Pieds-Noirs

In commemoration of the 45th year of their exile, 500 pieds-noirs and their families gathered in Toulouse, France in May 2007. During their meeting, the Amicale de Saida viewed the film Saida… On revient! sur les pas de notre enfance, which chronicles the return voyage of members of the community and their encounters with the places of their past. The amateur film provides a return to Algeria for the pieds-noirs who could not physically make the journey. While many buildings in the images were in ruins, the pieds-noirs did not view the present and experienced a return to somewhere other than what was filmed. Saida… On revient! is one of numerous journeys to Algeria that have occurred in the past 50 years. Notable Algerian-born authors Albert Camus, Marie Cardinal, Leila Sebbar, Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous have all participated in written and real returns to Algeria, and they all reflect on the ruins of Algeria that haunt them in their exile. By analysing the representation of real ruins in documented returns to Algeria, this article demonstrates how ruins of lost locations hold potential to ruin the stability of the past.

Publisher: One World Publication (US)
Winner of the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman
Winner of the Prix des Cinq Continents
Winner of the Prix Francois Mauriac
Longlisted for the FT/OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices Award
Published: 2013
ISBN-10: 1590517512
ISBN-13: 978-1590517512
pp 160; Price: $9.90
Reviewed by: Olatoun Williams

http://bordersliteratureonline.net/books/The-Meursault-Investigation

This is the front matter for an anthology I edited for Greenhaven Press that was published in 2001 and is, as far as I know, now out of print (though copies are still floating around on various used-book websites). What is included here is the front matter that I wrote as well as the table of contents for the excepted pieces that I anthologized within the book.

Entre autres services rendus à la domination française par Ahmed AI-Mokrani, père du futur Bachagha Mohammed Al-Mokrani, et ennemi irréductible de la résistance algérienne à la colonisation, le plus important a été de prendre fait et cause pour les français, dans leur lutte contre l’Emir Abdelkader.

S’agissant de juger les effets de la colonisation, cet historien universitaire rigoureux a dressé des tableaux précis. Hostile à toute lecture manichéenne, il montre que la colonisation européenne fut une immense révolution aux effets à la fois bénéfiques et pervers, objet par ailleurs de deux légendes, simultanées ou successives « La noire et la rose ».

Le 13 avril 1847 le Cherif Boumaza s’est rendu au colonel de Saint-Arnaud après avoir soutenu dans l'oasis des Ouled Djellal son dernier combat contre le général Herbillon, le bourreau des Zaatcha (Biskra).
C'est le capitaine Richard, chef du bureau d'Orléansville, qui est chargé de conduire le prisonnier jusqu’à Paris, où il devient la coqueluche des Parisiennes. L’Hôtel de la rue François-Ier où vécut un temps Boumaza, est situé dans le 8e arrondissement de Paris. Il jouxte l’allée d'Antin (actuelle avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt)..C'est là qu'il connut la princesse italienne Belgiojoso.

«Algeria. The War of Independence Fifty Years Later»

Andrea Brazzoduro (ed.)

Contributors: Roberto Bianchi, Giulia Fabbiano, Julien Hage, Jim House, Nicola Labanca, Amar Mohand-Amer, Irene Mordiglia, Gian Paolo Calchi Novati, Tramor Quemeneur, Éric Savarese

Despite its association with social criticism, the road movie genre frequently privi- leges a western, male subjectivity and presents unquestioningly his right to travel into the other’s space. The films of Tony Gatlif frequently depict westerners travelling into North Africa and eastern Europe; however, the romanticism inherent in this movement is undercut by the films’ insistent marking of these journeys as error. Deprived of the privileged relationship to space enjoyed by the classic road movie protagonist, Gatlif’s characters are instead enveloped by the spaces through which they journey in a manner that recasts the oppositions such as inside/outside and centre/periphery through which western spatial privilege is maintained. This article focuses in particular on Gatlif’s 2004 film Exils and its depiction of the exile’s return to his homeland.

Marseille s’est toujours présentée comme la ville française d’accueil de l’immigration nord-africaine. Aussi différents auteurs, à l’image de JMG Le Clézio, Michel Tournier ou Yasmina Khadra se sont-ils appropriés dans leurs œuvres ce lieu où est directement vécu par le nouvel arrivant le passage d’une culture connue à la découverte d’un monde souvent rêvé et idéalisé. Qu’il s’agisse de l’immigré ou du pied-noir, les différents personnages exposés se révèlent en ce sens particulièrement efficaces pour penser, décrire  et raconter un espace intermédiaire souvent bien loin d’une démarcation aussi nette que ne le laisserait supposer une définition première de la frontière.

While Algeria has long been a popular subject for travel writers, since its decolonization in 1962, the travelogues documenting journeys to Algeria have predominantly become returns and reunions with the homeland. Immediately after their exile from Algeria during and after the war for independence, the Pieds-Noirs, or former French citizens of Algeria, began returning to their homeland in their memories, literature, and recently, their films. Early return narratives were almost always filled with nostalgic descriptions of familiar places and sensations in an effort to bridge over the ruptures with the past. By transposing the colonial past onto the present, the travelogues effectively stop time in the homeland. However, more recent returns often demonstrate the instability of the past. Through a study of Marie Cardinal's Au pays de mes racines and Hélène Cixous's Si près, this article investigates how Algerian return narratives have begun to deconstruct themselves, and yet the past is ever present within them.Keywords. Pieds-Noirs, Algeria, Marie Cardinal, Hélène Cixous, Travel, Time

Zohra Drif, one of the notorious heroines of the Front de Libération Nationale’s independence movement during the Algerian War, has in the last fifteen years been frequently recreated in literature and film. Drif, who is now a retired lawyer and politician in Algeria as well as the author of her own memoires, planted a bomb in the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956 which killed three people, wounded fifty and left twelve maimed—all were civilians. This terrorist act, famously depicted in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film La Bataille d’Alger is often viewed as a heroic measure instrumental in the eventual independence of Algeria. The 2008 documentary film Les Porteuses de feu directed by Faouzia Fékiri engages Algerian women including Drif who testify to their willingness to participate in the FLN’s terrorist activities in their fight for independence from France (1954-1962). But two of the Milk Bar bombing victims have been grappling with its effects for most of their lives, and these depictions cause aftershocks that do not allow the trauma to dissipate. Nicole Guiraud and Danielle Michel-Chich were both children in the Milk Bar on the day of the attack. Guiraud, age ten, lost her left arm and saw her father gravely wounded; Michel-Chich was five when her leg was amputated and her grandmother was killed. Guiraud frequently depicts the trauma in her artwork but she sued France 3 in 2009 for “préjudice moral” after airing Les Porteuses de feu which allegedly glorifies the terrorist act that wounded her. Michel-Chich published an open letter to Zohra Drif in 2012 in an attempt to express to her attacker what she endured. She later went onto a television panel with Drif to discuss terrorism. Guiraud and Michel-Chich both willingly and publicly recount the traumatic moment of their loss, but they remain at odds with each other about how this memory should be confronted. This paper seeks to understand how traumatic memory, even nearly sixty years onward, is contested by those directly affected and how it continues to provoke scandal on a national level in France.

Talk given in the School of Languages and Cultures, Culture Seminar Series, 18 March 2022 at the University of Queensland.

France's colonial history in Algeria has been the subject of "Memory Wars" since the end of the 1990s. Culminating in 2012 at the 50th anniversary of the Algerian War (1954-1962), the Memory Wars contributed to numerous publications about every aspect of Algeria. Large format coffee-table photographical books (beaux livres) as well as paperback books full of collected memories of the colonial years and the war, from both French and Algerians, flooded French bookshops. In this chapter, I will engage with the concepts of competitive, multidirectional and hoarded memory to demonstrate how these various versions of the past reflect the traumatic war. By examining French memorial books that are especially photo driven, I will show that war appears to be on display but, at the same time, difficult and traumatic memory is deeply buried. Despite book titles that claim to examine the memories of war, within the books Algeria often remains a beautiful, peaceful, and nostalgic backdrop. Where war visually emerges, it is often covered up. As we approach the 60th anniversary of the war, and France has begun to recognise the atrocities committed, I will further question whether the war continues to be obscured or if wounds will be fully acknowledged.

This book examines the written recreation of Algeria in the literature from the Pied-Noir community from 1962 to present. Through an examination of nostalgic returns, both real and imagined, I demonstrate that repetition attempts to work through and preserve the lost homeland while returning threatens to destabilize it.

Between June 1990 and June 1992, I managed to spend as much time as possible in Oran on six successive Algerian cultural visas. Much of the time I stayed in the hostel attached to the Cathedral of Sainte-Marie, the seat of the diocese of Oran in El Maqqari (ex-St. Eugène). I owe my housing and much more to Pierre Claverie, who was the Bishop of Oran from 1981 until his assassination from a bomb placed near his car in 1996 that also took the life of his chauffeur, Mohamed Bouchikhi. I can still hear his voice, literally, because I tape-recorded an initial interview and I continue to follow his writings. It took me decades to listen to him again and not without tears.
OPEN ACCESS:  https://www.pieds-noirs.stir.ac.uk/oranimes-susan-slyomovics-interview-with-pierre-claverie/

This volume is the first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal). Each contributor examines these cases through a shared cultural sociology frame, unifying the historical and sociological analyses carried out in the collection. More particularly, the book strengthens and improves one of the most important and popular current streams of cultural sociology, that of collective trauma. Using a comparative perspective to study the trajectories of similarly traumatized groups in different countries allows for not only a thick description of the return processes but also a thick explanation of the mechanisms and factors shaping them. Learning from these various cases of colonial returnees, the authors have been able to develop a new theoretical framework that may help cultural sociologists to explain why seemingly similar claims of collective trauma and victimhood garner respect and recognition in certain contexts but fail in others.

Journaliste et chanteur engagé à droite, Jean-Pax Méfret traduit en chanson les tensions idéologiques et géopolitiques des années 1980. Son univers politique est typé : anticommunisme et antisoviétisme, rejet de la gauche au pouvoir après 1981, défense du peuple opprimé par les puissants, nostalgie de l’Algérie française. Il défend aussi des valeurs métapolitiques : vérité, engagement pour des valeurs, gloire militaire. Il peut être rapproché d’une forme de populisme républicain. Bien qu’en partie décalé de son public plutôt d’extrême droite et plutôt militaire, il participe à la politisation d’adolescents et à l’entretien d’une culture politique chez les adultes.

“Jean-Pax Méfret : anticommunist singer and French republican populist”

Journalist and committed French right-wing singer, Jean-Pax Méfret exemplifies the ideological and the geopolitical tensions of the 1980s. His political universe is a typical one : anticommunism and struggling against the Soviet Union, the reject of the ruling left-wing party after 1981, defending the people oppressed by the ruling people, nostalgia of French colonial Algeria. He also promotes metapolitical values : the truth, struggle for moral values, military glory. He can be seen as a kind of French republican populist. But his attendees are mainly soldiers and far-right-wing people who may not share all his values. Despite this fact, he contributes to create the political culture of the teenagers attracted by his music and he maintains the already built political universe of the adults listening his songs.

The Pieds-Noirs, or former French citizens of Algeria, are a diverse community brought together not as much by their common experience in Algeria as by their common exile from their homeland during and after the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962). Multiple intellectual voices emerged in the years during and after the war, and the new community of “Pieds-Noirs” became defined by their separation from and nostalgia for the homeland. Resulting from the traumas of colonization, decolonization, and discrimination, separation plays a major role in the philosophical vantage points of Algerian-born authors Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and Hélène Cixous, among others. This article demonstrates that both separation and return inevitably influence exile writing, but for those who suffered multiple separations both in and outside the colony, there is no singular location to which they may return. As such the perpetual motion of return, without hope of arrival, destabilizes the sense of nostalgia in their writing.

Jacques Ferrandez, born in Algiers in late 1955, spent only the first three months of his life in the capital before moving to France. His illustrated travel writing project, Retours à Alger [Return journeys to Algiers], closely tied to his epic bande dessinée series Carnets d’Orient  [notebooks/sketchbooks of the Orient], represents a constant struggle between myth and reality where a disillusioned critical approach that attempts to suggest an understanding of the “real” of his place of birth betrays a fascinating ideological interpellation that one can perhaps identify as peculiar to pied-noir postmemory identification. This article investigates how through an interaction of word and image, Ferrandez’s work attempts to chart a course to an objective reality of postcolonial Algeria, even making use of his special medium to evoke the power of ideological attachment in the colonial domain. This article will, however, argue that a discovery of objective reality is shown to be impossible, that, following the propositions of theorists such as Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek, reality is always shown to be a construct of the psyche that depends on fantasy/ideology and that in some sense precedes the conscious analysis of existential information. Thus, though Ferrandez in both Carnets d’Orient and Retours à Alger, makes varied attempts to produce a kind of representative disillusionment, and though these two projects in a sense work together to achieve this effect, this article will demonstrate how Ferrandez’ work is coloured by a particular ideology of the “multiple Mediterranean”  that is paradoxically subtended by his critical representations of the ideological interpellation of others and of himself. Focusing on the formal and conceptual peculiarities of the two projects, this article aims to evoke how Ferrandez’s disillusionment through travel is shown, through his manipulation of text and image, to be constituted, in Žižekian terms, through the institution of “a primordial form of narrative, which serves to occult some original deadlock”  and that this structural deadlock, this irresolvable antagonism, is disruptive of the core of his Pied-Noir postmemory identification.

France’s former French citizens of Algeria, the Pieds-Noirs, include one of Europe’s largest diaspora communities in the twentieth century. Because of the traumatic conditions of their departure and arrival, two types of remembrance arose in the community: for the older generation of migrants, a nostalgic attachment to the homeland often labeled “nostalgérie” began to appear in literature and art, and for the younger generation who had trouble processing what they had just experienced and why, their memories of Algeria were often silenced or fragmented. The generation of children and young teens during the war—those too young to understand the war but not too young to see and feel it—as well as those who do not remember but who grappled with post-memory, take the central role in this article. How can the memory of Algeria, both beautiful and violent, be expressed in visual work? How is pain and confusion transmitted when the fragile memory of Algeria as homeland also demands a place? For many of the artists born in the late 1940s onward, layering provides a way to both scar over and highlight physical and psychological wounds. I will specifically examine the artwork of Nicole Guiraud and Patrick Altes to explore how the memory of Algeria is transmitted in contemporary French art. Guiraud suffered the violence of the war directly through a bombing which severed her arm, and Patrick Altes, bearing no nostalgia of his own, has had the memories of Algeria transmitted to him from both family and community. Both artists use layers to engage the personal within the collective traumatic memories of Algeria.

From 2012 to 2016, three French women published autobiographies about surviving bombings as children during the Algerian War (1954-1962). Danielle Michel-Chich who survived the Milk Bar bombing in Algiers in 1956 published an open letter to Zohra Drif, the woman who placed the bomb in the restaurant (Lettre à Zohra D., 2012), and Pied-Noir artist Nicole Guiraud who survived the same event published her diary Algérie 1962: Journal de l’Apocalypse in 2013. Nicole Simon who survived a bombing at a concert in Mostaganem, Algeria published her autobiography, La Bombe: Mostaganem, j’avais quinze ans, in 2016. In these works, the women relate in different ways how they negotiated their injured bodies at home in Algeria as well as in a tense political climate in France during and after the war. In this article I analyze survivor autobiographies to elucidate how transformed bodies impact the individual who survived the trauma but also how and why these women alternately hide their wounds to accommodate the people around them or accept and respond to the stares upon their bodies. By engaging with disability studies, I examine how the discomfort of the transformed body, for both the victims and the people who see them, exemplifies the much larger tensions surrounding the painful memory of the Algerian War.

book abstract:

Cette collection d’articles retrace les différentes facettes de la mobilité inhérente à l’écriture migrante au féminin dans différentes aires géographiques, tels le Maghreb, l’Afrique sub-saharienne, les Caraïbes, le Moyen-Orient, le Québec et la France. Ces articles explorent les frictions et les devenirs qui se dégagent de ces traversées transgressives et problématiques. Organisé autour de trois axes : « Le questionnement identitaire », « La violence de l’exil » et « La mémoire fragmentée », cet ouvrage contribue au questionnement identitaire de la migration, ciblant un lectorat constitué de spécialistes en littérature de la migration, mais aussi de passionnés d’écriture au féminin. Les auteures et artistes étudiées dans ce collectif contribuent à l’émergence d’une certaine altérité littéraire qui prend force d’un privé autobiographique déplacé. Les univers narratifs qu’elles créent font ainsi éclater les contradictions des rhétoriques politiques classiques et démontrent que, même dans les circonstances les plus désavantageuses, la création artistique demeure un acte social décisif de transformation.

In 1957, the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus wrote a collection of short stories entitled " Exile and the Kingdom " , composed during the Algerian struggle for independence, which culminated in the displacement of around one-million pied-noirs and their " return " to France. In this paper, I will explore the themes of exile and return, and how these can lead to an underlying anxiety of inclusion and exclusion. Firstly, I will give a brief overview of Camus' pied-noir status as an influential factor in his writings, before looking more closely at two of these stories, discussing the ways in which they explore these themes in relation to Camus' absurdism. Finally, I will briefly point to how such themes might be understood in relation to the wider themes of anxiety, recognition, and rootedness, which will hopefully lead to further discussion on what belonging looks like, and what it means to be simultaneously included and excluded.

In his polemical 1961 text Les Français d’Algérie a young Pierre Nora argued that class distinctions in French Algeria were of little importance to the European settler population.  He stated, ‘Du grand colon capitaliste au petit tailleur juif [...] ce qui unit psychologiquement toutes ces catégories est plus fort que ce qui les sépare socialement’.  However, the examination of the work of French Algerian authors Albert Camus and Michèle Villanueva problematizes such a reduction in the role of social class in settler identity formation.  In this paper I will examine the representation of social mobility in Camus’s Le Premier Homme, which remained unfinished on his death in 1960, and Michèle Villanueva’s 1992 L’Echarde.  I will propose that both authors present a vision of social mobility among the French Algerian settler population which emphasises an emerging gap between their upwardly mobile protagonists and their petit-colon milieus of origin.  Such movement will be shown to lead to double sense of shame for Camus’s and Villanueva’s Poor White settler as they simultaneously cease to remain a part of the petit-colon milieu, but given their origins in the colony are not seen as fully French.

Célébrée en grandes pompes à la cathédrale de la Major à Marseille, l'Assomption donne lieu à une grande procession, le 15 août, à travers les rues du quartier historique du Panier. C'est l'occasion pour les « Siciliens de Tunis » de se réunir autour de la Vierge de Trapani, de lui demander une grâce et/ou de la remercier pour un voeu exaucé.

Originaires de Sicile, ces familles ont  accosté à proximité (au J4, emplacement de l'actuel MuCEM) dans les années 1950 avant de s'installer dans le Panier. Cette journée a une dimension identitaire importante où l'on évoque  avec nostalgie les années de jeunesse à la Goulette. Cette fête religieuse revêt donc une dimension mémorielle fondamentale.

Réalisation : Manoël Pénicaud © 2010
Durée : 35min34
1ère version du montage

“(Dis)integrating Roots in Ken Bugul’s and Marie Cardinal’s Autobiographies: A Return to the Baobab fou.” Emergent Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices. Ed. Jeanne-Sarah De Larquier and Ada Uzoamaka Azodo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2009. 81-99.

À bien voir, l’originalité majeure de l’approche qui caractérise From empire to exile est déjà clairement annoncée dans son sous- titre : History and memory within the pied-noir et harki communities, 1962-2012, où le mot-clé est bien sûr « within ». Si en effet, les débats mémoriels concernant la « guerre d’Algérie » et ses séquelles sont assez bien connus, cela est notamment vrai dans une perspective top-down, qui focalise l’attention sur les politiques mémorielles de l’État. L’approche de Claire Eldridge est différente, car plus qu’aux « mémoires » officielles, elle s’intéresse ici à leur fonctionnement. Il s’agit donc d’un changement de perspective radical, ni top-down ni vraiment bottom-up, mais qui nous plonge plutôt within, à l’intérieur de deux groupes porteurs de mémoire.