Looking Back: Deconstructing Postcolonial Blindness in Nostalgérie more

> Oh 00 53 o ■»-t o o Borrower: KKS Lending String: UIU,*WEL,CLU,EYM,IUL Patron: Hubbell, Amy Journal Title: CELAAN. Volume: 3 Issue: 1-2 Month/Year: Fall 2004Pages: 85-95 Article Author: Article Title: Hubbell, Amy L; "Looking Back; Deconstructing Postcolonial Blindness in Nostalgerie." Imprint: Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; Center for the LL Number: 54374476 Call #: PQ 3988.5 .N6 R4871 Location: Clapp Period'l v.1 :no.1/2 (2002:summer/fall)- Shipping Option: Ariel Mailing Address: Hale Library, ILL Kansas State University 137 HALE LIBRARY Manhattan, KS 66506-1200 Fax: 785-532-6144 Odyssey: 206.107.42.68 Ariel: 129.130.36.208 Printed: 5/27/2009 4:27 PM Scanned By: Date Scanned: Unable to fill: □ Not Found on Shelf □ Incorrect Citation □ Other: -a n WPLinjp it, hi .muuiiM. mp mam H 85 Looking Back: Deconstructing Postcolonial Blindness in Nostalgerie Amy L. HUBBELL In the 1995 novelBab el-Ouecf the Algerian author MerzakAllouache writes the return of a blind Pied-Noir2 woman to her former apartment in Algiers. The elderly woman is accompanied by her nephew, Paulo Gasen, who describes the present view: "Si tu voyais! Rien n'a change..." (118). Although visibly stunned by the nephew's commentary, the Algerian women who now occupy the apartment remain welcoming towards the visitors. As the tearful aunt reminisces about the apartment, Paulo exaggerates the present vision of the neighborhood to his aunt: "Si tu voyais le spectacle, tata! Tous les immeubles sont d'une blancheur immaculee. Ca donne un melange avec le ciel bleu. Fantastique! Si j'etais peintre, c'est ici que je viendrais pour l'inspiration..(121). During this return which is evidently embellished to satisfy the aunt's expectations, the Algerians express pity and disgust towards the Pieds-Noirs; the Algerian son of the owners, Said, wonders, "Pourquoi ils sont revenus? lis ont oublie quelque chose?" (120). The dual meaning of Said's remark (Did they forget something?) hints at the multiple levels of blindness present in this and other texts related to Pied- Noir return. Through an investigation of blindness in the works of Algerian born Pieds-Noirs authors Marie Cardinal, Albert Camus, and Jacques Derrida, this article will demonstrate that although blindness is inherent in the construction of Pied-Noir identity, in the process of its effacement of the postcolonial present it enslaves the one who cannot see his or her now absent referent. Postcolonial blindness holds the potential to unhinge the power structure upon which it is constructed. Blindness figures heavily in Pied-Noir literature although not as often as overtly as in Allouache's novel. Whereas the Pieds-Noirs believe they see Algeria in sharper focus than any other group, their blindness is primarily the act of not seeing or forgetting, and this mostly as a result of the obtrusive vision of the past that impairs the author's view of the present. Although not always intentionally, Pied-Noir blindness contributes to the unified and magnified vision of the lost homeland as the community strives to protect its past for its heirs. 86 CELAAN, Vol. 3, No. 1-2, Fall 2004 The nostalgic rewriting of Algeria prevalent in Pied-Noir texts is en reterred to as "Nostalgerie." The Pieds-Noirs, fated to perpetually remrn to their referent of colonial Algeria as a means of sustaining identity, nave created numerous autobiographical accounts of their homeland, inese accounts began to appear during the nearly thirty years of willful wience about the Algerian war in France; consequently, Pied-Noir accounts ootninate French-Algerian history today. Even authors such as Jacques uernda, who struggle to undo the repossessive gaze of their past homeland, admit to being overwhelmed by that longing for the invisible place.3 Unable and often unwilling to imagine a present Algeria without them, many Pieds-Noirs authors remain in a phase of written return, greatly embellishing and exaggerating Algeria with time. Nostalgerie goes beyond the compulsion to return or revisit the past and often becomes an effort to permanently exist in a recreated past. Coupling the reinstallation of the past with the community's obligation to protect its future allows the Pied-Noir to effectively skip over the present Algeria absent of European and colonial control. The circumvention of the present is the ultimate goal of blindness in this context. Widely renowned as a French feminist writer, Marie Cardinal was also one of the foremost writers of Pied-Noir identity. Not always openly aware of her blind spots, Cardinal attempted to reveal her Algeria to the French public in fictional novels, documentary works like Les Pieds- Noirs, and in her autobiographies. From her first novel in 1962 until her last in 1998,4 Cardinal continually rewrote the life of a Pied-Noir woman struggling to understand her independence and to navigate both present and past between Algeria and France.5 In her 1980 work Aupays de mes racines, Cardinal documented her return to Algeria approximately twenty years after her departure. Upon her arrival, the author experienced several phases of recognition of the places of her past that she had revisited in her works and in her memories for years. During the return, the view of her country did not become more sharply focused. Rather, her vision of her birth country was impeded by her memory and her nostalgic desire for the colonial homeland, in spite of the author's declarations of being non-nostalgic. At the beginning of her stay in Algeria, Cardinal's sight magnifies and improves upon her memory: "Les falaises d'El-Biar sont plus hautes que dans mon souvenir. Je trouve tout plus beau mais je m'empeche de le penser" (Au pays 110). The separation that Cardinal has struggled to annihilate for decades in her memory and writing evaporates as the past overcomes her-"Plage. Soleil. Mediterranee. Ce sable. Cette cote. Ces Amy L. HUBBELL 87 dunes. Je ne les ai jamais quittes. II n'y a pas de retrouvailles. C'est un jour de soleil comme tous ceux que j'ai deja vecus ici" (150). Cardinal's residual image of colonial Algeria dominates what she sees causing her to forego the present Algeria all together, and this eclipsing vision makes her joyful: "Quelle joie de te revoir, quelle joie profonde! Bonjour ma mere, ma sceur, mon amie. Tu es encore plus belle qu'avant" (111). While the author is joyfully surprised that the present more than justifies her memory of the past, in fact, her memory eclipses the present: Le centre d'Alger n'a absolument pas change. Les souvenirs affluent a une vitesse vertigineuse. Ma memoire s'ouvre comme une grenade mure et pleine. Mais tout cela ne me bouleverse pas. Ce sont des souvenirs, et, curieusement, ils me mettent en gaiete. (120) Cardinal allows her memory to overcome the present and shield her eyes from the changes or even the degradations much like Paulo Gasen does for his blind aunt. Equally akin to Gasen's fictionalizing of the present to forge the past, Cardinal repaints Algeria in terms that are muddied with memories: "Meme pas question de souvenirs. Le present se confond tellement avec le passe que je n'ai pas besoin de me rappeler" (147). She has so completely returned to both her nostalgic and unwanted visions that Cardinal no longer needs to open her eyes. As Cardinal claims to observe Algeria mAupays, she is criticized for tier blindness to its changes: "Je dis que 9a n'a pas change et mes hotes ont fair de trouver que j'exagere, que 9a s'est beaucoup modernise, beaucoup construit. Oui, c'est vrai. Mais c'est pareil quand meme" (112). The author claims that the country is so much the same that she could practically find Jier way around blindfolded: "Laissez-moi la, je sais ou je suis et vous verrez qiieje retrouverai tous les chemins. Je ne peux pas me perdre ici" (112). At ixioments the author catches a glimpse of the present through the cracks of jier memories, "Pour la premiere fois je regarde un pays et un peuple en train je naitre. Ca me fascine, mais aussi 9a m'angoisse" (142), but this present js simply too painful to fully acknowledge. Cardinal cannot find a way to j-econcile tne independence of the country with her own colonial past and $fre thus both prefers to remain in her memories and simultaneously claims ?lie is tired of remembering. Even as the author resumes her experience of feturn to Algeria, she once again eclipses the present with her memory: V" "-^^^0.1-2, Fan 2m Plusbea^E Pu- t r T^' Ct m6me Plus Dent il P de mon enfance : ^ ne sais ^eStr^the countiy has cardinai * manZ* Cann0t quite elaborate or ^rk through what those many neW thlngs and her fo ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ flat she is no longer to this country what it remains to her. a f i. u ?gh beanng the chan8es seems unbearable, Cardinal discovers mat her blindness to change is a painful handicap: C'etait insupportable ce batiment, ces rues, ces immeubles mchanges, temoins de crimes irreparables. Personne ne me rendra jamais mon esprit tel qu'il etait avant que ma mere m'assomme, au touraant de ces marches. Personne ne rendra la vie aux cadavres entasses du carrefour. (191) Because her powerful memories impede her perception of a changed Algeria, the author is overwhelmed with even the most traumatic memories of Algeria. In spite of her attempt to suppress these memories throughout Au pays, Cardinal finds that she cannot keep the past from superseding the present. Her blindness imprisons her to the past and tortures her there, yet Cardinal is inclined to continue returning in both her writing and her memory. While the process of forgoing the present had already begun in the colony as an attempt to build communal identity in reference to France, blindness continues in postcolonial texts to preserve the Pied-Noir community. Pied-Noir authors have traditionally been received as the only appropriate historians of their past, but their communal efforts to recreate their colony and forge their identity in France today have largely contributed to the blindness and selective forgetting we now see in "Nostalgeric" writings- According to historian Eric Savarese in his work L'invention des Pieds- h'oirs, blinding others and oneself to certain aspects of the community is necessary for its survival in the postcolonial context. This blindness comes AmyL. HUBBELL 89 across in silencing and forgetting and it is a foundational identity strategy of the Pied Noir community: Toute strategic identitaire suppose de Her, au sein d'un recit fondateur, les elements qui, fussent-ils contradictories, autorisent au groupe d'exister, de manifester son existence, de defendre ses interets. Mais les associations inedites qui autorisent de produire de tels recits ne sont possibles qu'en excluant de l'histoire tout ce qui est susceptible de les contredire. (164) This blindness, then, is a self-preservatory technique and yet problematic when the community of Pieds-Noirs proposes itself as the authority on the war and the ones who overcome the "forgetting" or "silencing" of the Algerian war in France. Savarese uses the term "amnesie liberatrice" to describe the Pieds-Noirs' forgetting, which is, more than an identity strategy, also a political ploy: ...ils oublient de l'histoire tout ce qui s'ecarte des normes morales atravers lesquelles la tradition pionniere estelaboree. [...] [L]es Pieds-Noirs realisent simultanement une double operation : ils se reinserent a une histoire dont la trame est rompue, en 1962, par la guerre d'Algerie, et excluent, via l'oubli, tout ce qui n'est pas conforme a V image des Francais d'Algerie magnifies par la tradition pionniere. (165) By reestablishing their pasts in the legend of the "pioneers" through a process of blindness to any contradictory identity "myth," the Pieds-Noirs are able to reconnect themselves as a "noble" community who suffered for the land.6 Blindness to the independence of Algeria and to the Pied- Noir role in Algerian independence is necessary for the maintenance of the community in the face of initial and continuing criticism in France. As I have shown, blindness is inherent in Pied-Noir texts because it is necessary and useful for the sustenance of a community that is rapidly aging and threatened by extinction. In the case of many Pieds-Noirs like Cardinal, the authors are not necessarily privy to their lack of sight towards the new Algeria. A few Pied-Noir authors, however, make this inherent trait overt, allowing a reconsideration of the position of the Pieds-Noirs both in the colony and now in postcolonial France. Postcolonial blindness 90 CELAAN,Vol.3,No.l-2,Fall2004 ttt ptiCNnPied'NOir Mentity " 6XPressed ^ Albert Camus, oneof In GrSk^r TtCrS,'in WS fetation of the J^/te A XtZ^087 uYPhUS WaS 3 man condemned to roll a rock up a Si is th fi f^ t0 leave his land at <he W™«d AW ^ I**e abSWd f0r Camus'works out his identity through me never-ending task of return: Acetinstantsubtiloul'hommeseretournesursavie,Sisyphe, revenant vers sonrocher, contemple certe suite d'actions sans lien qui devient son destin, cree par lui, uni sous le regard de sa memoire et bientot scelle par sa mort. Ainsi, persuade de l'ongine tout humaine de tout ce qui est humain, aveugle qui desire voir et qui sail que la nuit n 'a pas de fin, il est toujours en marche. Le rocher roule encore. (168, emphasis added) Essential to Camus' interpretation of the blind return are the acceptances of responsibility in this destiny and of the eternal quality to the blindness. Like the blindness from which Sisyphus suffers as he looks back, the Pied-Noir is also blinded by his or her memory of the past, towards which s/he attempts to return perpetually. Many Pied-Noir texts demonstrate the community's need and will to see Algeria as it was, more beautiful than reality, more beautiful than the past and the present, eternally exaggerated. To overcome the absurd condemnation of perpetual return, the Pieds-Noirs must examine the return, its goals, and their own unseeing. Remaining blind to the present and yet continually recounting the absent homeland, the Pieds-Noirs are condemned to pursue the rock, that fragment of their lost land from which they have been exiled. They labor it eternally and yet remain eternally blind to its changing. While Algeria remains independent from the French, the Pied-Noir is unable to let go of this task even as it slips away. Because colonial Algeria still maintains its nostalgic powers over tn Pieds-Noirs, a few authors have begun deconstructing their blindness ratn than only reproducing it. In a shift from the postcolonial identity paradigm demonstrated by blindness in Cardinal's work, Jacques: Demda and Sa Fathy seek to demonstrate blindness as an upending of the colonial bm** astheytumtheblindn^^ tJL for his philosophical contribution ^T^CcZ^ Jewish Pied-Noir who was both marginalin ^"^^ take a marginal approach to return and blindness in his works. Thro a to Amy L. HUBBELL 91 deconstructing nostalgia and return, Derrida can play in the dark of this blindness. In the work Tourner les mots : Au bordd'unfilm, Fathy, the "author" (director) of the film D'ailleurs Derrida, and the "actor" Derrida take part in a written dialogue that deconstructs the film's intranslatability. This film, like the 2002 film Derrida directed and produced by Amy Ziering Kofman, demonstrates the actor's blindness to what is documented as his biography. Fathy wanted to film Derrida in his formational contexts, his absent referents, or in his "elsewheres" in D 'ailleurs Derrida which obliged the author to return to the places of the actor's past. The process of allowing the actor to see what was filmed of his life, and then engaging him in commentary on this vision in the book, demonstrates the deconstructive value of blindness in postcolonial return. Derrida expresses in D 'ailleurs Derrida that the autobiographical and filmic processes cause him to lose or become blinded to his identity. The film is made to reproduce this blinding effect of the autobiographical process—images of the film are backwards, disturbed reflections, ruptured, cut, and faded—demonstrating the disturbed quality of the actor's visions, and the even more distant relationship of the author to the text. Derrida, although the subj ect, becomes an obj ect to the filming techniques and he must translate to the biographer what should be captured while she retranslates the actor's memory into images. The filtering effect of the documentary leaves the author blind, and the actor doubly blind, to the material as he no longer recognizes himself in the process: Jamais, comme en connaissance de cause, je n'ai ainsi agi en aveugle, les yeux fermes sur un ordre qui me dictait: « A ce point, a cette date, tu dois renoncer a garder, et a te garder, et a te regarder. Renonce a tout, renonce a tous les egards que tu reserves d'habitude a ce qui te protege. Oublie tout ce qui te garde ou te regarde, oui, baisse la garde, defaits-toi des armes... »(73) perrida, as material, is subjected to the film and blinded to himself. He loses his authority over the filmed aspects of his life as Fathy takes charge their integration into her story, or her translation of Derrida's past and returns. Further separating the actor from himself, Derrida is not able to [pake the return to Algeria for the film D'ailleurs, Derrida.1 As a result, 92 CELAAN, Vol 3, No. 1-2, Fall 2004 Fathy must make the return on behalf of the actor, allowing Derrida to be present in Algeria only in voice. In Tourner les mots Fathy and Derrida label this return without the subject a "Delegation" for which Derrida has given Fathy a list of visions to be recorded on the vicarious return voyage: L'Acteur [Derrida] a done donne delegation a l'Auteur [Fathy] pour filmer, en son absence, les lieux de son enfance: la maison d'El Biar-ne pas oublier, surtout, les carrelages, lui dit-il, et le defaut de Pun d'entre eux!, et ne pas oublier les cimetieres, et telles tombes, et le centre du village, et les eglises, et les synagogues, les ecoles et les lycees (Ben Aknoun, Gauthier, Bugeaud), les quais du port d'Alger et les voutes sous lesquelles travaillait le Pere, la Kabylie (que l'Auteur decouvrit, elle, sous la ncige!). Delegation de l'oeil, done, mandat optique, representation armee d'une camera, voila qui rappelle et relance autrement la grande question de la prothese ... (94) Upon seeing the returns made by Fathy in the film, however, Derrida no longer recognizes the places that had plagued his memory. The actor is blind to his reconstructed past and its symbols are only ruins of the delegation's already displaced findings. Fathy recognizes the displacement of the delegated return in Tourner les mots: Mcs images de la Kabylie ne correspondent en rien a leurs raisons d'etre biographiques, puisque Derrida m'a dit qu'en accompagnant son pere il n'a jamais vu la Kabylie enneigee. Le mondc a change, et je ne peux rien aux intemperies des temps modemes. (51) The author states that what she filmed was "encore plus ruines que les mines. Sans corps" (56). Fathy recognizes that her visions are alread} ruins of Dcrrida's memory and that Derrida's memory was already a ruin o his past. When Derrida then views the ruins of ruins, there is nothing lef for him to sec. Blindness is complete and the power of return is undone In this example of a postcolonial narrative of return, Fathy and Derrid: turn the sense of blindness on its head through their collaborative efforts DerriiLi is not blinded hy nostalgia or communal goals. As he deconstruct hn vision through the filmic process, he demonstrates that he is blind ti Amy L. HUB BELL 93 himself in return. He becomes, in a sense, relieved of his past through the lost recognition of return. In one of the interviews with Amy Kofman in the film Derrida, the philosopher deconstructs the story of Narcissus and Echo in explaining blindness. He comes to the conclusion that blindness is seeing nothing but the self. This kind of blindness explains the self-preservatory narcissism of thePied-Noir community to build its own identity and to sustain its authority. As a result of their unique focus, they are blind to the present freedom of Algeria. In D'ailleurs Derrida and Tourner les mots, however, Derrida has handed his blindness to another, more objective source, that makes him untranslatable and unrecognizable to himself. He has moved beyond postcolonial blindness by sharing the effort to look back. He understands the fictionalization of his story—that his guide is inventing the view, so to speak, once again like Paulo Gasen and his blind aunt in Bab el-oued. Written from an independent Algerian perspective, Bab el-Oued enlightens the blind quest for what is forgotten or left behind by returning the blind gaze of the Pieds-Noirs who insist on feeding their blindness through nostalgic reminiscing and written returns. By speaking the unseen,* the Algerian women undo the visitors' vision: Hanifa et les femmes ont brusquement cesse leur badinage, elles observent en silence Paulo et sa tante. Hanifa est ebahie par les propos que tient l'homme. — Mais il capte ou quoi ? II lui raconte que les immeubles sont blancs. Que tout est beau. C'est incroyable... — II ne voit pas les mines et la salete ? ajoute Lynda. — Normal! La vieille, elle ne voit pas. II ne veut pas lui faire de peine, surencherit Hannane. Zohra, la voisine du quatrieme, compatissante, approuve Paulo. — Je lui donne raison ! Les femmes trouvent la l'occasion d'une nouvelle discussion. — II voit ce qu'il veut voir... — En tout cas, il y a une chose de vrai dans ce qu'il raconte. Le ciel est vraiment bleu... (122) Playfully deconstructing the Pied-Noir vision, the women are able to put forth the "ruins" of the colonial past. Allouache has returned the blind gaze of the Pieds-Noirs upon themselves, setting clear what is true about their vision of the present Algeria. He has effectively deconstructed the power CELAAN, Vol 3, No. 1-2, Fall 2004 structure that was meant to be sustained by postcolonial blindness. Now it is the Algerian who sees, who has the power to invest in the reality of the present, and to return the colonial gaze upon itself. Now that Algeria is liberated and clearly able to return the Pied-Noir to fiction, it is tor e Pied-Noir to understand his or her own independence from Algena in face of blindness. Notes 1 Allouache wrote Bab el-oued after producing the 1993 movie Bab el- oued City in order to "exorciser les nombreuses frustrations vecues pendant le tournage de mon film..." On the bookjacket of the novel, the author explains that he felt freer to express in writing what he could not capture in the "hostile" environment of the filmic place. He adds, "Quel bonheur de pouvoir evoquer le riche passe et les atmospheres sensuelles de Bab el- Oued, ce quartier de mon enfance!" 2 Although Pied-Noir is the broader label for the former European inhabitants of North Africa who were ousted during the process of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, in this article Pied-Noir will be used to more specifically refer to the Europeans and indigenous Jews who were naturalized French citizens in Algeria and repatriated to France during and after the Algerian War for Independence. Although the indigenous Algerian Jews have a quite different history than the European Pieds-Noirs, the process of exile from Algeria yielded nostalgic writing for both groups. 3 In both Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida's work Jacques Derrida and in Towner les mots Derrida makes reference to his Nostalgerie: 'TAlgerie de ce que l'Acteur appelle sa 'nostalgerie'—El biar, Alger et la Kabylie—, la maison de l'enfance, les lycees, les maisons de culte..." (Towner 23). 4 Ecoutez la tner (1962) and Amour... Amours... (1998). 5 In an interview with Ysabel Saiah in Pieds-Noirs etfiers de letre, Cardinal said of this rewriting, "J'ecris toujours le meme livre dont l'empreinte est la-bas. La vie d'une femme vivant sur une terre ravagee par le conflit des humains" (105). 6 While I agree with Savarese's argument, I believe the creation of the Pied- Noir identity is also largely dependent upon the psychological processes of repetition in working through trauma. Amy L. HUBBELL 95 'Derrida cannot return because one of his Algerian friends had been imprisoned in Algeria for having organized a conference on Derrida {Tourner 94). Derrida did return in 1962, 1971, and 1984. Works Cited Allouache, Merzak. Bab el-Oued. Paris : Seuil, 1995. Bab el-Oued City. Dir. Merzak Allouache. Algeria, 1993. Camus, Albert, he mythe de Sisyphe. Paris : Gallimard, 1942. Cardinal, Marie. Amour. . . Amours .. . Paris : Grasset, 1998. — . Aupays de mes racines. Paris : Grasset, 1980. —. Ecoutez la men Paris : Julliard, 1962. — . Les Pieds-Noirs. Paris : Belfond, 1988. D'ailleurs Derrida. Dir. Safaa Fathy, Perf. Jacques Derrida. Arte, 1999. Derrida. Dir. Amy Ziering Kofman, Perf. Jacques Derrida. Zeitgeist Films, 2002. Derrida, Jacques, and Geoffrey Bennington. Jacques Derrida. Paris : Seuil, 1991. Derrida, Jacques, and Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots: Au bord d'un film. Paris: Galilee-Arte, 2000. Saiah, Ysabel. Pieds-Noirs et fiers de I'etre. Paris : Ed. 13 Michel Lafon, 1987. Savarese, Eric. L 'invention des Pieds-Noirs. Paris : Seguier, 2002.