from I Do Not Speak My Father’s Language
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A few useful dates so as not to get lost in the maze of memory:
My father is born in 1913 in Tènès. From 1932 to 1935, he studies at the teachers’ college in Bouzaréah, in Algiers, where he meets Mouloud Feraoun, assassinated in March 1962 by the OAS.
He will be a schoolteacher and school principal:
from 1935 to 1940, in El-Bordj
from 1940 to 1945, in Aflou
from 1945 to 1947, in Mascara
from 1947 to 1955, in Hennaya, near Tlemcen
from 1955 to 1960, in Blida (in 1957, he is imprisoned at Orléansville;
Maurice Audin is assassinated the same year by the French
army.)
from 1960 to 1965, in Algiers, in Salembier-Gardens.
He leaves Algeria for Nice, with my mother, in 1968.
He dies in 1997.
I do not speak my father’s language
I did not know that these neighborhoods were cursed.
Peripheral neighborhoods, always. Beyond the colonial village, beyond the city, Blida the Muslim town, Alger, Salembier-Gardens. It was there that the family’s voyage had ended, on the edge of the Wild Woman’s Ravine, last outpost of schoolteachers loyal to the Republic, whom the revolution had not had time to liquidate as traitors and agents of the French enemy, and whom the Secret Army Organization, clandestine French terrorist commandos, had not succeeded in getting at either. My father’s name was on a blacklist: it was necessary to cut the future elite of the young country off at the root, Moloud Feraoun, his fellow teacher, his friend, the writer, had been assassinated with others (on March 15, 1962), at the back of the classroom, against a wall, Feraoun the peaceful, he kept a journal like a scholarship boy at boarding school, his calm voice, the Kabyle accent beneath the [End Page 1189] black mustache. I had asked the writer questions, an adolescent, I had spoken with my father’s friend. I’ve forgotten his answers, he had answered, certainly, answers modest as his moderate man’s gestures. He is dead. My father would be next. How had he learned it? I can no longer ask him, telephone him from Paris to Nice several times a day to learn, a few decades later, what he had not said, because he didn’t speak of things which might cause us pain, he thought that one had to forget, not recall the troubles and grief, again and again. . . . Of those years, I knew nothing. My father, obstinately, had said nothing about them. And as for me, no less obstinately, I call him, I telephone. His tender and ironic voice, he knows that I’m going to ask him questions again, I’m no longer a child and I ask questions like a child. He will say “So then, daughter, how are things? The children . . .” I will interrupt him, rudely, I only realize now, I understood that Oriental protocol too late, I ought to have respected it, my father never made the slightest remark, he didn’t like calls to order. I don’t permit my father to finish the familial chain. “I’d like to know . . . —What is it that you’d like to know this time? . . . Why do you want to know all this? . . . One has to forget. . . .—Forget, why? You say one has to forget and you don’t want to say what . . . No, daughter, no . . . let it be, forget all that. . . . It’s not worth it, believe me, it’s not worth it . . . —But papa, the things you know, you might be the only one . . . And if you don’t tell anything . . . —The only one . . . You’re joking, daughter, I’m not the only one who knows, and now the whole world knows, what good does it do to repeat . . . —To repeat what . . . what? Tell me . . . You think that the whole world knows . . . Books say nothing and neither do you . . . —Listen, daughter, if I thought that it was important, I would answer you . . . So, what is it you want to know?—Everything.” My father laughs. “Everything, like that...
