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Transnational Social Formations in the New Europe 213 7 / Transnational Social Formations in the New Europe Born to a Kabyle family living in Algiers, Fatiha came to France for the first time in 1951. She was five years old. Fatiha lived with her father, who owned a café in a Kabyle enclave outside of the southern French city of Nîmes. She returned to Algeria shortly thereafter, but came back to France again two years later with her whole family soon after the beginning of the anti-colonial war. In both France and colonial Algeria, she lived in a primarily French-speaking milieu, was educated in Catholic schools, and was even baptized. “I was basically assimilated,” Fatiha told me when I met her in May 1996. Ironically, although Fatiha has legally lived in France for nearly half a century, she has never naturalized herself as a citizen. “Even if you become a citizen, you’re not necessarily accepted; you’re always a foreigner. What we want is to live as Berbers in a French state, not as French men and women.” At the age of forty-eight, two years before we met, Fatiha had founded a Berber cultural association in the west Parisian suburb of Nanterre. Fatiha’s long journey to Berber activism was mediated by Marxist and feminist engagements and followed her movements between France and Algeria. As a teenager during the war, she was active in the FLN’s Federation of Algerians in France network. As the war ended, she took part in the creation of Mohamed Boudiaf’s opposition party, the Party of the Socialist Revolution. The ruling FLN of President Ahmed Ben Bella declared Boudiaf’s party illegal and sent Boudiaf to prison and later to exile in Morocco. A strong 214 Algeria in France proponent of Arab nationalism, Fatiha “did everything I could such that people would treat me as an Arab.” In spite of these efforts, her Algerian family scorned her as française. Her father was extremely strict with her and her sisters, regulating their comings and goings to the point of violence. As a café owner, he was particularly sensitive to his public persona and the sense of family honor. At the end of the war he married Fatiha to a young Kabyle man from his natal village and sent her at the age of nineteen to live in Algeria, where she split her time between her family’s apartment in Algiers and the Kabyle village of her husband’s parents. Her first time in Kabylia she was under her in-laws’ strict surveillance and was often prevented from leaving home. Fatiha fought back against her family and her husband. “I revolted. I rejected the idea of being a Kabyle woman. I failed in taking on my Algerian nationality. I wasn’t ready to live in a conservative and tribal Kabylia. I had revolutionary ideas.” Resisting her family’s surveillance, Fatiha became politically active in Algeria. In 1965, she became a member of Hocine Aït Ahmed’s Socialist Forces Front (FFS) that was at the time waging a war of opposition in Kabylia against the FLN. “I participated in all of the demonstrations in Algiers and throughout the country.” Eventually, however, she became fed up with Algerian opposition political movements, sensing that the leaders, like those of the FLN, were corrupt and self-serving. In the meantime, she discovered a new pride in her Kabyle cultural heritage. Returning to France in the early 1970s, she enrolled in a degree program in education at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes, where the Berber Study Group was being formed to preserve and promote Berber language and literature. However, her interest in Kabyle culture, as she recollected it to me, antedated her participation in the group’s activities, deriving instead from a chance encounter with a group of Native Americans who were visiting the university in 1972. “I had been traumatized as a child by their portrayal in Westerns and was amazed to meet and talk with them in person.” She was struck by the parallels between their situation in the United States and that of Kabyles in Algeria, and in 1975 she went to the United States to see how they lived. She felt an immediate solidarity with their lives and their struggle, discovering in their material culture, rituals, and relationship with their territory as a “providing nature” strengths that could also be found in Kabylia. “It was through this experience that I...

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