The literature of decolonisation is full of victims and heroes. Between levels, self-doubt and existential memory loss are rare. Ali, his son Hamid, whose daughter Naïma, the main characters of the novel by Alice Zeniter, victims of the Algerian freedom war? The term would be inaccurate.
Ali belonged to that category of Algerians who have been to the French closer than the Algerian freedom fighters. To those in force in accordance with the independence agreement of 1962, as collaborators, left the country, and in France, had to settle where they let you in dreary social residential homes run a faceless in the shadows. “Harkis” is the Fix term for these people who have landed on the wrong side of history. And this book is the first great novel that gives you a voice.
A kind of phantom pain
The totgeschwie genes past get even with Naïma, a Normandy-born art student, late as a kind of phantom pain to the surface and it causes at the age of 29 years, for the first Time in your life to Algeria to travel. In the “other”, the real Algeria, of the you know as good as nothing.
What is funded from the research of the young woman, the author of Alice Zeniter looks in some ways similar to light, is more than a family history across three generations. It is a historical summary of the French presence in Algeria since 1830, the exploration of a blind spot of history and a reflection on today’s France, must face up to the long-delayed confrontation with the Algerian war now the history of the “Harkis”.
in 1986, in the Normandy-born Alice Zeniter has with the novel – her fifth – with Finesse and narrative talent of a literary pioneer submitted work to this issue. Distorted images of oppression and Terror are not to be found here. A veil of uncertainty, half-consciousness, doubt, chance, and mystery hangs over the historical events. Ali, in his village on the slope of the mountain, and prosperity to come the land owners, went to the first attacks of the National liberation front FLN in 1954 this movement at a distance, but also depend on that the rival land owners supported the movement. Also Ali refers to as a former soldier in the French army and a small war pension.
The contacts to the French army, he uses during the escalation between terrorist attacks and reprisals, the worst of his family and of his village away. Finally, he must recognize: From the mountain nothing Good comes, because a liberation command was hiding up there, and against the brutality of the French criminal actions also Ali can do nothing.
After the independence agreements of 1962 hit for him and his family the hour. From the mocking comments when he walks through the village, insults and threats. One Morning is found dead by a colleague from the war veterans Association, with his throat cut. Ali has to leave with his family under a French escort to his country.
Creased self-esteem
What follows are stored in the collection, and finally, in a dreary social housing estate in Normandy, is a broken sense of self-worth through the generations. Of once itself of some village Patriarch, in the eyes of their own children as clumsy, illiterate social case, the must be of his son, Hamid, the official forms to read and in the factory, and his French superiors no different than a submissive can face.
Alice Zeniter (33) has Algerian roots. Photo: opals, Leemage
Hamid comes a little further in life. He reads as a high school student under the distant Echo of the Parisian student revolt, Karl Marx, and later finds a job in the social service, married a French woman, the, four daughters, grow up as a genuine French. One of them Naïma, the Central figure of the novel. You will find eventually that it was enough with the Silence about their origin, and breaks to Search for Algeria.
In the mud of the camp
The entire spectrum between embarrassment, Silence, opportunism, self-deception, betrayal, and Forget the novel shines in its character panorama subtle. The existence of this Nameless – “Algeria calls if you are unable or remedy moderately rats, dogs, Unclean, bandits, France, she is called not just Harkis” – is in the scenes of the immediate reality of life vividly.
“We’ll see you in France again,” says Ali’s French friend Claude at the time of departure back to the mother country after the Algerian independence agreement, and pretends to believe it. The Algerian and the internally displaced people vegetate, however, for months in the mud of the French detention camp where the children measure in the distribution of clothes your Size in the barbed wire of the fence. And in their social housing estates, people will buy out of sheer fear of style errors in the new Dwelling on the Peddlers and the ugly most living room sets.
distance to the figure
by Using a clever game of Hide and seek between the figure Naïma and in the Text from time to time, has there I the author summarized your autobiographical Material to a rich Roman. This doubling allows Zeniter to go to the main character at a distance. If Naïma accused after the Paris attacks 2015 the terrorists, such acts provoked only the French, Arabs hate, the Icherzählerin, it is precisely this false reasoning’ve made sixty years earlier, her grandfather, Ali, to the liberation terrorism. Society is split by hatred is not a careless side-effect, but the target of the terrorists.
Although the initially skillfully composed narrative in a conventional chronology. But that does not detract from the qualities of the novel hardly has been translated by Hainer Kober precise and rich in nuances.
Alice Zeniter: to lose The art. Roman. From the German by Hainer Kober. Berlin Verlag 2019. 560 p., CA. 37 Fr. (editor-in-Tamedia)
Created: 07.05.2019, 18:08 PM
