Many times I request that he should call forth some remembrances out of his restless life, pictures of another climate, of seas and wildernesses, of glowing Africa and strange Egypt; scenes from the battle-fields around Atlas. It is rare that he will relate anything of this; but how curiously and desiringly do I not then listen! These pictures are so grand, and, I acknowledge, something grand also in the nature which has conceived them. (134)

This anecdote serves as such a brilliant metaphor for Europe’s colonial legacy:

Brenner now related— “It was in Egypt, near to Thebes. I rambled one  morning out into the surrounding desert to hunt, and happened to see a vulture sitting not far from me, among the ruins of fallen monuments. This bird is known for its strong power of life, and is dangerous to approach when it is wounded; it has a strength almost incredible. I shot at him, and hit him on the breast, and as I believed mortally. He remained however sitting quietly in his place, and I rushed to him that I might complete my work, but in that same moment the bird raised itself, and mounted upwards. Blood streamed from his breast, and a part of his entrails fell out, but notwithstanding this he continued to ascend still higher and higher, in wider and wider circles. A few shots which I fired after him produced no effect. It was beautiful, in the vast silent wilderness to see this bird, mortally wounded and dyeing the sand with his blood, silently circling upon his monstrous wings higher and ever higher; the last circuit which he made was unquestionably a quarter of a mile in extent; then I lost sight of him in the blue space of heaven.” (272-273)

While the company are impressed with such a strange story, it somehow causes them to think even better of Bremer. How better to explain colonialism and orientalism — the European admires great strength and beauty, shoots it, and then admires it still more as it struggles through its death throes.

For a final hilarious, and slightly ill-judged sentence:

Even the larva of suffering can receive wings, can fly in the night, and be lighted by its stars, and bathe in its dew. (233)

Perhaps it suffers in translation. The whole introduction sheds an interesting light on the ongoing problems of translations not rceieving enough pay, not being credited, of being stolen and violently edited down and released in cheap editions that can never earn enough royalties to pay for the translator’s time — if indeed there were ever an intention of paying for it.  Some things never change, this is from Mary Howitt the translator:

And what have we got instead, from this advocate of public good? An importation and reprint of anonymous abridgments of these works, got up and curtailed, both in style and quantity, into the limits suited to the American cheap market, and abounding with Americanisms, which all well-educated persons will be careful not to introduce into their families; as “she is a going”—” vanity belittles a woman”—”sleighs, and sleds, and sleighing,” for sledges and sledging—”surroundings,” for environs; with such Yankee slang as “he got mad in love, and she gave him the bag,” etc.; as any one may convince himself who looks into these eye-destroying small prints. (vii)
— Mary Howitt, 1843, The Grange, Upper Clapton

[Bremer, Fredrika (1844) New sketches of every-day life: a diary. Vol. 1 Tr. [from the Swedish] by Mary Howitt. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans]

 

Save

Empire, Fiction

Language and Violence — The Meursault Investigation

Leave a comment

The Meursault InvestigationI quite loved The Meursault Investigation, an evocative and angry wrenching away of anonymity from those murdered under colonial rule. A stinging refusal to allow the focus to remain on the problems and tragedies of the murderer to search them out instead in the man murdered, the hole he left behind, the impact of those who we were close to him. The very power of Camus’s words rendered the violence he inflicted on the stranger all the greater.

It’s simple: The story we’re talking about should be rewritten, in the same language, but from right to left. That is, starting when the Arab’s body was still alive, going down the narrow streets that led to his demise, giving him a name…So one reason for learning this language was to tell this story for my brother, the friend of the sun. Seems unlikely to you? You’re wrong. I had to find the response nobody wanted to give me when I needed it. You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you…(7)

The Meursault Investigation is about how we understand things, how we construct naratives around events. How European narratives erase non-whites, push them into the background, into the scenery, into simple provocations or plot twists that facilitate the drama experienced by white males.

The way counter-narratives must be constructed.

Without realizing it, and years before I learned to read, I rejected the absurdity of his death, and I needed a story to give him a shroud. (21)

There is so much here about language, the differences between Arabic and French, the limitations and liberations of each. In this it shares space with Assia Djebar, though from such different perspectives I love how they each grapple with the same questions.

Language and the construction of narrative.

For a long time, not a year passed without my mother swearing she’d found Musa’s body, heard his breathing or his footstep…And for a long time, that would make me feel impossibly ashamed of her–and later, it pushed me to learn a language that could serve as a barrier between her frenzies and me. Yes, the language. The one I read, the one I speak today, the one that’s not hers. Hers is rich, full of imagery, vitality, sudden jolts, and improvisations, but not too big on precision. Mama’s grief lasted so long that she needed a new idiom to express it in… I had to learn a language other than that one. To survive…Books and your hero’s language gradually enabled me to name things differently and to organize the world with my own words. (37)

She tells and retells, invents and reinvents narratives around his brother — they are so strong they smother him, contain him so that he cannot be himself, must always live in his brother’s shadow. One aspect of the violence of language, brought to life through loss and longing and obsession.

This explores another violence that can be found in words, in silences, in storytelling:

But Musa’s body will remain a mystery. There’s not a word in the book about it. That’s denial of a shockingly violent kind, don’t you think? As soon as the shot is fired, the murderer turns around, heading for a mystery he considers worthier of interest than the Arab’s life. (46)

A violence possible only through the construction of other, through conquest. What the colonised share in common around the world conquered by whites:

Arab. I never felt Arab, you know. Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes. In our neighbourhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces, and habits. Period. The others were “the strangers,”… (60)

These strangers for the narrator are the Meursaults, the numberless faceless figures of occupation and oppression.

And reminiscent of Fanon, there is yet another kind of violence, what could be a redemptive violence:

On that hot night, nothing had suggested that a murder was about to happen. You’re asking me what I felt afterward? Huge relief. A kind of worthiness, but without honor. Something deep inside me sat down, curled up into a ball, took its head in its hands, and sighed so profoundly that I was touched and tears sprang to my eyes. Then I raised them and looked around me. Again I was surprised by the extent of the courtyard where I had just executed an unknown person. It was as if perspectives were opening up and I could finally breathe. Whereas I’d always lived like a prisoner until then, confined within the perimeter established by Musa’s death and my mother’s vigilance, I now saw myself standing upright, at the heart of a vast territory: the whole nocturnal earth, the gift of that night. When my heart regained its place, all other objects did the same. (78)

But it is not that simple of course, just as the competing narratives, the claims on identity, the nature of family, the complexes existing between a man and his mother, nothing is simple.

Well, after I’d killed a man, it wasn’t my innocence I missed the most, it was the border that had existed until then between my life and crime. That’s a line that’s hard to redraw later. The Other is a unit of measurement you lose when you kill. (90)

After the murder he is imprisoned, will possibly be executed through the new state’s state-sanctioned violence for killing outside of the liberation struggle he is despised for not having joined.

Algeria lives in a different way in this story, Algiers both concrete and abstracted:

…but I loved the virile, almost comforting roar of the engine that was snatching us, my mother and me, out of an immense labyrinth made up of buildings, downtrodden people, shantytowns, dirty urchins, aggressive cops, and beaches fatal to Arabs. For the two of us, the city would always be the scene of the crime, or the place where something pure and ancient was lost. (21)

Funny the way that this is specific and yet non-specific, belonging to a national and urban geography, yet individuals have been erased from them.

…there’s no point inn your going to the cemetery, or to Bab-el-Oued, or to the beach. You won’t find anything… This story takes place somewhere in someone’s head, in mine and in yours and in the heads of people like you. In a sort of beyond.

Don’t do any geographical searching — that’s the point I’m trying to make. (57)

There is much more to The Meursault Investigation, more on language and identity, sexuality and relationships, nation and colonialism and struggle. Much of it is not at all subtle. A book that repays rereading I imagine, a good book for teaching. At the same time it has an intellectual feel, an abstracted feel not entirely due to the form of tales told a researcher in a bar. I am not quite sure why, in some ways the violence is as abstract as it is for Camus, as removed. It does not have the emotional power of Djebar’s Algerian White, cannot touch Mouloud Feraoun’s recollections before his assassination, or even the more rigorous incandescence of Fanon.

[Daoud, Kamel. 2015. The Meursault Investigation. London: Oneworld Publications.]

 

Save

Books, Empire, Intersections, Struggle & Movement

Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth

4 Comments

Fanon - The Wretched of the EarthThe Wretched of the Earth (1961) had such a huge impact on me when I first read it. It was a pleasure to come back to it, and get more far more from it this time around after more years of experience, and also reading Black Skin, White Masks and much more about colonialism and struggle. I had forgotten quite what an anguished call for revolution and redemption it is, and can see why looking back I loved it so much. I was in need of those things myself, though my own need barely deserves to sit within the same paragraph as all that Fanon theorises.

For those not already favourable to Fanon’s works, I think the key point is this:

The masses battle with the same poverty, wrestle with the same age-old gestures, and delineate what we could call the geography of hunger with their shrunken bellies. A world of underdevelopment, a world of poverty and inhumanity. But also a world without doctors, without engineers, without administrators. Facing this world, the European nations wallow in the most ostentatious opulence. The European opulence is literally a scandal for it was built on the backs of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves, and it owes its very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world. Europe’s well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians, and Asians. This we are determined never to forget. (53)

This is what is always forgotten. The second thing is this:

Antiracist racism and the determination to defend one’s skin, which is characteristic of the colonized’s response to colonial oppression, clearly represent sufficient reasons to join the struggle.  But one does not sustain a war, one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one’s entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph. Racism, hatred, resentment, and “the legitimate desire for revenge” alone cannot nurture a war of liberation.

…hatred is not an agenda…. (89)

The violence described by Fanon as part of the struggle for liberation is not fueled by hatred, it is necessary to break the psychological controls over one’s own mind, to claim a different worldview, set of values and above all a different way of life and a different future than that being imposed through the deeper violence of colonialism. This is why he writes:

National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used…decolonization is always a violent event.

…proof of success lies in a social fabric that is has been changed inside out. This change is extraordinarily important because it is desired, clamored for, and demanded. The need for this changes exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colons, the colonists. (1)

Violent because it involves people standing up to reclaim what has been stolen violently from them and change everything, turn everything upside down — and that change, that reclaiming is fought tooth and tail with an immensity of fear by those who stole it.

On Violence:

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder…it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance. Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation. (2)

The distance between the violence of capitalist and colonial regimes

In capitalist countries a multitude of sermonizers, counselors, and “confusion-mongers” intervene between the exploited and the authorities. In colonial regions, however, the proximity and frequent direct intervention by the police and the military ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm. We have seen how the government’s agent uses a language of pure violence . The agent does not alleviate repression or mask domination. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject.  (4)

— though arguably in the US at least, people of colour know more of the second than the first. The results:

So the colonized subject wastes no time lamenting and almost never searches for justice in the colonial context. (43)

During the struggle for liberation their is a singular loss of interest in these rituals. With his back to the wall, the knife at his throat, or to be more exact the electrode on his genitals, the colonized subject is bound to stop telling stories. (20)

Violence become creative appropriation, a declaration that another way is possible after the old ways of enslavement and exploitation are smashed:

The violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world, which tirelessly punctuated the destruction of the indigenous social fabric, and demolished unchecked the systems of reference of the country’s economy, lifestyles, and modes of dress, this same violence will be vindicated and appropriated when, taking history in their own hands, the colonized swarm into the forbidden cities. To blow the colonized world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject.

**

Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different. (6)

Resisting the violence of white supremacy and denigration of all others:

Now it so happens that when the colonized hear a speech on Western culture they draw their machetes or at least check to see if they are close to hand. The supremacy of white values is stated with such violence, the victorious confirmation of these values with then lifestyle and beliefs of the colonized is so impregnated with aggressiveness, that as a counter measure the colonized rightly makes a mockery of them whenever they are mentioned. (8)

Race and Marxism:

A topic very close to my heart

In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue. It is not just the concept of the precapitalist society, so effectively studied by Marx, which needs to be reexamined here…It is not the factories, the estates, or the bank account which primarily characterize the “ruling-class.” The ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, “the others.” (5)

Race used justify conquest and then exploitation, not just to maintain, but to increase those inequalities in service to an oppression of many races by white Europeans in ways that stretch to an older past:

As if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil. (6)

It’s “them or us” is not a paradox since colonialism, as we have seen, is precisely the organization of a Manichean world, of a compartmentalized world. (43)

how these new colonial and capitalist relations have shifted over time:

Capitalism, in its expansionist phase, regarded the colonies as a source of raw materials which once processed could be unloaded on the European market. After a phase of capital accumulation, capitalism has now modified its notion of profitability. The colonies have become a market. … A blind domination on the model of slavery is not economically profitable for the metropolis. The monopolistic fraction of the metropolitan bourgeoisie will not support a government whose policy is based solely on the power of arms. (27)

Another interesting aside on the nature of work and slavery:

They very quickly realized that work is not a simple notion, that slavery is the opposite of work, and that work presupposes freedom, responsibility, and consciousness. (133)

Tactics:

You do not disorganize a society, however primitive it may be, with such an agenda if you are not determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered. (3)

For us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned in blood. (146)

You must be ready to go all the way (and much as I value this work, much of this rhetoric does strike me as a very masculine position — there is little here on how to build and create though the need is acknowledged.). How much there is that can only be learned through struggle — and the necessity of struggle for learning it:

The colonized intellectual learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself. The  colonialist bourgeoisie hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals where each is locked in his subjectivity…Involvement in the organization of the struggle will already introduce him to a different vocabulary. “Brother,” “sister,” “comrade” are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie because in their thinking my brother is my wallet and my comrade, my scheming. In a kind of auto-da-fe, the colonized intellectual witnesses the destruction of all his idols: egoism, arrogant recrimination, and the idiotic, childish need to have the last word. this colonized intellectual, pulverized by colonialist culture, will also discover the strength of the village assemblies, the power of the people’s commissions…(11)

How much intellectuals have to learn…

For a colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity. (9)

The people, on the the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. “Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?” And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective working model. (14)

He writes again:

One of the greatest services the Algerian revolution has rendered to Algerian intellectuals was to put them in touch with the masses, to allow them to see the extreme, unspeakable poverty of the people and at the same time witness the awakening of their intelligence and the development of their consciousness. (130)

The people themselves also have much to learn alongside intellectuals, for both

But political education means opening up the mind, awakening the mind, and introducing it to the world. It is as Cesaire said: “To invent the souls of men.” (138)

There is much in here that echoes Cesaire. Education and struggle are necessary because colonization works actively to deform the colonized so as to better control them, and these deformations deepen as the colonized do what they must to survive. A few examples of how insidious colonialism is and how it shapes everyday behaviours:

The question of truth must also be taken into consideration. For the people, only fellow nationals are ever owed the truth. No absolute truth, no discourse on the transparency of the soul can erode this position. In answer to the lie of the colonial situation, the colonized subject responds with a lie. (14)

The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits (15)

So one of the ways the colonized subject releases his muscular tension is through the very real collective self-destruction of these internecine feuds. Such behavior represents a death wish in the face of danger, a suicidal conduct which reinforces the colonist’s experience and domination and reassures him that such men are not rational. (17-18)

The treatment of the colonized is to brutalize, oppress into silence, and to push into the natural world so that for the colonizers they are not a troubling presence:

Under the French occupation the Germans remained human beings. In Algeria there is not simply domination but the decision, literally, to occupy nothing else but a territory. The Algerians, the women dressed in haiks, the palm groves, and the camels form a landscape, the natural backdrop for the French presence. (182)

Yet for the colonized?

We believe that in the cases presented here the triggering factor is principally the bloody, pitiless, atmosphere, the generalization of inhuman practices, of people’s lasting impression that they are witnessing a veritable apocalypse. (183)

For colonialism has not simply depersonalized the colonized. The very structure of society has been depersonalized on a collective level. (219)

Key for Fanon is violence as a tactic of self-liberation — it is part of a necessary process to become truly free of the colonial relationship — a physical struggle but more importantly a psychological one:

only the armed struggle can effectively exorcise these lies about man that subordinate and literally mutilate the more conscious minded among us (220)

The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence. (44)

At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence. Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic, and even if they have been demobilized by rapid decolonization, the people have time to realize that liberation was the achievement of each and every one and no special merit should go to the leader. Violence hoists people up to the level of the leader. (51)

For Fanon, the party (as opposed to the government) was the organising force of the struggle, he writes:

A country which really want to answer to history, which wants to develop its towns and the minds of its inhabitants, must possess a genuine party. The party is not an instrument in the hands of the government. Very much to the contrary, the party is an instrument in the hands of the people. It is the party which decides on the policy enacted by the government. (127)

The role of the intellectual:

In Algeria especially, Horne’s A Savage Peace, and to a lesser extent Feraoun’s journals and Djebar’s writings, show just how implicated French intellectuals were in the occupation of the country, particularly sociologists.

Experts and sociologists are a guiding force behind these colonialist maneuvers and conduct numerous studies on the subject of complexes…attempts are made to disarm him [the colonized subject] psychologically and, naturally, with a few coins. (90)

To counter this, another kind of intellectual is needed, another task required, though for Fanon this is always dialectical, never one way. Struggle and the will of the people fighting for liberation and the ideology of the movement are at all times educating and shaping each other:

The task of bringing the people to maturity is facilitated by rigorous organization as well as the ideological level of their leaders. The power of ideology is elaborated and strengthened as the struggle unfolds, taking into account the enemy’s maneuvers and the movement’s victories and setbacks…The insurrection proves to itself its rationality and demonstrates its maturity every time it uses a specific case to advance the consciousness of the people. (95)

Totally irresponsible yesterday, today they are bent on understanding everything and determining everything. Enlightened by violence, the people’s consciousness rebels against any pacification. (52)

These intellectuals work together with the party, to critique it and ensure it is remaining true to the struggle and to the people:

some of the intellectual elements who have made a thorough analysis of the colonial reality and the international situation, begin to criticize the ideological vacuum of the national party and its dearth of strategy and tactics. They never tire of asking the leaders the crucial questions “What is nationalism? What does it mean to you? What does the term signify? What is the point of independence? And first how do you intend to achieve it?” while at the same time demanding that methodological issued be vigorously addressed (77)

An interesting note on language and relationship to movement — perennially under discussion

Resorting to technical language means you are determined to treat the masses as uninitiated. Such language is a poor front for the lecturer’s intent to deceive the people and leave them on the sidelines. Language’s endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to dispossess. The intention is to strip the people of their possessions as well as their sovereignty. You can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand. And if you think they can be dispensed with, that on the contrary they would be more of a nuisance to the smooth running of the many private and limited companies whose aim is to push them further into misery, than there is no more to be said. (131)

An awareness of the larger political context is also required, just as the anti-fascist fight and the US desire to become a leader of the free world after WWII played a key role in ensuring African American organising and struggle had levarage, so the context of this period must be taken into account:

Although the citadel is invincible against knives and bare hands, its invincibility crumbles when we take into account the context of the cold war. (38)

And for the future?

Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. (145)

On Culture:

Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: “Who am I in reality?” (182)

Culture provides an answer.

National culture is no folklore where an abstract populism is convinced it has uncovered the popular truth. It is not some congealed mass of noble gestures, in other words less and less connected with the reality fo the people. National culture is the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong. National culture in the underdeveloped countries, therefore, must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle… (168)

We believe the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists… After the struggle is over, there is not only the demise of colonialism, but also the demise of the colonized.

This new humanity, for itself and for other, inevitably defines a new humanism. (178)

Conclusions

And I shall let Fanon’s conclusions speak for themselves, they are splendid. I have such trouble, myself, writing conclusions. This is why I should try harder.

Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute.

We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let s not lose time in useless laments or sickening mimicry. Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world. (235)

When I look for man in European lifestyles and technology I see a constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders.

**

Let us decide not to imitate Europe and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavour to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.

Two centuries ago, a former European colony took it into its head to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the United States of American has become a monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions. (236-237)

yes, the European spirit is built on strange foundations…A permanent dialogue with itself, an increasingly obnoxious narcissism inevitably paved the way for a virtual delirium where intellectual thought turns into agony since the reality fo man as a living, working, self-made being is replaced by words, an assemblage of words and the tensions generated by their meanings. (237)

Last sentence:

For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavour to create a new man. (239)

For more on race, struggle, violence and empire…

Save

Save

Books, Intersections, Role of the intellectual, Struggle & Movement, Violence

Algerian White

1 Comment

Djebar_AlgerianWhite_HC_largeThis was beautiful.

A meditation on death and loss, lives taken in the struggle for freedom against the colonial power, against fundamentalism. A meditation on writing and all of its risks, language and all of its meanings, Algeria and all of its tragic complications.

Love and loss, hope and despair.

A travel through memories, like this one:

I took off for Kader’s Oran, the city and its deepest depths, which he had sketched out for me… we drove around the town, splattered with cries and laughter, full of youths (oh, the youths of Oran, everywhere, leaning against a wall, on the vertical, in the sun, at every street corner, watching, laughing, cautious!), our tour was gradually fed by Kader’s memories. (21)

A town to be loved. I had only just finished The Plague, also set in Oran. Albert Camus writes, with the eyes of a European that must always be comparing the rest of the world to an ideal of home:

The town itself, let us admit, is ugly. It has a smug, placid air and you need time to discover what it is that makes it different from so many business centres in other parts of the world. How to conjure up a picture, for instance, of a town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves — a thoroughly negative place in short? … Our citizens work hard, but solely with the objective of getting rich. (1-2)

There are no Arabs in the Oran found in these pages, though Camus does write of walking through the Negro district (and what does that word mean to him exactly?), ‘steep little streets flanked by blue, mauve and saffron-yellow walls… (79) He writes of the plague starting in the poorer and more crowded outskirts, but there are only Spaniards and Frenchmen.

This absence is possibly one of the largest presences in the literature I have read.

To Kader, returning to Oran, Djebar writes:

You must have often unveiled for others the naked, tumultuous and impulsive, raucous, mocking town. (22)

This town and the town of the Plague — two Orans, two visions of what a city could and should be.

Camus is in Algerian White as author. His lack of understanding of the complexities. His effort to make peace. His early death in a car accident. She later writes:

Camus, an old man: it seems almost as unimaginable as the metaphor of Algeria itself, as a wise adult, calm at last, at last turned toward life, ordinary life… (103)

I think it true that ordinary life escaped him, you see it in his words.

But he is really the least among this pantheon of writers, too many of whom I still know almost nothing, despite all my recent reading.

But first we return to the theme of dust:

Three Algerian days.

White with dust. The dust you didn’t notice, on any of these three days, but which seeped its way in, unseen and fine, into all those who came together for your departure.

A dust slowly forming, which gradually makes that day grow fainter, further away, a whiteness which insidiously effaces, distances, and makes each hour almost unreal, and the explosion of a word, the gasp of an ill-repressed sob, the bursting spray of chants and litanies from the crowd, all of the excessive on the day itself, from then on paled, worn hollow to the point of evanescence.

So, white days of that dust in which tens of witnesses, friends, those around you, who went with you to the graveside, they the followers, thereafter caught up; clothed in it stiffly and awkwardly, unknowingly. Dust of oblivion which cauteriuzes, weakens, softens, and …. Dust.

Three days white with that dust and that mortal fog. (51)

I cried for the death of Mouloud Feraoun, his words still live with me, I almost feel as though I know him. Feraoun, one of six murdered together in two sets of three, machine gunned down, with 109 9 mm cartridge cases found. The son of another there, Jean-Phillipe Ould Aloudia, spent thirty years investigating, identified the assassins granted amnesty by the French State.

Nothing could be done to them.

There is Djebar’s chance meeting with Mouloud Mammeri in Algiers, 1988:

‘Before I saw you in the distance, I was walking with my head in the clouds.. How lovely this city is, iridescent like this! I can’t get enough of it: as if it were the first time! I never tire of the facades or the balconies of the houses, and especially not of the sky!… (139-140)

I learned about Emir Abdelkader, who fought the colonial invasion, whose bones have been fought over:

Abdelkader, if he has truly come back to this land where he was first a soldier, will be better able than I to make the list of those who write and who, like so many others, are persecuted, silenced, pushed to suicide, to suffocation, or–through the intermediary if desperate youth, transformed into paid killers–killed by a single blow. (225)

There are Franz and Josie Fanon, Jean-el and Taos Amrouche, Kateb Yacine, M’Hamed Boukhobza, Mahfoud Boucebci, Anna Greki, Abdelkader Alloula among many  others. And, like Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, a return to language, nationality, home…the tangle of words and the limits language and culture place on what can be expressed.

Algerian literature–we must begin it with Apuleus in the second century and continue to Kateb Yacine and Mouloud Mammeri, passing Augustine, the emir Abdelkader, and Camus–has continuously been inscribed in  a linguistic triangle.

–a language of rock and soil, the original one let’s say.  Libyco-Berber, which lost its alphabet momentarily except among the Tuareg:

Berber

–a second language, that of the prestigious exterior, of Mediterranean heritage–Eastern and Western–admittedly reserved for lettered minorities…

Arabic and then French

–the third partner in this triangle presents itself as the most exposed of the languages, the dominant one, the public one, the language of power: that of the harangues, but also the written one of the forensic scientists, the scribes and the notaries.(227-228)

This has been Latin, Classic Arabic, Turkish, French, again Arabic…

These are just a few quotes I liked, there is so much more here, particularly for someone who knows more of these writers and the recent history. I am setting out to learn…

Perhaps the best of all, though was this (a facebook update from July 28th, as I mix my social media)

Today on the tube I met a Maori who asked how I came to be reading Assia Djebar and I told him a quick summary of the long story about this article I can’t finish and he told me how in New Zealand his university classes on colonialism had featured a professor who studied violence in Algerian women’s fiction, and then we talked about Djebar and Feraoun and Fanon and Paris and damn but did it bring happiness to my day.

For more on the struggle in Algeria…


Save

Save

Save

Books, Intersections, Writing

Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade

3 Comments

457864I quite loved this raising of women’s voices that plays with the deeply collective nature of their experience. It acknowledges the strengths of an enforced world of women hidden away behind veils and walls,  but also its high walls and limitations, examining the fractures in that world as women support the independence struggle, receive an education, travel to Paris. They are both joyful and devastating fractures. This narrative from multiple viewpoints in time and space struggles with an undifferentiated mass of understanding, survival of a life cycle where freedom of streets and speech end before puberty and all else folds in on the family and other women, but also those women who have been torn like splinters from it, whether through education or the freedom struggle. There is pride in this heritage, and also frustration. Nothing is easy and nothing is entirely one thing or the other.

She writes:

How could a woman speak aloud, even in Arabic, unless on the threshold of extreme age? How could she say ‘I’, since that would be to scorn the blanket-formulae which ensure that each individual journeys through life in a collective resignation? . . .

my oral tradition has gradually been overlaid and is in danger of vanishing: at the age of eleven or twelve I was abruptly ejected from this theatre of feminine confidences — was I thereby spared from having to silence my humble pride? in writing of my childhood memories I am taken back to those bodies bereft of voices. to attempt an autobiography using French words alone is to lend oneself to the vivisector’s scalpel, revealing what lies beneath the skin. the flesh flakes off, and with it, seemingly, the last shreds of the unwritten language of my childhood. (156)

The complications of relationships around gender fold into the complications of the colonial relationships fold into the complications of being a writer and a women emerging from then women’s world of illiteracy and oral tradition. It is a swirl of what is lost and what is gained negotiating all of these sides, and a needed counterpoint to the more straightforward narratives of the French/Algerian struggle narrated so eloquently by Mouloud Feraoun,  and Alistair Horne.

It is the French as the Other:

The policeman and his family suddenly seemed like transient ghosts in this locality, whereas these images, these objects became the true inhabitants of the place! For me, these French homes gave off a different smell, a mysterious light; for me, the French are still ‘The Others’, and I am still hypnotized by their shores.

Throughout my childhood, just before the war which was to bring us independence, I never crossed a single French threshold, I never entered the home of a single French schoolfellow… (23)

It is the French use of language, and their imprisoning within their own ideologies and stories, contrasted with young Algerian women:

But what is the significance behind the urge of so many fighting men to relive in print this month of July 1830? Did their writings allow them to savor the seducer’s triumph, the rapist’s intoxication? These texts are distributed in the Paris of Louis-Phillipe, far from Algerian soil…Their words thrown up by such a cataclysm are for me like a comet’s tail, flashing across the sky and leaving it forever riven.

And words themselves become a decoration, flaunted by officers like the carnations they wear in their buttonholes; words will become their most effective weapons. Hordes of interpreters, geographers, ethnographers, linguists, botanists, diverse scholars and professional scribblers will swoop down on this new prey. The supererogatory protuberances of their publications will form a pyramid to hide the initial violence from view.

The girls who were my friends and accomplices during my village holidays wrote in the same futile, cryptic language because they were confined, because they were prisoners; they mark their marasmus* with their own identity in an attempt to rise above their pathetic plight. The accounts of this past invasion reveal a contrario an identical nature: invaders who imagine they are taking the impregnable City, but who wander aimlessly in the undergrowth of their own disquiet. (45)

It explores the collectivity of women created by time and tradition and strict rules. One of the narrator’s sits outside of this, she receives a love letter and somehow feels it is for all:

those women who never received a letter: no word taut with desire, stretched like a bow, no message run through with supplication. (60)

There exists the fact that husbands always referred to as ‘he’ and not by name because for each woman there can be only one he, a multitude of unnamed men to match the multitude of women present. A tradition that beats individuality off with a stick, disciplines human being into the roles laid out for them.

You escape Algeria momentarily for Paris, the uneasy relationship, love found between two young people there, even as they remain trapped in the webs of revolutionary fratricidal violence:

The couple continued to roam the streets, chatting together, momentarily free of the others and the ‘Revolution’; nevertheless, even if their embraces in a doorway could not claim that they were making history, still their happiness was part of the collective fever, and they were always on the look-out to see if they were being shadowed and to throw the police off their trail. But the police were not seen to be the greatest danger…the couple knew that the secret fratricidal struggle was all around them….

As they strolled through the Paris streets together, at every crossroads the girl’s eyes instinctively avoided the tricolour flag whose red reminded her of the blood of her compatriots recently guillotined in a Lyons prison…(102).

Here a woman finds freedom and expression and space in the streets without being the prostitutes idealised by Breton or Soupault, without being the flaneuse or nightwalker.

A woman walks alone one night in Paris. Walking for walking’s sake, to try to understand…Searching for words and so dream no more, wait no longer.

Rue Richelieu, ten, eleven o’clock at night; the autumn air is damp, To understand . . . Where will this tunnel of interior silence lead? Just the act of walking, just to put one foot energetically down in front of the other, feeling my hips swinging, sensing my body lightly moving, makes my life seem brighter and the walls, all the walls vanish . . .

While the solitude of these recent months dissolves in the fresh cool tints of the nocturnal landscape, suddenly the voice bursts forth. It drains off all the scoriae of the past. What voice? is it my voice, scarcely recognizable? (115)

Some find voice in the city streets of Paris. Some find voice in the French language. But always it comes at a cost:

As if the French language suddenly had eyes, and lent them to me to see into liberty; as if the French language blinded the peeping-toms of my clan and, at this price, I could move freely, run headlong down every street, annex the outdoors for my cloistered companions, for the matriarchs of my family who endured a living death. As it . . . Derision! I know that every language is a dark depository for piled-up corpses, refuse, sewage, but faced with the language of the former conqueror, which offers me its ornaments, its jewels, its flowers, I find they are flowers of death… (181)

And yet…

To refuse to veil one’s voice and to start ‘shouting’, that was really indecent, real dissidence.

Writing in a foreign language, not in either of the tongues of my native country…writing has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins.

Writing does not silence the voice, but awakens it, above all to resurrect so many vanished sisters. (204)

Nothing can sit easily here. Nothing avoids contradictions.

After more than a century of French occupation — which ended not long ago in such butchery — a similar no-man’s land still exists between the French and the indigenous languages, between two national memories: the French tongue, with its body and voice, has established a proud presidio within me, while the mother-tongue, all oral tradition, all rags and tatters, resists and attacks between two breathing spaces. In time to the rhythm of the rebato, I am alternately the besieged foreigner and the native swaggering off to die, so there is seemingly endless strife between the spoken and written word (215)

A story comes near the end of the book, interspersed with an old woman telling of her hardships in supporting the freedom struggle, the house burned down about her, tramping into the hills. Burying her sons. A young woman joining the struggle. Burying her brother. This story of a wedding, a celebration of women to which uninvited guests can come and watch but cannot remove their veils and join in.

As if they were finding a way of forgetting their imprisonment, getting their own back on the men who kept them in the background: the males — father, sons, husband — were shut out once and for all by the women themselves who, in their own domain, began to impose the veil in turn on others. (205)

It mourns and celebrates the opening up of this world, the freeing of women and men from these bonds, and looks uneasily into the future and the crushing of contradictions and the voices that they made possible.

I wait amid the shatter sheaf of sounds, I wait, forseeing he inevitable moment when the mare’s hoof will strike down any woman who dares to stand up freely, will trample all life that comes out into the sunlight to dance! Yes, in spite of the tumult of my people all around, I already hear, even before it arises and pierces the harsh sky, I head the death cry in the Fantasia.

Paris/Venice/Algiers
(July ’82–October ’84)

*severe malnutrition characterized by energy deficiency.

Save

Books, Role of the intellectual, Struggle & Movement, Writing

Writer as Witness, Words as Struggle: Mouloud Feraoun

6 Comments

783373I wish I could clearly state what this book has meant to me, the twisting thought trails and brambled thickets surrounding writing and struggle and humanity it has uncovered, the old sadnesses it has opened and the new ones it has instilled. It is a gift, and one that came at great cost to its author.

The older I get the more I realise that saying things out loud or writing things down does not always help you. These pages were not for Feraoun, they were for us.

I have only scattered ways of marshaling my thoughts, they do not do justice to the ways that we have traveled together, Feraoun’s words and I. His pain shared at one remove as the days of this first Algerian war for independence progressed. I was thinking about grouping things thematically, but this progression over painful time must be honored I think.

1955

arton8671-2ae1fReading this after Horne’s A Savage War of Peace, what first emerged most strongly to me was the necessity of freeing oneself inside and out from the conquerors, but god the complexities of this. The tragedies. The grief at watching the abyss between peoples grow, knowing it must in the cold light of that original colonial relationship translated into years of continuous oppression. Watching, without turning away, the damage it causes to those inflicting as well as receiving it.

There is also the distance between himself as an intellectual, a writer, a teacher and others — a distance that many of us must try and manage to some extent. He writes:

This time I saw clearly the glint of malice in his eyes that is so typical of the fellagha in our region. For them, the teacher is both educated and naive, a man with good advice who can inform you about laws and regulations and yet believes everything that you tell him.
–November 13 (18)

On the widening distance between the Kabyles and the French, the essentialising of identities that happens through violence, struggle and war:

…as soon as it is legitimate to judge them as a group, it is no longer troubling for anyone to point out their faults. It is no longer a question of Mr Eugène or Jojo but of the triumphant Frenchman who has taken over his place and gotten rich off our backs. Once you buttress yourself with generalities, you are amazed to discover some very broad horizons.
–December 18 (31)

This emerges among his fellow teachers:

…there is now an impassable breach between us; a rupture that both sides deplore but also endure, knowing that it is inevitable. We avoid talking politics. Our French colleagues are, however, quite tactful. When they comment on a crime, a bomb, an attack, or when they speak about their fears, they always assume that we are on their side, that our fates are identical, in short, that we are just as French as they are. We tolerate the assumption, and everyday life remains bearable.
–December 18 (37)

ecole3339

But I love this description of the meaning of the uprising for the people:

You feel that this crowd is wrapped in a new dignity as stiff as a new suit. A suit cut and made to measure, for which everyone is determined to pay the price.
–December 18 (38)

We come to the crux of the things, the reason for the abyss and this struggle itself, what Horne just did not quite understand and Feraoun struggles to express in this summation of the why and the how of the war at the end of 1955:

How does a European define a native? A common labourer, a maid. A bizarre creature with ridiculous customs, peculiar dress, and an impossible language. A more or less dirty, tattered, and unpleasant character. At any rate, a person on the fringe, quite alone, and let us leave him where he is. It is almost childish to revert to these clichés so quickly.  We have been co-existing for a century without the slightest curiosity. The only thing left to do is harvest this mutual indifference that is the opposite of love. (42)

It is still bad faith to talk about their mistakes. From the very beginning they knew what had to be done in order to be on good terms with the natives. they also knew what was required in order to be the only ones to benefit from colonization, much to the detriment of the native. They had to exploit him, make him sweat, beat him, and keep him ignorant. In the beginning there was still a choice to be made, and they made it. Why talk about mistakes at this point? Because now we are demanding accountability? Come on, accountability is more than confessing one’s guilt…By accountability, we mean recognizing our right to live, our right to learn and make progress, and our right to be free….So the positions are quite clear: the fight between two different peoples has begun — the master and the slave. That is all there is to it. To talk, like the press, about an awakening of the Algerian consciousness is frivolous….The Algerians did not wait for the twentieth century to realize that they were Algerians. the best proof of this is that right away they got together behind the liberators. They gathered together because they thought that they were strong enough to fight or die a meaningful death. They united because they expected to success. There were no miraculous phenomena… (43)

More than ever, we are secluding ourselves within our respective worlds, both of which are distinct and hostile. They have their nostalgia for the past, for which they have decided to fight. We maintain the crazy hope of a better future, for which we have decided to die. But as their confidence wavers and discouragement sets in, our self-assurance and courage get stronger. (46)

And this, when will this ever cease to be true?

These people are politicians. Given that we are living in an era in which they are carving words into the flesh of men, this word politician makes us feel like vomiting. (50)

1956

Never for a moment does Faraoun cease to take the side of the rebels in this conflict, and there is never an alternative discussed to the FLN. This does not mean he is not highly critical, or deeply troubled by their strategies while recognising it is hardly his place and feeling guilt over this very critique as he is not the one carrying out this war with a gun in his hands. Still, he writes his thoughts:

The rebels’ expectations are both excessive and disappointing. They include prohibitions of all kinds, nothing but prohibitions, dictated by the most obtuse fanaticism, the most intransigent racism, and the most authoritarian fist. In a way, this is true terrorism. There is nothing left for the women of T.A. [ referring to the mosque which this story is describing] except to shrill with enthusiasm in honor of the new era of freedom that they seem to perceive beyond the foggy horizon that our dark mountains inexorably obstruct.
–January 8 (53)

He relates a story about the fellagha — they stop a jeep carrying a commander and his aide, demand their guns and ammunition and when they are handed over release them and say ‘Thank you sir. Have a good day.’ Faraoun writes

There are several stories like this one that are making the rounds. In the future they will be worthy of becoming folk stories. This is how people create History.
–January 11 (56)

Another trail leads from this along the tracks of history and its makings, but this is already too long.

The abyss between French and Kabyles has been long opened, yet the pain continues as it stretches wider and deeper, he describes his French Colleagues after another ‘terrorist’ arrest:

I read anger and hatred in their eyes. there they were, all four of them ready to contradict me, all four ready to insult me with their arrogance, all four of them ready to put me in that category that they despise, that they exploit, that they would massacre, and that they fear. A crazy fear.
–January 30 (65)

Here insights into village life, the need to know what is happening in this place you belong in a sense, for all the complications of that and even if you are far away.

I have received news from back home. Amar spent the night here, and we talked. He began talking, going back in time, one day at a time…I was happy. There are no more empty moments in my mind, and I am able to imagine what it is like without any difficulty.
–February 2 (66)

I love this critique of the French Left, this seems to hold true always and everywhere where histories of race, class, gender and colonialism hide the true nature of oppression from those on the other side of it:

I could say the same thing to Camus and to Roblès. I feel a lot of admiration for the first and brotherly affection for the other. But they are wrong to talk to us when we are waiting for generous hearts if there are any…It is a hundred times better that they remain quiet. Because, in the end, this country is indeed called Algeria and its inhabitants are called Algerians. Why sidestep the evidence? Are you Algerians my friends? you must stand with those who fight. Tell the French that this country does not belong to them, that they took it over by force, and that they intend to remain here by force. Anything else is a lie and in bad faith. Any other language is criminal because, for several months now, crimes have been committed in the name of the same lies…
–February 3 (71)

This…this exposition, a day’s entry written entirely in the voice of a French settler, it is so chilling. Both for what it meant for Algeria, but for how precise an echo it is of U.S. whites, whether on African Americans or Indigenous peoples and whether two hundred years ago or today.

All I do is ignore them — well, almost. Why are they now rising against me? All they had to do was get themselves a job, just like I did. They are unhappy, they are always unhappy. Is it my fault, damn it? I agree that I have always been aloof with them and that, in my mind, I cannot get used to the idea that they are my equals. I have to admit this with total sincerity, and admit just as sincerely that, deep down, we settled here as winners, that consequently we are the race that rules, that must serve itself first. Why deny it? And, in all modesty, I never display this attitude, and generally we all have enough tact so that life is bearable for the Arabs, and we all deal with enough good faith to give to the best of them almost everything they deserve, especially the more obedient ones. But these people want everything….
–February 15 (75)

And back to the abyss still growing between two peoples:

Will they be trapped in one or other of two molds that are separated by an abyss from which one can only escape as a traitor?

I am reading a few notes about the torture methods used by the Algerian police. I got this from a reliable witness, an intelligent and idealistic young man who looks a bit weary and carries in his eyes the immense distress of those who suffer, of those who have stopped calling for help because they know they are wasting their time. However, they still have hope of finding justice by their deeds.
— March 31 (103)

I sat on the bus with tears rolling down my cheeks reading of the torture. I cannot bear the thought that one human can do these things to another. Working with refugees from Central America all those years ago, I know the marks it leaves. I still see their faces whenever I read these things and my love for them chokes me.

And still Feraoun charts the changes inside of him, the changes he see in others:

Up to now the rebels were aiming to right wrongs; now they are claiming to defend great principles.
–April 6 (106)

We have been relieved of the heavy burden that was choking us: the burden of our common hypocrisy, which is as old as our common history.

We are gradually becoming insensitive, just like those who, privilged by fate, become luckily immune to contagion while providing devoted care to others who suffer from them. We may well be spared from the epidemic, but we will not be grateful.
–May 10 (110)

This now, is what the war feels like, how it shapes lives, destroys families and villages:

The village [Tizi-Hibel] has lost almost all of its young men…People are leaving in anticipation of another police sweep, and able-bodied men no longer dare to sleep at home. They leave at sunset.
–May 11, Aïd (111)

I no longer dare to go out for news. We are all suspects.
–May 21 (114)

I came back from Algiers with Djidj the day before these assassinations. Before reaching Tizi-Ouzou, we were checked six times. From the turns in the road shaded by eucalyptus trees extending from Haussonvillers toward Camp-du-Maréchal, one could see three villages that were burning on the Bou Segza-Sidi Ali Bou Nab. Old and young Kabyle women and children were waiting on the side of the road with shapeless bundles at their feet. They have evacuated the population over there in order to fight a real war. The spring sky cannot dispel the sadness from these drab images.
–May 27 (115)

On men from his hometown hanged by the FLN:

It is difficult to condemn or approve the dispensers of justice. It is just as difficult to expect a kind of infallibility that is not within man’s scope. The heart bleeds, however, when it witnesses this kind of spectacle: today’s executioner inescapably becomes tomorrow’s victim, and this, in turn, will call for another executioner.
–May 31 (117)

He returns from a month in his village, Tizi-Hebel, tries to understand what he has seen and learned:

I wanted to know, once and for all, what dangers were threatening me. I wanted to form my own personal opinion about the mind-set of the liberators. I have returned with my doubts, but I have left my illusions and my candor behind. I discovered much suffering and little enthusiasm, much injustice and little devotion, and cruelty, egoism, ambition, arrogance, and stupidity: a people that is used to being beaten, that continues to take it, but is tired, very tired and on the edge of despair. My people from back home inspire pity, and I am ashamed that I have peace of mind. What follows is a series of events that I witnessed and that may help to explain my overall dismay. But from the start, you must renounce any formal condemnations and look for the source of the evil. There are only victims; there are only guilty people; there are only dispensers of justice. At any time, you could be one or the other. There is no other alternative. (133)

Will I ever be able to say all that I have felt and all that I have promised myself I would say? Where would I find the necessary patience to do all of this? How will I sort out my conflicting feelings without forgetting about the victims themselves or the cruel God or the human beast? Why not forget all of this just as the dead are already forgotten? (135)

A friend Moubarek tells him of his cousin’s death, another view into speaking, bearing witness, telling stories, remembering:

I listened to him as he told his story for the hundredth time. He feels that, as long as he lives, he has to tell it. It is as if he now has nothing else to do in this absurd world where our lives have no more value or meaning than those of wild beasts in the eyes of well-equipped hunters.
–September 9(136)

Faraoun’s view of his own role as witness, his fatigue:

It has been a year since I started writing down my feelings. God knows that I did not lack material, but I was short on desire, taste, and drive. I did not write down everything, of course. Only guide posts, so that later, if my life is long, I will still be able to fee the sad memories of the dark years, of the gloomy days.
–November 2 (145-46)

This. This sentence true of so many peoples in so many places.

Each one of us is guilty for the sole reason that we belong to a category, a race, a people. you fear that someone will make you pay with your life for your place in the world, pay for the color of your skin. You fear that someone will attack you only because nobody has done it yet.
–November 2 (146)

2This one ray of light, this one possibility of the human heart being big enough to transcend all of this at some level at least:

I receive letters from Roblès on a regular basis. At a time when a sense of camaraderie and friendship is failing me, his has remained fraternal and strong. Roblès is more than just a friend or a Frenchman. I cannot connect him to any motherland because he is from everywhere, and that is exactly where I come from, poor friend.
–November 2 (147)

1957

There are more and more gaps now, years marked by a handful of words as though everything has been said. There is a litany of incidents. Then these thoughts on strategy, the UN, the role of Nationalism — these echo so strongly with the African American strategies of the same period, and Black Nationalism as it would grow inspired by such independence movements:

The UN conference on the Algerian question will open in a week. Here in Algeria, and insurrectionary strike — one that the French are trying to quell — will start simultaneously. We understand the sacred character of this strike. The Algerians must proclaim their suffering and anger to a world that hesitates to believe them. Those sickly sweet and hypocritical voices that will protest their innocence and will overwhelm us with imaginary kindness–fanatical and ungrateful that we are–must be drowned out by our shouts, the shouts of those who are skinned alive, the shouts of those who are afraid, and the groans of those who are dying. The best possible scenario would be if all our dead crossed the Atlantic so their sinister laughter might be heard at the tribune of the UN, behind the Parisian sirens who already flatter themselves with having seduced Uncle Sam.

I wish my people–my country–all the happiness of which it was deprived and all the glory it is capable of achieving; when I have witnessed its blossoming, its joy and pride, I will be able to despise my patriotism just as I despise other examples of patriotism.
–January 16 (170-71)

Another curious phrase on the distance imposed by intellect:

I am one of these complicated people who learned a lot of useless things in school. These useless things make me, as well as others like me, physically ill, and all of us together become strangers in our own land.
–January 24 (173)

This paradox of heroes of the French resistance against fascism using their experience to in turn oppress another people is not something Faraoun explores, cares much about, but there is this:

I had already encountered another SAS officer a long time ago who, acting on the same prejudice, wanted to deny us everything. This particular wretch would talk every chance he got about his exploits in the French Resistance in an effort to persuade us that our situation was not the same.
–December 25 (230)

1958

It has been a month since I last opened this notebook in which, for three years, I have made a practice of writing about my anxiety or my confusion, my pain and anger. In truth, I believe that I have said and rehashed absolutely everything about the subject. What good does it do to repeat and reframe the same matters one more time? What else has happened during this past month of war except what could have happened during other months? I am overwhelmed, and I live here as though in another world…
–April 1 (241)

It sometimes happens that some poor fellow’s nerves suddenly snap, and as he becomes submerged in a state of lucid madness, he begins to talk and talk and talk. At the djemaâ, in the cafes–everywhere–he says exactly what he thinks about “his brothers”. The people watching him become alarmed and try and feel sorry for him. They know that it is futile to try and stop him. If they enjoy listening to him, it is because, in a sense, he reads his words from their hearts…No, it will not last long. One fine morning, he disappears.
–April 3 (243)

1959

…it is always the fellagha who, no matter what they do, inspire confidence and win hearts. No matter what they do, they are still soldiers fighting the enemy, soldiers doomed to a certain death because they are defending the country.
–April 26 (265)

1960

So today, I had to get back to this notebook, which I abandoned several months ago. It is not that I had nothing to record concerning myself or anyone else, but the gap is always easiest to bridge when there is nothing special about the details…all this is sad, really too sad. So I say to myself, “What good will it do?”

I think that I am content to limit myself to an objective reporting of the facts as I see them unfolding in front of my eyes. Later on, this will allow me to recreate the atmosphere. Of course, that is if I live long enough.
–January 25 (272)

1961

To Horne the youyous were a signal of otherness, of eerie disregard, I knew they were not.

A rational fellow told me that the rage of the French in Algeria is out of control. Their rage is filled with hatred and fear, but not madness. They have money, and they use it to pay ruthless commandos to go terrorize the Arabs at night during curfew: they bang on doors, brutalize or kill people, and start fires. They must have lists and get specific orders. These people are killers. The Arabs fight back by yelling youyou and counterattack with bottles filled with water, pebbles, and sticks. As soon as someone knocks on your door, start youyouing but do not open your door; your neighbors will cry youyou also, and then others will do the same. When the alert has been heard everywhere in the vicinity, you must come out and make threats. Then the black 403 Peugeot or the D.S. Citroen of the same color will hightail it into the night, with its cargo of rowdies wearing civilian clothes or paratrooper outfits.
–January 16 (287)

This reminded me of El Salvador again, the precise descriptions of the vehicles carrying death squads, the assumption that everyone knows the meaning of the Ford Bronco pulling up to your door and me knowing the immigration officer would require more proof as a political matter.

And these, almost his final words, so much more meaningful here at the end of this war and just before the end of his life rather than pulled out of context and quoted as they so often are:

I have spent hours upon hours rereading all of my notes, newspaper articles, and small clippings that I have kept. I have become reimmersed in a sad past, and I am leaving it overwhelmed. I am frightened by my candor, my audacity, my cruelty, and, at times, my blind spots and prejudice. Do I have the right to tamper with what I have written, to go back, to alter or rectify it?

Did I not write all of this day by day, according to my frame of mind, my mood, the circumstances, the atmosphere created by the event, its reverberations in my heart? And why did I write it like this, bit by bit, if it was not to witness, to stand before teh world and shout out the suffering and misfortune that have stalked me….

If all this is printed and published, as I believe that it must be, if this publication incites even the least bit of anger or hatred, if it increases by any amount the misfortune of an individual or the community rather than comfort, rehabilitate, and instruct, this work will be futile and detrimental. I will regret having completed it. At least I will not have evaded my responsibility by remaining silent. This would be even more reprehensible…
–August 17 (294-296)

He was killed by the fascist OAS on March 15, 1962 but he is not forgotten. Mouloud Feraoun, presente.

Mouloud-Feraoun

Save

Books, Empire

A Savage War of Peace

5 Comments

A Savage War of Peace - Alistair HorneI knew almost nothing of the war of liberation in Algeria, and Horne’s A Savage War of Peace was an enormous introduction (624 pages worth), bringing immense satisfaction at finishing it. It is brilliantly crafted history, slow going but fairly enthralling none the less, and a wonderful management of detail. It is as balanced and critical as the author can make it I think, exploring the critical events and the political machinations of the war on both sides. For an aerial view of everything that happened, explored with all the benefits of both hindsight as well as the immediacy of interviews with almost all of the key figures surviving on both sides, this is a good place to start in understanding the conflict. And it is full of sidelights of the humorous and pulpy details of plots and spies and bungling that I confess with a sense of almost shame, I enjoyed immensely.

For all that it is written by a European (of neither France nor Algeria), and despite his best efforts and his deep critique of France’s role, it is still the French and the pied noir that A Savage War of Peace understands best, while Algerians themselves remain for the most part inscrutable and ‘other’. I am reading now the journal of the author Mouloud Feraoun, which has broken my heart in two and left me far more critical of Horne’s account because it exemplifies what is missing — the understanding of a colonised people finally standing up, along with the day to day fear, violence, death, descriptions of torture, hunger, loss, conflicted feelings about the FLN even while fully supporting their struggle.

Three things primarily struck me in reflecting back on it. First, how little I know of French history and how hugely important Algeria was in its history, as Horne summarises:

The war in Algeria — lasted almost eight years, toppled six French Prime Ministers and the Fourth Republic itself. It came close to bringing down General de Gaulle and his Fifth Republic and confronted metropolitan France with the threat of civil war.

The second is how closely it parallels the settling of the United States, and how much the white mobs in defense of their land and their privilege reminded me of the white mobs I have studied in the US…defending their land and their privilege. On the French policy of ‘pacification’:

Said Bugeaud in a renowned statement before the National Assembly in 1840: “Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, there one must locate colons, without concerning oneself to whom these lands belong. (30)

That is the foundation of it all, conquest and a refusal to give up its fruits. Part of that was the destruction of anything Algerian that could offer up resistance, primarily the policy of breaking up great traditional families

because we found them to be forces of resistance. We did not realise that in suppressing the forces of resistance in this fashion we were also suppressing our means of action. The result is that we are today confronted by a sort of human dust on which we have no influence and in which movements take place which are to us unknown.
— Jules Cambon, governor-general 1894 (p37)

This quote struck me, both in its poetic racism and in the sad reality of colonialism that seeks to destroy any sense of strength and sociality with such a tremendous human cost. Dust in the eyes of the oppressor, a terrifying analogy, for who cares what you do with dust? Lives shorn of culture and mutual support and richness in the experience of the oppressed, though of course they strive to conserve, protect, rebuild what they can.

The third is how this conflict, and that in Indochina, flowed naturally from World War II and calls into question much of what I thought I knew. It reverse polarities, putting people who might have been my heroes for their role in the resistance, for their sufferings in the concentration camps, in an alliance with fascists. I cannot fundamentally understand it, just as I cannot understand the oppression of the Palestinians by Israelis.

The list of generals — paras from both Indochina and Algeria — all heroes of WWII, leaders of resistance, many in concentration camps:

Ducournau, Trinquier, Bigeard, Brothier, Meyer, Jeanpierre, Fossey-François, Château-Jobert, Romain-Defossés, Coulet.

This is a long list. They took what they had learned in fighting fascism in Europe and applied it to the oppression of both the Vietnamese and the Algerians fighting a war of liberation, and they were both efficient and murderous.

One of the key figures of the revolt and attempted coup against de Gaulle was:

The slender St Cyrien, Jean Gardes…The only son of a Parisian heroine of the Reisistance, who had run a cell through her well-known Restaurant des Ministères on the Rue Ministères on the Rue du Bac, Gardes himself had won no less than twenty-four citations for bravery and been severely wounded with the Tiralleurs Marocains in Italy. (354)

He worked in Indo-China and Algeria, and was put in charge of the Cinquième Bureau, with its ‘potent functions of propaganda and psychological warfare’…

It is not just that they were heroes of the resistance, these men appropriated symbols of uprising from their history, drawing parallels from the French Revolition and the Paris Commune. In describing the brains behind the fascist OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète), Pierre Serjent writes of him: ‘rigid comportment and incisive speech, Jean Jacques Susini evoked in me … the image of St Just.’ (482)

Of the uprising led by the FNF (Front National Français — it would later fold into the OAS), Horne writes (and is he prompted in this by interviews with the men or simply on his own? It hurts me to think of the Commune in this fashion):

At Ortiz’s “command post” there was chaos reminiscent of the headier days of the Paris Commune; everybody talked, gave orders and made speeches in an atmosphere dense with Bastos cigarette-smoke, the smell of sweat and beer. In the street below some young members of the FNF began spontaneously to prise up paving-stones and create a barricade… (361)

With the same results:

With remarkable speed, army pioneers got to work, bulldozing the barricades, replacing the pavé and covering it with a thick, prophylactic layer of bitumen — as Paris had done after her “troubles” in the nineteenth century (373)

It was not just the French who were decorated war heroes in this conflict. In thinking about the turn to armed uprising as opposed to non-violence (which I think we tend to support more now on this end of history, both for philosophical and well as very practical reasons as the terrain of war has shifted), for those emerging from the celebrated armed struggle against German fascism, what could be more obvious or natural? How could they just return to be oppressed by the same people they had fought alongside of in a war for freedom and justice? This is again another parallel with returning soldiers of colour to the US no longer content to put up with second-class citizenship.

Just one example: The FLN’s external campaign to influence the United Nations was led by M’hamed Yazid and Abdelkader Chanderli —  Chanderli had fought in the French campaign of 1940, escaped to Britain to join de Gaulle, in 1948 a reporter on Palestine, and in 1954 he was working for UNESCO.

This same war created a wave of displaced Nazis seeking to occupy themselves, some of them, for money I am sure, ended up on the side of colonised peoples as arms-dealers:

On the ground floor were a group of ex-Nazis who had found refuge in Cairo and had made themselves useful to Nasser; among them a former S.S. man called Ernst-Wilhelm Springer, who had helped form the pro-German Muslim Legion in the Second World War… (262)

Racism and colonial struggle have clearly wrecked havoc on the ideology, on the sense of what is just and an instinctive knowledge of which side is the right one that is usually portrayed as being so clear in WWII. Obviously, it was not.

Horne also quotes Marighela, Brazilian revolutionary, and his ideas of destroying the ‘soft centre’ thus forcing the authorities to negotiate with the revolutionaries — a tactic used both by the FLN (learning from the use of Bao Dai to undercit Ho Chi Minh in negotiations in Vietnam) and the FNF in their khaki shirts.

Heading one of the chapters is this interesting quote:

No, all Algeria is not fascist, all the French are not “ultras”, all the army doesn’t torture. But Fascism, the “ultras”, and torture, they are France in Algeria (Pierre Nora, 1961)

Krim Belkacem, negotiating for the FLN in Switzerland, helps understand why.

A European population has been created, heterogenous in its origins, but soldered together by its integration within French nationality… It has benefited from exorbitant privileges … Independence is going to pose the problem of these Europeans. (471)

It is not until reading Feraoun that I have gotten the full sense of these privileges, you cannot from Horne.

Nor is he able to explain why the same men who had fought the fascism of Germany could fight on the side of fascism in Algeria, but there is one fascinating quote from him:

To begin at the beginning, in November 1954 France was caught at a major disadvantage because, in contrast to Britain over India, no French politician, not even Mendes-France or Mitterand, let alone the Communists, could contemplate any kind of French withdrawal from Algeria. Mollet the Socialist echoed Mendes-France the Radical: “France without Algeria would be no longer France.” (545)

It is a repetition of France and Haiti which I find so immensely chilling. How, you wonder, can entire peoples replay over and over again the same inabilities? To turn to Trouillot’s discussion of why France of the period of Enlightenment and the revolution would oppose to its last breath the revolution of Haiti and its struggle for freedom:

I am not suggesting that eighteenth-century men and women should have thought about the fundamental equality of humankind in the same way some of us do today. On the contrary, I am arguing that they could not have done so. But I am also drawing a lesson from the understanding of this historical impossibility. The Haitian Revolution did challenge the ontological and political assumptions of the most radical writers of the Enlightenment. The events that shook up Saint Domingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in in England had a conceptual frame of reference. They were “unthinkable” facts in the framework of Western thought. (82)

There is no such historical distance for France of 1956-1962. How was Algerian freedom after WWII still unthinkable?

Horne keeps returning to this phrase — Algérie montait à la tête
(Algeria goes to the head, Louis Joxe). Perhaps there is something to this, given how hard men fought to keep it when they had no prior roots or connection there. But I think most of the answer lies in the pattern of settlement — dense and deep-rooted as it was in the U.S., South Africa, Australia… I imagine what US history would have been if the genocide of Native Americans had not been quite so effective, if enough had survived this horror to outnumber white settlers and they had been able to carry out a struggle for liberation with such armed effectiveness. The reaction might have been even more violent than that of the French. The ongoing abolition-civil rights-black lives matter movements have been enough to inspire lynchings, riots and massive destruction.

The countries that the right — composed as it was by heroes of the resistance — considered sympathetic? Portugal, Spain, Israel, and South Africa.

Nor were the French restrained in their violence or determination. This included a policy of massive resettlement beginning in 1957:

This was regroupement, or resettlement, which — to rephrase the oft-quoted axiom — aimed at emptying the water away from the fish by isolating communities from the FLN and thus denying it refuge and supplies. It involved the resettlement of over a million peasants from ‘exposed’ communities to barbed-wire encampments, which often looked horribly like concentration camps (220)

When de Gaulle finally decided he would allow Algeria independence it was only a signal to increase terror. This declaration of the OAS shows that some of the settlers were willing to destroy everything to stop the peace process moving forward. Their goals as they articulated them were:

to paralyse the powers that be and make it impossible for them to exercise authority. Brutal actions will be generalised over the whole territory. They will aim at influential personalities of the Communist Party, at works of art and all that represents the exercise of authority, in a manner to lead towards the maximum of general insecurity and the total paralysis of the country. (516)

When peace talks began in Evian, the OAS assassinated the mayor and declared it an act of ‘national sulubrity’ (467).

Over the years French policy had also included a wide use of torture. Again, it is only in Feraoun that you get a sense of what this actually meant, but an interesting aside is the sense that torture is something the police do, not the army. I feel there is something psychologically important here to understand about oppression, but I am not sure what it is:

Certainly the pernicious effect on the French army as a whole lasted many years after the war had ended, and many officers came to agree with General Bollardie in condemning Massu for ever having allowed the army to be brought into such a police action in the first place, thus inevitably exposing it to the practice of torture (206).

The most pernicious effects, in reality, were suffered by Algerians, throughout the war and long after the war was over. On the situation of Algerians in France:

by 1973 they were close on 800,000. For the most part these Algerians lived like third-class citizens, their plight concealed from the eyes of other Frenchmen. Existing in rat-infested bidonvilles, or six to a tenement room, without women and on the poor food that their rock-bottom wages would provide, over eighty percent of the Algerian workers performed the traveaux pénibles; generally the heavy, dangerous or distasteful labour eschewed by Frenchmen…

In the summer of 1973 a bus driver had throat slit by an Algerian and terror was renewed:

whites machine gunned Algerian cafes in the city and threw Molotov cocktails into their lodgings; a sixteen-year old boy was shot down by men in a moving car. In Toulouse fifty paras rampaged through the streets on a ratonnade, beating up any North African they encountered. (550)

Just a final note before getting to the spy-novel details in which fascists are humiliated (a nice way to end), I was saddened (though not surprised I suppose) at the role ethnologists played in this. Jacques Soustelle was first an ethnologist, and then governor-general. Originally of the left, he soon shifted. Ethonlogist Germaine Tillion was part of the resistance, tortured by the Gestapo. She took the part of Algerians but was still instrumental in forming the policies of government support that formed the carrot that Soustelle hoped would neutralise the uprising for freedom when carried out alongside armed repression and torture. Another ethnologist Jean Servier, in 1957 started developing the harki units — light companies of Alegrian muslims that exploited the divisions between tribes, between Kabyles and Arabs and tried to attract FLN defectors.

There is one bright spot of academic solidarity, however:

…on hearing of his death [Ali Boumendjel] his former mentor, René Capitant, Professor of Public Law at the University of Paris, informed the Minister of Education that he was suspending his courses.  (233)

So now, some of the dark humour to be found in this terrible place:

 Bigeard had that particularly French quality of allure essential to an outstanding commander. He seldom did anything without panache. Instead of arriving by staff car or even helicopter, his favourite manner of inspecting a unit was to drop by parachute, arm at the salute as he touched down

The footnote is even more ridiculous:

This nearly ended in disaster when Bigeard, by now nearing sixty and a senior genera;, was dropped into a shark-infested sea by mistake during a visit to troops in Madagascar. He broke an arm but was saved by his faithful staff who had parachuted into the sea with him. (168)

They should have left him to the sharks, the poetic justice in that is almost unbearable.

The Algerians ran guns using the Queen of Jordan’s private yacht.

On the French Foreign Legion (actually mostly German apparently):

As an elite body it still enjoyed the best food in the army and was accompanied wherever it went by its own mobile brothels — “le puff”. (169)

There was an attempt by the right to blow up Salan (a key figure in all this, who would move as far right as anyone) with a bazooka, the conspirators? ‘Dr Kovacs, the ex-Hungarian doctor and hypnotist…and George Wattin, alias “The Limp”‘ (182)

The bad-assness of Algerian freedom fighters:

Azedine had had his right forearm shattered by a 50 mm. calibre bullet. For two days he lay in a coma, apparently half-blinded with pain, buy had refused the ministrations of even the primitive A.L.N. field hospital, dressing and removing splinters of bone from the wound himself. (252)

On Pierre Lagaillarde, fascist student leader (and by god, the French students were all fascists in this tale):

the forebear with whom Lagaillarde liked most to identify himself was his great-grandfather, an obscure deputy and revolutionary called Baudin who had found immortality in the 1851 uprising against Louis-Napoleon. Leaping on top of a barricade and crying “I’ll show you how one dies for twenty-five sous a day,” he had been promptly shot. (278)

I don’t know why that made me laugh out loud. But it did. Another interesting note, as part of the mob action on 13 may 1958 that seized the government, and the Gouvernement-Général…the students led  by Lagaillarde hurled down the bust of Marianne in the foyer. I can barely handle the symbolism.

Horne uses the expression to ‘cock a snook’. I have no comments on that.

A dude calling himself ‘Le Monocle’ was put in charge of the OAS terror campaign in Paris.

During the attempt at a putsch on Thursday, 20 April 1961:

Godard, the master intelligence operator, in the excitement of arriving had mislaid in a public corridor his briefcase containing all details of the putsch (448).

And again

…some of the waiting putschists apparently unaware even of the codeword Arnat… Once they were rendered leaderless by Faure’s arrest, no orders came through until a detachment of gendarmes appeared in the forest and gave a brusque order to disperse with which the powerful body of paras sheepishly complied. (454)

There were a few bright spots in the struggle to make our world bearable.

Save