Amy L. Hubbell

(Re)turning to Ruins: Pied-Noir Visual Returns to Algeria

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 Saïda viewed the film Saïda… 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. Saïda… 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, Leïla Sebbar, Jacques Derrida and Hélène 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.

Scandalous Memory: Terrorism Testimonial from the Algerian War

ABSTRACT Zohra Drif, a heroine of the Front de Libération Nationales independence movement during the Algerian War, planted a bomb in the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956, which killed three people, wounded fifty, and maimed twelve civilians. The 2008 documentary Les Porteuses de feu directed by Faouzia Fékiri engages Algerian women, including Drif, who testify to their willing participation in the FLNs terrorist activities in their fight for independence from France (1954–1962). But two of the Milk Bar bombing victims have grappled with the effects throughout their lives, and these depictions cause aftershocks that do not allow the trauma to dissipate. Nicole Guiraud, age ten, lost her left arm and saw her father gravely wounded; Danielle Michel-Chich was five when her leg was amputated and her grandmother was killed. Guiraud and Michel-Chich willingly and publicly recount the traumatic moment of their loss in spoken and written testimony, but they remain at odds about how this memory should be confronted. This article explores how traumatic memory, even sixty years onward, is contested by those directly affected, creating scandalous debate in France.

Accumulated Testimony: Layering French Girls' Diaries on the Algerian Exodus

In 1997, French-Algerian author Leila Sebbar published an illustrated children’s book, J’etais enfant en Algerie, juin 1962 (‘I was a child in Algeria, June 1962’) in which she creates the fictional account of a young girl from the interior of Algeria leaving her home during the great exodus of the French just prior to Algerian independence. Using the genre of diary writing, Sebbar’s text reads as testimonial of fleeing their country for a homeland they do not know. Although this text is intimate, Sebbar relies on accumulated scraps of collective experience that, when joined to her own, fill in the absence of her homeland. In 2013, French artist Nicole Guiraud published her personal diaries kept before and during her exodus from Algeria from April to July 1962. Her raw representation of traumatic upheaval is couched in a rich paratext including artwork, photographs, and German translations, that simultaneously intensifies her account and distracts the reader from the extreme pain behind her words. In this article I demonstrate how fictional and real accounts published in very different historical contexts convey the exodus experienced by almost one million individuals and how each author deploys a layering technique to simultaneously draw in and distance the reader from extraordinarily painful personal experience.

Made in Algeria: Mapping layers of colonial memory into contemporary visual art:

In 2016, the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille hosted the ‘Made in Algeria: Généalogie d’un territoire’ exhibition which gathered cartographic depictions of Algeria from the earliest European encounters to modern images of an independent culture still bearing colonial remnants. The contemporary pieces, notably by Franco-Algerian artists Zineb Sedira and Katia Kameli, expose multiple layers of the past as they reformulate what had been erased by colonisation and what had been silenced by the subsequent ruptures of independence. Their images, like the artists who have migrated back and forth between Algeria and France across time, show accumulated layers of colonial memory enmeshed in contemporary images of the Algerian people and landscape. By assessing the marks still visibly mapped onto Algeria in the exhibition, this article explores how what is ‘Made in Algeria’ remains heavily marked by France.

Self and Stuff: Accumulation in Francophone Literature and Art

Introduction.

An Amputated Elsewhere: Sustaining and Relieving the Phantom Limb of Algeria

Since their departure from Algeria in and around 1962, the former French citizens of Algeria, or Pieds-Noirs, have been writing about their traumatic separation from their homeland. Many of these authors, including Marie Cardinal and Nobel laureate Albert Camus, write to cultivate memory and communal identity. Their literature is filled with colorful recreations of the physical landscape of Algeria, sustaining their amputated homeland through writing. This continuing connection to the amputated past haunts the Pieds-Noirs like phantom limb pains that plague amputees, and the group uses its literature like a prosthesis to reconnect to what they have lost. This article demonstrates how most of the former French of Algeria perpetuate their phantom limb in their writing to maintain a connection to the past, while others such as Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous have embraced their amputated identities because they were separated while still in Algeria. By accepting this always absent or escapable elsewhere, the two use their writing to lay the ghostly limb to rest.