By Taous Claire Khazem
Alice Zeniter’s novel The Art of Losing tells the story of Naïma, a gallery curator who returns to her father’s native Algeria that he left as a child at the end of the Algerian War for independence in 1962. Naïma insists on making this journey across the Mediterranean by boat to honor the fact that her father did the same voyage in 1964, but in the opposite direction.
In 2004, I made the same 24-hour trip from Marseille to Algiers. I’m tempted to paint the arrival in Algiers in the exotic way it is often described: the Mediterranean glittering off of the white buildings; the call to prayer wafting in the distance from the hillside as the boat approaches the edge of Africa. Standing on deck I imagined how the Phonecians, the Romans, the Ottoman’s, and the French must have felt as they made the same approach–wonder and awe at this edge of something incredible. I could make out the minarets and the cathedral of Notre Dame d’Afrique, the layers and layers of the outer walls of the casbah, and the Djura Djura mountains looming sharp and green beyond the hillside of the city. Reality and the exotic orientalist fantasy co-exist, walking rather comfortably hand in hand.
It was exhausting and terrifying taking a train from Paris to Marseille, lugging my suitcase from the train station down a steep hill to the port. I would have gotten lost except for a man who seemed to be doing the same thing. He had done this suitcase lug from the train to the boat many times. I don’t remember his name. He was tall, broad shouldered, pale.
Once you arrive at the port, there is a lot of waiting around, lines for customs, the smell of diesel that didn’t leave my nostrils until days after the journey. At one point this man was repacking his suitcase as we were waiting in line. It was full of packs of Marlboro cigarettes, to give as gifts? To resell? As he repacked and rearranged all those long rectangular packages, he said the strangest thing in a low voice, head cocked to one side: “France should never have left Algeria.”
I grew up hearing the term harki from time to time. I usually understood it in a pejorative sense as it refers to the Algerians who fought on the side of France and not on the side of an Independent Algeria during the war from 1954-1962. In college I learned that France had not welcomed them with open arms but at arms length the way you might hold a dirty rag that helped you clean up a disgusting mess but now, full of muck, you don’t want to touch it anymore. This experience is clearly described in Zeniter’s book as her characters encounter the holding camps where the French government sent 1000s of Algerians who fled in 1962, running for their lives for having been willingly or unwillingly on the side of France.
Zeniter’s character Ali, Naïma’s Grandfather, fights in World War II (as did my Grandfather) for France. He received a pension from the French government for this (as did my Grandfather and even though he passed away in 2001 his wife still receives it monthly to this day). When war broke out in 1954, Zeniter’s Ali didn’t want to give up his weekly trip to the veterans club even though the FLN (National Liberation Front who is leading the independence movement) forbids it. And here’s where it gets murky and confusing. I had to reread this first section of the novel three times. Ali is a wealthy owner of olive groves. He has never been to school. He doesn’t read. He lives in a rural part of northern Kabylia (a region my family is also from about an hour south of Algiers). He happens upon this wealth by being almost killed in the river by an olive press that comes careening towards him one day. It feels like his involvement on the French side and later classification as harki is as random as this olive press floating into his hands. He just suddenly finds himself making olive oil. He just suddenly finds himself sneaking around the veterans association instead of purposefully on the side of the FLN. I wonder how many of these harki families found themselves in a similar position? Maybe that was Zeniter’s point–that the Algerian population was in many ways put in an impossible situation. The FLN comes and says here are the rules and if you don’t follow them you are dead. And the French army comes by and does the same thing. I wouldn’t know how to make heads or tales of it…many might say Algerians should have been ready to die for their country no matter what. How confusing though when France sent so many North Africans and West Africans off to fight their wars telling everyone the same thing. And then brought them as labors to rebuild France’s bombed out metropolitan areas and housed them in shanty towns which became the “cités” whose residents Nicholas Sarkozy famously referred to as “la racaille” which translates to rabble or scum in, 2015.
That in between is where we seem to still be today. After 1962 until now, many Algerians who had lived through the war as kids not from harki families moved to France as adults. Lyes Salam’s film “L’Oranais” starts to poke a bit at this period of big dreams, broken dreams, and subsequent debilitating corruption. In 2003 I spent a month in Paris hanging out with the Algerian playwright Mohamed Kacimi, whose play 1962 I was working on for a project in college. Kacimi told me, “Algeria is still a dream. A fiction.”
The Algeria we all hope and long for that can’t seem to find its footing. The Algeria of exotic romantic orientalist paintings that disappoints once you live there and understand the difficulty of making things happen day to day. The Algeria where everything is beautiful from a distance. At least that’s my experience.
My kids are very little. Their father grew up in a very different Algeria than my Dad. In fact their paternal Grandfather fought against the French army and lost his eye and stomach doing it. He would have been furious at that young man with the cigarettes. But my Grandfather’s bakery was threatened by both the French army and the FLN. My Grandfather who was put in a work camp by the French, only to have his bakery burned down later. I never met him. All I have been able to piece together is that all that war ruined any kindness or compassion he had.
My hope is that my kids can return to Algeria on summer vacations and really know Algeria rather than letting it be a romanticized fiction built up in their heads. Maybe like me, they will want to take the boat when they are 23, just for the experience, to really know what their ancestors saw. But I hope not. I hope they can just exist with a little Algeria and a little America and find confidence in between.
View of Algiers from the Sea
1818
Aquatnint by L. Clark after drawing by Henry Parice.
Coast of Western Algeria
Photo by Taous Khazem
–Taous Claire Khazem is a theatre educator, director, and performer Instagram @taouskhazem taousclairekhazem.com