The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals (review)

Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the French-Algerian war, a nearly eight-year conflict that resulted in the independence of colonial Algeria at the cost of as many as a million, mostly Muslim Algerian, lives and the displacement of over a million more. If the conflict was quickly subsumed into official, monolithic nationalist narratives—in France, as an unfortunate set of “events” best to be forgotten on the road to a Europe-centric future; in Algeria, as the sacrificial violence necessarily for the foundation of a nation unified around the victorious National Liberation Front (FLN)—it continued to live on in the personal and family lives of its many victims. Indeed, over the last 20 years the war seems to have been fought anew: whether in the Algerian civil conflict of the 1990s in which an Islamist insurgency took up arms against an FLN government it accused of neo-colonialism; in a burgeoning scholarship made possible by the gradual opening up of the wartime archives that has brought renewed attention to the French military’s war crimes and the FLN’s “war within the war” against its revolutionary rivals; or in the increasingly vocal activism of those unacknowledged victims who seek recognition and redress and call on the French state to take responsibility for its colonial past.

In this recently released book, Vincent Crapanzano introduces Anglophone readers to one such group: les Harkis, the members of various Muslim auxiliary forces who participated in the French war effort and were abandoned to their peril at the conflict’s end. Crapanzano culls his open-ended and “loosely phenomenological” (6) narrative from the reminiscences of various Harkis and their children from among the approximately 85,000 who survived the post-war massacres and were eventually “repatriated” to impoverished resettlement camps in France where they were effectively imprisoned until the mid-1970s. The result is a heartrending tale of physical suffering and psychic pain that asks profound philosophical questions about the limits of memory, enmity, agency, identity, and forgiveness.

Over many years of research and writing, Crapanzano has developed a person-centered anthropology attuned to the psychological dimensions of the human experience. Whether focusing on a single person (e.g., his 1980 portrait of the Moroccan Tuhami) or a set of interlocutors from a defined group (e.g., his 1985 ethnography of white South Africans), he has consistently resisted the sociological impulse to treat individuals as exemplars of social types, insisting instead on the “depth” revealed in the particular (178). Such a methodology requires the humility of the ethnographer, a constant recognition that “the mind, the subjective experience, of the other always remains opaque” (6), and a self-reflexive mode of exposition that highlights the researcher’s own limits, confusions, and dialogical development.

Working with the Harkis and their children posed a further set of challenges with which Crapanzano actively and insightfully contends throughout the book. If many of the older generation have embraced silence regarding their past suffering as a duty of perseverance (sabr, in Arabic), a submission to God’s will (qadar or mektub), and a “token of masculinity” (84), their children’s memories are fragmented, insisting, and often harrowing. Having witnessed the extremes of FLN torture and mass murder in immediate post-war Algeria and the betrayal of the French state in the miserable conditions and racism of the resettlement camps, their outrage offers no possibility for reconciliation or revenge. With no “homeland” to which to return or build nostalgia around, they have little but their narratives of past suffering to unite them into a “mnemonic community” (193). Since the early 1990s, activist associations and scholars from Harki families have collected testimonies, documented family histories, published community studies, and organized protests where they publicly retell their tragic saga. Given this intertwining of the personal and political, the particular that Crapanzano sought from his interlocutors often receded into the collective experience, the narrative “I” slipping into the “we” (109), and the lives recounted serving...