Hoarding Memory looks at the ways the stories of the
Algerian War (1954-62) have proliferated among the former French
citizens of Algeria. By engaging hoarding as a model, Amy L.
Hubbell demonstrates ...the simultaneously productive and destructive
nature of clinging to memory. These memories present massive
amounts of material, akin to the stored objects in a hoarder's
house. Through analysis of fiction, autobiography, art, and history
that extensively use collecting, layering, and repetition to
address painful war memories, Hubbell shows trauma can be hidden
within its own representation. Hoarding Memory dedicates
chapters to specific authors and artists who use this hoarding
technique: Marie Cardinal, Leïla Sebbar, and Benjamin Stora in
writing and Nicole Guiraud and Patrick Altes in art. All were born
in Algeria during colonial French rule but in vastly different
contexts; each suffered personal or inherited trauma from racism,
physical or psychological abuse, terrorist or other violent acts of
war, and exile in France. Zineb Sedira's artwork is also included
as an example of traumatic memory inherited from her parents.
Ultimately this book shows how traumatic experience can be conveyed
in a seemingly open account that is compounded and compacted by the
volume of words, images, and other memorial debris that testify to
the pain.
France's colonial history in Algeria has been the subject of “Memory Wars” since the end of the 1990s. Culminating in 2012 at the fiftieth anniversary of the Algerian War (1954–1962), these Memory ...Wars contributed to numerous publications about every aspect of Algeria. Large format coffee-table photographic books ( beaux livres), as well as paperbacks full of collected memories of the colonial years and the war, from both French and Algerians, flooded French bookshops. In this article, I engage with the concepts of competitive, hoarded, and multidirectional memory to demonstrate how French memorial books that are especially photo driven appear to place war on display, but, at the same time, bury difficult and traumatic memory. The research examines three French memorial books published between 2010 and 2012, leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, and addresses how traumatic memories are recuperated and still hidden within texts that attempt to fill a memorial void. Despite book titles that claim to examine the memories of war, within the books, Algeria often remains a beautiful, peaceful, and nostalgic backdrop. War is not clearly depicted in the images but emerges in accompanying descriptive texts. In light of France's establishment of the Truth and Memory Commission on the Algerian War in 2022, I examine how diverse versions of the past come into dialogue with each other, while individual memorial books continue to crowd out unspeakable violence.
Colonized by the French in 1830, Algeria was an important French settler colony that, unlike its neighbors, endured a lengthy and brutal war for independence from 1954 to 1962. The nearly one million ...Pieds-Noirs (literally "black-feet") were former French citizens of Algeria who suffered a traumatic departure from their homes and discrimination upon arrival in France. In response, the once heterogeneous group unified as a community as it struggled to maintain an identity and keep the memory of colonial Algeria alive.
Remembering French Algeriaexamines the written and visual re-creation of Algeria by the former French citizens of Algeria from 1962 to the present. By detailing the preservation and transmission of memory prompted by this traumatic experience, Amy L. Hubbell demonstrates how colonial identity is encountered, reworked, and sustained in Pied-Noir literature and film, with the device of repetition functioning in these literary and visual texts to create a unified and nostalgic version of the past. At the same time, however, the Pieds-Noirs' compulsion to return compromises these efforts. Taking Albert Camus'sLe Mythe de Sisypheand his subsequent essays on ruins as a metaphor for Pied-Noir identity, this book studies autobiographical accounts by Marie Cardinal, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Leïla Sebbar, as well as lesser-known Algeria-born French citizens, to analyze movement as a destabilizing and productive approach to the past.
Zohra Drif, a heroine of the Front de Libération Nationale's 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 FLN's 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.
For the nearly one million French citizens who fled Algeria during and after the Algerian War for Independence (19541962), the desire to return home has not easily been attenuated. These exiles, ...commonly referred to as Pieds-Noirs, settled predominantly in France where they experienced discrimination and exclusion due to their colonial ties. Consequently, the once diverse population bonded together in a close-knit community that became consumed with saving and transmitting memories of the homeland, and in a historical period of public silence about the Algerian War until 1999 when it was officially recognized. As Benjamin Stora points out, upon the Pieds- Noirs' exile in 1962, 'la memoire de l'Algerie fran aise va d'abord se transmettre, essentiellement, par les tenants d'un pays perdu' (1999: 72).1 In their effort to maintain their cultural roots, each year on the anniversary of their exodus Pieds-Noirs gather to share memories and to enjoy 'authentic' Pied-Noir dishes such as couscous, merguez, anisette, 'mouna', and 'mechoui'. In these almost stereotypical feasts among friends, the community reconnects to the past as they re-enact what was once a familiar experience. Much like biting into a Proustian madeleine, the Pieds-Noirs can be transported, if only fleetingly, to a former time of wholeness and comfort as they partake in the culinary delights of their youth.
In 1997, French-Algerian author Leïla Sebbar published an illustrated childrens book, Jétais enfant en Algérie, 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, Sebbars 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.
By exploring the autobiographies of two childhood amputees, Nicole Guiraud and Danielle Michel-Chich, who were maimed in the Battle of Algiers in 1956 as Algeria fought for independence from France, ...the article addresses the varied positions of these women with relationship to France's colonial history and within writing itself.
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.
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