Yesterday I was in a café at lunchtime with nothing to read, but luckily someone had left a copy of this week's Nouvel Observateur with Mozart on the front cover. There is a 48-page section on Mozart in this issue, but after reading a few of Mozart's surprisingly dirty letters, I moved on to the Nouvel Obs letters page, where I was struck by this letter.
Tu es Français, petit misérable!
[letter concerning issue no 2144, "The Truth about Colonization"]
November, 1961. A little "native," I went to sixth grade at the Lycée Mascara in Algeria. Out of 35 students, there were five of us little Arabs. The proportion was about inverse in the population as a whole, a beneficial effect of colonization no doubt....
Our history professor had us fill out an application for financial aid (...) I applied myself to filling it out. No particular problem with the identity or the income (close to zero!). But there was a box marked "Nationality." After long reflection, I decided to leave it blank. I actually did not know what to answer. Should I define myself as Algerian, citizen of a country which did not yet exist, or as French, when so many things reminded me that I was not much so? Let us go back in time....
At the beginning of the 1950s, my father was a police officer. He loved books, especially French literature. Every evening he brought home the fruits of his visits to the bookstores in town. There were all kinds, novels, essays, poems. (...) I could only admire them, wondering about this mysterious world, inaccessible to the illiterate little boy that I was then. I had only one desire, to go to school at last so that I could have access to the world my father loved so much.
In 1958, after two years of elementary school, a door opened up into that world. That same year, my father left to join the resistance. That esthete, that free spirit, chose to fight against a system that denied the right of freedom, the right of beauty, to an entire people. I never saw him again. In 1961, a letter from the French police informed us of his death in an "encounter." We were not able to bury him, since no one brought us his body. At the time it was said that he died under torture. Ever since then, the image of this evanescent father, grimacing with pain under the blows of his torturers, has never left me.
But at the same time, I never had a feeling of hatred toward France. In fact, I had made brilliant progress at school. Every evening I dived with delight into reading Homer, Virgil, Gérard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, or Hector Malot. I had the feeling, each time I held a book, that I was sharing a universe my father had loved. How could I hate a nation that had children like Flaubert, Maupassant, Voltaire? Alas, that nation also gave birth to the légionnaire who turned my house upside down, to the barbed wire that encircled my neighborhood, to the policemen who sorted out Europeans from natives at the entrance to the school, greeting some parents, patting down others. This nation had also committed massive massacres since the enfumades [in 1845, some French soldiers shut exits on caves full of fleeing tribespeople, then set fires that smoked all night; between 500 and a thousand men, women, and children suffocated to death on the smoke] from the beginning of the occupation to the destruction of the mechtas [hamlets] and the douars [encampments], not forgetting the monstrous murders of Sétif on May 8, 1945, day of the victory over Nazism, a victory to which Algerians had greatly contributed.
My grandfather and my great-uncle also had to pay for the "desertion" of my father. After having been atrociously tortured, they were buried (I hope they were really dead at that moment, but no one is entirely sure) before their own doorstep.
I also had a great-uncle who chose to work with the French administration. He was the deputy of Mr Vallat, the mayor of the town of Thiersville, a little community about 20 kilometers from Mascara. One day, his son went off to join the resistance with his father's government-issued gun. Mr Vallat had let it be known that if he were assassinated, his deputy, my great-uncle, would be considered responsible and would have to pay with his life. Some time later, Mr Vallat was in fact assassinated. My great-uncle was kidnapped and disappeared forever. Moreover, all the men of his village (the Ouled Sidi El habib) were massacred. Only one escaped. (...)
I love the France of the Enlightenment, of surrealism, of the cinema between the two World Wars-- of Renoir and Carné, as much as I hate the brutal France that haunted my childish dreams. How often, waking up in the middle of the night, I would see my mother sitting on her mattress, her face bathed in silent tears! I also married a Frenchwoman. My mother never reproached me for it. On the contrary, she loved her until the time that her reason, too challenged by suffering, abandoned her. I studied in France. At that time, I used to love to go for walks in the forest of Fontainebleau. (...) My father would have loved that landscape. He would have found a resonance with his reading, that atmosphere of deep peace, that douceur he loved so much. He was born in a countryside where beauty was organized around a few rock beds, sparse grass and thirsty soil where poplars and olive trees stretched their heads toward the sun in eternal supplication. He also loved that landscape. He did not love the mask of sadness over his compatriots, their poverty and insignificance. For them too, he dreamed of freedom, culture, dignity.
Right now in France there is a tendency to mix the problems of the suburbs with the aborted debate over the repeal of the law of February 23 [which said that schoolbooks should mention the "positive role" of colonization]. The rioters are, mainly, the grandchildren of people of the former colonies. In their homes, they see their fathers' bent backs, their mothers' silent faces, which tell of uprooting, of acculturation, of the loss of family. According to the law in question, they should learn in school that colonization had positive effects. In fact, they should learn a refusal of this suffering, and the fire that burns them is not about to go out. Only the repeal of this law, the active recognition of this murderous history, will be able to bring peace back into their hearts and put them back on the path to full citizenship in the France of rule of law and of beauty, the France my father loved, not the France of colonial rape that he fought against.
I see that I have forgotten to finish my story of the financial aid application. So, our professor gathered the applications and went over them to see they were correctly filled out. She saw that mine was missing the mention of nationality and asked me why I had left it blank. I answered that I had not forgotten, but that I did not know. She gave me a sharp slap that I still remember vividly and said, "Tu es Français, petit misérable!"
--Brahim Senouci
Maître de conférences, University of Cergy
From one of my Dear Ones who likes to annoy me. I've already gotten several funny looks from French people as they catch a glimpse of these on my mantel, especially the official-looking George and Laura one. 
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